Project Gutenberg Book of English Verse | Page 4

numbers chosen are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed I am
mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some
faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the
Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation. But the
lyrical spirit is volatile and notoriously hard to bind with definitions;
and seems to grow wilder with the years. With the anthologist--as with
the fisherman who knows the fish at the end of his sea-line--the gift, if
he have it, comes by sense, improved by practice. The definition, if he
be clever enough to frame one, comes by after-thought. I don't know
that it helps, and am sure that it may easily mislead.
Having set my heart on choosing the best, I resolved not to be
dissuaded by common objections against anthologies--that they repeat
one another until the proverb [Greek] loses all
application--or
perturbed if my judgement should often agree with that of good critics.
The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor
had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely
because it happened to be recondite. To be sure, a man must come to
such a task as mine haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in
days when he had much enthusiasm but little reading.
A deeper import
Lurks in the legend told my infant years
Than lies
upon that truth we live to learn.
Few of my contemporaries can erase--or would wish to erase--the dye

their minds took from the late Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury: and he
who has returned to it again and again with an affection born of
companionship on many journeys must remember not only what the
Golden Treasury includes, but the moment when this or that poem
appealed to him, and even how it lies on the page. To Mr. Bullen's
Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song Books and his other treasuries I own
a more advised debt. Nor am I free of obligation to anthologies even
more recent--to Archbishop Trench's Household Book of Poetry, Mr.
Locker-Lampson's Lyra Elegantiarum, Mr. Miles' Poets and Poetry of
the Century, Mr. Beeching's Paradise of English Poetry, Mr. Henley's
English Lyrics, Mrs. Sharp's Lyra Celtica, Mr. Yeats' Book of Irish
Verse, and Mr. Churton Collins' Treasury of Minor British Poetry:
though my rule has been to consult these after making my own choice.
Yet I can claim that the help derived from them--though gratefully
owned--bears but a trifling proportion to the labour, special and
desultory, which has gone to the making of my book.
For the anthologist's is not quite the dilettante business for which it is
too often and ignorantly derided. I say this, and immediately repent;
since my wish is that the reader should in his own pleasure quite forget
the editor's labour, which too has been pleasant: that, standing aside, I
may believe this book has made the Muses' access easier when, in the
right hour, they come to him to uplift or to console--
[Greek]
My thanks are here tendered to those who have helped me with
permission to include recent poems: to Mr. A. C. Benson, Mr. Laurence
Binyon, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. John Davidson,
Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Bret
Harte, Mr. W. E. Henley, Mrs. Katharine Tynan Hinkson, Mr. W. D.
Howells, Dr. Douglas Hyde, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Andrew Lang,
Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, Mr. George Meredith, Mrs. Meynell, Mr. T.
Sturge Moore, Mr. Henry Newbolt, Mr. Gilbert Parker, Mr. T. W.
Rolleston, Mr. George Russell ('A. E.'), Mrs. Clement Shorter (Dora
Sigerson), Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Francis Thompson, Dr. Todhunter, Mr.
William Watson, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mrs. Woods, and Mr. W. B. Yeats;
to the Earl of Crewe for a poem by the late Lord Houghton; to Lady
Ferguson, Mrs. Allingham, Mrs. A. H. Clough, Mrs. Locker-Lampson,

Mrs. Coventry Patmore; to the Lady Betty Balfour and the Lady
Victoria Buxton for poems by the late Earl of Lytton and the Hon.
Roden Noel; to the executors of Messrs. Frederic Tennyson (Captain
Tennyson and Mr. W. C. A. Ker), Charles Tennyson Turner (Sir
Franklin Lushington), Edward
FitzGerald (Mr. Aldis Wright),
William Bell Scott (Mrs. Sydney Morse and Miss Boyd of Penkill
Castle, who has added to her kindness by allowing me to include an
unpublished 'Sonet' by her sixteenth-century ancestor, Mark Alexander
Boyd), William Philpot (Mr. Hamlet S. Philpot), William Morris (Mr.
S. C. Cockerell), William Barnes, and R. L. Stevenson; to the Rev. H.
C. Beeching for two poems from his own works, and leave to use his
redaction of Quia Amore Langueo; to Mssrs. Macmillan for confirming

permission for the extracts from FitzGerald, Christina Rossetti, and
T. E. Brown, and particularly for allowing me to insert the latest
emendations in