INTRODUCTION

vii

Tennyson remarked, that it was one of those flights in which the poet' seemed to go up, and burst.' Between Shakespeare's sonnets he hardly liked to decide, all were so powerful. With most by far of the pieces submitted he was already acquainted; but I seem to remember more or less special praise of Lodge's 'Rosaline,' of 'My Love in Her Attire and the 'Emigrant's Song,' by Marvell. . . . After reading Cowper's 'Poplar Field' (CXLIII.), (Tennyson said), 'People now-a-days, I believe, hold this style and metre light; I wish there were any who could put words together with such exquisite flow and evenness.' Presently we reached the same poet's stanzas, 'To Mary Unwin' (CLXII.). He read them, yet could barely read them, so deeply touched was he by their tender, their almost agonizing pathos. And once when I asked him for the 'Lines on my Mother's Portrait,' his voice faltered as he said he would, if I wished it; but he knew he should break down. Resuming Tennyson's Golden Treasury' comments, another little poem greatly moved him-perhaps he was not very familiar with it-Scott's 'Maid of Neidpath' (CXCVI.). This also he read, adding after the last stanza, almost more pathetic than a man has the right to be. . . .' Tennyson was much struck by the plain force of Byron's 'Elegy on Thyrza,' and Moore's Light of other Days' (CCXXV.), saying of the last, 'O si sic omnia!' In Wolfe's noble 'Burial of Sir John Moore' (CCXVIII.), he wished the last line but two could be changed; at the close of Hood's 'Bridge of Sighs' (CCXXXI.), 'Her evil behaviour' was a slight defect in that masterpiece. And the infelicitous 'mermaid's song condoles' of the 'Battle of the Baltic,' tempted him to a 'How easily could a little blot like this be cured, if we had but Tom Campbell in the room to point it out to him!' adding, however, a tale how Rogers had done the same office for another poem, and how Campbell had bounced out of the room with a 'Hang it! I should like to see the man who would dare to correct me!'

เ

In turning the pages of the "Golden Treasury" over and

viii

PALGRAVE'S GOLDEN TREASURY

over in many lands, to make beautiful a weary stretch of the road or "when the small rain down doth rain," in the inn parlour, or by the fireside in the winter evenings, or best of all in the summer fields among the summer flowers, we come at last to consider what there is after all that is omitted here which should certainly have a place. How little it is we scarcely realize, till we have reasoned why such and such a beautiful verse has been passed by; so that it is easier to say, "this should have been left out perhaps," than to say, "this certainly should have been admitted.” And yet we miss at the very beginning the sweet naïve voice of Chaucer, full of "feeling" certainly and passionate too, in such a poem as this—

Hide, Absolon, thy giltë tresses clere ;
Ester, lay thou thy meekness all a-doun;
Hide, Ionathas, all thy friendly manére;
Penalopee and Mercia catoun,

Make of your wife-hood no comparisoun;
Hide ye your beauties, Isoude and Eleyne:
My lady cometh, that all this may disteyne!

Thy faire body, let it not appere
Lavyne; and thou, Lucrece of Rome toun,
And Polixene, that boughten love so dere,
And Cleopatre, with all thy passioun,
Hide ye your trouthe of love and your renoun:
And thou, Tisbe, that hast of love such peyne:
My lady cometh, that all this may disteyne!

Herró, Didó, Laudomia, all y-fere
And Phyllis, hanging for thy Demophoun,
And Canacé espiéd by thy chere,
Ysiphilé, betrayséd with Íasoun

Maketh of your trouth neither boast nor soun
Nor Ypermistre or Adriane, ye twenyne;

My lady cometh, that all this may disteyne!

Nor do I find that so difficult to understand as "To a

Field-Mouse" (CXLIV.) or "Duncan Gray"

"Duncan Gray" (CLIII.); it is

hard to understand why it was passed over, so that there is

INTRODUCTION

ix

no poem here by the Father of English Poetry. It would have been as hard to understand the omission of Spenser's "Epithalamion," but that Mr Palgrave has explained to us that he did not consider it "in harmony with" mid-Victorian manners. Happily manners have changed much since midVictorian times, and we may all now read the "Epithalamion without being expected to blush. Such a provincialism as that excuse for the omission of the loveliest love song in the language is one real blot in this book. The same midVictorian "manners" probably excluded Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," a passionate and beautiful song that Tennyson loved well enough, for we read of his "special admiration" of it; "delighting to read," Mr Palgrave tells us in those "Personal Recollections" quoted above, "delighting to read with a voice hardly yet to me silent, and dwelling more than once on the magnificent hyperbole, the powerful union of pathos and humour in the lines.

And that it seems to me is almost all there is to say by way of criticism: and while every man will of course prefer to make his own anthology, in which "the best" will be the best beloved, no one has been able to make an anthology that has been so generally received by Englishmen as in itself almost a work of art, as really fulfilling precisely its promise to be the Golden Treasury of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language.

E. H.