Introduction

xi

is 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 more 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.

1906.

E. H.

The following is a list of the works of F. T. Palgrave :

Preciosa, a tale, 1852; Idyls and Songs, 1854; The Works of Alfred de Musset (Oxford Essays), 1855; The Passionate Pilgrim (prose), 1858; The Golden Treasury, 1861 (second series, 1896); Memoir of Clough (with edition of poems), 1862; Handbook to the Fine Art Collection in International Exhibition, 1862; Edition of Shakespeare's poems, 1865; Essays on Art, 1866; Biographical and Critical Memoir of Scott (prefixed to poems), 1866; Hymns, 1867; Five Days' Entertainments at Wentworth Grange (Stories for Children), 1868; Lyrical Poems, 1871; A Lyme Garland: verses mainly written at Lyme Regis, etc., 1874; The Children's Treasury of English Song, 1875; Chrysomela (selections from Herrick), 1877; Visions of England (verse), 1881; Selections from Tennyson, 1885; Ode for the 21st June 1887; Treasury of Sacred Song, 1889; Amenophis and other verse, 1892; Landscape in Poetry (Oxford Lectures), 1897.