PREFACE In the beginning of last May I delivered at the Mansion House, in connection with the University Extension Movement, an address upon Victorian poetry, to which I had from early days given much attention. Presently afterwards it was suggested to me that I should make a Victorian Anthology, and I agreed to do so, in the hope that I might bring together, for the benefit of my readers, a good many old friends, and enable them to form a good many new acquaintances. In forming the earlier portion of the selection, I have been much assisted by a manuscript Anthology made by me for my own use in the early sixties. I have not the slightest desire to sustain, by the present publication, any critical theory, or to enable my readers to study the general development of poetry during the Victorian Age. There are abundant helps to doing that, as, for instance, the large and very useful book of Mr. Miles, entitled The Poets of the Century. My purpose is a far humbler one; I wish to collect a number of Victorian poems, very varied indeed in character, but all of which happen to give me pleasure, because I think the chances are that they will give pleasure to not a few other people who have similar likes and dislikes, though I am perfectly certain that my choice will be in many instances entirely disapproved by those whose likes and dislikes are different. That is inevitable; but if the ayes to the right exceed the noes to the left sufficiently to give one what we used to call in the House of Commons "a good division," I shall be perfectly satisfied. It was said of the Address out of which this volume arose, that "the personal equation was very much to the front" in it, and the same criticism will be made, with perfect justice, about the collection I am now publishing. I maintain, however, that in such a book as this "the personal equation ought to be very much to the front." If the choice of poems is not thoroughly individual, the result will be good for very little. It is idle to dream of meeting the tastes of readers who belong to a dozen different schools. The collector must consider himself, and himself alone, to be responsible for what is taken or omitted, save in so far as his selection may be modified by copyright difficulties or other force majeure. I have arranged the authors of whom I have to speak in three classes : 1. Poets who, born in the eighteenth century, lived on into the reign of Queen Victoria and did work during it. 2. Poets born in 1801 or later, who lived far into the reign of Queen Victoria, or even outlived it, but who are now dead. 3. Poets who wrote during the reign of Queen Victoria and are happily still with us.1 To each of these classes I have prefixed some brief introductory notes. I trust that I have succeeded in presenting to the reader a large number of the best poems produced in 1 Sir Franklin Lushington, who heads this class, died, alas, whilst these sheets were passing through the press. the age which it is intended to illustrate, but really the production of that age was so large that any one could put together a very respectable second volume of the same size as this, without drawing on the stores of any of the writers from whom I have quoted. Some editors of Anthologies-Archbishop Trench, for example-have constrained themselves to give only complete poems, not extracts from poems. This selfdenying ordinance seems to me unkind alike to the poet and to the reader, for it involves the sacrifice of a great deal that is very valuable. To leave out the extracts which I make from St. Stephen's, for example, because I cannot reprint the whole poem, would surely be absurd. It remains to express my gratitude to many friends, and to many whom I have not the honour to know personally, for the assistance I have received in a piece of work which has given me much agreeable employment. Almost every one to whom my publishers or I applied for permission to print some of their poems were kindness and courtesy itself. Only in a very few cases were difficulties made which have prevented my including two or three pieces. I have great pleasure in thanking the following ladies and gentlemen for permission to print their poems which appear in this volume: Lady Currie (Violet Fane), Mrs. Meynell, Mrs. Earl, Miss E. M. P. Hickey, Miss May Probyn. Messrs. George Meredith, William Watson, E. C. Pember, K.C., Austin Dobson, Algernon Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, A. Johnstone, Aubrey de Vere, C. K. Paul, Herman Merivale, J. W. Courthope, A. Simcox, F. Bourdillon, W. B. Yeats, A. P. Graves, H. Newbolt, |