Bryant's finest work, the first two are found only in Stedman's and the last only in Sargent's collection.

The selections from Whittier exhibit even wider discrepancies of taste. In his Songs of Three Centuries, he included six of his own pieces. Literary history shows that poets themselves are frequently far from being the best judges of the comparative excellence of their own performances. The difference between the creative and the critical faculty often becomes at such times almost painfully marked. That, in my opinion, Whittier shared in this not uncommon defect may be inferred from the fact that not a single one of the six chosen by him can be found in the present volume. I have, however, the consolation of discovering that I am not alone in my blindness to their merits; that not a single one of them found its way into six of the anthologies which have been mentioned; and their verdict would have been unanimous had not one of the author's half-dozen somehow escaped into Coates's collection. On the other hand, four of those which are given in this work-The Old Burying-Ground, Dedication to the Sewalls of the volume entitled In War Time, The Watchers, and Lines on the Death of O. S. Torreyhave no place in a single one of the seven anthologies I have specified. Two other poems-Randolph of Roanoke and What the Birds Said-appear in but

a single one of these collections, in each case in a different one.

The comparison would be even more striking in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes. There are over thirty of his pieces not found here which are included in some one of the seven volumes mentioned. Yet but a small proportion of the thirty appears in more than one of them. On the other hand, half a score of his poems which are here included cannot be found in a single one of these collections. But it is needless to go on giving illustrations of the wide divergencies of judgment and taste displayed in anthologies; for they could be multiplied almost endlessly. Facts of this nature prove conclusively to an editor that the selections he makes will never receive the full approval, not simply of all lovers of poetry, but of any individual among them. The impossibility of satisfying critics I take for granted, just as I would the impossibility of any one of them satisfying me, were he to undertake a similar task.

What, therefore, is incumbent to say here is to point out precisely what the aim is which has been kept in view in making this particular collection. It differs largely from most of the others which have been brought out. It puts forth no pretense of being representative or inclusive of American verse or verse-makers. Some names found in other antholo

gies do not appear here at all. Some again appear which are found in none of the others. This last was partly due to the fact that the plan of this work was to comprise kinds of verse which the plan of certain if not of all the others excluded. Had the whole field of English literature been open to draw from, it would have been easy from the abundance of material to restrict the selection to what might be distinctly called poetry pure and simple. Confined as this volume is to the comparatively scanty body of American verse, liberty of choice of this nature did not exist. Such a limitation was practically impossible. Yet had there been for it a demand, it would not have seemed to me desirable. Every kind of verse worth reading at all has a right to be represented; all that can fairly be demanded is that the poem chosen should be good in its kind, though the kind itself may be distinctly inferior. Accordingly specimens of all sorts of poetry can be found in the present volume— the serious, the light, the contemplative, the pathetic, the humorous and the satiric. Not even has the travesty been excluded; and there are a goodly number of specimens of that sort of verse which in our tongue lacks a recognized name and appears under the foreign title of vers de société. Perhaps, indeed, disproportionate space has been given to the representatives of these minor classes. Yet this is a fault,

if it be a fault, which the general reader will be disposed to pardon, however much the severe student of poetry may disapprove.

As the authors from whom selections were made were required to follow one another in chronological order, there was no choice save to begin with specimens of religious poetry; for only in that is found the very little of our early verse that can be deemed worthy of citation at all. Few will be disposed to deny that Joel Barlow's version of the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm is worth more, poetically considered, than the whole of his laborious epic, to say nothing of his other pieces. Curiously enough, not even his name, as well as that of one or two others represented in this volume, appears in Stedman's supposedly all-embracing anthology. The fact that Barlow's version of this psalm is rarely found in modern hymnals, is another justification for its inclusion in this work. Still, in the case of religious poetry, it must be confessed, the choice is so hard as to be almost perilous. "A good hymn," said Tennyson, "is the most difficult thing in the world to write. For a good hymn you have to be commonplace and poetical. The moment you cease to be commonplace and put in an expression at all out of the common, it ceases to be a hymn." But if difficulties of this sort beset the writer, full as perplexing

ones beset the editor. Most hymns that have any enduring popularity are almost invariably set to particular tunes. The permanent addition of music to the words blunts in time the critical sense. The two are at last so blended in the minds of those by whom they are heard frequently that it becomes practically impossible to dissociate them and judge the value of each independently. Hence the compiler is always in danger of choosing pieces not so much on account of the poetic merit they possess as of the music to which they are set; for he cannot tell where the influence of the one begins and that of the other ends. It may therefore be that he who comes to the consideration of some of these pieces without any associations save those purely literary may find them unworthy of being included.

Of the earlier writers represented in this collection, the two who seem to have given most promise of future performance were cut off prematurely. These were Joseph Rodman Drake and Edward Coate Pinkney. Both suffered long from disease, both lived only about a quarter of a century. For most of us the memory of Drake has been better preserved by the lines Halleck wrote on his death than by anything he himself produced. Of the two, indeed, Pinkney's was the more poetic nature. There is something peculiarly pathetic in the following pas