A Morning Song for Imogen (from Cymbeline) Silvia (from The Two Gentlemen of Verona) Sigh no more, Ladies (from Much Ado about Nothing) A Lover's Lament (from Twelfth Night) Ariel's Song (from The Tempest) A Sea Dirge (from The Tempest) In the Greenwood (from As You Like It) Winter (from Love's Labour's Lost). Verses found in his Bible at the Gate-House at Westminster 48y 494 Phillida's Love-call to her Corydon, and his Replying (Ignoto). 503 From Davison's Poetical Rapsody: A Fiction: how Cupid made a Nymph wound herself with his Arrows (Anon., but attributed to A. W.) A Sonnet to the Moon (Charles Best). The grief of Achilles for the slaying of Patroclus, Menoetius' Son Hermes in Calypso's Island (from Odyssey V) Odysseus' Speech to Nausicaa (from Odyssey VI) The Song the Sirens sung (from Odyssey XII). Queen Margaret to William de la Pool, Duke of Suffolk To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, his Ballad o Agincourt INTRODUCTION. THE future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.' Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as uttering the thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our study of poetry. In the present work it is the course of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. But whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought should be the same. We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and it. us.\ called to higher destinies, than those which in general men nave assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science;' and what is a countenance without its expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge:' our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize 'the breath and finer spirit of knowledge' offered to us by poetry. But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a strict judgment. Sainte-Beuve relates that Napoleon one day said, when somebody was spoken of in his presence as a charlatan: Charlatan as much as you please; but where is there not charlatanism?' 'Yes,' answers Sainte-Beuve, 'in politics, in the art of governing mankind, that is perhaps true. But in the order of thought, in art, the glory, the eternal honour is that charlatanism shall find no entrance; herein lies the inviolableness of that noble portion of |