Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Poems of the English Race: Selected and Edited
In this connection the editor has been naturally interested, while col leeting his materials, in fugitive memories of the literary passions of his own adolescence. Some of these have found representation in the book; others he has scarcely the courage to justify. Among the memories are these: a devotion to Macaulay's Horatius, easily explicable, of course, on the narrative side, but including a boyish ardor for the very melody of the opening words, Lars Porsena of Clusium, and the rest, - an ardor in no wise impaired by a total want of knowledge as to who Lars Porsena might have been or where Clusium might be found; an equally ardent affection for Buchanan Read's Drifting, which was (and is) so fine a thing to repeat while rowing or sailing on any bay or stream; a strange fascination, still hardly analyzed, for Herrick's little lyric on Julia's Clothes, which was selected for republication in a certain play-room periodical issued by very youthful printers; a thrilling fondness for Heber's hymn, The Son of God goes forth to war - in this instance partly accounted for by a boys' tale of Juliana Ewing's, where it figures as the tug-oi-war hymn' consciously ethical admiration for Lowell's The Present Crisis, and a con sciously sentimental appreciation of Longfellow's Maidenhood; finally, and in a little later period, when sunsets and such things had become reali ties, a capture of the senses by Browning's lines telling of the place where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles. These fragments of personal memory have not been gathered up here, of course, for personal reasons, but as fugitive data for the inductive study of the problem of poetry laying hold of youth. Happy the youth for whom the problem has been happily met! Who finds aid in the interpretation of his consciousness with such understanding as only poetry can give, - whose impulses toward the beau tiful, toward hero-worship and patriotism, love and religion, are expressed for him by the inherited wisdom of his race as it is enshrined in speech and song. To make this more easy is the highest of the purposes animating this book.
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