The purpose of this Collection is to put before children, and young people, poems which are good in themselves, and especially fitted to live, as Theocritus says, ‘on the lips of the young.’ The Editor has been guided to a great extent, in making his choice, by recollections of what particularly pleased himself in youth. As a rule, the beginner in poetry likes what is called ‘objective’ art—verse with a story in it, the more vigorous the story the better. The old ballads satisfy this taste, and the Editor would gladly have added more of them, but for two reasons. First, there are parents who would see harm, where children see none, in ‘Tamlane’ and ‘Clerk Saunders.’ Next, there was reason to dread that the volume might become entirely too Scottish. It is certainly a curious thing that, in Mr. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, where some seventy poets are represented, scarcely more than a tenth of the number were born north of Tweed. In this book, however, intended for lads and lassies, the poems by Campbell, by Sir Walter Scott, by Burns, by the Scottish song-writers, and the Scottish minstrels of the ballad, are in an unexpectedly large proportion to the poems by English authors. The Editor believes that this predominance of Northern verse is not due to any exorbitant local patriotism of his own. The singers of the North, for some reason or other, do excel in poems of action and of adventure, or to him they seem to excel. He is acquainted with no modern ballad by a Southern Englishman, setting aside ‘Christabel’ and the ‘Ancient Mariner—’ poems hardly to be called ballads—which equals ‘The Eve of St. John.’ For spirit-stirring martial strains few Englishmen since Drayton have been rivals of Campbell, of Scott, of Burns, of Hogg with his song of ‘Donald McDonald.’ Two names, indeed, might be mentioned here: the names of the late Sir Francis Doyle and of Lord Tennyson. But the scheme of this book excludes a choice from contemporary poets. It is not necessary to dwell on the reasons for this decision. But the Editor believes that some anthologist of the future will find in the poetry of living English authors, or of English authors recently dead, a very considerable garden of that kind of verse which is good both for young and old. To think for a moment of this abundance is to conceive more highly of Victorian poetry. There must still, after all, be youth and mettle in the nation which could produce ‘The Ballad of the Revenge,’ ‘Lucknow,’ ‘The Red Thread of Honour,’ ‘The Loss of the Birkenhead,’ ‘The Forsaken Merman,’ ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,’ ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ and many a song of Charles Kingley’s, not to mention here the work of still later authors. But we only glean the fields of men long dead.

For this reason, then—namely, because certain admirable contemporary poems, like ‘Lucknow’ and ‘The Red Thread of Honour,’ are unavoidably excluded—the poems of action, of war, of adventure, chance to be mainly from Scottish hands. Thus Campbell and Scott may seem to hold a pre-eminence which would not have been so marked had the works of living poets, or of poets recently dead, been available. Yet in any circumstances these authors must have occupied a great deal of the field: Campbell for the vigour which the unfriendly Leyden had to recognise; Scott for that Homeric quality which, since Homer, no man has displayed in the same degree. Extracts from his long poems do not come within the scope of this selection. But, estimated even by his lyrics, Scott seems, to the Editor, to justify his right, now occasionally disdained, to rank among the great poets of his country. He has music, speed, and gaiety, as in ‘The Hunting Song’ or in ‘Nora’s Vow:’

Lines like these sing themselves naturally in a child’s memory, while there is a woodland freshness and a daring note in

‘Young Lochinvar’ goes ‘as dauntingly as wantonly’ to his bridal, as the heir of Macpherson’s Rant to his death, in a wonderful swing and gallop of verse; while still, out of dim years of childhood far away, one hears how all the bells are ringing in Dunfermline town for the wedding of Alice Brand. From childhood, too, one remembers the quietism of Lucy Ashton’s song, and the monotone of the measure—

The wisdom of it is as perceptible to a child as that other lesson of Scott’s, which rings like a clarion:

Then there are his martial pieces, as the ‘Gathering Song of Donald Dhu’ and ‘The Cavalier,’ and there is the inimitable simplicity and sadness of ‘Proud Maisie,’ like the dirge for Clearista by Meleager, but with a deeper tone, a stronger magic; and there is the song, which the Fates might sing in a Greek chorus, the song which Meg Merrilies sang,

These are but a few examples of Scott’s variety, his spontaneity, his hardly conscious mastery of his art. Like Phemius of Ithaca, he might say ‘none has taught me but myself, and the God has put into my heart all manner of lays’—all but the conscious and elaborate ‘manner of lays,’ which has now such power over some young critics that they talk of Scott’s redeeming his bad verse by his good novels. The taste of childhood and of maturity is simpler and more pure.

In the development of a love of poetry it is probable that simple, natural, and adventurous poetry like Scott’s comes first, and that it is followed later—followed but not superseded—by admiration of such reflective poetry as is plain and even obvious, like that of Longfellow, from whom a number of examples are given. But, to the Editor at least, it seems that a child who cares for poetry is hardly ever too young to delight in mere beauty of words, in the music of metre and rhyme, even when the meaning is perhaps still obscure and little considered. A child, one is convinced, would take great pleasure in Mr. Swinburne’s choruses in ‘Atalanta,’ such as

and in Shelley’s ‘Cloud’ and his ‘Arethusa.’ For this reason a number of pieces of Edgar Poe’s are given, and we have not shrunk even from including the faulty ‘Ulalume,’ because of the mere sound of it, apart from the sense. The three most famous poems of Coleridge may be above a child’s full comprehension, but they lead him into a world not realised, ‘an unsubstantial fairy place,’ bright in a morning mist, like our memories of childhood.

It is probably later, in most lives, that the mind wakens to delight in the less obvious magic of style, and the less ringing, the more intimate melody of poets like Keats and Lord Tennyson. The songs of Shakespeare, of course, are for all ages, and the needs of youth comparatively mature are met in Dryden’s ‘Ode on Alexander’s Feast,’ and in ‘Lycidas’ and the ‘Hymn for the Nativity.’

It does not appear to the Editor that poems about children, or especially intended for children, are those which a child likes best. A child’s imaginative life is much spent in the unknown future, and in the romantic past. He is the contemporary of Leonidas, of Agincourt, of Bannockburn, of the ‘45; he is living in an heroic age of his own, in a PhÆacia where the Gods walk visibly. The poems written for and about children, like Blake’s and some of Wordsworth’s, rather appeal to the old, whose own childhood is now to them a distant fairy world, as the man’s life is to the child. The Editor can remember having been more mystified and puzzled by ‘Lucy Gray’ than by the ‘Eve of St. John,’ at a very early age. He is convinced that Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song,’ for example, which brings back to him the long, the endless evenings of the Northern summer, when one had to go to bed while the hills beyond Ettrick were still clear in the silver light, speaks more intimately to the grown man than to the little boy or girl. Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember,’ in the same way, brings in the burden of reflection on that which the child cannot possibly reflect upon—namely, a childhood which is past. There is the same tone in Mr. Stevenson’s ‘Child’s Garden of Verse,’ which can hardly be read without tears—tears that do not come and should not come to the eyes of childhood. For, beyond the child and his actual experience of the world as the ballads and poems of battle are, he can forecast the years, and anticipate the passions. What he cannot anticipate is his own age, himself, his pleasures and griefs, as the grown man sees them in memory, and with a sympathy for the thing that he has been, and can never be again. It is his excursions into the untravelled world which the child enjoys, and this is what makes Shakespeare so dear to him—Shakespeare who has written so little on childhood. In The Midsummer Night’s Dream the child can lose himself in a world familiar to him, in the fairy age, and can derive such pleasure from Puck, or from Ariel, as his later taste can scarce recover in the same measure. Falstaff is his playfellow, ‘a child’s Falstaff, an innocent creature,’ as Dickens says of Tom Jones in David Copperfield.

A boy prefers the wild Prince and Poins to Barbara Lewthwaite, the little girl who moralised to the lamb. We make a mistake when we ‘write down’ to children; still more do we err when we tell a child not to read this or that because he cannot understand it. He understands far more than we give him credit for, but nothing that can harm him. The half-understanding of it, too, the sense of a margin beyond, as in a wood full of unknown glades, and birds, and flowers unfamiliar, is great part of a child’s pleasure in reading. For this reason many poems are included here in which the Editor does not suppose that the readers will be able to pass an examination. For another reason a few pieces of no great excellence as poetry are included. Though they may appear full of obviousness to us, there is an age of dawning reflection to which they are not obvious. Longfellow, especially, seems to the Editor to be a kind of teacher to bring readers to the more reflective poetry of Wordsworth, while he has a sort of simple charm in which there is a foretaste of the charm of Tennyson and Keats. But everyone who attempts to make such a collection must inevitably be guided by his own recollections of childhood, of his childish likings, and the development of the love of poetry in himself. We have really no other criterion, for children are such kind and good-natured critics that they will take pleasure in whatever is given or read to them, and it is hard for us to discern where the pleasure is keenest and most natural.

The Editor trusts that this book may be a guide into romance and fairyland to many children. Of a child’s enthusiasm for poetry, and the life which he leads by himself in poetry, it is very difficult to speak. Words cannot easily bring back the pleasure of it, now discerned in the far past like a dream, full of witchery, and music, and adventure. Some children, perhaps the majority, are of such a nature that they weave this dream for themselves, out of their own imaginings, with no aid or with little aid from the poets. Others, possibly less imaginative, if more bookish, gladly accept the poet’s help, and are his most flattering readers. There are moments in that remote life which remain always vividly present to memory, as when first we followed the chase with Fitz-James, or first learned how ‘The Baron of Smaylho’me rose with day,’ or first heard how

Almost the happiest of such moments were those lulled by the sleepy music of ‘The Castle of Indolence,’ a poem now perhaps seldom read, at least by the young. Yet they may do worse than visit the drowsy castle of him who wrote

Childhood is the age when a love of poetry may be born and strengthened—a taste which grows rarer and more rare in our age, when examinations spring up and choke the good seed. By way of lending no aid to what is called Education, very few notes have been added. The child does not want everything to be explained; in the unexplained is great pleasure. Nothing, perhaps, crushes the love of poetry more surely and swiftly than the use of poems as school-books. They are at once associated in the mind with lessons, with long, with endless hours in school, with puzzling questions and the agony of an imperfect memory, with grammar and etymology, and everything that is the enemy of joy. We may cause children to hate Shakespeare or Spenser as Byron hated Horace, by inflicting poets on them, not for their poetry, but for the valuable information in the notes. This danger, at least, it is not difficult to avoid in the Blue Poetry Book. [Pg xiv] [Pg xv]

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CONTENTS

	Page
ANONYMOUS:
A Red, Red Rose	66
Annan Water	178
Cherry Ripe	176
Helen of Kirkconnel	115
Lawlands of Holland	106
Lyke-Wake Dirge	330
Sir Hugh; or, the Jew’s Daughter	326
Sir Patrick Spens	259
The Twa Corbies	78
The Wife of Usher’s Well	124
Willie Drowned in Yarrow	163
BARNEFIELD, RICHARD, 1574-1627:
The Nightingale	206
BLAKE, WILLIAM, 1757-1828:
Night	5
Nurse’s Song	1
The Chimney-sweeper	16
The Lamb	4
BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1809-1861:
To Flush, my Dog	51
BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN, 1794-1878:
To a Waterfowl	179
BUNYAN, JOHN, 1628-1688:
The Pilgrim	274
BURN, MINSTREL:
Leader Haughs	284
BURNS, ROBERT, 1759-1796:
Bannockburn	67
I Love my Jean	62
O, wert Thou in the Cauld Blast	61
The Banks o’ Doon	64
The Farewell	68
There’ll never be Peace till Jamie comes Hame	63
BYRON, LORD, 1788-1824:
Could Love for Ever, Run like a River	71
So, we’ll go no more a Roving	181
Stanzas written on the Road between Florence and Pisa	111
The Destruction of Sennacherib	82
CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1777-1844:
Hohenlinden	36
Lord Ullin’s Daughter	13
The Battle of the Baltic	43
The Last Man	255
The Soldier’s Dream	27
Ye Mariners of England	22
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1772-1834:
Christabel	312
Kubla Khan	142
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	215
COLLINS, WILLIAM, 1721-1756:
Ode written in mdccxlvi	88
To Evening	121
COWPER, WILLIAM, 1731-1800:
Boadicea	341
Epitaph on a Hare	285
John Gilpin	28
On a Spaniel called ‘Beau’ Killing a Young Bird	6
The Dog and the Water-lily	50
The Poplar Field	95
The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk	276
DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1745-1814:
Tom Bowling	270
DRAYTON, MICHAEL, 1563-1631:
Ballad of Agincourt	18
DRYDEN, JOHN, 1631-1701:
Alexander’s Feast; or, the Power of Music	129
ELLIOTT, JANE, 1727-1805:
The Flowers o’ the Forest	137
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 1728-1774:
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog	38
GRAY, THOMAS, 1716-1771:
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard	298
The Bard	243
HERRICK, ROBERT, 1591-1674:
To Blossoms	92
To Daffodils	89
HEYWOOD, THOMAS—d. circa 1640:
Morning	176
HOGG, JAMES, 1772-1835:
A Boy’s Song	2
The Skylark	198
HOOD, THOMAS, 1798-1845:
A Lake and a Fairy Boat	87
I Remember, I Remember	3
JONSON, BEN, 1574-1637:
Hymn to Diana	80
KEATS, JOHN, 1796-1821:
La Belle Dame Sans Mercy	265
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer	86
Winter	311
LAMB, CHARLES, 1775-1834:
Hester	120
LAMB, MARY, 1765-1847:
The Child and the Snake	268
LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE, 1775-1864:
Rose Aylmer	72
LINDSAY, LADY A., 1750-1825:
Auld Robin Gray	161
LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH, 1807-1882:
The Beleagured City	128
The Day is Done	192
The Fire of Drift-wood	185
The Village Blacksmith	37
The Wreck of the Hesperus	46
LOVELACE, RICHARD, 1618-1658:
To Althea from Prison	117
To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars	102
MACAULAY, LORD, 1800-1859:
Ivry	257
The Armada	167
The Battle of Naseby	211
MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER, 1564-1593:
The Passionate Shepherd to his Love	135
MARVELL, ANDREW, 1620-1678:
Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda	183
The Girl Describes her Fawn	25
MICKLE, WILLIAM JULIUS, 1734-1788:
Cumnor Hall	200
MILTON, JOHN, 1608-1674:
L’Allegro	144
Il Penseroso	150
Lycidas	291
On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity	303
MINSTREL BURN:
Leader Haughs	284
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border:
Battle of Otterbourne	286
Kinmont Willie	248
The Demon Lover	102
MOORE, THOMAS, 1779-1852:
As Slow our Ship	65
The Light of Other Days	184
The Harp that once through Tara’s Halls	70
The Minstrel-Boy	68
NAIRNE, LADY, 1766-1845:
The Land o’ the Leal	182
NASHE, THOMAS, 1567-1600:
Spring	210
PEACOCK, THOMAS LOVE, 1785-1866:
War-song of Dinas Vawr	187
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Mary Ambree	171
POE, EDGAR ALLAN, 1809-1849:
Annabel Lee	96
The Haunted Palace	240
The Sleeper	207
The Valley of Unrest	107
To Helen	198
To One in Paradise	79
Ulalume	138
PRAED, WINTHROP MACKWORTH, 1802-1839:
The Red Fisherman; or, the Devil’s Decoy	331
SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1771-1832:
A Weary Lot is Thine, Fair Maid	194
Alice Brand	55
Allen-a-Dale	126
County Guy	81
Evening	74
Gathering Song of Donald Dhu	82
Hunting Song	12
Hymn for the Dead	94
Jock of Hazeldean	156
Lucy Ashton’s Song	73
Nora’s Vow	17
Proud Maisie	92
Rosabelle	213
St. Swithin’s Chair	109
The Cavalier	85
The Eve of St. John	278
The Outlaw	< a href="@public@vhost@g@html@files@46515@46515-h@46515-h-2.htm.html#THE_OUTLAW" class="pginternal">40
?The Sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill	123
?Twist ye, Twine ye	101
?Where Shall the Lover Rest?	247
?Young Lochinvar	45
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM, 1564-1616:
?A Sea Dirge	71
?Fidele	199
?Orpheus with his Lute	77
?Where the Bee Sucks, there Suck I	181
?Who is Silvia? What is she	73
?Winter	95
SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE, 1792-1822:
?Arethusa	191
?To a Skylark	203
?The Recollection	159
SHIRLEY, JAMES, 1594-1666:
?Death the Leveller	177
SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP, 1554-1586:
?Sleep	94
SURTEES, ROBERT, 1779-1834:
?Barthram’s Dirge	111
WOLFE, CHARLES, 1791-1823:
?The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna	108
?To Mary	100
WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM, 1770-1850:
?I Wandered Lonely	119
?Lucy Gray; or, Solitude	8
?On the Departure of Sir Walter Scott
????from Abbotsford for Naples, 1831	343
?The Kitten and Falling Leaves	271
?The Reverie of Poor Susan	164
?The Solitary Reaper	90
?To the Cuckoo	113
?Two April Mornings	195
?Yarrow Unvisited, 1803	322
?Yarrow Visited, September 1814	324
WOTTON, SIR HENRY, 1568-1639:
?Elizabeth of Bohemia	175

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LIST OF PLATES

	PAGE
To behold the wandering Moon
Riding near her highest noon	Frontispiece
And the Star of Peace return	23
‘And if there’s blood upon his hand,
’Tis but the blood of deer’	59
Orpheus with his Lute	76
And the Idols are broke in the Temple of Baal	84
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
In this kingdom by the sea	97
‘Why weep ye by the tide, Ladie?’	157
Syne, in the cleaving of a craig	165
The beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep	190
The death-fires danced at night	220
And nothing else saw all day long	266
So half-way from the bed she rose,
And on her elbow did recline
To look at the Lady Geraldine	321

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the
Blue Poetry Book

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