As the scheme which the Author has here endeavoured to execute has not, so far as he knows, the advantage of any near precedent in any literature, he hopes that a few explanatory words may be offered without incurring censure for egotism.

Our history is so eminently rich and varied, and at the same time, by the fact of our insular position, so stamped with unity, that from days very remote it has supplied matter for song. This, among Celts and Angles, at first was lyrical. But poetry, for many centuries after the Conquest, mainly took the annalistic form, and, despite the ability often shown, was hence predoomed to failure. For a nation’s history cannot but present many dull or confused periods, many men and things intractable by poetry, though, perhaps, politically effective and important, which cannot be excluded from any narrative aiming at consecutiveness; and, by the natural laws of art, these passages, when rendered in verse, in their effect become more prosaic than they would be in a prose rendering.

My attempt has therefore been to revert to the earlier and more natural conditions of poetry, and to offer,—not a continuous narrative; not poems on every critical moment or conspicuous man in our long annals,—but single lyrical pictures of such leading or typical characters and scenes in English history, and only such, as have seemed amenable to a strictly poetical treatment. Poetry, not History, has, hence, been my first and last aim; or, perhaps I might define it, History for Poetry’s sake. At the same time, I have striven to keep throughout as closely to absolute historical truth in the design and colouring of the pieces as the exigencies of poetry permit:—the result aimed at being to unite the actual tone and spirit of the time concerned, with the best estimate which has been reached by the research and genius of modern investigators. Our island story, freed from the ‘falsehood of extremes,’—exorcised, above all, from the seducing demon of party-spirit, I have thus here done my best to set forth. And as this line of endeavour has conducted and constrained me, especially when the seventeenth century is concerned, to judgments—supported indeed by historians conspicuous for research, ability, and fairness, but often remote from the views popularized by the writers of our own day,—upon these points a few justificatory notes have been added.

A double aim has hence governed and limited both the selection and the treatment of my subjects. The choice has necessarily fallen, often, not on simply picturesque incident or unfamiliar character, but on the men and things that we think of first, when thinking of the long chronicle of England,—or upon such as represent and symbolize the main current of it. Themes, however, on which able or popular song is already extant,—notably in case of Scotland,—I have in general avoided. In the rendering, my desire has been always to rest the poetry of each Vision on its own intrinsic interest; to write with a straightforward eye to the object alone; not studious of ornament for ornament’s sake; allowing the least possible overt intrusion of the writer’s personality; and, in accordance with lyrical law, seeking, as a rule, to fix upon some factual picture for each poem.

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To define, thus, the scope of what this book attempts, is, in itself, a confession of presumptuousness,—the writer’s own sense of which is but feebly and imperfectly expressed in the words from Vergil’s letter to Augustus prefixed as my motto. In truth, so rich and so wide are the materials, that to scheme a lyrical series which should really paint the Gesta Anglorum in their fulness might almost argue ‘lack of wit,’ vitium mentis, in much greater powers than mine. No criticism, however severe, can add to my own consciousness how far the execution of the work, in regard to each of its aims, falls below the plan. Yet I would allow myself the hope, great as the deficiencies may be, that the love of truth and the love of England are mine by inheritance in a degree sufficient to exempt this book, (the labour of several years), from infidelity to either:—that the intrinsic worth and weight of my subject may commend these songs, both at home, and in the many Englands beyond sea, to those who, (despite the inevitably more engrossing attractions of the Present, and the emphatic bias of modern culture towards the immediate and the tangible), maintain that high and soul-inspiring interest which, identifying us with our magnificent Past, and all its varied lessons of defeat and victory, offers at the same time,—under the guidance from above,—our sole secure guarantee for prosperous and healthy progress in the Future.

The world has cycles in its course, when all
That once has been, is acted o’er again;

and only the nation which, at each moment of political or social evolution, looks lovingly backward to its own painfully-earned experience—Respiciens, Prospiciens, as Tennyson’s own chosen device expresses it—has solid reason to hope, that its movement is true Advance—that its course is Upward.

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It remains only to add, that the book has been carefully revised and corrected, and that nineteen pieces published in the original volume of 1881 are not reprinted in the present issue.

F. T. P.
July, 1889