poetry's thought-content than is approved by much characteristic criticism of the present day. In this connection the editor has been naturally interested, while collecting 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-of-war hymn"; a consciously ethical admiration for Lowell's "The Present Crisis," and a consciously sentimental appreciation of Longfellow's "Maidenhood"; finally, and in a little later period, when sunsets and such things had become realities, 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 beautiful, 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. The editor is under great obligation, and takes this occasion to express his gratitude, to the authors and publishers who kindly gave their permission for the reprinting of the following poems: The poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edward Rowland Sill, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Haven Schauffler, are reprinted by special arrangement with the Houghton Mifflin Company. The poems by Rudyard Kipling are reprinted by special arrangement with Doubleday, Page and Company. The poems by Walt Whitman are reprinted by permission of Horace Traubel and Doubleday, Page and Company. The poems by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Percy Mackaye, John G. Neihardt, James Oppenheim, Sara Teasdale, and George Edward Woodberry are reprinted by permission of the authors and the Macmillan Com pany; those by Madison Cawein by permission of the author's executors and the Macmillan Company. The poems by Alfred Noyes are reprinted by permission of the author and the Frederick A. Stokes Company. The poems by Wendell Phillips Stafford and O. W. Firkins are reprinted by permission of the authors and the Atlantic Monthly Company. The poems by Abbie Farwell Brown (from "Songs of Sixpence"), William Herbert Carruth (from "Each in his Own Tongue, and Other Poems"), Florence Earle Coates, Helen Gray Cone, Washington Gladden, Thomas S. Jones, Jr. (from "The Rose-Jar"), David Starr Jordan, Benjamin R. C. Low (from "The House that Was"), Edwin Markham, John Masefield, Harold T. Pulsifer (from "Mothers and Men"), Charles M. Sheldon, Lewis Worthington Smith, Will Henry Thompson, and Katharine Tynan, are reprinted by permission of their authors. The poems by Bliss Carman and Charlotte Perkins Stetson are reprinted by permission of their authors and Small, Maynard and Company. The poems by John B. Tabb, and Richard Hovey's "Comrades" and "At the End of the Day," are reprinted by permission of Small, Maynard and Company; Richard Hovey's "Unmanifest Destiny" is reprinted by permission of Duffield and Company. The poems by Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson are reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company. "A Song of Today," by Mary A. Lathbury, is reprinted by permission of the Chautauqua Institution. "After Construing," by Arthur Christopher Benson, is reprinted by permission of the author and the John Lane Company. "When the Great Gray Ships Come In," by Guy Wetmore Carryl, is reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons. "A Little Song of Life," by Lizette Woodworth Reese, is reprinted by permission of Thomas Bird Mosher. "Trees," by Joyce Kilmer, and "The Sacrament of Fire," by John Oxenham (from "The Fiery Cross"), are reprinted by permission of the George H. Doran Company. "The Listeners" and "Nod" by Walter de la Mare are reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Father Gilligan" and the "Ballad of Moll Magee" (from "Poetical Works") by W. B. Yeats, by special permission of the author and the Macmillan Company. Finally, grateful acknowledgement is made of the assistance rendered by the editor's sometime colleague, Mr. Frank Ernest Hill, who not only made for this volume the paraphrase of Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale," but supplied a great number of the explanatory notes for the poems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. R. M. A. |