Coventry Patmore, and to the excellent 'Poets'
Walk' of Mr. Mowbray Morris. My purpose has been to choose and
sheave a certain number of those achievements in verse which,
as expressing the simpler sentiments and the more elemental
emotions, might fitly be addressed to such boys--and men, for
that matter--as are privileged to use our noble English tongue.
To set forth, as only art can, the beauty and the joy of living,
the beauty and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle
and adventure, the nobility of devotion--to a cause, an ideal,
a passion even--the dignity of resistance, the sacred quality
of patriotism, that is my ambition here. Now, to read poetry
at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that
possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all
the world besides. That is, the personal equation is ever to be
reckoned withal, and I have had my preferences, as those that
went before me had theirs. I have omitted much, as Aytoun's
'Lays,' whose absence many will resent; I have included much,
as that brilliant piece of doggerel of Frederick Marryat's,
whose presence some will regard with distress. This without
reference to enforcements due to the very nature of my work.
I have adopted the birth-day order: for that is the simplest.
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