A HYMN OF EMPIRE (Coronation Year, 1911) God save England, blessed by Fate,So old, yet ever young:The acorn isle from which the greatImperial oak has sprung!And God guard Scotland's kindly soil,The land of stream and glen,The granite mother that has bredA breed of granite men!God save Wales, from Snowdon's valesTo Severn's silver strand!For all the grace of that old raceStill haunts the Celtic land.And, dear old Ireland, God save you,And heal... more...

INTRODUCTORY The New Influences and Tendencies Mere statistics are untrustworthy; dates are even less dependable. But, to avoid hairsplitting, what we call "modern" English literature may be said to date from about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly "of the period" are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a... more...

AN INTRODUCTION BY CHARLES DICKENS In the spring of the year 1853, I observed, as conductor of the weekly journal Household Words, a short poem among the proffered contributions, very different, as I thought, from the shoal of verses perpetually setting through the office of such a periodical, and possessing much more merit.  Its authoress was quite unknown to me.  She was one Miss Mary Berwick, whom I had never heard of; and she was... more...

THE CHRONICLE OF THE DRUM. PART I. At Paris, hard by the Maine barriers,Whoever will choose to repair,Midst a dozen of wooden-legged warriorsMay haply fall in with old Pierre.On the sunshiny bench of a tavernHe sits and he prates of old wars,And moistens his pipe of tobaccoWith a drink that is named after Mars.The beer makes his tongue run the quicker,And as long as his tap never fails,Thus over his favorite liquorOld Peter will tell his old... more...

Preface The Romantic poets rediscovered a pastoral and Biblical dream: that a child was the most innocent and the wisest of us all. Wordsworth hailed him as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" And in the next generation Victorian novelists took that dream seriously enough to make children the heroes and heroines of their most searching fictions. There had been no "children's literature" to speak of before, except for the oral and "popular" tradition,... more...

PREFACE. The First Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published, as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart. I had formed no very inaccurate estimate... more...

HART-LEAP WELL Hart-Leap Well is a small spring of water, about five miles from Richmond in Yorkshire, and near the side of the road which leads from Richmond to Askrigg. Its name is derived from a remarkable chase, the memory of which is preserved by the monuments spoken of in the second Part of the following Poem, which monuments do now exist as I have there described them.   The Knight had ridden down from Wensley... more...

LIFE OF KEATS Of all the great poets of the early nineteenth century—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats—John Keats was the last born and the first to die. The length of his life was not one-third that of Wordsworth, who was born twenty-five years before him and outlived him by twenty-nine. Yet before his tragic death at twenty-six Keats had produced a body of poetry of such extraordinary power and promise that the... more...

Pope’s life as a writer falls into three periods, answering fairly enough to the three reigns in which he worked.  Under Queen Anne he was an original poet, but made little money by his verses; under George I. he was chiefly a translator, and made much money by satisfying the French-classical taste with versions of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”  Under George I. he also edited Shakespeare, but with little... more...

ON THE LIFE AND POETIC GENIUS OF EDWARD YOUNG. Between the period of George Herbert, and that of Edward Young, some singular changes had taken place in British poetry as well as in British manners, politics, and religion. There had passed over the land the thunderstorm of the Puritanic Revolt, which had first clouded and then cleared, for a season, the intellectual and moral horizon. The effect of this on poetry was, for such fugitive though... more...