PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

In the second edition of this Anthology the editor has availed himself of suggestions by the professors of English in many of our leading universities which will tend to greatly increase its value, which, with much satisfaction to both the publishers and the editor, has been acknowledged by the sympathetic reception which greeted its publication.

In accordance with these suggestions there has been supplied in place of an index of poems by numbers, an index of titles under authors with short biographies of each. A glossary has also been added. In some instances slight changes have been made in the text. Where these have occurred, it has been due to a question of accuracy in the original versions or to later alterations by editors, with a view to rendering sixteenth-century meaning understandable to the point of view of the present day.

I hereby acknowledge my obligations for these suggestions and for encouraging words of praise to Prof. William Hand Browne, of Johns Hopkins University, Prof. William Lyon Phelps, of Yale University, Adele Lathrop, of Wellesley College, Prof. Felix Schelling, of the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Brander Matthews and Prof. Curtis Hidden Page, of Columbia University, Prof. Richard Burton, of the University of Minnesota, Prof. W. H. Schofield and Prof. C. T. Copeland, of Harvard University, William Dean Howells, John Russell Hayes, and others.

New Year's Day, 1907.

W. S. B.

PREFACE

It has been my purpose in compiling this book to do, what I marvel has not long ago been accomplished — that is, to make a single-volume anthology that would contain the best verse of the Elizabethan Age, whose limits I have set from the publication of Tottel's Miscellany, 1557, to the poets born as late as the eighteenth year of the seventeenth century. While these dates · are the indicative horizon lines of the opening and close of the period, the selections are really chosen from the contributions of one hundred and seventy-one years; for as we ken that mysterious pathway up which the sun creeps towards dawn, and meditate the solemnity of the woods lying behind the sunset, so here have we caught those early pipings which set the key for the noonday's golden chorus, and made a nest to give its faint and dying echoes a home after sunset.

Milton, I have not included, for in my judgment his muse is not Elizabethan, though something more that was strong and independent enough in its genius to create a new dawn out of the Elizabethan nightfall. The one pre-eminent poet he remains, without the ensemble of a great contemporary and succeeding group of singers, from the sixteenth century to the births of Blake and Burns, dates after which, for another century, the soul of English poetry was indigenous to mountain peaks.

Unlike Mr. Quiller-Couch's purpose stated in the Preface to his Golden Pomp, my aim has been both to instruct and please; and this I had hoped to accomplish without being

scholastic in any sense of attempt at chronological order of authors, or by adjusting single poems to complement any fact of historical significance. It being true as has been said by a contemporary critic, that the Age was one when verse was

used as speech, and becomes song by way of speech," there could be nothing better than its poetry as an expression of its manners, morals, religious aspirations, national and domestic life, vices, virtues, and the temper of the personal attitude. Soldiers and sea-faring adventurers, courtiers and ambassadors, barons and commons, tavern-vagabonds and play-actors, all wrote verse as the familiar and divine gift of some beneficent god on Parnassus who made the English his chosen people of melody. The world was fresh and young; the West passage to India was still a virgin route, and the chemical forces of nature were unleashed to the utility of man. Beauty and wonder came out of the re-awakened consciousness of the Italian Renaissance; the dim mysterious continent below the sunset filled the dreams in English minds with daring and bravery; at home were pageants and masques, and a Sovereign who, gracing them with her presence, exerted a subtle influence and power which her subjects from court to but acknowledged in prayer, praise, and devotion; there was personal and family honour to be cherished and preserved; and women filled men's hearts with a madness for possession as if their lips had tasted the wondrous apples of the Hesperides. And in their doing of these things the desire and the deed were intense. Emotion without any system of psychology went straight to the goal of expression; and out of emotion, thought was born, growing to a marvellous philosophy in Shakespeare, sound ethics in Fulke Greville, and sublime morality in Samuel Daniel. And to these qualities of a universal humanism the period contributed the classicism of Greece and Rome in a sort

of Hedonism of intellect in Jonson; a riotous Paganism of senses in Lodge and Fletcher; a Platonism of spiritual interpretation in Spenser and his great schoolmen Drayton and Browne; and in Campion and Herrick a rich, ripe lyric utterance which still remains something quite better in substance, form, and expression than any art except that of Shelley.

In grouping the poems I have followed roughly a general scheme; not too closely nor with the absolute formality of a flower-shop. I have preferred instead, to come out of a prodigal and fragrant field with an armful of flowers with perfumes and colours arranged by kind, indifferently, to give something of Nature's variety.

With Spenser, in all but one instance, the original spelling has been retained since inflection and colour are so intricately woven in the woof of the older fashion of words. With very few exceptions I have been particular to give each poem without omission of stanzas or lines; especially has this been so in cases where longer verses have been “ fashioned" by former editors to give the lyric form and quality, and depleted of fine lines and single stanzas which will be met with here as new to many readers. In making the selections my method was, first to read through the works of the poets in their own editions as far as accessible. Of course no one working in the poetry of the period could hope to do the work half well without the valuable contributions of Mr. Bullen's Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song Books. The reader as well as the editor owes to Mr. Bullen's patient and scholarly researches through the collections of public and private Manuscripts an infinite debt of gratitude. As it is impossible to indicate acknowledgment of each poem which owes its discovery and publication to bis loving and tireless labours, I wish here for all, to express my