America than in that of countries, further advanced in the arts, wherein lyrical expression has derived importance from its literary worth rather than from its might as the voice of the people. If it is difficult to assort our poets of any one time into classes it chances that they are significantly classified by generations. The arrangement of this volume thus depends upon its time-divisions, of which the sequence can be traced by a glance at the preliminary Table of Contents.

Colonial verse, howsoever witty, learned, and godly, is beyond the purview; and well it may be, if only in obeisance to the distich of that rare old colonist, Nathaniel Ward, who tells us in "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam," that

"Poetry 's a gift wherein but few excel;

He doth very ill that doth not passing well."

Those who wish glimpses of life in New England after the forefathers were measurably adjusted to new conditions, may acquaint themselves with the lively eclogues of our first native poet, Ben Tompson. They will find nothing else so clever until a hundred years later they come upon the verse of Mistress Warren, the measures grave and gay of Francis Hopkinson, the sturdy humor of Trumbull and his fellow-wits. Barlow's "Columbiad" certainly belonged to neither an Homeric nor an Augustan age. Contemporary with its begetter was a true poet, one of nature's lyrists, who had the temperament of a Landor and was much what the Warwick classicist might have been if bred, afar from Oxford, to the life of a pioneer and revolutionist, spending his vital surplusage in action, bellicose journalism, and new-world verse. A few of Freneau's selecter songs and ballads long have been a part of literature, and with additions constitute my first gleanings of what was genuinely poetic in the years before Bryant earned his title as the father of American song. In that preliminary stage, an acting-drama began with Tyler and Dunlap and should have made better progress in the halfcentury ensuing. A dialect-ballad of the time, "The Country-Lovers," by Fessenden of New Hampshire, though unsuited to this Anthology, is a composition from which Lowell seems to have precipitated the native gold of "The Courtin'." Apart from these I think that sufficient, if not all, of what the opening years have to show of poetic value or association may be found in the selections from Freneau and others earlier than the First Lyrical Period, a period which Pierpont, despite his birth-record, is entitled to lead off, considering the date of his first publications and the relation of his muse to an heroic future.

Accepting the advent of Bryant and Pierpont as the outset of a home minstrelsy which never since has failed of maintenance, our course hitherto divides itself readily into two periods, with the Civil War as a transitional rest between. The First ends with that national metamorphosis of which the impassioned verse of a few writers, giving no uncertain sound, was the prophecy and inspiration. The antecedent struggle was so absorbing that any conception of poetry as an art to be pursued for its own sake was at best not current; yet beauty was not infrequent in the strain of even the anti-slavery bards, and meanwhile one American singer was giving it his entire allegiance. Before reverting to these antebellum conditions, it should be noted that a Second Period began with the war olympiad, lasting to a date that enables a compiler to distinguish its stronger representatives until the beginning of the century's final decade. To complete the survey I add a liberal aftermath of verse produced in these last ten years; for it seems worth while to favor a rather inclusive chartage of the tendencies, even the minor currents and eddies, which the poetry of our younger writers reveals to those who care for it. As to omitted names, I reflect that their bearers well may trust to anthologists of the future, rather than to have lines embalmed here for which in later days they may not care to be held to account.

The sub-divisions of each of the lyrical periods, covering, as to the First Period, three terms of about fifteen years each, and as to the Second, three of ten years each, represent literary generations, some of which so overlap one another as to be in a sense contemporary. Finally, the "Additional Selections" at the end of every sub-division, and succeeding the preliminary and supplementary pages, are for the most part chronologically ordered as concerns any specific group of poems. These addenda have afforded a serviceable means of preserving notable "single poems," and of paying attention to not a few unpretentious writers who, while uttering true notes, have obeyed Wordsworth's injunction to shine in their places and "be content."

Here I wish to set down a few conclusions, not so much in regard to the interest of the whole compilation as to its value in any summary of the later poetry of our English tongue.

When I told a New York publisher-a University man, whose judgment is well entitled to respect that I had this book in mind as the final number of 2 series and as a companion to the British volume, he replied off-hand: "You

cannot make it half so good as the other: we have n't the material." This I was not ready to dispute, yet was aware of having entertained a feeling, since writing "Poets of America," that if a native anthology must yield to the foreign one in wealth of choice production, it might prove to be, from an equally vital point of view, the more significant of the two. Now having ended my labor, that feeling has become a belief which possibly may be shared by others willing to consider the grounds of its formation.

In demurring to what certainly is a general impression, the first inquiry must be: What then constitutes the significance of a body of rhythmical literature as found in either of these anthologies, each restricted to its own territory, and both cast in the same epoch and language? Undoubtedly, and first of all, the essential quality of its material as poetry; next to this, its quality as an expression and interpretation of the time itself. In many an era the second factor may afford a surer means of estimate than the first, inasmuch as the purely literary result may be nothing rarer than what the world already has possessed, nor greatly differing from it; nevertheless, it may be the voice of a time, of a generation, of a people, —all of extraordinary import to the world's future. A new constructive standard was set by Tennyson, with increase rather than reduction of intellectual power, but shortly before the art of the laureate and his school there was little to choose in technical matters between English and American rhythmists, Landor always excepted. Since the Georgian hey-day, imagination of the creative order scarcely has been dominant, nor is it so in any composite and idyllic era. Our own poetry excels as a recognizable voice in utterance of the emotions of a people. The storm and stress of youth have been upon us, and the nation has not lacked its lyric cry; meanwhile the typical sentiments of piety, domesticity, freedom, have made our less impassioned verse at least sincere. One who underrates the significance of our literature, prose or verse, as both the expression and the stimulant of national feeling, as of import in the past and to the future of America, and therefore of the world, is deficient in that critical insight which can judge even of its own day unwarped by personal taste or deference to public impression. He shuts his eyes to the fact that at times, notably throughout the years resulting in the Civil War, this literature has been a "force." Its verse until the dominance of prose fiction

- well into the seventies, let us say

formed the staple of current reading; and

fortunate it was while pirated foreign writings, sold cheaply everywhere,

handicapped the evolution of a native prose school

that the books of the "elder

American poets" lay on the centre-tables of our households and were read with zest by young and old. They were not the fosterers of new-world liberty and aspiration solely; beyond this, in the case of Longfellow for example, the legends read between the lines made his verse as welcome in Great Britain as among his own country-folk. The criterion of poetry is not its instant vogue with the illinformed classes; yet when it is the utterance of an ardent people, as in the works of Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, it once more assumes its ancient and rightful place as the art originative of belief and deed. Emerson presented such a union of spiritual and civic insight with dithyrambic genius as may not be seen again. His thought is now congenital throughout vast reaches, among new peoples scarcely conscious of its derivation. The transcendentalists, as a whole, for all their lapses into didacticism, made and left an impress. Longfellow and his pupils, for their part, excited for our people the old-world sense of beauty and romance, until they sought for a beauty of their own and developed a new literary manner touched by that of the motherland, yet with a difference ; the counterpart of that "national likeness" so elusive, yet so instantly recognized when chanced upon abroad. In Bryant, often pronounced cold and granitic by readers bred to the copious-worded verse of modern times, is found the large imagination that befits a progenitor. It was stirred, as that of no future American can be, by his observation of primeval nature. He saw her virgin mountains, rivers, forests, prairies, broadly; and his vocabulary, scant and doric as it was, proved sufficient-in fact the best - for nature's elemental bard. His master may have been Wordsworth, but the difference between the two is that of the prairie and the moor, Ontario and Windermere, the Hudson and the Wye. From "Thanatopsis" in his youth to "The Flood of Years" in his hoary age, Bryant was conscious of the overstress of Nature unmodified by human occupation and training. It is not surprising that Whitman - though it was from Emerson he learned to follow his own genius- so often expressed himself as in sympathy with Bryant, above other American poets, on the imaginative side. The elemental quality of the two is what makes them akin; what differentiates them is not alone their styles, but the advance of Whitman's generation from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. The younger minstrel, to use his own phrase, also saw things en masse; but in his day and vision the synthesis of the new world was that of populous hordes surging here and there in the currents of democracy. Bryant is the poet of the ages, Whitman of the generations. The aesthetic note

of poetry was restored by Longfellow, in his Vergilian office, and by Edgar Poe with surer magic and endurance. Has any singer of our time more demonstrably affected the rhythmical methods of various lands than Poe with his few but haunting paradigms? He gave a saving grace of melody and illusion to French classicism, to English didactics, to the romance of Europe from Italy to Scandinavia. It is now pretty clear, notwithstanding the popularity of Longfellow in his day, that Emerson, Poe, and Whitman were those of our poets from whom the old world had most to learn; such is the worth, let the young writer note, of seeking inspiration from within, instead of copying the exquisite achievements of masters to whom we all resort for edification, that is, for our own delight, which is not the chief end of the artist's throes. Our three most individual minstrels are now the most alive, resembling one another only in having each possessed the genius that originates. Years from now, it will be matter of fact that their influences were as lasting as those of any poets of this century.

The polemic work of Whittier, Lowell, and their allies, illustrates the applied force of lyrical expression. Their poetry of agitation scarcely found a counterpart on the Southern side until the four-years' conflict began; yet any study of the causes and conduct of that war confirms our respect for Fletcher's sage who cared to make the ballads of a nation rather than its laws. His saying never applies more shrewdly than at the stage of a nation's formation when the slightest deflection must needs be the equivalent of a vast arc in the circle of its futurity. It is strange to realize that the young now view the Civil War from a distance almost equal to that between their seniors' childhood and the war of 1812 - - the veterans of which we watched with kindly humor when their lessening remnant still kept up its musty commemorations. Our youth know the immeasurably larger scope of the mid-century struggle; they cannot understand from the echo of its trumpetings the music of a time when one half of a people fought for a moral sentiment, the other, for a birthright which pride would not forego. Even the motherland, though gaining a fresh view from that convulsion and its outcome, formed no adequate understanding of her progeny over sea. Years go by, and the oceans are held in common, and the world is learning that our past foretokened a new domain in art, letters, and accomplishment, of which we have barely touched the oorder. Making every allowance for the gratia hospitum, a recent visitor, William Archer, need not fear to stand by what he had the perception to discover and the courage to declare. In his judgment, "the whole world will one day come to

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