In almost every American household there will be some volume of poetry through which the young reader can make his entrance into the enchanted world; there will be a volume of Shakespeare, an old copy of “Paradise Lost” or the works of Longfellow or Tennyson. In our day a desire to read is seldom thwarted by lack of books. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the very abundance of books made us so familiar with their backs that we do not value the treasures inside. The biographies of our grandfathers tell us of walks of five miles to secure some coveted volume, and a volume so secured was not skimmed or neglected; the effort to get it made it doubly precious. If one is left to choose the door through which to enter the realm of poetry, a good anthology will prove a broad approach. There is none better than Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.” It is inexpensive, so that anyone can save enough pennies to buy it. It is convenient to carry in one’s pocket, a virtue that makes it preferable to larger anthologies, to those old-fashioned “household collections” printed in double columns. If all our men and boys had the “Golden Treasury” in their coat pockets, what a civilization we should have at the end of ten years! In order to keep up with us the ladies would have to provide pockets in their dresses or carry more spacious handbags than the tyranny of style now permits. The selections in Palgrave or in the four volumes of Ward’s “English Poets,” are so rich and varied that no reader can fail to find his own poet, and the next step will be to get a larger selection from that poet’s works. All the English poets have been published in inexpensive volumes of selections, many of them in the same _Golden Treasury Series_; and as poets, like other human beings, are not always at their best, an edition which contains only the best will save the reader from the unfortunate experience of meeting a poet for the first time in his inferior work. When we have learned really to like a poet, we shall wish to have his complete works, but for the young reader most modern poets are better for the suppression of their less admirable passages. Only three or four--Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, our greatest poets--wrote long poems which to be enjoyed at their fullest must be read entire. Although it is true that poetry consists of great lines and that a collection of short poems and passages will be enough to nourish the soul for its whole earthly life, yet supreme poetry is built on a mighty plan. Brief lyrics and bits of song are like jewels, precious, complete, beautiful. Great poems, epics and dramas, are like cathedrals in which the jewels are set in the walls and in the windows. One might read all the fine passages from Shakespeare and yet not feel Shakespeare’s highest, that is, his entire, poetic power.