Household Book of English Poetry [Illustration: colophon] A HOUSEHOLD BOOK OF ENGLISH POETRY SELECTED AND ARRANGED With Notes BY RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO. 1868 LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET PREFACE. The first question which I asked myself, when I resumed a purpose long ago entertained, and then for a long while laid aside, of publishing such a selection of English Poetry as the present, was this, namely, whether Mr. Palgrave’s _Golden Treasury_ had not so occupied the ground that there was no room for one who should come after. The selection is one made with so exact an acquaintance with the sources from which his _Treasury_ was to be replenished, with so fine a taste in regard of what was worthy to be admitted there, that this was the conclusion to which at the first I was disposed to arrive. Presently, however, I saw reason to change my mind. The volume which I meditated was on so different a scheme and plan from his, that, while no doubt I should sometimes go over ground which he had gone over before, it was evident that for the most part our paths would be different, and my choice not identical with his. This to so great an extent has proved the case, that of more than three hundred pieces which compose this volume, less than seventy have appeared in his. And it is easy to perceive how this should be. His is a _Treasury of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English Language_, and of these exclusively; but within this circle he proposes to include _all_ which is of first-rate excellence in our language by authors not living. My scheme is at once broader and narrower; broader, in that I limit myself to no one particular class of poetry, and embrace the living and the dead alike; narrower, in that I make no attempt to be exhaustive, or to give more than a very few samples even of the best and greatest of our poets.