I have called this volume a _Household Book of English Poetry_, by this name implying that it is a book for all, that there is nothing in it to prevent it from being confidently placed in the hands of every member of the household. I wish I could have kept it within a moderate size by no more than the excluding from it everything of inferior value; but it will be evident to all who are at all acquainted with the inexhaustible opulence of English Poetry that I could only do this by continual acts of self-denial, having, at every step of my progress, to set my seal to the truth of that Eastern proverb which says, ‘You may bring a nosegay to the city, but you cannot bring the garden.’ This is indeed all which in this anthology I have attempted. To have allowed it to grow to a larger bulk would have defeated my hopes that it might be a volume which the emigrant, finding room for little not absolutely necessary, might yet find room for it in his trunk, and the traveller in his knapsack, and that on some narrow shelves where there are few books this might be one. But indeed the actual amount which such a volume contains, whether it be much or little, will be of less consequence in our eyes, when once we have apprehended that Horace was only under the mark when he affirmed of good poetry that ten times repeated it will please. It would be truer to say of a poem which in motive, in form, in diction, in melody, in unity of plan, satisfies all conditions, that it is ‘a joy for ever.’ It is impossible so to draw out the sweetness of it that it shall not still have as much to yield us, or it maybe more than it had at the beginning. How many another book, once read, can yield no more pleasure or profit to us--but poems of the highest order are in their very essence sources of a delight which is inexhaustible. However much of this has been drawn from them, as much or more remains behind. There is another reflection which may console us in leaving so much untouched, namely, that almost every considerable poet has written something, in which all that he has of highest and most characteristic has come to a head. Thus I remember that Wordsworth used to speak of Shelley’s _Ode to a Skylark_ as the expression of the highest to which his genius had attained. Wordsworth’s own _Lines on revisiting the banks of the Wye_, or, higher perhaps even than these, his _Lines suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a Storm_, I should regard as fulfilling for him the same conditions; and what is true of these two, is no less true of other poets out of number.