This little volume is devoted to a sweet and delightful section of poetic fancy, and not to the lofty flights of inspired imagination. It is full of felicity and beauty, and though not a tabernacle enshrining the rarest gems, it is a storehouse of dainty devices. If individual poems are occasionally found to fall below the general level of their writers, as perhaps in the case of Herrick, an explanation will possibly be seen in the unserious spirit with which the subject has been too frequently approached by our English poets, who have generally represented a class superior to the superstitions and sometimes to the faiths of the time. In such cases as that of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, for whom the doctrine of spiritual essences was still true, for whom those elemental intelligences Which have their haunts in dale and piny mountain, Or forests, by slow stream or tingling brook, still survived in the “faith of reason,” we find the concentrated strength of a vivid and mature imagination devoted to the production of a true fairy poem which is “not for an age but for all time.” * * * * * A word, in conclusion, must be said on the arrangement of this anthology. The absence of a sufficiently harmonious development of fairy fancy as it is found in our English poetry does not warrant a simple chronological plan; I have adopted another, which I trust will contribute towards the attractiveness and literary value of the book. It opens with a foreview, or bird’s-eye prospect of the fairy country, as it might be beheld by the traveller from without. A prelude follows, which implores the return of its inhabitants into the world of humanity. Then, in the first division there is a particular account of the court, country, and people of Fairyland, of its temples, palaces, and festivals. The second division contains the Chronicles of Fairyland, a series of pleasing poetic romances, where the scene is laid in the Fairy country and the actors are exclusively elfin folk. A third division is devoted to those wonderful and mystical travels or spiritual pilgrimages into Fairyland, which have been occasionally undertaken by favoured and adventurous mortals. The section entitled Men and Fairies comprises those poems and romances in which the different orders of elfin spirits enter into communication with man and mingle in the life of earth, dispensing supernatural benevolence, or working unheard-of woe, according to their various dispositions. Some poems which cannot be included in the foregoing divisions, but deserve by their merits a place in this elfin anthology, are comprised in a miscellaneous section. The work closes with an epilogue, which shows why the fairies have departed, and what are the conditions of their return.