From the lyric poems of Tennyson, turn to Shelley’s “The Skylark” (one of the most beautiful poems in our language), and his “The Cloud,” and “Ode to the West Wind”; and after picking up such little gems as “Love’s Philosophy,” we may learn to like “Alastor” and “The Sensitive Plant.” Once Byron was almost worshiped, while today we hardly do him justice. He is the poet of the “dark mood,” and we shall probably find this mood in its greatest purity in his dramatic poems “Manfred” and “Cain,” of each of which he is himself the hero. Rather than read entire such long poems as “Childe Harold,” “The Giaour,” “The Corsair,” and “Don Juan,” it will be better to read the striking passages--at least at first. We must judge from our taste for Byron how much we shall read of him. No one should fail to read Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” If we would read further, we may perhaps choose first “St Agnes’ Eve,” “Ode to Autumn” and “Endymion.” It takes a fine poetic taste to appreciate Keats, for he is a poet “all of beauty,” rich, fragrant, sensuous beauty, such beauty as we shall find nowhere else; but his thoughts and emotions of love and conquest over life are not very great. Next to Browning, perhaps the greatest poet of the nineteenth century is Wordsworth. He is the very opposite of Browning standing to Nature as Browning does to humanity. We shall find his creed stated in a poem which is one of the greatest in the English language, called simply “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”; and much the same thought we shall find expressed in more lyric form in his famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Unquestionably the best of Wordsworth is to be found in Matthew Arnold’s selections in the “Golden Treasury” series, and this is better to possess than the bulky complete works, much of which we shall find exceedingly dull and almost fatal to our liking for any poetry whatever. But there are also many beautiful simple poems of Wordsworth’s which we should easily learn to like, among them, “We Are Seven,” “Lucy Gray,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She Grew,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (Daffodils), and many of his sonnets, such as that to “Milton,” “On Westminster Bridge,” “To the River Duddon--Afterthought,” “The World Is too Much With Us,” etc.