American verse has suffered at the hands both of its admirers and its enemies. Injudicious praise, no less than supercilious contempt, has reacted unfavorably on the fame of our poets. Again and again has some minor versifier been hailed as the "American Keats" or the "American Burns." Really excellent poets, though distinctly poets of second rank, have been elevated amid the blare of critical trumpets to the company of Wordsworth and Milton. All this is unprofitable and silly. But not much better is the attitude of certain critics who patronize everything in the English language which has been written outside of England. Though America has added--leaving Poe out of account--no distinctly new notes to English poetry, it has added certainly not a few true ones. A nation need never apologize for its literature when it has produced such lyrics--to go no further--as "On a Bust of Dante," "Ichabod," "The Chambered Nautilus," and the "Waterfowl." My method of arrangement is roughly chronological. The First Book, which is shorter than the others, might be called the book of Bryant; the Second, of Longfellow; and the Third, of Aldrich. Since the periods must of course overlap, this division of the poems can be at most only suggestive. I have made it no part of my design to grant to the better known poets a larger number of lyrics than those given later and younger men. I have paid no regard to that purely conventional idea of proportion, that would assign to five or six writers a dozen selections each, and to another set of poets, in proportion to their popular fame, half that number. We can safely leave the final adjustment of all rival claims to Time, the best critic; in the meanwhile having the more modest aim of selecting, irrespective of contemporary judgments, whatever is best suited to our purpose. A word more should be said about the title. I have not interpreted the term lyric so rigidly as to exclude sonnets, ballads, elegiac verse, or even pieces of almost pure description. If I had held to the strictest sense of lyric, this book would never have been compiled; for I suspect nothing will strike the reader more forcibly than the fact that, despite the excellence of the poems included, there is a notable lack of unconsciousness--of pure singing quality. Such things as Pinkney's "Health" and Holmes's "Old Ironsides" are the exception. The poems are composed cleverly, but they do not quite sing themselves to their own music. The best American verse, while not insincere, is seldom wholly spontaneous. This is not saying that much spontaneous verse has not been written in this country; much has been, but the singer's voice has too often been uncultivated, and the product inartistic.