Page:Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations.djvu/11



In offering this book to the public, the compiler must crave some of the indulgence usually extended to those who break new ground, for it has in most cases been a matter of suggesting passages, in the compiler's opinion suitable for quotation, rather than of collecting together those already adopted as quotations.

The idea that many of our modern poets, even among those who lay no claim to being considered of the first rank, have written pithy and epigrammatic passages, or expressed beautiful thoughts worthy of quotation, had for some time impressed itself upon the compiler's mind, and this idea has found expression in the present book.

That some who ought to have been represented are not, whilst others occupy an undue space, is but too well known to the compiler; but this want of proportion may in part be accounted for by the fact that it is not always the best writers who best lend themselves to quotation—the style of some of the very best almost forbids their being quoted at all. Beautiful passages are often too long for quoting, and can find fitting place only in an Anthology. Again, many lines have been inserted that can lay no claim whatever to beauty, but have been chosen solely because they are the best, or perhaps the only available, on some subject that seemed to call for representation.

Roughly speaking, the poems from which these quotations are taken date from after 1850, but to this rule there are obvious exceptions—notably those of the two Tennysons, the two Brownings, and the four American poets Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Whitman. To omit these from contemporary poets seemed impossible, though much of their work was published long before the date named, and much of it has already been accepted amongst the "Classics of Quotation."

H. S.