Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/19

 when the spirit moves, and tossing it into the air for the wind to blow where it listeth!

Whether the song survives is largely a matter of chance. Many people cherish the comfortable belief that a great work of art never perishes, that it holds within itself, in some mysterious way, the seed of deathlessness. But this is nonsense. The dust we tread is compounded of great works of art, and many lovely songs have passed into darkness along with the lovely women who inspired them. That some few live on is due largely to the “Reliques” and “Pastorals” and “Garlands” put together by the loving hand of the anthologist, who, industrious and undiscouraged, is continually assaying huge masses of very low-grade ore in the hope of discovering a grain of gold. Needless to say, many such grains escape him, and are carried down to oblivion by the sheer weight of the uninspired mass in which they are embedded. Sometimes, in turning over the old material, one of them is found, but many have been lost forever.

The poems dealt with in the following pages have no claim to greatness. They are, for the most part, curiosities, literary orphans which have flitted through the columns of the press, their parentage uncertain. They have been mutilated by brutal scissors, debased by stupid compositors and marred by careless