Page:The blue poetry book (IA bluepoetry00lang).pdf/11



purpose of this Collection is to put before children, and A young people, poems which are good in themselves, and espe- cially fitted to live, as Theocritus says, on the lips of the young. The Editor has been guided to a great extent, in making his choice, by recollections of what particularly pleased himself in youth. As a rule, the beginner in poetry likes what is called objective art-verse with a story in it, the more vigorous the story the better. The old ballads satisfy this taste, and the Editor would gladly have added more of them, Int for two reasons. First, there are parents who would see hari, where children see none, in Tamlane and Clerk Saunders. Next. there was reason to dread that the volume might become entirely too Scottish. It is certainly a curious thing that, in Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury, where some seventy poets are represented. scaredly more than a tenth of the number were born north of Twerd. In this book, how- ever, intended for lads and lassies, the poems by Campbell, by Sir Walter Scott, by Burns, by the Scottish song-writers, and the Scottish mainstrels of the ballad. are in an unexpectedly large proportion to the poems by English authors. The Editor believes that this predominance of Northern verse is not due to any exorbitant local patriotism of his own. The singers of the North, for some reason or other, do excel in poems of action and of adventure, or to him they seem to excel. He is acquainted with no modern ballnd by a Southern English- man, setting aside Christalul and the Ancient Mariner poems hardly to be called Ballads which equals The Eve of