HENRY CONSTABLE (1555-1615?) A Pastoral Song The Shepherd's Song of Venus and Adonis A Morning Song for Imogen (from Cymbeline) Silvia (from The Two Gentlemen of Verona) Sigh no more, Ladies (from Much Ado about Nothing) A Lover's Lament (from Twelfth Night) In the Greenwood (from As You Like It) Winter (from Love's Labour's Lost). A Vision upon this Conceit of The Fairy Queen Verses found in his Bible at the Gate-House at Westminster A Sonnet to the Moon (Charles Best). A Hymn in Praise of Neptune (T. Campion) Hermes in Calypso's Island (from Odyssey V).. Odysseus' Speech to Nausicaa (from Odyssey VI) The Song the Sirens sung (from Odyssey XII). Queen Margaret to William de la Pool, Duke of Suffolk To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, his Ballad of Agincourt i INTRODUCTION. 'THE future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.' Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as uttering the thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our study of poetry. In the present work it is the course of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. But whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and should be the same. |