THE
HE volume here presented to the reader is a se-
lection of complete poems1 from all or almost
all that is worth preserving in English Lyric Poetry
which has Love as its subject. And since Poetry is
the one Art in which we have made a really inde-
structible success, in which we have really expressed
ourselves, we may find here some hundreds of verses
of an imperishable beauty. In any wide view of
English Poetry it might seem as though all the
vitality of the race, that desire for expression, the
idealism and dreams of a great people who must
create, always with joy, had passed into Verse, since
in Prose we have not attained to the lucidity and
perfection of the French; nor in Sculpture to the
immortal and precise beauty of the Greeks; nor in
Painting to the loveliness and power of the Italians;
nor in Music to the profound rhythm of the Germans.
It is really only in Poetry that we are as it were a
world power, since we have produced indisputably the
most beautiful Verse of the modern world, perhaps
of all time, in Lyric as in Dramatic Poetry. Our
extraordinary indifference to Art or Beauty of any
sort has obscured much of the great dramatic litera-
1 There are, I think, but three exceptions: only one, that of the songs from "The Song of Songs," is of any importance.