Adversitie.

If it befall that God thee list visite
With any torment or adversitie,

Thank first the Lorde, and then thyself to quite
Upon sufferance and humilite

Found thou thy quaril, what ere that it be. Make thy defence, and thou shalt have no losse, The remembrance of Christ and of His crosse.

CHAUCER.

Daisies and Sorrow.

THESE flowers white and red,

Such as men callen daisies in our town;
To them have I so great affection,
As I said erst, when comen is the May,
That in my bed there daweth me no day,
That I n'am up and walking in the mead
To see this flow'r against the sunné spread,
When it upriseth early by the morrow;
That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow;
So glad am I when that I have presence
Of it, to doen it all reverence.

Caged Birds.

WHERE birds are fed in cages,

CHAUCER.

Though you should day and night tend them like pages,
And strew the bird's room fair and soft as silk,

And give him sugar, honey, bread, and milk;
Yet had the bird, by twenty-thousand fold,
Rather be in a forest wild and cold;

PREFATORY NOTE.

EVERY book ought to explain itself, without preface; but in a volume of selections from the past, a brief prefatory note will have its value. It is unnecessary to vindicate the re-issue of any Literature of the Old Times, which has in reality enriched the world: for in the noisy Present we need the Teaching of writings on which the silence of the Past has settled down. But when a volume is compiled from the works of men long silent, some explanation of its aim and plan may be expected.

The present volume is mainly, but not exclusively, a religious book. It is so exclusively, if the word Religion is understood as co-extensive with all the Deep and True in man, that has an upward tendency. It is not exclusively devotional. It is not a hymnology. But all its poems have an undertone of the devotional in them, even when the theme is not explicitly religious. Poetry which looks into the deep things of Man, or which speaks of the moral analogies of Nature, or reveals the hidden significance of Life, in a lofty and unworldly way, is really, in a broadly