GARLAND OF LOVE, WREATHED OF PLEASANT FLOWERS, GATHERED IN THE FIELD OF ENGLISH POESY. Love refines The thoughts, the heart enlarges; hath his seat In reason, and is judicious; is the scale By which to heavenly love thou may'st ascend. MILTON. LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 186, STRAND. MDCCCXXXVI. PREFACE. In the following selection of Love Poems, the greatest care has been taken to exclude such pieces as are as likely to corrupt the heart with their insidious poison, as to captivate the fancy by their alluring beauty. The chief object of the compiler has been to wreathe a garland of flowers which are at once pleasing and innoxious, though of various odour and hue; and in making the selection he has not forgotten that the daisy and heath-bell have their own peculiar charms, and give variety and beauty to a garland, as well as the lily and the rose. As there is no lack of love's flowers in the ample field of English Poesy, it would have been easy to have formed a Garland of much greater size; but when enough had been culled, the gatherer stinted: his Garland was meant for the brow of youth and beauty, and not to decorate a may-pole or an ale-stake. With respect to the arrangement, the deceased poets, from Lord Rochford, page 1, to Henry Neele, page 188, follow each other in the order of their birth; except in the case of Christopher Marlowe, who is placed at page 40, that his "Passionate Shepherd" may immediately precede Raleigh's answer to it; and in the case of Robert Anderson, who is placed at page 189, that his "Impatient Lassie" may stand in juxtaposition with Joanna Baillie's " Impatient Shepherd." For the dates of the birth and death of the earlier poets, the compiler has chiefly relied on those given by George Ellis, Esq., in his "Specimens of the Early English Poets;" a work to which he is indebted for several pieces that he could not have obtained elsewhere, without considerable trouble. He frankly makes this acknowledgment; for he would not like to be suspected of gathering a choice flower in a conservatory, and of then attempting to obtain the credit of a first discoverer, by pretending that he found it, after great search, in its natural habitat. The pieces selected from the works of living writers, commencing with Joanna Baillie, at page 191, are placed without any regard to order, but merely as they came to hand. To all from whose open fields, hedgerows, or gardens, he has cropped a flower or two in passing, the compiler begs to make his acknowledgments, with a hope that there is none so poor in the gifts of poesy as not to be able to spare them. The old spelling of Rochford, Wyatt, Surrey, Harrington, and two or three more of the elder poets, is retained; as, in several places, the rhythm or measure of the verse seemed to be dependent on it. To have altered the spelling in such instances, and to have eked out the measure by introducing supplementary words, would have been like removing the patina—the verdant and preserving tarnish of antiquity—from an ancient medal, and then filling up the rust-corroded holes |