7966

Lucy Larcom: "By the Fireside; "H. W. Longfellow: "Beware!" "The Household Sovereign," "Maidenhood," "My Lost Youth," "The Day is Done,' There was a Little Girl," "The Village Blacksmith;" J. R. Lowell: "The Heritage,' "She Came and Went," "Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire;" Nora Perry: "Riding Down;" Annie D. G. Robinson: "Two Pictures" F. D. Sherman: "The Shadows;" H. van Dyke: "The Child in the Garden;" J. G. Whittier: "The Barefoot Boy," "Benedicite," In School Days," "A New England Home in Winter."

MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, New York.-Harriet W. Durbin: "The Little Dutch Garden."

The OUTLOOK COMPANY, New York.-H. van Dyke: "A Wayfaring Song."

Messrs. SMALL, MAYNARD & Co., Boston.-B. Carman: “Spring Song."

Messrs M. WITMARK & SONS, New York.-E. D. Barker: "Go Sleep, Ma Honey."

II.

American poems in this volume by the authors whose names are given below are the copyrighted property of the authors, or of their representatives named in parenthesis, and may not be reprinted without their permission, which for the present work has been courteously granted.

1904.

PUBLISHERS OF THE WORLD'S BEST POETRY.

Charles T. Brooks (Mrs. Harriet Lyman Brooks); Mary A. De Vere; O. Herford; Margaret T. Janvier; J. E. Rankin; Annie R. Stillman.

YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE POETS.

BY WILLIAM DARNALL MACCLINTOCK.

WHEN it comes to poetry all of us are equally young and gay. The only thing your older friend, the critic, has a right to do is to run ahead, calling and beckoning you to fine pleasures a little higher up or over the hill.

Why then does he urge you to read for yourself these goodly volumes of poetry?

For pleasure.

The poets write first of all not to teach us, but to give us pleasure. If you will read them happily you will like them, you will remember and delight to say over their great lines. They will take you to a bright, romantic world of interesting people and places, where everything is choice, well arranged, full of warmth, of color, of movement, and where even sad things are sweet. That is almost enough; for he who gives you joy wherein you know you are not abusing some sacred faculty nor taking joy from some one else, brings a gift into whose perfection you need not inquire.

But you are now not a mere child, and I trust you care to know something of what is happening in your mind as you enjoy this other-world of the poets.

xxxiii.

Training the imagination.

By all art, but especially by poetry, your imagination will be aroused and cultivated. This means several things. By this faculty we make and see images and pictures. Take for example these pictures:

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas.'

...

"The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices."

-TENNYSON: Ulysses.

Do you not, like Odysseus himself, see with your eyes the harbor, the boat ready, and do you not hear him call to his comrades to

"Push off and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows"?

Such clear, concrete pictures the poets give you everywhere.

Sometimes, too, these images are addressed to the ear. Hear this:

"bees that soar for bloom

High as the highest peak of Furness fells
Will murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells."
-WORDSWORTH: Nuns fret not, etc.

Sometimes they appeal to the taste, as in

"lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon."

-KEATS: Eve of St. Agnes.

Now the poets make you realize and enjoy these vivid images; you learn through them to recall your own mental pictures, to make them clear and consistent, and to describe them in telling words.

By the imagination also poets take many bits of things they have seen, heard or felt, and build them into new wholes which they have never seen, yet which are beautiful and inspiring. These new creations always have some satisfying idea in them, as of things that might be or should be on earth, as showing justice or mercy at work, as delighting our sense of peace or beauty better than anything we have known, or as filled with charming people doing delightful things. Just above our human world there is made this new world, smaller but nearer our ideals, in which we live freely and happily.

It is by the imagination, too, that we seem to penetrate into the very depths of things,-as if with a new and powerful eye. Hear Lear's pathetic

exclamation :

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child!"

-SHAKESPEARE: King Lear;

or Emerson's radiant truth about the poets :

"Olympian bards who sung

Divine ideas below,

Which always find us young

And always keep us so."

-EMERSON: Ode to Beauty.

These swift glancings of the "mind's eye" make you see life more deeply, and they keep you from being commonplace, alive only because you are breathing.

We say, further, that it is by the imagination we spread the atmosphere of a gentle feeling over the face of a sharp image,-as the golden light of evening over a clear but hard landscape. So it is with

the artistic word "sleep" (noted by Ruskin) in Lorenzo's exclamation:

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.” -SHAKESPEARE: Merchant of Venice.

Here the word expresses both the bare fact of the moonlight lying or being on the grassy bank, and the tender aliveness of the night's soft light.

Read the poets, then, because they fill your mind with these lively pictures, teach you to make them for yourselves, make you eager to create new wholes -houses, landscapes, creatures, people and their actions and then make all these full of meaning and value for you. The poet's world is a living, moving world, and you have living emotions toward it.

Best of all, the poets will train your imaginations, as well as arouse them into activity. It would be unfortunate if your imaginations should become merely "fanciful," making up accidental, "idle " combinations-like those of a kaleidoscope-without any truth or wisdom in them. These new creations of the imagination should have in each some principle of physical or human nature, should be consistent, presenting things you would like to see and handle. Now whatever the great poets build up has in it these qualities. When you read them much you will be delighted to see your mere childish games of fancy begin to give place for the new but real beings "who do not walk the earth, and yet are of it." They make you, like the great inventors, constantly create new objects, yet always desire that these creations should please and serve mankind.