Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.
Emerson.
Lang, Andrew.
The Blue Poetry Book.
Longmans. 2.00
The Editor trusts that this book may be a guide into romance and fairy-land to many children.... By way of lending no aid to what is called Education, very few notes have been added. The child does not want everything to be explained; in the unexplained is great pleasure. Nothing, perhaps, crushes the love of poetry more surely and swiftly than the use of poems as schoolbooks.--Introduction.
This excellent collection, for the most part British verse, contains a large proportion of Scotch songs and ballads. The productions of contemporary poets are not included.
Lanier, Sidney.
The Boy's Percy.
Scribner. 2.00
Old Ballads of War, Adventure, and Love, from Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.--Title-page.
But, passing far beyond the plans of these small antiquarian pleasures, Percy's book immediately enriched our whole ordinary existence by making common property of those golden figures which the undying ballad-maker had enameled into the solid tissue of English life.... Each ballad is given here exactly as it stands in the original except that the spelling has been modernized and such parts cut away as cleanliness required.--Introduction.