CONTENTS.

PRINCIPAL DIVISIONS.
PAGE
Introduction[5]
The Nineteenth Century[15]
The Eighteenth Century[95]
The Seventeenth Century[157]
The Sixteenth Century[215]
The Fifteenth Century[267]
The Fourteenth Century[285]
Index[303]
POEMS.
By Alfred Tennyson:—
The Lady of Shalott[17]
The Brook[25]
By William Wordsworth:—
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood[37]
The Two April Mornings[49]
The Solitary Reaper[51]
By S. T. Coleridge:—
Christabel. Part I[55]
By Percy Bysshe Shelley:—
To a Skylark[67]
Hymn of Pan[71]
From Epipsychidion[74]
By John Keats:—
Ode to a Nightingale[83]
From The Eve of St. Agnes[87]
By Robert Burns:—
The Cotter's Saturday Night[97]
To a Mountain Daisy[107]
For a' that and a' that[109]
By William Cowper:—
Boadicea[113]
On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture[115]
Epitaph on a Hare[120]
By Oliver Goldsmith:—
The Village Parson[124]
The Village Schoolmaster[125]
By Thomas Gray:—
The Bard[129]
By Alexander Pope:—
From the Essay on Criticism[141]
Ode on St. Cecilia's Day[147]
By John Dryden:—
Alexander's Feast[159]
The Fire of London[169]
Reason and Religion[174]
By John Milton:—
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity[177]
Wordsworth's Sonnet to Milton[196]
By Robert Herrick:—
To Phillis[197]
The Mad Maid's Song[199]
A Thanksgiving to God[200]
By Edmund Waller:—
Song: Go, lovely Rose[203]
Of English Verse[204]
On a Girdle[205]
By Ben Jonson:—
An Ode to Himself[207]
To Cynthia[209]
To the Memory of William Shakespeare[210]
Herrick's Ode for Ben Jonson[214]
By William Shakespeare:—
Venus's Advice to Adonis on Hunting[217]
A Morning Song for Imogen[219]
Sigh no more, Ladies[220]
Sunshine and Cloud (Sonnet xxxiii.)[220]
The World's Way (Sonnet lxvi.)[221]
By Edmund Spenser:—
The Cave of Mammon[223]
Prothalamion; or, a Spousall Verse[235]
By Thomas Wyatt:—
A Love Song[247]
The Courtier's Life[248]
By the Earl of Surrey:—
From Virgil's Æneid[249]
Sonnet: Geraldine[250]
On the Death of Sir Thomas Wyatt[251]
Ballads:—
Waly, waly[253]
Sir Patrick Spens[255]
The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington[259]
Robin Hood and the Widow's three Sons[261]
By John Skelton:—
To Maystress Margaret Hussey[269]
Cardinal Wolsey[270]
By John Lydgate:—
A Visit to London[273]
The Golden Age[275]
By Robert Henryson:—
The Garmond of Fair Ladies[277]
By William Dunbar:—
A May Morning[279]
By Gawain Douglas:—
In Praise of Honour[281]
By Geoffrey Chaucer:—
From the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales[287]

SIX CENTURIES OF ENGLISH POETRY.

The Nineteenth Century.

"Now appeared the English romantic school, a sect of 'dissenters in poetry,' who spoke out aloud, kept themselves close together, and repelled settled minds by the audacity and novelty of their theories. They had violently broken with tradition, and leaped over all classical culture, to take their models from the Renaissance and the middle-age. They sought, in the old national ballads and ancient poetry of foreign lands, the fresh and primitive accent which had been wanting in classical literature, and whose presence seemed to them to be a sign of truth and beauty. They proposed to adapt to poetry the ordinary language of conversation, such as is spoken in the middle and lower classes, and to replace studied phrases and a lofty vocabulary by natural tones and plebeian words. In place of the classic mould, they tried stanzas, sonnets, ballads, blank verse, with the roughness and subdivisions of the primitive poets. . . . Some had culled gigantic legends, piled up dreams, ransacked the East, Greece, Arabia, the Middle Ages, and overloaded the human imagination with hues and fancies from every clime. Others had buried themselves in metaphysics and moral philosophy, had mused indefatigably on the condition of man, and spent their lives on the sublime and the monotonous. Others, making a medley of crime and heroism, had conducted, through darkness and flashes of lightning, a train of contorted and terrible figures, desperate with remorse, relieved by their grandeur. Men wanted to rest after so many efforts and so much success. On the going out of the imaginative, sentimental, and Satanic school, Tennyson appeared exquisite. All the forms and ideas which had pleased them were found in him, but purified, modulated, set in a splendid style. He completed an age."—Taine.