- 3 -
and read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Cæsar's Gaul). He may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin the perfect key to what is there called the "magical power of poetry." It is Shakespeare, with his
"daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;"
it is Wordsworth, with his
"voice . . . heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird.
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides;"
or Keats, with his
". . . . moving waters at their priest-like task
Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores."
William Hazlitt's" Table Talk," among the volumes of Essays, may help to show the relationship of one author to another, which is another form of the Friendship of Books. His incomparable essay in that volume, "On Going a Journey," forms a capital prelude to Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" and to his and Wordsworth's poems. In the same way one may turn to the review of Moore's Life of Byron in Macaulay's Essays as a prelude to the three volumes of Byron's own poems, remembering that the poet whom Europe loved more than England did was as Macaulay said: "the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry." This brings us to the provoking reflection that it is the obvious authors and the books most easy to reprint which have been the signal successes out of the seven hundred odd in the series, for Everyman is distinctly proverbial in his tastes. He likes best of all an old author who has worn well or
