Preface
tootling of Corydon's reed-pipe in ears accustomed to the martial music of our times. Yet, like all poets, I trust these little songs may find an audience to-morrow: they have that saving virtue of sincerity which is the salt of Art. But if I see the necessary grace that they possess, how clearly, alas! do I perceive the magnificent qualities they lack! Here there is nothing of the rush, the sumptuous abundance, the vigour, the splendour of Byron or Hugo; nothing of that sensuous magic and flooding glory which make certain lines of Keats and Swinburne blaze, as it were, in colour on the page. Still I fancy that Wordsworth, Tennyson, Vigny, and even the immortal Goethe—all the meditative poets—might have cared to read some of these sober little songs.
We cannot all be great poets; but the humblest, it they be sincere, may give a genuine pleasure. I have marked in red the days on which I discovered certain poets, most certainly minor, who died centuries ago. With what delight I made acquaintance with Ausonius and Dr. Donne, still more so with Joachim de Bellay, Marie de France, or Shahid the Bactrian: dear, enchanting books, exhumed from the dustiest corner of the library, that never counted on me for an audience. I may have to wait as long till I repay my debt to some other student who perchance, beside a bookstall of Cape Town or Honolulu, may fish my poems from the fourpenny box, or light on them in some anthology. But I count on his appreciation.
Depend upon it, after the very greatest names in poetry (who are to all of us a second religion) the minor poets have the happiest lot. Each of us worships in the temples of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, MoliJre ; but each of us also has some private niche, some inconsiderable intimate shrine, for the poet no one praises, who is all the more our own. How dreary the state and rank of your second-best great poet, enthroned in dismal glory on the less frequented slopes of Parnassus! Who lights a
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