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4

OF THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY

POEMS BY

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATS, LANDOR,
TENNYSON, ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, ROBERT BROWNING,
CLOUGH, ARNOLD, ROSSETTI, MORRIS, SWINBURNE

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COPYRIGHT,1904,1910,

BY CURTIS HIDDEN PAGE.

All rights reserved.

To M. E. H.

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This volume makes no attempt to do what has already been so excellently done in Mr. Stedman's Victorian Anthology, Ward's English Poets, and other similar collections. It is not a new Anthology of nineteenth century poetry. Instead of giving a few "gems," or "flowers " from each one of several hundred authors, it includes only the fifteen chief poets of the century. From each one of these, however, it attempts to give a full and adequate selection, sufficient really to represent the man and his work.

The book has been planned, primarily, to give in one volume all the material which should be in the hands of the student for a College or University course on the British poets of the nineteenth century. I have therefore tried to include, first, all the poems which would be given as prescribed reading in such a course; and, second, a thorough guide to the use of a well-equipped college or public library, in connection with that reading. I hope the book may also be found useful for more general courses on English Literature, for which there is no other collection covering exactly this part of the field; and for any reader who wishes to possess in one volume the best work of the chief nineteenth century poets"Infinite riches in a little room."

The selections are very full, and for the most part consist of complete poems. They are designed both to give all the best of each poet's work, and also (except for Mrs. Browning) to give some representation of each important period and class of his work. Long poems are usually given entire, and space has been found for Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Scott's Marmion, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Keats' Hyperion, Tennyson's Guinevere and Morte d'Arthur, Browning's Pippa Passes, Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, Morris's Atalanta's Race, etc., etc. In general, extracts from long poems are not given, except in the case of single cantos which are complete in themselves, like the last two cantos of Childe Harold; or lyrics, such as the songs from Tennyson's dramas, or the Hymns to Pan and Diana in Keats' Endymion, which, when de tached, make perfect and independent poems. An exception has been

V

04.11-34

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