DETRY OF THE PEOPLE COMPRISING OEMS ILLUSTRAtive of the history AND NATIONAL SPIRIT OF ENGLAND, SELECTED AND ARRANGED WITH NOTES BY CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY AND MARTIN C. FLAHERTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BOSTON, U.S.A. GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS The Athenæum Press COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY AND MARTIN C. FLAHERTY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED C LIBRARY Leland Stanford, Jr. UNIVERSITY PREFACE THIS little volume has a very modest but distinct and, we think, unique purpose, to supply the reading public and the schools with a compact body not necessarily of the most highly polished or artistic poems in the English tongue, Out of those which are at once most simple, most hearty, nost truly characteristic of the people, their tradition, hisory, and spirit. By Poetry of the People we do not mean nly ballads of countryside or battlefield, or of street or illage, hearth or market, not only the production of the lk-improviser or his succeeding bard long ago buried ehind the hills of anonymity: but poetry that the people ossess and occupy (or should occupy) because it is of eir blood and bone and sinew: poetry sometimes by, d sometimes not, but always for, the people; poems that re household words with our fathers and mothers, and close to the heart because of the heart; poems that even v beat in the bosom of the Folk and find utterance in hour of stress; poems which more often than not are the truer art because they are not artful. may have appeared to others, as it has to us, that litere in verse is not learned nor enjoyed nor even read by g or old as much as it used to be. One explanation of neglect is very probably that in the place of unsoicated poetry, such as generations of our forefathers V |