THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
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INTRODUCTION



Partial collections of English poems, decided by a common subject
or bounded by narrow dates and periods of literary history, are
made at very short intervals, and the makers are safe from the
reproach of proposing their own personal taste as a guide for the
reading of others. But a general Anthology gathered from the whole
of English literature--the whole from Chaucer to Wordsworth--by a
gatherer intent upon nothing except the quality of poetry, is a
more rare enterprise. It is hardly to be made without tempting the
suspicion--nay, hardly without seeming to hazard the confession--of
some measure of self-confidence. Nor can even the desire to enter
upon that labour be a frequent one--the desire of the heart of one
for whom poetry is veritably "the complementary life" to set up a
pale for inclusion and exclusion, to add honours, to multiply
homage, to cherish, to restore, to protest, to proclaim, to depose;
and to gain the consent of a multitude of readers to all those
acts. Many years, then--some part of a century--may easily pass
between the publication of one general anthology and the making of
another.

The enterprise would be a sorry one if it were really arbitrary,
and if an anthologist should give effect to passionate preferences
without authority. An anthology that shall have any value must be
made on the responsibility of one but on the authority of many.
There is no caprice; the mind of the maker has been formed for
decision by the wisdom of many instructors. It is the very study
of criticism, and the grateful and profitable study, that gives the
justification to work done upon the strongest personal impulse, and
done, finally, in the mental solitude that cannot be escaped at the
last. In another order, moral education would be best crowned if
it proved to have quick and profound control over the first
impulses; its finished work would be to set the soul in a state of
law, delivered from the delays of self-distrust; not action only,
but the desires would be in an old security, and a wish would come
to light already justified. This would be the second--if it were