THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
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instance, would rightly be placed at the head of everything below
that mark. It is, in fact, so near to the work of genius as to be
most directly, closely, and immediately rebuked by genius; it meets
genius at close quarters and almost deserves that Shakespeare
himself should defeat it. Mediocrity said its own true word in the
Elegy:


"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."


But greatness had said its own word also in a sonnet:


"The summer flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die."


The reproof here is too sure; not always does it touch so quick,
but it is not seldom manifest, and it makes exclusion a simple
task. Inclusion, on the other hand, cannot be so completely
fulfilled. The impossibility of taking in poems of great length,
however purely lyrical, is a mechanical barrier, even on the plan
of the present volume; in the case of Spenser's Prothalamion, the
unmanageably autobiographical and local passage makes it
inappropriate; some exquisite things of Landor's are lyrics in
blank verse, and the necessary rule against blank verse shuts them
out. No extracts have been made from any poem, but in a very few
instances a stanza or a passage has been dropped out. No poem has
been put in for the sake of a single perfectly fine passage; it
would be too much to say that no poem has been put in for the sake
of two splendid passages or so. The Scottish ballad poetry is
represented by examples that are to my mind finer than anything
left out; still, it is but represented; and as the song of this
multitude of unknown poets overflows by its quantity a collection
of lyrics of genius, so does severally the song of Wordsworth,
Crashaw, and Shelley. It has been necessary, in considering
traditional songs of evidently mingled authorship, to reject some
one invaluable stanza or burden--the original and ancient surviving
matter of a spoilt song--because it was necessary to reject the
sequel that has cumbered it since some sentimentalist took it for
his own. An example, which makes the heart ache, is that burden of