THIS is, as far as I know, the first miscellaneous collection of American Poetry, of any considerable size, that has been published in England. It gives examples from 65 authors (including two anonymous),-the total number of the compositions being 255.

In America there have naturally been several such compilations. The first project of the kind was that of James Rivington, a printer in New York, who in 1773 proposed to publish a collection on the same plan as Dodsley's in England. The revolution of the American colonies stopped this scheme. In 1791 appeared Matthew Carey's Beauties of Poetry, British and American, in which nineteen native writers were represented. Various other works of the same class followed; among which may be named those of Samuel Kettell in 1829, and of the poet Bryant in 1839, and especially that of Mr. Rufus Willmot Griswold in 1842.

The last-named voluminous compendium, in its edition dated 1863, furnishes specimens of no less than 146 poets of the male sex, beginning with Philip Freneau (born in 1752, died in 1832); besides several earlier writers who are mentioned, with some brief indication of their performances, in Mr. Griswold's Introduction. In addition to these, there are still the poetesses, filling a separate volume to themselves, and numbering 94 in the edition of that volume dated 1854. I will here at once confess my obligations to this industrious and in many respects well-qualified compiler. For the purposes of the book now presented to the reader I have perused many works of American poets-including, in various instances, the complete poetical writings of the author; but, where these primary sources of material had to be supplemented, it is very generally to Mr. Griswold that I am indebted, both for the poems selected, and for the brief biographical particulars appended. Another much smaller volume which I have consulted, Golden Leaves from the American Poets, 1865, edited by Mr. J. W. S. Hows, I find to be little more than an evisceration of Mr. Griswold's so far as the male poets (more especially) are concerned.

Looking back to the opening era of British settlements in North America, we have to note the first known writer included in the present collection, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, who published in 1640 a volume of poetry which earned her some considerable celebrity. This is one of the earliest works in the form of verse printed in British America. Probably the first native-born poet was Benjamin Thomson, born at Dorchester (now named Quincey) in 1640: he wrote New England's Crisis towards the year 1676, and died in 1714, at

the age of seventy-four. James Ralph, a friend of Franklin, wrote several plays, some of which were acted at Drury Lane, and various poems as well. Two of these, Cynthia and Night, are ridiculed in a couplet of Pope's Dunciad. The satirized author died in 1762. Franklin himself composed some verses; those named Paper are among the best known. The first tragedy written on American soil, and by a native author, was The Prince of Parthia, by Thomas Godfrey, who died in 1763, at the early age of twenty-six. These few and brief details are some of the leading points which have to be observed concerning American poetry of a date antecedent to that of the second known author here represented, Washington Allston. On the first page of our volume will be found a few verses, the oldest now known as extant from the pen of an English colonist in America, dating about 1630: but these remain to us, in the lapse of time, anonymous.

The reader will understand that my selection, while it goes over a wide area, does not nevertheless aim to be exhaustive. Indeed, one whole class of American poetry, comprising (especially in the Biglow Papers of Lowell, and in the writings of Bret Harte) some of the very best work of their respective authors, or of the poetic art of America, is entirely omitted; it having been found more convenient to transfer all writings of this description to the volume of Humorous Poems pertaining to our series.1 But, even apart from this, I do not profess that the only American poets deserving to figure in such a book as the present one are

1 The writers thus represented are President Adams, Halleck, Brainard, G. P. Morris, Whittier, Holmes, Park Benjamin, M. C. Field, Saxe, Whitman, Lowell, Leland, Hay, Stedman, Harte, Newell.

those who have found a place here; nor yet that, in every instance, the pieces here chosen are absolutely the best of their respective authors-still less, that they are the only ones deserving admittance. In the case, however, of those poets whom I have had the opportunity of reading through, my selection does with a near approach to accuracy indicate my own opinion of what is best-subject to this qualification that I have made it a rule to leave aside any such compositions as are already well known and popularly diffused in an excessive degree-one might say, fulsomely. or mawkishly well known. I have not expressly deviated from this rule, save in the case of Edgar Poe. That great genius would, without his Raven, be almost as forlorn as Barnaby Rudge without his. This endlessly reprinted poem therefore, as well as the hardly less often-clanged Bells of the author, I have not thought it reasonable to omit; and the selection here made from Poe, inclusive of these two archetypal examples, gives all that appears to me to be of his highest quality-culled from the few but precious pages of poetical work that he has left us. I should add that, as the general bulk of American poetry is not extremely well known in England, the instances in which I have omitted poems on this ground of superabundant popularity are very few.

To these voluntary exclusions I must add that of the works of Longfellow, without any exception: the reason for this anomalous treatment of so important and celebrated an American poet being simply that his collected works constitute one whole volume in this same series of Moxon's Popular Poets, and I have therefore deemed it more appropriate and convenient to omit him altogether here, and so