Again, on behalf of readers of this NATIONAL LIBRARY, I have to thank a
poet of our day--in this case the Oxford Professor of Poetry--for joining
his voice to the voices of the past through which our better life is
quickened for the duties of to-day. Not for his own verse only, but for
his fine sense also of what is truest in the poets who have gone before,
the name of Francis Turner Palgrave is familiar to us all. Many a home
has been made the richer for his gathering of voices of the past into a
dainty "Golden Treasury of English Songs." Of this work of his own I may
cite what was said of it in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for October, 1882, by
a writer of high authority in English Literature, Professor A. W. Ward,
of Owens College. "A very eminent authority," said Professor Ward, "has
accorded to Mr. Palgrave's historical insight, praise by the side of
which all words of mine must be valueless," Canon [now Bishop] Stubbs
writes:--"I do not think that there is one of the _Visions_ which does
not carry my thorough consent and sympathy all through."
Here, then, Mr. Palgrave re-issues, for the help of many thousands more,
his own songs of the memories of the Nation, addressed to a Nation that
has not yet forfeited the praise of Milton. Milton said of the
Englishman, "If we look at his native towardliness in the roughcast,
without breeding, some nation or other may haply be better composed to a
natural civility and right judgment than he. But if he get the benefit
once of a wise and well-rectified nurture, I suppose that wherever
mention is made of countries, manners, or men, the English people, among
the first that shall be praised, may deserve to be accounted a right
pious, right honest, and right hardy nation." So much is shown by the
various utterances in this NATIONAL LIBRARY. So much is shown, in the
present volume of it, by a poet's vision of the England that has been
till now, and is what she has been.