The Sun.
London, England, 1867-03-13 00:00:00

lklackay's English Anthology.

A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry.
Selected and arranged by Charles Mackay, LL.D.
One Vol. Pp. 602. Georgo Routledge and Sons,

London and New York.

A charming volume, this is, with a most charming
title. It is far more than that, however. It is in
many respects the amplest and choicest collection of
English Poetry yet published, within our own know-
ledge at least, upon either side of the Atlantic. The
gems here brought together by the skilled lapidary
to whom has been entrusted the delicate task of
their selection are not all of them, of course, or
even the majority among them, of the purest water.
They are not--as he himself expresses it in his In-
troduction—all of them of equal brilliancy. " The
diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls of literature
are few," he writes, " but there are other gems
than these of inferior value, but still gemlike" : some
of which latter he thereupo❑ enumerates as " agate,
corn elian, amethyst, turquoise, onyx"—and others the
names of which it were unnecessary to particularise.
Going in quest of them, Dr. Mackay has been, as
it were, wandering of late, hither and thither, as the
fancy prompted him, about avery Garden of Aladdin
—culling the more or less precious fruits clustered
there abundantly among the umbrage of familiar
leaves— sometimes in those same devious and dis-
cursive wanderings of his, striking upon pathways
such as those sung of by Sir Walter Raleigh in his
celebration of the Soul's Pilgrimage, where he ex-
claims—

" Then, those holy paths we'll travel,
Strewn with rubies thick as gravel."

Here they certainly are at intervals " thick as
gravel"—these glorious rubies strewn prodigally
before us as we advance—as (to content ourselves
with one solitry example as in itself all-sufficient)
in the instance of Lord Byron. Jewels—happily
fur us—more than—

,L. . five words long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever."—
Such, let us say, in the instance just now particu-
larised (that of Lord Byron) as—The Fall of
Sennacherib—The Isles of Greece—The Ode to

Napoleon—The Apostrophe to the Ocean—The
Cataract of Velino—The Vision of Darkness—The

Night before the Battle of Waterloo—with other
peerless effusions. A niiscellanous collection of
Poetry such as this—a collection, that is to say which
undertakes to give the choisest specimens of the
different writers in any given language or literature
—can never, as a matter of course, as a matter of
absolute certainty, perfectly satisfy as a whole from

first to last the taste of any one save the actua

collector himself. Quot homines—" but the pro-
verb's somewhat musty." The whole of it is to a very
great extent purely a matter of personal preference
—a matter almost, one might say, of temperament
or of idiocyncracy. All that can reasonably be looked
for is that the reader's ideas and the compiler's
may in a very great measure approximate—as
to the judiciousness, that is, upon the whole, of
the selection made by the latter when his very
difficult, and, as we have just now said, most
delicate task of selection has been accomplished.

Altogether—judging of the selection here made as
a whole—this " Thousand and One Gems of Eng-
lish Poetry," collected together by Dr. Mackay,
appears to us to be not only such as will be found by
the majority of his readers to be worthy of very
high commendation indeed, but such as entitles
him, in his capacity as a wise and choice col-
lector, to gratitude as well as to admiration. The
Gems he has here clustered together were, in
many instances—to employ the alliterative phrase
used by Dr. Johnson in his Preface to Shakspere—
" mingled with a mass of meaner minerals," until,
having been picked thus afresh from among the
meaner minerals, they were set here in this (may weso
designate it without incurring the charge of affecta-
tion?) aigrette or torque for the brow or bosom of
Britannia. It cannot but be absolutely essential,

however, as we take it, for every, one coming to
an examination of this volume as a very choice
collection—to our own notion as the very choicest
of all collections yet published—of English Poetry
—it cannot but be absolutely essential, we say, for
any one coming to the examination of a volume
like this (no matter how highly he may feel disposed
to commend it) to justify his commendation of it
as a collection, precisely as we do, by speak-
ing of it as, upon the whole, worthy of admi-
ration, or—as we have even gone so far as
to say—worthy of gratitude as well as of admiration.
For, to the eyes of any lettered reader examining
pages of this particular character, the contents of
those pages cannot possibly but be here and there
suggestive of regrets as to this or that having been
preferred, or, still more again, as to this or that espe-
cial and cherished favourite having been altogether
omitted—forgotten or overlooked. Unpremedi-
tatedly and quite haphazard, let us, then, by way
of argument, give here a very few illustrations of
what we are thus implying. Geoffery Chaucer, for
example, we, for our own part, should hardly have
thought, adequately represented without our having
included among the extracts from him his cele-
bration of the Daisy. Thomas Chatterton, we
should have preferred to represent by his Dirge,
or even by his rhythmical delineation of the
solar System (chiming as with the music of the
spheres) than by his brief though noble
stanzas "On Resignation." From Leigh Hunt,
again, we should have dearly liked to have taken
" Paganini," or "To Johnny," instead of " The
Glove and the Lions," or, as it is by an odd mis-
print given here in the index, " The Globe and the
Lions." From Thomas Hood we should yet more
dearly have welcomed " We watched her breathing
through the night," and "I smell the rose above
the would," and "Love thy mother, little one"—
Gems as exquisite in their way as the " Song of the
Shirt," or the " Bridge of Sighs." Just as surely
as we would have given with Edgar Poe's " Raven"
his " Bells," and—together with their harmonious
tintinabulation—his ineffably beautiful apostrophe
(de profundis) "To Annie." Samuel Coleridge—
even though he is here, so to speak, rendered
audible to us by such matchless fragments as
—" Christabel" and the " Ancient Mariner"—seems
to lack one other fragmentary excerpt from the
former poem—namely, the passage there conveying
to us that most perfect portraiture of all that is
winning and winsome in Childhood
" A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself ;
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds and never seeks,
Makes such a joy unto the sight,
As fills a father's oyes with light."
Still more, even, than that minute Gem, which
might, as we think, with advantage have been ga-
thered from among the leaves of Coleridge by Dr.
Mackay, while that keen-eyed collector of jewels
was filling his casket in the Aladdin's Garden, as
we have called it, of our English Parnassus—still
more, even, than that one minute Gem do we re-
gret not to discover here what is certainly, in our
own estimation, Coleridge's pearl of price, or his
diamond of the purest water, his Koh-i-noor, or
his paragon-ruby—" Love," beginning—
" All thoughts, all passions, all delights,"
And ending with the wooing and the winning of
Genevieve ! In regard to Lord Houghton again
(Monckton Milnes that was) we regret to find any
other exemplar of his lyrical genius than what is
still to our mind the happiest and daintiest among
them all—" I wandered by the brookside." Among
the poets dead and gone, we look here in vain, by
the way, for the name of Robert Nicholl, whose
claim, nevertheless, to that glorious title of poet
might have been so very readily as well as nobly
justified by his celebration of the theme " God is
Everywhere "—a poem comprising within it stanzas
such as these (we quote them from memory) :
A trodden daisy from the sward
With tearful eye I took,
And on its ruined beauties I
With moving heart did look.
For crushed and broken though it was,
That little flower was fair,
And 0, I loved the drooping bud,
Fur God was there.

I stood upon the seabeat shore,
The waves came rushing on,
The tempest raged in giant wrath,
Tho light of clity was gone.