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EMILY

LADY TENNYSON

My dear Lady Tennyson:

Many years ago, when Hallam and Lionel were hardly older than "golden-hair'd Ally" himself, it was my happy fortune to be allowed the honour of dedicating the "Golden Treasury" to the Poet Laureate. During a walk near the Land's End, which is still fresh in my memory, I had placed the scheme of the book before him : -but, on learning that my plan included the best lyrics by writers then alive, and only the best, he at once barred any pieces by him from insertion within an anthology bearing a title which, in itself, seemed to claim the honours of excellence for the contents. And so very large a portion of admissible contemporary song was banished by this decree, that limitation to the poetry of those no longer alive became inevitable.

That deficiency is, however, now supplied, to the best of my power, in the Treasury, not less

worthy the title Golden, with the formation of which I have been entrusted. You have allowed me, in this Dedication, to grace it with a name honoured, wherever Lord Tennyson's is known, as that of the one

Dear, near, and true

to him from youth to age,—the counsellor to whom he has never looked in vain for aid and comfort, the Wife whose perfect love has blessed him through these many years with large and faithful sympathy.-And it is my hope that you will not find your favour ill-bestowed, although, (through the strict limits of space imposed), you will necessarily miss here some choice flowers from that Vergilian Garden which your own Poet has added to the realm,already so wealthy and so wide,—of England's Helicon.

It is not in the crowd, not in the study, that Poetry,―Lyrical Poetry in especial, as the deepest and nearest to the heart,-can most efficiently perform her natural "happy-making" function :—can, as the Laureate's great Predecessor said, "add sunshine to daylight," lift us out of ourselves, and even give a foreglimpse of that other world, without faith in which, this fair earth itself is but a "land of the shadow

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