THE GOLDEN ВООК O F ENGLISH SELECTED BY WILLIAM ROBERTSON LONDON GEORGE G. HARRAP UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LIBRARY 448 R549 THE PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I T lies wholly outside the scope of a popular collection such as this to provide an essay on the history, structure, and development of the Sonnet. In like manner, literary annotations, whether biographical or critical, have been excluded. My commission was simply to make an anthology of some 230 sonnets from the whole range of English literature, giving, however, a friendly preference to the work of recent and living authors. At the last moment, the number of sonnets was slightly increased, enabling me to make the representation of our greater poets, such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Rossetti, more adequate, and thus securing a better balance for the collection. Were any apology needed for the appearance of such a volume, it would be found in the fact that sonnet-books are at present very scarce and difficult to procure, those of Leigh Hunt, Dennis, Main, Mr. Waddington, Mr. Hall Caine, and Mr. S. Wellwood being all out of print. Sharp's ever popular Sonnets of the Nineteenth Century is still in circulation, but it necessarily covers only a limited part of the field, and supplies the reader with no examples of our early sonnet-literature, or of that which has been appearing b SALVATION ARMY 2080 |