The Flower of the Mind

								

to light already justified.  This would be the second—if it were not the
only—liberty.  Even so an intellectual education might assuredly confer
freedom upon first and solitary thoughts, and confidence and composure
upon the sallies of impetuous courage.  In a word, it should make a
studious anthologist quite sure about genius.  And all who have bestowed,
or helped in bestowing, the liberating education have given their student
the authority to be free.  Personal and singular the choice in such a
book must be, not without right.
Claiming and disclaiming so much, the gatherers may follow one another to
harvest, and glean in the same fields in different seasons, for the
repetition of the work can never be altogether a repetition.  The general
consent of criticism does not stand still; and moreover, a mere accident
has until now left a poet of genius of the past here and there to neglect
or obscurity.  This is not very likely to befall again; the time has come
when there is little or nothing left to discover or rediscover in the
sixteenth century or the seventeenth; we know that there does not lurk
another Crashaw contemned, or another Henry Vaughan disregarded, or
another George Herbert misplaced.  There is now something like finality
of knowledge at least; and therefore not a little error in the past is
ready to be repaired.  This is the result of time.  Of the slow actions
and reactions of critical taste there might be something to say, but
nothing important.  No loyal anthologist perhaps will consent to
acknowledge these tides; he will hardly do his work well unless he
believe it to be stable and perfect; nor, by the way, will he judge
worthily in the name of others unless he be resolved to judge intrepidly
for himself.
Inasmuch as even the best of all poems are the best upon innumerable
degrees, the size of most anthologies has gone far to decide what degrees
are to be gathered in and what left without.  The best might make a very
small volume, and be indeed the best, or a very large volume, and be
still indeed the best.  But my labour has been to do somewhat
differently—to gather nothing that did not overpass a certain
boundary-line of genius.  Gray’s Elegy, for instance, would rightly be
placed at the head of everything below that mark.  It is, in fact, so
near to the work of genius as to be most directly, closely, and
immediately rebuked by genius; it meets genius at close quarters and
almost deserves that Shakespeare himself should defeat it.  Mediocrity
said its own true word in the Elegy:



   ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

   And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’
But greatness had said its own word also in a sonnet:



   ‘The summer flower is to the summer sweet

   Though to itself it only live and die.’
The reproof here is too sure; not always does it touch so quick, but it