The Flower of the Mind

								

is not seldom manifest, and it makes exclusion a simple task.  Inclusion,
on the other hand, cannot be so completely fulfilled.  The impossibility
of taking in poems of great length, however purely lyrical, is a
mechanical barrier, even on the plan of the present volume; in the case
of Spenser’s Prothalamion, the unmanageably autobiographical and local
passage makes it inappropriate; some exquisite things of Landor’s are
lyrics in blank verse, and the necessary rule against blank verse shuts
them out.  No extracts have been made from any poem, but in a very few
instances a stanza or a passage has been dropped out.  No poem has been
put in for the sake of a single perfectly fine passage; it would be too
much to say that no poem has been put in for the sake of two splendid
passages or so.  The Scottish ballad poetry is represented by examples
that are to my mind finer than anything left out; still, it is but
represented; and as the song of this multitude of unknown poets overflows
by its quantity a collection of lyrics of genius, so does severally the
song of Wordsworth, Crashaw, and Shelley.  It has been necessary, in
considering traditional songs of evidently mingled authorship, to reject
some one invaluable stanza or burden—the original and ancient surviving
matter of a spoilt song—because it was necessary to reject the sequel
that has cumbered it since some sentimentalist took it for his own.  An
example, which makes the heart ache, is that burden of keen and remote
poetry:



   ‘O the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom,

      The broom of Cowdenknowes!’
Perhaps some hand will gather all such precious fragments as these
together one day, freed from what is alien in the work of the restorer.
It is inexplicable that a generation resolved to forbid the restoration
of ancient buildings should approve the eighteenth century restoration of
ancient poems; nay, the architectural ‘restorer’ is immeasurably the more
respectful.  In order to give us again the ancient fragments, it is
happily not necessary to break up the composite songs which, since the
time of Burns, have gained a national love.  Let them be, but let the old
verses be also; and let them have, for those who desire it, the
solitariness of their state of ruin.  Even in the cases—and they are not
few—where Burns is proved to have given beauty and music to the ancient
fragment itself, his work upon the old stanza is immeasurably finer than
his work in his own new stanzas following, and it would be less than
impiety to part the two.
I have obeyed a profound conviction which I have reason to hope will be
more commended in the future than perhaps it can be now, in leaving aside
a multitude of composite songs—anachronisms, and worse than mere
anachronisms, as I think them to be, for they patch wild feeling with
sentiment of the sentimentalist.  There are some exceptions.  The one
fine stanza of a song which both Sir Walter Scott and Burns restored is