The Flower of the Mind

								


Transcribed from the 1898 Grant Richards edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org



                            Of this reissue

                                only 250

                              copies will

                                be bound

                                  up.

                                THE FLOWER

                               OF THE MIND

                      A Choice among the best Poems



                                 MADE BY



                              ALICE MEYNELL



                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]



                                * * * * *



                                  LONDON

                              GRANT RICHARDS

                            9 HENRIETTA STREET

                                   1898



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         Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty

INTRODUCTION

PARTIAL collections of English poems, decided by a common subject or
bounded by narrow dates and periods of literary history, are made at very
short intervals, and the makers are safe from the reproach of proposing
their own personal taste as a guide for the reading of others.  But a
general Anthology gathered from the whole of English literature—the whole
from Chaucer to Wordsworth—by a gatherer intent upon nothing except the
quality of poetry, is a more rare enterprise.  It is hardly to be made
without tempting the suspicion—nay, hardly without seeming to hazard the
confession—of some measure of self-confidence.  Nor can even the desire
to enter upon that labour be a frequent one—the desire of the heart of
one for whom poetry is veritably ‘the complementary life’ to set up a
pale for inclusion and exclusion, to add honours, to multiply homage, to
cherish, to restore, to protest, to proclaim, to depose; and to gain the
consent of a multitude of readers to all those acts.  Many years,
then—some part of a century—may easily pass between the publication of
one general anthology and the making of another.
The enterprise would be a sorry one if it were really arbitrary, and if
an anthologist should give effect to passionate preferences without
authority.  An anthology that shall have any value must be made on the
responsibility of one but on the authority of many.  There is no caprice;
the mind of the maker has been formed for decision by the wisdom of many
instructors.  It is the very study of criticism, and the grateful and
profitable study, that gives the justification to work done upon the
strongest personal impulse, and done, finally, in the mental solitude
that cannot be escaped at the last.  In another order, moral education
would be best crowned if it proved to have quick and profound control
over the first impulses; its finished work would be to set the soul in a
state of law, delivered from the delays of self-distrust; not action
only, but the desires would be in an old security, and a wish would come