The agreeable task of the editor, therefore, was to search English and
American literature for those poems which had fallen from the lips of
poets with so sweet a cadence and in such simple notes that they would
offer but slight difficulties to a child who had mastered the rudiments
of reading. It was by no means necessary that such poems should have had
an audience of children in mind nor have taken childhood for a subject,
though it was natural that a few of the verses should prove to be
suggested by some aspect of child-life. The selection must be its own
advocate, but it may be worth while to point out that the plan of the
book supposes an easy approach to the more serious poems by means of the
light ditties of the nursery; that there is no more reason for depriving
a child of honest fun in his verse than there is for condemning the
child's elders to grave poetry exclusively; and that it is not necessary
or even desirable for a poem to come at once within the reader's
comprehension. To take an extreme case, Tennyson's lines "Break, Break,
Break!" would no doubt be ruled out of such a book as this by many in
sympathy with children; yet the unexplainable power of the poem is not
beyond the apprehension of sensitive natures at an early age.

The contents have been gleaned from a number of sources, and the editor
is glad to mingle with the names of the secure dwellers on Parnassus
those of some living Americans and Englishmen. He does not pretend that
he has made an exhaustive collection, but he hopes the book may be
regarded as the nucleus for an anthology which cannot, in the nature of
things, be very large.

The prose, as already intimated, is confined to groups of proverbs and
familiar sayings. In one aspect these single lines of prose present
difficulties to the young reader: they are condensed forms of