GOLDEN TREASURY, The, a collection of English poetry published in 1861. The book was dedicated to Tennyson, with whom Pal grave had long discussed his plan. In the course of 30 years the original form was en larged to include other poems of importance and rearranged to conform more to literary his tory, the latter change in some judgments ad vantageous, in others not. The collection be gins with the Elizabethans, and, with some rather conspicuous omissions, the old English ballads or some of Shelley, for example, and the relative exaggeration of the amount of Wordsworth included, follows the great names up through Keats, Shelley and Byron. The great success of the book can scarcely be said to have diminished to this day. The 'Second Series,' composed of contemporary verse, ap peared in 1897, but was comparatively a fail ure. Palgrave's age and the uncertainties of contemporary judgment, perhaps, afford the ex planation. Anthologies, collections of the flowers of poetry, are of ancient origin; but few — none in English certainly — have rivalled The Golden Palgrave's original poetry never attained to great eminence, but the quality that he gave to his anthology amounts to a unique and original distinction. It
is as if a finely endowed artistic nature had worked, though unable to create through the brush itself, to bring together a collection of pictures that expressed a veritable artistic crea tion. The author —a word that applies thus to no other anthology-maker in English — of The Golden Treasury' expresses himself through taste and judgment in poems as an other author might in subject matter and style. And not the least of the causes to his com plete effect lies in the subtle and exquisite ar rangement by which poems follow one after an other, leading out the thought of one to enrich the other, and often to build up a mood to which each poem is made to contribute and by which it is revealed. The combination of the last five poems in the book, for example, is it self a poem; and the idea of ending the whole with Shelley's KMusic when soft voices die is an act of creative imagination.