Excerpt from Selected Poems: Old and New A few of the poems have not appeared before. The sonnets 'for Dreyfus, ' having been written in eager indignation and sympathy while this book was actually passing through the press, are possibly too much touched by the heat and passion of the moment, and hardly give enough honour to those true sons and daughters of France who have, by stupendous effort and at immeasurable sacrifice and risk, done their utmost to right a great wrong. As for the rest of the book, the harvestings here tied together make a sheaf in which the red poppies may, if Offered to my friends, seem to the passer-bygood for little but to send him to sleep, and the ears of corn hardly worthy to be laid upon the Altar. Yet, even in so limited a field, where the harvest itself is only what may be carried in the hand, and where the harvester is smitten with a passionate wish that the ground had been richer and deeper, even here, the plough and the harrow have been busy through many days of many years, that the sun and wind Of heaven might not scatter their gifts wholly in vain, and that now and again some garnered seed of the centuries might, when wafted hither, find a fruitful grave. Had the ears been fuller, the grain riper, then, perhaps, even around this handful of harvestings, having nothing else to give, I might in gratitude have entwined the names of London, my birthplace; Oswestry, my first home; Nottingham, always kind to me for my father's sake; New York, Knutsford and Manchester, that long ago helped me to my only years of comparative leisure; and Oxford, the giver of more than can be written. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.