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  [** Transcriber's Notes:
      Superscripts have been represented using regular characters,
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  BALLADS OF BOOKS

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               BALLADS OF BOOKS




                  CHOSEN BY
               BRANDER MATTHEWS


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                   NEW YORK
             DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
                     1900




                _Copyright, 1886_
               BY GEORGE J. COOMBES


                    PRINTED BY
         THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.




                        TO
                  FREDERICK LOCKER

              POET AND LOVER OF BOOKS

       _Come and take a choice of all my library_
                                Titus Andronicus, iv. 1




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                    PREFATORY NOTE.
                    _______________


The poets have ever been lovers of books; indeed, one might ask how
should a man be a poet who did not admire a treasure as precious and as
beautiful as a book may be. With evident enjoyment, Keats describes


    A viol, bowstrings torn, cross-wise upon
    A glorious folio of Anacreon;


and it was a glorious folio of Beaumont and Fletcher which another
English poet (whose most poetic work was done in prose) "dragged home
late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden," and to pacify his
conscience for the purchase of which he kept to his overworn suit of
clothes for four or five weeks longer than he ought. Charles Lamb was a
true bibliophile, in the earlier and more exact sense of the term; he
loved his ragged volumes as he loved his fellow-men, and he was as
intolerant of books that are not books as he was of men who were not
manly. He conferred the dukedom of his library on Coleridge, who was no
respecter of books, though he could not but enrich them with his
marginal notes. Southey and Lord Houghton and Mr. Locker are English
poets with libraries of their own, more orderly and far richer than the
fortuitous congregation of printed atoms, a mere medley of unrelated
tomes, which often masquerades as The Library in the mansions of the
noble and the wealthy. Shelley said that he thought Southey had a
secret in every one of his books which he was afraid the stranger might
discover: but this was probably no more, and no other, than the secret
of comfort, consolation, refreshment, and happiness to be found in any
library by him who shall bring with him the golden key that unlocks its
silent door.

Mr. Lowell has recently dwelt on the difference between literature and
books: and, accepting this distinction, the editor desires to declare
at once that as a whole this collection is devoted rather to books than
to literature. The poems in the following pages celebrate the
bric-a-brac of the one rather than the masterpieces of the other. The
stanzas here garnered into one sheaf sing of books as books, of books
valuable and valued for their perfection of type and page and
printing,--for their beauty and for their rarity,--or for their
association with some famous man or woman of the storied past

Two centuries and a half ago Drummond of Hawthornden prefixed to the
'Varieties' of his friend Persons a braggart distich:--


    This book a world is; here, if errors be,
    The like, nay worse, in the great world we see.


The present collection of varieties in verse has little or naught to do
with the great world and its errors: it has to do chiefly, not to say
wholly, with the world of the Bookmen--the little world of the
Book-lover, the Bibliophile, the Bibliomaniac--a mad world, my masters,
in which there are to be found not a few poets who cherish old wine and
old wood, old friends and old books, and who believe that old books are
the best of old friends.


    Books, books again, and books once more!
    These are our theme, which some miscall
    Mere madness, setting little store
    By copies either short or tall,
    But you, O slaves of shelf and stall!
    We rather write for you that hold
    Patched folios dear, and prize "the small
    Rare volume, black with burnished gold."


as Mr. Austin Dobson sang on the threshold of Mr. Lang's delightfully
discursive little book about the 'Library.'

The editor has much pleasure in thanking the poets who have allowed him
to reprint their poems in these pages; and he acknowledges a double
debt of gratitude to the friends who have written poems expressly for
this collection. Encouraged by their support, and remembering that he
is not a contributor to his own pages, the editor ventures to conclude
his harmless necessary catalogue of the things contained and not
contained within these covers, by quoting Herrick's address to his
Book:--


     Be bold, my Book, nor be abash'd, or fear,
     The cutting thumb-nail, or the brow severe;
     But by the muses swear, all here is good,
     If but well read, or ill read, understood.

                             BRANDER MATTHEWS.

  NEW YORK, _November_, 1886.


 