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TO THE READER.

THIS Poetry-Book of Modern Poets begins, as to date, with Robert Burns and ends with the poets of to-day. Burns marks, in fact, the great starting point of contemporary poetry. Between him and his immediate predecessors there is fixed a great gulf, as of a century of time; while for modernness of thought and style, and for simple expression of feeling, all that he has given us might have been written yesterday. With him, therefore, although he died four years before the commencement of our century, the present school of English poetry is assumed to begin.

As in the preceding volume, no chronological order has been observed in the arrangement of the poems; the position of each piece being determined solely by its relation to that which leads up to it or follows it. Thus Shelley and Jean Ingelow, Swinburne and Coleridge, as they may illustrate or contrast with each other, will be found side by side. In this way (to quote the Preface printed with the PoetryBook of Elder Poets) "it is hoped that readers who care to observe the attitude of contemporary thought

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