Best Loved ClassicsTreasury of Poems Author:Browning, Addison, Burns This sprightly collecion of familiar verse includes not only the timeless lyrics of such Olympian bards as Shakespeare and Shelley, but the works of the "humbler poets"-minor masterpieces which we have all known from childhood, though the names of the poets have all but faded from our memory. — Here are Elizabeth Barrett Browning's immortal "Sonn... more »ets from the Portuguese," with their tender enumeration of the ways of love; and here, too, is her husband Robert's haunting tale, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Here is the entire text of Coleridge's enchanting "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and of Fitzgerald's matchless translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar. Here is Gray's stately, somber "Elegy" and Shelley's mightly lament on the death of Keats. And, among more than a hundred lesser pieces, the stirring ballads of Kipling, Scott, and Macaulay; the irresistible jingles of Edward Lear and Wm. Schwenck Gilbert; Tennyson's grim memorial of Balaclava, "The Charge of the Light Brigade"; Clement Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" ("The Night Before Christmas"), a unique contribution to our literary folklore; and gemlike lyrics by Spenser, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Poe, and many others.
Mingled with these classics is a rich assortment of sentimental lyrics and ballads; the litlting love songs of Tom Moore, Stephen Foster's old plantation ballads, George Pope Morris' plea to the woodman, and Samuel Woodworth's nostalgic recollection of the "moss-cover'd bucket, which hung in the well."
These are the poems which people like to clip out of magazines and newspapers and which they cherish for years in scrapbooks and albums. These are the poems we read and commit to memory; poems we quote at the fireside or even on the battlefield. These are poems which have become part of our everyday living.« less