EVER Since I could read Songs, I have loved them. The dearest shelf of my book-case is that where rank, shoulder to shoulder, in loving brotherhood, Burns and Béranger, Campbell and Herrick. There, too, are those best-loved of all book-companions, the volumes which bring together the quaint fancies and delicate music of the lyrics of our Elizabethan Dramatists and our Cavalier Singers, and treasure for ever, in the Songs of Scotland and of Ireland, the sobs and laughs of bygone generations, for the admiration and the love of all coming centuries. Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, I reverence with awe. They are the forests, the mountain ranges, the oceans of our literature. But Song-writers are my familiar friends. With what ever-new delight I wander through the grassy valleys, the daisied fields, the summer orchards, by the tinkling rivulets of the land of Song. The Epic speaks to the brain. It demands that I labour up to a fitting comprehension of its grandeur. The Song sings to my heart, and my heart laughs, or answers in tears what pleasant ones! to every cry of nature which it utters. "Blessings be on them, and eternal praise," who have made the dead past so blossom with strange loveliness for the toiling present. I, too, would add a flower or two to the great garden of Song, best gladdener of the present, best comforter of the |