PREFACE TO READINGS ON POETRY. To write explanations of poetry for young people is an humble and laborious task, that requires a degree of minute care and patience, of which those who have not actually made the attempt cannot form an adequate idea. Those who are best acquainted with the human understanding, in its most highly cultivated and in its most ignorant state, in the maturity and in the infancy of its powers, can best appreciate the difficulties of our apparently trivial undertaking, difficul ties, which there is no glory in overcoming, and an undertaking, which in the utmost perfection of its execution could not obtain any literary fame. The only motive then, which can induce authors, who have other and more promising pursuits in literature, voluntarily to persevere in such labours, is the hope of being useful. The writers of the following pages will feel themselves sufficiently rewarded if this hope be accomplished. A little volume called " Explanations of poetry," was published some years ago, and many who have now had time to judge of it by experience, the safest test, have assured the author, that they have found it advantageous to their children in They perceived that many ways. these explanations of poetry enabled their pupils to commit with facility to memory, what they had thus previously been taught to understand, they found that their children grew fonder of literature, the more they were enabled to comprehend perfectly what they read; and they were convinced that their pupil's understandings, their powers of judgement and taste, were by the same means and in a high proportion encreased. A farther extension of this plan, of which only a small specimen was originally hazarded, is now with increased confidence presented to the public. No pains have been spared to render the following illustrations of popular poems and of passages from popular poets, suitable not only to the capacities of children, but to the main purpose of enlarging their b understanding, and forming their taste for literature. The poems and passages selected for explanation have been chosen chiefly from Enfield's Speaker," 66 because we are informed that this is an established school-book, and we see in private families that it is in every body's hands. Pope's description of "the Man of Ross" is the first passage taken for explanation; there are no lines perhaps which are more frequently given to children to learn by rote; because it is generally thought that they are very easy to be understood; yet, upon appealing to two girls of eight and ten years old, who for their age were not deficient in knowledge, we found to our surprise, that they did not thoroughly com |