THE GOLDEN TREASURY
Poetry gives pleasure ‘more golden than gold,’ leading us in higher and healthier ways than those of the world, and interpreting to us the lessons of Nature.—Francis Palgrave
On Reverend Beeching’s recommendation, I checked out one of Francis Palgrave’s celebrated treasuries, the Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. Hazel brought it from the library one afternoon.
I opened the faded but sturdy covers to the wonderful smell of old pages. ‘Is that an original edition?’ Mama asked. That would seem incredible, but I couldn’t find a date anywhere. The large volume was beautifully illustrated by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, ‘the last Pre-Raphaelites.’ Half a dozen brightly colored plates were pasted on thick gray paper and protected by printed tissue overlays.
The full title given was The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language Selected and Arranged with Notes by Francis Turner Palgrave, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. This edition was published for George H. Doran Company {New York} and printed in Great Britain.
The dedication bears the name of ‘Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate,’ to whose encouragement, advice and assistance Palgrave credits both the start and the completion of his ambitious book.
He addressed Lord Tennyson: ‘Permit me then to inscribe to yourself a book which, I hope, may be found by many a lifelong fountain of innocent and exalted pleasure; a source of animation to friends when they meet; and able to sweeten solitude itself with best society,—with the companionship of the wise and the good, with the beauty which the eye cannot see, and the music heard only in silence.’
Palgrave thoughtfully arranged the poems to reflect the chronological development of poetry. They are some of the best and most beautiful we have in the English language.
‘[I]f it teaches those indifferent to the Poets to love them, and those who love them to love them more, the aim and desire entertained in framing it will be fully accomplished.’
• illustrations by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale in Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, edited by Francis Palgrave •
February 14, 2014