There is possibly much to be said
in favour of such a poem as that which ends with

And I thank my God with falling tears
For the things in the bottom drawer:

but how different it is from

_I_ was a child, and _she_ was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged Seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me

The selection from Blake, again, is very incomplete, many of the
loveliest poems being excluded, such as those on The Little Girl Lost and
The Little Girl Found, the Cradle Song, Infant Joy, and others; nor can
we find Sir Henry Wotton's Hymn upon the Birth of Prince Charles, Sir
William Jones's dainty four-line epigram on The Babe, or the delightful
lines To T. L. H., A Child, by Charles Lamb.

The gravest omission, however, is certainly that of Herrick. Not a
single poem of his appears in Mr. Robertson's collection. And yet no
English poet has written of children with more love and grace and
delicacy. His Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour, his poem To His Saviour,
A Child: A Present by a Child, his Graces for Children, and his many
lovely epitaphs on children are all of them exquisite works of art,
simple, sweet and sincere.

An English anthology of child-poems that excludes Herrick is as an
English garden without its roses and an English woodland without its
singing birds; and for one verse of Herrick we would gladly give in
exchange even those long poems by Mr. Ashby-Sterry, Miss Menella Smedley,
and Mr. Lewis Morris (of Penrhyn), to which Mr. Robertson has assigned a
place in his collection. Mr. Robertson, also, should take care when he
publishes a poem to publish it correctly. Mr. Bret Harte's Dickens in
Camp, for instance, is completely spoiled by two ridiculous misprints. In
the first line 'dimpling' is substituted for 'drifting' to the entire
ruin of rhyme and reason, and in the ninth verse 'the _pensive glory_
that fills the Kentish hills' appears as 'the Persian glory . . .' with a
large capital P! Mistakes such as these are quite unpardonable, and make
one feel that, perhaps, after all it was fortunate for Herrick that he
was left out. A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

As for Mr. Robertson's preface, like most of the prefaces in the
Canterbury Series, it is very carelessly written. Such a sentence as 'I
. . . believe that Mrs. Piatt's poems, in particular, will come to many
readers, fresh, as well as delightful contributions from across the
ocean,' is painful to read. Nor is the matter much better than the
manner. It is fantastic to say that Raphael's pictures of the Madonna
and Child dealt a deadly blow to the monastic life, and to say, with
reference to Greek art, that 'Cupid by the side of Venus enables us to
forget that most of her sighs are wanton' is a very crude bit of art
criticism indeed. Wordsworth, again, should hardly be spoken of as one
who 'was not, in the general, a man from whom human sympathies welled
profusely,' but this criticism is as nothing compared to the passage
where Mr. Robertson tells us that the scene between Arthur and Hubert in
King John is not true to nature because the child's pleadings for his
life are playful as well as piteous. Indeed, Mr. Robertson, forgetting
Mamillius as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly
that Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature.