for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk
is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A
few small corrections have been made, but only when they were
quite obvious.

The numbers chosen are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed I
am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at
least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to
pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite
deliberation. But the lyrical spirit is volatile and notoriously
hard to bind with definitions; and seems to grow wilder with the
years. With the anthologist--as with the fisherman who knows the
fish at the end of his sea-line--the gift, if he have it, comes by
sense, improved by practice. The definition, if he be clever
enough to frame one, comes by after-thought. I don't know that it
helps, and am sure that it may easily mislead.

Having set my heart on choosing the best, I resolved not to be
dissuaded by common objections against anthologies--that they
repeat one another until the proverb [Greek] loses all
application--or perturbed if my judgement should often agree with
that of good critics. The best is the best, though a hundred
judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out
and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be
recondite. To be sure, a man must come to such a task as mine
haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in days when he
had much enthusiasm but little reading.

A deeper import
Lurks in the legend told my infant years