Excerpt from Little Masterpieces of English Poetry, Vol. 2: By British and American Authors, Dyls and Stories in Verse This volume of Little Masterpieces of English Poetry contains idyls and stories in verse. It covers a region lying between the ballad, which is almost, if not altogether, objective and impersonal, and the descriptive and reflective lyric, in which the personal thought and feeling of the poet is the main element. The poems in this volume are marked by a blending of the two elements. They are narratives which have in them something of the reflective and descriptive element. Of course this must not be taken as a hard and fast classification, nor are the divisions within the volume to be so regarded. Many of the poems here have aspects and relations which connect them with the poems in other groups. The idyls have been separated from the rest on the principle of classification, that they are poems which call up pictures of life and landscape for the sake of the pictures themselves. There is emotional coloring and usually a human figure or figures in the foreground. The difficulty arises with poems like Shelley's Sensitive Plant and Lowell's Rh cus. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."