Every anthologist must adopt some plan for making selections. Mine has been very simple. I have made a small collection of poems that would have pleased the child I used to be and the boy who was my playmate. Above all things I have striven to keep the book small, for the big books of poetry on our shelves were always left to themselves. It was the little books that became our intimate companions.

To make a selection for boys and girls from the countless riches of lyric poetry in our language, and to reduce that selection to the contents of so small a book as this one, is a grave task. It involves the exclusion on the grounds of mere lack of space, of so much that one loves. I should have liked to make a book of this size containing only Elizabethan songs and early English ballads, another entirely devoted to Georgian and Victorian poets, a third to living writers, and a fourth to child-rhymes, parodies, nonsense verses and the like.

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