FAVOURITE QUOTATIONS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1079, 18 March 1911, Page 9

FAVOURITE QUOTATIONS.

Everyone in these days is familiar (gossips an English writer) with the boo kof "Favourite Quotations" as an expedient for raising money for charitable purposes. \ ou. pay a shilling and furnish a quotation, and after an interval, in exchange for another shilling, receive a volume of litorary scraps which, after-the fearful joy of contemplating. your own name printed besido .your own quotation, you hurry awav to ■whatever , corner of your library "you ,: have' : a6signcd for the accommodation of books that are no hooks. Now tho usual method in which such compilations are supplied with, matter is that if a person has a favourite quotation ho frankly gives it, and if he has nono lie sends a. quotation which he feels would be his favourite if ho had one, so that, whatever may be the valuo of the completed-s-ork as Mi anthology, it has a certain value as indicating tho stato, of the public tasto for poetry. ,0n the whole, the'general impression left upon'tho mind of a reader who has dipped into several of such .books isthat tho sort of poetry Which the public prefer is the serious, purposive sort. There are fow comic verses. It is only once in a way that one comos across such • aii achievement as this:— In the drinking well .Which the plumbers built her Aunt Eliza fell .We must use a filter. Nor aro there many of those, lines or c.auplets which appeal instantly to the imagination because of their inherent poetic quality; this, of Meredith's, for exampleShe hath a palace in tho West, Bright Hcspcr lights her to her rest, or that couplet of Blake's concerning which Pater said that he never repeated it to'himself "without a strange and almost terrifying sensation of isolation and long weariness"— , . Sunflower, weary of timp, Who con ntest the steps of the sun. On tlie other band, there is a welcomo absence of sentimental .verse of the "choky" sort, cither because it is discounted even when appreciated or because it docs not lend itself to'quotation. No, but let poetry inculcate sound, ethical teaching, let it deal with faith, dtity, and destiny, let it be rich ill the elements that make a sermon a good sermon ,and your British taxpayer will lovo it; lie will love it although it has been quoted ad nauseam already, and he will find it in George Eliot, in Mrs;. Felicia Dorothea Hemans, and in tho pages of that Martin Tupper who has been the punching-ball of two generations of writers.