Navy calf fine binding. Gilt double line border on both boards. Gilt squared banding with gilt title on the spine. All edges gilt.

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A superb book

The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics is a popular anthology of English poetry, originally selected for publication by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861. It was considerably revised, with input from Tennyson, about three decades later. Palgrave excluded all poems by poets then still alive.

The book continues to be published in regular new editions; still under Palgrave’s name. These reproduce Palgrave’s selections and notes, but usually include a supplement of more recent poems. Christopher Ricks in 1991 produced a scholarly edition of the original Treasury, along with an account of its evolution from 1861 to 1891, with inclusions and exclusions.

Francis Turner Palgrave 28 September 1824 – 24 October 1897) was a British critic, anthologist and poet. Palgrave published both criticism and poetry, but his work as a critic was by far the more important. His Visions of England (1880–1881) has dignity and lucidity, but little of the “natural magic” which the greatest of his predecessors in the Oxford chair considered to be the test of inspiration. His last volume of poetry, Amenophis, appeared in 1892. His criticism is considered to demonstrate fine and sensitive tact, quick intuitive perception, and generally sound judgment. His Handbook to the Fine Arts Collection, International Exhibition, 1862, and his Essays on Art (1866), though flawed, were full of striking judgments strikingly expressed.

His Landscape in Poetry (1897) showed wide knowledge and critical appreciation of one of the most attractive aspects of poetic interpretation. But Palgrave’s principal contribution to the development of literary taste was contained in his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), an anthology of the best poetry in the language constructed upon a plan sound and spacious, and followed out with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely be surpassed. Palgrave followed it with a Treasury of Sacred Song (1889), and a second series of the Golden Treasury (1897), including the work of later poets, but in neither of these was quite the same exquisiteness of judgment preserved. Among his other works were The Passionate Pilgrim (1858), a volume of selections from Robert Herrick entitled Chrysomela (1877), a memoir of Arthur Hugh Clough (1862) and a critical essay on Sir Walter Scott (1866) prefixed to an edition of his poems. He published a small collection of hymns in 1867 which ran to three editions, each slightly enlarged.