Excerpt from Nine Choice Poems of Longfellow, Lowell, Macaulay, Byron, Browning and Shelley Almost all children enjoy nursery rhymes, especially if they may listen to their recital instead of being required to read them. The great majority take pleasure in reading or hearing any simple verses provided they tell something and have life and movement. They enjoy ballads, whether old or new, and metrical stories no matter how awkward the rhyme. They like these, not for any beauty of thought or expression, but because of the action and the variety of images which they present to the imagination. But such productions are not poetry of the highest class, - most commonly they are not poetry at all. They are Simply substitutes for poetry, and as such they serve a most excellent purpose with minds that are not yet sufficiently mature to appreciate beautiful thoughts expressed in beautiful and poetic language. 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.