Excerpt from The Garden Muse: Poems for Garden Lovers No attempt has been made to bring together in this book all the poems that have been written about gardens. The compiler has simply sought to please himself and those whose taste chimes with his own, by weaving a chaplet of choice garden flowers culled more or less at random from the richest and rarest parterres of poetry. The only fixed principle he has followed in the process of selection is that no poem should be admitted merely because it had the garden for its theme or inspiration. The primary pleasure afforded by poetry is, after all, whatever its subject, that which is proper to it as a form of artistic expression. Surely it would be a poor compliment to pay the gar den lover to suppose that he could relish bad verse the more because it was consecrated to a cult at whose shrine he worshiped. Hence, any poem that has seemed not to conform to the. 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.