This is not a collection of devotional poems. It is not an attempt to rival O'rby Shipley's admirable Carmina Mariana or any other similar anthology. What I have tried to do is to bring together the poems in English that I like best that were written by Cath olics since the middle of the Nineteenth Century. There are in this book poems religious in theme; there are also love-songs and war-songs. But I think that it may be called a book of Catholic poems. For a Catholic is not a Catholic only when he prays; he is a Catholic in all the thoughts and actions of his life. And when a Catholic attempts to re?ect in words some of the Beauty of which as a poet he is conscious, he cannot 'be far from prayer and adoration.