The chief difficulty in the preparation of this book has been the choice of the poems to be included. The material is so abundant that, if one were to include merely such pieces as in France would be thought indispensable to a knowledge of Hugo, it would necessitate a collection at least three timw as long as the following. This I say in order that the lover of Hugo may not be surprised if he miss here some poems which he expected to find. In grouping the material, I have adopted a systematic rather than a chronological arrangement. The chronologi cal order usually followed is undesirable. N 0 one would attempt to explain a picture by tracing the order of the strokes of the painter's brush; it only breeds confusion in the mind of the student. Moreover, it is now certain that many of the dates which Hugo placed at the end of his poems are not exact though we do not always know what the true dates are. I have, therefore, suppressed them, since scholarly discussions would here be out of place. In two or three places only, when they were essential to the understanding of the poem, I have retained them.