many countries.

Hence a number of similar ballads (cf. the extraordinary spread of a ballad known in English as Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight) in the different literatures of Europe. Again, like fairy and nursery tales, like superstitions and folk-lore of every sort, many strikingly similar European ballads point to a common mythical source. But amid the diversity of subject and origin, the general spirit of the ballad or folk-song remains one and the same. The genuine ballad is one thing, and the imitated ballad - - even such an imitation as Chatterton could make is quite another. To understand this clearly, read a good specimen of each kind; compare, say, Thomas of Ercildoune with Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a Ballad. The latter is wrought by the fancy of a poet under certain influences of the past; the other, written in the Fifteenth Century, but older in composition than that, is the work of a single poet or minstrel only in the sense that this minstrel combined materials which had been handed down from remotest times. The study of these materials leads in all directions, to the prophecies of Merlin, the story of the Tannhäuser, and so forth; the floating waifs of myth and superstition had gathered about the legendary (or historical) form of Thomas the Rhymer, and under one minstrel's hands take this definite shape as ballad. It is the old epic process in miniature. Even in the style we may distinguish the two. "I am glad as grasse wold be of raine" is the ballad style (Marriage of Sir Gawayne); "With kisses glad as birds are that get sweet rain at noon" is the imitated ballad style (Swinburne, A Match).

The ballad, with the spread of letters, degenerates

into the street-song or broadside. It bewails abuses in government, the wrongs of the poor, satirizes the follies of the day, and the like. For a collection of such, see (among others) the Roxburghe Ballads.

§ 5. LATER BALLADS.

As with the epic, so with the folk-song; poets soon saw how much could be done with the form and manner of the ballad. Prudentius wrote a sort of ballad on the death of the martyr Laurentius; it was in the metre of the Latin folk-song, and is called by Ebert the first example of a modern ballad. He compares the style, and even the metre, to the English popular ballads of later time. Of course, Prudentius purposely adopts this ballad style: "Hear," he cries to the martyr, "a rustic poet." The nearer such conscious ballads approach the tone of genuine folk-song, the better they are. The old AngloSaxon ballad, e.g., Byrhtnoth's Death, may be compared with Drayton's stirring Battle of Agincourt. The list of these imitated or conscious ballads, works of individual poets, would be endless. Any great occasion or situation can inspire such songs. Of martial ballads, we instance Campbell's Battle of the Baltic; of loveballads (narrative, of course), Maud Müller or Lord Ullin's Daughter; gay ballads, like Burns' Duncan Grey or John Barleycorn; longer historical ballads, like Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, in which there is more tinsel than true metal; the "dramatic," spirited ballad, such as Robert Browning delights in; and a host of others. Often a story is told in. a story; e.g., Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. Comic ballads are of two

kinds. In one, the fun springs from the situation or event; e.g., John Gilpin's famous ride. In the other, the mind must work out the humor of the poem; there is nothing laughable in the event itself. Of this kind is Goldsmith's Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog. To classify the great number of occasional ballads would be useless. They cover every conceivable situation. But we must note the gradual shading away of narrative ballads into ballads that are either lyric or dramatic. The tragic ballad is in its purity objective, as The Children in the Wood, or Sir Patrick Spens: when it begins to let emotion outweigh narrative, then we have a lyric ballad. When the persons of the story speak for themselves, we have a dramatic ballad. Naturally, the lyric and epic are often closely blended. Thus a deep emotion-as of grief- finds expression by dwelling on certain events. The Burial of Sir John Moore is strongly objective; mingled with outbursts of feeling is the narrative in David's beautiful lament over Jonathan (2 Sam. 1. 17 ff.). This is closely allied to the lyric Threnody; but there is a tendency to dwell on events. There is much narrative in Milton's Lycidas, and at first we might call it chiefly epic in its lament; -what with the pastoral allegory, and the appeal to the nymphs, one is almost ready to add "artificial": but a deeper study shows us that the whole poem is a splendid burst of grief and indignation, - Milton's first strong cry against the evil of the times, against a degenerate priesthood. King's death is only the occasion for uttering those feelings. Lycidas is in every sense of the word a lyric.

CHAPTER II.-LYRIC POETRY.

THE epic belongs to the outward world. Its business is to tell a story. It sings the wrath of Achilles, or the wanderings of Odysseus, or the feats of Beowulf; it reports simply what has happened. Quite the contrary with the lyric: it is subjective, proceeds from one individual; has to do, not with events, but with feelings. It belongs to a later stage of culture than the epic. "The lyric poets," says Paul Albert,1 "are the interpreters of the new society. The field that is opened to them is vast, boundless, as the needs, desires, and energies of the people." Children, and the early world, content themselves with things about them, events, objects of nature. Growing man becomes conscious of a world within him, of desires, hopes, fears. To express these is the business of lyric poetry. Consequently the test of a good lyric poem is sincerity. To show how important this is, read an artificial lyric like Rogers' Wish ("Mine be a cot beside the hill”), and compare it with the exquisite Happy Heart of Dekker. [Both lyrics are in Palgrave's Golden Treasury.] We ask, therefore, of the lyric that it be a real expression, an adequate, harmonious, and imaginative expression, of real feeling.

Hegel gives a good illustration of this subjective nature of the lyric as compared with the epic objectivity. Homer, he says, is so shut out, as individual, from his

1 La Poésie, Paris, 1870. He is speaking especially of Greece, from 760-400 B.C.

great epics, that his very existence is questioned; though his heroes are safely immortal. The heroes of Pindar, on the other hand, are empty names; while he who sang them is the immortal poet. Lyric poetry tends to exalt the poet himself, to make his personality far more to us than the events which occasion his poem. Whether it be Horace or Robin Herrick who is singing, it is the poet who interests us, not the Mæcenas or Corinna to whom he sings, nor yet the villa or the Mayday which he takes as subject.

Again, the epic moves slowly, majestically; it is a broad and quiet current. The lyric is concentrated. It is like a well-spring bursting out suddenly at one's feet.

So, too, epic and lyric differ in form. The epic has a traditional, uniform metre, such as the hexameter or the heroic couplet or blank verse. The lyric has its choice of a hundred forms, or may go further, and invent a new form. The epic was chanted; the lyric was sung. The old minstrel had his harp; the German Minnesänger accompanied their songs on the violin (not the harp, as often stated). This suggests the origin of the word lyric, something sung to the lyre. Thus we have three elements: instrument, voice, words. In time a separation was brought about, so that now (1) the music is everything, and the words either altogether discarded (compare the Lieder ohne Worte) or else very subordinate and often foolish, as in opera; or (2) the words are the chief consideration and the music a possibility. When to a lyric of the second class (such as Goethe's charming songs), the music of a great master is added, we have revived the original conception of a lyric.

The Abbé Batteux says that enthusiasm is the basis