sion." (Geo. Puttenham, Arte of Eng. Poesie, ch. 22.) Or we may sum up the two prevailing moods - hope and despair of love-songs, in Chaucer's line :—

"Now up, now doun, as bokets in a welle."

The troubadours (or trouvères, i.e., finders, inventors of poetry) flourished in France, and the Minnesänger (Minne = love) in Germany, some six centuries ago, and made a golden age of love-lyrics. To compose a lovesong, and then sing it effectively, was every noble's accomplishment. Richard the Lion-heart is credited with a French love-lay. Then, too, the gay "clerkes," the wandering scholars of the middle ages, sang love-songs enough, from the reckless tavern-catch (such as may be found in modern collections of the medieval Latin songs) up to the passionate outburst of love to the holy and gracious Virgin of heaven. [See Kennedy's trans lation of Ten Brink's Hist. Eng. Lit., p. 208.] Another great cycle of love-lyrics is found in the time of Elizabeth; e.g., Marlowe's "smooth song," Come live with me and be my love. Popular collections were printed; e.g., "England's Helicon," Tottel's "Miscellany," &c. The Madrigal was originally a shepherd's song, but came to mean a love-ditty; "airs and madrigals," says Milton, "which whisper softness in chambers." It must be short and fanciful; e.g., Take, O take those lips away (see above), or Tell me where is fancy bred (Merch. of Ven.). Reckless or amusing love-lyrics are plentiful: Suckling's Why so pale and wan, fond lover? and Wither's Shall I, wasting in despair are good examples. An admirable love-lyric, swaying between jest and earnest, is Drayton's sonnet, Since there's no help, come let us

We must,

kiss and part; the sudden turn of the last two lines is of the highest merit. Grave entirely, and gracious, is Lovelace's Tell me not, sweet, I am unkinde. With Herrick, Carew and the rest, we come to Vers de Société, which will be treated below. It is folly to attempt any minute classification of love-lyrics: each good one should make a class for itself. however, note the wonderful revival of the Elizabethan lyric by William Blake; e.g., in his song My Silks and Fine Array. The tragic side of love represented in this song is more appropriately treated under lyrics of grief, though we may here mention the exquisite ballad Fair Helen, Wordsworth's Lucy (that beginning She dwelt among the untrodden ways, and also A slumber did my spirit seal); while there is what Mr. Arnold calls a "piercing" pathos in the stanza of Auld Lang Syne:

"We twa hae paidl'd i̇' the burn

From morning sun till dine;

But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne."

§ 4. LYRIC OF NATURE.

The good poet ought to feel with Chaucer:

"When that the monethe of May

Is comen, and I here the foulës synge,
And that the flourës gynnen for to sprynge,
Fairewel my boke, and my devocioun !"

Out of very early times comes down to us a fresh lit tle "Cuckoo-Song," a refrain to welcome Summer; it is an excellent example of the simple nature-lyric :

"Sumer is i-cumen1 in,

Lhude 2 sing cuccu!
Groweth sed

And bloweth med,3

And springth the wde nu5;
Sing cuccu."

Simple, too, is the song in Cymbeline, "Hark, hark, the lark," and the song in R. Browning's Pippa Passes, "The Year's at the Spring." A little reflection (nature is ever suggestive) is mingled with Shelley's Cloud, Blake's Tiger, Wordsworth's Cuckoo and Daffodils, Keats' Autumn, Beaumont and Fletcher's Now the lusty Spring is seen and Shepherds all and maidens fair, and Swinburne's fine chorus When the hounds of spring, in "Atalanta in Calydon."

Of the odes, we instance Collins' beautiful Ode to Evening; and Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality, etc., is also in great part a praise of

nature.

on,

With reflective lyrics of nature we come upon a boundless field. Man's life and the life of nature are so mutually suggestive, we so perpetually express one in terms of the other, the oak dies, hope fades, and so that there can be no end to the variety of emotions called forth. Burns ploughs up the daisy, and the analogy with his own fate bursts out in song. Even light-hearted Herrick reminds Corinna (Corinna's Going a Maying) that life ebbs fast, and nature must be enjoyed while May is with us. When the feelings come still further under the influence of the intellect, when we allow analogies to be suggested which lead us hither and thither, there results the reflective lyric of the

1

come. 2 loud. 3 meadow.

4 wood.

5 now.

graver cast.

The lyric tends to be less spontaneous;

but it gains in breadth and often in beauty. Take the process in little. Wordsworth says:

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky :

So was it when my life began :

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety."

Here we note (1) a pure emotion, a simple, unmixed influence of nature; then (2) memory, and a wish born of reflection; finally (3) an intellectual conclusion, a result of that reflection. This process, extended or brief, makes a reflective nature-lyric. Shelley's Skylark and Ode to the West Wind, Andrew Marvell's Garden, and especially Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, may be read with profit as excellent examples of this class. Mr. Pattison has shown, as regards Milton's two poems, that they are not "descriptive"; — that descriptive poetry (as Lessing proved in his Laocoön) is "a contradiction in terms. . . . Human action or passion is the only subject of poetry." The charm of nature-poetry is not its description, its rivalry with a painting of the scene; it is the suggestive power of objects to stimulate the imagination, - in Marvell's fine words, often

66

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade."

The perfection of this sort of poetry is perhaps reached in Keats' two odes To a Nightingale and On a Grecian Urn.

Finally, nature may serve as mere mirror for intense feeling. Such a poem is Tennyson's Break, break, break.

§ 5. LYRIC OF GRIEF.

There is pure grief expressed in the last poem cited. above; and indeed, classification of lyrics is often arbitrary and uncertain, for a poet does not confine himself in one poem to one feeling. But death is the prime mover of grief, and we consider here the lyric that deals with death. Such a lyric should be the result of immediate feeling. Malherbe, the French poet, took three years to compose an ode to a friend who had lost his wife. When the ode was ready, the friend was again married.

The old-time lament was epic; it sang the deeds of the dead. So the end of Beowulf tells us how twelve warriors rode around the hero's tomb and sang his praise. Nowadays the lament is lyric. Examples are: Dirge in Cymbeline; Shelley's Adonais (in memory of Keats); Tennyson's In Memoriam (Hallam). These will fairly represent the simple (also expressed in Wordworth's Lucy and in Poe's Annabel Lee), the impassioned, and the philosophic or reflective. But In Memoriam has three distinct moods: (1) epic, memories of old friendship; (2) lyric, bursts of pure grief; (3) reflective, philosophic as in the canto 117, Contemplate all this work of time. See, further, Milton's Lycidas and Arnold's Thyrsis. A calamity involving many deaths is bewailed in Cowper's Loss of the Royal George.

The words elegy and elegiac must be used with caution. The classical lament was written in alternate