ENGLISH FROM ILLVSTRATIONS BY LONDON GEORGE BELL & SONS MDCCCXCVIII CHISWICK PRESS:-CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY lane, LONDON. BJ BLEIA 17 1.18 9 LIBRARY THERE are two periods of English literature in which poetry has burst out in song with a music so irresistibly enchanting that criticism is lost in delight. In these periods, represented by Spenser and Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, and by Coleridge, Shelley, and Tennyson in the nineteenth, our lyric poets have sung with such sweetness that the ear must be depraved or dull that is not won by their notes. There have been times when English poets were as unapt to sing as birds in autumn. In the eighteenth century the voices of the most popular versemen failed ignominiously. Great as Pope was in his own department, he had no ear for song, and neither Young nor Thomson, Akenside, nor, though it must be said with reluctance, even Gray, possessed the faculty which is perhaps beyond all others the most captivating in poetry. William Collins, indeed, before the first half of the century had closed, published a few lyrics of the choicest beauty; but he stood alone in the art until Blake sang his fitful snatches of verse in which the soul of music is embodied; and Burns came in glory and in joy to bewitch the world with a voice as sweet as it was strong. Burns wrote songs that are loved and learnt by the common people, by the shepherd on the hillside, by the ploughman in the field, and by the milkmaid in the byre. A great poet, he is also immeasurably the greatest writer of words that can be set to music and sung by village maidens during their daily toil,-of words such as Wordsworth's " Highland Reaper" sang while she bent over her sickle, in a voice more soothing to her poet than the nightingale's, and more thrilling than the voice of the cuckoo, "Breaking the silence of the seas The Scottish song-writers, before the advent of Burns, and several of his successors in the art, are alike in the significant characteristic that they express themselves simply and with poetic feeling. Of songs that are both beautiful and homely English literature is for the most part destitute. The songs of Shakespeare and of Tennyson are not known to our villagers or to city-dwellers whose tastes are uncultured. Our supreme lyric poets demand almost without an exception a fair degree of education and an instinctive knowledge of what is rarest and loveliest in verse, to appreciate them thoroughly. The lyric includes the song, but it occupies a far wider field than that held by the song-writer. Spenser, |