hexameter and pentameter; this was called elegiac verse. It came to be used for any reflective poetry; hence "elegiac" refers more to the metre than to the subject. In English we understand it generally to mean solemn or plaintive poetry; but the Roman Elegies, for example, of Goethe are anything rather than solemn or plaintive. Still, in general terms, an elegy is a song of grief, whether acute or mild. It can also look forward to death, as well as back. Thus Nash has some beautiful lines on Approaching Death (in Summer's Last Will and Testament) :— “Brightness falls from the air: Queens have died young and fair; I am sick, I must die, — Lord, have mercy on us!" Less immediate is Shirley's Dirge ("The glories of our blood and state"), or Beaumont's lines On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey. On the contrary, personal and full of terrible suffering are those saddest verses of Cowper, The Castaway. Like Beaumont's lines in beauty, and more read than any other poem in our language, is Gray's famous Elegy. There is no passion; it is simply the language of the heart that comes face to face with the wide and impersonal idea of death. There is no individual grief, nor is there appeal to tumultuous sorrow, as in Hood's Bridge of Sighs. Again, the living can cause grief; there can be a living death. So Whittier in Ichabod laments the fall of Webster; so R. Browning, in the Lost Leader, bewails as it is generally understood - Wordsworth's 'secession' to the Tories. Finally, one must draw a sharp line between the sentimental and the really pathetic. To the former class belong many vulgar but popular songs about blind people, drunkards, dead sweethearts, and so on; to the latter, Lamb's Old Familiar Faces. § 6. PURELY REFLECTIVE, AND MISCELLANEOUS. Purely intellectual verse is too apt to be didactic. It easily drifts away altogether from the domain of poetry. Still, there are poems filled with exalted thought which deserve a high place. Such is Sir H. Wotton's How Happy is he Born and Taught (simple); such is, for more elaborate work, the Ode to Duty of Wordsworth, full of high enthusiasm. Much of Matthew Arnold's poetry is purely reflective. Here, too, we may mention such lyric poems with a strong epic leaning as Gray's Progress of Poesy; Alexander's Feast is of the same nature. Further, we note the ode addressed to a certain person, like Marvell's 'Horatian Ode' to Cromwell; Ben Jonson's Ode to Himself; and many other poems more or less filled with the reflective, philosophical element. Here belong such half allegorical lyrics as George Herbert's Pulley, — ("When God at first made man"). As a reflective ode, pure and simple, wrought up to the highest fervor, there is nothing better than George Eliot's one poem, "O may I join the choir invisible." Didactic poetry, as hinted above, can hardly be called in the strict sense, poetry. The difference between it and the reflective lyric may be thus stated: the latter allows the poetic suggestion of the senses or imagination to lead the mind in certain channels (e.g., a dead leaf, our mortality). The didactic poem forces our poetic instincts, as well as suggestions of the senses, into certain channels of its own. But this is putting Pegasus to the plough. § 7. CONVIVIAL LYRICS; VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ. Man is social by nature, and from most ancient time he has had convivial songs. Drinking choruses and songs in honor of wine and good fellowship over the bowl, are found in every literature. The wandering "clerkes" of the middle ages were very skilful with this sort of lyric; there are certain famous lines attributed to Walter Mapes : "Meum est propositum In taberna mori," etc. In our own literature, drinking songs are numerous : thus in Bishop Still's play, Gammer Gurton's Needle, there is a song inserted (probably taken from some popular ballad-collection of the day) in praise of ale, "I cannot eat but little meat." The Dutch wars during Elizabeth's reign greatly increased drinking-excesses among the English; and hence the frequent allusions to heavy drinking made by such writers as Shakspere; the passages in Hamlet (1. 4) and Othello (II. 3) are well known. One of the best short songs of this kind is in Antony and Cleopatra (11. 7), with the refrain, Cup us, till the world go round; though for sheer Bacchanalian glee and reckless merriment, the prize must be given to Burns' Willie brew'd a peck o' maut. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Valentinian, there is a fine drinking-song, God Lyæus ever young. Anacreon was the master of this sort of poetry, all his songs praise love or wine, and the name Anacreontic is often applied to the convivial lyric. Thomas Moore has both translated Anacreon and also written many songs in the same vein. From strictly convivial lyrics we pass into that wide realm covered by the term Vers de Société. Locker, in his collection of such poems (Lyra Elegantiarum, London, 1867) quotes a definition of Vers de Société: "It is the poetry of men who belong to society. . . who amid all this froth of society feel that there are depths in our nature which even in the gaiety of drawing-rooms cannot be forgotten. Theirs is the poetry of sentiment that breaks into humour. . . . When society ceases to be simple, it [i.e., Vers de Soc.] becomes sceptical. . . . Emotion takes refuge in jest, and passion hides itself in scepticism of passion." Locker thinks Suckling and Herrick, Swift and Prior, Cowper and Thomas Moore, Praed and Thackeray, the representative men of this class of poetry. This vers de société spreads itself over a wide area, and must, of course, cover some ground already marked off, love, reflective, and other lyrics. The lower forms of this sort are lines in an album, a short note in verse, asking pardon for some blunder or omission, hits at passing folly, a valentine, and the like. Higher are poems like Clough's Spectator ab Extra, where sad earnest is hidden beneath a mocking tone. The poets of the Seventeenth Century were particularly apt in the former sort of verse; besides Herrick, we have a number of graceful writers, such as Carew, and later, Prior, whose Ode, The Merchant to secure his treasure, is a brilliant specimen of the Vers de Société. Carew and Herrick, 'pagan,' as Mr. Gosse calls them, were the poets whose joyous, indolent verses made the Puritan Milton sigh a moment over his more serious task, and query if it were not perhaps better after all, "as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair." These lines from Lycidas admirably define a great part of the sort of poetry treated in this division, as opposed to the 'high seriousness' of Milton's own work. § 8. OTHER LYRICAL FORMS. As a rule, the lyric is of no fixed length or form. But there are certain kinds of lyric which are bound by absolute limits as to quantity and confined to specified forms of verse. Such, for example, is the Sonnet. The Sonnet is often reflective, but the prevailing tone is lyric. Its chief advantage lies in the compression of thought in the compass of fourteen lines, in which the changes of rime are also limited. Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, and Daniel were among the first to use the sonnet, which was introduced from Italy into England. Shakspere's so-called sonnets are not of the strict form, being three quatrains' followed by a 'couplet.' The true sonnet has two parts, the octave and sestette: in the first eight lines the subject is introduced and expanded; in the last six the conclusion or result is drawn out; but both parts must relate to one main idea. [For further particulars as to form, cf. Part III.] As an outburst of pure feeling, Milton's splendid sonnet Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints is perhaps the best in our tongue. Wordsworth (e.g., To Milton) and Keats (e.g., On first looking into Chapman's Homer) are masters of this form. The host of poor sonnets is |