being opened, are so light as that they are subject to be shaken with the least breath; yet, rightly handled, they serve both for ornament and use. Such are light Airs." And yet, in all this lyric-song there is almost never the suggestion of the mere exercise in versification. It has everywhere the note of spontaneity. A flying mood is caught in its passage, is slightly idealized, and then is fitted. to diction and verse which by association and by cadence exactly render it to the hearer or reader. If the mood be inconsequential and fleeting, it is so much the more the proper material for musical and lyric expression. The mere music of words, allied to the exact quantum and substance of feeling and idea, has never elsewhere been equalled in English for lightness and grace, and an indescribable charm and singularity of verbal expressiveness. In Shakespeare, Campion, Heywood, Dekker, and Breton, and in the single masterpieces of a host of minor or unnamed singers, is found in unapproachable perfection that peculiar artless art, that first fine careless rapture, that exquisite harmony and union of form and substance, which in the last resort, as M. Brunetière rightly says, is all that is needed in poetic form to constitute the true lyric, and which in any form seems to be the crowning attainment of art. In its day the Elizabethan song-lyric is a holiday lyric, the sweetener and solace of life in hall and bower, in court and city. It responds to the superabundant play-instinct of the age-the instinct of men seeking free expression after the long ascetic repression of the Middle Ages. The Elizabethan period is partly, and for a few brief

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years, what Taine calls it, the period of a Pagan Renaissance. Life all at once has come to have a new joy and interest for men, here, now, and of itself. The senses reassert their rights. And it is still a half-century before the relapse into the black remorse of Puritanism. And so, meanwhile, the romantic comedy of life is played out to the sound of the lyre and of song.

This sense of joyous elation, this spontaneity and careless ease of the early Elizabethan song, is that which gives it high permanent worth to us; and no one can appreciate its richness and inspiration who does not drink somewhat deeply of it—who cannot for the moment give himself up to the mood of it, rejoice in its joy, and admire its seeming-careless art and its happy music. It supplies something not elsewhere found in English poetry. Afterwards, and all too soon, the eternal note of sadness is brought in.

Lyrists.

The chief lyric writers typical of the first great poetic period extending to the death of Elizabeth Chief Elizabethan are Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Nash, Lodge, Breton, Shakespeare, Daniel, Drayton, Southwell, Barnes, Heywood, and Dekker. Others-Donne, Jonson, Campion, and Sir John Davies, for example-fall partly within the same period, but their lyric manner, as well as in a less degree also the lyric manner of Shakespeare, Chapman, and Daniel, points rather to the special style of the lyric of the Jacobean period, and is rather transitional than typically Elizabethan. Spenser and Sidney fitly usher in the great period of the lyric. In the

Shepherd's Calendar the lyric and the pastoral notes are blended. Fresh and elate, if also slightly conscious and naive, like the voice of youth, it struck out a new music in English verse. The Lyrics of Spenser's characteristic lyric, however, Spenser. is the Greater Lyric, the prolonged lyric. His art requires ample room for its evolutions. Accordingly his lyric utterance, as in the Epithalamion, is large, harmonious, and splendidly impassive. The sharper lyrical cry, the strenuous utterance of brief but deep emotion, first comes from Sidney, as in the sonnet beginning:

Of Sidney.

Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust.

Of Minor

After this the way is open to all comers, and the full choir of song is heard in the land. In this choir are many notes and many voices: the delicate melody of Lyly, perfect in Lyrists. diction, light and refined; the richer note of Greene, full of English feeling, strangely heightened with pastoral and Renaissance fancies, varied in rhythm, but somewhat languorous and overwrought; Peele's few lyrics, golden in cadence, that go on murmuring in the memory; the fresh voice of Nash, now rollicking and open, and again musically melancholic; Lodge, more inclined to pastoralism, trying experiments in motives and rhythms that evade failure by a hand's-breadth, and too copious in his vein of song to be uniformly felicitous; Breton, as fresh as Nash, as copious as Lodge, but endowed with a finer artistic feeling, and altogether captivating in his ready grace and buoyancy; Dekker and Heywood, lyrical and Elizabethan in spirit, humane,

lovers of sunshine and song, and carrying down into the midst of the perplexities of the Jacobean age the simpler lyrical snatches that had pleased their youth; Drayton, grave-minded, with the ethical poet's fuller ambition, and touched with the new and deeper lyric feeling that utters itself most perfectly in Shakespeare's sonnets; Daniel, pure in utterance, refined and meditative, and typical minor master of the closet lyric; and, lastly, the sum of all these parts and master of the poetic schools of both periods, the lyric Shakespeare, most poignant and intense of sonnetteers, through all whose moods runs a hidden noble harmony, bitter-sweet, ever broken and ever synthesized anew, the fire of desire and the calm of æsthetic contemplation alternately active and quiescent, large, self-sacrificing, and Promethean,—and on the other hand, and in the same breath, subtlest and aptest singer of a lyric song, tuned to the whole gamut of singable emotions, from the woodnotes wild of the lyrics in As You Like It to the last solemn perfect simplicity of the Dirge in Cymbeline.

Leading Moods

the Elizabethan Lyric: Moral Idealism.

The history of its lyrical poetry exhibits a strenuous and fervent idealism as one of the constant traits of the English mind. We and Motives of feel the first breath of this spirit in the heroic resignation and loyalty of Beowulf; it reappears in the eager hymns of Cynewulf's Christ; we may find it in a score of Hail Marys in the period before Chaucer; it shines like a cathedral lamp through the tender symbolism of the Pearl; it is loftiest in Spenser's Hymns of Heavenly Love and Beauty; it is felt in the lyrics of

Milton and in the verse of Herbert and Vaughan; until, with the decline of the lyrical spirit in the poetry of the English classical period, it disappears for a time, only to come to a new birth in the lyrical revival of the modern romantic period. This peculiarly English note of idealism, ethical and earnest, and yet ardent and enthusiastic-this serious and moral acceptance and interpretation of things, underlies even the lightness and insouciance of the Elizabethan song-lyric. We find it even in Campion; we find it, for all his Paganism, in Herrick. From Beowulf to Hamlet, from Hamlet to the Ode to Duty and The Two Voices, this is the dominant mood of English poetry. It underlies even Chaucer's playfulness and breezy delight in the panorama of external existence. In the midst of discordant conditions, it impels the essentially English nature of Dryden to dissatisfied satire and self-reproaches; Pope is driven by it to write didactic Essays on Man; and it is the very breath of nineteenth-century lyricism. When this temperamental mood of the race attains to adequate objective expression, as in the great poetry of the Elizabethan age, when it projects itself into concrete forms of the imagination, as in Shakespeare and Spenser, in Keats and Tennyson, the result is an art at once English and universal. Something of this universality of æsthetic validity, combined with the native flavour of a national art, attaches even to the minor lyrical production of the Elizabethan period.

The England of the Renaissance is a new-old world; every element is mixed in it; and its poetry reflects this mixture. In its greater writers, in