Mixture of
Moods.

Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare, in its lyrical drama and its Greater Lyric, we study its weightier poetic interpretation of life. But when we wish merely to catch the freshness and lighter music of its native mood, we go to its minor lyrists, to Greene, Peele, Breton, and Lodge, and the other contributors to England's Helicon and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody.

Lyric Themes.

The themes of this song are the eternal themes of lyric poetry. Praise of the gods—whatever gods may be,―patriotism, war, revelry, and rejoicing, and above all, love: these are the set descants of the lyric poet in every age. The subject in a lyric poem, of course, is of less account than in any other kind of poetry. The feeling, the music, the mood, is everything. Simple and perpetually recurrent is the range of themes in any collection of Elizabethan lyrics: pastorals and pastoral piping, presenting spring, May-time and maying, shepherds' feasts, shepherds' loves, and the joys of country-life; ditties of careless delight, and blithe praises of contentment and ease; flowers and birds, fairy life, songs of pagan gods and myths,

Where flowers and founts, and nymphs and demi-gods, And all the Graces find their old abodes,

siren-songs and kisses, and the easy admonition to seize the passing hour; until lastly all these themes in their turn give place to others of deeper and more sombre meaning. But in the earlier Elizabethan poetry at least we discover proof that the English sense of pure beauty has found expression in lyric poetry more perfectly than in any other art.

Lyric Love.

Love is the first subject of the Elizabethan lyrics. In the sonnets it is refined and elaborate and romantic, as with Spenser and Sidney, or deep and passionate and perplexed as with Shakespeare. The song-lyric, as developed in accord with the musical art of the time, is too light an instrument to utter the deeper notes of passion, and its theme is fanciful love, love that laughs and entreats and sings from very blitheness of soul. It is pagan love and Renaissance love, and the love of English man and maiden, that sounds through these lyrics; nothing deeply sentimental or mediæval. After love there are many themes, treated in many moods; but in the Elizabethan period, with a few significant exceptions, love is the expected theme, the point de repère of all lyrical verse. Its apotheosis is reached in Spenser's Hymn in Honour of Love.

The chief lyric writers who mark the transition to the new poetic period, the period of James and

Charles I., as we have already noticed, The Jacobean

Lyric.

are Donne, Jonson, Campion, Sir John and Carolan Davies, and in less measure, Shakespeare, Daniel, Chapman, and perhaps also Drummond, Browne, and Drayton. Those who are typical of the period are the younger Fletchers, the Beaumonts, Ford, Shirley, Randolph, Suckling, Lovelace, Herrick, Habington, Carew, Crashaw, Quarles, Vaughan, the two Herberts, and Wither. Pointing to the impending classical manner in poetry, and generally non-lyrical in genius, are Waller, Denham, Davenant, and Cowley.

The change from the earlier to the later period

The Change in
Poetic Mood.

is rapid and unmistakable, but is partly hidden by the divergent and sometimes slightly anachronic aims and tendencies of different writers and schools. It is, indeed, as much a change in national temper and mood as it is in poetic form. The characteristic spirit of the early times is one of freshness, elation, and the great joy of curiosity and of satisfied discovery. A new view of the world always promises so much at first! And as the eagerness and facility of youth mark the opening of this poetic period, so something of the soberness and deepening cast of thought of maturity are characteristic of the last years of Elizabeth and of the times of James and Charles. Life becomes no longer an Arcadian pastoral or a fairy pageant. It grows many-sided, vast and weighty. It has problems after all which mere audacity and elateness are incapable of solving. Experience brings thought, and thought, reflective thought, too often brings sorrow. The carnival of the Renaissance, the joyous bravado of the new awakening in England was soon over. The Puritan undercurrent in the national character begins again to make itself felt. Life drunk to the lees casts us back into remorse and revulsion of feeling. The lyric poetry of the new period reflects the entire process, just as the drama does,-just as the drama of Shakespeare alone does when studied in its chronological development.1 The several copies of verses ascribed to Bacon, to Essex, and to Raleigh, express the new Weltschmerz, just as Hamlet

1 As in Prof. Dowden's Shakspere's Mind and Art; or in Prof. Barrett Wendell's William Shakspere (New York, 1894).

expresses it. The generation yearns for rest. The time-spirit speaks, for example, through Donne. After a hot and extravagant youth, he turns ardent devotee and sings a palinode to poetry and the other kickshaws of youth in a Farewell to the World, in which he voices the growing discontent of the times with the overstrained hurly-burly of life, and its yearning for rest in some idyllic retreat. It is the inevitable reaction of mood which always attends Romanticism. The same yearning reappears two centuries later in Rousseau and Byron, in Shelley and Wordsworth. Milton, from the calm perspective of his retired youth, voices the eternal antithesis of the two ideals of life in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso.

Expressive of this change in life, the lyrical poetry of the seventeenth century from the very beginning rapidly becomes more subjec- The Change in tive, more reflective, and more weighted

with conscious meaning. The old manner of lyrical writing is still attempted; there is still pastoral and song; but even pastoral and song are affected by the new something in the moral atmosphere; they become more literary and less spontaneous, less amateurish and more deliberate; there is a growth of manner and of self-consciousness, until in the end art begins to supersede nature and native inspiration, and by the time of Charles the golden cadence of Breton and Lyly and Peele is heard no more. Pastoral and song expand with the expanding content of life and thought less than other

1 Claimed by Dr. Grosart for Donne; but variously ascribed also to Wotton, to Raleigh, and to others.

literary kinds, in proportion to their less immediate attachment to the actual forms of life; so that inevitably they give place more and more to the weightier lyric forms, to ode and elegy, and reflective monody, which become characteristic poetic types of the new age, just as pastoral and song are the representative forms of the earlier period; while the sonnet is the connecting link of the two, and in its fuller development in Shakespeare perhaps antedates the spirit of the later changes by several years. The lyric throughout exhibits a deeper moral substance. It is becoming modernized.

New Foreign
Influences.

The influence of Petrarch and the early Italian lyric, so prominent in all Elizabethan poets of the first period, and the influence of Italian Platonism, so marked in the cases of Sidney and Spenser, make way first for the influence of the later Petrarchists of Italy, France, and Spain, such as Chiabrera, Marino, and Gongora, which is felt in the poets of the so-called Fantastic School in England, in Crashaw, Cowley, Quarles, and all the followers of Donne, and even, in a less degree, in poets like Drummond; later, or even beginning with Jonson, the normalizing and literate influence of Latin poetry grows stronger and stronger with poets who smack of the new classicism, until it allies itself in the end with the various French influences which are so noticeable in much of the literature of the last half of the seventeenth century.

The themes of lyric poetry do not greatly change.

1 The date of Shakespeare's sonnets is uncertain; and may be anywhere from 1592 to 1608.