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said in a few words: "Lyric poetry must come from the heart, or it will not fit the lyre."

Further, there is a" song to be sung " which is common to all literatures, but still is not a lyric: it is the simple story, told in verse, to which the name Ballad has been given; a name which comes from the Latin word for dancing. The Epic generally speaking, the Lyric and the Ballad always are forms of poetry. Besides these, since one of poetry's functions is to give expression to every kind of human thought and feeling, sorrow, woe, despair even, must be included; and these find their proper place in the Elegy, or Lament, and in the case of a Burial Song, the Dirge. Possibly, the most magnificent of all poetic forms is the Ode, though, as Mr. Edmund Gosse pointed out many years ago, the original meaning of the Greek word was simply "chant." . But in course of ages the name, though often inaccurately applied to verse which strays a long way from the Odeform, has become attached to a triumphant, emotional, and splendid outburst of song, arranged in a series of triple verses, known as the strophe, antistrophe, and epode, of which the metre of the first two should be precisely similar. But even now any poem on a noble subject, which is carried along to a definite end, or goal, in language at once musical, laudatory, and full of high, dignified feeling would probably be allowed the title of Ode, without any serious protest.

Some people, however, cannot, if they wish, write poetry. Moreover, many subjects can be handled much better in prose; so, as a race becomes more civilised and more literary, many forms of prose are perfected. All races at the beginning of their lives seem to compose verse most naturally, which suggests that poetry is the natural way in which "youth" can express itself; and therefore children, like young races, should by rights like, and not hate, it.

The forms of prose, on the whole, are not so easy to distinguish from each other as those of poetry. A general if clumsy name for a long discussion in prose of some subject, or for a long explanatory statement about it, is Treatise. Again, there are matters to be written about, which though of great interest and importance are not bulky enough to fill a treatise. Such a concise, definitely planned, short setting forth in prose of a fact or related set of facts or opinions is called an Essay. The meaning of this word is trial or weighing, which really suggests the business of an Essay, which is to consider and judge some matter, to set out facts, reasons, and arguments and to draw a conclusion from them. The Essay thus has a clear purpose, and a more or less definite form: the name is not to be given to any short piece of prose, however rambling, and tumbling to pieces it may be.

It is not possible to describe the various forms which literature takes in their precise historical order, because different nations develop differently. But when some fair degree of skill has been reached, "action" is added to that which so far has been written down to be read, and so drama begins. The usual division into Tragedy, the play which moves on through sorrow, pain, calamity and fear to a disastrous ending, and Comedy, which deals with the more cheerful, lighter side of everyday human life, and invariably "ends happily "-this usual division does not cover everything which can be presented on the stage of a theatre, just because human life is not neatly and sharply divided like that into terrible and pleasant parts. So perhaps the English word "play" best suggests that form of literature wherein men and women are represented on the stage as acting, thinking, feeling creatures, but are taken at some moment of their lives when the story of all that works itself out, and so the reason of it, and its result, can be made plain, intelligible and enthralling to an audience in a comparatively short time. Of course, plays can be written in verse or prose; Shakespeare, as we all know, uses both forms in the compass of one play.

The rigidest form of poetry, the one most closely bound by rules, is the Sonnet. It can deal with almost any subject, but the form of it is, with a few variations, fixed. It must never contain less or more than fourteen lines. These lines are divided into two parts, the first eight being called the octave, the last six the sestet. In the strictest form the position of the rimes is fixed, but by English sonneteers this order is often neglected.

A Satire may be written in verse or prose. Its aim is to bring ridicule upon wrong-doing, or foolishness, or upon any form of moral failure. Sometimes it is intensely personal, and ridicules a stupid or vicious individual, or at any rate one who is taken to be so. However unpleasant or even cruel it may chance to be, the satirist assumes, and expects others to assume, that his purpose is to discourage at least, and, at best, to reform or destroy the person's capacity for wrong-doing, and not actually to destroy the person.

The Idyll, one of the most purely charming of literary forms, occasionally prose, but more often poetry, is a description of some beautiful or peculiarly interesting incident or scene. It is neither a narrative nor a lyric, but has some of the qualities of both.

Finally, there are people who have a story to tell, and who yet have not the playwright's gifts or specialised skill. Further, there are circumstances which are too complicated, and which develop too slowly to be squeezed into a play which could be acted on a stage in any reasonable length of time. So there has arisen in all literatures the form of prose story-telling. In early stages it probably takes the form of Romance, something between an Epic and the Novel which, as literary skill grows, is developed. All of these are stories drawn, more or less directly, from human life, in the present or the past, from the interplay of character, the unrolling of events, the causes and effects of human action and conduct. The novel is expected to have, as its main interest, human love; in recent years, in England, some writers have widened their subject matter, trying to include human life in all its ways and deeds, which is perhaps a return, more or less conscious, to the older Romance form. To cover all possibilities we must remember that many poems have been written from time to time which cannot, strictly speaking, be called by any of these names-epic, lyric, etc. The only name which can be applied to these is "miscellaneous," which does not carry us very far.

No one must suppose that these various forms grow up in a nation's literature in a fixed order. Some writers prefer one, their talents or genius being fitted for that, some another. There is no reason, so far as we know, why time, or a stage of development, should have any power to decide in what order men use them. On the whole, however, the history of the literatures of different nations would suggest that the epic, the ballad, and the lyric are, naturally, we may say, early forms in which men, at the beginning of a nation's life, express themselves. There seems to be in normal human beings an indigenous liking for both song and story. As men slowly grew what we call more civilised, more educated, the equally natural taste for change, for variety, shows itself, and then the more difficult and complicated forms of expression like the sonnet and the drama arise. The Satire is almost entirely a growth of a highly developed civilisation, springing as it does from emotions of dislike, disapproval, anger. Among primitive people, the normal outlet for such feelings, when men are unwilling or unable to contain themselves, is hard blows; while in the more polished, politer, if not so sincere and straightforward stages of a nation's life, barbed and stinging words give some people such relief. The Satire compared with the epic or the ballad is rather like the contrast between the poison gas of modern warfare when contrasted with the hand-to-hand scuffles of earlier days. A comparison is seldom exact or complete, but this one may suggest the nature and use of satire in literature, especially that of the bitterest satires.

How far a bare " history of literature" can be useful to anyone is a point on which people disagree. No one, however, can deny that if it is a good thing to read good literature, it is also well to know something, at any rate, of the way and order in which it has come to us; something about the times and circumstances in which it was written, simply because literature is a picture more or less true, more or less inspiring, of actual life. That life is no simple affair, for first human nature, in its deeper feelings, its loves, hatreds, tempers, self-sacrifices, self-seekings and so forth, changes slowly as the centuries go by. We can see this if we will read the ancient literatures, the Old Testament of the Hebrews, Chinese Poetry of the eighth and following centuries before Christ, the Ramayana of India, the Greek Iliad and Odyssey. Everything loses something in a translation, but these great stories, even in an English dress, show us how like men and women of the old days were to us of to-day in all the big and deep qualities of human nature. And, secondly, in the more superficial thoughts and feelings, and specially in outward circumstances, changes are very easy to see as the story of mankind goes on. From generation to generation men's surroundings differ, and with them their lighter feelings, their everyday thoughts and opinions and tastes do alter; and all these changes show in their national literatures. The same piece of land is not always inhabited by the same race precisely. At one time this land which we now call England, as also a large part of Western Europe, seems, so far as scholars can make out, to have been populated by Iberians, who in time became so mixed with other and seemingly stronger races, that only the Basques of the Pyrenees now remain in Europe to represent the purest Iberian blood.

In England, the Iberians were overcome by a race of Celts, whose original home was in Asia. These Celts, Goidels as they were called, killed many of the Iberians, though they married some, and kept others in slavery. After a while, another swarm of Celts, Brythons, arrived, and apparently drove out the Goidels, at first to Ireland, whence, later, some made settlements in Wales, Scot

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