Gray-lipped waves about thee shouted, crying, Lanier's Psalm of the West, written in the same year as the Centennial Cantata, is a poetical review of our history in ode form and movement, but long enough to be divided into three odes on different historical epochs. His Ode to Johns Hopkins University is one of the many excellent "poems for occasions" buried here and there in our literature, the interest of which was heightened by the occasion but by no means entirely dependent on it. The odes by William Vaughn Moody and Owen Wister, published in the Atlantic Monthly, go to show that vigorous poetic expression is not a lost art in America, and that the ode form is well adapted to the multifarious thought and broad social emotions of our age. CHAPTER V DIRGES AND MEMORIAL VERSE THE emotion of grief seeks relief in rhythmical and metrical language as naturally as does the emotion of love or exultation. Dirges, laments, and funeral hymns are connected with the earliest religious observances. The "keen " or wailing cry of Celtic women over the dead is a survival of the tribal lament, and is the only primitive poetical expression that can ever be heard in our country. Feelings of which we are unconscious though we have inherited them from very distant ancestors respond vaguely to this ancient lyrical wail. The funeral hymn, too, meets a very general response from emotions common to all civilized people, but much nearer the surface. It is unnecessary, however, to refer to the universal nature of grief, the "legacy of love," the inevitable consequence of the conditions which make society possible and life endurable. It is sufficient to say that a class of poems in our own, and in every other language, gives expression and relief to sorrow, or commem orates eminent character and services. In some of them personal feeling is dominant, in others, when the loss is public or national, the feelings of the community are embodied. If personal feeling is entirely absent and the poet is merely the spokesman of the community, the poem is an ode, like Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. Personal feeling, however, is rarely entirely absent, for the poet feels the loss of the community as if it were his own, the situation reproduces itself in his mind as vividly as a personal experience could, he sympathizes with the nation or with humanity in an untimely loss as Shelley does in his lament for Keats. Memorial verse is essentially emotional except in some of the odes of the official poets laureate on the death of the sovereign, in which the diction and the sentiment are alike professional. The first lament in our language in point of time is Chaucer's Boke of the Duchesse. This was written in commemoration of Blanche of Castile, wife of John of Gaunt, first Duke of Lancaster. It is romantic in construction and hints only remotely at actual life. The poet, being unable to sleep, promises Morpheus a feather bed and pillows if he will relieve him, whereupon he not only falls asleep, but is visited by a dream in which a knight celebrates the beauty of his lady and laments her death. The only reference to the Lady Blanche is in the lines: And gode faire Whyte she hete,1 The romantic allegory is far removed from our methods of expression, but we can still admire the poet's conception of a fair and gracious lady, of whom the knight says: I saw hir daunce so comlily, So goodly speke and so frendly, The memorial verses so frequently prefixed to the collected works of dead authors are usually not much more than complimentary notices of the book. Ben Jonson's well-known verses to the memory of "My beloved, the Author, Master William Shakespeare and what he has left us," evince generous appreciation of the poet's preeminence and enthusiastic friendship as well. He declines to rank him with his contemporaries, "great, but disproportioned muses," and boldly claims for him a place with the greatest of all ages. It is the first recognition of the real character of 1 Hete, was called. 2 Evermore nas seen, never was seen. Shakespeare's genius. He speaks of his - Shake- character in the lines: speare's Look how the father's face Lives in his issue. Even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well-turned and true-filed lines, as if his friend's nature was as harmonious and well balanced as his verses are. We must regret that the eulogist did not go more into detail and express his feelings for the author as fully as he did his admiration of his book, but we are thankful he said as much as he did. The other verses in the folios are confined to praise of the poetry and the acting qualities of the plays. The finest were prefixed to the second folio (1632) and are signed I. M. S. They recognize the vital quality of Shakespeare's historical characters quite as distinctly as modern critics have done: A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear In that deep dusky dungeon to discern |