Night came and Nature had not thee,

I said "we are mates in misery."

The morrow dawned with needless glow;
Each snow bird chirped, each fowl must crow;
Each tramper started; but the feet

Of the most beautiful and sweet

Of human youth had left the hill
And garden.

After the father's lament the "deep heart" (of the universe) answers, giving such comfort as philosophy affords, which seems only to intensify our sense of the indifference of nature to human sorrow and of the useless waste and cruel wrong to humanity involved in the death of a child. Nor is the artistic form of the poem so beautiful as to be consoling simply by its beauty.

Nevertheless Emerson's Threnody, like all the poetry of sorrow, is educative in the highest sense, since it calls us away from our preoccupation with forms and appearances to serious reflection on the unknown reality.

CHAPTER VI

THE LYRIC AND SONG

THE word "lyric" has much the same indefinite range of meaning as the word "ode." Primarily a poetical composition fitted to be sung by a singlevoice, not recited or chanted, it is of necessity restricted to comparatively short compositions. In consequence it admits no detailed narrative like the ballad. It can present only the outline of a situation, and the personal impression made on the poet must give it emphasis. Its burden is largely emotional, and it should appeal to feelings common to the majority of mankind. The lyric must be musical in form since it is through musical form that emotion can be best expressed. Love is the most universal passion, and is so much the most frequent subject of lyrical expression that the word "lyric" is colored in the conception of most persons with the idea of joy and spontaneity. It is true that grief and the religious sentiment are also emotions which are naturally expressed in the terms of rhythmical harmony, but we usually call a religious lyric a hymn or a psalm, and the lyric of grief a lament or a dirge, as we call a lyric of

adventure a ballad. The lyrical element appears in passages of the Drama or Epic when personal feeling is expressed in musical words, as in Juliet's hymn to love in Romeo and Juliet, or the morning hymn of the lovers in the same play, or the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Iliad. We can speak of the hymn as a sacred lyric, the ode as a dignified and extended lyric, the ballad as a narrative lyric or popular lyric, the short elegy as the lyric of grief, and yet retain the word "lyric” unsupported by any adjective to mean a short poem full of joyous personal emotion expressed in musical form and usually adapted to the singing voice. In many cases the sonnet is lyrical in tone; Shakespeare's love sonnets are notably so, but a sonnet is a sonnet though frequently belonging to the general class of lyrical poetry and sometimes to that of reflective poetry.

The true lyric or song, in the modern sense, is the brief expression of subjective emotion: pathos, love, exultation, patriotism, or any feeling uppermost in the mind of the singer. It should have some energy and variety of movement though not necessarily of form, for the emotion proper to the lyric is not stationary-it has life and flow. The lyric arouses the emotional faculties, whether it be read or sung, by bringing us in contact with the feeling of the poet, and thereby conduces to psychical health, quite as important a matter as physical health. It may appeal to the underlying racial

sympathies of the individual or only to those shared by the more reflective and imaginative, for its range of emotional expression is very wide, but it should always appeal to natural and healthy sentiment, though it may be admitted that a few lyrics of remarkable artistic quality deal with morbid and perverted themes. The lyric must be brief, for it arouses feeling by the presentation in poetic form of a simple idea without argument or narrative. It leaves to more ambitious forms the assembling of multifarious details into a unity. It is songlike in structure even when not specifically adapted to the singing voice. The lyric calls the soul from its solitude to that communion which is psychical life, but each soul responds with its own individual voice though each feels the delight of sympathy.

The lyric, therefore, is marked organically, by musical movement; rhetorically, by the personal figures, apostrophe and interrogation; grammatically, by the use of the personal pronouns; and metrically, by end-stopt lines and by the refrain. It begins, "Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled," or "Rock of Ages, cleft for me," or "Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing," or "Never melt away, thou wreath of snow, that art so kind in graving me"; its burden is, "I feel," not "I think." It has some of the qualities of the human voice; it penetrates, arouses, or charms. The lyrical quality is of the very essence of poetry, since it

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transfers emotion from the singer to the hearer.

The lyric is vivified by the personal note, "the keen lyrical cry," as Matthew Arnold called it. It must be written under excitement; frigidity is fatal to it. Except in those rare cases where men of great poetic powers have written songs which were the inspiration of a moment, though the result of years of thought and experience of life, it must be labored over, for no birth is without pain. It must be written under excitement, but must have the air of spontaneity. If to a sympathetic nature some power of musical expression in words is given, then we have the lyrical poet. That part of the world is his audience which sympathizes with his feelings. If, as in the case of Robert Burns, he appeals to the broad, genial emotions which are shared by all humanity, and his power of musical expression is of a high order, then the whole world is his audience. If, like Herrick, his feelings are bounded by a narrow horizon, his lovers will be fewer- perhaps only men of a certain amount of cultivation or knowledge of art will find pleasure in reading his verse.

In a broad sense all lyrics are songs;, in a specialized sense, only those lyrics which are set to music are songs. For a popular song the tune must be not difficult to catch, and not complicated, and accordant with the sentiment which, too, must not be subtle nor complicated. The time-beat must be emphatically marked, and the range within the