ness, humor and pathos, the happy secrets of love and the pensive suggestions of melancholy-all thoughts, all feelings, all emotions-whatever is written in the redleaved tablets of the heart, or the book and volume of the brain. Shakespeare was superior to all the poets of his time in lyrical writing, as he was superior to them in dramatic writing, but not so much so in the former as the latter, for Lodge, and Breton, and Jonson approached him in the lyric in his own generation, and in the next generation Beaumont and Fletcher were abreast with him, albeit upon a somewhat lower plane. There is a dramatic quality in the lyrics of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher which is not to be found in those of their brother dramatists, though there are indications of it in Ford and Webster, and a marked example of it in Shirley. The seventeenth century lyric was elegant and poetic in the hands of Carew, courtly and witty in the hands of Suckling, naif and joyous in the hands of Herrick, and nobly impassioned in the hands of Lovelace. Darling of the lighthearted Cavaliers, it flaunted before the eyes of Oliver and his Roundheads, and when they assembled in their conventicles to snuffle psalms through the nose it drank confusion to them amid the clinking of tavernglasses. "God send this Crum well down!" It survived the Commonwealth, which destroyed so much; it even survived the Restoration, which destroyed so much more—the Restoration which turned the grandest drama in the world into opera, the blank verse of Shakespeare into the rhyming couplets of Dryden, and the nobles of England into the boon companions of a dissolute king. All this the lyric survived; for though its jubilant tones were hushed, it was still a voice in English Verse—a clear, sweet voice in Sedley, a low, plaintive voice in Rochester, a womanly voice in Aphra Behn. An immortal Voice, for when, slumbering and murmuring in its dreams, it awoke at last in the next century, it was with a start and a cry-a sweet, wild cry, a deep, loud shout-the long triumphant song of the Master Singer-Burns. Such, in brief, is the history of English Verse from its first great story-teller to its first great song-writerfrom Chaucer to Burns. R. H. STODDARD. THE CENTURY, NEW YORK, August 20th, 1883. |