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to. It is in the unfolding of action and incident, that the feelings can be most surely stimulated. The Lyric is adapted to a special want of the mind; namely, to give vent to, and to moderate, feelings once aroused. Incidentally it cultivates the feelings, but principally it gives them utterance.

(b) The Love Song. Used in the various forms of tender feeling. First is the love of the sexes. To this, in all its sit uations, the song adapts itself. In ancient times, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, gave choice examples. Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine eyes" is probably unsurpassed. Shakespeare has numerous snatches. Suckling's songs are exquisite. Burns, Moore, Campbell, Béranger, are a few of the host of composers of love songs.

The other affections of kindred have had their share of celebration. Burns has sung of friendship. Expression has been given to home, country, and patriotic sentiment (Hail Columbia. Rule Britannia, &c).

(c) The Drinking Song. Sociality, genial feeling, and the praises of wine, have been the subject of Lyrics in both ancient and modern times. Burns and Moore have contributed a number of these. The German Burschen Songs may also be quoted. (d) The Political Song; as the Jacobite songs, and all outbursts of party feeling.

(e) The purely Sentimental Song: for example, Tennyson's "Break, break, break-."

The Comic Song is generally a ludicrous narrative. Many so-called songs are in fact Ballads.

(2.) The Ode. This is the loftiest effusion of intense feeling. It is not intended to be sung. The elaborate versification that constitutes its peculiarity, is intended partly to make up for this disadvantage, partly to accommodate the transitions natural to intense feeling. We may give as examples, Milton's Hymn on the Nativity; Collins' Ode to Liberty; Gray's Bard; Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, and Ode to Liberty; Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality; Coleridge's Ode to the Departing Year. The "Ode to the Passions" is an Ode only in form; it is not so much the display, as the description, of feeling.

THE ELEGY.- -THE SONNET.

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(3.) The Elegy, with which we may connect, in sentiment at least, the Dirge. In the original form, in Greece, this was the expression of plaintive, melancholy sentiment, for which was devised that modification of the heroic metre known as the Elegiac. It is now connected chiefly with the expression of regret for the departed, removal by death being the pre-eminently mournful incident of humanity. Milton's Lycidas is a typical instance. Gray's Elegy is a diffused expression of feeling on mortality in general, and also a sustained poetical exercise. The Adonais and In Memoriam interweave ethical and theoretical views with the images of the main sentiment.

(4.) The Sonnet. This is sometimes descriptive, but most commonly a concentrated expression of a single phase of feeling; the reference may, or may not, be to something external. Shakespeare's Sonnets are in a connected thread, being, as is supposed, the successive effusions of his own feelings growing out of a sentimental relationship. Wordsworth's Sonnets are perhaps his most peculiarly Lyrical compositions.

(5.) The simple or nondescript Lyric comprehends a variety of effusions, wanting in any of the specific aims above mentioned. Many of them are mere utterances, designed to support poetic ornament. Reference may be made to Burns (The Mountain Daisy), Tennyson (St. Agnes' Eve), Wordsworth (To the Cuckoo; "O blithe new comer"). Some have an ethical purpose, as Goethe's ode (translated by Carlyle) :

"The mason's ways are

A type of existence,
And his persistence
Is as the days are

Of men in this world," &c.

EPIC POETRY.

133. The Epic, in contrast to the Lyric, is a narrative of outward events contrived for poetic interest, by plot or story, scenery, characters, language, &c. The author appears in his own person; lays the scenes, introduces the actors, and narrates the events.

Of all the forms of Poetry, the Epic has the widest compass; not only is verse unessential, but there are varieties of story, genuinely poetical in their interest, and yet expressly suited for prose. Such is the Novel.

The Epic is also the longest of all poetical compositions. Its many alternations and windings allow it to be protracted without exhausting the interest.

134. The leading forms of Epic Poetry are these :(1.) The Great Epic.

This is the Epic, in which supernatural agency is permitted, with a view of controlling the events according to the highest moral government of the world. It is mixed up therefore with Religion, or else with the great personified abstractions called Destiny, Fate, Justice, Right, the Evil Principle, which are supposed to take events out of mere human hands.

The division into Sacred and Heroic is scarcely tenable; the Greek Heroic Epic was thoroughly religious. The only important difference in this respect is between the Pagan and the Christian, and between these and the kinds that eliminate more and more the supernatural control.

The conditions imposed upon the Epic in respect of subject, place, and time, are resolvable into the necessities of the story or plot, which must be intelligibly started, and conducted to a definite termination. The plot being for the most part, although not necessarily or universally, the element of highest interest, it must govern everything else; or, at all events, be in harmony with the scenes, the characters, the sentiments, and the diction. Thus, the Trojan War was a subject for History; the wrath of Achilles was selected and treated as an Epic.

The high Epic demands a metre, of a less marked kind than the Lyric, although more marked than the Drama. Such was the Greek hexameter, and such are our English Epic metres, as,

for example, the blank verse of Milton.

The usual examples of the Great Epic are:—

The Iliad and Odyssey.

The Encid.

THE ROMANCE. THE TALE.

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The Niebelungen Lied.

The Divina Comedia.

The Lusiad.

Jerusalem Delivered.

Paradise Lost.

The Pharsalia of Lucan is held up by critics as a warning beacon against the tendency of the Great Epic to degenerate into bombast, mere oratorical display, and prosaic feebleness. Pollok's Course of Time is an Epic of the high class.

The real or serious Epic has a counterpart or parody in the Mock Epic, as "The battle of the Frogs and Mice," "The Rape of the Lock," &c.

(2.) The Romance, or Narrative of Adventure, under a more purely human control. Supernatural personages are still occasionally admitted, but with a lower function. The element of love, repressed in the Great Epic, is now allowed greater scope. The metre is of a lighter cast.

As examples, we have the poetry of the Troubadours; with which we may compare, as modern instances, Scott's Marmion and Lady of the Lake. The Faerie Queen, in its narrative handling, abstracted from the didactic purpose, is a Romance, retaining the modified supernatural machinery of the Middle Ages. To the same class belong Hudibras and Don Juan; their peculiarity consisting in the addition of satire.

(3.) The Tale, with complete story and dénouément, love being predominant. Many of Chaucer's Tales (the Knight's, &c.) might be cited. Also the Rape of Lucrece; Byron's Corsair, Giaour, &c.; Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone; Keats' Lamia and Eve of St. Agnes; the Tales of Crabbe, distinguished by his realistic manner; Enoch Arden; Longfellow's Wayside Inn. In the light and humorous vein, we have examples likewise in Chaucer. The presence of intense humor dispenses with the love-interest, as in Tam o' Shanter; a remark of still wider application.

(4.) The Ballad, generally made short and simple, by rapidity in the succession of incidents, and by leaving many things merely suggested; hence less discursive than the Tale. The

examples are Chevy Chase; the Heir of Linne; Wordsworth's Ruth; Hood's Eugene Aram; Lord Ullin's Daughter; Macaulay's Lay of Horatius; Burial of Sir John Moore; Loss of the Royal George; Bayard Taylor's Paso del Mar; Schiller's Diver; Goethe's Bride of Corinth. In a lighter vein, we have the otherwise-designated Comic Song; Thackeray's Ballads; Hood's comic pieces; Horace and James Smith's parodies; the Mock Heroic-Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogen. In American literature, the comic poems of Saxe and Oliver Wendell Holmes are worthy of mention in this department.

(5.) The Historical Poem, or Metrical History, might be called a Narrative Poem, with a didactic purpose: Barbour's Bruce; Blind Harry's Wallace. The Annus Mirabilis of Dryden contains much that is properly Lyrical.

(6.) The Mixed Epic: having a slight epic character, with a mixture of sentiment, satire, moralizing, and other reflections. Childe Harold is destitute of plot, and consists of a string of descriptions, reflections, and lyrical outbursts of the author's personality. Shelley's Revolt of Islam contains an unbroken narrative, of the nature of the Romance, but with a superabundance of Lyrical effusion.

(7.) The Pastoral, Idyll, &c. These have just sufficient traces of narrative to bring them under the Epic division; but they are distinguished by the prominence of poetic description, and this, either of external nature or of manners. In some, the narrative is still supreme. In the Endymion of Keats, a mythical story connects a series of descriptions of nature. We may add Beattie's Minstrel, the Cotter's Saturday Night, the Gardener's Daughter, the Idylls of the King. In others, there is still continuous narrative, but only to furnish subjects for the description; as, the Excursion and the Princess. We might perhaps place the Minstrel here. A third class contain narrative only by way of episode to the description, and that often in a small and vanishing quantity. Such are L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. In Thomson's Seasons, the course of the year is the only succession of events. Cowper's Task is composite in its nature; description alternates with didactic and satirical strokes.

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