border line into the province of art for art's sake. To combine these elements in right proportions is a mark of genius, and not the least so in the lyric, where thought and feeling must alike enter and yet feeling be the controlling factor. To make it such, and yet to save the poem from being unduly passionate, is no easy matter. Within the sphere of the religious lyric the violation of this principle is far too often apparent-as seen in modern hymnology, where good sense and poetic taste are so often sacrificed to vapid sentiment. Sacred lyrics, above all, should be characterized by mental equipoise and literary taste, and not so often be composed by those who have a type of religious experience devoid of intelligence and sanity. Within the province of the secular lyric such transgression is often seen. In no species of lyric is this union of the mental and emotional in right adjustment better seen than in that known as the reflective lyric. In George The very title indicates this union. Eliot's "O, may I join the choir invisible!" we note a striking example of this species. It is also seen in Wordsworth's great "Ode on Intimations of Immortality in Childhood" and in much of his naturalistic verse. Thus he writes:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky;

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die.

The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

There is also in the lyric a pertinent example of the union of the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real. While as lyric it has largely to do with subjective states, there is danger lest feeling become morbid, and hence it must have an outlet. Whether it take the form of friendship or patriotism or religion, the object on which the emotion terminates is as essential as the emotion itself, and, indeed, the only occasion of its exercise. Just as soliloquy cannot be the highest form of oral address, as having no audience, so any species of emotion that finds its reason in itself is abnormal and ineffective. Hence one of the tests of lyric verse is found at this point, whether or not the lyrist has an object outside of himself and worthy to elicit the deepest impulses of the soul. In the one case we

have the wholesome verse of a Milton and Wordsworth; in the other, the unwholesome verse of a Byron, Clough, and Whitman. It is fortunate for the honor and influence of English poetry that, taken as a whole, it illustrates the union of the inner and the outer-the uniform presence of an end with the effort of the poet to realize it.

Still further, the lyric is noteworthy for the fact that its historical development from age to age has been in keeping with the general development of English verse. The law of development operates

in literature as in nature. There is a literary evolution going on from age to age, appearing at times on the surface of the literature, and at times deeply concealed, and visible only after the closest inspection. Such a development is found to be regular, and ever working toward a definite end, despite occasional variations in the line of the grotesque and abnormal. Hence, in the earlier stages of our national literature, we find what we expect to findthe simple, rather than the more elaborate, forms of the lyric; hymns and songs and idyls and the shorter odes, and not the extended efforts more in keeping with a later age. Such are the lyrics of early English days; such the songs of Wyatt and Surrey at the opening of the Elizabethan era, and the semi-dramatic lyrics of the Elizabethan age itself.

To look for such a lyric as "In Memoriam" in the age of Spenser would be out of keeping with the historic conditions of the time. Though it is, in a sense, true that no form of verse is less dependent on antecedent and contemporary conditions than the lyric, because of its eminent simplicity and naturalness, still it is seen to hold itself substantially amenable to the great principle of historic sequence, and to come to its fullest and best expression when rightfully expected so to do. Thus, by way of confirmation, the lyric is always found in a good degree of excellence at the time of any general poetic awakening. This would seem to

show that it is of the very essence of genuine verse and in vital relation to every other poetic form.

At the very opening of English poetry as national, in the days of Chaucer, this lyric quality was clearly seen in the great descriptive development of the time. In the days of Henry the Eighth it was the dominant type. Even in the Elizabethan age, of special epic and dramatic excellence, this idyllic type was so prominent as to modify every other form the lyrical portions of the "Faerie Queene" and the Shakespearean plays being so pronounced as to give them a character of their own and incite to their separate study. Later in the history the epic era of Milton was characterized by a decidedly lyr ical movement, as seen in Milton himself. Even the age of Queen Anne-an age of prose and didactic verse-was not without some sign of lyric interest and impulse.

When we come to 1727, the opening year of the reign of George the Second, and of the great romantic movement in English poetry, we note that verse is the dominant literary form, and that the golden age of the lyric has dawned; while on through the Victorian era lyric verse has held its way, and is even now, at the close of the century, the most pronounced poetic form, as seen in Swinburne and Tennyson, Watson and Austin. There is a sense, therefore, in which it may with truth be said that

the lyric is the most representative form of British poetry.

There is a distinct lyric drift in modern English. Mr. Stedman, in his Victorian Poets, speaks of "the fine and sensitive lyrical feeling of America," and adds "that we are not to think that British poetry is to decline with the loss of Tennyson," but that it is to be followed "by a new cycle of lyrical and dramatic achievement." If either element in this prophecy fails, it bids fair to be the dramatic. Lyric poetry, as the poetry of the heart, makes its permanence a kind of moral necessity. Epic verse is to a degree conventional, and must be rare as a literary form. Even dramatic verse, related closely to character as it is, has well-understood conditions, and we have been waiting more than three centuries for a dramatist that may even remind us of Shakespeare. The lyric, however, the fixed form of the sonnet excepted, is absolutely without artistic limitations, as free as the unrestrained utterances of Nature herself in her varied moods. Hence it may exist, as in American verse, in masterly form when other types are below the average of excellence, or, as in British letters, it may divide the honors with other forms.

Lyric poetry is essentially realistic, and as such is demanded by the necessities of modern life. We speak of the drama as realistic in its portraiture of life, and yet the method is purely imitative. In the lyric there is no deputy or substitute for the author, but a heart-to-heart interview, an impression immediate and personal, and thus intensely