WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 381 



directness of utterance. Like Shelley's skylark, the poet has 

 been 



Pouring his full heart 

 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 



Each composition is meant to be sung, and can be sung, 

 because the poet's soul was singing when he made it. They 

 are not all of one kind or of equal simplicity. The lyrics 

 from the song-books, for example, have not the intensity of 

 some songs introduced into the dramas of that period, 'in 

 which,' as Mr. Pater once observed while speaking of the 

 verses sung by Mariana's page in Measure for Measure, l the 

 kindling power and poetry of the whole play seems to pass 

 for a moment into an actual strain of music.' They are rarely 

 so high-strung and weighty with meaning as Webster's dirges 

 or as Ford's and Shirley's solemn descants on the transitori- 

 ness of earthly love and glory. Nor, again, do we often 

 welcome in them that fulness of romantic colour which makes 

 the lyrics of Beaumont and Fletcher so resplendent. This is 

 perhaps because their melodies are not the outgrowth of 

 dramatic situations, but have their life and being in the aerial 

 element of musical sound. For the purposes of singing they 

 are exactly adequate, being substantial enough to sustain and 

 animate the notes and yet so slight as not to overburden 

 these with too much meditation and emotion. We feel that 

 they have arisen from the natural marrying of musical words 

 to musical phrases in the minds which made them. They 

 are the right verbal counterpart to vocal and instrumental 

 melody, never perplexing and surcharging the tones which 

 need language for a vehicle with complexities of fancy, invo- 

 lutions of ideas, or the disturbing tyranny of vehement 

 passions. And this right quality of song, the presence of 

 which indicates widespread familiarity with musical require- 

 ments in England of the sixteenth century, may be likewise 

 found in the more deliberate lyrics of dramatic or literary 

 poets in Jonson's and Shakespeare's stanzas, in the lofty 

 odes of Spenser and the jewelled workmanship of Herrick. 

 We discover but little of this quality in the lyrics of the 



