Victorian Songs

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Index of First Lines
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Victorian Songs

“‘Let some one sing to vs, lightlier move
The minvtes fledged with mvsic’.”

TENNYSON

— Title Page Text —

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

Some editions of the book have a two-page Editor’s Note before the Contents, acknowledging the “publishers and authors who have given permission for the use of many of the songs included in this volume”. It has been omitted from this e-text.

Where are the songs I used to know?
Christina Rossetti.

AÏDÉ, HAMILTON (1830).	page
Remember or Forget	3
Oh, Let Me Dream	6
Love, the Pilgrim	7
ALLINGHAM, WILLIAM (1824-1889).
Lovely Mary Donnelly	9
Song	13
Serenade	14
Across the Sea	16
ARNOLD, SIR EDWIN (1832).
Serenade	18
A Love Song of Henri Quatre	20
ASHE, THOMAS (1836-1889).
No and Yes	22
At Altenahr	23
Marit	24
AUSTIN, ALFRED (1835).
A Night in June	26
BEDDOES, THOMAS LOVELL (1803-1849).
Dream-Pedlary	30
Song from the Ship	33
Song	34
Song	35
Song, by Two Voices	36
Song	38
BENNETT, WILLIAM COX (1820).
Cradle Song	39
My Roses blossom the Whole Year Round	41
Cradle Song	42
BOURDILLON, F. W. (1852).
Love’s Meinie	43
The Night has a Thousand Eyes	44
A Lost Voice	45
BUCHANAN, ROBERT (1841).
Serenade	46
Song	48
COLLINS, MORTIMER (1827-1876).
To F. C.	49
A Game of Chess	50
Multum in Parvo	52
Violets at Home	53
My Thrush	54
CRAIK, DINAH MARIA MULOCK (1826-1887).
Too Late	56
A Silly Song	58
DARLEY, GEORGE (1795-1846).
May Day	60
I ’ve been Roaming	62
Sylvia’s Song	63
Serenade	64
DE TABLEY, LORD (1835).
A Winter Sketch	66
The Second Madrigal	69
DE VERE, AUBREY (1788-1846).
Song	70
Song	72
Song	74
DICKENS, CHARLES (1812-1870).
The Ivy Green	75
DOBSON, AUSTIN (1840).
The Ladies of St. James’s	77
The Milkmaid	81
DOMETT, ALFRED (1811-1887).
A Glee for Winter	84
A Kiss	86
DUFFERIN, LADY (1807-1867).
Song	88
Lament of the Irish Emigrant	90
FIELD, MICHAEL.
Winds To-day are Large and Free	94
Let us Wreathe the Mighty Cup	96
Where Winds abound	97
GALE, NORMAN (1862).
A Song	98
Song	99
GOSSE, EDMUND (1849).
Song for the Lute	101
HOOD, THOMAS (1798-1845).
Ballad	102
Song	104
I Remember, I Remember	106
Ballad	108
Song	110
HOUGHTON, LORD (RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES) (1809-1885).
The Brookside	111
The Venetian Serenade	113
From Love and Nature	115
INGELOW, JEAN (1830).
The Long White Seam	116
Love	118
Sweet is Childhood	120
KINGSLEY, CHARLES (1819-1875).
Airly Beacon	121
The Sands of Dee	122
Three Fishers went Sailing	124
A Farewell	126
LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE (1775-1864).
Rose Aylmer	127
Rubies	128
The Fault is not Mine	129
Under the Lindens	130
Sixteen	131
Ianthe	132
One Lovely Name	133
Forsaken	133
LOCKER-LAMPSON, FREDERICK (1821-1895).
A Garden Lyric	134
The Cuckoo	137
Gertrude’s Necklace	139
LOVER, SAMUEL (1797-1868).
The Angel’s Whisper	141
What will you do, Love?	143
MACKAY, CHARLES (1814-1889).
I Love my Love	145
O Ye Tears!	147
MAHONEY, FRANCIS (1805-1866).
The Bells of Shandon	149
MASSEY, GERALD (1828).
Song	153
O’SHAUGHNESSY, ARTHUR (1844-1881).
A Love Symphony	156
I made Another Garden	158
PROCTER, ADELAIDE ANNE (1825-1864).
The Lost Chord	160
Sent to Heaven	162
PROCTER, B. W. (BARRY CORNWALL) (1787-1874).
The Poet’s Song to his Wife	165
A Petition to Time	167
A Bacchanalian Song	168
She was not Fair nor Full of Grace	170
The Sea-King	172
A Serenade	174
King Death	176
Sit Down, Sad Soul	178
A Drinking Song	180
Peace! What do Tears Avail?	182
The Sea	184
ROSSETTI, CHRISTINA G. (1830-1895).
Song	186
Song	188
Song	189
Three Seasons	190
ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL (1828-1882).
A Little While	191
Sudden Light	193
Three Shadows	194
SCOTT, WILLIAM BELL (1812-1890).
Parting and Meeting Again	196
SKIPSEY, JOSEPH (1832).
A Merry Bee	198
The Songstress	199
The Violet and the Rose	200
STERRY, J. ASHBY.
Regrets	201
Daisy’s Dimples	203
A Lover’s Lullaby	204
SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES (1837).
A Match	205
Rondel	208
Song	209
TENNYSON, ALFRED (1809-1892).
The Bugle Song	210
Break, Break, Break	212
Tears, Idle Tears	213
Sweet and Low	215
Turn, Fortune, Turn thy Wheel	216
Vivien’s Song	217
THACKERAY, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE (1811-1863).
At the Church Gate	218
The Mahogany Tree	220
THORNBURY, GEORGE WALTER (1828-1876).
Dayrise and Sunset	223
The Three Troopers	225
The Cuckoo	228

Listen—Songs thou ’lt hear
Through the wide world ringing.
Barry Cornwall.

		page
A baby was sleeping	Samuel Lover	141
“A cup for hope!” she said	Christina G. Rossetti	190
A golden bee a-cometh	Joseph Skipsey	198
A little shadow makes the sunrise sad	Mortimer Collins	52
A little while a little love	Dante Gabriel Rossetti	191
A thousand voices fill my ears	F. W. Bourdillon	45
Across the grass I see her pass	Austin Dobson	81
Ah, what avails the sceptered race!	Walter Savage Landor	127
Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon	Charles Kingsley	121
All glorious as the Rainbow’s birth	Gerald Massey	153
All through the sultry hours of June	Mortimer Collins	54
Along the garden ways just now	Arthur O’Shaughnessy	156
Although I enter not	William Makepeace Thackeray	218
As Gertrude skipt from babe to girl	Frederick Locker-Lampson	139
As I came round the harbor buoy	Jean Ingelow	116
Awake!—The starry midnight Hour	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	174
Awake thee, my Lady-love!	George Darley	64
Back flies my soul to other years	Joseph Skipsey	199
Break, break, break	Alfred Tennyson	212
Came, on a Sabbath noon, my sweet	Thomas Ashe	23
Christmas is here	William Makepeace Thackeray	220
Come, rosy Day!	Sir Edwin Arnold	20
Come sing, Come sing, of the great Sea-King	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	172
Could ye come back to me, Douglas, Douglas	Dinah Maria Mulock Craik	56
Drink, and fill the night with mirth!	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	180
Every day a Pilgrim, blindfold	Hamilton Aïdé	7
Fast falls the snow, O lady mine	Mortimer Collins	49
First the fine, faint, dreamy motion	Norman Gale	98
Hence, rude Winter! crabbed old fellow	Alfred Domett	84
How many Summers, love	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	165
How many times do I love thee, dear?	Thomas Lovell Beddoes	38
I bring a garland for your head	Edmund Gosse	101
I had a Message to send her	Adelaide Anne Procter	162
I have been here before	Dante Gabriel Rossetti	193
I leaned out of window, I smelt the white clover	Jean Ingelow	118
I looked and saw your eyes	Dante Gabriel Rossetti	194
I made another garden, yea	Arthur O’Shaughnessy	158
I remember, I remember	Thomas Hood	106
I sat beside the streamlet	Hamilton Aïdé	3
I wandered by the brook-side	Lord Houghton	111
I walked in the lonesome evening	William Allingham	16
If I could choose my paradise	Thomas Ashe	22
If love were what the rose is	Algernon Charles Swinburne	205
If there were dreams to sell	Thomas Lovell Beddoes	30
I ’m sitting on the stile, Mary	Lady Dufferin	90
In Clementina’s artless mien	Walter Savage Landor	131
In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours	Alfred Tennyson	217
Into the Devil tavern	George Walter Thornbury	225
It was not in the winter	Thomas Hood	102
I ’ve been roaming! I ’ve been roaming!	George Darley	62
King Death was a rare old fellow!	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	176
Kissing her hair I sat against her feet.	Algernon Charles Swinburne	208
Lady! in this night of June	Alfred Austin	26
Last time I parted from my Dear	William Bell Scott	196
Let us wreathe the mighty cup	Michael Field	96
Little dimples so sweet and soft	J. Ashby Sterry	203
Lullaby! O lullaby!	William Cox Bennett	42
Lute! breathe thy lowest in my Lady’s ear	Sir Edwin Arnold	18
Mirror your sweet eyes in mine, love	J. Ashby Sterry	204
Mother, I can not mind my wheel	Walter Savage Landor	133
My fairest child, I have no song to give you	Charles Kingsley	126
My goblet’s golden lips are dry	Thomas Lovell Beddoes	34
My love, on a fair May morning	Thomas Ashe	24
My roses blossom the whole year round	William Cox Bennett	41
O for the look of those pure gray eyes	J. Ashby Sterry	201
O happy buds of violet!	Mortimer Collins	53
“O Heart, my heart!” she said, and heard	Dinah Maria Mulock Craik	58
O lady, leave thy silken thread	Thomas Hood	104
O lips that mine have grown into	Algernon Charles Swinburne	209
O Love is like the roses	Robert Buchanan	48
O May, thou art a merry time	George Darley	60
O roses for the flush of youth	Christina G. Rossetti	188
O spirit of the Summertime!	William Allingham	13
O ye tears! O ye tears! that have long refused to flow	Charles Mackay	147
Often I have heard it said	Walter Savage Landor	128
Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green	Charles Dickens	75
Oh, hearing sleep, and sleeping hear	William Allingham	14
Oh! let me dream of happy days gone by	Hamilton Aïdé	6
Oh, lovely Mary Donnelly, my joy, my only best!	William Allingham	9
“Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home”	Charles Kingsley	122
One lovely name adorns my song	Walter Savage Landor	133
Peace! what can tears avail?	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	182
Seated one day at the Organ	Adelaide Anne Procter	160
Seek not the tree of silkiest bark	Aubrey de Vere	72
She was not fair, nor full of grace	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	170
She ’s up and gone, the graceless Girl	Thomas Hood	108
Sing!—Who sings	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	168
Sit down, sad soul, and count	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	178
Sleep sweet, belovëd one, sleep sweet!	Robert Buchanan	46
Sleep! the bird is in its nest	William Cox Bennett	39
Softly, O midnight Hours!	Audrey de Vere	70
Strew not earth with empty stars	Thomas Lovell Beddoes	35
Sweet and low, sweet and low	Alfred Tennyson	215
Sweet is childhood—childhood ’s over	Jean Ingelow	120
Sweet mouth! O let me take	Alfred Domett	86
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean	Alfred Tennyson	213
Terrace and lawn are white with frost	Mortimer Collins	50
Thank Heaven, Ianthe, once again	Walter Savage Landor	132
The fault is not mine if I love you too much	Walter Savage Landor	129
The ladies of St. James’s	Austin Dobson	77
The night has a thousand eyes	F. W. Bourdillon	44
The Sea! the Sea! the open Sea!	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	184
The splendour falls on castle walls	Alfred Tennyson	210
The stars are with the voyager	Thomas Hood	110
The streams that wind amid the hills	George Darley	63
The Sun came through the frosty mist	Lord Houghton	115
The Violet invited my kiss	Joseph Skipsey	200
There is no summer ere the swallows come.	F. W. Bourdillon	43
Three fishers went sailing away to the West	Charles Kingsley	124
To sea, to sea! the calm is o’er	Thomas Lovell Beddoes	33
Touch us gently, Time!	B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)	167
Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud!	Alfred Tennyson	216
Two doves upon the selfsame branch	Christina G. Rossetti	189
Under the lindens lately sat	Walter Savage Landor	130
Wait but a little while	Norman Gale	99
We have loiter’d and laugh’d in the flowery croft	Frederick Locker-Lampson	134
We heard it calling, clear and low	Frederick Locker-Lampson	137
What is the meaning of the song	Charles Mackay	145
“What will you do, love, when I am going”	Samuel Lover	143
When a warm and scented steam	George Walter Thornbury	228
When along the light ripple the far serenade	Lord Houghton	113
When another’s voice thou hearest	Lady Dufferin	88
When I am dead, my dearest	Christina G. Rossetti	186
When I was young, I said to Sorrow	Aubrey de Vere	74
When Spring casts all her swallows forth	George Walter Thornbury	223
When the snow begins to feather	Lord de Tabley	66
Where winds abound	Michael Field	97
Who is the baby, that doth lie	Thomas Lovell Beddoes	36
Winds to-day are large and free	Michael Field	94
With deep affection	Francis Mahoney	149
Woo thy lass while May is here	Lord de Tabley	69

Their songs wake singing echoes in my land.
Christina Rossetti.

Sweet and low, sweet and low	Frontispiece
“Oh! let me dream of happy days gone by”	6
Across the Sea	16
“My love on a fair May morning”	24
Song in the Garden	38
The night has a thousand eyes	44
A Game of Chess	50
“I ’ve been roaming, I ’ve been roaming”	62
“A maid I know,—and March winds blow”	82
“That bright May morning long ago”	90
“I remember, I remember”	106
I wandered by the brook-side	112
“Three fishers went sailing away to the West”	124
Ianthe	132
Gertrude’s Necklace	140
“She turned back at the last to wait”	158
King Death	176
“I looked and saw your eyes”	194
Break, Break, Break	212
“When Spring casts all her swallows forth”	224

The writer of prose, by intelligence taught,
Says the thing that will please, in the way that he ought.
Frederick Locker-Lampson.

No species of poetry is more ancient than the lyrical, and yet none shows so little sign of having outlived the requirements of human passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and the freshness of girlhood expand, is seized with a pang which nothing but the spasm of verse will relieve. Each youth imagines that spring-tide and love are wonders which he is the first of human beings to appreciate, and he burns to alleviate his emotion in rhyme. Historians exaggerate, perhaps, the function of music in awakening and guiding the exercise of lyrical poetry. The lyric exists, they tell us, as an accompaniment to the lyre; and without the mechanical harmony the spoken song is an artifice. Quite as plausibly might it be avowed that music was but added to verse to concentrate and emphasize its rapture, to add poignancy and volume to its expression. But the truth is that these two arts, though sometimes happily allied, are, and always have been, independent. When verse has been innocent enough to lean on music, we may be likely to find that music also has been of the simplest order, and that the pair of them, like two delicious children, have tottered and swayed together down the flowery meadows of experience. When either poetry or music is adult, the presence of each is a distraction to the other, and each prefers, in the elaborate ages, to stand alone, since the mystery of the one confounds the complexity of the other. Most poets hate music; few musicians comprehend the nature of poetry; and the combination of these arts has probably, in all ages, been contrived, not for the satisfaction of artists, but for the convenience of their public.

This divorce between poetry and music has been more frankly accepted in the present century than ever before, and is nowadays scarcely opposed in serious criticism. If music were a necessary ornament of lyrical verse, the latter would nowadays scarcely exist; but we hear less and less of the poets devotion (save in a purely conventional sense) to the lute and the pipe. What we call the Victorian lyric is absolutely independent of any such aid. It may be that certain songs of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti have been with great popularity “set,” as it is called, “to music.” So far as the latter is in itself successful, it stultifies the former; and we admit at last that the idea of one art aiding another in this combination is absolutely fictitious. The beauty—even the beauty of sound—conveyed by the ear in such lyrics as “Break, break, break,” or “When I am dead, my dearest,” is obscured, is exchanged for another and a rival species of beauty, by the most exquisite musical setting that a composer can invent.

The age which has been the first to accept this condition, then, should be rich in frankly lyrical poetry; and this we find to be the case with the Victorian period. At no time has a greater mass of this species of verse been produced, not even in the combined Elizabethan and Jacobean age. But when we come to consider the quality of this later harvest of song, we observe in it a far less homogeneous character. We can take a piece of verse, and decide at sight that it must be Elizabethan, or of the age of the Pléiade in France, or of a particular period in Italy. Even an ode of our own eighteenth century is hardly to be confounded with a fragment from any other school. The great Georgian age introduced a wide variety into English poetry; and yet we have but to examine the selected jewels strung into so exquisite a carcanet by Mr. Palgrave in his “Golden Treasury” to notice with surprise how close a family likeness exists between the contributions of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. The distinctions of style, of course, are very great; but the general character of the diction, the imagery, even of the rhythm, is more or less identical. The stamp of the same age is upon them,—they are hall-marked 1820.

It is perhaps too early to decide that this will never be the case with the Victorian lyrics. While we live in an age we see the distinction of its parts, rather than their co-relation. It is said that the Japanese Government once sent over a Commission to report upon the art of Europe; and that, having visited the exhibitions of London, Paris, Florence, and Berlin, the Commissioners confessed that the works of the European painters all looked so exactly alike that it was difficult to distinguish one from another. The Japanese eye, trained in absolutely opposed conventions, could not tell the difference between a Watts and a Fortuny, a Théodore Rousseau and a Henry Moore. So it is quite possible, it is even probable, that future critics may see a close similarity where we see nothing but divergence between the various productions of the Victorian age. Yet we can judge but what we discern; and certainly to the critical eye to-day it is the absence of a central tendency, the chaotic cultivation of all contrivable varieties of style, which most strikingly seems to distinguish the times we live in.

We use the word “Victorian” in literature to distinguish what was written after the decline of that age of which Walter Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were the survivors. It is well to recollect, however, that Tennyson, who is the Victorian writer par excellence, had published the most individual and characteristic of his lyrics long before the Queen ascended the throne, and that Elizabeth Barrett, Henry Taylor, William Barnes, and others were by this date of mature age. It is difficult to remind ourselves, who have lived in the radiance of that august figure, that some of the most beautiful of Tennyson’s lyrics, such as “Mariana” and “The Dying Swan” are now separated from us by as long a period of years as divided them from Dr. Johnson and the author of “Night Thoughts.” The reflection is of value only as warning us of the extraordinary length of the epoch we still call “Victorian.” It covers, not a mere generation, but much more than half a century. During this length of time a complete revolution in literary taste might have been expected to take place. This has not occurred, and the cause may very well be the extreme license permitted to the poets to adopt whatever style they pleased. Where all the doors stand wide open, there is no object in escaping; where there is but one door, and that one barred, it is human nature to fret for some violent means of evasion. How divine have been the methods of the Victorian lyrists may easily be exemplified:—

“Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife
To heart of neither wife nor maid,
Lead we not here a jolly life
Betwixt the shine and shade?
“Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife
To tongue of neither wife nor maid,
Thou wagg’st, but I am worn with strife,
And feel like flowers that fade.”

That is a masterpiece, but so is this:—

“Nay, but you who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?
Holds earth aught—speak truth—above her?
Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
And this last fairest tress of all,
—So fair, see, ere I let it fall?
“Because, you spend your lives in praisings,
To praise, you search the wide world over:
Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught—speak truth—above her?
Above this tress, and this I touch,
But cannot praise, I love so much!”

And so is this:—

“Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
“This be the verse yon grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

But who would believe that the writers of these were contemporaries?

If we examine more closely the forms which lyric poetry has taken since 1830, we shall find that certain influences at work in the minds of our leading writers have led to the widest divergence in the character of lyrical verse. It will be well, perhaps, to consider in turn the leading classes of that work. It was not to be expected that in an age of such complexity and self-consciousness as ours, the pure song, the simple trill of bird-like melody, should often or prominently be heard. As civilization spreads, it ceases to be possible, or at least it becomes less and less usual, that simple emotion should express itself with absolute naïveté. Perhaps Burns was the latest poet in these islands whose passion warbled forth in perfectly artless strains; and he had the advantage of using a dialect still unsubdued and unvulgarized. Artlessness nowadays must be the result of the most exquisitely finished art; if not, it is apt to be insipid, if not positively squalid and fusty. The obvious uses of simple words have been exhausted; we cannot, save by infinite pains and the exercise of a happy genius, recover the old spontaneous air, the effect of an inevitable arrangement of the only possible words.

This beautiful direct simplicity, however, was not infrequently secured by Tennyson, and scarcely less often by Christina Rossetti, both of whom have left behind them jets of pure emotional melody which compare to advantage with the most perfect specimens of Greek and Elizabethan song. Tennyson did not very often essay this class of writing, but when he did, he rarely failed; his songs combine, with extreme naturalness and something of a familiar sweetness, a felicity of workmanship hardly to be excelled. In her best songs, Miss Rossetti is scarcely, if at all, his inferior; but her judgment was far less sure, and she was more ready to look with complacency on her failures. The songs of Mr. Aubrey de Vere are not well enough known; they are sometimes singularly charming. Other poets have once or twice succeeded in catching this clear natural treble,—the living linnet once captured in the elm, as Tusitala puts it; but this has not been a gift largely enjoyed by our Victorian poets.

The richer and more elaborate forms of lyric, on the contrary, have exactly suited this curious and learned age of ours. The species of verse which, originally Italian or French, have now so abundantly and so admirably been practised in England that we can no longer think of them as exotic, having found so many exponents in the Victorian period that they are pre-eminently characteristic of it. “Scorn not the Sonnet,” said Wordsworth to his contemporaries; but the lesson has not been needed in the second half of the century. The sonnet is the most solid and unsingable of the sections of lyrical poetry; it is difficult to think of it as chanted to a musical accompaniment. It is used with great distinction by writers to whom skill in the lighter divisions of poetry has been denied, and there are poets, such as Bowles and Charles Tennyson-Turner, who live by their sonnets alone. The practice of the sonnet has been so extended that all sense of monotony has been lost. A sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning differs from one by D. G. Rossetti or by Matthew Arnold to such excess as to make it difficult for us to realize that the form in each case is absolutely identical.

With the sonnet might be mentioned the lighter forms of elaborate exotic verse; but to these a word shall be given later on. More closely allied to the sonnet are those rich and somewhat fantastic stanza-measures in which Rossetti delighted. Those in which Keats and the Italians have each their part have been greatly used by the Victorian poets. They lend themselves to a melancholy magnificence, to pomp of movement and gorgeousness of color; the very sight of them gives the page the look of an ancient blazoned window. Poems of this class are “The Stream’s Secret” and the choruses in “Love is enough.” They satisfy the appetite of our time for subtle and vague analysis of emotion, for what appeals to the spirit through the senses; but here, again, in different hands, the “thing,” the metrical instrument, takes wholly diverse characters, and we seek in vain for a formula that can include Robert Browning and Gabriel Rossetti, William Barnes and Arthur Hugh Clough.

From this highly elaborated and extended species of lyric the transition is easy to the Ode. In the Victorian age, the ode, in its full Pindaric sense, has not been very frequently used. We have specimens by Mr. Swinburne in which the Dorian laws are closely adhered to. But the ode, in a more or less irregular form, whether pæan or threnody, has been the instrument of several of our leading lyrists. The genius of Mr. Swinburne, even to a greater degree than that of Shelley, is essentially dithyrambic, and is never happier than when it spreads its wings as wide as those of the wild swan, and soars upon the very breast of tempest. In these flights Mr. Swinburne attains to a volume of sonorous melody such as no other poet, perhaps, of the world has reached, and we may say to him, as he has shouted to the Mater Triumphalis:—

“Darkness to daylight shall lift up thy pæan,
Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale,
With wind-notes as of eagles Æschylean,
And Sappho singing in the nightingale.”

Nothing could mark more picturesquely the wide diversity permitted in Victorian lyric than to turn from the sonorous and tumultuous odes of Mr. Swinburne to those of Mr. Patmore, in which stateliness of contemplation and a peculiar austerity of tenderness find their expression in odes of iambic cadence, the melody of which depends, not in their headlong torrent of sound, but in the cunning variation of catalectic pause. A similar form has been adopted by Lord De Tabley for many of his gorgeous studies of antique myth, and by Tennyson for his “Death of the Duke of Wellington.” It is an error to call these iambic odes “irregular,” although they do not follow the classic rules with strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The enchanting “I have led her home,” in “Maud,” is an example of this kind of lyric at its highest point of perfection.

A branch of lyrical poetry which has been very widely cultivated in the Victorian age is the philosophical, or gnomic, in which a serious chain of thought, often illustrated by complex and various imagery, is held in a casket of melodious verse, elaborately rhymed. Matthew Arnold was a master of this kind of poetry, which takes its form, through Wordsworth, from the solemn and so-called “metaphysical” writers of the seventeenth century. We class this interesting and abundant section of verse with the lyrical, because we know not by what other name to describe it; yet it has obviously as little as possible of the singing ecstasy about it. It neither pours its heart out in a rapture, nor wails forth its despair. It has as little of the nightingale’s rich melancholy as of the lark’s delirium. It hardly sings, but, with infinite decorum and sobriety, speaks its melodious message to mankind. This sort of philosophical poetry is really critical; its function is to analyze and describe; and it approaches, save for the enchantment of its form, nearer to prose than do the other sections of the art. It is, however, just this species of poetry which has particularly appealed to the age in which we live; and how naturally it does so may be seen in the welcome extended to the polished and serene compositions of Mr. William Watson.

Almost a creation, or at least a complete conquest, of the Victorian age is the humorous lyric in its more delicate developments. If the past can point to Prior and to Praed, we can boast, in their various departments, of Calverly, of Locker-Lampson, of Mr. Andrew Lang, of Mr. W. S. Gilbert. The comic muse, indeed, has marvellously extended her blandishments during the last two generations, and has discovered methods of trivial elegance which were quite unknown to our forefathers. Here must certainly be said a word in favor of those French forms of verse, all essentially lyrical, such as the ballad, the rondel, the triolet, which have been used so abundantly as to become quite a feature in our lighter literature. These are not, or are but rarely, fitted to bear the burden of high emotion; but their precision, and the deftness which their use demands fit them exceedingly well for the more distinguished kind of persiflage. No one has kept these delicate butterflies in flight with the agile movement of his fan so admirably as Mr. Austin Dobson, that neatest of magicians.

Those who write hastily of Victorian lyrical poetry are apt to find fault with its lack of spontaneity. It is true that we cannot pretend to discover on a greensward so often crossed and re-crossed as the poetic language of England many morning dewdrops still glistening on the grasses. We have to pay the penalty of our experience in a certain lack of innocence. The artless graces of a child seem mincing affectations in a grown-up woman. But the poetry of this age has amply made up for any lack of innocence by its sumptuous fulness, its variety, its magnificent accomplishment, its felicitous response to a multitude of moods and apprehensions. It has struck out no new field for itself; it still remains where the romantic revolution of 1798 placed it; its aims are not other than were those of Coleridge and of Keats. But within that defined sphere it has developed a surprising activity. It has occupied the attention and become the facile instrument of men of the greatest genius, writers of whom any age and any language might be proud. It has been tender and fiery, severe and voluminous, gorgeous and marmoreal, in turns. It has translated into words feelings so subtle, so transitory, moods so fragile and intangible, that the rough hand of prose would but have crushed them. And this, surely, indicates the great gift of Victorian lyrical poetry to the race. During a time of extreme mental and moral restlessness, a time of speculation and evolution, when all illusions are tested, all conventions overthrown, when the harder elements of life have been brought violently to the front, and where there is a temptation for the emancipated mind roughly to reject what is not material and obvious, this art has preserved intact the lovelier delusions of the spirit, all that is vague and incorporeal and illusory. So that for Victorian Lyric generally no better final definition can be given than is supplied by Mr. Robert Bridges in a little poem of incomparable beauty, which may fitly bring this essay to a close:—

“I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet immemorial scents:
A joy of love at sight,—
A honeymoon delight,
That ages in an hour:—
My song be like a flower.
“I have loved airs that die
Before their charm is writ
Upon the liquid sky
Trembling to welcome it.
Notes that with pulse of fire
Proclaim the spirit’s desire,
Then die, and are nowhere:—
My song be like an air.”

Edmund Gosse.

“Short swallow-flights of song”

TENNYSON