a sudden becomes subjective, personal, reflective, alive, intense. The individual is liberated from the blighting anonymity of mediævalism. He seeks the free expression of himself in art. The arts accessible to him in England are music, the drama, and lyric poetry, and these accordingly are the chief arts developed during the succeeding period. Lyricism the Note of Elizabethan Literature. In the broadest sense lyricism, the salient, personal, and rhythmical expression of the individual passion and sense of things, is the pervading note of the Elizabethan times. English history at all times has been largely the struggle of the individual for emancipation and self-manifestation. Hence lyric art in all its composite forms is peculiarly an English art, and the lyricism of English poetry is its most constant and permanent element. So we find that the very drama of the Elizabethans is pervaded by this prevailing lyric mood.1 The Elizabethan lyrical impulse seeks expression in a great variety of poetical forms.2 The lyric proper appears, now under the pastoral Leading forms of the Elizabethan Lyric. convention, now as sonnet and sonnetsequence, now in various composite 1 See the ingenious essay by the late Mr. J. A. Symonds on 'The Lyrism of the English Romantic Drama' (in The Key of Blue and other Prose Essays, London and New York, 1893). ? The extensive lyrical production of the Elizabethan period is to be found scattered through innumerable publications, such as the works of individual poets, the various miscellanies and anthologies of the day, occasional songs in prose romances, in the drama, in the masques (in itself a quasi-lyrical species), and in the song-books which supplied and delighted the musical tastes of our forefathers. In addition to all this many pieces in manuscript yet remain unpublished. More specific bibliographical indications are to be found in the body of the present volume in the brief introductory notes accompanying the text. literary forms, such as formal ode and epithalamium, and again as the pure song-lyric of the Elizabethan song-books, in madrigal, canzon, ‘ode', roundelay, and catch, that altogether delightful and exquisite outburst of bird-like music, exotic and Italianate, and yet, to modern ears, at the same time so freshly English and native.1 Further than this, many elegiac and idyllic variations, prolonged to more than lyric length, are frequently heard. The variety and scope of Elizabethan lyrical production as a whole are as remarkable as its distinction and perfection of style in many parts. The more purely literary lyric in almost every kind of form known at the present day is produced in abundance, in addition to the lyric in which the pastoral manner, or the note of song, or the sonnet convention predominates. Lyrics in these forms reach their chief perfection, perhaps, in the more literary poets, such as Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, and Milton. In Spenser's Epithalamion and the Four Hymns, especially, is exemplified what has been called the Greater Lyric,2 the long-breathed lyric of elaborate involutions in subject-matter and in metrical form, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is represented principally by the formal ode, Pindaric and otherwise. No one in English has managed this difficult form of art with such constancy of 1 On the various forms of the Elizabethan lyric Professor Schelling's Introduction, pp. xiv f., to his charming anthology of Elizabethan lyrics (Boston, 1895), may be consulted with advantage by the reader interested in the further study of the subject. 2 See Mr. Ernest Rhys's Introduction to his volume of selections from the lyric poems of Spenser. poetic inspiration, and such unfailing harmony of the parts and of the whole, as has Spenser. The Elizabethan period, in the whole history of the English lyric, is the great period of the shaping and development of lyrical forms and rhythms. With the wandering minstrels and university wits like Peele and Greene, and with the song-writers, the lyric becomes popular and racy of English life and sentiment. They attain, as by instinct, to the perfect touch and phrase of the artist in words. The language is still something plastic, and can be mastered and made ductile to song and to measure. Euphuism and word-play of every sort are practised and parodied and then practised again. But it is a Euphuism not yet intellectualized nor crystallized into a rigid mannerism. And so artful phrasing becomes a gift and a passion with writers, and the taste for it spreads to all classes, until the lyric perfection of diction of even the minor Elizabethan song is made possible. In Spenser the musical development of English speech is at its highest, until Milton comes and adds a harmony unknown even to Spenser. The refinement of form, it is true, continues through the next two reigns, and many new effects are caught, as in Herrick and in Milton, but the lyrical form and spirit of the first period is sui generis and distinctive. Pastoral and Sonnet Forms: The essential artistic impulse and the accepted conventions of any literary form are always more or less at variance. In the Aims and Real Elizabethan lyric this discrepancy of form and inspiration is less marked than in many other literary kinds, for the reason that Aims. the lively sense of beauty and delight which marked the lyric mood of the time more easily accommodated itself to and revitalized fixed and exotic literary modes than would have been possible with a colder and more literal generation. Conventional meaning and real meaning, however, we find rapidly shifting and changing from decade to decade throughout this age of rapid change and swift development, whether in the vein of pastoral, of sonnet, or of song. The earlier romantic idealism rests chiefly in the pastoral convention, which, indeed, tinges the Elizabethan lyric throughout. In the best of the pastoral lyrics pastoralism is but a setting or background, subtly suggesting the tone of romantic idealism and of golden-age otherworldliness, which is the fundamental mood of the piece. Likewise, also, amid all the amatory conventionality of the sonnet-sequences, we feel that the recurrent formulæ of love, of lover's despair and lady's praise, are but the obbligato accompaniment of the real, the underlying theme, which, through all the artifices of art, is purposing the lyric revelation and self-expression of the poet's inner mood and nature. It is so in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and in the best of those of Sidney, Spenser, and Drayton. And for the reason, doubtless, that love is the great awakener of the soul Beauty breeds love, love consummates a man, as Chapman sings-we find in these sonnets more of the modern note, more of the introspective and analytical spirit, than had yet appeared in the lyric. They are the first full expression in English poetry of the subjective spirit of modern lyricism. The Elizabethan In the song-lyric of the Elizabethan age conventionality is melted into pure lyric mood, or only adds a further ornament and grace to Song-Lyric. a musical utterance without it somewhat formless and unstayed. The exquisite accord of music and words in this lyric has been noted by all competent judges. Elizabethan music was a music perfectly fitted to song, slight and melodic, full of local colour and suggestiveness, and admirably adapted to commend and ensure and fortify lyric poetry of as perfect a quality in its particular kind as probably has been or ever will be written to the accompaniment of musical notes in so intractable a language as English. The Elizabethan song-lyric is a form of pure art-poetic emotion stirred by the sense of beauty and of musical delight, with the slightest possible admixture of the temporal and the adventitious. These haunting measures of song, the secret of which seems to be now lost from our speech, are never overweighted with meaning, nor at their best are they overcharged with convention or with ornament. The Elizabethan song-writer understands instinctively the laws of the kind in which he works. How free are the lyrics in Shakespeare's plays, for example, from the subtleties and the compressions of the dramatic style of that master. Meaning here is masked in pure mood, is suggested and potential, not hardened into thought. "The apothecaries", writes Thomas Campion in the preface to his Fourth Book of Airs, "have Books of Gold, whose leaves, |