lighter poems"in playful mood." These facts have their explanation. Shelley's poems are an expression of personal emotion, the reaction of a sensitive spirit upon the conditions of human life. There is, to be sure, an element of reflective meditation in the poems, but there is a stronger sense of deep feeling, and it is the intensity of this that leaves the final impresAnd though the poems have grace and delicacy too, these qualities are not, as in playful verse, in the service of whimsicality or sentiment, but expressive rather of sensitive tenderness.

sion.

It is natural, therefore, to find that among the best of Shelley's poems are certain exquisite lyrics of love-such as The Indian Serenade, or One Word is Too Often Profaned. Other poems, addressed to the members of his intimate circle, idealize the relation of sympathetic friendship. The Invitation and The Recollection are among the best examples of these. The dominating mood of certain other poems is that of longing, in which enters a note of sad realization of the hopelessness of it. A Dream of the Unknown is such a poem, and it is typical of Shelley's mind that the wild garden that he describes with such delicacy should be a dream phantom of visionary flowers." It is but a step to poems of another class, those dominated by a reaction of resigned despair. Examples come readily to mind, the most notable among them, perhaps, being the Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples.

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In their several ways all these divisions of Shel

ley's poems express the same mind,—a spirit yearning passionately for the ideal, willing rather to suffer disillusionment and despair than to lower in any degree his high standard of perfection. But the ideals he cherishes are not abstract; he longs to realize practically all his hopes, and, in the face of disappointment, even his dreams are prophecies of final fulfilment. So it is that the skylark directs him to a perfect ideal of poetic attainment, and the west wind bears a personal suggestion of hope for the final acceptance of his poetic message.

Study. Observe whether the poems which Shelley addressed to friends-The Invitation, The Recollection, and To a Lady, With a Guitar-leave an impression of real people and places, or of a land of imagination. Do Shelley's poems seem to be

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autobiographic" in the sense that many of Wordsworth's are? What is meant by the "subjective" interest in Shelley's poetry, as compared with the objective" interest of such a poet as Campbell? Does the verse accent in Shelley's poems, compared with that in the poems of Scott, seem to fall with regularity? How does this matter affect the sound of Shelley's poems when read aloud? Why are the poems of Burns on the whole more suitable to be set to music than those of Shelley?

GENERAL SURVEY

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It is much to know poems, to know them well and to care for them. In that respect they are like friends. -the more we see of them, the more we find in common. But friends have another interest for us beside the personal regard we have for them: we like to compare them, to note what interests they have in common, what makes them different" from others, what part of our own life they share. And in doing this we feel that we understand not only them better, but ourselves as well-that we make contact with life, which is a broader thing than knowing only people. So it is with poems. Taken one at a time, they are poems, perhaps with some special appeal to us, yet special poems still. Compared with one another, they go to make up poetry, a larger thing, because they have one quality in common: art-whatever that may mean.

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There is nothing to be gained by trying to define poetry" or "art" now: perhaps the mere definition will never interest us. But a simpler inquiry is both. interesting and profitable; namely, to set side by side. before us a few poems that we already know, and to observe what they have in common. If we are successful, and then we go on adding other poems to the

number, when we pause at last we shall find that we have indeed arrived, unconsciously, at some clear ideas concerning poetry in the larger sense. For such an inquiry the poems included in this volume are well adapted, and the groupings in which they appear are convenient. Narrative poems are best to begin with, and the simplest of these, the group of old English ballads, afford a natural starting-point for our study.

OLD BALLADS

It is impossible to read several old ballads in succession without being struck by the directness with which they go straight to the heart of the story they tell. There is movement, action, from the very first stanza, and more than that, action that leads unerringly to the central interest of the tale-nothing roundabout, secondary, indirect. Johnie Armstrong is a good example, but any one will serve. This effect of straight-forward, vigorous movement is enhanced by another quality found in practically all old ballads, but conspicuously in certain ones of them; namely, concentration of interest on the important stages of the action. Sir Patrick Spens furnishes a particularly happy illustration of this. No words are lost between the giving of advice by the 'eldern knicht" and the acting thereon by the king. In the next line the letter has been already written, and within the stanza Sir Patrick has received it. After the first bitter outcry we must imagine him transported to

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the company of his sailors, giving energetic, cheery orders to his merry men all." Which of his comrades it was that remonstrated with him is not even mentioned. And then the preparation, the start, the storm, the wreck,-all these incidents the story passes abruptly over, and returns again to the shore, where the little company of women wait, and wait in vain, for the return of their absent lords. It is amazing, when we stop to think of it, how much action has been conveyed to us in the eleven short stanzas of the ballad, and how readily our attention has flashed from one important moment to another as the tale has been unfolded to us.

Another aspect of this same quality of directness in the old ballads is their prevailingly concrete diction: the situations are put before our very eyes, so that we see and hear what happens. The idea would perhaps have been adequately conveyed had we been told, in general terms, that Sir Patrick Spens and his men were drowned; but in the ballad it comes before us visibly, in a picture,—

Bot lang ower a' the play wer playd
Thair hats they swam aboone.

Similarly, The Battle of Otterburn tells, in effect, that the Earl Douglas, in his first encounter with Lord Percy, overcame him, to the consternation of the latter's adherents; but it does not say so in any such abstract terms: rather,