delicate subtleties of meaning: the mind should sp the sense with perfect ease, if the emotions are to respond readily to the feeling that is in the song. No group of poems illustrates this better than the love songs of Burns, and one of these, the one beginning "O my luve's like a red, red rose," will stand for all. Its meaning is simple and expressed in the most direct of words; more than that, there is repetition of word and phrase that addresses itself rather to the ear and the feelings than to the eye and the mind: the poem, in a word, suggests song so strongly that it seems to sing itself. Should we wish to test this by contrast, no poems would be more to our purpose than the sonnets. In these, taken as a whole, the ideas are discriminated and related each to each, and the mind is too closely engaged with them to give itself up to the free enjoyment of a musical accompaniment. Milton's sonnet On His Blindness would be a rather extreme case in point.

When we come to the more particular consideration of rhythm in lyric poetry, we observe first of all, perhaps, that certain measures common in narrative poetry are conspicuous for their absence. Blank verse, the most important of these, is obviously better suited to the irregularity and eccentricity of narrative or dramatic expression; it is somewhat too heavy, also, and it lacks the feeling of structure that rime and stanza form give to a lyric. And, for somewhat similar reasons, the same can be said of dactylic hexameter, in which Longfellow's Evangeline is written. But among the

measures commonly found in lyrics, the same harmony is to be noticed between the mood of the poem and its meter that was found in the case of narrative poems. The point is an important one, and worth more than passing mention.

It would indeed be interesting if some large principle could be found connecting certain forms of rhythm with certain forms of feeling. And when we find the vigorous mood of

Waken, lords and ladies gay,

so admirably expressed in trochaic meter, or the solemnity of Gray's Elegy so fittingly expressed in iambic, it might indeed seem possible to arrive at some consistent principle. But it soon appears that the iambic meter that is lively and spirited in

A wet sheet and a flowing sea,

A wind that follows fast,

has solemnity of movement in

My days among the dead are past.

And the dactylic meter that gives speed and vigor to The Charge of the Light Brigade is deliberate and meditative in Hood's poem beginning

One more Unfortunate
Weary of breath.

And so it is necessary to conclude that however strong the tendency may be to associate certain moods with

certain kinds of meter, nevertheless it is more important to realize the flexibility of which any given meter is capable, and to take full account of it in reading. For the most part, then, the meter, with sympathetic reading, is felt to be harmonious with the mood of the poem, though in an undefinable sort of way. Occasionally, however, some special effects are observed, so interesting as to repay a somewhat closer observation.

Shorter lines, introduced here and there among longer, often have an effect of special emphasis. This is so in Shelley's poem To the Night, in which the pause and the slower cadence give greater value to the shorter lines," Come, long sought," "Soon, too soon." And, in a lighter mood, the unusual emphasis gives an effect of playful anti-climax in The Last Leaf, by Holmes:

But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,

Are so queer!

Moore, in his poem called Echoes, by interspersing shorter lines among the longer, reminds us of the reply made by the real echo to the syllables of our longer calling,—

Yet love hath echoes truer far,

And far more sweet,

Than e'er beneath the moonlight's star,

Of horn, or lute, or soft guitar,

The songs repeat.

The echoing of sound to sense, known as onomatopœia, finds its most notable instances in the passages where the resemblance is one of pure vowel and consonant tone, as in the famous lines, from Tennyson, The moan of doves in immemorable elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Shakspere's It Was a Lover and His Lass has already been cited, and Milton's sonnet On the Late Massacre in Piedmont is too remarkable an example not to be mentioned specially. It is unusual, however, to find an instance so sustained as this; generally it is in the phrase or the line that we meet with an echo of the sense in the sound of the words.

Not alone in the quality of the sound, however, is there found this special effect of echo: the swing of the meter sometimes helps to express definitely the idea of the poem as a whole. In narrative poetry this has been illustrated in the galloping anapests of How They Brought the Good News. An instance among lyric poems is the stanza form of Shelley's famous address To the Skylark. In this stanza the short trochees of the first part give something of the effect of rapid winging, and the long iambic lines that bring each stanza to a close have a sense of sustained power not unlike that of a bird's soaring:

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire,

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In this connection Moore's The Young May Moon has a point of particular interest. It begins with an iambic line made especially slow by the long unaccented syllables:

The young May moon is beaming, love,

The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love,

and the effect of drowsy dreaming is well sustained through the beginning of the stanza. But with the sixth line there is an abrupt change in the mood, signaled by the sudden substitution of anapestic feet, with their brisk, wide-awake movement:

Then awake!-the heavens look bright, my dear,
"Tis never too late for delight, my dear,

And the best of all ways

To lengthen our days

Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!

To be sensitive to effects of meter such as these quickens our enjoyment of poetry, yet it is well to realize the limitations on their use set by the conditions of iiterary art. Tone or rhythm may suggest an experience of the senses, but it is not the province of poetry to try to imitate such experience closely. The sound of the words and the swing of the rhythm are truly effective when they simply express the mood of the poem, and help the reader catch its spirit.

It is useful to pause at this point for a moment, to compare the first impression of lyric poetry with that