Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part,
And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart;
Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er,

The muse forgot, and thou belov'd no more!"

Among elegies of the subjective class may be mentioned the lines written by Raleigh the night before his death, Cowley's elegy on Crashaw, Milton's Lycidas, Gray's Elegy in a Country Church-yard, and Shelley's Adonais. At the close of his meteor-like career the gallant Raleigh wrote his own epitaph in these few pious and feeling lines:

"Even such is Time, that takes on trust

Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days!
But from this earth, this grave,

this dust,

The Lord shall raise me up, I trust!"

Lycidas was written by Milton to commemorate the death of a college friend, Mr. King, who was drowned on the passage from England to Ireland. But Milton's grief sets him thinking; and in this remarkable poem the monotone of a deep sorrow is replaced by the linked musings of a mind, which, once set in motion by grief, pours forth abundantly the treasures of thought and imagination stored up within it. The following eloquent passage contains a line that has almost passed into a proverb:

"Alas! what boots it with incessant care

To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,

And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise,'
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears;
'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies:
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-seeing Jove;

As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed."

So also in Adonais, which is an elegy on Keats, the glorious imagination of Shelley transports him into regions far beyond the reach of the perturbations of a common grief:

"The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the land, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven;

I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."

It would be impossible to give an adequate idea of Gray's famous elegy by a short extract, but the student is recommended to read the entire poem carefully. He will find it eminently subjective in spirit; and may compare it with Hamlet's moralisings over the skull of Yorick. Both may be regarded as products of a mind in which there is a morbid preponderance of the contemplative faculty - the balance not being duly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect.*

* See Coleridge's remarks on Hamlet. Literary Remains, vol. ii. p. 204.

Miscellaneous Poems.

A large number of poems, chiefly belonging to modern times, still remain unnoticed, because they refuse to be classified under any of the received and long-established designations. This miscellaneous section we propose to divide into

1. Poems founded on the Passions and Affections.

2. Poems of Sentiment and Reflection.

3. Poems of Imagination and Fancy.

4. Philosophical poetry.

1. Poems of the first kind are evidently of the lyrical order, but they are not to be classed among lyrics, because they are deficient in the excitation of thought and rapidity of movement which the true lyric must exhibit. They occur in great numbers in the works of modern poets, and, if a type of excellence in the kind were required, a purer one could not easily be found than Wordsworth's Michael. Many have seen the unfinished sheepfold in Green Head Ghyll, referred to in the following lines, which Michael, the old Westmoreland "statesman," after the news had come that the son so tenderly cherished had brought disgrace and peril on his head, had never afterwards the heart to complete:

"There is a comfort in the strength of love;
"Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart.
I have conversed with more than one, who well
Remember the old man, and what he was
Years after he had heard this heavy news.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength. Among the rocks
He went, and still looked up to sun and cloud,
And listened to the wind; and, as before,
Performed all kinds of labour for his sheep,
And for the land, his small inheritance.
And to that hollow dell from time to time

Did he repair, to build the fold of which
His flock had need. 'Tis not forgotten yet
The pity which was then in every heart
For the old man- - and 'tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone.

There, by the sheepfold, sometimes was he seen
Sitting alone, or with his faithful dog,

Then old, beside him, lying at his feet.

The length of full seven years, from time to time,
He at the building of this sheepfold wrought,
And left the work unfinished when he died.
Three years, or little more, did Isabel

Survive her husband: at her death the estate

Was sold, and went into a stranger's hand.

The cottage which was named the Evening Star

Is gone the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood; great changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood; yet the oak is left

--

That grew beside their door; and the remains

Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen,

Beside the boisterous brook of Green Head Ghyll."

Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, a poem in which love, pride, repentance, and despair seem to be striving together for the mastery, and an overcharged heart seeks relief in bursts of wild half-frenzied eloquence, must also be placed among poems of this class.

2. Sentiment may be regarded as the synthesis of thought and feeling; and therefore poems of this second class hold an intermediate place between those founded on the passions and affections, and those in which intellectual faculties are, solely or principally, exercised. They are very numerous in every period of our literary history. Spenser's Ruines of Time is an early and very beautiful example. In the midst of a personified presentment of Fame, the wish recorded of Alexander is thus strikingly related :

"But Fame with golden wing aloft doth flie
Above the reach of ruinous decay,

And with brave plumes doth beat the azure skie

Admir'd of base-born men from farre away;
Then whoso will by vertuous deeds assay
To mount to heaven, on Pegasus must ride,
And by sweet poets' verse be glorified.

"For not to have been dipt in Lethe lake
Could save the son of Thetis from to die,
But that blind bard did him immortal make
With verses, dipped in dew of Castalie;
Which made the Eastern Conquerour to crie,
'O fortunate young man, whose vertue found
So brave a trump, thy noble acts to sound.'"

Sir John Davies's poem on the Immortality of the Soul may be classed either with the present series, or under the head of didactic poetry. The poetry of Quarles is partly sentimental, partly fantastic. A fine couplet occurs in the poem entitled Faith:

"Brave minds oppressed, should, in despite of Fate,
Look greatest, like the sun, in lowest state." 1

The Soul's Errand, said to be by Raleigh, Milton's Penseroso, Dryden's Religio Laici, and Burns' Cotter's Saturday Night, are additional examples. Cowper's Lines on his Mother's Picture deserve special mention. The chief merits of this celebrated poem are a remarkable tenderness and purity of feeling; the vividness of imagination with which past scenes and circumstances are represented; and, occasionally, dignity of thought couched in graceful expressions. Its demerits are the egotistic strain which is apt to infect a poet who leads an unemployed and retired life, leading him to dwell on circumstances trivial or vulgar, equally with those of a truly poetical cast, because they interest himself; and a lamentable inequality hence arising such worthless lines as

or

"The biscuit or confectionary plum,"

"I pricked them into paper with a pin,”