Comus, are too familiar to every one to be more than mentioned as evidence of the persistence, in the past as in the present, of the warbling impulse in all poets. Heard but fitfully during the greater part of the eighteenth century, yet most arrestingly in Gray, Collins, and Burns, Lyrical Poetry from the last onward without intermission, to our own time, in Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, is almost the only poetry that has in recent days been much listened to, or much written and talked about. This circumstance is far from being conclusive as to whether,[Pg 16] during the same period, poems higher and greater than mere Lyrical Poetry have or have not been produced. But it is absolutely certain that, if produced, they have been, so far, more or less ignored; and that, if the same poets have written such and Lyrical Poetry as well, they will have been considered and estimated by the latter only.

[Pg 16]

But the domain of feeling and emotion in which Lyrical Poetry has room to display its power and versatility is so extensive that lyrics are very various in their themes and in the treatment of them. Love, religion, patriotism, cosmopolitan benevolence, being, as I have shown in The Human Tragedy, the most elevated and most permanent sources of human sentiment and emotion, there will necessarily be in Lyrical Poetry, even considered by itself, and apart from all the other forms of poetry, a scale of relative elevation and importance.

The love of individuals for each other, whether domestic, romantic, or sexual, is much more common than any of the other three, being practically universal; and it has given birth to so many well-known lyrics that it is unnecessary to cite any of them here. Some of them are very beautiful; but none of them, by reason of the comparative narrowness of their theme, satisfies the essentials of great poetry. Not even Tennyson’s Maud, which is perhaps the most ambitious and the best known of long poems dedicated mainly to the subject, though it contains lovely passages, approaches greatness.

Though what is understood as religious sentiment comes next to the love of individuals for each other in the extent of its influence, it has produced much verse, but, it must be allowed, little poetry, the reason[Pg 17] probably being that the religious sentiment of the few who are endowed with the gift of writing poetry differs from that of the average “religious” person. Nor can the fact be overlooked that there is a certain character of reserve in Protestantism which has operated since the Reformation against the growth of 

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