THE GOLDEN TREASURY OF ENGLISH SONGS AND LYRICS.* THERE is

no book in the English language which will make a more delightful companion than this. It has been selected with the - *Ay Golden Treasury of the Best Bongs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, .‘ted and Arranged with Notes by Francis Turner Palgrave, Fellow of Exeter College, Word, Macmillan and Co. greatest taste and discrimination, with the assistance, too, Mr. Pal- grave tells us, of the Poet Laureate himself, and has been printed with a care and beauty which render its external form worthy of its contents. The vignette, drawn by Mr. Woolner, in the title-page, is one of rare delicacy and grace. On the whole, no selection from the English lyrical poets has ever been made which gives so adequately the very essence and aroma of this, not perhaps the most character- istic, but the most original, and in one direction also the most ex- pressive side of our literature.

There are two distinct lines of descent in the lyrical poetry of England which mark, on the one side, the modifying influences which original English poetry has exerted over English life, and on the other, the blossoming of English life in English poetry—the series of the meditative poets, and the series of the national song-writers. In the one series is revealed chiefly the power which the national life has gained from poetry ; in the other, the power which our poetry has gained from the national life. Among lyrical poets there have always been some whose vision has consisted in their deeper know- ledge of the springs of human life and strength, and others whose imagination has been fascinated by the beauty and splendour of the outward spectacle. The former mould the thoughts of the few by the depth and rapture of their own vision; the latter embody the emotions and paint the pictures which best express, and therefore most deeply impress, the popular mind. The former it is who are always lifting

"The painted veil which they who live call life,"

while the latter are quite content to mirror the varying frescoes which they find shining everywhere on its surface. The former are the prophets who discern deep and hidden springs of life of which it needs all the harmony and fire of poetic thought to persuade even a few enthusiasts from age to age to drink; the latter are

"Priests to all time of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we see with their eyes and are glad."

In short, the former are the deepest roots, the latter the latest fruits, of the imaginative life of the nation. Yet lyrical poetry includes both these extremes, and ought to show both the profound medita- tive depths which, as in Milton and Wordsworth, reflect the stars even in the blaze of noon, and the fair open waters which image successively the varying forms and colours, the lights and shadows, the motion and the rest, the momentary passions, and the momen- tary peace, of human chance and change. Shakspeare's mind was so great as to penetrate partially to the deeper sources of poetic life, as well as to give an almost complete picture of the "wonder and bloom of the world ;" but it was evidently for the latter task, and not for "prophetic poetry," that he was fitted. His songs and sonnets breatne the very essence of popular visions and popular harmonies ; the love and joy of youth, the rapture of spring, the coarse mirth of clowns, the bright crystal fancies which captivate even the rudest as well as the subtlest imagination, the broader contrasts of life, its healthy sorrows and most natural passions,—these, and such as these, are far more adequately expressed in his short lyrics and exquisite songs, than any of the deeper themes into which he now and then plunges for a moment, more perhaps for the sake of the succession of brilliant bubbles which rise out of them to the surface, than from any wish to grapple with the thoughts they suggest. The following, for instance, is a rough specimen of his pleasure in just gathering up in one picturesque cluster the surface-colours of the passing world :

"WINTER.

"When icicles hang by the wall And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail; When blood is nipt, and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl

-Tuwhoo!

Tuwhit tuwhoo! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

"When all around the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw ; When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl— Then nightly sings the staring owl Tuwhoo I Tuwhit I towhee! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth keel the pot."

But from the time of Shakspeare there is a marked divergence be- tween what we have described as the two schools of lyrical poetry— the meditative or lonely school, — and the bright surface-colour school,—the school of solitary musings,—and the school of popular song. In the one school, the chain of meditative poetry which plunges deeper and deeper into the spiritual sources of human life as we approach our own age, is represented by Milton, Vaughan, Herbert—perhaps Gray—Cowper, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Cole- ridge. A fair specimen of what we mean may be found in the fol- lowing beautiful lines of Vaughan's, which are, in fact, the germs, in the seventeenth century, of Wordsworth's great Ode on Intimations of Immortality.

"THE RETREAT.

"Happy those early days, when I Shined in my Angel-infancy! Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walk'd above A mile or two from my first Love, And looking back, at that short space Could see a glimpse of his brighrface;

When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. 0 how I long to travel back,

And tread again that ancient track! That I might once more reach that plain, Where first I left my glorious train; From whence th' enlighten'd spirit sees That shady City of Palm trees ! But ah ! my soul with too much stay Is drunk, and staggers in the way;— Some men a forward motion love, But I by backward steps would move; And when this dust falls to the tan, In that state I came, return."

We do not mean that the lonely or meditative school of poets are always or generally so little popular as either Vaughan or Words- worth, but only that their strains, like the lines quoted above, do not float apon the popular mind, but pierce beneath it. On the other band the great chain of singers who are sustained by, instead of in- spiring, the breath of popular life, and who reflect its general warmth and superficial bloom, is represented by Pope, and afterwards the Scotch and Irish school of minstrels, Goldsmith, Burns, Scott, Camp- bell, Byron, and Moore. It is a singular merit in this selection, that it exhibits an impar- tial love of both lyrical schools, and thus enables us to see side by side the most solitary and the most social forms of English poetry, —the richest fruits of the old life, and the gathering fountains of the new,—the ballads which sum up the life of a bygone age, the songs which express the momentary enthusiasms of a passing generation, and the musings of minds of whom it may be said, as Wordsworth has said of Milton,

"Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart,"

wrapped in their own ethereal atmosphere whether of prophetic truth or brooding imagination. It is not often that the same mind has catholicity enough to embrace both these classes of poetry, and yet it is very desirable that it should. In some sense, as Mr. Palgrave cites Shelley to prove, all true poets, and especially all true poets of the same age and nation, supplement each other; for instance, Burns never seems so broad, so fresh, so genial, as when read in close con- nexion with the shy and shrinking Cowper, nor Cowper's melancholy and delicate humour so fascinating as when seen in contrast with the strong homely grain of Burns's manly pathos. Mr. Palgrave has ex- plained the principles on which he has determined the order of his arrangement, in the following words:

"In the arrangement, the most poetically effective order has been attempted. The English mind has passed through phases of thought and cultivation so various and interopposed cluing these three centuries of Poetry, that a rapid passage between Old and New, like rapid alteration of the eye's focus in looking at the landscape, will always be wearisome and hurtful to the sense of Beauty. The poems have been therefore distributed into Books corresponding, I. to the ninety years closing about 1616, II. thence to 1700, III. to 1800, IV. to the half century just ended. Or, looking at the Poets who more or less give each portion its distinctive character, they might be called the Books of Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, and Wordsworth. The volume, in this respect, so far as the limi- tations of its range allow, accurately reflects the natural growth and evolution of our Poetry. A rigidly chronological sequence, however, rather fits a collection aiming at instruction than at pleasure, and the Wisdom which comes through Pleasure:—within each book the pieces have therefore been arranged in grade- tions of feeling or subject. The development of the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven has been here thought of as a model, and nothing placed without care- ful consideration. And it is hoped that the contents of this Anthology will thus be found to present a certain unity, 'as episodes,' in the noble language of Shelley, to that great Poem which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.'" But however impartial Mr. Palgrave may be—and he is, we be- lieve,yeally impartial—in his selection from both schools of poets, it is impossible to conceal the fact that, as the truly lyrical school begins to run in deeper channels and with a fuller stream, the school of minstrels, as we may call them by contrast,—i. e. the ballad- tellers and the popular singers show a genius more and more at- tenuated. The reason seems to be that the popular mind is seldom undivided and at harmony with itself after a certain era in the na- tional history. Culture divides while it ripens a nation's thought. There comes a time in every national history when the people seem to waken up to some knowledge of themselves. The poet who ex- presses this first phase of self-knowledge—like Shakspeare for Eng- land, and Burns or Scott for different phases of Scotch life—are borne on the crest of a national wave. But all who come after them find a far snore divided life to express. They can gain con- sistency and character only by limiting themselves to a certain sec- tion of social life. Thus Byron represented an aristocracy rather than a people, and Moore a literary society. Poets, whose gift it is to catch the external flush of national life and popular genius, have a harder and harder task as individualities multiply, and the genius of a people is refracted, for a time at least, into a million diverging rays. Poets, on the other hand, to whom it is given to go apart with Nature and their own hearts, furnish a fresher and more needful tonic to the national mind, exactly in proportion to the grow- ing dissipation of national thoughts and convictions. It could only be in an age when Moore was pouring out his sparkling but enervat- ing wines that the deep cold springs of Wordsworth's bracing genius could have been adequately sought after and loved. •

We have few criticisms to upon this volume, which must not

only be read but possessed, in order to be adequately valued. One or two, however, we will make. Mr. Palgrave lays down among the principles by which he has been guided in his selection, "that a poem should be worthy of the writer's genius, that it shall reach a perl fection commensurate with its aim, that we should require finish in proportion to brevity, that excellence should be looked for rather in the whole than in the parts," &c.,—all excellent canons. But we think he has scarcely applied these maxims with uniform success. Why, for instance, while giving Cowper's not very admirable and not at all characteristic lines on Alexander Selkirk's solitude, has he omitted those exquisite and melancholy verses which sum up the inward history of the poet's sad life, called "The Castaway ?"—the verses in which he passes from the story of Anson's sailor, who, falling overboard in a storm when no effectual assistance could be rendered-, long coutinued to make his voice heard by his helpless comrades as he struggled with the sea, to his own still sadder let:

"No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone, When snatched from all effectual aid, We perished each alone: Butl beneath a rougher sea And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he."

The genius of Cowper—almost, indeed, the poetic genius of his day—is indissolubly associated with these desparing lines, and we cannot understand how Mr. Palgrave can have put in so many com- paratively uncharacteristic and fugitive pieces, while omitting this. Byron's great genius, too, is very inadequately represented. Again, exquisite as Mr. Palgrave's appreciation of Wordsworth evidently is, we cannot help thinking that his own canons should have induced him to select the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle" as more lyrical, because more finished, more reflective, and more characteristic of his genius, than "Ruth," which he has inserted in full. All the Scotch pieces are chosen with great felicity. It is, however, of course impossible for any two men to conic to the same conclusion in so delicate a task as the selection of the most perfect of English lyrics, and Mr. Palgrave has shown a discrimina- tion which will ensure the widest popularity to his work. When- ever it is possible to enrich the book with a selection of the most perfect specimens of Tennyson's lyrical genius, it will not only be enriched, but brought to a far more harmonious conclusion. The Poet Laureate gathers up in his mind the dissevered threads of the solitary and the social poetic genius of which we have spoken. While inclining to the meditative school, as decidedly as Shakspeare in- clined to the school which reflects the external "wonder and bloom of the world," Tennyson yet shows a singular aptitude for both, for inter- preting the wants and hopes, and reflecting the splendour of the living world, as well as for deepening and elevating our poetic life. Tennyson's lyrics would in a manner unite again the lyrical schools which since the time of Shakspeare have been, almost always run- ning parallel, but wide apart.