It hath been generally acknowledged, that the Lyric is a more excellent kind of writing than the Satiric; and consequently he who excells in the most excellent species, must undoubtedly be esteemed the greatest poet.

Other love lyrics which should be read are Spenser's Prothalamion, Lodge's Love in My Bosom Like a Bee and Ben Jonson's To Celia.

George II. was equally insensible to the Muses; and had the annual lyrics been a mosaic of the merest gibberish, they would have satisfied his earlier tastes as thoroughly as the odes of Collins or Gray.

His lyrics are the purest echoes of folk-song and folk-lore, and the simplicity and genuineness of his art give an undying charm to his songs of idyllic meadows and woodlands, post-chaises, carefree wanderers, and lovely maidens in picturesque settings; all suffused with gentle yearning and melting into soft melody.

The best pastoral lyrics from the modern point of view are Shakespeare's two songs: "Under the Greenwood Tree" (As you like it) and "When Icicles Hang by the Wall" (Love's Labor's Lost).

In poetry, as the most perfect and universal (or the totality of) art, uniting in itself the two contraries, the symbolic and the classical, the lyric is a repetition of the architectonic-musical, the epic, of the plastic-pictorial, the drama, the union of the lyric and the epic.

Its tumult is of many tongues; one can hear in it the laughter of Rabelais, or, for that matter, the lyrics of Shakespeare; but the dark heart of the storm was indeed more austral and volcanic; a noise of thunderous wings and the name of Michael the Archangel.

Many lyrics are merely examples of word painting.

PRICE 11/3½. These remarkable lyrics are translations into vernacular verse of the prose versions of specimens of the literature of the great apes of Africa, collected by Professor GARNER.

Footnote 16: A lyric is a short poem reflecting some personal emotion, like love or grief.