When she reached the house itself she found an evening reception going forwardthe Hardwicks were entertaining the Lyric Club.

"Don't you remember, Jerome, he was here at the Lyric reception?" "Oh, I remember well enough," said Hardwick knitting his brows.

There is his lyric named Misery, written in 1818, which begins 'Come, be happy,sit by me, Shadow-vested Misery: Coy, unwilling, silent bride, Mourning in thy robe of pride, Desolation deified.'

There is also the briefer lyric named Death, 1817, which begins 'They diethe dead return not.

Unlike his fellows, Collins had moments of great lyric power, and gave posterity a few treasured poems.

The great poet of this decade was Gray, whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, by many held the noblest English lyric, appeared in 1751.

He fabricated, in what he thought to be Middle English, a body of songs and interludes, which he attributed to a monk named Thomas Rowleie, and which showed that, in the supposedly unsophisticated simplicity of medieval times, charity to Man and love for Nature had flourished as beautifully as lyric utterance.

It was his emotional intensity as well as his lyric genius that made him the most popular poet of his time.

Nor would I wish it to; a few disappointments, a few failures to recapture something of that first fine careless rapture, would instill a lyric melancholy; but too many would make one morbid....

3. It hardly deserves remark that Lodge is placed last in this list; but had he been the same individual who had written for the stage, was the friend of so many dramatists, and was so well known as a lyric poet, it seems likely that Heywood would have said more about him.

" And the delightful little fellow merrily piped the whole of that "song of pleasant glee," one of the most melodious and sauciest bits of lyric coquetry to be found in Spanish.

Had the office been hampered with any demands upon the occupant for popular lyric, in celebration of notable events, Wordsworth was certainly the last man to place in it.

Antecedently to Southey, it was the consideration for which return in poetry was demanded,in the first instance, a return in dramatic poetry, and then in the formal lyric.

Thus it would appear that in the three great departments of poetry,the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic,the old Greeks were great masters, and have been the teachers of all subsequent nations and ages.

But Herodotus was not born until Aeschylus had gained a prize for tragedy, nor for more than two hundred years after Simonides the lyric poet nourished, and probably five or six hundred years after Homer sang his immortal epics; yet though two thousand years and more have passed since he wrote, the style of this great "Father of History" is admired by every critic, while his history as a work of art is still a study and a marvel.

But if this incorrect Essay, written in the country, without the help of books or advice of friends, shall find any acceptance in the World: I promise to myself a better success of the Second Part, wherein the virtues and faults of the English Poets who have written, either in this, the Epic, or the Lyric way, will be more fully treated of; and their several styles impartially imitated.

"For in the Epic, or Lyric way, it will be hard for them to shew us one such amongst them, as we have many now living, or who lately were so.

He had heard Bonanni in her best days and many great lyric sopranos from Patti to Melba, and he was thinking that none of them had sung the mad scene better than Cordova, who had only been on the stage two years, and was now in New York for the first time.

Afterwards the audience would all say again what they had always said about every great lyric soprano, that it was just a wonderful instrument without a particle of feeling, that it was an over-grown canary, a human flute, and all the rest of it; but while the trills ran on the people listened in wonder and the diamonds were very quiet.

Margaret was there, no doubt, behind the paint and the 'liquid white,' but the reality was what the public saw beyond the footlights two or three times a week during the opera season, and applauded with might and main as the most successful lyric soprano of the day.

Down the field, toward the corner, cutting in sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost tropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the thin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags and the frogs.

Porque te apartas de mi? NM: Spanish lyric.

(In Lyric, winter 1945) © 8Mar45; B667759.

Selections from the Greek elegiac, iambic, and lyric poets.

(In Three lyric poets)