to the emotional and æsthetic sensibilities of the reader. It includes nearly all short poems and many of considerable length-the great bulk, indeed, of modern verse—and the sources of its inspiration cover the entire range of human feeling, from the religious worshiper's hymn or the mother's tender lullaby over her sleeping infant to the warrior's fierce cry of battle and victory. Examples rise in perplexing number: Take, O take those lips away That so sweetly were forsworn, Bring again Seals of love, but seal'd in vain, Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart -Shakspere. In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, -Shelley. Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. -Tennyson. Under the general head of lyric poetry must be included a number of more or less specialized varieties, such as ELEGIES, or mourning poems, of which Milton's Lycidas is the great English example; EPITHALAMIA, or marriage hymns, like Spenser's Epithalamion; and ODES and SONNETS, both of which have been more fully described in the preceding section on Poetic Form. Dramatic Poetry. This is the poetry of enacted life. In it the poet drops the rôle of narrator or interpreter and simply presents his characters, allowing them to speak and act for themselves. Sometimes poetic drama is written only to be read, when we give it the name of "closet-drama," but in the greatest period of the English drama, the time of Queen Elizabeth, it was invariably intended for actual representation on the stage and the productions were called simply "plays." Plays are commonly classified as either TRAGEDIES or COMEDIES. A tragedy is solemn and lofty in character, usually portraying the struggle of an individual against fate, and moving to a fatal issue. Hamlet and Macbeth are familiar examples. Comedy, on the other hand, presents a more or less amusing plot with a happy ending. Usually only the higher class of romantic comedies, such as The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It, are cast in poetic form; when comedy descends toward the level of farce, its natural vehicle is prose. To all these varieties of poetry-epic, lyric, and dramatic,-may be added some others not easily classifiable, such as PASTORALS, SATIRES, EPIGRAMS, and the great body of reflective and didactic verse. READING AND INTERPRETATION There are obviously several kinds of enjoyment to be derived from poetry. The first is the simple, immediate sense of something beautiful or moving-the enjoyment which the poet meant to give, and the only enjoyment which the unschooled and perhaps even the average hearer or reader ever gets. Nothing should be allowed to obscure or diminish this enjoyment, and the advice given by Dr. Johnson in the preface to his edition of Shakspere in the year 1765 is well worth dwelling on: "Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleassure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators." It is a cardinal principle in the interpretation of poetry that to feel is better than to know, or rather that, except possibly in the severest orders of didactic verse, feeling is the only true knowledge. To know without feeling is after all not to understand; none but he who follows his poet with lively sympathy, with kindled imagination, with sharpened sensibility to all beauty and power, can have any true or vital knowledge of him. Poetry, then, should first of all be read, earnestly read, neither studied on the one hand, nor skimmed on the other. It should be read aloud, if possible, both that the reading may be done with care, and that the ear may get in reality, and not through imagination only, the melodies and harmonies of the verse. So organic are these musical elements in all good poetry, so intimately connected with the poet's thought and feeling, that the only road to complete sympathy with him lies through them. If the reader's metrical sense is defective or untrained, he must confine himself at first to the simpler and more marked rhythms, gradually perfecting his education in this particular in the only possible way, namely, by reading more and more verse. In time he will find, if he have any faculty for rhythm at all, that the freest of meters will give him little trouble and he will instinctively make the nicest necessary adjustments between rhetorical sense and metrical law. The teacher of poetry can devise no more profitable exercise than daily to read or have read a short selection of verse without comment or criticism, depending on the inherent power of the verse to command both interest and appreciation. Understanding is of course also necessary. For however strong may be the appeal of poetry to the senses, its language is the language of reason, and it has always a pure intellectual basis that cannot be ignored. One should not rest content until the words and sentences of a poem convey to him definite and accurate ideas. Therefore it may sometimes be necessary to paraphrase. For instance, readers who are unfamiliar with the Scotch dialect and with the less usual forms of our subjunctive construction may require to have Burns's lines, "O wad some power the giftie gie us," etc., turned into "If some power would but give us the gift," etc. But if we stop there, the poetry |