The sonnet derives its name from the fact that it was originally a song to be sung to accompaniment; yet it is now the least song-like of all The sonnet. brief lyrics. This seems to be due chiefly to the fact that its fixed length and intricate structure (on the rules for this, see chapter vi) early appeared to fit it for the elaborated and hence more or less reflective expression of emotion; and this, true in other languages, is doubly true for English, since English writers have always shunned highly intricate metrical forms for the expression of simple emotions. The sonnet, therefore, while a favorite form with many of our greatest poets, is rarely used for other than distinctly conscious and formal expression; at its best, too, it expresses a definite intellectual conception fused with a single emotion. Its two-part structure (in the case of the Italian form) makes it peculiarly fitted for that lyrical movement described on a previous page, where the impulse takes its rise in the outer world and passes to a point in the inner. Originally the emotion of love was the conventional theme for the sonnet; and the love sonnets of the Elizabethan age, notably those of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakspere, remain the best examples of this type in our language. Milton and Wordsworth made use of the form for very different themes,a circumstance to which Landor finely alludes in the lines:

"He caught the sonnet from the dainty hand Of Love, who cried to lose it, and he gave The notes to Glory; "

and their poems include on the whole the finest examples of what may be called the spiritualized sonnet. In the sonnet beginning

"Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room"

Wordsworth briefly discusses the limitations of the highly restricted form, suggesting that a soul which has "felt the weight of too much liberty" may find pleasure in being confined within such a "scanty plot of ground." This suggests the character of the lyrical pleasure derived from this form: a pleasure restrained, fixed, deriving a certain zest from the difficulty and finish of the formal expression, and-as has already been suggested-dependent very often on the combination of a concept of the mind with a related emotion.

Finally, we have to notice under lyrical forms of poetry a type which is allied to the song in lightness and grace, but distinguished

from the more familiar song types Vers de société. by both matter and manner. Both

manner and matter give it its name in a French phrase which has thus far found no adequate

* i. e., Milton. There were, it should be noted, not a few writers of "spiritual" sonnets even in the Elizabethan age.

This sort

English equivalent:* vers de société. of poetry takes as its theme, in the words of Professor Schelling, "man living in a highly organized state of society;" it turns "the conventions of social life into a subject for art." (Introduction to Seventeenth Century Lyrics.) Or, in the words of Mr. Austin Dobson, it represents the mood and manner of "those latter-day Athenians who, in town and country, spend their time in telling or hearing some new thing, and whose graver and deeper impulses are subordinated to a code of artificial manners." In the same connection one may note a stanza in reminiscent praise of the verse of Sir Frederick Locker-Lampson, in which Mr. Dobson again suggests the qualities of vers de société:

"a verse so neat,

So well-bred and so witty-
So finished in its last conceit,
So mixed of mirth and pity." +

All this is different from the usual lyrical method, which is likely to separate from their trivial environing associations the elemental emotions of man; yet the modern writers of society verse often touch their bantering manner with genuine feeling and imaginative insight. Examples of this type of

* The editor of a recent anthology of society verse, Miss Carolyn Wells, proposes the name "gentle verse."

† Both quotations are from the prefatory matter of the second Rowfant Catalogue (1901).

poetry will be found among the lyrics of Waller, Cowley, Herrick, Carew, and Prior, in its earlier manner; of the later manner William M. Praed, Charles S. Calverley, Sir Frederick Locker-Lampson, and Mr. Austin Dobson are notable representatives, so also, among American poets, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. A single stanza from Prior's verses called A Better Answer well exhibits the spirit and style of society

verse:

"What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows The difference there is betwixt nature and art: I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose: And they have my whimsies; but thou hast my heart."

Examples showing more of the tenderness, the gentle reminiscent manner, introduced into the form by the later poets, are Locker's To my Grandmother, Holmes's Dorothy Q. and Last Leaf, and Aldrich's Thalia, in which "a middle-aged lyrical poet is supposed to be taking leave of the Muse of Comedy." On a group of verse forms especially connected, in recent poetry, with vers de société, see below in chapter vi, pages 378-384.

For critical accounts of vers de société, one may see, besides the passage from Seventeenth Century Lyrics cited above, the preface of Locker-Lampson to the anthology called Lyra Elegantiarum, and Miss Wells's Preface to A Vers de Société Anthology.

Composite character of the drama.

C.-THE DRAMA.

The drama is unique among the forms of poetry in being not merely a form of poetry but in a sense an art by itself, or a union of arts. It represents life not only by means of speech, like the other literary arts, but by visible action, usually with a visible setting of scenery, and sometimes (as always in the Greek drama) with the additional aid of music and dancing. Thus it has laws of its own, and a history of its own, which differentiate it clearly from the other types of poetry. We may of course consider the drama only as literature, that is, only as written and read; but in that case we have to supply by the imagination (helped by the occasional suggestions of the author) all the action and some of the scenery. There is, moreover, a considerable body of drama written in prose, the general structure and method of which are not essentially different from that written in poetry, a fact which further suggests that the drama cannot be considered merely as a part of the territory covered by poetry. Much confusion in the history and criticism of the form would be avoided if this were frankly recognized.

Dramatic poetry, nevertheless, is one Lyric and epic qualities of the great types included in our study, and we have to consider it from that standpoint, omitting as far as possible those

combined.