me ye heavy states of night,
Do my father's spirit right;
Soundings baleful let me borrow,
Burthening my song with sorrow:
Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings
By thee, are turned into springs.

"Come you Virgins of the night
That in dirges sad delight,
Quire my anthems; I do borrow
Gold nor pearl, but sounds of sorrow.
Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings
By thee, are turned into springs."

It does not matter who wrote that--the point is its occurrence in an
ordinary collection of songs to music neither better nor worse than many
others. When we read such verses as this, or as the still more charming
Address to Love given on page 122, there is evident at once the _non so
che_ which distinguishes this period. There is a famous story of a
good-natured conversation between Scott and Moore in the latter days of Sir
Walter, in which the two poets agreed that verse which would have made a
fortune in their young days appeared constantly in magazines without being
much regarded in their age. No sensible person will mistake the meaning of
the apparent praise. It meant that thirty years of remarkable original
production and of much study of models had made possible and common a
standard of formal merit which was very rare at an earlier time. Now this
standard of formal merit undoubtedly did not generally exist in the days of
Elizabeth. But what did generally exist was the "wind blowing where it
listeth," the presence and the influence of which are least likely to be
mistaken or denied by those who are most strenuous in insisting on the
importance and the necessity of formal excellence itself. I once undertook
for several years the criticism of minor poetry for a literary journal,
which gave more room than most to such things, and during the time I think
I must have read through or looked over probably not much less than a
thousand, certainly not less than five or six hundred volumes. I am
speaking with seriousness when I say that nothing like the note of the
merely casual pieces quoted or referred to above was to be detected in more
than at the outside two or three of these volumes, and that where it seemed
to sound faintly some second volume of the same author's almost always came
to smother it soon after. There was plenty of quite respectable poetic
learning: next to nothing of the poetic spirit. Now in the period dealt
with in this volume that spirit is everywhere, and so ar