in any language, are "Oft in the stilly Night," "When
in Death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the Beach." They all
exemplify what has been pointed out above, the complete adaptation of
words to music and music to words, coupled with a decidedly high quality
of poetical merit in the verse, quite apart from the mere music. It can
hardly be necessary to quote them, for they are or ought to be familiar
to everybody; but in selecting these three I have no intention of
distinguishing them in point of general excellence from scores, nay
hundreds of others. "Go where Glory waits thee" is the first of the
Irish melodies, and one of those most hackneyed by the enthusiasm of
bygone Pogsons. But its merit ought in no way to suffer on that account
with persons who are not Pogsons. It ought to be possible for the
reader, it is certainly possible for the critic, to dismiss Pogson
altogether, to wave Pogson off, and to read anything as if it had never
been read before. If this be done we shall hardly wonder at the delight
which our fathers, who will not compare altogether badly with ourselves,
took in Thomas Moore. "When he who adores thee" is supposed on pretty
good evidence to have been inspired by the most hollow and senseless of
all pseudo-patriotic delusions, a delusion of which the best thing that
can be said is that "the pride of thus dying for" it has been about the
last thing that it ever did inspire, and that most persons who have
suffered from it have usually had the good sense to take lucrative
places from the tyrant as soon as they could get them, and to live
happily ever after. But the basest, the most brutal, and the bloodiest
of Saxons may recognise in Moore's poem the expression of a possible, if
not a real, feeling given with infinite grace and pathos. The same
string reverberates even in the thrice and thousand times hackneyed Harp
of Tara. "Rich and rare were the Gems she wore" is chiefly comic opera,
but it is very pretty comic opera; and the two pieces "There is not in
the wide world" and "How dear to me" exemplify, for the first but by no
means for the last time, Moore's extraordinary command of the last
phase of that curious thing called by the century that gave him birth
Sensibility. We have turned Sensibility out of doors; but he would be a
rash man who should say that we have not let in seven worse devils of
the gushing kind in her comparatively innocent room.

Then we may skip not a few pieces, only