lutely
independent of any such aid. It may be that certain songs of Tennyson
and Christina Rossetti have been with great popularity "set," as it is
called, "to music." So far as the latter is in itself successful, it
stultifies the former; and we admit at last that the idea of one art
aiding another in this combination is absolutely fictitious. The
beauty--even the beauty of sound--conveyed by the ear in such lyrics as
"Break, break, break," or "When I am dead, my dearest," is obscured, is
exchanged for another and a rival species of beauty, by the most
exquisite musical setting that a composer can invent._

_The age which has been the first to accept this condition, then, should
be rich in frankly lyrical poetry; and this we find to be the case with
the Victorian period. At no time has a greater mass of this species of
verse been produced, not even in the combined Elizabethan and Jacobean
age. But when we come to consider the quality of this later harvest of
song, we observe in it a far less homogeneous character. We can take a
piece of verse, and decide at sight that it must be Elizabethan, or of
the age of the Pleiade in France, or of a particular period in Italy.
Even an ode of our own eighteenth century is hardly to be confounded
with a fragment from any other school. The great Georgian age introduced
a wide variety into English poetry; and yet we have but to examine the
selected jewels strung into so exquisite a carcanet by Mr. Palgrave in
his "Golden Treasury" to notice with surprise how close a family
likeness exists between the contributions of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats,
and Byron. The distinctions of style, of course, are very great; but the
general character of the diction, the imagery, even of the rhythm, is
more or less identical. The stamp of the same age is upon them,--they
are hall-marked 1820._

_It is perhaps too early to decide that this will never be the case with
the Victorian lyrics. While we live in an age we see the distinction of
its parts, rather than their co-relation. It is said that the Japanese
Government once sent over a Commission to report upon the art of Europe;
and that, having visited the exhibitions of London, Paris, Florence, and
Berlin, the Commissioners confessed that the works of the European
painters all looked so exactly alike that it was difficult to
distinguish one from another. The Japanese eye, trained in absolutely
opposed conventions, could not tell the difference betwe