her?
Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
And this last fairest tress of all,
--So fair, see, ere I let it fall?_

_"Because, you spend your lives in praisings,
To praise, you search the wide world over:
Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught--speak truth--above her?
Above this tress, and this I touch,
But cannot praise, I love so much!"_

_And so is this:--_

_"Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will._

_"This be the verse yon grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."_

_But who would believe that the writers of these were contemporaries?_

_If we examine more closely the forms which lyric poetry has taken since
1830, we shall find that certain influences at work in the minds of our
leading writers have led to the widest divergence in the character of
lyrical verse. It will be well, perhaps, to consider in turn the leading
classes of that work. It was not to be expected that in an age of such
complexity and self-consciousness as ours, the pure song, the simple
trill of bird-like melody, should often or prominently be heard. As
civilization spreads, it ceases to be possible, or at least it becomes
less and less usual, that simple emotion should express itself with
absolute naivete. Perhaps Burns was the latest poet in these islands
whose passion warbled forth in perfectly artless strains; and he had the
advantage of using a dialect still unsubdued and unvulgarized.
Artlessness nowadays must be the result of the most exquisitely finished
art; if not, it is apt to be insipid, if not positively squalid and
fusty. The obvious uses of simple words have been exhausted; we cannot,
save by infinite pains and the exercise of a happy genius, recover the
old spontaneous air, the effect of an inevitable arrangement of the only
possible words._

_This beautiful direct simplicity, however, was not infrequently secured
by Tennyson, and scarcely less often by Christina Rossetti, both of whom
have left behind them jets of pure emotional melody which compare to
advantage with the most perfect specimens of Greek and Elizabethan song.
Tennyson did not very often essay this class of writing, but when he
did, he rarely failed; his songs combine, with extreme naturalness and
something of a familiar