he senses; but here, again, in
different hands, the "thing," the metrical instrument, takes wholly
diverse characters, and we seek in vain for a formula that can include
Robert Browning and Gabriel Rossetti, William Barnes and Arthur Hugh
Clough._

_From this highly elaborated and extended species of lyric the
transition is easy to the Ode. In the Victorian age, the ode, in its
full Pindaric sense, has not been very frequently used. We have
specimens by Mr. Swinburne in which the Dorian laws are closely adhered
to. But the ode, in a more or less irregular form, whether paean or
threnody, has been the instrument of several of our leading lyrists. The
genius of Mr. Swinburne, even to a greater degree than that of Shelley,
is essentially dithyrambic, and is never happier than when it spreads
its wings as wide as those of the wild swan, and soars upon the very
breast of tempest. In these flights Mr. Swinburne attains to a volume of
sonorous melody such as no other poet, perhaps, of the world has
reached, and we may say to him, as he has shouted to the Mater
Triumphalis:--_

_"Darkness to daylight shall lift up thy paean,
Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale,
With wind-notes as of eagles AEschylean,
And Sappho singing in the nightingale."_

_Nothing could mark more picturesquely the wide diversity permitted in
Victorian lyric than to turn from the sonorous and tumultuous odes of
Mr. Swinburne to those of Mr. Patmore, in which stateliness of
contemplation and a peculiar austerity of tenderness find their
expression in odes of iambic cadence, the melody of which depends, not
in their headlong torrent of sound, but in the cunning variation of
catalectic pause. A similar form has been adopted by Lord De Tabley for
many of his gorgeous studies of antique myth, and by Tennyson for his
"Death of the Duke of Wellington." It is an error to call these iambic
odes "irregular," although they do not follow the classic rules with
strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The enchanting "I have led her
home," in "Maud," is an example of this kind of lyric at its highest
point of perfection._

_A branch of lyrical poetry which has been very widely cultivated in the
Victorian age is the philosophical, or gnomic, in which a serious chain
of thought, often illustrated by complex and various imagery, is held in
a casket of melodious verse, elaborately rhymed. Matthew Arnold was a
master of this kind of poetry, which takes its fo