which is unique of its kind, and of the highest order of excellence. As much almost may be said for the To-morrow' of John Collins, a lovely lyric, which appeared in a volume of the writer's verse, now deservedly forgotten, entitled Scripscrapologia.' The Rev. Charles Wolfe would be unremembered in our day were it not for his immortal lines on the death of Sir John Moore. A single song, indeed, witness the Auld Robin Gray' of Lady Anne Lindsay, may raise the singer to a place with the immortals, so precious in poetry is quality, so insignificant a factor is quantity in our estimate of a poet's work.

There was a time in the last century when poetry seemed dead, when verse-making had become a trade, and when the sound thought sometimes uttered in rhyme might have been more fittingly expressed in prose. But the present age, so notable for what may be called matter-of-fact aims, so eager in the pursuit of knowledge that might seem inimical to the special work of the poet, is remarkable at the same time for the ideality of its poetry, and among living poets are several whose exquisite gifts lie almost wholly in the direction of the lyric. To these it will suffice to allude, for it is not our object in this essay to examine the lyric poetry of living poets. Consider for an instant what such an exami

nation would involve. Mr. Browning is never more vigorous, more picturesque, more able to stir the pulses, than when he surrenders himself to the emotion of the ballad, and Mr. Tennyson, who has produced some of the sweetest lyrics in the language, and who, even in his blank verse and in his 'Idylls,' writes with the kind of movement that belongs to the lyric poet, has a claim in this respect not readily to be satisfied. "Lord! what a blessed thing it is," exclaims Dickens, of the 'Idylls,' “to read a man who really can write! I thought nothing could be finer than the first poem, till I came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to me to be absolutely unapproachable.” There is perhaps no modern poet who combines with a genius so exquisite, so profound a knowledge of his art. We may add, what the reader can scarcely fail to observe, that Mr. Tennyson's supreme excellence is always to be found in the lyric. The more indeed that we examine the poetry of the age, the more evident will it appear that its principal achievements have been performed in this field. In America, Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Lowell, and the venerable Bryant, to name three poets only out of many, are chiefly to be distinguished as lyrists. In our own country, it will suffice to mention but the names of Sir Henry

Taylor-successful in the song as in the drama-of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Rossetti and his sister, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Miss Ingelow, Mr. Buchanan, and Mr. Matthew Arnold (whose 'Scholar Gipsy,' and 'Forsaken Merman,' by the way, are of almost peerless beauty), to show how thoroughly the poetical genius of the time is penetrated with the spirit of lyric poetry.

Looking back over three centuries of our literature, it will be evident that the splendid achievements of this age are worthy of the early fathers of English poetry. It is surely remarkable that the most practical race in the world should have produced the noblest fictions, and the most imaginative verse.

ENGLISH RURAL POETRY.

THERE was a time when the term Rural Poetry was regarded as synonymous, or nearly so, with Pastoral Poetry. The most artificial verse ever written, and which, in its legitimate form, was "a slavish mimicry of classical remains," was confounded, at the beginning of the last century, with the poetry that describes the simple sights, sounds, and occupations of country life, the changes of the seasons, the colour of wayside flowers, the song of birds, the beauty of woods and meadows, and the manifold charms of rivers winding through rich pasture-lands, of sunny nooks, and shady lanes, and forest glades lying close to the haunts of rustics. Before Pope's time, and after it, a city poet, who knew nothing about the life of nature, or the ways of country livers, and who had probably never ventured beyond Epsom or Bath, would sing, as a matter of course, of shepherds and shepherdesses, and produce conventional pictures of the country unlike anything that existed outside

a verse-maker's covers. Edmund Spenser, it is true, following the examples of Theocritus and Virgil, had long before introduced this grotesque form of composition; and a still greater poet had also given a slight sanction to it by the publication of his immortal Lycidas;' but these poets-such is the power of genius-could make their shepherd swains discuss dogmatic theology while tending their sheep, without raising a smile; the incongruity of the position being atoned for in these cases by the rare beauty of the song. In the splendid English which Dryden knew how to write, we can enjoy a fable in which the controversy between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England is discussed by a milk-white hind and a spotted panther.

The Pastorals of Pope, although destitute, as Warton has pointed out, of a single rural image that is new, possess a certain smoothness of versification. They are well-nigh unreadable now, and the praise they won at the time from able critics sounds ridiculous to us. Both the poetry and the criticisms upon it are as foreign to modern taste as the euphuism of Lyly; but that Pope satisfied a want of his age-which was eminently artificial and prosaic—is evident from the mass of so-called pastoral poetry that was issued during the first half