内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and it is much the same with a lyric. It is hit or miss with it: if it does not at once approve itself to the reader it is at once condemned. It may be otherwise with other kinds of poetry; but with the lyric it is a rule, almost or quite without exceptions. It is at once the easiest, and the most difficult of poetic achievements: the easiest, that is, to the born singer, and the hardest to those whose music, instead of springing upwards as from a fountain, has to be drawn op painfully as from a well. And it is hard to explain why a lyric is beautiful, or for what quality it should be admired. To have no liking for the lyrics of Campion or Herrick, or of the many other lyrical poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is to confess oneself to be without a taste for poetry at all; but one is no more called upon to explain why he admires these things than why he admires the nightingale's song. Therefore I shall not attempt to prove that Strode's lyrical poems are worthy of admiration. If the reader does not at the first reading appreciate the beauty of " When Orpheus Sweetly did Complayne," " In Commendation of Musick," " O tell me, tell, thou God of Wynde," and " As I out of a Casement Sent," it is not likely that anything I can say will enable him to do so. Of the famous lyric on Melancholy, which, as I shall show later on, is probably Strode's and not Fletcher's, I will not now speak. It is to be wished that our poet had devoted more of his time to the writing of lyrics rather than to the composition of the many occasional pieces which are to be found in the present volume; for these, though always ingenious and subtle, and sometimes witty and humorous, would have been well exchanged for a few more of his lyrics. He has left enough of them, however (if I amnot much mista...