"Man, torn with love, with inward furies blasted,
Drowned with despair, with fleshly lustings shaken,
Cannot for this with heaven be distasted:

Love, fury, lustings out of man are taken.
Then man endure thyself, those clouds will vanish.
Life is a top which whipping Sorrow driveth,
Wisdom must bear what our flesh cannot banish,
The humble lead, the stubborn bootless striveth:
Or, man, forsake thyself, to heaven turn thee,
Her flames enlighten nature, never burn thee."

And again:

"Whenas man's life, the light of human lust,
In socket of his earthly lanthorn burns,
That all his glory unto ashes must,

And generations to corruption turns,

Where time doth end, and thoughts accuse the dead,
Where all to come is one with all that was;

Then living men ask how he left his breath,

That while on earth he lived never thought of death"

"

"The two great sources of religion, Christian and Pagan, ran side by side, says Taine, "they were collected in the same vessel, without imagining that the wisdom of reason and nature could mar the wisdom of faith and revelation."

The spirit of melancholy and pathos, does not come from religious doubt alone. We find the most sentimental poems among the Victorian poems and they are sentimental not because of the subject, but because of the manner in which the subject is treated. Some of the most commonplace subjects have been treated in the most tenderly pathetic manner. The poets have gone to the extreme of sentimentality in this, their object being to appeal to the finer emotions, and when the world seemed cold, old and dig

nified, the poet found it necessary to appeal through lovelove void of the burning passion of the Elizabethans but

full of that gentle, sweet, and sympathetic strain of pathos.

The world in 1800 was no longer the impulsive, eager, confidential youth of 1600 it was old in years and older in experience, had seen fortune fail, and grown distrustful; that which had once appealed would appeal no longerthe heart was too cold to respond to gaiety and laughteran appeal to be at all effective must be made to tears, and the poems once gorgeously dressed were now veiled in soft greys.

The effect is sometimes visible in the sub

ject matter itself and at other times simply in the general atmosphere and spirit of the poem.

Barnes, Kingsley, Landor, O'Shaughnessy,

Patmore,

C. G. Rossetti and G. C. D. Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris and others are all influenced by this spirit of the age, and each tries in his own individual manner to touch the cords of human affection and sympathy. The minute comparison of the lyrics of these men will follow as closely as possible the following order of classification: Sacred Lyric, the Reflective, the Patriotic, the lyrics of Grief, of Nature, and the Convivial lyric. In this way we can see the same general subject treated by both Elizabethans and Victorians. Poems will be quoted and cited with

The