history is the basis of the story, in many cases the imagination of the poet soars beyond the earth, and strives to create and describe the history of new worlds, discovered by the imagination, and ingeniously to connect them with our own. Of heroic poems every one will readily point to the most notable examples. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the first describing the wrath of Achilles, and narrating the wonderful deeds in and around Troy, and the second relating the adventures of Ulysses, are the finest of the ancient heroic poems. Homer is, indeed, the father of Epic poetry.

Among other truly heroic poems we must also class Virgil's "Eneid," Dante's "Divina Commedia," Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and Milton's "Paradise Lost," all of which are renowned wherever literary culture has exerted the least influence.

Of the Poetic Romance Spenser's "Faerie Queene" is a magnificent example; and Byron's "Corsair" and "Lara" are well known as spirited illustrations. Such, also, is Moore's "Lalla Rookh," with its fine poetic stories. Of the next and humbler form of the Epic,-the Tales in Verse,-Crabbe's "Tales of the Hall," the "Village," and the "Borough," are examples. His design was to paint nature in low life, and Byron has called him "Nature's sternest painter,

yet the best." Of this kind are many of Wordsworth's poems.

It need hardly be asserted that epic poetry, in its highest forms, is only produced by the highest order of genius, and a glance at the course of history teaches us that epic poems of such an order are rarely produced-scarcely more than one in the same era, and after great intervals of time.

Cowper has justly and beautifully expressed this thought, in his Table-talk:

"Ages elapsed ere Homer's lamp appeared,
And ages ere the Mantuan Swan was heard;
To carry nature lengths unknown before,
To give a Milton birth, asked ages more.
Thus genius rose and set at ordered times,
And shot a day-spring into distant climes,
Ennobling every region that he chose;
He sunk in Greece, in Italy he rose ;
And, tedious years of Gothic darkness past,
Emerged all splendour in our isle at last;

Thus lovely halcyons dive into the main,

Then show far off their shining plumes again."

The mock-heroic has been already described and illustrated in the section (27) on Wit and Humour, to which it is really allied in its design and construction. It retains the form and external characteristics of epic poetry, but it places in heroic positions, and endows with heroic functions, meaner persons and objects, with the design of ridiculing the true heroes and their deeds.

(35.) Lyric Poetry.

Lyric Poetry, as the name indicates, meant poetry set to the music of the Lyra or Lute, and was supposed to be sung with an accompaniment, as our ballads are to the music of a guitar or piano-forte at the present day. Under the head of Lyric Poetry are ranged the following subdivisions :

The hymn, which is used in the praise of some Divinity, and, in the Christian worship, always in praise of God, and designed for a congregation; the song, which varies according to its subject, being of love, or war, or comic character; the ballad, which originally was the song of the dancers, and now means only a popular song of more pretension, perhaps, than the song just mentioned; and the ode, from the Greek won, a song, which was designed to express feelings of high excitement, and in its divisions of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, formed a prominent part of the Greek drama.

In more modern times the ode seems to have been longer than the other lyrical poems, and of a more dignified and stately nature. Such are the Odes of Keats, one of which is entitled an "Ode to Pan"—in imitation of the Greek poetry, and another the "Ode to a Nightingale." So, too, we have Dryden's "Ode to St. Cecilia," and Collins's "Ode on the Passions," and his exquisite “Ode to Evening;" and, among

American poets, Sprague's "Shakspeare Ode," and "Centennial Ode," may be mentioned as good examples of this form of poem. Although the modern ode is usually recited instead of sung, yet its arrangement is purely lyrical; and much of the pleasure in hearing it arises from its evident adaptation to music, and the musical cadences of the voice even in its recitation. One other form of Lyric Poetry is the elegy, which is a mournful and plaintive song, on the occasion of meditating the troubles of life, or the coming of death. We have the best illustration of this form in the famous Elegy of Gray, "Written in a Country Churchyard." We have also the beautiful dirge in

Cymbeline," written by Collins; and also Collins's Elegy on the Death of the Poet Thomson.”

(36.) Pastoral Poetry.

Expressive as this kind of poetry originally was of the life and manners of shepherds, from the Latin pastor, a shepherd, it has been extended to include the idyl, (from the Greek dos, form,) which is descriptive of nature and primitive country life, as the Idyls of Theocritus; and also the bucolic, which, as its name indicates, (from Bovxozos, a herdsman,) tells the manners and customs of countrymen who keep flocks and herds, of which the Bucolics of Virgil are an example. Perhaps the finest idyl, in modern

poetry, is "The Seasons," of Thomson.

Shen

stone's pastorals include, besides the descriptions of nature, portraits of manners and characters, as in his "Schoolmistress."

Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night" will be familiar to every one as a natural and touching illustration of the Idyl.

In the Eclogue, which is also pastoral poetry, there is usually a colloquy; the shepherds are introduced as the speakers. In this characteristic this properly comes, therefore, under the head of Dramatic Poetry, but as it is purely pastoral, it may be best classified here. The Idyl, in its most extended meaning, would include the Epitaph and appropriate Inscriptions, as upon grottoes, gateways, and country houses; and in many cases the Sonnet. But the sonnet, in its subject, often partakes more of an epic character. To the fine Idyls already mentioned we may add Beattie's "Minstrel," in its day very popular, and still charming in its pastoral descriptions, and Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," which combines as many charms as any pastoral in any language; charms of thought and language so familiar that it is quite unnecessary to refer to them, because, upon the mere mention of them the pictures arise, and the verses resound in the memory. The fine poem of Pope, entitled "The Messiah," he styled a Sacred Eclogue, but it is scarcely a just

name.