It is strange how little of the lyrical quality (in the poet’s sense of the term) there was in the music of the eighteenth century. The lyric is that form of poetry which expresses individual emotion. It is thus sharply to be contrasted in spirit with all other forms--the epic, which tells a long and heroic story; the narrative, which tells a shorter and more special story; the dramatic, which pictures the characters as acting; the satiric, the didactic, and the other forms of more or less objective intent. No less is the lyric to be contrasted with the other types in point of form. For, whereas the epic, the dramatic, and the rest can add detail upon detail at great length, and lives by its quantity of good things, the lyric stands or falls at the first blow. Either it transmits to the reader the emotion it seeks to express, or it does not, and if it does not then the longer it continues the greater bore it becomes. For all the forms of objective poetry can get their effect by reproducing objective details in abundance. But to transmit an emotion one must somehow get at the heart of it--by means of a suggestive word or phrase or of a picture that instantly evokes an emotional experience. The accuracy of the lyrical expression depends upon selecting just the right details and omitting all the rest. Thus the lyric must necessarily be short, while most of the other poetic forms can be indefinitely extended. And, besides, an emotion usually lasts in its purity only for a moment. You divine it the instant it is with you, or you have lost it. It cannot be prolonged by conscious effort; it cannot be recalled by thinking about it. The expression of it will therefore last but for a moment. It must be caught on the wing. And the power so to catch an emotion is a very special power. Few poets have had it in the highest degree. Those who have had it, such as Burns, Goethe, or Heine, can, in a dozen lines or so, take their place beside the greatest poets of all time. The special beauty of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ or ‘_Der du von dem Himmel bist_’ or ‘_Du bist wie eine Blume_’ is as far removed from that of the longer poem--say, ‘Il Penseroso’ or Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Man’--as a tiny painting by Vermeer is from a canvas by Veronese. Emotional expression, of course, exists in many types of poetry, but it cannot be sustained and hence is only a sort of recurrent by-product. The lyric is distinguished by the fact that in it individual emotional expression is the single and unique aim.