In England in the first part of the nineteenth century song writing, as we have seen in another chapter,[27] was at a very low ebb. The chief output of songs was in the street ballad class and in the slightly superior opera ballad. The ballad opera of the nineteenth century was not that of the previous century, of which ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ was a type. The newer ballad opera was usually romantic, somewhat elaborate, and composed by one musician instead of ten. Of this opera ‘The Bohemian Girl’ by Michael Balfe (1808-1870) is an excellent example. Three of its ‘ballads’--‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,’ ‘The Heart Bowed Down,’ and ‘When Other Lips’--are among the best known of household songs. And if we except the omnipresent street ballad and ‘occasional’ song (such as cheap pæans of triumph over Napoleon) such lyrics were the chief item in English song. Their beauty is obvious to everybody. They deserve their long life and popularity. But it cannot be said that they are an interpretation of their text, as is the case in a song by Schubert. In addition to his opera ballads Balfe has at least one thoroughly fine song to his credit--‘Killarney,’ said to have been written on his deathbed. Rarely has a conscious composer caught the true Irish idiom and flavor as Balfe did here. Balfe’s once popular setting of Longfellow’s ‘The Day Is Done’ is admirably expressive. Sir Henry Bishop (1786-1855) and Julius Benedict (1804-1885) were popular composers of the time, known rather by their operas than by their songs. But of the group only William Vincent Wallace (1814-1865), in addition to Balfe, can be said to have lived. His ‘Maritana’ is still occasionally performed, and the song, ‘Scenes That Are Brightest,’ from that work, has a popularity analogous to that of ‘The Heart Bowed Down.’ But whatever occasional beauties may have lived from the England of the early nineteenth century, we must feel how dead the period was productively. Much of the English music of the time is _gauche_ in the extreme, and none of it shows any of the creative vigor which goes to make history. III