Although the Elizabethan age was great in all forms of pure literature, except the prose romance and the satire, and was not wholly barren even of these, yet it was more copious, more uniformly excellent in the lyric, than in any other. Sir Walter Scott has spoken of the wind of poetry which blew throughout that wonderful generation. He was thinking of the drama; but this general inspiration which gives its grandeur to the activity of the time is to be traced more widely, and with less admixture of weakness in its songs, than in any other of its manifold activities. But this very extension of the lyric faculty, and the number of the singers, makes it not merely difficult but impossible to deal fully with the subject within the limits of our space. Of the sonnet writers we can speak with some approach to completeness, for there the field, though large, is not boundless. But the freer forms of lyric spread over all the life and literature of England. Raleigh, who was a soldier, politician, discoverer, colonist, historian, political writer, and amateur chemist, was also a lyric poet of more than note. So were the Jesuit missionary Southwell and the courtier Earl of Oxford. Some of the most beautiful lyrics in the language were written by pamphleteers, prose story-writers, and dramatists. The composer wrote his own songs, and some of them are among the best, while many are only just below that level. So much was the time penetrated by poetic fire, that gems of verse are to be found in its song-books for which no known author can be traced. [SN: _The Collections and Song-books._]