"Music when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory: Odours when sweet violets sicken Live within the sense they quicken; Rose leaves when the rose is dead Are heaped for the beloved's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on." There is no doubt of Shelley's superiority; but on the other hand Shelley's words, if sung, would not carry their sense so easily as Moore's. The mind would lose itself in the quick succession of metaphors; and it is noticeable in the _Melodies_ how often the whole song is merely the skilful and deliberate evolution of a single metaphor--an art akin to the rhetorician's. This is true even of the famous "Oh breathe not his name"; and, indeed, it is not less true that Emmet's utterance was the real poem--Moore's only an ingenious amplification of the thought--or rather of a part of it. One must bear in mind, then, that Moore's lyrics are verse written for public utterance, designed to produce their impression instantly, and not to sink slowly into the mind: and it is useless to compare them with the packed thought of Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth's odes, or whatever else is in the highest category of lyric poetry. There is, however, a class of verse to which hardly anything can be preferred, and in it are not only the songs of Shakespeare, but some of Scott's and many of Burns's; music as simple as a bird's, dealing in the simplest emotions, free from all taint of rhetoric. In that class I do not think that anything of Moore's can be placed. But one must remember when Moore wrote. He wrote under the influence of the eighteenth century, when the reaction towards a style less coloured by convention had barely set in. He wrote, it is true, when Scott did, and not long after Burns; but both Burns and Scott (whenever Scott is at his best) had the guiding inspiration of a perfect style in the Lowland vernacular poetry, never sophisticated by criticism, or by the intrusion of a dialect of polite prose. And if one compares Moore's lyrics with the best that Burns wrote _in English_, when liable to the influence of Gray and the rest, I do not think it is to Burns that the preference will be given--by the impartial arbiter, who should be neither Scot nor Irish. It is, however, unreasonable to talk about Moore's lyrics as a whole, for the work falls into two distinct categories, and in one of these Moore must be pronounced the equal of any man who ever lived. The lighter numbers breathe the very spirit of gaiety, united to a real distinction of style:-- "Drink to her, who long Hath waked the poet's sigh, The girl who gave to song What gold could never buy." Still more characteristic perhaps is another, so melodious and so roguish:--