_If we examine more closely the forms which lyric poetry has taken since 1830, we shall find that certain influences at work in the minds of our leading writers have led to the widest divergence in the character of lyrical verse. It will be well, perhaps, to consider in turn the leading classes of that work. It was not to be expected that in an age of such complexity and self-consciousness as ours, the pure song, the simple trill of bird-like melody, should often or prominently be heard. As civilization spreads, it ceases to be possible, or at least it becomes less and less usual, that simple emotion should express itself with absolute naïveté. Perhaps Burns was the latest poet in these islands whose passion warbled forth in perfectly artless strains; and he had the advantage of using a dialect still unsubdued and unvulgarized. Artlessness nowadays must be the result of the most exquisitely finished art; if not, it is apt to be insipid, if not positively squalid and fusty. The obvious uses of simple words have been exhausted; we cannot, save by infinite pains and the exercise of a happy genius, recover the old spontaneous air, the effect of an inevitable arrangement of the only possible words._ _This beautiful direct simplicity, however, was not infrequently secured by Tennyson, and scarcely less often by Christina Rossetti, both of whom have left behind them jets of pure emotional melody which compare to advantage with the most perfect specimens of Greek and Elizabethan song. Tennyson did not very often essay this class of writing, but when he did, he rarely failed; his songs combine, with extreme naturalness and something of a familiar sweetness, a felicity of workmanship hardly to be excelled. In her best songs, Miss Rossetti is scarcely, if at all, his inferior; but her judgment was far less sure, and she was more ready to look with complacency on her failures. The songs of Mr. Aubrey de Vere are not well enough known; they are sometimes singularly charming. Other poets have once or twice succeeded in catching this clear natural treble,--the living linnet once captured in the elm, as Tusitala puts it; but this has not been a gift largely enjoyed by our Victorian poets._