(_a_) The content of the lyric work of art cannot comprise the development of an objective action in its possibilities of expansion into all the breadth and wealth of a world. It is the single person, and along with him the isolated fact of situation and objects, no less than the mode and manner in which the soul is made aware of itself in such content, with its private judgments, its joy, its wonder, its pain, and its feeling, which it presents to our vision. Through this principle of division and particularity, as present in the Lyric, the content may be of the greatest variety, associated with every tendency of national life. There is, however, this essential distinction, that whereas the Epos combines in one and the same work the spirit of a people in all its breadth, and in its actual deed and fashion, the more definite content of lyrical poetry limits itself to one particular aspect, or at least is unable successfully to attain to the explicit completeness and exposition which the Epos ought at least to possess. The entire wealth of lyrical poetry in a nation may, therefore, no doubt embrace the collective exuberance of national interest, idea, and purpose; but it is not the single lyrical poem that can do this. The Lyric is not called upon to produce Bibles such as we have discovered in Epic poetry. It does, however, enjoy the advantage of being able to touch upon every conceivable aspect of national development; whereas the true Epos is limited to distinct epochs of a primitive age, and its success in our more recent times of prosaic culture is very jejune. (_α_) Within this field of particularization we have, to start with, the _universal_ as such--the supreme height and depth of human belief, imagination, and knowledge--the essential content of religion, art, ay, even of scientific thought, in so far as the same is adaptable to the form of imagination and creation, and can enter the sphere of emotions. Consequently general opinions, what is of permanent substance in a view of the world, the profounder grasp of far-reaching social conditions are all not excluded from the Lyric; and a considerable part of the material I have referred to[4] when discussing the more incomplete types of the Epic falls rightly, and with pertinency into the sphere now under review.