poet, and yet it is himself for all that. It is not himself he gives us, but something else as best he can. He is, in short, an actor, who runs through an infinite variety of parts. First he lingers on this, then on that; he reviews momentarily a scene, then maybe a group of people. But whatever he may endeavour to reproduce, it is throughout his individual artistic soul-life, his own experience, his own feeling, which is vitally interwoven with it. (_γγ_) But, further, in so far as the individuality of self-conscious life is the true source of the Lyric, the poet is justified in limiting his expression to his own moods and reflections without any further combination of them in a concrete situation that includes a truly objective character. It is in this direction that examples of what is little more than an empty fluting for fluting's sake, the song and trill simply on its own account, will yet give us genuine lyrical satisfaction. In such the words are to a more or less extent merely the vehicle of cheerfulness or sorrow, whose effect, moreover, very readily serves as an invitation to musical accompaniment. Folk-songs especially very often amount to little more than this. In the songs of Goethe, too, though we may no doubt discover here a more defined and abundant mode of expression, it is not unfrequently simply a single and transitory bit of merriment that is vouchsafed, a passing mood that the poet does not attempt to throw aside, but on the tune of which he pipes for a moment in his tiny song. In others, of course, his treatment of similar moods is on a larger scale, even systematic, as, for instance, in the poem: "_Ich hab mein Sach' auf nichts gestellt_," in which the poet passes before us as things that come and vanish, first, money and property, then women, travel, fame, honour, and, last of all, fight and war, retaining throughout as the ever-recurring refrain of stability his own free and careless cheerfulness. Conversely, however, the intimate individual life may from the same point of view grow in depth and expansion, in conditions of the soul of the most imposing proportions and ideas that embrace the world itself. A considerable number of Schiller's poems are of this type. What is great, what opens to intelligence, this is the incentive of his heart. But he will neither celebrate in hymn fashion a religious or otherwise profound subject; nor will he be the minstrel who looks for inspiration without him to the pertinent fact or occasion. He sings in the presence of, and inspired by, his own soul-life, the highest interest of which are the ideals of life, beauty, and the imperishable claims and thoughts of our humanity. (_c_) There is a _third_ consideration we have to deal with in connection with the general character of lyric poetry. It is the nature of the general stage of human development and culture from which the isolated poem originates.