There is a yet further type of composition of this general class, to which we must concede a more exalted or, at least, a more widely embracing content. The large majority of Protestant hymns composed for spiritual edification are essentially songs. They express the yearning after God, the plea for His grace, repentance, hope, trust, doubts, faith, and the like of the religious heart; no doubt, in the first instance, to meet the importunity of the individual soul, but at the same time in a manner of general significance, wherein such feelings and states of soul may or ought to apply, to a greater or less extent, to every member of the Christian Church. (_ββ_) We may further return to another division of this class, the _sonnet, sestine, elegy, epistle_, and a few other such modes. These latter assert themselves as distinct from the ordinary sphere of song previously discussed. The immediacy of feeling and expression is emphasized in this class as a mediating bond with reflection, and a contemplation which, while remaining alert to many features of its subject, conceives the particular detail of perception and soul-experience under more general points of view. Science, learning, and, in short, a wide culture may be here effective; and if also in all the relations thus established the personal life, which connects and mediates in itself the particular fact with the general concept, is and remains the insistent and predominant factor, yet the standpoint presupposed is of a wider and more universal import than that of the ordinary song. The Italians in particular have given us splendid examples of a highly sensitive type of feeling and reflection in their sonnets and sestines. Such not only directly expresses in a given situation states of yearning, grief, longing, and the like, or the counterfeit of external objects, with a peculiarly intimate concentration, but includes many a diversion, many a shrewd glance into mythology and history, whether past or present, while remaining throughout able to return upon itself, true to the fundamental demand of selfrestriction and concentration. The simplicity of the song is incompatible with a culture of this kind. The exalted character of the ode is equally disallowed. As a primary consequence of this the possibility of actual musical delivery vanishes; but, on the other hand, as some set-off to the absence of musical accompaniment, the verbal expression itself, in its sound and composed rhymes, becomes a melodic flow of speech. The Elegy, moreover, may, in the measure of its syllables, its meditation, its comments, and the descriptive display of emotional life, assume the form of the Epic.