Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/131

 of the Vedic hymns, or like the medieval service of the Mass, contained the germs of a drama.

§ 31. The war-song, the marriage-hymn, the dirge, chants to the ancestral gods, songs of the spring and autumn festivals—these and such as these would nearly exhaust the varieties of the clan's choral poetry. Many of these we perhaps hear at a distance in the more refined music of individual song-makers—the war-song, for example, in the embatêria or anapæstic marches of Tyrtæus, the dirge in such fragments of the thrênos as those of Pindar. In any work aiming at an exhaustive treatment of early choral song, the close communion of music and early poetry would require a special study of vocal and instrumental music in their beginnings. Such treatment in the present work, however, is clearly impossible; and the student can only be referred to the works of specialists, such as that of Dr. Flach previously mentioned. The beginnings of music and metres appear