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 such as the metres employed; and yet this is little more than an effort to define the English "lyric." Turn to Dr. Buchreim's Deutsche Lyrik, and we shall find even greater varieties of spirit (the Vollksleid, the Kirchenlied, songs of the Göttingen Hainbund, of Goethe, of the War of Liberation, of personal Weltschmerz) and of form (from the metres of Luther to those of Heine) in the development of the German "lyric." If, moreover, we were to examine the songs of France or Spain, of Italy or Russia—to say nothing of the literatures of the East—we should find many other and conflicting varieties of form and spirit summed up in the generalisation "lyric." Reverting, then, to Mr. Palgrave's attempted definition, it would be easy to prove that the lyrical idea it expresses can claim only limited truth even within the literary evolution of England. But students of comparative literature should rather thank Mr. Palgrave for an anthology exquisitely illustrating "the natural growth and evolution of our poetry" than find fault with a definition to which that evolution necessarily allows only limited accuracy.

The truth is that "lyric " poetry has changed prodigiously both in form and spirit, not only with differences of language and nationality, but with the alterations which social and individual character undergo in the development of any given community. If in the songs of the Shih King we find the sentiments of the Chinese family and its ancestor-worship, if in the hymns of the Rig-Veda we discover the spirit of the early Indian communities and their nature-worship, the song of the Saxon Scôp with its appeal to clan feelings, of the Norman troubadour with its feudal chivalry, of the English minstrel on Chevy Chace or Robin Hood, remind us that each country has its own "lyrical " developments