Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/65

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The impulse to music is the lyric's source. But the fragile, delicately wrought vessel of lyrical form is capable of inexhaustible variety and wealth of content. It may hold as an aroma the evanescent mood of a moment; or into it may be poured the accumulated treasures of a ripe experience. The only limitation of a lyric is that it shall sing; otherwise it is free to range earth and sky and the inmost chambers of the heart.

The lyric, therefore, is a poet's fullest outpouring of himself. More than any other form of poetry it is toned to his mood, and breathes the intensity of his emotion. But it is capable also of a burden of thought, provided only that the thought take wing and rise from the shell of abstraction into the full-embodied life of warm and colored image. In its simplest import the lyric is a cry.