Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/245

Rh gifts of certain bards, amuse yourselves by translating Pope, Tennyson, Emerson, Autre temps, autres mœurs. Browning, into one another's measures and styles, and you will find the result suggestive.

Three, at least, of these poets have at times a delicious humor and fancy, as in "The Humor as a Rape of the Lock," Humor as a poetic element. "The Talking Oak," poetic element "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," "The Pied Piper," etc. Humor, in the sense of fun, is doubtless another lyrical heresy. But humor is the overflow of genius,—the humor compounded of mirth and pathos, of smiles and tears,—and in the poems cited, and in Thackeray's ballads, it speaks for the universality of the poet's range. While certain notes in excess are fatal to song, in due subordination they supply a needful relief, and act as a fillip to the zest of the listener.

In speaking, as I have, of measures and diction suited to the English language, it must Eclectic genius of our English tongue. be with reservation. That language has advanced of late so rapidly from the simple to the complex, that it seems ready to assimilate whatever is most of worth in the vocabularies and forms of many tongues. In Pope's time it had thrown away, "like the base Indian," half the riches bequeathed by Chaucer and the dramatists; nevertheless, an age of asceticism often leads to one of prodigal vigor. It required long years after Pope, and a French Revolution, to renew the affluence of English letters, but if the process was slow