Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/296

266 to the supreme, such as that of Shelley's "Lines to an Indian Air," The ecstasy of song. or the more spiritual ecstasy of his invocation to the West Wind:

Of recent English lyrical poets Mrs. Browning is "Das Ewigweibliche." one of the most impassioned. Her lips were touched with fire; her songs were magnetic with sympathy, ardor, consecration. But our women poets of the century usually have written from the heart; none more so than Emma Lazarus, whose early verse had been that of an art-pupil, and who died young,—but not before she seized the harp of Judah and made it give out strains that all too briefly renewed the ancient fervor and inspiration.

Every note of emotion has its varying organ-stops: "Fill all the stops of Life with tuneful breath." religious feeling, for instance, whether perfectly allied with music in cloistral hymns, or expressed objectively in studies like Tennyson's "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," and Elizabeth Lloyd's "Milton in his Blindness," or rising to the eloquent height of Coleridge's Chamouni Hymn. So it is with martial songs and national hymns, from Motherwell's "Cavalier's Song," and Campbell's "Ye Mariners of England," to the Marseillaise hymn, to "My Maryland"