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It is so sweet! a little hill town! And beyond are Bassano and Belluno, and somewhere in the mist before you get to those snow-heads is Pieve da Cadore." Her voice dropped caressingly over the last vowels. The mere, procession of names was a lyric sent across sea to the main.
For as yet, even in the nominally or intentionally tragic and historic work of the first period, we descry always and everywhere and still preponderant the lyric element, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac element. All these queens and heroines of history and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than a Sophoclean grace of bearing and of speech.
The very stones suggested peace. A mellow and aristocratic flavour clung to those pink dwellings that nestled, world forgotten, in a green content. . . . One of those few modern houses was the Villa Mon Repos. There was a curious history attached to the place. It had been built about a century ago at the orders of an eccentric French lady, a lyric poetess, who professed to be tired of life.
"'Pa had a lot of faith in that lyric poem, says Sammy to me, 'an' no one had a better right to, for he wrote it himself, but the publishing game was dull an' depressed about the time he got ready to issue it forth, an' he was necessitated to compensate the cost of printing it himself.
And thus, from its humility, its sense of weakness and weariness, its consciousness of sin and failure, combined with its deep apprehension of the stainless beauty of the moral law, this lyric has found its way to the hearts of all who find the world and temptation and fear too strong, all who through repeated failure have learned that they cannot even be true to what they so pathetically desire and admire; who would be brave and vigorous if they could, but, as it is, can only hope to be just led step by step, helped over the immediate difficulty, past the dreaded moment; whose heart often fails them, and who have little of the joy of God; who can only trust that, if they go astray, the mercy of God will yet go out to seek them; who cannot even hope to run in the way of God's beloved commandments, till He has set their heart at liberty.
Throughout the fifteenth century the lyric drama of Italy continued to be a denizen of courts and to be saturated with what has been called the "passionate sensualism" of the Italian genius. The rivalry of lords, spiritual and temporal, of popes, of dukes and princes, in the luxury of their fêtes was a salient phenomenon of the time.
The explanation is simple enough; it is that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ordinary man.
Once endowed with the lyric temperament and the command of technique, their cry of love or longing, of grief or patriotism, is the inevitable resultant from a real situation or desire. Sometimes, like children, they do not tell us very clearly what they are crying about, but it is easy to discover whether they are, like children, "making believe." The Objects of the Lyric Vision
Shelley was not interested in things themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem, To Night, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them "Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes."
We must look, above all, at the lyric poetry of France, Provence, Germany, and Sicily in the early Middle Ages. Vos qui très bien ameis i petit mentendeis Por l'amor de Ihesu les pucelles ameis. Nos trouvons en escris de sainte auctoriteis Ke pucelle est la fleur de loyaulment ameir.
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