narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. Every one knows the Lucy Gray and the Ruth of Wordsworth. Both poems are excellent; but the subject-matter of the narrative of Ruth is much more weighty and impressive to the poet's own feeling than that of the narrative of Lucy Gray, for which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed Ruth,— his great time, his annus mirabilis, about 1800,-strove to be simple; it was his mission to be simple; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use it; he would have used it if he could: but the gravity of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form; he is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more augustness, to shake out its folds.

"The wretched parents all that night

Went shouting far and wide;

But there was neither sound nor sight

To serve them for a guide."

That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other

hand :

"I, too, have passed her on the hills,
Setting her little water-mills

By spouts and fountains wild;
Such small machinery as she turned,
Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned,
A young and happy child."

Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet to adopt a form of more volume than the simple ballad-form?

I

It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking; the question is about the use of the ballad-form for this. say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer's is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate; and that Homer's translator must not adopt it, because it even leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand style rather than towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which conveys it, is not so independent of this vehicle, so absorbing and powerful in itself,—as the matter of purely emotional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily. To go again for an illustration to Wordsworth;-our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gift and promise ;-in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have:

"And I can listen to thee yet;

Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget

That golden time again."

Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple balladform, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler form, as grand as the

"An innocent life, yet far astray!"

of Ruth; as the

"There is a comfort in the strength of love"

of Michael. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand style.

"O lang, lang may their ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence
Come sailing to the land.

"O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi' their gold combs in their hair,
Waiting for their ain dear lords,
For they'll see them nae mair."

But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter fills it over and over again,-is, indeed, in itself, all in all,-one must not infer its effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great body of a narrative.

But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a better instrument; he took this instrument because he was a different poet from them; so different,-not only so much better, but so essentially different,that he is not to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the Excursion)

"On God, on Nature, and on human life," which they have acquired for themselves.

In the