gives its peculiar quality to lyric verse, making
it "simple, sensuous, passionate" beyond
other species of Poetry, is always marked by
freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness.

To the lyric Poet all must seem new; each
sunrise "herrlich wie am ersten Tag." "Thou
know'st't is common," says Hamlet's mother,
speaking of his father's death, "Why seems it
so particular with thee?" But to men of the
lyrical temperament everything is "particu-
lar." Age does not alter their exquisite sense
of the novelty of experience. Tennyson's
lines on "Early Spring," written at seventy-
four, Browning's "Never the Time and the
Place" written at seventy-two, Goethe's
love-lyrics written when he was eighty, have
all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Some-
times this freshness seems due in part to the
Poet's early place in the development of his
national literature: he has had, as it were, the
first chance at his particular subject. There
were countless springs, of course, before a
nameless Poet, about 1250, wrote one of the
first English lyrics for which we have a con-
temporary musical score:

"Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu."

-233-