chaos, which supplies a key, or offers a ruling principle likely
to be of use in the later record.

What, then, was the character of the impulse that gave the
breath and the spirit of life to song, and moulded from the
beginning of things the genius inspiring lyric poetry? We
need not in seeking an answer attempt any complete philo-
sophy of the lyric. We can leave it to the folklorist to
elaborate the theories of the communal strain in folk-song,
and may be satisfied as lovers of verse to accept provisionally
the old idea of a savage confronting fate and the elements,
with his squaw and her babe by her side. He, we perceive,
must soon have taken to uttering ejaculatory syllables; long
before he had learnt to use his words with any syntax, or
anything but a rude assonance and a rhythm dictated by the
sustaining power and the suspiration of a single breath. When
the wild man had named the first things--earth, fire, water;
man and woman; sun and moon; quick and dead: we know
that he must have also felt the need of expressing his joy and
terror and other direct emotions. We cannot think of him
at a stage where the mother's love for the child or the youth's
for the maid, the brave's challenge or the squaw's lament, did
not prompt an outcry, however rude and artless. In that
cry which at the first iteration tended, according to a well-
known law, to become modulated, we have the essential atom
out of which has grown all the intricate melody of words which
we agree to call lyrical.

It does not greatly matter that in building up our convention,
and all that goes with the lyric "make-believe," we first
subtracted music from the art in one form, and then re-added
it in another; or that the lyre presently became only a figurative
instrument, and afforded only an imaginary accompaniment
(on which, however, still depended a certain part of its effect).
So far we are occupied with the primary emotions that con-
ditioned song before it was a literary art at all; and there
we cannot mistake the nature of the impulse. Dealing with
it at that stage, we see that man's utterance fell naturally
from the beginning into two modes, the first of which had

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