erick Dhu, James FitzJames, and other personages real or imaginary, but not, save through inference, with Sir Walter. The story-teller, whether dramatist or romancer, stands apart from, or back of, his narrative, as may be represented by these three circles:

"Do not think of me," he seems to request; "watch the characters in the little fiction world that I have imagined, and listen to what they have to say." The lyric poet, on the other hand, aims to reveal the very depths of his heart, sharing without restraint his innermost emotions -an attitude which may be represented thus:

The purest form of lyric is song; indeed the word is derived from lyre, the name of an instrument used for musical accompaniment. Normally, song is an outburst of feeling of joy or grief, of patriotism, or reverence, or

mere conviviality. But the term lyric is applied to any short poem which "turns on some single thought, feeling, or situation." For example, the poet hears Song

a nightingale sing. The song fills him with emotion which he records in a lyric. Or he opens by chance Chapman's translation of Homer's epic and reads for the first time the grand story of the Iliad. Later he records in a few lines his emotions upon discovering this new-old world of beauty. Milton, brooding over his blindness, yielding to a mood of despair at his helplessness, is suddenly struck with a great truth which brings him comfort, and he writes a little lyric of fourteen lines setting forth this truth, that all who are afflicted in like manner may share the consolation that has come to him.

The ballad

The elegy

One of the best collections of English lyrics is Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, a copy of which everyone should own. In this wonderful treasury are found many varieties. There is the ballad, which though properly classed with narrative poetry, is sometimes so touched with the tender emotion of the narrator that it becomes truly lyrical. The elegy, commonly defined as a "meditative poem of sorrowful theme, usually lamenting the dead," is well represented by Milton's Lycidas and Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The ode, also meditative, differs from other forms in that its structure is complicated or irregular, and the feeling expressed more exalted. Wordsworth's Ode to Duty serves as an example. Many of the best The sonnet lyrics are written in sonnet form-fourteen iambic pentameter lines with a definite rhyming scheme. This was a favorite form with Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.

The ode

The varieties of poetry considered thus far are the prin

cipal ones. Descriptive and didactic or reflective verse are considered minor varieties, partly, no doubt, because they are most commonly found in connec- Descriptive tion with other forms. And yet English lit- and didactic erature is exceptionally rich in poems which poetry paint the beauties of nature in all her moods, and picture in ideal colors the simple joys and the virtues of rural lifepoetry quiet and reflective in character. Fine bits of nature description are found in Thomson's Seasons and Cowper's Task, eighteenth century poems now little read. More familiar to modern readers is Burns's The Cotter's Saturday Night, which pictures the simple life of the Scottish peasantry, and Whittier's Snow-Bound. Byron and Scott paint scenes of romantic beauty. Our greatest nature poet, however, is Wordsworth, to whom nature in her quieter moods made a strong appeal; but it is not so much the pictures in his poems as it is the thoughts or reflections prompted by his love for nature that have made him great. Were we to make a collection of the very best descriptions to be found in all English literature, we should find it necessary to take lines from nearly every poet of prominence, beginning with that unknown singer who composed Beowulf far back in Anglo-Saxon days, and ending with Tennyson and Browning.

The pastoral

and the idyl

Two terms related to description are pastoral and idyl. Pastoral (from the Latin pastor, meaning shepherd) is a name applied to any poem picturing the life of shepherds, or indeed any phase of rural life. The finest of all pastorals are Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. An idyl (also spelled idyll) is defined in Webster's dictionary as "a little picture in verse, or kind of short descriptive poem, as one dealing with pastoral or rural life." But it is also applied to longer poems, narrative as well as descriptive, in which the picture

element is prominent, as in Tennyson's Idylls of the King.

Didactic poetry

Didactic poetry, as its name implies, has for its main purpose instruction. We feel at once, when the poet turns teacher or preacher, that he encroaches upon the province of the prose writer; yet we do not mind the short didactic passages found nearly everywhere in English poetry-a line or two only, pointing a moral or giving terse expression to some notable thought. There have even been a few poets, notably Dryden and Pope, who have succeeded through wit and cleverness in making attractive purely didactic poems of some length. Pope's Essay on Criticism, a sort of rhymed treatise on rhetoric, is a good example. Sometimes didactic poetry takes the form of satire, the purpose of which is to reform through ridicule. Yet brilliant as are a number of the long, satirical poems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we can but say of them that though they are excellent of their kind, it is a kind which lies remote from the center of true poetry.

CHAPTER XVI

THE STUDY OF PROSE FICTION

The five
elements

For purposes of study, the novel, or indeed any piece of prose fiction, may be thought of as made up of certain necessary elements. First, there must be a plot; something must happen, otherwise no story. Second, there must be one or more characters. Third, there must be what is called the setting; that is to say, what happens must happen somewhere, sometime, somehow. Fourth, no matter how simple the tale, there is pretty sure to be a discoverable central thought, or ideal, or purpose, which serves in a way to unify the whole. Fifth, the story must be told by somebody, in language of his own choosing, in a way peculiarly his own. That is, there must be an author whose skill as a craftsman and whose personality are revealed in the narrative. Plot, characters, setting, central truth, the author's skill and personality: these are the five elements to be considered in the study of any piece of fiction.

The plot

By plot is meant, loosely speaking, the skeleton of the complete narrative, or the important incidents without which there would be no story. Usually it can be stated in a few sentences. There are not many absolutely different plots-perhaps fifteen or twenty in all literature; yet there are so many thousands of ways of varying these fifteen or twenty that no two stories are alike. The essential characteristics of storyplots can be made clear through a number of simple illustrations.