"words for music" by a great majority. There is hardly a single poem in
the Elizabethan Song-books, properly so named, that has what would in our
day be called a tone of sentiment. Music had not then the tone herself;
she was ingenious, and so must the words be. She had the air of epigram,
and an accurately definite limit. So, too, the lady of the lyrics, who
might be called the lady of the stanzas, so strictly does she go by
measure. When she is quarrelsome, it is but fuguishness; when she
dances, she does it by a canon. She could not but be perverse, merrily
sung to such grave notes.

So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books is
allowed to be kind enough for a "melody," except one lady only. She may
thus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that she is
"brown." She is brown and kind, and a "sad flower," but the song made
for her would have been too insipid, apparently, without an antithesis.
The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her even less lovely than
the brown.

Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for innumerable
verses, uncertain with the regularity of the madrigal, and inconstant
with the punctuality of a stanza, she has gone with the arts of that day;
and neither verse nor music will ever make such another lady. She
refused to observe the transiency of roses; she never really
intended--much as she was urged--to be a shepherdess; she was never
persuaded to mitigate her dress. In return, the world has let her
disappear. She scorned the poets until they turned upon her in the
epigram of many a final couplet; and of these the last has been long
written. Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and she
frightened Love out of her sight in a ballet. Those occupations are
gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away. She was something