whatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desired
this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the
most heroic altruism.]



WHAT IS LYRIC?


And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the
other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer,
but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest
of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the
world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of
something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are
left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's
achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned,
and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is
possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good
judges, that--

Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been filled with flowers,
And ye the walks have been
Where maids have spent their hours.
You have beheld how they
With wicker arks did come
To kiss and bear away
The richer cowslips home.
You've heard them sweetly sing,