SONG-WRITING.
Burns.
No composition, not even a sonnet, seems to us to concentrate within so small a bound so much delight and so much difficulty as a good song. We cannot say of it what was said, by a sweet poet, of the ribbon that encircled his mistress's waist—
"A narrow compass, and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair."
Minor poetry, however pleasing or perfect, must never be exalted to the same level with the sublimer efforts of the muse—with those massive monuments of poetic genius, in which wisdom and beauty are united with majesty and power—in which the susceptibilities and destinies of the human soul are better developed than even in the loftiest attainments of pure science, and in which ordinary minds find a source at once of docile veneration and of pious pride. Yet as the epos, or the drama, abstractly, are superior to the sonnet or the song, in the same, or rather in a still greater proportion, does a good poem of the slenderest style transcend a bad epic or tragedy. There is far less difference between the Iliad and the Flowers of the Forest, than between the Flowers of the Forest and the Antediluvians. The popular lyric, however, is not a slender, though it is not a long-sustained, exertion of poetry. Within its limited extent it affords scope for very high talent, and exercises in its perfection a very powerful sway. The best feelings of our nature may and must be here addressed; the fairest, the vividest images must be evoked; the ideas must be developed in the most rapid and direct manner; the language must be eminently precise, polished, and appropriate. Every thought must go straight to the hearer's heart—every word must speak magically to the ear and the fancy. The choice of a subject for a song, is as difficult as the task of doing justice to that subject. Its essence and object imply that the theme shall be popular but not commonplace; simple and single in its conception, but stirring and striking in its progress, and in its close complete and satisfying, and producing, for the most part, a sober and subdued surprise. Any thing flat or feeble—any thing subtle or strained—is out of the question. Homer may sometimes nod, and may almost in his slumbers approach within a measurable distance of M' Henry's snore; but Sappho and Alcæus must always be wide awake. The epic, the didactic, the Pindaric poet, may be sometimes turbid as the torrent, or dark as the sea; but the song-writer must be clear and transparent as the living fountain or the pebbled stream. His work must have the purity, the ease, the modesty, of nature; and it must have another of nature's attributes, which perfect art can alone approach, that of wearing the freshness of novelty on the hundredth repetition.
"Enough," perhaps our reader may say, after the prince in Rasselas; "you have convinced me that no man can write a song." But such a conclusion would be rash and erroneous. Innumerable lyric jewels are to be found in the treasuries of poetic genius. In all times, and in all tongues, songs have been written and sung, realizing enough of their proper attributes to delight the hearts and live in the memories of the multitude, while they were capable of pleasing the most fastidious and baffling the most critical. How many a palace, how many a cottage, how many solitary glens and crowded alleys have resounded, and at this hour resound, with vocal verse, in which the spirit of poetry is breathed around with more or less of power and loveliness, exhilarating the happy, cheering the sad, softening the sullen, and reclaiming the depraved! The themes which befit the lyric muse are not many, but they are exhaustless; they may be disfigured in their form, or perverted from their purpose, but they are in their nature noble and good. Love is the essence of them all—love in all its forms and phases; whether the love of lovers, or of friends, or of kindred, or of patriots, for the dear objects which engage their hearts—love, whether exulting in the happiness of hope, and presence, and enjoyment, or enduring the trials of absence, disappoint-
