This plea for a more comprehensive range of material holds good not only in the discussion of poetry in general, its origins, history, future, but in the study of the great poem itself. Take something that every one reads, and even Macaulay's schoolboy studies--the Lycidas of Milton. Reader, critic, biographer, have long since come to terms with the poem; it stirs heart and mind, it belongs to the masterpieces, it voices the genius of Milton, it echoes Puritan England. Here one usually stops; but here one should not stop. Lycidas, as a poem, is the outcome of human emotion in long reaches of social progress; it is primarily a poem of grief for the dead, a link in that chain of evolution in rhythmic utterance which leads from wild gestures and inarticulate cries up to the stately march of Milton's verse and the higher mood of his thought. So far from degrading one's conception of great poetry, the comparison of rough communal verse should throw into strongest relief the dignity and the majesty of a poet's art. One has taken this poet from his parochial limits, and set him strongly lighted, at the front of a great stage, with its dim background full of half-seen, strangely moving figures; his song is now detached from a vast chorus of human lamentation, and now sinks back into it as into its source. In certain great elegies, as also in the hymeneal, this chorus actually lingers as a refrain. True, the individuals of the chorus are seldom interesting in themselves. The black fellow of Australia shall not soothe our grief with his howlings for his dead, nor even the Corsican widow with her _vocero_. But the chorus as chorus is impressive enough; it is a part of the piece; heard or unheard, it belongs with the triumphs of individual art. Somewhere in every great poem lurks this legacy of communal song. It may better be called the silent partner, without whose capital, at the least, no poet can now trade in Parnassian ware; and as for lyric verse, there the partner is not even silent. All amorous lyric, whether of German Walther or of Roman Catullus, holds an echo of festal throngs singing and dancing at the May. The troubadours come down to us with proud names, yet they are only spokesmen of an aristocratic guild; and this again was but a sifting and a refinement of the throngs which danced about their _regine Avrillouse_ a thousand years ago. It was once lad and lass in the crowd; it comes to be lover and high-born dame at daybreak, with a warning from the watcher on the castle walls; then that vogue passes, with all its songs that seem to sing themselves; the situation has grown deplorably unconventional, and the note is false. Amorous lyric waxes mere grave, taking on a new privacy of utterance, and a new individuality of tone. It is now the subtle turn of thought, and not the cadence of festal passion, which sets off Lovelace's one perfect song from all its kind; yet, without that throb of passion, that rhythm as of harmonious steps, one of them a piece of human nature, and the other a legacy from the throng, Lovelace had never made his verses and there would be no lyric in the world.