A rider is he;
His horse is the kaiser’s,
The rider’s for me.
So, too, the rude compliment:—
You girl with the black eyes
And chestnut-brown hair,
When you look at me so,
I turn fool, I declare.
Easy and silly, one says. Precisely. Easy because made by everybody and still close to the repeated refrain of the throng, and silly in the old meaning of simple and plain. All the great lyric poets know that they must be silly in this sense, or they are mere ink and paper, divorced from life and the lilt of communal song; Goethe, Burns, Heine, will tell that tale plainly enough, and let one compare Matthew Arnold’s Geist’s Grave, not to speak of Wordsworth’s and Landor’s triumphs, with the genuine pathos but irritating intricacy of T. E. Brown’s Aber Stations. Perhaps this bit from Salzburg[[1029]] shows the improvisation, still simple to a fault, working up to the note which one demanded for real poetry:—
My heart is a clock,