but beseeches it also to add a warning voice, telling her, to whom the pomp of gold is dear, of ‘Tyre that fell, of Fortune’s perfidy.’
Other poetic celebrations—such as those of Mr. Ernest Myers, Mr. Ashby-Sterry, and ‘C. C. R.’—might be recorded; but the above will suffice to show how prominent a place the Thames has always held in the heart and mind of those poets who have come within the sphere of its influence. Even if it were never made the subject of a future song, it would still figure largely and conspicuously in the British corpus poetarum.
ENGLISH EPIGRAPHS.
he student of English poetry must often have been struck by its richness in that form of verse which may best be called the Epigraph—the brief sententious effort, answering somewhat to the epigram as understood and practised by the Greeks, but unlike the Latin, French, and English epigram in being sentimental instead of witty, and aiming rather at all-round neatness than at pungency or point. Our language abounds, of course, in examples of short lyrical compositions, such (to name familiar instances) as Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Lay a garland on my hearse,’ Congreve’s ‘False though she be to me and love,’ Goldsmith’s ‘When lovely woman stoops to folly,’ Shelley’s ‘Music, when soft voices die,’ and MacDonald’s ‘Alas, how easily things go wrong!’—all of these being only eight lines long. There are, indeed, plenty of lyrical performances even more brief than this; such as Mr. Marzials’ ‘tragedy’ in quatrain:
‘She reach’d a rosebud from the tree,
And bit the tip and threw it by;
My little rose, for you and me
The worst is over when we die!’