is beyond question,
however, that there is epic genius in that marvellous _Athalie,_ so
exalted and so simple in its sublimity that the royal century was
unable to comprehend it. It is certain, too, that the series of
Shakespeare's chronicle dramas presents a grand epic aspect. But it is
lyric poetry above all that befits the drama; it never embarrasses
it, adapts itself to all its caprices, disports itself in all forms,
sometimes sublime as in Ariel, sometimes grotesque as in Caliban. Our
era being above all else dramatic, is for that very reason eminently
lyric. There is more than one connection between the beginning and the
end; the sunset has some features of the sunrise; the old man becomes
a child once more. But this second childhood is not like the first;
it is as melancholy as the other is joyous. It is the same with lyric
poetry. Dazzling, dreamy, at the dawn of civilization it reappears,
solemn and pensive, at its decline. The Bible opens joyously with
_Genesis_ and comes to a close with the threatening _Apocalypse_. The
modern ode is still inspired, but is no longer ignorant. It meditates
more than it scrutinizes; its musing is melancholy. We see, by its
painful labour, that the muse has taken the drama for her mate.

To make clear by a metaphor the ideas that we have ventured to put
forth, we will compare early lyric poetry to a placid lake which
reflects the clouds and stars; the epic is the stream which flows from
the lake, and rushes on, reflecting its banks, forests, fields and
cities, until it throws itself into the ocean of the drama. Like the
lake, the drama reflects the sky; like the stream, it reflects its
banks; but it alone has tempests and measureless depths.

The drama, then, is the goal to which everything in modern poetry
leads. _Paradise Lost_ is a drama before it is an epic. As we know, it
first presented itself to the poet's imagination in the first of these
forms, and as a drama it always remains in the reader's memory, so
prominent is the old dramatic framework still beneath Milton's epic
structure! When Dante had finished his terrible _Inferno_, when he had
closed its doors and nought remained save to give his work a name, the
unerring instinct of his genius showed him that that multiform poem
was an emanation of the drama, not of the epic; and on the front
of that gigantic monument, he wrote with his pen of bronze: _Divina
Commedia._

Thus we see that the only two poets of modern ti