emotion.'

Shall we employ an illustration before proceeding?--some sentence easily
handled, some commonplace of the moralist, some copybook maxim, I care
not what. 'Contentment breeds Happiness'--That is a proposition with
which you can hardly quarrel; sententious, sedate, obviously true;
provoking delirious advocacy as little as controversial heat; in short a
very fair touchstone. Now hear how the lyric treats it, in these lines of
Dekker--

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd?
O punishment!
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex'd
To add to golden numbers golden numbers?
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour wears a lovely face;
Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!

Canst drink the waters of the crystal spring?
O sweet content!
Swim'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears?
O punishment!
Then he that patiently want's burden bears
No burden bears, but is a king, a king!
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour wears a lovely face;
Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!

There, in lines obviously written for music, you have our sedate
sentence, 'Contentment breeds Happiness,' converted to mere emotion. Note
(to use Coleridge's word) the 'excitement' of it. There are but two plain
indicative sentences in the two stanzas--(1) 'Honest labour wears a
lovely face' (used as a refrain), and (2) 'Then he that patiently want's
burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightened
emotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout how
broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations:
both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: with
cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza wound up by an
outburst of emotional nonsense--'hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!'--as
a man might skip or whistle to himself for want of thought.

Now (still keeping to our same subject of Contentment) let us _prosify_
the lyrical order of language down to the lowest pitch to which genius
has been able to reduce it and still make noble verse. You have all read
Wordsworth's famous Introduction to the "Lyrical Ballads," and you know
that Wordsworth's was a genius working on a theory that the languages of
verse and of p