careful to point
out that it was a moral song "dulcet in contagion," and too good, except
for sarcasm, to be wasted on Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. The critics
neglected to note what the Duke says about "Come away, come away,
Death," and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this must not
really have been sung by Viola, all the while insensible to the poignant
dramatic value of it as warbled by the ironic Clown in the presence of
the blinded pair. But indeed the whole of _Twelfth Night_ is burdened
with melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and at each
change of scene some unseen hand is overheard touching a harp-string.
The lovely, infatuated lyrics arrive, dramatically, to relieve this
musical tension at its height.

Rather different, and perhaps still more subtle, is the case of _A
Winter's Tale_, where the musical obsession is less prominent, and where
the songs are all delivered from the fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here
again the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "When
daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as driven snow" into one
bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as "two nonsensical songs" sung
by "a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed to think that such "nonsense"
could be foisted on Shakespeare's text. Strange that those learned men
were unable to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human
and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part of the
drama. They complete the revelation of the complex temperament of
Autolycus, with his passion for flowers and millinery, his hysterical
balancing between laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden
sentimentality, like the Clown's

"Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown!"

It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tenderness that the
firm hand of the creator of character reveals itself.

But it is in _The Tempest_ that Shakespeare's supremacy as a writer of
songs is most brilliantly developed. Here are seven or eight lyrics, and
among them are some of the loveliest things that any man has written.
What was ever composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicately
fairy-like than Ariel's First Song?

"Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd,--
The wild waves whist."

That is, not "kissed the wild waves," as ingenious punctuators pretend,
but, parenthetically