Book Description

Excerpt from English Lyrics From Dryden to Burns The purest form of the lyric is the song, - in which words and music cannot be thought of, one without the other. But unhappily the writing of songs is an art that suffers from a general advance in education. The farther away a people moves from the simplicity of early times, the less freely do its feelings find natural expression in song. Nowadays we have almost separated the idea of poetry - or at least good poetry - from the idea of singing. The words that we sing to popular songs we seldom take very seriously, and when we desire good lyrics we read them in the works of our great poets. It is unfortunate that poetry and singing are thus separated; and it was not always so. Among our English ancestors of the Middle Ages there were many traditional ballads of the finest quality, written perhaps by wandering minstrels, and sung by the common people on all occasions. The famous Robin Hood ballads are among the finest of these old folk-songs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.