Perhaps
his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry
composers will endure and singers will accept. Why, "words for
music" are almost invariably trash now, though the words of
Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and
difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister
art, and don't know anything about it. But any one can see that
words like Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with
musical people than words like Shelley's, Keats's, Shakespeare's,
Fletcher's, Lovelace's, or Carew's. The natural explanation is not
flattering to musical people: at all events, the singing world
doted on Bayly.
"She never blamed him--never,
But received him when he came
With a welcome sort of shiver,
And she tried to look the same.
"But vainly she dissembled,
For whene'er she tried to smile,
A tear unbidden trembled
In her blue eye all the while."
This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines
to an Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines
to an Indian air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the
singers preferred Bayly's. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal
the popularity of what follows. I shall ask the persevering reader
to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins:
"When the eye of beauty closes,
When the weary are at rest,
When the shade the sunset throws is
But a vapour in the west;
When the moonlight tips the billow
With a wreath of silver foam,
And the whisper of the willow
Breaks the slumber of the gnome, -
Night may come, but sleep will linger,
When the spirit, all forlorn,
Shuts its ear against the singer,
And the rustle of the corn
Round the sad old mansion sobbing
Bids the wakeful maid recall
Who it was that caused the throbbing
Of her bosom at the ball.
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