Sathiran 12-22-27 15995 W PREFACE HEN I began to bring together what I thought the best of the Elizabethan songs, I was at once faced with the question "What is a song?" I soon decided that my life at least would be too short for the framing of a satisfactory definition. We think we know a song when we see one, but there must be, and are, borderland cases. An extreme instance is Campion's poem beginning: "When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arrived, a new admired guest, The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round, White Iope, blithe Helen, and the When we first read that it certainly does not appear to us to be a song. Yet Rossiter set it to music with the author's assent, and published it as a song. As an Elizabethan |