Drummond excels in madrigals, or canzonets--baby-odes or songs--which have more of wing and less of thought than sonnets.

Through the greater part of his verse we hear a certain muffled tone of the sweetest, like the music that ever threatens to break out clear from the brook, from the pines, from the rain-shower,--never does break out clear, but remains a suggested, etherially vanishing tone.

His is a _voix voilee_, or veiled voice of song.

It is true that in the time we are now approaching far more attention was paid not merely to the smoothness but to the melody of verse than any except the great masters had paid before; but some are at the door, who, not being great masters, yet do their inferior part nearly as well as they their higher, uttering a music of marvellous and individual sweetness, which no mere musical care could secure, but which springs essentially from music in the thought gathering to itself musical words in melodious division, and thus fashioning for itself a fitting body.

The melody of their verse is all their own--as original as the greatest art-forms of the masters.