The unit of all ordinary kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly quarrelled with for using words that have belonged to other people.

But the unit of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is not the word but the phrase.

Now in daily human intercourse the use, which is universal and habitual, of set forms and phrases of talk is not commonly supposed to detract from, or destroy sincerity.

In the crises indeed of emotion it must be most people's experience that the natural speech that rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is something quite familiar and commonplace, some form which the accumulated experience of many generations of separate people has found best for such circumstances or such an occasion.

The lyric is just in the position of conversation, at such a heightened and emotional moment.