a mournful and plaintive kind of poem. See Elegiac.

As elegy, at its first institution, was intended for tears, it expressed no other sentiments, it breathed no other accents but those of sorrow: with the negligence natural to affliction, it sought less to please than to move; and aimed at exciting pity, not admiration. By degrees, however, elegy degenerated from its original intention, and was employed upon all sorts of subjects, gay or sad, and especially upon love. Ovid's book of Love, the poems of Tibullus and Propertius, notwithstanding they are termed elegies, are sometimes so far from being sad, that they are scarce serious. The chief subjects then to which elegy owes its rise, are death and love: that elegy therefore ought to be esteemed the most perfect in its kind which has somewhat of both at once; such, for instance, where the poet bewails the death of some youth or damsel falling a martyr to love.