PAGE NO. 73 89 1. 6 ore: rays of golden light. Doric lay (1. 25) Sicilian, pastoral. 75 93 The assault was an attack on London expected in 1642, when the troops of Charles I reached Brentford. Written on his door' was in the original title of this sonnet. Milton was then living in Aldersgate Street. 7 The Emathian Conqueror: When Thebes was destroyed (B.c. 335) and the citizens massacred by thousands, Alexander ordered the house of Pindar to be spared. 1. 2, the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet: Plutarch has a tale that when the Spartan confederacy in 404 B.C. took Athens, a proposal to demolish it was rejected through the effect produced on the commanders by hearing part of a chorus from the Electra of Euripides sung at a feast. There is however no apparent congruity between the lines quoted (167, 168 Ed. Dindorf) and the result ascribed to them. 95 A fine example of a peculiar class of Poetry;-that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little. Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Berkeley, Dr. Johnson, Lord Macaulay, have left similar speci mens. 78 98 These beautiful verses should be compared with Wordsworth's great Ode on Immortality: and a copy of Vaughan's very rare little volume appears in the list of Wordsworth's library.-In imaginative intensity, Vaughan stands beside his contemporary Marvell. 79 99 80 100 Favonius: the spring wind. Themis: the goddess of justice. Skinner was grandson by his mother to Sir E. Coke :—hence, as pointed out by Mr. Keightley, Milton's allusion to the bench. L. 8: Sweden was then at war with Poland, and France with the Spanish Netherlands. 82 103 1. 28 Sydnaean showers: either in allusion to the conversations in the 'Arcadia,' or to Sidney himself as a model of 'gentleness' in spirit and demeanour. 85 105 Delicate humour, delightfully united to thought, at once simple and subtle. It is full of conceit and paradox, but these are imaginative, not as with most of our Seventeenth Century poets, intellectual only. 88 110 Elizabeth of Bohemia: Daughter to James I, and ancestor of Sophia of Hanover. These lines are a fine specimen of gallant and courtly compliment. 89 111 Lady M. Ley was daughter to Sir J. Ley, afterwards Earl of Marlborough, who died March, 1629, coincidently with the dissolution of the third Parliament of Charles' reign. Hence Milton poetically compares his death to that of the Orator Isocrates of Athens, after Philip's victory in 328 B.C. 93 118 A masterpiece of humour, grace, and gentle feeling, PAGE NO. all, with Herrick's unfailing art, kept precisely within the peculiar key which he chose,-or Nature for him,-in his Pastorals. L. 2 the god unshorn: Imberbis Apollo. St. 2 beads: prayers. 96 123 With better taste, and less diffuseness, Quarles might (one would think) have retained more of that high place which he held in popular estimate among his contemporaries. 99 127 From Prison: to which his active support of Charles I twice brought the high-spirited writer. L. 7 Gods: thus in the original; Lovelace, in his fanciful way, making here a mythological allusion. Birds, commonly substituted, is without authority. St. 3, 1. 1 committed to prison. 100 128 104 133 105 134 106 135 107 136 108 137 112 141 St. 21. 4 blue-god: Neptune. Waly waly: an exclamation of sorrow, the root and by Edinburgh. Cramasie, crimson. corbies, crows: fail, turf: hause, neck: theek, thatch. The poetical and the prosaic, after Cowley's fashion, blend curiously in this deeply-felt elegy. Perhaps no poem in this collection is more delicately fancied, more exquisitely finished. By placing his description of the Fawn in a young girl's mouth, Marvell has, as it were, legitimated that abundance of imaginative hyperbole' to which he is always partial: he makes us feel it natural that a maiden's favourite should be whiter than milk, sweeter than sugar lilies without, roses within.' The poet's imagination is justified in its seeming extravagance by the intensity and unity with which it invests his picture. 113 142 The remark quoted in the note to No. 65 applies equally to these truly wonderful verses. Marvell here throws himself into the very soul of the Garden with the imaginative intensity of Shelley in his West Wind. This poem appears also as a translation in Marvell's works. The most striking verses in it, here quoted as the book is rare, answer more or less to stanzas 2 and 6: Alma Quies, teneo te! et te, germana Quietis, PAGE NO. 115 143 St. 3 tutties: nosegays. St. 4 silly : simple. 116 144 118 119 L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. It is a striking proof of The mountain-nymph; compare Wordsworth's Sonnet, 120 145 1. 3 bestead: avail. L. 19 starr'd Ethiop queen: Cassiopeia, the legendary Queen of Ethiopia, and thence translated amongst the constellations. 121 122 123 Cynthia: the Moon: Milton seems here to have transferred to her chariot the dragons anciently assigned to Demeter and to Medea. Hermes, called Trismegistus, a mystical writer of the Neo-Platonist school. L. 27 Thebes, &c. subjects of Athenian Tragedy. Buskin'd (1. 30) tragic, in opposition to sock above. L. 32 Musaeus: a poet in Mythology. L. 37 him that left half-told: Chaucer in his incomplete 'Squire's Tale.' great bards: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, are here presumably intended. L. 9 frounced: curled. The Attic Boy (1. 10) Cephalus. 124 146 Emigrants supposed to be driven towards America by the government of Charles I. 125 1. 9, 10. But apples, &c. A fine example of Marvell's imaginative hyperbole. 147 1.6 concent: harmony. 128 149 A lyric of a strange, fanciful, yet solemn beauty :Cowley's style intensified by the mysticism of Henry More.-St. 2 monument: the World. 129 151 Entitled 'A Song in Honour of St. Cecilia's Day: 1697.' Summary of Book Third It is more difficult to characterize the English Poetry of the Eighteenth century than that of any other. For it was an age not only of spontaneous transition, but of bold experiment: it includes not only such absolute contrasts as distinguish the Rape of the Lock' from the 'Parish Register,' but such vast contemporaneous differences as lie between Pope and Collins, Burns and Cowper. Yet we may clearly trace three leading moods or tendencies :-the aspects of courtly or educated life represented by Pope and carried to exhaustion by his followers; the poetry of Nature and of Man, viewed through a cultivated, and at the same time an impassioned frame of mind by Collins and Gray:-lastly, the study of vivid and simple narrative, including natural description, begun by Gay and Thomson, pursued by Burns and others in the north, and established in England by Goldsmith, Percy, Crabbe, and Cowper. Great varieties in style accompanied these diversities in aim: poets could not always distinguish the manner suitable for subjects so far apart and the union of conventional and of common language, exhibited most conspicuously by Burns, has given a tone to the poetry of that century which is better explained by reference to its historical origin than by naining it artificial. There is, again, a nobleness of thought, a courageous aim at high and, in a strict sense manly, excellence in many of the writers :-nor can that period be justly termed tame and wanting in originality, which produced poems such as Pope's Satires, Gray's Odes and Elegy, the ballads of Gay and Carey, the songs of Burns and Cowper. In truth Poetry at this, as at all times, was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age: and the many complex causes which made the Eighteenth century the turning-time in modern European civilization are also more or less reflected in its verse. An intelligent reader will find the influence of Newton as markedly in the poems of Pope, as of Elizabeth in the plays of Shakespeare. On this great subject, however, these indications must here be sufficient. PAGE NO. 134 153 We have no poet more marked by rapture, by the ecstasy which Plato held the note of genuine inspiration, than Collins. Yet but twice or thrice do his lyrics reach that simplicity, that sinceram sermonis Attici gratiam to which this ode testifies his enthusiastic devotion. His style, as his friend Dr. Johnson truly remarks, was obscure; his diction often harsh and unskilfully laboured; he struggles nobly against the narrow, artificial manner of his age, but his too scanty years did not allow him to reach perfect mastery. PAGE NO. St. 3 Hybla: near Syracuse. Her whose . . . woe: the nightingale, 'for which Sophocles seems to have entertained a peculiar fondness'; Collins here refers to the famous chorus in the Oedipus at Colonus. St. 4 Cephisus: the stream encircling Athens on the north and west, passing Colonus. St. 6 stay'd to sing: stayed her song when Imperial tyranny was established at Rome. St. 7 refers to the Italian amourist poetry of the Renaissance: In Collins' day, Dante was almost unknown in England. St. 8 meeting soul: which moves sympathetically towards Simplicity as she comes to inspire the poet. St. 9 Of these: Taste and Genius. The Bard. In 1757, when this splendid ode was completed, so very little had been printed, whether in Wales or in England, in regard to Welsh poetry, that it is hard to discover whence Gray drew his Cymric allusions. The fabled massacre of the Bards (shown to be wholly groundless in Stephens' Literature of the Kymry) appears first in the family history of Sir John Wynn of Gwydir (cir. 1600), not published till 1773; but the story seems to have passed in MS. to Carte's History, whence it may have been taken by Gray. The references to high-born Hoel and soft Llewellyn; to Cadwallo and Urien; may, similarly, have been derived from the 'Specimens of early Welsh poetry, by the Rev. E. Evans-as, although not published till 1764, the MS., we learn from a letter to Dr. Wharton, was in Gray's hands by July 1760, and may have reached him by 1757. It is, however, doubtful whether Gray (of whose acquaintance with Welsh we have no evidence) must not have been also aided by some Welsh scholar. He is one of the poets least likely to scatter epithets at random: 'soft' or gentle is the epithet emphatically and specially given to Llewelyn in contemporary Welsh poetry, and is hence here used with particular propriety. Yet, without such assistance as we have suggested, Gray could hardly have selected the epithet, although applied to the King (p. 141-3) among a crowd of others, in Llygad Gwr's Ode, printed by Evans.-After lamenting his comrades (st. 2, 3) the Bard prophesies the fate of Edward II, and the conquests of Edward III (4): his death ani that of the Black Prince (5): of Richard II, with the wars of York and Lancaster, the murder of Henry VI (the meek usurper), and of Edward V and his brother (6). He turns to the glory and prosperity following the accession of the Tudors (7), through Elizabeth's reign (8): and concludes with a vision of the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton. 140 159 1. 13 Glo'ster: Gilbert de Clare, son-in-law to Edward. Mortimer, one of the Lords Marchers of Wales. |