Adparet domus intus, et atria longa patescunt though it is, indeed, to the sympathetic eye only that its treasures will be visible. PAGE NO. 247 ccviii This beautiful lyric, printed in 1783, seems to anticipate in its imaginative music that return to our great early age of song, which in Blake's own lifetime was to prove,-how gloriously! that the English Muses had resumed their ancient melody':-Keats, Shelley, Byron, he overlived them all. 249 252 253 263 272 278 280 CCX stout Cortez: History would here suggest Balboa: (A.T.) It may be noticed, that to find in Chapman's Homer the 'pure serene' of the original, the reader must bring with him the imagination of the youthful poet; he must be a Greek himself,' as Shelley finely said of Keats. ccxii The most tender and true of Byron's smaller poems. This poem exemplifies the peculiar skill with which Scott employs proper names: a rarely misleading sign of true poetical genius. ccxxvi Simple as Lucy Gray seems, a mere narrative of what has been, and may be again,' yet every touch in the child's picture is marked by the deepest and purest ideal character. Hence, pathetic as the situation is, this is not strictly a pathetic poem, such as Wordsworth gives us in 221, Lamb in 264, and Scott in his Maid of Neidpath,- 'almost more pathetic,' as Tennyson once remarked, 'than a man has the right to be.' And Lyte's lovely stanzas (224) suggest, perhaps, the same remark. CCXXXV In this and in other instances the addition (or the change) of a Title has been risked, in hope that the aim of the piece following may be grasped more clearly and immediately. ccxlii This beautiful Sonnet was the last word of a youth, in whom, if the fulfillment may ever safely be prophesied from the promise, England lost one of the most rarely gifted in the long roll of her poets. Shakespeare and Milton, had their lives been closed at twentyfive, would (so far as we know) have left poems of less excellence and hope than the youth who, from the petty school and the London surgery, passed at once to a place with them of 'high collateral glory.' ccxlv It is impossible not to regret that Moore has written so little in this sweet and genuinely national style. 281 ccxlvi 290 A masterly example of Byron's command of strong thought and close reasoning in verse:-as the next is equally characteristic of Shelley's wayward intensity. ccliii Bonnivard, a Genevese, was imprisoned by the Duke of Savoy in Chillon on the lake of Geneva for his cour PAGE NO. 291 293 297 ageous defence of his country against the tyranny with which Piedmont threatened it during the first half of the Seventeenth century.-This noble Sonnet is worthy to stand near Milton's on the Vaudois massacre. ccliv Switzerland was usurped by the French under Napoleon in 1800: Venice in 1797 (255). cclix This battle was fought Dec. 2, 1800, between the cclxii After the capture of Madrid by Napoleon, Sir J. 307 cclxxii 308 313 314 315 The Mermaid was the club-house of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other choice spirits of that age. cclxxiii Maisie: Mary.-Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wild-wood music of the rarest quality. No morai is drawn, far less any conscious analysis of feeling attempted:-the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentment of the situation. A narrow criticism has often named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial, from its apparent simple facility: but firstrate excellence in it is in truth one of the least common triumphs of Poetry. This style should be compared with what is not less perfect in its way, the searching out of inner feeling, the expression of hidden meanings, the revelation of the heart of Nature and of the Soul within the Soul,-the analytical method, in short, -most completely represented by Wordsworth and by Shelley. cclxxvii Wolfe resembled Keats, not only in his early death by consumption and the fluent freshness of his poetical style, but in beauty of character:-brave, tender, energetic, unselfish, modest. Is it fanciful to find some reflex of these qualities in the Burial and Mary? Out of the abundance of the heart cclxxviii correi: covert on a hillside. Cumber: trouble. cclxxx This book has not a few poems of greater power and more perfect execution than Agnes and the extract which we have ventured to make from the deep-hearted author's Sad Thoughts (No. 224). But none are more emphatically marked by the note of exquisiteness. 316 cclxxxi st. 3 inch: island. 320 cclxxxiii From Poetry for Children (1809), by Charles and Mary Lamb. This tender and original little piece seems clearly to reveal the work of that noble-minded and afflicted sister, who was at once the happiness, the PAGE NO. misery, and the life-long blessing of her equally nobleminded brother. 328 cclxxxix 339 344 345 357 CCC This poem has an exaltation and a glory, joined with an exquisiteness of expression, which place it in the highest rank among the many masterpieces of its illustrious Author. interlunar swoon: interval of the moon's invisibility. ccciv Calpe: Gibraltar. Lofoden: the Maelstrom whirlpool off the N.W. coast of Norway. CCCV This lovely poem refers here and there to a ballad by Hamilton on the subject better treated in 163 and 164. CCCXV And Arcturi: seemingly used for northern stars. wild roses, &c. Our language has perhaps no line modulated with more subtle sweetness. 358 cccxvi 362 370 371 375 376 377 378 Coleridge describes this poem as the fragment of a dream-vision, perhaps, an opium-dream?-which composed itself in his mind when fallen asleep after reading a few lines about 'the Khan Kubla' in Purchas' Pilgrimage. cccxviii Ceres' daughter: Proserpine. God of Torment: Pluto. cccxxi The leading idea of this beautiful description of a day's landscape in Italy appears to be-On the voyage of life are many moments of pleasure, given by the sight of Nature, who has power to heal even the worldliness and the uncharity of man. 1. 23 Amphitrite was daughter to Ocean. cccxxii 1. 21 Maenad: a frenzied Nymph, attendant on Dionysos in the Greek mythology. May we not call this the most vivid, sustained, and impassioned amongst all Shelley's magical personifications of Nature? -- 1. 5 Plants under water sympathize with the seasons of the land, and hence with the winds which affect them. cccxxiii Written soon after the death, by shipwreck, of Wordsworth's brother John. This poem may be profitably compared with Shelley's following it. Each is the most complete expression of the innermost spirit of his art given by these great Poets:-of that İdea which, as in the case of the true Painter, (to quote the words of Reynolds,) 'subsists only in the mind: The sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting.' the Kind: the human race. PAGE NO. 381 381 cccxxvii the Royal Saint: Henry VI. cccxxviii st. 4 this folk: its has been here plausibly but, perhaps, unnecessarily, conjectured.-Every one knows the general story of the Italian Renaissance, of the Revival of Letters. From Petrarch's day to our own, that ancient world has renewed its youth: Poets and artists, students and thinkers, have yielded themselves wholly to its fascination, and deeply penetrated its spirit. Yet perhaps no one more truly has vivified, whilst idealizing, the picture of Greek country life in the fancied Golden Age, than Keats in these lovely (if somewhat unequally executed) stanzas: his quick imagination, by a kind of 'natural magic,' more than supplying the scholarship which his youth had no opportunity of gaining. 155 cxxxiv These stanzas are by Richard Verstegan (—c. 1635), a poet and antiquarian, published in his rare Odes (1601), under the title Our Blessed Ladies Lullaby, and reprinted by Mr. Orby Shipley in his beautiful Carmina Mariana (1893). The four stanzas here given form the opening of a hymn of twenty-four. |