Page 71. A Heavenlie Visitor. From Bullen's "More Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books." Reprinted there from a Christ Church manuscript. Page 72. Milton. For the somewhat fantastic spelling here, the persistent theorist and schoolmaster in Milton is solely accountable. It has, however, the merit of indicating the precise scansion and cadence of his verse so long misunderstood. Page 108.-Thomas Traherne. The romantic tale of the discovery of a manuscript book of Traherne's poems by Mr. Bertram Dobell, after they had lain hid for more than two centuries, is now too well known to repeat. For those, however, who are unfamiliar with Mr. Dobell's critical introduction to the poems it may be interesting to point out how remarkably Traherne forecasts Wordsworth's Ode on Some Intimations of Immortality, and how he is often like in form as well as in blithe acceptance of man and the world to our own Walt Whitman. Page 108.-Wonder. "The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold, the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O, what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange, seraphic pieces of life and beauty. Boys and girls tumbling in the streets and playing were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden and to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine and so were the sun and moon and stars and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it."-Centuries of Meditations. By Thomas Traherne. Century II., ¶ 3. Page 123.-The soul wherein God dwells. I first ran across this little poem in the personal note-book of Miss Irene K. Leache, of Virginia. After giving it a tentative date, diligent search failed to discover the authorship. A decade and a half later I fell quite by chance upon a copy of the Cherubinischer Wandersmann," by Johann Scheffler, that early seventeenth-century mystic who renounced a high place at court, and, under the name of Angelus Silesius, wandered through the country meditating, exhorting, and earning his living by the sale of dice, rosaries, playing-cards, and prayerbooks. In the detached quatrains of the " Cherubic Wanderer" I recognized the stanzas of this little poem, though I am still ignorant as to who combined these particular lines or made the translation. Page 125.-The Keys of the Gates. This poem goes with Blake's striking designs. The poem and the seventeen beautiful pictures make, as Allan Cunningham says, "a sort of devout dream equally wild and lovely." Even without the accompanying drawings one may delight in the mystic pantheism of the poem. Page 149.-Thanatopsis. The entirely conventional and hortatory tone of this poem makes a striking and interesting contrast to the last lines of Shelley's Epilogue. Conventional and soothing exhortations have their own place in poetry. Bryant reads like a remnant of the early eighteenth cen.. tury while Shelley strikes the note of liberty, revolt, and reconstruction so characteristic of the revolutionary end of the eighteenth century with its touching faith in the perfectibility of man, or of the nineteenth century with its bold iconoclasm and challenge to authority. Page 204.-The Prisoner. The close of a long poem. Page 206.-The Search. "La colombe demande un petit nid bien clos; le cadavre un tombe; l'âme le paradis." Page 215.-Rest. Part IV of Rest in "Organ Songs." Page 216.-A Christmas Carol. This and the following little song seem to have recaptured something of the sweetness and simplicity of the very earliest lyrics. Page 217.-That Holy Thing. The idea that the birth of our Lord made a woman cry is against all tradition. The Second Eve, being free from the stain of original sin, is supposed to have brought forth her Son without travail and without pain. Page 231.-Sleeping at Last. These were the poet's last lines, and therefore interesting to compare with Lord Tennyson's Silent Voices and the Epilogue of Robert Browning, one of his last and most characteristic utterances. Page 260.-This poem is said to be by R. D. Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doone, although he never acknowledged the authorship. Page 261. From the poem entitled "To H. D. Traill." Page 271.-In No Strange Land. In the Selected Poems" of Francis Thompson, Mr. Wilfred Meynell appends the following note: "This poem (found among his papers when he died) Francis Thompson might yet have worked upon to remove, here a defective rhyme, there an unexpected elision. But no altered mind would he have brought to the purport of it; and the prevision of 'Heaven in Earth and God in Man' pervading his earlier published verse, we find here accented by poignantly local and personal allusions. For in these triumphing stanzas we hold in retrospect, as did he, those days and nights of human dereliction he spent beside London's river, and in the shadow but all radiance to him-of Charing Cross." The acute accent, to mark a sounded syllable, used necessarily in the early English poetry, has been retained throughout in the interests of uniformity. Certain idiosyncrasies of capitalization and spelling in the later poets were retained out of respect for individual preference. As I in hoary Winter's night stood shivering in the snowe 29 At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time 175 Brave flowers-that I could gallant it like you 47 By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair 230 Can I see another's woe 131 Chanting the square deific, out of the One advancing, out Death, be not proud, though some have called thee |