miration for philosophy as equivalent to "high reason,' or wisdom, appeared in the "Epistle to Reynolds," lines 71-76 (page 238). In his delightful Letters to his Friends, he shows an increasing desire to study philosophy as a means of winning deeper thought and higher calmness for his poetry. A few weeks after his twentysecond birthday he exclaimed, “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts" (Nov. 22, 1817). Sixteen months later, half a year before beginning "Lamia,' he writes that poetry may be "not so fine a thing as philosophy - for the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth."

(279.) 231-238. There was an awful rainbow once etc.: Keats has in mind Newton's prismatic analysis of the rainbow, with which he compares Apollonius's destructive scrutiny of Lamia, presently to be described. The passage does not express a general hostility to science, but the fact that beauty escapes those who are

con

cerned only with calculable forces. — On her first appearance, Lamia was imaged as "rainbow-sided" (Part First, line 54, page 270).

(280.) 263-264. The stately music

a thousand wreaths: The myrtle, rather than the other foliage in the wreaths (see lines 215-220), wilted because it was sacred to Venus. The "stately music," like the myrtle, is in supernatural sympathy with Lamia; see note to line 122, above. This music therefore ceases before the "voice" and "lute" of the guests (line 265).

Though lacking the magic phrase and rhythm of the preceding sonnet, this one has a compelling march from first to last line, and a fine poetic idea. Milton gave Adam's first sleep ("Paradise Lost," VIII, 287 ff.); but not his first experience of darkness. Meditating on this, Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841) found a fresh outlet for the old human sense of the relation between night and death. Perhaps the sestet grew directly from his own religious difficulties.

At this time he had passed from the Catholic to the Anglican church, and was moving toward Unitarianism. His autobiography, Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (1833), is revealing for the spirit of the time. The hope expressed in the poem may help to account for its powerful effect on the aged and regretful Coleridge, who pronounced it the finest sonnet in the language.

H. COLERIDGE: WHITHER IS GONE THE WISDOM

BRIGHT STAR

Written on September 30, after Keats

of the time-spirit that had shaped his own life and work. He had actually had that free upbringing in the presence of nature which his great father so poetically prophesied and desired for him; see S. T. Coler

(page 77). It fostered his sensitive appreciation of nature's beauties, and of humble affections; while it aggravated his inborn defect, his lack of "the self-constraining will" (see line 7 of the sonnet). With a firmer character he would have developed more fully his most distinctive gift, that of fine criticism. It appears often in his sonnets, which are the best of

THOMAS HOOD (1799-1845)

Hood may be considered "the most richly endowed of all the poets intermediate between Shelley and Keats on the one hand, and Tennyson and Browning on the other" (Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era, 1910). A versatile journalist, brave in long poverty and disease, Hood found a vent for his fun-loving spirit, and a means of supporting his family, in a succession of popular-humorous poems. The lengthiest of them is "Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg" (of gold). Through its jocularity runs an invective against the worship of money and comfort. From this mode, Hood passed to the serious and plain power of "The Song of the Shirt." Another side of his poetry, reminiscent of Hunt and Keats, is illustrated by "Ruth.”

RUTH

Compare the glimpse of Ruth in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," lines 65-67 (page 253).

(282.) 15. stooks: shocks, -i.e., upright sheaves of grain massed together.

FAREWELL, LIFE

Written on Hood's deathbed. - The shift of atmosphere, from night and earth

to morning and the rose, is carried on subtle changes of tone and rhythm.

THE SONG OF THE SHIRT

Hood had in mind the recent trial of a woman charged by her employer with pawning articles that belonged to him, though, as he said, she was making a "good living." It was brought out in evidence that she earned at trouser-making seven shillings a week, on which she had been trying to support herself and family. In the poem, however, Hood develops a single theme and effect. - Compare his "Bridge of Sighs," written shortly afterwards: which is the better poem of the two?

This was a dogma in Mahometanism.

22. gusset: an extra strip sewn on, to give strength or width in some part of the garment.

12.

45. That shattered roof: Cf. line

PRAED: THE VICAR

The work of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839), unlike Hood's, is quite in the vein of eighteenth century social wit. "Praed is the embodiment of Eton and Cambridge and St. James's; the very spirit of good English society without its insolence. He has the code, the wit, the manners, the way of taking itself for granted that belongs to the caste, but is something more as well; for in him the caste turns upon itself, and describes and mocks itself, though still it knows of no other self, and refuses to mock too hard." (Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, II, 282). His verse has admirable finish; he made himself the master, in particular, of the form illustrated by the present poem, an eight-line stanza with double rhymes. His Poems of Life of Manners, of which "The Vicar" is a good example, often remind one of the gently satirical portraiture of Jane Austen and Oliver Goldsmith. Compare the present parson with him of "Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village."

R. S. HAWKER (1804-1875) Educated at Oxford, Robert Stephen Hawker became parson of Morwenstow a community given to smuggling and even wrecking on the coast of Cornwall. An eccentric reformer, he closed his life in the Roman Catholic Church. His most ambitious works are Records of the Western Shore, and The Quest of the Sangraal (1864); the latter (like Hawker's missionary life and personality) has a special vigor not present in Tennyson's treatment of the Arthurian story.

MAWGAN OF MELHUACH

Hawker gives the following note on this ballad: "Gilbert Mawgan, a noted wrecker, lived in a hut that stood by the sea-shore at Melhuach. . . . Among other crimes it is said that he once buried the captain of a vessel, whom he found exhausted on the strand, alive! At the death of the old man, they told me that a vessel came up the Channel, made for Melhuach bay, and lay-to amid a tremendous surf. When Mawgan ceased to breathe, she stood-out to sea and disappeared."

(285.) 19. their: refers to "men" in line 2.

ARE THEY NOT ALL MINISTERING SPIRITS?

14.

The title is quoted from Hebrews, I,

BARNES: BLACKMWORE

MAIDENS

Son of a farmer, William Barnes (18011886) was born in the Vale of Blackmore in Dorsetshire. In this southern county he held various positions in the Church, and became widely known as the author of poems in the broad dialect of Dorset,notable for their tender feeling, understanding of rural life and character, and perception of natural beauty.

3. down treeless upland of the south of England.

line 14).

tops.

4. clote: yellow waterlily.

6. tow'r: the church-tower (see

7. bricken tuns: brick chimney

8. Stour: The name of the river is locally pronounced to rhyme with "tower" (two lines above).

31. en: him. (286.) 37. tweil: toil.

W. S. LANDOR (1775-1864)

"I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my life, although I have written many which have been thought such," Walter Savage Landor remarked in his last years, with characteristic forthrightness and exaggeration. Passionate and irascible by temperament, he lived much to himself. The son of a successful physician, he retired, after classical schooling at Rugby and Oxford, to several years of solitary study in Wales. Three years later, in 1798, appeared his very romantic "epic" entitled "Gebir." In 1808 he proceeded to Spain to take part in the war against Bonaparte. During the remainder of his long life, he resided partly in England, partly in Italy; publishing voluminously, both poetry and prose, strengthening his hold on that ancient world in which he really dwelt, and mastering his creative

faculty. His outstanding achievements are, in prose, the many Imaginary Conversations, and, in verse the Hellenics and a large number of exquisitely shaped short

poems.

Temperamentally akin to some of the great poets of the early century, he was related with them, also, in his passion for freedom and republicanism (which took the Byronic aristocratic form) and in his enthusiasm for the ancient Hellenic world, - an enthusiasm not, however, the same as that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. While Keats, for example, absorbed his Grecian lore almost unconsciously, and made it a part of his own fair dreaming, the hard-working Landor found in the ancient Greek and Latin world, as in Milton among the moderns, the opportunity for a discipline that was at once artistic, intellectual, and ethical. The ancient forms of thought, as Lord Houghton said, "gave to his character the heroic influences which alone subdued the wilfulness of his temperament, and amid all the confusions of life kept his heart high and his fancy pure." Acknowledging no debt to any contemporary writer, disrelishing "green lanes" in which the romantic poets had strayed (as he indicates in "Lately our songsters loitered in green lanes," page 296), he strove to "climb A loftier station" - that land of pure beauty conjoined with firm control and greatmindedness, which he found in ancient Hellas. "Nowhere in the range of English literature"

the

to quote Lord Houghton once more "is the glory and happiness of moderation of mind more nobly preached than in the writings of this most intemperate man; nowhere is the sacredness of the placid life more hallowed and honoured than in the utterances of this tossed and troubled spirit."

ROSE AYLMER

(286.) 1-2. sceptered race: Rose Aylmer, upon whose death Landor wrote these elegiac lines, was the only daughter of the fourth Baron Aylmer and the sister of his successor, who was a Governor-General of Canada.

ON "THE HELLENICS"

These lines form a proem or introduction to the fifty or so "Hellenics" upon which Landor was at work for a large part of his life. By an Hellenic (or Idyllium Heroicum, as he named the form when he wrote in Latin hexameters) he meant a short tale on an heroic, or mythological, or idyllic theme of Greek origin, composed in blank verse. Sometimes he used dialogue only, without narrative linking; such poems are really metrical "Imaginary Conversations," and may be profitably compared with those in prose, especially the series on Greeks and Romans. The reader who desires a fuller acquaintance with the Hellenics than is afforded by the present volume may turn to "Acon and Rhodope" (sequel of "The Hamadryad," page 290), "Coresus and Callirrhoe," "Menelaus and Helen," "The Death of Paris and none." All of these pieces, — indeed all the poems that Landor wrote, - should be read slowly and repeatedly, if they are to reveal, through their deceptive simplicity and restraint, the warmth and depth of their feeling.

Of the three poems that here follow the

long

proem, the first two illustrate the "graver," the third the "lighter" song (see line 14), even though the third -"The Hamadryad" - ends in death. (288.) 3-4. the silent sands strides: the banks of the river Simoïs, the scene of many a resounding struggle in the Trojan War; the Homeric heroes are suggested in the phrase "long strides." "Simoïs" has three syllables, only the first of which, in Landor's line, receives metrical

stress.

5-8. higher grounds - far below: Mount Ida, whence the Simoïs flows to the Trojan plain. It was here that the judgment of Paris took place- see the introductory note to Tennyson's "Enone," page 719, below.

8. happy Ares: Ares (Mars), the god of war, was represented as delighting in the din and destruction of war. His lover was Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of love, whose winning of the golden apple led to the Trojan War.

10. Anapos: a winding Sicilian

river, here representing idyllic poetry, as the Simoïs above represents heroic poetry, -"lighter song" (last line) as opposed to "graver."

THE DEATH OF ARTEMIDORA

Landor set this Hellenic in the frame of one of his most ambitious imaginary conversations in prose, "Pericles and Aspasia," Letter 85. The poem illustrates the "curious arrestedness of his pictures. . . He has the air of representing not so much the imaginary object, as some marble or painted representation of it that he has first imagined. He chronicles the moment of checked emotion that is proper to a solid Keats group or to the figures on a vase. might have taken examples for his great ode from Landor's verse or prose" (Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, II, 18). This statuesque picture of husband and wife, Elpenor and Artemidora, reminds one of the ancient Attic tombstones, of which Percy Gardner has said: "The family groups in which husband and wife are hand in hand, or in which a mother is taking leave of the children grouped about her, are among the most pleasing works of ancient sculpture, free from all painful expression and from all exaggerated sentiment, but full of the poetry of the life of simple duty and natural affection" (The Principles of Greek Art, 66). (Figure 9, page 65, in the work just cited, gives a good example.)

5. other rivers: rivers of the lower world; see note to line 19, below. (289.) 11. Iris stood over her dark hair, unseen: Iris, messenger of the gods, standing ready to release her spirit by loosening her hair.

19. not hers: This was succeeded, in the first edition, by the following lines: "With her, that old boat incorruptible, Unwearied, undiverted in its course, Had plashed the water up the farther strand."

The "old boat" is, of course, that of Charon, conveying the shades of the dead across the rivers of the lower world to their destination. With or without these