Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place."-Shelley's Preface to Adonais. P. 473. 1. 460. Cf. the note on 1. 381.

1. 461. The same idea in different words. That earthly phenomena are shadows cast by the Heavenly Light is set forth in the seventh book of Plato's Republic.

1. 463. The white radiance of eternity was doubtless suggested by the description of heaven in Plato's Phædrus. "Real existence, colorless, formless, and intangible, visible only to the intelligence which sits at the helm of the soul . . . has its abode in this region." The comparison of life to a dome of many colored glass may conceivably have been suggested by the fable which Socrates tells Simmias in the Phado to the effect that "this earth, if any one should survey it from above, is like one of those balls covered with twelve different pieces of leather, variegated and distinguished with colors," though that of course is really a different conception from this.

FINAL CHORUS FROM HELLAS

Hellas is a lyrical drama inspired by the proclamation of Greek independence in 1821 and celebrating this event as preluding the return of the "Golden Age." Shelley tells us in a note that the Final Chorus was suggested by the prophetic visions of Isaiah and Vergil, that is, especially the sixty-fifth chapter of Isaiah and the fourth Eclogue of Vergil. The student may also compare Pope's Messiah, which was likewise suggested by Isaiah and Vergil.

Il. 1-18. A belief of the ancients was that at the end of many thousand years all the heavenly bodies would have returned to the positions they occupied at creation and the events of history would begin to repeat themselves. As the Golden Age of innocence and happiness was, in poetry and mythology, placed in the first age of the world, its return was also looked for. In this poem Shelley develops in detail this ideal of historic recapitulation. A new Greece (Hellas) shall arise with all the beauties and glories of ancient Greek history and poetry: the river Peneus, the vale of Tempe, the islands of the Cyclades shall again be scenes of pastoral sim

plicity and delight; the great adventures of the search for the Golden Fleece, the descent of Orpheus to Hades to release his lost Eurydice, the return of Ulysses, shall all be relived.

P. 474. ll. 19-24. Pursuing the same idea, the poet is shocked by the thought that the evil of the past will also be renewed - the Trojan War, the dark tragedy of Edipus - and he prays that this may be averted.

11. 31-34. "Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness. All those who fell, or the gods of Greece, Asia and Egypt; the One who rose, or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan World were amerced of their worship; and the many unsubdued, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over the understandings of men, in conjunction or in succession." - Shelley's Note.

JOHN KEATS

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

The poet, listening to the song of the nightingale, is affected to a passion of tearful delight in the happiness of the bird (ll. 1-10), and longs for a magical draught of summer that will cause him to follow the bird (ll. 11-20), leaving behind the fever and fret of the world (11. 21-30). Imagination fulfils his desire, and he finds himself in the forest of his fancy (11. 31-40), a place lighted only by moon-beams, and so dim that he discerns the flowers about him only by their odors (ll. 41-50).

Resuming the theme of the first stanza, he declares that, as he listens in the dark, death seems richer and sweeter at the thought that the bird's song is immortal (ll. 51-70).

His thoughts are brought back to himself and his sorrows by the word "forlorn," and as the song of the bird fades away in the distance, he questions whether it may not have been "a vision or a waking dream."

In music and suggestiveness of diction, in beauty of imagery, in sensuous richness of conception, this poem has never been surpassed even by Keats himself. It must be read often and in many moods, for though its magical charm can be felt at a single reading, every rift, to borrow a phrase from Keats's advice to Shelley, is loaded with ore. P. 475. 1. 9. The shadows are those cast by the full moon (see l. 36).

ll. 11-20. The draught that is to transport the poet away from the weariness and sorrow of life

is no draught of earthly wine (cf. l. 32), for all its taste and color, but the wine of poetic inspiration (cf. ll. 16, 33).

1. 14. Provençal poetry, though he knew little about it, was always associated in Keats's imagination with romantic beauty (cf. The Eve of St. Agnes, 1. 292, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci). 1. 16. Hippocrene, like Lethe (1. 4), Dryad (1. 7), Flora (1. 13), Bacchus (1. 32), is fully explained in Gayley's Classic Myths.

1. 32. Bacchus is here only the vulgar god of wine, not the mystical god Dionysus. There is no better way of appreciating these two different phases of the same Greek god than by reading in succession the Cyclops and the Bacche of Euripides (Shelley translated the former).

II. 65-67. Cf. Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper for a picture much akin to this.

11. 69-70. Why these lines suggest to the imagination the whole world of romance, it would be difficult to say.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Pp. 475 f. This urn, like the deep bowl of ivywood which the Goatherd gave to Thyrsis for singing the Affliction of Daphnis (Theocritus, Idyl I), was carved with a succession of beautiful scenes and figures. No urn exactly answering to that in the poem is known; some editors think Keats had in mind a finely carved marble urn that stood in the garden of Holland House, but if so, he has not described it closely. "Description" is, indeed, hardly the term for his method of setting these sculptured scenes before our eyes. For him they live, and we learn what they are like only from the emotions and reflections they produce in him. The carvings of the Goatherd's bowl are perhaps no less beautiful, but the descriptions of them are simple and uncolored by emotion or reflection.

The urn seems to present two main scenes: (1) the rout of fleeing maidens and pursuing men of ll. 8-10; and (2) the sacrificial procession of 11. 31-37. The youth piping beneath the trees (1. 15) and the bold lover (1. 17) who has almost caught the maiden, are apparently details of the first scene; and the little town of silent streets (ll. 38-39) is obviously not in the picture, but only inferred by the poet from the crowd that follows the priest and the sacrificial victim to the forest altar, — which also is not visible except to the imagination of the poet.

The fundamental idea of the poem is, of course, the permanence of all these beautiful forms and the consequent permanence of their wild rapture

This poem, a companion piece in the same metre and manner as the preceding, is even lighter in tone. Keats might have shrunk from being "disrespectful to the Equator," but he certainly treats the Zodiac with delightful levity.

The Mermaid Tavern was the resort of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, and their fellows (see Beaumont's Letter to Ben Jonson, p. 174 of this volume).

1. 19. Why new old-sign?

1. 22. Which of the signs of the Zodiac is the Mermaid?

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI The title of this poem (The Beautiful Lady without Mercy) is taken from one written in French by Alain Chartier about 1400. Keats seems to have thought it was written in Provençal (cf. The Eve of St. Agnes, l. 292). The English translation of it by Richard Ros was accessible to him among the poems ascribed to Chaucer in Chalmers' English Poets, but its mediocre quality did not prevent him from being fascinated by the title and writing a poem to suit it.

It is not a poem that the student should try to analyze or reason about. It is the expression of a romantic mood by means of a combination of romantic figures and imagery with wonderful verbal music. It should, however, be read with

recognition of the art with which the withered sedge, the lonely lake, the fairy lady, the vision of the pale kings and princes who had been her victims, and, indeed, all the details, are combined to harmonize with the figure of the knight; and all to develop the suggestions of the title.

SONNETS

Pp. 478 f. Among the comparatively few masters of the sonnet, Keats ranks very high. The six chosen for this volume of selections illustrate various themes and moods. None of them requires any explanation. With that on The Grasshopper and the Cricket the student may compare Lovelace's The Grasshopper, p. 218. The pedant has long been shocked to note that in the one On First Looking into Chapman's Homer Keats has ascribed to Cortez a feat performed by Balboa, and has extended the bounds of Darien perhaps unwarrantably. But the poem as a poem is none the less admirable on those accounts.

Wordsworth has a fine sonnet To Sleep (p. 395), which it is interesting to compare with Keats's on the same subject. It is somewhat characteristic of the two poets that Wordsworth woos Sleep as the

"Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health,"

whereas Keats mingles with a sensuous pleasure in sleep itself a yearning for it as shutting out the cares and sorrows of life. Wordsworth's is a fine wholesome poem; Keats's is a subtle and rich work of sensuous art, almost every line of which is a masterpiece of thought and phrasing.

ENDYMION

Pp. 479 f. In this poem Keats follows that form of the Endymion myth which represents him as a shepherd lad. The scene is laid in ancient Greece, and the rivers, fountains, meadows, and forests are peopled by the beautiful creatures of Greek fancy nymphs, dryads, oreads, fauns, etc. That the beauty of the poem is too elaborate, too rich, too overcharged with ornament and sentiment, Keats himself recognized; but it was a youthful production and he knew that he could free himself from the faults it contained and develop into greater solidity and strength the beauties it undeniably possessed. The fact is that Keats regarded all his work, as he says in his letters, as mere experiments, exercises in composition to prepare him for the great and serious work

which he planned to do when mind and character were riper and more richly furnished with the wisdom of life.

Lines 1-331 —a proem on the influence and value of beauty give his reasons for choosing this subject. Lines 540-671 describe the first meeting of Endymion and the Moon Goddess, Diana.

HYPERION

Pp. 481 f. The subject of Hyperion is the overthrow of the older gods by the younger, especially of the old sun deity Hyperion by the new sun-god Apollo. The chief older gods, or Titans, were Oceanus and Tethys, Hyperion and Thea, Chronos (or Saturn) and Rhea, Japetus, Themis, and Mnemosyne. In the new order Oceanus was replaced by Neptune, Hyperion by Apollo, and Saturn by Jupiter. The theme is really the eternal conflict between the old order of established power and peace and the new order of aggressiveness and progress. Although the poem shows a great improvement in power and restrained beauty over Endymion, Keats did not finish it perhaps because he felt that he was not yet mature enough for the great demands of such a theme. 1. 21.

Gaea (or Earth) was the mother of the older gods; Uranus (or Heaven) their father. 1. 23. there came one, Thea.

1. 30. Ixion was bound to a revolving wheel in Tartarus (Hell) for boasting that Juno loved him. 1. 51. To compared to.

=

ll. 83-4. A month had passed.

1. 129. What is implied by metropolitan?

THE EVE OF ST. AGNES

Pp. 482 ff. The poem is a simple story of two lovers separated, like Romeo and Juliet, by the enmity of their families, and of their elopement on St. Agnes' Eve. The scene is laid in feudal times, and the date chosen is the night on which, according to popular superstition, a girl may have a vision of her true lover if she performs certain ceremonies. The poem itself tells all that is necessary for its interpretation, but those who wish a prose account of the superstitions may consult Chambers' Book of Days or Brand's Popular Antiquities.

1. 1. St. Agnes' Eve, the night of January 20. 11. 5 ff. Beadsman, a beadsman was one paid or maintained to pray for his benefactor or others. This one is represented as praying in the chapel of the castle before the picture of the Virgin. About him, on their tombs enclosed with iron railings or in

oratories (alcoves along the walls), are the sculptured figures of the dead with their hands folded as if in prayer.

1. 71. On account of her name and her innocence the lamb (Latin agnus) is associated with St. Agnes. Eight days after her martyrdom, her parents, praying at her tomb, saw a vision of angels, among whom was their daughter, and beside her a lamb white as snow.

P. 484. 1. 116. The nuns who weave the sacred wool of St. Agnes' lambs; of the ceremonies on her day in Rome, Naogeorgus, as translated by Barnaby Googe, says:

"For in St. Agnes' church upon this day while masse they sing,

Two lambes as white as snowe the nonnes do yearely use to bring,

And when the Agnus chaunted is upon the aulter hie

(For in this thing there hidden is a solemne mysterie),

They offer them. The servants of the Pope, when this is done,

Do put them into pasture good till shearing time be come.

Then other wooll they mingle with these holy fleeces twaine,

Whereof, being sponne and drest, are made the pals [palls] of passing gaine."

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Pp. 487 ff. Landor's temperament was very erratic and volcanic. In singular contrast, his verse, as well as his prose, is distinguished by reserve and moderation of expression, sometimes, indeed, lapsing into the prosaic. He often has lines and short passages of an exquisite quiet beauty and suggestiveness, but never succeeds in maintaining a high poetic level throughout a long poem. It is not strange that only the finest of his poems, like Rose Aylmer and the others given here, have attained general currency. Each of these is written, as it were, in a single flash of inspiration, and each incorporates in a form of ultimate beauty thoughts and feelings that awaken an almost universal response.

ESOP AND RHODOPÈ

The suggestion for this dialogue Landor took from Herodotus, who says that Æsop and Rhodopè were both slaves in the same household. Æsop was the famous writer of fables, of whom

little is known except that he was a Phrygian who lived about 600 B.C. Traditionally he was hunchbacked and ugly. Rhodopè or Rhodopis (the rose-faced) was a Thracian, whom her master Xanthus took to Egypt. Sappho's brother fell in love with her and purchased her freedom, as appears from one of Sappho's poems. Strabo tells of her a story which is the oldest form of one episode in the tale of Cinderella. It is that while she was bathing, an eagle flew away with one of her shoes and dropped it in the lap of the King of Egypt. He was so attracted by the beauty of the foot suggested by it and by the strangeness of the circumstance that he sent out messengers to find the owner of the shoe and married her.

The story of the way in which Rhodopè came to be a slave was invented by Landor.

ROSE AYLMER

P. 492. This beautiful and suggestive elegy contains all the elements of the poetry of personal loss the reflection that no virtue or power could save the beloved one, and the expression of the poet's own sorrows. Those prosaic souls who have objected that one night is little to consecrate to the memory of a friend so beloved are inaccessible to the effects of suggestion and incapable of understanding that the poet's sense of loss can be permanent unless he tells them explicitly that he will never get over it.

A FIESOLAN IDYL

Fiesole (pr. Fee ay' so le) is an ancient town situated at the summit of a small mountain of the same name that rises with a steep slope on the outskirts of Florence. The idyl is a sweet, small poem, presenting, as in a picture, a single, simple incident. The poet hears a rustling among the orange trees on the slope of the mountain, and, finding a graceful young girl gathering flowers, helps her pull down the branches that are too high for her to reach. Then comes the delicate embarrassment of both, when she wishes, but hardly dares, to offer him a large sweet blossom, and he dares not assume that she means to offer or that he ought to take it. Incidentally the poet's love and tender care of flowers is exquisitely expressed (IL 16-33).

ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY

P. 493. The only thing that has ever been unfavorably criticised in this poetic summary of

Landor's life, and his contentment with what it has brought him, is the supposed egotism of the first line. But if a man loves nature and art and devotes himself to them (warming "both hands before the fire of life") and to the expression of his love for them, he may well feel that striving with other men is silly and unworthy of him.

THE VICTORIAN AGE

THOMAS CARLYLE

SARTOR RESARTUS

Pp. 497 ff. In reading Sartor Resartus, it is well to remember that Carlyle had a Scotch temperament and that he purposely adopted German modes of thought and phrasing. The first results in a picturesque half-suppressed violence in the utterance of the emotions with which his philosophy of life was surcharged, and the second gives his style the complexity and elaboration that characterize much German philosophical writing. He chose for the vehicle of the message embodied in Sartor Resartus an imaginary German professor whom he calls Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo (Don't-know-where). Under the pretence that he has met this man and become impressed with his ideas, Carlyle represents himself as translating his biography into English. The materials of this biography, he says, reached him in the following form:

"Six considerable PAPER-BAGS, carefullysealed, and marked successively, in gilt China ink, with the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal Signs, beginning at Libra; in the inside of which sealed Bags lie miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips, written in Professor Teufelsdröckh's scarce legible cursiv-schrift; and treating of all imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it. . . ."

By this device Carlyle obtains the greatest possible freedom in the expression of his ideas. He begins with the idea suggested by Swift in his Tale of a Tub (p. 248 above), choosing the title Sarlor Resartus (the tailor re-tailored) to show that he meant to tear away the outward appearances of life in order to get at its real meaning. He sums up the purpose of the book thus:

"Have many British readers actually arrived with us at the new promised country; is the Philosophy of Clothes now at last opening around them? Long and adventurous has the journey been: from those outmost vulgar, palpable

Woollen Hulls of Man; through his wondrous Flesh-Garments, and his wondrous Social Garnitures; inwards to the Garments of his very Soul's Soul, to Time and Space themselves! And now does the spiritual, eternal Essence of Man, and of Mankind, bared of such wrappages, begin in any measure to reveal itself? Can many readers discern, as through a glass darkly, in huge wavering outlines, some primeval rudiments of Man's Being, what is changeable from what is unchangeable?"

He criticises its character and value as follows: "It was in this high moment, when the soul, rent, as it were, and shed asunder, is open to inspiring influence, that I first conceived this Work on Clothes: the greatest I can ever hope to do; which has already, after long retardations, occupied, and will yet occupy, so large a section of my life. . . ."

The three chapters given in this book form a thought-unit, showing Carlyle's growth from pessimism and despair to the foundation of his particular form of optimism, that the supreme need of the soul is to express itself in some sort of. work.

There is much autobiography even in the details of the book, and as a spiritual history, it is entirely autobiographical.

THOMAS, LORD MACAULAY

Pp. 510 ff. The long selection from Macaulay's famous chapter on the state of England at the time of the Revolution of 1688 is out of proportion to his importance among writers of English prose; but teachers who are tired of reading over and over again his biographical sketches will doubtless welcome it as a change, and both teachers and pupils will surely find it valuable for the vivid picture it gives of the physical and social background against which so large a part of English literature must be seen if it is to be seen truly. Moreover, in style it presents Macaulay at his best, and Macaulay at his best is a triumph of clear and vivid common sense. He is, to be sure, one-sided; he was not a big enough man to have an all-round vision or a subtle enough man to observe distinctions and shades that make all the difference in the final accuracy of a picture, and he has no real philosophy of history. He is pompous, rhetorical, even blatant at times; but he is one of the first writers of history in English who gets beyond the point of stringing together and weighing events merely as events. He really constructs pictures that enable us to realize the times and the men about which he is writing.