Then, sing ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song! As to the tabor's sound! We, in thought, will join your throng Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts to-day Feel the gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Though nothing can bring back the hour Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring In the faith that looks through death, And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forbode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquish'd one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway: I love the brooks which down their channels fret The clouds that gather round the setting sun That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; CCCXXXIX MUSIC, when soft voices die, Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, P. B. Shelley NOTES 26. Els Tòv λeiμŵva кalloas, etc. "Sitting down in the meadow, he plucked spoils of flowers, one after another, winning them with delighted soul." Quoted by Plutarch in his Moralia from a lost play of Euripides, Hypsipyle. SUMMARY OF BOOK FOURTH It proves sufficiently the lavish wealth of our own age in Poetry, that the pieces which, without conscious departure from the Standard of Excellence, render this Book by far the longest, were with very few exceptions composed during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Exhaustive reasons can hardly be given for the strangely sudden appearance of individual genius: that, however, which assigns the splendid national achievements of our recent poetry to an impulse from the France of the first Republic and Empire is inadequate. The first French Revolution was rather one result, the most conspicuous, indeed, yet itself in great measure essentially retrogressive, of that wider and more potent spirit which through inquiry and attempt, through strength and weakness, sweeps mankind round the circles (not, as some too confidently argue, of Advance, but) of gradual Transformation: and it is to this that we must trace the literature of Modern Europe. But, without attempting discussion on the motive causes of Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others, we may observe that these poets carried to further perfection the later tendencies of the century preceding, in simplicity of narrative, reverence for human passion and character in every sphere, and love of Nature for herself: - that, whilst maintaining on the whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers: that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in meter, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the Soul and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger sense of Humanity, - hitherto scarcely attained, and perhaps unattainable even by predecessors of not inferior individual genius. In a word, the Ñation which, after to the Greeks in their glory, may fairly claim that during six centuries it has proved itself the most richly gifted of all nations for Poetry, expressed in these men the highest strength and prodigality of its nature. They interpreted the age to itself hence the many phases of thought and style they present:sympathize with each, fervently and impartially, without fear and without fancifulness, is no doubtful step in the higher education of the soul. For purity in taste is absolutely proportionate to strength and when once the mind has raised itself to grasp and to delight in excellence, those who love most will be found to love most wisely. But the gallery which this Book offers to the reader will aid him more than any preface. It is a royal Palace of Poetry which he is invited to enter: Adparet domus intus, et atria longa patescuntthough it is, indeed, to the sympathetic eye only that its treasures will be visible. [P.] 33, 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. [P.] 34, CCIx, 1. 8. Parle. Speech. --- 35, ccx. Chapman's Homer. Chapman was a poet and dramatist of the time of Shakespeare. His translation of Homer, while very splendid in poetic form and imagery, is less in the spirit of the original than of Elizabethan verse. 36. 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. [P.] 40, CCXII. The most tender and true of Byron's smaller poems. [P.] 41, CCXIII. This poem exemplifies the peculiar skill with which Scott employs proper names:- a rarely misleading sign of true poetical genius. [P.] 44, CCXV. In some editions called "Lines to an Indian Air." 54, 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 ccxxi, Lamb in CCLXIV, 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 (CCXXIV) suggest, perhaps, the same remark. [P.] 55. Moor. A tract of uninclosed, waste ground, overgrown with heather. - Minster-clock. Church clock. — Faggot-band. String or strip of bark used for tying up twigs into bundles. 56, Furlong. Eighth of a mile. 61, ccxxxi, 1.3. Pensile. Hanging in space. 66, 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. [P.] 68, CCXXXVII. La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The lovely lady without mercy. Keats has taken an ancient tradition of enchantment and made it live again for modern ears. 69. Zone. Belt. 74, CCXLII. This beautiful sonnet was the last word of a youth, in whom, if the fulfilment 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 twenty-five, 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." [P.] Eremite. Hermit. 75, CCXLIII. Charact'ry. Letters. 76, CCXLIV. Desideria. Lost and longed for. CCXLV. It is impossible not to regret that Moore has written so little in this sweet and genuinely national style. [P.] 77, CCXLVI. 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. [P.] 80, CCXLVII. Written to Jane Williams, for whom the poet had in his later years a romantic attachment. CCXLVIII. From The Lady of the Lake. - Pibroch. A kind of bagpipe music, variations on a particular kind of theme, generally martial. - Donuil Dhu. Donald the Black. 89, CCLIII. Bonnivard, a Genevese, was imprisoned by the Duke of Savoy in Chillon on the lake of Geneva for his courageous defense 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. [P.] 90, CCLIV. Switzerland was usurped by the French under Napoleon in 1800: Venice in 1797 (CCLV)." [P.] 91, CCLV. Espouse the everlasting Sea. Referring to the |