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is no draught of earthly wine (cf. 1. 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).

11. 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

and quiet happiness, as contrasted with the transiency of human happiness and the cloying of human passion that wins to its goal.

1. 1. unravished, because preserving its purity and beauty.

1. 2. foster-child, because nursed by them. 1. 3. Sylvan historian, because telling tales of woods, as well as of men (cf. ll. 15, 21, 32, 43).

P. 476. l. 7. Tempe and Arcady, delightful regions in Greece, famous in mythology and poetry; for particulars, see Gayley.

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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, 1. 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 á 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

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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.

11. 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. l. 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 Rhodope 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.

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Fiesole (pr. Fee ay' sō 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 (ll. 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 Sartor 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.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

Pp. 518 ff. In 1851 the Catholics of Ireland founded a University in Dublin. Newman was called upon to speak on the occasion, and delivered nine lectures which were published under the title The Idea of a University. He himself was chosen as rector of the newly-founded university; but it was a failure from the first, partly through lack of government support, and partly because Newman himself lacked executive ability.

The lectures themselves may, perhaps, be summed up, in a phrase used by Newman himself in the passage chosen for this book, as inspired by "clear, calm, accurate vision." And it was largely this clearness, this poise, this precision, that made Newman such a power in his day.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

THE LADY OF SHALOTT

Pp. 523 f. Like Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci, this poem seems to have been suggested by its title. In this case, as in the other, the piece from which the title was taken bears little relation to the poem suggested by it. The curious may read the story of La Donna di Scalotta in the old Italian Cento Novelle Antiche, where it is No. 81 (tr. Roscoe, Italian Novelists, Vol. I). This is Tennyson's first attempt to deal with a theme taken from the stories that clustered about King Arthur and his knights. Here the interest lies not in the story as such, but in the mood of the poet and the suggested but indefinite symbolism of the poem. The key to the symbolism of the poem is said by Tennyson's son to lie in ll. 69-72 and to consist in the entrance of human interests into the world of shadows in which the Lady had lived. It is hardly possible, and certainly unnecessary, to attempt to find a definite symbolic meaning for every detail of the situation and narrative.

The poem is divided into four parts, each devoted to a single phase of the theme. Part I sets before us the lonely situation of the Lady in the gray-walled island tower beside the thronged road to Camelot. Part II emphasizes her isolation from the world of realities and her contact with life only through the shadows in the magic mirror, which apparently she reproduces in her magic web as her fragment of the dream of human life. In Part III, half-sick of shadows as she has become, she sees the brilliant figure of Sir Lancelot in the mirror, and, in spite of the curse that will

come upon her, she leaves her web and for the first time sees in direct vision the world of nature, represented by the water lil and the world of mankind, represented by Lan lot, whom she has loved at first sight. In Part IV the curse has come upon her, and real life is broken for her, as was the mirror in which she saw the world of shadows. When the boat bearing her body floats down the stream to Camelot, Lancelot, though all unaware of her love for him, is touched by admiration and pity, and breathes a prayer for her.

A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN

Pp. 524 ff. The style of this poem is rich and elaborate in three ways. In the first place Tennyson's imagination is largely pictorial; he visualizes the scenes and persons and objects of his story, and the reader who would perfectly recreate in his own mind the poet's conception must try to catch every hint given by the words of the poem and reconstruct the pictorial images. This is true not only of such striking figures as Cleopatra with her wild exotic beauty or Jephthah's daughter, the embodiment of maidenly sweetness and filial submission until, at the thought of the victory over Ammon, her face glows with a light that would be savage if it were not Biblical; it is true, also, of such incidentals as the dim red morn lying dead and pale across the threshold of the sun, and the bizarre emphasis given to the dark silent forest by the red anemone that burned among the lush green grasses. Everywhere, in almost every stanza, the reader must move slowly, must read carefully, must let every word play its due part in the elaborate and highly colored pictures that hovered in the poet's vision.

The second element of richness and elaborateness of effect is due to the fact that in the poet's mind many of the rich pictures of the poem itself exist in a very atmosphere of beauty and pathos created for him by poets and painters and sculptors who have treated these same things before him. As he sees in his vision Helen and Iphigenia, his memory is filled with the music of the Iliad and the choral measures of Eschylus and Sophocles, and he sees not only these women and the vivid picture of the death of one of them, but all the heroes who went out from Greece to battle on the windy plains of Troy, the fatal return of Agamemnon to his dishonored home, and the vengeance of Electra and Orestes. The disconnected pictures of ancient strife and wrong that pass before his eyes before he fully falls asleep - the lances in ambush, the attack on the walled

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