Act II, Scene 3: 'The grey-eyed morn smiles,' &c.--It should be added

that three lines, which appeared hopelessly misprinted, have been omitted in this Poem.

4 6 _Time's chest_: in which he is figuratively supposed to lay up past treasures. So in Troilus, Act III, Scene 3, 'Time hath a wallet at his back' &c. In the _Arcadia_, _chest_ is used to signify _tomb_.

5 7 A fine example of the high wrought and conventional Elizabethan Pastoralism, which it would be unreasonable to criticize on the ground of the unshepherdlike or unreal character of some images suggested. Stanza 6 was perhaps inserted by Izaak Walton.

6 8 This beautiful lyric is one of several recovered from the very rare Elizabethan Song-books, for the publication of which our thanks are due to Mr. A. H. Bullen (1887, 1888).

8 12 One stanza has been here omitted, in accordance with the principle noticed in the Preface. Similar omissions occur in a few other poems. The more serious abbreviation by which it has been attempted to bring Crashaw's 'Wishes' and Shelley's 'Euganean Hills,' with one or two more, within the scheme of this selection, is commended with much diffidence to the judgment of readers acquainted with the original pieces.

9 13 Sidney's poetry is singularly unequal; his short life, his frequent absorption in public employment, hindered doubtless the development of his genius. His great contemporary fame, second only, it appears, to Spenser's, has been hence obscured. At times he is heavy and even prosaic; his simplicity is rude and bare; his verse unmelodious. These, however, are the 'defects of his merits.' In a certain depth and chivalry of feeling,--in the rare and noble quality of disinterestedness (to put it in one word),--he has no superior, hardly perhaps an equal, amongst our Poets; and after or beside Shakespeare's Sonnets, his _Astrophel and Stella_, in the Editor's judgment, offers the most intense and powerful picture of the passion of love in the whole range of our poetry.--_Hundreds of years_: 'The very rapture of love,' says Mr. Ruskin; 'A lover like this does not believe his mistress can grow old or die.'

12 19 Readers who have visited Italy will be reminded of more than one picture by this gorgeous Vision of Beauty, equally sublime and pure in its Paradisaical naturalness. Lodge wrote it on a voyage to 'the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries;' and he seems to have caught, in those southern seas, no small portion of the qualities which marked the almost contemporary Art of Venice,--the glory and the glow of Veronese, Titian, or Tintoret.--From the same romance is No. 71: a charming picture in the purest style of the later Italian Renaissance.

_The clear_ (l. 1) is the crystalline or outermost heaven of the old cosmography. _For a fair there's fairer none_: If you desire a Beauty, there is none more beautiful than Rosaline.

14 22 Another gracious lyric from an Elizabethan Song-book, first reprinted (it is believed) in Mr. W. J. Linton's 'Rare Poems,' in 1883.

15 23 _that fair thou owest_: that beauty thou ownest.

16 25 From one of the three Song-books of T. Campion, who appears to have been author of the words which he set to music. His merit as a lyrical poet (recognized in his own time, but since then forgotten) has been again brought to light by Mr. Bullen's taste and research:--_swerving_ (st. 2) is his conjecture for _changing_ in the text of 1601.

20 31 _the star Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken_: apparently, Whose stellar influence is uncalculated, although his angular altitude from the plane of the astrolabe or artificial horizon used by astrologers has been determined.

20 32 This lovely song appears, as here given, in Puttenham's 'Arte of English Poesie,' 1589. A longer and inferior form was published in the 'Arcadia' of 1590: but Puttenham's prefatory words clearly assign his version to Sidney's own authorship.

23 37 _keel_: keep cooler by stirring round.

24 39 _expense_: loss.

-- 40 _prease_: press.

25 41 _Nativity, once in the main of light_: when a star has risen and entered on the full stream of light;--another of the astrological phrases no longer familiar.

_Crooked_ eclipses: as coming athwart the Sun's apparent course.

Wordsworth, thinking probably of the 'Venus' and the 'Lucrece,' said finely of Shakespeare: 'Shakespeare _could_ not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought.' This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration than any other portion of the Editor's task),--contains many that will not be fully felt and understood without some earnestness of thought on the reader's part. But he is not likely to regret the labour.

26 42 _upon misprision growing_: either, granted in error, or, on the growth of contempt.

-- 43 With the tone of this Sonnet compare Hamlet's 'Give me that man That is not passion's slave' &c. Shakespeare's writings show the deepest sensitiveness to passion:--hence the attraction he felt in the contrasting effects of apathy.

26 44 _grame_: sorrow. Renaissance influences long impeded the return of English poets to the charming realism of this and a few other poems by Wyat.

28 45 Pandion in the ancient fable was father to Philomela.

29 47 In the old legend it is now Philomela, now Procne (the swallow) who suffers violence from Tereus. This song has a fascination in its calm intensity of passion; that 'sad earnestness and vivid exactness' which Cardinal Newman ascribes to the master-pieces of ancient poetry.

31 50 _proved_: approved.

-- 51 _censures_: judges.

-- 52 Exquisite in its equably-balanced metrical flow.

32 53 Judging by its style, this beautiful example of old simplicity and feeling may, perhaps, be referred to the earlier years of Elizabeth. _Late_ forgot: lately.

35 57 Printed in a little Anthology by Nicholas Breton, 1597. It is, however, a stronger and finer piece of work than any known to be his.--St. 1 _silly_: simple; _dole_: grief; _chief_: chiefly. St. 3 _If there be_ ...: obscure: Perhaps, if there be any who speak harshly of thee, thy pain may plead for pity from Fate.

This poem, with 60 and 143, are each graceful variations of a long popular theme.

36 58 _That busy archer:_ Cupid. _Descries_: used actively; _points out_.--'The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, _Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue?_' (C. Lamb).

37 59 _White Iope_: suggested, Mr. Bullen notes, by a passage in Propertius (iii, 20) describing Spirits in the lower world:

Vobiscum est Iope, vobiscum candida Tyro.

38 62 _cypres_ or cyprus,--used by the old writers for _crape_: whether from the French _crespe_ or from the Island whence it was imported. Its accidental similarity in spelling to _cypress_ has, here and in Milton's Penseroso, probably confused readers.

39 63 _ramage_: confused noise.

41 66 'I never saw anything like this funeral dirge,' says Charles Lamb, 'except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.'

43 70 Paraphrased from an Italian madrigal

... Non so conoscer poi Se voi le rose, o sian le rose in voi.

44 72 _crystal_: fairness.

45 73 _stare_: starling.

-- 74 This 'Spousal Verse' was written in honour of the Ladies Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset. Nowhere has Spenser more emphatically displayed himself as the very poet of Beauty: The Renaissance impulse in England is here seen at its highest and purest.

The genius of Spenser, like Chaucer's, does itself justice only in poems of some length. Hence it is impossible to represent it in this volume by other pieces of equal merit, but of impracticable dimensions. And the same applies to such poems as the _Lover's Lament_ or the _Ancient Mariner_.

46 -- _entrailed_: twisted. Feateously: elegantly.

48 -- _shend_: shame.

49 -- _a noble peer_: Robert Devereux, second Lord Essex, then at the height of his brief triumph after taking Cadiz: hence the allusion following to the Pillars of Hercules, placed near Gades by ancient legend.

-- -- _Elisa_: Elizabeth.

50 -- _twins of Jove_: the stars Castor and Pollux: _baldric_, belt; the zodiac.

52 79 This lyric may with very high probability be assigned to Campion, in whose first Book of Airs it appeared (1601). The evidence sometimes quoted ascribing it to Lord Bacon appears to be valueless.

_Summary of Book Second._

This division, embracing generally the latter eighty years of the Seventeenth century, contains the close of our Early poetical style and the commencement of the Modern. In Dryden we see the first master of the new: in Milton, whose genius dominates here as Shakespeare's in the former book,--the crown and consummation of the early period. Their splendid Odes are far in advance of any prior attempts, Spenser's excepted: they exhibit that wider and grander range which years and experience and the struggles of the time conferred on Poetry. Our Muses now give expression to political feeling, to religious thought, to a high philosophic statesmanship in writers such as Marvell, Herbert, and Wotton: whilst in Marvell and Milton, again, we find noble attempts, hitherto rare in our literature, at pure description of nature, destined in our own age to be continued and equalled. Meanwhile the poetry of simple passion, although before 1660 often deformed by verbal fancies and conceits of thought, and afterwards by levity and an artificial tone,--produced in Herrick and Waller some charming pieces of more finished art than the Elizabethan: until in the courtly compliments of Sedley it seems to exhaust itself, and lie almost dormant for the hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of Burns and Cowper.--That the change from our early style to the modern brought with it at first a loss of nature and simplicity is undeniable; yet the bolder and wider scope which Poetry took between 1620 and 1700, and the successful efforts then made to gain greater clearness in expression, in their results have been no slight compensation.

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58 85 l. 8 _whist_: hushed.

-- -- l. 32 _than_: obsolete for _then_: _Pan_: used here for the Lord of all.

59 -- l. 38 _consort_: Milton's spelling of this word, here and elsewhere, has been followed, as it is uncertain whether he used it in the sense of _accompanying_, or simply for _concert_.

61 -- l. 21 _Lars and Lemures_: household gods and spirits of relations dead. _Flamens_ (l. 24) Roman priests. _That twice-batter'd god_ (l. 29) Dagon.

62 -- l. 6 _Osiris_, the Egyptian god of Agriculture (here, perhaps by confusion with Apis, figured as a Bull), was torn to pieces by Typho and embalmed after death in a sacred chest. This mythe, reproduced in Syria and Greece in the legends of Thammuz, Adonis, and perhaps Absyrtus, may have originally signified the annual death of the Sun or the Year under the influences of the winter darkness. Horus, the son of Osiris, as the New Year, in his turn overcomes Typho. L. 8 _unshower'd_ grass: as watered by the Nile only. L. 33 _youngest-teemed_: last-born. _Bright-harness'd_ (l. 37) armoured.

64 87 _The Late Massacre_: the Vaudois persecution, carried on in 1655 by the Duke of Savoy. No more mighty Sonnet than this 'collect in verse,' as it has been justly named, probably can be found in any language. Readers should observe that it is constructed on the original Italian or Provençal model. This form, in a language such as ours, not affluent in rhyme, presents great difficulties; the rhymes are apt to be forced, or the substance commonplace. But, when successfully handled, it has a unity and a beauty of effect which place the strict Sonnet above the less compact and less lyrical systems adopted by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and other Elizabethan poets.

65 88 Cromwell returned from Ireland in 1650, and Marvell probably wrote his lines soon after, whilst living at Nunappleton in the Fairfax household. It is hence not surprising that (st. 21-24) he should have been deceived by Cromwell's professed submissiveness to the Parliament which, when it declined to register his decrees, he expelled by armed violence:--one despotism, by natural law, replacing another. The poet's insight has, however, truly prophesied that result in his last two lines.

This Ode, beyond doubt one of the finest in our language, and more in Milton's style than has been reached by any other poet, is occasionally obscure from imitation of the condensed Latin syntax. The meaning of st. 5 is 'rivalry or hostility are the same to a lofty spirit, and limitation more hateful than opposition.' The allusion in st. 11 is to the old physical doctrines of the non-existence of a vacuum and the impenetrability of matter:--in st. 17 to the omen traditionally connected with the foundation of the Capitol at Rome:--_forced_, fated. The ancient belief that certain years in life complete natural periods and are hence peculiarly exposed to death, is introduced in st. 26 by the word _climacteric_.

68 89 _Lycidas_: The person here lamented is Milton's college contemporary, Edward King, drowned in 1637 whilst crossing from Chester to Ireland.

Strict Pastoral Poetry was first written or perfected by the Dorian Greeks settled in Sicily: but the conventional use of it, exhibited more magnificently in _Lycidas_ than in any other pastoral, is apparently of Roman origin. Milton, employing the noble freedom of a great artist, has here united ancient mythology, with what may be called the modern mythology of Camus and Saint Peter,--to direct Christian images. Yet the poem, if it gains in historical interest, suffers in poetry by the harsh intrusion of the writer's narrow and violent theological politics.--The metrical structure of this glorious elegy is partly derived from Italian models.

69 -- l. 11 _Sisters of the sacred well_: the Muses, said to frequent the Pierian Spring at the foot of Mount Olympus.

70 -- l. 10 _Mona_: Anglesea, called by the Welsh poets, the Dark Island, from its dense forests. _Deva_ (l. 11) the Dee: a river which may have derived its magical character from Celtic traditions: it was long the boundary of Briton and English.--These places are introduced, as being near the scene of the shipwreck. _Orpheus_ (l. 14) was torn to pieces by Thracian women. _Amaryllis_ and _Neaera_ (l. 24, 25) names used here for the love-idols of poets: as _Damoetas_ previously for a shepherd. L. 31 _the blind Fury_: Atropos, fabled to cut the thread of life.

71 89 _Arethuse_ (l. 1) and _Mincius_: Sicilian and Italian waters here alluded to as representing the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Vergil. L. 4 _oat_: pipe, used here like Collins' _oaten stop_ l. 1, No. 186, for _Song_. L. 12 _Hippotades_: Aeolus, god of the Winds. _Panope_ (l. 15) a Nereid. Certain names of local deities in the Hellenic mythology render some feature in the natural landscape, which the Greeks studied and analysed with their usual unequalled insight and feeling. _Panope_ seems to express the boundlessness of the ocean-horizon when seen from a height, as compared with the limited sky-line of the land in hilly countries such as Greece or Asia Minor. _Camus_ (l. 19) the Cam: put for King's University. _The sanguine flower_ (l. 22) the Hyacinth of the ancients: probably our Iris. _The Pilot_ (l. 25) Saint Peter, figuratively introduced as the head of the Church on earth, to foretell 'the ruin of our corrupted clergy,' as Milton regarded them, 'then in their heighth' under Laud's primacy.

72 -- l. 1 _scrannel_: screeching; apparently Milton's coinage (Masson). L. 5 _the wolf_: the Puritans of the time were excited to alarm and persecution by a few conversions to Roman Catholicism which had recently occurred. _Alpheus_ (l. 9) a stream in Southern Greece, supposed to flow underseas to join the Arethuse. _Swart star_ (l. 15) the Dog-star, called swarthy because its heliacal rising in ancient times occurred soon after midsummer: l. 19 _rathe_: early. L. 36 _moist vows_: either tearful prayers, or prayers for one at sea. _Bellerus_ (l. 37) a giant, apparently created here by Milton to personify Belerium, the ancient title of the Land's End. _The great Vision_:--the story was that the Archangel Michael had appeared on the rock by Marazion in Mount's Bay which bears his name. Milton calls on him to turn his eyes from the south homeward, and to pity Lycidas, if his body has drifted into the troubled waters off the Land's End. Finisterre being the land due south of Marazion, two places in that district (then through our trade with Corunna probably less unfamiliar to English ears), are named,--_Namancos_ now Mujio in Galicia, _Bayona_ north of the Minho, or perhaps a fortified rock (one of the _Cies_ Islands) not unlike Saint Michael's Mount, at the entrance of Vigo Bay.

73 89 l. 6 _ore_: rays of golden light. _Doric_ lay (l. 25) Sicilian, pastoral.

75 93 _The assault_ was an attack on London expected in 1642, when the troops of Charles I reached Brentford. 'Written on his door' was in the original title of this sonnet. Milton was then living in Aldersgate Street.

_The Emathian Conqueror_: When Thebes was destroyed (B.C. 335) and the citizens massacred by thousands, Alexander ordered the house of Pindar to be spared.

7 -- l. 2, _the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet_: Plutarch has a tale that when the Spartan confederacy in 404 B.C. took Athens, a proposal to demolish it was rejected through the effect produced on the commanders by hearing part of a chorus from the _Electra_ of Euripides sung at a feast. There is however no apparent congruity between the lines quoted (167, 168 Ed. Dindorf) and the result ascribed to them.

-- 95 A fine example of a peculiar class of Poetry;--that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little. Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Berkeley, Dr. Johnson, Lord Macaulay, have left similar specimens.

78 98 These beautiful verses should be compared with Wordsworth's great Ode on _Immortality_: and a copy of Vaughan's very rare little volume appears in the list of Wordsworth's library.--In imaginative intensity, Vaughan stands beside his contemporary Marvell.

79 99 _Favonius_: the spring wind.

80 100 _Themis_: the goddess of justice. Skinner was grandson by his mother to Sir E. Coke:--hence, as pointed out by Mr. Keightley, Milton's allusion to the _bench_. L. 8: Sweden was then at war with Poland, and France with the Spanish Netherlands.

82 103 l. 28 _Sidneian showers_: either in allusion to the conversations in the 'Arcadia,' or to Sidney himself as a model of 'gentleness' in spirit and demeanour.

85 105 Delicate humour, delightfully united to thought, at once simple and subtle. It is full of conceit and paradox, but these are imaginative, not as with most of our Seventeenth Century poets, intellectual only.

88 110 _Elizabeth of Bohemia_: Daughter to James I, and ancestor of Sophia of Hanover. These lines are a fine specimen of gallant and courtly compliment.

89 111 Lady M. Ley was daughter to Sir J. Ley, afterwards Earl of Marlborough, who died March, 1629, coincidently with the dissolution of the third Parliament of Charles' reign. Hence Milton poetically compares his death to that of the Orator Isocrates of Athens, after Philip's victory in 328 B.C.

93 118 A masterpiece of humour, grace, and gentle feeling, all, with Herrick's unfailing art, kept precisely within the peculiar key which he chose,--or Nature for him,--in his Pastorals. L. 2 _the god unshorn_: Imberbis Apollo. St. 2 _beads_: prayers.

96 123 With better taste, and less diffuseness, Quarles might (one would think) have retained more of that high place which he held in popular estimate among his contemporaries.

99 127 _From Prison_: to which his active support of Charles I twice brought the high-spirited writer. L. 7 _Gods_: thus in the original; Lovelace, in his fanciful way, making here a mythological allusion. _Birds_, commonly substituted, is without authority. St. 3, l. 1 _committed_: to prison.

100 128 St. 2 l. 4 _blue-god_: Neptune.

104 133 _Waly waly_: an exclamation of sorrow, the root and the pronunciation of which are preserved in the word _caterwaul_. _Brae_, hillside: _burn_, brook: _busk_, adorn. _Saint Anton's Well_: below Arthur's Seat by Edinburgh. _Cramasie_, crimson.

105 134 This beautiful example of early simplicity is found in a Song-book of 1620.

106 135 _burd_, maiden.

107 136 _corbies_, crows: _fail_, turf: _hause_, neck: _theek_, thatch.--If not in their origin, in their present form this, with the preceding poem and 133, appear due to the Seventeenth Century, and have therefore been placed in Book II.

108 137 The poetical and the prosaic, after Cowley's fashion, blend curiously in this deeply-felt elegy.

112 141 Perhaps no poem in this collection is more delicately fancied, more exquisitely finished. By placing his description of the Fawn in a young girl's mouth, Marvell has, as it were, legitimated that abundance of 'imaginative hyperbole' to which he is always partial: he makes us feel it natural that a maiden's favourite should be whiter than milk, sweeter than sugar--'lilies without, roses within,' The poet's imagination is justified in its seeming extravagance by the intensity and unity with which it invests his picture.

113 142 The remark quoted in the note to No. 65 applies equally to these truly wonderful verses. Marvell here throws himself into the very soul of the _Garden_ with the imaginative intensity of Shelley in his _West Wind_.--This poem appears also as a translation in Marvell's works. The most striking verses in it, here quoted as the book is rare, answer more or less to stanzas 2 and 6:--

Alma Quies, teneo te! et te, germana Quietis, Simplicitas! vos ergo diu per templa, per urbes Quaesivi, regum perque alta palatia, frustra: Sed vos hortorum per opaca silentia, longe Celarunt plantae virides, et concolor umbra.

115 143 St. 3 _tutties_: nosegays. St. 4 _silly_: simple.

_L'Allégro_ and _Il Penseroso_. It is a striking proof of Milton's astonishing power, that these, the earliest great Lyrics of the Landscape in our language, should still remain supreme in their style for range, variety, and melodious beauty. The Bright and the Thoughtful aspects of Nature and of Life are their subjects: but each is preceded by a mythological introduction in a mixed Classical and Italian manner.--With that of _L'Allégro_ may be compared a similar mythe in the first Section of the first Book of S. Marmion's graceful _Cupid and Psyche_, 1637.

116 144 _The mountain-nymph_; compare Wordsworth's Sonnet, No. 254. L. 38 is in _apposition_ to the preceding, by a syntactical license not uncommon with Milton.

118 -- l. 14 _Cynosure_; the Pole Star. _Corydon_, _Thyrsis_, &c.: Shepherd names from the old Idylls. _Rebeck_ (l. 28) an elementary form of violin.

119 -- l. 24 _Jonson's learned sock_: His comedies are deeply coloured by classical study. L. 28 _Lydian airs_: used here to express a light and festive style of ancient music. The 'Lydian Mode,' one of the seven original Greek Scales, is nearly identical with our 'Major.'

120 145 l. 3 _bestead_: avail. L. 10 _starr'd Ethiop queen_: Cassiopeia, the legendary Queen of Ethiopia, and thence translated amongst the constellations.

121 -- _Cynthia_: the Moon: Milton seems here to have transferred to her chariot the dragons anciently assigned to Demeter and to Medea.

122 -- _Hermes_, called Trismegistus, a mystical writer of the Neo-Platonist school. L. 27 _Thebes_, &c.: subjects of Athenian Tragedy. _Buskin'd_ (l. 30) tragic, in opposition to sock above. L. 32 _Musaeus_: a poet in Mythology. L. 37 _him that left half-told_: Chaucer in his incomplete 'Squire's Tale.'

123 -- _great bards_: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, are here presumably intended. L. 9 _frounced_: curled. _The Attic Boy_ (l. 10) Cephalus.

124 146 Emigrants supposed to be driven towards America by the government of Charles I.

125 -- l. 9, 10. _But apples_, &c. A fine example of Marvell's imaginative hyperbole.

-- 147 l. 6 _concent_: harmony.

128 149 A lyric of a strange, fanciful, yet solemn beauty:--Cowley's style intensified by the mysticism of Henry More.--St. 2 _monument_: the World.

129 151 Entitled 'A Song in Honour of St. Cecilia's Day: 1697.'

_Summary of Book Third_

It is more difficult to characterize the English Poetry of the Eighteenth century than that of any other. For it was an age not only of spontaneous transition, but of bold experiment: it includes not only such absolute contrasts as distinguish the 'Rape of the Lock' from the 'Parish Register,' but such vast contemporaneous differences as lie between Pope and Collins, Burns and Cowper. Yet we may clearly trace three leading moods or tendencies:--the aspects of courtly or educated life represented by Pope and carried to exhaustion by his followers; the poetry of Nature and of Man, viewed through a cultivated, and at the same time an impassioned frame of mind by Collins and Gray:--lastly, the study of vivid and simple narrative, including natural description, begun by Gay and Thomson, pursued by Burns and others in the north, and established in England by Goldsmith, Percy, Crabbe, and Cowper. Great varieties in style accompanied these diversities in aim: poets could not always distinguish the manner suitable for subjects so far apart: and the union of conventional and of common language, exhibited most conspicuously by Burns, has given a tone to the poetry of that century which is better explained by reference to its historical origin than by naming it artificial. There is, again, a nobleness of thought, a courageous aim at high and, in a strict sense manly, excellence in many of the writers:--nor can that period be justly termed tame and wanting in originality, which produced poems such as Pope's Satires, Gray's Odes and Elegy, the ballads of Gay and Carey, the songs of Burns and Cowper. In truth Poetry at this, as at all times, was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age: and the many complex causes which made the Eighteenth century the turning-time in modern European civilization are also more or less reflected in its verse. An intelligent reader will find the influence of Newton as markedly in the poems of Pope, as of Elizabeth in the plays of Shakespeare. On this great subject, however, these indications must here be sufficient.

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134 153 We have no poet more marked by rapture, by the ecstasy which Plato held the note of genuine inspiration, than Collins. Yet but twice or thrice do his lyrics reach that simplicity, that _sinceram sermonis Attici gratiam_ to which this ode testifies his enthusiastic devotion. His style, as his friend Dr. Johnson truly remarks, was obscure; his diction often harsh and unskilfully laboured; he struggles nobly against the narrow, artificial manner of his age, but his too scanty years did not allow him to reach perfect mastery. St. 3 _Hybla_: near Syracuse. _Her whose ... woe_: the nightingale, 'for which Sophocles seems to have entertained a peculiar fondness'; Collins here refers to the famous chorus in the _Oedipus at Colonus_. St. 4 _Cephisus_: the stream encircling Athens on the north and west, passing Colonus. St. 6 _stay'd to sing_: stayed her song when Imperial tyranny was established at Rome. St. 7 refers to the Italian amourist poetry of the Renaissance: In Collins' day, Dante was almost unknown in England. St. 8 _meeting soul_: which moves sympathetically towards Simplicity as she comes to inspire the poet. St. 9 _Of these_: Taste and Genius.

_The Bard._ In 1757, when this splendid ode was completed, so very little had been printed, whether in Wales or in England, in regard to Welsh poetry, that it is hard to discover whence Gray drew his Cymric allusions. The fabled massacre of the Bards (shown to be wholly groundless in Stephens' _Literature of the Kymry_) appears first in the family history of Sir John Wynn of Gwydir (cir. 1600), not published till 1773; but the story seems to have passed in MS. to Carte's History, whence it may have been taken by Gray. The references to _high-born Hoel_ and _soft Llewellyn_; to _Cadwallo_ and _Urien_; may, similarly, have been derived from the 'Specimens' of early Welsh poetry, by the Rev. E. Evans:--as, although not published till 1764, the MS., we learn from a letter to Dr. Wharton, was in Gray's hands by July 1760, and may have reached him by 1757. It is, however, doubtful whether Gray (of whose acquaintance with Welsh we have no evidence) must not have been also aided by some Welsh scholar. He is one of the poets least likely to scatter epithets at random: 'soft' or gentle is the epithet emphatically and specially given to Llewelyn in contemporary Welsh poetry, and is hence here used with particular propriety. Yet, without such assistance as we have suggested, Gray could hardly have selected the epithet, although applied to the King (p. 141-3) among a crowd of others, in Llygad Gwr's Ode, printed by Evans.--After lamenting his comrades (st. 2, 3) the Bard prophesies the fate of Edward II, and the conquests of Edward III (4): his death and that of the Black Prince (5): of Richard II, with the wars of York and Lancaster, the murder of Henry VI (_the meek usurper_), and of Edward V and his brother (6). He turns to the glory and prosperity following the accession of the Tudors (7), through Elizabeth's reign (8): and concludes with a vision of the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton.

140 159 l. 13 _Glo'ster_: Gilbert de Clare, son-in-law to Edward. _Mortimer_, one of the Lords Marchers of Wales.

141 159 _High-born Hoel, soft Llewellyn_ (l. 15); the _Dissertatio de Bardis_ of Evans names the first as son to the King Owain Gwynedd: Llewelyn, last King of North Wales, was murdered 1282. L. 16 _Cadwallo_: Cadwallon (died 631) and Urien Rheged (early kings of Gwynedd and Cumbria respectively) are mentioned by Evans (p. 78) as bards none of whose poetry is extant. L. 20 _Modred_: Evans supplies no _data_ for this name, which Gray (it has been supposed) uses for Merlin (Myrddin Wyllt), held prophet as well as poet.--The Italicized lines mark where the Bard's song is joined by that of his predecessors departed. L. 22 _Arvon_: the shores of Carnarvonshire opposite Anglesey. Whether intentionally or through ignorance of the real dates, Gray here seems to represent the _Bard_ as speaking of these poets, all of earlier days, Llewelyn excepted, as his own contemporaries at the close of the thirteenth century.

Gray, whose penetrating and powerful genius rendered him in many ways an initiator in advance of his age, is probably the first of our poets who made some acquaintance with the rich and admirable poetry in which Wales from the Sixth Century has been fertile,--before and since his time so barbarously neglected, not in England only. Hence it has been thought worth while here to enter into a little detail upon his Cymric allusions.

142 -- l. 5 _She-wolf_: Isabel of France, adulterous Queen of Edward II.--L. 35 _Towers of Julius_: the Tower of London, built in part, according to tradition, by Julius Caesar.

143 -- l. 2 _bristled boar_: the badge of Richard III. L. 7 _Half of thy heart_: Queen Eleanor died soon after the conquest of Wales. L. 18 _Arthur_: Henry VII named his eldest son thus, in deference to native feeling and story.

144 161 The Highlanders called the battle of Culloden, Drumossie.

145 162 _lilting_, singing blithely: _loaning_, broad lane: _bughts_, pens: _scorning_, rallying: _dowie_, dreary: _daffin'_ and _gabbin'_, joking and chatting: _leglin_, milkpail: _shearing_, reaping: _bandsters_, sheaf-binders: _lyart_, grizzled: _runkled_, wrinkled: _fleeching_, coaxing: _gloaming_, twilight: _bogle_, ghost: _dool_, sorrow.

147 164 The Editor has found no authoritative text of this poem, to his mind superior to any other of its class in melody and pathos. Part is probably not later than the seventeenth century: in other stanzas a more modern hand, much resembling Scott's, is traceable. Logan's poem (163) exhibits a knowledge rather of the old legend than of the old verses,--_Hecht_, promised; the obsolete _hight_: _mavis_, thrush: _ilka_, every: _lav'rock_, lark: _haughs_, valley-meadows: _twined_, parted from: _marrow_, mate: _syne_, then.

148 165 The Royal George, of 108 guns, whilst undergoing a partial careening at Spithead, was overset about 10 A.M. Aug. 29, 1782. The total loss was believed to be nearly 1000 souls.--This little poem might be called one of our trial-pieces, in regard to taste. The reader who feels the vigour of description and the force of pathos underlying Cowper's bare and truly Greek simplicity of phrase, may assure himself _se valde profecisse_ in poetry.

151 167 A little masterpiece in a very difficult style: Catullus himself could hardly have bettered it. In grace, tenderness, simplicity, and humour, it is worthy of the Ancients: and even more so, from the completeness and unity of the picture presented.

155 172 Perhaps no writer who has given such strong proofs of the poetic nature has left less satisfactory poetry than Thomson. Yet this song, with 'Rule Britannia' and a few others, must make us regret that he did not more seriously apply himself to lyrical writing.

156 174 With what insight and tenderness, yet in how few words, has this painter-poet here himself told _Love's Secret!_

157 177 l. 1 _Aeolian lyre_: the Greeks ascribed the origin of their Lyrical Poetry to the Colonies of Aeolis in Asia Minor.

158 -- _Thracia's hills_ (l. 9) supposed a favourite resort of Mars. _Feather'd king_ (l. 13) the Eagle of Jupiter, admirably described by Pindar in a passage here imitated by Gray. _Idalia_ (l. 19) in Cyprus, where _Cytherea_ (Venus) was especially worshipped.

159 -- l. 6 _Hyperion_: the Sun. St. 6-8 allude to the Poets of the Islands and Mainland of Greece, to those of Rome and of England.

160 -- l. 27 _Theban Eagle_: Pindar.

163 178 l. 5 _chaste-eyed Queen_: Diana.

164 179 From that wild rhapsody of mingled grandeur, tenderness, and obscurity, that 'medley between inspiration and possession,' which poor Smart is believed to have written whilst in confinement for madness.

165 181 _the dreadful light_: of life and experience.

166 182 _Attic warbler_: the nightingale.

168 184 _sleekit_, sleek: _bickering brattle_, flittering flight: _laith_, loth: _pattle_, ploughstaff: _whyles_, at times: _a daimenicker_, a corn-ear now and then: _thrave_, shock: _lave_, rest: _foggage_, after-grass: _snell_, biting: _but hald_, without dwelling-place: _thole_, bear: _cranreuch_, hoar-frost: _thy lane_, alone: _a-gley_, off the right line, awry.

175 188 _stoure_, dust-storm; _braw_, smart.

176 189 _scaith_, hurt: _tent_, guard: _steer_, molest.

177 191 _drumlie_, muddy: _birk_, birch.

178 192 _greet_, cry: _daurna_, dare not.--There can hardly exist a poem more truly tragic in the highest sense than this: nor, perhaps, Sappho excepted, has any Poetess equalled it.

180 193 _fou_, merry with drink: _coost_, carried: _unco skeigh_, very proud: _gart_, forced: _abeigh_, aside: _Ailsa craig_, a rock in the Firth of Clyde: _grat his een bleert_, cried till his eyes were bleared: _lowpin_, leaping: _linn_, waterfall: _sair_, sore: _smoor'd_, smothered: _crouse_ and _canty_, blithe and gay.

181 194 Burns justly named this 'one of the most beautiful songs in the Scots or any other language.' One stanza, interpolated by Beattie, is here omitted:--it contains two good lines, but is out of harmony with the original poem. _Bigonet_, little cap: probably altered from _béguinette_: _thraw_, twist: _caller_, fresh.

182 195 Burns himself, despite two attempts, failed to improve this little absolute masterpiece of music, tenderness, and simplicity: this 'Romance of a life' in eight lines.--_Eerie_: strictly, scared: uneasy.

183 196 _airts_, quarters: _row_, roll: _shaw_, small wood in a hollow, spinney: _knowes_, knolls. The last two stanzas are not by Burns.

184 197 _jo_, sweetheart: _brent_, smooth: _pow_, head.

-- 198 _leal_, faithful. St. 3 _fain_, happy.

185 199 Henry VI founded Eton.

188 200 Written in 1773, towards the beginning of Cowper's second attack of melancholy madness--a time when he altogether gave up prayer, saying, 'For him to implore mercy would only anger God the more.' Yet had he given it up when sane, it would have been 'maior insania.'

191 203 The Editor would venture to class in the very first rank this Sonnet, which, with 204, records Cowper's gratitude to the Lady whose affectionate care for many years gave what sweetness he could enjoy to a life radically wretched. Petrarch's sonnets have a more ethereal grace and a more perfect finish; Shakespeare's more passion; Milton's stand supreme in stateliness; Wordsworth's in depth and delicacy. But Cowper's unites with an exquisiteness in the turn of thought which the ancients would have called Irony, an intensity of pathetic tenderness peculiar to his loving and ingenuous nature.--There is much mannerism, much that is unimportant or of now exhausted interest in his poems: but where he is great, it is with that elementary greatness which rests on the most universal human feelings. Cowper is our highest master in simple pathos.

193 205 Cowper's last original poem, founded upon a story told in Anson's 'Voyages.' It was written March 1799; he died in next year's April.

195 206 Very little except his name appears recoverable with regard to the author of this truly noble poem, which appeared in the 'Scripscrapologia, or Collins' Doggerel Dish of All Sorts,' with three or four other pieces of merit, Birmingham, 1804.--_Everlasting_; used with side-allusion to a cloth so named, at the time when Collins wrote.

_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 enquiry 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 metre, 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 Nation which, after 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:--to 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 patescunt--

though it is, indeed, to the sympathetic eye only that its treasures will be visible.

PAGE NO.

197 208 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.

199 210 _stout Cortez_: History would here suggest _Balbóa_: (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.

202 212 The most tender and true of Byron's smaller poems.

203 213 This poem exemplifies the peculiar skill with which Scott employs proper names:--a rarely misleading sign of true poetical genius.

213 226 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 221, Lamb in 264, 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 (224) suggest, perhaps, the same remark.

222 235 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.

228 242 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.'

230 245 It is impossible not to regret that Moore has written so little in this sweet and genuinely national style.

231 246 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.

240 253 Bonnivard, a Genevese, was imprisoned by the Duke of Savoy in Chillon on the lake of Geneva for his courageous defence 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.

241 254 Switzerland was usurped by the French under Napoleon in 1800: Venice in 1797 (255).

243 259 This battle was fought Dec. 2, 1800, between the Austrians under Archduke John and the French under Moreau, in a forest near Munich. _Hohen Linden_ means _High Limetrees_.

247 262 After the capture of Madrid by Napoleon, Sir J. Moore retreated before Soult and Ney to Corunna, and was killed whilst covering the embarkation of his troops.

257 272 The Mermaid was the club-house of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other choice spirits of that age.

258 273 _Maisie_: Mary.--Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wild-wood music of the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis of feeling attempted:--the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentment of the situation. A narrow criticism has often named this, which maybe called the Homeric manner, superficial, from its apparent simple facility; but first-rate excellence in it is in truth one of the least common triumphs of Poetry.--This style should be compared with what is not less perfect in its way, the searching out of inner feeling, the expression of hidden meanings, the revelation of the heart of Nature and of the Soul within the Soul,--the analytical method, in short,--most completely represented by Wordsworth and by Shelley.

263 277 Wolfe resembled Keats, not only in his early death by consumption and the fluent freshness of his poetical style, but in beauty of character:--brave, tender, energetic, unselfish, modest. Is it fanciful to find some reflex of these qualities in the _Burial_ and _Mary_? Out of the abundance of the _heart_ ...

264 278 _correi_: covert on a hillside. _Cumber_: trouble.

265 250 This book has not a few poems of greater power and more perfect execution than _Agnes_ and the extract which we have ventured to make from the deep-hearted author's _Sad Thoughts_ (No. 224). But none are more emphatically marked by the note of exquisiteness.

266 281 st. 3 _inch_: island.

270 283 From _Poetry for Children_ (1809), by Charles and Mary Lamb. This tender and original little piece seems clearly to reveal the work of that noble-minded and afflicted sister, who was at once the happiness, the misery, and the life-long blessing of her equally noble-minded brother.

278 289 This poem has an exaltation and a glory, joined with an exquisiteness of expression, which place it in the highest rank among the many masterpieces of its illustrious Author.

289 300 _interlunar swoon_: interval of the moon's invisibility.

294 304 _Calpe_: Gibraltar. _Lofoden_: the Maelstrom whirlpool off the N.W. coast of Norway.

295 305 This lovely poem refers here and there to a ballad by Hamilton on the subject better treated in 163 and 164.

307 315 _Arcturi_: seemingly used for _northern stars_. _And wild roses, &c._ Our language has perhaps no line modulated with more subtle sweetness.

308 316 Coleridge describes this poem as the fragment of a dream-vision,--perhaps, an opium-dream?--which composed itself in his mind when fallen asleep after reading a few lines about 'the Khan Kubla' in Purchas' _Pilgrimage_.

312 318 _Ceres' daughter_: Proserpine. _God of Torment_: Pluto.

320 321 The leading idea of this beautiful description of a day's landscape in Italy appears to be--On the voyage of life are many moments of pleasure, given by the sight of Nature, who has power to heal even the worldliness and the uncharity of man.

321 -- l. 23 Amphitrite was daughter to Ocean.

325 322 l. 21 _Maenad_: a frenzied Nymph, attendant on Dionysos in the Greek mythology. May we not call this the most vivid, sustained, and impassioned amongst all Shelley's magical personifications of Nature?

326 -- l. 5 Plants under water sympathize with the seasons of the land, and hence with the winds which affect them.

327 323 Written soon after the death, by shipwreck, of Wordsworth's brother John. This poem may be profitably compared with Shelley's following it. Each is the most complete expression of the innermost spirit of his art given by these great Poets:--of that Idea which, as in the case of the true Painter, (to quote the words of Reynolds,) 'subsists only in the mind: The sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting.'

328 -- _the Kind_: the human race.

331 327 _the Royal Saint_: Henry VI.

331 328 st. 4 _this_ folk: _its_ has been here plausibly but, perhaps, unnecessarily, conjectured.--Every one knows the general story of the Italian Renaissance, of the Revival of Letters.--From Petrarch's day to our own, that ancient world has renewed its youth: Poets and artists, students and thinkers, have yielded themselves wholly to its fascination, and deeply penetrated its spirit. Yet perhaps no one more truly has vivified, whilst idealizing, the picture of Greek country life in the fancied Golden Age, than Keats in these lovely (if somewhat unequally executed) stanzas:--his quick imagination, by a kind of 'natural magic,' more than supplying the scholarship which his youth had no opportunity of gaining.

105 134 These stanzas are by Richard Verstegan (--c. 1635), a poet and antiquarian, published in his rare Odes (1601), under the title _Our Blessed Ladies Lullaby_, and reprinted by Mr. Orby Shipley in his beautiful _Carmina Mariana_ (1893). The four stanzas here given form the opening of a hymn of twenty-four.

INDEX OF WRITERS

WITH DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH

ALEXANDER, William (1580-1640) 29

BARBAULD, Anna Laetitia (1743-1825) 207 BARNEFIELD, Richard (16th Century) 45 BEAUMONT, Francis (1586-1616) 90 BLAKE, William (1757-1827) 174, 180, 181, 208 BURNS, Robert (1759-1796) 161, 168, 176, 184, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 196, 197 BYRON, George Gordon Noel (1788-1824) 212, 214, 216, 234, 246, 253, 266, 275

CAMPBELL, Thomas (1777-1844) 225, 231, 241, 250, 251, 259, 295, 304, 310, 314, 332 CAMPION, Thomas (c. 1567-1620) 25, 26, 50, 52, 55, 59, 76, 79, 101, 143 CAREW, Thomas (1589-1639) 112 CAREY, Henry (---- -1743) 167 CIBBER, Colley (1671-1757) 155 COLERIDGE, Hartley (1796-1849) 218 COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834) 211, 316, 329 COLLINS, John (18th Century) 206 COLLINS, William (1720-1756) 153, 160, 178, 186 COWLEY, Abraham (1618-1667) 130, 137 COWPER, William (1731-1800) 165, 170, 183, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205 CRASHAW, Richard (1615?-1652) 103 CUNNINGHAM, Allan (1784-1842) 249

DANIEL, Samuel (1562-1619) 46 DEKKER, Thomas (---- -1638?) 75 DEVEREUX, Robert (1567-1601) 83 DONNE, John (1573-1631) 12 DRAYTON, Michael (1563-1631) 49 DRUMMOND, William (1585-1649) 4, 61, 63, 77, 80, 81, 84 DRYDEN, John (1631-1700) 86, 151

ELLIOTT, Jane (18th Century) 162

FLETCHER, John (1576-1625) 132

GAY, John (1685-1732) 166 GOLDSMITH, Oliver (1728-1774) 175 GRAHAM, Robert (1735-1797) 169 GRAY, Thomas (1716-1771) 152, 156, 159, 177, 182, 187, 199, 201 GREENE, Robert (1561?-1592) 60

HABINGTON, William (1605-1645) 148 HERBERT, George (1593-1632) 97 HERRICK, Robert (1591-1674?) 108, 113, 118, 119, 120, 124, 139, 140 HEYWOOD, Thomas (---- -1649?) 73 HOOD, Thomas (1798-1845) 268, 274, 279

JONSON, Ben (1574-1637) 96, 102, 116

KEATS, John (1795-1821) 209, 210, 235, 237, 242, 243, 272, 290, 292, 303, 318, 328, 333

LAMB, Charles (1775-1835) 264, 276, 282 LAMB, Mary (1764-1847) 283 LINDSAY, Anne (1750-1825) 192 LODGE, Thomas (1556-1625) 19, 71 LOGAN, John (1748-1788) 163 LOVELACE, Richard (1618-1658) 109, 127, 128 LYLYE, John (1554-1600) 72 LYTE, Henry Francis (1793-1847) 224, 280

MARLOWE, Christopher (1562-1593) 7 MARVELL, Andrew (1620-1678) 88, 105, 141, 142, 146 MICKLE, William Julius (1734-1788) 194 MILTON, John (1608-1674) 85, 87, 89, 93, 94, 99, 100, 111, 144, 145, 147 MOORE, Thomas (1780-1852) 229, 245, 261, 265, 269

NAIRN, Carolina (1766-1845) 198 NASH, Thomas (1567-1601?) 1 NORRIS, John (1657-1711) 149

PHILIPS, Ambrose (1671-1749) 157 POPE, Alexander (1688-1744) 154 PRIOR, Matthew (1662-1721) 173

QUARLES, Francis (1592-1644) 123

ROGERS, Samuel (1762-1855) 171, 185

SCOTT, Walter (1771-1832) 213, 227, 230, 236, 238, 240, 248, 273, 278, 281, 285, 311 SEDLEY, Charles (1639-1701) 106, 126 SHAKESPEARE, William (1564-1616) 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 27, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 48, 51, 56, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 78, 82 SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822) 215, 219, 228, 232, 239, 247, 270, 287, 293, 300, 307, 308, 312, 315, 321, 322, 324, 334, 335, 339 SHIRLEY, James (1596-1666) 91, 92 SIDNEY, Philip (1554-1586) 13, 32, 40, 47, 58 SMART, Christopher (1722-1770) 179 SOUTHEY, Robert (1774-1843) 260, 271 SPENSER, Edmund (1553-1598-9) 74 SUCKLING, John (1608-9-1641) 129 SYLVESTER, Joshua (1563-1618) 34

THOMSON, James (1700-1748) 158, 172

VAUGHAN, Henry (1621-1695) 98, 138, 150

WALLER, Edmund (1605-1687) 115, 122 WEBSTER, John (---- -1638?) 66 WILMOT, John (1647-1680) 107 WITHER, George (1588-1667) 131 WOLFE, Charles (1791-1823) 262, 277 WORDSWORTH, William (1770-1850) 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 233, 244, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 263, 267, 284, 286, 288, 289, 291, 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301, 302, 305, 306, 309, 313, 317, 319, 320, 323, 325, 326, 327, 330, 331, 336, 337, 338 WOTTON, Henry (1568-1639) 95, 110 WYAT, Thomas (1503-1542) 28, 44

ANONYMOUS, 8, 20, 21, 22, 30, 33, 36, 53, 54, 57, 70, 104, 114, 117, 121, 125, 133, 135, 136, 164, 195

134 is by Richard Verstegan (-c. 1635).

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

PAGE

A Chieftain to the Highlands bound 211 A child's a plaything for an hour 270 A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by 305 A slumber did my spirit seal 210 A sweet disorder in the dress 95 A weary lot is thine, fair maid 225 A wet sheet and a flowing sea 235 Absence, hear thou this protestation 8 Ah, Chloris! could I now but sit 86 Ah! County Guy, the hour is nigh 217 All in the Downs the fleet was moor'd 149 All thoughts, all passions, all delights 199 And are ye sure the news is true 181 And is this--Yarrow?--This the Stream 297 And thou art dead, as young and fair 231 And wilt thou leave me thus 26 Ariel to Miranda:--Take 288 Art thou pale for weariness 305 Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers 50 As it fell upon a day 27 As I was walking all alane 107 As slow our ship her foamy track 251 At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears 288 At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly 230 Avenge, O Lord! Thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones 64 Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake 157 Awake, awake, my Lyre 101

Bards of Passion and of Mirth 197 Beauty sat bathing by a spring 13 Behold her, single in the field 287 Being your slave, what should I do but tend 9 Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed 277 Best and brightest, come away 299 Bid me to live, and I will live 97 Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy 125 Blow, blow, thou winter wind 34 Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art 228

Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren 41 Calm was the day, and through the trembling air 45 Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in Arms 75 Care-charmer Sleep, son of the Sable Night 28 Come away, come away, Death 38 Come, cheerful day, part of my life to me 51 Come little babe, come silly soul 35 Come live with me and be my Love 5 Come, Sleep: O Sleep! the certain knot of peace 24 Come unto these yellow sands 2 Crabbed Age and Youth 6 Cupid and my Campaspe play'd 44 Cyriack, whose grandsire, on the royal bench 80

Daughter of Jove, relentless power 188 Daughter to that good Earl, once President 89 Degenerate Douglas! oh, the unworthy lord 283 Doth then the world go thus, doth all thus move 54 Down in yon garden sweet and gay 147 Drink to me only with thine eyes 92 Duncan Gray cam here to woo 180

Earl March look'd on his dying child 228 Earth has not anything to show more fair 281 E'en like two little bank-dividing brooks 96 Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind 240 Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky 273 Ever let the Fancy roam 310

Fain would I change that note 6 Fair Daffodils, we weep to see 111 Fair pledges of a fruitful tree 110 Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing 25 Fear no more the heat o' the sun 40 Fine knacks for ladies, cheap, choice, brave and new 22 Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow 30 For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove 155 Forget not yet the tried intent 18 Four Seasons fill the measure of the year 339 From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony 63 From Stirling Castle we had seen 295 Full fathom five thy father lies 40

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may 87 Gem of the crimson-colour'd Even 218 Get up, get up for shame! The blooming morn 93 Go fetch to me a pint o' wine 152 Go, lovely Rose 91

Hail thou most sacred venerable thing 128 Hail to thee, blithe Spirit 274 Happy the man, whose wish and care 136 Happy those early days, when I 78 Happy were he could finish forth his fate 55 He that loves a rosy cheek 90 He is gone on the mountain 264 Hence, all you vain delights 103 Hence, loathéd Melancholy 116 Hence, vain deluding Joys 120 He sang of God, the mighty source 164 High-way, since you my chief Parnassus be 9 How happy is he born and taught 76 How like a winter hath my absence been 10 How sleep the brave who sink to rest 144 How sweet the answer Echo makes 217 How vainly men themselves amaze 113

I am monarch of all I survey 190 I arise from dreams of Thee 205 I cannot change, as others do 87 I dream'd that as I wander'd by the way 307 I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden 208 I have had playmates, I have had companions 250 I have no name 165 I heard a thousand blended notes 312 I meet thy pensive, moonlight face 211 I met a traveller from an antique land 282 I remember, I remember 254 I saw Eternity the other night 129 I saw her in childhood 265 I saw my lady weep 19 I saw where in the shroud did lurk 268 I travell'd among unknown men 208 I wander'd lonely as a cloud 291 I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile 327 I wish I were where Helen lies 106 If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song 170 If doughty deeds my lady please 153 If I had thought thou couldst have died 263 If Thou survive my well-contented day 41 If to be absent were to be 100 I'm wearing awa', Jean 184 In a drear-nighted December 222 In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining 195 In the sweet shire of Cardigan 248 In this still place, remote from men 329 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 308 It is a beauteous evening, calm and free 303 It is not growing like a tree 77 It was a dismal and a fearful night 108 It was a lover and his lass 8 It was a summer evening 244 I've heard them lilting at our ewe-milking 145

Jack and Joan, they think no ill 115 John Anderson my jo, John 185

Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting 43 Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son 79 Let me not to the marriage of true minds 20 Life! I know not what thou art 196 Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore 25 Like to the clear in highest sphere 12 Love in my bosom, like a bee 43 Love in thy youth, fair Maid, be wise 90 Love not me for comely grace 98 Lo! where the rosy-bosom'd Hours 166

Many a green isle needs must be 320 Mary! I want a lyre with other strings 191 Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour 242 Mine be a cot beside the hill 169 Mortality, behold and fear 73 Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes 309 Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold 199 Music, when soft voices die 346 My days among the Dead are past 257 My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 279 My heart leaps up when I behold 341 My Love in her attire doth shew her wit 96 My lute, be as thou wert when thou didst grow 39 My thoughts hold mortal strife 38 My true-love hath my heart, and I have his 20

Never love unless you can 16 Never seek to tell thy love 156 No longer mourn for me when I am dead 42 Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note 247 Not, Celia, that I juster am 98 Now the golden Morn aloft 133 Now the last day of many days 301

O blithe new-comer! I have heard 278 O Brignall banks are wild and fair 203 O Friend! I know not which way I must look 242 O happy shades! to me unblest 188 O if thou knew'st how thou thyself dost harm 18 O leave this barren spot to me 283 O listen, listen, ladies gay 266 O lovers' eyes are sharp to see 227 O Mary, at thy window be 175 O me! what eyes hath love put in my head 31 O Mistress mine, where are you roaming 22 O my Luve's like a red, red rose 177 O never say that I was false of heart 11 O saw ye bonnie Lesley 176 O say what is that thing call'd Light 136 O talk not to me of a name great in story 202 O Thou, by Nature taught 134 O waly waly up the bank 104 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms 224 O wild West Wind, thou breath Of Autumn's being 325 O World! O Life! O Time 340 Obscurest night involved the sky 193 Of all the girls that are so smart 151 Of a' the airts the wind can blaw 183 Of Nelson and the North 237 Of Neptune's empire let us sing 80 Of this fair volume which we World do name 53 Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray 213 Oft in the stilly night 255 Oh snatch'd away in beauty's bloom 262 On a day, alack the day 17 On a Poet's lips I slept 329 Once did She hold the gorgeous East in fee 241 One more Unfortunate 259 One word is too often profaned 233 On Linden, when the sun was low 243 Our bugles sang truce, for the night-cloud had lower'd 306 Over the mountains 84

Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day 45 Phoebus, arise 2 Pibroch of Donuil Dhu 233 Poor Soul, the centre of my sinful earth 52 Proud Maisie is in the wood 258

Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair 81

Rough Wind, that moanest loud 339 Ruin seize thee, ruthless King 140

Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness 293 See with what simplicity 85 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day 15 Shall I, wasting in despair 102 She dwelt among the untrodden ways 208 She is not fair to outward view 207 She walks in beauty, like the night 206 She was a Phantom of delight 206 Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea 4 Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part 30 Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me 31 Sleep on, and dream of Heaven awhile 154 Sleep, sleep, beauty bright 165 Souls of Poets dead and gone 257 Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king 1 Star that bringest home the bee 304 Stern Daughter of the Voice of God 239 Surprized by joy--impatient as the wind 230 Sweet, be not proud of those two eyes 90 Sweet Highland Girl, a very shower 285 Sweet Love, if thou wilt gain a monarch's glory 14 Sweet stream, that winds through yonder glade 154 Swiftly walk over the western wave 219

Take, O take those lips away 29 Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense 331 Tell me not, Sweet, I an unkind 88 Tell me where is Fancy bred 42 That time of year thou may'st in me behold 23 That which her slender waist confined 96 The curfew tolls the knell of parting day 172 The forward youth that would appear 65 The fountains mingle with the river 216 The glories of our blood and state 74 The last and greatest Herald of Heaven's King 55 The lovely lass o' Inverness 144 The man of life upright 52 The merchant, to secure his treasure 155 The more we live, more brief appear 338 The nightingale, as soon as April bringeth 28 The poplars are fell'd; farewell to the shade 167 There be none of Beauty's daughters 204 There is a flower, the lesser Celandine 253 There is a garden in her face 92 There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away 252 There's not a nook within this solemn Pass 340 There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream 341 The sea hath many thousand sands 33 The sun is warm, the sky is clear 256 The sun upon the lake is low 304 The twentieth year is well-nigh past 192 The world is too much with us; late and soon 330 They are all gone into the world of light 109 They that have power to hurt, and will do none 26 This is the month, and this the happy morn 56 This Life, which seems so fair 51 Though others may her brow adore 21 Thou art not fair, for all thy red and white 34 Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness 331 Three years she grew in sun and shower 209 Thy braes were bonny, Yarrow stream 146 Timely blossom, Infant fair 138 Tired with all these, for restful death I cry 54 Toll for the Brave 148 To me, fair Friend, you never can be old 11 To one who has been long in city pent 282 Turn back, you wanton flyer 16 'Twas at the royal feast for Persia won 129 'Twas on a lofty vase's side 137 Two Voices are there; one is of the Sea 241

Under the greenwood tree 7 Upon my lap my sovereign sits 105

Verse, a breeze 'mid blossoms straying 333 Victorious men of earth, no more 74

Waken, lords and ladies gay 272 Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie 168 Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee 37 Weep you no more, sad fountains 14 Were I as base as is the lowly plain 21 We talk'd with open heart, and tongue 336 We walk'd along, while bright and red 334 We watch'd her breathing thro' the night 265 Whenas in silks my Julia goes 95 When Britain first at Heaven's command 139 When first the fiery-mantled Sun 294 When God at first made Man 78 When he who adores thee has left but the name 246 When icicles hang by the wall 23 When I consider how my light is spent 76 When I have borne in memory what has tamed 243 When I have fears that I may cease to be 229 When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced 4 When I survey the bright 126 When I think on the happy days 182 When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes 10 When in the chronicle of wasted time 15 When lovely woman stoops to folly 156 When Love with unconfinéd wings 99 When maidens such as Hester die 262 When Music, heavenly maid, was young 161 When Ruth was left half desolate 313 When the lamp is shatter'd 226 When the sheep are in the fauld, and the kye at hame 178 When thou must home to shades of underground 37 When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 24 When we two parted 221 Where art thou, my beloved Son 270 Where shall the lover rest 222 Where the bee sucks, there suck I 2 Where the remote Bermudas ride 124 Whether on Ida's shady brow 197 While that the sun with his beams hot 32 Whoe'er she be 82 Why art thou silent? Is thy love a plant 220 Why so pale and wan, fond lover 100 Why weep ye by the tide, ladie 215 With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies 36 With little here to do or see 291 With sweetest milk and sugar first 112

Ye banks and braes and streams around 177 Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon 157 Ye distant spires, ye antique towers 185 Ye Mariners of England 235 Yes, there is holy pleasure in thine eye 284 Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more 68 You meaner beauties of the night 88

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