of delight when Hunt announced that the publishers had accepted Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

Pp. 434 ff. The Confessions of an Opium Eater is a literary elaboration of a class of experiences never before put into literary form. De Quincey began taking opium when he was a student at Oxford and continued all his life, although, after several severe crises, he succeeded in reducing the amount very greatly. His Confessions became immediately popular, doubtless rather through morbid interest in the theme than through appreciation of his art.

The fact is, however, that he gives singularly little definite information in regard to either the sensations or the dreams produced by opium. His method is to take a comparatively small body of experiential fact and play with it as a musician plays with a theme in a fugue or a symphony. His high place among writers of English prose is due chiefly to the elaborate and subtle rhythms he builds up in his long, involved sentences. For the suggestions of these he is indebted to the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially Hooker, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor and Milton.

P. 435 b. My knowledge of the Oriental tongues. The reader might infer that De Quincey knew the Arabic and Turkish words he mentions at the time of the visit of the Malay, but this visit if it ever occurred is placed by him in 1816-1817 (see p. 438 a), at least two years before the publication of Anastasius. The fact is that De Quincey was a little vain in regard to his learning - even when, as here, it was very small- and rarely neglects an opportunity to insinuate it.

The quantity was enough to kill three dragoons and their horses. At the usual price of opium, this amount was an expensive gift for so poor a man as De Quincey to make. But the incident is picturesque.

P. 436 b. as a witty author has it. The reference is to Southey's The Devil's Walk, st. 8:

centurion to Jesus: "I say unto this man 'Go,' and he goeth; and to another 'Come,' and he cometh." Matt. viii: 9.

P. 440 b. That Homer knew of opium and its effects is inferred from the account in the Odyssey, IV, 220-221, of the drug which Helen cast into the drink of the heroes who were lamenting those who had fallen in the Trojan war, to lull pain and cause forgetfulness; but there is no reason to believe that this implies that Homer had any personal experience of the drug.

P. 441 a. Observe how slight a use is made of the Malay after all the elaborate preparations of pp. 435-436. De Quincey seems often to secure his effects upon his readers rather by awakening enormous expectations and supplying eloquent generalizations than by given specific details of horror or obsession. The passage at the foot of p. 441 b has been greatly and justly admired, but except in it and the passages on pp. 442-443 he displays little faculty for visual imagery, despite what he says in p. 438 b. His method furnishes a remarkable example of the use and effectiveness of "atmosphere" which he creates abundantly. P. 442 a. my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside. At this date he had only one child - an infant in arms; he married Margaret Simpson the "dear M." of p. 437 b in 1816. The first child was born in 1817. Easter Sunday. A dream-confusion; Easter cannot occur in May.

P. 443 b. "I will sleep no more!" But he did.

LORD BYRON

Byron is not a poet whose work requires to be studied in detail, though his powerful imagination often produces images and phrases that do not reveal their full significance without careful reflection. In general, it is the larger, broader phases of his work that demand attention, his emotional power, his creative imagination. That much of his poetry is the product of hysterical sentimentality, partly natural and partly cultivated, is true, and this has been the cause of strange ups and downs in his reputation; but his genius is undeniable, and few English poets have exercised so powerful an influence upon foreign literature.

ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS

Pp. 443 ff. In 1807 Byron published his first volume of verse, Hours of Idleness. It was unfavorably reviewed in the Edinburgh Review, one of the two most influential magazines of the time.

This is his reply. That his judgments are the product, not of intelligence, but of emotion, may be inferred from the praise he lavishes upon forgotten versifiers such as Montgomery, Bloomfield, Gifford, Macneil, White and Shee. In his preface he says, referring, we may presume, to Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge: "But the unquestionable possession of considerable genius by several of the writers here censured, renders their mental prostitution the more to be regretted. Imbecility may be pitied or, at worst, laughed at and forgotten; perverted powers demand the more decided reprehension."

P. 445. ll. 235-238. "Mr. W., in his Preface, labors hard to prove that prose and verse are much the same, and certainly his precepts and practice are strictly conformable." Byron's Note.

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

The very title of this poem, no less than the occasional archaic diction, serves to create an atmosphere of artificiality appropriate to its blasé hero, steeped in the unconquerable melancholy of youth. There is, perhaps, no period in the life of an imaginative and sensitive man at which melancholy holds him so fast, at which

"the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world”

bears so sadly upon him- as when he is just passing from youth to manhood. This was the period at which Byron began this poem, and he had, in addition to youth's natural causes of melancholy, some special ones, arising from his morbid pride and sensitiveness, accentuated by fits of nervous exhaustion and reaction from a life of excessive self-indulgence.

The poem is a series of more or less connected descriptions and meditations, suggested by the scenes through which his imaginary pilgrim took his proud and lonely way. The subjects are very varied, and it is interesting to note how the poet has made the Spenserian stanza respond to all the moods and movements of his themes.

The extracts give a few of the many famous passages.

The first (Canto I, ll. 1-197) describes the pilgrim and his departure on his pilgrimage. Note his pride in his profligacy and his unfaithfulness in love, his disbelief in friendship, his sullen aloofness, and — despite all this his fundamental capacity for strong and genuine affection. His attitude is indicated in the very first stanza by his refusal to invoke the Muse.

1. 1. Hellas, ancient Greece.

1.6. Delphi, the shrine of Apollo, god of music and poetry. He obtained the lyre from Hermes, who had stretched strings across a tortoise shell (see 1. 8) and produced the first lyre.

1. 8. Mote, an ancient form meaning may, Other archaisms, for which the dictionary may be consulted, are whilome (l. 10), in sooth (1. 14'. Childe (1. 19), hight (1. 19), losel (1. 23), Eremite (1. 36), lemans (1. 77), feere (1. 79), Paynim (1.99).

1. 8. the weary Nine, the nine muses, who have been invoked by so many generations of poets. P. 446. 1. 61. Paphian girls. Cyprus, was the seat of one of the most famous Paphos, in temples of Aphrodite (Venus). Here the adjective is applied to devotees of sensual love.

1. 79. Eros (Cupid), the god of capricious sensual love. feere, an old word for companion. friend.

1. 81. Mammon, the Syrian god of wealth (see Par. Lost, I, ll. 678–688).

P. 447. The second extract (Canto III, 11. 181252) begins with the ball in Brussels the night before the battle of Quatre Bras (two days before Waterloo) and passes almost immediately to the battle itself (11. 200-207). The Duke of Brunswick was one of the first leaders to leave the ball and one of the first to fall in the battle. His father was mortally wounded nine years before in the

battle of Auerstadt.

of the works of Man with the desert, the forest, and the ocean (Canto IV, ll. 1587–1656).

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON

Pp. 451 ff. Bonnivard, celebrated in the prefatory sonnet, was a Genevan patriot, imprisoned for six years in the castle of Chillon, four of which he spent in the dungeon. He was released by his own party and seems to have lived for some thirtyfour years more. His story, though not very similar to that of "the prisoner," no doubt suggested the poem.

ODE

Pp. 455 ff. There can be no doubt of the genuineness of Byron's interest in political independence. It is attested not only by the sonnet on Chillon, this Ode, and many other passages in his writings, but by his devotion of his money and his life to the struggle for the independence of Greece. At the time this Ode was written, Venice, once a glorious and powerful republic, had been since 1797 a possession of Austria. Austrian governors sat in the ancient seat of the doges, and Austrian soldiers paraded with drums and guns in the streets and in the Piazza di San Marco; the ancient spirit of patriotism seemed dead or at least alive only in the hearts of a few conspirators, who held meetings in Byron's own apartments. Every reader will wish to read in connection with this Ode, Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Vol. II, Chap. IV (cf. above, pp. 582 ff.), especially §§ xii-xv.

This Ode is very uneven in conception and execution. Cantos I and IV are well conceived and in general nobly expressed; Cantos II and III are awkward and uncertain in thought and awkward and involved in style.

After four lines of invocation to the city, Canto I is devoted to a merciless arraignment of the Venetians for cowardice and submission to the tyrant Austria. Even the carved Lion of St. Mark, the patron saint of the city, is made to appear subdued and spiritless (1. 19) and the city is compared to a dying man (II. 37-55).

In Canto II (11. 56-100) the same theme is continued in confused fashion, with almost unintelligible references to "the few spirits" who love freedom and are not appalled at thought of the crimes which the mob will commit in freedom's name when the prison wall is thundered down.

P. 456. Canto III recites some of the former glories of Venice and her services in preserving

freedom for Europe, and, finally, the poor requital she has received.

Canto IV predicts the disappearance of freedom from Europe with the subjugation of Switzerland and declares America to be its only remaining refuge.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Pp. 458 ff. Shelley's poetry should be read in the light of his own views of the nature and value of poetry. These are given with clearness and eloquence in his Defense of Poetry, which, with the views of sixteen other poets, including Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, is published in a small volume entitled The Prelude to Poetry, edited by Ernest Rhys (J. M. Dent and Co.). What the poets themselves thought about the nature and value of their own art is surely of greater interest to lovers of it than the disquisitions of critical system makers.

ALASTOR

Alastor is not the name of the hero or any other character in the poem indeed there are no other characters. It is a Greek word meaning an evil spirit; Shelley's intention was to set forth solitude as evil and even fatal. "The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin." But Shelley's sympathy is so obviously engaged by his picture of the youth enamored of "his own imaginations" of "all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful" and uniting them in a single image," that the terror of the poet's fate is less impressive than the charm of his lonely and restless pursuit of loveliness and truth. The passage here given contains only the characterization of the youth and a general account of his early efforts in search of truth. The quotation from St. Augustine is from the Confessions, Bk. III, Chap. I.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY

Pp. 459 f. The basis of this poem is Plato's doctrine of beauty; cf. especially The Banquet. It gains new light and interest from a comparison with Spenser's Hymn in Honor of Beauty and Hymn of Heavenly Beauty (see pp. 120-122), which are based upon Neo-Platonism; that is, upon the ideas of Plato as modified by later Christian and nonChristian philosophers and poets.

The following quotation from Diotima's conversation, as given by Socrates in Plato's Banquet,

legend arose that his mother confessed that he was the son of Satan himself. He is placed by Dante, in the Inferno, among the tyrants expiating the sin of cruelty, and his career was the subject of the first modern tragedy, the Eccerinus of Albertino Mussato. The dice play by Sin and Deathtwo Miltonic figures- was, according to the poet, to decide whether he should continue his life of sin or die.

ll. 256 ff. Padua was the seat of one of the most famous universities of medieval and early modern times.

P.462. 1. 292. point of heaven's profound, zenith of the fathomless depths of air.

1. 333. Its, the frail bark's (1. 331).

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

The poet, despondent and empty of energy, appeals for aid to the West Wind of Autumn. Stanzas I, II, and III are successive apostrophes to the Wind in various functions and aspects. In stanzas IV and V he makes his appeal for aid, and as his inspiration glows and his pulses quicken, he passes from appeals that he may be passively subject to the Wind's power -a leaf lifted and driven before it, or a lyre responding in mighty harmonies to its breath - to a prayer for active union in spirit and power to scatter his thoughts among men, and finally reaches a triumphant recognition that the coming of Winter is the promise of Spring.

The poem is very subtly and skilfully constructed. Not only do the last two stanzas recall all the activities of the first three, but ll. 64, 65 are beautifully associated with ll. 2~14, and the triumphant note of ll. 68-70 is prepared for by the words,

"Thou dirge

Of the dying year" (11. 23, 24).

The stanzas are ingeniously formed from the terza rima, the verse of Dante's Divina Commedia. Strictly speaking, the terza rima1ends with the thirteenth line of each stanza; Shelley, in order to get a stanzaic effect, adds another line rhyming with the thirteenth. The terza rima gives him the continuity of movement within the stanza

1In tersa rima the first rhyme and the last must appear twice and only twice, while each of the others must appear three times. The rhyme formula is ababcbcdc xwxyxyzyz. Terza rima is rare in English. Other examples of it in this volume are Wyatt's Of the Meane and Sure Estate (p. 98) and Rossetti's fragment, Francesca da Rimini (p. 629), translated from Dante.

appropriate to his subject; the couplet rhyme gives the stanzaic structure necessary to his plan. 1. 9. Thine azure sister of the spring is not the South Wind, as has sometimes been supposed, for from ancient times the south wind has been dreaded in Italy (see Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, passim). The wind meant is the West Wind of the Spring, sister to the West Wind of Autumn.

P. 463. 1. 21. Manad. The women who in ecstasy took part in the rites of Dionysus, with flying hair and flaming torches, were called Mænads (the frenzied ones). Everybody who has not already done so should read Professor Gilbert Murray's translation of the Baccha of Euripides.

1. 32. A pumice isle is one formed from the lava of a volcano. Baie, an ancient Roman pleasure resort, is the modern Baja, a few miles west of Naples, in a region where nearly extinct volcanoes still rumble and spurt feebly.

THE INDIAN SERENADE

There are several versions of this poem, all apparently originating with Shelley himself. This explains the variant readings, of which there are several, for example: burning for shining (1. 4) ;' As I must die on thine (1. 15); Beloved as thou art (l. 16); press me to thine own and press it close to thine again (1. 23).

THE CLOUD

P. 464. ll. 17-30. Shelley conceives of the Lightning as the pilot of the Cloud and as itself following the movements of the genii that move in the sea. Wherever the Lightning dreams, the spirit he loves will be found below —- under mountain or stream. But how does the Lightning dissolve in rain (1. 30)? One would expect the Cloud to do that.

TO A SKYLARK

Pp. 465 f. This flood of divine rapture is one of the many wonderful poems in English which have so impressed lovers of the beautiful, that even we Americans, to whom the cuckoo, the English skylark, and the nightingale are entirely unknown, think of these birds as sources of delight, and some of us who "meddle with making," as the old scribbler said, have even written about them without ever having heard a song from their throats. Nearly all the poem is devoted to the bird itself the first six stanzas to pure lyric outcries, the second six to lyric comparisons with