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Page 281. "SONG"-T. L. Beddoes. This drinking song is grandly conceived. One can fancy some mighty Homeric hero calling thus upon Etna to become a wine-cloud, and rain into his cup.

Page 285. "YOUTH AND AGE"-S. T. Coleridge. "This is one of the most perfect poems for style, feeling and everything, that ever was written." L. Hunt. This "and every thing" is charming.

Page 289. "THE GARDEN OF PROSERPINE"-A. C. Swinburne. This beautiful weird poem, in a metre new to English verse, is apparently sung by some shade in Hades. For the legend of Proserpine, or Persephone, see Note to Miss Ingelow's "Persephone," page 322.

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Page 294. "CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES"-S. T. Coleridge. Line 5. "the god of flocks"-Apollo, vóμios 980s. Apollo is rarely treated of in this character by Homer, but chiefly by the later poets, and in the Thessalian myth wherein he tends the flocks of Admetus. L. 13. the son of Cytherea" Cytherea was the Aphrodite especially worshipped in the island of Cythera; and it was off the coast of this island that she was fabled to have risen from the sea-foam. Eros, the God of Love, was the son of Cytherea and Ares. Page 295. "MILTON"-A. Tennyson. This poem is interesting alike for its magnificent grasp of language, and for the declaration of individual taste which it conveys.

Page 296. "IN ARCADY”—A. H. Clough. Line 6. "that fabled garden of Alcinous." Alcinoüs was king of the Phæacians in the isle of Scheria. For the description of his palace and gardens see the Odyssey of Homer. Book VII. Page 297. "ODE ON A GRECIAN URN"-7. Keats. We do not know in the whole field of English poetry a more exquisite piece of fancy than this, which supposes a moment of early Greek life, with its buoyant gaiety and all its simple incidents, transferred to the surface of the Urn and there arrested for ever.

Page 299.

"AN ANTIQUE INTAGLIO"-J. A. Symonds. Of this poem, it is unnecessary to observe that the legend and the intaglio alike exist only in the poet's imagination.

Page 302. "CLEON"-R. Browning. Line 53. Page 303. "the Pacile" i. e. a variegated, or brightly decorated place painted with many colours. There was at Athens a gallery adorned with paintings, called "the Poecile;' hence other similar galleries came generally to be so styled. Cleon, having such a gallery in his island, painted by himself, gives it therefore this name. There is also a rock on the coast of Cilicia called The Pacile, on which have of late years been discovered the ruins of a Roman town built during the reigns of Valentinian, Valens and Gratian. L. 132. Page 305. "Savage-tasted drupe" an over-ripe, wrinkled olive. L. 140. Page 306. "Terpander" a native of Antissa in Lesbos, who flourished somewhere between BC. 700 and 650. He is reported to have first reduced Greek music to a system; to have added three strings to the lyre, and to have been the first victor in the musical contests at the Festival of the Carnea. L. 141. "Phidias" the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, under whose superintendence the Parthenon and Propylæa

were built and whose masterpieces were supposed to be the cryselephantine statues of Athena at Athens, and of Jupiter at Olympia.

Page 313. "THE BLESSED Damosel"-D. G. Rossetti. For pathos, and purity, and mediævalism of the most exquisite kind, this poem may fitly be compared with the missal-paintings of Fra Angelico. Line 6. Verse 21. "citherns and citoles”—a cithern was an ancient stringed instrument, something like a guitar; a citole seems to have been the same as a dulcimer. Especially beautiful is the lover's vague consciousness of the hovering presence of his lost love while he is supposed to be writing this poem.

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