went on in advance of Dr Richardson and others. When the party was re-united, "the Doctor" says Franklin, “particularly remarked the sepulchral tone of our voices, which he requested us to make more cheerful, if possible, not aware that his own partook of the same key." See Milner's Gallery of Geogr. i. 84. 167. 71. ought here has a past sense; and strictly, it is a preterite, owed; but it is commonly used as a present; see note on went. Prothal. 1. 139; Durst, also strictly a pret., is used sometimes in a present, sometimes in a past sense. [What would I ought to have done, mean?] 91. [What is meant by below here?] 95. [What is the force of had stood here? How would you explain this usage? Comp. the Latin usage, as in Hor. Od. II. xvii. 28.] 97. To pine must be connected with formed in 1. 93. 101. forced it on. 168. 107. Lake Leman. nius and Losannensis. He speaks of his spirit as of a drooping soldier. Elsewhere this lake is called LausoPerhaps the root is that from which comes the Greek Aíum, and also the English place-name Lymne, the Roman name of which (founded no doubt on some native name) was Portus Lemanis. 118. So in some of the Cornish mines the workers hear the sea beating about them. 121. sky radically, something shading or covering, a cloud, &c. Probably sky, shade, oxía are all from the same prime root. 122. = the very rock hath rock'd. The subst. rock and the verb rock are of altogether different extraction. The root idea of the subst. is something broken, (rock and broken are in fact cognate); that of the verb movement. The word-play might better have been avoided. And so the play in the next line on the literal and the metaphorical-the physical and the moral-forces of shake and shock, which are really but various forms of one word. 131. [What is meant by the like here?] 169. 148. gnash. This word is no doubt an onomatop, expressing the sound made by striking or clashing the upper-jaw teeth against those of the lower-jaw; here it seems to mean to break by violent bitings-by clashing the teeth fiercely and madly against the chain; to crash with the teeth, to craunch furiously as one might say of a lion. 150. scorp, shape, ship, skif, oкάπтw, Lat. cavo are all ultimately akin. 152. boon originally, a prayer. See in another form in Wordsworth's Force of Prayer: "What is good for a bootless bene?" (The A. S. form is ben, the Danish bon). Then that which is prayed for, (so wish = object of one's wishes), and so = a favour, a deed of grace. 155. within my brain it wrought. See Christabel: "And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain." Macbeth, I. iii. 149: "My dull brain Was wrought with things forgotten-" Wrought would seem to be formed from wroked worked (so briddes and birds, «padía and καρδία &c). 162. [How can the chain be called empty? Could you speak of an empty piece of string ?] 163. [What is the force of the possessive case here?] 175. [What difference of meaning is there between he was withered and he wither'd?] 170. 189. those he left behind. There is much delicacy in this plural. By such a fanciful multiplying of the survivors the elder brother prevents self-intrusion; himself and his lone 403 liness are, as it were, kept out of sight, and forgotten. There is a not unlike sensitiveness in the Scotch phrase "them that's awa" of some single lost one. The grief is softened by vague. So too the Greeks used the plural. ness. 194. [What part of the sentence is eye?] 225. franctic, etymologically, phrenetic, frenzied. See Butler's Hudibras: "What oestrum, what phrenetic mood Makes you thus lavish of your blood?" Harvey speaks of madmen as phreneticks. 171. 251. He is saved from that deadly torpor, described with such masterly power in the IXth stanza, by the song of a bird, just as the Ancient Mariner is delivered from a like stagnancy by the sight of the fishes disporting themselves. The sympathies of his nature are awakened once more. His heart softens. He lives again. 172. 294. Comp. Wordsworth's Daffodils: "I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills." 173. 317. fell is a verb of "incomplete predication" here; so in "fell ill.” 336. the blue Rhone. The Rhone does not become "blue" till it leaves the lake at Geneva. It enters it of the common colour of glacier streams. 340. skimming. Comp. Virgil's use of rado, as Æn. v. 170: "Ille inter navemque Gyæ Scopulosque Sonantes 174. 351. Comp. Ancient Mar. 272-91. Wordsworth's Song at The Feast of Brougham Castle, 141-6. 378. Comp. Lovelace's famous lines "Stone walls do not a prison make," &c. KEATS. 4. 1795-1817. JOHN KEATS was born Oct. 29, 1795, in Moorfields, London. His father, employed in some large livery stables there, had married his master's daughter. Killed by a fall from a horse in 1804, he left his widow, who survived him six years, a moderate competency. John was sent to school at Enfield, when he learnt some little Latin and Classical Mythology, and was then apprenticed to a surgeon in Edmonton. In 1812, during his apprenticeship, a great æra was made in his life by the perusal of the Faerie Queene. Deep called unto deep; Keats felt that he too was a poet. In 1815 he came up to London "to walk the hospitals." At this time he made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt and other notable men of the day. He began to form a dislike to his appointed profession. This arose partly from the extreme nervousness of his nature-he mistrusted his skill as an operator-partly no doubt from his growing devotion to his own proper art. 1817 he published a little volume of poems. 2. 1817-1821. This volume attracted little, or no general notice. But Keats had now made his election. He was fully conscious of the high requirements of the work he had chosen, and of his own imperfections. In 1818 was published Endymion. This poem, with all its many faults, gave unmistakeable signs of a genuine poetic power, and of aims and strivings of the loftiest order. It met with simply infamous treatment from the Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine, and other, minor serials. The author was told to "go back to his gallipots," and that "a starved apothecary was better than a starved poet." And this, in the face of an extremely touching preface, in which he had frankly acknowledged his many shortcomings. The story that these brutal reviews shortened Keat's life is happily without foundation. They were too coarse to wound him; he thoroughly despised them. He went on steadily toiling to satisfy somewhat better his own high ideal-in his own words, "fitting himself for verses fit to live." And the progress he made was grand. In Hyperion a true master is apparent. But meanwhile, consumption, an hereditary disease, which in 1818 had laid low one of his brothers, began to undermine him. His delicate health was no doubt made worse by certain love troubles. He had become attached with all the vehemence of his nature to a lady at Hampstead. His passion was returned; but his pecuniary position seemed at this time hopeless. What little money he had received from his mother was gone; he had abandoned the medical profession; his literary prospects were anything but bright. Moreover, he was much dissatisfied with his own poetic performances. All these things broke him down. As a last chance, it was arranged that he should winter in Italy. In September, 1820, he sailed for Naples, accompanied by his true friend Severn, a painter of rising fame. From Naples he went to Rome, only to die. There for some weeks he lay bed-ridden, more than "half in love with easeful Death," not calling him "Soft names in many a mused rhyme To take into the air my quiet breath," "Thank but calling him eagerly, often somewhat wildly. At last the call was answered. God, it has come," he said, rejoicing at the near release from all his pains of body and mind. This was on the 27th of February, 1821. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery; where some eighteen months afterwards Shelley too, his fervent elegist, was laid. Few Keats had not reached his poetic prime when he died. The work he has left behind him is marked by numerous signs of youthfulness. It is florid, luxuriant, often wild and wanton. He was only just beginning to learn the great duty of restraint, of pruning, of selection. geniuses have been more liberally endowed by nature; it is not perhaps too much to say that amongst the many great poets of this century Keats was pre-eminently, if not solely, the one of epical power; but he was only just learning how to manage his splendid property. To begin with, he was a very prodigal, a mere lavisher; he scattered his pearls and gems recklessly around him, and had no sense of any noble economy. His education was all along very imperfect. His school-training was inadequate. Leigh Hunt, his chief friend and counsellor when he came up to town, was not of sufficient culture and judgment to guide him. The critics, instead of trying to direct and promote his growth, simply mocked and abused him. Indeed England gave but a queer welcome to her brilliant son. What Keats above all things wanted was a wise education. Perhaps for no man that ever lived would the thorough study of "the Classics," especially of Greek Literature, have been more beneficial. With Greek art, so far as he knew it, he deeply sympathised; see especially his Ode on a Grecian Urn, and the Sonnet on first looking into Chapman's Homer, but there is scarcely a poem in which this sympathy is not shown. There was in him the keenest sense and enjoyment of beauty; and this gave him a fellow-feeling with the great Greek masters. He recognised in them the most perfect representers of the beautiful, and this, so far as literature went, through translations. Happily he could know their plastic art better through the specimens treasured up in the British Museum, of which he was an earnest rapturous visitor. But it was only one side of Greek art that he saw. He saw its beauty; but he did not see its purity, its self-restraint, its severe refinement. He did not learn from it that the fancy must not be merely indulged. A knowledge of Sophocles might have impressed this lesson upon him. His one great delight in English Literature was a dangerous model for him. Spenser as a writer suffers from diffuseness, amd exuberance. No doubt years, had they been granted him, would have taught him repression and control. Certainly he was beginning to grow wiser in this respect. Hyperion is a hopeful advance upon Endymion. The flowers do not lie so tanglingly thick there; the pathway is not encumbered with them; one is not choked with sweet odours; one's eyes are not dazzled and blinded with a monstrous blaze of colours. Clearly, he was gathering a better understanding of his art. The Apollo, of whom he had sung so sweetly but so wildly, was revealing himself to him; the Muses were becoming known in their serene, not showy beauty, draped gracefully, not in any garish colours. But who would part with what he has left us, let the faults be what they may? No works of our literature are more truly poetical; none more completely carry one away into an ideal realm, where worldly noises come to the ear, if they reach it at all, subdued and deadened; none breathe out of them, and around them a more bewitching atmosphere. His song as one hears it is like that of the nightingale as he heard it: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past and Lethe-wards had sunk." Not without reason Shelley, apostrophizing Keats, calls the nightingale 'thy spirit' sister. ST AGNES' EVE. 1. The chief incident of this poem is founded on a popular superstition. The belief which in Scotland is associated with Halloween, or the Eve of All Saints' Day, was in England attached to the vigil of St Agnes, whose feast was celebrated on January the 21st. It was thought that, if certain rites and forms were observed, maidens might be vouchsafed a sight of their future husbands. The accounts of these requisite ceremonies vary. See Chambers' Book of Days, also Ellis' Brand's Pop. Antiq. It is impossible to say when such a notion became connected with St Agnes. Her legend is "one of the oldest" of the church; see Mrs Jameson's Sacred and Leg. Art; her effigies are as old as any, next to those of the Evangelists and Apostles; but in the story of her martyrdom, in the Diocletian persecution, there is no sign of the matrimonial interest that is found at a later time adding to her popularity. For other legends that gathered around her, her name is no doubt answerable. It was impossible that it should not suggest 'agna," and that, consequently, lambs and she should not be allied. In Tennyson's lines, called St Agnes' Eve, the speaker, some saintly nun, wins through prayer and faith a vision of the Heavenly Bridegroom. Other incidents of the poem seem to have been drawn from Romeo and Juliet, perhaps from Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, and also, it may be, from the old Haddon Hall story of the elopement of Dorothy Vernon with her true lover, John Manners. It 2, The poem abounds with the beauties, and with the faults, that characterize Keats. need not mar one's enjoyment of it as a poem that its archæology is somewhat inaccurate. Scott himself is by no means perfect in this respect. If we are not introduced into the veritable medieval world, at least we are taken out of our own present workaday atmosphere; we are borne away into a land of enchantment; we feel the very air of Romance blowing around us; we too are "hoodwinked with faery fancy." 176. 1. St Agnes' Eve, Jan. 21. 2. for all his feathers. See note in Hymn Nat. 73. a cold. So King Lear, III. iv. 84, &c. In 13th and 14th century writings occur the forms acolden, to grow or make cold; akelen, accolded, and acold, part. &c. (Stratmann). See in the Ancren Riwle, Ed. Morten, p. 404: "Idel acoaldeth and acwencheth this fur" = Idleness cooleth and quencheth this fyre. The a here is a corrupted form of an intensive prefix af or of. So in a-hungred, which in Piers Ploughman, vi. 269, appears as af-yngred (comp. A. S. of-hingrian, and see Skeat's, Clar. Press, P.P. Gloss.). So afered, afraid, atheist, ago (see note to Hymn Nat. 155), aweary (as Mids. N. D. V. i. 257, &c.), &c. 5. beadsman = strictly, prayers-man. The term often denoted one who in return for obligations received gave his benefactor the benefit of his prayers. Hence often beadsman almsman. So the "blue-gowns" of Scotland are called King's Bedesman; see the Antiquary. As for prayers being looked upon as a return for material kindnesses, comp. the yet extant phrase in "petitions": "and your petitioners will ever pray, &c." See in the N.T., St James v. 15, Shakspere, passim. For the form of the word, in Piers Pl. is found bedeman (see iii. 41 and 46 in Clar. Press Ed.), in the Ancren Riwle, beodeman. The final e of bede represents the old plural inflection. When that inflection was superseded by s, then came in the form bedesman. For the derivation, bede is connected with bid, beadle, &c. Bead, a little ball, is bede itself in a secondary sense. Bidding-prayer is strictly a tautologue, if we may use such a word (comp. analogue). told. See note to L'Alleg. 67. |