O fountain Arethuse,' and thou honoured flood, And listens to the herald of the sea That came in Neptune's plea ; He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds, 2 And sage Hippotades their answer brings, Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark, Next Camus,3 reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge, Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge, Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.* "Ah! who hath reft," quoth he, "my dearest pledge?" Last came, and last did go, The pilot of the Galilean lake,5 1 Now Phoebus, whose strain was of a higher mood, has done speaking, he invokes the fountain Arethuse of Sicily, the country of Theocritus, and Mincius, the river of Mantua, Virgil's country, in compliment to those poets. 2 Æolus, the son of Hippotas. 3 The Cam, the river of Cambridge. sea, 4 Meaning the hyacinth, the leaves of which were supposed to be marked with the mournful letters At, At. Cf. Ovid, Met. x. 210 sqq. 5" The introduction of St. Peter after the fabulous deities of the has appeared an incongruity deserving of censure to some admirers of this poem. It would be very reluctantly that we could abandon to this criticism the most splendid passage it presents. But the censure rests, as I think, on too narrow a principle. In narrative or dramatic poetry, where something like illusion or momentary belief is to be produced, the mind requires an objective possibility, a capacity of real existence, not only in all the separate portions of the imagined story, but in their coherency and relation to a common whole. Whatever is obviously incongruous, whatever shocks our previous knowledge of possibility, destroys, to a certain extent, that acquiescence in the fiction which it is the true business of the fiction to produce. But the case is not the same in such poems as Lycidas. They pretend to no credibility, they aim at no illusion, they are read Two massy keys he bore, of metals twain (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain), He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake: How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, Enow of such as for their bellies' sake Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold! And shove away the worthy bidden guest; Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel1 pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, with the willing abandonment of the imagination to a waking dream, and require only that general possibility, that combination of images, which common experience does not reject as incompatible, without which the fancy of the poet would be only like that of the lunatic. And it had been so usual to blend sacred with mythological personages in allegory, that no one, probably, in Milton's age, would have heen struck by the objection."-Hallam. 1 Probably equivalent to the Latin "stridens," creaking, piercing. The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, And daffodillies fill their cups Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Where thou, perhaps, under the whelming tide 3 Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor; And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walked the waves, 1 Probably Bellerus, one of the Cornish giants, fabulously supposed to dwell at the Land's End. 2 A watch-tower and lighthouse formerly stood on the promontory called the Land's End, and looked, as Orosius says, towards another high tower at Brigantia in Gallicia, and consequently towards Bayona's Hold.-Newton. 3 Pity. 4A dolphin is said to have carried the body of Palamon to the shore of Corinth, where he was deified. Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more; Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, L XVIII. THE FIFTH ODE OF HORACE, LIB. I. "Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa," rendered almost word for word without rhyme, according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit.] WHAT slender youth, bedewed with liquid odours, In wreaths thy golden hair, Plain in thy neatness? Oh, how oft shall he Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold; To whom thou untried seem'st fair. Me in my vowed My dank and dropping weeds To the stern god of sea. AD PYRRHAM. ODE V. Horatius ex Pyrrhæ illecebris tanquam è naufragio enataverat, cujus amore irretitos, affirmat esse miseros. QUIS multa gracilis te puer in rosa Emirabitur insolens! Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea, Intentata nites. Me tabula sacer Suspendisse potenti XIX. ON THE NEW FORCERS OF CONSCIENCE UNDER BECAUSE you have thrown off your prelate lord, To force our consciences that Christ set free, By shallow Edwards1 and Scotch what d'ye call:2 1 The author of the Gangræna (published in 1646), or "a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the errors, heresies, and blasphemies, and pernicious practices of the sectaries of this time, vented and acted in England in these four last years."-Thyer. 2 Possibly the famous Alexander Henderson, or George Gillespie, a Scotch minister and commissioner at Westminster.-Newton. |