from Phoenicia the letters which make the Greek alphabet. 61. Samian, etc. While a refugee from his native land, Anacreon was hospitably entertained at Samos by the tyrant Polycrates, a patron of art and literature. 67. The tyrant, etc. Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, for several years previous to the battle was "tyrant" of the Cher

sonesus.

74. Suli's rock, a fortress on a height overlooking the river Suli in Albania.

74. Parga, a seaport in Albania. 78. Heracleidan. The Heraclidæ, or descendants of Hercules, are fabled to have conquered the Peloponnesus before the Trojan War.

757a 91. Sunium, the promontory at the southeastern extremity of Attica, now Cape Colonna,

DON JUAN

Don Juan represents the reactions of the world-weary Byron to contemporary conditions in his later years. His purpose was, as he declared, to be "a little quietly facetious about everything" -- society, politics, and literature. He took as his hero the traditional Spanish libertine, Don Juan, and in a loosely constructed narrative conducts him from an intrigue in his native land to the islands of the East, through Turkey and Russia, and into England, where he leaves him at the end of the sixteenth canto. The narrative is interrupted freely by the author's commentary, grave, gay, or flippant, as the mood prevails. The tone was borrowed from the Italian of Pulci and had been lately employed in England by John Hookham Frere. The poem was begun in 1818 and was left unfinished at the time of Byron's departure for Greece in the late summer of 1823. Byron regarded the poem as "the comic epic of the human race." The public at the time, mistaking it for "an eulogy of vice," was shocked by its license. Critical opinion since has regarded it as the greatest verse satire in English.

21. 'falls into the yellow Leaf.' Cf. Macbeth V, iii, 23.

757b 43. Pulci, an Italian poet of the fifteenth century, author of the burlesque epic, Il Morgante Maggiore.

44. Quixotic. Cervantes ridicules the decadent romances of chivalry in his great satirical burlesque Don Quixote. 762b 411. Cassandra. See note to Sackville's Induction, p. 201b, l. 463.

418. Phlegethontic rill, Phlegethon, a river of fire in Hades.

431. Fez, a sultanate in the northern part of Morocco.

763a 455. Numidian. Numidia was a country of northern Africa.

763b 485. Laocoön, a famous antique group in sculpture, showing the Trojan priest of Apollo and his two sons ensnared and bitten to death by pythons.

486. ever-dying Gladiator, the Dying Gaul, a famous statue, showing a half-reclining gladiator reluctantly yielding to death. 764b 576. Cyclades, a group of islands southeast of Greece in the Ægean Sea.

ON THIS DAY, etc.

This poem was written in Greece, January 22, 1824. Byron died April 19, following.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Percy Bysshe Shelley, the greatest of English lyrical poets, stands in striking contrast to Keats, whom he admired and elegized, in his idealization of intellectual rather than sensuous beauty and in the employment of the great body of his poetry for his philosophy of reform. He was the son of a bluff Tory squire and was born and spent his early youth at Field Place, the family estate in Sussex. As an oldest son he was heir to the baronetcy which came into the family in 1806. At the age of ten he was sent to Sion House Academy, near London, and two years later went to Eton, where he showed himself a rebel to school tradition and published a romance called Zastrozzi. He entered Oxford in 1810 and began at once to gratify his intellectual avidity by reading widely in philosophy, specifically Hume, Locke, and Godwin, and when the year was no more than half over issued his first formal protest against "tyranny," The Necessity of Atheism. His expulsion in consequence brought on a family rupture. Taking up lodgings in London, he met a pink-and-white school-girl beauty of sixteen, Harriet Westbrook, who readily adopted his revolutionary doctrines. Sympathizing with her rebellious attitude toward parental and school authority, he eloped with her to Edinburgh. The next two or three years, spent in migrations from place to place in the British Isles, are significant mainly for the publication of his Queen Mab, 1813, and for his sojourn in Ireland to aid the cause of political and religious liberty by tracts and addresses. By the spring of 1814 he was intimate with the Godwins in London. Mary Godwin attracted him by her delicate beauty and intellectuality, Harriet was neglectful and spent much time away from him, and after apprising Harriet of his pur

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pose to separate from her he eloped with Mary to the continent. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine two and a half years afterward, having had in the meanwhile other attachments. Shelley and Mary were again in England after a brief stay abroad. They spent the summer of 1816 with Byron in Switzerland, returned to England for another year and a half, and in the spring of 1818 left the country for good. These years are notable mainly for Alastor, 1816, and the long Revolt of Islam, 1817, both of which show the effects on his poetry of his speculations on reform. In Italy, where he spent his remaining years, he found his realm; the climate suited him, a few friends were congenial, and he was far from the scenes of his early agitations. Here from 1819 to 1821 he produced in rapid succession the great works which have given him an enduring fame: Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais, Epipsychidion, and his unrivaled lyrics. In the spring of 1822 he went to Lerici, on the bay of Spezzia, to spend the summer. On July 8, while he was returning from a meeting with Byron and Leigh Hunt in Pisa, his little sailing craft Ariel was foundered in a storm. His body, discovered on the shore a few days later with that of his friend Williams, was burned, and his ashes were placed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome near the grave of Keats. For the greater part of his career he imagined himself a reformer and used his poetry as a means of freeing the race from its social, political, and religious shackles, but in his last years he became reconciled to the calling of a poet and wrote more as an inspired representative of pure art. Though he idealizes intellectual beauty, he is far from being unsympathetic or cold. He is a neo-Platonist, and the prototype of his intellectual idealism is Love (see note to p. 91a, 1. 38). In his combination of noble aspiration, profound emotion, and exquisite technique, he is the supreme lyric genius of the language.

In this poem Shelley announces his ideal of life, the pursuit of intellectual beauty. His conception is essentially Platonic. The beauties of earth are but partial and imperfect reflections of a higher essence of pure beauty. It is man's duty and privilege to aspire to an understanding and realization of this higher archetype, which when attained will transform his whole being and suffuse it with brotherly love.

[765a

767a

ODE TO THE WEST WIND This ode is one of Shelley's greatest lyrical achievements. It was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind was actually blowing. În its treatment of Nature the poem illustrates his unique myth-making faculty and his power of gradual mergence into the object he describes until he becomes one with it and sings as the inspired object itself. The stanzaic form of the poem is unusual in English, being an adaptation of the popular Italian terza rima.

9. Thine azure sister, etc., the south wind laden with blue haze.

767b 21. Maenad, a priestess of Bacchus. 32. Baiae's bay, near Naples, a favorite resort of the ancient Romans.

Adonais, one of the great elegies, is Shelley's spontaneous tribute to the memory of Keats. After Keats's death the erroneous notion prevailed that he had been hurried to his grave by the savage criticism of his Endymion in the Quarterly Review. Shelley knew Keats, though not intimately, and greatly admired him. When he heard of this last act of tyranny, he "dipped his pen in consuming fire for Keats's destroyers." The elegy therefore had a double motive in its inception-sympathy for the young genius as the victim of oppression and righteous indignation against unjust and indiscriminate reviewers. In execution, however, the former motive prevailed, and the poem became one of the most beautiful threnodies in any language. The name "Adonais" is the poet's own formation from Adonis, the beautiful youth loved by Aphrodite and killed by a wild boar.

772b 12. Urania, Uranian Aphrodite, with some elements of the Muse Urania. 30. the Sire, etc., Milton. Shelley's poem is reminiscent of Lycidas as well as of Bion's Lament for Adonis and Moschus' Elegy on Bion.

36. the third, the other two being Homer and Shakespeare, or, among epic poets, Homer and Dante.

41. Others more sublime, perhaps such as Chatterton and Burns.

44. some yet live, such as Byron and Wordsworth.

773a 55. that high Capital, Rome. 774a 127. Lost Echo. See note to Comus,

p. 333b, 1. 230.

140. Hyacinth. See note to Lycidas, p. 344a, 1. 106.

152 f. his head who, etc., the reviewer in the Quarterly, J. W. Croker. Shelley supposed the author was H. H. Milman, an English clergyman.

775b 238. the unpastured dragon, the critical world.

244 ff. The herded wolves. . . ravens . . vultures, etc., the critics who served party ends.

250 f. The Pythian of the age, etc., Byron, in allusion to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

264 ff. The Pilgrim of Eternity, etc., Byron, in allusion to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 268 ff. Ierne, Ireland. Thomas Moore, the Irish poet (see p. 805 f.), in several poems sang the tragic fate of the patriot, Robert Emmet.

776a 271. one frail Form, Shelley himself. 276. Actaeon, a young hunter who saw Diana

bathing with her nymphs. He was changed into a stag by the goddess and destroyed by his own hounds.

284 ff. a dying lamp, etc. See note to Time Long Past, p. 770a.

307 ff. What softer voice, etc., Leigh Hunt. 776b 317 ff. What deaf and viperous murderer, etc. See note to I. 152 f.

777b 399. Chatterton. See p. 591a and notes.

401. Sidney. See p. 273 and notes. 404. Lucan. See note to p. 458a, l. 5. 778a 439 ff. a slope of green access, the Protestant cemetery, where Keats was buried and where a few months later Shelley's ashes were interred. 444 ff. one keen pyramid, etc., the tomb of Caius Cestius.

451 ff. Here pause, etc. For the vein of personal reference from this point on, see note to Time Long Past, p 770.

John Keats died when he was little more than twenty-five years old. He was not unusually precocious. His active literary career extended over scarcely half a dozen years; yet unlike any other English writer of so brief a career, he is reckoned one of the major poets of the language. He was born in Moorfields, London, the son of a stableman who had married his proprietor's daughter. He attended school at Enfield, near London, and there came into contact with Charles Cowden Clarke, who more than any other influenced him in his literary development. At fifteen he was removed from school and apprenticed to a surgeon; but surgery was uncongenial to his tastes and temperament, and in the winter of 1816-1817 he definitely decided to devote himself to poetry. 1817 appeared his first volume, containing along with other good juvenile pieces his celebrated sonnet on Chapman's Homer. His Endymion, written in fulfillment of a pact with Shelley, was published the following year. The poem contains passages of exquisite beauty, but its obscurity and his association with Leigh Hunt (see introductory note to Leigh Hunt, p. 807) and the so-called Cockney School called down on him the

In

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wrath of the Tory reviewers. Meanwhile his health showed signs of decline; and the breaking up of the little family group, by the departure of one brother for America, the death of another to whom he was devotedly attached, and isolation from his sister Fanny by an unsympathetic guardian, affected him greatly. About the same time he became engaged to Fanny Brawne, his violent passion for whom proved a real affliction. In 1820 appeared the volume on which his fame chiefly rests. It contained along with other notable poems Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, the great odes, and the fragmentary Hyperion. Meanwhile the condition of his health made it necessary for him to spend the cold season in a warmer climate. Accordingly in the autumn of 1820 he set out for Italy in company with the painter Severn, whose devoted friendship in those last months is one of the beautiful things in literary biography But hereditary consump tion, as it was called at the time, had progressed too far. The friends spent the winter in anguish at Rome, and just before its close the poet died. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery near the mound of Caius Cestius, where the following year the ashes of Shelley were laid. He is noteworthy in English poetry for his idealization of sensuous beauty; in his own words, "a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” He even goes so far as to regard Beauty as supreme Truthtruth discovered by imaginative power rather than by scientific analysis (see the closing lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, p. 787). He is frequently regarded as one of the chief English exponents of the principle of "art for art's sake." The little group of artist poets led by Rossetti (see introductory notes to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, p. 981; William Morris, p. 996; and Algernon Charles Swinburne, p. 1006) and called "pre-Raphaelites" because of their advocacy in painting and poetry of the artistic principles that prevailed before Raphael, found a kinship in his works which caused them to regard him as their great predecessor and exemplar. Some of his sonnets are among the best in the language; he is the greatest ode writer in English; and in his fragment of Hyperion, Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustum alone perhaps excepted, he has written the best epic poetry since Milton.

KEEN FITFUL GUSTS

780a 10. a little cottage, Leigh Hunt's residence in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, on the occasion of Keats's first visit to the place.

THE EVE OF ST. AGNES St. Agnes, a Roman virgin and martyr, was beheaded in the reign of Diocletian. The poem is founded on the superstition that if a maiden, after certain rites, retired fasting on the night before St Agnes's Day (January 21), her future husband would appear and feast with her in her dreams. The story is of Keats's own creation. It is feudal in setting and spirit, and by its richness of color and imagery it suggests the preRaphaelitism which found chief expres sion in the poetry of Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne later in the century. 782a 70. amort, deadened, dazed. 71. her lambs unshorn. On account of her name (cf. Latin agnus, lamb) and 11. cence, St. Agnes's symbol was a lar Her proper sacrifice was two unshorn lambs.

782b 115 ff. by the holy loom, etc. The wool

of the sacrificial lambs was dressed, spun, and woven into cloth by the nuns. 783a 171. Merlin paid his Demon, etc. Mer

lin, the son of a demon, disappeared in a violent storm in the forest of Broceliande by the magic of an enchantress, to whom he had confided the secret of the spell which overcame him. To the poet his "monstrous debt" was his existence, which he owed to the Devil for the gift of his magic.

784a 241. a missal, etc., a Christian prayerbook with pictures of converted heathen

at prayer.

784b 269. Fez, a district in northern Morocco.

The city of Fez is an important commercial center.

270. silken Samarcand, a city in Turkestan, Asiatic Russia, celebrated for its manufacture of cotton goods, silks, etc. 270. cedared Lebanon, a mountain range in southern Syria, noted from time immemorial for its cedars.

292. La belle dame sans mercy,' the title of a poem by Alain Chartier, an early fifteenth-century French poet. See Keats's own poem by the same title, p. 790.

785b

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE During his general depression in the spring of 1819, following the death of his brother Tom, Keats was at times delighted by the song of a nightingale which had built its nest near Wentworth Palace, where he was residing. He composed his ode one morning while seated under a plum tree, listening to the bird's ravishing strains.

786a 15. O for a beaker, etc. Keats was very fond of claret wine.

32. pards, leopards. Bacchus is often represented as riding in a car drawn by leopards or other wild beasts.

786b 66. the sad heart of Ruth. See Ruth ii.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

The particular urn which is generally understood to have inspired this ode is still preserved, though in a weatherbeaten condition, at Holland House in London.

787b 41. brede, braid, ornament.

ODE TO PSYCHE

1. Goddess. See note to Milton's Comus, p. 342b, l. 1005.

14. Tyrian, of a purple color.

26. Phoebe's . . . star, the moon.

27. Vesper, the evening star, the planet Venus when east of the sun and appearing after sunset.

Keats completed only two books and a part of a third of Hyperion. He left the poem unfinished partly because of his declining health, partly because of the unfavorable reception of Endymion, and because it contained "too many Miltonic inversions." If he had completed it, it would have treated, so says a friend, the dethronement of Hyperion (the god of physical light) by Apollo, of Saturn by Jupiter, of Oceanus by Neptune, and the like, and the war of the Titans for Saturn's restoration. The mythology represented is but darkly suggested in the Greek and Roman poets. The incidents would have been, as in the parts achieved, the poet's own imaginative creation. In the general character of its subject and treatment and in its masterful blank verse, the poem ably suggests Milton.

23. there came one, Thea, a Titan, the sister of Saturn and Hyperion.

30. Ixion's wheel. See note to the Rape of the Lock, i, p. 489b, l. 133.

792a 147. The rebel three, Zeus or Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto.

793a 246. Tellus, the goddess of Earth. 794a 307. Cœlus, god of the Sky.

JAMES HOGG

James Hogg, known as the "Ettrick Shepherd," came of ancestors who had been shepherds for centuries. He had