almost no schooling and grew up wellnigh ignorant of books. At the age of twenty, after several years of herding for various masters, he was employed by a Mr. Laidlaw of Blackhouse, through whose kindness he found access to a good library. He read and taught himself while he was attending his flocks. In 1801 he produced his Scottish Pastorals. On Scott's recommendation, in return for some assistance in the Border Minstrelsy, his Mountain Bard was published by Constable in 1807. He tried farming in Dumfriesshire for three years without success; and failing of employment as a shepherd in his native district, he set out for Edinburgh in 1810 to try his fortune as a literary venturer. His Queen's Wake in 1813 made his reputation. At the request of the Duchess of Buccleuch, to whom he had dedicated his Forest Minstrel, 1810, he was given a lease for life of the farm of Eltrive in Yarrow, and there he remained, without relaxing his literary endeavors, for the rest of his life. During his later years he wrote considerable prose, and was kept continually before the public by his connection with Blackwood's Magazine. Fame came to him in both England and Scotland only a few years before his death in 1835 (see Wordsworth's Extempore Effusion, etc., p. 699). He is known in English literature mainly as a great peasant poet. Some of his lyrics are exquisite, and occasionally, as in his romantic ballad of Kilmeny, he shows an absorption in the ideal and supernatural that has rarely been excelled in any poetry. native country. The theme of a journey to fairyland is a common one. particu larly among the Celts (see notes to Connla of the Golden Hair, p. 61a f.). 5. yorlin, the yellow bunting, yellow-ham mer. 7. hypp, the dog rose or wild brier. 10. minny, mother. 11. shaw, grove, thicket. 26. dean, a sandy tract or low hill. 30. snood, a fillet worn around the hair. 36. emerant, emerald. 796a 48. swa'd, swelled. 52. waik, a trail. 53. wene, a path. 54. maike, a mate (matchless one). 67. speer, ask. 70. fere, comrade, companion. 211. hundit, hounded, set on. 798a 226. gowled, howled. 229. arles, a pledge (of possession). 239. herkèd, hearkened. 244. lened, granted. 246. swinked, struggled. 247. brainzelled, rushed headlong. 250. mooted, moulted. 270. unmeled, uncontaminated. 798b 286. seymar, a loose upper garment, a scarf. 290. raike, range. 305. boughts, enclosures. 306. goved, stared idly or vacantly. 311. corby, crow, raven. 311. houf, haunt. 315. leveret, a hare in its first year. 316. attour, above. 317. forhooyed, forsook. ROBERT SOUTHEY Robert Southey was the son of an unsuccessful linen draper of Bristol Most of his childhood was spent at Bath under the care of a maternal aunt. At fourteen he entered Westminster School, and four years later was expelled for an article against the discipline of the institutior At Oxford he lived a life apart and it without a degree. In 1794 he met 799a Coleridge, who inspired him with Pantisocracy (see introductory note to Coleridge, p. 701), the only practical result of which was to make the men brothers-in-law. He began his residence at Greta Hall in 1803, and there spent the remainder of his life, with the added responsibility of Coleridge's family after 1809. His admiration for Coleridge was tempered somewhat by close acquaintance with his failings; Wordsworth he admired greatly, but the two were never at any time intimate. He became a writer for the Quarterly Review but had nothing to do with its policy of harsh criticism. In 1813 he was made poet laureate after Scott's refusal of the office. His mature years are remembered chiefly for his quarrel with Byron. His last years were clouded by family losses and afflictions, and after 1839 he was almost entirely incapable from the decline of his own powers. He died in 1843. The amount of his work is enormous; and because of its general inferiority, it will probably never all be collected. His poetry is always disappointing, largely because it contains too much prosaic commonplace. His ponderous epics, such as Thalaba, 1801, and the Curse of Kehama, 1810, when not "wildly impossible" are "incurably dull." His prose, written with ease and grace, is his best work. His Life of Nelson is a model of the short biography. THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM See Addison's The Campaign, p. 471 and notes. 799b MY DAYS AMONG THE DEAD ARE PAST Southey possessed a library of about fourteen thousand well-selected volumes and spent much of his time in it. He was a great reader, and even after his powers of comprehension were gone he found pleasure in walking about his shelves and mechanically examining his beloved books. 800a THE CATARACT OF LODORE The cascade of Lodore is on the Derwent River in Cumberland. As suggested in the poem, Southey wrote the piece for his children. It is one of the best examples in the language of sustained onomatopoia. 22. I was Laureate. Southey was made poet laurcate in 1813. THOMAS CAMPBELL Thomas Campbell, born in Glasgow and educated in the schools and the university there, is another of the poets popular in their own day upon whom later critics have passed a more discriminating judgment. In view of what has been found enduring in his verse, the two most significant episodes of his life were a long vacation spent in the western Island of Mull in 1795, where he enriched his imagination with images of the savage beauty of nature and lonely men, and a trip to the continent in 1800, when his earlier enthusiasm for the French Revolution, the struggles of Poland, and his own native history, gloried anew in the outward pageantry of battle. He became inspired by the terrible sublimity of war, from watching the battle of Ratisbon and from hearing the distant guns of Hohenlinden. It was after these experiences that his great war-songs were written. In 1802 he settled in London and made literature his profession. He wrote for the magazines and even tried a verse romance, Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809. He was instrumental in founding the University of London, and became lord rector of Glasgow University. He died at Boulogne. 801a YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND The patriotic ardor of this poem is explained partly by its composition abroad and partly by the recent naval victories over the French, particularly those of Cape St. Vincent, 1797, and the Nile, 1798. 15. Blake, Robert Blake, a famous English admiral of the Commonwealth. He died at sea, near Plymouth, in 1757. 15. mighty Nelson. Horatio Nelson, the greatest of English admirals, "fell" sorely wounded at the battle of Copenhagen, April 2, 1801. He was slain at Trafalgar four years after the date of the poem. 802b HOHENLINDEN The village of Hohenlinden is in Upper Bavaria not far from Munich. It was the scene of a decisive victory of the French over the Austrians on December 3, 1800. LOCHIEL'S WARNING On Donald Cameron of Lochiel (see note to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1. 226), chief of the Camerons, rested the responsibility of deciding whether his clan should cast its lot with the Young Pretender in 1745. The chieftain met the prince and tried to dissuade him from attempting to establish his claim, but was unsuccessful. To the taunt that he should hear of his prince's victories from the newspapers, his reply was, "I will share the fate of my Prince and so shall every man over whom nature or fortune hath given me any power." He was wounded at the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness, April 16, 1746. 7. Proud Cumberland, William Augustus, a younger son of George II and Duke of Cumberland, commanded the English forces at Culloden. 15. Albin, a Gaelic name for Scotland, particularly the Highlands. 804a THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC The Battle of the Baltic, or Copenhagen, between the English fleet and the Danish land and naval forces, was fought on April 2, 1801. The English admiral, Sir Hyde Parker, remaining in reserve, sent Nelson in to the attack. When it appeared that the English were in distress, he gave the signal to discontinue the action, but Nelson applying his blind eye to the telescope declared he could not see the signal and ordered his fleet to close in. He offered generous terms of surrender, and on landing was given a hearty ovation by the people for his brotherly treatment of the Danish wounded. 804b 63. Elsinore, a seaport near Copenhagen, famous as the scene of Hamlet. 67. the gallant good Riou, Captain Edward Riou, in command of the smaller craft. He was killed in the action. LORD ULLIN'S DAUGHTER The scene of the poem is the Island of Mull on the west coast of Scotland, where the poet spent several months as a private tutor in 1795. Ulva is a small island near Mull on the southwest. THOMAS MOORE The Irish poet, Thomas Moore, was born in Dublin. He was the son of a prosperous grocer and wine merchant, and was well educated. At Trinity College, Dublin, he formed a friendship with the patriot Robert Emmet, whose tragic fate he commemorated in several of his best lyrics. In 1799 he entered the Middle Temple to study law, but by the exercise of his lyrical gift and his talents as a musician and singer he soon became the most fashionable poet in England. For a harsh review of some of his amatory poems, 1806, in the Edinburgh Magazine he challenged the editor and writer, Francis Jeffrey, to a duel. A meeting took place, but officers of the law interfered; his antagonist's pistol was found without charge; and the ludicrous affair resulted in a warm friendship between the two men. Throughout life he was sensitive in matters of personal honor, but affectionate, generous, and highminded. He was successful in satire, but his best work was in his Irish Melodies, begun in 1807 and continued until 1834. These poems show a command over the harmony of numbers and an elevation of the simpler emotions which suggest a kinship with the nobler strains of Burns and Wordsworth. They constitute an imposing body of Anglo-Irish verse; and in spite of a certain amount of false sentiment, their combination of fancy, melody, and pathos with a genuinely Lational quality established for the author the reputation (which he still holds) of being the lyric poet of Ireland. His long poem, Lalla Rookh, 1817, which cloaks 66 Irish patriotic aspirations under the garb of oriental romance" and which in its day was one of the most admired poems in the English language, stil maintains a measure of popularity. His last significant work, the Life and Letters, 1830, of his friend Byron, gave the world just the sort of biography that the age required and is in its way a classic. In his mature years he saw his popularity wane before that of the greater Romantic poets, and was harassed by debt. His last child died in 1845, and from that time until his death in 1852 he was a total wreck. He is remembered as a charming lyricist and as the author of Lalla Rookh. As a poet he ranks high for his troubadour-like combination of poetry with music. 805a THE LAKE OF THE DISMAL SWAMP Moore came to Bermuda as registrar of the Admiralty Court in 1803. Disliking 806b The person celebrated in this poem was Sarah Curran, the fiancée of the Irish patriot, Robert Emmet. Emmet was captured on his return from hiding in the Wicklow Mountains to bid her good-by, and was tried for high treason and executed in 1803. CHARLES WOLFE No English poet has greater fame for the composition of one short poem than has Charles Wolfe for his Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna. It is one of the most stirring and affecting war poems in the language. No other work of the author is worthy of record. He was born in County Kildare, Ireland. He was educated in English schools and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he enjoyed some reputation as a poet while still an undergraduate. He entered the ministry in 1817 and occupied curacies in County Tyrone. He died at Cork when he was only thirty-one years of age. the marked individualism that characterized his adult years. When about sixteen he left school and continued his education by wide though desultory reading in the British Museum. His earliest works consisted of poems, published between 1810 and 1815, but it is upon his novels, which appeared at intervals during the next fifty years, that his fame chiefly rests. As a young man he seems to have been somewhat of a dreamer. He was fond of wandering through romantic country districts, especially through Wales, where he met Jane Gryffydh (Griffith), who afterward became his wife, and where he gathered the inspiration for some of his best work. For more than a quarter of a century he filled with distinction a position in the office of the East India Company in London until his retirement in 1856, when he settled down in the country and devoted the remaining ten years of his life to his grandchildren, his library, and his garden. Peacock is a puzzling figure. Though he was a close friend of Shelley, he had much of the common-sense satirical attitude of the eighteenth-century realists, and he made fun of " that egregious confraternity of Rhymsters," as he called Coleridge and his fellow adherents of poetical simplicity. Like the romanticists he shrank from the modern world and loved the past, but he looked at the past with no tender, Ossianic retrospect. To him the Middle Ages were only a vantage ground from which to ridicule the follies of his own time. Unlike the typical dreamy romantic social reformer, he was an unusually practical and successful man of affairs who proposed no theories and recommended no cure-alls. He hated the extremes of affectation and conventionality. His novels are still read for their humorous satire on contemporary writers and literary fads, but his memory is best preserved from oblivion by the admirable ballads and songs that are scattered through their pages. THE FRIAR'S SONG This song occurs in Maid Marian. The friar who sings it resembles Friar Tuck in his drinking propensities. THE WAR-SONG OF DINAS In the Misfortunes of Elphin, a satirical novel based on the early Welsh romance of The History of Taliessin. The meter is an interesting example of the threeaccent iambic (x) line with double rhyme (sweeter: meeter, etc.) and an unaccented syllable at the end. The second line also has an extra syllable at the beginning. Dinas Vawr is represented as a petty Welsh king of King Arthur's time, whose castle was surprised by King Melvas from beyond the Severn. 9. Dyfed. See introductory note to Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, p. 63. LEIGH HUNT Leigh Hunt was a thoroughgoing man of letters. He was an editor, a prolific reviewer and critic, a familiar essayist, an exponent of dramatic reform, a patron of younger writers, and a poet of no mean ability. He was the son of a clergyman and was born at Southgate, near London. At Christ's Hospital School he indulged his fancy in some crude attempts at verse. Here too he met Lamb. Leaving a clerkship in the War Office, he became editor, together with his brother, of the Examiner in 1808, and soon won for the publication a high reputation. For what was adjudged a personal libel on the Prince Regent in 1812 he was fined heavily and imprisoned for two years. In 1816 he published his Story of Rimini, a notable achievement in poetical narrative and an important influence on English metrical art. In the pages of his Indicator, started in 1818, he generously befriended both Shelley and Keats during their reverses. For years he struggled against poverty and adverse fortune, but an annuity by Mrs. Shelley in 1844 and a crown pension three years later relieved him, and he spent his last years in easier circumstances. He died at Putney in 1859. His taste was not sure or elevated, and he wrote too much to be uniformly good. As an essayist he is surpassed by Lamb in range and variety, but in other respects he is often Lamb's equal. His poetry in general is bright, animated, and harmonious. In personality he was cheerful, courageous, lovable, forgiving. "He is perhaps the best teacher in our literature of the contentment which flows from a recognition of everyday joys and blessings land). ABOU BEN ADHEM (Ire Line 14, which contains the central idea of this charming little fable, has been applied to Hunt himself and stands inscribed over his grave. The name “Abou Ben Adhem" (which means "Father of the Son of Adam" if it means anything) is the product of Hunt's fancy. GEORGE DARLEY George Darley undoubtedly possessed genius; but though he was accepted by his contemporaries for his occasional literary gems, he has since been forgotten by a public that is unwilling to extract his beauties from the rubbish in which they are set. He was born of an Irish family of good standing and independent means residing in Dublin. Ir. the absence of his parents in America during his early years he was left to the care of his grandfather at Springfeid near Dublin. Many of his lyrics were inspired by his happy recollections of the place. He entered Trinity College in 1815 and was graduated in 1820, but he was hampered in his career by an incurable stammer, which, as he says. made him a "solitudinarian" for life. Adopting literature as a profession, he settled in London, issued his first volume of verse in 1822, and became a regular contributor to the London Magazine, then in its heydey. The connection brought him in contact with many of the leading writers of the day, and won for him in particular the esteem of Lamb. He was abroad for a time, and on his return became a dramatic reviewer for the Athenarum; but his criticism displayed such truculency and personal bias, even against the best writers, tha it is worth little. His poetical dramasSylvia, 1827; Thomas à Becket, 1840: and Athelstane, 1841, though showing evidence of splendid talent, were not written for the stage. He was a good mathematician and wrote some treatises and texts on mathematical subjects. He continued his connection with the Atte næum until his death, which occurred in London in the autumn of 1846. poetry is not sustained, it often lacks taste and finish, and it not infrequently fails in definiteness of meaning for the general reader, but he has occasional outbursts and entire lyrics that deserve to be remembered. His unfinished Nepenthe, 1835, contains his best poetry THE FALLEN STAR His 808b 5. the orb of fire. See note to Rosal. •Ï's Description, p. 257b, l. 1. 26. Uriel, one of the seven archangels. |