said: I by no means admit your apology, however ingeniously and artfully stated, for not visiting the bonny holms of Yarrow, and certainly will not rest until I have prevailed upon you to compare the ideal with the real stream. . . I like your swan upon St. Mary's Lake. How came you to know that it is actually frequented by that superb bird?'

Wordsworth subsequently complained that Scott in one of his novels mis-quoted lines 43-44 of this poem, printing swans instead of swan.' He added Never could I have written "swans" in the plural. The scene, when I saw it with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness: there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan, its own white image in the water. It was for that reason that I recorded the Swan and its Shadow. Had there been many swans and many shadows, they would have implied nothing as regards the character of that place: and I should have said nothing about them.'

530. 6. Marrow, companion. Dorothy Wordsworth. 20. lintwhites, linnets, small singing birds.

33. holms, flat and low-lying pieces of ground by a river, surrounded or submerged in time of flood. 531. 37. Strath, valley.

SHE WAS A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT The subject of this poem, written in 1804, is Mary Hutchinson, whom Wordsworth had married two years before.

22. machine. This word has been objected to as unpoetical. But cf. Hamlet II, ii, 124: whilst this machine is to him?'

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD Wordsworth says: 'The daffodils grew and still grow on the margin of Ullswater, and probably may be seen to this day as beautiful in the month of March, nodding their golden heads beside the dancing and foaming waves.'

Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal has the following entry under April 15, 1802: 'When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. As we went along there were more, and yet more; and, at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there was a long belt of them along the shore.

I never saw daffodils So beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones, about and above them; some rested their heads on these stones as on a pillow for weariness; and the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake. They looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing.'

21-2. These lines, said by Wordsworth to be the best in the poem, were contributed by his wife. For the thought of this stanza cf. Tintern Abbey, lines 23-36.

TO A SKY-LARK

Cf. Shelley's poem with the same title (p. 627) and Meredith's The Lark Ascending (p. 960).

ELEGIAC STANZAS

There are two Peele Castles, one in the Isle Man, the other on the coast of Lancashire. The latter is the one referred to in the poem, Words worth being known to have spent a four-weeks' va cation in its neighborhood.

ODE ON IMMORTALITY

Of this poem the very highest opinions have bee expressed by competent judges. Principal Shain says it marks the highest limit which the tide poetic inspiration has reached in England since the days of Milton.' It is, therefore, worthy of the most careful study. The best help to unde standing it is given in Wordsworth's own note:This was composed during my residence at Tow end, Grasmere. Two years at least passed betwee the writing of the four first stanzas and the remai ing part. To the attentive and competent reade the whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelg or experiences of my own mind on which the str ture of the poem partly rests. Nothing was me difficult for me in childhood than to admit the tion of death as a state applicable to my own being I have said elsewhere:

A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

But it was not so much from feelings of anim vivacity that my difficulty came as from a serst of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elija and almost to persuade myself that, whatever mig become of others, I should be translated, in se thing of the same way, to heaven. With a feeli congenial to this, I was often unable to think! external things as having external existence, and cominuned with all that I saw as something apart from, but inherent in my own immater nature. Many times while going to school have! grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from t abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time! was afraid of such processes. In later periods life I have deplored, as we have all reason to de subjugation of an opposite character, and have t joiced over the remembrances, as is expressed the lines:

Obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things
Fallings from us, vanishings, etc.

To that dream-like vividness and splendor wh invest objects of sight in childhood, every one. believe, if he would look back, could bear testime and I need not dwell upon it here; but having the poem regarded it as presumptive evidence ci prior state of existence, I think it right to pro against a conclusion, which has given pain to s good and pious persons, that I meant to incal such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion be recommended to faith as more than an ele in our instincts of immortality. But let us bear mind that, though the idea is not advanced in m lation, there is nothing there to contradict it,

the fall of man presents an analogy in its favour. Accordingly, a pre-existent state has entered into the 1 popular creeds of many nations, and, among all persons acquainted with classic literature, is known as an ingredient in Platonic philosophy. Archimedes said that he could move the world if he had a point whereon to rest his machine. Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own mind? Having to wield some of its elements when I was impelled to write this poem on the "Immortality of the Soul," I took hold of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorizing me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a poet.'

Wordsworth's view of childish reminiscences of a previous existence was, however, probably not suggested by Plato, but by the seventeenth century poet Vaughan, in Childhood and The Retreat. 185.

See p.

126 earthly freight, burden of earthly cares.' (Webb.)

132. fugitive, evanescent, quickly disappearing. 141-5. Professor Bonamy Price, walking one day with Wordsworth by the side of Rydal Water, asked him the meaning of these lines: The venerable old man raised his aged form erect; he was walking in the middle, and passed across me to a fivebarred gate in the wall which bounded the road on the side of the lake. He clenched the top bar firmly with his right hand, pushed strongly against it, and then uttered these ever-memorable words, "There was a time in my life when I had to push against something that resisted, to be sure that there was anything outside of me. I was sure of my own mind; everything else fell away and vanished into thought." Thought he was sure of; matter for him, at the moment, was an unreality.'

181. primal sympathy, the child's intuitive sympathy with Nature.

183-4. Cf. Tintern Abbey, lines 92-5 (p. 518).

185. through, beyond. 189. yet, still, even now.

196-9. The sunset has no longer a celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream,' but sug gests serious reflections to the Man who has pondered on the issues of Life and Death. The poet's final thought is that acquaintance with the world, while robbing Nature of its first glory, increases its significance by awakening sympathy with the joys and sorrows of humanity. Professor Dowden has well observed that the last two lines of the Ode are often quoted as an illustration of Wordsworth's sensibility to external nature; in reality, they testify to his enriching the sentiment of nature with feeling derived from the heart of man and from the experience of human life.'

NUNS FRET NOT

537. 3. pensive citadels, refuges in which they can think, secure from interruption.

6. Furness-fells, the hills of the district of Furness, in or near which Wordsworth spent the greater part of his life.

8-9. Cf. Lovelace, To Althea from Prison, p. 182. PERSONAL TALK, III

13. Desdemona in Othello.

14. See Spenser Faery Queen, 11. 27 ff. (p. 110). COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE Wordsworth appears to have been mistaken as to the date he assigned to this sonnet, which was written when he left London for Dover on his way to Calais early in the morning of July 30th, 1802. The following is the entry in his sister's diary under that date: 'Left London between five and six o'clock of the morning outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The city, St. Paul's, with the river a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge; the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, and were spread out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one of Nature's own grand spectacles.'

IT IS A BEAUTEOUS EVENING 538. 9. Dear Child! Dorothy Wordsworth.

12. Abraham's bosom. In the presence of God. See Luke xvi, 22.

ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC

1-2. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the Venetians, with the help of France, captured Constantinople, and added to their dominions a large part of the Eastern Empire. They protected Western Europe from the incursions of the Turks for centuries.

4. Venice was founded in the fifth century in the marshes of the Adriatic by inhabitants of the mainland who fled before the conquering Huns under Attila.

7-8. The Venetians having protected Pope Alexander III against the German Emperor, whom they defeated in a sea fight in 1177, the Pope gave the Doge a ring and bade him wed with it the Adriatic that posterity might know that the sea was subject

to Venice, as a bride is to her husband.' The ceremony was observed annually by a solemn naval procession, after which the Doge threw a ring into the sea.

9-14. Venice was robbed of much of her power in 1508 by the League of Cambrai, but the real cause of her decay was the discovery of the New World, which made the Atlantic the highway of trade instead of the Mediterranean, and shifted the com mercial center from Italy to England and Holland. The Republic, however, remained free and independent, though greatly enfeebled, until 1797, when Austria and France divided its territory between them. Venice remained under Austrian dominion (except for brief intervals) until it became a part of the kingdom of Italy in 1866.

TO TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE

This sonnet was written in August, 1802, when Toussaint L'Ouverture, the liberator of St. Domingo, was lying in prison at Paris, where he died a few months later. He was born in 1743, the child of African slaves, and showed great political and military ability; but he was unable to resist the French fleet sent against him by Napoleon, who reestablished slavery in the island in 1801.

TO THE MEN OF KENT

Written when Britain was in fear of a Napoleonic invasion.

539. 4. hardiment, hardihood, courage.

540. 10. from the Norman, at the battle of Hastings, 1066.

ON THE SUBJUGATION OF SWITZERLAND

Switzerland was conquered by the French in 1798, and three of its cantons were annexed to the Republic. The sonnet appears to have been suggested by the Act of Mediation, by which Napoleon arranged for the government of Switzerland in 1803; he became Emperor a few months afterwards, and at the time the sonnet was written had made himself master of Europe, England alone having resisted him successfully. It was the attack upon the liberties of Switzerland which gave the final blow to the French sympathies of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, and united them with their fellow-countrymen in antago nism to Napoleon.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US 13-14. Proteus and Triton were sea-deities in the old Greek mythology. Wordsworth means that he would rather be a heathen with some sense of the Divinity in Nature than a professed Christian whose heart is so given to the pursuit of wealth and worldly ambition that he is out of harmony with the beautiful sights and sounds of land and sea.

THE RIVER DUDDON

This is the concluding sonnet of a beautiful series which Wordsworth wrote under the above title. The Duddon is a small stream which rises on the borders of Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire, and flows into the Irish Sea.

KING'S COLLEGE CHAPEL

This beautiful chapel was built by Henry VI the scholars of the College, which up to a few ye ago was reserved to students from Eton. CONTINUED

541. 4. Westminster Abbey.

8. younger Pile. St. Paul's Cathedral, built! Sir Christopher Wren in the seventeenth centu It is a more modern structure than the Abbey, contains the ashes of many great men for w room could not be found in the older natio burial place. It is surmounted by a great dome

C1 OSS.

ON THE DEPARTURE OF SIR WALTER SCOT This was the journey which Scott took in hope of recovery from what proved to be his illness. Abbotsford, on the Tweed, was his hone 3. Eildon, three hills near Abbotsford, fameus Scottish legend.

14. Parthenope, one of the Sirens, said to burned at Naples.

'THERE!' SAID A STRIPLING 'Mossgiel was thus pointed out to me by a yo man on the top of the coach on my way from gow to Kilmarnock.' (Wordsworth's note.) 9. bield, lodging, dwelling, place of shelter. CONCLUSION

COLERIDGE: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA 543. a. 24. The Friend. A periodical published Coleridge in 1809-10.

544. b. 37. stamp tax, levied at this time upon newspapers and weekly periodicals.

39. a war against freedom, against France. 54. ad normam Platonis, after the rule of P the Greek philosopher.

κατ ̓ ἔμφασιν, in appearance rather than reality. 545. a. 26. pingui-nitescent, shining with fat. b. 1. Phileleutheros, lover of freedom. 31. ambrosial, heavenly.

546. a. 19. Orpheus, the musician of classical thology whose strains persuaded even stones trees to follow him.

24. illuminati, illuminated or inspired ones. 547. a. 1. Jacobinism, revolutionary principle. cobin means, originally, a friar of the order of Dominic. Hence one of a faction in the Fre revolution, so called from the Jacobin club, w first met in the hall of the Jacobin friars in Pa Oct. 1789.

8. The Watchman ran from March 1 to May

46. gagging bills. The bills introduced into Parliament to restrict public meetings and the freedom of the press.

b. 1. melioration, improvement.

21. a dear friend. Thomas Poole.

29. first revolutionary war, against the French revolutionists.

44. Stowcy. In Somersetshire.

46. morning paper. The Post.

548. a. 25. a poct. Wordsworth came to Stowey in July, 1797.

53. Quidnunc, an idle gossip, continually asking 'what now?'

55. Dogberry, the pompous, ignorant constable of Much Ado about Nothing.

57. pour surveillance of, to exercise supervision

over.

b 25. Spy Nozy, the great Jewish philosopher Spinoza (1632-1677), in whose teaching Wordsworth

and Coleridge were greatly interested.

26. a remarkable feature, a red nose.

552. a. 3. Anacreon, Greek lyric poet of the sixth century B. C.

b. 34. Bishop Taylor. See p. 221.

35. Burnet (1635-1715), a distinguished philos,opher and divine. His Sacred Theory of the Earth is a fanciful and ingenious speculation. 553. a. 47. Sir John Davies (1570-1626).

THE ANCIENT MARINER

The circumstances under which this poem was written and published have been already related (see p. 503). Some further particulars of the sugges tions made by Wordsworth may here be given, from his own account:

In the autumn of 1797 Mr. Coleridge, my sister and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. Accordingly we set off and proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the "Ancient Mariner," founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention, but certain parts I suggested.

For example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime, and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages a day or two before that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. Suppose," said I, " you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime." The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which

Coleridge seems later to have had doubts whether Wordsworth's suggestion of moral responsibility was consistent with the imaginative character of the poem as a whole. He is reported as saying in his Table Talk on May 31, 1830: - Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it, it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the proba bility, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only. or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.'

A marginal gloss was added by Coleridge in the edition of 1817, together with a Latin motto from Burnet, of which the following is a translation: 'I readily believe that there are more invisible beings in the universe than visible. But who shall explain to us the nature, the rank and kinship, the distinguishing marks and graces of each? What do they do? Where do they dwell? The human mind has circled round this knowledge, but never attained to it. Yet there is profit, I do not doubt, in sometimes contemplating in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a greater and better world: lest the intellect, habituated to the petty details of daily life, should be contracted within too narrow limits and settle down wholly on trifles. But, meanwhile, a watchful eye must be kept on truth, and proportion observed, that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night.'

It has been thought that Coleridge took some hints from the Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captain Thomas James (London, 1633), and from an earlier story of Saint Paulinus, but his borrow. ings from these sources were certainly slight. The invention of the subject, as well as its imaginative treatment, is substantially his own.

553. 11. loon, an idle, stupid, worthless fellow.

12. eftsoons, forthwith, immediately. These obsolete words are used to recall the style of the old ballads, which Coleridge was trying to revive, and to suggest that the time of the story was somewhat remote. What other words in Part I produce the same impression?

Notice what a vivid picture of the Mariner is brought before the mind by the mention of successive details of his personal appearance.

1086

23-4. As the ship sailed further away from the harbor, first the church, then the hill, and last the top of the lighthouse upon the hill disappeared from view.

25. If the sun rose on the left, in what direction was the ship sailing?

554. 29-30. At the equator the noon sun is never far out of the perpendicular, and during the equinoxes it is directly overhead. See lines 111

114.

This particular detail was probably 32. bassoon. suggested to Coleridge by the fact that during his residence at Stowey, his friend, Poole, added a bassoon to the instruments used in the village church. 36. minstrelsy, band of minstrels.

41. drawn (in the marginal note) seems to be a printer's mistake for driven,' but it is the reading given in all the editions during Coleridge's lifetime. 46-48. Write out this metaphor in your own words so as to make sure that you understand it.

55-57. clifts, cliffs. sheen, brightness, splendour. ken, see, discern. Compare notes above on lines

10-11.

58. between the ship and the land. 62. in a swound, heard in a swoon.

75. shroud, a rope running from the mast-head to the ship's side.

76. vesper, (Latin) evening; in its plural form the term is usually applied to the evening service of the Roman Catholic church.

This suggests that the time of the 81. crossbow. story was at the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century, when the crossbow was still in common use.

83. Why 'upon the right?' The reader should trace the voyage of the ship on a map; it must have been now about nine days' sail from a point between Cape Horn and the South Pole.

(as eat' in98. uprist, used instead of uprose stead of eaten' in line 67) to give the suggestion of language of the olden time.

104. In the edition of 1817 Coleridge altered this line to read

The furrow streamed off free, and added in a footnote: line was

'In the former edition the

as

ness.

'Are those her ribs which flecked the sun
Like bars of a dungeon grate?
Are these two all, all of the crew,
That woman and her mate?'

197. What is it that the Woman Life-in-D won, and what difference does this make story?

199–200. A fine description of the sudde ness of the tropics.

556. 209-11. A star within the lower t
This is Coler
crescent moon is never seen.
aginative way of using what he describes :
script note as the common superstition a
ors that something evil is about to happen.
a star dogs the moon.'

223. Notice at the end of each part the reference to the crime the Ancient Mariner mitted.

226-7. For the last two lines of this am indebted to Mr. Wordsworth. It was 5 lightful walk from Nether Stowey to with him and his sister, in the autumn cf this poem was planned and in part com Coleridge's note in the edition of 1817. 254. reek, give off vapor.

267-8. The white moonlight, as if in r ered the hot sea with a sheen like t hoar frost.

294. Note this and other indications th ligious setting of the poem is Romas another way of suggesting the atmosp tiquity.

557. 297. The buckets looked silly be
had stayed so long dry and useless.
302. dank, wet.

314. sheen, bright. The reference sem
the Polar Lights, known in the Norther
as the Aurora Borealis.

319. sedge, coarse grass growing
333. had been (subjunctive moo
been.
558. 394. I have not the power; I ca
435. charnel-dungeon, a vault for the

dead.