written in an irregular metre. Campbell's Ode to Winter (XCVII.) is different, the stanzas exactly corresponding to each other. In the present Ode the movement of the verse is intended to vary with the varying emotion: hence the abrupt transitions to shorter lines, to anapaestic feet, to trochaic endings. "Parts of the Ode," Mr. Aubrey de Vere has said, "are familiar even to roughness. That roughness was intentional, and was not mitigated in the later editions. It was needed. Without such passages the sentiment of this Ode would have lacked its passionate impulse, and its doctrine would have been frozen into a scholastic theory" (Essays, Vol. I., p. 258).

10. the rainbow. Cp. cxxx.

13. bare of cloud. Imitated by Shelley in LXXX. 28.

14. For Wordsworth's delight in waters on a starry night,' cp. CVI. 4 and the passage quoted in the notes on that poem. 16. sunshine. Cp. LXXXIV., Upon Westminster Bridge. 21. tabor, a small drum, played with one stick. A Provençal word, the modern French tambour. The root is that of the Greek TÚTT-TW, to beat. Timbrel' (CXXI. 10) is a cognate form. The unexpected introduction of the tabor'-as of the 'dulcimer' in Kubla Khan (CIX. 37)—is a romantic touch, an importation of something 'rich and strange' into the homely pastoral context.

6

25. cataracts. "The Ghills and Forces and Falls of his loved Lake country" (Prof. J. W. Hales).

27. echoes. Cp. Adonais, st. xv., "Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains," a line which Shelley took from the Greek Epitaphium Bionis. But the echoes' in Wordsworth are the sounds of Nature, not the songs of her poet.

"the yet

28. the fields of sleep. Prof. Hales explains as reposeful, slumbering country side. It is early morning, and the land is still, as it were, resting." In support of this we may quote "The green field sleeps in the sun" from the little poem of Wordsworth that begins, The cock is crowing:" It would be possible, however, to give "the fields of sleep" a more allegorical meaning. The soft Spring winds come from the warm South. Cp. the opening lines of a Ballade' by Mr. Andrew Lang:

"The soft wind from the south land sped,

He set his strength to blow

O'er forests where Adonis bled

And lily flowers a-row.

31. jollity. Cp. L'Allegro (G. T., CXLIV.), “Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity.'

32. May. Cp. Corinna's Maying, G. T., CXVIII.

38. jubilee, literally 'a shout of joy,' Lat. iubilum, a word used

by the Silver Age poets; then, a season of great rejoicing. The word may have its literal sense here.

40. coronal, the wreath worn by guests at Greek and Roman banquets.

41. Contrast Coleridge, Dejection, "I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!"

49. leaps up. Cp. cxxx. 1. 54. pansy, Fr. pensée from heart's ease. Cp. Ophelia in pansies, that's for thoughts." of this line when he wrote CI. 43, "the soft flower beneath our feet."

penser, the thought-flower, the Hamlet, IV. v. 176, "There is Shelley may have been thinking

59. Closely akin to the belief here avowed is the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, held by Pythagoras and adopted by Plato in the myth of Er, Republic, Bk. x.

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65. Mr. Aubrey de Vere quotes an opinion entertained by some theologians-viz. that each human soul not only sees its Judge immediately after death, but saw its Creator also, for one brief moment, at the instant of its creation."

The

67. prison-house. Another Platonic touch. Cp. Phaedo, 62, and Republic, vii. 514-517. But whilst Wordsworth takes the 'prison-house' from Plato, his use of the simile is different. Childhood is not, in Plato's view, outside the prison. human child is born into the prison of 'sense,' the erroneous impressions he receives from external objects and from other men, and can only escape through the study of philosophy, dialectic. So, too, the 'reminiscence' in Plato is not something that is more active in childhood than in manhood, it is purely latent in the boy and needs to be drawn out by education. There is nothing in Plato like the intimacy with a particular tree or flower which Wordsworth speaks of as enjoyed in childhood and lost in later years.

71. farther. Cp. Hood in LXI., last stanza.

85. The child that Wordsworth had in his mind in writing this stanza was Hartley Coleridge. Cp. his lines, To H. C., six years old, and see introductory note to XI.

Prof. Hales contrasts Pope's Essay on Man, ii. 275-282.

"Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,

Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw;
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,

A little louder, but as empty quite :
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age:
Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tir'd he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er."

In all which Pope was perhaps merely expanding, after his manner, the fine concluding sentence of Sir W. Temple's Essay on Poetry: "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

86. pigmy. Gr. Tuyμaîos, of the length of a ruyμn, the distance from the elbow to the knuckles. For the 'pygmies,' the nation of dwarfs whom classical legend placed in India or Aethiopia, see Iliad, iii. 6.

88. fretted, chafing at the continual interruption. intransitive use of 'fret' in l. 192.

Cp. the 89. An imaginative expression for the father's pride in the son as revealed in the father's eye. In such a line Wordsworth forgets his dislike of poetic diction to magnificent purpose.

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103. humorous stage.' Stage on which are exhibited the humours of mankind, that is, according to the Elizabethan usage, their whims, follies, caprices, odd manners. For this Elizabethan sense of the word see Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, etc. See Nares. In its modern acceptation, humour, confined rather to words, implies a conscious, deliberate whimsicality, a sense on the part of the actor of the ridiculousness of what he does, an intentional and well-appreciated incongruity." (Prof. Hales.)

104. persons, characters represented on a stage. Lat. personae. Cp. the speech of Jaques in As You Like It, II. vii.

107. imitation. Cp. Aristotle, Poetic, 1448 B, тò yàp μμeîσlai σύμφυτον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἐκ παίδων ἐστίν, “ Inuitation is natural to man from childhood."

108. S. T. Coleridge, whose admiration for Wordsworth's poetry and for this ode in particular was both genuine and deep, criticises the extravagance of this stanza severely in his Biographia Literaria, ch. xxii. The criticism is the more amusing when we remember that it is Coleridge's own child whom Wordsworth is addressing.

127. custom. Сp. vóμos пávтwv Barileus, "Custom is lord of all," a saying of Pindar quoted by Herodotus, iii. 38.

139. not, i.e. 'not only' or 'not now.'

141. obstinate questionings. See Wordsworth's own note quoted above.

143. fallings from us, vanishings, "fits of utter dreaminess and abstraction, when nothing material seems solid, but every

thing mere mist and shadow" (Prof. Hales.) Cp. Tennyson, Princess:

"Myself too had weird seizures, Heaven knows what:

On a sudden in the midst of men and day,
And while I walk'd and talk'd as heretofore,
I seemed to move among a world of ghosts,
And feel myself the shadow of a dream."

Op. also King Arthur's speech at the end of The Holy Grail. The weird seizures,' as we learn from the biography, were an experience of Tennyson's own youth.

145. Cp. the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world,' Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey. The whole of that poem should be read carefully in connection with this ode.

154. moments, i.e. only moments. Cp. Wordsworth's Ode on the Power of Sound, "O Silence! are man's noisy years No more than moments of thy life?"

187. Is it fanciful to recall the dying speech of Ajax in Sophocles (Ajax, 862) ?—

κρῆναί τε ποταμοί θ' οἵδε, καὶ τὰ Τρωϊκὰ

πεδία προσαυδῶ, χαίρετ ̓, ὦ τροφῆς ἐμοί.

"Ye springs and rivers, and ye plains of Troy, ye that have nursed my life, farewell."

189. heart of hearts. Cp. Hamlet, 111. ii. 78, "I will wear him in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart" (singular).

192. fret. Cp. Keats in XXVIII. 14, "They stay their crystal fretting," and Horace, Odes, II. iii. 11, Quid obliquo laborat Lympha fugax trepidare rivo?

193. Cp. Shelley in cxv. 47-51, Coleridge in cxxII. 9-17.

198. Cp. cxvi., Nature and the Poet, especially lines 33-40, 53-end.

203. See some of these thoughts in XLV., LX., CXII.

"The close of this sublime ode restores to the reader's mind that repose which is needful after the soarings and the sinkings of the strain. The elegy ends in a hymn of praise: the estrangement in reconciliation; for Nature, besides her divine gleams, so seldom revealed, has her human side, and that alone might well suffice for the brief parenthesis of mortal life.' Its tranquil gladness is intensified by the pathos which loss alone can confer. To those who are still inmates of 'this valley of exile' it is not transport but consolation that Nature brings and should bring." --Aubrey de Vere, Essays chiefly on Poetry, Vol. I., p. 256.

APPENDIX.

A. METRE.

In the comments on metre, which will be found at the end of the introductory note to most of the poems, an attempt has been made to supply such guidance as will enable the student easily to overcome the first difficulties of the subject. Technical terms have therefore been avoided as far as possible, and there is no pretence of exhaustive treatment. The free character of English metre should always be borne in mind: the poets often allow themselves an extra syllable at the beginning (II. 22) or end (CXIV. 47-8) of the line, or they shorten a final trochee to a single syllable (LXXX. 26). Again, the sense-rhythm is not always identical with the verse-rhythm: e.g., in the first line of Shelley's Ode to a Skylark (LXXX.), "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit," the sense-accent falls on 'blithe,' the verse-accent on 'thee': see note on CVIII. 20. Tennyson's remark, that if people would only read his poetry aloud naturally and intelligently they would find no difficulty about the metre, applies to all English poetry: but the subtler harmonies which depend on occasional differences between sense-rhythm and verse-rhythm are not always to be apprehended on a first reading.

For a beginner in metre these "Lines written for a Boy," by the poet Coleridge, will be found useful:

Trōchěe trips from lōng to shōrt;
From long to long in solemn sort

Slow Spōndee stālks; strōng fōot! yet ill able

Evěr to come up with Dactyl trisyllablě.

Iambics march from short to long;

With ǎ leap and ǎ bound the swift Anǎpaěsts thrōng;

One syllable long, with one short at each side
Amphibrǎchys hastes with ǎ stātěly stride.

B. THE SONNET.

A SONNET consists of fourteen lines, each of five iambic feet. As written by Shakespeare, it is simply made up of three stanzas of four lines each, the lines rhyming alternately, and a concluding couplet. Three sonnets by Keats in this volume are on the Shakespearean model, viz. xxxv., xxxvI., CXXVI.