55. No voice divine the storm allay'd, No light propitious shone, When, snatch'd from all effectual aid, But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he. 65 W. Cowper TOMORROW In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, Than a snug elbow-chair will afford for reclining, CCVI. With an ambling pad-pony to pace o'er the lawn, 5 And blithe as the lark that each day hails the dawn With a porch at my door, both for shelter and shade too, 10 And a small spot of ground for the use of the spade too, With a barn for the use of the flail : A cow for my dairy, a dog for my game, And a purse when a friend wants to borrow; I'll envy no Nabob his riches or fame, 15 Or what honours may wait him Tomorrow. From the bleak northern blast may my cot be completely And at night may repose steal upon me more sweetly And while peace and plenty I find at my board, With my friends may I share what Today may afford, And let them spread the table Tomorrow. And when I at last must throw off this frail cov'ring On the brink of the grave I'll not seek to keep hov'ring, But my face in the glass I'll serenely survey, And with smiles count each wrinkle and furrow; As this old worn-out stuff, which is threadbare Today, 56. J. Collins 30 CCVII. Life! I know not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; Life! we've been long together Through pleasant and through cloudy weather Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear; -Then steal away, give little warning, Say not Good Night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good Morning. A. L. Barbauld 5 10 NOTES MR. PALGRAVE'S SUMMARY OF BOOK THIRD : IT is more difficult to characterize the English Poetry of the Eighteenth century than that of any other. For it was an age not only of spontaneous transition, but of bold experiment: it includes not only such absolute contrasts as distinguish the Rape of the Lock from the Parish Register, but such vast contemporaneous differences as lie between Pope and Collins, Burns and Cowper. Yet we may clearly trace three leading moods or tendencies: the aspects of courtly or educated life represented by Pope and carried to exhaustion by his followers: the poetry of Nature and of Man, viewed through a cultivated, and at the same time an impassioned frame of mind by Collins and Gray lastly, the study of vivid and simple narrative, including natural description, begun by Gray and Thomson, pursued by Burns and others in the north, and established in England by Goldsmith, Percy, Crabbe, and Cowper. Great varieties in style accompanied these diversities in aim: poets could not always distinguish the manner suitable for subjects so far apart and the union of conventional and of common language, exhibited most conspicuously by Burns, has given a tone to the poetry of that century which is better explained by reference to its historical origin than by naming it artificial. There is, again, a nobleness of thought, a courageous aim at high and, in a strict sense manly, excellence in many of the writers: nor can that period be justly termed tame and wanting in originality, which produced poems such as Pope's Satires, Gray's Odes and Elegy, the ballads of Gay and Carey, the songs of Burns and Cowper. In truth Poetry at this, as at all times, was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age: and the many complex causes which made the Eighteenth century the turning-time in modern European civilization are also more or less reflected in its verse. An intelligent reader will find the influence of Newton as markedly in the poems of Pope as of Elizabeth in the plays of Shakespeare. On this great subject, however, these indications must here be sufficient. ABBREVIATIONS. = A.S.Anglo-Saxon, A.V. = Authorised Version of Bible, adj. adjective, cp.=compare, Fr. French, Ger. German, Lat. Latin, 1.=line, N.E. D. = New English Dictionary (Oxford), O.E.=Old English, O. F. Old French, S. Scottish, trans. = translated by. Notes borrowed from Mr. F. T. Palgrave are enclosed in inverted commas and followed by his initials (F. T. P.). Gray's notes to his own poems are given within inverted commas and followed by his initial (G.). Poems in Book III. are referred to by their number in this volume, thus-No. 26; poems in other Books of the Golden Treasury are referred to by their number in the complete edition of 1891 and subsequent reprints, preceded by the letters G. T. AN unfinished Ode, published after Gray's death by his friend Mason, to whom the title is probably due. It seems to have been written in 1754. Besides the complete stanzas given here Gray left the first quatrain of two other stanzas, and a few other lines or fragments of lines. The additional stanzas given in some printed versions of the poem are these fragments of Gray's work presumptuously completed by Mason. To appreciate fully this ode we must bear in mind the aim of eighteenth century poetry-perfection of form. "A poem was no longer to be a story told with picturesque imagery, but was to be a composition in symmetry and keeping. A thought or a feeling was not to be blurted out in the first words that came, but was to be matured by reflection, and reduced to its simplest expression. Condensation, terseness, neatness, finish, had to be studied" (Pattison on Pope). It is Gray's merit that while he seeks and attains perfection of form, he seldom sacrifices truth and naturalness. And, though he is full of reminiscences of other poets, he does not take his ideas of external Nature from books. He has a keen and unaffected delight in open-air sights and sounds; and these sights and sounds are all the dearer to him because other poets have written of them before. Books perform their right function for him: instead of interposing a barrier between him and Nature, they help him to see Nature and rejoice in her beauty. - Metre. A simple and beautiful variation of the octosyllabic iambic couplet. The last four lines of each stanza consist of two regular couplets. But in the first four lines of each stanza the rhymes alternate-a b a b. Further, in the first two lines a single long syllable is substituted for the first foot: the effect is to give a trochaic rhythm instead of an iambic to these lines. The third line is of full length-four iambic feet-but the |