probably had in mind, moreover, Shakespeare's description of the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, 11. i. 30-32, "He lay along Under an oak, whose antique root peeped out 105. Hard by yon wood. The first draft gave 'With gestures quaint.' Gray probably made the alteration when he had decided to cut out the stanza given in the note on 1. 100. Hard by. Cp. note on No. 14. 4, "Fast by.” 107. woeful-wan, i.e. woeful and wan. 114. church-way path. The phrase occurs in Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, v. i. 389: "Now is the time of night That, the graves all gaping wide, In the church-way paths to glide." In Shakespeare, therefore, the paths are paths in the churchyard leading to the church; but the church-way paths' of Stoke Pogis are paths leading from the high road to the churchyard (Bradshaw). 115. (for thou canst read) perhaps implies, as Prof. Hales says, that the hoary-headed swain' himself could not read, reading being a far from universal accomplishment in Gray's time. lay, properly a 'song'-the German lied: here very loosely used for verses." 6 116. thorn, hawthorn tree. The Pembroke MS. here contains this stanza, which was actually printed in the third edition of the Elegy, 1751, but omitted again in the 1753 edition : "There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; Mason says it was omitted because Gray thought it too long a parenthesis in this place. Dr. Bradshaw adds that Gray may have rejected it as too fanciful, or because of its close resemblance to some lines in Collins' Dirge in Cymbeline: "To fair Fidele's grassy tomb Soft maids and village hinds shall bring To deck the ground where thou art laid." 119. science, knowledge, as in No. 35. 50 and No. 48. 3, and in 1 Timothy, vi. 20 (A.V.), “oppositions of science falsely so called." frown'd not on, looked favourably upon. Cp. Horace, Odes IV. iii. Quem tu Melpomene semel Nascentem placido lumine videris, "Whom thou, Melpomene, hast once looked upon with kindly eye at his birth." 120. melancholy. Gray is undoubtedly thinking of himself in these lines. He often refers to his melancholy in his letters, and defines it in a letter to West, May 27, 1742: "Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part, which though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of state." It is, in other words, the studious Melancholy of Milton's Il Penseroso. 123-4. The tear is the bounty of 1. 121, and the friend the recompense of 1. 122. In writing a friend' Gray is surely thinking of his dead friend West, though Dr. Bradshaw understands him to mean God Himself. The first interpretation is confirmed if we think with Mitford that the stanza was suggested by the noble lines in Cowley's poem on the death of Mr. William Hervey (G. T., cxxxvII.): "Large was his soul; as large a soul as e’er Submitted to inform a body here; High as the place 'twas shortly in heaven to have, But low and humble as his grave; So high that all the virtues there did come As to the chiefest seat Conspicuous, and great; So low that for me too it made a room." 127. trembling hope. Sonnet 114" (G.). paventosa speme, Petrarch, 37. O Mary at thy window be Nos. 37-40 form a group of love lyrics, charmingly simple and exquisitely musical, by ROBERT BURNS. Mary Morison was described by Burns as one of my juvenile works"; but it bears no signs of immaturity. Metre. The arrangement of rhymes in each eight-line stanza is a b, a b, bc, b c. This 'octave on three rhymes' is shown in Henley and Henderson's note on The Lament (Burns, ed. 1901, I. 371) to have been a very favourite metre in Scotland. It had been used by Henryson (1430-1506?), who got it from Chaucer, by Gavin Douglas, Dunbar, and others; and Allan Ramsay had printed some twenty examples of it in his ballad book, The Evergreen, with which Burns was familiar. 2. trysted, 'appointed,' participial adj. formed from the substantive tryst, an appointment to meet.' The word tryst is a variant of trust. 6 5. stoure. The oldest meaning seems to be a storm of dust (Douglas' Virgil); then, metaphorically, trouble, vexation. Sometimes it is used in O. E. as well as Scottish, for a fight. It may be connected with the English stir. 9. Yestreen. See note on No. 13. 29. 13. braw, smart, The same word as the English and French brave and the German brav. 14. toast. The use of this word to signify a person whose health is drunk is said to be derived from the old custom of putting toasted bread in liquor: cp. Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor, III. v. 3, "Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in't." See the story told in the Tatler, No. 24, June 4, 1709. 38. O saw ye bonnie Lesley WRITTEN in 1792, in honour of Miss Lesley Baillie, of Mayfield, Ayrshire. "Mr. B., with his two daughters, accompanied with Mr. H. of G., passing through Dumfries a few days ago on their way to England, did me the honour of calling on me; on which I took my horse—though God knows I could ill spare the time— and accompanied them fourteen or fifteen miles, and dined and spent the day with them. 'Twas about nine I think that I left them, and riding home I composed the following ballad, of which you will probably think you have a dear bargain, as it will cost you another groat of postage. You must know that there is an old ballad beginning with: My Bonnie Lizzie Baillie, I'll rowe thee in my plaiddie. So I parodied it as follows, which is literally the first copy 'unanointed, unannealed,' as Hamlet says" (Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Aug. 22, 1792). Metre.-Iambic, with three accents in each line, and an extra syllable, which gives a trochaic or 'feminine' ending. The third line in several stanzas is lengthened by another syllable, and becomes an iambic line of four feet. 8. Another reading is "And never made anither." 13. scaith. See note on No. 18. 23, "Nae maiden lays her skaith to me." 17. tent, protect. A Scottish variant of the English tend. 18. steer, meddle with. The same word as the English stir. 22. Caledonie. Caledonia, the Latin name for Scotland. 39. O my Luve's like a red, red rose THE research of commentators-notably of Messrs. Henley and Henderson (Poetry of Burns, 1901 edition, I. 402)—has shown that each stanza of this exquisite lyric is derived from an earlier original. The first stanza is traced back to a blackletter ballad, The Wanton Wife of Castle Gate: "Her cheeks are like the roses That blossom fresh in June. O, she's like a new-strung instrument Another blackletter ballad, The Unkind Parents, or the Languishing Lamentation of Two Loyal Lovers, contains these verses: "Now fare thee well, my Dearest Dear, And fare thee well awhile; If I go ten thousand mile And roaring billows burn, Then wait for my return." Other songs contain such stanzas as this: Or this: "The Day shall turn to Night, dear Love, "The seas they shall run dry, And rocks melt into sands; When all those things are done." The superiority of Burns' poem to these rude originals is obvious. We may give to him the praise that was given to Virgil, who borrowed freely from the old Italian poets: "he has touched nothing that he has not adorned." And if any reader finds in the fame of this lyric an injustice to Burns' nameless predecessors, he should reflect that the tiny seeds of poetry that lay hidden in their work would long ago have perished from memory if the touch of Burns' genius had not quickened them into lovely flowers. 40. Ye banks and braes and streams around Highland Mary was Mary Campbell, in whose honour Burns also wrote the song, My Highland Lassie. It is worth remarking that there are no exact rhymes in this poem, their place being supplied, as so often in popular songs and ballads, by mere assonances. 2. Montgomery, in Ayrshire, on the river Faile. 41. When the sheep are in the fauld, and the kye a' hame "THERE can hardly exist a poem more truly tragic in the highest sense than this: nor, perhaps, Sappho excepted, has any Poetess equalled it" (F.T.P.). Sir Alfred Lyall (Tennyson, p. 118) remarks that its resemblance to a genuine ballad "comes from that absence of colouring adjectives (there is but one in all the eight stanzas) which is the note of all primitive and popular verse a woodnote wild that is very seldom caught and domesticated by elaborate culture": he contrasts with its simplicity the picturesque detail of Tennyson's May Queen. The story of a woman who allows herself to be persuaded into marriage in the long-continued absence of a lover or husband whom she believes to be dead is a favourite theme in literature. "It is the Odyssey of humble mariners, and many traces of it may be found in the folklore and in the superstitions of Asia as well as of Europe, where the forgotten husband is liable to be treated on his reappearance as a ghostly revenant, or even as a demon who has assumed a dead man's body in order to gain entrance into the house" (Sir A. Lyall's Tennyson, p. 115). It is the theme of old sea-ballads, both English and Breton; of Mrs. Gaskell's romance, Sylvia's Lovers; of Tennyson's Enoch Arden, Crabbe's Parting Hour, and Adelaide Procter's Homeward Bound. LADY ANNE LINDSAY (after her marriage, BARNARD) wrote this ballad, the only poem by which she is remembered, in her twenty-first year. She told the story of its composition long afterwards in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, July 8, 1823: "Robin Gray, so called from its being the name of the old herd at Balcarres, was born soon after the close of the year 1771. My sister Margaret had married, and accompanied her husband to London. I was melancholy, and endeavoured to amuse myself by attempting a few poetical trifles. There was an EnglishScotch melody of which I was passionately fond. Sophy Johnstone, who lived before your day, used to sing it to us at Balcarres. She did not object to its having improper words, though I did. I longed to sing old Sophy's air to different words, and give its plaintive tones some little history of virtuous |