9. gauds, ornaments; a poetical word. Cp. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, I. i. 32,

"And stolen the impression of her fantasy

With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gauds, conceits,
Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats."

pageant weeds, garments such as are worn at a magnificent spectacle. Cp. Milton, L'Allegro, 119-20,

"Where throngs of knights and barons bold

In weeds of Peace high triumphs hold."

The use of the word 'weeds' for dress is now confined to the phrase 'a widow's weeds.'

pall (Lat. palla), a long robe worn by tragic actors in antiquity. Cp. Milton, Il Penseroso, 97-8,

"Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy

In scepter'd pall come sweeping by."

10. decent, becoming (Latin decens).

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11. Attic, Athenian. The severe self-restraint of the best Athenian art in sculpture, poetry, and rhetoric is proverbial. Thus Asiatic oratory was distinguished by the ancients themselves from the Attic by its greater profusion of verbal ornament, its more liberal use of tropes, antithesis, figures, and generally by its inanity of thought" (Cruttwell, Hist. of Roman Literature).

13. By, etc. The poet calls to witness the favourite haunts of poetry in antiquity.

honey'd store, store of honey in the flowers. See note on No. 31. 26.

Hybla, a mountain in Sicily famous for thyme, bees, and honey. Cp. Virgil, Eclogue 1. 55, Hyblaeis apibus. Sicily was famous as the home of pastoral poetry. So Milton in Lycidas addresses the 'Sicilian Muse.'

16. her, "the nightingale, for which Sophocles seems to have entertained a peculiar fondness" (Collins' Note). Philomela and Procne in the Greek legend were two sisters, who were changed, the one into a nightingale, the other into a swallow. For the nightingale's "love-lorn woe cp. Sir P. Sidney's poem, "The nightingale as soon as April bringeth, " G. T. XLVII., and M. Arnold's unrhymed lyric, "Hark, ah! the nightingale.

18. sad Electra's poet. The phrase is borrowed from Milton, who had used it of Euripides in his sonnet "Captain or Colonel or Knight in Arms" (G.T., XCIII.). Collins applies the title to Sophocles, who also wrote a tragedy with Electra for heroine.

The reference is to the famous chorus in Oedipus Coloneus, 668719:

"Frequent down this greenwood dale
Mourns the warbling nightingale,
Nestling mid the thickest screen

Of the ivy's darksome green" (trans. by Anstice).

19. Cephisus, "the stream encircling Athens on the north and west, passing Colonus" (F. T. P.). Cp. Sophocles in the chorus already quoted :

"Here the golden crocus gleams,
Murmur here unfailing streams,

Sleep the bubbling fountains never,
Feeding pure Cephisus river,

Whose prolific waters daily

Bid the pastures blossom gaily,

With the showers of spring-tide blending
On the lap of earth descending."

21. warbled.

The passive form is Miltonic: cp. Nativity Ode (G. T., LXXXV. 96), "divinely-warbled voice." It may be taken as a real passive "made to warble," or as active="warbling." 'Languished' and 'festered' are used by Milton where we should say languishing,'' festering.'

22. enamelled, i.e. made bright with flowers. of the word cp. Lycidas (G.Ť., LXXXIX. 139),

:

A Miltonic use "Throw hither

all your quaint enamelled eyes." There is a similar use in Andrew Marvell: "He gave us this eternal Spring Which here enamels everything " (G.T., CXLVI. 13, 14).

24. thy future feet, i.e. allured thy feet to roam in the future.

30. range, to place in rank.

6

adjective, so as to be in order.'

31. none, no theme.

order'd, proleptic use of the

33. laureat, crowned with the laurel, or rather the bay-leaf, of Apollo, whose ministers the poets were supposed to be. Cp. Milton, Lycidas (G. T. LXXXIX. 151), "To strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies."

34. stay'd to sing alone, only stayed to sing to one Emperor, Augustus, and then fled. The reign of Augustus was the Golden Age of Latin poetry: Virgil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid were all contemporaries of Augustus, and all sang his praises. Even if we follow some critics in magnifying Lucretius and Catullus as stronger in genuine inspiration than the Augustan poets, we must admit that they belonged to the decadence of the Roman Republic, not to the good old times of "Virtue's patriot theme." Rome in her best days seems to have been quite without great poets. Poetry was an exotic at

Rome, only produced under the direct influence of Greek literature. Collins' theory, therefore, hardly derives support from the history of Rome. But it is true that poetry rapidly declined after the Augustan age, and that under Augustus it was inspired by the best features of his monarchy-his efforts to restore the Roman morality and religion, to revive Italian country life, and to give peace and rest after the exhaustion of civil war. [Mr. F. T. Palgrave's note, "stayed her song when Imperial tyranny was established at Rome," implies a somewhat different interpretation of Collins' words. I prefer my own interpretation, which is certainly more in accordance with historic fact, and is supported by the 'Observations' on this poem of Langhorne, himself a poet and a contemporary of Collins.]

37. "Stanza 7 refers to the Italian amourist poetry of the Renaissance. In Collins' day, Dante was almost unknown in England" (F. T. P.). Coleridge writes of the Italian poets of the 15th and 16th centuries (Biographia Literaria, ch. 16): "The imagery is almost always general; sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularise."

bower. The word first means 'dwelling' (O.E.); (2) a vague poetic word for an idealized abode, not realized in any actual dwelling: cp. Milton, 'The bower of earthly bliss'; (3) an inner apartment, especially a lady's private apartment boudoir; (4) a place closed in with trees, a leafy court, arbour. Here it is used in sense (3).

or

48. meeting soul, "which moves sympathetically__ towards Simplicity as she comes to inspire the poet" (F. T. P.). The phrase is from Milton, L'Allegro (G. T. CXLIV. 138).

49. Of these, Taste and Genius.

51-4. There may be here a reminiscence of Virgil, Eclogue x., especially of lines 31-6 and 42-3.

3.

Happy the man, whose wish and care

"THIS was a very early production of our author, written at about twelve years old" (Pope's Note). It is curious that the first of his preserved juvenile pieces should be the only poem by AlexANDER POPE that has found a place in The Golden Treasury: but though Pope was a great poet, he is not distinguished in lyric poetry. We must also remember what Dr. A. W. Ward calls "the extraordinary and perhaps unparalleled fact" that "there is little vital difference, so far as form is concerned, between some

His

of the earliest and some of the latest of Pope's productions. early pieces lack the vigour of wit and the brilliancy of antithesis of his later works, but they have the same felicity of expression and the same easy flow of versification." Some of the couplets in an epic poem that he began soon after his twelfth birthday were afterwards inserted by him, without alteration, in the Essay on Criticism and in the Dunciad.

An English reader, unfamiliar with Latin, could hardly gain a better idea of Horace's quieter lyrics than he will receive from this little Ode. The sentiment is Horatian; sincere but not too deeply felt; the praise of the country by a youthful poet whose strongest inclinations were to draw him, as they had drawn Horace, to the town and fashionable life. The style is Horatian the diction simple, but, even at this early age, with the epigrammatic simplicity of conscious art, not the diffuse simplicity of nature. Finally, the rhythm is Horatian also; not an attempt at an English poem in Latin metre, such as Canning produced in his humorous Sapphics on The Needy Knife-grinder,' or Tennyson in his Alcaics on Milton, but a happy reproduction in a thoroughly English metre of the most characteristic effect of the Sapphic stanza-the brief fourth line that brings to a sudden check the short "swallow-flight of song" which is all that the stanza permits.

Pope had doubtless read Horace's description of his farm in Satires, II. vi., or Epistles, 1. xvi. 1-16, or the praise of a farmer's life in Odes, III. xvi. 29-32. Probably he had also read Claudian's Felix qui patriis aevum transegit in agris and Virgil's O fortunatos nimium. With the "sound sleep" of 1. 13 we may compare Horace, Odes, III. i. 21, somnus agrestium lenis virorum, and with the " unseen, unknown" of 1. 17, Ovid's Bene qui latuit, bene vixit (Tristia, III. iv. 25) and Horace's Nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque fefellit (Epistles, I. xvii. 10). But there is no end to the parallels; and Dr. Johnson would remind us that "Criticism disdains to chase a school-boy"'—even such a school-boy as Pope -"to his common-places.'

4. O say what is that thing call'd Light

COLLEY CIBBER (1671-1757) was an actor, a dramatist of some skill, and a great critic of acting. He was unfortunate enough to quarrel with Pope, who revenged himself by making Cibber the hero of his Dunciad. In its simple pathos, "The Blind Boy" is almost worthy of Blake or Wordsworth.

19. Compare Sir E. Dyer's well-known poem, "My mind to me a kingdom is," especially the second stanza:

"Content I live, this is my stay;

I seek no more than may suffice;

I press to bear no haughty sway;
Look, what I lack my mind supplies.

Lo! thus I triumph like a king,

Content with what my mind doth bring."

5. 'Twas on a lofty vase's side

THE cat belonged to Gray's friend, Horace Walpole. Gray sent the Ode in a letter to Walpole, March 1, 1747: "As one ought to be particularly careful to avoid blunders in a compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me (before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your misfortune) to know for certain, who it is I lament. I knew Zara and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima), or rather I knew them both together; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your handsome cat, the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing one's handsome cat is always the cat one likes best; or if one be alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the survivor: oh no! I would rather seem to mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you will excuse me if I do not begin to cry. Tempus inane peto, requiem, spatiumque doloris." In 1. 4 the cat is described as 'demurest of the tabby-kind"; in 1. 10 we hear of her "coat that with the tortoise vies." We must remember that Gray did not know which cat had died, and was also determined to ingratiate himself with the survivor. If the two cats were respectively tabby and tortoise-shell, we may suppose that the survivor (a) if tortoise-shell, would take 'tabbykind' as a general name for cats and would understand 1. 10 in its more obvious sense, (b) if a tabby, would appropriate 1. 4 and understand 1. 10 to mean "beautiful as any tortoise shell cat. This is the interpretation of Gray's letter and poem advocated by Mr. Tovey, and it seems the best, as it is certainly the most ingenious.

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"The mishap occurred at Walpole's house in Arlington Street, not long before Walpole purchased the little house at Twickenham which he converted into the famous Strawberry Hill. To Strawberry Hill the vase was ultimately transferred; Walpole wrote to Mason, July 29, 1773, 'I have a pedestal making for the tub in which my cat was drowned; the first stanza of the Ode is to be written on it, beginning thus: "Twas on this lofty vase's side, etc.' The tub was sold at the Strawberry Hill sale in 1842 for £42, and is now at Knowsley, the seat of the Earl of Derby." (Tovey).

Johnson's criticism of the poem (Life of Gray) is as follows: