Iliad is the "wrath of Achilles." His rages and frequent refusals to fight are responsible for most of the Greeks' troubles. 39. Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, beginning of eighteenth century. 41. Plato, Aristotle, Greek philosophers; Hobbes, Bacon, English philosophers; Sydney (or Sidney), English statesman and political scientist; Paine. see above, pages 40-42. 50. Wilhelmus Kieft, or William the Testy (60), governor after Wouter Van Twiller. 66. wanted, lacked.

Tom Walker.-160. persecutions. During the seventeenth century these sects were severely persecuted in Massachusetts. Roger Williams led a number of Baptists to Rhode Island, where they not only "worshipped God according to their own belief," but allowed all men to do so. A tract entitled The Wrongs of the Quakers (1660), by Edward Burrough, an English Quaker (printed in Hart's American History Told by Contemporaries, Vol. I, pp. 404-6); and Hawthorne's imaginative presentation of the same in The Gentle Boy (in Twice Told Tales), will give the student a most interesting bit of "parallel reading." 332. rhino, slang for "money." 348. Eldorado, land of gold or immense wealth. 373. 'change, the stock exchange.

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ing
a few days. The poem as

BRYANT.Thanatopsis. The title is from two Greek words meana view of death." 12. the narrow house, the grave. 17. Yet first published began with these words. 28. the rude swain, etc. Cf. Hamlet, V, i, 83 ff. 51. Barcan wilderness, in northern Africa.

published ended here.

66. bed with thee.

Poem as first

Waterfowl. This poem is a meditation on an actual flight of a bird observed by the poet. 10. marge, poetic word for "margin.” Forest Hymn.—3. architrave, in classical architecture, that part of a building which rests directly on the capitals of the pillars. 5. vault, in Gothic architecture, the arch which itself forms the roof or supports a separate roof. 11. stilly, poetic word. 26-28. See Genesis, I, 11-12. 45. instinct (accented on second syllable), filled. Death of the Flowers. -25 ff. These lines refer to the poet's beloved sister, who had died the year before.

Fringed Gentian. — Cf. Wordsworth's four poems on the daisy and three on the celandine.

Gladness of Nature. —One of the few nature-poems of Bryant which have no moral. Not seldom it seems very loosely joined to the poem, as in To the Fringed Gentian and To a Waterfowl; but for Bryant the moral was always just as real and just as impor

tant as the rest of his meditation-the description of the natural object.

COOPER. Ariel and Alacrity. The scene of most of The Pilot is the northeastern coast of England; the time, December, 1778. 1. English cutter, the Alacrity. 7. Barnstable, commander of the American schooner Ariel. 12. The cockswain, "Long Tom " Coffin, is one of the notable characters of English fiction, worthy to rank with Cooper's two other creations-Leather-Stocking and Harvey Birch. 9. in the wind's eye, against the wind. 40. boltropes, ropes stitched to the edge of sails. 66. his namesake, the cannon, called "Long Tom." 75. long bowls, a game somewhat like tenpins. 79. dub, trim. Trimming a gamecock for a fight is called "dubbing." 114. curmudgeon is hardly a suitable name for the boy; but Tom's anger is not very accurate in expressing itself. Besides, he probably did not know the meaning of the word, but attached it to his vocabulary as a good "mouth-filling" term of abuse. 181. soldiers. A party of British troopers were watching the contest from the cliff. 260. Merry, the boy who earlier had so

stirred Tom's anger.

HALLECK. Marco Bozzaris.

- 13. Suliote, native of Suli in Epirus, where Bozzaris was born. 16. Persian; probably Xerxes is meant, though the Persian commander defeated at Plataa was Mardonius. When this battle was fought, Xerxes had returned to Persia, after his own defeat in the sea fight of Salamis. Mohammedan. 75. Indian isles, the West Indies. Columbus.

38. Moslem, 76. Genoese,

CALHOUN.-18. twenty-four sovereign powers. The debate between Calhoun and Webster took place in 1833. 61-62. Calhoun's last prediction has come true; for we have chairs of political science everywhere, and not a few "schools of diplomacy."

WEBSTER. - If time serves, the study of Calhoun and Webster here might well be preceded by at least a rapid reading of the debate three years earlier between Robert Y. Hayne and Webster. 43. gloss, marginal note. 72. Mirabeau, French statesman of the Revolution. He and Napoleon are commonly regarded as the greatest figures who appeared in that momentous period. 107 ff. The student would do well to follow Webster's argument with a good American history or better, with two histories, one written from Webster's

point of view, the other from Calhoun's. Even H. C. Lodge, how. ever, Webster's biographer and certainly in sympathy with his subject, says that the Massachusetts statesman's argument was historically unsound.

LINCOLN. Showing His Hand.- - New Salem was in Sangamon County, Illinois. Lincoln at the time of this letter was serving his first term in the legislature. Hugh L. White was the candidate of the Whig party.

Speech Leaving Springfield. If we had nothing of Lincoln's but this, there would be slight ground for questioning his religion, as has frequently been done.

Gettysburg Address. — This speech was delivered at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg a few months after the great battle.

TIMROD. A Cry to Arms. The second of Timrod's remarkable series of poems growing out of incidents of the war. The first was Ethnogenesis. 5. byre, cowhouse. cot, cottage, i.e., home. Sibyl-leaves, valuable fragmentary writings

Flower-Life. -41.

easily scattered or lost.

HAYNE. - Beauregard's Appeal.—Early in 1862 General Beauregard appealed to the people of the Mississippi valley to give up plantation-bells to be moulded into cannon. Not only was this request granted: churches gave up their bells, and women offered brass candlesticks and andirons.

Forgotten.-29. Supply "that" before "Its."

Axe and Pine. This poem and Poets are excellent examples of the sonnet, a form in which few poets have been strikingly successful. Longfellow is the greatest American sonnet-writer. For a satisfactory brief treatment of the sonnet, see Corson, Primer of English Verse, Chapter X.

Poets will repay careful study of substance as well as of form.

POE. To Helen. - Of this poem Lowell said: "There is a little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of the outline are such as few poets ever attain. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the fingers. which the inner ear alone can estimate. Greek column, because of its perfection."

It is of that finer sort It seems simple, like a 2. Nicean, Poe prob

ably used this word with no definite place in mind, merely suggesting something distant. So the wanderer of line 4, though some have thought it an allusion to Ulysses, is perhaps not meant to indicate any man in particular. 7. hyacinth here means simply "beautiful." It was a favorite epithet with the poet. 8. The Naiads were nymphs who presided over fountains, lakes, brooks, and wells. 9-10. These lines originally read:

"To the beauty of fair Greece,

And the grandeur of old Rome."

It would be a good exercise to find out how the revision is an improvement. 14. Psyche, the soul. Cf. Ulalume, line 12.

Israfel.

5. giddy, whirling rapidly.

12. levin, lightning. 23. skies is the object of trod. 45-51. The thought of this stanza the influence of environment on what one accomplishes - is expressed elsewhere by Poe.

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Haunted Palace. - Poe explained that the haunted palace symbolizes a mind haunted by phantoms." In a letter he asserted that Longfellow's Beleaguered City (page 204) was taken from this poem, claiming that even the versification was copied. The student might well compare the two to see how far Poe's charge was justified. 9-10. These lines show Poe's careful choice of words for their sound value. Note also The Raven, 13, 71, Ulalume, 5, 18–19, Annabel Lee, 34. He was fond of words containing long vowels and sustainable consonants. 22. Porphyrogene, born to the purple.

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Raven. - See first note on Short-Story below. 10. Poe used the name Lenore in several other places. Others that he used, to some extent at least for their sound value, are "Eleonora," Berenice," "Morella." 41. Pallas, or Minerva, goddess of wisdom; a suitable bust for a student's room, said Poe. 89. Balm in Gilead. See Jeremiah, VIII, 22. 93. Aidenn, a variant of "Eden"; here it means any delightful place. 101. Here it becomes apparent, says Poe, that the raven is “emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance."

Annabel Lee is supposed to have been inspired by the memory of the poet's child-wife.

Ulalume.-N. P. Willis, friend and admirer of Poe, said that this poem is "full of beauty and oddity in sentiment and versification, but a curiosity (and a delicious one, we think) in philologic flavor." Professor Pattee thinks its meaning is perfectly clear- it

is an allegory-"the epitome of Poe's last years"; "the marvelous repetition . . . shows that the poet's mind was in a state almost of collapse." See the Chautauquan, Vol. 31, pp. 182-186 (May, 1900). Pattee expounds the " allegory" in great detail, but is not altogether convincing.

Morella. - 8. Eros, love. 20. Presburg, ancient capital of Hungary, and one of its finest cities. 45. Hinnon became the Gehenna. Before being defiled by Josiah (see 2 Kings, XXIII, 10) the valley of Hinnon south of Jerusalem formed part of the royal gardens. 53. Pantheism, etc. It would be quite useless for the student to attempt to understand even the names here. They are given merely as specimens of abstruse philosophies. 58. Locke, John; chief work, Essay on the Human Understanding. 118. Postum, ancient Greek city of Lucania (southern part of Italy). 119. play the Teian with time seems to mean "enjoy a care-free sort of existence." The Teian is probably put for Anacreon, the Greek lyric poet, who was born at Teos in Ionia. He wrote many poems in praise of love and wine, and was a favorite at the courts of several rulers. 175. A lustrum (plural, lustra ) is five years.

Short-Story.- The theory of poetry set forth in the first paragraph here Poe repeated in many places. One of the most interesting for the young student is The Philosophy of Composition, which purports to tell how The Raven was composed. (The essay may be had in several cheap editions.) 28. De Béranger, a French poet prominent in Poe's day. 34. In medio, etc.; A happy medium is safest. 79. tales of ratiocination, tales in which acute reasoning is used; sometimes spoken of as analytical tales. The best examples are Poe's own - The Gold-Bug, The Purloined Letter, Murders in the Rue Morgue. Sir Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes are later examples of the same kind. The models for these, by the way, Doyle unhesitatingly asserted were Poe's tales just mentioned. 91. par parenthèse, parenthetically.

HAWTHORNE.

- May-Pole.

See the reading from Bradford, page 15. 70. Comus, god of mirth. See Milton's masque. 98. Clerk of Oxford, minister educated at Oxford University. 195. St. John's Day is Dec. 27. 300. Endicott, colonial governor of Massachusetts, severe in his treatment of "heretics." He figures also in another of the Twice Told Tales - Endicott and the Red Cross. 303, Blackstone, the clerk of line 98. 328. Ancient, standard bearer.