[22] “My proper scorn”—proprius—is scorn of myself, an imprecation. See Lancelot’s self-condemnation at the end of “Lancelot and Elaine.”
[23] The churches are not to be identified. Those in the neighbourhood of Somersby have too small belfries to allow of change ringing. The sounds may have been only in the Poet’s mind.
[24] John, xii., 3
[25] A South African snake—bucephalus Capensis—commonly called the “Boom-slange ”—attracts birds into its mouth as prey, drawing them by an irresistible fascination. Dr. Smith, in his “Zoology of South Africa,” describes the process.
[26] In Cary’s translation of Dante’s “Hell,” canto iii., line 21, we find this note on what Dante and Virgil encountered in the infernal shades—“Post hæc omnia ad loca tartarea, et ad os infernalis baratri deductus sum, qui simile videbatur puteo, loca vero eadem horridis tenebris, fætoribus exhalantibus, stridoribus quoque et nimiis plena erant ejulatibus, juxta quem infernum vermis erat infinitæ magnitudinis, ligatus maxima catena.” Alberici Virio, § 9.
[27] If time be merged and lost in eternity, why may not place, all sense of locality, be equally lost in infinitude of space?
[28] I remember holding a serious conversation with an enlightened physician, some years ago, who said, “I hardly like to venture the theory, but it almost seems to me, as if what is now said and thought becomes written on the physical brain, like a result of photography, and that a revelation of this transcript, may be our real accuser at the day of judgment.” Had Shakespeare any such notion, in making Macbeth say,
“Raze out the written troubles of the brain?”
[29] Wordsworth entertains the notion of our having lived before in his fine Ode, “Intimations of Immortality,” wherein he says,
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar,” &c.