[2.]In the two Hinkseys. That is, North and South Hinksey. See note, l. [125], The Scholar-Gipsy.
[4.] Sibylla's name. In ancient mythology the Sibyls were certain women reputed to possess special powers of prophecy, or divination, and who claimed to make special intercession with the gods in behalf of those who resorted to them. Do you see why their "name" would be used on signs as here mentioned?
[6.] ye hills. See note, l. [30], The Scholar-Gipsy.
14. Ilsley Downs. The surface of East and West Ilsley parishes, in Berkshire, some twelve or fourteen miles south of Oxford, is broken by ranges of plateau-like hills, known in England as downs.
[15.] The Vale. White Horse Vale; the upper valley of the River Ock, westward from Oxford. weirs. See note, l. [95], The Scholar-Gipsy.
[19.] And that sweet city with her dreaming spires.[p.205] Arnold's intense love for Oxford and the surrounding country appears in many of his essays and poems. In the introduction to his Essays on Criticism, Vol. I, occurs the following tribute: "Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
'There are our young barbarians all at play!'
And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her garments to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantment of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?... Home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in his incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise ... to have left miles out of sight behind him: the bondage of 'was uns alle bändigt, Das Gemeine'?"
[20.] Compare with Lowell's lines on June, in The Vision of Sir Launfal.
[22-23.] Explain.