[C–CIII]
The two first are from the ‘Song of Myself,’ Leaves of Grass (1855); the others from Drum Taps (1865). See Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, 1884), pp. 60, 62–63, 222, and 246.
[CIV], [CV]
By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. Dated severally 1857 and 1859.
[CVI]
Edinburgh Courant, 1852. Compare The Loss of the ‘Birkenhead’ in The Return of the Guards, and other Poems (Macmillan, 1883), pp. 256–58. Of the troopship Birkenhead I note that she sailed from Queenstown on the 7th January 1852, with close on seven hundred souls on board; that the most of these were soldiers—of the Twelfth Lancers, the Sixtieth Rifles, the Second, Sixth, Forty-third, Forty-fifth, Seventy-third, Seventy-fourth, and Ninety-first Regiments; that she struck on a rock (26th February 1852) off Simon's Bay, South Africa; that the boats would hold no more than a hundred and thirty-eight, and that, the women and children being safe, the men that were left—four hundred and fifty-four, all told—were formed on deck by their officers, and went down with the ship, true to colours and discipline till the end.
[CVII–CIX]
By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. From Empedocles on Etna (1853). As regards the second number, it may be noted that Sohrab, being in quest of his father Rustum, to whom he is unknown, offers battle as one of the host of the Tartar King Afrasiab, to any champion of the Persian Kai Khosroo. The challenge is accepted by Rustum, who fights as a nameless knight (like Wilfrid of Ivanhoe at the Gentle and Joyous Passage of Ashby), and so becomes the unwitting slayer of his son. For the story of the pair the poet refers his readers to Sir John Malcom's History of Persia. See Poems, by Matthew Arnold (Macmillan), i. 268, 269.
[CX], [CXI]
Ionica (Allen, 1891). By permission of the Author. School Fencibles (1861) was ‘printed, not published, in 1877.’ The Ballad for a Boy, Mr. Cory writes, ‘was never printed till this year.’