[Footnote 8: "—da kroch's heran," etc. The It in the original has been greatly admired. The poet thus vaguely represents the fabulous misshapen monster, the Polypus of the ancients.]
[Footnote 9: The theatre.]
[Footnote 10: This simile is nobly conceived, but expressed somewhat obscurely. As Hercules contended in vain against Antæus, the Son of Earth,—so long as the Earth gave her giant offspring new strength in every fall,—so the soul contends in vain with evil—the natural earth-born enemy, while the very contact of the earth invigorates the enemy for the struggle. And as Antæus was slain at last, when Hercules lifted him from the earth and strangled him while raised aloft, so can the soul slay the enemy (the desire, the passion, the evil, the earth's offspring), when bearing it from earth itself and stifling it in the higher air.—Translator.]
[Footnote 11: Translated by Edward, Lord Lytton (Permission George
Routledge & Sons.)]
[Footnote 12: "I call the Living—I mourn the Dead—I break the Lightning." These words are inscribed on the Great Bell of the Minster of Schaffhausen—also on that of the Church of Art near Lucerne. There was an old belief in Switzerland that the undulation of air, caused by the sound of a Bell, broke the electric fluid of a thunder-cloud.]
[Footnote 13: A piece of clay pipe, which becomes vitrified if the metal is sufficiently heated.]
[Footnote 14: The translator adheres to the original, in forsaking the rhyme in these lines and some others.]
[Footnote 15: Written in the time of the French war.]
[Footnote 16: That is—the settled political question—the balance of power.]
[Footnote 17: Apollo.]