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[197] 208 This beautiful lyric, printed in 1783, seems to anticipate in its imaginative music that return to our great early age of song, which in Blake's own lifetime was to prove,—how gloriously! that the English Muses had resumed their 'ancient melody':—Keats, Shelley, Byron,—he overlived them all.
[199] 210 stout Cortez: History would here suggest Balbóa: (A.T.) It may be noticed, that to find in Chapman's Homer the 'pure serene' of the original, the reader must bring with him the imagination of the youthful poet;—he must be 'a Greek himself,' as Shelley finely said of Keats.
[202] 212 The most tender and true of Byron's smaller poems.
[203] 213 This poem exemplifies the peculiar skill with which Scott employs proper names:—a rarely misleading sign of true poetical genius.
[213] 226 Simple as Lucy Gray seems, a mere narrative of what 'has been, and may be again,' yet every touch in the child's picture is marked by the deepest and purest ideal character. Hence, pathetic as the situation is, this is not strictly a pathetic poem, such as Wordsworth gives us in 221, Lamb in 264, and Scott in his Maid of Neidpath,—'almost more pathetic,' as Tennyson once remarked, 'than a man has the right to be.' And Lyte's lovely stanzas (224) suggest, perhaps, the same remark.
[222] 235 In this and in other instances the addition (or the change) of a Title has been risked, in hope that the aim of the piece following may be grasped more clearly and immediately.
[228] 242 This beautiful Sonnet was the last word of a youth, in whom, if the fulfilment may ever safely be prophesied from the promise, England lost one of the most rarely gifted in the long roll of her poets. Shakespeare and Milton, had their lives been closed at twenty-five, would (so far as we know) have left poems of less excellence and hope than the youth who, from the petty school and the London surgery, passed at once to a place with them of 'high collateral glory.'
[230] 245 It is impossible not to regret that Moore has written so little in this sweet and genuinely national style.
[231] 246 A masterly example of Byron's command of strong thought and close reasoning in verse:—as the next is equally characteristic of Shelley's wayward intensity.