[31]. His mistress.
[32]. Scotch for send’st, for complain’st, &c.
[33]. ‘I was all ear,’ see Milton’s Comus.
[34]. Chapman’s Hymn to Pan.
[35]. Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the birth of the Messiah.
[36]. ‘He spreads his sail-broad vans.’—Par. Lost, b. ii. l. 927.
[37]. See Satan’s reception on his return to Pandemonium, in book X. of Paradise Lost.
[38]. Sir Thomas Brown has it, ‘The huntsmen are up in America,’ but Mr. Coleridge prefers reading Arabia. I do not think his account of the Urn-Burial very happy. Sir Thomas can be said to be ‘wholly in his subject,’ only because he is wholly out of it. There is not a word in the Hydriotaphia about ‘a thigh-bone, or a skull, or a bit of mouldered coffin, or a tomb-stone, or a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or an echo,’ nor is ‘a silver nail or a gilt anno domini the gayest thing you shall meet with.’ You do not meet with them at all in the text; nor is it possible, either from the nature of the subject, or of Sir T. Brown’s mind, that you should! He chose the subject of Urn-Burial, because it was ‘one of no mark or likelihood,’ totally free from the romantic prettinesses and pleasing poetical common-places with which Mr. Coleridge has adorned it, and because, being ‘without form and void,’ it gave unlimited scope to his high-raised and shadowy imagination. The motto of this author’s compositions might be—‘De apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio.’ He created his own materials: or to speak of him in his own language, ‘he saw nature in the elements of its chaos, and discerned his favourite notions in the great obscurity of nothing!‘
[39]. The above passage is an inimitably fine paraphrase of some lines on the tombs in Westminster Abbey by F. Beaumont. It shows how near Jeremy Taylor’s style was to poetry, and how well it weaves in with it.
‘Mortality, behold, and fear,