Lyra Heroica Part 48

XLVII-LII

Of the first four numbers, the high-water mark of Wordsworth's achievement, all four were written in 1802; the second and third were published in 1803; the first and fourth in 1807. The _Ode to Duty_ was written in 1805, and published in 1807, to which year belongs that _Song for the Feast of Brougham Castle_, from which I have extracted the excellent verses here called _Two Victories_.

LIII-LXII

The first three numbers are from _Marmion_ (1808): I. Introduction; V. 12; and VI. 18-20, 25-27, and 33-34. The next is from _The Lady of the Lake_ (1810), I. 1-9: _The Outlaw_ is from _Rokeby_ (1813), III. 16; the _Pibroch_ was published in 1816; _The Omnipotent_ and _The Red Harlaw_ are from _The Antiquary_ (1816), and the _Farewell_ from _The Pirate_ (1821). As for _Bonny Dundee_, that incomparable ditty, it was written as late as 1825. 'The air of Bonny Dundee running in my head to-day,' he writes under date of 22d December (_Diary_, 1890, i. 61), 'I wrote a few verses to it before dinner, taking the key-note from the story of Clavers leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688-9. _I wonder if they are good._'

See _The Doom of Devorgoil_ (1830), Note A, Act II. sc. 2.

LXIII

This unsurpa.s.sed piece of art, in which a music the most exquisite is used to body forth a set of suggestions that seem dictated by the very Spirit of Romance, was produced, under the influence of 'an anodyne,' as early as 1797. Coleridge, who calls it _Kubla Khan: A Vision within a Dream_, avers that, having fallen asleep in his chair over a sentence from Purchas's Pilgrimage--'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereto; and thus ten miles of ground were enclosed with a wall,'--he remained unconscious for about three hours, 'during which time he had the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than three hundred lines'; 'if that,' he adds, 'can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.' On awakening, he proceeded to write out his 'composition,' and had set down as much of it as is printed here, when 'he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock,'

whose departure, an hour after, left him wellnigh oblivious of the rest. This confession, which is dated 1816, has been generally accepted as true; but Coleridge had a trick of dreaming dreams about himself which makes doubt permissible.

LXIV

From the _h.e.l.lenics_ (written in Latin, 1814-20, and translated into English at the instance of Lady Blessington), 1846. See Colvin, _Landor_ ('English Men of Letters'), pp. 189, 190.

LXV-LXVII

Of the first, 'Napoleon and the British Sailor' (_The Pilgrim of Glencoe_, 1842), Campbell writes that the 'anecdote has been published in several public journals, both French and English.' 'My belief,' he continues, 'in its authenticity was confirmed by an Englishman, long resident in Boulogne, lately telling me that he remembered the circ.u.mstance to have been generally talked of in the place.' Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to _Hohenlinden_, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (_Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809) is truly one of 'the glories of our birth and state.' The third (_idem_) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable it seem, at least gets rid of the chief who gave a country's wounds relief by stopping a battle, eliminates the mermaid and her song (the song that 'condoles'), and ends the lyric on as sonorous and romantic a word as even Shakespeare ever used.

LXVIII

_Corn Law Rhymes_, 1831.

LXIX

From that famous and successful forgery, Cromek's _Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song_ (1810), written when Allan was a working mason in Dumfriesshire. I have omitted a stanza as inferior to the rest.

LXXI

_English Songs and other Small Poems_, 1834.

LXXII-LXXVIII

The first is from the _Hebrew Melodies_ (1815); the next is selected from _The Siege of Corinth_ (1816), 22-33; _Alhama_ (_idem_) is a spirited yet faithful rendering of the _Romance muy Doloroso del Sitio y Toma de Alhama_, which existed both in Spanish and in Arabic, and whose effect was such that 'it was forbidden to be sung by the Moors on the pain of death in Granada'

(Byron); No. LXXV., surely one of the bravest songs in the language, was addressed (_idem_) to Thomas Moore; the tremendous _Race with Death_ is lifted out of the _Ode in Venice_ (1819); for the next number see _Don Juan_, III. (1821); the last of all, 'Stanzas inscribed _On this day I completed my Thirty-sixth year_'

(1824), is the last verse that Byron wrote.

LXXIX

Napier has described the terrific effect of Napoleon's pursuit; but in the operations before Corunna he was distanced, if not out-generalled, by Sir John Moore, and ere the first days of 1809 he gave his command to Soult, who pressed us vainly through the hill-country between Leon and Gallicia, and got beaten at Corunna for his pains. Wolfe, who was an Irish parson and died of consumption, wrote some spirited verses on the flight of Busaco, but this admirable elegy--'I will show you,' said Byron to Sh.e.l.ley (Medwin, ii. 154) 'one you have never seen, that I consider little if at all inferior to the best, the present prolific age has brought forth'--remains his pa.s.sport to immortality. It was printed, not by the author, in an Irish newspaper; was copied all over Britain; was claimed by liar after liar in succession; and has been reprinted more often, perhaps, than any poem of the century.

Lx.x.x

From _Snarleyow, or the Dog Fiend_ (1837). Compare Nelson to Collingwood: '_Victory_, 25th June, 1805,--May G.o.d bless you and send you alongside the _Santissima Trinidad_.'

Lx.x.xI, Lx.x.xII

The story of Casabianca is, I believe, untrue; but the intention of the singer, alike in this number and in the next, is excellent.

Each indeed is, in its way, a cla.s.sic. The _Mayflower_ sailed from Southampton in 1626.

Lx.x.xIII

This magnificent sonnet, _On First Reading Chapman's Homer_, was printed in 1817. The 'Cortez' of the eleventh verse is a mistake; the discoverer of the Pacific being Nunez de Balboa.

Lx.x.xIV-Lx.x.xVII

The _Lays_ are dated 1824; they have pa.s.sed through edition after edition; and if Matthew Arnold disliked and contemned them (see Sir F. H. Doyle, _Reminiscences and Opinions_, pp. 178-87), the general is wise enough to know them by heart. But a book that is 'a catechism to fight' (in Jonson's phrase) would have sinned against itself had it taken no account of them, and I have given _Horatius_ in its integrity: if only, as Landor puts it,

To show the British youth, who ne'er Will lag behind, what Romans were, When all the Tuscans and their Lars Shouted, and shook the towers of Mars.

As for _The Armada_, I have preferred it to _The Battle of Naseby_, first, because it is neither vicious nor ugly, and the other is both; and, second, because it is so brilliant an outcome of that capacity for dealing with proper names which Macaulay, whether poet or not, possesses in common with none but certain among the greater poets. For _The Last Buccaneer_ (a curious antic.i.p.ation of some effects of Mr. Rudyard Kipling), and that n.o.ble thing, the _Jacobite's Epitaph_, they are dated 1839 and 1845 respectively.

Lx.x.xVIII

_The Poetical Works of Robert Stephen Hawker_ (Kegan Paul, 1879). By permission of Mrs. R. S. Hawker. 'With the exception of the choral lines--

And shall Trelawney die?

There's twenty thousand Cornishmen Will know the reason why!--

and which have been, ever since the imprisonment by James II. of the Seven Bishops--one of them Sir Jonathan Trelawney--a popular proverb throughout Cornwall, the whole of this song was composed by me in the year 1825. I wrote it under a stag-horned oak in Sir Beville's Walk in Stowe Wood. It was sent by me anonymously to a Plymouth paper, and there it attracted the notice of Mr. Davies Gilbert, who reprinted it at his private press at Eastbourne under the avowed impression that it was the original ballad. It had the good fortune to win the eulogy of Sir Walter Scott, who also deemed it to be the ancient song. It was praised under the same persuasion by Lord Macaulay and Mr. d.i.c.kens.'--_Author's Note._

Lx.x.xIX-XCII

From _The Sea Side and the Fire Side_, 1851; _Birds of Pa.s.sage_, _Flight the First_, and _Flight the Second_; and _Flower de Luce_, 1866. Of these four examples of the picturesque and taking art of Longfellow, I need say no more than that all are printed in their integrity, with the exception of the first. This I leave the lighter by a moral and an application, both of which, superfluous or not, are remote from the general purpose of this book: a confession in which I may include the following number, Mr. Whittier's _Barbara Frietchie_ (_In War-Time_, 1863.)

XCIV

_Nineteenth Century_, March 1878; _Ballads and other Poems_, 1880. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan, to whom I am indebted for some of my choicest numbers. For the story of Sir Richard Grenville's heroic death, 'in the last of August,' 1591--after the Revenge had endured the onset of 'fifteen several armadas,'

and received some 'eight hundred shot of great artillerie,'--see Hakluyt (1598-1600), ii. 169-176, where you will find it told with singular animation and directness by Sir Walter Raleigh, who held a brief against the Spaniards in Sir Richard's case as always. To Sir Richard's proposal to blow up the ship the master gunner 'readily condescended,' as did 'divers others'; but the captain was of 'another opinion,' and in the end Sir Richard was taken aboard the ship of the Spanish admiral, Don Alfonso de Bazan, who used him well and honourably until he died: leaving to his friends the 'comfort that being dead he hath not outlived his own honour,' and that he had n.o.bly shown how false and vain, and therefore how contrary to G.o.d's will, the 'ambitious and bloudie practices of the Spaniards' were.