Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Part 75

[Footnote 14: NOTE 14, PAGE 213.

_The Hunter of the Tanagraean Field._

Orion, the Wild Huntsman of Greek legend, and in this capacity appearing in both earth and sky.]

[Footnote 15: NOTE 15, PAGE 214.

_O'er the sun-redden'd western straits._

Erytheia, the legendary region around the Pillars of Hercules, probably took its name from the redness of the West under which the Greeks saw it.]

[Footnote 16: NOTE 16, PAGE 273.

_The Scholar-Gipsy._

"There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gipsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others: that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compa.s.sed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned."--GLANVIL'S _Vanity of Dogmatizing_, 1661.]

[Footnote 17: NOTE 17, PAGE 281.

_Thyrsis._

Throughout this poem there is reference to the preceding piece, _The Scholar-Gipsy_.]

[Footnote 18: NOTE 18, PAGE 287.

_Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing._

Daphnis, the ideal Sicilian shepherd of Greek pastoral poetry, was said to have followed into Phrygia his mistress Piplea, who had been carried off by robbers, and to have found her in the power of the king of Phrygia, Lityerses. Lityerses used to make strangers try a contest with him in reaping corn, and to put them to death if he overcame them. Hercules arrived in time to save Daphnis, took upon himself the reaping-contest with Lityerses, overcame him, and slew him. The Lityerses-song connected with this tradition was, like the Linus-song, one of the early plaintive strains of Greek popular poetry, and used to be sung by corn-reapers. Other traditions represented Daphnis as beloved by a nymph who exacted from him an oath to love no one else. He fell in love with a princess, and was struck blind by the jealous nymph. Mercury, who was his father, raised him to Heaven, and made a fountain spring up in the place from which he ascended. At this fountain the Sicilians offered yearly sacrifices.--See Servius, _Comment. in Virgil.

Bucol._, v. 20, and viii. 68.]

[Footnote 19: NOTE 19, PAGE 294.

_Ah! where is he, who should have come._

The author's brother, William Delafield Arnold, Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab, and author of _Oakfield, or Fellowship in the East_, died at Gibraltar on his way home from India, April the 9th, 1859.]

[Footnote 20: NOTE 20, PAGE 295.

_So moonlit, saw me once of yore._

See the poem, _A Summer Night_, p. 257.]

[Footnote 21: NOTE 21, PAGE 295.

_My brother! and thine early lot._

See Note 19.]

[Footnote 22: NOTE 22, PAGE 299.

_I saw the meeting of two Gifted women._

Charlotte Bronte and Harriet Martineau.]

[Footnote 23: NOTE 23, PAGE 302.

_Whose too bold dying song._

See the last verses by Emily Bronte in _Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell_.]

[Footnote 24: NOTE 24, PAGE 317.

_Goethe, too, had been there._

See _Harzreise im Winter_, in Goethe's _Gedichte_.]

[Footnote 25: NOTE 25, PAGE 325.

The author of _Obermann_, etienne Pivert de Senancour, has little celebrity in France, his own country; and out of France he is almost unknown. But the profound inwardness, the austere sincerity, of his princ.i.p.al work, _Obermann_, the delicate feeling for nature which it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence of many pa.s.sages of it, have attracted and charmed some of the most remarkable spirits of this century, such as George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, and will probably always find a certain number of spirits whom they touch and interest.

Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and pa.s.sed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and pa.s.sed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: _eternite, deviens mon asile!_

The influence of Rousseau, and certain affinities with more famous and fortunate authors of his own day,--Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael,--are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though _Obermann_, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of sentiment, Senancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in his solitude far less than it is with them; of all writers he is the most perfectly isolated and the least att.i.tudinising. His chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of _Obermann_; the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth century, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but now more fully bringing to light,--all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high.

Besides _Obermann_ there is one other of Senancour's works which, for those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting; its t.i.tle is, _Libres Meditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu_.]

[Footnote 26: NOTE 26, PAGE 326.

_Behind are the abandon'd baths._

The Baths of Leuk. This poem was conceived, and partly composed, in the valley going down from the foot of the Gemmi Pa.s.s towards the Rhone.]

[Footnote 27: NOTE 27, PAGE 332.

_Glion?----Ah, twenty years, it cuts._