At last divine Cecilia came, Inventress of the vocal frame; The sweet enthusiast from her sacred store Enlarged the former narrow bounds, And added length to solemn sounds, With Nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before, ---Let old Timotheus yield the prize Or both divide the crown; He raised a mortal to the skies ; She drew an angel down! 135 140 J. Dryden. NOTES. SUMMARY OF BOOK SECOND. THIS division, embracing the latter eighty years of the Seventeenth century, contains the close of our Early poetical style and the commencement of the Modern. In Dryden we see the first master of the new: in Milton, whose genius dominates here as Shakespeare's in the former book,-the crown and consummation of the early period. Their splendid Odes are far in advance of any prior attempts, Spenser's excepted: they exhibit that wider and grander range which years and experience and the struggles of the time conferred on Poetry. Our Muses now give expression to political feeling, to religious thought, to a high philosophic statesmanship in writers such as Marvell, Herbert, and Wotton: whilst in Marvell and Milton, again, we find noble attempts, hitherto rare in our literature, at pure description of nature, destined in our own age to be continued and equalled. Meanwhile the poetry of simple passion, although before 1660 often deformed by verbal fancies and conceits of thought, and afterwards by levity and an artificial tone,-produced in Herrick and Waller some charming pieces of more finished art than the Elizabethan: until in the courtly compliments of Sedley it seems to exhaust itself, and lie almost dormant for the hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of Burns and Cowper. That the change from our early style to the modern brought with it at first a loss of nature and simplicity is undeniable: yet the far bolder and wider scope which Poetry took between 1620 and 1700, and the successful efforts then made to gain greater clearness in expression, in their results have been no slight compensation. 91 No. I. ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY. This Ode was conceived very early in the morning of Christmas Day, 1629, when Milton had lately passed his twenty-first year, and was in his sixth academic year at Cambridge. In his sixth elegy, addressed to his friend Charles Diodati, the poet thus alludes to the composition of the Ode: "Wouldst thou (perhaps 'tis hardly worth thine ear), etc. In the previous year he had addressed his native language in a Vacation Exercise and expressed his wish to find a subject suited to his muse and to the capabilities of the language-the "reeds of Albion : " "Yet had I rather, if I were to choose, Thy service in some graver subject use, Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Such where the deep transported mind may soar Christ's nativity was that 'graver subject,' which suited the character of his muse so well that the result was what Hallam considered to be perhaps the finest ode in the English language. "A grandeur, a simplicity, a breadth of manner, an imagination at once elevated and restrained by the subject, reign throughout it. If Pindar is a model of lyric poetry, it would be hard to name any other ode so truly Pindaric; but more has naturally been derived from the Scriptures." This mixture of classical and Biblical influences is illustrated in the accompanying notes; the key-note of the poem is struck when Nature, with all the religions of antiquity, is treated as guilty-as representing a fallen world which is to be redeemed by "the mighty Pan." I. Introduction. 1. Occasion of the poem: (a) Time and Purpose of the Nativity, 2. Poet's address to his Muse: The Wise Men of the East come to worship lines 1-7 8-14 15-28 29-44 45-52 53-60 (b) The winds and waters are at rest, 61-68 69-76 (d) The sun withholds "his wonted speed," 77-84 85-92 3. Heavenly Music announces him. (a) The music described, 93-100 (b) Its effects on Nature, 101-108 (c) Its accompaniments, 109-116 (d) Such music never before heard, except (There is here a skilful transition from the heavenly 117-124 4. What would follow if "the Music of the (c) The Last Judgment must be held, when 163-166 6. What has actually occurred: (a) The old Dragon is bound, 167-172 (b) The heathen Oracles are dumb, and the In 1630 Milton wrote a fragment on The Passion, in the opening stanza of which he thus alludes to the Nativity Ode: "Erewhile of music, and ethereal mirth, Wherewith the stage of Air and Earth did ring, From this poem and from the lines Upon the Circumcision it has been thought that the poet intended to write a series of Odes on the great festivals of the Christian Church. The reason he gives for having failed to complete that on The Passion is as follows: "This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished. THE VERSE. The Introduction consists of four stanzas of seven lines-the first six decasyllabic (5 x a), the seventh an Alexandrine (6 x a). The same stanza had already been used by Milton in his poem On the Death of a Fair Infant (1626), and it is similar to that in which Spenser wrote his Four Hymns, Ruins of Time, etc., and Shakespeare his Lucrece. But Spenser's form is decasyllabic throughout, the break between the stanzas being therefore less distinctly marked than in Milton's poem. The rhyme formula, however, is the same in both, viz. ababbcc. The earlier form was used by Chaucer (see Clerk's Tale, Troilus and Cresseide, etc.), and was the favourite measure of the English poets down to the time of Queen Elizabeth; but it cannot be positively asserted that Chaucer invented it, as it is said to have been used prior to his time by the French poet Machault. In his essay on the language and versification of Chaucer, Tyrwhitt states that "in the time of Gascoigne it had acquired the name of rhythme royall [or 'Rhyme Royal']; 'and surely,' says he, 'it is a royall kinde of verse, serving best for grave discourses." " It will be noted that by the arrangement of the rhymes the stanza is made to turn, as on a pivot, on the fourth line, which has three lines on each side of it: this line is "the last of a quatrain of alternate rhymes and first of a quatrain of couplets; thus— a b a b b c c This stanza is evidently adapted from an eight-lined decasyllabic stave; it is, in fact, a modification of the ottava rima of the Italians (in which Boccaccio, Tasso and Ariosto wrote), the rhymne formula of which was abababcc. By the excision of the fifth line we get the eight-line stanza of Chaucer and early |