114.

10-11.

58. between the ship and the land.
62. in a swound, heard in a swoon.

75. shroud, a rope running from the mast-head to the ship's side.

76. vesper, (Latin) evening; in its plural form the term is usually applied to the evening service of the Roman Catholic church.

81. crossbow. This suggests that the time of the story was at the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century, when the crossbow was still in common use.

83. Why upon the right?' The reader should trace the voyage of the ship on a map; it must have been now about nine days' sail from a point between Cape Horn and the South Pole.

98. uprist, used instead of 'uprose' (as 'eat' instead of eaten' in line 67) to give the suggestion of language of the olden time.

104. In the edition of 1817 Coleridge altered this line to read

The furrow streamed off free,

and added in a footnote: In the former edition the line was

The furrow followed free;

but I had not been long on board a ship before I perceived that this was the image as seen by a spectator from the shore, or from another vessel. From the ship itself the wake appears like a brook flowing off from the stern.' But in 1828 and after, the original reading was restored.

107. Notice the sudden check in the verse at the end of this line, and the contrast with the swift movement of the preceding stanza.

555. 128. death-fires, phosphorescent lights, to which the sailors attached a superstitious significance.

139. well-a-day, an antique exclamation of lament, as 'gramercy' in line 164 is of joy and thankful

ness.

152. wist, knew. See notes above on use of old words.

164. I took the thought of "grinning for joy"

from poor Burnett's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly Idead with thirst. We could not speak for the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me, "You grinned like an idiot!" He had done the same.' (Table Talk.)

184. gossameres, fine spider-threads.

185-9. Coleridge made considerable alterations, omissions and additions in this part of the poem after it was first published. Another version of this stanza reads:

A plankless Spectre-
Like a being of the Sea!

The woman and a fleshless man
Therein sate merrily.'

197. What is it that the Woman Life-in-Death has won, and what difference does this make to the story?

199–200. A fine description of the sudden darkness of the tropics.

556. 209-11. A star within the lower tip of the crescent moon is never seen. aginative way of using what he describes in a manuThis is Coleridge's imscript note as the common superstition among sailors that something evil is about to happen whenever a star dogs the moon.'

223. Notice at the end of each part the repeated reference to the crime the Ancient Mariner has committed.

226-7. For the last two lines of this stanza I am indebted to Mr. Wordsworth. It was on a delightful walk from Nether Stowey to Dulverton, with him and his sister, in the autumn of 1797, that this poem was planned and in part composed.'Coleridge's note in the edition of 1817.

254. reek, give off vapor.

302. dank, wet.

559. 489. rood, cross.

512. shrieve (usually pronounced and shrive') to absolve after confession.

524. trow, trust, believe, think, 535. ivy-tod, ivy-bush.

written

565. 13. athwart wood.

a cedarn cover, across

a cedar

560. 575. crossed his brow, made the sign of the cross on his forehead to warn off evil spirits.

623. of sense forlorn, one who has lost his senses.

CHRISTABEL

Christabel was begun in 1797-8, and continued in 1800. Scot heard it recited while it was still in manuscript, and the melody of the verse made such an impression on his mind that he adopted it for The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Christabel in its fragmentary state was printed in 1816; Coleridge said in 1821, 'Of my poetic works I would fain finish Christabel,' but he never succeeded in doing So. It remains, however, one of the most wonderful and beautiful poems of the Romantic Revival. 564. 408-426. Said by Coleridge to be the best and sweetest lines I ever wrote.'

KUBLA KHAN

In a note to this poem on its publication in 1816, Coleridge relates the circumstances of its composi tion. Being in ill-health, he had retired to a lonely farmhouse on Exmoor, and an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence from the old book of travels known as Purchas his Pilgrimage: -'In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately palace, encompassing sixteen miles of plain ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meadows, pleasant springs, delightful streams, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the midst thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure.' Coleridge adds: The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed 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 awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas without the after restoration of the latter!'

Kubla Khan in the thirteenth century founded the Mogul dynasty in China, and made Pekin the capital of his empire, which was the largest that has ever existed in Asia. He was an enlightened but ambitious ruler, very fond of pomp and splendor.

41. Abora, apparently a mountain of Coleridge's imagination.

FROST AT MIDNIGHT

Mrs. Coleridge was wont to complain to her friends that her husband would walk up and down composing poetry instead of coming to bed at proper hours.' This poem was the outcome of a midnight meditation in his cottage at Stowey in February, 1798, and was published in the same year. 566. 27. stranger, a film of soot sticking to the bars of the grate, which, according to a common English superstition, betokens the coming of a visitor.

29-30. As to Coleridge's birth and school days, see Life, p. 542.

38. stern preceptor. Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, says: At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master.' He goes on to speak at length of Boyer's merits as a teacher, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations.' Coleridge writes also in his Table Talk: The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra Spartan; all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Boyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays," Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! Boy! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying! Coming under the influence of Voltaire, Coleridge professed himself an infidel. So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you?' said Boyer; then I'll flog your infidelity out of you!' Coleridge said it was the only just flogging he ever received.'

43-44. Coleridge was very fond of his sister Ann, who was five years older than himself and had been his playmate when he was still in petticoats. She died in 1791, to his great grief.

52-54. At Christ's Hospital Coleridge used to lie on the roof and gaze upon the clouds and stars.

55-65. There was no likelihood at this time that Coleridge would live in the Lake District, but he fulfilled his own prophecy in 1800 by removing to Greta Hall, Keswick, from which he writes, soon after his settlement there, of his little son's enjoyment of nature: 'I look at my doted-on Hartley he moves, he lives, he finds impulses from within and from without, he is the darling of the Isun and the breeze. Nature seems to bless him as a thing of her own. He looks at the clouds, the mountains, the living beings of the earth, and vaults and jubilates.'

HUMILITY THE MOTHER OF CHARITY The date appended to this poem is that of com position.

'Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?
I had a mother, but she died and left me,
Died prematurely in a day of horrors-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.'

The last stanza began with the word 'For,' and the words And some are taken from me' in 1. 20 were italicized, referring no doubt to Mary Lamb, whose illness was probably the occasion of the poem. The 'friend' of 1. 10 was Charles Lloyd, with whom Lamb had a temporary difference about this time; the more than brother' of 1. 16, Coleridge.

MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE

All these essays appeared in the London Magazine, 1821-22, and were afterwards included in the Essays of Elia.

Mackrye End may now be easily reached from Wheathampstead Station on the Great Northern Railway. The old farmhouse, with some additions since Lamb's day, is still standing.

568. a. 4. Bridget Elia, Mary Lamb. See biographical sketch, p. 567.

12. the rash king's offspring, Jephthah's daughter. Judges xi, 30-40.

15. with a difference.' Ophelia in Hamlet IV, v. 183, O, you must wear your rue with a difference.' 17. bickerings, little quarrels.

20. dissembling, simulating. This is contrary to the established usage, according to which dissemble is to pretend not to be something that you are.

26. Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

33. a story. Mary Lamb's passion for novel-reading is spoken of by others.

39. humors, eccentricities. 43. bizarre, whimsical, fantastic. 46.holds Nature more from Gay, Epitaph of Byewords. 48. obliquities, irregularities.

clever a quotation

49. Religio Medici, the chief work of Sir Thomas Browne, whose curious notions and elaborate style made him a favorite with Lamb. See p. 200. 52. intellectuals, reasoning powers, intelligence. b. 1. Margaret Newcastle, an eccentric Restoration noblewoman, of high character and remarkable talents, for whom Lamb often expressed his admiration.

34. derogatory, disparaging.

42. stuff of the conscience, quoted from Othello I, ii, 2.

50. good old English reading, in the library of Samuel Salt of the Inner Temple.

569. a. 18. beat up the quarters of, arouse, disturb, visit unceremoniously. The expression is used in exactly the same way by Richardson in Pamela.

14. the poet, Wordsworth. See Yarrow Visited, stanza 6, than which' (Lamb wrote to Wordsworth) I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry.'

21. waking bliss, conscious enjoyment, less like a dream; quoted from Milton's Comus.

570. a. 5. gossamer, spider thread. rending, sepa. rating.

14. the two scriptural cousins, Mary and Elizabeth. Luke i, 39-40.

23. B. F., Baron Field, an English barrister, who in 1816 became Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. To him Lamb addressed the Elia essay entitled Distant Correspondents. 24. peradventure, by chance.

26. The fatted calf. See the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke xv, 23.

43. astoundment, intense surprise.

50. I forget all this. A reminiscence of Psalm cxxxvii, 5: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.'

DREAM-CHILDREN: A REVERIE

The death of Lamb's brother John on Oct. 26, 1821, appears to have suggested the tender vein of reminiscence and musing on what might have been in this essay, which is justly regarded as one of the most delicate in pathos and perfect in work! manship Lamb ever wrote. But this kind of rev erie was not unusual with him. He writes in an earlier essay (New Year's Eve): Being without wife or family and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and

favorite.'

b. 11. Norfolk. Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, was housekeeper for more than fifty years at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, the seat of the Plumers, described in the Elia essay, Blakesmoor in H-shire. William Plumer, who lived in another family seat (also in Hertfordshire), and dismantled Blakesware, was still living when Dream-Children was published, and this may have been the reason why Lamb altered the name of the county to Norfolk, the scene of the legend of the children in the wood.

23. Robin Redbreasts, which at the end of the ballad cover the bodies of the murdered children with leaves.

50. tawdry, showy, pretentious and yet worthless. 571. a. 3. Psaltery, the Psalms. Psalter is the more usual and correct form.

5. spread her hands, in amazement at such learn ing.

14. cancer, the actual cause of Mrs. Field's death. 21. apparition of two infants. There was a legend in the Plumer family about the mysterious disap pearance of two children in the seventeenth c tury.

36. the old busts. These were among the things removed by Mr. Plumer from Blakesware.

49. nectarines, a variety of peach thought particularly delicious.

52. forbidden fruit. See Genesis ii, 16-17, and the opening lines of Paradise Lost.

b. 3. basking, lying in the sun; originally a Norse word, meaning to bathe one's self.'

11. impertinent, because the pike eats dace. It is a sluggish fish, while dace are very lively.

20. irrelevant, not to the purpose, not worth attention.

30. mettlesome, high-spirited.

43. a lame-footed boy. It is not known whether Lamb was ever temporarily lame in boyhood. John Lamb's lameness was caused by the fall of a stone in 1796, just before the tragedy which made such a difference in Charles Lamb's life. Writing to Coleridge just afterwards he says: 'I had the whole weight of the family thrown on me; for my brother, little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties, and I was now left alone.' John Lamb was self-indulgent, and in manhood they saw little of each other, but Charles felt his loss severely, as is shown by the letters he wrote at the time. A fuller account of John Lamb, written be fore his death, will be found in the Elia essay, My Relations.

572. a. 13. took off his limb. This is a detail supplied from Lamb's imagination.

22. Alice W--n, Winterton in Lamb's Key, but he adds that it is a feigned name. The real name of the village girl 'with the bright yellow Hertfordshire hair, and eye of watchet hue' was probably Ann Simmons. She seems to have lived in one of the cottages near Blakesware and married Mr. Bartram, or Bartrum, a London pawnbroker. Lamb probably idealized this youthful passion, which, if his 'seven long years' are to be taken literally, must have begun when he was a boy of fourteen. He writes in New Year's Eve: 'I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W-n, than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost.'

25. difficulty, shyness, reserve, reluctance to be

won.

28. representment, re-incarnation.

31. whose, i.e., the first or the second Alice's. 42. might have been, if he had married Alice. 44. Lethe, the river of Hades, which made those who drank of it completely forget their past life. Virgil in the Enid (VI, 703-751) says that after thousands of years the soul, having drunk of Lethe, returns to earth in another body. Some such faroff incarnation is all that is possible for the creations of the dreamer's imagination. 49. Bridget

James Elia, the names given by Lamb to his sister and brother in My Relations. 50. gone for ever. This was the only part of the dream that remained true.

A CHAPTER ON EARS

Lamb exaggerates his lack of appreciation for music in this essay, as in his verses, Free Thoughts on Several Eminent Composers, beginning:

'Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites; for my part
I do not care a farthing candle

For either of them, or for Handel.'

As a matter of fact he was a fervent admirer of Braham, whose singing of Handel's oratorio, Israel in Egypt, is commended in the essay on Imperfect Sympathies. Lamb wrote of this great singer: He was a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel; yet all these elements mixed up so kindly in him that you could not tell which preponderated.'

b. 3. volutes, spiral ornaments at the sides of the capital or top of Ionic and Corinthian pillars. 6. conduits, channels, usually for water, here for sound.

8. the mole has small ears but keen hearing. 9. labyrinthine, winding, intricate.

10. side-intelligencers, side passages, conveying information to the brain.

13. to draw upon assurance, to rely upon impudence.

14. quite unabashed.' Lamb gave the reference in a foot-note in the London Magazine to Pope's Dunciad (II, 147):

'Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe.'

15. upon that article, in that particular.

17. pillory, a frame in which the offender's head and hands were fixed in an uncomfortable and helpless position while he was exposed to the jeers and insults of the mob. This mode of punishment was practised in Great Britain up to the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign. Defoe was subjected to it for his satirical tract, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (see p. 287), but the barbarous practice of cutting off the ears, which often accompanied exposure in the pillory, was in his case not carried out.

23. concourse of sweet sounds. The Merchant of Venice V, i, 83-5.

24. Water parted from the sea.' This and In infancy' are both songs from Arne's opera Artaxerxes, Lamb's First Play.

27. harpsichord, the forerunner of the modern pianoforte.

32. Mrs. S-, not identified beyond the name 'Spinkes' given in Lamb's Key.

42. Alice W—n. See notes to Dream Children above.

56. A., William Ayrton, a well-known musical critic of the time.

573. a. 29. Sostenuto and adagio, Italian musical terms indicating that a passage is to be played in a 'sustained' or 'leisurely manner.

31. Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, names of notes used in singing.

32. conjuring, mysterious, magical. Baralipton, a meaningless word invented by the scholastic philos ophers for the purpose of exercises in logic.

56. con, learn by heart.

b. 1. thrid, thread, follow all the windings of. 2. hieroglyphics, the sacred picture-writings of the ancient Egyptians.

8. follow, with the mind, in the attempt to connect what went before with what comes after.

13. the Enraged Musician, a picture by Hogarth of a musician almost driven mad by street noises. 15. Oratorio, a sacred musical performance without scenery or special dress.

18. pit, the part of the theatre on the ground floor, a little removed from the stage, chiefly frequented by devoted theatre-goers who cannot afford to pay for dearer seats.

19. Laughing Audience, a wonderful picture by Hogarth representing varieties of mirth as seen on different human faces at a play. There is a good description of it in Dowden, Shakspere's Mind and Art, pp. 338-9.

30. Party in a parlor, etc. Quoted from the

first edition of Wordsworth's Peter Bell. The stanza was omitted from subsequent editions, but in the meantime Shelley had taken it for the motto of his Yurlesque Peter Bell the Third.

Latin

33. concertos, elaborate pieces of music for one or more instruments, accompanied by an orchestra. 46. all stops, all punctuation marks, no words. 50. mime, a mimic or actor of farces. mimus. 574. a. 1. book in Patmos. See Revelation x, 10. 3. Burton. Anatomy of Melancholy 1, ii, 2, 6. 6. melancholy given, given or inclined to melancholy.

10. amabilis insania, delightful ecstasy. Horace, Odes III, iv, 5.

11. mentis gratissimus error, a most welcome dea the mind, ception of pleasing hallucination.

Horace, Epistles II, ii, 140.

17. toys, trifles, innocent amusements. 26. habitated, habituated, accustomed.

pudor,

awkward bashfulness.

30. subrusticus Cicero, Epistolae ad Familiares V, xii, first sentence. 44. Nov, Vincent Novello, a well-known organist and composer.

53. abbey, Westminster.

b. 3. dove's wings. Psalm lv, 6: 'Oh that I had wings like a dove!' Barron Field says that Lamb was especially fond of the setting of these words by Kent, the English composer of the previous Mendelssohn's anthem, O for the wings century. of a dove.' was not yet composed.

6. cleanse his mind. Psalm exix. 9: 'Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? An

thems to these words were written by the Engich composers Cook and Boyce.

10. rapt above earth, etc. Walton's Complete Angler I, iv. See p. 212.

17. ' earthly' inthians xv, 48-9.

'heavenly. See 1

Co.

21. German ocean, of music by German composers. 23. Arion (long i), a musician of Lesbos, who according to the Greek legend, when threatened with death by pirates, obtained permission to play one last tune. This attracted a shoal of dolphins, and upon the back of one of these he escaped to land.

24. Tritons, sea gods, half men, half fishes. Mod ein opinion would not agree with Lamb in making Bach and Beethoven subordinate to Haydn and Mozart.

28. at my wit's end. See Psalm cvii, 26–7.

31. dazzle, gleam confusedly. This is a curious use of the word, which is a diminutive of daze.' and means to make or become confused. his, No vello's.

33. tiara, an elaborate head-dress; originally Per sian, now used with special reference to the triple crown worn by the Pope on ceremonial occasions. 34. naked, unadorned, frank.

38. malleus hereticorum, the heretics' hammer, the title of an attack upon Luther and other early Prot

estants.

39. heresiarch, chief of heretics.

41. Marcion, Ebion, Cerinthus, heretics of the first century, each of whom had a view inconsistent with the opinions of the other two.

42. Gog and Magog. See Revelation xx, 8. where they stand for all unbelievers. what not, anything and everything.

44. dissipates the figment, dispels the vision. 45. Lutheran, Protestant. Ben Jonson has a jest ing reference to Luther's beer' (Epigram 101). Ollier in his reminiscences of Lamb says: • Once at a musical party at Leigh Hunt's, being oppresse with what to him was nothing better than a pre longed noise he said "If one only had a

pot of porter, one might get through this." It was procured for him, and he weathered the Mozartian storm.'

47. rationalities of a purer faith, reasonable views of Protestantism.

A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 'The idea of the discovery of roasting pigs I but rowed from my friend Manning,' Lamb says in a leter written six months later. Manning had been in China for some years, and this fact may have sug gested to Lamb his fantastic setting of the story. which in its bald outlines is a commonplace of t erature going back to the third century. With the exception of the name of the Chinese philosoph Confucius (sixth century B. C.), the details are, cl course, Lamb's own invention.

575. a. 11. broiling, exposing to a fierce heat; ruast ing, to a moderate one.

12. the elder brother, of earlier date. 16. mast, beech nuts, used to feed pigs.

18. lubberly, awkward.