I cannot bid you farewell without thanking you for the patience with which you have followed me to the end. I may have seemed sometimes to be talking to you of things that would weigh but as thistle-down in the great business-scales of life. But I have an old opinion, strengthening with years, that it is as important to keep the soul alive as the body: nay, that it is the life of the soul which gives all its value to that of the body. Poetry is a criticism of life only in the sense that it furnishes us with the standard of a more ideal felicity, of calmer pleasures and more majestic pains. I am glad to see that what the understanding would stigmatize as useless is coming back into books written for children, which at one time threatened to become more and more drearily practical and didactic. The fairies are permitted once more to imprint their rings on the tender sward of the child's fancy, and it is the child's fancy that often lives obscurely on to minister solace to the lonelier and less sociable mind of the man. Our nature resents the closing up of the windows on its emotional and imaginative side, and revenges itself as it can. I have observed that many who deny the inspiration of Scripture hasten to redress their balance by giving a reverent credit to the revelations of inspired tables and camp-stools. In a last analysis it may be said that it is to the sense of Wonder that all literature of the Fancy and of the Imagination appeals. I am told that this sense is the survival in us of some savage ancestor of the
age of flint. If so, I am thankful to him for his longevity, or his transmitted nature, whichever it may be. But I have my own suspicion sometimes that the true age of flint is before, and not behind us, an age hardening itself more and more to those subtle influences which ransom our lives from the captivity of the actual, from that dungeon whose warder is the Giant Despair. Yet I am consoled by thinking that the siege of Troy will be remembered when those of Vicksburg and Paris are forgotten. One of the old dramatists, Thomas Heywood, has, without meaning it, set down for us the uses of the poets:
"They cover us with counsel to defend us
From storms without; they polish us within With learning, knowledge, arts, and disciplines; All that is nought and vicious they sweep from us Like dust and cobwebs; our rooms concealed Hang with the costlicst hangings 'bout the walls, Emblems and beauteous symbols pictured round."
American language, foolish talk about Browne, Sir Thomas, quoted, 7, 153.
Ancestor, adopting an, 56.
Browning, his translation of the Aga- memnon, 145.
Appleton, Samuel, anecdote of, 308, Burbage, Richard, the actor, 189. 309.
Areopagitica. See Milton.
Arnold, Matthew, on the grand style, 145-147; his admiration of Homer, 151.
Art of being idle, 10.
Aucassin and Nicolete cited, 137. Autobiographies, unconscious betray- als in, 263.
Bancroft, George, 132 n. Barabas, in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, 225, 230-232. Beaumont, verses to Ben Jonson quoted, 199.
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, 284-296; in- separably linked, 284; contribution of each, 284; individual character- istics, 285, 286; Fletcher's Bonduca quoted, 285; their region that of fancy, 287; their comedies amusing, 287, 288; their poetical quality con- stant and unfailing, 290; their first joint play, 290; their notions of women, 292; authorship of The Turo Noble Kinsmen, 293; looked upon as gentlemen and scholars, 294; compared with Shakespeare, 295. Mayne, Cartwright, and Brome on, 284; Cartwright on Fletcher's wit, 287, 288; Coleridge on, 292. The Elder Brother, 288; Philaster analyzed, 291. Bell, Peter, 111. Biglow, Mr. Hosea, 197. Biographer, the
Burke, compared with Dryden, 4; in- fluence of Milton's prose on, 104. Burleigh, Lord, on polyglottism, 139. Burton, Robert, 190.
Calderon, 191, 192, 209.
Canorousness, the, of Homer's verses, 151.
Capital, importance of having a na- tional, 13, 14.
Celestina, the tragicomedy of, 192, 193. Chalkhill, John, 83, 84.
Change, the condition of our being, 161. Chanson de Roland, 146, 147, 196. CHAPMAN, 262-283; his birth and death, 266; his education, 267; fa- miliar with several languages, 267; imprisoned by King James, 267; joint author with Jonson and Mar- ston, 267; some condemned passages, 267; a man of grave character, 268; his strong friendships, 268, 269; the number of his plays, 269; his char- acters are types, 269; his finest tragedies, 271, 273; his choice of heroes, 274; never knew when to stop, 275; the most sententious of poets, 275; his annotations to the Iliad, 275, 276; incomparable am- plitude in his style, 276; his Eng- lish of the best, 277; his fondness for homespun words, 277; his rela- tions with his brother poets, 279; his use of compound words, 279; his mannerism, 280; as a translator, 280-283; his theory of translation, 281; a poet for intermittent read-
ing, 283 compared with Shake- speare, 119; his appreciation of his mother-tongue, 201; his invoca- tion of Marlowe, 222, 223. See also General Index in Vol. VI. Dryden on, 274, 275; Professor Minto on, 278.
Byron's Tragedy, eulogy of Philip II. in, 268; All Fools, his best comedy, 269, 270; The Gentleman Usher, 271; Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, 271, 277, 278; Tragedy of Chabot, 272, 273.
Charles V., cited, 139. Cinthio, Giraldi, 231.
Classics, Greek and Latin, 133; the true use of, 135.
Coleridge, little influenced by Milton,
104; his sense of harmony and mel- ody, 112; on Shakespeare's style, 114.
Commerce, the influence of, 175, 176. Commonplace, the, within reach of us all, 42.
Common sense, in literary criticism, 112, 113.
Consciousness, national, 197. Copyright, Milton on, 97.
Cotton, Charles, 78; a man of genius, 80; his treatise on fly-fishing, 81. Cowper, his poetry admirable in its own middle-aged way, 2; poet of Nature in domestic moods, 12; on Gray, 25, 38. See also General In- der in Vol. VI. Crashawe, Richard, 72.
Crime, as a subject for tragedy, 245. Critic, the first essential of a, 217. Criticism, subjective, as untrustwor- thy as it is fascinating, 111; com- mon sense in, 112, 113. Crotchet, the nucleus of a sect, 94. Crusaders, unwitting service of the, 176.
Culture, many-sidedness the essence of, 156.
Daniel, Samuel, a master of style, 143, 144; his Defence of Rhyme quoted, 144; also, 206.
Dante, his style, 137.
Dark Lady, the, of Shakespeare's son- nets, 265.
Decameron, price of the, 163. Dekker, Thomas, 205-208; his Old Fortunatus quoted, 205, 207. Democracy, its ideal, 178. Dodsley's Old Plays, 202. Donne, A Valediction forbidding Mourning quoted, 65; and Walton, 64, 65; Walton's elegy on, 64, 68, 69. Drama, origin of the modern, 188; the English, 189; the French, 191; the Spanish, 192-194; the Italian, 194. Dramatists, unskilful plots of the sec- ondary English, 241-243.
Drayton, on Sir Philip Sidney, 214; on Marlowe, 222. Dryden, wonderfully impressive at his best, 3; his æsthetical training es- sentially French, 4; his style gen- tlemanlike, 4; much of his work was job-work, 5; a successful con- jurer with vowels, 5; perfected the English rhymed heroic verse, 6; a well of English undefiled, 42; in- spired by Shakespeare, 121. See also General Inder in Vol. VI. compared with Milton, 3; with Burke, 4.
Flint, the age of, possibly before us, 316.
Floud, Rachel, first wife of Izaak Walton, 66.
Ford, John, his plays chiefly remark- able for sentimentality, 312; a mas- ter of the trick of falsification, 313; his diction hackneyed, 313, 314; compared with Shakespeare, 314. Form, in literature, 142, 144; dra- matic, 239, 240.
French and Italian models, influence of, on early English writers, 138, 139.
Gallatin, Albert, instructor in French at Harvard College, 132 n. Gammer Gurton's Needle, 190. Geology, the gigantic runes of, 166. German tongue, singular effect of learning, 136, 137.
Goethe, on Shakespeare, 125; Faust and Iphigenie contrasted, 142; on the study of the ancients, 149; lack- ing in dramatic power, 209. Goldsmith, on Gray, 32, 33; his ad- mirable style, 145.
Good, the, in men, is immortal, 264. Good taste, an acquisition as well as a gift, 206; a powerful factor of civ- ilization, 217.
Government, the true function of, 181. Grant, James, his Newspaper Press cited, 109.
GRAY, 1-42; a rare combination of genius and dilettanteism, 13; an ar- tist in words and phrases, 14, 31; birth and education, 14; his quarrel with Horace Walpole, 14, 15; a con- scientious traveller, 15; a tint of ef- feminacy in his nature, 15; his im- agination passive, 16, 17; at Cam- bridge, 19; letters quoted, 18, 20, 24-30, 33; his flowering period, 20; his natural indolence, 23; his mel- ancholy, 23, 24; his minute care in matters of expression, 30; the charm of his Elegy, 31, 32; influenced by Pindar, 33; underrated by Johnson and Wordsworth, 34-38; helped him- self from everybody, 38, 39; but the result is always his own, 39; stanza omitted from the Elegy, 40; wrote less and pleased more than any other English poet, 42; a teacher of the art of writing, 42; his use of vowel sounds, 241. See also General Inder in Vol. VI.
Bonstetten on, 16; Dr. Johnson on, 19, 20, 34, 35; Sainte-Beuve on, 22; Cowper on, 25, 38; Wordsworth on, 35-38; Sir James Mackintosh on, 37.
Sonnet on the death of West quoted, 35.
Greene, Robert, 203.
Grimm, Jacob, his opinion of the Eng- lish language, 216.
Hall, Bishop, quoted, 138.
Hamlet, a fat, inconceivable, 189. Hawkins, Rev. William, son-in-law of Walton, 82.
Hawthorne, the Scarlet Letter cited, 209, 210.
Heath, John Francis, 45 n.
Hebrew, believed to have been spoken by God himself, 131.
Herbert, Sir Henry, on two of Massin- ger's plays, 299, 300. Heywood, Thomas, on the uses of the poets, 316.
Historian, what constitutes the tri- umph of an, 59.
Homer, the canorousness of his verses, 151. Hooker, Richard, 72.
Horace and Malherbe compared, 41. Hugo, Victor, compared with John Webster, 260.
Humor, in Shakespeare and Cervantes, 123; distinguished from mere fun, 288.
Iliad, power of the, 143. Imagination, relation between it and Form, 240.
Indifference of men of the eighteenth century, 8-11.
Indolence, a master of casuistry, 20. Interludes, the, training-schools for actors, 189; not easy to read, 190. Ireland, his clumsy forgery of Vorti- gern, 118.
Italian and French sources drawn from by early English writers, 138, 139.
Johnson, Dr., on the rupture between Gray and Walpole, 14; criticisms of Gray, 19, 34; his treatment of Lyci- das, 113.
Jonson, Ben, his theory of dramatic construction, 241, 242. Jourdain, M., 188.
Kaiser, Rothbart, 50. Keats, 116.
Ken, Anne, second wife of Izaak Wal- ton, 66.
Landor, Robert, his Fountain of Are- thusa, 53, 54. LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE, SOME LET- TERS OF, 43-56.
Landor, his works highly esteemed by Emerson, 43; his stately eloquence, 44; theatrical and uppish, 45, 46; his fondness for writing Latin verse, 46; his characters are images rather than persons, 47; sued for libel, 47; his remoteness from the real world, 47, 48; nothing in him at second hand, 48; his English pure, harmo- nious, and sonorous, 48; some of his shorter poems perfect, 49; his poli- tics, 49; his books good for reading aloud, 50; his biography by Forster, 50, 52; collected edition of his works, 50; Lowell's only meeting with, 50; his personal appearance, 51; Car- lyle's opinion of, 51, 52; his Fieso- lan villa, 52; story of his throwing his cook out of a window, 52; his extravagant opinion of Prince Louis Napoleon, 53; his Merino sheep "stolen" by George III., 53; mem- ory and imagination mixed in him, 53; his enthusiasm over his bro- ther's Fountain of Arethusa, 54; his judgment of Wordsworth, 54; his adoption of ancestors, 55. See also General Index in Vol. VI. Imaginary Conversations, 45, 47.
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