“There’s something in a flying horse,
Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, stanza I
There’s something in a huge balloon;
But through the clouds I’ll never float
Until I have a little Boat,
Shaped like the crescent-moon.”
—Editor ↩
For Medea’s escape from the wrath of Jason,
“Titaniacis ablata draconibus,”
see Ovid., Met., VII 398
—Editor ↩
In his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” to his “Poems” of 1815, Wordsworth, commenting on a passage on Night in Dryden’s Indian Emperor, says,
“Dryden’s lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless. … The verses of Dryden once celebrated are forgotten.”
He is not passing any general criticism on “him who drew ‘Achitophel.’ ” In a letter to Sir Walter Scott (November 7, 1805), then engaged on his great edition of Dryden’s Works, he admits that Dryden is not “as a poet any great favourite of mine. I admire his talents and genius highly, but he is not a poetical genius. The only qualities I can find in Dryden that are essentially poetical, are a certain ardour and impetuosity of mind, with an excellent ear” (Life of Wordsworth, by W. Knight, 1889, II 26–29). Scott may have remarked on Wordsworth’s estimate of Dryden in conversation with Byron. —Editor ↩
While swung the signal from the sacred tower.
—[MS.]
Are not these pretty stanzas?—some folks say—
—[MS.]
Downright in print—.
Compare Coleridge’s “Lines to Nature,” which were published in the Morning Herald, in 1815, but must have been unknown to Byron—
“So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be.”
—Editor ↩
“As early as the fifth or sixth century of the Christian era, the port of Augustus was converted into pleasant orchards, and a lovely grove of pines covered the ground where the Roman fleet once rode at anchor. … This advantageous situation was fortified by art and labour, and in the twentieth year of his age, the Emperor of the West … retired to … the walls and morasses of Ravenna.”
—Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, 1825, II 244, 245
—Editor ↩
“The first time I had a conversation with Lord Byron on the subject of religion was at Ravenna, my native country, in 1820, while we were riding on horseback in an extensive solitary wood of pines. The scene invited to religious meditation. It was a fine day in spring. ‘How,’ he said, ‘raising our eyes to heaven, or directing them to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of God?—or how, turning them to what is within us, can we doubt that there is something more noble and durable than the clay of which we are formed?’ ”
—Count Gamba
—Editor ↩
If the Pineta of Ravenna, bois funèbre, invited Byron “to religious meditation,” the mental picture of the “spectre huntsman” pursuing his eternal vengeance on “the inexorable dame”—“that fatal she,” who had mocked his woes—must have set in motion another train of thought. Such lines as these would “speak comfortably” to him—
“Because she deem’d I well deserved to die,
Dryden’s “Theodore and Honoria” (sub fine)
And made a merit of her cruelty, …
Mine is the ungrateful maid by heaven design’d:
Mercy she would not give, nor mercy shall she find.”
“By her example warn’d, the rest beware;
More easy, less imperious, were the fair;
And that one hunting, which the Devil design’d
For one fair female, lost him half the kind.”
—Editor ↩
Εσπερε παντα φερεις
Φερεις οινον—φερεις αιγα
Φερεις ματερι παιδα.
Fragment of Sappho
[Ϝέσπερε, πάντα φέρων, ὅσα φαίνολις ἐσκέδασ’ αὔως·
Φέρεις οἴν φέρεις αἶγα, Φέρεις ἄπυ ματέρι παῖδα.
Sappho, Memoir, Text, by Henry Thornton Wharton, 1895, p. 136
“Evening, all things thou bringest
J. A. Symonds
Which dawn spread apart from each other;
The lamb and the kid thou bringest,
Thou bringest the boy to his mother.”
Compare Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After”—
“Hesper, whom the poet call’d the Bringer home of all good things.”]
“Era già l’ora che volge il disio
Ai naviganti, e intenerisce il cuore;
Lo di ch’ han detto ai dolci amici addio;
E che lo nuovo peregrin’ damore
Punge, se ode squilla di lontano,
Che paia il giorno pianger che si more.”
Dante’s Purgatory, canto VIII, lines 1–6
This last line is the first of Gray’s Elegy, taken by him without acknowledgment. ↩
See Suetonius for this fact.
[“The public joy was so great upon the occasion of his death, that the common people ran up and down with caps upon their heads. And yet there were some, who for a long time trimmed up his tomb with spring and summer flowers, and, one while, placed his image upon his rostra dressed up in state robes, another while published proclamations in his name, as if he was yet alive, and would shortly come to Rome again, with a vengeance to all his enemies.”
—De XII Caes., lib. VI cap. LVII]
But I’m digressing—what on earth have Nero
—[MS.]
And Wordsworth—both poetical buffoons, etc.
See De Poetica, cap. XXIV. See, too, the Preface to Dryden’s “Dedication” of the Aeneis (Works of John Dryden, 1821, XIV 130–134). Dryden is said to have derived his knowledge of Aristotle from Dacier’s translation, and it is probable that Byron derived his from Dryden. See letter to Hodgson (Letters, 1891, V 284), in which he quotes Aristotle as quoted in Johnson’s Life of Dryden. —Editor ↩
“Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down,
Paradise Lost, IV 40, 41
Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King.”
—Editor ↩
“Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy:
In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour,
The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow’r;
With listless eyes the dotard views the store,
He views, and wonders
