Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ... NOTES ON THE POEMS. ODE ON THE SPRING. Gray wrote this Ode at Stoke in June, 1742. He sent it to his school friend, Richard West, not knowing that West's death had already occurred on the first of June. The Ode was first published in 1748, in Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands, with no signature; it next appeared in the folio 01753Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. Gray added the footnotes in the edition of his Poems in 1768. Mason said that Gray originally gave the title of A7oontide to this Ode; and Mr. Gosse, Gray's Works, I, 4, notes that in a copy of the poem, in Gray's handwriting, preserved at Pembroke College, the title is: Noon-tide. An Ode. Mason said that Gray probably meant to write two companion pieces, Morning and Evening. lie suggested that the Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude, beginning "Now the golden Morn aloft" may have been intended for the Morning ode, and the Elegy for the Evening. These conjectures are ingenious, whether true or not. i. Hours. The Horae, goddesses of the changes of the seasons. Cf. Comus, 986: "The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours." Mitford notes that the Hours are joined with Aphrodite in the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (5) and that to Apollo (194-5) and are made part of her train in Hesiod (Works and Days, 75). 3. Disclose. Open, expand. Cf. "The canker galls the infants of the spring, Too oft before their buttons r'.. buds be disclosed." Hamlet, i, 2, 39-40. 5. The Attic Warbler. The Nightingale. This bird is very common in Attica. Philomela, daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, was supposed to have been changed into a nightingale.--Wakefield compares Milton, Par. Reg., iv, 245: "Where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the...