The study of any choral lyric, properly so called, and designed to be sung and otherwise performed by a group of executants on a specific public occasion, must be considerably hampered when its original musical setting is not at hand. Indeed the appreciation of such a poem as Alexander's Feast can be only partial at best if the text is read with the comparatively simple apparatus that one usually brings to bear upon a sonnet by Sidney. When the music to a choral ode was no afterthought but rather an integral part of the whole performance, the divorcement of the words from their setting results in an inevitable loss of understanding and of proper response. The ideal way to absorb any choral lyric, whether it be by Pindar, the author of the Book of Judges, or Dryden, would be to hear, if not to participate in, the complex display of sound through which its author intended it to be proclaimed. And since one cannot be present at the original performance of any save contemporary compositions of the kind, it becomes imperative to reconstruct, through the vigorous use of both study and imagination, the original circumstances and the original music which accompanied the poem.

An Understanding of the purposes and the popularity of Young's Night Thoughts is possible only through a realization of their relation to contemporary currents of thought. For the most part critics have confined their attention to the so-called personal element and the treatment of the theme of death, and have neglected perhaps the most outstanding feature of the Night Thoughts, the interest in Christian apologetics. Though the nine poems reveal a shift in emphasis and purpose—the first five, of 459, 694, 536, 842, and 1068 lines respectively, chiefly concerned with moral reflections on life and death, and the last four, of 819, 1480, 1417, and 2434 lines, almost wholly devoted to apologetics—there is throughout a fairly definite effort to defend one phase or other of religion. This rationalistic defence of religion places the poems in the current of apologetic literature so outstanding in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Analysis of Young's aims and arguments will show to what extent he is following those of the outstanding defenders of religion and demonstrate that the Night Thoughts are to be considered as largely an expression of contemporary apologetics.

James Thomson's first contact with Newtonian philosophy was as a student at the University of Edinburgh between 1715 and 1725. Newtonianism had been first introduced there by David Gregory, who, upon graduation in 1683, was appointed Professor of Mathematics. William Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge, says that it was to one of Gregory's papers that he owed his conversion to Newton's philosophy. When David Gregory accepted the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford in 1691, he was succeeded at Edinburgh by his brother, James Gregory, another Newtonian. In 1725, on the recommendation of Newton himself, Colin Maclaurin was appointed to assist James Gregory at Edinburgh; thus, from 1683 on, Newtonianism was firmly established in the University of Edinburgh.

The essay “On the Ancient Metrical Romances,” introduced into the third volume of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), is an important landmark in the modern revival of interest in the medieval romances. Through the earlier part of the eighteenth century the infrequent comments on the romances had been incidental to something else (chivalry, for a conspicuous example) or had been concerned with theories, chiefly of origin, based on very little evidence. Of the romances themselves, little was known, but they were generally considered barbarous, uncultivated, and infantile. But in Percy's essay the subject is treated with some attempt at completeness, and includes not merely theories about their origin (though these are present) but a discussion of the romances themselves. Upon scrutiny, Percy's knowledge of the subject is found to be large, much larger than has been generally suspected, and toward the material he is seen to display a hesitating and diffident enthusiasm manifestly held in check by the disapproval of the current taste. A summary of his essay follows:

The purpose of this study is to set forth the reaction that occurred in novelistic form, and in novels, both in prefaces and in the body of the works, to melodramatic sentimentality in the English novel between 1796–1830. The term melodramatic sentimentality is subject to objection. It includes those things most often reacted to: the romantic, the sentimental, the gothic—in fact, all the unrealistic and unnatural elements that had been incorporated into the novel. But it does not include those novels which were unrealistic because their authors were unfamiliar with their subject matter.

The complexity of Wordsworth's spiritual troubles during the critical summer of 1793 and the subtlety of his examination of his mind at the time should be excuse enough for another attempt to bring all the aspects of the truth together. The attempt affects the reading of so characteristic and popular a poem as the Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey. These Lines are as obviously autobiographical as the Prelude, and passages in each are admittedly parallel evidence of certain aspects of the poet's development. When, however, we compare the passages which refer to the period of the first visit to Tintern Abbey, we find certain discrepancies which not even the most recent students of Wordsworth's life have been able to reconcile. The contrast between his attitude towards Nature in 1793 and his attitude towards Nature in 1798, which is the substance of the Lines, does not correspond in all particulars with the contrast made in the Prelude between these two periods. Consequently the familiar passage in the Lines is differently interpreted by Wordsworth's readers. If it is to be read as authentic biography, it needs more careful harmonizing with the Prelude. If, on the other hand, such a harmony cannot be made, the shorter poem may have to be accepted as a poem symbolizing two states of mind without possessing autobiographical accuracy. While the poem would thereby lose nothing, biography would gain something in strict truth.

Because of their later apportionment among “Poems founded on the Affections” and “Poems of the Imagination” Wordsworth's “Lucy” lyrics are usually grouped as follows:

I. “Strange fits of passion have I known”
II. “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”
III. “I travelled among unknown men”
IV. “Three years she grew in sun and shower”
V. “A slumber did my spirit seal”

That two boys of seventeen should have welcomed the most important early book of the romantic movement in England is remarkable, a curiosity of literature. The letters of Thomas De Quincey and John Wilson, in praise of the Lyrical Ballads, probably afforded Wordsworth greater pleasure in 1802 and 1803 than any commendation outside of his immediate circle.

Although printed forty years ago in a once well-known textbook, certain marginalia written by Coleridge in a copy of Descartes' Opera Philosophica have never, I believe, been the subject of any comment. They are, however, of considerable interest, aside from that of a sentimental kind, for of four notations—one a mere reference for later transcription—two have relationship, hitherto unnoticed as far as I am aware, with a paragraph in the Biographia Literaria, and the reference is to a passage part of which was quoted as a volume motto in The Friend.

The early thinking of both Wordsworth and Coleridge centered about one idea which was, if not the psychological origin, at least the logical culmination of their humanitarian, esthetic, and religious doctrines. This notion we may designate as the theory of imaginative love. We find this hidden in the allegory of the Ancient Mariner and more clearly stated in the philosophical passages of The Prelude. It contains the explanation which Wordsworth offers of the spiritual efficacy of “natural piety” and of his mystical love of beauty. It is, in short, the keystone of that heroic system of natural religion which the two poets constructed during the period of mutually inspiring companionship when they walked together upon “Quantock's airy ridge.” They believed that creative and appreciative imagination engenders a love of nature and a love of man, and they did not hesitate to affirm that this love is a profoundly religious experience which owes its power to the mystical communion with a cosmic spirit. This last belief was essentially a faith in an animate Nature and it served them both as the justification of their worship of woodlands and hillsides from which they drew such spiritual strength. This idea, however, was not by any means a mere doctrine with which they defended their peculiar religious position; it hovered over their thinking, “a master o'er a slave,” and found expression again and again in their most successful utterances.

From the notice in the Monthly Review in 1816 to the most recent investigations Alastor has remained an enigma to Shelley's critics. A century of criticism has done little to throw light on the mystery. The contemporary notice in the Monthly Review attributes the confusion of Alastor to the influence of Wordsworth:

More than one critic has recalled the passage in Robertson's History of America which probably inspired the final simile of Keats's most famous sonnet. It was in September, 1513. Balboa and his men had been struggling for twenty days across the sixty miles of forest and mountain that made the isthmus of Darien, having been obliged to battle with the natives as well as with torrents, swamps, and precipices. Many of the men were sick and ready to give up.

The friendship between John Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon is one chapter in the life of the poet which has never been satisfactorily written. A biography, like a novel, must needs have a villain; and in Haydon, Keats's biographers have one ready made. He was an egoist, a fanatic, and—worst of all—a failure; and surely, one is likely to think, whenever Haydon and Keats disagreed, Keats must have been right. The fact is that Keats and Haydon were intimate friends during the greater part of Keats's active creative life, and that each held the other, as an artist, in the highest regard. The purpose of the present study is to examine in some detail the course of this friendship and tentatively evaluate the importance of the influence of the painter on the poet.

One of the longest established conventions in English literature is that of giving self-interpreting names to characters. Scores of instances might be drawn from morality plays, Elizabethan and Restoration drama, with its Justice Greedys and Lovelesses, and eighteenth-century novels and plays, with their Slipslops and Lydia Languishes. During Scott's day George Colman the Younger, in his The Heir at Law, 1808, entertained audiences with Stedfasts and Homespuns and references to Lawyer Ferret, Lady Littlefigure, Lord Sponge, Mrs. Holdbank, Lady Betty Pillory, the Hon. Mrs. Cheatwell, Lord Spindle, Master Drumstick, Mrs. Sudds, Old Latitat (a lawyer, of course), Lord Loggerhead, Lord Docktail, Twist, and Young Vats (the beau brewer). Later in the century, Dickens peopled his pages with Mr. Glibs, Surgeon Slashers, and Professor Wheezys; but, as most of his names were chosen solely for their comicality, they lack suggestive variety. Thackeray's social satire is at times unreal because of an excessive use of telltale soubriquets; this is particularly true of The Book of Snobs with its infinity of Lord and Lady Snobbingtons. George Eliot exhibits little subtlety in this field; perhaps the most obvious instances are those of Scrag Whale, an explorer, Greenland Grampus, Proteus Merman, and Professor Sperm N. Whale in Theophrastus Such. The convention has even survived to the present day, though with somewhat impaired vitality. Mr. Burthen, a carrier, Mr. Bulge, a wine merchant, Dr. Chestman, Hardman, a blacksmith, Louisa Menlove, Rootle, a dentist, Tipman, a valet, and Parson Billy Toogood appear in Hardy's novels; and the Earl of Frogs, Gosling, an apprentice, Grubb, Lady Hammergallow, Mrs. Jabber, and Mrs. Montague Pangs in those of H. G. Wells.

Few English poets have been more faithful to their literary loves than Swinburne. His devotion to Landor, his passion for the Elizabethan drama, his adoration of Hugo are well-known illustrations of this truism. Not so familiar, but none the less genuine, was his admiration of the popular ballads. John Addington Symonds reports that Swinburne once purposed to translate them into French for Hugo. The poet cherished the memory of an old gamekeeper's praise of his youthful verses as being worthy of comparison with the ballads. Border minstrelsy was a topic often discussed at The Pines. Pride of ancestry and love of country and its traditions—feelings which swayed both Scott and Swinburne—led the latter to criticize his beloved predecessor for giving to “one of the most valuable books in our language” the “mendacious title” of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

A Notable contribution to the already imposing mass of critical material on Rubén Darío has recently appeared in the form of Dr. Arturo Torres-Ríoseco's Rubén Darío: casticismo y americanismo de su obra. Its special interest is the author's endeavor to combat two unfortunate tendencies evident in much of the critical material on Darío: (1) that of ascribing an undue share in the poet's artistic novelties to French influence, and (2) that of considering as “innovations” by Darío details of technique which he really resurrected, with little or no change, from earlier Spanish poetry. In cases where excess of zeal has led other critics into the errors above mentioned, Mr. Torres' program of destruction has been a real contribution to truth. It seems to the present writer, however, that a similar excess of zeal for the “castizo” has led the Chilean scholar into errors at least as great as those he ascribes to others. The above remarks apply particularly to Mr. Torres' chapter on “Metrical Resurrections and Innovations,” to the consideration of which the present article is limited.

Zur Wiedergabe von Worten, Gedanken und Gefühlen seiner Personen bedient sich der moderne Erzähler der direkten Rede (D), der indirekten Rede (I), der erlebten Rede (E) oder des Monologs (M). Während Form und Bedeutung von D und I allgemein bekannt sind, haben die beiden letzten Arten der Rededarstellung, E und M, erst in jüngerer Zeit die Aufmerksamkeit der Grammatiker und Stilisten auf sich gezogen.

Needless to say, it is not with an American agrarian revolt of the end of last century, nor with the fortunes of a German political party that this paper is concerned, but rather with that fruitful and significant grouping of a score or more of contemporary French novelists under the banner of a common conception of the novel, its aims and appropriate media. If the name “Populism” is misleading because of certain political implications, one can at least be thankful that André Thérive and Léon Lemonnier in the consultations that preceded the launching of the new school a little over three years ago rejected labels such as “humilism” and “demotism” which might have proved even more puzzling.