Como es sabido, Antonio Machado discurre sobre innumerables temas divinos y prof anos por boca de su sabio y occurrente profesor de Retórica, Juan de Mairena. Este professor apócrifo no se cansa de repetir que la poesía es un arte temporal.

In an era when many English writers were becoming identified with a single publisher, Walter Savage Landor distinguished himself by the singularity of dealing with perhaps more publishers than any other writer in English literature. Not taking into account the editors of periodicals, Landor's separate volumes (sometimes, to be sure, mere pamphlets) made their appearance from the houses of at least twenty-eight publishers in the seventy years of his productivity. The story of his relations with his publishers, then, will obviously not be a simple one, and yet it throws a great deal of light both on Landor himself and on the condition of his text.

In the studies devoted to the literary growth of Novalis the roots that lower into the realm of Shakespearean art and thought have strangely been overlooked. Such omission is not entirely unwarranted in view of the seeming disparity in substance and character between the works of the two poets. And yet the assumption that Novalis should have remained impervious to the “fine frenzy” of Shakespeare, when all of his friends and literary companions came under the spell of it, must give us pause. Literary “influences” do not always proceed along the path of material evidence; they are forces that often come to light in forms and directions which we least expect. A poet as sensitive and unpredictable as Novalis is no exception; he strove to be unique and master of his own existence and style, although the evidence shows that the poetic art of Shakespeare vitally contributed to the fruition of the Hymnen an die Nacht.

Chievrefueil,the shortest and perhaps the most charming of the lays by Marie de France, has troubled critics because, unlike her other poems, it seems to lack clarity. Is it not fair to assume, however, that in this instance the usual limpidity and forthrightness of Marie's narrative style may have been clouded by her modern interpreters, rather than by Marie herself? I hope to show that to her mediaeval audience the lovely lines of Chievrefueil presented no difficulties whatsoever, needed no esoteric subtleties for their understanding, and that their Old Norse translator as well as the scribes of both our surviving manuscripts readily comprehended Marie's lucid phrases.

Coleridge's interest in philology, more specifically in English linguistics, was one manifestation—by no means the least important—of his amazing myriad-mindedness. His lectures, essays, notes, and reported conversations abound with allusions, comments, and speculations on the nature and problems of language in general and of English in particular; and his experiments in vocabulary bear additional testimony to his interest in the subject. Although increasing attention has recently been paid to this aspect of his genius, a systematic study of the subject awaits the publication of a definitive edition of his works. Nevertheless, an attempt might be made to examine certain limited phases of his interest in linguistics, particularly his theories about the nature and development of language, his observations on the character of English, and his own remarkable contributions to the enrichment of its vocabulary.

Emerson saw in the art of poetry a process veiled in mystery, and no one fully acquainted with his writings is unaware of the manifold ways in which Emerson approached that mystery in an attempt to explain it. As early as 1838, he began what he hoped would be a long poem on the poet and his art. Occasionally returning to the composition over a period of some years, in the end he left only fragments of his original plan. The essay entitled “The Poet”, published in 1844, integrated more fully many of the conclusions to which Emerson had come on the subject. But still he was apparently unsatisfied. Further early experiments in suggesting the function of the poet are revealed in four poems in the 1847 collection of verses. In “The Problem”, “Saadi”, and “Bacchus” Emerson viewed in different ways the origin of the artist's and poet's power. And in the last poem, entitled “Merlin”, he turned back, for the embodiment of the ideal poet, to the ancient bard.

While some of the most interesting questions regarding the early history of the Canterbury Tales will undoubtedly never be settled, it seems equally certain that in the full corpus of variants prepared by Professors Manly and Rickert evidence lies embedded which little by little should add to our understanding of the conditions in which the first manuscripts were prepared, hence, possibly, lead to a clearer picture of the situation when Chaucer died. The present article will deal with the lost ancestor of the manuscript family which Dr. Manly and Dr. Rickert have called group d, that ancestor to be designated hereafter as √d. Section I will be devoted to the origin of the material used in the preparation of √d; Section II to the √d editor's handling of that material.

Johann Caspar Lavater is one of the three writers personally known to Goethe whose names are mentioned most often in Dichtung und Wahrheit. The other two are Herder and Merck: Herder, whose stimulating influence on Goethe may be easily discerned in countless passages of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and whose Vont Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele has been suggested “as a more probable (and more systematic) source of psychological information for Goethe than the vague ‘Sturm-und-Drang-Psychologie’ sometimes indicated as the framework of the novel”; Merck—“dieser eigne Mann, der auf mein Leben den größten Einfluß gehabt”, Goethe declares in Dichtung und Wahrheit—who in 1772 played a rôle in Goethe's life very like that of the far blinder and less effectual Wilhelm in the story of Werther, and who in 1774 insisted that Goethe submit Die Leiden des jungen Werthers for publication without making any revisions in the manuscript.

A. W. Pollard, in his brief bibliographical introduction to the Macmillan two-volume edition of Sterne (1924), has written: “Tristram Shandy is full of surprises, and not the least remarkable of them is the fact that its publication was spread over eight years, thus further accentuating the very leisurely rate of progress of the story itself.” I can attest to many surprises that await the man who looks into the history of the publication of this novel; and these notes—although they solve none of the vexing bibliographical problems—are designed to give a loosening tug to some of these knots. A brief history of the publication of Tristram Shandy runs:

Malcolm El Win'S treatment of Charles Reade's documentary method is for the most part sound, yet his suggested sources for the “flood scenes” of Put Yourself in His Place (1870) are incomplete and misleading. While he is correct in saying that Reade “enacted his principal researches at Sheffield”, and that “the scene of the novel [Sheffield] is thinly disguised under the name of Hillsborough”, he is wrong in assuming that Reade derived his “flood scenes” from the materials included in one of his notebooks.

Recent studies have made evident the profound effect of natural science, especially of physics and astronomy, upon English neo-classical literature. In several of these studies, it has been remarked that Matthew Prior's writings contain many passages referring to scientific doctrines and manifesting an unusual attitude toward them. There has been, however, no thorough investigation of the rôle played by the new science in Prior's thought.

Escasas son las noticias que alcanzamos a recoger de la vida de Diego de Morlanes. Perteneció a una familia distinguida de juristas zaragozanos. El más famoso de ellos fué el abuelo de nuestro poeta, Micer Diego de Morlanes, autor de importantes obras de jurisprudencia. El viejo Morlanes dejó dos hijos: Bartolomé y Agustín. El primero se dedicó a la iglesia; el segundo siguió las huellas de su padre en la magistratura. Este fué el padre del autor del romance que hoy sacamos a luz. Ocuparon todos ellos cargos de importancia en la administración civil del reinó de Aragon. El joven Morlanes murió un “sábado 26 de marzo de 1633, siendo consejero civil de Aragón.”

In spite of the wide range of topics and techniques in the poetry of Tennyson, a reader is apt to become aware of certain recurrences which eventually assume an air of familiarity. The present study deals with one of the most persistent of these recurrences, which is especially significant because of a process of change that affected it over a period of years, symptomatic of a gradual shift in the poet's outlook.

Giraut de Bornelh liked to discuss the question of whether a poet should make the products of his muse understandable to everybody (trobar leu), or adhere to a more obscure, hermetic type of poetry accessible only to a few adepts (trobar clus). In none of his poems is he so positive about the preferability of a simple style as in the well-known tenso with Linhaure and the song A penas sai comensar (Gr. 242,11; ed. Kolsen, No. 4). It is probably the latter that caused his princely interlocutor to start a poetical controversy on this topic with the troubadour, the above-named tenso. In fact, three stanzas of Gr. 242,11 deal with this problem. It is the third of them that interests us here, because it contains the phrase ab so que. It runs thus in Kolsen's edition:

Ja, pos volrai clus trobar,
no cut aver man parer
3 ab so que ben ai mester
a far una leu chanso;
qu'eu cut c'atretan grans sens
6 es, qui sap razo gardar,
com los motz entrebeschar.