And such wert thou! Look, how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well-turnèd and true filèd lines, In each of which he seems to shake a lance, As brandished at the eyes of ignorance. Sweet Swan of Avon!{10} what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Eliza and our James! But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere{11} Advanced, and made a constellation there! Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage, Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night, And despairs day but for thy volume's light. NOTES. This poem was prefixed to the first folio edition of Shakespeare, 1623, and is also printed in Ben Jonson's "Underwoods." 1. The meaning of these two lines would seem to be: "To show that I am not envious, Shakespeare, of thy name, I thus write fully of thy works and fame." 2. =seeliest.= Silliest, simplest. From A.-S. _saelig_, foolish. See note 23, page 190. 3. In allusion to W. Basse's elegy on Shakespeare, beginning: "Renownèd Spenser, lie a thought more nigh To learned Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lie A little nearer Spenser, to make room For Shakespear in your threefold, fourfold tomb." 4. =Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe.= Contemporaries of Shakespeare. See Biographical Dictionary. 5. =Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.= The founders of the Greek tragical drama. 6. =Pacuvius, Accius.= Celebrated Roman tragic poets. =him of Cordova.= Seneca, the great rhetorician, was born at Cordova, in Spain, B.C. 61. 7. =socks were on.= The socks indicated comedy, and the buskins tragedy. Compare Milton's "L'Allegro," 131: "Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-note wild." Also, "Il Penseroso," 97. See note on _buskin_, page 139. 8. =Aristophanes, Terence, Plautus.= Ancient writers of comedy. 9. =that he.= That man. 10. =Swan of Avon.= So Cowper calls Virgil "the Mantuan swan." 11. =hemisphere.= The celestial hemisphere. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.