197 208 This beautiful lyric, printed in 1783, seems to anticipate in its imaginative music that return to our great early age of song, which in Blake's own lifetime was to prove,--how gloriously! that the English Muses had resumed their 'ancient melody':--Keats, Shelley, Byron,--he overlived them all. 199 210 _stout Cortez_: History would here suggest _Balbóa_: (A.T.) It may be noticed, that to find in Chapman's Homer the 'pure serene' of the original, the reader must bring with him the imagination of the youthful poet;--he must be 'a Greek himself,' as Shelley finely said of Keats. 202 212 The most tender and true of Byron's smaller poems. 203 213 This poem exemplifies the peculiar skill with which Scott employs proper names:--a rarely misleading sign of true poetical genius. 213 226 Simple as _Lucy Gray_ seems, a mere narrative of what 'has been, and may be again,' yet every touch in the child's picture is marked by the deepest and purest ideal character. Hence, pathetic as the situation is, this is not strictly a pathetic poem, such as Wordsworth gives us in 221, Lamb in 264, and Scott in his _Maid of Neidpath_,--'almost more pathetic,' as Tennyson once remarked, 'than a man has the right to be.' And Lyte's lovely stanzas (224) suggest, perhaps, the same remark. 222 235 In this and in other instances the addition (or the change) of a Title has been risked, in hope that the aim of the piece following may be grasped more clearly and immediately. 228 242 This beautiful Sonnet was the last word of a youth, in whom, if the fulfilment may ever safely be prophesied from the promise, England lost one of the most rarely gifted in the long roll of her poets. Shakespeare and Milton, had their lives been closed at twenty-five, would (so far as we know) have left poems of less excellence and hope than the youth who, from the petty school and the London surgery, passed at once to a place with them of 'high collateral glory.' 230 245 It is impossible not to regret that Moore has written so little in this sweet and genuinely national style. 231 246 A masterly example of Byron's command of strong thought and close reasoning in verse:--as the next is equally characteristic of Shelley's wayward intensity. 240 253 Bonnivard, a Genevese, was imprisoned by the Duke of Savoy in Chillon on the lake of Geneva for his courageous defence of his country against the tyranny with which Piedmont threatened it during the first half of the Seventeenth century.--This noble Sonnet is worthy to stand near Milton's on the Vaudois massacre. 241 254 Switzerland was usurped by the French under Napoleon in 1800: Venice in 1797 (255). 243 259 This battle was fought Dec. 2, 1800, between the Austrians under Archduke John and the French under Moreau, in a forest near Munich. _Hohen Linden_ means _High Limetrees_.