... buds and bells, To travel through the pathless air, Or who consigned with frugal care To the pure keeping of those waxen cells, Where, She--a valiant soldier if need were-- MS. ] [Footnote 246: 1820. ... wintry ... MS. ] [Footnote 247: 1820. ... by this tempting flower Observe ... MS. ] [Footnote 248: 1820. ... majesty. MS. ] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote CI: Compare George Eliot's "O may I join the choir invisible" (_Poems_, p. 240).--ED.] [Footnote CJ: See Pliny's _Historia Naturalis_, book xi. chap. 1.--ED.] [Footnote CK: The first eight lines of stanza iii. were added in the edition of 1836; and in that of 1832 stanzas ii. and iii. were included in a single one. They were again separated in 1836.--ED.] [Footnote CL: Urania (the heavenly muse) was usually represented as crowned with stars, and holding a globe in her hand; while Clio was crowned with laurel.--ED.] ODE TO LYCORIS MAY, 1817 Composed 1817.--Published 1820 [The discerning reader--who is aware that in the poem of _Ellen Irwin_ I was desirous of throwing the reader at once out of the old ballad, so as if possible, to preclude a comparison between that mode of dealing with the subject and the mode I meant to adopt--may here perhaps perceive that this poem originated in the four last lines of the first stanza. Those specks of snow, reflected in the lake and so transferred, as it were, to the subaqueous sky, reminded me of the swans which the fancy of the ancient classic poets yoked to the car of Venus. Hence the tenor of the whole first stanza, and the name of Lycoris, which--with some readers who think my theology and classical allusion too far fetched and therefore more or less unnatural and affected--will tend to unrealise the sentiment that pervades these verses. But surely one who has written so much in verse as I have done may be allowed to retrace his steps in the regions of fancy which delighted him in his boyhood, when he first became acquainted with the Greek and Roman poets. Before I read Virgil I was so strongly attached to Ovid, whose _Metamorphoses_ I read at school, that I was quite in a passion whenever I found him, in books of criticism, placed below Virgil. As to Homer, I was never weary of travelling over the scenes through which he led me. Classical literature affected me by its own beauty. But the truths of Scripture having been entrusted to the dead languages, and these fountains having recently been laid open at the Reformation, an importance and a sanctity were at that period attached to classical literature that extended, as is obvious in Milton's _Lycidas_ for example, both to its spirit and form in a degree that can never be revived. No doubt the hacknied and