syllable express the bird's pulsing flight through the air; but the feet accented on the last syllable express his continued ascent). (See XCVIII.) IV. Blithe, profuse, melody, chant, vaunt, harmonious. V. "Wert" (1) rhymes with "heart." (In England, the tendency is to pronounce er just as we pronounce ar: clerk is pronounced like clark; sergeant like sargeant, even with us.) "That from heaven, or near it "—is the alternative, “or near it," poetical, or the reverse? (The hyperbole of "from heaven" is burlesqued by the addition; it is as though one should say, “The wild waves roll in billows as high as the sky, or within a few feet of it.") Higher still, and higher," does not continue the first stanza, but describes the first ascent of the lark. "Sunken sun" is generally used to mean the sun that has set; here it may mean the sun not yet risen, and "o'er which clouds are brightening." "Float and run "-is" run a good word to describe the flight of a bird? Note the beautiful simile in the 5th stanza; it suggests the simile of Homer in the 8th book of the "Iliad" (Tennyson's translation): As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars Note the contrast of art and like (i. e., of being and seeming) in 6th stanza. Stanza 7 is the climax of the similes, and is really an inverted simile, for it is rather the rhapsody of the lark that illustrates the poetic inspiration than the contrary. Ordinarily and properly the hidden and spiritual should be illustrated by the visible and material; the light of thought, the inspiration of the poet, could be illustrated through the simile that compared it with the song of a lark; but Shelley attempts to illustrate the lark song by comparing it with the inspiration of a poet-i. e., compares what is audible with what is inaudible, and not a sensuous fact at all. "I know not how thy joy," etc. (11)-(i. e., if we had no "saddest thought" we could not appreciate our sweetest songs"; the lark's sweetness tells of grief overcome). 66 CXXXVII.-FOSSIL POETRY. 1. Language is fossil poetry; in other words, we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, traditions, and beliefs. word also is a concentrated poem, having Many a stores of poet ical thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual, bringing those to illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. 2. The image may have grown trite and ordinary now-perhaps, through the help of this very word, may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old word, never before but literally used, this new figurative sense, this man was, in his degree, a poet-a maker, that is, of things which were not before; which could not have existed but for him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. 3. He who spake first of a "dilapidated dilapidated" fortune, what an image must have risen up before his mind's eye of some falling house or palace-stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin! 4. He who to that Greek word which signified "that which will endure to be held up to and judged by the light," gave first its ethical signification of "sincere,” "truthful," or, as we sometimes say, "transparent can we deny to him the poet's feeling and eye? 5. Many a man had gazed, we are sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain before one called them "sierras," or "saws "-the name by which now they are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada; but that name coined his imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he named. 6. "Iliads without a Homer," some one has called, with a little exaggeration, the beautiful but anonymous ballad poetry of Spain. One may be permitted, perhaps, to push the exaggeration a little farther in the same direction, and to apply the phrase not merely to a ballad, but to a word. 7. Let me illustrate that which I have been here saying somewhat more at length by the word "tribulation." We all know, in a general way, that this word-which occurs not seldom in Scripture-means affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question the word a little closer. is derived from the Latin tribulum, which was the threshing instrument or roller whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks; and tribulatio, in its primary signification, was the act of this separation. It 8. But some Latin writer of the Christian Church appropriated the word and image for the setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separating in men of their chaff from their wheat-of whatever in them was light, and trivial, and poor, from the solid and the true—therefore he called these sorrows and griefs 66 tribulations threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner. Richard Chenevix Trench. FOR PREPARATION.-I. What are "fossils"? (Fossil is from the Latin word fodere, to dig, and means something found by digging.) Animal or vegetable organisms that have been turned into stone; or rather, whose tis sues have been replaced by stone, leaving their shapes perfectly preserved. Impressions of such organisms made in a substance originally soft, and afterward hardened and thus preserved, are also called fossils. II. Be-liefs', il-lus'-trate, děs-o-la'-tion, trans-pâr'-ent, ex-ǎgger-a'-tion, a-non'-y-moŭs, Si-er'-rå, Mo-re'-nå, Ne-vä'-dä. III. Dilapidated (di = asunder, lapid = stones, ate = time-stones made (to fall) asunder). make, ed past IV. Ethical, anonymous, garner, chaff, trite, devised, trivial. V. "He who first discerned the relation " (i. e., saw the correspondence of things natural and things spiritual). "Never before but literally used " ("before" applied only to natural things). "To that Greek word" (4) (the Greek word referred to is eilikrines tested-by-the-sun). = CXXXVIII.-L'ALLEGRO. I. -MORNING GLADNESS IN THE COUNTRY. 1. Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, 2. Come, and trip it, as ye go, And in thy right hand lead with thee 3. To hear the lark begin his flight, And, singing, startle the dull Night While the cock with lively din 4. Oft listening how the hounds and horn By hedgerow elms, on hillocks green, Where the great Sun begins his state, II. EVENING GLADNESS IN THE CITY. 5. Towered cities please us then, Where throngs of knights and barons bold 6. There let Hymen oft appear In saffron robe, with taper clear, |