Epigraph
“Cogito — Ergo Sum.”
Self of myself, unto the future age
Pass, murmuring low whate’er thine own has taught,
“I think, and therefore am,”—exclaim’d the Sage:
As now the Man, so henceforth be the page;
A life, because a thought.
Through various seas, exploring shores unknown,
A soul went forth, and here bequeaths its chart—
Here Doubt retains the question, Grief the groan,
And here may Faith still shine, as when she shone
And saved a sinking heart.
From the lost nectar-streams of golden youth,
From rivers loud with Babel’s madding throng,
From wells whence Lore invokes reluctant Truth,
And that blest pool the wings of angels smooth,
Life fills mine urns of song.
Calmly to time I leave these images
Of things experienced, suffer’d, felt, and seen;
Fruits shed or tempest-torn from changeful trees,
Shells murmuring back the tides in distant seas—
Signs where a Soul has been.
As for the form Thought takes—the rudest hill
Echoes denied to gardens back may give;
Life speaks in all the forms which Thought can fill;
If thought once born can perish not—here still
I think, and therefore live!
Footnotes
A These Poems, with one exception, have received but little alteration since they were first composed, and are taken from the little volume called “Eva, &c.” The Poem called “The Ideal World,” to which I refer as an exception, appeared in a much ruder form in the earlier editions of the “Pilgrims of the Rhine,” to which it served as a Preface. I recast, and, indeed, re-wrote it for the last edition of that work, from which (with slight corrections, and the omission of the verses which connected the poem with the tale by which it was first accompanied) it is now reprinted.
B “Comus.”
C “Gulliver’s Travels.”
D Plut. in “Vit. Cim.”
E “The men respect you, and the women love you.”—Such was the subtle compliment paid by Prior to one equally ambitious of either distinction; viz. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke.
F Epicurean.
G The celebrated comparison between Sculpture and the Ancient Painting and the Modern Dramatic Poetry, is not applicable to Euripides, who has a warmth and colour of passion which few, indeed, of the moderns have surpassed, and from which most of the modern writers have mediately, if not directly, borrowed their most animated conceptions.
H Among the taunting accusations which Aristophanes, in his Comedy of the Frogs, lavishes upon Euripides, through the medium of Æschylus, is that of having introduced female love upon the stage! Æschylus, indeed, is made, very inconsistently, considering his Clytemnestra (Ran. 1. 1042) to declare that he does not know that he ever represented a single woman in love. At a previous period of the comedy, Euripides is also ridiculed, through a boast ironically assigned to his own lips, for having debased Tragedy by the introduction of domestic interest—(household things, οικεΐα πράγματα). Upon these and similar charges have later critics, partly in England, especially in Germany, sought by duller diatribes to perpetuate a spirit of depreciation against the only ancient tragic poet who has vitally influenced the later stage. The true merit of Euripides is seen in the very ridicule of Aristophanes.
I “Wise Sophocles, wiser Euripides, wisest of all, Socrates,” was the well-known decision of the Delphian Oracle. Yet the wisdom of Euripides was not in the philosophical sentences with which he often mars the true philosophy of the drama. His wisdom is his pathos.
J Gibbon, after a powerful sketch of the fraud, the corruption, and the vices of George the Cappadocian, thus concludes:—“The odious stranger, disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the mask of a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero; and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England, the patron of arms, of chivalry, and the garter.”—Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, vol. iv. c. xxiii.
K “Italian Beauty! didst thou not inspire
Raphael, who died in thy embrace?”
—Byron.
L Thucyd. lib. 1, c. 68-71 (The Speech of the Corinthians).
M Herod. lib. 6, c. 120.
N Midsummer’s Night Dream.
O According to a belief in the East, which is associated with one of the loveliest and most familiar of Oriental superstitions the bird of Paradise is never seen to rest upon the earth—and its nest is never to be found.
P It is supposed by many of the commentators on Dante, that in the form of his lost Beatrice, who guides him in his Vision of Heaven, the poet allegorizes Religious Faith.
Q The gloomy Typhon of Egypt assumes many of the mystic attributes of the Principle of Life which, in the Grecian Apotheosis of the Indian Bacchus, is represented in so genial a character of exuberant joy and everlasting youth.
R “What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was.”—Pope.