Select Poems of Thomas Gray
boding night-birds tell."

 

52. Gray refers to Cowley, Brutus:

The following variations on 52 and 53 are found in the MS.:

The accent of Hyperion is properly on the penult, which is long in quantity, but the English poets, with rare exceptions, have thrown it back upon the antepenult. It is thus in the six instances in which Shakes. uses the word: e.g. Hamlet, iii. 4: "Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself." The word does not occur in Milton. It is correctly accented by Drummond (of Hawthornden), Wand. Muses:

by West, Pindar's Ol. viii. 22:

also by Akenside, and by the author of the old play Fuimus Troes (A.D. 1633):

Hyperion was a Titan, the father of Helios (the Sun), Selene (the Moon), and Eos (the Dawn). He was represented with the attributes of beauty and splendor afterwards ascribed to Apollo. His "glittering shafts" are of course the sunbeams, the "lucida tela diei" of Lucretius. Cf. a very beautiful description of the dawn in Lowell's Above and Below:

We may quote also his Vision of Sir Launfal:

54. Gray's note here is as follows: "Extensive influence of poetic genius over the remotest and most uncivilized nations; its connection with liberty and the virtues that naturally attend on it. [See the Erse, Norwegian, and Welsh fragments; the Lapland and American songs.]" He also quotes Virgil, Æn. vi. 796: "Extra anni solisque vias," and Petrarch, Canz. 2: "Tutta lontana dal camin del sole." Cf. also Dryden, Thren. August. 353: "Out of the solar walk and Heaven's highway;" Ann. Mirab. st. 160: "Beyond the year, and out of Heaven's highway;" Brit. Red.: "Beyond the sunny walks and circling year;" also Pope, Essay on Man, i. 102: "Far as the solar walk and milky way."

56. Twilight gloom. Wakefield quotes Milton, Hymn on Nativ. 188: "The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn."

57. Wakefield says, "It almost chills one to read this verse." The MS. variations are "buried native's" and "chill abode."

 

60. Repeat [their chiefs, etc.]. Sing of them again and again.


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