Their owners all are dead; The mighty ships that brought them rot on shore; Yet still that murmur lingers at their core, And Fancy's light across their tropic bed Is shed. I, less than bird or shell, More volatile, more fragile far than these, You shook it from my wing, You dived to lift it from my glimmering deeps; Now, wakened by your voice no more, it sleeps And grows less mine than yours; here let it cling And sing; Then, when at dusk you spy The noiseless phantom-schooners warping down To load in mouldering wharves of Boston town, Turn sometimes to your lamp-lit shelves, where I Shall lie. 302 BEACON STREET, BOSTON, December, 1884. PREFACE. THE following chapters were written in response to an invitation from the trustees of the Lowell Institute in Boston, and were delivered before that institution in the month of December last. They were also read during the same winter, in whole or in part, before the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, before Yale College, before private audiences in New York and elsewhere in America, as well as before my own university audience at Cambridge. It has been of no small advantage to me that among the distinguished listeners to whom I have had the honour of reading these pages, there have been more than a few whose special studies have rendered them particularly acute in criticising the links of my argument. In consequence of such criticism, I have been able profitably to revise the work, to add evidence where it seemed wanting, to remove rash statements and to re-mould ambiguous sentences. Above all, I have given a great deal of care to the accumulation, in the form of notes and appendices, of historical and critical data of a kind too particular for the purposes of a lecturer, but not, I hope, without genuine importance to the student of the history of literature. The friendly criticism of which I have spoken has not, however, shaken me in the slightest degree with regard to my central idea. On the contrary, the effect of minute controversy has merely been to strengthen on every side my conviction that the theory which I have here laid down for the first time is substantially the true one, and that the opinion hitherto received regarding the sources of the classical school in our poetry is erroneous. I think I may at least claim, from the critic who is inclined to reject my views, a careful consideration of the arguments and evidence upon which they are founded. It would be impossible for me to speak too warmly of the kindness which my friend, Professor Samuel R. Gardiner, has shown me in allowing me to see and use the unfinished MS. of the forthcoming eleventh volume of his history, and in leading me to MS. sources of seventeenth-century information. It is wholly owing to his generosity that I have been enabled, in the second chapter of this volume, to give an account of Waller's Plot which is much more complete and accurate than any hitherto published. Prof. Gardiner's volume, for which students of the Caroline period can hardly command their impatience, will not, I am sorry to say, be in our possession for some years. I suppose that our great historian will not come forward to greet the public again until he can bring the head of Charles I. in his hands. TRIN. COLL., CAMBRIDGE, May, 1885. |