NOTES. A DAY AT TIVOLI. WHILE choosing the old heroic couplet for his vehicle, the author has been fully aware how little popular that measure is. One cause of this may be its presumed want of variety. And where (as Cowper has said, speaking of Pope) "every warbler has the tune by heart;" where the writing has been a mere imitation; a writing, after a recipe; the objection is, no doubt, well founded. But where the thought or the feeling shall honestly have dictated the versification (which fact would include cadence, tone of expression, and also length of paragraph) it would seem that there might be variety sufficient. At all events the writer has chosen this measure as best fitted for his particular purpose. Not assuredly for its easiness of execution. For by him, who aspires to write the couplet as it ought to be written, it will be found by no means so easy as the looser lyric. Page 5. Line 5. All strangely perforate too, with rounded eyes. Such perforations characterize old olive trees, and to an imaginative observer may well suggest the notion of being watched. Page 6. Line 10. How falls or winds each little cascatelle. "The cascatelle, or little cascades, inferior in mass and grandeur, but equal in beauty to the great fall."— EUSTACE. Page 14. Line 7. To face, in ship, the deadly Afran breeze. Let this line recal to the thought of some, into whose hands the present poem will fall, the loved and respected name of the late Commodore William Jones, who commanded the Penelope on the coast of Africa, and died a victim to the climate. Page 24. Line 3. Or cruel bandit plants him, &c. See "Three Months passed in the Mountains East of Rome," by Maria Graham. Page 24. Line 7. Thou pausest for a while in silent lake. The Anio forms three lakes in its course. Page 24. Line 18. Which here he loved to weave (or so they say). This is a common, but probably not a well-founded, tradition. Page 27. Line 4. Here, where ten centuries do not make the Old. He who has journeyed in classical lands will recal the several and varying estimates, which, as modified by locality, he has been led to make of time. If he be a native of northern Europe his antiquities will have been, chiefly, medieval and ecclesiastical; and, when at Rome, he will probably have desired to see some church or baptistery of Constantine or Helen; or to dive into the catacombs for records of the early Christians. Already his mediæval antiquities will have lost some part of their savour. But as, next day, he meditates in the forum, Helen and Constantine and the catacombs have in turn faded down. And as he stands by the Cloaca Maxima, or gropes through the Mammertine prisons, then the forum itself is of dwindled antiquity. In Greece he is passingly told by his Cicerone not to trouble himself about such or such a wall. "It is merely Roman!" And should he afterwards chance to find himself in presence of the Ægyptian Memnon, he cannot but think with what contempt that venerable statue, if still vocal, would speak of Greece, "the upstart!" |