1. 37.-skeleton at the feast. "In social meetings among the rich, when the banquet is ended, a servant carries round to the several guests a coffin, in which there is a wooden image of a corpse, carved and painted to resemble nature as nearly as possible, about a cubit or two in length. As he shows it to each guest in turn, the servant says, 'Gaze here, and drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be.'"- Herodotus, i. 78, speaking of the Egyptians (tr. Rawlinson). The same feature of banquets is described in Petronius, Satyricon, 34; Plutarch, etc. Numerous references are in the Bible likewise,-2. Corinth. xv. 32, etc. 1. 43f.—O golden prime....time! That cropp'd the golden prime of this sweet prince. -Shakspere, Richard III., i. ii. 248. In sooth it was a goodly time, For it was in the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid. -Tennyson, Recollections of the Arabian Nights. prime. Fr. prime, Lat. prima, the first hour; hence, here, youth in its highest development. Page 59. 1. 61.-long since. 1816, long-since 1. 66. Where all parting. Revel. xxi. 4. 1. 69.-horologe (hor'o lōdge). Time-piece. (OFr. horologe, Mod. Fr. horloge, clock; L. horologium; Gk. hōra, hour, legō, I speak.) THE FIRE OF DRIFT-WOOD. Composition and publication. L.'s Journal reads under September 29, 1846: "A delicious drive with F. through Malden and Lynn to Marblehead, to visit E. W. at the Devereux Farm by the sea-side. Drove across the beautiful sand. What a delicious scene! The ocean in the sunshine changing from the silvery hue of the thin waves upon the beach, through the lighter and the deeper green, to a rich purple on the horizon. We recalled the times past, and the days when we were at Nahant. The Devereux Farm is by the sea, some miles from Lynn. An oldfashioned farm-house, with low rooms and narrow windows rattling in the sea-breeze. After dinner we drove to Marblehead,--a strange old place on a rocky promontory, with narrow streets, and strange, ugly houses scattered at random, corner - wise and every-wise, thrusting their shoulders into the streets and elbowing the passers out of their way. A dismantled fort looks seaward. We rambled along the breast-works, which are now a public walk, and asked in vain for the reef of Norman's Woe, which is, nevertheless, in this neighborhood. On returning to the Devereux Farm we sat on the rocks and listened to 'the bellowing of the savage sea."" The outcome of this visit was the poem The Fire of Drift-Wood, which appeared in Seaside and Fireside, 1850. Page 60.-Sub-title. Marblehead. "Marblehead is a backbone of granite, a vertebra of syenite and prophyry thrust out into Massachusetts Bay, in the direction of Cape Ann, and hedged about with rocky islets. It is somewhat sheltered from the weight of north-east storms by the sweep of the cape, which launches itself out to sea, and gallantly receives the first buffetings of the Atlantic. The promontory of Marblehead may once have been a prolongation of Cape Ann, the whole ccast hereabouts looking as if the ocean had licked out the softer parts, leaving nothing that was digestible behind. This rock, on which a settlement was begun two hundred and fifty odd years ago, performs its part by making Salem Harbor on one hand, and another for its own shipping on the east, where an appendage known as Marblehead Neck is joined to it by a ligature of sand and shingle. The port [1. 5] is open to the northeast, and vessels are sometimes blown from their anchorage upon the sand banks at the head of the harbor, though the water is generally deep and the shores bold. At the entrance a light-house [1. 7] is built on the entrance point of the Neck; and on a tongue of land opposite is Fort Sewall [1.7] a beckoning finger and a clenched fist.... "The beach is the mall of Marblehead. It opens upon Nahant Bay, and is much exposed to the force of south-east gales. Over this beach a causeway is built....The Neck is the peculiar domain of a transient population of careworn fugitives from the city [Boston lies 18 miles to the south west].”—Drake, New England Coast, p. 228ff. 1. 5.—we saw the port. Of Marblehead. "In a letter in 1879 to a correspondent who had raised a matter-of-fact objection, Mr. L. readily admitted that the harbor and the lighthouse....could not be seen from the windows of the farm-house."-Note in Riverside ed. 1. 6.-old-fashioned, silent town. "I began to have some notion of the maze of rocky lanes, alleys, and courts. Caprice seems to have governed the locality of a majority of the houses by the water-side, and the streets to have adjusted themselves to the wooden anarchy....or else the houses must have been stranded here by the flood."Drake, p. 238. The town has taken to making shoes, and is losing in part its silent antique character. 1. 7.-dismantled fort. Fort Sewall, built in 1742, rebuilt during the American Civil War. 1. 81.-the wreck of stranded ships. The fire of ocean drift-wood is the most beautiful of all open fires. No other wood has such clear, pale, many-coloured flames to mark its burning. 1. 43.-long-lost ventures. Venture was formerly often used with the special sense of something sent over seas in trade. My ventures are not in one bottom trusted, -Shakspere, Merchant of Venice, i. i. Here it is used of the ship itself. RESIGNATION. Autobiographical signifiance. Resignation, while representing to us the chastened feelings of fathers and mothers in general on the loss of beloved children, acquires additional interest from its connection with the poet's own life. This poem is the expression of Longfellow's feelings on the death of his infant daughter Frances. In his journal he chronicles the incidents of her short life. "Oct. 30, 1847. Fanny was christened....She looked charmingly, and behaved well throughout. Sept. 4, 1848. Fanny very weak and miserable. Which way will the balance of life and death turn? 10th. A day of agony; the physicians no longer have any hope; I cannot yet abandon it. Motionless she lies; only a little moan now and then. 11th. Lower and lower. Throughout the silent desolate room the clocks tick loud. At half-past four this afternoon she died....Her breathing grew fainter, fainter, then ceased without a sigh, without a flutter-perfectly quiet, perfectly painless. The sweetest expression on her face. The room was full of angels where she lay; And when they had departed she was gone. 12th. Our little child was buried to-day. From her nursery, down the front stairs, through my study and into the library, she was borne in the arms of her old nurse. And thence, after prayer, through the long hall to her coffin and grave. For a long time, I sat by her alone in the darkened library. The twilight fell softly on her placid face and the white flowers she held in her little hands. In the deep silence, the bird sang from the hall, a sad strain, a melancholy requiem. It touched and soothed me. Nov. 12th. I feel very sad to-day. I miss very much my dear little Fanny. An unappeasable longing to see her comes over me at times, which I can hardly control." In the autumn of the year 1848, Resignation was written, and appeared as the first poem of the part By the Fireside in the volume, Seaside and Fireside, Boston, 1850. No changes have been made in this earliest text. The poem bears a close relationship in phrase and in thought to Vaughan's poem, They are all Gone, quoted in the Appendix, with which it should be compared. Page 62. 1.7.-The heart of Rachel. Rachel stands here as a type of the bereaved mother. See Jerem. xxxi. 15 and Matth. ii. 18. 1. 9.-Let us be patient. One of the poet's favourite virtues is patience. Cf. Ps. of L., l. 36; Evang., 1. 725, etc. 1. 10.—not from the ground arise. Like noxious exhalations, born of earth. "Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground." Job v. 6. 1. 14. We see but dimly, etc. Cf. 1. Corinth. xiii. 12. Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 1. 15.-funereal tapers. -Shelley, Adonais. Used as typical of all outward signs of sorrow and death. It is customary with the Roman Catholics to surround the coffined dead with burning candles. |