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James Russell Lowell, Among my books, Spenser (search)
e the Faery Queen two long poems were printed and popular,— the Mirror for Magistrates and Warner's Albion's England,—and not long after it came the Polyolbion of Drayton and the Civil Wars of Daniel. This was the period of the saurians in English poetry, interminable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like far-stretchi hard work. Fathers when their day on earth was up must have folded down the leaf and left the task to be finished by their sons,—a dreary inheritance. Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their genius on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could lexandrines! Even the laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book. Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of fancy, as his Nymphidia proves. His poem To the Cambro-Britons on their Harp is full of vigor; it runs, i<
James Russell Lowell, Among my books, Milton. (search)
to dwell. As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom, may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am persuaded that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to the same event) gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that Milton wrote, or meant to write,— Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit, which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that Milton liked best. Milton, however, would not have balked at th' bottomess any more than Drayton at tha rejected or Donne at tha sea. Mr. Masson does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects ia tha midst to ia the midst, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He might better have restored the n in ia, where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronunciation, as oa for of and on. Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduction of the way in which the verses of Milton should be read is judicious enough, though some of the examples he gives, of the comicality