29. "SLEEP STAYS NOT, THOUGH A MONARCH BIDS" (line 11). Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, Under the canopies of costly state, And lulled with sound of sweetest melody? O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast And in the visitation of the winds, Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude; 30. Henry IV. Part ii. For many years I read this poem as if the accents in the first line of each stanza fell on the first and third word-the two "I's." It was stupid of me, for clearly the accent should fall (lightly) on the second syllable of the "remembers." Apart from the accents or stresses in a line of verse, there is the rise and fall of the voice, a kind of tune in the saying of it. If the right tune is not caught, then the difference is as much as if one sniffed a wallflower and it smelt like African mimosa. And to me, as to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, this poem is as familiar, long-endeared and refreshing as wallflower, Sweet William, or Old Man. This is the second or third time I have made remarks about the rhythm, lilt or tune of a poem; and it won't be the last. May I be forgiven, for as Chaucer wrote to his small son Louis when he was sharing with him his love of astronomy: "Soothly me seemeth betre to writen unto a child twice a good sentence, then he forget it ones." As for his elders, even thrice may be short commons. "THOSE FLOWERS MADE OF LIGHT" (line 12). Hold up a flower between eye and sun, or even candle-flame, and it seems little but its own waxen hue and colour. Moonlight is too pale; the petals remain opaque. In the moon's light, indeed, blueness is scarcely distinguishable from shadowiness; red darkens but yellow pales, and the fairest flowers of all wake in her beams-jasmine, convolvulus, evening-primrose—as if they not only shared her radiance but returned a glowwormlike fuminess of their own. Once, long before I came to Thrae, having plucked for my mother a few convolvulus flowers, I remember when I was just about to give them into her hand I discovered that the beautiful cups of delight had enwreathed themselves together, and had returned as it were to the bud, never to reopen. I was but a child, and this odd little disappointment was so extreme that I burst out crying. 32. See just above, No. 30: and for proof of the curious obedience of words to any bidden rhythm it is interesting to compare this poem with its next neighbours. Mr. Frost's colt is called "a little Morgan," because he was of a famous breed of horses of that name which are the pride of the State of Vermont. 35. Only a single copy of the old play, Mundus et Infans, from which this fragment is taken, is known to be in existence. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1522; and was written roundabout 1500. The lines need a slow reading to get the run and lilt of them: and even at that the jog and creak like an old farm-cart. But the boy, Dalyaunce, if one takes a little pains, will come gradually out of them as clear to the eye as if you had met him in the street to-day, on his way to "schole" for yet another "docking." Clothes, houses, customs, food a little, thoughts a little, knowledge, too-all change as the years and centuries go by, but Dalyaunce under a thousand names lives on. It never occurred to me when I was young to think that the children in Rome talked Latin at their games, and that Solomon and Caesar, Prester John and the Grand Khan knew in their young days what it means to be homesick and none too easy to sit down. Yet there are knucklebones and dolls in London that the infant subjects of the Pharaohs played with, and at Stratford Grammar School, for all to see, is Shakespeare's school desk. As for Dalyaunce, "dockings" are not nowadays so harsh as once they were. In proof of this, there is a passage from a book, telling of his own life as a small boy, written by Guibert de Nogent. He is speaking of his childhood, about the year when William the Conqueror landed at Hastings: "So, after a few of the evening hours had been passed in that study, during which I had been beaten even beyond my deserts, I came and sat at my mother's knees. She, according to her wont, asked whether I had been beaten that day; and I, unwilling to betray my master, denied it; whereupon, whether I would or no, she threw back my inner garment (such as men call shirt), and found my little ribs black with the strokes of the osier, and rising everywhere into weals. Then, grieving in her inmost bowels at this punishment so excessive for my tender years, troubled and boiling with anger, and with brimming eyes, she cried, 'Never now shalt thou become a clerk, nor shalt thou be thus tortured again to learn thy letters!' Whereupon, gazing upon her with all the seriousness that I could call to my face, I repplied, 'Nay, even though I should die under the rod, I will not desist from learning my letters and becoming a clerk!" Still, there were more merciful schoolmasters than Guibert de Nogent's, even in days harsh as his; as this further extract from Mr. G. G. Coulton's enticing Medieval Garner shows: "One day, when a certain Abbot, much reputed for his piety, spake with Anselm concerning divers points of Monastic Religion, and conversed among other things of the boys that were brought up in the cloister, he added: 'What, pray, can we do with them? They are perverse and incorrigible; day and night we cease not to chastise them, yet they grow daily worse and worse.' "Whereat Anselm marvelled, and said, "Ye cease not to beat them? And when they are grown to manhood, of what sort are they then?' 'They are dull and brutish,' said the other. "Then said Anselm, 'With what good profit do ye expend your substance in nurturing human beings till they become brute beasts? . . . But I prithee tell me, for God's sake, wherefore ye are so set against them? Are they not human, sharing in the same nature as yourselves? Would ye wish to be so handled as ye handle them? Ye will say, "Yes, if we were as they are." So be it, then; yet is there no way but that of stripes and scourges for shaping them to good? Did ye ever see a goldsmith shape his gold or silver plate into a fair image by blows alone? I trow What then? That he may give the plate its proper shape, he will first press it gently and tap it with his tools; then again. he will more softly raise it with discreet pressure from below, and caress it into shape. So ye also, if ye would see your boys adorned with fair manners, ye should not only beat them down with stripes, but also raise their spirits and support them with fatherly kindness and pity'. . ." not. There was an old woodcut, hanging on Mr. Nahum's wall in his tower room, showing a boy in the middle ages being whipped in a kind of machine (something like a roasting-jack), and a schoolmaster standing by, nicely smiling, in a gown. When Coleridge was a bluecoat boy at Christ's Hospital with Charles Lamb, he seems to have had a headmaster of this kind: "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day after my return after the holidays,-'Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying.' "Mrs. Bowyer was no comforter, either. Val. Le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us, by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in and said, 'Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!' This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the inter ruption that he growled out, 'Away, woman, away!' and we were let off." Coleridge tells of yet another schoolmaster, whose name, like Bowyer and birch, also began with a B.: "Busby was the father of the English public school system. He was headmaster of Westminster through the reign of Charles I., the Civil War, the Protectorate, the reign of Charles II., and the Revolution of 1688. Under him Westminister became the first school in the kingdom. When Charles II. visited the school, Busby stalked before the King with his hat upon his head, whilst his most sacred majesty meekly followed him. In private Busby explained that his conduct was due to the fact that he could not allow, for discipline's sake, the boys to imagine there could be a greater man than himself alive." Quite rightly, of course. There is, too, the story of the little Lion that went to school to the Bear. Being, though of royal blood, a good deal of a dunce, Master Lion bore many sound cuffings from Dr. Bruin on the road to learning, and found it hot and dusty. After such administrations, he would sometimes sit in the sun under a window, learning his task and brooding on a day when he would return to the school and revenge himself upon the Doctor for having treated him so sore. But Master Lion was all this time growing up, and so many were the cares of State when he had left his books and become a Prince and Heir Apparent, that for a time he had no thought for his old school. Being, however, in the Royal Gardens one sunny morning, and seeing bees busy about their hive, he remembered an old saying on the sweetness of knowledge and wisdom, and this once more reminded him of his old Master. Bidding his servants sling upon a rod half a dozen of the hives, he set out to visit Dr. Bruin. The hives were taken into his study, and the bees, being unused to flitting within walls out of the sunshine, angrily sang and droned about the head of the old schoolmaster as he sat at his desk. Their stings were of little account against his thick hide, but their molestation was a fret, and he presently cried aloud, "Would that the Prince had kept his gifts to himself!" The Prince, who was standing outside the door, listening and smiling to himself, thereupon cried out: "Ah! Dr. Bruin, when I was under your charge, you often heavily smit and cuffed me with those long |