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Updated: May 24, 2025
I scarcely opened a book of any kind. I had a volume of Macauly's Essays with me in which I read a little on the Sabbath. On rainy days I stole away to the hay mow and read one of Jane Porter's novels which I found in the house. I attempted to commit to memory the whole of the Lady of the Lake, but got no farther than the first canto, and the songs interspersed through the others.
There is a balcony from the saloon which looks upon the lake and the mountain Jura; and I imagine, that it must have been hence, he contemplated the storm so magnificently described in the Third Canto; for you have from here a most extensive view of all the points he has therein depicted.
LONDON, March 2, O. S. 1752. MY DEAR FRIEND: Whereabouts are you in Ariosto? Or have you gone through that most ingenious contexture of truth and lies, of serious and extravagant, of knights-errant, magicians, and all that various matter which he announces in the beginning of his poem: Le Donne, I Cavalier, l'arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l'audaci impreso io canto.
Among the crew, he went by the name of the Long Doctor, or more frequently still, Doctor Long Ghost. And from whatever high estate Doctor Long Ghost might have fallen, he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen. As for his learning, he quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbs of Malmsbury, beside repeating poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras.
Spring is more beautiful in the city than in the country; it comes with less alloy. No one has ever drawn a better picture of a country road in the pouring rain, where "the hoof-prints vanish away." In spite of his preoccupation with the exact value of oral words, he is not a singing lyrist. There is not much bel canto in his volumes. Nor do any of his poems seem spontaneous.
We seek for short cuts, and we get corresponding results. The bel canto is, simply, beautiful singing, the result of perfect technique, and is opposed to effects which are not truly artistic, though no doubt often highly expressive to the unmusical and the inartistic.
For the forward poise which singers find so advantageous and which aids in the horizontal lifting of the ribs, also induces that gentle sinking in of the lower abdominal wall which is the final detail in the correct method of drawing in the breath and on which the old Italian masters of bel canto insisted as an important factor in their methods.
He uses many of Chaucer's words, which even then had grown old-fashioned and were little used. So much is this so that a glossary written by a friend of Spenser, in which old words were explained, was published with the Shepherd's Calendar. But whether old or new, Spenser's power of using words and of weaving them together was wonderful. *Faery Queen, book VI, canto ii.
Yet another authority is the profane author of "Don Juan," who, in the first stanza of the tenth canto, says of Newton: "And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple." Milton, being very pious, was probably in the counsel of God. How else could he have given us an authentic version of the long colloquies that were carried on in heaven?
Sadly and slowly I stemmed my course from among the heaps of slain, and, guided by the twinkling lights of the town, at length reached Rodosto. Lord Byron's Fourth Canto of Childe Harolde. Shakspeare's Sonnets.
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