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The morning's studies being over, they had set off to take a ramble on the hills, and gather heather-blossoms with which to decorate their hair for dinner. As they came bounding lightly, like young fawns, and their dresses fluttering in the pure summer breeze, I was reminded of Scott's own description of his children in his introduction to one of the cantos of "Marmion."
His latter speeches, owing partly to his delivery, blamed as too Asiatic, were less successful. To a reader the three seem much on the same level. They are clever, but evidently set performances, and leave us no ground to suppose that the poet's abandonment of a parliamentary career was a serious loss to the nation. On the 29th of February the first and second cantos of Childe Harold appeared.
During his absence, which extended over two years, he wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold, which were pub. after his return in 1812, and were received with acclamation. In his own words, "he awoke one morning and found himself famous." He followed up his success with some short poems, The Corsair, Lara, etc. The only fruit of it was a dau., Augusta Ada.
His great epic of the soil must have lacked many episodes, perhaps whole books and cantos, if it had been written only in the slower and more elaborate method. The comparative slightness and rapidity of execution of his drawings and pastels enabled him to register many inventions and observations that we must otherwise have missed, and many of these are of the highest value.
The Ramayana was written by Valmiki, a poet belonging to an unknown period. It consists of seven cantos, and contains twenty-five thousand verses. The original, with its translation into Italian, was published in Paris by the government of Sardinia about the middle of this century.
And Sir Walter Scott, in the midst of a hearty panegyric: "It has the variety of Shakespeare himself. Neither Childe Harold, nor the most beautiful of Byron's earlier tales, contain more exquisite poetry than is to be found scattered through the cantos of Don Juan, amidst verses which the author seems to have thrown from him with an effort as spontaneous as that of a tree resigning its leaves."
It is said that when Dante was living at Ravenna he would spend whole days alone among the forest glades, thinking of Florence and her civil wars, and meditating cantos of his poem. Nor have the influences of the pine-wood failed to leave their trace upon his verse.
He cast about for a new variety of diction and rhyme, and having happened to hear a recitation of Coleridge's unpublished "Christabel" determined to adopt a similar cadence. The division into cantos was suggested by one of his friends, after the example of Spenser's "Faery Queen." The creation of the framework, the conception of the ancient harper, came last of all.
In hearing from Jack Ballard's own lips the story of Jerry Benham's first appearance in Broadway I was forcibly reminded of the opening cantos of the Divine Comedy where Dante follows the shade of Virgil into the abyss of hell. I had not let Jerry know of my presence in New York, for I believed that he would have wanted me with him and did not care to be placed in a position to refuse him.
Translator and antiquary, a county gentleman of Cornwall, ed. at Oxf., made a translation of the first five cantos of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered , more correct than that of Fairfax. Other works were A Survey of Cornwall , and an Epistle concerning the Excellencies of the English Tongue .
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