THE HALCYON, OR KINGFISHER 63 



phrases which take the fancy as when he writes of negroes as 

 ' God's images cut in ebony '. 



13. aungeVs fethres brighte. Quoted from Chaucer's Parlement 

 ofFowles, 1. 356. 



60. the sea-Urn bird [of March]. Quoted from Tennyson's 

 In Memoriam, section XCI : ' When rosy plumelets tuft the 

 larch,' &c. 



73. as Tennyson saw. In a letter to the Duke of Argyll 

 (1864) Tennyson states that, while walking one day in March 

 by a deep-banked brook, he saw, flitting or fleeing beneath him, 

 and under the leafless bushes, a gorgeous kingfisher, and that 

 there came simultaneously into his mind the phrase by which 

 an old Greek poet has described the \>\n:&halip6rphyros eiaros 

 drnis. 



78. as Keats saw. See the fragmentary Imitation of Spenser 

 ' Now Morning from her orient chamber came,' &c. 



110. says the Jew. The principal character in Marlowe's Jew 

 of Malta. 



128. Ben Jonsonwho wore a learned sock. The reference is 

 to a passage in Milton's L' Allegro 



Then to the well-trod stage anon, 



If Jonson's learned sock be on (11. 131, 132). 



Here ' sock ' is equivalent to ' comedy'. 



139. over which Dan Chaucer fell asleep. See Chaucer's Proem 

 to The Book of the Duchesse. It begins with a reference to a 

 mysterious insomnia from which the poet had suffered for eight 

 years caused, perhaps, by the unhappiness of his married life. 

 Reading is the resource of the sleepless; and one night he 

 opened Ovid's Metamorphoses, and there (in the eleventh book) 

 he became engrossed in the story of Ceyx and Alcyone : he read 

 of their happy married life, of Ceyx's perilous voyage and death 

 by drowning, of Alcyone's weary waiting for her lord's return, 

 of the revelation to her in a dream of his death, and of her own 

 death from sorrow for his sake. Chaucer fell into a reverie 

 over the sad story, and gradually sank into a slumber that 

 brought with it the vision of a new world and the mingled 

 happiness and woe of other men. Daw, or Dorninus (Sp. Don) 

 = Mr. or Lord. 



