l. 224. _Each richer . . . murderer._ This is what they have gained by their deed--the guilt of murder--that is all.
l. 229. _stifling_: partly literal, since the widow's weed is close-wrapping and voluminous--partly metaphorical, since the acceptance of fate stifles complaint.
l. 230. _accursed bands._ So long as a man hopes he is not free, but at the mercy of continual imaginings and fresh disappointments. When hope is laid aside, fear and disappointment go with it.
PAGE 64. l. 241. _Selfishness, Love's cousin._ For the two aspects of love, as a selfish and unselfish passion, see Blake's two poems, _Love seeketh only self to please_, and, _Love seeketh not itself to please_.
l. 242. _single breast_, one-thoughted, being full of love for Lorenzo.
PAGE 65. ll. 249 seq. Cf. Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_.
l. 252. _roundelay_, a dance in a circle.
l. 259. _Striving . . . itself._ Her distrust of her brothers is shown in her effort not to betray her fears to them.
_dungeon climes._ Wherever it is, it is a prison which keeps him from her. Cf. _Hamlet_, II. ii. 250-4.
l. 262. _Hinnom's Vale_, the valley of Moloch's sacrifices, _Paradise Lost_, i. 392-405.
l. 264. _snowy shroud_, a truly prophetic dream.
PAGE 66. ll. 267 seq. These comparisons help us to realize her experience as sharp anguish, rousing her from the lethargy of despair, and endowing her for a brief space with almost supernatural energy and willpower.
PAGE 67. l. 286. _palsied Druid._ The Druids, or priests of ancient Britain, are always pictured as old men with long beards. The conception of such an old man, tremblingly trying to get music from a broken harp, adds to the pathos and mystery of the vision.
l. 288. _Like . . . among._ Take this line word by word, and see how many different ideas go to create the incomparably ghostly effect.
ll. 289 seq. Horror is skilfully kept from this picture and only tragedy left. The horror is for the eyes of his murderers, not for his love.
l. 292. _unthread . . . woof._ His narration and explanation of what has gone before is pictured as the disentangling of woven threads.
l. 293. _darken'd._ In many senses, since their crime was (1) concealed from Isabella, (2) darkly evil, (3) done in the darkness of the wood.
PAGE 68. ll. 305 seq. The whole sound of this stanza is that of a faint and far-away echo.
l. 308. _knelling._ Every sound is like a death-bell to him.
PAGE 69. l. 316. _That paleness._ Her paleness showing her great love for him; and, moreover, indicating that they will soon be reunited.
l. 317. _bright abyss_, the bright hollow of heaven.
l. 322. _The atom . . . turmoil._ Every one must know the sensation of looking into the darkness, straining one's eyes, until the darkness itself seems to be composed of moving atoms. The experience with which Keats, in the next lines, compares it, is, we are told, a common experience in the early stages of consumption.
PAGE 70. l. 334. _school'd my infancy._ She was as a child in her ignorance of evil, and he has taught her the hard lesson that our misery is not always due to the dealings of a blind fate, but sometimes to the deliberate crime and cruelty of those whom we have trusted.
l. 344. _forest-hearse._ To Isabella the whole forest is but the receptacle of her lover's corpse.
PAGE 71. l. 347. _champaign_, country. We can picture Isabel, as they 'creep' along, furtively glancing round, and then producing her knife with a smile so terrible that the old nurse can only fear that she is delirious, as her sudden vigour would also suggest.
PAGE 72. st. xlvi-xlviii. These are the stanzas of which Lamb says, 'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser'--and again, after an appreciation of _Lamia_, whose fairy splendours are 'for younger impressibilities', he reverts to them, saying: 'To _us_ an ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in Heaven;
