Hollow organs all the day;

Here, by turns, his dolphins all,
Finny palmers, great and small,
Come to pay devotion due, -

Each a mouth of pearls must strew!
Many a mortal of these days
Dares to pass our sacred ways;
Dares to touch, audaciously,
This cathedral of the sea!
I have been the pontiff-priest,
Where the waters never rest,
Where a fledgy sea-bird choir
Soars for ever! Holy fire
I have hid from mortal man;
Proteus is my Sacristan!
But the dulled eye of mortal

Hath pass'd beyond the rocky portal;
So for ever will I leave

Such a taint, and soon unweave
All the magic of the place.'
So saying, with a Spirit's glance
He dived!

TRANSLATION FROM A SONNET

OF RONSARD

Published in Life, Letters and Literary Remains in a letter to Reynolds, of which the probable date is September 22, 1818; in a letter to Charles Wentworth Dilke September 21, 1818, Keats quotes the last line with the remark: 'You have passed your Romance, and I never gave in to it, or else I think this line a feast for one of your Lovers.' The text of the sonnet will be found in the Appendix.

NATURE withheld Cassandra in the skies, For more adornment, a full thousand

Then the hurry and alarm
When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
Acorns ripe down-pattering
While the autumn breezes sing.

Oh, sweet Fancy ! let her loose;

Every thing is spoilt by use;

Where's the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gazed at? Where's the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where's the eye, however blue,
Doth not weary? Where's the face
One would meet in every place?
Where's the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth.
Let, then, winged Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind:
Dulcet-eyed as Ceres' daughter
Ere the God of Torment taught her
How to frown and how to chide;
With a waist and with a side
White as Hebe's, when her zone
Slipt its golden clasp, and down

Fell her kirtle to her feet,

While she held the goblet sweet,

70

80

And Jove grew languid. — Break the mesh Of the Fancy's silken leash;

Quickly break her prison-string,

And such joys as these she 'll bring. -
Let the winged Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.

7 ODE

90

Written on the blank page before Beaumont and Fletcher's tragi-comedy, The Fair Maid of the Inn, and addressed thus to these bards in particular. Sent in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, January 2, 1819. It is included in the 1820 volume.

BARDS of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new?
Yes, and those of heaven commune

With the spheres of sun and moon;
With the noise of fountains wond'rous
And the parle of voices thund'rous;
With the whisper of heaven's trees
And one another, in soft ease
Seated on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian's fawns;
Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not;
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.

Thus ye live on high, and then On the earth ye live again; And the souls ye left behind you

Teach us, here, the way to find you,
Where your other souls are joying,
Never slumber'd, never cloying.
Here, your earth-born souls still speak
To mortals, of their little week;
Of their sorrows and delights;

Of their passions and their spites;
Of their glory and their shame;

What doth strengthen and what maim.
Thus ye teach us, every day,
Wisdom, though fled far away.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new!

SONG

10

20

30

40

'There is just room, I see, in this page to copy a little thing I wrote off to some Music as it was playing.' Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, January 2, 1819.

I HAD a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving:

Published in Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems, 1820. There is no date affixed to it, but if it takes its color at all from Keats's own experience, it might not be amiss to refer it to the early part of 1819, when he had come under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne. In a letter to Haydon, written between January 7 and 14, 1819, Keats says: 'I have been writing a little now and then lately: but nothing to speak of - being discontented and as it were moulting. Yet I do not think I shall ever come to the rope or the pistol. For after a day or two's melancholy, although I smoke more and more my own insufficiency I see by little and little more of what is to be done, and how it is to be done, should I ever be able to do it.'

Lord Houghton, in the Aldine edition of 1876, makes the following prefatory note: 'A singular instance of Keats's delicate perception occurred in the composition of this Ode. In the original manuscript he had intended to represent the vulgar conception of Melancholy with gloom and horror, in contrast with the emotion that incites to

"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a platform gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy- whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."

But no sooner was this written, than the poet became conscious that the coarseness of the contrast would destroy the general effect of luxurious tenderness which it was the object of the poem to produce, and he confined the gross notion of Melancholy to less violent images, and let the ode at once begin,

I

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poison

ous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, or the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy
owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drows-

ily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

II

But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hills in an April

shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless

eyes.

Begun early in 1819. In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, dated February 14, 1819, Keats says: 'I was nearly a fortnight at Mr. John Snook's and a few days at old Mr. Dilke's (Chichester in Hampshire). Nothing worth speaking of happened at either place. I took down some thin paper and wrote on it a little poem called St. Agnes's Eve.' The poem

underwent a great deal of revision, and was not in final form before September; it was published in the 1820 volume.

His prayer he saith, this patient, holy

man;

Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,

And back returneth, meagre, barefoot,

wan,

Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees: The sculptured dead, on each side, seem to freeze,

Emprison'd in black, purgatorial rails:

し

Knights, ladies, praying in umb orat❜ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.

III

Northward he turneth through a little door,

And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue

Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor;

But no- already had his death-bell rung; The joys of all his life were said and sung:

His was harsh penance on St. Agnes' Eve:

Another way he went, and soon among

Rough ashes sat he for his soul's reprieve,

And all night kept awake, for sinners' sake to grieve.

IV

That ancient Beadsman heard the pre

lude soft;

And so it chanced, for many a door was wide,

From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft, The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:

The level chambers, ready with their pride,

Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:

The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,