into the lap of his charities those other estrays from whom the law divides him; his generosities are of the noblest and fullest; he even entertains at one time the singular caprice of "taking orders," as if the author of Queen Mab could hold a vicarage! It opens, he said, so many ways of doing kindly things, of making hearts joyful; and -for doctrine, one can always preach Charity! With rare exceptions, it is only in his mental attitudes and forays that he oversteps the metes and bounds of the every-day moralities around him. Few poets, even of that time, can or do so measure him as to enjoy him or to give him joy. Leigh Hunt is gracious and kindly; but there are no winged sandals on his feet which can carry him into regions where Shelley walks. Southey is stark unbeliever in the mystic fields where Shelley grazes. Wordsworth is conquered by the Art, but has melancholy doubts of the soul that seems caught and hindered in the meshes of its own craftsmanship. Landor, of a certainty, has detected with his keen insight the high faculties that run rampant under the mazes of the new poet's language; but Landor, too, is in exile—

driven hither and thither by the same lack of steady home affinities which has overset and embroiled the domesticities of the younger poet.

John Keats.

Yet another singer of these days, in most earnest sympathy with the singing moods of Shelley -for whom I can have only a word now, was John Keats;* born within the limits of London smoke, and less than three-quarters of a mile from London Bridge-knowing in his boy days only the humblest, work-a-day ranges of life; getting some good Latinity and other schooling out of a Mr. Clarke (of the Cowden Clarke family)reading Virgil with him, but no Greek. And yet the lad, who never read Homer save in Chapman, when he comes to write, as he does in extreme youth, crowds his wonderful lines with the delicate trills and warblings which might have broken out straight from Helicon - with an susurrus from the Bees of Hymettus. This makes a good argument

* John Keats, b. 1795; d. 1821. First "collected" Poems, 1817; Endymion, 1818; second volume of collected Poems, 1820; Life and Letters - Lord Houghton (Milnes), 1848.

-so far as it reaches-in disproof of the averments of those who believe that, for conquest of Attic felicities of expression, the Greek vocables must needs be torn forth root by root, and stretched to dry upon our skulls.

He published Endymion in the very year when Shelley set off on his final voyagings—a gushing, wavy, wandering poem, intermeshed with flowers and greenery (which he lavishes), and with fairy golden things in it and careering butterflies; with some bony under-structure of Greek fable-loose and vague—and serving only as the caulking pins to hold together the rich, sensuous sway, and the temper and roll of his language.

I must snatch one little bit from that book of Endymion, were it only to show you what music was breaking out in unexpected quarters from that fact-ridden England, within sound of the murmurs of the Thames, when Shelley was sailing away :

"On every morrow are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all,

KEATS IN ITALY.

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such-the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such, too, is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;

All lovely tales that we have heard or read."

231

I might cite page on page from Keats, and yet hold your attention; there is something so beguiling in his witching words; and his pictures are finished with only one or two or three dashes of

his pencil. Thus we come upon —

"Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs

Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold."

And again our ear is caught with —

"Rustle of the reapéd corn,

And sweet birds antheming the morn."

Well, this young master of song goes to Italy, too-not driven, like Byron, by hue and cry, or like Shelley, restless for change (from Chancellor's courts) and for wider horizons-but running from the disease which has firm grip upon him, and

which some three years after Shelley's going kills the poet of the Endymion at Rome. His ashes lie in the Protestant burial-ground thereunder the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Every literary traveller goes to see the grave, and to spell out the words he wanted inscribed there:

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Upon that death, Shelley, then living in Pisa, blazed out in the Adonais-the poem making, with the Lycidas of Milton, and the In Memoriam of Tennyson, a triplet of laurel garlands, whose leaves will never fade. Yet those of Shelley have a cold rustle in them. - shine as they may :—

"Oh, weep for Adonais- he is dead!

Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep

Like his― a mute and uncomplaining sleep.

For he is gone where all things wise and fair

Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deep

Will yet restore him to the vital air;

Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.

"Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams,

The passion-winged ministers of thought

Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams