the indulgence that can be claimed for a first attempt; but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrown with the flowers of poetry, that, even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present. The models upon which he has formed himself in the Endymion, the earliest and by much the most considerable of his poems, are obviously the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson, the exquisite metres and inspired diction of which he has copied with great boldness and fidelity; and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air which breathes only in them and in Theocritus-which is at once homely and majestic, luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights, and sounds, and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of Elysium.' The genius of the poet was still further displayed in his latest volume, Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, &c. This volume was well received. The state of the poet's health now became so alarming that, as a last effort for life, he was advised to try the milder climate of Italy. A young friend, Mr Severn, an artist (now British consul at Rome), generously abandoned his professional prospects at home, in order to accompany Keats; and they sailed in September 1820. The invalid suffered severely during the voyage, and he had to endure a ten days' quarantine at Naples. The thoughts of a young lady to whom he was betrothed, and the too great probability that he would see her no more, added a deeper gloom to his mind, and he seems never to have rallied from this depression. At Rome, Mr Severn watched over him with affectionate care; Dr Clark also was unremitting in his attendance; but he daily got worse, and died on the 23d of February 1821. Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, one of the most beautiful spots on which the eye and heart of man can rest. 'It is,' says Lord Houghton, 'a grassy slope amid verdurous ruins of the Honorian walls of the diminished city, and surmounted by the pyramidal tomb which Petrarch attributed to Remus, but which antiquarian truth has ascribed to the humbler name of Caius Cestius, a Tribune of the people only remembered by his sepulchre. In one of those mental voyages into the past which often precede death, Keats had told Severn that "he thought the intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers;" and another time, after lying a while still and peaceful, he said: "I feel the flowers growing over me." And there they do grow even all the winter long-violets and daisies mingling with the fresh herbage, and, in the words of Shelley, making one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a

66

place." Keats had a few days before his death expressed a wish to Mr Severn that on his gravestone should be the inscription: "Here fies one whose name was writ in water." Shelley honoured the memory of Keats with his exquisite elegy Adonais. Even Byron felt that the young poet's death was a loss to literature. The fragment of Hyperion, he said, "seems actually

inspired by the Titans: it is as sublime as Eschylus."

It was the misfortune of Keats, as a poet, to be either extravagantly praised or unmercifully condemned. The former was owing to the generous partialities of friendship, somewhat obtrusively displayed; the latter, in some degree, to resentment of that friendship, connected as it was with party politics and peculiar views of society as well as of poetry. In the one case his faults, and in the other his merits, were entirely overlooked. A few years dispelled these illusions and prejudices. Keats was a true poet. If we consider his extreme youth and delicate health, his solitary and interesting self-instruction, the severity of the attacks made upon him by his hostile and powerful critics, and, above all, the original richness and picturesqueness of his conceptions and imagery, even when they run to waste, he appears to be one of the greatest of the young poets-resembling the Milton of Lycidas, or the Spenser of the Tears of the Muses. What easy, finished, statuesque beauty and classic expression, for example, are displayed in this picture of Saturn and Thea!

Saturn and Thea.—From 'Hyperion.'

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity

Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.

Along the margin sand large footmarks went
No further than to where his feet had strayed,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bowed head seemed listening to the earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

It seemed no force could wake him from his place; But there came one, who with a kindred hand Touched his wide shoulders, after bending low With reverence, though to one who knew it not. She was a goddess of the infant world; By her in stature the tall Amazon Had stood a pigmy's height: she would have ta'en Achilles by the hair, and bent his neck; Or with a finger stayed Ixion's wheel. Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, Pedestaled haply in a palace court, When sages looked to Egypt for their lore. But oh! how unlike marble was that face!

* Byron could not, however, resist the seeming smartness of saying in Don Juan that Keats was killed off by one critique:

"Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article!

Mr Croker, writing to a friend about this article,' in a letter which we have seen, said: 'Gifford added some pepper to my grill. A miserable piece of cookery they made of it! High as is now the fame of Keats, it is said he died 'admired only by his personal friends and by Shelley; and even ten years after his death, when the first Memoir was proposed, the woman he had Mr Dilke: "The kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in loved had so little belief in his poetic reputation, that she wrote to the obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him." Papers of a Critic, vol. i. p. 11.

137

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self!
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun ;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was, with its stored thunder, labouring up.
One hand she pressed upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain;
The other upon Saturn's bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenor and deep organ tone;

Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents-oh! how frail,
To that large utterance of the early gods !—
'Saturn, look up! though wherefore, poor old
king?

I cannot say, "O wherefore sleepest thou ?"
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a god;
And ocean, too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy sceptre passed, and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years !
All, as ye pass, swell out the monstrous truth,
And press
so upon our weary griefs

That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
Saturn, sleep on! Oh, thoughtless, why did I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should I ope my melancholy eyes?
Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep.'

As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;
So came these words and went.

The antique grace and solemnity of passages like this must be felt by every lover of poetry. The chief defects of Keats are his want of distinctness and precision, and the carelessness of his style. There would seem to have been even affectation in his disregard of order and regularity; and he heaps up images and conceits in such profusion, that they often form grotesque and absurd combinations, which fatigue the reader. Deep feeling and passion are rarely given to young poets redolent of fancy, and warm from the perusal of the ancient authors. The difficulty with which Keats had mastered the classic mythology gave it an undue importance in his mind: a more perfect knowledge would have harmonised its materials, and shewn him the beauty of chasteness and simplicity of style; but Mr Leigh Hunt is right in his opinion that the poems of Keats, with all their defects, will be the 'sure companions in field and grove' of those who love to escape 'out of the strife of commonplaces into the haven of solitude and imagination.'

One line in Endymion has become familiar as a 'household word' wherever the English language is spoken

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

The Lady Madeline at her Devotions.
From the Eve of St Agnes.

Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died:
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;

As though a tongueless nightingale should swell

Her throat in vain, and die heart-stifled in her dell.

A casement high and triple-arched there was
All garlanded with carven imageries

Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device
Innumerable, of stains and splendid dyes,

As are the tiger-moth's deep damasked wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory like a saint: She seemed a splendid angel newly drest, Save wings, for heaven; Porphyro grew faint : She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

The dreary melody of bedded reeds—

In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth,
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loath
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx-do thou now,
By thy love's milky brow,

By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan !

O thou for whose soul-soothing quiet turtles
Passion their voices cooingly 'mong myrtles,
What time thou wanderest at eventide
Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side
Of thine enmossed realms: O thou to whom
Broad-leaved fig-trees even now foredoom
Their ripened fruitage; yellow-girted bees
Their golden honeycombs; our village leas
Their fairest blossomed beans and poppied corn ;
The chuckling linnet its five young unborn,
To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries
Their summer coolness; pent-up butterflies
Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year
All its completion-be quickly near,
By every wind that nods the mountain pine,
O forester divine!

Thou to whom every faun and satyr flies
For willing service; whether to surprise
The squatted hare while in half-sleeping fit;
Or upward ragged precipices flit

To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw;
Or by mysterious enticement draw
Bewildered shepherds to their path again;
Or to tread breathless round the frothy main,
And gather up all fancifulest shells
For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells,
And, being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping;
Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,
The while they pelt each other on the crown
With silvery oak-apples, and fir-cones brown-
By all the echoes that about thee ring,
Hear us, O satyr king!

O hearkener to the loud-clapping shears,
While ever and anon to his shorn peers
A ram goes bleating: winder of the horn,
When snouted wild-boars, routing tender corn,
Anger our huntsmen: breather round our farms,
To keep off mildews and all weather harms :
Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,
That come a-swooning over hollow grounds,
And wither drearily on barren moors:
Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge-see,
Great son of Dryope,

The many that are come to pay their vows,
With leaves about their brows!

Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain be still the leaven,
That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth,
Gives it a touch ethereal-a new birth :
Be still a symbol of immensity;

A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;

An unknown-but no more: we humbly screen
With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending,
And giving out a shout most heaven-rending,
Conjure thee to receive our humble Paan,
Upon thy Mount Lycean!

Ode to a Nightingale.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been

Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret,

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes, whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue ;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft,

Or sinking, as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now, with treble soft, The redbreast whistles from a garden croft, And gathering swallows twitter from the skies.

Sonnets.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdom seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne :
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific-and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmiseSilent, upon a peak in Darien.

On England.

Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent;
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment

For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters ;
Enough their simple loveliness for me;
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about their summer waters.

DR REGINALD HEBER.

DR REGINALD HEBER, bishop of Calcutta, was born April 21, 1783, at Malpas in Cheshire, where his father had a living. In his seventeenth year he was admitted of Brazen-nose College, Oxford, and soon distinguished himself by his classical attainments. In 1802 he obtained the university prize for Latin hexameters, his subject being the Carmen Seculare. Applying himself to English verse, Heber, in 1803, composed his poem of Palestine, which has been considered the best prize-poem the university has ever produced. Parts of it were set to music; and it had an extensive sale. Previous to its recitation in the theatre of the university, the young author read it to Sir Walter Scott, then on a visit to Oxford; and Scott observed, that in the verses on Solomon's Temple, one striking circumstance had escaped himnamely, that no tools were used in its construction.

Reginald retired for a few minutes to the corner of the room, and returned with the beautiful lines:

No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung;
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!

His picture of Palestine, in its now fallen and desolate state, is pathetic and beautiful :

Palestine.

Reft of thy sons, amid thy foes forlorn,
Mourn, widowed queen! forgotten Sion, mourn!
Is this thy place, sad city, this thy throne,
Where the wild desert rears its craggy stone?
While suns unblest their angry lustre fling,
And wayworn pilgrims seek the scanty spring?
Where now thy pomp, which kings with envy viewed?
Where now thy might, which all those kings subdued?
No martial myriads muster in thy gate;
No suppliant nations in thy temple wait;
No prophet-bards, the glittering courts among,
Wake the full lyre, and swell the tide of song:
But lawless Force and meagre Want are there,
And the quick-darting eye of restless Fear,
While cold Oblivion, 'mid thy ruins laid,
Folds his dank wing beneath the ivy shade.

He has also given a striking sketch of the Druses, the hardy mountain race descended from the Crusaders :

The Druses.

Fierce, hardy, proud, in conscious freedom bold,
Those stormy seats the warrior Druses hold;
From Norman blood their lofty line they trace,
Their lion-courage proves their generous race.
They, only they, while all around them kneel
In sullen homage to the Thracian steel,
Teach their pale despot's waning moon to fear
The patriot terrors of the mountain spear.
Yes, valorous chiefs, while yet your sabres shine,
The native guard of feeble Palestine,

Oh, ever thus, by no vain boast dismayed,
Defend the birthright of the cedar shade!
What though no more for you the obedient gale
Swells the white bosom of the Tyrian sail;
Though now no more your glittering marts unfold
Sidonian dyes and Lusitanian gold;
Though not for you the pale and sickly slave
Forgets the light in Ophir's wealthy cave;
Yet yours the lot, in proud contentment blest,
Where cheerful labour leads to tranquil rest.
No robber-rage the ripening harvest knows;
And unrestrained the generous vintage flows:
Nor less your sons to manliest deeds aspire;
And Asia's mountains glow with Spartan fire.
So when, deep sinking in the rosy main,
The western sun forsakes the Syrian plain,
His watery rays refracted lustre shed,
And pour their latest light on Carmel's head.

Yet shines your praise, amid surrounding gloom,
As the lone lamp that trembles in the tomb;
For few the souls that spurn a tyrant's chain,
And small the bounds of freedom's scanty reign.

In 1805 Heber took his degree of B.A., and the same year gained the prize for the English essay. He was elected to a fellowship at All Souls' College, and soon after went abroad, travelling over Germany, Russia, and the Crimea. On his return he took his degree of A.M. at Oxford. He appeared again as a poet in 1809, his subject being Europe, or Lines on the Present War. The struggle in Spain formed the predominating theme

of Heber's poem. He was now presented to the living of Hodnet; and at the same time he married Amelia, daughter of Dr Shipley, dean of St Asaph. The duties of a parish pastor were discharged by Heber with unostentatious fidelity and application. He also applied his vigorous intellect to the study of divinity, and in 1815 preached the Bampton Lecture, the subject selected by him for a course of sermons being the Personality and Office of the Christian Comforter. He was an occasional contributor to the Quarterly Review; and in 1822 he wrote a copious life of Jeremy Taylor, and a review of his writings, for a complete edition of Taylor's works. Contrary to the advice of prudent friends, he accepted, in 1823, the difficult task of bishop of Calcutta, and no man could have entered on his mission with a more Christian or apostolic spirit. His whole energies appear to have been devoted to the propagation of Christianity in the East. In 1826 the bishop made a journey to Travancore, accompanied by the Rev. Mr Doran, of the Church Missionary Society. On the 1st of April he arrived at Trichinopoly, and had twice service on the day following. He went the next day, Monday, at six o'clock in the morning, to see the native Christians in the fort, and attend divine service. He then returned to the house of a friend, and went into the bath preparatory to his dressing for breakfast. His servant, conceiving he remained too long, entered the room, and found the bishop dead at the bottom of the bath. Medical assistance was applied, but every effort proved ineffectual; death had been caused by apoplexy. The loss of so valuable a public man, equally beloved and venerated, was mourned by all classes, and every honour was paid to his memory. At the time of his death he was only in his forty-third year-a period too short to have developed those talents and virtues which, as one of his admirers in India remarked, rendered his course in life, from the moment that he was crowned with academical honours till the day of his death, one track of light, the admiration of Britain and of India. The widow of Dr Heber published a Memoir of his Life, with selections from his letters; and also a Narrative of his Journey through the Upper Provinces of India from Calcutta to Bombay.

Missionary Hymn.

From Greenland's icy mountains, From India's coral strand, Where Afric's sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand; From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver

Their land from error's chain.

What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft on Ceylon's isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile;
In vain, with lavish kindness,

The gifts of God are strown,
The heathen, in his blindness,

Bows down to wood and stone.

Shall we whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high;
Shall we to man benighted
The lamp of life deny?

Salvation! oh, salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learned Messiah's name.

From Bishop Heber's Journal.
If thou wert by my side, my love,
How fast would evening fail
In green Bengala's palmy grove,
Listening the nightingale!

If thou, my love, wert by my side,
My babies at my knee,

How gaily would our pinnace glide
O'er Gunga's mimic sea!

I miss thee at the dawning gray,
When on our deck reclined,
In careless ease my limbs I lay,

And woo the cooler wind.

I miss thee when by Gunga's stream
My twilight steps I guide,

But most beneath the lamp's pale beam
I miss thee from my side.

I spread my books, my pencil try,
The lingering noon to cheer,
But miss thy kind approving eye,
Thy meek attentive ear.

But when of morn or eve the star
Beholds me on my knee,

I feel, though thou art distant far,
Thy prayers ascend for me.

Then on then on! where duty leads,
My course be onward still;
O'er broad Hindostan's sultry meads,
O'er bleak Almorah's hill.

That course, nor Delhi's kingly gates,
Nor wild Malwah detain;

For sweet the bliss us both awaits
By yonder western main.

Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say,
Across the dark-blue sea;

But ne'er were hearts so light and gay
As then shall meet in thee!

CHARLES WOLFE.

The REV. CHARLES WOLFE (1791-1823), a native of Dublin, may be said to have earned a literary immortality by one short poem. Reading in the Edinburgh Annual Register a description of the death and interment of Sir John Moore on the battle-field of Corunna, this amiable young poet turned it into verse with such taste, pathos, and even sublimity, that his poem has obtained an imperishable place in our literature. The subject was attractive-the death of a brave and popular general on the field of battle, and his burial by his companions-in-arms-and the poet himself dying when young, beloved and lamented by his friends, gave additional interest to the production. The ode was published anonymously in an Irish newspaper in 1817, and was ascribed to various authors; Shelley considering it not unlike a first draught by Campbell. In 1841 it was claimed by a Scottish student and teacher, who ungenerously and dishonestly sought to pluck the laurel from the grave of its owner. The friends of Wolfe came forward, and established his right