THE WAR-SONG OF DINAS VAWR.

[From The Misfortunes of Elphin.]

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.

We made an expedition;

We met an host and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed's richest valley,

Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,

To furnish our carousing.

Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o'erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;

But we conquered them, and slew them,

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:

His rage surpassed all measure,

But his people could not match us.

He fled to his hall-pillars;

And, ere our force we led off,

Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewildering,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen:
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,

And much their land bemoaned them,

Two thousand head of cattle,

And the head of him who owned them: Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,

His head was borne before us;

His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,

And his overthrow, our chorus.

THE MEN OF GOTHAM.

[From Nightmare Abbey.]

Seamen three! What men be ye?
Gotham's three wise men we be.
Whither in your bowl so free?

To rake the moon from out the sea.
The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine.

And our ballast is old wine;

And your ballast is old wine.

Who art thou, so fast adrift?
I am he they call Old Care.
Here on board we will thee lift.
No: I may not enter there.
Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree,
In a bowl Care may not be ;
In a bowl Care may not be.

Fear ye not the waves that roll?

No in charmed bowl we swim.

What the charm that floats the bowl?

Water may not pass the brim.

The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine.

And our ballast is old wine;

And your ballast is old wine.

[From Melincourt.]

THE FLOWER OF LOVE

'Tis said the rose is Love's own flower,
Its blush so bright, its thorns so many;
And winter on its bloom has power,
But has not on its sweetness any.
For though young Love's ethereal rose
Will droop on Age's wintry bosom,
Yet still its faded leaves disclose
The fragrance of their earliest blossom.

But ah! the fragrance lingering there
Is like the sweets that mournful duty
Bestows with sadly-soothing care,
To deck the grave of bloom and beauty.
For when its leaves are shrunk and dry,
Its blush extinct, to kindle never,
That fragrance is but Memory's sigh,
That breathes of pleasures past for ever.

Why did not Love the amaranth choose,
That bears no thorns, and cannot perish?
Alas! no sweets its flowers diffuse,
And only sweets Love's life can cherish.
But be the rose and amaranth twined,
And Love, their mingled powers assuming
Shall round his brows a chaplet bind,
For ever sweet, fer ever blooming.

THE GRAVE OF LOVE

I dug, beneath the cypress shade,
What well might seem an elfin's grave;
And every pledge in earth I laid,
That erst thy false affection gave.

I pressed them down the sod beneath;
I placed one mossy stone above;
And twined the rose's fading wreath
Around the sepulchre of love.

Frail as thy love, the flowers were dead,
Ere yet the evening sun was set :
But years shall see the cypress spread,
Immutable as my regret.

MR. CYPRESS'S SONG IN RIDICULE OF LORD BYRON

[From Nightmare Abbey.]

There is a fever of the spirit,

The brand of Cain's unresting doom,

Which in the lone dark souls that bear it

Glows like the lamp in Tullia's tomb :

Unlike that lamp, its subtle fire

Burns, blasts, consumes its cell, the heart,

Till, one by one, hope, joy, desire,

Like dreams of shadowy smoke depart.

When hope, love, like itself, are only
Dust-spectral memories--dead and cold-
The unfed fire burns bright and lonely,
Like that undying lamp of old:

And by that dreary illumination,

Till time its clay-built home has rent, Thought broods on feeling's desolationThe soul is its own monument.

JOHN KEATS.

[JOHN KEATS was born in London on the 29th of October, 1795. His father was in the employment of a livery-stable keeper in Moorfields, whose daughter he married. Our poet was born prematurely. He lost his father when he was nine years old, and his mother when he was fifteen. He and his brothers were sent to a good school at Enfield kept by Mr. Clarke, whose son, Charles Cowden Clarke, well known afterwards from his connexion with letters and literary men, was a valuable friend to John Keats As a schoolboy, Keats seems to have been at first remarked chiefly for his pugnacity and high spirit, but he soon showed a love of reading. On leaving school in 1810 he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton; he was thus still in the neighbourhood of the Clarkes, who continued to see him, took interest in his awakening powers, and lent him books, - amongst them the Fairy Queen of Spenser, the poet whose influence has left on the poetry of Keats so deep an impression. The young surgeon' apprentice took to verse-making; when he went to London to walk the hospitals, he was introduced by the Clarkes to their literary friends there, and knew Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Basil Montagu, Haydon, Shelley, and Godwin. In 1817 he brought out his first volume of verse and abandoned the profession of surgery, for which however, disagreeable though it was to him, he had shown aptitude and dexterity. His first volume contained the Epistles, which we now read amongst his collected poems; it had no success. But his friends saluted his genius with warm admiration and confidence, and in 1818 he published his Endymion. It was mercilessly treated by Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and by the Quarterly Review. Meanwhile Keats's small fortune was melting away, and signs of disease began to show them. selves in him. Nevertheless, in the next year or two he produced his best poems; but his health and circumstances did not mend, while a passionate attachment, with which he was at this time seized, added another cause of agitation. The seeds of consumption were in him, he had the temperament of the consumptive; his poetry fevered him, his embarrassments fretted him, his love-passion shock him to pieces. He had an attack of bleeding from the lungs; he got better, but it returned; change of climate was