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,

Brows'd 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, trancèd 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-liv'd in regions new!

J. Keats.

The Poet

Now, therein, of all sciences (I speak still of

human, and according to the human conceit), is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it; nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste you may long to pass farther. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness, but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner.

Sir Philip Sidney.

Reading

S

HALL I be thought fantastical, if I confess that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear-to mine, at leastthan that of Milton or of Shakespeare? It may be, that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queene for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons?

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

Winter evenings-the world shut out-with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloudto yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one-and it degenerates into an audience.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out.

Charles Lamb.

Old Books are Best

OLD

LD books are best! With what delight
Does "Faithorne fecit" greet our sight;
On frontispiece or title-page

Of that old time, when on the stage
"Sweet Nell" set "Rowley's" heart alight!

And you, O friend, to whom I write,
Must not deny, e'en though you might,
Through fear of modern pirates' rage,
Old books are best.

What though the print be not so bright,
The paper dark, the binding slight?
Our author, be he dull or sage,
Returning from that distant age

So lives again, we say of right:
Old books are best.

Beverly Chew.

A Wish

F two things one with Chaucer let me ride,

OF

And hear the Pilgrims' tales; or, that denied,

Let me with Petrarch in a dew-sprent grove

Ring endless changes on the bells of love.

T. E. Brown.

Chaucer

A

N old man in a lodge within a park ;

The chamber walls depicted all around

With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,

Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark

Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.

He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read

I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page

Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead.
H. W. Longfellow.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms 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-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne :
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold :