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199-207. Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died. This is a verse in the taste of Chaucer, full of minute grace and truth. The smoke of the wax taper seems almost as ethereal and fair as the moonlight, and both suit each other and the heroine.'- Hunt. But to her heart, her heart was voluble, Paining with eloquence her balmy side. 'The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of suspense, the second makes us realize at once the physical effect of the emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on ourselves.' - Colvin's Keats, Cap. ix. 208-216. Keats' manuscript shows that this gorgeous picture was completed only after many revisions and elaborate toil. pecially the exquisite comparison in line 213.

Notice es

Moonlight shining

217-225. Rose-bloom fell on her hands. through stained glass is not strong enough to produce this effect. But as we read this description, we cannot help wishing it were! Porphyro grew faint. The lover's growing faint' is one of the few inequalities which are to be found in the latter productions of this great but young and over-sensitive poet. He had, at the time of his writing this, the seeds of a mortal illness in him, and he doubtless wrote as he had felt, for he was also deeply in love; and extreme sensibility struggled in him with a great understanding.'- Hunt. 226-243. clasp'd like a missal, etc. Hunt takes this to mean where Christian prayer-books must not be seen and are therefore doubly cherished for the danger.' Butcherished' by whom? And how does this explain 'clasp'd'? Her soul is certainly the thing 'clasp'd;' i.e., tight-closed, unopened as would be a Christian prayer-book in a land of Paynims.

244-261. carpet. An anachronism (repeated in line 360). Medieval chambers and halls were strewn with rushes; 'carpets' were then coverings for tables and couches, such as the 'cloth' described in line 256.

262-270. Notice the Oriental richness of the coloring. This stanza owes something to Paradise Lost, v. 331-348.

271-297. carpet (285); here used correctly, referring to the cloth' of line 256. La belle dame sans mercy; the title of a poem written by Alain Chartier in the fifteenth century. Keats' poem of the same name has almost nothing in common with the original. 298-315. tunable harmonious, musical. See note on Lycidas, 37-49.

316-324. Notice the striking effect produced by the sharp contrast

between the warmth and passion of the hero and the unsympathetic chill of his surroundings.

325-351. heart-shaped and vermeil dyed. The best we can say for this conceit is that it is in Shakespeare's earliest and worst style. Rhenish Rhine wine, as in

The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering upspring reels;
And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,-
Hamlet, i. 4, 8-10.

352-378. Not the least artistic portion of this wonderful poem is its conclusion — carefully prepared for by the allusions in lines 22– 23 and 155-156. Such exquisite dramatic propriety is rare in Keats; it is nevertheless indispensable in every work of art that would claim for itself the first rank.

The Eve of St. Agnes is the one considerable effort of Keats in which he has been able to invent a human interest and a human action manifesting themselves in a manner at once rational and noble. Yet even in this masterpiece, we feel that the poet is least at home in the human part of the story; that his strength lies in the more limited field of Word-Painting; in his ability to individualize a scene and represent it for us in words as the painter does in colors.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.

During the autumn and winter of 1818 much of Keats' time was occupied with the sad duty of nursing his brother Thomas, -ill with that same hereditary consumption which took off Keats himself. Thomas Keats died in December, 1818; this Ode, written in the following spring, is tinged with the melancholy that was thenceforth to accompany Keats to his early grave.

1-10. It must be confessed that this opening stanza is not clear. No sufficient reason is assigned for the poet's drowsy numbness.' Lethe; the river of Forgetfulness in the Underworld; Cl. Myths, pp. SI, 195, 351. Dryad; Wood-nymph. Compare Keats' Ode to

Psyche, given in Cl. Myths, pp. 160–161.

11-30. Flora; goddess of Flowers and Spring.

See note on Lycidas, 15-22.

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Hippocrene.

hast never

known, The weariness, etc. This treatment is not strictly classical ;

the following is:

O wanderer from a Grecian shore,

Still, after many years, in distant lands,

Still nourishing in thy bewildered brain

That wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain!
Say, will it never heal?

And can this fragrant lawn
With its cool trees, and night
And the sweet, tranquil Thames
And moonshine and the dew,
To thy racked heart and brain
Afford no balm?

Matthew Arnold's Philomela: 5-15.

31-50. Not charioted by Bacchus. A sudden change of mood from that expressed in lines 11-20; he will have none of the inspiration of Wine; Poesy shall convey him to some Land of Faery. In line 35 he imagines himself there. Was there ever a more lovely picture of this Land than is suggested in the fifteen lines that follow? See also the exquisite picture in lines 69-70, and compare the remarks in the Notes at the conclusion of The Eve of St. Agnes.

51-60. I have been half in love with easeful Death. A sigh from the depth of Keats' own soul. Less than two short years of life were before him when he wrote this line.

61-80. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird. The enduring type (the Bird) is here illogically contrasted with the passing individual (the Poet). No hungry generations press thee down, bringing before us vis

'is Dantesque in its weird vigor, ions of many terrible things, and chiefly of multitudinous keen and cruel faces more relentless in the relentless oppressiveness of their onset upon the sensitive among men than anything [?] in the mighty visions of damnation and detestableness seen five hundred years ago in Italy.' - Forman, i. xxi.

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

Keats seems never to have acquired any knowledge of Greek; the crude but vigorous version of the Elizabethan furnished the sole inspiration for this magnificent Sonnet. True, it was Balboa and not Cortez that discovered the Pacific, but what matter? Hunt's criticism on the last line can hardly be bettered: it leaves the reader, he says, 'with all the illimitable world of thought and feeling before him to which his imagination will have been brought, while journeying through these "realms of gold."'

Keats was only twenty-one when he wrote this Sonnet (1816). In 1848 was published the following Sonnet to Homer, found among his papers: whether written in 1816 or in 1818 is not known.

Standing aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.

So thou wast blind; - but then the veil was rent,
For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live,
And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,

And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;
Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green,
There is a budding morrow in midnight,
There is a triple sight in blindness keen;
Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel

To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti told Forman he considered

There is a budding morrow in midnight

one of the finest lines 'in all poetry.'

SHELLEY.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, the son of a wealthy, commonplace Sussex baronet, was born in 1792. His hatred of tyranny made Eton anything but a bed of roses for him. The same Oxford that still maintains in a place of honor1 a statue to James II. this Oxford expelled Shelley for the utterance of religious opinions which, however mistaken, were inspired by a youthful and generous enthusiasm for truth. This same noble enthusiasm partly redeems the follies and eccentricities of the next five years; in Alastor (1816) dawned upon the world another poet in this age of poets. Impartial judgment cannot acquit Shelley of all responsibility for his first wife's suicide, nor can it fail to approve the legal decree that deprived him of the guardianship of her children; Shelley had to learn by this bitter experience that mere iconoclasm saveth the soul neither of society nor of the individual. Laon and Cynthia (1818) shows Shelley in all his glory and all his weakness: his vehement passion, his splendor of imagery, his idealizing spirituality, his monotony in character-delineation, his inability to gain any 'wide and luminous view' of life. - The same year (1818) he left England for the third time- never to return. The next four years he spent chiefly in Italy; the impressions of that residence, recorded in the prose of his Letters, Matthew Arnold prefers to his poetry. His intimacy with Byron gave us Julian and Maddalo; 2 a profound and admiring study of the Greek tragedians gave us the Prometheus Unbound (1821), ‘a genuine liking [for which],' Mr. Symonds declares, 'may be reckoned the touch-stone of a man's capacity for understanding lyric poetry.'s Of all his works, Adonais (1821) is the most artistic in form. Years were bringing to Shelley the philosophic mind; had he lived he would undoubtedly have produced something great. But this was not to be: he was drowned while sailing on the Gulf of Spezzia, July 8,

1822.

Keats, Napoleon, Shelley, Byron-all died between 1820 and 1824. Was there ever, within so short a time, such an in-gathering of mighty spirits to the abodes of dusty death!

1 Over the entrance to the main quadrangle of University College Shelley's College!

2 See Bibliography on Byron.

30 Cruel Test! Must all lack the lyric sense who cannot 'like' a 'Lyrical Drama,' a production whose very title is a contradiction in terms? - The Lyrics in the Prometheus Unbound are undoubtedly beautiful, though at times dangerously near to 'words, detached from meaning' (Symonds, p. 124). But how about the Drama' part of this play, -a Drama' where the characters are abstractions, where the action obeys no law but that of unreason, and where the fundamental philosophy (if anything) is mere Rousseauism?

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