"Arise arise! the morning is at hand; 66 There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see, "Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead: 66 Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be, 6 For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee." XL. She hurried at his words, beset with fear, For there were sleeping dragons all around, Arise my Love. For line 6 there is a false start, Over the moors. Line 7 originally ended with the drench of mead, altered to the drenching mead before the happier reading of the text was supplied. The last two lines stand thus in the manuscript Put on warm cloathing, sweet, and fearless be Over the dartmoor bl[e]ak I have a home for thee. There is a cancelled reading, Over the bleak Dartmoor; but for which one might not have felt perfectly certain that dartmoor blak (with a small d) was an allusion to that moor wherein the river Dart takes its rise, and which Keats could see from Teignmouth in looking up the Estuary of the Teign. (XL) In line 2, about stands cancelled for around in the manuscript; and line 3 was first written thus: Or perhaps at glaring watch with ready spears — but the reading of the text is substituted. Well is struck out at the beginning of line 4; and in line 5 not a is struck out and heard no written instead. Then there is much fastidiousness in the matter of going on, as thus The Lamps were flickering death shades on the walls Without, the Tempest kept a hollow roar... The Lamps were flickering... The Lamps were dying in... But here and there a Lamp was flickering out... A drooping Lamp was flickering here and there. All these readings are rejected, and the stanza then proceeds to the end without further erasures except the word flutter'd after arras in line 7, and with cold after Flutter'd in line 8. Hunt observes upon the Alexandrine "This is a slip of the memory, for there were hardly carpets in those days. But the truth of the painting makes amends, as in the unchronological pictures of old masters." Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in similar circumstances in his magnificent ballad of The King's Tragedy, has avoided the unchronological flaw thus: And now the ladies fled with the Queen; And thorough the open door The night-wind wailed round the empty room At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears- A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. XLI. They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, : By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: XLII. And they are gone: aye, ages long ago (XLI) Lines 1 and 2 were first written thus: Like Spirits into the wide-paven hall They glide, and to the iron porch in haste; but the reading of the text is supplied in the manuscript. In line 3, slept is substituted for lay, and lay again for slept. The manuscript reads beaker for flaggon, For line 6 was originally written and next And paced round Madeline all angerless, But with a calmed eye his mistress owns, and then the reading of the text except that unanger'd has the place of sagacious, which does not appear in the manuscript at all. Of line 7 there is a rejected opening, The chains are loos'd, the... and again a rejected close Silent. Line 8 was originally the easy bolts back slide Upon the pavement lie the heavy chains; And they are gone-Aye, ages long ago That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold. And all his warrior Guests with shades and forms Line 2 is left unfinished, as a night of is struck out and the storm (?) inserted but the second word cancelled. In line 3 night is struck out in favour of Morn; but Morn was rejected and night restored, doubtless, when in revising the proof night was removed from line 2. In line 5 charnal stands cancelled for coffin. In line 6 long is cancelled and all left standing in its place; and for the rest the manuscript is revised to correspond with the stanza as given in the text. Hunt's last word is "Here endeth the young and divine Poet, but not the delight and gratitude of his readers; for, as he sings elsewhere- A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." POEMS. [Published with Lamia &c., 1820.] ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE. MY I. Y heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains " Haydon, in one of his letters to Miss Mitford (Correspondence &c., Volume II, page 72), says of Keats - The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale' at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely." Lord Houghton says the Ode was suggested by the continued song of a nightingale which, in the spring of 1819, had built its nest close to Wentworth Place. "Keats," says his Lordship (Aldine edition, 1876, page 237), "took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of this Ode." The anecdote as told in the Life, Letters, &c. (Volume I, page 245 of the 1848 edition, and page 207 of the 1867 edition) represents Brown as detecting the poet in the act of thrusting the scraps of the Ode away as waste paper, behind some books," and names Brown as the person who put them together. I presume Lord Houghton saw afterwards that Brown must have mistaken the bearing of Keats's action, inasmuch as the other evidence does not square with the carelessness implied. It is well to put the two forms of the story together, because the earlier version is a favourite cutting for magazine and anthology notes. The fair copy of the Ode written at the end of the Endymion in Sir Charles Dilke's collection is dated "May 1819." The poem was printed as long ago as July 1819, in a quarterly magazine called Annals of the Fine Arts, which was edited by James Elmes, but to a great extent informed by Haydon. The ode is the last thing in Number XIII, and is signed with a "dagger" (†). The original version corresponds in the main with Sir Charles Dilke's manuscript; and both are headed Ode to the Nightingale, not a Nightingale. (1) Lord Houghton and Mr. Palgrave follow the editions of Galignani and Smith in printing thy for thine in the sixth line of this stanza; but I am not aware of any authority for the change. Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, 2. O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, 3. 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; (2) Of Keats's partiality for claret enough and too much has been made; but with his delightful list of desiderata given to his sister in a letter, now before me, it is impossible to resist citing as a prose parallel to these two splendid lines of poetry, the words, "and, please heaven, a little claret wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep' -with a few or a good many ratafia cakes." In the first line of this stanza the manuscript and the Annals read has for hath, in the sixth true and blushful; and both are without the word away which, in the subsequent version published with Lamia &c., makes the final line of this stanza an Alexandrine. I do not think the circumstances warrant the reduction of this wonderful line to the metric standard of the rest, albeit Lord Houghton has been taken to task for leaving it in its loveliness. The evidence of one manuscript and one printed text, especially when another manuscript certainly existed though not forthcoming, is insufficient. To me the introduction of the word away in the version finally given forth by Keats is too redolent of genius to pass for a mere accident. The perfection thus lent to the echo opening the next stanza exceeds a thousand times in value the regularity got by dropping the word; and that one line with its lingering motive has ample reason to be longer than any other in the poem. Hunt must have been familiar enough with the poem before it was embodied in the Lamia volume; and it is more than possible that he knew all about the history of that one word's introduction. Therefore it is worth while to set down as external evidence that when he quoted the poem entire in The Indicator and again when he printed it in Imagination and Fancy, he gave the author's last copy that preference which a textual critic is bound to give. (3) In the third stanza the manuscript reads have for hast in line 2 and other's for other in line 4; but the Annals reads as in the text of 1820. The sixth line very clearly bears out Haydon's words connecting the sadness of the poem with the |