better; there are many like Sir F. Burdett, who like to sit at the head of political dinners,- but there are none prepared to suffer in obscurity for their country. The motives of our worst men are interest, and of our best, vanity; we have no Milton or Algernon Sidney. Governors in these days lose the title of man in exchange for that of diplomate or minister. We breathe a sort of official atmosphere. All the departments of the Government have strayed far from simplicity, which is the greatest of strength. There is as much difference in this, between the present Government and Oliver Cromwell's, as there is between the Twelve Tables of Rome and the volumes of Civil Law digested by Justinian. A man now entitled Chancellor has the same honour paid him whether he be a hog or a Lord Bacon. No sensation is created by greatness, but by the number of Orders a man has at his buttonhole. Notwithstanding the noise the Liberals make in the cause of Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of Liberty than any one else could have done. Not that the Divine Right gentlemen have done or intend to do any good-no, they have taken the lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done, without any of the good. The worst thing he has taught them is how to organize their monstrous armies. The Emperor Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his empire, as did Dioclesian, creating two czars besides himself, and continuing supreme monarch of the whole. Should he do so, and they for a series of years keep peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to China. I think it a very likely thing that China may fall of itself; Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its horn against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France. Dilke,' whom you know to be a Godwin-perfectibility man, pleases himself with the idea that America will be the country to take up the march of the human intellect where England leaves off. I differ there with him greatly: a country like the United States, whose greatest men are Franklins and Washingtons, will never do that: they are great men, doubtless; but how are they to be compared to these, our countrymen, Milton and the two Sidneys? The one is a philosophical Quaker, full of mean and thrifty maxims; the other sold the very charger who had taken him through all his battles. These Americans are great, but they are not sublime, men; the humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime. Birkbeck's mind is too much in the American style; you must endeavour to enforce a little spirit of another sort into the settlement, always with great caution; for thereby you may do your descendants more good than you may imagine. If I had a prayer to make for any great good, next to Tom's recovery, it should be that one of your children should be the first American poet. I have a great mind to make a proph 'Dilke was the founder of the" London Athenæum," the father of the first baronet, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, of whom, by the way, as a boy several allusions will be found in these letters. Keats's friend was the grandfather of the present Sir Charles Dilke. ecy; and they say prophecies work out their own fulfilment. 'Tis the witching hour of night, For a song and for a charm, See they glisten in alarm, And the moon is waxing warm To hear what I shall say. Moon, keep wide thy golden ears- I sing an infant's lullaby, Listen, listen, listen, listen, Though the rushes that will make Child, I see thee! Child, I've found thee And thy mother sweet is nigh thee! Child, I know thee! Child no more, But a poet evermore! See, see, the lyre, the lyre, Upon the little cradle's top Flaring, flaring, flaring, Past the eyesight's bearing. It stares, it stares, it stares, It lifts its little hand into the flame O' th' western wild, Bard art thou completely! O' th' western wild, Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendations, I hope I shall never marry: though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk and the curtains of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet's down, the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Windermere,-I should not feel, or rather my happiness should not be, so fine. My solitude is sublime-for, instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home. The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through my window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as part of that beauty, but I must have a thousand of these beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day as my imagination strengthens that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's body-guard: "Then Tragedy with sceptr❜d pall comes sweeping by." According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating these lines, "I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage." I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone. These things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children, to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony, which I rejoice in.' I have written this that you might see that I have my share of the highest pleasures of life, and that though I may choose to pass my days alone, I shall be no solitary; you see there is nothing splenetic in all this. The only thing that can affect me personally for more than one short passing day is any doubts about my powers for poetry: I seldom have any, and I look with the hope to the nighing time when I shall have none. I am as happy as a man 'It was about six months from the date of this letter that he began to be haunted by "the voice and shape of a woman," and that woman, of course, was Fanny Brawne. |