And from the Desert's ice-girt pinnacles,
Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.

Girt there with blasts and meteors, Tempest dwells
By Nile's aërial urn, with rapid spells
Urging its waters to their mighty end.

O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level,

And they are thine, O Nile! and well thou knowest

That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil,

And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest. Beware, O man! for knowledge must to thee,

Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.

SHELLEY.

X.

SONNET FROM THE GARDEN OF FLORENCE

&C.,

BY JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS,

the subject of Keats's sonnet, "Blue! 'Tis the life of
heaven," &c.

SWEET poets of the gentle antique line,
That made the hue of beauty all eterne;

And gave earth's melodies a silver turn,-
Where did you steal your art so right divine?—
Sweetly ye memoried every golden twine

Of your ladies' tresses :-teach me how to spurn
Death's lone decaying and oblivion stern
From the sweet forehead of a lady mine.

The golden clusters of enamouring hair
Glow'd in poetic pictures sweetly well ;-
Why should not tresses dusk, that are so fair
On the live brow, have an eternal spell
In poesy?-dark eyes are dearer far

Than orbs that mock the hyacinthine-bell.

See page 257 of this volume.

XI.

SONNET BY PIERRE RONSARD.

NATURE, ornant Cassandre, qui deuoit
De sa douceur forcer les plus rebelles,
La composa de cent beautez nouuelles,
Que dès mille ans en espargne elle auoit:-
De tous les biens qu' Amour au Ciel couuoit
Comme un trésor cherement sous ses ailes,
Elle enrichit les graces immortelles
De son bel oeil qui les Dieux esmouuoit.—
Du Ciel à peine elle estoit descenduë
Quand ie la vey, quand mon asme esperduë
En deuint folle, et d'un si poignant trait,
Amour coula ses beautez en mes veines,
Qu'autres plaisirs ie ne sens que mes peines
Ny autre bien qu' adorer son portrait.

This sonnet, Keats's translation from which is given at pages 31718 of the present volume, is the second in Les Amours de Cassandre. Cassandre, it should be explained, was, as Lord Houghton records in the Life, Letters &c., "a damosel of Blois," beloved of Master Peter Ronsard.

XII.

ON LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCY;
REMARKS BY LEIGH HUNT,

published in The Indicator for the 10th of May 1820.

AMONG the pieces printed at the end of Chaucer's works, and attributed to him, is a translation, under this title, of a poem of the celebrated Alain Chartier, Secretary to Charles the Sixth and Seventh. It was the title which suggested to a friend the verses at the end of our present number. We wish Alain could have seen them. He would have found a Troubadour air for them, and sung them to La Belle Dame Agnes Sorel, who was however not Sans Mercy. The union of the imaginative and the real is very striking throughout, particularly in the dream. The wild gentleness of the rest of the thoughts and of the music are alike old; and they are also alike young; for love and imagination are always young, let them bring with them what times and accompaniments they may. If we take real flesh and blood with us, we may throw ourselves, on the facile wings of our sympathy, into what age we please. It is only by trying to feel, as well as to fancy, through the medium of a costume, that writers become mere fleshless masks and cloaks,-things like the trophies of the ancients, when they hung up the empty armour of an enemy. A hopeless lover would still feel these verses, in spite of the introduction of something unearthly. Indeed any lover, truly touched, or

any body capable of being so, will feel them; because love itself resembles a visitation; and the kindest looks, which bring with them an inevitable portion of happiness because they seem happy themselves, haunt us with a spell-like power, which makes us shudder to guess at the sufferings of those who can be fascinated by unkind ones.

People however need not be much alarmed at the thought of such sufferings now-a-days; not at least in some countries. Since the time when ladies, and cavaliers, and poets, and the lovers of nature, felt that humanity was a high and not a mean thing, love in general has become either a grossness or a formality. The modern systems of morals would ostensibly divide women into two classes, those who have no charity, and those who have no restraint; while men, poorly conversant with the latter, and rendered indifferent to the former, acquire bad ideas of both. Instead of the worship of Love, we have the worship of Mammon; and all the difference we can see between the sufferings attending on either is, that the sufferings from the worship of Love exalt and humanize us, and those from the worship of Mammon debase and brutalize. Between the delights there is no comparison.-Still our uneasiness keeps our knowledge going on.

A word or two more of Alain Chartier's poem. "M. Aleyn," saith the argument, "secretary to the king of France, framed this dialogue between a gentleman and a gentlewoman, who finding no mercy at her hand, dieth for sorrow." We know not in what year Chartier was born; but he must have lived to a good age, and written this poem in his youth, if Chaucer translated it; for he died in 1449, and Chaucer, an old man, in 1400. The beginning however, as well as the goodness of the version, looks as if our countryman had done it; for he