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judgment hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself-that which is created, must create itself."

A few weeks later he writes on the same subject," Reynolds is well and persuades me to publish my 'Pot of Basil,' as an answer to the attack made on me by Blackwood' and the Quarterly. I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly' has only brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among book-men, I wonder the Quarterly' should cut its own throat.'" So little, indeed, had it cooled his ardour, or broken his spirit, that about this time he penned the following passage of exalted feeling:"In the second place I will speak of my views, and of the life I purpose to my self. I am ambitious of doing the world some good; if I should be spared that may be the work of future years. In the interval I will assay to reach as high a summit in poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. The fairest conceptions I have of poems to come, bring the blood frequently into my forehead. All I hope is that I may not lose all interest in human affairs; that the solitary indifference I feel for applause, even from the finest spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may have.

I

do not think it will. I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever shine upon them."

In a letter to his brother George, October, 1818, he mentions a lady of noble form, refined manners, and superior intellect, as simply admiring her this admiration in time ripened into a passion which ceased only with his existence. However warmly the devotion of Keats may have been returned, his outward circumstances soon became in so uncertain a state as to render a union for some years at least impossible. Poverty and sickness overtook him; these he met, and for a time successfully baffled, with strong hope and consciousness of his own mighty power of intellect; but they at length overcame him, and the very intensity of his passion was, in a certain sense, accessory

to his death. Had he lived less he might, possibly, have lived longer.

When in December, Keats was left alone by the death of his brother Tom, (who had long been in consumption,) he accepted the invitation of Mr. Brown to reside with him. The cheerful sociey of his friend had a beneficial effect on his spirits, and stimulated him to renewed poetic exertions. It was then he begun " Hyperion," that noble fragment full "of the large utterance of the early gods," of which Shelley said the scenery and drawing of Saturn, dethroned by the fallen Titans, surpassed those of Satan and his rebellious angels in "Paradise Lost."

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Hypernion is, without doubt, the most mature of his poems, and contains more of the sublime than any other, which is relieved and softened by imagery of the most exquisite and äeriel hue.

Take, for example, the following fragmentary passage:—

As when upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust,
Which comes upon the silence and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave:
So came these words and went.

A simile of more unearthly haunting majesty than the following, the intellect of man could hardly create:--

There is a roaring in the bleak grown pines When winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a God gives sign, With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,

With thunder and with music and with pomp. Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines Which when it ceases in this mountain'd world, No other sound succeeds.

The "Eve of St. Agnes" was begun in 1819 in Hampshire, and finished on his return to Hampstead-there is a certain Spenserian handling about it, but with a striking improvement in diction and versification. Lord Jeffrey justly remarks, "The glory and charm of the poem is the description of the fair maiden's antique chamber and of all that passes in that sweet and angelguarded sanctuary, every part of which is touched with colour at once rich and delicate, and the whole chastened and harmonized in the midst of its gorgeous distinctness by a pervading grace and purity, that indicate not less clearly the exaltation than the refinement of the author's fancy." We find the following critical observations in Leigh Hunt's

poet, and the contrast between the glory of the diction and the poverty of invention is very striking.

delightful work on "Imagination and Fancy:""The Eve of St. Agnes' is young, but full-grown poetry of the rarest description; graceful as the beard- Keats now began to find himself in less Apollo; glowing and gorgeous with somewhat straightened circumstances, the colours of romance-in addition to from various causes. His volumes of felicity of treatment, its subject is in poems had not sold so well as he had every respect a happy one, and helps to hoped they would. Then it is possible 'paint' this our bower of poetry with he possessed no overplus of prudence delight.' In all the luxury of the poem and economy in money matters-a quathere is nothing of the conventional lity which is not usually found to exist craft of artificial writers; no heaping up in excess in men of high literary talent. of words or similes for their own sakes Certainly their is no reason why common or the rhyme's sake; no gaudy common practical sense should not be combined places; no borrowed airs of earnest with intellectual superiority, though it ness; no tricks of inversion; no sub- rarely is. To meet his present wants, he stitution of reading or of ingenious determined to write for the periodicals, thoughts for feeling or spontaneity, no although he formerly entertained strong irrelevancy or unfitness of any sort. objections to magazine writing; he All flows out of sincerity and passion. subdued his proud feelings, and there The writer is as much in love with his are several letters which relate to this heroine as his hero is; his description subject, but it does not appear that he of the painted window, however gor-ever carried out his intentions, for it geous, has not an untrue or superfluous was in the early part of 1820, that word; and the only speck of a fault in symptoms first appeared of that disease the whole poem arises from an excess of which was soon to close his bright, emotion." though not unclouded, career.

One night, about eleven o'clock he returned home in a state of great physical excitement to those who did not know him, it might appear in a state of fierce intoxication. He told his friend that he had been outside a coach, had received a severe chill and was a little fevered, but added, "I don't feel it now." He was easily persuaded to go to bed, and as he leaped into the cold sheets, he slightly coughed, and said,

me the candle, let me see this blood." He gazed stedfastly, for some moments, at the crimson stain, and then, looking into his friend's face with an expression of sudden calmness never to be forgotten, remarked, "I know the colour of that blood-it is arterial blood-I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my death warrant. I must die."

Keats spent the greater part of the summer at Shanklin in company with his friend Brown. Here they attempted a combination of intellectual power as was hardly likely to prove successful, they were to write a drama between them. Brown was to supply the characters, incident and dramatic plot, while Keats translated them into rich and glowing verse-this was no doubt an amusing diversion, but it requires no profound æsthetic knowledge to un-"That is blood from my month, bring derstand that this singular mode of composition was not likely to be successful -for the unity of form and emotion must receive an injury hard to be compensated by any apparent improvement in the several parts, and a certain inferiority is often more agreeable than an attempt at entire completeness, at the sacrifice of that unity of feeling and character, which in the drama most especially should be preserved" the story is confused and unreal, and the personages are mere imbodied passions, the heroine and her brother walk through the whole piece like the demons of an old romance, and the historical character which gives his name to the play (Otho the Great) is almost excluded and made a part of the pageantry-passages, however, of great beauty and power are continually recurring-there is scarce a page without some touch of the great

A surgeon was immediately called in, and after being bled, Keats fell into a quiet sleep. The medical man declared the lungs to be sound and the rupture unimportant; but Keats was of a different opinion, and with the frequent self-prescience of disease, added to his scientific knowledge, he was not to be persuaded out of his forebodings; his love of life did at times, however, get the better of his gloom.

The advancing year brought with it

such an improvement in health and strength, as amounted almost in the estimation of many of his most sanguine friends, to recovery. Gleams of his old cheerfulness returned. In a letter (February, 1820) he remarks, with exquisite delicacy and feeling, "how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us. I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known since my infancy, their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers, in hot-houses, of the most beautiful natures, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of spring are what I want to see again."

In May, Keats went to Kentish Town to be near his friend, Leigh Hunt, but soon returned to Hampstead, and remained with the family of the lady to whom he was attached. But as the summer and autumn advanced all the delusive hopes which his apparent recovery had fostered died away, for the disease was making visible progress, and in September, as a last forlorn hope, he was recommended to try the genial climate of Italy. His friend Severn, nobly regardless of his fair prospects for the future, (the gold medal for the best historical painting had just been awarded to him) at once offered to accompany Keats into Italy. Such a companionship was everything to him, and though he reproached himself on his deathbed with permitting Severn to make the sacrifice, it no doubt afforded all the alleviation of which his sad condition was capable.

Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon to death. which was the last he ever wrote. A violent storm in the Bay of Biscay lasted thirty hours. After the tempest had subsided, Keats was reading the description of the storm in Don Juan, and cast the book on the floor in a transport of indignation—“How horrible an example of human nature," he cried, "is this man, who has no pleasure left him, but to gloat over and jeer at the most awful incidents of life. Oh! this is a paltry originality, which consists in making solemn things gay, and gay things solemn, and yet it will fascinate thousands, by the very diaboli cal outrage of their sympathies. Byron's perverted education makes him assume to feel, and try to impart to others, those depraved sensations which the want of any education excites in many.”

The invalid's sufferings increased during the latter part of the voyage, and a miserable ten days quarantine at Naples. But when once fairly settled in comfortable quarters, his spirits appeared somewhat to revive, and the glorious scenery to bring back at moments his old sense of delight; these transitory gleams of hope were only remarkable as contrasting painfully with the gloom of melancholy and despair, which overcame all his feelings, even those of love.

Little things which might have passed at other times unobserved, now struck his exquisitely susceptible feelings with intense disgust. He could not bear to go to the Opera, on account of the sentinels who were stationed continually on the stage. "We will go

at once to Rome," he said, "I know my end approaches, and the continual visi ble tyranny of this government prevents me from having any peace of mind—I could not lie quietly here-I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism."

The voyage was begun on the 20th of September, for a fortnight they were delayed in the Channel by contrary winds. He landed once more on the Dorchester coast; the bright beauty of the day and the scene revived the poet's drooping heart, it was then that he He had received at Naples a most composed that sonnet of solemn ten-kind letter from Shelley, anxiously enderness,

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou artNot in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching with eternal lips apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moorsNo-yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

quiring after his health, and concluding with a pressing invitation to Pisa, where he could ensure him every comfort and attention. It is unfortunate this invitation was not accepted, as it might have spared the sufferer much annoyance, and relieved the mind of his friend from much painful responsi

bility and distress. On arriving at Rome he delivered the letter of introduction to Dr. (now Sir James) Clarke, from whom he received all the attention which skill and knowledge can confer, and all that sympathy and delicate thoughtfulness which could lighten the dark passages of mortal sickness, and soothe the pillow of the forlorn stranger. Dr. Clarke procured Keats a lodging in the Piazza di Spagna, opposite to his own dwelling; it was in the first house on your right hand as you ascend the steps of the "Trinita del Monte." The desolation and gloom of Keats's state were alone alleviated by the love and care of his faithful friend Severn and Dr. Clarke. Once during his illness he requested that on his grave stone might be this inscription:

Here lies one whose name was writ in water;

a

since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since the body was opened, the lungs were completely gone. The doctors could not imagine how he had lived these two months. I followed his dear body to the grave on Monday, with many English. The letters I placed in the coffin with my own hand."

Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, one of the most beautiful spots on which the eye or heart of man can rest. It is a grassy slope, amid the verdurous ruins of the Honorian walls of the diminished city, and surrounded by the pyramidal tomb which Petarch attributed to Remas, but which antiquarian truth has ascribed to the humbler man of Caius Cestius, a tribune of the people only remembered by his sepulchre. In one of those mental voyages into the he also wished that a purse of his sister's past, which often precede death, Keats together with an unopened letter, which had told Severn that "he thought the he was unable to read, and some hair intensest pleasure he had received in should be placed in his coffin. This life was in watching the growth of flowrequest Severn fulfilled with his owners;" and another time, after lying hand. He continued to linger in awhile still and peaceful, he said, "I state of extreme suffering and weakness. feel the flowers growing over me." And The lowering clouds of gloom and there they do grow, even all the winter foreboding which, during the first part long-violets, and daisies, mingling of his illness, hung so heavily and with the fresh herbage, and in the thickly around him, happily passed words of Shelley, "making one in love away, and left a beautiful calm of quiet- with death, to think that one should be ness and peace. On the 27th February, buried in so sweet a place." 1821, Mr. Severn wrote a letter to a friend,"He is gone; he died with the most perfect ease-he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn —1—lift me up—I am dying-I shall die easy; don't be frightened-be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sunk into death, so quiet that I still thought he slept. I cannot say more now. I am broken down by four nights watching, no sleep

To the memory of John Keats, Shelley inscribed his exquisitely beautiful poem, "Adonäis-truly one of the fairest monuments ever raised, and the sweetest tribute of love that has ever been offered

on the altar of departed genius.' And a few years after this was written, in the extended burying-ground, a little above the grave of Keats, was placed another tombstone, recording that below rested the passionate and world-worn heart of Shelley himself "Cor Cordium."

P. B. S.

ANDREW MARVELL.

THERE are times in the histories of all nations which are strangely productive of great minds. After a long dark winter of sluggish inactivity, a spring time comes upon the mind of the world as

well as upon the earth. The sun of knowledge and the dews of faith soften the clods and warm them into life, and then the seeds which have been dropped on the soil of humanity begin to ger

minate and prepare to put forth their harvest. Such a period in the history of England was that which preceeded the Commonwealth. Up to the reign of the eighth Henry, superstition had dominated over art, set limits to science, confined intellect within a narrow circle, and banned free thought. The world's heart and brain were as though they were dead, so faint was the action of one, under the shadow of the hood of the monk-so faint the pulsation of the other beneath its ecclesiastical shroud. Philosophers were fain to hide their lore within the recesses of their studies, for fear that it might offend the dogmas of the Church-and men spake of the thoughts which began to beam in upon their souls as though truth were a crime. But there were men who, like Galileo, spake with the voices which echoed to them out of the recesses of nature, and braved the dungeon-there were martyrs who like the Lollards, proclaimed the faith which was in them, and dared the stake and the flame. The first blow at a system thoroughly rotten, seals its fate. Its end may be delayed or put off-but from that moment it is written on the page of the future, for

Freedom's battle once begun,

Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son, Though baffled oft, is ever won. Human thought often errs, but it has this godlike quality, that in the end it always tends to the right. Keep it still, silent, immovable-shut it in an exhausted receiver from which the air of knowledge is thoroughly excluded, it will remain latent-let but a breath enter its prison-house, and it begins to wake-it ceases to be compressible-it grows, and puts a firm grasp on power. It is a beautiful story, that in the Arabian Nights' Tales where the fisherman draws up in his net the vessel sealed with the magic signet of Solomon. When he opened it there arose from it a cloud—that cloud became a giant threatening him with destruction. That is how thought was imprisoned; but when once the seal was off its prisonhouse, it grew so rapidly that it was beyond the power of man to force it back into the narrow cell from which it had emerged.

It has been said that great men make great times. Invert the sentence and it is still true-great times make great men. Those who recognise the

providential government of the world, note its workings in this, that a crisis brings the men fitted to meet it; close upon the heels of the danger ever follows the means of safety. If it were our task to trace the progress of humanity, we might show how, with the spirit of enquiry which marked the era of the Reformation, came intellectual power from which rose Shakespere and his contemporaries, and how the two blended to produce the pure, earnest, unwavering, stern faith of the puritans. But that is not our purpose. We may only so far touch history as to observe the general circumstances which preceeded and accompanied a particular life-only so far indulge in specu lation as to trace the connection of the wide-spread cause with the one effect which forms our subject. That we have attempted to do as briefly as may be; and now to the matter in hand.

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At the town of Kingston-on-Hull, where the broad Humber floats between verdant banks to the sea, stands a monument bearing the following inscription: Near this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esq., a man so endowed by nature, so improved by education, study, and travel, so consummated by experience, that joining the peculiar graces of wit and learning with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few, and scarce paralleled by any. But a tombstone can neither contain his character, nor is marble necessary to transmit it to posterity; it is engraved in the minds of this generation, and will always be legible in his inimitable writings, nevertheless. He having served twenty years in Parliament, and that with such wisdom, dexterity, and courage, as becomes a true patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence he was deputed to that assembly, lamenting in his death the public loss, have erected this monument of their grief and their gratitude, 1688."

It has been observed by a satirist, that if the testimony of tombstones is to be taken, the living have sadly degenerated from the virtues of the dead. Monuments are so infected with the vice of flattery, that monumental in

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