Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:

Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.

"Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep;

There was a painful change, that nigh expelled
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep.

"Ah, Porphyro,' said she,' but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tunable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,

Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
Oh, leave me not in this eternal woe,

For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.

"My Madeline ! sweet dreamer! lovely bride! Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?

Thy beauty's shield, heart-shaped and vermeil dyed? Ah! silver shrine, here will I take my rest

After so many hours of toil and quest,

A famished pilgrim, — saved by miracle.

Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest, Saving of thy sweet self, if thou think'st well To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.

"Hark! 't is an elfin storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
Arise arise! the morning is at hand,
The bloated wassailers will never heed.
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,
Drowned all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead,
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,

Far o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.'

"They glide like phantoms into the wide hall;

Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide,
Where lay the porter, in uneasy sprawl,

With a huge empty flagon by his side;

The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns :

By one and one, the bolts full easy slide,

The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;

The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.

"And they are gone : aye! ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm;
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior guests, with shade and form
Of witch and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmared. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold."

With Keats, who died in 1820, we enter upon the fair field of modern poetry, and find ourselves among the poets of our own age and our own forms of thought.

Lowell, one of our most sympathetic literary critics, has said,

"Three men almost contemporaneous with each otherWordsworth, Keats, and Byron were the great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth was the only conscious reformer and the deepest thinker; Keats, the most essentially a poet; and Byron, the most keenly intellectual of the three.... Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms; and Byron, interesting to men of imagination less for his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires not yet regulated by experience, nor supplied with motives by the duties of life."

LVII.

ON SOME FRIENDS OF THE LAKE POETS.

HERE are many interesting writers, in prose as well

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as verse, who wrote at the time the Lake School was rising to fame. They are worth better and longer mention than I can give in one brief Talk. The early part of this century saw gathered in London a group of men more interesting than any similar group since the days when the Scriblerus Club used to meet at Will's Coffee-house.

CHARLES LAMB, one of the sweetest and gentlest characters that the past keeps alive for us, was a school1775-1835 mate of Coleridge in Christ's Hospital school, and they formed a friendship there which was never broken. Lamb was a man of varied talents. He wrote poems and one or two plays; but his merit as a writer is shown best in his Essays of Elia, which are full of quaint humor, and have a pathos entirely their own. No essays so fresh, delicate, and original had been written since the time of Abraham Cowley as these of Lamb, and I think I would rather part with Cowley even than with the gentle Elia.

Lamb was a true Londoner, born and dwelling in or near that great city all his life, and loving it as if it were a feeling and responsive being, conscious of his love. He went to visit Wordsworth once, and enjoyed the beautiful lake. and mountain region among which his friend lived; but his heart was always in London. In one of his letters to Wordsworth he says,

...

"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable tradesmen and customers, coaches, wagons, play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rabbles, . . . the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print-shops, old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes, all London itself a pantomime and masquerade, these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about the city's crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much

life."

Dr. Johnson also loved London as Lamb did, and preferred it to all the nature outside.

Lamb held for years a place as clerk in the India House, and his slight, stooping figure, clad in clerkly black, coming

down Fleet Street to his lodgings in the Temple, where he lived many years, is one of the most vivid pictures in my imagination. His sister Mary, who is the Bridget of his essays, was his housekeeper. She was subject to fits of insanity, and he devoted his life to unfailing care of her, — a care repaid on her part by tenderest gratitude and love. When not under the influence of these melancholy attacks, she was a clever woman and charming companion.

When Lamb was about fifty he was pensioned by the East India Company, in whose service he had so long been a clerk, and for the rest of his days he lived in freedom. One must read his own account of his delight at his emancipation, in his letters to friends, to see how keen and boyish was his enjoyment of the liberation from his daily drudgery.

The Essays of Elia are delightful reading. Their humor is so quaint, and yet so tender, that in reading them one often laughs with tears in the eyes.

One series in the essays on Popular Fallacies, - That handsome is that handsome does; That a man must not laugh at his own jest; That ill-gotten gain never prospers; That we should rise with the lark, are in Lamb's wittiest vein.

I quote for you from his Essays of Elia the greater part of his amusing dissertation upon Roast Pig:—

"Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M- was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing it or biting it from the living animal just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term cho-fang, literally, the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother), was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swineherd Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy who, being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into

a bundle of straw, which, kindling, quickly spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, — not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from? Not from the burnt cottage, — he had smelt that smell before ; indeed, this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them, applied them, in his booby fashion, to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it), he tasted — crackling!

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Again he felt the pig. It did not burn him so much now; still, he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding that it was the pig that smelt so and tasted so delicious; and surrendering himself to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin, with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion when his sire entered amid smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders as thick as hailstones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure which he experienced in his lower regions had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued: