We brought away from battle, And much their land bemoaned them, Two thousand head of cattle, And the head of him who owned them: Ednyfed, King of Dyfed, His head was borne before us; His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, And his overthrow, our chorus. THE MEN OF GOTHAM. [From Nightmare Abbey.] Seamen three! What men be ye? To rake the moon from out the sea. And our ballast is old wine; And your ballast is old wine. Who art thou, so fast adrift? In a bowl Care may not be. Fear ye not the waves that roll? No in charmed bowl we swim. What the charm that floats the bowl? Water may not pass the brim. The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine. And our ballast is old wine; And your ballast is old wine. [From Melincourt.] THE FLOWER OF LOVE. 'Tis said the rose is Love's own flower, But ah! the fragrance lingering there Why did not Love the amaranth choose, THE GRAVE OF LOVE. I dug, beneath the cypress shade, I pressed them down the sod beneath; Frail as thy love, the flowers were dead, MR. CYPRESS'S SONG IN RIDICULE OF LORD BYRON. [From Nightmare Abbey.] There is a fever of the spirit, The brand of Cain's unresting doom, Which in the lone dark souls that bear it Glows like the lamp in Tullia's tomb : Unlike that lamp, its subtle fire Burns, blasts, consumes its cell, the heart, Till, one by one, hope, joy, desire, Like dreams of shadowy smoke depart. When hope, love, like itself, are only And by that dreary illumination, Till time its clay-built home has rent, Thought broods on feeling's desolationThe soul is its own monument. JOHN KEATS. [JOHN KEATS was born in London on the 29th of October, 1795. His father was in the employment of a livery-stable keeper in Moorfields, whose daughter he married. Our poet was born prematurely. He lost his father when he was nine years old, and his mother when he was fifteen. He and his brothers were sent to a good school at Enfield kept by Mr. Clarke, whose son, Charles Cowden Clarke, well known afterwards from his connexion with letters and literary men, was a valuable friend to John Keats. As a schoolboy, Keats seems to have been at first remarked chiefly for his pugnacity and high spirit, but he soon showed a love of reading. On leaving school in 1810 he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton; he was thus still in the neighbourhood of the Clarkes, who continued to see him, took interest in his awakening powers, and lent him books,―amongst them the Fairy Queen of Spenser, the poet whose influence has left on the poetry of Keats so deep an impression. The young surgeon's apprentice took to verse-making; when he went to London to walk the hospitals, he was introduced by the Clarkes to their literary friends there, and knew Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Basil Montagu, Haydon, Shelley, and Godwin. In 1817 he brought out his first volume of verse, and abandoned the profession of surgery, for which however, disagreeable though it was to him, he had shown aptitude and dexterity. His first volume contained the Epistles, which we now read amongst his collected poems; it had no success. But his friends saluted his genius with warm admiration and confidence, and in 1818 he published his Endymion. It was mercilessly treated by Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and by the Quarterly Review. Meanwhile Keats's small fortune was melting away, and signs of disease began to show themselves in him. Nevertheless, in the next year or two he produced his best poems; but his health and circumstances did not mend, while a passionate attachment, with which he was at this time seized, added another cause of agitation. The seeds of consumption were in him, he had the temperament of the consumptive; his poetry fevered him, his embarrassments fretted him, his love-passion shook him to pieces. He had an attack of bleeding from the lungs; he got better, but it returned; change of climate was recommended, and after publishing his third volume, Lamia, Isabella, and other Poems, he sailed for Italy in September 1820, accompanied by his friend Severn. Italy could not restore him. He established himself at Rome with Severn, but in spite of the devoted care and kindness of this admirable friend, he rapidly grew worse, and on the 23rd of February, 1821, he died. He was twenty-five years old. John Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, and on his gravestone is the inscription which he himself told his friend to place there: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.] Poetry, according to Milton's famous saying, should be 'simple, sensuous, impassioned.' No one can question the eminency, in Keats's poetry, of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else. Many things may be brought forward which seem to show him as under the fascination and sole dominion of sense, and desiring nothing better. There is the exclamation in one of his letters: 'O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!' There is the thesis, in another, 'that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.' There is Haydon's story of him, how he once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in all its glory-his own expression. One is not much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks together he was hardly ever sober. 'He had no decision of character,' Haydon adds, 'no object upon which to direct his great powers.' Character and self-control, the virtus verusque labor so necessary for every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats, of Haydon's portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats of the Letters to Fanny Brawne. These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon's anecdotes. The editor of Haydon's journals could not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but for the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne I can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of mortal disease, we will not judge. But here |