of her father to the crime of parricide, for which she suffered the penalty of death at Rome; but the character of the old Count is one of such monstrous and hideous depravity, that the story is in reality quite unsuited to the purpose of the dramatist. In spite of several powerful and striking scenes, this piece is of a morbid and unpleasing character, though the language is vigorous and masculine. § 14. The narrative poem of Rosalind and Helen is an elaborate pleading against the institution of marriage. The poet contrasts two lives, one in which the indissolubility of the marriage tie is arbitrarily made out to be productive of nothing but misery, while in the other a connection not sanctioned by law and custom is shown in a most artractive light. But the parallel, like those so often brought forward in the writings of George Sand and other advocates for what is called the emancipation of women, has the disadvantage of proving nothing at all; for it would have been just as easy to have inverted the two cases imagined; and common and universal experience shows that though married life may, in particular instances, be unhappy, the general practical tendency of the conjugal bond is unquestionably calculated to promote individual happiness as well as general morality. In the poem of Adonais Shelley has given us a beautiful and touching lament on the early death of Keats, whose short career gave such a noble foretaste of poetical genius that would have made him one of the greatest writers of his age. It is of the pastoral character, and is in some measure a revival of the beautiful Idyl of Moschus on the death of Bion, and reminds the reader of the eulogies of Sidney by Spenser, and the immortal Lycidas of Milton. One of the most imaginative and at the same time one of the obscurest of Shelley's poems is the Sensitive Plant, which combines the qualities of mystery and fancifulness to the highest degree, perpetually stimulating the reader with a desire to penetrate the meaning symbolized in the luxuriant description of the garden and the Plant, and filling him with the richest imagery and description. The versification of this poem is extraordinary for its melody and variety, and the reader is incessantly tantalized with the hope of unveiling the secret and abstract meaning which the poet has locked up, as the embryo is involved in the foldings of the petals of a flower. Many of Shelley's detached lyrics are of inexpressible beauty, as the Ode to a Skylark, which breathes the very rapture of the bird's soaring song, the wild but picturesque imagery of the Cloud, besides a number of minor but not less beautiful productions. By a singular anomaly or contrast, Shelley, whose mind was so filled with images of superhuman grace and beauty, exhibits occasionally a morbid tendency to dwell on ideas of a hideous and repulsive character. Like the ocean, his genius, so pure, transparent, and sublime, the parent of so many forms of strange and fairy loveliness, hides within its abysses monstrous and horrible shapes at which imagination recoils. His mode of writing is full of pictures, but the images subsidiary to or illustrative of the principal thought are often made more prominent than the thought they are intended to enforce. Nay, he very frequently goes farther, and makes the antitype and the type change places; the illustrative image becoming the principal object, and thus destroying the due subordination of the ornament to the edifice it is intended to decorate. Shakspeare's miraculous imagination, it is true, seems sometimes almost to run away with him; but when closely studied it will be found that he never fails to keep his principal idea always above and distinct from even his wildest outbursts of fancy, and ever remains master of his thought. § 15. JOHN KEats (1796-1821) was born in Moorfields, London, and was apprenticed to a surgeon in his fifteenth year. During his apprenticeship he devoted most of his time to poetry, and in 1817 he published a volume of juvenile poems. This was followed in 1818 by his long poem Endymion, which was severely censured by the "Quarterly Review"- an attack which has been somewhat erroneously described as the cause of his death. It is probable that it gave a rude shock to Keats's highly sensitive nature, and to a physical condition much weakened by the attention which he had bestowed upon a dying brother. But he had a constitutional tendency to consumption, which would most likely have developed itself under any circumstances. He went for the recovery of his health to Rome, where he died on the 24th of February, 1821. In the previous year he had published another volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, &c., in which was included the fragment of his remarkable poem entitled Hyperion. It was the misfortune of Keats to be either extravagantly praised or unmercifully condemned. This arose on the one hand from the extreme partiality of friendship, and on the other from resentment of that friendship, connected as it was with party politics and with peculiar views of society. That which is most remarkable in his works is the wonderful profusion of figurative language, often exquisitely beautiful and luxuriant, but sometimes purely fantastical and far-fetched. The peculiarity of Shelley's style, to which we may give the name of incatenation, Keats carries to extravagance one word, one image, one rhyme suggests another, till we quite lose sight of the original idea, which is smothered in its own sweet luxuriance, like a bee stifled in honey. Shakspeare and his school, upon whose manner Keats undoubtedly endeavored to form his style of writing, have, it is true, this peculiarity of language; but in them the images never run away with the thought the guiding master-idea is ever present. These poets never throw the reins on their Pegasus, even when soaring to "the brightest heaven of invention." With them the images are produced by a force acting ab intra; like wild flowers springing from the very richness of the ground. In Keats the force acts ab extra; the flowers are forcibly fixed in the earth, as in the garden of a child, who cannot wait till they grow there of themselves. Keats deserves high praise for one very peculiar and original merit: he has treated the classical mythology in a way absolutely new, representing the Pagan deities not as mere abstractions of art, nor as mere creatures of popular belief, but giving them passions and affections like our own, highly purified and idealized, however, and in exquisite accordance with the lovely scenery of ancient Greece and Italy, and with the golden atmosphere of primeval existence. This treatment of a subject, which ordinary readers would consider hopelessly worn and threadbare, is certainly not Homeric, nor is it Miltonic, nor is it in the manner of any of the great poets who have employed the mythological imagery of antiquity; but it is productive of very exquisite pleasure, and must, therefore, be in accordance with true principles of art. In Hyperion, in the Ode to Pan, in the verses on a Grecian Urn, we find a noble and airy strain of beautiful classic imagery, combined with a perception of natural loveliness so luxuriant, so rich, so delicate, that the rosy dawn of Greek poetry seems combined with all that is most tenderly pensive in the calm sunset twilight of romance. Such of Keats's poems as are founded on more modern subjects - The Eve of St. Agnes for example, or The Pot of Basil, a beautiful anecdote versified from Boccaccio are, to our taste, inferior to those of his productions in which the scenery and personages are mythological. It would seem as if the severity of ancient art, which in the last-mentioned works acted as an involuntary check upon a too luxuriant fancy, deserted him when he left the antique world; and the absence of true, deep, intense passion (his prevailing defect) becomes necessarily more painfully apparent, as well as the discordant mingling of the prettinesses of modern poetry with the directness and unaffected simplicity of Chaucer and Boccaccio. But Keats was a true poet. If we consider his extreme youth and delicate health, his solitary and interesting self-instruction, the severity of the attacks made upon him by hostile and powerful critics, and above all the original richness and picturesqueness of his conceptions and imagery, even when they run to waste, he appears to be one of the greatest of the young poets― resembling the Milton of Lycidas, or the Spenser of the Tears of the Muses. - § 16. THOMAS Campbell (1777-1844), who was born on the 27th of July, 1777, at Glasgow, was educated at the University in that city, where he distinguished himself by his translations from the Greek poets. In 1799, when he was only in his twenty-second year, he published his Pleasures of Hope, which was received with a burst of enthusiasm as hearty as afterwards welcomed the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Childe Harold. Shortly afterwards he travelled abroad, where the warlike scenes he witnessed and the battle-fields he visited suggested some noble lyrics. To the seventh edition of the Pleasures of Hope, published in 1802, were added the magnificent verses on the battle of Hohenlinden, Ye Mariners of England, the most popular of his songs, and Lochiel's Warning. In the following year he settled in London, married, and commenced in earnest the pursuit of literature as a profession. His works were written chiefly for the booksellers, and, with the exception of his Gertrude of Wyoming, which appeared in 1809, do not require any notice in a history of literature. In 1843 he retired to Boulogne, where he died in the following year. His body was brought over to England and interred in Westminster Abbey. To his lyrics, which are among the finest in any language, Campbell will owe his lasting fame. In Campbell, as in the general state of literary feeling reflected in his works, a complete and vast change had taken place. In the fluctuation of popular taste, in the setting of that current, which, flowing from the old classicism, has carried us insensibly but irresistibly first through Romanticism, and has now brought us to a species of metaphysical quietism, there have been many temporary changes of direction, nay, some apparent stoppages. Despite the effort and impulsion of the Byronian poetry · the poetry of passion - there were writers who not only retained many characteristics of the former school that had to appearance been exploded, but even something of the old tone of sentiment, modified, of course, by the aesthetic principles which were afterwards to be completely embodied in such a cycle of great works as constitutes a school of literature. Campbell is one of the connecting links between the two systems so opposite and apparently so incompatible; and in comparing his first work with his last we find a perfect image of the gradual transition from the one style of writing to the other. § 17. In the circle of poets with Byron, Shelley, and Keats, outliving by many years the latest of these, must be mentioned the names of Leigh Hunt and Walter Savage Landor. JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859) was the son of a West Indian, who, resident in the United States, had remained a firm loyalist, and after the declaration of independence found it advisable to come over to this country. The poet was born at Southgate, Middlesex, and received his education at Christ's Hospital, which he left in the same rank, at the same age, and for the same reasons, as Lamb." He stammered, and therefore "Grecian I could not be." In 1805 he joined his brother in editing a newspaper called the News, and shortly afterwards established the Examiner, which still exists. A conviction for libel on the prince regent detained him in prison for two years, the happiest portion of his life: he was free from the worry and care which never afterwards forsook him. Soon after he left prison he published the Story of Rimini, an Italian tale in verse (1816), which contains some exquisite poetry, both as to conception and execution. About 1818 he started the Indicator, a weekly paper, in imitation of the Spectator; and in 1822 he went to Italy, to assist Lord Byron and Shelley in their projected paper called the Liberal. Shelley died soon after Hunt's arrival in Italy; and though Hunt was kindly received by Byron, and lived for a time in his house, there was no congeniality between them. The Liberal was discontinued, and they parted on bad terms. On his return to England, Hunt published an account of Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, which was universally condemned as both ungenerous and unjust. He continued to write for periodicals, and published various poems from time to time, of which one of the most celebrated was Captain Sword and Captain Pen. He died in 1859, at the age of seventy-five, having enjoyed during the latter years of his life a pension of 2007. a year from the Crown. Leigh Hunt's poetry is graceful, sprightly, and full of fancy. Though not possessing much soul and emotion, it has true life and genius, while here and there his verse is lit up with wit, or glows with tenderness and grace. His prose writings consist of essays, collected under the title of the Indicator and his Companions; Sir Ralph Esher, a novel; The Old Court Suburb; and his lives of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, prefixed to his edition of their dramatic writings. § 18. WALTER Savage Landor (1775-1864) was born on the 30th of January, 1775. His father was a gentleman of good family and wealthy circumstances residing in Warwickshire. The son entered Rugby at an early age, and thence proceeded to Trinity College, Oxford. Like many others who have taken important literary positions, he left the University without a degree; and though intended at first for the army, and afterwards for the bar, he declined both professions, and threw himself into literature, with the assistance of a liberal allowance from his father. In 1795 his first worka volume of poems appeared, followed early in the present century by a translation into Latin of Gebir, one of his own English poems. Landor had no small facility in classical composition, and he appeared to have the power of transporting himself into the times and sentiments of Greece and Rome. This is still more clearly seen in the Heroic Idyls (1820), in Latin verse; and the reproduction of Greek thought in The Hellenics is one of the most successful attempts of its kind. At the death of his father, the poet found himself in possession of an extensive estate; but longing for a life of greater freedom and less monotony than that of an English country-gentleman, he sold his patrimony and took up his abode on the continent, where he resided during the rest of his life, with occasional visits to his native country. The republican spirit which led him to take part as a volunteer in the Spanish rising of 1808 continued to burn fiercely to the last. He even went so far as to defend tyrannicide, and boldly offered a pension to the widow of any one who would murder a despot. Between 1820 and 1830 he was engaged upon his greatest work, Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen. This was followed in 1831 by Poems, Letters by a Conservative, Satire on Satirists (1836), Pentameron and Pentalogue (1837), and a long series in prose and poetry, of which the chief are the Hellenics enlarged and completed, Dry Sticks Fagoted, and The Last Fruit off an Old Tree. He resided towards the close of his life at Bath; but some four or five years before his death, a libel on a lady, for which he was condemned to pay heavy damages, drove him again from his country, and he retired to his Italian home near Florence, and there in serene old age "the Nestor of English poets," one of the last literary links with the age of the French Republic, passed quietly away. He died on the 17th of September, 1864, an exile from his country, misunderstood from the very individuality of his genius by the majority of his countrymen, but highly appreciated by those who could rightly estimate the works he has left behind him. It has been well said of the author of Imaginary Conversations that weakne 128ICS AD writings g ply his gr is dispositi no regard fo 30 fond of p received, beca what no one el Cniversal assent Alferi the great and Fox a charla wilfulness, which was their due. Conversations the rendered, and the nest, yet wanting which are require |