That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven !

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

20

20

330

Shelley wintered at Pisa; in spring was at Lerici, in the Gulf of Spezia; in summer went to Leghorn to welcome Leigh Hunt, and on the 8th of July embarked to return, against advice of those who saw a

Higher still and higher

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

This is another of Shelley's shorter poems

THE CLOUD.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid

In the noon-day dreams;

From my wings are shaken the dews that awaken
The sweet birds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,

And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning my pilot sits,

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes

And his burning plumes outspread,

10

20

30

in life by help both of the far sight and the near. Does a man really care less for the glory of the distant hills because he has ceased from sighing after angel's wings, and takes the sure and simple way of travelling towards them at the pace of human feet? Shelley in this sonnet supposed Wordsworth to be a deserter from the cause for which he spent his life, doubted him at the very time when he became its truest leader:

TO WORDSWORTH.

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return!

Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st; yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude.
In honour'd poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
Deserting these, thou leavest me grieve,

Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

10

The tumult of the revolution was in Byron; its purest aspirations were in Shelley. Wordsworth survived the tumult, retained throughout life the aspirations, and learnt the one way to their fulfilment. In John Keats there was a non-combatant's delicious sense of all beauty that lies around, above, below the battle-field of life. He was born in October, 1795, son of a stableman, who had married his master's daughter and so become himself master of the Swan and Hoop Livery Stables, No. 28, Pavement, Moorfields. In 1810 the four children of the family were left fatherless and motherless, with about £8,000 of property to divide among them. John Keats, who had been to school at Enfield, was apprenticed by his guardian to a surgeon at Enfield, but his mind turned more and more to poetry. He read, and tells how he felt

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

10

Keats came from Edmonton to lodge in London, that he might attend hospital practice, and he published, in 1817, a small volume of poems. In April of that year he was in the Isle of Wight, delighting

his imagination with pursuit of beauty in his longer poem of "Endymion," which opens with the familiar and characteristic line, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." "Endymion" was published in 1818, and in the spring of that year John Keats was with a brother who was dying, at Teignmouth, of consumption. He was himself to die early in life of the same disease, and not of the savage review of " Endymion" in the Quarterly. Keats was known to be a devoted friend of Leigh Hunt's. Leigh Hunt wrote politics to which it became good Tory journals to show no mercy; and according to the common custom of that day, men known to be of the "set" of an obnoxious politician were, as occasion offered, unceremoniously cried down by his opponent. Keats was thus sacrificed to the customs of the country in the two chief Tory journals, the Quarterly and Blackwood. If he had been in a Tory set, then he would have been hunted and scalped by Whigs. Men of the time are much the same sort of beings, from whatever camp they may chance to sound their war-cries. Keats did not write politics, but he had a friend who did. He suffered less than Shelley supposed from censure that he knew to be unjust, but modestly admitted to himself and others the shortcomings of his early work. "I have written," he said, "independently without judgment. I may write independently and with judgment hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man.' It was at the end of this year, 1818, that spitting of blood indicated the advance of a more deadly peril. Life was slowly ebbing away, when some of his most beautiful verse was written.

6:

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high piléd books, in charact'ry,

Hold like full garners the full-ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And feel that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!-then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

In 1820 Keats published "Lamia," "Isabella," The Eve of St. Agnes," and other poems; and in the September of that year he left England for Italy, where he died in February, 1821, aged twenty-five years and four months.

THE EVE OF ST. AGNES.

St. Agnes' Eve! Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman's fingers while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seem'd taking flight for heaven without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.