THE CHILD'S FIRST GRIEF.

“Oh! call my Brother back to me !
I cannot play alone;

The summer comes with flower and bee-
Where is my Brother gone?

"The butterfly is glancing bright
Across the sunbeam's track;
I care not now to chase its flight-
Oh! call my Brother back!

"The flowers run wild-the flowers we sow'd
Around our garden tree;

Our vine is drooping with its load

Oh! call him back to me!"

"He could not hear thy voice, fair child,
He may not come to thee;

The face that once like spring-time smiled
On earth no more thou'lt see.

"A rose's brief bright life of joy,
Such unto him was given;
Go-thou must play alone, my boy!
Thy Brother is in heaven!"

"And has he left his birds and flowers,

And must I call in vain?

And, through the long, long summer hours,
Will he not come again?

"And by the brook, and in the glade,

Are all our wanderings o'er?

Oh, while my Brother with me play'd,
Would I had loved him more!"

TO A FAMILY BIBLE.

What household thoughts around thee, as their shrine, Cling reverently?-of anxious looks beguiled,

My mother's eyes, upon thy page divine,

Each day were bent-her accents gravely mild,
Breathed out thy love: whilst I, a dreamy child,
Wandered on breeze-like fancies oft away,
To some lone tuft of gleaming spring-flowers wild,
Some fresh-discover'd nook for woodland play,
Some secret nest: yet would the solemn Word
At times, with kindlings of young wonder heard,

FROM ODE TO AUTUMN.

Fall on my wakened spirit, there to be
A seed not lost ;-for which, in darker years,
O Book of Heaven! I pour, with grateful tears,
Heart blessings on the holy dead and thee!

479

JOHN KEATS.

(1796-1820.)

IF this young poet had lived, he might have rivalled the finest genius of his time. He was the son of a livery stable keeper in London, and was at first apprenticed to a surgeon. An ardent student from his youth, he displayed more than most men of his period capacities for poetry, and he displayed them in all the luxuriance of enthusiasm that renders even the literary errors of youth beautiful. The rough reception by the Quarterly Review of his first publication, "Endymion," has been said to have led to the state of his health that terminated in his death, and Byron has countenanced this idea in his Don Juan, but it is incorrect. Consumption had already begun its fatal inroads. Keats ultimately proceeded to Italy to avert the progress of disease, but died at Rome in the arms of his faithful friend, a young painter, Mr. Severn, "who had almost risked his own life by unwearied attendance on his friend."

etc.

Besides "Endymion," he has left a fragment, "Hyperion," "Lamia,” His writings are fervid but untrained, full of luxuriant descriptions of nature, and bright with noble pictures of classical mythology. Of his "Hyperion," Byron said, that it "seems actually inspired by the Titans. But his poetry teaches nothing; it is in general the mere expression of intense sensuous enjoyment of natural beauty.1

FROM ODE TO AUTUMN.

WHO hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook ;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

'It must have been this quality of his poetry that excited the admiration of Shelley, much of whose writing is cast in a similar mould; he lamented the fate of his friend in the elegy, "Adonais.' When Shelley's body was recovered in the gulf of Spezzia, a volume of the poetry of Keats was found open in his pocket.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-
While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river shallows, borne aloft,

Or sinking, as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn ;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now, with treble soft,
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft ;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

FROM ENDYMION.-BOOK I.

HYMN TO PAN.

O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang
From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth
Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death
Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;

Who lovest to see the hamadryads1 dress

Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;

And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken

The dreary melody of bedded reeds

In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds

The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth

Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx2-do thou now,
By thy love's milky brow!

By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan !

Thou, to whom every fawn and satyr flies
For willing service; whether to surprise
The squatted hare, while in half sleeping fit;
Or upward ragged precipices flit

To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw;
Or by mysterious enticement draw

Bewildered shepherds to their path again;
Or to tread breathless round the frothy main,
And gather up all fancifullest shells,

For thee to tumble into Naiads'' cells,

And, being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping;
Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,

1 Wood-nymphs, supposed to be produced with and to die with the trees to which they were tutelary: from Gr. hama, along with, drys, an oak.

2 The nymph Syrinx, flying from the pursuit of Pan, was changed at her prayer into a reed, from which the god formed his pipe.

8 The Naiads are associated with the wood-gods in the poetry of Theocritus and Virgil, Eclog. vi. 20.

FROM ENDYMION.

The while they pelt each other on the crown
With silvery oak apples1 and fir cones brown,-
By all the echoes that about thee ring,
Hear us, O satyr king!

O hearkener to the loud clapping shears,
While ever and anon to his shorn peers
A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn,
When snouted wild boars, routing tender corn,
Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms,
To keep off mildews, and all weather harms :
Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,
That come a-swooning over hollow grounds,
And wither drearily on barren moors:
Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge2—see,
Great son of Dryope,3

The many that are come to pay their vows,
With leaves about their brows.

Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven,
That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth,
Gives it a touch ethereal-a new birth:

Be still a symbol of immensity;

A firmament reflected in a sea;

An element filling the space between ;

An unknown-but no more : We humbly screen
With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending,
And giving out a shout most heaven-rending,
Conjure thee to receive our humble Pæan,
Upon thy mount Lycean!"

*

1 Comp. Virg., Eclog. iii. 64.

481

2 "The later Platonists considered Pan (like many other deities) as a cosmogonic power, having many of the attributes of Hermes, with whom indeed he is sometimes identified (as the sons of some other deities were with their fathers); and his name, which they chose to interpret by Universe,' was used as an argument for this theory." 3 Dryope (Oak-voice), a wood-nymph. One of the myths of Pan's birth is that he was her son by Hermes; Orph. Hymn xix. 34.

4 The Wolf-mountain, in Arcadia, sacred to the god. This hymn, abounding as it does in faults of language and versification, and though stilted in expression, and crowded with imagery in violation of the simplicity of classical models, forms, in its aspiring fervour of ambition, a fair specimen of the early style of Keats

U

FROM BOOK III.

MOONLIGHT.

Eterne Apollo! that thy sister1 fair
Is of all these the gentlier-mightiest.
When thy gold breath is misting in the west,
She unobservéd steals unto her throne,

And there she sits most meek and most alone;
As if she had not pomp subservient ;

As if thine eye, high Poet! was not bent
Towards her with the muses in thine heart;
As if the ministering stars kept not apart,
Waiting for silver-footed messages.

O Moon! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees
Feel palpitations when thou lookest in:

O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din
The while they feel thine airy fellowship.
Thou dost bless everywhere, with silver lip
Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine,
Couched in thy brightness, dream of fields divine:
Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes;

And yet thy benediction passeth not

One obscure hiding-place, one little spot

Where pleasure may be sent the nested wren
Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken,
And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf
Takes glimpses of thee; thou art a relief
To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps
Within its pearly house. The mighty deeps,
The monstrous sea is thine-the myriad sea!
O Moon! far spooming Ocean bows to thee,
And Tellus feels her forehead's cumbrous load.

TO AUTUMN.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun ;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

1 See note 3, p. 26.