That Beauty in which all things work and move, The breath whose might I have invoked in song 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, 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, I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In the noon-day dreams; From my wings are shaken the dews that awaken When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, I sift the snow on the mountains below, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, 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 Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, These common woes I feel. One loss is mine 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, 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 hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, Numb were the Beadsman's fingers while he told 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. |