TO AUTUMN

EASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

SEAS

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 mossed 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.

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-reaped furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barrèd 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 sallows, 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 redbreast whistles from a garden croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

* In the version by Lord Houghton of this poem, this line and its repetition in the second stanza run, "Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!" and that form of the line is often met, with other changes.

The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hillside.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry'd "La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

I saw their starved lips in the gloom
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hillside.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

SONNET

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER

UCH have I traveled in the realms of gold,

MR

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-browed 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 Looked at each other with a wild surmiseSilent, upon a peak in Darien.

M

SONNET

ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES

Y SPIRIT is too weak: mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep;
And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die,

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time - with a billowy main —
A sun a shadow of a magnitude.

SONNET

WRITTEN ON A BLANK PAGE IN SHAKESPEARE'S POEMS, FACING A LOVER'S COMPLAINT

B

RIGHT star, would I were steadfast as thou art:

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors; No-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever- or else swoon to death.

JOHN KEBLE

(1792-1866)

HE Christian Year,' a small volume of religious poems, ap-
The verses had all the scholarly simplicity

peared in 1827. resulting from classical study, and critics quickly recognized their artistic workmanship. But the immediate and astonishing popularity of the work was due to its personal character. "It was the most soothing, tranquillizing, subduing work of the day," said Newman: "if poems can be found to enliven in dejection and to comfort in anxiety, to cool the over-sanguine, to refresh the weary, and to awe the worldly, to instill resignation into the impatient and calmness into the fearful and agitated, they are these." Many men and women found solace in these voicings of their own religious life.

The author, John Keble, was not ambitious of literary fame. He had written his poems from time to time as he felt the need of self-expression, and it was only after long persuasion from his friends that he consented to make them public.

JOHN KEBLE

There is something of the mellow brightness of a summer Sunday about his life and work. "Dear John Keble," as his associates called him, was a most ardent churchman. With a rare patience and sympathy for repentant sinners he combined an implacable condemnation of wrong-doing, which won him respect as well as love. Throughout the religious storm which, emanating from Oxford, shook all England,-which forced John Henry Newman unwillingly away from his friends and his church,- Keble was a stanch support to more vacillating spirits. His sermon upon apostasy preached in 1833 stirred up people's consciences, and may be said to have initiated the Tractarian movement. He himself wrote several of the more important Tracts for the Times.'

His entire life was passed in intimate connection with the church. He was born at Fairford, Gloucestershire, in 1792, but was very young when his father became vicar of Coln-St.-Aldwynd. The elder Keble was a sweet-natured man and a fine classical student, who took charge himself of his son's early education; and so successfully that