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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Keats: Poems Published in 1820, by John
+Keats, Edited by M. Robertson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+
+
+
+Title: Keats: Poems Published in 1820
+
+
+Author: John Keats
+
+Editor: M. Robertson
+
+Release Date: December 2, 2007  [eBook #23684]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS: POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1820***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Lisa Reigel, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
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+Transcriber's note:
+
+      Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+      The one Greek word has been transliterated and placed between
+      +plus signs+.
+
+      Ellipses match the original.
+
+      See the end of the text for a more detailed transcriber's note.
+
+
+
+
+
+KEATS
+
+POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1820
+
+Edited with Introduction and Notes by
+
+M. ROBERTSON
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Oxford
+At the Clarendon Press
+1909
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The text of this edition is a reprint (page for page and line for line)
+of a copy of the 1820 edition in the British Museum. For convenience of
+reference line-numbers have been added; but this is the only change,
+beyond the correction of one or two misprints.
+
+The books to which I am most indebted for the material used in the
+Introduction and Notes are _The Poems of John Keats_ with an
+Introduction and Notes by E. de Selincourt, _Life of Keats_ (English Men
+of Letters Series) by Sidney Colvin, and _Letters of John Keats_ edited
+by Sidney Colvin. As a pupil of Dr. de Selincourt I also owe him special
+gratitude for his inspiration and direction of my study of Keats, as
+well as for the constant help which I have received from him in the
+preparation of this edition.
+                                                            M. R.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                             PAGE
+PREFACE                                                        ii
+
+LIFE OF KEATS                                                   v
+
+ADVERTISEMENT                                                   2
+
+LAMIA. PART I                                                   3
+
+LAMIA. PART II                                                 27
+
+ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL.  A STORY FROM BOCCACCIO        47
+
+THE EVE OF ST. AGNES                                           81
+
+ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE                                          107
+
+ODE ON A GRECIAN URN                                          113
+
+ODE TO PSYCHE                                                 117
+
+FANCY                                                         122
+
+ODE ['Bards of Passion and of Mirth']                         128
+
+LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN                                   131
+
+ROBIN HOOD. TO A FRIEND                                       133
+
+TO AUTUMN                                                     137
+
+ODE ON MELANCHOLY                                             140
+
+HYPERION. BOOK I                                              145
+
+HYPERION. BOOK II                                             167
+
+HYPERION. BOOK III                                            191
+
+  NOTE ON ADVERTISEMENT                                       201
+
+INTRODUCTION TO LAMIA                                         201
+
+  NOTES ON LAMIA                                              203
+
+INTRODUCTION TO ISABELLA AND THE EVE OF ST. AGNES             210
+
+  NOTES ON ISABELLA                                           215
+
+  NOTES ON THE EVE OF ST. AGNES                               224
+
+INTRODUCTION TO THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE, ODE ON A GRECIAN
+  URN, ODE ON MELANCHOLY, AND TO AUTUMN                       229
+
+  NOTES ON ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE                               232
+
+  NOTES ON ODE ON A GRECIAN URN                               235
+
+INTRODUCTION TO ODE TO PSYCHE                                 236
+
+  NOTES ON ODE TO PSYCHE                                      237
+
+INTRODUCTION TO FANCY                                         238
+
+  NOTES ON FANCY                                              238
+
+  NOTES ON ODE ['Bards of Passion and of Mirth']              239
+
+INTRODUCTION TO LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN                   239
+
+  NOTES ON LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN                        239
+
+INTRODUCTION TO ROBIN HOOD                                    240
+
+  NOTES ON ROBIN HOOD                                         241
+
+  NOTES ON 'TO AUTUMN'                                        242
+
+  NOTES ON ODE ON MELANCHOLY                                  243
+
+INTRODUCTION TO HYPERION                                      244
+
+  NOTES ON HYPERION                                           249
+
+
+
+
+LIFE OF KEATS
+
+
+Of all the great poets of the early nineteenth century--Wordsworth,
+Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats--John Keats was the last born
+and the first to die. The length of his life was not one-third that of
+Wordsworth, who was born twenty-five years before him and outlived him
+by twenty-nine. Yet before his tragic death at twenty-six Keats had
+produced a body of poetry of such extraordinary power and promise that
+the world has sometimes been tempted, in its regret for what he might
+have done had he lived, to lose sight of the superlative merit of what
+he actually accomplished.
+
+The three years of his poetic career, during which he published three
+small volumes of poetry, show a development at the same time rapid and
+steady, and a gradual but complete abandonment of almost every fault and
+weakness. It would probably be impossible, in the history of literature,
+to find such another instance of the 'growth of a poet's mind'.
+
+The last of these three volumes, which is here reprinted, was published
+in 1820, when it 'had good success among the literary people and . . . a
+moderate sale'. It contains the flower of his poetic production and is
+perhaps, altogether, one of the most marvellous volumes ever issued from
+the press.
+
+But in spite of the maturity of Keats's work when he was twenty-five, he
+had been in no sense a precocious child. Born in 1795 in the city of
+London, the son of a livery-stable keeper, he was brought up amid
+surroundings and influences by no means calculated to awaken poetic
+genius.
+
+He was the eldest of five--four boys, one of whom died in infancy, and a
+girl younger than all; and he and his brothers George and Tom were
+educated at a private school at Enfield. Here John was at first
+distinguished more for fighting than for study, whilst his bright,
+brave, generous nature made him popular with masters and boys.
+
+Soon after he had begun to go to school his father died, and when he was
+fifteen the children lost their mother too. Keats was passionately
+devoted to his mother; during her last illness he would sit up all night
+with her, give her her medicine, and even cook her food himself. At her
+death he was brokenhearted.
+
+The children were now put under the care of two guardians, one of whom,
+Mr. Abbey, taking the sole responsibility, immediately removed John from
+school and apprenticed him for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton.
+
+Whilst thus employed Keats spent all his leisure time in reading, for
+which he had developed a great enthusiasm during his last two years at
+school. There he had devoured every book that came in his way,
+especially rejoicing in stories of the gods and goddesses of ancient
+Greece. At Edmonton he was able to continue his studies by borrowing
+books from his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of his
+schoolmaster, and he often went over to Enfield to change his books and
+to discuss those which he had been reading. On one of these occasions
+Cowden Clarke introduced him to Spenser, to whom so many poets have owed
+their first inspiration that he has been called 'the poets' poet'; and
+it was then, apparently, that Keats was first prompted to write.
+
+When he was nineteen, a year before his apprenticeship came to an end,
+he quarrelled with his master, left him, and continued his training in
+London as a student at St. Thomas's Hospital and Guy's. Gradually,
+however, during the months that followed, though he was an industrious
+and able medical student, Keats came to realize that poetry was his true
+vocation; and as soon as he was of age, in spite of the opposition of
+his guardian, he decided to abandon the medical profession and devote
+his life to literature.
+
+If Mr. Abbey was unsympathetic Keats was not without encouragement from
+others. His brothers always believed in him whole-heartedly, and his
+exceptionally lovable nature had won him many friends. Amongst these
+friends two men older than himself, each famous in his own sphere, had
+special influence upon him.
+
+One of them, Leigh Hunt, was something of a poet himself and a pleasant
+prose-writer. His encouragement did much to stimulate Keats's genius,
+but his direct influence on his poetry was wholly bad. Leigh Hunt's was
+not a deep nature; his poetry is often trivial and sentimental, and his
+easy conversational style is intolerable when applied to a great theme.
+To this man's influence, as well as to the surroundings of his youth,
+are doubtless due the occasional flaws of taste in Keats's early work.
+
+The other, Haydon, was an artist of mediocre creative talent but great
+aims and amazing belief in himself. He had a fine critical faculty which
+was shown in his appreciation of the Elgin marbles, in opposition to the
+most respected authorities of his day. Mainly through his insistence
+they were secured for the nation which thus owes him a boundless debt of
+gratitude. He helped to guide and direct Keats's taste by his
+enthusiastic exposition of these masterpieces of Greek sculpture.
+
+In 1817 Keats published his first volume of poems, including 'Sleep and
+Poetry' and the well-known lines 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill'.
+With much that is of the highest poetic value, many memorable lines and
+touches of his unique insight into nature, the volume yet showed
+considerable immaturity. It contained indeed, if we except one perfect
+sonnet, rather a series of experiments than any complete and finished
+work. There were abundant faults for those who liked to look for them,
+though there were abundant beauties too; and the critics and the public
+chose rather to concentrate their attention on the former. The volume
+was therefore anything but a success; but Keats was not discouraged, for
+he saw many of his own faults more clearly than did his critics, and
+felt his power to outgrow them.
+
+Immediately after this Keats went to the Isle of Wight and thence to
+Margate that he might study and write undisturbed. On May 10th he wrote
+to Haydon--'I never quite despair, and I read Shakespeare--indeed I
+shall, I think, never read any other book much'. We have seen Keats
+influenced by Spenser and by Leigh Hunt: now, though his love for
+Spenser continued, Shakespeare's had become the dominant influence.
+Gradually he came too under the influence of Wordsworth's philosophy of
+poetry and life, and later his reading of Milton affected his style to
+some extent, but Shakespeare's influence was the widest, deepest and
+most lasting, though it is the hardest to define. His study of other
+poets left traces upon his work in turns of phrase or turns of thought:
+Shakespeare permeated his whole being, and his influence is to be
+detected not in a resemblance of style, for Shakespeare can have no
+imitators, but in a broadening view of life, and increased humanity.
+
+No poet could have owed his education more completely to the English
+poets than did John Keats. His knowledge of Latin was slight--he knew no
+Greek, and even the classical stories which he loved and constantly
+used, came to him almost entirely through the medium of Elizabethan
+translations and allusions. In this connexion it is interesting to read
+his first fine sonnet, in which he celebrates his introduction to the
+greatest of Greek poets in the translation of the rugged and forcible
+Elizabethan, George Chapman:--
+
+     _On first looking into Chapman's Homer._
+
+     Much have I travelled 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.
+
+Of the work upon which he was now engaged, the narrative-poem of
+_Endymion_, we may give his own account to his little sister Fanny in a
+letter dated September 10th, 1817:--
+
+'Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell
+you. Many years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his
+flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus--he was a very contemplative
+sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little
+thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in
+Love with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep she used to
+come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at
+last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of
+that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I dare say you
+have read this and all the other beautiful tales which have come down
+from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece.'
+
+On his return to London he and his brother Tom, always delicate and now
+quite an invalid, took lodgings at Hampstead. Here Keats remained for
+some time, harassed by the illness of his brother and of several of his
+friends; and in June he was still further depressed by the departure of
+his brother George to try his luck in America.
+
+In April, 1818, _Endymion_ was finished. Keats was by no means
+satisfied with it but preferred to publish it as it was, feeling it to
+be 'as good as I had power to make it by myself'.--'I will write
+independently' he says to his publisher--'I have written independently
+_without judgment_. I may write independently and _with judgment_
+hereafter. In _Endymion_ I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby
+have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and
+the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly
+pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.' He published it with a
+preface modestly explaining to the public his own sense of its
+imperfection. Nevertheless a storm of abuse broke upon him from the
+critics who fastened upon all the faults of the poem--the diffuseness of
+the story, its occasional sentimentality and the sometimes fantastic
+coinage of words,[xiii:1] and ignored the extraordinary beauties of
+which it is full.
+
+Directly after the publication of _Endymion_, and before the appearance
+of these reviews, Keats started with a friend, Charles Brown, for a
+walking tour in Scotland. They first visited the English lakes and
+thence walked to Dumfries, where they saw the house of Burns and his
+grave. They entered next the country of Meg Merrilies, and from
+Kirkcudbrightshire crossed over to Ireland for a few days. On their
+return they went north as far as Argyleshire, whence they sailed to
+Staffa and saw Fingal's cave, which, Keats wrote, 'for solemnity and
+grandeur far surpasses the finest Cathedral.' They then crossed Scotland
+through Inverness, and Keats returned home by boat from Cromarty.
+
+His letters home are at first full of interest and enjoyment, but a
+'slight sore throat', contracted in 'a most wretched walk of
+thirty-seven miles across the Isle of Mull', proved very troublesome and
+finally cut short his holiday. This was the beginning of the end. There
+was consumption in the family: Tom was dying of it; and the cold, wet,
+and over-exertion of his Scotch tour seems to have developed the fatal
+tendency in Keats himself.
+
+From this time forward he was never well, and no good was done to either
+his health or spirits by the task which now awaited him of tending on
+his dying brother. For the last two or three months of 1818, until
+Tom's death in December, he scarcely left the bedside, and it was well
+for him that his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was at hand to help and
+comfort him after the long strain. Brown persuaded Keats at once to
+leave the house, with its sad associations, and to come and live with
+him.
+
+Before long poetry absorbed Keats again; and the first few months of
+1819 were the most fruitful of his life. Besides working at _Hyperion_,
+which he had begun during Tom's illness, he wrote _The Eve of St.
+Agnes_, _The Eve of St. Mark_, _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, and nearly
+all his famous odes.
+
+Troubles however beset him. His friend Haydon was in difficulties and
+tormenting him, poor as he was, to lend him money; the state of his
+throat gave serious cause for alarm; and, above all, he was consumed by
+an unsatisfying passion for the daughter of a neighbour, Mrs. Brawne.
+She had rented Brown's house whilst they were in Scotland, and had now
+moved to a street near by. Miss Fanny Brawne returned his love, but she
+seems never to have understood his nature or his needs. High-spirited
+and fond of pleasure she did not apparently allow the thought of her
+invalid lover to interfere much with her enjoyment of life. She would
+not, however, abandon her engagement, and she probably gave him all
+which it was in her nature to give. Ill-health made him, on the other
+hand, morbidly dissatisfied and suspicious; and, as a result of his
+illness and her limitations, his love throughout brought him
+restlessness and torment rather than peace and comfort.
+
+Towards the end of July he went to Shanklin and there, in collaboration
+with Brown, wrote a play, _Otho the Great_. Brown tells us how they used
+to sit, one on either side of a table, he sketching out the scenes and
+handing each one, as the outline was finished, to Keats to write. As
+Keats never knew what was coming it was quite impossible that the
+characters should be adequately conceived, or that the drama should be a
+united whole. Nevertheless there is much that is beautiful and promising
+in it. It should not be forgotten that Keats's 'greatest ambition' was,
+in his own words, 'the writing of a few fine plays'; and, with the
+increasing humanity and grasp which his poetry shows, there is no reason
+to suppose that, had he lived, he would not have fulfilled it.
+
+At Shanklin, moreover, he had begun to write _Lamia_, and he continued
+it at Winchester. Here he stayed until the middle of October, excepting
+a few days which he spent in London to arrange about the sending of some
+money to his brother in America. George had been unsuccessful in his
+commercial enterprises, and Keats, in view of his family's ill-success,
+determined temporarily to abandon poetry, and by reviewing or journalism
+to support himself and earn money to help his brother. Then, when he
+could afford it, he would return to poetry.
+
+Accordingly he came back to London, but his health was breaking down,
+and with it his resolution. He tried to re-write _Hyperion_, which he
+felt had been written too much under the influence of Milton and in 'the
+artist's humour'. The same independence of spirit which he had shown in
+the publication of _Endymion_ urged him now to abandon a work the style
+of which he did not feel to be absolutely his own. The re-cast he wrote
+in the form of a vision, calling it _The Fall of Hyperion_, and in so
+doing he added much to his conception of the meaning of the story. In no
+poem does he show more of the profoundly philosophic spirit which
+characterizes many of his letters. But it was too late; his power was
+failing and, in spite of the beauty and interest of some of his
+additions, the alterations are mostly for the worse.
+
+Whilst _The Fall of Hyperion_ occupied his evenings his mornings were
+spent over a satirical fairy-poem, _The Cap and Bells_, in the metre of
+the _Faerie Queene_. This metre, however, was ill-suited to the subject;
+satire was not natural to him, and the poem has little intrinsic merit.
+
+Neither this nor the re-cast of _Hyperion_ was finished when, in
+February, 1820, he had an attack of illness in which the first definite
+symptom of consumption appeared. Brown tells how he came home on the
+evening of Thursday, February 3rd, in a state of high fever, chilled
+from having ridden outside the coach on a bitterly cold day. 'He mildly
+and instantly yielded to my request that he should go to bed . . . On
+entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly
+coughed, and I heard him say--"that is blood from my mouth". I went
+towards him: he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet.
+"Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood." After regarding
+it steadfastly he looked up in my face with a calmness of expression
+that I can never forget, and said, "I know the colour of that blood;--it
+is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop of
+blood is my death warrant;--I must die."'
+
+He lived for another year, but it was one long dying: he himself called
+it his 'posthumous life'.
+
+Keats was one of the most charming of letter-writers. He had that rare
+quality of entering sympathetically into the mind of the friend to whom
+he was writing, so that his letters reveal to us much of the character
+of the recipient as well as of the writer. In the long journal-letters
+which he wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in America he is
+probably most fully himself, for there he is with the people who knew
+him best and on whose understanding and sympathy he could rely. But in
+none is the beauty of his character more fully revealed than in those to
+his little sister Fanny, now seventeen years old, and living with their
+guardian, Mr. Abbey. He had always been very anxious that they should
+'become intimately acquainted, in order', as he says, 'that I may not
+only, as you grow up, love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as
+my dearest friend.' In his most harassing times he continued to write to
+her, directing her reading, sympathizing in her childish troubles, and
+constantly thinking of little presents to please her. Her health was to
+him a matter of paramount concern, and in his last letters to her we
+find him reiterating warnings to take care of herself--'You must be
+careful always to wear warm clothing not only in Frost but in a
+Thaw.'--'Be careful to let no fretting injure your health as I have
+suffered it--health is the greatest of blessings--with _health_ and
+_hope_ we should be content to live, and so you will find as you grow
+older.' The constant recurrence of this thought becomes, in the light of
+his own sufferings, almost unbearably pathetic.
+
+During the first months of his illness Keats saw through the press his
+last volume of poetry, of which this is a reprint. The praise which it
+received from reviewers and public was in marked contrast to the
+scornful reception of his earlier works, and would have augured well for
+the future. But Keats was past caring much for poetic fame. He dragged
+on through the summer, with rallies and relapses, tormented above all by
+the thought that death would separate him from the woman he loved. Only
+Brown, of all his friends, knew what he was suffering, and it seems that
+he only knew fully after they were parted.
+
+The doctors warned Keats that a winter in England would kill him, so in
+September, 1820, he left London for Naples, accompanied by a young
+artist, Joseph Severn, one of his many devoted friends. Shelley, who
+knew him slightly, invited him to stay at Pisa, but Keats refused. He
+had never cared for Shelley, though Shelley seems to have liked him,
+and, in his invalid state, he naturally shrank from being a burden to a
+mere acquaintance.
+
+It was as they left England, off the coast of Dorsetshire, that Keats
+wrote his last beautiful sonnet on a blank leaf of his folio copy of
+Shakespeare, facing _A Lover's Complaint_:--
+
+     Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
+     Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
+     And watching, with eternal lids apart,
+     Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
+     The moving waters at their priest-like 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,
+     Pillow'd 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.
+
+The friends reached Rome, and there Keats, after a brief rally, rapidly
+became worse. Severn nursed him with desperate devotion, and of Keats's
+sweet considerateness and patience he could never say enough. Indeed
+such was the force and lovableness of Keats's personality that though
+Severn lived fifty-eight years longer it was for the rest of his life a
+chief occupation to write and draw his memories of his friend.
+
+On February 23rd, 1821, came the end for which Keats had begun to long.
+He died peacefully in Severn's arms. On the 26th he was buried in the
+beautiful little Protestant cemetery of which Shelley said that it 'made
+one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a
+place'.
+
+Great indignation was felt at the time by those who attributed his
+death, in part at least, to the cruel treatment which he had received
+from the critics. Shelley, in _Adonais_, withered them with his scorn,
+and Byron, in _Don Juan_, had his gibe both at the poet and at his
+enemies. But we know now how mistaken they were. Keats, in a normal
+state of mind and body, was never unduly depressed by harsh or unfair
+criticism. 'Praise or blame,' he wrote, 'has but a momentary effect on
+the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic
+on his own works,' and this attitude he consistently maintained
+throughout his poetic career. No doubt the sense that his genius was
+unappreciated added something to the torment of mind which he suffered
+in Rome, and on his death-bed he asked that on his tombstone should be
+inscribed the words 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'. But it
+was apparently not said in bitterness, and the rest of the
+inscription[xxiii:1] expresses rather the natural anger of his friends
+at the treatment he had received than the mental attitude of the poet
+himself.
+
+Fully to understand him we must read his poetry with the commentary of
+his letters which reveal in his character elements of humour,
+clear-sighted wisdom, frankness, strength, sympathy and tolerance. So
+doing we shall enter into the mind and heart of the friend who, speaking
+for many, described Keats as one 'whose genius I did not, and do not,
+more fully admire than I entirely loved the man'.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[xiii:1] Many of the words which the reviewers thought to be coined were
+good Elizabethan.
+
+[xxiii:1] This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English
+Poet, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the
+Malicious Power of his Enemies, desired these Words to be engraven on
+his Tomb Stone 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water' Feb. 24th
+1821.
+
+
+
+
+LAMIA,
+
+ISABELLA,
+
+THE EVE OF ST. AGNES,
+
+AND
+
+OTHER POEMS.
+
+
+BY JOHN KEATS,
+AUTHOR OF ENDYMION.
+
+
+LONDON:
+PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY,
+FLEET-STREET.
+1820.
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+
+If any apology be thought necessary for the appearance of the unfinished
+poem of HYPERION, the publishers beg to state that they alone are
+responsible, as it was printed at their particular request, and contrary
+to the wish of the author. The poem was intended to have been of equal
+length with ENDYMION, but the reception given to that work discouraged
+the author from proceeding.
+
+  _Fleet-Street, June 26, 1820._
+
+
+
+
+LAMIA.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+  Upon a time, before the faery broods
+  Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,
+  Before King Oberon's bright diadem,
+  Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem,
+  Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns
+  From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns,
+  The ever-smitten Hermes empty left
+  His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft:
+  From high Olympus had he stolen light,
+  On this side of Jove's clouds, to escape the sight           10
+  Of his great summoner, and made retreat
+  Into a forest on the shores of Crete.
+  For somewhere in that sacred island dwelt
+  A nymph, to whom all hoofed Satyrs knelt;
+  At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured
+  Pearls, while on land they wither'd and adored.
+  Fast by the springs where she to bathe was wont,
+  And in those meads where sometime she might haunt,
+  Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse,
+  Though Fancy's casket were unlock'd to choose.               20
+  Ah, what a world of love was at her feet!
+  So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat
+  Burnt from his winged heels to either ear,
+  That from a whiteness, as the lily clear,
+  Blush'd into roses 'mid his golden hair,
+  Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare.
+  From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew,
+  Breathing upon the flowers his passion new,
+  And wound with many a river to its head,
+  To find where this sweet nymph prepar'd her secret bed:      30
+  In vain; the sweet nymph might nowhere be found,
+  And so he rested, on the lonely ground,
+  Pensive, and full of painful jealousies
+  Of the Wood-Gods, and even the very trees.
+  There as he stood, he heard a mournful voice,
+  Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys
+  All pain but pity: thus the lone voice spake:
+  "When from this wreathed tomb shall I awake!
+  When move in a sweet body fit for life,
+  And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife                 40
+  Of hearts and lips! Ah, miserable me!"
+  The God, dove-footed, glided silently
+  Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed,
+  The taller grasses and full-flowering weed,
+  Until he found a palpitating snake,
+  Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.
+
+    She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
+  Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
+  Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
+  Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd;                 50
+  And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
+  Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
+  Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries--
+  So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
+  She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
+  Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
+  Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
+  Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar:
+  Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
+  She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:        60
+  And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
+  But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?
+  As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air.
+  Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake
+  Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love's sake,
+  And thus; while Hermes on his pinions lay,
+  Like a stoop'd falcon ere he takes his prey.
+
+    "Fair Hermes, crown'd with feathers, fluttering light,
+  I had a splendid dream of thee last night:
+  I saw thee sitting, on a throne of gold,                     70
+  Among the Gods, upon Olympus old,
+  The only sad one; for thou didst not hear
+  The soft, lute-finger'd Muses chaunting clear,
+  Nor even Apollo when he sang alone,
+  Deaf to his throbbing throat's long, long melodious moan.
+  I dreamt I saw thee, robed in purple flakes,
+  Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks,
+  And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart,
+  Strike for the Cretan isle; and here thou art!
+  Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid?"                80
+  Whereat the star of Lethe not delay'd
+  His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired:
+  "Thou smooth-lipp'd serpent, surely high inspired!
+  Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes,
+  Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise,
+  Telling me only where my nymph is fled,--
+  Where she doth breathe!" "Bright planet, thou hast said,"
+  Return'd the snake, "but seal with oaths, fair God!"
+  "I swear," said Hermes, "by my serpent rod,
+  And by thine eyes, and by thy starry crown!"                 90
+  Light flew his earnest words, among the blossoms blown.
+  Then thus again the brilliance feminine:
+  "Too frail of heart! for this lost nymph of thine,
+  Free as the air, invisibly, she strays
+  About these thornless wilds; her pleasant days
+  She tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet
+  Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet;
+  From weary tendrils, and bow'd branches green,
+  She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen:
+  And by my power is her beauty veil'd                        100
+  To keep it unaffronted, unassail'd
+  By the love-glances of unlovely eyes,
+  Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear'd Silenus' sighs.
+  Pale grew her immortality, for woe
+  Of all these lovers, and she grieved so
+  I took compassion on her, bade her steep
+  Her hair in weird syrops, that would keep
+  Her loveliness invisible, yet free
+  To wander as she loves, in liberty.
+  Thou shalt behold her, Hermes, thou alone,                  110
+  If thou wilt, as thou swearest, grant my boon!"
+  Then, once again, the charmed God began
+  An oath, and through the serpent's ears it ran
+  Warm, tremulous, devout, psalterian.
+  Ravish'd, she lifted her Circean head,
+  Blush'd a live damask, and swift-lisping said,
+  "I was a woman, let me have once more
+  A woman's shape, and charming as before.
+  I love a youth of Corinth--O the bliss!
+  Give me my woman's form, and place me where he is.          120
+  Stoop, Hermes, let me breathe upon thy brow,
+  And thou shalt see thy sweet nymph even now."
+  The God on half-shut feathers sank serene,
+  She breath'd upon his eyes, and swift was seen
+  Of both the guarded nymph near-smiling on the green.
+  It was no dream; or say a dream it was,
+  Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
+  Their pleasures in a long immortal dream.
+  One warm, flush'd moment, hovering, it might seem
+  Dash'd by the wood-nymph's beauty, so he burn'd;            130
+  Then, lighting on the printless verdure, turn'd
+  To the swoon'd serpent, and with languid arm,
+  Delicate, put to proof the lythe Caducean charm.
+  So done, upon the nymph his eyes he bent
+  Full of adoring tears and blandishment,
+  And towards her stept: she, like a moon in wane,
+  Faded before him, cower'd, nor could restrain
+  Her fearful sobs, self-folding like a flower
+  That faints into itself at evening hour:
+  But the God fostering her chilled hand,                     140
+  She felt the warmth, her eyelids open'd bland,
+  And, like new flowers at morning song of bees,
+  Bloom'd, and gave up her honey to the lees.
+  Into the green-recessed woods they flew;
+  Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do.
+
+    Left to herself, the serpent now began
+  To change; her elfin blood in madness ran,
+  Her mouth foam'd, and the grass, therewith besprent,
+  Wither'd at dew so sweet and virulent;
+  Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear,               150
+  Hot, glaz'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
+  Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
+  The colours all inflam'd throughout her train,
+  She writh'd about, convuls'd with scarlet pain:
+  A deep volcanian yellow took the place
+  Of all her milder-mooned body's grace;
+  And, as the lava ravishes the mead,
+  Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede;
+  Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars,
+  Eclips'd her crescents, and lick'd up her stars:            160
+  So that, in moments few, she was undrest
+  Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst,
+  And rubious-argent: of all these bereft,
+  Nothing but pain and ugliness were left.
+  Still shone her crown; that vanish'd, also she
+  Melted and disappear'd as suddenly;
+  And in the air, her new voice luting soft,
+  Cried, "Lycius! gentle Lycius!"--Borne aloft
+  With the bright mists about the mountains hoar
+  These words dissolv'd: Crete's forests heard no more.       170
+
+    Whither fled Lamia, now a lady bright,
+  A full-born beauty new and exquisite?
+  She fled into that valley they pass o'er
+  Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas' shore;
+  And rested at the foot of those wild hills,
+  The rugged founts of the Peraean rills,
+  And of that other ridge whose barren back
+  Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack,
+  South-westward to Cleone. There she stood
+  About a young bird's flutter from a wood,                   180
+  Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread,
+  By a clear pool, wherein she passioned
+  To see herself escap'd from so sore ills,
+  While her robes flaunted with the daffodils.
+
+    Ah, happy Lycius!--for she was a maid
+  More beautiful than ever twisted braid,
+  Or sigh'd, or blush'd, or on spring-flowered lea
+  Spread a green kirtle to the minstrelsy:
+  A virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the lore
+  Of love deep learned to the red heart's core:               190
+  Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain
+  To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain;
+  Define their pettish limits, and estrange
+  Their points of contact, and swift counterchange;
+  Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart
+  Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art;
+  As though in Cupid's college she had spent
+  Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent,
+  And kept his rosy terms in idle languishment.
+
+    Why this fair creature chose so fairily                   200
+  By the wayside to linger, we shall see;
+  But first 'tis fit to tell how she could muse
+  And dream, when in the serpent prison-house,
+  Of all she list, strange or magnificent:
+  How, ever, where she will'd, her spirit went;
+  Whether to faint Elysium, or where
+  Down through tress-lifting waves the Nereids fair
+  Wind into Thetis' bower by many a pearly stair;
+  Or where God Bacchus drains his cups divine,
+  Stretch'd out, at ease, beneath a glutinous pine;           210
+  Or where in Pluto's gardens palatine
+  Mulciber's columns gleam in far piazzian line.
+  And sometimes into cities she would send
+  Her dream, with feast and rioting to blend;
+  And once, while among mortals dreaming thus,
+  She saw the young Corinthian Lycius
+  Charioting foremost in the envious race,
+  Like a young Jove with calm uneager face,
+  And fell into a swooning love of him.
+  Now on the moth-time of that evening dim                    220
+  He would return that way, as well she knew,
+  To Corinth from the shore; for freshly blew
+  The eastern soft wind, and his galley now
+  Grated the quaystones with her brazen prow
+  In port Cenchreas, from Egina isle
+  Fresh anchor'd; whither he had been awhile
+  To sacrifice to Jove, whose temple there
+  Waits with high marble doors for blood and incense rare.
+  Jove heard his vows, and better'd his desire;
+  For by some freakful chance he made retire                  230
+  From his companions, and set forth to walk,
+  Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk:
+  Over the solitary hills he fared,
+  Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared
+  His phantasy was lost, where reason fades,
+  In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades.
+  Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near--
+  Close to her passing, in indifference drear,
+  His silent sandals swept the mossy green;
+  So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen                    240
+  She stood: he pass'd, shut up in mysteries,
+  His mind wrapp'd like his mantle, while her eyes
+  Follow'd his steps, and her neck regal white
+  Turn'd--syllabling thus, "Ah, Lycius bright,
+  And will you leave me on the hills alone?
+  Lycius, look back! and be some pity shown."
+  He did; not with cold wonder fearingly,
+  But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice;
+  For so delicious were the words she sung,
+  It seem'd he had lov'd them a whole summer long:            250
+  And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up,
+  Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup,
+  And still the cup was full,--while he, afraid
+  Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid
+  Due adoration, thus began to adore;
+  Her soft look growing coy, she saw his chain so sure:
+  "Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, Goddess, see
+  Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!
+  For pity do not this sad heart belie--
+  Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.                      260
+  Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!
+  To thy far wishes will thy streams obey:
+  Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,
+  Alone they can drink up the morning rain:
+  Though a descended Pleiad, will not one
+  Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune
+  Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?
+  So sweetly to these ravish'd ears of mine
+  Came thy sweet greeting, that if thou shouldst fade
+  Thy memory will waste me to a shade:--                      270
+  For pity do not melt!"--"If I should stay,"
+  Said Lamia, "here, upon this floor of clay,
+  And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough,
+  What canst thou say or do of charm enough
+  To dull the nice remembrance of my home?
+  Thou canst not ask me with thee here to roam
+  Over these hills and vales, where no joy is,--
+  Empty of immortality and bliss!
+  Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know
+  That finer spirits cannot breathe below                     280
+  In human climes, and live: Alas! poor youth,
+  What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe
+  My essence? What serener palaces,
+  Where I may all my many senses please,
+  And by mysterious sleights a hundred thirsts appease?
+  It cannot be--Adieu!" So said, she rose
+  Tiptoe with white arms spread. He, sick to lose
+  The amorous promise of her lone complain,
+  Swoon'd, murmuring of love, and pale with pain.
+  The cruel lady, without any show                            290
+  Of sorrow for her tender favourite's woe,
+  But rather, if her eyes could brighter be,
+  With brighter eyes and slow amenity,
+  Put her new lips to his, and gave afresh
+  The life she had so tangled in her mesh:
+  And as he from one trance was wakening
+  Into another, she began to sing,
+  Happy in beauty, life, and love, and every thing,
+  A song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres,
+  While, like held breath, the stars drew in their panting
+      fires.                                                  300
+  And then she whisper'd in such trembling tone,
+  As those who, safe together met alone
+  For the first time through many anguish'd days,
+  Use other speech than looks; bidding him raise
+  His drooping head, and clear his soul of doubt,
+  For that she was a woman, and without
+  Any more subtle fluid in her veins
+  Than throbbing blood, and that the self-same pains
+  Inhabited her frail-strung heart as his.
+  And next she wonder'd how his eyes could miss               310
+  Her face so long in Corinth, where, she said,
+  She dwelt but half retir'd, and there had led
+  Days happy as the gold coin could invent
+  Without the aid of love; yet in content
+  Till she saw him, as once she pass'd him by,
+  Where 'gainst a column he leant thoughtfully
+  At Venus' temple porch, 'mid baskets heap'd
+  Of amorous herbs and flowers, newly reap'd
+  Late on that eve, as 'twas the night before
+  The Adonian feast; whereof she saw no more,                 320
+  But wept alone those days, for why should she adore?
+  Lycius from death awoke into amaze,
+  To see her still, and singing so sweet lays;
+  Then from amaze into delight he fell
+  To hear her whisper woman's lore so well;
+  And every word she spake entic'd him on
+  To unperplex'd delight and pleasure known.
+  Let the mad poets say whate'er they please
+  Of the sweets of Fairies, Peris, Goddesses,
+  There is not such a treat among them all,                   330
+  Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,
+  As a real woman, lineal indeed
+  From Pyrrha's pebbles or old Adam's seed.
+  Thus gentle Lamia judg'd, and judg'd aright,
+  That Lycius could not love in half a fright,
+  So threw the goddess off, and won his heart
+  More pleasantly by playing woman's part,
+  With no more awe than what her beauty gave,
+  That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save.
+  Lycius to all made eloquent reply,                          340
+  Marrying to every word a twinborn sigh;
+  And last, pointing to Corinth, ask'd her sweet,
+  If 'twas too far that night for her soft feet.
+  The way was short, for Lamia's eagerness
+  Made, by a spell, the triple league decrease
+  To a few paces; not at all surmised
+  By blinded Lycius, so in her comprized.
+  They pass'd the city gates, he knew not how,
+  So noiseless, and he never thought to know.
+
+    As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,                   350
+  Throughout her palaces imperial,
+  And all her populous streets and temples lewd,
+  Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd,
+  To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.
+  Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,
+  Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white,
+  Companion'd or alone; while many a light
+  Flared, here and there, from wealthy festivals,
+  And threw their moving shadows on the walls,
+  Or found them cluster'd in the corniced shade               360
+  Of some arch'd temple door, or dusky colonnade.
+
+    Muffling his face, of greeting friends in fear,
+  Her fingers he press'd hard, as one came near
+  With curl'd gray beard, sharp eyes, and smooth bald crown,
+  Slow-stepp'd, and robed in philosophic gown:
+  Lycius shrank closer, as they met and past,
+  Into his mantle, adding wings to haste,
+  While hurried Lamia trembled: "Ah," said he,
+  "Why do you shudder, love, so ruefully?
+  Why does your tender palm dissolve in dew?"--               370
+  "I'm wearied," said fair Lamia: "tell me who
+  Is that old man? I cannot bring to mind
+  His features:--Lycius! wherefore did you blind
+  Yourself from his quick eyes?" Lycius replied,
+  "'Tis Apollonius sage, my trusty guide
+  And good instructor; but to-night he seems
+  The ghost of folly haunting my sweet dreams."
+
+    While yet he spake they had arrived before
+  A pillar'd porch, with lofty portal door,
+  Where hung a silver lamp, whose phosphor glow               380
+  Reflected in the slabbed steps below,
+  Mild as a star in water; for so new,
+  And so unsullied was the marble hue,
+  So through the crystal polish, liquid fine,
+  Ran the dark veins, that none but feet divine
+  Could e'er have touch'd there. Sounds AEolian
+  Breath'd from the hinges, as the ample span
+  Of the wide doors disclos'd a place unknown
+  Some time to any, but those two alone,
+  And a few Persian mutes, who that same year                 390
+  Were seen about the markets: none knew where
+  They could inhabit; the most curious
+  Were foil'd, who watch'd to trace them to their house:
+  And but the flitter-winged verse must tell,
+  For truth's sake, what woe afterwards befel,
+  'Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,
+  Shut from the busy world of more incredulous.
+
+
+PART II.
+
+  Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
+  Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
+  Love in a palace is perhaps at last
+  More grievous torment than a hermit's fast:--
+  That is a doubtful tale from faery land,
+  Hard for the non-elect to understand.
+  Had Lycius liv'd to hand his story down,
+  He might have given the moral a fresh frown,
+  Or clench'd it quite: but too short was their bliss
+  To breed distrust and hate, that make the soft voice hiss.   10
+  Besides, there, nightly, with terrific glare
+  Love, jealous grown of so complete a pair,
+  Hover'd and buzz'd his wings, with fearful roar,
+  Above the lintel of their chamber door,
+  And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor.
+
+    For all this came a ruin: side by side
+  They were enthroned, in the even tide,
+  Upon a couch, near to a curtaining
+  Whose airy texture, from a golden string,
+  Floated into the room, and let appear                        20
+  Unveil'd the summer heaven, blue and clear,
+  Betwixt two marble shafts:--there they reposed,
+  Where use had made it sweet, with eyelids closed,
+  Saving a tythe which love still open kept,
+  That they might see each other while they almost slept;
+  When from the slope side of a suburb hill,
+  Deafening the swallow's twitter, came a thrill
+  Of trumpets--Lycius started--the sounds fled,
+  But left a thought, a buzzing in his head.
+  For the first time, since first he harbour'd in              30
+  That purple-lined palace of sweet sin,
+  His spirit pass'd beyond its golden bourn
+  Into the noisy world almost forsworn.
+  The lady, ever watchful, penetrant,
+  Saw this with pain, so arguing a want
+  Of something more, more than her empery
+  Of joys; and she began to moan and sigh
+  Because he mused beyond her, knowing well
+  That but a moment's thought is passion's passing bell.
+  "Why do you sigh, fair creature?" whisper'd he:              40
+  "Why do you think?" return'd she tenderly:
+  "You have deserted me;--where am I now?
+  Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow:
+  No, no, you have dismiss'd me; and I go
+  From your breast houseless: ay, it must be so."
+  He answer'd, bending to her open eyes,
+  Where he was mirror'd small in paradise,
+  "My silver planet, both of eve and morn!
+  Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn,
+  While I am striving how to fill my heart                     50
+  With deeper crimson, and a double smart?
+  How to entangle, trammel up and snare
+  Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
+  Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?
+  Ay, a sweet kiss--you see your mighty woes.
+  My thoughts! shall I unveil them? Listen then!
+  What mortal hath a prize, that other men
+  May be confounded and abash'd withal,
+  But lets it sometimes pace abroad majestical,
+  And triumph, as in thee I should rejoice                     60
+  Amid the hoarse alarm of Corinth's voice.
+  Let my foes choke, and my friends shout afar,
+  While through the thronged streets your bridal car
+  Wheels round its dazzling spokes."--The lady's cheek
+  Trembled; she nothing said, but, pale and meek,
+  Arose and knelt before him, wept a rain
+  Of sorrows at his words; at last with pain
+  Beseeching him, the while his hand she wrung,
+  To change his purpose. He thereat was stung,
+  Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim                     70
+  Her wild and timid nature to his aim:
+  Besides, for all his love, in self despite,
+  Against his better self, he took delight
+  Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new.
+  His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue
+  Fierce and sanguineous as 'twas possible
+  In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell.
+  Fine was the mitigated fury, like
+  Apollo's presence when in act to strike
+  The serpent--Ha, the serpent! certes, she                    80
+  Was none. She burnt, she lov'd the tyranny,
+  And, all subdued, consented to the hour
+  When to the bridal he should lead his paramour.
+  Whispering in midnight silence, said the youth,
+  "Sure some sweet name thou hast, though, by my truth,
+  I have not ask'd it, ever thinking thee
+  Not mortal, but of heavenly progeny,
+  As still I do. Hast any mortal name,
+  Fit appellation for this dazzling frame?
+  Or friends or kinsfolk on the citied earth,                  90
+  To share our marriage feast and nuptial mirth?"
+  "I have no friends," said Lamia, "no, not one;
+  My presence in wide Corinth hardly known:
+  My parents' bones are in their dusty urns
+  Sepulchred, where no kindled incense burns,
+  Seeing all their luckless race are dead, save me,
+  And I neglect the holy rite for thee.
+  Even as you list invite your many guests;
+  But if, as now it seems, your vision rests
+  With any pleasure on me, do not bid                         100
+  Old Apollonius--from him keep me hid."
+  Lycius, perplex'd at words so blind and blank,
+  Made close inquiry; from whose touch she shrank,
+  Feigning a sleep; and he to the dull shade
+  Of deep sleep in a moment was betray'd.
+
+    It was the custom then to bring away
+  The bride from home at blushing shut of day,
+  Veil'd, in a chariot, heralded along
+  By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage song,
+  With other pageants: but this fair unknown                  110
+  Had not a friend. So being left alone,
+  (Lycius was gone to summon all his kin)
+  And knowing surely she could never win
+  His foolish heart from its mad pompousness,
+  She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress
+  The misery in fit magnificence.
+  She did so, but 'tis doubtful how and whence
+  Came, and who were her subtle servitors.
+  About the halls, and to and from the doors,
+  There was a noise of wings, till in short space             120
+  The glowing banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.
+  A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
+  Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan
+  Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.
+  Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade
+  Of palm and plantain, met from either side,
+  High in the midst, in honour of the bride:
+  Two palms and then two plantains, and so on,
+  From either side their stems branch'd one to one
+  All down the aisled place; and beneath all                  130
+  There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall.
+  So canopied, lay an untasted feast
+  Teeming with odours. Lamia, regal drest,
+  Silently paced about, and as she went,
+  In pale contented sort of discontent,
+  Mission'd her viewless servants to enrich
+  The fretted splendour of each nook and niche.
+  Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first,
+  Came jasper pannels; then, anon, there burst
+  Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees,                   140
+  And with the larger wove in small intricacies.
+  Approving all, she faded at self-will,
+  And shut the chamber up, close, hush'd and still,
+  Complete and ready for the revels rude,
+  When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude.
+
+    The day appear'd, and all the gossip rout.
+  O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout
+  The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister'd hours,
+  And show to common eyes these secret bowers?
+  The herd approach'd; each guest, with busy brain,           150
+  Arriving at the portal, gaz'd amain,
+  And enter'd marveling: for they knew the street,
+  Remember'd it from childhood all complete
+  Without a gap, yet ne'er before had seen
+  That royal porch, that high-built fair demesne;
+  So in they hurried all, maz'd, curious and keen:
+  Save one, who look'd thereon with eye severe,
+  And with calm-planted steps walk'd in austere;
+  'Twas Apollonius: something too he laugh'd,
+  As though some knotty problem, that had daft                160
+  His patient thought, had now begun to thaw,
+  And solve and melt:--'twas just as he foresaw.
+
+    He met within the murmurous vestibule
+  His young disciple. "'Tis no common rule,
+  Lycius," said he, "for uninvited guest
+  To force himself upon you, and infest
+  With an unbidden presence the bright throng
+  Of younger friends; yet must I do this wrong,
+  And you forgive me." Lycius blush'd, and led
+  The old man through the inner doors broad-spread;           170
+  With reconciling words and courteous mien
+  Turning into sweet milk the sophist's spleen.
+
+    Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room,
+  Fill'd with pervading brilliance and perfume:
+  Before each lucid pannel fuming stood
+  A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood,
+  Each by a sacred tripod held aloft,
+  Whose slender feet wide-swerv'd upon the soft
+  Wool-woofed carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke
+  From fifty censers their light voyage took                  180
+  To the high roof, still mimick'd as they rose
+  Along the mirror'd walls by twin-clouds odorous.
+  Twelve sphered tables, by silk seats insphered,
+  High as the level of a man's breast rear'd
+  On libbard's paws, upheld the heavy gold
+  Of cups and goblets, and the store thrice told
+  Of Ceres' horn, and, in huge vessels, wine
+  Come from the gloomy tun with merry shine.
+  Thus loaded with a feast the tables stood,
+  Each shrining in the midst the image of a God.              190
+
+    When in an antichamber every guest
+  Had felt the cold full sponge to pleasure press'd,
+  By minist'ring slaves, upon his hands and feet,
+  And fragrant oils with ceremony meet
+  Pour'd on his hair, they all mov'd to the feast
+  In white robes, and themselves in order placed
+  Around the silken couches, wondering
+  Whence all this mighty cost and blaze of wealth could spring.
+
+    Soft went the music the soft air along,
+  While fluent Greek a vowel'd undersong                      200
+  Kept up among the guests, discoursing low
+  At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow;
+  But when the happy vintage touch'd their brains,
+  Louder they talk, and louder come the strains
+  Of powerful instruments:--the gorgeous dyes,
+  The space, the splendour of the draperies,
+  The roof of awful richness, nectarous cheer,
+  Beautiful slaves, and Lamia's self, appear,
+  Now, when the wine has done its rosy deed,
+  And every soul from human trammels freed,                   210
+  No more so strange; for merry wine, sweet wine,
+  Will make Elysian shades not too fair, too divine.
+  Soon was God Bacchus at meridian height;
+  Flush'd were their cheeks, and bright eyes double bright:
+  Garlands of every green, and every scent
+  From vales deflower'd, or forest-trees branch-rent,
+  In baskets of bright osier'd gold were brought
+  High as the handles heap'd, to suit the thought
+  Of every guest; that each, as he did please,
+  Might fancy-fit his brows, silk-pillow'd at his ease.       220
+
+    What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
+  What for the sage, old Apollonius?
+  Upon her aching forehead be there hung
+  The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue;
+  And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
+  The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
+  Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
+  Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
+  War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
+  At the mere touch of cold philosophy?                       230
+  There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
+  We know her woof, her texture; she is given
+  In the dull catalogue of common things.
+  Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
+  Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
+  Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--
+  Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
+  The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
+
+    By her glad Lycius sitting, in chief place,
+  Scarce saw in all the room another face,                    240
+  Till, checking his love trance, a cup he took
+  Full brimm'd, and opposite sent forth a look
+  'Cross the broad table, to beseech a glance
+  From his old teacher's wrinkled countenance,
+  And pledge him. The bald-head philosopher
+  Had fix'd his eye, without a twinkle or stir
+  Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride,
+  Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride.
+  Lycius then press'd her hand, with devout touch,
+  As pale it lay upon the rosy couch:                         250
+  'Twas icy, and the cold ran through his veins;
+  Then sudden it grew hot, and all the pains
+  Of an unnatural heat shot to his heart.
+  "Lamia, what means this? Wherefore dost thou start?
+  Know'st thou that man?" Poor Lamia answer'd not.
+  He gaz'd into her eyes, and not a jot
+  Own'd they the lovelorn piteous appeal:
+  More, more he gaz'd: his human senses reel:
+  Some hungry spell that loveliness absorbs;
+  There was no recognition in those orbs.                     260
+  "Lamia!" he cried--and no soft-toned reply.
+  The many heard, and the loud revelry
+  Grew hush; the stately music no more breathes;
+  The myrtle sicken'd in a thousand wreaths.
+  By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased;
+  A deadly silence step by step increased,
+  Until it seem'd a horrid presence there,
+  And not a man but felt the terror in his hair.
+  "Lamia!" he shriek'd; and nothing but the shriek
+  With its sad echo did the silence break.                    270
+  "Begone, foul dream!" he cried, gazing again
+  In the bride's face, where now no azure vein
+  Wander'd on fair-spaced temples; no soft bloom
+  Misted the cheek; no passion to illume
+  The deep-recessed vision:--all was blight;
+  Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white.
+  "Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!
+  Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban
+  Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images
+  Here represent their shadowy presences,                     280
+  May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn
+  Of painful blindness; leaving thee forlorn,
+  In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright
+  Of conscience, for their long offended might,
+  For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries,
+  Unlawful magic, and enticing lies.
+  Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch!
+  Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch
+  Around his demon eyes! Corinthians, see!
+  My sweet bride withers at their potency."                   290
+  "Fool!" said the sophist, in an under-tone
+  Gruff with contempt; which a death-nighing moan
+  From Lycius answer'd, as heart-struck and lost,
+  He sank supine beside the aching ghost.
+  "Fool! Fool!" repeated he, while his eyes still
+  Relented not, nor mov'd; "from every ill
+  Of life have I preserv'd thee to this day,
+  And shall I see thee made a serpent's prey?"
+  Then Lamia breath'd death breath; the sophist's eye,
+  Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly,               300
+  Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well
+  As her weak hand could any meaning tell,
+  Motion'd him to be silent; vainly so,
+  He look'd and look'd again a level--No!
+  "A Serpent!" echoed he; no sooner said,
+  Than with a frightful scream she vanished:
+  And Lycius' arms were empty of delight,
+  As were his limbs of life, from that same night.
+  On the high couch he lay!--his friends came round--
+  Supported him--no pulse, or breath they found,              310
+  And, in its marriage robe, the heavy body wound.[45:A]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[45:A] "Philostratus, in his fourth book _de Vita Apollonii_, hath a
+memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus
+Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that going betwixt
+Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair
+gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her
+house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by
+birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play,
+and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him;
+but she, being fair and lovely, would live and die with him, that was
+fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a philosopher, otherwise staid
+and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love,
+tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her,
+to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius; who, by some
+probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that
+all her furniture was, like Tantalus' gold, described by Homer, no
+substance but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept,
+and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and
+thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an
+instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the
+midst of Greece."
+
+            Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' _Part_ 3. _Sect._ 2
+                                            _Memb._ 1. _Subs._ 1.
+
+
+
+
+ISABELLA;
+
+OR,
+
+THE POT OF BASIL.
+
+
+A STORY FROM BOCCACCIO.
+
+
+  I.
+
+  Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
+    Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love's eye!
+  They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
+    Without some stir of heart, some malady;
+  They could not sit at meals but feel how well
+    It soothed each to be the other by;
+  They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
+  But to each other dream, and nightly weep.
+
+  II.
+
+  With every morn their love grew tenderer,
+    With every eve deeper and tenderer still;                  10
+  He might not in house, field, or garden stir,
+    But her full shape would all his seeing fill;
+  And his continual voice was pleasanter
+    To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;
+  Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,
+  She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.
+
+  III.
+
+  He knew whose gentle hand was at the latch,
+    Before the door had given her to his eyes;
+  And from her chamber-window he would catch
+    Her beauty farther than the falcon spies;                  20
+  And constant as her vespers would he watch,
+    Because her face was turn'd to the same skies;
+  And with sick longing all the night outwear,
+  To hear her morning-step upon the stair.
+
+  IV.
+
+  A whole long month of May in this sad plight
+    Made their cheeks paler by the break of June:
+  "To-morrow will I bow to my delight,
+    To-morrow will I ask my lady's boon."--
+  "O may I never see another night,
+    Lorenzo, if thy lips breathe not love's tune."--           30
+  So spake they to their pillows; but, alas,
+  Honeyless days and days did he let pass;
+
+  V.
+
+  Until sweet Isabella's untouch'd cheek
+    Fell sick within the rose's just domain,
+  Fell thin as a young mother's, who doth seek
+    By every lull to cool her infant's pain:
+  "How ill she is," said he, "I may not speak,
+    And yet I will, and tell my love all plain:
+  If looks speak love-laws, I will drink her tears,
+  And at the least 'twill startle off her cares."              40
+
+  VI.
+
+  So said he one fair morning, and all day
+    His heart beat awfully against his side;
+  And to his heart he inwardly did pray
+    For power to speak; but still the ruddy tide
+  Stifled his voice, and puls'd resolve away--
+    Fever'd his high conceit of such a bride,
+  Yet brought him to the meekness of a child:
+  Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!
+
+  VII.
+
+  So once more he had wak'd and anguished
+    A dreary night of love and misery,                         50
+  If Isabel's quick eye had not been wed
+    To every symbol on his forehead high;
+  She saw it waxing very pale and dead,
+    And straight all flush'd; so, lisped tenderly,
+  "Lorenzo!"--here she ceas'd her timid quest,
+  But in her tone and look he read the rest.
+
+  VIII.
+
+  "O Isabella, I can half perceive
+    That I may speak my grief into thine ear;
+  If thou didst ever any thing believe,
+    Believe how I love thee, believe how near                  60
+  My soul is to its doom: I would not grieve
+    Thy hand by unwelcome pressing, would not fear
+  Thine eyes by gazing; but I cannot live
+  Another night, and not my passion shrive.
+
+  IX.
+
+  "Love! thou art leading me from wintry cold,
+    Lady! thou leadest me to summer clime,
+  And I must taste the blossoms that unfold
+    In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time."
+  So said, his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
+    And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:                       70
+  Great bliss was with them, and great happiness
+  Grew, like a lusty flower in June's caress.
+
+  X.
+
+  Parting they seem'd to tread upon the air,
+    Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart
+  Only to meet again more close, and share
+    The inward fragrance of each other's heart.
+  She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair
+    Sang, of delicious love and honey'd dart;
+  He with light steps went up a western hill,
+  And bade the sun farewell, and joy'd his fill.               80
+
+  XI.
+
+  All close they met again, before the dusk
+    Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
+  All close they met, all eyes, before the dusk
+    Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
+  Close in a bower of hyacinth and musk,
+    Unknown of any, free from whispering tale.
+  Ah! better had it been for ever so,
+  Than idle ears should pleasure in their woe.
+
+  XII.
+
+  Were they unhappy then?--It cannot be--
+    Too many tears for lovers have been shed,                  90
+  Too many sighs give we to them in fee,
+    Too much of pity after they are dead,
+  Too many doleful stories do we see,
+    Whose matter in bright gold were best be read;
+  Except in such a page where Theseus' spouse
+  Over the pathless waves towards him bows.
+
+  XIII.
+
+  But, for the general award of love,
+    The little sweet doth kill much bitterness;
+  Though Dido silent is in under-grove,
+    And Isabella's was a great distress,                      100
+  Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove
+    Was not embalm'd, this truth is not the less--
+  Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers,
+  Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.
+
+  XIV.
+
+  With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
+    Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
+  And for them many a weary hand did swelt
+    In torched mines and noisy factories,
+  And many once proud-quiver'd loins did melt
+    In blood from stinging whip;--with hollow eyes            110
+  Many all day in dazzling river stood,
+  To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
+
+  XV.
+
+  For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
+    And went all naked to the hungry shark;
+  For them his ears gush'd blood; for them in death
+    The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
+  Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
+    A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
+  Half-ignorant, they turn'd an easy wheel,
+  That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.            120
+
+  XVI.
+
+  Why were they proud? Because their marble founts
+    Gush'd with more pride than do a wretch's tears?--
+  Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts
+    Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?--
+  Why were they proud? Because red-lin'd accounts
+    Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?--
+  Why were they proud? again we ask aloud,
+  Why in the name of Glory were they proud?
+
+  XVII.
+
+  Yet were these Florentines as self-retired
+    In hungry pride and gainful cowardice,                    130
+  As two close Hebrews in that land inspired,
+    Paled in and vineyarded from beggar-spies;
+  The hawks of ship-mast forests--the untired
+    And pannier'd mules for ducats and old lies--
+  Quick cat's-paws on the generous stray-away,--
+  Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay.
+
+  XVIII.
+
+  How was it these same ledger-men could spy
+    Fair Isabella in her downy nest?
+  How could they find out in Lorenzo's eye
+    A straying from his toil? Hot Egypt's pest                140
+  Into their vision covetous and sly!
+    How could these money-bags see east and west?--
+  Yet so they did--and every dealer fair
+  Must see behind, as doth the hunted hare.
+
+  XIX.
+
+  O eloquent and famed Boccaccio!
+    Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon;
+  And of thy spicy myrtles as they blow,
+    And of thy roses amorous of the moon,
+  And of thy lilies, that do paler grow
+    Now they can no more hear thy ghittern's tune,            150
+  For venturing syllables that ill beseem
+  The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme.
+
+  XX.
+
+  Grant thou a pardon here, and then the tale
+    Shall move on soberly, as it is meet;
+  There is no other crime, no mad assail
+    To make old prose in modern rhyme more sweet:
+  But it is done--succeed the verse or fail--
+    To honour thee, and thy gone spirit greet;
+  To stead thee as a verse in English tongue,
+  An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.                     160
+
+  XXI.
+
+  These brethren having found by many signs
+    What love Lorenzo for their sister had,
+  And how she lov'd him too, each unconfines
+    His bitter thoughts to other, well nigh mad
+  That he, the servant of their trade designs,
+    Should in their sister's love be blithe and glad,
+  When 'twas their plan to coax her by degrees
+  To some high noble and his olive-trees.
+
+  XXII.
+
+  And many a jealous conference had they,
+    And many times they bit their lips alone,                 170
+  Before they fix'd upon a surest way
+    To make the youngster for his crime atone;
+  And at the last, these men of cruel clay
+    Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone;
+  For they resolved in some forest dim
+  To kill Lorenzo, and there bury him.
+
+  XXIII.
+
+  So on a pleasant morning, as he leant
+    Into the sun-rise, o'er the balustrade
+  Of the garden-terrace, towards him they bent
+    Their footing through the dews; and to him said,          180
+  "You seem there in the quiet of content,
+    Lorenzo, and we are most loth to invade
+  Calm speculation; but if you are wise,
+  Bestride your steed while cold is in the skies.
+
+  XXIV.
+
+  "To-day we purpose, ay, this hour we mount
+    To spur three leagues towards the Apennine;
+  Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
+    His dewy rosary on the eglantine."
+  Lorenzo, courteously as he was wont,
+    Bow'd a fair greeting to these serpents' whine;           190
+  And went in haste, to get in readiness,
+  With belt, and spur, and bracing huntsman's dress.
+
+  XXV.
+
+  And as he to the court-yard pass'd along,
+    Each third step did he pause, and listen'd oft
+  If he could hear his lady's matin-song,
+    Or the light whisper of her footstep soft;
+  And as he thus over his passion hung,
+    He heard a laugh full musical aloft;
+  When, looking up, he saw her features bright
+  Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.              200
+
+  XXVI.
+
+  "Love, Isabel!" said he, "I was in pain
+    Lest I should miss to bid thee a good morrow
+  Ah! what if I should lose thee, when so fain
+    I am to stifle all the heavy sorrow
+  Of a poor three hours' absence? but we'll gain
+    Out of the amorous dark what day doth borrow.
+  Goodbye! I'll soon be back."--"Goodbye!" said she:--
+  And as he went she chanted merrily.
+
+  XXVII.
+
+  So the two brothers and their murder'd man
+    Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream           210
+  Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan
+    Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
+  Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
+    The brothers' faces in the ford did seem,
+  Lorenzo's flush with love.--They pass'd the water
+  Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.
+
+  XXVIII.
+
+  There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
+    There in that forest did his great love cease;
+  Ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win,
+    It aches in loneliness--is ill at peace                   220
+  As the break-covert blood-hounds of such sin:
+    They dipp'd their swords in the water, and did tease
+  Their horses homeward, with convulsed spur,
+  Each richer by his being a murderer.
+
+  XXIX.
+
+  They told their sister how, with sudden speed,
+    Lorenzo had ta'en ship for foreign lands,
+  Because of some great urgency and need
+    In their affairs, requiring trusty hands.
+  Poor Girl! put on thy stifling widow's weed,
+    And 'scape at once from Hope's accursed bands;            230
+  To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,
+  And the next day will be a day of sorrow.
+
+  XXX.
+
+  She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
+    Sorely she wept until the night came on,
+  And then, instead of love, O misery!
+    She brooded o'er the luxury alone:
+  His image in the dusk she seem'd to see,
+    And to the silence made a gentle moan,
+  Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
+  And on her couch low murmuring "Where? O where?"            240
+
+  XXXI.
+
+  But Selfishness, Love's cousin, held not long
+    Its fiery vigil in her single breast;
+  She fretted for the golden hour, and hung
+    Upon the time with feverish unrest--
+  Not long--for soon into her heart a throng
+    Of higher occupants, a richer zest,
+  Came tragic; passion not to be subdued,
+  And sorrow for her love in travels rude.
+
+  XXXII.
+
+  In the mid days of autumn, on their eves
+    The breath of Winter comes from far away,                 250
+  And the sick west continually bereaves
+    Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
+  Of death among the bushes and the leaves,
+    To make all bare before he dares to stray
+  From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
+  By gradual decay from beauty fell,
+
+  XXXIII.
+
+  Because Lorenzo came not. Oftentimes
+    She ask'd her brothers, with an eye all pale,
+  Striving to be itself, what dungeon climes
+    Could keep him off so long? They spake a tale             260
+  Time after time, to quiet her. Their crimes
+    Came on them, like a smoke from Hinnom's vale;
+  And every night in dreams they groan'd aloud,
+  To see their sister in her snowy shroud.
+
+  XXXIV.
+
+  And she had died in drowsy ignorance,
+    But for a thing more deadly dark than all;
+  It came like a fierce potion, drunk by chance,
+    Which saves a sick man from the feather'd pall
+  For some few gasping moments; like a lance,
+    Waking an Indian from his cloudy hall                     270
+  With cruel pierce, and bringing him again
+  Sense of the gnawing fire at heart and brain.
+
+  XXXV.
+
+  It was a vision.--In the drowsy gloom,
+    The dull of midnight, at her couch's foot
+  Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb
+    Had marr'd his glossy hair which once could shoot
+  Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom
+    Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
+  From his lorn voice, and past his loamed ears
+  Had made a miry channel for his tears.                      280
+
+  XXXVI.
+
+  Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake;
+    For there was striving, in its piteous tongue,
+  To speak as when on earth it was awake,
+    And Isabella on its music hung:
+  Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
+    As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung;
+  And through it moan'd a ghostly under-song,
+  Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.
+
+  XXXVII.
+
+  Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
+    With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof                290
+  From the poor girl by magic of their light,
+    The while it did unthread the horrid woof
+  Of the late darken'd time,--the murderous spite
+    Of pride and avarice,--the dark pine roof
+  In the forest,--and the sodden turfed dell,
+  Where, without any word, from stabs he fell.
+
+  XXXVIII.
+
+  Saying moreover, "Isabel, my sweet!
+    Red whortle-berries droop above my head,
+  And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet;
+    Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed                 300
+  Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
+    Comes from beyond the river to my bed:
+  Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
+  And it shall comfort me within the tomb.
+
+  XXXIX.
+
+  "I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
+    Upon the skirts of human-nature dwelling
+  Alone: I chant alone the holy mass,
+    While little sounds of life are round me knelling,
+  And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
+    And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,               310
+  Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
+  And thou art distant in Humanity.
+
+  XL.
+
+  "I know what was, I feel full well what is,
+    And I should rage, if spirits could go mad;
+  Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss,
+    That paleness warms my grave, as though I had
+  A Seraph chosen from the bright abyss
+    To be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad;
+  Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel
+  A greater love through all my essence steal."               320
+
+  XLI.
+
+  The Spirit mourn'd "Adieu!"--dissolv'd, and left
+    The atom darkness in a slow turmoil;
+  As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,
+    Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil,
+  We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
+    And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil:
+  It made sad Isabella's eyelids ache,
+  And in the dawn she started up awake;
+
+  XLII.
+
+  "Ha! ha!" said she, "I knew not this hard life,
+    I thought the worst was simple misery;                    330
+  I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife
+    Portion'd us--happy days, or else to die;
+  But there is crime--a brother's bloody knife!
+    Sweet Spirit, thou hast school'd my infancy:
+  I'll visit thee for this, and kiss thine eyes,
+  And greet thee morn and even in the skies."
+
+  XLIII.
+
+  When the full morning came, she had devised
+    How she might secret to the forest hie;
+  How she might find the clay, so dearly prized,
+    And sing to it one latest lullaby;                        340
+  How her short absence might be unsurmised,
+    While she the inmost of the dream would try.
+  Resolv'd, she took with her an aged nurse,
+  And went into that dismal forest-hearse.
+
+  XLIV.
+
+  See, as they creep along the river side,
+    How she doth whisper to that aged Dame,
+  And, after looking round the champaign wide,
+    Shows her a knife.--"What feverous hectic flame
+  Burns in thee, child?--What good can thee betide,
+    That thou should'st smile again?"--The evening came,      350
+  And they had found Lorenzo's earthy bed;
+  The flint was there, the berries at his head.
+
+  XLV.
+
+  Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard,
+    And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
+  Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
+    To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole;
+  Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd,
+    And filling it once more with human soul?
+  Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
+  When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.                             360
+
+  XLVI.
+
+  She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
+    One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
+  Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
+    Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
+  Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow,
+    Like to a native lily of the dell:
+  Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
+  To dig more fervently than misers can.
+
+  XLVII.
+
+  Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon
+    Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies,                 370
+  She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,
+    And put it in her bosom, where it dries
+  And freezes utterly unto the bone
+    Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:
+  Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,
+  But to throw back at times her veiling hair.
+
+  XLVIII.
+
+  That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
+    Until her heart felt pity to the core
+  At sight of such a dismal labouring,
+    And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,              380
+  And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
+    Three hours they labour'd at this travail sore;
+  At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
+  And Isabella did not stamp and rave.
+
+  XLIX.
+
+  Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?
+    Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?
+  O for the gentleness of old Romance,
+    The simple plaining of a minstrel's song!
+  Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance,
+    For here, in truth, it doth not well belong               390
+  To speak:--O turn thee to the very tale,
+  And taste the music of that vision pale.
+
+  L.
+
+  With duller steel than the Persean sword
+    They cut away no formless monster's head,
+  But one, whose gentleness did well accord
+    With death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
+  Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
+    If Love impersonate was ever dead,
+  Pale Isabella kiss'd it, and low moan'd.
+  'Twas love; cold,--dead indeed, but not dethroned.          400
+
+  LI.
+
+  In anxious secrecy they took it home,
+    And then the prize was all for Isabel:
+  She calm'd its wild hair with a golden comb,
+    And all around each eye's sepulchral cell
+  Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
+    With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
+  She drench'd away:--and still she comb'd, and kept
+  Sighing all day--and still she kiss'd, and wept.
+
+  LII.
+
+  Then in a silken scarf,--sweet with the dews
+    Of precious flowers pluck'd in Araby,                     410
+  And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
+    Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,--
+  She wrapp'd it up; and for its tomb did choose
+    A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
+  And cover'd it with mould, and o'er it set
+  Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
+
+  LIII.
+
+  And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
+    And she forgot the blue above the trees,
+  And she forgot the dells where waters run,
+    And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;                  420
+  She had no knowledge when the day was done,
+    And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
+  Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
+  And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.
+
+  LIV.
+
+  And so she ever fed it with thin tears,
+    Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
+  So that it smelt more balmy than its peers
+    Of Basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew
+  Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,
+    From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:       430
+  So that the jewel, safely casketed,
+  Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread.
+
+  LV.
+
+  O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
+    O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
+  O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
+    Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us--O sigh!
+  Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile;
+    Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily,
+  And make a pale light in your cypress glooms,
+  Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs.                  440
+
+  LVI.
+
+  Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
+    From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
+  Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
+    And touch the strings into a mystery;
+  Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
+    For simple Isabel is soon to be
+  Among the dead: She withers, like a palm
+  Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm.
+
+  LVII.
+
+  O leave the palm to wither by itself;
+    Let not quick Winter chill its dying hour!--              450
+  It may not be--those Baaelites of pelf,
+    Her brethren, noted the continual shower
+  From her dead eyes; and many a curious elf,
+    Among her kindred, wonder'd that such dower
+  Of youth and beauty should be thrown aside
+  By one mark'd out to be a Noble's bride.
+
+  LVIII.
+
+  And, furthermore, her brethren wonder'd much
+    Why she sat drooping by the Basil green,
+  And why it flourish'd, as by magic touch;
+    Greatly they wonder'd what the thing might mean:          460
+  They could not surely give belief, that such
+    A very nothing would have power to wean
+  Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay,
+  And even remembrance of her love's delay.
+
+  LIX.
+
+  Therefore they watch'd a time when they might sift
+    This hidden whim; and long they watch'd in vain;
+  For seldom did she go to chapel-shrift,
+    And seldom felt she any hunger-pain;
+  And when she left, she hurried back, as swift
+    As bird on wing to breast its eggs again;                 470
+  And, patient, as a hen-bird, sat her there
+  Beside her Basil, weeping through her hair.
+
+  LX.
+
+  Yet they contriv'd to steal the Basil-pot,
+    And to examine it in secret place:
+  The thing was vile with green and livid spot,
+    And yet they knew it was Lorenzo's face:
+  The guerdon of their murder they had got,
+    And so left Florence in a moment's space,
+  Never to turn again.--Away they went,
+  With blood upon their heads, to banishment.                 480
+
+  LXI.
+
+  O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!
+    O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
+  O Echo, Echo, on some other day,
+    From isles Lethean, sigh to us--O sigh!
+  Spirits of grief, sing not your "Well-a-way!"
+    For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;
+  Will die a death too lone and incomplete,
+  Now they have ta'en away her Basil sweet.
+
+  LXII.
+
+  Piteous she look'd on dead and senseless things,
+    Asking for her lost Basil amorously;                      490
+  And with melodious chuckle in the strings
+    Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry
+  After the Pilgrim in his wanderings,
+    To ask him where her Basil was; and why
+  'Twas hid from her: "For cruel 'tis," said she,
+  "To steal my Basil-pot away from me."
+
+  LXIII.
+
+  And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,
+    Imploring for her Basil to the last.
+  No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
+    In pity of her love, so overcast.                         500
+  And a sad ditty of this story born
+    From mouth to mouth through all the country pass'd:
+  Still is the burthen sung--"O cruelty,
+  To steal my Basil-pot away from me!"
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+EVE OF ST. AGNES.
+
+
+  I.
+
+    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.
+
+  II.
+
+    His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;               10
+    Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
+    And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan,
+    Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:
+    The sculptur'd dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
+    Emprison'd in black, purgatorial rails:
+    Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
+    He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
+  To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
+
+  III.
+
+    Northward he turneth through a little door,
+    And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue          20
+    Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor;
+    But no--already had his deathbell rung;
+    The joys of all his life were said and sung:
+    His was harsh penance on St. Agnes' Eve:
+    Another way he went, and soon among
+    Rough ashes sat he for his soul's reprieve,
+  And all night kept awake, for sinners' sake to grieve.
+
+  IV.
+
+    That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft;
+    And so it chanc'd, for many a door was wide,
+    From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft,                     30
+    The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:
+    The level chambers, ready with their pride,
+    Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:
+    The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,
+    Star'd, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
+  With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts.
+
+  V.
+
+    At length burst in the argent revelry,
+    With plume, tiara, and all rich array,
+    Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
+    The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay        40
+    Of old romance. These let us wish away,
+    And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there,
+    Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,
+    On love, and wing'd St. Agnes' saintly care,
+  As she had heard old dames full many times declare.
+
+  VI.
+
+    They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve,
+    Young virgins might have visions of delight,
+    And soft adorings from their loves receive
+    Upon the honey'd middle of the night,
+    If ceremonies due they did aright;                         50
+    As, supperless to bed they must retire,
+    And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
+    Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
+  Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.
+
+  VII.
+
+    Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:
+    The music, yearning like a God in pain,
+    She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,
+    Fix'd on the floor, saw many a sweeping train
+    Pass by--she heeded not at all: in vain
+    Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,                      60
+    And back retir'd; not cool'd by high disdain,
+    But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:
+  She sigh'd for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year.
+
+  VIII.
+
+    She danc'd along with vague, regardless eyes,
+    Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short:
+    The hallow'd hour was near at hand: she sighs
+    Amid the timbrels, and the throng'd resort
+    Of whisperers in anger, or in sport;
+    'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn,
+    Hoodwink'd with faery fancy; all amort,                    70
+    Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,
+  And all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn.
+
+  IX.
+
+    So, purposing each moment to retire,
+    She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors,
+    Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire
+    For Madeline. Beside the portal doors,
+    Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores
+    All saints to give him sight of Madeline,
+    But for one moment in the tedious hours,
+    That he might gaze and worship all unseen;                 80
+  Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss--in sooth such things
+      have been.
+
+  X.
+
+    He ventures in: let no buzz'd whisper tell:
+    All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords
+    Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel:
+    For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes,
+    Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords,
+    Whose very dogs would execrations howl
+    Against his lineage: not one breast affords
+    Him any mercy, in that mansion foul,
+  Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul.              90
+
+  XI.
+
+    Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came,
+    Shuffling along with ivory-headed wand,
+    To where he stood, hid from the torch's flame,
+    Behind a broad hall-pillar, far beyond
+    The sound of merriment and chorus bland:
+    He startled her; but soon she knew his face,
+    And grasp'd his fingers in her palsied hand,
+    Saying, "Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place;
+  They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race!"
+
+  XII.
+
+    "Get hence! get hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand;       100
+    He had a fever late, and in the fit
+    He cursed thee and thine, both house and land:
+    Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit
+    More tame for his gray hairs--Alas me! flit!
+    Flit like a ghost away."--"Ah, Gossip dear,
+    We're safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit,
+    And tell me how"--"Good Saints! not here, not here;
+  Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier."
+
+  XIII.
+
+    He follow'd through a lowly arched way,
+    Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume,                110
+    And as she mutter'd "Well-a--well-a-day!"
+    He found him in a little moonlight room,
+    Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.
+    "Now tell me where is Madeline," said he,
+    "O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom
+    Which none but secret sisterhood may see,
+  When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously."
+
+  XIV.
+
+    "St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes' Eve--
+    Yet men will murder upon holy days:
+    Thou must hold water in a witch's sieve,                  120
+    And be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays,
+    To venture so: it fills me with amaze
+    To see thee, Porphyro!--St. Agnes' Eve!
+    God's help! my lady fair the conjuror plays
+    This very night: good angels her deceive!
+  But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve."
+
+  XV.
+
+    Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon,
+    While Porphyro upon her face doth look,
+    Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone
+    Who keepeth clos'd a wond'rous riddle-book,               130
+    As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.
+    But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told
+    His lady's purpose; and he scarce could brook
+    Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold
+  And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
+
+  XVI.
+
+    Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
+    Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
+    Made purple riot: then doth he propose
+    A stratagem, that makes the beldame start:
+    "A cruel man and impious thou art:                        140
+    Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream
+    Alone with her good angels, far apart
+    From wicked men like thee. Go, go!--I deem
+  Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem."
+
+  XVII.
+
+    "I will not harm her, by all saints I swear,"
+    Quoth Porphyro: "O may I ne'er find grace
+    When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer,
+    If one of her soft ringlets I displace,
+    Or look with ruffian passion in her face:
+    Good Angela, believe me by these tears;                   150
+    Or I will, even in a moment's space,
+    Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen's ears,
+  And beard them, though they be more fang'd than wolves and
+      bears."
+
+  XVIII.
+
+    "Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?
+    A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
+    Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll;
+    Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening,
+    Were never miss'd."--Thus plaining, doth she bring
+    A gentler speech from burning Porphyro;
+    So woful, and of such deep sorrowing,                     160
+    That Angela gives promise she will do
+  Whatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe.
+
+  XIX.
+
+    Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy,
+    Even to Madeline's chamber, and there hide
+    Him in a closet, of such privacy
+    That he might see her beauty unespied,
+    And win perhaps that night a peerless bride,
+    While legion'd fairies pac'd the coverlet,
+    And pale enchantment held her sleepy-eyed.
+    Never on such a night have lovers met,                    170
+  Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt.
+
+  XX.
+
+    "It shall be as thou wishest," said the Dame:
+    "All cates and dainties shall be stored there
+    Quickly on this feast-night: by the tambour frame
+    Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare,
+    For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare
+    On such a catering trust my dizzy head.
+    Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer
+    The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed,
+  Or may I never leave my grave among the dead."              180
+
+  XXI.
+
+    So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear.
+    The lover's endless minutes slowly pass'd;
+    The dame return'd, and whisper'd in his ear
+    To follow her; with aged eyes aghast
+    From fright of dim espial. Safe at last,
+    Through many a dusky gallery, they gain
+    The maiden's chamber, silken, hush'd, and chaste;
+    Where Porphyro took covert, pleas'd amain.
+  His poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain.
+
+  XXII.
+
+    Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,                   190
+    Old Angela was feeling for the stair,
+    When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,
+    Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:
+    With silver taper's light, and pious care,
+    She turn'd, and down the aged gossip led
+    To a safe level matting. Now prepare,
+    Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;
+  She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.
+
+  XXIII.
+
+    Out went the taper as she hurried in;
+    Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:              200
+    She clos'd the door, she panted, all akin
+    To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
+    No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
+    But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
+    Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
+    As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
+  Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.
+
+  XXIV.
+
+    A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
+    All garlanded with carven imag'ries
+    Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,        210
+    And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
+    Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
+    As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
+    And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
+    And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
+  A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
+
+  XXV.
+
+    Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
+    And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
+    As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
+    Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,             220
+    And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
+    And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
+    She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
+    Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint:
+  She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
+
+  XXVI.
+
+    Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
+    Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
+    Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
+    Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
+    Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:             230
+    Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
+    Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
+    In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
+  But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
+
+  XXVII.
+
+    Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
+    In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,
+    Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
+    Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
+    Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
+    Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;                240
+    Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
+    Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
+  As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.
+
+  XXVIII.
+
+    Stol'n to this paradise, and so entranced,
+    Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress,
+    And listen'd to her breathing, if it chanced
+    To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
+    Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
+    And breath'd himself: then from the closet crept,
+    Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,                   250
+    And over the hush'd carpet, silent, stept,
+  And 'tween the curtains peep'd, where, lo!--how fast she
+      slept.
+
+  XXIX.
+
+    Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
+    Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
+    A table, and, half anguish'd, threw thereon
+    A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:--
+    O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
+    The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
+    The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarionet,
+    Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:--              260
+  The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
+
+  XXX.
+
+    And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
+    In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd,
+    While he from forth the closet brought a heap
+    Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd
+    With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
+    And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
+    Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
+    From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
+  From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.                   270
+
+  XXXI.
+
+    These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand
+    On golden dishes and in baskets bright
+    Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
+    In the retired quiet of the night,
+    Filling the chilly room with perfume light.--
+    "And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
+    Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
+    Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake,
+  Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache."
+
+  XXXII.
+
+    Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm                   280
+    Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream
+    By the dusk curtains:--'twas a midnight charm
+    Impossible to melt as iced stream:
+    The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam;
+    Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies:
+    It seem'd he never, never could redeem
+    From such a stedfast spell his lady's eyes;
+  So mus'd awhile, entoil'd in woofed phantasies.
+
+  XXXIII.
+
+    Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,--
+    Tumultuous,--and, in chords that tenderest be,            290
+    He play'd an ancient ditty, long since mute,
+    In Provence call'd, "La belle dame sans mercy:"
+    Close to her ear touching the melody;--
+    Wherewith disturb'd, she utter'd a soft moan:
+    He ceased--she panted quick--and suddenly
+    Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:
+  Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.
+
+  XXXIV.
+
+    Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
+    Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
+    There was a painful change, that nigh expell'd            300
+    The blisses of her dream so pure and deep
+    At which fair Madeline began to weep,
+    And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
+    While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;
+    Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
+  Fearing to move or speak, she look'd so dreamingly.
+
+  XXXV.
+
+    "Ah, Porphyro!" said she, "but even now
+    Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
+    Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
+    And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:              310
+    How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
+    Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
+    Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
+    Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
+  For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go."
+
+  XXXVI.
+
+    Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far
+    At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
+    Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star
+    Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose
+    Into her dream he melted, as the rose                     320
+    Blendeth its odour with the violet,--
+    Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
+    Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
+  Against the window-panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.
+
+  XXXVII.
+
+    'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet:
+    "This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"
+    'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:
+    "No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!
+    Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.--
+    Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring?              330
+    I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine
+    Though thou forsakest a deceived thing;--
+  A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing."
+
+  XXXVIII.
+
+    "My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
+    Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
+    Thy beauty's shield, heart-shap'd and vermeil dyed?
+    Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
+    After so many hours of toil and quest,
+    A famish'd pilgrim,--saved by miracle.
+    Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest              340
+    Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well
+  To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel."
+
+  XXXIX.
+
+    "Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land,
+    Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
+    Arise--arise! the morning is at hand;--
+    The bloated wassaillers will never heed:--
+    Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
+    There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,--
+    Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:
+    Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,                   350
+  For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."
+
+  XL.
+
+    She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
+    For there were sleeping dragons all around,
+    At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears--
+    Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.--
+    In all the house was heard no human sound.
+    A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door;
+    The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
+    Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar;
+  And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.            360
+
+  XLI.
+
+    They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
+    Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
+    Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,
+    With a huge empty flaggon by his side:
+    The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
+    But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
+    By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:--
+    The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;--
+  The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
+
+  XLII.
+
+    And they are gone: ay, ages long ago                      370
+    These lovers fled away into the storm.
+    That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
+    And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form
+    Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
+    Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
+    Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;
+    The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
+  For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.
+
+
+
+
+POEMS.
+
+
+
+
+ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.
+
+
+  1.
+
+  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
+    My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
+  Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
+    One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
+  'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
+    But being too happy in thine happiness,--
+      That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
+          In some melodious plot
+    Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
+      Singest of summer in full-throated ease.                 10
+
+  2.
+
+  O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
+    Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
+  Tasting of Flora and the country green,
+    Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
+  O for a beaker full of the warm South,
+    Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
+      With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
+          And purple-stained mouth;
+    That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
+      And with thee fade away into the forest dim:             20
+
+  3.
+
+  Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
+    What thou among the leaves hast never known,
+  The weariness, the fever, and the fret
+    Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
+  Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
+    Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
+      Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
+          And leaden-eyed despairs,
+    Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
+      Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.               30
+
+  4.
+
+  Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
+    Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
+  But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
+    Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
+  Already with thee! tender is the night,
+    And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
+      Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
+          But here there is no light,
+    Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
+      Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.         40
+
+  5.
+
+  I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
+    Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
+  But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
+    Wherewith the seasonable month endows
+  The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
+    White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
+      Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
+          And mid-May's eldest child,
+    The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
+      The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.             50
+
+  6.
+
+  Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
+    I have been half in love with easeful Death,
+  Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
+    To take into the air my quiet breath;
+  Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
+    To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
+      While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
+          In such an ecstasy!
+    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
+      To thy high requiem become a sod.                        60
+
+  7.
+
+  Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
+    No hungry generations tread thee down;
+  The voice I hear this passing night was heard
+    In ancient days by emperor and clown:
+  Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
+    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
+      She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
+          The same that oft-times hath
+    Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
+      Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.                70
+
+  8.
+
+  Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
+    To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
+  Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
+    As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
+  Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
+    Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
+      Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
+          In the next valley-glades:
+    Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
+      Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?                 80
+
+
+
+
+ODE ON A GRECIAN URN.
+
+
+  1.
+
+  Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
+    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
+  Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
+    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
+  What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
+    Of deities or mortals, or of both,
+      In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
+    What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
+  What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
+      What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?              10
+
+  2.
+
+  Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
+    Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
+  Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
+    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
+  Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
+    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
+      Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
+  Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
+    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
+      For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!                20
+
+  3.
+
+  Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
+    Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
+  And, happy melodist, unwearied,
+    For ever piping songs for ever new;
+  More happy love! more happy, happy love!
+    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
+      For ever panting, and for ever young;
+  All breathing human passion far above,
+    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
+      A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.               30
+
+  4.
+
+  Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
+    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
+  Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
+    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
+  What little town by river or sea shore,
+    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
+      Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
+  And, little town, thy streets for evermore
+    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
+      Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.                 40
+
+  5.
+
+  O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
+    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
+  With forest branches and the trodden weed;
+    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
+  As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
+    When old age shall this generation waste,
+      Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
+  Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
+    "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
+      Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.               50
+
+
+
+
+ODE TO PSYCHE.
+
+
+  O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
+    By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
+  And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
+    Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
+  Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
+    The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?
+  I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,
+    And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
+  Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
+    In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof              10
+    Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
+          A brooklet, scarce espied:
+  'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
+    Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
+  They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
+    Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
+    Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
+  As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
+  And ready still past kisses to outnumber
+    At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:                       20
+        The winged boy I knew;
+    But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
+        His Psyche true!
+
+  O latest born and loveliest vision far
+    Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!
+  Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,
+    Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
+  Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
+      Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
+  Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan                      30
+      Upon the midnight hours;
+  No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
+    From chain-swung censer teeming;
+  No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
+    Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
+
+  O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
+    Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
+  When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
+    Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
+  Yet even in these days so far retir'd                        40
+    From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
+    Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
+  I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
+  So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
+      Upon the midnight hours;
+  Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
+    From swinged censer teeming;
+  Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
+    Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
+
+  Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane                  50
+    In some untrodden region of my mind,
+  Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
+    Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
+  Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
+    Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
+  And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
+    The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
+  And in the midst of this wide quietness
+  A rosy sanctuary will I dress
+  With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,                60
+    With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
+  With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
+    Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
+  And there shall be for thee all soft delight
+    That shadowy thought can win,
+  A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
+    To let the warm Love in!
+
+
+
+
+FANCY.
+
+
+  Ever let the Fancy roam,
+  Pleasure never is at home:
+  At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
+  Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
+  Then let winged Fancy wander
+  Through the thought still spread beyond her:
+  Open wide the mind's cage-door,
+  She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
+  O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
+  Summer's joys are spoilt by use,                             10
+  And the enjoying of the Spring
+  Fades as does its blossoming;
+  Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too,
+  Blushing through the mist and dew,
+  Cloys with tasting: What do then?
+  Sit thee by the ingle, when
+  The sear faggot blazes bright,
+  Spirit of a winter's night;
+  When the soundless earth is muffled,
+  And the caked snow is shuffled                               20
+  From the ploughboy's heavy shoon;
+  When the Night doth meet the Noon
+  In a dark conspiracy
+  To banish Even from her sky.
+  Sit thee there, and send abroad,
+  With a mind self-overaw'd,
+  Fancy, high-commission'd:--send her!
+  She has vassals to attend her:
+  She will bring, in spite of frost,
+  Beauties that the earth hath lost;                           30
+  She will bring thee, all together,
+  All delights of summer weather;
+  All the buds and bells of May,
+  From dewy sward or thorny spray
+  All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
+  With a still, mysterious stealth:
+  She will mix these pleasures up
+  Like three fit wines in a cup,
+  And thou shalt quaff it:--thou shalt hear
+  Distant harvest-carols clear;                                40
+  Rustle of the reaped corn;
+  Sweet birds antheming the morn:
+  And, in the same moment--hark!
+  'Tis the early April lark,
+  Or the rooks, with busy caw,
+  Foraging for sticks and straw.
+  Thou shalt, at one glance, behold
+  The daisy and the marigold;
+  White-plum'd lilies, and the first
+  Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst;                        50
+  Shaded hyacinth, alway
+  Sapphire queen of the mid-May;
+  And every leaf, and every flower
+  Pearled with the self-same shower.
+  Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep
+  Meagre from its celled sleep;
+  And the snake all winter-thin
+  Cast on sunny bank its skin;
+  Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see
+  Hatching in the hawthorn-tree,                               60
+  When the hen-bird's wing doth rest
+  Quiet on her mossy nest;
+  Then the hurry and alarm
+  When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
+  Acorns ripe down-pattering,
+  While the autumn breezes sing.
+
+    Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;
+  Every thing is spoilt by use:
+  Where's the cheek that doth not fade,
+  Too much gaz'd at? Where's the maid                          70
+  Whose lip mature is ever new?
+  Where's the eye, however blue,
+  Doth not weary? Where's the face
+  One would meet in every place?
+  Where's the voice, however soft,
+  One would hear so very oft?
+  At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth
+  Like to bubbles when rain pelteth.
+  Let, then, winged Fancy find
+  Thee a mistress to thy mind:                                 80
+  Dulcet-eyed as Ceres' daughter,
+  Ere the God of Torment taught her
+  How to frown and how to chide;
+  With a waist and with a side
+  White as Hebe's, when her zone
+  Slipt its golden clasp, and down
+  Fell her kirtle to her feet,
+  While she held the goblet sweet,
+  And Jove grew languid.--Break the mesh
+  Of the Fancy's silken leash;                                 90
+  Quickly break her prison-string
+  And such joys as these she'll bring.--
+  Let the winged Fancy roam
+  Pleasure never is at home.
+
+
+
+
+ODE.
+
+
+  Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
+  Ye have left your souls on earth!
+  Have ye souls in heaven too,
+  Double-lived in regions new?
+  Yes, and those of heaven commune
+  With the spheres of sun and moon;
+  With the noise of fountains wond'rous,
+  And the parle of voices thund'rous;
+  With the whisper of heaven's trees
+  And one another, in soft ease                                10
+  Seated on Elysian lawns
+  Brows'd by none but Dian's fawns
+  Underneath large blue-bells tented,
+  Where the daisies are rose-scented,
+  And the rose herself has got
+  Perfume which on earth is not;
+  Where the nightingale doth sing
+  Not a senseless, tranced thing,
+  But divine melodious truth;
+  Philosophic numbers smooth;                                  20
+  Tales and golden histories
+  Of heaven and its mysteries.
+
+    Thus ye live on high, and then
+  On the earth ye live again;
+  And the souls ye left behind you
+  Teach us, here, the way to find you,
+  Where your other souls are joying,
+  Never slumber'd, never cloying.
+  Here, your earth-born souls still speak
+  To mortals, of their little week;                            30
+  Of their sorrows and delights;
+  Of their passions and their spites;
+  Of their glory and their shame;
+  What doth strengthen and what maim.
+  Thus ye teach us, every day,
+  Wisdom, though fled far away.
+
+    Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
+  Ye have left your souls on earth!
+  Ye have souls in heaven too,
+  Double-lived in regions new!                                 40
+
+
+
+
+LINES
+ON
+THE MERMAID TAVERN.
+
+
+  Souls of Poets dead and gone,
+  What Elysium have ye known,
+  Happy field or mossy cavern,
+  Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
+  Have ye tippled drink more fine
+  Than mine host's Canary wine?
+  Or are fruits of Paradise
+  Sweeter than those dainty pies
+  Of venison? O generous food!
+  Drest as though bold Robin Hood                              10
+  Would, with his maid Marian,
+  Sup and bowse from horn and can.
+
+    I have heard that on a day
+  Mine host's sign-board flew away,
+  Nobody knew whither, till
+  An astrologer's old quill
+  To a sheepskin gave the story,
+  Said he saw you in your glory,
+  Underneath a new old-sign
+  Sipping beverage divine,                                     20
+  And pledging with contented smack
+  The Mermaid in the Zodiac.
+
+    Souls of Poets dead and gone,
+  What Elysium have ye known,
+  Happy field or mossy cavern,
+  Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
+
+
+
+
+ROBIN HOOD.
+
+TO A FRIEND.
+
+
+  No! those days are gone away,
+  And their hours are old and gray,
+  And their minutes buried all
+  Under the down-trodden pall
+  Of the leaves of many years:
+  Many times have winter's shears,
+  Frozen North, and chilling East,
+  Sounded tempests to the feast
+  Of the forest's whispering fleeces,
+  Since men knew nor rent nor leases.                          10
+
+    No, the bugle sounds no more,
+  And the twanging bow no more;
+  Silent is the ivory shrill
+  Past the heath and up the hill;
+  There is no mid-forest laugh,
+  Where lone Echo gives the half
+  To some wight, amaz'd to hear
+  Jesting, deep in forest drear.
+
+    On the fairest time of June
+  You may go, with sun or moon,                                20
+  Or the seven stars to light you,
+  Or the polar ray to right you;
+  But you never may behold
+  Little John, or Robin bold;
+  Never one, of all the clan,
+  Thrumming on an empty can
+  Some old hunting ditty, while
+  He doth his green way beguile
+  To fair hostess Merriment,
+  Down beside the pasture Trent;                               30
+  For he left the merry tale
+  Messenger for spicy ale.
+
+    Gone, the merry morris din;
+  Gone, the song of Gamelyn;
+  Gone, the tough-belted outlaw
+  Idling in the "grene shawe;"
+  All are gone away and past!
+  And if Robin should be cast
+  Sudden from his turfed grave,
+  And if Marian should have                                    40
+  Once again her forest days,
+  She would weep, and he would craze:
+  He would swear, for all his oaks,
+  Fall'n beneath the dockyard strokes,
+  Have rotted on the briny seas;
+  She would weep that her wild bees
+  Sang not to her--strange! that honey
+  Can't be got without hard money!
+
+    So it is: yet let us sing,
+  Honour to the old bow-string!                                50
+  Honour to the bugle-horn!
+  Honour to the woods unshorn!
+  Honour to the Lincoln green!
+  Honour to the archer keen!
+  Honour to tight little John,
+  And the horse he rode upon!
+  Honour to bold Robin Hood,
+  Sleeping in the underwood!
+  Honour to maid Marian,
+  And to all the Sherwood-clan!                                60
+  Though their days have hurried by
+  Let us two a burden try.
+
+
+
+
+TO AUTUMN.
+
+
+  1.
+
+  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-eves 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,               10
+      For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
+
+  2.
+
+  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,
+    Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
+      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
+  And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
+    Steady thy laden head across a brook;                      20
+    Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
+      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
+
+  3.
+
+  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 sallows, borne aloft
+      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
+  And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;            30
+    Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
+    The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
+      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
+
+
+
+
+ODE ON MELANCHOLY.
+
+
+  1.
+
+  No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
+    Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
+  Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
+    By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
+  Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
+    Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
+      Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
+  A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
+    For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
+      And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.               10
+
+  2.
+
+  But when the melancholy fit shall fall
+    Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
+  That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
+    And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
+  Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
+    Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
+      Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
+  Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
+    Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
+      And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.              20
+
+  3.
+
+  She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
+    And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
+  Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
+    Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
+  Ay, in the very temple of Delight
+    Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
+      Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
+  Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
+    His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
+      And be among her cloudy trophies hung.                   30
+
+
+
+
+HYPERION.
+
+A FRAGMENT.
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+  Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
+  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
+  Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
+  Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
+  Still as the silence round about his lair;
+  Forest on forest hung about his head
+  Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
+  Not so much life as on a summer's day
+  Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
+  But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.             10
+  A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
+  By reason of his fallen divinity
+  Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
+  Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.
+
+    Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
+  No further than to where his feet had stray'd,
+  And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
+  His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
+  Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
+  While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth,          20
+  His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.
+
+    It seem'd no force could wake him from his place;
+  But there came one, who with a kindred hand
+  Touch'd his wide shoulders, after bending low
+  With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
+  She was a Goddess of the infant world;
+  By her in stature the tall Amazon
+  Had stood a pigmy's height: she would have ta'en
+  Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
+  Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel.                       30
+  Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,
+  Pedestal'd haply in a palace court,
+  When sages look'd to Egypt for their lore.
+  But oh! how unlike marble was that face:
+  How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
+  Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
+  There was a listening fear in her regard,
+  As if calamity had but begun;
+  As if the vanward clouds of evil days
+  Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear                  40
+  Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
+  One hand she press'd upon that aching spot
+  Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
+  Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain:
+  The other upon Saturn's bended neck
+  She laid, and to the level of his ear
+  Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
+  In solemn tenour and deep organ tone:
+  Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
+  Would come in these like accents; O how frail                50
+  To that large utterance of the early Gods!
+  "Saturn, look up!--though wherefore, poor old King?
+  I have no comfort for thee, no not one:
+  I cannot say, 'O wherefore sleepest thou?'
+  For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
+  Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
+  And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
+  Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air
+  Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
+  Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,                   60
+  Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
+  And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands
+  Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
+  O aching time! O moments big as years!
+  All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
+  And press it so upon our weary griefs
+  That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
+  Saturn, sleep on:--O thoughtless, why did I
+  Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
+  Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?                        70
+  Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep."
+
+    As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
+  Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
+  Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
+  Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
+  Save from one gradual solitary gust
+  Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
+  As if the ebbing air had but one wave;
+  So came these words and went; the while in tears
+  She touch'd her fair large forehead to the ground,           80
+  Just where her falling hair might be outspread
+  A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet.
+  One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
+  Her silver seasons four upon the night,
+  And still these two were postured motionless,
+  Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
+  The frozen God still couchant on the earth,
+  And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet:
+  Until at length old Saturn lifted up
+  His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,                    90
+  And all the gloom and sorrow of the place,
+  And that fair kneeling Goddess; and then spake,
+  As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard
+  Shook horrid with such aspen-malady:
+  "O tender spouse of gold Hyperion,
+  Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face;
+  Look up, and let me see our doom in it;
+  Look up, and tell me if this feeble shape
+  Is Saturn's; tell me, if thou hear'st the voice
+  Of Saturn; tell me, if this wrinkling brow,                 100
+  Naked and bare of its great diadem,
+  Peers like the front of Saturn. Who had power
+  To make me desolate? whence came the strength?
+  How was it nurtur'd to such bursting forth,
+  While Fate seem'd strangled in my nervous grasp?
+  But it is so; and I am smother'd up,
+  And buried from all godlike exercise
+  Of influence benign on planets pale,
+  Of admonitions to the winds and seas,
+  Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting,                    110
+  And all those acts which Deity supreme
+  Doth ease its heart of love in.--I am gone
+  Away from my own bosom: I have left
+  My strong identity, my real self,
+  Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit
+  Here on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search!
+  Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round
+  Upon all space: space starr'd, and lorn of light;
+  Space region'd with life-air; and barren void;
+  Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell.--                 120
+  Search, Thea, search! and tell me, if thou seest
+  A certain shape or shadow, making way
+  With wings or chariot fierce to repossess
+  A heaven he lost erewhile: it must--it must
+  Be of ripe progress--Saturn must be King.
+  Yes, there must be a golden victory;
+  There must be Gods thrown down, and trumpets blown
+  Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
+  Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
+  Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir                    130
+  Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be
+  Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
+  Of the sky-children; I will give command:
+  Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?"
+
+    This passion lifted him upon his feet,
+  And made his hands to struggle in the air,
+  His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat,
+  His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease.
+  He stood, and heard not Thea's sobbing deep;
+  A little time, and then again he snatch'd                   140
+  Utterance thus.--"But cannot I create?
+  Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
+  Another world, another universe,
+  To overbear and crumble this to nought?
+  Where is another chaos? Where?"--That word
+  Found way unto Olympus, and made quake
+  The rebel three.--Thea was startled up,
+  And in her bearing was a sort of hope,
+  As thus she quick-voic'd spake, yet full of awe.
+
+    "This cheers our fallen house: come to our friends,       150
+  O Saturn! come away, and give them heart;
+  I know the covert, for thence came I hither."
+  Thus brief; then with beseeching eyes she went
+  With backward footing through the shade a space:
+  He follow'd, and she turn'd to lead the way
+  Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist
+  Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest.
+
+    Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed,
+  More sorrow like to this, and such like woe,
+  Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe:                160
+  The Titans fierce, self-hid, or prison-bound,
+  Groan'd for the old allegiance once more,
+  And listen'd in sharp pain for Saturn's voice.
+  But one of the whole mammoth-brood still kept
+  His sov'reignty, and rule, and majesty;--
+  Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire
+  Still sat, still snuff'd the incense, teeming up
+  From man to the sun's God; yet unsecure:
+  For as among us mortals omens drear
+  Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he--                  170
+  Not at dog's howl, or gloom-bird's hated screech,
+  Or the familiar visiting of one
+  Upon the first toll of his passing-bell,
+  Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp;
+  But horrors, portion'd to a giant nerve,
+  Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace bright
+  Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold,
+  And touch'd with shade of bronzed obelisks,
+  Glar'd a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
+  Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;                     180
+  And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
+  Flush'd angerly: while sometimes eagle's wings,
+  Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
+  Darken'd the place; and neighing steeds were heard,
+  Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.
+  Also, when he would taste the spicy wreaths
+  Of incense, breath'd aloft from sacred hills,
+  Instead of sweets, his ample palate took
+  Savour of poisonous brass and metal sick:
+  And so, when harbour'd in the sleepy west,                  190
+  After the full completion of fair day,--
+  For rest divine upon exalted couch
+  And slumber in the arms of melody,
+  He pac'd away the pleasant hours of ease
+  With stride colossal, on from hall to hall;
+  While far within each aisle and deep recess,
+  His winged minions in close clusters stood,
+  Amaz'd and full of fear; like anxious men
+  Who on wide plains gather in panting troops,
+  When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers.          200
+  Even now, while Saturn, rous'd from icy trance,
+  Went step for step with Thea through the woods,
+  Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear,
+  Came slope upon the threshold of the west;
+  Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope
+  In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes,
+  Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet
+  And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies;
+  And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape,
+  In fragrance soft, and coolness to the eye,                 210
+  That inlet to severe magnificence
+  Stood full blown, for the God to enter in.
+
+    He enter'd, but he enter'd full of wrath;
+  His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels,
+  And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
+  That scar'd away the meek ethereal Hours
+  And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared,
+  From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,
+  Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,
+  And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades,                    220
+  Until he reach'd the great main cupola;
+  There standing fierce beneath, he stampt his foot,
+  And from the basements deep to the high towers
+  Jarr'd his own golden region; and before
+  The quavering thunder thereupon had ceas'd,
+  His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb,
+  To this result: "O dreams of day and night!
+  O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
+  O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
+  O lank-eared Phantoms of black-weeded pools!                230
+  Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
+  Is my eternal essence thus distraught
+  To see and to behold these horrors new?
+  Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
+  Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
+  This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
+  This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
+  These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
+  Of all my lucent empire? It is left
+  Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.                      240
+  The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry,
+  I cannot see--but darkness, death and darkness.
+  Even here, into my centre of repose,
+  The shady visions come to domineer,
+  Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp.--
+  Fall!--No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
+  Over the fiery frontier of my realms
+  I will advance a terrible right arm
+  Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
+  And bid old Saturn take his throne again."--                250
+  He spake, and ceas'd, the while a heavier threat
+  Held struggle with his throat but came not forth;
+  For as in theatres of crowded men
+  Hubbub increases more they call out "Hush!"
+  So at Hyperion's words the Phantoms pale
+  Bestirr'd themselves, thrice horrible and cold;
+  And from the mirror'd level where he stood
+  A mist arose, as from a scummy marsh.
+  At this, through all his bulk an agony
+  Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown,                260
+  Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular
+  Making slow way, with head and neck convuls'd
+  From over-strained might. Releas'd, he fled
+  To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours
+  Before the dawn in season due should blush,
+  He breath'd fierce breath against the sleepy portals,
+  Clear'd them of heavy vapours, burst them wide
+  Suddenly on the ocean's chilly streams.
+  The planet orb of fire, whereon he rode
+  Each day from east to west the heavens through,             270
+  Spun round in sable curtaining of clouds;
+  Not therefore veiled quite, blindfold, and hid,
+  But ever and anon the glancing spheres,
+  Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure,
+  Glow'd through, and wrought upon the muffling dark
+  Sweet-shaped lightnings from the nadir deep
+  Up to the zenith,--hieroglyphics old,
+  Which sages and keen-eyed astrologers
+  Then living on the earth, with labouring thought
+  Won from the gaze of many centuries:                        280
+  Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge
+  Of stone, or marble swart; their import gone,
+  Their wisdom long since fled.--Two wings this orb
+  Possess'd for glory, two fair argent wings,
+  Ever exalted at the God's approach:
+  And now, from forth the gloom their plumes immense
+  Rose, one by one, till all outspreaded were;
+  While still the dazzling globe maintain'd eclipse,
+  Awaiting for Hyperion's command.
+  Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne              290
+  And bid the day begin, if but for change.
+  He might not:--No, though a primeval God:
+  The sacred seasons might not be disturb'd.
+  Therefore the operations of the dawn
+  Stay'd in their birth, even as here 'tis told.
+  Those silver wings expanded sisterly,
+  Eager to sail their orb; the porches wide
+  Open'd upon the dusk demesnes of night
+  And the bright Titan, phrenzied with new woes,
+  Unus'd to bend, by hard compulsion bent                     300
+  His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
+  And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
+  Upon the boundaries of day and night,
+  He stretch'd himself in grief and radiance faint.
+  There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars
+  Look'd down on him with pity, and the voice
+  Of Coelus, from the universal space,
+  Thus whisper'd low and solemn in his ear.
+  "O brightest of my children dear, earth-born
+  And sky-engendered, Son of Mysteries                        310
+  All unrevealed even to the powers
+  Which met at thy creating; at whose joys
+  And palpitations sweet, and pleasures soft,
+  I, Coelus, wonder, how they came and whence;
+  And at the fruits thereof what shapes they be,
+  Distinct, and visible; symbols divine,
+  Manifestations of that beauteous life
+  Diffus'd unseen throughout eternal space:
+  Of these new-form'd art thou, oh brightest child!
+  Of these, thy brethren and the Goddesses!                   320
+  There is sad feud among ye, and rebellion
+  Of son against his sire. I saw him fall,
+  I saw my first-born tumbled from his throne!
+  To me his arms were spread, to me his voice
+  Found way from forth the thunders round his head!
+  Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face.
+  Art thou, too, near such doom? vague fear there is:
+  For I have seen my sons most unlike Gods.
+  Divine ye were created, and divine
+  In sad demeanour, solemn, undisturb'd,                      330
+  Unruffled, like high Gods, ye liv'd and ruled:
+  Now I behold in you fear, hope, and wrath;
+  Actions of rage and passion; even as
+  I see them, on the mortal world beneath,
+  In men who die.--This is the grief, O Son!
+  Sad sign of ruin, sudden dismay, and fall!
+  Yet do thou strive; as thou art capable,
+  As thou canst move about, an evident God;
+  And canst oppose to each malignant hour
+  Ethereal presence:--I am but a voice;                       340
+  My life is but the life of winds and tides,
+  No more than winds and tides can I avail:--
+  But thou canst.--Be thou therefore in the van
+  Of circumstance; yea, seize the arrow's barb
+  Before the tense string murmur.--To the earth!
+  For there thou wilt find Saturn, and his woes.
+  Meantime I will keep watch on thy bright sun,
+  And of thy seasons be a careful nurse."--
+  Ere half this region-whisper had come down,
+  Hyperion arose, and on the stars                            350
+  Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide
+  Until it ceas'd; and still he kept them wide:
+  And still they were the same bright, patient stars.
+  Then with a slow incline of his broad breast,
+  Like to a diver in the pearly seas,
+  Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore,
+  And plung'd all noiseless into the deep night.
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+  Just at the self-same beat of Time's wide wings
+  Hyperion slid into the rustled air,
+  And Saturn gain'd with Thea that sad place
+  Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn'd.
+  It was a den where no insulting light
+  Could glimmer on their tears; where their own groans
+  They felt, but heard not, for the solid roar
+  Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,
+  Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where.
+  Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem'd            10
+  Ever as if just rising from a sleep,
+  Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns;
+  And thus in thousand hugest phantasies
+  Made a fit roofing to this nest of woe.
+  Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon,
+  Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge
+  Stubborn'd with iron. All were not assembled:
+  Some chain'd in torture, and some wandering.
+  Coeus, and Gyges, and Briareues,
+  Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion,                           20
+  With many more, the brawniest in assault,
+  Were pent in regions of laborious breath;
+  Dungeon'd in opaque element, to keep
+  Their clenched teeth still clench'd, and all their limbs
+  Lock'd up like veins of metal, crampt and screw'd;
+  Without a motion, save of their big hearts
+  Heaving in pain, and horribly convuls'd
+  With sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse.
+  Mnemosyne was straying in the world;
+  Far from her moon had Phoebe wandered;                       30
+  And many else were free to roam abroad,
+  But for the main, here found they covert drear.
+  Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
+  Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque
+  Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor,
+  When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,
+  In dull November, and their chancel vault,
+  The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.
+  Each one kept shroud, nor to his neighbour gave
+  Or word, or look, or action of despair.                      40
+  Creues was one; his ponderous iron mace
+  Lay by him, and a shatter'd rib of rock
+  Told of his rage, ere he thus sank and pined.
+  Iaepetus another; in his grasp,
+  A serpent's plashy neck; its barbed tongue
+  Squeez'd from the gorge, and all its uncurl'd length
+  Dead; and because the creature could not spit
+  Its poison in the eyes of conquering Jove.
+  Next Cottus: prone he lay, chin uppermost,
+  As though in pain; for still upon the flint                  50
+  He ground severe his skull, with open mouth
+  And eyes at horrid working. Nearest him
+  Asia, born of most enormous Caf,
+  Who cost her mother Tellus keener pangs,
+  Though feminine, than any of her sons:
+  More thought than woe was in her dusky face,
+  For she was prophesying of her glory;
+  And in her wide imagination stood
+  Palm-shaded temples, and high rival fanes,
+  By Oxus or in Ganges' sacred isles.                          60
+  Even as Hope upon her anchor leans,
+  So leant she, not so fair, upon a tusk
+  Shed from the broadest of her elephants.
+  Above her, on a crag's uneasy shelve,
+  Upon his elbow rais'd, all prostrate else,
+  Shadow'd Enceladus; once tame and mild
+  As grazing ox unworried in the meads;
+  Now tiger-passion'd, lion-thoughted, wroth,
+  He meditated, plotted, and even now
+  Was hurling mountains in that second war,                    70
+  Not long delay'd, that scar'd the younger Gods
+  To hide themselves in forms of beast and bird.
+  Not far hence Atlas; and beside him prone
+  Phorcus, the sire of Gorgons. Neighbour'd close
+  Oceanus, and Tethys, in whose lap
+  Sobb'd Clymene among her tangled hair.
+  In midst of all lay Themis, at the feet
+  Of Ops the queen all clouded round from sight;
+  No shape distinguishable, more than when
+  Thick night confounds the pine-tops with the clouds:         80
+  And many else whose names may not be told.
+  For when the Muse's wings are air-ward spread,
+  Who shall delay her flight? And she must chaunt
+  Of Saturn, and his guide, who now had climb'd
+  With damp and slippery footing from a depth
+  More horrid still. Above a sombre cliff
+  Their heads appear'd, and up their stature grew
+  Till on the level height their steps found ease:
+  Then Thea spread abroad her trembling arms
+  Upon the precincts of this nest of pain,                     90
+  And sidelong fix'd her eye on Saturn's face:
+  There saw she direst strife; the supreme God
+  At war with all the frailty of grief,
+  Of rage, of fear, anxiety, revenge,
+  Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair.
+  Against these plagues he strove in vain; for Fate
+  Had pour'd a mortal oil upon his head,
+  A disanointing poison: so that Thea,
+  Affrighted, kept her still, and let him pass
+  First onwards in, among the fallen tribe.                   100
+
+    As with us mortal men, the laden heart
+  Is persecuted more, and fever'd more,
+  When it is nighing to the mournful house
+  Where other hearts are sick of the same bruise;
+  So Saturn, as he walk'd into the midst,
+  Felt faint, and would have sunk among the rest,
+  But that he met Enceladus's eye,
+  Whose mightiness, and awe of him, at once
+  Came like an inspiration; and he shouted,
+  "Titans, behold your God!" at which some groan'd;           110
+  Some started on their feet; some also shouted;
+  Some wept, some wail'd, all bow'd with reverence;
+  And Ops, uplifting her black folded veil,
+  Show'd her pale cheeks, and all her forehead wan,
+  Her eye-brows thin and jet, and hollow eyes.
+  There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
+  When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
+  Among immortals when a God gives sign,
+  With hushing finger, how he means to load
+  His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,       120
+  With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:
+  Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines;
+  Which, when it ceases in this mountain'd world,
+  No other sound succeeds; but ceasing here,
+  Among these fallen, Saturn's voice therefrom
+  Grew up like organ, that begins anew
+  Its strain, when other harmonies, stopt short,
+  Leave the dinn'd air vibrating silverly.
+  Thus grew it up--"Not in my own sad breast,
+  Which is its own great judge and searcher out,              130
+  Can I find reason why ye should be thus:
+  Not in the legends of the first of days,
+  Studied from that old spirit-leaved book
+  Which starry Uranus with finger bright
+  Sav'd from the shores of darkness, when the waves
+  Low-ebb'd still hid it up in shallow gloom;--
+  And the which book ye know I ever kept
+  For my firm-based footstool:--Ah, infirm!
+  Not there, nor in sign, symbol, or portent
+  Of element, earth, water, air, and fire,--                  140
+  At war, at peace, or inter-quarreling
+  One against one, or two, or three, or all
+  Each several one against the other three,
+  As fire with air loud warring when rain-floods
+  Drown both, and press them both against earth's face,
+  Where, finding sulphur, a quadruple wrath
+  Unhinges the poor world;--not in that strife,
+  Wherefrom I take strange lore, and read it deep,
+  Can I find reason why ye should be thus:
+  No, no-where can unriddle, though I search,                 150
+  And pore on Nature's universal scroll
+  Even to swooning, why ye, Divinities,
+  The first-born of all shap'd and palpable Gods,
+  Should cower beneath what, in comparison,
+  Is untremendous might. Yet ye are here,
+  O'erwhelm'd, and spurn'd, and batter'd, ye are here!
+  O Titans, shall I say 'Arise!'--Ye groan:
+  Shall I say 'Crouch!'--Ye groan. What can I then?
+  O Heaven wide! O unseen parent dear!
+  What can I? Tell me, all ye brethren Gods,                  160
+  How we can war, how engine our great wrath!
+  O speak your counsel now, for Saturn's ear
+  Is all a-hunger'd. Thou, Oceanus,
+  Ponderest high and deep; and in thy face
+  I see, astonied, that severe content
+  Which comes of thought and musing: give us help!"
+
+    So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,
+  Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,
+  But cogitation in his watery shades,
+  Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,                      170
+  In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue
+  Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.
+  "O ye, whom wrath consumes! who, passion-stung,
+  Writhe at defeat, and nurse your agonies!
+  Shut up your senses, stifle up your ears,
+  My voice is not a bellows unto ire.
+  Yet listen, ye who will, whilst I bring proof
+  How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop:
+  And in the proof much comfort will I give,
+  If ye will take that comfort in its truth.                  180
+  We fall by course of Nature's law, not force
+  Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, thou
+  Hast sifted well the atom-universe;
+  But for this reason, that thou art the King,
+  And only blind from sheer supremacy,
+  One avenue was shaded from thine eyes,
+  Through which I wandered to eternal truth.
+  And first, as thou wast not the first of powers,
+  So art thou not the last; it cannot be:
+  Thou art not the beginning nor the end.                     190
+  From chaos and parental darkness came
+  Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil,
+  That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends
+  Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came,
+  And with it light, and light, engendering
+  Upon its own producer, forthwith touch'd
+  The whole enormous matter into life.
+  Upon that very hour, our parentage,
+  The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest:
+  Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race,                200
+  Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms.
+  Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain;
+  O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
+  And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
+  That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!
+  As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far
+  Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
+  And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
+  In form and shape compact and beautiful,
+  In will, in action free, companionship,                     210
+  And thousand other signs of purer life;
+  So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
+  A power more strong in beauty, born of us
+  And fated to excel us, as we pass
+  In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
+  Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule
+  Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil
+  Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed,
+  And feedeth still, more comely than itself?
+  Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?                   220
+  Or shall the tree be envious of the dove
+  Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings
+  To wander wherewithal and find its joys?
+  We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs
+  Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves,
+  But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower
+  Above us in their beauty, and must reign
+  In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law
+  That first in beauty should be first in might:
+  Yea, by that law, another race may drive                    230
+  Our conquerors to mourn as we do now.
+  Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas,
+  My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face?
+  Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd along
+  By noble winged creatures he hath made?
+  I saw him on the calmed waters scud,
+  With such a glow of beauty in his eyes,
+  That it enforc'd me to bid sad farewell
+  To all my empire: farewell sad I took,
+  And hither came, to see how dolorous fate                   240
+  Had wrought upon ye; and how I might best
+  Give consolation in this woe extreme.
+  Receive the truth, and let it be your balm."
+
+    Whether through poz'd conviction, or disdain,
+  They guarded silence, when Oceanus
+  Left murmuring, what deepest thought can tell?
+  But so it was, none answer'd for a space,
+  Save one whom none regarded, Clymene;
+  And yet she answer'd not, only complain'd,
+  With hectic lips, and eyes up-looking mild,                 250
+  Thus wording timidly among the fierce:
+  "O Father, I am here the simplest voice,
+  And all my knowledge is that joy is gone,
+  And this thing woe crept in among our hearts,
+  There to remain for ever, as I fear:
+  I would not bode of evil, if I thought
+  So weak a creature could turn off the help
+  Which by just right should come of mighty Gods;
+  Yet let me tell my sorrow, let me tell
+  Of what I heard, and how it made me weep,                   260
+  And know that we had parted from all hope.
+  I stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore,
+  Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land
+  Of fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers.
+  Full of calm joy it was, as I of grief;
+  Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth;
+  So that I felt a movement in my heart
+  To chide, and to reproach that solitude
+  With songs of misery, music of our woes;
+  And sat me down, and took a mouthed shell                   270
+  And murmur'd into it, and made melody--
+  O melody no more! for while I sang,
+  And with poor skill let pass into the breeze
+  The dull shell's echo, from a bowery strand
+  Just opposite, an island of the sea,
+  There came enchantment with the shifting wind,
+  That did both drown and keep alive my ears.
+  I threw my shell away upon the sand,
+  And a wave fill'd it, as my sense was fill'd
+  With that new blissful golden melody.                       280
+  A living death was in each gush of sounds,
+  Each family of rapturous hurried notes,
+  That fell, one after one, yet all at once,
+  Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string:
+  And then another, then another strain,
+  Each like a dove leaving its olive perch,
+  With music wing'd instead of silent plumes,
+  To hover round my head, and make me sick
+  Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame,
+  And I was stopping up my frantic ears,                      290
+  When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands,
+  A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune,
+  And still it cried, 'Apollo! young Apollo!
+  The morning-bright Apollo! young Apollo!'
+  I fled, it follow'd me, and cried 'Apollo!'
+  O Father, and O Brethren, had ye felt
+  Those pains of mine; O Saturn, hadst thou felt,
+  Ye would not call this too indulged tongue
+  Presumptuous, in thus venturing to be heard."
+
+    So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook           300
+  That, lingering along a pebbled coast,
+  Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,
+  And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice
+  Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath:
+  The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
+  In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,
+  Came booming thus, while still upon his arm
+  He lean'd; not rising, from supreme contempt.
+  "Or shall we listen to the over-wise,
+  Or to the over-foolish, Giant-Gods?                         310
+  Not thunderbolt on thunderbolt, till all
+  That rebel Jove's whole armoury were spent,
+  Not world on world upon these shoulders piled,
+  Could agonize me more than baby-words
+  In midst of this dethronement horrible.
+  Speak! roar! shout! yell! ye sleepy Titans all.
+  Do ye forget the blows, the buffets vile?
+  Are ye not smitten by a youngling arm?
+  Dost thou forget, sham Monarch of the Waves,
+  Thy scalding in the seas? What, have I rous'd               320
+  Your spleens with so few simple words as these?
+  O joy! for now I see ye are not lost:
+  O joy! for now I see a thousand eyes
+  Wide glaring for revenge!"--As this he said,
+  He lifted up his stature vast, and stood,
+  Still without intermission speaking thus:
+  "Now ye are flames, I'll tell you how to burn,
+  And purge the ether of our enemies;
+  How to feed fierce the crooked stings of fire,
+  And singe away the swollen clouds of Jove,                  330
+  Stifling that puny essence in its tent.
+  O let him feel the evil he hath done;
+  For though I scorn Oceanus's lore,
+  Much pain have I for more than loss of realms:
+  The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled;
+  Those days, all innocent of scathing war,
+  When all the fair Existences of heaven
+  Came open-eyed to guess what we would speak:--
+  That was before our brows were taught to frown,
+  Before our lips knew else but solemn sounds;                340
+  That was before we knew the winged thing,
+  Victory, might be lost, or might be won.
+  And be ye mindful that Hyperion,
+  Our brightest brother, still is undisgraced--
+  Hyperion, lo! his radiance is here!"
+
+    All eyes were on Enceladus's face,
+  And they beheld, while still Hyperion's name
+  Flew from his lips up to the vaulted rocks,
+  A pallid gleam across his features stern:
+  Not savage, for he saw full many a God                      350
+  Wroth as himself. He look'd upon them all,
+  And in each face he saw a gleam of light,
+  But splendider in Saturn's, whose hoar locks
+  Shone like the bubbling foam about a keel
+  When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove.
+  In pale and silver silence they remain'd,
+  Till suddenly a splendour, like the morn,
+  Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps,
+  All the sad spaces of oblivion,
+  And every gulf, and every chasm old,                        360
+  And every height, and every sullen depth,
+  Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams:
+  And all the everlasting cataracts,
+  And all the headlong torrents far and near,
+  Mantled before in darkness and huge shade,
+  Now saw the light and made it terrible.
+  It was Hyperion:--a granite peak
+  His bright feet touch'd, and there he stay'd to view
+  The misery his brilliance had betray'd
+  To the most hateful seeing of itself.                       370
+  Golden his hair of short Numidian curl,
+  Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade
+  In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk
+  Of Memnon's image at the set of sun
+  To one who travels from the dusking East:
+  Sighs, too, as mournful as that Memnon's harp
+  He utter'd, while his hands contemplative
+  He press'd together, and in silence stood.
+  Despondence seiz'd again the fallen Gods
+  At sight of the dejected King of Day,                       380
+  And many hid their faces from the light:
+  But fierce Enceladus sent forth his eyes
+  Among the brotherhood; and, at their glare,
+  Uprose Iaepetus, and Creues too,
+  And Phorcus, sea-born, and together strode
+  To where he towered on his eminence.
+  There those four shouted forth old Saturn's name;
+  Hyperion from the peak loud answered, "Saturn!"
+  Saturn sat near the Mother of the Gods,
+  In whose face was no joy, though all the Gods               390
+  Gave from their hollow throats the name of "Saturn!"
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+  Thus in alternate uproar and sad peace,
+  Amazed were those Titans utterly.
+  O leave them, Muse! O leave them to their woes;
+  For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire:
+  A solitary sorrow best befits
+  Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief.
+  Leave them, O Muse! for thou anon wilt find
+  Many a fallen old Divinity
+  Wandering in vain about bewildered shores.
+  Meantime touch piously the Delphic harp,                     10
+  And not a wind of heaven but will breathe
+  In aid soft warble from the Dorian flute;
+  For lo! 'tis for the Father of all verse.
+  Flush every thing that hath a vermeil hue,
+  Let the rose glow intense and warm the air,
+  And let the clouds of even and of morn
+  Float in voluptuous fleeces o'er the hills;
+  Let the red wine within the goblet boil,
+  Cold as a bubbling well; let faint-lipp'd shells,
+  On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn                  20
+  Through all their labyrinths; and let the maid
+  Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris'd.
+  Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades,
+  Rejoice, O Delos, with thine olives green,
+  And poplars, and lawn-shading palms, and beech,
+  In which the Zephyr breathes the loudest song,
+  And hazels thick, dark-stemm'd beneath the shade:
+  Apollo is once more the golden theme!
+  Where was he, when the Giant of the Sun
+  Stood bright, amid the sorrow of his peers?                  30
+  Together had he left his mother fair
+  And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower,
+  And in the morning twilight wandered forth
+  Beside the osiers of a rivulet,
+  Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.
+  The nightingale had ceas'd, and a few stars
+  Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush
+  Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle
+  There was no covert, no retired cave
+  Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,                   40
+  Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.
+  He listen'd, and he wept, and his bright tears
+  Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
+  Thus with half-shut suffused eyes he stood,
+  While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by
+  With solemn step an awful Goddess came,
+  And there was purport in her looks for him,
+  Which he with eager guess began to read
+  Perplex'd, the while melodiously he said:
+  "How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?                      50
+  Or hath that antique mien and robed form
+  Mov'd in these vales invisible till now?
+  Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er
+  The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone
+  In cool mid-forest. Surely I have traced
+  The rustle of those ample skirts about
+  These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers
+  Lift up their heads, as still the whisper pass'd.
+  Goddess! I have beheld those eyes before,
+  And their eternal calm, and all that face,                   60
+  Or I have dream'd."--"Yes," said the supreme shape,
+  "Thou hast dream'd of me; and awaking up
+  Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side,
+  Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast
+  Unwearied ear of the whole universe
+  Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth
+  Of such new tuneful wonder. Is't not strange
+  That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth,
+  What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad
+  When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs               70
+  To one who in this lonely isle hath been
+  The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life,
+  From the young day when first thy infant hand
+  Pluck'd witless the weak flowers, till thine arm
+  Could bend that bow heroic to all times.
+  Show thy heart's secret to an ancient Power
+  Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones
+  For prophecies of thee, and for the sake
+  Of loveliness new born."--Apollo then,
+  With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes,                     80
+  Thus answer'd, while his white melodious throat
+  Throbb'd with the syllables.--"Mnemosyne!
+  Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how;
+  Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest?
+  Why should I strive to show what from thy lips
+  Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark,
+  And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes:
+  I strive to search wherefore I am so sad,
+  Until a melancholy numbs my limbs;
+  And then upon the grass I sit, and moan,                     90
+  Like one who once had wings.--O why should I
+  Feel curs'd and thwarted, when the liegeless air
+  Yields to my step aspirant? why should I
+  Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet?
+  Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing:
+  Are there not other regions than this isle?
+  What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun!
+  And the most patient brilliance of the moon!
+  And stars by thousands! Point me out the way
+  To any one particular beauteous star,                       100
+  And I will flit into it with my lyre,
+  And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss.
+  I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power?
+  Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity
+  Makes this alarum in the elements,
+  While I here idle listen on the shores
+  In fearless yet in aching ignorance?
+  O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp,
+  That waileth every morn and eventide,
+  Tell me why thus I rave, about these groves!                110
+  Mute thou remainest--Mute! yet I can read
+  A wondrous lesson in thy silent face:
+  Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
+  Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
+  Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
+  Creations and destroyings, all at once
+  Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
+  And deify me, as if some blithe wine
+  Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
+  And so become immortal."--Thus the God,                     120
+  While his enkindled eyes, with level glance
+  Beneath his white soft temples, stedfast kept
+  Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne.
+  Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush
+  All the immortal fairness of his limbs;
+  Most like the struggle at the gate of death;
+  Or liker still to one who should take leave
+  Of pale immortal death, and with a pang
+  As hot as death's is chill, with fierce convulse
+  Die into life: so young Apollo anguish'd:                   130
+  His very hair, his golden tresses famed
+  Kept undulation round his eager neck.
+  During the pain Mnemosyne upheld
+  Her arms as one who prophesied.--At length
+  Apollo shriek'd;--and lo! from all his limbs
+  Celestial     *      *      *      *      *
+  *      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+THE END.
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+PAGE 184, l. 310. over-foolish, Giant-Gods? _MS._: over-foolish giant,
+Gods? _1820._
+
+
+
+
+NOTES.
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+PAGE 2. See Introduction to _Hyperion_, p. 245.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO LAMIA.
+
+_Lamia_, like _Endymion_, is written in the heroic couplet, but the
+difference in style is very marked. The influence of Dryden's
+narrative-poems (his translations from Boccaccio and Chaucer) is clearly
+traceable in the metre, style, and construction of the later poem. Like
+Dryden, Keats now makes frequent use of the Alexandrine, or 6-foot line,
+and of the triplet. He has also restrained the exuberance of his
+language and gained force, whilst in imaginative power and felicity of
+diction he surpasses anything of which Dryden was capable. The flaws in
+his style are mainly due to carelessness in the rimes and some
+questionable coining of words. He also occasionally lapses into the
+vulgarity and triviality which marred certain of his early poems.
+
+The best he gained from his study of Dryden's _Fables_, a debt perhaps
+to Chaucer rather than to Dryden, was a notable advance in constructive
+power. In _Lamia_ he shows a very much greater sense of proportion and
+power of selection than in his earlier work. There is, as it were, more
+light and shade.
+
+Thus we find that whenever the occasion demands it his style rises to
+supreme force and beauty. The metamorphosis of the serpent, the entry
+of Lamia and Lycius into Corinth, the building by Lamia of the Fairy
+Hall, and her final withering under the eye of Apollonius--these are the
+most important points in the story, and the passages in which they are
+described are also the most striking in the poem.
+
+The allegorical meaning of the story seems to be, that it is fatal to
+attempt to separate the sensuous and emotional life from the life of
+reason. Philosophy alone is cold and destructive, but the pleasures of
+the senses alone are unreal and unsatisfying. The man who attempts such
+a divorce between the two parts of his nature will fail miserably as did
+Lycius, who, unable permanently to exclude reason, was compelled to face
+the death of his illusions, and could not, himself, survive them.
+
+Of the poem Keats himself says, writing to his brother in September,
+1819: 'I have been reading over a part of a short poem I have composed
+lately, called _Lamia_, and I am certain there is that sort of fire in
+it that must take hold of people some way; give them either pleasant or
+unpleasant sensation--what they want is a sensation of some sort.' But
+to the greatest of Keats's critics, Charles Lamb, the poem appealed
+somewhat differently, for he writes, 'More exuberantly rich in imagery
+and painting [than _Isabella_] is the story of _Lamia_. It is of as
+gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of,' and, after enumerating
+the most striking pictures in the poem, he adds, '[these] are all that
+fairy-land can do for us.' _Lamia_ struck his imagination, but his heart
+was given to _Isabella_.
+
+
+NOTES ON LAMIA.
+
+PART I.
+
+PAGE 3. ll. 1-6. _before the faery broods . . . lawns_, i.e. before
+mediaeval fairy-lore had superseded classical mythology.
+
+l. 2. _Satyr_, a horned and goat-legged demi-god of the woods.
+
+l. 5. _Dryads_, wood-nymphs, who lived in trees. The life of each
+terminated with that of the tree over which she presided. Cf. Landor's
+'Hamadryad'.
+
+l. 5. _Fauns._ The Roman name corresponding to the Greek Satyr.
+
+l. 7. _Hermes_, or Mercury, the messenger of the Gods. He is always
+represented with winged shoes, a winged helmet, and a winged staff,
+bound about with living serpents.
+
+PAGE 4. l. 15. _Tritons_, sea-gods, half-man, half-fish. Cf. Wordsworth,
+'Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn' (Sonnet--'The World is too
+much with us').
+
+l. 19. _unknown to any Muse_, beyond the imagination of any poet.
+
+PAGE 5. l. 28. _passion new._ He has often before been to earth on
+similar errands. Cf. _ever-smitten_, l. 7, also ll. 80-93.
+
+l. 42. _dove-footed._ Cf. note on l. 7.
+
+PAGE 6. l. 46. _cirque-couchant_, lying twisted into a circle. Cf.
+_wreathed tomb_, l. 38.
+
+l. 47. _gordian_, knotted, from the famous knot in the harness of
+Gordius, King of Phrygia, which only the conqueror of the world was to
+be able to untie. Alexander cut it with his sword. Cf. _Henry V_, I. i.
+46.
+
+l. 58. _Ariadne's tiar._ Ariadne was a nymph beloved of Bacchus, the god
+of wine. He gave her a crown of seven stars, which, after her death, was
+made into a constellation. Keats has, no doubt, in his mind Titian's
+picture of Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery. Cf. _Ode to
+Sorrow_, _Endymion_.
+
+PAGE 7. l. 63. _As Proserpine . . . air._ Proserpine, gathering flowers
+in the Vale of Enna, in Sicily, was carried off by Pluto, the king of
+the underworld, to be his queen. Cf. _Winter's Tale_, IV. iii, and
+_Paradise Lost_, iv. 268, known to be a favourite passage with Keats.
+
+l. 75. _his throbbing . . . moan._ Cf. _Hyperion_, iii. 81.
+
+l. 77. _as morning breaks_, the freshness and splendour of the youthful
+god.
+
+PAGE 8. l. 78. _Phoebean dart_, a ray of the sun, Phoebus being the god
+of the sun.
+
+l. 80. _Too gentle Hermes._ Cf. l. 28 and note.
+
+l. 81. _not delay'd_: classical construction. See Introduction to
+Hyperion.
+
+_Star of Lethe._ Hermes is so called because he had to lead the souls of
+the dead to Hades, where was Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Lamb
+comments: '. . . Hermes, the _Star of Lethe_, as he is called by one of
+those prodigal phrases which Mr. Keats abounds in, which are each a poem
+in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a
+picture, all the dim regions and their habitants, and the sudden coming
+of a celestial among them.'
+
+l. 91. The line dances along like a leaf before the wind.
+
+l. 92. Miltonic construction and phraseology.
+
+PAGE 9. l. 98. _weary tendrils_, tired with holding up the boughs, heavy
+with fruit.
+
+l. 103. _Silenus_, the nurse and teacher of Bacchus--a demigod of the
+woods.
+
+PAGE 10. l. 115. _Circean._ Circe was the great enchantress who turned
+the followers of Ulysses into swine. Cf. _Comus_, ll. 46-54, and
+_Odyssey_, x.
+
+PAGE 11. l. 132. _swoon'd serpent._ Evidently, in the exercise of her
+magic, power had gone out of her.
+
+l. 133. _lythe_, quick-acting.
+
+_Caducean charm._ Caduceus was the name of Hermes' staff of wondrous
+powers, the touch of which, evidently, was powerful to give the serpent
+human form.
+
+l. 136. _like a moon in wane._ Cf. the picture of Cynthia, _Endymion_,
+iii. 72 sq.
+
+l. 138. _like a flower . . . hour._ Perhaps a reminiscence of Milton's
+'at shut of evening flowers.' _Paradise Lost_, ix. 278.
+
+PAGE 12. l. 148. _besprent_, sprinkled.
+
+l. 158. _brede_, embroidery. Cf. _Ode on a Grecian Urn_, v. 1.
+
+PAGE 13. l. 178. _rack._ Cf. _The Tempest_, IV. i. 156, 'leave not a
+rack behind.' _Hyperion_, i. 302, note.
+
+l. 180. This gives us a feeling of weakness and weariness as well as
+measuring the distance.
+
+PAGE 14. l. 184. Cf. Wordsworth:
+
+     And then my heart with pleasure fills
+     And dances with the daffodils.
+
+ll. 191-200. Cf. _Ode on Melancholy_, where Keats tells us that
+melancholy lives with Beauty, joy, pleasure, and delight. Lamia can
+separate the elements and give beauty and pleasure unalloyed.
+
+l. 195. _Intrigue with the specious chaos_, enter on an understanding
+with the fair-looking confusion of joy and pain.
+
+l. 198. _unshent_, unreproached.
+
+PAGE 15. l. 207. _Nereids_, sea-nymphs.
+
+l. 208. _Thetis_, one of the sea deities.
+
+l. 210. _glutinous_, referring to the sticky substance which oozes from
+the pine-trunk. Cf. _Comus_, l. 917, 'smeared with gums of glutinous
+heat.'
+
+l. 211. Cf. l. 63, note.
+
+l. 212. _Mulciber_, Vulcan, the smith of the Gods. His fall from Heaven
+is described by Milton, _Paradise Lost_, i. 739-42.
+
+_piazzian_, forming covered walks supported by pillars, a word coined by
+Keats.
+
+PAGE 16. l. 236. _In the calm'd . . . shades._ In consideration of
+Plato's mystic and imaginative philosophy.
+
+PAGE 17. l. 248. Refers to the story of Orpheus' attempt to rescue his
+wife Eurydice from Hades. With his exquisite music he charmed Cerberus,
+the fierce dog who guarded hell-gates, into submission, and won Pluto's
+consent that he should lead Eurydice back to the upper world on one
+condition--that he would not look back to see that she was following.
+When he was almost at the gates, love and curiosity overpowered him, and
+he looked back--to see Eurydice fall back into Hades whence he now might
+never win her.
+
+PAGE 18. l. 262. _thy far wishes_, your wishes when you are far off.
+
+l. 265. _Pleiad._ The Pleiades are seven stars making a constellation.
+Cf. Walt Whitman, 'On the beach at night.'
+
+ll. 266-7. _keep in tune Thy spheres._ Refers to the music which the
+heavenly bodies were supposed to make as they moved round the earth. Cf.
+_Merchant of Venice_, V. i. 60.
+
+PAGE 20. l. 294. _new lips._ Cf. l. 191.
+
+l. 297. _Into another_, i.e. into the trance of passion from which he
+only wakes to die.
+
+PAGE 21. l. 320. _Adonian feast._ Adonis was a beautiful youth beloved
+of Venus. He was killed by a wild boar when hunting, and Venus then had
+him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers. Cf.
+_Endymion_, ii. 387.
+
+PAGE 22. l. 329. _Peris_, in Persian story fairies, descended from the
+fallen angels.
+
+ll. 330-2. The vulgarity of these lines we may attribute partly to the
+influence of Leigh Hunt, who himself wrote of
+
+  The two divinest things the world has got--
+  A lovely woman and a rural spot.
+
+It was an influence which Keats, with the development of his own
+character and genius, was rapidly outgrowing.
+
+l. 333. _Pyrrha's pebbles._ There is a legend that, after the flood,
+Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones behind them which became men, thus
+re-peopling the world.
+
+PAGE 23. ll. 350-4. Keats brings the very atmosphere of a dream about us
+in these lines, and makes us hear the murmur of the city as something
+remote from the chief actors.
+
+l. 352. _lewd_, ignorant. The original meaning of the word which came
+later to mean dissolute.
+
+PAGE 24. l. 360. _corniced shade._ Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, ix,
+'Buttress'd from moonlight.'
+
+ll. 363-77. Note the feeling of fate in the first appearance of
+Apollonius.
+
+PAGE 25. l. 377. _dreams._ Lycius is conscious that it is an illusion
+even whilst he yields himself up to it.
+
+l. 386. _Aeolian._ Aeolus was the god of the winds.
+
+PAGE 26. l. 394. _flitter-winged._ Imagining the poem winging its way
+along like a bird. _Flitter_, cf. flittermouse = bat.
+
+PART II.
+
+PAGE 27. ll. 1-9. Again a passage unworthy of Keats's genius. Perhaps
+the attempt to be light, like his seventeenth-century model, Dryden, led
+him for the moment to adopt something of the cynicism of that age about
+love.
+
+ll. 7-9. i.e. If Lycius had lived longer his experience might have
+either contradicted or corroborated this saying.
+
+PAGE 28. l. 27. _Deafening_, in the unusual sense of making inaudible.
+
+ll. 27-8. _came a thrill Of trumpets._ From the first moment that the
+outside world makes its claim felt there is no happiness for the man
+who, like Lycius, is living a life of selfish pleasure.
+
+PAGE 29. l. 39. _passing bell._ Either the bell rung for a condemned man
+the night before his execution, or the bell rung when a man was dying
+that men might pray for the departing soul.
+
+PAGE 31. ll. 72-4. _Besides . . . new._ An indication of the selfish
+nature of Lycius's love.
+
+l. 80. _serpent._ See how skilfully this allusion is introduced and our
+attention called to it by his very denial that it applies to Lamia.
+
+PAGE 32. l. 97. _I neglect the holy rite._ It is her duty to burn
+incense and tend the sepulchres of her dead kindred.
+
+PAGE 33. l. 107. _blushing._ We see in the glow of the sunset a
+reflection of the blush of the bride.
+
+PAGE 34. ll. 122-3. _sole perhaps . . . roof._ Notice that Keats only
+says 'perhaps', but it gives a trembling unreality at once to the magic
+palace. Cf. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_:
+
+     With music loud and long
+     I would build that dome in air.
+
+PAGE 36. l. 155. _demesne_, dwelling. More commonly a domain.
+_Hyperion_, i. 298. _Sonnet_--'On first looking into Chapman's Homer.'
+
+PAGE 38. l. 187. _Ceres' horn._ Ceres was the goddess of harvest, the
+mother of Proserpine (_Lamia_, i. 63, note). Her horn is filled with the
+fruits of the earth, and is symbolic of plenty.
+
+PAGE 39. l. 200. _vowel'd undersong_, in contrast to the harsh, guttural
+and consonantal sound of Teutonic languages.
+
+PAGE 40. l. 213. _meridian_, mid-day. Bacchus was supreme, as is the sun
+at mid-day.
+
+ll. 215-29. Cf. _The Winter's Tale_, IV. iv. 73, &c., where Perdita
+gives to each guest suitable flowers. Cf. also Ophelia's flowers,
+_Hamlet_, IV. v. 175, etc.
+
+l. 217. _osier'd gold._ The gold was woven into baskets, as though it
+were osiers.
+
+l. 224. _willow_, the weeping willow, so-called because its branches
+with their long leaves droop to the ground, like dropping tears. It has
+always been sacred to deserted or unhappy lovers. Cf. _Othello_, IV.
+iii. 24 seq.
+
+_adder's tongue._ For was she not a serpent?
+
+l. 226. _thyrsus._ A rod wreathed with ivy and crowned with a fir-cone,
+used by Bacchus and his followers.
+
+l. 228. _spear-grass . . . thistle._ Because of what he is about to do.
+
+PAGE 41. ll. 229-38. Not to be taken as a serious expression of Keats's
+view of life. Rather he is looking at it, at this moment, through the
+eyes of the chief actors in his drama, and feeling with them.
+
+PAGE 43. l. 263. Notice the horror of the deadly hush and the sudden
+fading of the flowers.
+
+l. 266. _step by step_, prepares us for the thought of the silence as a
+horrid presence.
+
+ll. 274-5. _to illume the deep-recessed vision._ We at once see her dull
+and sunken eyes.
+
+PAGE 45. l. 301. _perceant_, piercing--a Spenserian word.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO ISABELLA AND THE EVE OF ST. AGNES
+
+In _Lamia_ and _Hyperion_, as in _Endymion_, we find Keats inspired by
+classic story, though the inspiration in each case came to him through
+Elizabethan writers. Here, on the other hand, mediaeval legend is his
+inspiration; the 'faery broods' have driven 'nymph and satyr from the
+prosperous woods'. Akin to the Greeks as he was in spirit, in his
+instinctive personification of the lovely manifestations of nature, his
+style and method were really more naturally suited to the portrayal of
+mediaeval scenes, where he found the richness and warmth of colour in
+which his soul delighted.
+
+The story of _Isabella_ he took from Boccaccio, an Italian writer of the
+fourteenth century, whose _Decameron_, a collection of one hundred
+stories, has been a store-house of plots for English writers. By
+Boccaccio the tale is very shortly and simply told, being evidently
+interesting to him mainly for its plot. Keats was attracted to it not so
+much by the action as by the passion involved, so that his enlargement
+of it means little elaboration of incident, but very much more dwelling
+on the psychological aspect. That is to say, he does not care so much
+what happens, as what the personages of the poem think and feel.
+
+Thus we see that the main incident of the story, the murder of Lorenzo,
+is passed over in a line--'Thus was Lorenzo slain and buried in,' the
+next line, 'There, in that forest, did his great love cease,' bringing
+us back at once from the physical reality of the murder to the thought
+of his love, which is to Keats the central fact of the story.
+
+In the delineation of Isabella, her first tender passion of love, her
+agony of apprehension giving way to dull despair, her sudden wakening to
+a brief period of frenzied action, described in stanzas of incomparable
+dramatic force, and the 'peace' which followed when she
+
+     Forgot the stars, the moon, the sun,
+     And she forgot the blue above the trees,
+     And she forgot the dells where waters run,
+     And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
+     She had no knowledge when the day was done,
+     And the new morn she saw not--
+
+culminating in the piteous death 'too lone and incomplete'--in the
+delineation of all this Keats shows supreme power and insight.
+
+In the conception, too, of the tragic loneliness of Lorenzo's ghost we
+feel that nothing could be changed, added, or taken away.
+
+Not quite equally happy are the descriptions of the cruel brothers, and
+of Lorenzo as the young lover. There is a tendency to exaggerate both
+their inhumanity and his gentleness, for purposes of contrast, which
+weakens where it would give strength.
+
+_The Eve of St. Agnes_, founded on a popular mediaeval legend, not being
+a tragedy like _Isabella_, cannot be expected to rival it in depth and
+intensity; but in every other poetic quality it equals, where it does
+not surpass, the former poem.
+
+To be specially noted is the skilful use which Keats here makes of
+contrast--between the cruel cold without and the warm love within; the
+palsied age of the Bedesman and Angela, and the eager youth of Porphyro
+and Madeline; the noise and revel and the hush of Madeline's bedroom,
+and, as Mr. Colvin has pointed out, in the moonlight which, chill and
+sepulchral when it strikes elsewhere, to Madeline is as a halo of glory,
+an angelic light.
+
+A mysterious charm is given to the poem by the way in which Keats endows
+inanimate things with a sort of half-conscious life. The knights and
+ladies of stone arouse the bedesman's shuddering sympathy when he thinks
+of the cold they must be enduring; 'the carven angels' '_star'd_'
+'_eager-eyed_' from the roof of the chapel, and the scutcheon in
+Madeline's window '_blush'd_ with blood of queens and kings'.
+
+Keats's characteristic method of description--the way in which, by his
+masterly choice of significant detail, he gives us the whole feeling of
+the situation, is here seen in its perfection. In stanza 1 each line is
+a picture and each picture contributes to the whole effect of painful
+chill. The silence of the sheep, the old man's breath visible in the
+frosty air,--these are things which many people would not notice, but it
+is such little things that make the whole scene real to us.
+
+There is another method of description, quite as beautiful in its way,
+which Coleridge adopted with magic effect in _Christabel_. This is to
+use the power of suggestion, to say very little, but that little of a
+kind to awaken the reader's imagination and make him complete the
+picture. For example, we are told of Christabel--
+
+     Her gentle limbs did she undress
+     And lay down in her loveliness.
+
+Compare this with stanza xxvi of _The Eve of St. Agnes_.
+
+That Keats was a master of both ways of obtaining a romantic effect is
+shown by his _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, considered by some people his
+masterpiece, where the rich detail of _The Eve of St. Agnes_ is replaced
+by reserve and suggestion.
+
+As the poem was not included in the volume published in 1820, it is
+given here.
+
+     LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.
+
+     Oh what can ail thee Knight at arms
+       Alone and palely loitering?
+     The sedge has withered from the Lake
+       And no birds sing.
+
+     Oh what can ail thee Knight at arms
+       So haggard, and so woe begone?
+     The Squirrel's granary is full
+       And the harvest's done.
+
+     I see a lily on thy brow
+       With anguish moist and fever dew,
+     And on thy cheeks a fading rose
+       Fast withereth too.
+
+     I met a Lady in the Meads
+       Full beautiful, a faery's child,
+     Her hair was long, her foot was light
+       And her eyes were wild.
+
+     I made a garland for her head,
+       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone,
+     She look'd at me as she did love
+       And made sweet moan.
+
+     I set her on my pacing steed,
+       And nothing else saw all day long,
+     For sidelong would she bend and sing
+       A Faery's song.
+
+     She found me roots of relish sweet,
+       And honey wild and manna dew,
+     And sure in language strange she said
+       I love thee true.
+
+     She took me to her elfin grot,
+       And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,
+     And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
+       With kisses four.
+
+     And there she lulled me asleep,
+       And there I dream'd, Ah! Woe betide!
+     The latest dream I ever dreamt
+       On the cold hill side.
+
+     I saw pale Kings, and Princes too,
+       Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
+     They cried, La belle dame sans merci,
+       Thee hath in thrall.
+
+     I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
+       With horrid warning gaped wide,
+     And I awoke, and found me here
+       On the cold hill's side.
+
+     And this is why I sojourn here
+       Alone and palely loitering;
+     Though the sedge is withered from the Lake
+       And no birds sing. . ..
+
+
+NOTES ON ISABELLA.
+
+_Metre._ The _ottava rima_ of the Italians, the natural outcome of
+Keats's turning to Italy for his story. This stanza had been used by
+Chaucer and the Elizabethans, and recently by Hookham Frere in _The
+Monks and the Giants_ and by Byron in _Don Juan_. Compare Keats's use of
+the form with that of either of his contemporaries, and notice how he
+avoids the epigrammatic close, telling in satire and mock-heroic, but
+inappropriate to a serious and romantic poem.
+
+PAGE 49. l. 2. _palmer_, pilgrim. As the pilgrim seeks for a shrine
+where, through the patron saint, he may worship God, so Lorenzo needs a
+woman to worship, through whom he may worship Love.
+
+PAGE 50. l. 21. _constant as her vespers_, as often as she said her
+evening-prayers.
+
+PAGE 51. l. 34. _within . . . domain_, where it should, naturally, have
+been rosy.
+
+PAGE 52. l. 46. _Fever'd . . . bridge._ Made his sense of her worth more
+passionate.
+
+ll. 51-2. _wed To every symbol._ Able to read every sign.
+
+PAGE 53. l. 62. _fear_, make afraid. So used by Shakespeare: e.g. 'Fear
+boys with bugs,' _Taming of the Shrew_, I. ii. 211.
+
+l. 64. _shrive_, confess. As the pilgrim cannot be at peace till he has
+confessed his sins and received absolution, so Lorenzo feels the
+necessity of confessing his love.
+
+PAGE 54. ll. 81-2. _before the dusk . . . veil._ A vivid picture of the
+twilight time, after sunset, but before it is dark enough for the stars
+to shine brightly.
+
+ll. 83-4. The repetition of the same words helps us to feel the
+unchanging nature of their devotion and joy in one another.
+
+PAGE 55. l. 91. _in fee_, in payment for their trouble.
+
+l. 95. _Theseus' spouse._ Ariadne, who was deserted by Theseus after
+having saved his life and left her home for him. _Odyssey_, xi. 321-5.
+
+l. 99. _Dido._ Queen of Carthage, whom Aeneas, in his wanderings, wooed
+and would have married, but the Gods bade him leave her.
+
+_silent . . . undergrove._ When Aeneas saw Dido in Hades, amongst those
+who had died for love, he spoke to her pityingly. But she answered him
+not a word, turning from him into the grove to Lychaeus, her former
+husband, who comforted her. Vergil, _Aeneid_, Bk. VI, l. 450 ff.
+
+l. 103. _almsmen_, receivers of alms, since they take honey from the
+flowers.
+
+PAGE 56. l. 107. _swelt_, faint. Cf. Chaucer, _Troilus and Cressida_,
+iii. 347.
+
+l. 109. _proud-quiver'd_, proudly girt with quivers of arrows.
+
+l. 112. _rich-ored driftings._ The sand of the river in which gold was
+to be found.
+
+PAGE 57. l. 124. _lazar_, leper, or any wretched beggar; from the
+parable of Dives and Lazarus.
+
+_stairs_, steps on which they sat to beg.
+
+l. 125. _red-lin'd accounts_, vividly picturing their neat
+account-books, and at the same time, perhaps, suggesting the human blood
+for which their accumulation of wealth was responsible.
+
+l. 130. _gainful cowardice._ A telling expression for the dread of loss
+which haunts so many wealthy people.
+
+l. 133. _hawks . . . forests._ As a hawk pounces on its prey, so they
+fell on the trading-vessels which put into port.
+
+ll. 133-4. _the untired . . . lies._ They were always ready for any
+dishonourable transaction by which money might be made.
+
+l. 134. _ducats._ Italian pieces of money worth about 4_s._ 4_d._ Cf.
+Shylock, _Merchant of Venice_, II. vii. 15, 'My ducats.'
+
+l. 135. _Quick . . . away._ They would undertake to fleece unsuspecting
+strangers in their town.
+
+PAGE 58. l. 137. _ledger-men._ As if they only lived in their
+account-books. Cf. l. 142.
+
+l. 140. _Hot Egypt's pest_, the plague of Egypt.
+
+ll. 145-52. As in _Lycidas_ Milton apologizes for the introduction of
+his attack on the Church, so Keats apologizes for the introduction of
+this outburst of indignation against cruel and dishonourable dealers,
+which he feels is unsuited to the tender and pitiful story.
+
+l. 150. _ghittern_, an instrument like a guitar, strung with wire.
+
+PAGE 59. ll. 153-60. Keats wants to make it clear that he is not trying
+to surpass Boccaccio, but to give him currency amongst English-speaking
+people.
+
+l. 159. _stead thee_, do thee service.
+
+l. 168. _olive-trees._ In which (through the oil they yield) a great
+part of the wealth of the Italians lies.
+
+PAGE 60. l. 174. _Cut . . . bone._ This is not only a vivid way of
+describing the banishment of all their natural pity. It also, by the
+metaphor used, gives us a sort of premonitory shudder as at Lorenzo's
+death. Indeed, in that moment the murder is, to all intents and
+purposes, done. In stanza xxvii they are described as riding 'with their
+murder'd man'.
+
+PAGE 61. ll. 187-8. _ere . . . eglantine._ The sun, drying up the dew
+drop by drop from the sweet-briar is pictured as passing beads along a
+string, as the Roman Catholics do when they say their prayers.
+
+PAGE 62. l. 209. _their . . . man._ Cf. l. 174, note. Notice the
+extraordinary vividness of the picture here--the quiet rural scene and
+the intrusion of human passion with the reflection in the clear water of
+the pale murderers, sick with suspense, and the unsuspecting victim,
+full of glowing life.
+
+l. 212. _bream_, a kind of fish found in lakes and deep water. Obviously
+Keats was not an angler.
+
+_freshets_, little streams of fresh water.
+
+PAGE 63. l. 217. Notice the reticence with which the mere fact of the
+murder is stated--no details given. Keats wants the prevailing feeling
+to be one of pity rather than of horror.
+
+ll. 219-20. _Ah . . . loneliness._ We perpetually come upon this old
+belief--that the souls of the murdered cannot rest in peace. Cf.
+_Hamlet_, I. v. 8, &c.
+
+l. 221. _break-covert . . . sin._ The blood-hounds employed for tracking
+down a murderer will find him under any concealment, and never rest till
+he is found. So restless is the soul of the victim.
+
+l. 222. _They . . . water._ That water which had reflected the three
+faces as they went across.
+
+_tease_, torment.
+
+l. 223. _convulsed spur_, they spurred their horses violently and
+uncertainly, scarce knowing what they did.
+
+l. 224. _Each richer . . . murderer._ This is what they have gained by
+their deed--the guilt of murder--that is all.
+
+l. 229. _stifling_: partly literal, since the widow's weed is
+close-wrapping and voluminous--partly metaphorical, since the acceptance
+of fate stifles complaint.
+
+l. 230. _accursed bands._ So long as a man hopes he is not free, but at
+the mercy of continual imaginings and fresh disappointments. When hope
+is laid aside, fear and disappointment go with it.
+
+PAGE 64. l. 241. _Selfishness, Love's cousin._ For the two aspects of
+love, as a selfish and unselfish passion, see Blake's two poems, _Love
+seeketh only self to please_, and, _Love seeketh not itself to please_.
+
+l. 242. _single breast_, one-thoughted, being full of love for Lorenzo.
+
+PAGE 65. ll. 249 seq. Cf. Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_.
+
+l. 252. _roundelay_, a dance in a circle.
+
+l. 259. _Striving . . . itself._ Her distrust of her brothers is shown
+in her effort not to betray her fears to them.
+
+_dungeon climes._ Wherever it is, it is a prison which keeps him from
+her. Cf. _Hamlet_, II. ii. 250-4.
+
+l. 262. _Hinnom's Vale_, the valley of Moloch's sacrifices, _Paradise
+Lost_, i. 392-405.
+
+l. 264. _snowy shroud_, a truly prophetic dream.
+
+PAGE 66. ll. 267 seq. These comparisons help us to realize her
+experience as sharp anguish, rousing her from the lethargy of despair,
+and endowing her for a brief space with almost supernatural energy and
+willpower.
+
+PAGE 67. l. 286. _palsied Druid._ The Druids, or priests of ancient
+Britain, are always pictured as old men with long beards. The conception
+of such an old man, tremblingly trying to get music from a broken harp,
+adds to the pathos and mystery of the vision.
+
+l. 288. _Like . . . among._ Take this line word by word, and see how
+many different ideas go to create the incomparably ghostly effect.
+
+ll. 289 seq. Horror is skilfully kept from this picture and only tragedy
+left. The horror is for the eyes of his murderers, not for his love.
+
+l. 292. _unthread . . . woof._ His narration and explanation of what has
+gone before is pictured as the disentangling of woven threads.
+
+l. 293. _darken'd._ In many senses, since their crime was (1) concealed
+from Isabella, (2) darkly evil, (3) done in the darkness of the wood.
+
+PAGE 68. ll. 305 seq. The whole sound of this stanza is that of a faint
+and far-away echo.
+
+l. 308. _knelling._ Every sound is like a death-bell to him.
+
+PAGE 69. l. 316. _That paleness._ Her paleness showing her great love
+for him; and, moreover, indicating that they will soon be reunited.
+
+l. 317. _bright abyss_, the bright hollow of heaven.
+
+l. 322. _The atom . . . turmoil._ Every one must know the sensation of
+looking into the darkness, straining one's eyes, until the darkness
+itself seems to be composed of moving atoms. The experience with which
+Keats, in the next lines, compares it, is, we are told, a common
+experience in the early stages of consumption.
+
+PAGE 70. l. 334. _school'd my infancy._ She was as a child in her
+ignorance of evil, and he has taught her the hard lesson that our misery
+is not always due to the dealings of a blind fate, but sometimes to the
+deliberate crime and cruelty of those whom we have trusted.
+
+l. 344. _forest-hearse._ To Isabella the whole forest is but the
+receptacle of her lover's corpse.
+
+PAGE 71. l. 347. _champaign_, country. We can picture Isabel, as they
+'creep' along, furtively glancing round, and then producing her knife
+with a smile so terrible that the old nurse can only fear that she is
+delirious, as her sudden vigour would also suggest.
+
+PAGE 72. st. xlvi-xlviii. These are the stanzas of which Lamb says,
+'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and
+moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser'--and again,
+after an appreciation of _Lamia_, whose fairy splendours are 'for
+younger impressibilities', he reverts to them, saying: 'To _us_ an
+ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur
+again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of
+basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we
+think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it
+would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light
+to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies,
+rather than acknowledge she is fair.'--_The New Times_, July 19, 1820.
+
+l. 361. _fresh-thrown mould_, a corroboration of her fears. Mr. Colvin
+has pointed out how the horror is throughout relieved by the beauty of
+the images called up by the similes, e.g. 'a crystal well,' 'a native
+lily of the dell.'
+
+l. 370. _Her silk . . . phantasies_, i.e. which she had embroidered
+fancifully for him.
+
+PAGE 73. l. 385. _wormy circumstance_, ghastly detail. Keats envies the
+un-self-conscious simplicity of the old ballad-writers in treating such
+a theme as this, and bids the reader turn to Boccaccio, whose
+description of the scene he cannot hope to rival. Boccaccio writes: 'Nor
+had she dug long before she found the body of her hapless lover, whereon
+as yet there was no trace of corruption or decay; and thus she saw
+without any manner of doubt that her vision was true. And so, saddest of
+women, knowing that she might not bewail him there, she would gladly, if
+she could, have carried away the body and given it more honourable
+sepulture elsewhere; but as she might not do so, she took a knife, and,
+as best she could, severed the head from the trunk, and wrapped it in a
+napkin and laid it in the lap of the maid; and having covered the rest
+of the corpse with earth, she left the spot, having been seen by none,
+and went home.'
+
+PAGE 74. l. 393. _Persean sword._ The sword of sharpness given to
+Perseus by Hermes, with which he cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa,
+a monster with the head of a woman, and snaky locks, the sight of whom
+turned those who looked on her into stone. Perseus escaped by looking
+only at her reflection in his shield.
+
+l. 406. _chilly_: tears, not passionate, but of cold despair.
+
+PAGE 75. l. 410. _pluck'd in Araby._ Cf. Lady Macbeth, 'All the perfumes
+of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,' _Macbeth_, V. ii. 55.
+
+l. 412. _serpent-pipe_, twisted pipe.
+
+l. 416. _Sweet Basil_, a fragrant aromatic plant.
+
+ll. 417-20. The repetition makes us feel the monotony of her days and
+nights of grief.
+
+PAGE 76. l. 432. _leafits_, leaflets, little leaves. An old botanical
+term, but obsolete in Keats's time. Coleridge uses it in l. 65 of 'The
+Nightingale' in _Lyrical Ballads_. In later editions he altered it to
+'leaflets'.
+
+l. 436. _Lethean_, in Hades, the dark underworld of the dead. Compare
+the conception of melancholy in the _Ode on Melancholy_, where it is
+said to neighbour joy. Contrast Stanza lxi.
+
+l. 439. _cypress_, dark trees which in Italy are always planted in
+cemeteries. They stand by Keats's own grave.
+
+PAGE 77. l. 442. _Melpomene_, the Muse of tragedy.
+
+l. 451. _Baaelites of pelf_, worshippers of ill-gotten gains.
+
+l. 453. _elf_, man. The word is used in this sense by Spenser in _The
+Faerie Queene_.
+
+PAGE 78. l. 467. _chapel-shrift_, confession. Cf. l. 64.
+
+ll. 469-72. _And when . . . hair._ The pathos of this picture is
+intensified by its suggestions of the wife- and mother-hood which Isabel
+can now never know. Cf. st. xlvii, where the idea is still more
+beautifully suggested.
+
+PAGE 79. l. 475. _vile . . . spot._ The one touch of descriptive
+horror--powerful in its reticence.
+
+PAGE 80. l. 489. _on . . . things._ Her love and her hope is with the
+dead rather than with the living.
+
+l. 492. _lorn voice._ Cf. st. xxxv. She is approaching her lover. Note
+that in each case the metaphor is of a stringed instrument.
+
+l. 493. _Pilgrim in his wanderings._ Cf. st. i, 'a young palmer in
+Love's eye.'
+
+l. 503. _burthen_, refrain. Cf. _Tempest_, I. ii. Ariel's songs.
+
+
+NOTES ON THE EVE OF ST. AGNES.
+
+See Introduction to _Isabella_ and _The Eve of St. Agnes_, p. 212.
+
+St. Agnes was a martyr of the Christian Church who was beheaded just
+outside Rome in 304 because she refused to marry a Pagan, holding
+herself to be a bride of Christ. She was only 13--so small and slender
+that the smallest fetters they could find slipped over her little wrists
+and fell to the ground. But they stripped, tortured, and killed her. A
+week after her death her parents dreamed that they saw her in glory with
+a white lamb, the sign of purity, beside her. Hence she is always
+pictured with lambs (as her name signifies), and to the place of her
+martyrdom two lambs are yearly taken on the anniversary and blessed.
+Then their wool is cut off and woven by the nuns into the archbishop's
+cloak, or pallium (see l. 70).
+
+For the legend connected with the Eve of the Saint's anniversary, to
+which Keats refers, see st. vi.
+
+_Metre._ That of the _Faerie Queene_.
+
+PAGE 83. ll. 5-6. _told His rosary._ Cf. _Isabella_, ll. 87-8.
+
+l. 8. _without a death._ The 'flight to heaven' obscures the simile of
+the incense, and his breath is thought of as a departing soul.
+
+PAGE 84. l. 12. _meagre, barefoot, wan._ Such a compression of a
+description into three bare epithets is frequent in Keats's poetry. He
+shows his marvellous power in the unerring choice of adjective; and
+their enumeration in this way has, from its very simplicity, an
+extraordinary force.
+
+l. 15. _purgatorial rails_, rails which enclose them in a place of
+torture.
+
+l. 16. _dumb orat'ries._ The transference of the adjective from person
+to place helps to give us the mysterious sense of life in inanimate
+things. Cf. _Hyperion_, iii. 8; _Ode to a Nightingale_, l. 66.
+
+l. 22. _already . . . rung._ He was dead to the world. But this hint
+should also prepare us for the conclusion of the poem.
+
+PAGE 85. l. 31. _'gan to chide._ l. 32. _ready with their pride._ l. 34.
+_ever eager-eyed._ l. 36. _with hair . . . breasts._ As if trumpets,
+rooms, and carved angels were all alive. See Introduction, p. 212.
+
+l. 37. _argent_, silver. They were all glittering with rich robes and
+arms.
+
+PAGE 86. l. 56. _yearning . . . pain_, expressing all the exquisite
+beauty and pathos of the music; and moreover seeming to give it
+conscious life.
+
+PAGE 87. l. 64. _danc'd_, conveying all her restlessness and impatience
+as well as the lightness of her step.
+
+l. 70. _amort_, deadened, dull. Cf. _Taming of the Shrew_, IV. iii. 36,
+'What sweeting! all amort.'
+
+l. 71. See note on St. Agnes, p. 224.
+
+l. 77. _Buttress'd from moonlight._ A picture of the castle and of the
+night, as well as of Porphyro's position.
+
+PAGE 88. ll. 82 seq. Compare the situation of these lovers with that of
+Romeo and Juliet.
+
+l. 90. _beldame_, old woman. Shakespeare generally uses the word in an
+uncomplimentary sense--'hag'--but it is not so used here. The word is
+used by Spenser in its derivative sense, 'Fair lady,' _Faerie Queene_,
+ii. 43.
+
+PAGE 89. l. 110. _Brushing . . . plume._ This line both adds to our
+picture of Porphyro and vividly brings before us the character of the
+place he was entering--unsuited to the splendid cavalier.
+
+l. 113. _Pale, lattic'd, chill._ Cf. l. 12, note.
+
+l. 115. _by the holy loom_, on which the nuns spin. See l. 71 and note
+on St. Agnes, p. 224.
+
+PAGE 90. l. 120. _Thou must . . . sieve._ Supposed to be one of the
+commonest signs of supernatural power. Cf. _Macbeth_, I. iii. 8.
+
+l. 133. _brook_, check. An incorrect use of the word, which really means
+_bear_ or _permit_.
+
+PAGE 92. ll. 155-6. _churchyard . . . toll._ Unconscious prophecy. Cf.
+_The Bedesman_, l. 22.
+
+l. 168. _While . . . coverlet._ All the wonders of Madeline's
+imagination.
+
+l. 171. _Since Merlin . . . debt._ Referring to the old legend that
+Merlin had for father an incubus or demon, and was himself a demon of
+evil, though his innate wickedness was driven out by baptism. Thus his
+'debt' to the demon was his existence, which he paid when Vivien
+compassed his destruction by means of a spell which he had taught her.
+Keats refers to the storm which is said to have raged that night, which
+Tennyson also describes in _Merlin and Vivien_. The source whence the
+story came to Keats has not been ascertained.
+
+PAGE 93. l. 173. _cates_, provisions. Cf. _Taming of the Shrew_, II. i.
+187:--
+
+     Kate of Kate Hall--my super-dainty Kate,
+     For dainties are all cates.
+
+We still use the verb 'to cater' as in l. 177.
+
+l. 174. _tambour frame_, embroidery-frame.
+
+l. 185. _espied_, spying. _Dim_, because it would be from a dark corner;
+also the spy would be but dimly visible to her old eyes.
+
+l. 187. _silken . . . chaste._ Cf. ll. 12, 113.
+
+l. 188. _covert_, hiding. Cf. _Isabella_, l. 221.
+
+PAGE 94. l. 198. _fray'd_, frightened.
+
+l. 203. _No uttered . . . betide._ Another of the conditions of the
+vision was evidently silence.
+
+PAGE 95. ll. 208 seq. Compare Coleridge's description of Christabel's
+room: _Christabel_, i. 175-83.
+
+l. 218. _gules_, blood-red.
+
+PAGE 96. l. 226. _Vespers._ Cf. _Isabella_, l. 21, ll. 226-34. See
+Introduction, p. 213.
+
+l. 237. _poppied_, because of the sleep-giving property of the
+poppy-heads.
+
+l. 241. _Clasp'd . . . pray._ The sacredness of her beauty is felt here.
+
+_missal_, prayer-book.
+
+PAGE 97. l. 247. _To wake . . . tenderness._ He waited to hear, by the
+sound of her breathing, that she was asleep.
+
+l. 250. _Noiseless . . . wilderness._ We picture a man creeping over a
+wide plain, fearing that any sound he makes will arouse some wild beast
+or other frightful thing.
+
+l. 257. _Morphean._ Morpheus was the god of sleep.
+
+_amulet_, charm.
+
+l. 258. _boisterous . . . festive._ Cf. ll. 12, 112, 187.
+
+l. 261. _and . . . gone._ The cadence of this line is peculiarly adapted
+to express a dying-away of sound.
+
+PAGE 98. l. 266. _soother_, sweeter, more delightful. An incorrect use
+of the word. Sooth really means truth.
+
+l. 267. _tinct_, flavoured; usually applied to colour, not to taste.
+
+l. 268. _argosy_, merchant-ship. Cf. _Merchant of Venice_, I. i. 9,
+'Your argosies with portly sail.'
+
+PAGE 99. l. 287. Before he desired a 'Morphean amulet'; now he wishes to
+release his lady's eyes from the charm of sleep.
+
+l. 288. _woofed phantasies._ Fancies confused as woven threads. Cf.
+_Isabella_, l. 292.
+
+l. 292. '_La belle . . . mercy._' This stirred Keats's imagination, and
+he produced the wonderful, mystic ballad of this title (see p. 213).
+
+l. 296. _affrayed_, frightened. Cf. l. 198.
+
+PAGE 100. ll. 298-9. Cf. Donne's poem, _The Dream_:--
+
+     My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.
+
+l. 300. _painful change_, his paleness.
+
+l. 311. _pallid, chill, and drear._ Cf. ll. 12, 112, 187, 258.
+
+PAGE 101. l. 323. _Love's alarum_, warning them to speed away.
+
+l. 325. _flaw_, gust of wind. Cf. _Coriolanus_, V. iii. 74; _Hamlet_,
+V. i. 239.
+
+l. 333. _unpruned_, not trimmed.
+
+PAGE 102. l. 343. _elfin-storm._ The beldame has suggested that he must
+be 'liege-lord of all the elves and fays'.
+
+l. 351. _o'er . . . moors._ A happy suggestion of a warmer clime.
+
+PAGE 103. l. 355. _darkling._ Cf. _King Lear_, I. iv. 237: 'So out went
+the candle and we were left darkling.' Cf. _Ode to a Nightingale_, l.
+51.
+
+l. 360. _And . . . floor._ There is the very sound of the wind in this
+line.
+
+PAGE 104. ll. 375-8. _Angela . . . cold._ The death of these two leaves
+us with the thought of a young, bright world for the lovers to enjoy;
+whilst at the same time it completes the contrast, which the first
+introduction of the old bedesman suggested, between the old, the poor,
+and the joyless, and the young, the rich, and the happy.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE, ODE ON A GRECIAN URN, ODE ON
+MELANCHOLY, AND TO AUTUMN.
+
+These four odes, which were all written in 1819, the first three in the
+early months of that year, ought to be considered together, since the
+same strain of thought runs through them all and, taken all together,
+they seem to sum up Keats's philosophy.
+
+In all of them the poet looks upon life as it is, and the eternal
+principle of beauty, in the first three seeing them in sharp contrast;
+in the last reconciling them, and leaving us content.
+
+The first-written of the four, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, is the most
+passionately human and personal of them all. For Keats wrote it soon
+after the death of his brother Tom, whom he had loved devotedly and
+himself nursed to the end. He was feeling keenly the tragedy of a world
+'where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies', and the song of
+the nightingale, heard in a friend's garden at Hampstead, made him long
+to escape with it from this world of realities and sorrows to the world
+of ideal beauty, which it seemed to him somehow to stand for and
+suggest. He did not think of the nightingale as an individual bird, but
+of its song, which had been beautiful for centuries and would continue
+to be beautiful long after his generation had passed away; and the
+thought of this undying loveliness he contrasted bitterly with our
+feverishly sad and short life. When, by the power of imagination, he had
+left the world behind him and was absorbed in the vision of beauty
+roused by the bird's song, he longed for death rather than a return to
+disillusionment.
+
+So in the _Grecian Urn_ he contrasts unsatisfying human life with art,
+which is everlastingly beautiful. The figures on the vase lack one thing
+only--reality,--whilst on the other hand they are happy in not being
+subject to trouble, change, or death. The thought is sad, yet Keats
+closes this ode triumphantly, not, as in _The Nightingale_, on a note of
+disappointment. The beauty of this Greek sculpture, truly felt, teaches
+us that beauty at any rate is real and lasting, and that utter belief in
+beauty is the one thing needful in life.
+
+In the _Ode on Melancholy_ Keats, in a more bitter mood, finds the
+presence, in a fleeting world, of eternal beauty the source of the
+deepest melancholy. To encourage your melancholy mood, he tells us, do
+not look on the things counted sad, but on the most beautiful, which are
+only quickly-fading manifestations of the everlasting principle of
+beauty. It is then, when a man most deeply loves the beautiful, when he
+uses his capacities of joy to the utmost, that the full bitterness of
+the contrast between the real and the ideal comes home to him and
+crushes him. If he did not feel so much he would not suffer so much; if
+he loved beauty less he would care less that he could not hold it long.
+
+But in the ode _To Autumn_ Keats attains to the serenity he has been
+seeking. In this unparalleled description of a richly beautiful autumn
+day he conveys to us all the peace and comfort which his spirit
+receives. He does not philosophize upon the spectacle or draw a moral
+from it, but he shows us how in nature beauty is ever present. To the
+momentary regret for spring he replies with praise of the present hour,
+concluding with an exquisite description of the sounds of autumn--its
+music, as beautiful as that of spring. Hitherto he has lamented the
+insecurity of a man's hold upon the beautiful, though he has never
+doubted the reality of beauty and the worth of its worship to man. Now,
+under the influence of nature, he intuitively knows that beauty once
+seen and grasped is man's possession for ever. He is in much the same
+position that Wordsworth was when he declared that
+
+                    Nature never did betray
+     The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
+     Through all the years of this our life, to lead
+     From joy to joy: for she can so inform
+     The mind that is within us, so impress
+     With quietness and beauty, and so feed
+     With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
+     Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
+     Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
+     The dreary intercourse of daily life,
+     Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
+     Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
+     Is full of blessings.
+
+This was not the last poem that Keats wrote, but it was the last which
+he wrote in the fulness of his powers. We can scarcely help wishing
+that, beautiful as were some of the productions of his last feverish
+year of life, this perfect ode, expressing so serene and untroubled a
+mood, might have been his last word to the world.
+
+
+NOTES ON THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.
+
+In the early months of 1819 Keats was living with his friend Brown at
+Hampstead (Wentworth Place). In April a nightingale built her nest in
+the garden, and Brown writes: 'Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy
+in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table
+to the grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours.
+When he came into the house I perceived he had some scraps of paper in
+his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On
+inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his
+poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well
+legible, and it was difficult to arrange the stanza on so many scraps.
+With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his _Ode to a
+Nightingale_.'
+
+PAGE 107. l. 4. _Lethe._ Cf. _Lamia_, i. 81, note.
+
+l. 7. _Dryad._ Cf. _Lamia_, i. 5, note.
+
+PAGE 108. l. 13. _Flora_, the goddess of flowers.
+
+l. 14. _sunburnt mirth._ An instance of Keats's power of concentration.
+The _people_ are not mentioned at all, yet this phrase conjures up a
+picture of merry, laughing, sunburnt peasants, as surely as could a long
+and elaborate description.
+
+l. 15. _the warm South._ As if the wine brought all this with it.
+
+l. 16. _Hippocrene_, the spring of the Muses on Mount Helicon.
+
+l. 23. _The weariness . . . fret._ Cf. 'The fretful stir unprofitable
+and the fever of the world' in Wordsworth's _Tintern Abbey_, which Keats
+well knew.
+
+PAGE 109. l. 26. _Where youth . . . dies._ See Introduction to the Odes,
+p. 230.
+
+l. 29. _Beauty . . . eyes._ Cf. _Ode on Melancholy_, 'Beauty that must
+die.'
+
+l. 32. _Not . . . pards._ Not wine, but poetry, shall give him release
+from the cares of this world. Keats is again obviously thinking of
+Titian's picture (Cf. _Lamia_, i. 58, note).
+
+l. 40. Notice the balmy softness which is given to this line by the use
+of long vowels and liquid consonants.
+
+PAGE 110. ll. 41 seq. The dark, warm, sweet atmosphere seems to enfold
+us. It would be hard to find a more fragrant passage.
+
+l. 50. _The murmurous . . . eves._ We seem to hear them. Tennyson,
+inspired by Keats, with more self-conscious art, uses somewhat similar
+effects, e.g.:
+
+     The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
+     And murmuring of innumerable bees.
+
+                           _The Princess_, vii.
+
+l. 51. _Darkling._ Cf. _The Eve of St. Agnes_, l. 355, note.
+
+l. 61. _Thou . . . Bird._ Because, so far as we are concerned, the
+nightingale we heard years ago is the same as the one we hear to-night.
+The next lines make it clear that this is what Keats means.
+
+l. 64. _clown_, peasant.
+
+l. 67. _alien corn._ Transference of the adjective from person to
+surroundings. Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, l. 16; _Hyperion_, iii. 9.
+
+ll. 69-70. _magic . . . forlorn._ Perhaps inspired by a picture of
+Claude's, 'The Enchanted Castle,' of which Keats had written before in a
+poetical epistle to his friend Reynolds--'The windows [look] as if
+latch'd by Fays and Elves.'
+
+PAGE 112. l. 72. _Toll._ To him it has a deeply melancholy sound, and it
+strikes the death-blow to his illusion.
+
+l. 75. _plaintive._ It did not sound sad to Keats at first, but as it
+dies away it takes colour from his own melancholy and sounds pathetic to
+him. Cf. _Ode on Melancholy_: he finds both bliss and pain in the
+contemplation of beauty.
+
+ll. 76-8. _Past . . . glades._ The whole country speeds past our eyes in
+these three lines.
+
+
+NOTES ON THE ODE ON A GRECIAN URN.
+
+This poem is not, apparently, inspired by any one actual vase, but by
+many Greek sculptures, some seen in the British Museum, some known only
+from engravings. Keats, in his imagination, combines them all into one
+work of supreme beauty.
+
+Perhaps Keats had some recollection of Wordsworth's sonnet 'Upon the
+sight of a beautiful picture,' beginning 'Praised be the art.'
+
+PAGE 113. l. 2. _foster-child._ The child of its maker, but preserved
+and cared for by these foster-parents.
+
+l. 7. _Tempe_ was a famous glen in Thessaly.
+
+_Arcady._ Arcadia, a very mountainous country, the centre of the
+Peloponnese, was the last stronghold of the aboriginal Greeks. The
+people were largely shepherds and goatherds, and Pan was a local
+Arcadian god till the Persian wars (c. 400 B.C.). In late Greek and in
+Roman pastoral poetry, as in modern literature, Arcadia is a sort of
+ideal land of poetic shepherds.
+
+PAGE 114. ll. 17-18. _Bold . . . goal._ The one thing denied to the
+figures--actual life. But Keats quickly turns to their rich
+compensations.
+
+PAGE 115. ll. 28-30. _All . . . tongue._ Cf. Shelley's _To a Skylark_:
+
+     Thou lovest--but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
+
+ll. 31 seq. Keats is now looking at the other side of the urn. This
+verse strongly recalls certain parts of the frieze of the Parthenon
+(British Museum).
+
+PAGE 116. l. 41. _Attic_, Greek.
+
+_brede_, embroidery. Cf. _Lamia_, i. 159. Here used of carving.
+
+l. 44. _tease us out of thought._ Make us think till thought is lost in
+mystery.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO THE ODE TO PSYCHE.
+
+In one of his long journal-letters to his brother George, Keats writes,
+at the beginning of May, 1819: 'The following poem--the last I have
+written--is the first and the only one with which I have taken even
+moderate pains. I have for the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry.
+This I have done leisurely--I think it reads the more richly for it, and
+will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable
+and healthy spirit. You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a
+goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist, who lived after the
+Augustan age, and consequently the goddess was never worshipped or
+sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour, and perhaps never thought
+of in the old religion--I am more orthodox than to let a heathen goddess
+be so neglected.' _The Ode to Psyche_ follows.
+
+The story of Psyche may be best told in the words of William Morris in
+the 'argument' to 'the story of Cupid and Psyche' in his _Earthly
+Paradise_:
+
+     'Psyche, a king's daughter, by her exceeding beauty caused the
+     people to forget Venus; therefore the goddess would fain have
+     destroyed her: nevertheless she became the bride of Love, yet
+     in an unhappy moment lost him by her own fault, and wandering
+     through the world suffered many evils at the hands of Venus,
+     for whom she must accomplish fearful tasks. But the gods and
+     all nature helped her, and in process of time she was
+     re-united to Love, forgiven by Venus, and made immortal by the
+     Father of gods and men.'
+
+Psyche is supposed to symbolize the human soul made immortal through
+love.
+
+
+NOTES ON THE ODE TO PSYCHE.
+
+PAGE 117. l. 2. _sweet . . . dear._ Cf. _Lycidas_, 'Bitter constraint
+and sad occasion dear.'
+
+l. 4. _soft-conched._ Metaphor of a sea-shell giving an impression of
+exquisite colour and delicate form.
+
+PAGE 118. l. 13. _'Mid . . . eyed._ Nature in its appeal to every sense.
+In this line we have the essence of all that makes the beauty of flowers
+satisfying and comforting.
+
+l. 14. _Tyrian_, purple, from a certain dye made at Tyre.
+
+l. 20. _aurorean._ Aurora is the goddess of dawn. Cf. _Hyperion_, i.
+181.
+
+l. 25. _Olympus._ Cf. _Lamia_, i. 9, note.
+
+_hierarchy._ The orders of gods, with Jupiter as head.
+
+l. 26. _Phoebe_, or Diana, goddess of the moon.
+
+l. 27. _Vesper_, the evening star.
+
+PAGE 119. l. 34. _oracle_, a sacred place where the god was supposed to
+answer questions of vital import asked him by his worshippers.
+
+l. 37. _fond believing_, foolishly credulous.
+
+l. 41. _lucent fans_, luminous wings.
+
+PAGE 120. l. 55. _fledge . . . steep._ Probably a recollection of what
+he had seen in the Lakes, for on June 29, 1818, he writes to Tom from
+Keswick of a waterfall which 'oozes out from a cleft in perpendicular
+Rocks, all fledged with Ash and other beautiful trees'.
+
+l. 57. _Dryads._ Cf. _Lamia_, l. 5, note.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO FANCY.
+
+This poem, although so much lighter in spirit, bears a certain relation
+in thought to Keats's other odes. In the _Nightingale_ the tragedy of
+this life made him long to escape, on the wings of imagination, to the
+ideal world of beauty symbolized by the song of the bird. Here finding
+all real things, even the most beautiful, pall upon him, he extols the
+fancy, which can escape from reality and is not tied by place or season
+in its search for new joys. This is, of course, only a passing mood, as
+the extempore character of the poetry indicates. We see more of settled
+conviction in the deeply-meditative _Ode to Autumn_, where he finds the
+ideal in the rich and ever-changing real.
+
+This poem is written in the four-accent metre employed by Milton in
+_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, and we can often detect a similarity of
+cadence, and a resemblance in the scenes imagined.
+
+
+NOTES ON FANCY.
+
+PAGE 123. l. 16. _ingle_, chimney-nook.
+
+PAGE 126. l. 81. _Ceres' daughter_, Proserpina. Cf. _Lamia_, i. 63,
+note.
+
+l. 82. _God of torment._ Pluto, who presides over the torments of the
+souls in Hades.
+
+PAGE 127. l. 85. _Hebe_, the cup-bearer of Jove.
+
+l. 89. _And Jove grew languid._ Observe the fitting slowness of the
+first half of the line, and the sudden leap forward of the second.
+
+
+NOTES ON ODE
+
+['BARDS OF PASSION AND OF MIRTH'].
+
+PAGE 128. l. 1. _Bards_, poets and singers.
+
+l. 8. _parle_, French _parler_. Cf. _Hamlet_, I. i. 62.
+
+l. 12. _Dian's fawns._ Diana was the goddess of hunting.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN.
+
+The Mermaid Tavern was an old inn in Bread Street, Cheapside. Tradition
+says that the literary club there was established by Sir Walter Raleigh
+in 1603. In any case it was, in Shakespeare's time, frequented by the
+chief writers of the day, amongst them Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher,
+Selden, Carew, Donne, and Shakespeare himself. Beaumont, in a poetical
+epistle to Ben Jonson, writes:
+
+     What things have we seen
+     Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
+     So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
+     As if that any one from whence they came
+     Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
+     And has resolved to live a fool the rest
+     Of his dull life.
+
+
+NOTES ON LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN.
+
+PAGE 131. l. 10. _bold Robin Hood._ Cf. _Robin Hood_, p. 133.
+
+l. 12. _bowse_, drink.
+
+PAGE 132. ll. 16-17. _an astrologer's . . . story._ The astrologer would
+record, on parchment, what he had seen in the heavens.
+
+l. 22. _The Mermaid . . . Zodiac._ The zodiac was an imaginary belt
+across the heavens within which the sun and planets were supposed to
+move. It was divided into twelve parts corresponding to the twelve
+months of the year, according to the position of the moon when full.
+Each of these parts had a sign by which it was known, and the sign of
+the tenth was a fish-tailed goat, to which Keats refers as the Mermaid.
+The word _zodiac_ comes from the Greek +zodion+, meaning
+a little animal, since originally all the signs were animals.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO ROBIN HOOD.
+
+Early in 1818 John Hamilton Reynolds, a friend of Keats, sent him two
+sonnets which he had written 'On Robin Hood'. Keats, in his letter of
+thanks, after giving an appreciation of Reynolds's production, says: 'In
+return for your Dish of Filberts, I have gathered a few Catkins, I hope
+they'll look pretty.' Then follow these lines, entitled, 'To J. H. R. in
+answer to his Robin Hood sonnets.' At the end he writes: 'I hope you
+will like them--they are at least written in the spirit of outlawry.'
+
+Robin Hood, the outlaw, was a popular hero of the Middle Ages. He was a
+great poacher of deer, brave, chivalrous, generous, full of fun, and
+absolutely without respect for law and order. He robbed the rich to give
+to the poor, and waged ceaseless war against the wealthy prelates of the
+church. Indeed, of his endless practical jokes, the majority were played
+upon sheriffs and bishops. He lived, with his 'merry men', in Sherwood
+Forest, where a hollow tree, said to be his 'larder', is still shown.
+
+Innumerable ballads telling of his exploits were composed, the first
+reference to which is in the second edition of Langland's _Piers
+Plowman_, c. 1377. Many of these ballads still survive, but in all these
+traditions it is quite impossible to disentangle fact from fiction.
+
+
+NOTES ON ROBIN HOOD.
+
+PAGE 133. l. 4. _pall._ Cf. _Isabella_, l. 268.
+
+l. 9. _fleeces_, the leaves of the forest, cut from them by the wind as
+the wool is shorn from the sheep's back.
+
+PAGE 134. l. 13. _ivory shrill_, the shrill sound of the ivory horn.
+
+ll. 15-18. Keats imagines some man who has not heard the laugh hearing
+with bewilderment its echo in the depths of the forest.
+
+l. 21. _seven stars_, Charles's Wain or the Big Bear.
+
+l. 22. _polar ray_, the light of the Pole, or North, star.
+
+l. 30. _pasture Trent_, the fields about the Trent, the river of
+Nottingham, which runs by Sherwood forest.
+
+PAGE 135. l. 33. _morris._ A dance in costume which, in the Tudor
+period, formed a part of every village festivity. It was generally
+danced by five men and a boy in girl's dress, who represented Maid
+Marian. Later it came to be associated with the May games, and other
+characters of the Robin Hood epic were introduced. It was abolished,
+with other village gaieties, by the Puritans, and though at the
+Restoration it was revived it never regained its former importance.
+
+l. 34. _Gamelyn._ The hero of a tale (_The Tale of Gamelyn_) attributed
+to Chaucer, and given in some MSS. as _The Cook's Tale_ in _The
+Canterbury Tales_. The story of Orlando's ill-usage, prowess, and
+banishment, in _As You Like It_, Shakespeare derived from this source,
+and Keats is thinking of the merry life of the hero amongst the outlaws.
+
+l. 36. '_grene shawe_,' green wood.
+
+PAGE 136. l. 53. _Lincoln green._ In the Middle Ages Lincoln was very
+famous for dyeing green cloth, and this green cloth was the
+characteristic garb of the forester and outlaw.
+
+l. 62. _burden._ Cf. _Isabella_, l. 503.
+
+
+NOTES ON 'TO AUTUMN'.
+
+In a letter written to Reynolds from Winchester, in September, 1819,
+Keats says: 'How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A
+temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste
+weather--Dian skies--I never liked stubble-fields so much as now--Aye
+better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field
+looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me
+so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.' What he composed
+was the Ode _To Autumn_.
+
+PAGE 137. ll. 1 seq. The extraordinary concentration and richness of
+this description reminds us of Keats's advice to Shelley--'Load every
+rift of your subject with ore.' The whole poem seems to be painted in
+tints of red, brown, and gold.
+
+PAGE 138. ll. 12 seq. From the picture of an autumn day we proceed to
+the characteristic sights and occupations of autumn, personified in the
+spirit of the season.
+
+l. 18. _swath_, the width of the sweep of the scythe.
+
+ll. 23 seq. Now the sounds of autumn are added to complete the
+impression.
+
+ll. 25-6. Compare letter quoted above.
+
+PAGE 139. l. 28. _sallows_, trees or low shrubs of the willowy kind.
+
+ll. 28-9. _borne . . . dies._ Notice how the cadence of the line fits
+the sense. It seems to rise and fall and rise and fall again.
+
+
+NOTES ON ODE ON MELANCHOLY.
+
+PAGE 140. l. 1. _Lethe._ See _Lamia_, i. 81, note.
+
+l. 2. _Wolf's-bane_, aconite or hellebore--a poisonous plant.
+
+l. 4. _nightshade_, a deadly poison.
+
+_ruby . . . Proserpine._ Cf. Swinburne's _Garden of Proserpine_.
+
+_Proserpine._ Cf. _Lamia_, i. 63, note.
+
+l. 5. _yew-berries._ The yew, a dark funereal-looking tree, is
+constantly planted in churchyards.
+
+l. 7. _your mournful Psyche._ See Introduction to the _Ode to Psyche_,
+p. 236.
+
+PAGE 141. l. 12. _weeping cloud._ l. 14. _shroud._ Giving a touch of
+mystery and sadness to the otherwise light and tender picture.
+
+l. 16. _on . . . sand-wave_, the iridescence sometimes seen on the
+ribbed sand left by the tide.
+
+l. 21. _She_, i.e. Melancholy--now personified as a goddess. Compare
+this conception of melancholy with the passage in _Lamia_, i. 190-200.
+Cf. also Milton's personifications of Melancholy in _L'Allegro_ and _Il
+Penseroso_.
+
+PAGE 142. l. 30. _cloudy_, mysteriously concealed, seen of few.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO HYPERION.
+
+This poem deals with the overthrow of the primaeval order of Gods by
+Jupiter, son of Saturn the old king. There are many versions of the
+fable in Greek mythology, and there are many sources from which it may
+have come to Keats. At school he is said to have known the classical
+dictionary by heart, but his inspiration is more likely to have been due
+to his later reading of the Elizabethan poets, and their translations of
+classic story. One thing is certain, that he did not confine himself to
+any one authority, nor did he consider it necessary to be circumscribed
+by authorities at all. He used, rather than followed, the Greek fable,
+dealing freely with it and giving it his own interpretation.
+
+The situation when the poem opens is as follows:--Saturn, king of the
+gods, has been driven from Olympus down into a deep dell, by his son
+Jupiter, who has seized and used his father's weapon, the thunderbolt. A
+similar fate has overtaken nearly all his brethren, who are called by
+Keats Titans and Giants indiscriminately, though in Greek mythology the
+two races are quite distinct. These Titans are the children of Tellus
+and Coelus, the earth and sky, thus representing, as it were, the first
+birth of form and personality from formless nature. Before the
+separation of earth and sky, Chaos, a confusion of the elements of all
+things, had reigned supreme. One only of the Titans, Hyperion the
+sun-god, still keeps his kingdom, and he is about to be superseded by
+young Apollo, the god of light and song.
+
+In the second book we hear Oceanus and Clymene his daughter tell how
+both were defeated not by battle or violence, but by the irresistible
+beauty of their dispossessors; and from this Oceanus deduces 'the
+eternal law, that first in beauty should be first in might'. He recalls
+the fact that Saturn himself was not the first ruler, but received his
+kingdom from his parents, the earth and sky, and he prophesies that
+progress will continue in the overthrow of Jove by a yet brighter and
+better order. Enceladus is, however, furious at what he considers a
+cowardly acceptance of their fate, and urges his brethren to resist.
+
+In Book I we saw Hyperion, though still a god, distressed by portents,
+and now in Book III we see the rise to divinity of his successor, the
+young Apollo. The poem breaks off short at the moment of Apollo's
+metamorphosis, and how Keats intended to complete it we can never know.
+
+It is certain that he originally meant to write an epic in ten books,
+and the publisher's remark[245:1] at the beginning of the 1820 volume
+would lead us to think that he was in the same mind when he wrote the
+poem. This statement, however, must be altogether discounted, as Keats,
+in his copy of the poems, crossed it right out and wrote above, 'I had
+no part in this; I was ill at the time.'
+
+Moreover, the last sentence (from 'but' to 'proceeding') he bracketed,
+writing below, 'This is a lie.'
+
+This, together with other evidence external and internal, has led Dr. de
+Selincourt to the conclusion that Keats had modified his plan and, when
+he was writing the poem, intended to conclude it in four books. Of the
+probable contents of the one-and-half unwritten books Mr. de Selincourt
+writes: 'I conceive that Apollo, now conscious of his divinity, would
+have gone to Olympus, heard from the lips of Jove of his newly-acquired
+supremacy, and been called upon by the rebel three to secure the kingdom
+that awaited him. He would have gone forth to meet Hyperion, who, struck
+by the power of supreme beauty, would have found resistance impossible.
+Critics have inclined to take for granted the supposition that an actual
+battle was contemplated by Keats, but I do not believe that such was, at
+least, his final intention. In the first place, he had the example of
+Milton, whom he was studying very closely, to warn him of its dangers;
+in the second, if Hyperion had been meant to fight he would hardly be
+represented as already, before the battle, shorn of much of his
+strength; thus making the victory of Apollo depend upon his enemy's
+unnatural weakness and not upon his own strength. One may add that a
+combat would have been completely alien to the whole idea of the poem as
+Keats conceived it, and as, in fact, it is universally interpreted from
+the speech of Oceanus in the second book. The resistance of Enceladus
+and the Giants, themselves rebels against an order already established,
+would have been dealt with summarily, and the poem would have closed
+with a description of the new age which had been inaugurated by the
+triumph of the Olympians, and, in particular, of Apollo the god of light
+and song.'
+
+The central idea, then, of the poem is that the new age triumphs over
+the old by virtue of its acknowledged superiority--that intellectual
+supremacy makes physical force feel its power and yield. Dignity and
+moral conquest lies, for the conquered, in the capacity to recognize the
+truth and look upon the inevitable undismayed.
+
+Keats broke the poem off because it was too 'Miltonic', and it is easy
+to see what he meant. Not only does the treatment of the subject recall
+that of _Paradise Lost_, the council of the fallen gods bearing special
+resemblance to that of the fallen angels in Book II of Milton's epic,
+but in its style and syntax the influence of Milton is everywhere
+apparent. It is to be seen in the restraint and concentration of the
+language, which is in marked contrast to the wordiness of Keats's early
+work, as well as in the constant use of classical constructions,[247:1]
+Miltonic inversions[247:2] and repetitions,[247:3] and in occasional
+reminiscences of actual lines and phrases in _Paradise Lost_.[247:4]
+
+In _Hyperion_ we see, too, the influence of the study of Greek
+sculpture upon Keats's mind and art. This study had taught him that the
+highest beauty is not incompatible with definiteness of form and
+clearness of detail. To his romantic appreciation of mystery was now
+added an equal sense of the importance of simplicity, form, and
+proportion, these being, from its nature, inevitable characteristics of
+the art of sculpture. So we see that again and again the figures
+described in _Hyperion_ are like great statues--clear-cut, massive, and
+motionless. Such are the pictures of Saturn and Thea in Book I, and of
+each of the group of Titans at the opening of Book II.
+
+Striking too is Keats's very Greek identification of the gods with the
+powers of Nature which they represent. It is this attitude of mind which
+has led some people--Shelley and Landor among them--to declare Keats, in
+spite of his ignorance of the language, the most truly Greek of all
+English poets. Very beautiful instances of this are the sunset and
+sunrise in Book I, when the departure of the sun-god and his return to
+earth are so described that the pictures we see are of an evening and
+morning sky, an angry sunset, and a grey and misty dawn.
+
+But neither Miltonic nor Greek is Keats's marvellous treatment of nature
+as he feels, and makes us feel, the magic of its mystery in such a
+picture as that of the
+
+                               tall oaks
+     Branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
+
+or of the
+
+                            dismal cirque
+     Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor,
+     When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,
+     In dull November, and their chancel vault,
+     The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.
+
+This Keats, and Keats alone, could do; and his achievement is unique in
+throwing all the glamour of romance over a fragment 'sublime as
+Aeschylus'.
+
+
+NOTES ON HYPERION.
+
+BOOK I.
+
+PAGE 145. ll. 2-3. By thus giving us a vivid picture of the changing
+day--at morning, noon, and night--Keats makes us realize the terrible
+loneliness and gloom of a place too deep to feel these changes.
+
+l. 10. See how the sense is expressed in the cadence of the line.
+
+PAGE 146. l. 11. _voiceless._ As if it felt and knew, and were
+deliberately silent.
+
+ll. 13, 14. Influence of Greek sculpture. See Introduction, p. 248.
+
+l. 18. _nerveless . . . dead._ Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, l. 12, note.
+
+l. 19. _realmless eyes._ The tragedy of his fall is felt in every
+feature.
+
+ll. 20, 21. _Earth, His ancient mother._ Tellus. See Introduction, p.
+244.
+
+PAGE 147. l. 27. _Amazon._ The Amazons were a warlike race of women of
+whom many traditions exist. On the frieze of the Mausoleum (British
+Museum) they are seen warring with the Centaurs.
+
+l. 30. _Ixion's wheel._ For insolence to Jove, Ixion was tied to an
+ever-revolving wheel in Hell.
+
+l. 31. _Memphian sphinx._ Memphis was a town in Egypt near to which the
+pyramids were built. A sphinx is a great stone image with human head and
+breast and the body of a lion.
+
+PAGE 148. ll. 60-3. The thunderbolts, being Jove's own weapons, are
+unwilling to be used against their former master.
+
+PAGE 149. l. 74. _branch-charmed . . . stars._ All the magic of the
+still night is here.
+
+ll. 76-8. _Save . . . wave._ See how the gust of wind comes and goes in
+the rise and fall of these lines, which begin and end on the same sound.
+
+PAGE 150. l. 86. See Introduction, p. 248.
+
+l. 94. _aspen-malady_, trembling like the leaves of the aspen-poplar.
+
+PAGE 151. ll. 98 seq. Cf. _King Lear_. Throughout the figure of
+Saturn--the old man robbed of his kingdom--reminds us of Lear, and
+sometimes we seem to detect actual reminiscences of Shakespeare's
+treatment. Cf. _Hyperion_, i. 98; and _King Lear_, I. iv. 248-52.
+
+l. 102. _front_, forehead.
+
+l. 105. _nervous_, used in its original sense of powerful, sinewy.
+
+ll. 107 seq. In Saturn's reign was the Golden Age.
+
+PAGE 152. l. 125. _of ripe progress_, near at hand.
+
+l. 129. _metropolitan_, around the chief city.
+
+l. 131. _strings in hollow shells._ The first stringed instruments were
+said to be made of tortoise-shells with strings stretched across.
+
+PAGE 153. l. 145. _chaos._ The confusion of elements from which the
+world was created. See _Paradise Lost_, i. 891-919.
+
+l. 147. _rebel three._ Jove, Neptune, and Pluto.
+
+PAGE 154. l. 152. _covert._ Cf. _Isabella_, l. 221; _Eve of St. Agnes_,
+l. 188.
+
+ll. 156-7. All the dignity and majesty of the goddess is in this
+comparison.
+
+PAGE 155. l. 171. _gloom-bird_, the owl, whose cry is supposed to
+portend death. Cf. Milton's method of description, 'Not that fair
+field,' etc. _Paradise Lost_, iv. 268.
+
+l. 172. _familiar visiting_, ghostly apparition.
+
+PAGE 157. ll. 205-8. Cf. the opening of the gates of heaven. _Paradise
+Lost_, vii. 205-7.
+
+ll. 213 seq. See Introduction, p. 248.
+
+PAGE 158. l. 228. _effigies_, visions.
+
+l. 230. _O . . . pools._ A picture of inimitable chilly horror.
+
+l. 238. _fanes._ Cf. _Psyche_, l. 50.
+
+PAGE 159. l. 246. _Tellus . . . robes_, the earth mantled by the salt
+sea.
+
+PAGE 160. ll. 274-7. _colure._ One of two great circles supposed to
+intersect at right angles at the poles. The nadir is the lowest point in
+the heavens and the zenith is the highest.
+
+PAGE 161. ll. 279-80. _with labouring . . . centuries._ By studying the
+sky for many hundreds of years wise men found there signs and symbols
+which they read and interpreted.
+
+PAGE 162. l. 298. _demesnes._ Cf. _Lamia_, ii. 155, note.
+
+ll. 302-4. _all along . . . faint._ As in l. 286, the god and the
+sunrise are indistinguishable to Keats. We see them both, and both in
+one. See Introduction, p. 248.
+
+l. 302. _rack_, a drifting mass of distant clouds. Cf. _Lamia_, i. 178,
+and _Tempest_, IV. i. 156.
+
+PAGE 163. ll. 311-12. _the powers . . . creating._ Coelus and Terra (or
+Tellus), the sky and earth.
+
+PAGE 164. l. 345. _Before . . . murmur._ Before the string is drawn
+tight to let the arrow fly.
+
+PAGE 165. l. 349. _region-whisper_, whisper from the wide air.
+
+BOOK II.
+
+PAGE 167. l. 4. _Cybele_, the wife of Saturn.
+
+PAGE 168. l. 17. _stubborn'd_, made strong, a characteristic coinage of
+Keats, after the Elizabethan manner; cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, IV. i. 16.
+
+ll. 22 seq. Cf. i. 161.
+
+l. 28. _gurge_, whirlpool.
+
+PAGE 169. l. 35. _Of . . . moor_, suggested by Druid stones near
+Keswick.
+
+l. 37. _chancel vault._ As if they stood in a great temple domed by the
+sky.
+
+PAGE 171. l. 66. _Shadow'd_, literally and also metaphorically, in the
+darkness of his wrath.
+
+l. 70. _that second war._ An indication that Keats did not intend to
+recount this 'second war'; it is not likely that he would have
+forestalled its chief incident.
+
+l. 78. _Ops_, the same as Cybele.
+
+l. 79. _No shape distinguishable._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, ii. 666-8.
+
+PAGE 172. l. 97. _mortal_, making him mortal.
+
+l. 98. _A disanointing poison_, taking away his kingship and his
+godhead.
+
+PAGE 173. ll. 116-17. _There is . . . voice._ Cf. i. 72-8. The
+mysterious grandeur of the wind in the trees, whether in calm or storm.
+
+PAGE 174. ll. 133-5. _that old . . . darkness._ Uranus was the same as
+Coelus, the god of the sky. The 'book' is the sky, from which ancient
+sages drew their lore. Cf. i. 277-80.
+
+PAGE 175. l. 153. _palpable_, having material existence; literally,
+touchable.
+
+PAGE 176. l. 159. _unseen parent dear._ Coelus, since the air is
+invisible.
+
+l. 168. _no . . . grove._ 'Sophist and sage' suggests the philosophers
+of ancient Greece.
+
+l. 170. _locks not oozy._ Cf. _Lycidas_, l. 175, 'oozy locks'. This use
+of the negative is a reminiscence of Milton.
+
+ll. 171-2. _murmurs . . . sands._ In this description of the god's
+utterance is the whole spirit of the element which he personifies.
+
+PAGE 177. ll. 182-7. Wise as Saturn was, the greatness of his power had
+prevented him from realizing that he was neither the beginning nor the
+end, but a link in the chain of progress.
+
+PAGE 178. ll. 203-5. In their hour of downfall a new dominion is
+revealed to them--a dominion of the soul which rules so long as it is
+not afraid to see and know.
+
+l. 207. _though once chiefs._ Though Chaos and Darkness once had the
+sovereignty. From Chaos and Darkness developed Heaven and Earth, and
+from them the Titans in all their glory and power. Now from them
+develops the new order of Gods, surpassing them in beauty as they
+surpassed their parents.
+
+PAGE 180. ll. 228-9. The key of the whole situation.
+
+ll. 237-41. No fight has taken place. The god has seen his doom and
+accepted the inevitable.
+
+PAGE 181. l. 244. _poz'd_, settled, firm.
+
+PAGE 183. l. 284. _Like . . . string._ In this expressive line we hear
+the quick patter of the beads. Clymene has had much the same experience
+as Oceanus, though she does not philosophize upon it. She has succumbed
+to the beauty of her successor.
+
+PAGE 184. ll. 300-7. We feel the great elemental nature of the Titans in
+these powerful similes.
+
+l. 310. _Giant-Gods?_ In the edition of 1820 printed 'giant, Gods?' Mr.
+Forman suggested the above emendation, which has since been discovered
+to be the true MS. reading.
+
+PAGE 185. l. 328. _purge the ether_, clear the air.
+
+l. 331. As if Jove's appearance of strength were a deception, masking
+his real weakness.
+
+PAGE 186. l. 339. Cf. i. 328-35, ii. 96.
+
+ll. 346-56. As the silver wings of dawn preceded Hyperion's rising so
+now a silver light heralds his approach.
+
+PAGE 187. l. 357. See how the light breaks in with this line.
+
+l. 366. _and made it terrible._ There is no joy in the light which
+reveals such terrors.
+
+PAGE 188. l. 374. _Memnon's image._ Memnon was a famous king of Egypt
+who was killed in the Trojan war. His people erected a wonderful statue
+to his memory, which uttered a melodious sound at dawn, when the sun
+fell on it. At sunset it uttered a sad sound.
+
+l. 375. _dusking East._ Since the light fades first from the eastern
+sky.
+
+BOOK III.
+
+PAGE 191. l. 9. _bewildered shores._ The attribute of the wanderer
+transferred to the shore. Cf. _Nightingale_, ll. 14, 67.
+
+l. 10. _Delphic._ At Delphi worship was given to Apollo, the inventor
+and god of music.
+
+PAGE 192. l. 12. _Dorian._ There were several 'modes' in Greek music, of
+which the chief were Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian. Each was supposed to
+possess certain definite ethical characteristics. Dorian music was
+martial and manly. Cf. _Paradise Lost_, i. 549-53.
+
+l. 13. _Father of all verse._ Apollo, the god of light and song.
+
+ll. 18-19. _Let the red . . . well._ Cf. _Nightingale_, st. 2.
+
+l. 19. _faint-lipp'd._ Cf. ii. 270, 'mouthed shell.'
+
+l. 23. _Cyclades._ Islands in the Aegean sea, so called because they
+surrounded Delos in a circle.
+
+l. 24. _Delos_, the island where Apollo was born.
+
+PAGE 193. l. 31. _mother fair_, Leto (Latona).
+
+l. 32. _twin-sister_, Artemis (Diana).
+
+l. 40. _murmurous . . . waves._ We hear their soft breaking.
+
+PAGE 196. ll. 81-2. Cf. _Lamia_, i. 75.
+
+l. 82. _Mnemosyne_, daughter of Coelus and Terra, and mother of the
+Muses. Her name signifies Memory.
+
+l. 86. Cf. _Samson Agonistes_, ll. 80-2.
+
+l. 87. Cf. _Merchant of Venice_, I. i. 1-7.
+
+l. 92. _liegeless_, independent--acknowledging no allegiance.
+
+l. 93. _aspirant_, ascending. The air will not bear him up.
+
+PAGE 197. l. 98. _patient . . . moon._ Cf. i. 353, 'patient stars.'
+Their still, steady light.
+
+l. 113. So Apollo reaches his divinity--by knowledge which includes
+experience of human suffering--feeling 'the giant-agony of the world'.
+
+PAGE 198. l. 114. _gray_, hoary with antiquity.
+
+l. 128. _immortal death._ Cf. Swinburne's _Garden of Proserpine_, st. 7.
+
+     Who gathers all things mortal
+     With cold immortal hands.
+
+PAGE 199. l. 136. Filled in, in pencil, in a transcript of _Hyperion_ by
+Keats's friend Richard Woodhouse--
+
+     Glory dawn'd, he was a god.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[245:1] 'If any apology be thought necessary for the appearance of the
+unfinished poem of Hyperion, the publishers beg to state that they alone
+are responsible, as it was printed at their particular request, and
+contrary to the wish of the author. The poem was intended to have been
+of equal length with Endymion, but the reception given to that work
+discouraged the author from proceeding.'
+
+[247:1]
+
+     e.g.  i.  56 Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a god
+           i. 206 save what solemn tubes . . . gave
+          ii.  70             that second war
+                  Not long delayed.
+
+[247:2]
+
+     e.g. ii.   8 torrents hoarse
+               32 covert drear
+           i. 265 season due
+              286 plumes immense
+
+[247:3]
+
+     e.g.  i.       35 How beautiful . . . self
+                   182 While sometimes . . . wondering men
+          ii. 116, 122 Such noise . . . pines.
+
+[247:4] e.g. ii. 79 No shape distinguishable. Cf. _Paradise Lost_, ii.
+667.
+
+i. 2 breath of morn. Cf. _Paradise Lost_, iv. 641.
+
+
+HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
+PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
+LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
+
+
+
+  *      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
+
+
+Line numbers are placed every ten lines. In the original, due to space
+constraints, this is not always the case.
+
+On page 237, the note for l. 25 refers to "_Lamia_, i. 9, note". There
+is no such note.
+
+The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been left
+as in the original.
+
+     bed-side           bedside
+     church-yard        churchyard
+     death-bell         deathbell
+     demi-god           demigod
+     no-where           nowhere
+     re-united          reunited
+     sun-rise           sunrise
+     under-grove        undergrove
+     under-song         undersong
+
+The following words have variations in spelling. They have been left as
+in the original.
+
+     AEolian             Aeolian
+     Amaz'd             Amazed
+     branch-charmed     Branch-charmed
+     faery              fairy
+     should'st          shouldst
+     splendor           splendour
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the poems but not in the notes
+section.
+
+     Coeus
+     Coelus
+     Phoebe             Phoebe's           Phoebean
+     Phoenician
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS: POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1820***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 23684.txt or 23684.zip *******
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