level of lyrical feeling which it demands are suitable to the genius of poets who work in perhaps the finest and richest of all languages. Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "to Melancholy," and "to Psyche" are singularly beautiful even among English odes, but the poem which perhaps has carried his name furthest, and which is likely to live longest, is his "Ode to a Nightingale." There is one other little poem which I should like to mention, and it has long been a favourite of my own, and seems, in its very essence, to form a kind of colophon to the poetry of Keats. It is very short and simple, but it contains an idea of great solemnity and pathos; it seems to express the vanity of human hopes, the irrevocableness of human destiny, and the inability of even poetry itself to console the human heart for sorrows that transcend the changes of the natural world. "In a drear-nighted December Thy branches ne'er remember The north cannot undo them With a sleety whistle through them; Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime. In a drear-nighted December, Never, never petting About the frozen time. Ah! would 'twere so with many A gentle girl and boy! But were there ever any Writhed not at passèd joy? These sad lines seem almost prophetic of the young poet's end, for already, before the poems we have been speaking of had seen the light, the shadow of death was darkening around him. It was in 1817, as we have seen, that his first volume was published. In the summer of 1820 his last volume saw the light, containing " Isabella," "Lamia," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Hyperion," but by that time Keats was so far gone in the terrible malady that afflicted him, that he determined, on the advice of his friends, to try the milder air of Italy. He was particularly fortunate in the friend whom he found to accompany him-Mr. Joseph Severn, a young painter, whose care and devotion to the poet will ever be remembered. He left England in September, 1820. On arriving at Naples, he received an invitation from Shelley, who was then at Pisa, to come and visit him, which, however, he was unable to accept. He went to Rome, and was there tended by his friend Severn with the most touching devotion, but all was of no avail. He died on the 23rd of February, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery, where his friends and admirers have erected a modest monument to his memory. A nobler epitaph has seldom been written than the beautiful threnody, called "Adonais," in which Shelley mourned his dead friend. There, beneath the blue Italian skies, and within the time-honoured walls of the eternal city, lies this English lad, who, had he lived, might now have been blazoned among the Shakespeares and the Miltons of our literature, but who, although he had not this fortune, has at least the reward of being enshrined deep in the affections of all who love English letters. That Keats had faults, it is needless to deny. But who, of our greatest, dying at 25, would have left a memory so full of promise? His faults and failings are forgotten in the splendour of his achievement, in the haunting melodies with which he has enriched our language; and as the violets in spring come, year by year, upon his grave by the crumbling walls of Honorius, so will his undying memory in English song outlast the palaces of the Cæsars. ROMANCE T HERE is perhaps no word in the language more difficult of definition than romance. It embraces the highest intellectual truth and the most ridiculous and childish fable. Generally speaking, and roughly speaking, it means the imaginative world which surrounds the facts of life-and in its better sense, the selection from that world by highly gifted minds, of those imaginations which contain the highest ends and most glorious aims, and which give rise to the noblest emotions. It is not imagination-for imagination is the term applied to the intellectual bodying forth of things which, although they never have actually existed, might have existed, and which by their truth for the moment flatter our self-delusion into the belief that they have existed. Romance is only one form of imagination, a department so to speak in that great warehouse of the mind where strange articles are kept and a curious atmosphere prevails. To many it is a locked cabinet, to others an absurd toy-shop, the goods in which are only fit for babies-for there are moral and intellectual babies as well as natural and physical. To some again it is a drug-shop, full of spirits and stimulants. To most men of healthy brain and of true moral fibre it is a place of innocent and even of ennobling SO enjoyment, where the cares of life, "the weariness, the fever and the fret," can for a moment be laid aside in a world that charms their senses, strengthens their hearts, clears their intellects, and gives that rest to the mind. which is no less restorative than the natural sleep of the body. In these days there is too little intellectual rest -we are so eager to reap rich and repeated crops that we forget the wisdom of lying fallow for a while. And our intellects, like some of the best regulated machines, begin, after long use, to exhibit eccentricities which startle their owner; and for want of a little rest, and a little oil, and for want of an almost make-believe taking down and setting up again, get permanently injured. A moderate indulgence in literary romance resembles somewhat closely this process of taking to pieces and refitting. We throw ourselves into a world that never existed, the dust of our common labour falls from us, and we are bathed in "the light that never was on sea or land"-we sail on unknown seas to unfamiliar coasts-we who can scarcely, as a rule, summon courage to crush a blue-bottle on the window pane, find ourselves wielding the brand Excalibur with Arthur, or beating back the paynim hordes from the holy places of the east. And when we come back from these high emprises, and these doughty deeds, and find ourselves in our own arm-chair again, we smile at all the little clouds that had so clustered round us as to make a darkness in our minds, we feel awakened and refreshed as a man does when he comes from his cold morning plunge. It is like the taking down of machinery, because new conditions are suggested to us G |