of the most refined organisation, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced those emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide-abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The remote abstract character of Shelley's poetry, and its general want of anything real or tangible, by which the sympathies of the heart are awakened, must always prevent its becoming popular. Even to Charles Lamb it was 'icy cold.' He was a pantheistic dreamer and idealist. Yet the splendour of his lyrical verse-so full, rich, and melodious-and the grandeur of some of his conceptions, stamp him a great poet. His influence on the succession of English poets since his time has been inferior only to that of Wordsworth. Macaulay doubted whether any modern poet possessed in an equal degree the highest qualities of the great ancient masters.' His diction is singularly classical and imposing in sound and structure. He was a close student of the Greek and Italian poets. The descriptive passages in Alastor, and the river-voyage at the conclusion of the Revolt of Islam, are among the most finished of his productions. His better genius leads him to the pure waters and the depth of forest shades, which none of his contemporaries knew so well how to describe. Some of the minor poems The Cloud, The Skylark, &c.—are imbued with a fine lyrical and poetic spirit. One striking peculiarity of his style is his constant personification of inanimate objects. In The Cenci we have a strong and almost terrible illustration of this feature of his poetry : I remember, Two miles on this side of the fort, the road With which it clings, seems slowly coming down; By the dark ivy's twine. At noonday here The Flight of the Hours in Prometheus is equally vivid, and touched with a wild inimitable grace: Behold! The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds, Which trample the dim winds in each there stands A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight. Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there, And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars : Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink With eager lips the wind of their own speed, As if the thing they loved fled on before, And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all These are the immortal Hours, One waits for thee. Opening of Queen Mab. How wonderful is Death, When, throned on ocean's wave, Hath then the gloomy Power, Must then that peerless form As breathing marble, perish? But loathsomeness and ruin? Stealing o'er sensation, Which the breath of roseate morning Will Ianthe wake again, And give that faithful bosom joy Her dewy eyes are closed, And on their lids, whose texture fine Hark! whence that rushing sound? 'Tis like the wondrous strain That round a lonely ruin swells, Which, wandering on the echoing shore, The enthusiast hears at evening: 'Tis softer than the west wind's sigh; 'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes Of that strange lyre whose strings The genii of the breezes sweep: Those lines of rainbow light Are like the moonbeams when they fall Behold the chariot of the fairy queen! Their filmy pennons at her word they furl, The Cloud." I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet birds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; I sift the snow on the mountains below, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, Lured by the love of the genii that move Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings; And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest, That orbed maiden with white fire laden, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, * The odes To the Skylark and The Cloud, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames. No poet was ever warmed by a more genuine and unforced inspiration. His extreme sensibility gave the intensity of passion to his intellectual pursuits, and rendered his mind keenly alive to every perception of outward objects, as well as to his internal sensations. Such a gift is, among the sad vicissitudes of human life, the disappointments we meet, and the galling sense of our own mistakes and errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such he delivered up his soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself from the influence of human sympathies in the wildest regions of fancy.'MRS SHELLEY, Pref. to Poet. Works. May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, I bind the sun's throne with the burning zone, From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Sunbeam proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march, When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, I know not how thy joy we ever could come near. From The Sensitive Plant? A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the spring arose on the garden fair, But none ever trembled and panted with bliss In the garden, the field, or the wilderness, The snowdrop, and then the violet, Arose from the ground with warm rain wet, And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall, And the Naiad-like lily of the vale, And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue, It was felt like an odour within the sense; And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, And the wand-like lily, which lifted up, Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky; And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose, And on the stream whose inconstant bosom, Broad water-lilies lay tremulously, And starry river-buds glimmered by, And around them the soft stream did glide and dance With a motion of sweet sound and radiance. And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss, Which led through the garden along and across, Some open at once to the sun and the breeze, Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees, Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells And flowerets which, drooping as day drooped too, And from this undefiled Paradise The flowers-as an infant's awakening eyes When heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them, For each one was interpenetrated With the light and the odour its neighbour shed, Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear, Wrapt and filled by their mutual atmosphere. But the Sensitive Plant, which could give small fruit For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; The light winds which, from unsustaining wings, The plumed insects swift and free, The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie The quivering vapours of dim noontide, Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide, In which every sound, and odour, and beam, Move as reeds in a single stream; Each and all like ministering angels were For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear, Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by, Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky. And when evening descended from heaven above, And the earth was all rest, and the air was all love, And delight, though less bright, was far more deep, And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep, And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned In an ocean of dreams without a sound; (Only overhead the sweet nightingale Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant); The Sensitive Plant was the earliest Forest Scenery. From Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine, A soul-dissolving odour, to invite To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples. The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, I see the deep's untrampled floor With green and purple sea-weeds strown ; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers thrown; I sit upon the sands alone, The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion; How sweet, did any heart now share in my emotion! To Music, when soft voices die, Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved's bed; JOHN KEATS. JOHN KEATS was born in London, October 29, 1795, in the house of his grandfather, who kept a livery-stable at Moorfields. He received his education at Enfield, and in his fifteenth year was apprenticed to a surgeon. Most of his time, however, was devoted to the cultivation of his literary talents, which were early conspicuous. During his apprenticeship, he made and carefully wrote out a literal translation of Virgil's Eneid, but he does not appear to have been familiar with more difficult Latin poetry, nor to have even commenced learning the Greek language (Lord One of his earliest friends and Houghton). critics was Mr Leigh Hunt, who, being shewn some of his poetical pieces, was struck, he says, with the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before him, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. A volume of these juvenile poems was published in 1817. In 1818 Keats published his Endymion, a Poetic Romance, defective in many parts, but evincing rich though undisciplined powers of imagination. The poem was criticised, in a strain of contemptuous severity, by Mr John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review; and such was the sensitiveness of the young poet-panting for distinction, and flattered by a few private friends-that the critique imbittered his existence. The first effects,' says Shelley, ' are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.' The process had begun, as was too soon apparent ; but the disease was a family one, and would probably have appeared had no hostile criticism existed. Lord Houghton, Keats's biographer, states that the young poet profited by the attacks of the critics, their effect being' to purify his style, correct his tendency to exaggeration, enlarge his poetical studies, and produce, among other improved efforts, that very Hyperion which called forth from Byron a eulogy as violent and unqualified as the former onslaught.' Byron had termed the juvenile poetry of Keats, 'the drivelling idiotism of the manikin.' Keats's poetry falling into the hands of Jeffrey, he criticised it in the Edinburgh Review, in a spirit of kindliness and just appreciation which formed a strong contrast to the criticism in the Quarterly. But this genial critique did not appear till 1820, too late to cheer the then dying poet. Mr Keats,' says the eloquent critic, 'is, we understand, still a very young man; and his whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. They manifestly require, therefore, all |