The Eve of the poem high place among his work. There are minor blemishes. The rhetorical questionings of stanza XVI, the strained description of the brothers in the last lines of stanza XVII, and the intrusive apostrophes of stanzas LV and LXI show that Keats has not yet reached his full strength; but these shortcomings are more than redeemed by the exquisite passages in which human feeling is associated with natural loveliness (XXXII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, and LIII); and the poem's whole beauty and tragedy are summed in the magnificent central stanza: 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, Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me, More perfect, if less intense, is The Eve of St. Agnes (1819). St. Agnes Here Keats has turned away from Milton and reverted not and other only to the stanza, but to the spirit, of Spenser. The rich and poems. various colouring of the poem, and the magic blending of the sensuous with the spiritual, are perfectly in the older poet's manner. The subject is mediaeval, however, and was probably suggested to Keats by a passage in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (III. 2, 3). Whereas the tale of Lorenzo and Isabella had been tragedy, that of Porphyro and Madeline is pure romance, and romance held aloof from life by the strangeness of its atmosphere, and the more than earthly beauty of its colouring. This, it has been said, is the first of Keats's longer poems in which we would wish no line or stanza altered or erased. In the fragmentary Eve of St. Mark (1819), Keats's octosyllabic couplet moves with freedom and variety, and he displays two different masteries in the fine opening picture of a chilly English spring, and in the rich pre-Raphaelite detail of the passage describing Bertha and her room. In a letter to his brother, he writes that the poem is quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish evening'. Nowhere is his touch more sure than here. Yet there was a still higher perfection to come in La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819), which in its short compass embodies all that is most elvish and tragic in the mediaeval imagination. The intensity and chaste beauty of this poem give it place among Keats's greatest poetry. The ballad metre is here restricted to quatrains, and the magic foreshortening of 6 1 Suggested, according to D. G. Rossetti, by the legend that if a person on St. Mark's Eve placed himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparitions of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year, go into the church'. the last line, without forbidding variety, gives each verse, as Professor Elton has remarked, a spondaic, tolling close.' 1 The later Odes 1 naturally tell us more of Keats's mind, and His Odes. its emotions and ecstasies, than do the dramatic poems. The perfect image embodied in the central stanza of the Ode to Autumn might be taken as the symbol, not of Autumn alone, but of all Nature and her beauty as seen and felt by Keats. There is nothing here of the self-conscious transcendentalism of Lines written above Tintern Abbey: the poet is to find his Absolute in loveliness, and to express his worship of Nature through the sensuous ecstasy of his song. The same sensuousness, and the same ecstasy of Nature-worship appear in the Ode to a Nightingale; and that supreme faith in Beauty which was a main part, though by no means the whole, of Keats's religion, becomes explicit in the closing lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. A more intimate beauty is that of the Ode to Melancholy, throughout which runs the undercurrent of sadness so steady in Keats's soul. It was this quality which, outside poetry, gave increasing depth and seriousness to his intuition of the world, and made him long for leisure in which to devote himself to philosophy and general study. It is at once fascinating and unprofitable to speculate as to what Keats might have achieved had he lived to the age of Shakespeare, and been 'nerved up to the writing of a few fine plays', which, as he assures us, was his greatest ambition; but the tendency of modern criticism has been increasingly to recognize, not only the loveliness of his accomplished work, but the growing depth and fullness, and the Shakespearean universality, of his outlook.2 Gebir, the first considerable poem of Walter Savage Landor Landor(1775–1864), was published in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Gebir. Ballads, and narrates in seven books of blank verse the loves and death of a mythical Spanish king. Landor's choice of metre, and his conscious rejection of the couplet, are instructive as showing the tendency of the age-' I have chosen blank verse', he writes, because there never was a poem in rhyme that grew not tedious in a thousand lines.' Gebir is perhaps less read and remembered as a whole than for the frequent beauty of its parts. Though its language is too often forced and awkward, it can rise to perfect passages, and occasionally achieves an almost Miltonic majesty. Miltonic, too, is Landor's zest for a succession of beautiful proper names. Throughout Gebir, as through all Landor's poetry, the Greek and Latin influence is strong, and Landor actually turned the poem into Latin in the year after its original appearance in English. The romantic imagination, which in its highest form was expressly denied to Landor by Coleridge (Table Talk, January 1, 1834), seems 1 All of the four Odes here mentioned were written in 1819.. 2 Cf. A. C. Bradley, The Letters of Keats, in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry. One of the best critical estimates of Keats is that prefixed by Mr. E. de Sélincourt to his edition of Keats (Methuen, 1905). The evident in the often-quoted passage describing the sea-shells in Book I, in the fine incantation scene between Myrthyr and the witch-wife Dalica at the end of Book V, and in such lines as or or How whirlpools have absorbed them, storms o'erwhelmed, What potent hand. hath touched thy quickened corse, One that had called her in the morn, observed (Book VI.) (Book V.) (Book VII.) Nearly fifty years later, in 1847, Landor published the HelHellenics. lenics, a still more famous volume, consisting of poems on Greek subjects which he had written at irregular intervals during the preceding years. Many of these, as the short and exquisite Death of Artemidora, combine great tenderness of feeling with all the marble clearness of Heredia's best His shorter poems. Moore. Hood. sonnets. Landor is the greatest master in English of the short epigram, playful, graceful or pathetic, written after the Greek model; and he divides with Prior the honours of the highest kind of occasional verse. Of the former kind the most famous examples are the beautiful Dirce, and the lines on himself beginning, I strove with none.' In Clementina's artless mien and Household Gods are good examples of verse written in lighter vein, yet remaining true poetry. More intense and tragic is the beautiful Rose Aylmer. Of Landor's four blank-verse dramas the best, and the best known, is the noble Count Julian. Thomas Moore (1779–1852) is included by Shelley in Adonais as one of the chief poets of his day. Later criticism has been less merciful towards him, and beside the work of such modern Irish poets as Yeats, and 'A.E.', a great part of his verse seems crude, conventional, and even vulgar. Yet he had a fine and true gift of song writing, and it is probably by such lyrics as Oft in the Stilly Night', and others appearing in his Irish Melodies (1807) or elsewhere, that his fame will live, rather than by the worthy and laborious Lalla Rookh (1817), or his smooth but undistinguished renderings of Anacreon (1800). A good deal of fastidious modern criticism upon Moore proceeds from the rather ludicrous assumption that a song must needs be inferior because it has taken a strong hold on the people. Equally popular through some of his verse-for example, The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt-but at his best a far finer artist, is Thomas Hood (1799-1845). His work falls into two sharply divided classes of humorous and serious. Unfortunately his reputation with the many is chiefly that of the racy jingler or punster who wrote Miss Kilmansegg and His head was turned, and so he chewed His real strength, however, is to be found in his graver work, Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) first won pelf and fame Campbell. through The Pleasures of Hope, written when he was twentytwo. This collection was composed in the couplet, which Campbell in the lengthy and rather tedious Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) deserted for the Spenserian stanza. His real strength and fame lie, not in the long philosophic or narrative poem, but in songs and ballads, patriotic like Ye Mariners of England, The Battle of the Baltic, and Hohenlinden, or romantic like Lochiel's Warning and Lord Ullin's Daughter. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), banker and lavish entertainer of Rogers, literary men, wrote The Pleasures of Memory (1792) and Italy Hogg, and (1822), neither of which has more than an historical interest in others. in our day. James Hogg (1770-1835), the Ettrick Shepherd of Christopher North's' Noctes Ambrosianae, lives by a few of the ballads for instance, Donald McGillavry, and Lock the door, Lariston '-occurring in The Forest Minstrel (1810), and elsewhere; and by The Queen's Wake (1813), a succession of tales and songs sung to Mary, Queen of Scots, by competing bards. This collection contains the finely conceived Kilmeny, the tale of a mortal maiden stolen by fairies and restored seven years later to the bewilderment of earth. Allan Cunningham (1784-1842) belongs in spirit to the age of Burns, and carries on, though with no great mastery, the tradition of the 'makars'. On a lower level ranks William Thom (1798-1848), author of Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver. With these we are on the eve of a fresh transition. The Rise of the Reviews and the Edinburgh. CHAPTER XXVII MISCELLANEOUS PROSE OF THE EARLY Rise of the Reviews - Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Brougham - The great THE end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was a period prolific in great essayists, whose careers were largely determined by the rise of such famous -Jeffrey reviews and magazines as the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, Blackwood, and the London Magazine. The growth of the new spirit is as strongly evident in these writers as in the poets of the period, and may be best illustrated by a survey of their work. The Edinburgh Review was a quarterly founded in 1802 and conducted mainly in the Whig interest by Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Brougham. Smith edited its first number, but after his departure from Edinburgh to London, his place was taken by Jeffrey, then a briefless advocate at the Scottish Bar, and subsequently a Scottish judge. The first number of the Review made a great impression, both in England and Scotland, and its reputation was sustained by the continued brilliancy of its articles. The Edinburgh', said Jeffrey, has but two legs to stand on. Literature is one of them, but its right leg is politics.' It was in virtue of the left leg that Scott, the high Tory, became an early contributor to the Review. The moving spirits remained the three men just mentioned. From first to last Jeffrey contributed some two hundred articles to the Edinburgh, and these display considerable fluency and force of style, and a judgment which was acute and just within its not very wide limits. He did small justice to Shelley and Keats, though his review of Endymion is discrimination itself compared with the Blackwood article. The opening Sydney Brougham. 6 words of his criticism on Wordsworth's Excursion- This will never do '—have become a by-word, though that criticism as a whole is by no means cruel or unfair. The contributions of Sydney Smith are distinguished by balance, sanity, and a dislike of mysticism; but above all by the incorrigible and irresistible sallies of wit and humour which seem subsequently to have told against him when his name was proposed for a bishopric. It was Smith who suggested as a punning motto for the Edinburgh the Virgilian tag Tenui musam meditamur avena. For this was eventually substituted the even more appropriate Iudex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur. Perhaps Smith's best-known work is his Letters of Peter Plymley, written in favour of Catholic Emancipation. The most notable qualities of Henry Brougham (17781868), subsequently Lord Chancellor of England, were his |