claims, and with open hand and heart maintained them. It was in the pages of the Examiner that, amid specimens of young poets, I first made acquaintance with the magnificent sonnet of Keats on reading Chapman's Homer, and with Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. From that hour there could be no moment's question but that great men were come among us; those men who, in fact, "turn the world upside down," and by which turning upside down, the only process, the asps and scorpions of malice are shook out of it, and all its strong-rooted fabrics of prejudice and pride are toppled into the dust. Till death, the souls of these men, who

Learned in suffering what they taught in song,"

never ceased to maintain that brave union thus begun, but amid abuse, misrepresentation, and the vilest onslaughts from the army of the aliens, went on blessing the world with those emanations of splendid and unshackled thought, which are now recognized as among the most precious of the national property. Who in future days will not pray that he might have been as one of these?

It is to the account by Leigh Hunt, in his "Byron and some of his Cotemporaries," that we owe almost all that we know of the life and haunts of Keats. From this we learn that "Mr. Keats's origin was of the humblest description. He was born October 29, 1796, at a livery-stable in Moorfields, of which his grandfather was proprietor. He never spoke of it, perhaps out of a personal soreness which the world had exasperated. After receiving the rudiments of a classical education at Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, he was bound apprentice to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon, in Church-street, Edmonton; and his enemies having made a jest even of this, he did not like to be reminded of it; at once disdaining them for their meanness, and himself for being weak enough to be moved by them. Mr. Clarke, Jun., his schoolmaster's son, a reader of genuine discernment, had encouraged with great warmth the genius that

he saw in the young poet; and it was to Mr. Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him.”

Mr. Hunt, in his warm-hearted way, lost no time in introducing his poetry to the best judges of poetry, among them to Godwin, Hazlitt, Basil Montagu, Charles Lamb, and others. He read to them, among others, that fine sonnet already mentioned, which, as it is printed in a volume now not much seen, can not too often be quoted:

"ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.
"Much have I traveled in the land 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 have I been told,
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet I did never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold,
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes,

He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other in a wild surprise,

Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

The two poets became speedily familiar and almost inseparable. They read, walked, and talked together continually; and Mr. Hunt gives us various particulars of Keats's haunts at this period which are nowhere else to be obtained. "The volume containing the above sonnet," he says, 66 was published in 1817, when the author was in his twenty-first year. The poem with which it begins was suggested to him by a delightful summer day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the battery on Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood; and the last poem, the one on Sleep and Poetry, was occasioned by his sleeping in one of the cottages in the Vale of Health, the first one that fronts to the valley, beginning from the same quarter. I mention these things, which now look trivial, because his readers will not think them so twenty years

hence. It was in the beautiful lane running from the road between Hampstead and Highgate to the foot of Highgate Hill, that, meeting me one day, he first gave me the volume. If the admirer of Mr. Keats's poetry does not know the lane in question, he ought to become acquainted with it, both on his author's account and its own. It has been also paced by Mr. Lamb and Mr. Hazlitt, and frequently, like the rest of the beautiful neighborhood, by Mr. Coleridge; so that instead of Millfield Lane, which is the name it is known by on earth,' it has sometimes been called Poet's Lane, which is an appellation it richly deserves. It divides the grounds of Lords Mansfield and Southampton, running through trees and sloping meadows, and being rich in the botany for which this part of the neighborhood of London has always been celebrated.” Mr. Hunt was at this time living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health, and the house at which it is said Keats wrote the beautiful poem on Sleep and Poetry was his. There is another fact in this account that deserves attention, and that is, the date of the publication of Keats's first small volume. This was 1817; in 1818 he published his Endymion; on the 26th of June, 1820, his third volume, Lamia, and other Poems, was published; and on the 27th of December of the same year he died at Rome. Thus the whole of his poetical life, from the issue of his first small volume to his death, was but about three years. During the greater part of that period he felt his disease, consumption, was mortal. Yet what progress in the development of his powers, and the maturing of his judgment and feeling of art, was manifested in that short space and under those circumstances! The first volume was a volume of immature fancies and unsettled style, but with things which denoted the glorious dawn of a short but illustrious day. The Endymion had much extravngance. It was a poetical effervescence. The mind of the writer was haunted by crowds of imaginations, and scenes of wonder, and dreams of beauty, chiefly from the VOL L-X

old mythological world, but mingled with the passion for living nature, and the warmest feelings of youth. It brought forward the deities of Greece, and invested them with the passions and tenderness of men, and all the youthful glow which then reigned in the poet's heart. The mind was boiling over from intense heat; but amid the luscious foam rose streams of the richest wine of poetry which ever came from the vintage of this world. The next volume, Lamia, Isabella, &c., showed how the heady liquor had cleared itself, and become spirit bright and strong. There was an aim, a settled plan and purpose in each composition, and a steady power of judgment growing up amid all the vivid impulses of the brain that still remained vivid as ever. The style was wonderfully condensed, and the descriptive as well as conceptive faculty had assumed a vigor and acumen which was not, and is not, and probably never will be, surpassed by any other poet. For proofs to justify these high terms, it is only necessary to open the little volume, and open it almost any where. How powerful and tender is the narrative of Isabella; how rich, and gorgeous, and chaste, and well-weighed is the whole of St. Agnes's Eve; how full of the soul of poetry is The Ode to the Nightingale. Perhaps there is no poet, living or dead, except Shakspeare, who can pretend to any thing like the felicity of epithet which characterizes Keats. One word or phrase is the essence of a whole description or sentiment. It is like the dull substance of the earth struck through by electric fires, and converted into veins of gold and diamonds. For a piece of perfect and inventive description, that passage from Lamia, where, Lycius gone to bid the guests to his wedding, Lamia, in her uneasy excitement, employs herself and her demon powers in adorning her palace, is unrivaled:

"It was the custom then to bring away

The bride from home at blushing shut of day,
Veiled, in a chariot, heralded along

By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage-song,

With other pageants: but this fair unknown
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 most 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
The glaring banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace
A haunting music, sole, perhaps, and lone

Supportress of the fairy roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.

Fresh carved cedar mimicking a glade

Of palm and plantain, sent from either side

High in the midst, in honor of the bride,

Two palms, and then two plantains, and so on;

From either side their stems branched one to one

All down the aisled place; and beneath all

There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall.

So canopied lay an untasted feast

Teeming with odors. Lamia, regal dress'd,
Silently paced about, and as she went,

In pale, contented, silent discontent,
Missioned her viewless servants to enrich
The fretted splendor of each nook and niche:
Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first,
Came jasper panels; then anon there burst
Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees,
And with the larger wove in small intricacies.

Approving all, she faded at self-will,

And shut the chamber up, close, hushed, and still,

Complete and ready for the revels rude,

When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude."

The description of Lamia undergoing the metamorphosis by which she escaped from the form of a serpent to that of a beautiful woman, is marvelous for its power and pre

cision of language.

"Left to herself, the serpent now began

To change: her elfin blood in madness ran,