XX.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

XXI.

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

TO NIGHT.

Swiftly walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!

Out of the misty eastern cave,

Where all the long and lone daylight
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,-
Swift be thy flight!

Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!

Blind with thine hair the eyes of day,

Kiss her until she be wearied out,

Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand-
Come, long sought!

When I arose and saw the dawn
I sighed for thee;

When light rode high, and the dew was gone,

And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,

And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest,—

I sighed for thee.

Thy brother Death came, and cried,
Wouldst thou me?—

Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noontide bee,

Shall I nestle near thy side?

Wouldst thou me ?—And I replied,
No, not thee!

Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon;

Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night.
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!

SELECTIONS FROM KEATS.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN.

I.

Thou still unravished 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-fringed 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 ecstacy?

II.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
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, Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

III.

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,

Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;

All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

IV.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Leadest 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 forever more
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

V.

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 sayest, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

Much have I traveled 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-browed 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
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Chapter 11.

RECENT WRITERS.-1830.

THE year 1830 may conveniently be regarded as beginning the latest literary epoch of England. Within the limits of a few years, events are thickly clustered about it which mark the breaking up of old conditions and the establishment of new.

in Literature.

By 1830 that extraordinary outburst of poetic genius which began during the closing years of the preceding The New Era century had spent its force. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey still lived, indeed, but their work was done, while the recent and untimely deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron had made a sudden gap in English poetry. Into the firmament thus strangely left vacant of great lights, there rose a new star. It was in 1830 that Alfred Tennyson, the representative English poet of our era, definitely entered the literary horizon by the publication of his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. After him great writers of the new era crowd in quick succession, and the next ten years see the advent of Robert Browning (Pauline, 1833), Elizabeth Barrett-afterwards Mrs. Browning—(Prometheus Bound, 1833), Charles Dickens (Sketches by Boz,

in History.

1834), William Makepeace Thackeray (Yellowplush Papers, 1837), and John Ruskin (Salsette and Elephanta, 1839). The year 1830 is likewise an important one in spheres of thought and action inseparably connected with the literature of the time. The revolutionary. The New Era spirit, temporarily repressed in the conservative reaction that followed the Congress of Vienna, came again to the surface. It was in 1830 that the Bourbon king, Charles X., was driven from the throne of France, an event which awakened in Germany a fervor of democratic feeling which had been but half suppressed. In England the same drift towards social change over-rode the more conservative element; the year 1832 made an epoch in the advance of democracy by the passage of a Reform Bill which greatly increased the political power of the people, and prepared the way for those extensive changes in government which have marked her subsequent history.

From this same period, too, date many of those important changes in the outward conditions of daily. life which have followed the application of modern science to directly practical ends. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway went into operation, the first railroad opened in England; the first electric telegraph followed in 1837, and steam communication with the United States was begun in the following year.

in Science.

Nor was this year 1830 unproductive in that scientific investigation, the results of which have influenced enormously the literary spirit of our time. Sir The New Era Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830), expanding men's imagination by its revelation of the vast duration of the earth's past, was one of the first of those many books of science which during the past half century have combined to modify some of our fundamental ideas of life.