Your course of love, and Ariel still

Has track'd your steps and serv'd
Now in humbler, happier lot,
This is all remembered not;

And now, alas! the poor sprite is
Imprisoned for some fault of his
In a body like a grave.

From you, he only dares to crave,
For his service and his sorrow,
A smile to-day—a song to-morrow.

your will.

The artist who this idol wrought,
To echo all harmonious thought,
Fell'd a tree, while on the steep
The woods were in their winter sleep,
Rock'd in that repose divine
On the wind-swept Apennine :
And dreaming, some of autumn past,
And some of spring approaching fast,
And some of April buds and showers,
And some of songs in July bowers,
And all of love; and so this tree-
O that such our death may be !—
Died in sleep, and felt no pain,

To live in happier form again:

From which, beneath Heaven's fairest star,

The artist wrought this lov'd Guitar,

And taught it justly to reply

To all who question skilfully,

In language gentle as thine owu ;
Whispering in enamour'd tone
Sweet oracles of woods and dells,
And summer winds in sylvan cells;

For it had learnt all harmonies

Of the plains and of the skies,
Of the forest and the mountains,

And the many-voiced fountains,
The clearest echoes of the hills,
The softest notes of falling rills,
The melodies of birds and bees,
The murmuring of summer seas,
And pattering rain, and breathing dew,
And airs of evening; and it knew
That seldom-heard mysterious sound,
Which, driv'n on its diurnal round,
As it floats through boundless day,
Our world enkindles on its way :-
All this it knows, but will not tell
To those who cannot question well
The spirit that inhabits it;
It talks according to the wit
Of its companions; and no more
Is heard than has been felt before,
By those who tempt it to betray
These secrets of an elder day.
But, sweetly as its answers will
Flatter hands of perfect skill,
It keeps its highest, holiest tone
For our beloved friend alone.

This is a Catullian melody of the first water. The transformation of the dreaming wood of the tree into a guitar was probably suggested by Catullus's Dedication of the Galley, — a poem with which I know he was conversant, and which was particularly calculated to please him; for it records the consecration of a favourite old sea-boat to the Dioscuri. The modern poet's imagination beats the ancient; but Catullus

equals him in graceful flow; and there is one very Shelleian passage in the original :

Ubi iste, post phaselus, antea fuit
Comata silva: nam Cytorio in jugo
Loquente sæpe sibilum edidit comȧ.

For of old, what now you see
A galley, was a leafy tree

On the Cytorian heights, and there

Talk'd to the wind with whistling hair.

MUSIC, MEMORY, AND LOVE.

ΤΟ

Music, when soft voices die,1
Vibrates in the memory;

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken;
Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

1" Music, when soft voices die."—This song is a great favourite with musicians: and no wonder. Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the kind more lovely.

KEATS.

BORN, 1796, DIED, 1821.

KEATS was born a poet of the most poetical kind. All his feelings came to him through a poetical medium, or were speedily coloured by it. He enjoyed a jest as heartily as any one, and sympathized with the lowliest common-place; but the next minute his thoughts were in a garden of enchantment, with nymphs, and fauns, and shapes of exalted humanity;

Elysian beauty, melancholy grace.

It might be said of him, that he never beheld an oak-tree without seeing the Dryad. His fame may now forgive the critics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry. Repeated editions of him in England, France, and America, attest its triumphant survival of all obloquy; and there can be no doubt that he has taken a permanent station among the British Poets, of a very high, if not thoroughly mature, description.

Keats's early poetry, indeed, partook plentifully of the exuberance of youth; and even in most of his

later, his sensibility, sharpened by mortal illness, tended to a morbid excess. His region is “a wilderness of sweets," - flowers of all hue, and "weeds of glorious feature,"-where, as he says, the luxuriant soil brings

The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.

But there also is the "rain-scented eglantine," and bushes of May-flowers, with bees, and myrtle, and bay, and endless paths into forests haunted with the loveliest as well as gentlest beings; and the gods live in the distance, amid notes of majestic thunder. I do not say that no "surfeit" is ever there; but I do, that there is no end of the "nectared sweets." In what other English poet (however superior to him in other respects) are you so certain of never opening a page without lighting upon the loveliest imagery and the most eloquent expressions? Name one. Compare any succession of their pages at random, and see if the young poet is not sure to present his stock of beauty; crude it may be, in many instances; too indiscriminate in general; never, perhaps, thoroughly perfect in cultivation; but there it is, exquisite of its kind, and filling envy with despair. He died at five-andtwenty; he had not revised his earlier works, nor given his genius its last pruning. His Endymion, in resolving to be free from all critical trammels, had no versification; and his last noble fragment, Hyperion, is not faultless, but it is nearly so.