Chapter 1 of Days with Great Poets. Days with Great Poets. About four o'clock on a September morning of 1665, when the sun was not yet shining upon his windows facing the artillery fields, and the autumnal dew lay wet upon his garden leaves. John Milton awoke with his customary punctuality, and, true to his austere and abstentious mode of life, wasted no time over comfortable indolence. He rose and proceeded to dress with the help of his man-servant green. However, although he was but fifty-four years in age, his hands were partially crippled with gout and chalkstones, and his eyes, clear, bright and blue, as they had always been to outward seeming, were both stone-blind. Milton still retained much of that personal comeliness which had won him at Cambridge, the nickname of Lady of Christ College. His original red and white had now become a uniform pallor. His thick, light-brown hair parted at the top, and curling richly on his shoulders, no close-cropped roundhead this, was beginning to fade towards grey. But his features were noble and symmetrical. He was well-built and well-proportioned. He was justified in priding himself upon a personal appearance which he had never neglected or despised. In his own words he was neither large nor small, at no time had he been considered ugly, and in his youth with a sword by his side he had never feared the bravest. Such was the man who now, neatly dressed in black, was led into his study upon the same floor as his bedroom.  One after another they entered the room, and each bestowed a characteristic greeting upon her father. Anne, the eldest, a handsome girl of twenty, was lame, and had a slight impediment in her speech. She bade him good morning with a stammering carelessness, inquired casually as to his night's rest, and stared out of window, palpably bored at the commencement of another monotonous, irksome day. Mary, the second, dark, impetuous, and impatient, was in a state of small during rebellion. She addressed him in a tone of almost insolent moxivility. He must needs have been deaf as well as blind, not to detect the unfealial dislike in her words. Ten-year-old Deborah, the most affectionate of the three, ventured to kiss her father, even to stroke the long, beautiful hair, and to retie the tassels of his collar. Mary will read to me this morning, said Milton, gravely inclining his head in acknowledgment of Deborah's attentions. The dark girl, with a mutiny strug of her shoulders, sat down and began to read aloud, in a hard, uninterested voice, out of the great, leather-bound Hebrew Old Testament, which lay upon the table. And not one single sentence did she understand, not one word of what she was reading. John Milton's theories of education, which he had expounded at length in pamphlets, were a curious blend of the practical and the ideal. Justly in advance of his time, in his demand for a practical training, he had evolved that fine definition, which has never been improved upon. I call it complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices both private and public, of peace and war. But he made no allowances for slowness or stupidity. All his schemes were based upon the existence of scholars equally gifted with himself, and he entirely left out of all calculations, much as a Mohammedan might, that complex organism, the female mind. He wished it when must conjecture, to remain a blank. So his daughters had received no systematic schooling, only some sort of home instruction from a governess. And he had himself trained them to read aloud in five or six languages, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and even Syriac, in total ignorance of the meaning. One tongue, observed Milton brusquely, almost brutally, is enough for any woman. Mary read on, steadily, stallingly, sullenly, for a full hour. The others had left the room and were busy upon household tasks. At the conclusion of two hours, leave me, commanded Milton. I would be alone now for contemplation. And Mary willingly escaped to breakfast. The great poet reclined in his chair, wrapped in such solemn and melancholy meditation, as might have served as the model for his own pinciroso. A severe composure suffused his fine features. A serious sadness looked out of his unclouded eyes. His entire expression was that of English intrepidity, mixed with unutterable sorrow, for Milton was a bitterly disappointed man. It was not merely his comparative poverty, because the restoration, besides depriving him of his post as Latin or foreign secretary to the Commonwealth Council of State, had reduced his means from various sources almost to vanishing point. Nor was his melancholy mainly the result of his affliction, that he had deliberately incurred, and was as deliberately enduring. Constant headaches, late study, and perpetual recourse to one nostrum after another, had eventuated in the certainty of total blindness if he persisted in his mode of work. The choice lay before me between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight, and I therefore concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I had to enjoy in doing this the greatest service to the common wheel that it was in my power to render. No, it was not a personal matter which could sadden John Milton to the very roots of his stern, ambitious, courageous soul. It was the contravention of all that he held dear in life, the frustration as he conceived it, of that liberty which was his very heart's blood by the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. He had resolved, in his own words, to transfer into the struggle for liberty, all my genius and all the strength of my industry. It appeared that he had flung away both in vain. The Stuart monarchy to him lay monstrously black, overshadowing all the land, like his own conception of Satan. The restoration was not merely the political defeat of his party, it was the total defeat of the principles, of the religious and social ideals with which Milton's life was bound up. He had always stood aloof from the other salient men of the time. Of Cromwell he had practically no personal knowledge, with the bulk of the Presbyterians he was openly at enmity. Shut away behind a barrier of his own ideas, he did not care to associate with men of less lofty intellectual standing, but now he was even more isolated. Since the downfall of the Puritan regime, he of necessity stood alone and became the party himself. And he presented in his Samson agonisties the intensest utterance of the most intensive English poets, the agonized cry of the beaten party, condensed into the expression of one unflinching and heroic soul. Upon the mysterious and inscrutable decrees of Providence, which had laid in the dust what seemed to him the very cause of God, Milton sat and pondered, in a despondency so profound, a disappointment so poignant, that his own great lines had sought in vain to voice it. I feel my genial spirit's droop, my hopes all flat, nature within me seems in all her functions weary of herself, my race of glory run and my race of shame, and I shall shortly be with them that rest, Samson agonisties. Yet his indomitable spirit was by no means quenched in despair, and an outlet was now open to him at last which for eighteen years he had forgotten, the outlet of poetic expression. He was conscious of his capacity to travel and to traverse the regions which none had dared explore Saint Dante, and with that tremendous chief of pioneers he was measuring himself, man to man. He was able above the turmoil of faction and the tumult of conflicting troubles to weigh his spread wings at leisure to behold far off the ephemeral heaven, extended wide in circuit, undetermined square or round, with opal towers and battlements adorned of living sapphire, once his native seat. Paradise lost. That Milton had been silent for so long a period was due, first to his preoccupation with political and polemical questions, into which he had thrown the whole weight of his mind. And secondly, to the effect of his own firm resolve that the great epic which he had always secretly intended should be the outcome of matured and ripened powers. The apathesis of all that was worthiest in him, the full fruit of his strenuous life. He had long since arrived at that conclusion, never surpassed in its terceness and truth, that true poetry must be simple, sensuous, impassioned, words which might serve as the text and touchstone of art. And long it was not after when he was confirmed in this opinion that he who would not be frustrated of his hopes to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem. For poetry to John Milton was no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal, in his hand the thing became a trumpet, apt to seraphic usages and the rallying of celestial cohorts. Therefore when he ceased to touch the tender stops of various quills that trembled into silence and licitice, it was not as one discomfited of his attainment. Rather it was as one convinced of a mighty purpose and patiently awaiting the just time of its fulfillment. The woodnotes wild of Comus, the exquisitely stipled genre painting of Allegro and Pinciroso, were mere childish attempts compared with that monumental work to which Milton firmly proposed to devote the fruition of his genius. And now having become a man through mental and physical experience even more than through the passage of years, he had put away childish things. He had resolved at last upon and had at last undertaken the one subject most congenial to his taste and most suitable to his style and diction. Paradise Lost was the triumphant offspring of his brain. It had sprung like light from chaos, out of the darkness of poverty, blindness and defeat. A rose the poem which was to set him on the pinnacles of Parnassus. You make many inquiries as to what I am about. He wrote in bygone years to his old school fellow Charles Diodati. What I am thinking of? Why, with God's help, of immortality? Forgive the word. I only whisper it in your ear. Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight. Nor was this the idle boasting of an egotist, the empty imagination of a dreamer. Consumed by the desire of honor and repute and universal fame seated, as he put it, in the breast of every true scholar, Milton, sedulously and assiduously, had prepared himself for the achievement of his aims. That he should strictly meditate the thankless muse required a certain self-control. To scorn delights and live laborious days is not the customary delight of a handsome young scholar, expert in swordsmanship as in languages. To equip himself for his self-chosen task, still a misty, undefined prospect in the remotest future required strenuous and disciplined study and necessitated his foregoing too frequently the scenes of rustic happiness, which he had pictured so charmingly in the legro. Absenting himself from the groves and ruins and the beloved village elms where I too, among rural scenes and remotest forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden eternity. And this, though Milton had neither the eye nor the ear of a born nature-lover, was in itself a sufficient deprivation and sacrifice. For beauty appealed to him with the most earnest insistence, and the purer and the more abstract form it took, the more urgent was that appeal. God hasn't stilled into me at all events, he declared, of the hemmed love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor as Cersei said to have sought Persephone, as I am want day and night, to search for the idea of the beautiful through all forms and faces of things, and to follow it, leading me on with certain assured traces. Yet not alone among forms and faces was he predestined to discover that absolute beauty. The passionate love of music, so frequently characteristic of a great linguist, which led him into sound worlds as well as sight worlds, was faded to remain with him an incalculable consolation when forms and faces could be no more seen, and into the vocabulary of Paradise Lost, that incomparably rich vocabulary, with its infallible ear for rhythm, for phrase, for magnificent consonantal effects, and the magic of great names that reverberate through open vowels. Into this he poured forth his whole sense of beautiful sound. As the wakeful bird sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid, tunes her nocturnal note. Paradise Lost remains, as has been observed, the elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry, the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great, and the wise of all past time, equally magnificent in verbiage whether describing man, or God, or the arch enemy visiting this pendant world, when thither full fraught with mischievous revenge accursed, and in accursed hour he lives. At seven o'clock the body-servant Green re-entered, followed by Mrs. Milton, the poet's third wife, and by Mary Fisher their maid-servant, bringing in his breakfast, a light slight-re-past. Mrs. Milton, nay, Elizabeth, mensual of Natwitch, was a comely, attractive, capable woman of a peaceful and agreeable humor so far at least as her husband was concerned, for she shared the traditional destiny of a stepmother in not hitting it off with the first wife's daughters. Her golden hair and calm common sense were in striking contrast alike with the dark beauty and petulant spirit of Mary Powell, and with the fragile sweetness of Catherine Woodstock, Milton's former spouses. If she did not in her heart confirm her husband's celebrated theory of the relative position of man and wife, he forgot only she forgot in him, which it has been said condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and to her maker. She managed very adroitly to convey an impression of entire acquiescence in the will of her lord, and at least she was entirely adequate as a housewife. Had Milton ever encountered that not impossible she, whom he portrayed in his ideal Eve, or was this latter a mere visionary abstract of great qualities to show us how divine a thing a woman may be made. Neither of his three wives, nor yet that very handsome and witty gentle woman, Miss Davis, to whom he had at one time paid his addresses, conformed to this description. One cannot even conjecture that it was a pisticio of their respective fine attributes. Mrs. Milton, third of that name, as she bustled and busied herself about the study, was by no means a new Eve. She regarded her husband's ambitions and achievements with that good nature tolerance so characteristic of the materially minded. Only genius can appreciate genius, and the man who shut himself away from his confrers in scholarship and literature was not likely to unbosom himself to his housewifely, provincial wife. The man's servant Green, breakfast being concluded, read aloud, or wrote to his master's dictation for some hours. This had formally been the girl's daily office, but they were revolting more and more. The whole position was becoming untenable, for they resented the presence of their stepmother as much as they disliked the duties which fettered them to their father's side and forced them to parrot-like feudal drudgery in unknown tongues. Today, however, Green was relieved of the task for which he was manifestly but ill-fitted by the entrance of Milton's two favorite visitors. No celebrity ever had fewer friends. From all who might have called themselves such, he was separated by hostility of party, rancor of sect, or by that almost repellent isolation of character to which reference has already been made. When, at the highest point of his political fame, he had almost boasted of this splendid isolation, I have very little acquaintance with those in power in as much as I keep very much to my own house and prefer to do so. At heart a Republican beyond the conception of any roundhead, cherishing a form of religion so recondite that it could be classed under no heading since he ignored both public worship and family prayer, having given offence to all and sundry by his outspoken theories upon divorce and divine right, Milton presented to most men a dangerous personality. And most of all now when the wits of the Restoration Ruse could be sharpened upon him and when the heathen, as he considered them, roistered and ruffled it through the city that had returned to her wallowing in the mire. Yet those who had sat at his feet as pupils retained a singular affection for their former master. For all such young folk as adopted the disciples attitude, the stern self-contained man had a very soft spot in his heart. With such he was not only instructive but genial, almost cheerful, and they alone could move him to the only utterances which were neither solemn, serious or sad. Chief among his former pupils were those who now made entrance, Henry Lawrence and Syriac Skinner. It may be guessed, therefore, with that pleasure the blind poet received these loyal and affectionate men. His pensive face became transformed with interest and animation. As with gentle courtesy and unfaigned delight, he turned his sightless eyes from one speaker to another. Upon every subject he had a ready flow of easy colloquial conversation seasoned with shrewd satire. His deep and musical voice ran up and down the whole gamut of worthy topics. Sometimes he fell into the stately, almost stilt addiction of his great prose pamphlets. Sometimes he spoke in racy English vernacular. Sometimes warming to his subject he assumed an almost fiery eloquence. But when, at twelve o'clock, he was escorted downstairs to dinner in the parlor, the metamorphosis was complete. He was no longer the brooding introspective man of the early morning, but of one extreme pleasant in his conversation, almost merry in society so congenial, the life of the party, abstinent but not acetic, having a healthy human enjoyment of the dishes set before him. These are the victual's most my liking, he observed as he ate. Being sensible and with all of no great cost, for that which is of great rarity or richness, and must be procured with care or toil hath no temptation for me. I always do my best, Mr. Milton, replied his wife, that you shall be well satisfied and me thinks today I have hit your taste right fairly. God her mercy, Betty! said Milton, regarding her with an air of kindly tolerance. I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise in providing me such dishes as I think fit while I live, and when I die thou knowest I have left thee all. Here Anne, Mary, and Deborah sat up very straight, it looks a fury and astonishment towards their stepmother. Talk not a dying in God's name, man! responded the embarrassed Betty. We have enough to do to make shift to live nowadays, and hastily pressed her good but simple fare, homely Cheshire dishes well prepared upon the two guests. Such a many alone foreign folk have visited our poor home these latter days. Time hath failed me for my cheesecakes, and of the haather cakes I made two days ago.  Though these be but country victuals none of your court kickshaws, I warrant you there are fresh and savoury. I would commend you now to this rabbit pie. Peace, Betty, peace! The woman prats her pies like a pie, magpie herself. What sayeth the apostle? I suffer not a woman to speak in the presence of the man's authority. Had done, good Betty, with thy harping on kitchen matters, let thy savoury messes be companioned with a sauce of silence. Temporary eclipses of Mrs. Milton, obvious in malevolent satisfaction of Anne and Mary, desperately suppressed inclination to giggle on the part of little Deborah, and a desire to cover up the situation with talk as regards kindly Lawrence and courtly Skinner. The foreign folk were no new thing. Milton's fame indeed was European. As a prose writer and pamphleteer, be it understood not, as a poet, had he not refuted and put to shame the most erudite scholars of the day. Foreign savants of note, therefore, who might be visiting London, were desirous to acquaint themselves with so powerful a personality. And the little house in the artillery walk was the rendezvous for many distinguished persons. They found their host no such recluse as town talk might have led them to imagine, but one ready and willing to converse with them, and English gentleman to the backbone, a scholar and artist to the fingertips. His continental tours and Italian sojourns had made him less insular than most of his compatriots, and his vast range of reading had imparted a certain cosmopolitanism to his exceedingly individual lines of thought. The visitors found him moreover employed upon a work so important and of a theme so lofty as might well give them pause considering the circumstances under which it was being accomplished. And whatever their particular religious tenets might be, they could not fail to admire the magnitude of his aim in composing Paradise Lost. To justify the ways of God. To men. Dinner dispatched, the master of the house led by his devoted friends, went out into the garden. A garden was the desideratum of his existence, and he had never been without one. For in 17th century London, every house was fitly furnished in this respect. Here Milton was in the habit of taking that steady exercise, which was a sinquanon to a sedentary and gouty man. He made a point of walking up and down out of doors in cold weather for three or four hours at a time, sometimes composing his majestic lines, sometimes merely meditating. When weary with walking he would come in and either dictate what he had conceived or would take further exercise in a swing. In really warm weather he received his visitors sitting outside his house door, wrapped in a coarse grey overcoat, gazing out upon the fields of the artillery ground with those unblemished eyes that belied their own clear beauty. The only point, as he said, in which I am against my will a hypocrite. Today being cool and cloudy allowed but intermittent periods in the open air. Milton Lawrence and Skinner paced slowly to and fro deep and enthralling intercourse until three o'clock when the rain and Thomas Elwood arrived simultaneously, and the other two men departed to the respective avocations. Thomas Elwood was a young Quaker of twenty-three, who was acting in some degree as honorary secretary to Milton. Himself of a defective education and having been expelled from his father's house on account of his religious opinions, he was only too glad to take lodging in the neighbourhood, and by reading aloud to Milton every afternoon, acquire an amount of information and a variety of learning which by no other means could have been obtained. And there was also a tacit sympathy between them in so much as Milton was more and more as life went on inclining towards the Quaker tenants. In those days, being in tendu, veered with horror and detestation by the majority of men. Having re-entered the house, we will not read as yet, Tom. Milton said, I desire greatly to comfort myself with sweet sounds, bring me into the withdrawing room and place me at the organ. A little bellows blowing will not hurt thee, Tom, and let my wife attend me that she may have song with all. She had the good voice, though a poor ear. Seated at his beloved instrument, the blind man steeped himself in the principal pleasure that was left him. Milton's father, a stout Puritan, though he might be, was an accomplished musician and had taught his son to play in early youth. The austerities of a narrow dogma had not been able to crush out the inveterate artistry of either father or son, and now the devotee of divinest melancholy was able to solace himself with such lovely concords, such anthems clear, as may with sweetness through my ear dissolve me into ecstasies and bring all heaven before my eyes. Sometimes he sang as he played, sometimes Mrs. Milton with her clear and emotional notes sang to his accompaniment. Presently, that Elwood should not be wearied in his blowing, he quitted the organ for the bass file, on which he was no mean performer. At the conclusion of his playing he sat with a wrapped, transfigured face, such as might have well called forth the Italians in Commium thirty years before, if thy piety were equal to thy understanding, figure, eloquence, beauty, and manners, verily thou wouldst not be an angle but an angel. And now, good Tom, quote Milton to the young man, let us to work. The day moves on apace, and they went upstairs to study. Before we read I have some forty lines to set down, continue the poet. All day they have been knocking for admission, and with that last music they made entrance. Needs must I house them now in ink and paper. I am instant at thy bidding friend, and Elwood seated himself with dutiful alacrity at the table. Milton, placing himself obliquely a thwart as elbow chair, with one leg thrown across the arm, dictated forty lines almost in a breath. They burst from him, as it would seem, in a stream no longer to be restrained. Gently, gently good sir, exclaimed Elwood, slow witted and slow fingered I may be, but I cannot keep pace with thee. A grim smile hovered over Milton's lips. Out of practice, Tom, he replied indulgently, It is a long while since I require this service at thy hands, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox as I have told thee my muse lies dumb, and silent as the moon, when she deserts the night, hid in her vacant interlunal cave. But now the winter is over past, the singing of birds is heard in our land, and she too awakes and sings. With the vernal equinox my thoughts now flow free as helicon. Then with slow and deliberate diction, he repeated the lines once more, and having had them read aloud to him he compressed, condensed, concentrated every thought and phrase, and reduced them to twenty. There is more to come, queried Elwood, his quill poised ready to write. No more, not one word more at present, replied Milton sighing as though somewhat exhausted. No more, not one word more at present, replied Milton sighing as though somewhat exhausted. His inspiration was entirely intermittent, and sometimes he would lie awake at night, trying but without success to complete one single line to his liking. They pleased me not wholly these lines, he continued, much remains to be done before I set them down to be changed no more. Not every man would say so, replied Elwood, the learning and the erudition whereof these few lines alone give witness would supply many with just cause for boasting throughout a lifetime. Milton shook his head. Pomp, an ostentation of reading, he remarks, is admired among the vulgar. But in matters of religion he is learnedadest, who is plainest. Yet Mr. Milton these hath the reputation of such scope and range of wisdom as the greatest scholar in Europe might fitly envy. To me I confess in my poor, unlettered ignorance. It is not conceivable in what manner have they acquired so great and witty powers. I gathered them not of my own strength, said Milton. But they were mine for the asking and endeavor, and any man may obtain them in the like fashion. I ceased not, nor will cease, in devout prayer to the Holy Spirit, that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases. To this must be added select reading, and steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs. And now, good Tom, to reading. Elwood took up the Latin author which he was at present engaged upon, and proceeded with it. Whenever the preternaturally acute ear of Milton detected, by Elwood's intonation, that he did not quite understand a sentence. He would stop him, examine him, and elucidate the difficult passage. By and by you will find saying very similar to that, he observed, in Virgil his fourth echelon, fetched the book down, and let us hear what the mantu and hath written therein. Elwood searched along the bookshelves but to no avail. Friend, said he, Virgil is no longer here. Yesterday I handled it myself. Today it is vanished. So is the Lucretius. A frown contracted Milton's splendid brow.  They are verily the root of all evil. Bid me hither my wife and daughters and Mary Fisher the maid moreover. The first and the last being summoned, arrived in all haste, and disavowed any knowledge of the missing books. Anne and Mary Milton it appeared, were gone out marketing, but little Dabra being strictly cross-examined, confessed that she had seen sister Anne carrying books away from the study last night when her father had retired. The wherewithal for marketing was easily obtained in this way. Milton groaned in his ineptitude. How have I deserved this treacherous dealing at their hands? Lord, how long shall I be dark and light exposed to daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong within doors and without, still as a fool in power of others never in my own? Samson agonisties. Here, and by a happy coincidence, there was a sturdy hammering heard at the front door, and Andrew Marvel was ushered in. I am out of my due time, said he, for it is not yet gone six. Six to eight p.m. being Milton's best time for receiving visitors. Yet to so old an offender as myself, John, I thought thou wilt make an exception. Marvel was the one friend of his own type in standing, the one constant and inalienable comrade upon whose fidelity the blind man could rely. He had formally been Milton's colleague under the Cromwellian government, and was his kindred spirit so far as anyone could claim such relationship with the frozen heights of the poet's intellect. With him, during the next two hours, the learned physician Paget joining them and Elwood listening in respectful silence to the converse of the mighty men, Milton forgot the vexations of his ill-assorted household. He assured his friends that he was truly far happier now in poverty, infirmity and neglect, occupied solely upon his long-projected masterpiece, than during the eighteen years of his manly prime, when his mind and pen were solely employed upon the controversies which he now professed to hate. Never again, he declared, shall earthly ambitions interrupt and thwart me. Never now shall I endure to leave a calm and pleasing solitaryness fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes. Cast out of my fool's paradise of fame not worth the finding, shall not I and the hope whereon too I am wedded explore some fair and fragrant track of outer Eden? Even as I have set forth the banishment of our first parents, some natural tears they dropped but wiped them soon. The world was as before them where to choose their place of rest and providence their guide. They, hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way. Paradise lost. The four men now, at eight o'clock, went down to supper. A very spare and frugal meal so far as Milton was concerned, for all he consumed was a very light wine, a piece of bread, and a few olives. His flow of speech was still unwirried, his spirit as near vivacity as he could approach it when his friends rose to take leave. The night is yet young, said Paget, but I know that nowadays you seek rest early. That is so, Milton assented. Since I am no longer able to study a night and sense the best of secretaries, he smiled towards Elwood. Must needs grow weary of a blind man's whims. I were as well in bed as Outfit, moreover I can compose my lines in better advantage lying down. One thing at least you were spared, Marvel told him, darkness cannot discmode your doings, nor doth your eye-weariness of the midnight student afflict you with grevious brow-akes in the morning as of old. Milton answered, my darkness hitherto by the singular kindness of God, amid rest and studies, and the voices and greetings of friends, has been much easier to bear than the deathly one. What should prevent me from resting in the belief that I site lies not in eyes alone, but enough for all purposes in God's leading and providence, and to you now I bid farewell with a mind not less brave and steadfast than if I were lincious himself or keenness of sight? In a short space of time he was at rest in his darkened room, not as yet drowsy, but revolving great phrases and deriving a greater joy from these lonely silences of the night watches than could ever accrue to him by day. Gradually the aisles and bowers of the paradise, which his mental eye enjoyed, took upon them more and more the lovely similitude of rural England, the greennesses and sweetnesses of his childhood's home, the Buckinghamshire village, were fused into the eternal spring of the primeval garden, and from the glassy, cool, translucent wave of the river that ran through Eden, by the rushy, fringed bank, where grows the Willow and the Ossier bank, a rose Sabrina attended by water-nymphs as once he saw her rise in comas and sang the stightless bard to sleep with the plashing of water music. End of Chapter 1 Recording by Capricia Page A Day With Colourage In a beautiful part of beautiful Somerset, where the soft orchard and cottage scenery is dimpled between blue hill slopes, where meadows and woods and translucent streams compete with each other in charm, in the lovely region of the Quantuck Hills lies the quiet little market village of Nether Stoey. About sunrise on a May morning of 1790 a young man awoke in a little wayside cottage there, and resolutely thrusting back his natural inclination to indolence, rose and dressed, and set himself to the performance of such humble duties as devolve upon a very poor householder with a wife and child. Samuel Taylor Colourage was in his 26th year.  It was a face, in short, to match his general appearance, which he dismissed as that of indolence capable of energies, and Carlisle characterized as weakness under possibility of strength, for this was a man who was consistent in his faults as in his virtues, always conscious of power, but also conscious of want of will to use his power. And it was therefore with redoubled vigor, this particular morning, that he put on a spurt and threw unusual force into his chopping of firewood, his somewhat clumsy attempts to clean up the cottage with its poor accommodation and few utensils, and his valiant if ineffectual endeavours to have the fire lighted and the modest meal enroute, whilst his wife, up the ladder stairs, attended to herself and the baby. Between whiles he cast admiring glances of the most ardent delight at his garden of an acre and a half, and its glowing mass of apple-bloom, and at all the luscious greeneries of the May World without. These glimpses into the opening paradise went far to compensate him for his determination to keep no servant, but to be made of all work and nurse if need be himself. They ministered to that spirit of contemplation which was the ruling spirit of his life. They were the very texture of dreams. Soon Sarah Coleridge descended and took her share in the domestic life. She found fault after a quick vivacious fashion with her husband's futile efforts and perplexities. She was the typical incompatible wife for a poet, not only socially speaking his inferior but naturally incapable of sharing his dreams or sympathising with his studies. Yet she was an honest and good-hearted woman, and perhaps now and then she felt a certain lack of human warmth in the warmest of human friendships, for there was a tepid quality about Coleridge's affections and his expression of them. Fire and fervour were utterly unknown to his pensive, tender, gentle methods. He had no intensity or passion either in love or friendship. His feelings were steadfast and of an unblemished purity, yet the very fact that they knew neither ebb nor flow, but were always maintained at a calm level, might jar upon the inscrutable mind of a woman. One might almost imagine, as Sarah bustled to and fro and scolded her husband with the volubility of a squirrel, that she was anxious to urge him, if for but one moment, out of his invariable laissez-faire of amiability. But no, he remained as placid, as good-tempered, as cheerful as ever. Presently another member of the household appeared. Coleridge's pupil and paying guest, worth a precious seventy pounds a year to the lean ex-checker, one Charles Lloyd. He was a young bank clerk, who had poetry on the brain and found himself ill-attuned to the drudgery of keeping his father's ledgers. He was also subject to epileptic fits, which did not conduce either to poetizing or banking with success. But he expected to learn from Coleridge, it is hard to say. Certainly his curriculum included a good many hardships, makeshifts and contra-tents, to which he had never looked forward. His instructor, however, had not deceived him as to the hybrid nature of his present occupation. Coleridge had deliberately set himself down at Nether Stoey to be his friend Tom Poole and to support himself by a mixture of literature and husbandry. He proposed to make some sixty pounds per annum by reviewing and magazine work. He had an offer from Cottle, the Bristol publisher, for as much verse as he chose to write, at terms working out somewhere near four pence a line. And for the rest I would rather, he declared, be an expert self-maintaining gardener Milton, for I could not unite both. I mean to raise the vegetables for myself and wife, and feed a couple of snouted and grunting cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature. And what, inquired Charles Lamb after hearing of this desperate undertaking, what does your worship know about farming? But Coleridge was not to be discouraged. He allowed his natural unfitness for the task. I am, and ever have been, a great reader, and I have read almost everything. I am deep in all out of the way books, whether of the monkish times or of the puritanical era. I have read and digested most of the historic writers, but I do not like history. Metaphysics and poetry and facts of the mind, that is, accounts of all the strange fantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers, from Toth the Egyptian to Taylor the English Pagan, are my darling studies. In short, I seldom read except to amuse myself, and I am almost always reading. Of useful knowledge I am a so-so chemist and I love chemistry, all else is blank. But I will be, please God, a horticulturist and farmer. What is to be done against such impregnable obstinacy? Coleridge's friends let him gang his aingate, and when Moway could dare threatened to drive him to despair, they came to the rescue with timely checks. Meanwhile, Tom Poole strove hard to educate him in potato culture, and Charles Lloyd paid down his twenty-five shillings a week. But today Charles Lloyd was looking ill at ease and sulky. He threw out hints about the general discomfort of things, vague allusions to other people being made much of and, himself, contempt. He was in a disagreeable mood and evidently dying to pick a quarrel. Half through breakfast he took ombridge at some inoffensive jest and flung himself out of the room. What can ale the lad? asked Coleridge in amazement. I suppose he has another fit coming on, observed the practical Sarah. I don't like sour looks and bitter words in our peaceful home, said the poet, rumbling his heavy black locks with a distracted air. God forbid that he should take it into his head to go away, said Sarah, and she got up with a very grave face and proceeded to clear the breakfast table. Coleridge betook himself to the garden and called over the back hedge to the neighbour for whose companionship he had taken this inefficient little cottage. Thomas Poole, his friend and benefactor, was a well-to-do tanner, well educated, and a devout student of literature. He discerned the potentialities of great things in Coleridge and felt honoured by his acquaintanceship. For the poet had something of that peculiar fascination for more prosaic men, the magnetic charm of personality, which atones for so many minor defects, which obviates weakness and ill-balance of mind, which even endears him who is impossible from a worldly standpoint to those of saner and robuster calibre. Coleridge could never be without a friend, without a listener, and a listener was a desideratum to him. This noticeable man with large grey eyes undoubtedly attracted to himself all that was best in other people. His culture allured them, his eloquence held them spellbound, and his voice, that wonderful voice which was to hazlet, a stream of rich, distilled perfumes sank into every fibre of their being. So you cannot be surprised that the faithful, kindly Thomas Poole, already busy in his tanyard, hearing Coleridge calling at the hedge, instantly forsook his proper tasks and hurried to salute his comrade. When he heard of Charles Lloyd's tendency towards mutiny, oh, says Poole, with a great laugh, don't let that discompose you. The young man is consumed by a very common malady, jealousy. And indeed I think he has some cause. Jealousy, repeated Coleridge, rolling his fine eyes wildly, it was a word which had little or no meaning for him. Jealousy of whom? About whom? I do not understand you in the least. Why your fine friends the words worths, of course, Poole told him.  You have taken precious little notice of him. And as for your friends, they think him but a poor thing, not worth mention. I say he is a lad of spirit to kick up his heels at last. True, true, I may have neglected him to some extent, murmured Coleridge, with a pained air. But indeed, my good Poole, if you knew what the words worth had been to me, manna in the desert, water in the wilderness, happiness like the alighting of a paradise bird. Quite so, my dear fellow, interrupted the unemotional Poole, but you are not now in the pulpit. Bring yourself down to earth for a moment, for I have but little time to spare this morning, and let us see what are the most crying needs of today in your garden. There is enough to do in a May garden to occupy the most diligent, and as Coleridge raked and hod and thinned out and weeded his vegetable beds, with blistered hands and a back that longed for a hinge in it, he was inclined to wish that Lloyd had come as an agricultural rather than a poetical pupil. From time to time he rested on his tool and assimilated with rapt eye the innumerable surrounding touches of simple beauty. He was a man who, like Wordsworth, interested himself in every little trifle. The delicate details of sight and sound were very dear to him. They had enabled him to become one with nature in an almost literal sense, as he observed with a calm but intense enjoyment such side issues as the one red leaf, the last of its clan that dances as often as dance it can, hanging so light and hanging so high on the topmost twig that looks up at the sky, or the unripe flax went through its half transparent stalks at Eve the level sunshine glitters with green light, or the hornet moon with one bright star within the nether tip, and indeed Coleridge was aware himself of the extraordinary power which was exercised upon him by external and visible things, especially by the magic of scenery. He wrote, I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, but my spirit careers, drives and eddies like a leaf in autumn. A wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and impulses of motion rises up within me. The further I ascend from animated nature the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit that neither has nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere, and where is there room for death? And he determinately developed in his theory of poetry his sense of the depths that lie below nature's more superficial aspects. He had accorded to his sleeping babe a few short months before that tenderest of all benedictions, that gift of untarnishable joy. Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, whether the summer clothed the general earth with greenness, or the red breast sit and sing betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch of mossy apple tree, while the nigh thatch smokes in the sun-thaw, whether the eave drops fall heard only in the traces of the blast, or if the secret ministry of frost shall hang them up in silent icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon. And he had conversed at great length and frequency with Wordsworth on what he termed the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. He had no greater pleasure possible than to steep himself in the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure, he proclaimed, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solitude, we have eyes, yet sea-knot, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. And when his imagination craved some wilder and more romantic outlook than the peaceful village where, beside one friend, beneath the impervious covert of one oak, I've raised a lowly shed and know the names of husband and of father, that imagination could at will supply its wants. His eyes could make pictures when they are shot, and could carry him momentarily, as on some magic carpet, to a dreamland beyond the limitations of mortal experience. The same exquisite and meticulous perception which enabled Coleridge to realize and remember the double sound of rain, the quiet sounds from hidden rills among the heather, the slanting shower of blossoms on the faint gale of departing May, revealed to him how, in Zanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through Cavern's measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round, and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree, and here were forests ancient as the hills and folding sunny spots of greenery. But, oh, that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill thwart a seeden cover, a savage place, as holy and enchanted as air beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon-lover. Five miles meandering with amazing motion, through wood and dale the sacred river ran, then reached the Cavern's measureless to man, and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far ancestral voices prophesying war. Such, in fact, was the dual capacity of Kolarage's mind such its ability to commingle the actual and the imaginary that whilst he could at one moment paint the gentle English landscape in which he dwelt. Low was our pretty cot, our tallest rose peeped at the chamber window. We could hear at silent noon and eve and early morn the sea's faint murmur. In the open air our myrtles blossomed, and across the porch, thick jasmine's twined, the little landscape round, was green and woody, and refreshed the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call the valley of seclusion. He was enabled to describe with the verisimilitude of perfect memory the dim sea reaches where now there came both mist and snow, and it grew wondrous cold, and ice, mast high, came floating by as green as emerald, and through the drifts the snowy cliffs did send a dismal sheen, nor shapes of men, nor beasts we can. The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around, it cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swound. At length did cross an albatross, through the fog it came, as if it had been a Christian soul we hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it near had eat, and round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit, the helmsman steered us through. But now, while the sun poured down hotter and still hotter rays upon the unaccustomed back of Coleridge, he heard the hearty voice of Tom Poole summoning him to the bark-built arbor under the big elm trees. A jug of egg-flip and a delightful chat were awaiting him. The bees were humming round in the lime-tree-bower of the garden, and the deep vibrating voice of the poet, roused to unwonted exhilaration, was presently moved to declaim one of his own magnificent imitations of Schiller, the Visit of the Gods, his recitation rose like a chant in its music and sonority. Never, believe me, appear the immortals, never alone. Scarce had I welcomed the sorrow-beguiler Ayakus, but in came Boy Cupid the Smiler. Lo, Phoebus the Glorious descends from his throne, they advance, they float in, the Olympians all. With divinities fills my terrestrial hall. How shall I yield you due entertainment, celestial choir? Me, rather, bright guests, with your wings of up-boyance, bear aloft to your homes, to your banquets of joyance, that the roofs of Olympus may echo my lyre. Ah, we mount!  Oh, give me the nectar! Oh, fill me the bowl! Indeed one might easily forget all mundane matters upon a day like this, mused the poet, as he became rested and refreshed. It is not a day for doing, Poole, for digging and forking and stooping. It was meant for dreaming, for endless reveries of eternal beauty. That is not likely ever to be my lot, said the matter of fact, Poole, too much to see after. It might be mine, perhaps, did I choose, observed Coleridge, with the abstracted air of one talking in his sleep. Have I ever told you, Poole, of the offer I have had from the Wedgwood Brothers? The China man's son, Poole queried? The same, said Coleridge. They have offered me an annuity for life, of a hundred and forty pounds a year, to prevent my being obliged to abandon poetry and philosophy, as I must do if I take up preaching professionally. It is a vastly fine offer, exclaimed the astonished Poole. On the other hand, continued his friend, the Unitarian Chapel people at Shrewsbury will pay me one hundred and twenty pounds a year to become their preacher, and that means that I give up literary work. I cannot combine both, hitherto, as you know, I have refused to accept any remuneration for my sermons. To be a hireling is against my principles. When I go to Totten or Bridgewater I do it freely. But here are these two proposals, and I know not which to accept. I freely confess to you, Poole, what you probably know already, that I am very seriously worried over money matters, and that I perceive I can never support my family by manual labour. My play, Osorio, which Sheridan requested me to write for Drury Lane, has been rejected. I have no talent, I fear, for the drama. I am too scared after work in an evening to do any reviewing or writing, and now I am threatened by the prospect of Lloyd leaving us. That means the loss of our main income. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed, every mode of life which promised me bread and cheese has been torn away from me. But God remains. This long speech was not without effect upon the kind hearted Poole. Pocketing certain twinges of what in Charles Lloyd he had defined as jealousy, he asked, and what does your friend Mr. Wordsworth say? You are constantly in his company that I should suppose he would be a very fit judge of the best course for you to take. Oh, Wordsworth, well need you ask. Of course he urges me to accept the Wedgewood's generosity and devote myself to poetical work alone. But my mind misgives me. Lest in doing that I should be turning my back upon the service of God. Am I not more efficacious for good as a preacher than as a versifier? Well, I don't know, muttered Poole. We can all read your poems, you see, but we can't all follow you about the West Country to listen to you. We can't track you to chapels at Taunton or Bridgewater or Shrewsbury, however eloquent you may be. Not but what, he added, with a sly twinkle. You do a pretty fairish deal of preaching in private. That's what Lamb said, remarked Coleridge. I asked him if he had ever heard me preach and he said, My dear fellow, I never heard you do anything else. A trifle flippant at times is our good Lamb, but who's this? And he sprang from his seat with unwanted energy. Oh, it's your friends from El Fawxton, said Poole. And with the resigned expression of one relegated to a back seat he picked up the empty flip jug and glasses and returned to his own domain. Two people were coming down Coleridge's garden. A gaunt and Don Quixote-like man in striped pantaloons and a brown, fustian jacket and a slender, pleasing, dark-haired woman in her early twenties. They were William and Dorothy Wordsworth, names dearer than any to the contemplative heart of Coleridge. For nearly a year they had been tenants of El Fawxton Manor House, about a mile away among the hills. For nearly a year they had been his constant companions, his solace, his inspiration, to their example and society he owed as he allowed, the awakening and consummation of his genius, for although the magic and melody of his verse were all his own, that magic unsurpassed and unsurpassable altogether beyond price, and that melody, such a soft, floating, witchery of sound as twilight elfens make, when they at eve voyage on gentle gales from fairyland, where melodies round heavy-dropping flowers footless and wild, like birds of paradise, nor paws nor push, hovering on untamed wing, the Eolian harp. Yet it was Wordsworth who had helped him to find himself, and it was Dorothy whose influence on both men called out their best and deepest. Three people but one soul, Coleridge had called this ideally united trio of himself and his friends, and as three people with one soul they walked on Seaward Quantuck's heathy hills and had every thought in common. We are off for a long walk this lovely noon, explained Dorothy, and taking our lunch with us. Will you come, Mr. Coleridge? A very hasty wash and brush, and a hurried goodbye to Sarah, and the poet had forsaken a distasteful employment for a singularly congenial one. Over the hills and far away he could postpone for the months every work-a-day question which troubled him, and deep in the abstrusest consideration of poetry, or speculation of philosophy, could steep himself in the calm which was his ultimate desire. He had a host of projects to discuss. He had planned in collaboration with Wordsworth a great book of man and nature and society to be symbolized by a brook in its course from upland source to sea, much on the lines of his own strophe from the German. Unperishing youth, thou leapest from forth the cell of thy hidden nativity, never mortal saw the cradle of the strong one, never mortal heard the gathering of his voices, the deep murmured charm of the sun of the rock, that is lisped ever more at his slumberless fountain, there's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil at the shrine of his ceaseless renewing, it embusoms the roses of dawn, it entangles the shafts of the noon, and into the bed of its stillness the moonshine sinks down as in slumber, that the sun of the rock, that the nursing of heaven, may be born in a holy twilight. He had begun the ancient mariner upon a previous walking tour, also as joint composition with another poet, but had taken it into his own hands and finally completed it this spring. He had an immense proposal for an epic, which should take ten years for collecting material, five for writing and five for revising. Nobody could accuse Coleridge of undue haste. He had undertaken a translation of Violin's Oberon, which was likely to be more troublesome than remunerative. But most of all he desired to ascertain his friend's criticism on his newest fragment, Christabel. The bulk of his achievements were but fragmentary at the best. Coleridge's mind was that extremely rara avis intera, which combines the artistic with the philosophic temperament, two inherently opposed qualities, his acute and sensitive perceptions of sound, sight, color, and romantic possibility did not in the least satisfy his heavy, logical demands. Of art for art's sake he had the poorest opinion. He was of dual nature. And where the philosopher, the metaphysician, and the divine preponderated in him, they completely over-weighted the exquisite, ethereal imagination, which was so infinitely more precious, had he known it. And although in this golden year of his life, this Anous Mirabilis, of his sojourn in Nether Stoë, he was still allured to the marvelous, the strange, and the supernatural. He sought to disguise his surrender to these fantasies by clothing his desires in the garb of a severe philosophy of poetry. He decided, in concert with Wordsworth, that it would be well for him to undertake a series of poems in which, as he put it, the incident and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural. And the excellence arrived at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real, in this sense, they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. A cold and unproductive soil this, one would suppose, in which to grow the glowing flowers of Christabel, where night itself, peopled with occult alarms, cannot minimize the mingled horror and splendor of Geraldine's first appearance. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high. It covers, but not hides the sky. The moon is behind and at the full. And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray. It is a month before the month of May. And the spring comes slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, whom her father loves so well. What makes her in the wood so late? A furlong from the castle gate. She had dreams all yesterday night of her own betrothed night. And she in the midnight wood would pray for the wheel of her lover that's far away. She stole along. She nothing spoke. The size she heaved were soft and low, and not was green upon the oak, but moss and rarest mistletoe. She kneels beneath the huge oak tree and in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, the lovely lady, Christabel. It moaned as near as near can be, but what it is she cannot tell. On the other side it seems to be of the huge broad-breasted old oak tree. There she sees a damsel bright, dressed in a silken robe of white, that shadowy in the moonlight shone, the neck that made the white robe won. Her stately neck and arms were bare, her blue veined feet unsandled were, and wildly glittered here and there the gems entangled in her hair. I guess it was frightful there to see a lady so richly clad as she, beautiful, exceedingly. And a chilly basis these solemnly propounded theories for the gorgeous fabric of the ancient mariner. Originally founded as regards its main outlines upon a dream which occurred to crookshank, a dream of a skeleton ship with figures in it, who could have anticipated such results as that unforgettable scene where the ancient mariner beholdeth a sign in the element far off. The western wave was all aflame, the day was well nigh done, almost upon the western wave rested the broad bright sun, when that strange shape drove suddenly betwixt us and the sun, and straight the sun was flecked with bars, Heaven's mother send us grace, as if through a dungeon great he peered with broad and burning face. Alas! thought I, and my heart beat loud, how fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the sun like restless gossip ears? Are those her ribs through which the sun did peer, as through a great? And is that woman all her crew? Is that a death? And are there two? Is death that woman's mate?  The game is done! I've won! I've won! Quoth she and whistles thrice! The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, at one stride comes the dark, with far heard whisper o'er the sea, off shot the spectre bark. We listened and looked sideways up, fear at my heart as at a cop my life blood seemed to sip, the stars were dim and thick the night, the steersman's face by lamp gleamed white, from the sails the dew did drip, till clam above the eastern bar, the hornet moon with one bright star within the nether tip. Or who could have supposed that Wordsworth's subsequent suggestion for the plot of the poem, suppose you represent the Mariner as having killed an albatross on entering the South Sea, and that the holy spirits of these regions take upon themselves to avenge the crime should develop into that magnificent defense of the animal right to live, which in Coleridge's opinion, obtruded a moral sentiment too openly in a work of such pure imagination, the curse of remorse throughout the whole story hangs as heavy on the seamen's soul as does the dead weight of the albatross around his neck, until that mystical moment when he blesses the beauty of the happy living things in the water, God's creatures of the great calm, the moving moon went up the sky and nowhere did abide, softly she was going up and a star or two beside. Her beams be mocked the sultry mane like April whorefrost spread, but where the ship's huge shadow lay the charmant water burnt all way a still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship I watched the water snakes, they moved in tracks of shining white, and when they reared the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire. Blue, glossy green and velvet black they coiled and swam, and every track was a flash of golden fire. Oh happy living things! No tongue their beauty might declare. A spring of love gushed from my heart and I blessed them unaware. Sure my kind saint took pity on me and I blessed them unaware. The self-same moment I could pray. And from my neck so free the albatross fell off and sank like lead into the sea. Side by side the three friends wandered over the May sweet hillsides, dipping into wooded combs, musical with the sound of streams, climbing the heathery slopes, resting here and there upon some glorious crest to drink in all the joy and color of the landscape and to reflect in Coleridge's own words how flowers are lovely, love is flower-like, friendship is a sheltering tree. Each of them young, each of them passionate lovers of nature, each brimming with hopes and equipped with commanding intellect. They formed the three-fold cord with its tonic, dominant, and mediant, of which is born all music. It was nearly eight o'clock when Coleridge parted from the Wordsworths at the gate of Al-Foxton.  Coleridge tried to frame his thoughts into words as he strode homeward with his loose shambling gate, continually shifting from one side of the path to the other after his notorious corkscrew habit. The notes of the nightingale poignantly sweet echoed to him out of the woods, and he would gladly have lingered to listen, but instead he thought, Farewell, O Warbler, till to-morrow eve, and you, my friends, farewell, a short farewell, we have been loitering long and pleasantly, and now for our dear homes. That strain again, full feign it would delay me. My dear babe, who, capable of no articulate sound, marrs all things with his imitative lisp.  And I deem it wise to make him nature's playmate. He knows well the evening star, and once, when he awoke in most distressful mood some inward pain had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream, I hurried with him to our orchard plot, and he beheld the moon, and hushed at once, suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, while his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, did glitter in the yellow moon-beam. Well, it is a father's tale, but if that heaven should give me life, his childhood shall grow up familiar with these songs, that with the night he may associate joy. Once more farewell, sweet knight and gale. Once more, my friends. Farewell. Sarah met him in the road with a despondent air. Lloyd has gone, said she. Gone? What, actually gone? Do you mean to say he has left us? Exclaimed colleridge horror struck. He packed up his things and took leave of me, she replied. It seems he hired a conveyance from Bristol to fetch him home. Good heavens, cried her husband, and all the tranquil joy died out of his face. Nothing but weariness, flabbiness and dejection remained. Did he give no reason? Oh, he said things about the wordsworths, replied Sarah, he thinks you have neglected him shamefully.  Though so prolific a conversationalist, and so prone to speech, knew when there was a time to be silent. He attempted no defence or excuse. He simply went indoors and, sitting distastefully to an unprepossessing supper, let Sarah say her say upon the subject of Lloyd. It was an extensive and a justifiable recrimination. Then, still in the same abstracted and monosyllabic state, he helped to wash up, attended better late than never, to the pigs and fowls, and sat before the fire with a notebook in his hands and baby-clothes pinned to warm upon his knees while Sarah put the child to bed. He was working out with patient care those apparently unprimeditated effects which go to make up the haunting melody of Christabel, for skillful and accomplished metrists as he was. It was only by dint of repeated experiments and intense mental effort that he achieved those results in which his art appears most artless. However, he was in no fit state, overtired and distressed as he felt, for laborious efforts of this kind, and presently nature took vengeance upon him in the form of intolerable toothache. A little while he bore it. Then, moving tiptoe lest he should be heard in the upper room where Sarah was soothing the little one to sleep, he stole to a corner cupboard and took out a bottle of laudanum. In this false friend and insidious comforter he had already found relief and repose from mental, as from physical troubles, more and more frequently he had recourse to it. He knew its fatal tendency to undermine the will and debilitate the Constitution, yet he could not deny himself an artificial peace which he described as a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains and trees in the very heart of a waste of sand, and immediately he began to view things gler de rose. The sharp tongue and angry face of Sarah became transmogrified into the gentle semblance of her anagram, the imaginary asra of his poems. To be beloved is all I need, and whom I love I love indeed. O ever, ever be thou blessed, for dearly Azra love I thee. This brooding warmth across my breast, this depth of tranquil bliss. Ah me, fount, tree, and shed are gone, I know not wither, but in one quiet room we three are still together. The shadows dance upon the wall, by the still dancing fire flames made, and now they slumber moveless all, and now they melt to one deep shade, but not from me shall this mild darkness steal thee, I dream thee with mine eyes, and at my heart I feel thee. The visions born of opium floated in vague, rich phantasmagoria across his slumberous brain, and so his senses gradually wrapped in a half-sleep he dreams of better worlds, sitting in the failing firelight. With a great effort he roused himself to creep up the stair ladder and to lay his drugged limbs upon the hard straw bed. The child and Sarah were already dreaming. He gazed at them with serene affection. Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, whose gentle breathings heard in this deep calm fill up the interspersed vacancies and momentary pauses of the thought. My Babe, so beautiful, it thrills my heart with tender gladness thus to look at thee.  Air on my bed my limbs I lay. It hath not been my use to pray with moving lips or bended knees, but silently by slow degrees my spirit eye to love compose. In humble trust mine eyelids close with reverential resignation, no wish conceived, no thought expressed. Only a sense of supplication, a sense or all my soul impressed that I am weak, yet not unblessed, since in me, round me, everywhere, eternal strength and wisdom are. But now the stealthy narcotic utterly clouded him. He sank away as through unfathomable gulfs of somnolence. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had closed another day. A Day with Keats About eight o'clock one morning in early summer, a young man may be seen sauntering to and fro in the garden of Wentworth Place, Hempstead. Wentworth Place consists of two houses only. In the first, John Keats established along with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. The second is inhabited by a Mrs. Braun and her family. They are wooden houses with festooning draperies of foliage, and the clean, contrived air of Hempstead comes with sweet freshness through the gardens and fills the young man with ecstatic delight. He gazes around him, with his weak, dark eyes upon the sky, the flowers, the various of nature which means so much to him, and although he has severely tried a never robust physique by sitting up half the night in study, a new exhilaration now throbs through his veins. For in his own words he loves the principle of beauty in all things, and he repeats to himself, as he loiters up and down in the sunshine, the flowers into which he has crystallized for all time sensations similar to those of the present. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Its loveliness increases. It will never pass into nothingness, but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and asleep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow are we breathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth, spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth of noble natures, of the gloomy days, of all the unhealthy and or darkened ways made for our searching, yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty moves away the pawl from our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, trees old and young, sprouting a shady boom for simple sheep, and such our daffodils with the green world they live in, and clear rills that for themselves a cooling covert make against the hot season, the mid-forest break, rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms, and such, too, is the grandeur of the dunes we have imagined for the mighty dead, all lovely tales that we have heard or read, an endless fountain of immortal drink pouring unto us from the heaven's brink, nor do we merely feel these essences for one short hour. No, even as the trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, the passion-poesy, glories infinite haunt us till they become a cheering light unto our souls, and bound to us so fast that whether there be shine or gloom or cast, they all way must be with us, or we die. And dimmium. Yet John Keats is, in some respects, out of keeping with the magnificent phraseology of which he is the self-peace. Little Keats, as his fellow medical students termed him, is a small, undersized man, not over five feet high, the shoulders too broad, the legs too spare, death in his hand, as Coleridge said, the slack, moist hand of the incipient consumptive. The only thing of beauty about him is his face. It is a face, to quote his friend Lee Hunt, in which energy and sensibility, that is, sensitiveness, are remarkably mixed up, an eager power wrecked and made impatient by ill health, every feature at once strongly cut and delicately alive. There is that femininity in the cast of his features which Coleridge classed as an attribute of true genius, his beautiful brown hair falls loosely over those eyes, large, dark, glowing, which appeal to all observers by their mystical illumination of rapture, eyes which seem as though they had been dwelling on some glorious sight, which have, as Hayden said, an inward look perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions. And he is seeing visions all the while. Some chance sight or sound has wrapped him away from the young greenness of the May morning, and plunged him deep into the opulent color of September. His prophetic eye sees all the apple buds as golden orbs of fruit, and the swallows that now build beneath the eaves, making ready for their departure. And these future splendors shape themselves into lines as richly colored. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun, conspiring with him how to load and bless with fruit the vines that round the thatcheeves run, to bend with apples the most cottage trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core, to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel, and pump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel, to set budding more and still more later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days will never cease. For summer has orbrimmed their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor, thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind. Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook spares the next swath, and all its twined flowers.  Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them! Thou hast thy music, too, while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble plains with rosy hue, then in a waleful choir the small gnats mourn among the river-salos, borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies, and full-grown lambs loud bleed from hilly borne, hedge-crickets sing, and now, with treble soft, the red-breast whistles from a garden-croft, and gathering swallows, twitter in the skies. Autumn The voice of Charles Brown at the open window, hailing him cheerily, breaks the spell. Keats goes in, and they sit down together to a simple breakfast-table, and Brown quizzes Keats, as the current phrase goes, on his inveterate abstractedness. The young man, with his sweet and merry laugh, defends himself by producing the result of his last night's meditations in praise of the self-same, wandering fancy. Ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home, at a touch sweet pleasure melteth, like to bubbles when rain pelteth. Then let winged fancy wander through the thought still spread beyond her. Open wide the mind's cage door, she'll dart forth, and cloudward soar. Oh, sweet fancy, let her loose, summer's joys are spoiled by use, and the growing of the spring fades as does its blossoming. Autumn's red-lipped frutage, too, blushing through the mist and dew, cloys with tasting. What do then? Sit thee by the angle, when the seer-faggot blazes bright, spirit of a winter's night. When the soundless earth is muffled, and the caked snow is shuffled from the plow-boy's heavy tune. Fancy, high-commissioned, send her, she has vassals to attend her. She will bring, in spite of frost, beauties that the earth hath lost. She will bring thee altogether, all delights of summer weather, all the buds and bells of May, from dewy suard or thorny spray, all the tepid Autumn's wealth, with a still mysterious stealth. She will mix these pleasures up, like three fit wines in a cup, and thou shalt quaff it. Fancy. Breakfast over, the business of the day begins, and that, with Keats, is poetry, and all that can foster poetic stimulus. He takes no real heed of anything else. A devoted son and brother, one ready to sacrifice himself and his slender resources to the uttermost farthing for his mother, brothers, sister and friends, yet he has no vital interest in other folks's affairs, nor in current events, nor in ordinary social topics. Other people's poetry does not appeal to him except that of Shakespeare, and of Homer, whom he does not know in the original, but who, through the poor medium of translation, has filled his soul with Grecian fantasies. Much have I travelled 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. Offed of one wide expanse had I been told that deep-browed Homer ruled as his demean. 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 his eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wide surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Sonnet This is what he wrote after sitting up one night till daybreak with his friend Cowden Clark, shouting with delight over the vistas newly revealed to him, and from that time on he has luxuriated in dreams classic beauty, warmed to new life by the sorcery of romance. Immortal shapes arise upon him from the infinite azure of the past, and he sees how deep in the shady sadness of a veil, far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, far from the fiery noon and Eve's one star, sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, still as the silence round about his lair. Forest on forest hung about his head, like cloud on cloud, no stir of air was there. Not so much life as on a summer's day robs not one light seed from the feathered grass, but where the dead leaf fell. There did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more by reason of his fallen divinity, spreading a shade. The niad mid her reeds pressed her cold finger closer to her lips. Hyperion. He is studying French, Latin, and especially Italian, all with the view of furthering his poetic ability. Though no great reader, he has soaked himself in the atmosphere of old Italian tales, and the very spirit of medieval Florence breathes from the story borrowed from Boccaccio, an echo in the north wind sung, which narrates how the hapless Isabelle bit away the head of her murdered lover. Then in a silken scarf, sweet with the dews of precious flowers plucked in Araby, and divine liquids come with odorous ooze through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully, she wrapped it up, and for its tomb did lose a garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, and covered it with mold, and o'er it set sweet basil which her tears kept ever wet, and she forgot the stars, the moon and sun, and she forgot the blue above the trees, and she forgot the dels where waters run, and she forgot the chilly autumn breeze. She had no knowledge when the day was done, and the new moon she saw not. But in peace hung over her sweet basil ever more, and moistened it with tears unto the core. Isabella. Keats has brought himself with difficulty, however, to the perusal of modern poets, his boyish enthusiasm for Lee Hunt's work has long since evaporated, and after reading Shelley's revolt of Islam, all he has found to say is, poor Shelley, I think he has his quota of good qualities, but for the rest he is not attracted to any kind of knowledge which cannot be made applicable and subservient to the purposes of poetry, his own poetry, for his one desire is to win an immortal name, and he has begun life full of hopes, fiery, impetuous and ungovernable, expecting the world to fall at once beneath his pen. Poor fellow. Hayden's diary. But men of genius, Keats himself has said, are as great as certain ethereal chemicals operating in a mass of created matter, but they have not any determined character, that indefiniteness of literary aim that want of willpower, without which genius is a curse, which have hampered the young man all along, are now still further emphasized by the restlessness of a passionate lover. John Keats cannot stay indoors this fine May morning, fitting himself for verses fit to live, when the girl who is to him the incarnation of all poetry is visible in the next door garden. He throws down his pen and hurries out to find her. Contemporary portraits of Fanny Braun have not succeeded in representing her as beautiful, and at first sight Keats has complained that although she manages to make her hair look well, she wants sentiment in every feature. Propinquity, however, has achieved the usual result, and now the young poet believes his enamorata to be the very apotheosis of loveliness.  If the truth be told, Fanny Braun is a fairly good-looking young woman, blue-eyed and long-nosed. Her hair arranged with curls and ribbons over her brow. She has a curious but striking resemblance to the draped figure of Titian's sacred and profane love, and for the rest she is by no means poetic or sentimental, but of a luminous reader, whose strong point is an extraordinary knowledge of the history of costume. She accepts the homage of Keats much as she accepts the fact of their visit betrothal, and the fact that her mother disapproves of it, without taking it too seriously in any sense, and now, though not particularly keen on open-air enjoyment, she accepts his daily suggestion of a walk with her, and they go out into the beautiful meadows which were part of Hempstead a hundred years ago. Keats is in his glory in the fields. Always the humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, have seemed to make his nature tremble. Then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, his mouth quivered, peculiarly sensitive as he is to external influences, his chiefty light is to think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy. The man who is so soon to feel the days he's growing over him, takes one of his intensest pleasures in watching the growth of flowers, and now, as in exquisite music, notes that pierce and pierce, descends through the young green oak leaves, the poet seizes this golden moment of the May World and transmutes it into song. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past and lethy words had sunk. It is not with envy of thy happy lot, but being too happy in thine happiness, that thou, light-winged dried of the trees in some melodious plot of beach and green and shadows numberless, singest of summer in full-throated ease. Oh, for a draught of vintage, that hath been cooled a long age in the deep delvid earth, tasting of flora and the country green, dance and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth.  The weariness, the fever, and the fret here, where men sit and hear each other groan, where palsy shakes a few sad, last gray hairs, where youth grows pale and spectre thin and dies, where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs, where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow. Thou wasst not born for death immortal bird. No hungry generations tread thee down. The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown. Perhaps the self-same song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth when sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn, that same, at often times hath charmed magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairy-lands forlorn. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my soul self. Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows, over the still stream, up the hillside, and now, it is buried deep in the next valley-glades. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep? Ode to a nightingale. The poet is recalled from these rapturous flights to the fugitive sweetness of the present. He is wandering in may meadows, young and impetuous, on fire with hopes, and his heart's beloved beside him. It is almost too good to be true. I have never known any unalloyed happiness for many days together, he tells Fanny, the death or sickness of someone has always spoiled my home. I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days, three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. He talks to her honestly of his dreams, his aspirations, his ambitions, and then the sordid facts of everyday life begin to cast a blighting shadow over his effulgent hopes. What has he, indeed, to offer worth her taking? A young man of twenty-three, ex-dresser at a hospital who has abandoned his surgical career without adopting any other, with slender resources and no occupation beyond that of producing verses which are held up to absolute derision by the great reviews. I would willingly have recourse to other means, he tells her again, as he has told his friend Dilkey. I cannot. I am fit for nothing else but literature. He talks of taking up journalism, but in his heart he feels unfit for any regular action, by reason both of physical weakness and a certain lack of system in mental work. The future becomes blackly, blankly overcast. The rays of Gosta Dome descend like a curtain between the sublimity of Keats and the calm common sense of fanny. They turn homewards in silence, the poet revolving melancholy musings. But when the melancholy fit shall fall, sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, that fosters the droop-headed flowers all, and hides the green hill in an April shroud, then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, or on the wealth of globed peonies, or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, imprison her soft hand and let rave, and feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. She dwells with beauty, beauty that must die, and Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu, and aching pleasure nigh, turning to poison while the B mouth sips, I in the very temple of delight, veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine. Though scene of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine, his soul shall taste the sadness of her might, and be among her cloudy trophies hung. Ode to melancholy. Fanny Braun enters her mother's house, and John Keats goes into his room and sits down, brooding, brooding. Oh, he says, that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers, then I might hope. But despair is forced upon me as a habit. And he is only too well aware that although he is naturally the very soul of courage and manliness, this habit of despair is growing upon him, and eating his energy away. A wintry chill settles down upon the maytime, and his misery finds vent in lovely lines. In a drear nighted December, too happy, happy tree, thy branches nare remember their green felicity, the north cannot undo them, with a sleety whistle through them, nor frozen thawings glue them from budding at the prime. In a drear nighted December, too happy, happy brook, thy bubblings nare remember Apollo's summer look. But with a sweet forgetting, they stay their crystal fretting never, never petting about the frozen time. Ah, would twirl so with many a gentle girl and boy! But were there ever any writhe knot at passage joy to know the change and feel it, when there is none to heal it, nor nom'd sense to steal it, was never said in rhyme. Yet Keats is young, and youth means buoyancy. With an effort increasingly difficult he is able to shake off this somber fit for a while, and he makes use of the simplest means to that end. Whenever I feel vaporish he has said, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly, and in fact adonize, as if I were going out. Then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. These very prosaic methods adopted, he abandons himself to the full flood of inspiration, and lets his mind suffuse itself in antique glory. As dimion he receives the divine commands of the passionately bright moon lady, as she stoops at last to bless him, and as she spake into her face there came light, as reflected from a silver flame, her long black hair swelled ample in display full golden.  And dimion. Or as Lyceus he succumbs to the serpentine grace of Lamia, or as Porfiro, hidden in the silence, watches Madeleine at prayer. A casement high and triple-arched there was, all garlanded with carven imageries of fruits and flowers, and punches of knot-grass, and diamond-ed with panes of quaint device, innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, as are the tiger moths' deep-damessed wings. And in the midst mung thousand heraldries, and twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, a shielded scutian blushed with blood of queens and kings. Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, and threw warm ghouls on Madeleine's fair breast, as down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon, rose bloom fell on her hands, together pressed, and on her silver cross, soft amethyst, and on her hair a glory like a saint. She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed, save wings for heaven, Porfiro grew faint. She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Eve of St. Agnes But the inspiration does not well up to-day. Its flow is frustrated, in view of the mountainous difficulties which hedge him in. Ill health, stinted means, hopeless love, and continual lack of success. These are calculated to give the bravest pause. And presently Keats, snatching a few hurried mouthfuls of lunch, is off to the studio of his friend, the painter Hayden, the one man among all his acquaintance, who is capable of really understanding him. He sits down morbid and silent in the painting room. For a while nothing will evoke a word from him, good or bad. But his keen interest in matters of art, and the entry of various friends one by one, Wentworth Dilkey, Hamilton Reynolds, Bailey and Lee Hunt, soon arouse him to animated conversation. Keats is shy and ill at ease in women's society, but a delightful combination of earnestness and pleasantry distinguishes his intercourse with men. He says fine things finally, jokes with ready humor, and at the mention of any oppression or wrong rises into grave manliness at once, seeming like a tall man. No wonder that his society is much sought after, and himself greatly beloved by these genial spirits. No wonder that here at least he meets with that appreciation of which elsewhere his genius has been starved. In this young fellow of twenty-three, who unites winning affectionate ways and habitual gentleness of manner with the loftiest and most nobly worded ideals, few would discover that imaginary Johnny Keats, the apothecary's assistant, upon whom the Blackwood reviewer had lavished such vials of vituperation. He is here openly acknowledged as one of the bards of passion and of mirth, and his poems are each accepted as not a senseless tranced thing, but divine melodies of truth, philosophic numbers smooth, tales and golden histories of heaven and its mysteries. No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. Matthew Arnold. But only these few friends of his are able to recognize that perfection.  The afternoon wears on, and the friends disperse. Keats returning to Wentworth Place, flushed with hectic exhilaration, finds a veritable douche of cold water awaiting him, in the shape of a letter from his publishers. They refer to his unlucky first volume of poems brought out in 1817. By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us, they say, have found fault with it in such plain terms that we have in many cases offered to take the book back, rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has time after time been showered upon it. In fact it was only on Sunday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman who told us that he considered it no better than a take-in. For a few minutes the pendulum swings back to despair. A man whose whole business and life is the creation of the work, who never wrote a line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought, who believes that after his death he will be among the English poets, and that if he only has time now, he will make himself remembered.  It is an unendurable position. Not that Keats attaches undue importance to popular applause. Praise or blame, he says, has but a momentary effect upon the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. In Andimion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks than if I had stayed upon the green shore and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. But what will Fanny think of such a letter? He falls to miserable meditation over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the constant erection of new obstacles in the course of his luckless love. And of Fanny's love he always has had a smoldering doubt. Yet he remains her vassal from the first, as he has told her, irrevocably her slave. He conceives himself an outcast on the wintry hillside, exiled from all his heart's desires. Ah, what can ale thee wretched white, alone and palely loitering? The sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. Ah, what can ale thee wretched white, so haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel's granary is full, and the harvest's done. I see a lily on thy brow, with anguish moist and fever due, and on thy cheek a fading rose, fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads. Full beautiful, a fairy's child. Her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild. I set her on my pacing steed, and nothing else saw all day long. And sideways would she lean and sing a fairy's song. I made a garland for her head, and bracelets too, and fragrant zone. She looked at me, and she did love, and made sweet moan. She found me roots of relish sweet, and honey wild, and manad you. And sure in language strange she said, I love thee true. She took me to her elfin grot, and there she gazed and sighed deep.  And there we slumbered on the moss, and there I dreamed, a woe betide, the latest dream I ever dreamed on the cold hillside. I saw pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death pale where they all, who cried, la belle dame sang merci, hath thee enthrall. I saw their starved lips in the gloam, with horrid warning gaped wide, and I awoke, and found me here on the cold hillside. And this is why I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. La belle dame sang merci. And now he hears the voice of his belle dame ringing light across the garden. While he sits here, a prey to every distress, she is gaily gossiping with her next door neighbor, Brown. At once the unhappy Keats is tormented by a thousand jealous fears. Fanny is transferring her affection to Brown. Of that he is quite certain. He rushes out, his black looks banish the much amused Brown, and very nearly produce an immediate rupture between Fanny and himself. But after a few bitter words he permits himself to be reassured, or is it cajoled, and tells her, I must confess that I love you the more, in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. The poor boy, from the worldly point of view, has nothing else to offer. The lover's quarrel is over for the nonce. Visitors begin to drop in for the evening. There is music and singing in Brown's little drawing-room. Keats is very fond of music, and can himself, though possessing hardly any voice, produce a pleasing musical effect. He will sit and listen for hours to a sympathetic performer. But his ear, like all his faculties, is abnormally sensitive, and a wrong note will drive him into a frenzy. As the room grows fuller he becomes restive. The poetical character he has observed is not itself, it has no character. When I am in a room with people the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a little time annihilated. In the light chit-chat of small talk and body-nage he has no part. It bewilders and annoys him. Those about him, especially the women, seem to show up in their worst colors. Fanny herself appears, as he has described her at their first meeting, an absolute minx. And presently he contrives to slip stealthily away, and seats himself in some quiet chamber, alone with the darkness and the may-sense of leaf and blossom. I hope I shall never marry, he groans once more. The roaring wind is my wife, and the stars through the window-panes are my children. The mighty abstract idea of beauty I have in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, then shapes of epic greatness are stationed round me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's bodyguard. The young man now lights his candles, and takes up a familiar and favorite occupation, the writing of a long letter to his brother George in America. This epistle is, as one might expect, almost entirely concerned with the art of poetry, what else has Keats to write about, whether from the side of technique or inspiration. He dwells on the adroit management of open and closed vowels. He shows how the poetry of earth is never dead. He discusses the need of constant application to work, and how the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man, and meanwhile, as fitful strains of song reach him from the distance, and his roving gaze rivets itself upon a wedgewood copy of a Grecian vase, one of Brown's chief treasures. The fleeting wafts of sound, and the lovely symmetry of shape, and the golden chain of figures blend themselves into one harmonious whole of word music. Thou still unraveished 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 loathe? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Herd 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 hast not thou thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair. Ah, happy, happy boughs, that cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu. And happy melodist, unwirried, for ever piping songs for ever new. More happy love, more happy, happy love, for ever warm and still to be enjoyed, for ever panting and for ever young. All breathing human passion far above, that leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloyed, a burning forehead and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, old mysterious priest, leads to thou that heifer lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garlands dressed? What little town by river or sea shore, or mountain built with peaceful citadel, is emptied of its folk this pious morn?  And not a soul to tell why thou art desolate can ere return. O Attic shape, fair attitude, with breed of marble men and maidens overwrought, with forest branches and trodden weed, thou silent form dust, 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. Ode to a Grecian urn, the shapes of epic greatness throng closer and mightier around him, the storm and stress of the day's thoughts have utterly drained his small reserve of strength. Outworn by the vehemence of his own conflicting emotions, John Keats lays his aching eyes and dark brown head upon his arm as it rests along the table, and sinks into a dreamless slumber of exhaustion, while a happy melodist, unwirried, forever singing songs forever new, the nightingale chants on outside. 1 February afternoon in the year 1822 about two o'clock, for this is the hour at which his day begins, the most notorious personality of his century arouses himself in the Palatialan Franci in Pisa. George Gordon Knowle, Lord Byron, languidly arises in dresses with the assistance of his devoted valet, Fletcher. Invariably he awakens in very low spirits. In actual despair and despondency he has termed it. This is in part constitutional, and partly no doubt a reaction after the feverish brainwork of the previous night. It is at any rate an unutterable melancholy end on we that he surveys in the mirror that slight and graceful form which had been idolized by London drawing rooms, and the pale, scornful, beautiful face, like a spirit, good or evil, which the enthusiastic Walter Scott has termed a thing to dream of. He notes the gray streaks already visible among the brown locks and murders his own lines miserably to himself. Through life's dull roads so dim and dirty I have dragged to three and thirty. What have these years left to me? Nothing except thirty three. An innumerable motley crowd of reminiscences, most of them bitter, sorrowful, or contemptuous, throng across his mind, shaping themselves into poignant verse. There's not a joy the world can give, like that it takes away, when glow of earthly thought declines in feeling still decay. It is not on youth's smooth cheek that blush alone which fades so fast, but the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past. O could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been, or weep as I could have wept, or many have vanished seen, as springs and desert fountains seem sweet, all brackish though they be. So midst the withered waste of life those tears would flow to me. A meager breakfast of claret and soda with a few mouthfuls of some Italian dish somewhat restores his natural vivacity, and he listens with cynical amusement to Fletcher's blood-curdling stories of phantoms who have made the night hideous. For the famous old feudal palazzo with its dungeons and secret chambers has been immemorably infested with ghosts and harassed by inexplicable noises. Fletcher has already begged Leeds to change his room and then refuse to occupy his new room because, as his master reports, there are more ghosts in there than the other. There is one place where people were evidently walled up. I am bothered about these specters, as they say the last occupants were too. However, he is laughing as he descends the magnificent staircase, the reputed work of Michelangelo, laughing until the shrill quarrelous cries of peevish children make him stop and frown. He has allowed the Lee Hunts, with their large and fractious family, to occupy for the present the ground floor of the palazzo, and the children are his patch of whorents. I abominate the sight of them so much, he has already told more, that I have always had the greatest respect for the character of Herod. No child figures in any of his poems. His own paternal feeling towards Ada, sole daughter of my house and home, is merely a fluctuating sentiment. He shrugs his shoulders and enters his great sammel, again moody and with a downcast air, and throws himself upon a couch in gloomy reverie. Snatches of poetry wander through his thoughts. Poetry intrinsically autobiographical, for the inequalities of his style are those of his career, and his imaginary heroes are endless reproductions of himself, the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind. He has drawn his own picture more effectively in Laura than any strange hand could do. In him, inexplicably mixed, appeared much to be loved and hated, sought and feared. Opinion, varying or his hidden lot, in praise or railing, near his name forgot.  He stood a stranger in this breathing world, an erring spirit from another hurled. His early dreams of good outstripped the truth, and troubled manhood followed baffled youth. His men in short, as has been observed, are made after his own image, and his women after his own heart. Yet the inveterate family likeness of these heroes is not shown by the heroines of his romantic stances, for Byron has an eclectic taste in beauty. One can hardly imagine a wider dissimilarity than between the bride of Abidos, the gentle Zuleika, with her nameless charms unmarked by her alone, the light of love, the purity of grace, the mind, the music breathing from her face, the heart who softnessed harmonized the whole, and oh, that I was in itself a soul. And Circassia's daughter, the stately Leila of the Gior, whose black and flowing hair swept the marble where her feet gleamed wider than the mountain's sleet, or if the reader seek her for the choice, there is Medora, beloved of the Corsair, Medora of the deep blue eye and long, fair hair, or the nameless eastern maiden of the Hebrew melodies. She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climbs and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. Thus melods that tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies. One shade the more, one ray the less, had half impaired the nameless grace which waves in every raven truss, where softly lightens or her face, where thoughts serenely sweet express how pure, how dear their dwelling place. And on that cheek and or that brow, so soft, so calm yet eloquent, the smiles that win, the tints that glow, but tale of days and goodness spent, a mind at peace with all below, a heart whose love is innocent. Yet all these heroines are alike in one respect, the potentiality of passionate emotion, since Byron's passions and his powers, according to his intense admirer Shelley, are incomparably greater than those of other men, and he has used the last almost recklessly in portrayal of the first. As the poet reclines in sombre meditation, his reverie is broken by the not unwelcome entrance of his friends, who may be better termed his intimate acquaintances. For to that brooding, introspective spirit, constitutionally shy and morbidly conscious of the fact, friendship is a propensity he has declared, to which my genius is very limited. I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel anything that deserves the name. All my others are men of the world friendships. Be that as it may, it is with a warmly cordial expression, and with that peculiarly sweet smile of his that Byron welcomes his usual visitors, Captain Williams, Captain Medwin, Teff, the Irishman, and Percy Bish Shelley, the most companionable person under thirty he has avowed, that ever I knew. When they have discussed the latest little pizan on D and the progress of Shelley's boat building, the conversation trends more and more toward literary topics, personal topics, be it understood, for Byron is not an omnivorous reader like Shelley. Williams and Medwin themselves dabblers in verse and prose, listen with respectful admiration to the dicta of the great poet's exchange in views. The low, clear, harmonious voice of Byron is a sort of intoxication. Men are held by it as under a spell. He makes no secret of his open contempt for the professional writing fraternity. Who will write if he had anything better to do? he scornfully inquires. I think the mighty stir about scribbling and scribes by themselves and others, a sign of a feminacy, a degeneracy, and weakness. Shelley, whose assiduous studies in literature have led him quite to other conclusions, defends his craft with order, but Byron's chief successes have been too lightly won. He who wrote the Corsair in ten days, the Bride of Abidos in four, and Laura, whilst undressing after balls and masquerades, cannot be expected to take a very serious view of poetry as the one business of a lifetime. I by no means rank poetry or poet, says he, high in the scale of imagination. Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake. If I live ten years longer, he adds prophetically, you will see that all is not over with me. I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing, and it may seem odd enough to say, I don't think it's my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something or other. This conteminar of poetry, however, is soon persuaded, without much difficulty, to read aloud some excerpts from his new poems in the process of completion, and very well he reads them. The listeners are moved to smiles by the bitter humor of the visitation of judgment. They are left half breathless by the impetuous vigor of heaven and earth, but a murmur of unfeigned applause punctuates the second canto of Don Juan with its exquisite presentment of youth, love, and ecstasy in the persons of Juan and Aidae. It was the cooling hour, just when the rounded red sun sinks down behind the azure hill, which then seems as if the whole earth bounded it, circling all nature, hushed and dim and still, with the far mountain crescent half surrounded, on one side, and the deep sea calm and chill upon the other, and the rosy sky, with one star sparkling through it like an eye. And thus they wandered forth, and hands in hands, over the shining pebbles and the shells, glided along the smooth and hardened sand. They looked up to the sky, whose floating glow spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright. They gazed upon the glittering sea below, once the broad moon rose circling into sight. They heard the waves splash, and the wind so low, and saw each other's dark eyes darting light into each other, and beholding this, their lips drew near and clung into a kiss. Dunwan. Byron's restless spirit, perpetually eager to express itself in action, now makes him anxious to dismiss intellectual discussions, and he hastily proposes a game of billiards. As he moves around the billiard table, his lameness is distinctly noticeable. Not all the ingenuity of his tailor, nor his own efforts to walk naturally, can conceal it. Yet, as has been said of him in other matters, he redeems all his defects by his graces. And his companions note with surprise the remarkable change for the better which has taken place in him since. A few months before, he arrived at this old palace on the Arno with a troop of servants, carriages, horses, vows, dogs, and monkeys. The selfish and sensual Byron of Venetian days is entirely a thing of the past. He is improved in every respect, says Shelley to Williams, in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health and happiness. And although keeping up a certain splendor upon an income of four thousand pounds a year, he devotes one thousand pounds of that income entirely to purposes of charity. His unpersonal needs are of the simplest. The game concluded, Byron's carriage is announced. His friends and he proceed in it as far as the town gates of Pisa by this means to avoid the stairs of the streets. Horses are in readiness at the gates. The company, with one or two servant men, mounts and ride into the pine forest that reaches towards the sea. Byron is as excellent and graceful a rider as a swimmer with remarkable powers of endurance. He can cover seventy or eighty miles a day, fast going, and swim five miles at a stretch. He is indeed in many respects the typical open-air Englishman. But today he rides slowly and immersed in thought. As his wife years since assured him, he is at heart the most melancholy of mankind, often when apparently the gayest. His abnormally long sight takes in every detail of the scenery, storing it up unconsciously for future reference. It has been said that Byron is nothing without his descriptions. And in these he has achieved some of his finest work, notably in some of the immortal stanzas of Child Harold, with a dazzling panoramic succession of vivid scenes, where they're depicting how I stood in Venice on the bridge of size, a palace and a prison on each hand. I saw from out the way her structures rise as from the stroke of the enchanter's wands. Or on the eve of Waterloo, there was a sound of revelry by night and Belgium's capital had gathered then, her beauty and her chivalry and bright the lamp shone, or fair women and brave men. A thousand hearts beat happily, and when music arose with its full up to a swell, soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, and all went merry as a marriage-bell. But hush, hark! A deep sound strikes like a rising knell. Were there again in the veil of vintage? The castled crag of Druckenfell's frowns or the wide and winding Rhine, whose breast of water's broadly swells between the banks which bear the vine and hills all rich with blossom trees, and peasant girls with deep blue eyes and hands which offer early flowers walk smiling o'er this paradise, or looking backwards through a score of centuries. I see before me the gladiator lie. He leans upon his hands, his manly brow consents to death, but conquers agony, and his dropped head sinks gradually low, and through his side the last drops ebbing slow, and the red gash fall heavy, one by one. Like the first of a thunder shower, and now the arena swims round him, he is gone. Air ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won. Byron is emphatically a citizen of the world, who has not only painted the environs, but reflected the passions and aspirations of every scene which he visualizes, and that is this magic power of conveying the authentic impression of an actual occurrence, which renders his most recondite situation so thrilling, which breathes a western vigor into the scented air of the Orient, and thrills with poignant pathos through the horrors of the prisoner of Chillon. A light broke in upon my brain. It was the carol of a bird. It ceased, and then it came again, the sweetest song I ever heard, and mine was thankful till my eyes ran over with a glad surprise, and they that moment could not see. I was the mate of misery. But then by dull degrees came back my senses to their wanted track. I saw the dungeon walls and floor closed slowly round me as before. I saw the glimmer of the sun creeping as it before had done. But through the crevice where it came, that bird was perched as fond and tame, and tamer than upon the tree. A lovely bird with azure wings. A song that said a thousand things, and seemed to say them all for me. I never saw it like before. I now shall see its likeness more. It seemed to me to want a mate, but was not half so desolate. And it was come to love me when none lived to love me so again. And cheering for my dungeon's brink had brought me back to feel and think. I know not if it late were free or broke its cage to perch on mine. But knowing so well captivity, sweet bird, I could not wish for thine. Or if it were a winged guise, a visitant from Paradise, for heaven forgive that thought, the while which made me both weep and smile. I sometimes deemed that it might be my brother's soul come down to me. But then at last away it flew, and then to his mortal well I knew, for he would never thus have flown, and left me twice so doubly lone.  The prisoner of Chillon. Unhappily all these shifting scenes of imagination or experience, so the poet has made mournful confession, have little power to wean him from himself, neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrents, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, and for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, above, around, and beneath me. And although it will be noticed, he exempts the sea, and although the blood of old sea-kings running fiercely in his veins, still kindles him to imperishable rapture in its presence, and I have loved the ocean, and my joy of youthful sports was on thy breast to be, born, like thy bubbles onward, from a boy, I wantoned on thy breakers, they to me were a delight, and if the freshening sea made them a terror, it was a pleasing fear, for I was, as it were, a child of thee, and trusted to thy billows far and near, and laid my hands upon thy mane, as I do hear. Child herald, yet there is sorrow on the sea itself, the unplumbed salt, a strangeing sea, which separates him from his mother country. Cosmopolitan, as he is, self-managed exile, quick with Greek and Italian sympathies, Byron never for one moment forgets that he is the head of one of England's proudest families. Despite his scathing scorn towards his fair-weather London friends, towards the unreasoning outbursts of malignity which drove him out of his England, with all her faults, he loves her still. He vaguely hopes and hankers after a return to those long-lost shores, and endeavors to believe that the future will in some way make atonement for all the calamities of the past. But now, Shelley, Williams, Medwin, and Tafe are dismounting in the pine forest, and the men's servants setting up the target. Pistol practice is Byron's forte. When he hits a half-crown at twelve yards, he is as delighted as a boy, and quite glum and disconcerted if he should happen to miss. This very rarely happens, as he is a crack shot, easily distancing the other competitors. His hand trembles violently, but he calculates on this vibration, and depending entirely on his eye, hardly ever fails. After about an hour shooting, the light begins to wane towards sunset, and the friends ride back to the city. Byron an exuberant good humor with himself and everyone else. Arrived at the Palate Lanfranci, he finds two guests awaiting him, Count Pietro Gamba, brother of the lovely Contessa Giugcioli, and Trelawney, that handsome, picturesque, pyratical-looking younger son who has not yet published to an astonished world his remarkable and almost incredible adventures. Trelawney is at presence in command of Byron's yacht, the Boulevard, lying in the harbor of Genoa. The poet welcomes these new additions to his company, for since his arrival in Pisa he has began to entertain men at dinner parties, for the first time since leaving England. At very cheerful companies that stand with him to dinner, their host displays himself to great advantage. Being at once, to quote Shelley, polite and cordial, full of social hilarity and the most perfect good humor, never diverging into ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout the evening. Byron, according to his own declaration, has never passed two hours in mixed society without wishing himself out of it again. Nobody, however, could guess at this fact from his bright, frank and spontaneous gaiety. Always an upstreamious eater. I have fed at times, for over two months together, he assures his friends, on sheer biscuit and water. Very little food defices him, and besides, byron tendu, he is anxious to retain that happy slenderness on which he prides himself. The slenderness, which is a characteristic of his family, in which he has recently endangered by a lazy life in Venice. The guests sit fascinated by his enthralling personality. They recognize that he wears a natural greatness which his errors can only half obscure, and they rivet their gazes upon that pale and splendid face, the only one, as Scott says, that ever came up to an artist's notion of what the lineaments of a poet should be. He looks around him upon the ethereal and feminine countenance of Shelley, the visionary, the kind, pleasant, honest English faces of Medwin and Williams, the good-looking Italian gamba, the quaint little Irishman tafe, last, not least, the dark moustachios and wildly flashing Celtic eyes of the Cornish adventurer Trelawney. This latter might well have served for a model of Conrad the Corsair, and so he is assured by his companions. Sun burnt his cheeks, his forehead high in pale, the sable curls in wild profusion veil his features deepening lines and varying hue, at times attracted yet perplexed the view, but where they ask shall the original of Gulnar be found? Gulnar, who stains her hand with the blood of her lord the Pasha, to save the Corsair from a dreadful death, Byron refuses to reveal his source of inspiration, but Shelley quotes with sincere approval the lines which most emphatically delineate the lovely desperate woman. Embarked, the sail unfurled, the light breeze blew, how much had Conrad's memory to review? He thought on her afar his lovely bride. He turned and saw Gulnar the homicide. She watched his features till she could not bear their freezing aspect and averted air, and that strange fierceness foreign to her eye fell quenched in tears too late to shed or dry. But for that deed of darkness where worth thou? Reproach me, but not yet. Oh, spare me now. I am not what I seem this fearful night, my brain bewildered, do not madden quite. If I had never loved, though less my guilt, though hath not lived to hate me if thou wilt, extreme in love or hate, in good or ill, the worst of crimes had left her woman still. Does Conrad marked and felt, ah, could he less? Hate of that deed, but grief for her distress. And what she had done, no tears could wash away, and heaven must punish on its angry day. But it was done, he knew, whatever her guilt, for him that punyard smote, that blood was spilt, and he was free, and she for him had given her all on earth, and more than all in heaven. The Corsair But Heaven's Shelley cries the host. What infinite nonsense are you quoting, and he hastily turns the current of conversation towards more impersonal subjects? The evening wears on, the guests depart. The clear spring moonlight streams upon the winding Arno. Byron stands dreaming at the open window. The bridges and buildings of Pisa lie still and silverlit before him. A subtle influence of quietudes steals down upon him from the stars. What nothings we are, he murmurs, before the least of these stars. One in particular, is it serious? And trances his attention with its cold revolutions of pure light. His thoughts involuntarily shape themselves in rhythm and rhyme. Son of the sleepless, melancholy star, whose tearful beam glows tremulously far, that show us the dark thou canst not dispel, how like thou art to joy remembered well, so gleams the past the light of other days which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays. A night beam sorrow watches to behold, distinct but distant, clear, but oh how cold. It is the hour when Byron's brain becomes thronged with the glowing phantasmagoria of ideas that cry a lad for visible expression. He forgets, under the stress of creative impulse, the sources and causes of his inherent melancholy, the miserable days of his childhood, with a fury for a mother, the wounds never to be healed of his unrequited love for Mary Chaworth, the inimical wife from whom he is eternally alienated, the little daughter that he may never hold in his arms, the beloved sister separate from his side, the ancestral home of his forefathers now pass him to a stranger's hold, the meteoric glory and total eclipse of his unparalleled popularity in England, the follies and worsen follies which have made him what he is, consisting in nothing but his passion and his pride. These memories, like poisonous exhalations, are banished from his mind and leave a clear horizon for a while, a fertile landscape peopled with great words and images, something akin to inspiration ceases upon him, and he throws himself to work with all the zest and nerve of his impulsive nature. This is a man who writes, in his own phrase, with rapidity and rarely with pains, when I once take a pen in hand I must say what comes uppermost or fling it away, not for him that careful polishing of sentences which other writers meticulously bestow. I have always written as fast as I could put pen to paper, and never revised but in the proofs. I can never recast anything. I am like a tiger, if I miss the first spring I go grumbling back to my jungle. And to this impetuous directness of onslaught, his finest poems bear witness, some critic has remarked that Byron is too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrical writer, yet a Promethean fire stolen from heaven burns immortally through some of his shorter lyrics. In Greek it is said, there are one thousand six hundred and thirty-two ways of expressing simple facts I love you, yet who has ever put it in a more convincing form than Byron does in made of Athens? Made of Athens, ere we part, give oh give me back my heart, or since that it has left my breast keep it now and take the rest. Hear my vow before I go, zdo emu sas agapol, my life I love you.  By that lip I longed to taste, by that zone encircled waste, by all the token flowers that tell what words can never speak so well, by love's alternate joy and woe, zdo emu sas agapol. Made of Athens, I am gone, think of me sweet when alone, though I fly to Istanbul. Athens holds my heart and soul. Can I cease to love thee? No. Zdo emu sas agapol. Rapidly as his pen flies over the paper, the taunt of throbbing thought flows faster still, far on into the night when ghostly noises echo through the sleeping palace, that ever gushing and perennial fonts of natural waters, as Scott has described the genius of Byron, pours forth in reckless perfusion. Until at last, outspent with energy, he draws a deep breath of exhaustion and realizes that he is weariness itself. The moon has sunk in Arno. The stars are halfway across the sky. The cold glimmer of dawn is palpitating along the east as Byron, again, to that accustomed couch must creep, where joy subsides and sorrow sighs to sleep. After a day's fitful fever, he sleeps well and rest, a few short hours of it, is due to that perturbed spirit which now, or labored with his being's strife, shrinks to that sweet forgetfulness of life, that sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least. Laura. End of Section 4 Chapter 5 OF DAYS WITH GREAT POETS This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bob Gonzalez. DAYS WITH GREAT POETS by May Clarissa Gillington Byron. Chapter 5 A Day with Walt Whitman About six o'clock on a mid-summer morning in 1877, a tall old man awoke and was out of bed next moment, but he moved with a certain slow leisureliness. As one who will not be hurried, the reason of this deliberate movement was obvious. He had to drag a paralyzed leg, which was only gradually recovering its ability and would always be slightly lame. Seen more closely, he was not, by any means, so old as at first sight one might imagine. His snow-white hair and almost white gray beard indicated some 80 years, but he was vigorous, erect and rosy. His clear gray blue eyes were bright with a wild hawk look. His face was firm and without a line. An air of splendid vital force, despite his infirmity, was diffused from his whole person and defied the fact of his actual age, which was two years short of sixty. Dressing with the same large leisurely gestures as characterized him in everything, Walt Whitman was presently attired in his invariable suit of gray, and by the time the clock touched half past seven, he was seated in the veranda comfortably inhaling the sweet, fresh morning air and quite ready for his simple breakfast. In this old farmhouse in the New Jersey hamlet of Whitehorse, Walt Whitman had been long an inmate. He was recovering by almost imperceptible degrees from the breakdown induced by over strain, mental and physical, which had culminated in intermittent paralytic seizures for the last eight years and had left his robust physique a mere wreck of its former magnificence. Here, in the absolute peace and seclusion of the little wooden house with its few fields and fruit trees, he lived in a lovable companionship with the farmer folk, man, wife, and sons, and here the level, faintly undulated country, neither