the old men "sitting calm and peacefully" under the sea-Endymion "leaning upon a bough," and gazing on the young Indian-and the Bacchus, "within his car aloft trifling bis ivy-dart,"-all beautiful, all master-pieces; but we must pass on to the few additional extracts we propose to present under the head of dialogues. In these Keats excels as much as he does in painting. His dialogues are eminently dramatic. Passion speaks out in its own burning language-Grief breathes forth from trembling lips the story of her trials. Passion and Grief, both poetic elements, as commanding that excited state, that high-wrought emotion, in which the most grovelling are, for the time being, lifted up above their usual selves, and rapt into a world which is usually the home only of those of lofty minds, and refined sensibility.

In this high heaven which Grief and Passion inhabit, Keats was a constant dweller he had interlinked their existences with his own, until they became a part of his very being, and then throwing himself, Proteuslike, into the spirit of his actors, he saw what they should see, acted as they should act, felt as they should feel, and spoke as they should speak. It is only in possessing this power that any one can give each emotion its own true utterance, and it he possessed in its full and perfect strength.

What more graphic-what more brief-what more full of feeling-what more poetic-than Glaucus' description of his Scylla, found dead and floating on the sea —

Young lover, I must weep-such hellish spite

With dry cheek who can tell? While thus my might
Proving upon this element, dismay'd,

Upon a dead thing's face my hand I laid;

I look'd 'twas Scylla! cursed, cursed Circe!
Oh, vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy!
Could not thy harshest vengeance be content,
But thou must nip this tender innocent
Because I loved her? Cold, O cold indeed
Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed
The sea swell took her hair."

How true to nature is the speech of Endymion when he finds the young stranger again, after their flight through the heavens, when, worn out and aweary with chasing his love, so cherished, so burthening, he bids it a melancholy farewell, and elects his Indian damsel sole sovereign of his affections:

"My sweetest Indian, here,

Here will I kneel; for thou redeemed hast
My life from, too, thin breathing; gone and past
Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell!
And air of visions, and the monstrous swell

Of visionary seas! No, never more

Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore
Of tangled wonder, breathless and aghast.
Adieu my daintiest dream! although so vast
My love is still for thee. The hour may come
When we shall meet in pure elysium.

On earth I may not love thee; and therefore,
Doves will I offer up, and sweetest store
All through the teeming year: so thou will shine
On me, and on this damsel fair of mine,

And bless our simple lives. My Indian bliss!
My river-lily bud! one human kiss!

One sigh of REAL breath-one gentle squeeze,
Warm as a dove's nest among summer trees,
And warm with dew at ooze from living blood!
Whither didst melt? Ah! what of that?-all good
We'll talk about—no more of dreaming."

And although not exactly under our present head, there is so similar, so master-like a portrayal of a struggle between these loves given, where he sees the two objects of his passion at once, that we cannot forbear transcribing it here:

"and, strange, o'erhead
Beheld awake his very dream: the gods
Stood smiling; merry Hebe laughs and nods;
And Phoebe bends towards him crescented.
O state perplexing! On the pinion bed,
Too well awoke, he feels the panting side
Of his delicious lady. He who died
For soaring too audacious in the sun,

Where that same treacherous wax began to run,
Felt not more tongue-tied than Endymion.
His heart leaped up as to its rightful throne,
To that fair-shadow'd passion pulsed its way-
Ah, what perplexity! ah, well-a-day!
So fond, so beauteous was his bed-fellow,
He could not help but kiss her: then he grew
Awhile forgetful of all beauty save

Young Phabe, golden-hair'd; and so 'gan crave
Forgiveness: yet he turned once more to look
At the sweet sleeper,—all his soul was shook—
She press'd his hand in slumber : so once more
He could not help but kiss her and adore.

At this the shadow wept, melting away.

What a depth of meaning is there in the following eight lines. Through what a labyrinth of feeling do they not lead the willing mind?

I was a fisher once, upon this main,

And my boat danced in every creek and bay;
Rough billows were my home by night and day,-
The sea-gulls not more constant; for I had

No housing from the storm and tempests mad,
But hollow rocks,-and they were palaces
Of silent happiness, of slumbering ease:
Long years of misery have told me so.

There were some others we would like to have added, but must now pause, and present an isolated passage, which claims attention from its exquisite beauty-it is where Endymion is bringing back to life the dead lovers in the temple beneath the sea:

"he left them to their joy,

And onward went upon his high employ.

Showering those powerful fragments on the dead,

And as he pass'd each lifted up its head,

As doth a flower at Apollo's touch.
Death felt it to his inwards; 't was too much :
Death fell a-weeping in his charnel·house.
The Labmian persevered along, and thus
All were reanimated. There arose
A noise of harmony, pulses and throes
Of gladness in the air-while many, who
Had died in mutual arms devout and true
Sprang to each other madly! AND THE REST
FELT A HIGH CERTAINTY OF BEING BLEST.

This is a splendid illustration of his great poetic power. A lovers suddenly brought to life! Now what shall they do? Weep? Rave? Call on each other's names? No; those

"who

Had died in mutual arms devout, and true,
Sprang to each other madly"-

number of How act?

But the others-they who had not died in mutual arms. Here is a greater difficulty still. How shall they act? They whose all-absorbing thought must be love, with its object far away. A lesser genius would have filled the air with their shrieks and plaints, and made them curse their cruel fates and long again for death; but our poet sinks into their hearts, and sees, that having been re-animated by some beneficent power, they must have known and felt it, and knowing this, have been conscious that all did not stop there; and with the faith of a dying Christian,

"the rest

Felt a high certainty of being blest."

We shall give no more extracts, enough having been presented to show the author's high claim to an eminent position among the poets; and what we have given, have extended our limits so much beyond what we had set as bounds to ourselves, that we must close as briefly as possible, not ever being able to take a single glance at either of the other poems. Keats' mind was deeply imbued with the spirit of ancient mythologythat Pantheon, in which each god seems rather the offspring of the Muses-and in which imagination worships with ecstatic devotion, bending before shrines so rich in all that it may adore, and wandering through its many aisles, breathless with wonder, thrilling with delight. Its many divinities rushed, a færy throng, into his dizzy brain, and, whirling in the mazy dance, wrought, with their light foot-prints, an arabesque tracery, to be interpreted and sung forth by him.

The usual poet is the student of nature, external and internal; a creature of passion, who, with the glowing fervor of enthusiasm, worships at the inmost shrine of his goddess, and chaunts forth the melodious gushings and outpourings of his too full spirit, in the harmonious notes of inspiration. But to Keats their one goddess was multiplied an hundred fold; and, presenting herself in the myriad forms attributed to her in the Grecian Mythology, their one creature of adoration became to him a multitude of deities, each possessing the same control of his heart the rest give to the one. To him each star looked down with an animate eye on the world; each brook murmured forth the plaints or loves of its deity;

each breeze which whispered through the leaves of a tree, sported in soft dalliance with its Hamadryad. In the morning, he did not look with a philosophic eye upon the golden clouds, but to him it was rosy-fingered Aurora who drew near; and when they began to fade away, it was

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And when the crescent moon "from ebon streak" put forth one little tipno bigger than an unobserved star," it was a bright signal that she only stooped to tie her silver sandals." Thus, to him all nature became a temple, each object a deity, and he stood enraptured in her midst -her worshipper and priest.

But there are many who crowd round to hear the words which fall from the lips of the priest, who understand not their full import-many who catch the outward beauties of poesy, who do not discern its inward, its hidden beauties. The poetic idea which strikes the first glance, has something deeper, more delicate, enclosed in this outward covering. Indeed, we may liken it to a figure which we pursue into a labyrinth, through whose mazes, wander as we will, we at times see it laughing among flowers-then bathing among fountains-then sporting among cupidsand anon toying with wild beasts-while, in all these various situations, it is still the same, clearly known and to be recognized. To the blind man, who has his sight suddenly given him, the eastern sky at noon would be a great and exceeding beauty; but to one who can look beyond the horizon, it is also the precursor of the splendid and glorious god of day. To one of dimmed vision, the rocket, just ascending in its blazing course, is the meteor he can recollect to have seen shooting athwart the sky; but to him who follows it in its sparkling ascent it becomes, when it bursts into a myriad of stars, each brilliant and various hued, a part of that spangled sphere itself. We mean that, while all can see the beauty of the idea, few can discern the multitude of accompanying images, which, to the poetic mind, cluster round it in a beautiful and bright band.

And while this power of associating images is possessed in a high degree by Keats, he carries it also into his mere story. Possessing a thorough knowledge of mythological stories himself, to appreciate his tale alone fully, we must ourselves be acquainted with the whole history of each fabled individual to whom he adverts; his parentage, his trials, and his loves, must all be distinct in our minds; and then we can see how perfect a group of statuary the mere personages introduced would form.

Thus, while there will be nothing to admire in the classical chasteness of Keats' poetry, to those who dwell with forced admiration on the newfangled schools, in which feeble imitators of Shelley endeavor to combine metaphysics with poetry, and others take Wordsworth for a model, and run, in the one case, into unintelligibility, and in the other into maudlin simplicity, still one imbued with a refined poetic taste cannot fail to draw copious draughts of delight from this one of the few streams which has its source in the true Castalian fount.

THE REVULSION.

CHAPTER I.

"And ne'er did Grecian chisel trace

A Nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace,

Of finer form, or lovelier face."-SCOTT.

THE year 1836 was one of unusual prosperity. The Asiatic cholera, after ravaging our country in different regions for the three preceding years-smiting the high and the low, the great and the small-withering the pride of manhood and the beauty of youth-in many sections marring, in others obliterating the festivities and gayeties of life - robing the social circle and the family group in the garments of grief-spreading the gloom and striking the panic of sudden death-had disappeared from the land; peace and health-peace eternal and internal, health public and individual, the duality that, rightly used, engenders an advancing happiness-reigned within our borders. The political heresies of the restrictive system-legislatively established in 1828, and productive, from its nature, of injustice and oppression-had been repealed by its creators; and thus freed from the exorbitant burthens of improper taxation, the great planting interests of the South and West were rapidly regaining a progressive position; while clouded brows and angry features on political subjects had, throughout our Union, changed to gladness and smiles. In fulfillment of the Indian policy of the government, vast numbers of the Indians residing, or rather roaming miserably at large, in many of the States, had been, or were then being removed to allotted districts in the then Far West. The Aborigines, in all cases, carried with them their property-slaves included-to their new homes, and that without an echo of disapprobation, much less of opposition, from the teeming thousands of our country, who, in 1850, would move heaven and earth lest an American citizen should migrate with his property to a country west and south of this same territory, and be protected in so doing by the Constitution of the Confederacy. The Indian and his slaves, if he had any, in 1836 were removed, at public expense, to a new home; while in 1850, the citizens of fifteen sovereign states are denied the right of seeking with their property new homes, won by their valor, and paid for with their blood!

The migration of the red man brought into market vast quantities of public land, which, with the distribution of the surplus revenue among the States-the enormous discounts of State and local banks greatly stimulated by Biddle's monster-the exorbitant expansion of commercial credit-the high and largely remunerating price of the great staple-the successful returns of previous adventures-each and all produced a mania, a real frenzy for speculation of every kind, pervading every grade of the community. A general disinclination for the steady pursuits of life-a total relaxation of ordinary prudence in the management of commercial operations-a fatal proclivity to acquire wealth without antecedent labor -an unusual eagerness to consummate the most visionary schemes—a