addition to felicity of treatment, its subject is in every respect a happy one, and helps to "paint" this our bower of "poetry with delight." Melancholy, it is true, will "break in" when the reader thinks of the early death of such a writer; but it is one of the benevolent provisions of nature, that all good things tend to pleasure in the recollection; when the bitterness of their loss is past, their own sweetness embalms them. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. While writing this paragraph, a hand-organ out-of-doors has been playing one of the mournfullest and loveliest of the airs of Bellini-another genius who died young. The sound of music always gives a feeling either of triumph or tenderness to the state of mind in which it is heard: in this instance it seemed like one departed spirit come to bear testimony of another, and to say how true indeed may be the union of sorrowful and sweet recollections. Keats knew the youthful faults of his poetry as well as any man, as the reader may see by the preface to Endymion, and its touching though manly acknowledgment of them to critical candor. I have this moment read it again, after a lapse of years, and have been astonished to think how anybody could sanswer such an appeal to the mercy of strength, with the cruelty of weakness. All the good for which Mr. Gifford pretended to be zealous, he might have effected with pain to no one, and glory to himself; and therefore all the evil he mixed with it was of his own making. But the secret at the bottom of such unprovoked censure is exasperated inferiority. Young poets, upon the whole,—at least very young poets,-had better not publish at all. They are pretty sure to have faults; and jealousy and envy are sure to find them out, and wreak upon them their own disappointments. The critic is often an unsuccessful author, almost always an inferior one to a man of genius, and possesses his sensibility neither to beauty nor to pain. If he does, if by any chance he is a man of genius himself (and such things have been), sure and certain will be his regret, some day; for having given pains which he might have turned into noble pleasures; and nothing will console him but that very charity towards himself, the grace of which can only be secured to us by our having denied it to no one. Let the student of poetry observe, that in all the luxury of the Eve of Saint Agnes there is nothing of the conventional craft of artificial writers; no heaping up of words or similes for their own sakes or the rhyme's sake; no gaudy common-places; no borrowed airs of earnestness; no tricks of inversion; no substitution of reading or of ingenious thoughts for feeling or spontaneity; no irrelevancy or unfitness of any sort. All flows out of sincerity and passion. The writer is as much in love with the heroine as his hero is; his description of the painted window, however gorgeous, has not an untrue or superfluous word; and the only speck of a fault in the whole poem arises from an excess of emotion. THE EVE OF SAINT AGNES.1 I. St. Agnes' Eve-Ah! bitter chill it was: The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold; Numb were the beadsman's fingers while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem'd taking flight for heaven without a death Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.3 II. His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man, Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees, And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan, Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees : The sculptur'd dead on each side seem'd to freeze, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails 4 III. Northward he turneth through a little door, Rough ashes sat he, for his soul's reprieve; IV. That ancient beadsman heard the prelude soft; The silver-snarling trumpets 'gan to chide; And carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts. V. At length burst in the argent revelry The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay VI. They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve, Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire. VII. Full of this whim was youthful Madeline; And back retired, not cool'd by high disdain, VIII. She danc'd along with vague, regardless eyes, IX. So, purposing each moment to retire, She linger'd still. Meantime across the moors, Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores All saints to give him sight of Madeline, But for one moment in the tedious hours, That he might gaze and worship all unseen, Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss ;-in sooth such things have been. X. He ventures in, let no buzz'd whisper tell; All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords Hyæna foemen, and hot-blooded lords, Him any mercy, in that mansion foul, Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul. ΧΙ. Ah! happy chance! the aged creature came To where he stood, hid from the torches' light, The sound of merriment and chorus bland. Saying, “Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place. ΧΙΙ. "Get hence! get hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand, He cursed thee and thine, both house and land: And tell me how-"-" Good Saints! not here! not here! Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier!" XIII. He follow'd through a lowly, arched way, XIV. "St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes' Eve- But let me laugh awhile; I've mickle time to grieve." XV. Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon, |