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bright eyes, profuse and beauteous hair, bleeding hands and trickling tears, avenge his wanderings by the lash. And surely cruel the critics, who stripped, and striped, and cut, and branded the Muse's Son.

"Isabella" is a versification of one of Boccacio's finest stories; but on the simple thread of the narrative Keats has suspended some of his own richest gems. The story is that of two lovers who loved "not wisely but too well." The brothers of the maiden, seducing the youth away under the guise of a journey, kill and bury him in the forest. Isabella, after long watching, and weeping, and uncertainty as to his fate, is warned of it in a dream, and, repairing to the forest where her true love lies, digs up his head, and hides it in a pot of sweet basil, over which she prays and weeps out her heart incessantly. Her cruel kinsmen, finding out the secret, remove the basil-pot, banish themselves, and their sister pines away. The story is told with exquisite simplicity, pathos, and those quiet quaint touches so characteristic of the author. Two expressions, instinct with poetry, cling to our memories. They occur in the same stanza :

So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence to where Arno's stream
Gurgles through straitened banks.

Sick and wan,

The brothers' faces in the ford did seem

Lorenzo's flush with love-they pass d the water
Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.

What an awful leap forward of imagination in the first line! Florence saw no gore on Lorenzo's garments as he rode by; but the guilty eye of the brothers, and the purged eye of the poet, saw it all bedropped with gouts of blood-the deed already done the man murdered. No spectre bestriding spectre-steed, no fiend mounted on black charger, joining a solitary traveller at twilight among trackless woods, was ever such a terrible companion as to the two brothers and to us is the murdered man— his own apparition. And then, how striking the contrast between the wan, sick, corpse-like faces of the brothers and his, shining with the rose-hue of love! They enter an old forest, not swinging its dark cones in the tempest, but "quiet for the slaughter," as if supernaturally hushed for the occasion, as if by a special decree prepared and predestined to the silence of that hour, as if dumbly sympathising through all its red trunks and black rounded tops, with the "deed without a name."

Much more gorgeous in style, and colouring, and breathing a yet more intensely poetical spirit, is "St Agnes' Eve." It is a dream within a dream. Its every line wears couleur de rose. A curious feature of Keats's mind was its elegant effeminacy. No poet describes dress with more gusto and beauty. Witness his

picture of Madeline kneeling at her devotions, and seeming, in the light of the painted window, "a splendid angel, newly dressed, save wings, for heaven," or "trembling in her soft and chilly nest," after having freed her hair from her "wreathed pearls," 'unclasped her warmed jewels," "loosened her fragrant boddice," and,

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By degrees,

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.

None, save Keats, and Tennyson after him, has adventured on the delicate yet lovely theme-the poetry of dress; a subject which, artificial as it is, is capable, in chaste and tender hands,, of the most imaginative treatment. Who, following in their footsteps, shall write the rhymed history of dress, from the first reeking lion-hide worn by a warrior of the infant world, down through the coloured skins of the Picts, the flowing toga of the ancients, the "garb of old Gaul," the turban of the Turks, the picturesque attire of the American Indians, the gorgeous vestments of God's ancient people, the kilt, the trews, and the plaid of Caledonia, the sandal or symar, or cloak, or shawl, or head-dress of various ages, to the great-coat of the modern Briton, who, in the description of Cowper, is

An honest man, close button'd to the chin,

Broad-cloth without, and a warm heart within.

The finest of Keats's smaller pieces åre, "Lines written on Chapman's Homer" (the only translation which gives the savageism, if not the sublimity of Homer-his wild beasts maddening in their fleshy fury, and his heroes "red-wat-shod," and which, in its original folio, Charles Lamb is said once to have kissed in his rapturous appreciation); the "Ode to a Nightingale," or rather to its voice, "singing of summer in full-throated ease;" the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," elegant as that "sylvan historian itself" (what a sigh for eternity in its description of the pair of pictured lovers, whom he congratulates "that ever thou wilt love, and she be fair!"); the "Ode to Autumn" "sitting careless on a granary floor," "her hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;" and the dewy sonnet beginning—

Happy is England, I could be content

To see no other verdure but its own.

In originality, Keats has seldom been surpassed. His works "rise like an exhalation." His language had been formed on a false system; but, ere he died, was clarifying itself from its more glaring faults, and becoming copious, clear, and select. He seems to have been averse to all speculative thought, and his only creed, we fear, was expressed in the words " Beauty is truth-truth beauty."

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His great defect lay in the want, not of a man-like soul or spirit, but of a man-like constitution. His genius lay in his body like sun-fire in a dew-drop, at once beautifying and burning it up. Griffin, the author of the "Collegians," describes him (in deep consumption the while) hanging over the fatal review in the "Quarterly" as if fascinated, reading it again and again, sucking out every drop of the poison. Had he but had the resolution, as we have known done in similar circumstances, of dashing it against the wall, or kicking it into the fire! Even Percival Stockdale could do this to "The Edinburgh Review," when it cut up his "Lives of the English Poets;" and John Keats was worth many millions of him. But disappointment, disease, deep love, and poverty, combined to unman him. Through his thin materialism he "felt the daisies growing over him." And in this lowly epitaph did his soaring ambitions terminate: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But why mourn over his fate, when the lamentation of all hearts has been already enshrined in the verse of "Alastor?" Let "Adonais” be at once his panegyric and his mausoleum :

The inheritors of unfulfill'd renown

Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the unapparent. Chatterton

Rose pale: his solemn agony had not

Yet faded from him.

And many more, whose names on earth are dark,
Though their transmitted effluence cannot die,
So long as fire outlives its parent spark,

Rose robed in dazzling immortality.

"Thou art become as one of us," they cry;

"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long

Swung blind in unascended majesty,

Silent alone, amid a heaven of song.

Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng."

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.

WE heard recently a keen discussion on the question, Is Thomas Macaulay, in the strict sense, a man of genius? Now, in order to qualify ourselves for determining this question, we must first inquire what genius is? a question of some moment in a book which professes to be a gallery of contemporary genius.

We can conceive of nothing more undefinable than genius. It is so on account of the complexity of the elements which make it up. It is not one thing, nor is it many things, but it is the one subtle result of many elements subordinated into harmony and completeness. We shall perhaps best attain our object by

showing, after the fashion of the scholastic divines, what genius is not, ere we proceed to inquire what it is.

Genius, then, first of all, is not mental dexterity. How many seem to think that it is! With how many people does the expert player of chess, and the acute solver of riddles, and the accurate summer up of intricate accounts, and the man of mere verbal memory (who has equally by heart Milton and Mallet), and the expert versifier, and the flippant declaimer, pass, each and all of them, for men of genius? One reason of this is, that this kind of power is so tangible in its effects, that only the external senses are required to perceive its results. It can neither be disputed nor denied. All are agreed about it. It needs no exertion of mind to form an opinion about its merit; and an opinion, when once formed, is rarely, if ever, altered. No circumstance can fritter away the character of the man who has only to open his mouth to pour forth puns and acrostics by the thousand. The merit, mean as it may be, is something positive and incontestable. Again, this sort of cleverness is habitual and inveterate: hence its displays are masterly and imposing: the thing is done, and done quickly, and as well as it is possible to conceive. The achievement, whatever it may be, has distinctness, prominence, and perfection. Perhaps mechanical were a better name than mental dexterity. Mechanism performs its wonders with unerring effect, and at all times equally. In given circumstances, the application of steam has, of course, the same result. So, set a man of this kind to write, and he writes, and writes well, but writes like an automaton. And yet the impres sion made by this kind of merit upon the majority is wonderful. A man of genius may go on for a lifetime digging wells of beauty and rapture, and one out of ten may talk about him, and one out of a hundred may read him, and one out of a thousand may partially understand him, and he may die unappreciated. But let one arise who can express commonplace in sounding phraseology, or work up weakness into epigram, or even disguise nonsense under copious and splendid verse, and he will be appreciated and admired as infallibly as any able mender of soles or stitcher of broad-cloth. Wordsworth (to translate principle into fact), during half his long lifetime, was neglected, while Waller is loaded and suffocated with panegyric. The reason is, Wordsworth is a poet, and Waller was a mechanist. It is easy distinguishing the characters. The mechanist has probably not one original thought in his mind. He is perhaps even incapable of appreciating the original thoughts of others. It is to say much, if we grant that a "plastic stress," such as called in chaos, might perhaps stir him into the genuine animation of mind. As it is, he neither thinks, nor dreams of thinking. Far from welcoming those impulses to deep and thrilling meditation, which more or less affect

all intellects, he repulses them, and turns eagerly to his machinery. There, however, he is perfectly at home. He can handle his tools to admiration. He can throw off a poem, which, though not a "Paradise Lost," tickles the ear a great deal more, and is far more easily understood. He can dash down commonplaces. on any given subject as fast as his pen can move. He can per-. haps mimic all sorts of styles in succession with the skill of a mocking-bird. He can write a "Poetical Mirror," though a "Kilmeny" be beyond him. Nay, he can perhaps even shed off apparent and surface originalities as fast as the thistle its down: and he may be able to do all this, and much more, without the appearance of effort, at a moment's warning, and at all times equally. He is subject to no moods, no shadows, no sudden loathings of his occupation, no ambitious towering above the dead level of the paper on which he is inscribing his thoughts. His merit is thus great; and, what is more, is beyond all question. He has done all this; and no one doubts but he will do it again. Still his merit is very different from the merit of a man of genius. The man of genius cannot refrain from thinking. All impulses which affect him are so many summonses to vigorous intellectual exertion. His originality, never ostentatious, is nevertheless the element of his mind. He cannot stifle an inducement to thought, except it be for the sake of indulging in reverie, which is just thought in its nebular state. He cannot sacrifice sense to sound, except it be for an instant, that he may afterwards link both in unchanging harmony. He cannot complacently indite commonplace. He can write centos, but he will do so rarely, and only for the pleasure of gratifying his sympathy, by plunging more completely into another's habits of thought and feeling. He cannot, finally, do any thing equally well at any time. It may be asked, why not? We reply, because he is a man, not a machine. He is not screwed up to a pitch whence he can only descend by a struggle. His brains move freely. The constant whirl supposed can only be produced by two causes: first, the result of mechanical straining, and, secondly, madness. He is neither mad nor a machine. It may be asked, Does not cultivation bring the powers to such perfection, that their fruit in any circumstances must be excellence? Most things, no doubt, are possible, and consistency of style may thus be secured even by men of impulse; but we believe that the highest pressure can rarely effect any more. Who more intensely cultivated than Milton? and yet who more dependent upon moods and moments? If nobody has written better, who has written worse? We are far, indeed, from denying that some men have great mechanical power added to their genius; and that it is better that they have. But such a conjunction is rare; and when it does occur, the mechanical part of the power ever appears to be subordinate. It

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