Yet the strong spirit lives-and not a cry
Shall own the might of nature's agony!
That furrow'd brow unconquer'd soul reveals,
That patient eye to angry Heaven appeals,
That struggling bosom concentrates its breath,
Nor yields one moan to torture or to death!

Sublimest triumph of intrepid Art!

With speechless horror to congeal the heart,
To freeze each pulse, and dart through every vein
Cold thrills of fear, keen sympathies of pain;
Yet teach the spirit how its lofty power
May brave the pangs of fate's severest hour.*

Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy.

THE ITALIAN MASTERS OF PAINTING. TURN from such conflicts, and enraptured gaze On scenes where Painting all her skill displays : Landscapes, by colouring dress'd in richer dyes, More mellow'd sunshine, more unclouded skies, Or dreams of bliss to dying martyrs given, Descending seraphs robed in beams of heaven.

Oh! sovereign Masters of the Pencil's might,
Its depths of shadow and its blaze of light;
Ye, whose bold thought, disdaining every bound,
Explored the worlds above, below, around,
Children of Italy! who stand alone

And unapproach'd, midst regions all your own;

* See Byron's description of the Laocoon below, and compare Shelley's fine critique on that other sublime conception of human Sorrow-the Niobe at Florence.

What scenes, what beings bless'd your favour'd sight,
Severely grand, unutterably bright!

Triumphant spirits! your exulting eye
Could meet the noontide of eternity,
And gaze untired, undaunted, uncontroll❜d,
On all that Fancy trembles to behold.

Bright on your view such forms their splendour shed
As burst on prophet-bards in ages fled:

Forms that to trace no hand but yours might dare,
Darkly sublime, or exquisitely fair;

These o'er the walls your magic skill array'd,
Glow in rich sunshine, gleam through melting shade,
Float in light grace, in awful greatness tower,
And breathe and move, the records of your power.
Inspired of heaven! what heighten'd pomp ye cast
O'er all the deathless trophies of the past!
Round many a marble fane and classic dome,
Asserting still the majesty of Rome—

Round many a work that bids the world believe
What Grecian Art could image and achieve,

Again, creative minds, your visions throw

Life's chasten'd warmth and Beauty's mellowest glow;
And when the morn's bright beams and mantling dyes
Pour the rich lustre of Ausonian skies,

Or evening suns illume with purple smile.
The Parian altar and the pillar'd aisle,
Then, as the full or soften'd radiance falls
On angel-groups that hover o'er the walls,
Well may those temples, where your hand has shed.
Light o'er the tomb, existence round the dead,
Seem like some world, so perfect and so fair,
That naught of earth should find admittance there,
Some sphere, where beings, to mankind unknown,
Dwell in the brightness of their pomp alone!

BB

Id.

THE GRAVE OF THE OUTCAST:

A DIRGE.

WHERE shall we make her grave?
Oh! where the wild-flowers wave
In the free air!

Where shower and singing-bird

Midst the young leaves are heard— There-lay her there!

Harsh was the world to her—
Now may sleep minister
Balm for each ill:

Low on sweet Nature's breast
Let the meek heart find rest,
Deep, deep and still!

Murmur, glad waters! by;
Faint gales! with happy sigh,
Come wandering o'er

That green and mossy bed,
Where, on a gentle head,

Storms beat no more!

What though for her in vain
Falls now the bright spring-rain,
Plays the soft wind,
Yet still, from where she lies,
Should blessed breathings rise,
Gracious and kind.

Therefore let song and dew
Thence in the heart renew

Life's vernal glow!

And o'er that holy earth

Scents of the violet's birth
Still come and go!

Oh! then, where wild flowers wave Make ye her mossy grave,

In the free air!

Where shower and singing-bird Midst the young leaves are heardThere-lay her there!

KEATS.

1795-1820.

PRINCIPAL WORKS:-Endymion: a Poetic Romance, 1818, displaying at once the immaturity and the true poetic fancy of a possibly great poet. It is founded upon the Hellenic myth of the love of Selene (the divinity of the moon) for the young Latmian Shepherd-prince who was eventually kissed into an everlasting sleep by the Eros-smitten goddess. Like so much of Coleridge's poetry, it is essentially transcendental and dreamy. It was, as is generally known, assailed with a supererogatory amount of critical acumen or spleen in the Quarterly Review.--Hyperion, an unfinished work, of which Byron professed that 'it seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Eschylus.' It is founded upon the myth of the Hellenic theology which narrates the attempt of the rebel angels or Titans to dispossess the usurping tyrant Zeus, in favour of the milder régime of Kronos and the other primeval divinities.— The Eve of St. Agnes, a mediæval story in the Spenserian stanza.— Lamia, in the style of Endymion, suggested by the story of Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius, of one of those antique witch-fiends called Lamiæ, whose vocation it was, in the guise of beautiful women, to allure and devour too amorous youths.-Isabella, a poetic tale taken from Boccaccio's Decamerone.-Odes to the Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Fancy, and Autumn. All these appeared together in 1820, the year of the poet's death.

If the Endymion and Hyperion can scarcely be classed with the very best English poems, such as The Faery Queen, Comus, or Prometheus Unbound, they contain many beauties and much charming imagery, and are full of the promise of future excellence: ecstatic imagination, and ideas imbued with the spirit of the old Hellenic genius (with which Keats was acquainted only at second-hand), of Spenser, and the best productions of the Italian and English 'pastoral' style of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century. The want of human interest, on what just grounds (unless the phrase must be limited to mean the serious trifling of ordinary human life) it is not easy to understand, has been often objected to the immortal poems of Shelley; it is an objection, perhaps, more just in regard to Coleridge or Keats, and in respect of some other poets who are commonly credited with