so soon and found it vanity. It is for this reason, and in spite of himself, that Byron becomes, to those who have sense enough to learn from him, a great moral teacher.

"It is," writes George Brimley, "in his fearless attempt at solving the problem of life in his own way, his complete discomfiture, and his unshrinking exhibition of that discomfiture, that the absolute and permanent value of his social teaching consists. For he was endowed with such gifts of nature and of fortune, so highly placed, so made to attract and fascinate, adorned with such beauty and grace, with such splendour of talents, with such quick susceptibility to impressions, with such healthy activity of mind, with such rich flow of speech, with such vast capacity of enjoyment, that no one is likely to make the experiment he made from a higher vantage ground with more chances of success."*

Byron, in Mr. Swinburne's judgment, cannot be justly appreciated in a selection, since he rarely wrote anything faultless. Mr. Arnold thinks otherwise, and observes

Although the abundance and variety of his production is undoubtedly a proof of his power, yet I question whether by reading everything which he gives us we are so likely to acquire an admiring sense even of his variety and abundance as by reading what he gives us at his happier moments. . . . Receive him absolutely, without omission or compression, follow his whole outpouring, stanza by stanza and line by line, from the commencement to the very end, and he is capable of being tiresome."

This verdict of two pocts upon a third is, it will be seen, in one important respect contradictory.

* Essays by the late George Brimley, p. 108 (Macmillan and Co.).

Whichever judgment be the true one, it is doubtful whether any poetical student of our time has read the entire works of Byron, and certain that he will have gained little by so doing. This poet's genius lies upon the surface; it speaks at once to the mind of the reader, and makes the strongest impression on a first perusal. There are poets who, like Chaucer, like Shakespeare, like Wordsworth, yield more and more gold the oftener we dig for it; there are others who, like Goldsmith, Campbell, and Moore, leave us nothing to discover on a second perusal which we did not find upon the first; and this is true also of Lord Byron. You will observe I am not placing these poets on a level. To do so would be ridiculous; for Byron is among the great poets of his country, but he does not rank with the greatest, partly because there are no depths to sound in his work, partly because much which he has done is slovenly and unartistic, and partly because what was vulgar, empirical, and impure in his life is reflected on the larger portion of his poetry.

[Thomas Moore's "Life of Byron," in six volumes, is the foremost biography of the poet, but the literature that has accumulated round his name is considerable. Lord Byron forms the subject of one of Lord Macaulay's essays. A selection from his works (now, I believe, out of print) has been made by Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Matthew Arnold in 1881 undertook the same labour. There is a life of Byron by Professor Nichol in the series of "English Men of Letters" (Macmillan and Co.). The latest contribution to Byronic literature is a work, in two volumes, by Mr. Jeaffreson, entitled "The Real Lord Byron."]

CHAPTER XVII.

POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

(Continued).

JOHN KEATS-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

1795-1821.

"I THINK I shall be among the English poets after my death," were the modest but proud John Keats, words of Keats, and comparatively brief though the time has been since the death of "Adonais," we can say without rashness that his place among the immortals is secure. There is no poet of his century whose work is more intensely poetical, and if some of it bear the marks of immaturity, even that portion is rich in lovely imagery, pervaded by a sense of beauty, and totally free from prosaic elements. The faults of Keats are the faults of genius spurred on by a noble ambition, and wanting the restraints of experience. He was but a boy, be it remembered, when he published his "Endymion;" he was scarcely more than a

boy when he died; but there is nothing more remarkable in his brief career than the rapid intellectual growth which marked those few years. "Endymion," published in 1818, is a poem of promise a garden of exquisite spring blossoms, not an orchard of golden fruit; but the "Hyperion," the "Eve of St. Agnes," and the "Odes," published a year or two later, show the vigour of imagination and the consummate mastery of form which entitle us to speak of Keats as a great poet.

He was born in 1795, and received all the education he ever gained at school, from the father of Charles Cowden Clarke, who had a seminary at Enfield. There he studied in his own way with great ardour, but his acquirements were limited, and the poet who was influenced above all others in our century by the romantic mythology of Greece, never learnt Greek. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton, and long before they ended, the boy, thanks partly to Chapman's Homer, and more to the "Faerie Queene” of Spenser, had discovered the bent of his genius. Sympathetic and gifted friends recognized it also, and on removing to London to walk the hospitals he found an intimate associate in Leigh Hunt. The influence of this friendship is evident, as it was natural it should be, in Keats's earlier poems. Other men of genius and talent welcomed the poet with open arms, and life for a short time glowed with the "purple light" of youth and hope. Medicine and poetry did not

agree together in the case of Keats, and to the latter, poor though he was, he became wholly devoted. His brightest days were spent at Hampstead, where, in the Vale of Health, then a spot of rural beauty, Leigh Hunt had a cottage, and there, too, occurred some of the saddest, for Love, alike passionate and hopeless, seized the young poet with iron grasp at the very time when Death, with a hand still stronger, turned all his love to pain. He knew his doom long before the end came, and in resolving for a last chance of life to try the air of Italy, he felt, as he said, "the sensation of marching up against a battery." At Rome the artist Severn watched over the dying poet with the tenderness of a sister. The struggle for life was terrible. Keats believed in immortality after the fashion of a virtuous pagan, but he knew nothing of the "good hope" which sustains a Christian, and oftentimes does more than sustain him, when passing through the dark valley. His mind, like his body, was diseased. "His imagination and memory presented every thought to him in horror." When letters came to him from home he dared not read them. One from the woman he loved, to quote the emphatic language of Severn, "tore him. to pieces;" and he adds, " He did not read it-he could not-but requested me to place it in his coffin." The delirium of fever disappeared on the near approach of death, much to the relief of the friend who had been "beating about in the tempest of his mind so long." "I feel," said the poet, "the