The Sun.
London, England, 1848-11-14 00:00:00

TUESDAY EVENING, NOVEMBER 14, 1848.

LITERATURE.

LIFE, LETTERS, AND LITERARYREMAINS
OF JOHN KEATS. 2 Yols. Edited by Ric/ard
Monchton 11IiInes.

Twenty-seven years ego there died, at a lodging-
house in the Piazza di Spagna, at Rome, a young
Englishman, of humble origin, in exceeding poverty,
and with a body emaciated by consumption. The
existence of this extraordinary being numbered only
twerty-five years, three months, and twenty-five
days ; and the whole of his simple history may be
summed up, according to the pathetic expression of
his biographer, in the composition of three small
volumes of verse, some earnest friendships, one pas
sion, and a premature death." After the lapse of the
interval already mentioned, we have now before us
the narrative of his life, and of his sufferings, and the
last fragmentary melodies of his splendid and exqui-
sitely poetic genius—the gleanings of "a harvest of
which so few full sheaves were permitted to be gar-
nered." Adonais sleeps in his Italian grave, a grave
beautified by perpetual verdure, and blooming with
violets and daisies, under the shadow of the pyramidal
tomb erected to the memory of Caius Cestius, a
Tribune of the Roman people, the cenotaph errone-
ously imrgined by Petrarch to contain the ashes of
the brother of Romulus. The lovers of Laon have
long been familiar with that romantic burying-place,
from a vignette prefixed to the collected writings of
Shelley, for Shelley and Keats, the mourner and the
mourned, kindred in their premature deaths, and
congenial in their precocious intellects, lie there
together, in that spot of earth which their mouldering
bones have rendered doubly classic. Above one
grave lingers that humble and almost despairing in-
scription :

" Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Upon the other is engraven a brief but impassioned
memento—

" Cor Cordium."
Scorn and obloquy were almost the only recom-
pense of these young poets during their lifetime; but
since their departure their fame has so widened that
their names have at length become two of the brightest
glories of our national literature. Applying to these
two most true and great poets the language which
was originally applied to Keats and Tennyson, we
may, indeed, exclaim with a distinguished critic re-
cently deceased—" When we think of the amount of
the recognition they have received, one may well bless
GOD that poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether
it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own
magic hermitage." We do bless GOD for this, ear-
nestly—because, in the works of these illustrious
beings, our hearts recognise the sweetness, and the
depth, and the holiness of those intellectual amenities
by which this earth is adorned and sanctified. We
b!ess GOD that such is the strength and joy of poetry
that it emerges with as much vitality from the dun-
geon of the Earl of Surrey, when he sang love-songs
in the royal walls of Windsor, as from the capitol of
the Eternal City when the hermit of Vaucluse was
crowned with a garland of bay-leaves. We bless
GOD that it is ever thus, whether Tasso is incarce-
rated as a madman, or whether Voltaire is borne in
triumph on the shoulders of the Parisians. We
bless GOD, moreover, for the same reason, that
John Keats is no longer derided as a pigmy
among the Lilliputians of Cockaigne, but that
in his undeveloped genius is recognised the
fragment of a colossus, kindred in its proportions to
the sublime stature of the giants of poetry--our
Miltons, and Virgils, and Spensers, and Shaksperea.
Prom our acquaintance with the productions of Keats
we had long since been impressed with these ideas,
and filled with admiration for the wealth of his
imageries and the magnificent profusion of his lan-
guage. We had appreciated in his " Endyrnion," that
" stretched metre of an antique song," the realisa-
tion of the truth of its inductive declaration that
"a thing of beauty is a joy for ever." With its un-
numbered blemishes, its schoolbred affectation of
pomp, its colloquialisms, and even its occasional ab-
surdities, both in regard to diction and to fancy, we
had rejoiced in its equally unnumbered graces
and beauties, from the submarine wanderings of
Glaucus, through the " blue-green," to the hymn of
Pan, when

silver thrills
From kissing cymbals made a merry din;"
from the erratic springs of Latmos, " warming their
chilliest bubbles in the grass," to the bower of Peoria,
with its bed of " sacred ditanny and poppies red,"
until the whole poem became to us, in its own be-
witching phraseology,
" An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us f om the heaven's brink."
Lamia, again, that incomparable effusion which 11Ir.
Milnes justly declares to be the most perfect speci
men of narrative poetry in the language, had been
to us a household thought, a thought as complete as
its embodiment was classic, from the moment when
the demon-beauty is discovered
a palpitating snake,
Bt ight and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake,"

•
throughout the story of her metamorphosis, of the
love of Lyciug, of their marriage at Athens, and of
the appearance of Apollonius—

" Until it seenfti a horrid presence there,
And not a man but felt :he terror in his hair."
" The Pot of Basil," too, that piteous tale from Bee-
eacio, with the loves of Isabella and Lorenzo of whom
the poet says—
" Parting, they seem'd to tread upon the air,
Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart
Only to meet again more close, and share
he inward fragrance of each other's heart;"
' The Eve of Saint Agnes," that seraphic vision of
revelry, loveliness, and bridal rapture, when Madeline
after dreaming of Porphyro, and finding him on his
knees by her couch, speaks to him in the impassioned
terms of love, and
" At her voluptuous accents, he arose,
Etherial, tlush'd, and like a throbbing star
Seen 'mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted , us the rose
Blendtth its odour with the violet ;"
" The Ode to Psyche," depicting the "rosy sanc-
tuary " of the goddess, decked " with the wreathed
trellis of a working brain ;" the " Ode on a Grecian
Urn " pourtraying those
happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Their leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And happy melodist, unweati‘d,
For ever singing songs for ever new;"
The " Ode to a Nightingale "
composed on a garden
grass-plot under a plum-tree atHampstead ; the
;"
" Ode on Melancholy" Sleep and Poetry ;"
" Fancy ;" "Robin Hood;"
"To Autumn ;" "Lines
on the Mermaid Tavern ;"
tiptoe upon a little hill;'' "To Hope ;" " I stood
" Imitation- of Spenser;"
" Calidore ;" Sonnets, Fpist es, and Miscellanies—
all had been familiar to us as the breath of clover in
the meadows, they had con to our ears as pleasantly
and as often as "the clicking
time, or the luxury of a sutmhemi of the coal in winter
ger rain at the windows."
But, beyond all these,
utterance
fragment of
" Hyperion"—as grand inins
inspired
as anything ever
syllabled by Homer,
,a_s
had
as Pindar, and "as
sublime as .tEschylus' ha entrancedso us with admi-
ration for a genius which could
Our
at such an early
period to so vast an altitude. rooandfimrireadtioinn has
only been enhanced in degree, and
ear-
nestness, after the perusal of the two volumes edited
by the author of " Palm Leaves." Marvellous' as the
powers of Keats appeared before, they now seem to
be little short of the miraculous. That one so young
should write in a tone so harmonious, and with a
vigour so full and elevated, must always appear re-
markable ; but, that a 3 outh bred behind the
counter of a surgeon-apothecary, and aided only
by the most slipshod and insufficient education,
should revive in his metre the forms, and
the passions, and the graces, and the melodies of
Attic life and Grecian Mythology, must for ever re-
main one of the most surprising and inexplicable of
all the enigmas of the Psychologist. A glance at the
few domestic facts which are recorded in the first
volume will afford ample testimony that in speaking
thus we are guilty of no exaggeration. The family
of Keats we have already intimated to have been very
humble ; but its lowliness was at the least respectable.
The father was employed as a groom or otherwise in
the livery-stable of a Mr. Jennings, whose establish-
ment was situated on the Pavement in' Moorfields.
The mother was the daughter of this man s employer;
and both parents departed life somewhat prematurely,
leaving their children to the care of a Mr. Abbey.
Besides John, whose genius was destined ultimately
to render the obscure name of his parents illustrious,
there was his elder brother George who died in
America, his younger brother Thomas who perished
in the poet's arms from a lingering decline, and his
little child-like sister Fanny, who was subsequently
married to a Spanish gentleman named Llanos.
In 1810, John was apprenticed by his guardian
for a period of five years to Mr. Ham-
mond, a surgeon, living at Edmonton. Previous
to this he had studied at the school of Mr. Clarke, in
Enfield, but had learnt little enough beyond the
merest rudiments of knowledge. Latin was to him,
in more senses than one, a dead letter ; Greek was,
as the saying goes, nothing more comprehensible
than High Dutch; and even in English literature the
young apprentice was only in a relative degree be-
coming a proficient. Notwithstanding a passion for
poetry and mythology, which had grown up with him
from his boyhood, and which was confirmed by his
perusal of Lempriere's " Diction,ary," Spence's
polymetis," Tooke's "Pantheon,' and Spenser's
" Fairy Queen," he laboured with so much assiduity
at his profession, that he passed the examination at
Apothecary's Hall with considerable credit. On
arriving in London for the purpose of walking the
hospitals, John Keats took up his residence in the
Poultry, but towards the autumn of 1817 removed to
Hampstead. Here it was that commenced those
friendships and those compositions which redounded ,
throughout his
in the end to his glory, although
brief lifetime, coupled with so many anxieties and
such melancholy misrepresentations. In the revela-
tion of these miseries Mr. things has displayed

siderable delicacy, and by allowing the correspondence of
the poet to constitute the chief portion ( f the biography
—his own intermediate remarks being, figuratively
speaking, nothing more than the thread upon which
the pearls of fancy and the emeralds of wit are strung
together—he has revealed in the purest light the
intellect and character of this extraordinary man.
But for the publication of the letters contained in
these beautiful volumes, the public would have re-
mained in ignorance of one of the most exquisite
phases in the disposition of Keats, we mean his infinite
relish and appreciation of the humorous. Loving as
he did with his whole soul the ideal of the I3eautitul,
and adoring from the innermost receeses of his pro-
found and susceptible heart the loftier and holier
emotions of humanity—the emotions of love, of pity,
of passion, and of grief—Keats, nevertheless, revelled
in those sudden gleams of wisdom and abrupt flashes
of imagination which are commcnly called—wit. Ile
exulted in everything odd, comic, and grotesque, as
he did in everything fraught with pathos, affection,
and loveliness. He afforded another illustration of the
blendingof extremes—that subtleprincipie of harmony
which constitutes the charm of antithesis in
rhetoric, and the magic effect of contrasting sounds
produced by the skill of the contrapuntist. Keats
seemed to feel that drollery was the natural ebullition
of the human mind in its moods of pleasure (and,
therefore for that reason, to be cherished) quite as
much as he believed in the divine origin of the
nobler kinds of poetry—that creed which has been
since expressed so inimitably by the voice of Waldo
Emerson :
" Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of Nature rolled,
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,
The canticles of love and woe."
Of the capacity of Keats for appreciating the ludi
crous, the letters here edited by Mr. Milnes present
us with abundant evidence. Hear him, for instance,
in one epistle complaining of a fit of laziness then
upon him, saying, in proof of it (I. 142), " I am in
that temper that if I was under water I would
scarcely kick to come up to the top !" Or, talking in
another place (I. 170) of the " mahogany-faced old
jackass who knew Burns, and who ought to have been
kicked for having spoken to him !" Or, complaining to
a friend at Oxford against duns thus—" So you are de-
termined to be my mortal foe—draw a sword at me,
and I will forgive—put a bullet in my brain, and I
will shake it out as a dew-drop from the lion's mane
—put me on a gridiron, and I will fry with great
complacency—but—oh, horror ! to come upon me in
the shape of a dun !"—(I. 54.) Or hear him again
depicting the miserable weather, as Judge Haliburton
would call them, " the juicy days" of Devonshire—
" As the drops beat against my window," says he in
one part (I. 122), "they give me the same sensation as
a quart of cold water offered to revive a half-drowned
devil—no feel of the clouds dropping fatness; but as
if the roots of the earth were rotten, cold, and
drenched." And, in another letter (I. 127), " I lay
awake last night listening to the rain, with a sense of
being drowned and rotted like a grin of wheat!"
And, in another (I. 217), " By the bye, you may say
what you will of Devonshire; the truth is, it is a
splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody,
muddy, slipshod county. The hills are very beauti-
ful, when you can get a sight of 'em ; the primroses
are out—but you are in." Hear him again,
interrupting himself in the course of an-
other epistle in this wise—(11. 18)
" Talking of pleasure, this moment I was writing
with one hand, and with the other holding
to my mouth a nectarine. Good God, how fine It
went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious
embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beati-
fied strawberry !" Other and longer quotations we
must be allowed to give in proof of the comic powers
of Keats ; and we are satisfied that after their perusal
no one will expect us to speak of these quotations
apologetically. During the course of a delightful
pedestrian excursion through the lake-scenery in
Cumberland, our poet describes a country-dance seen
by him in the village tavern of Treby—" It was,
indeed, no new cotillion fresh from France," says he
(I. 155) ; "no, they kickit and jumpit with mettle
extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed it,
and go'd it, and twirl'd it, and whirl'd it, and stamp'd
it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad." On
another trip of a similar character he writes thus in
a spirit of amiable banter to a sick friend whose ill-
ness renders him incapable of participating in such
robust enjoyments :—" Buy a girdle," he exclaims
(I. 110), " put a pebble in your mouth, loosen
your braces for I am going among scenery
whence I intend to tip you the Damosel Rad-
cliffe. I'll cavern you, and grotto you, and water-
fall you, and wood you, and water you, and
immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and
solitude you. make a lodgement on your glacis
by a row of pines, and storm your covered way with
bramble bushes. I'll have at you with hip-and-haw
small shot, and cannonade you with shingles. I'll be
witty upon salt fish', and impede your cavalry with
clotted cream." Here, however, as conclusive evi-
dence of the drollery stored in the bosom of this child
of love and susceptibility, are three humorous pas-
sages worthy of Swift in his finest moods :
" Whether he chose Cervantes' serious air,
Or laugh'd and shook in Rabelais' easy chair."
The first passage is conceived in the wildest spirit of
gaiety, and may be called

A POET RUN MAD.
" Give my sincerest respects to Mrs. Dilke, saying
that I have not forgiven myself for not having got her
little box of medicine I promised, and that, had I re-
ruLined at Hampstead, I would have made precious havoc
with her house and furniture—drawn a great harrow
over her garden—poisoned Boxer—eaten her clothes-
pegs—fried her cabbages—fricaseed (how is it spelt?)
her radishes—ragouted her onions—belaboured her
beat-root—outstripped her scarlet runners—parlez.vous'd
with her french-beans—devoured her mignon or mignio-
nette—metamorphosed her bell-handles—splintered her
looking glasses—bulloAed at her cups and saucers—
agonised her decanters—put old P-- to pickle i❑ the
brine-tub—disorganized her piano—dislocated her can-
dlesticks—emptied her wine-bins in a fit of despair—
turned out her maid to grass—and astonished B—;
whose letter to her on these events I would rather see
than th© original copy of the Book of Genesis."

A VERY LATH OF A LADY.
" Your mother and I had some talk about Miss —.
Says 1, Will Henry have that Miss —, a lath with a
buddies, she who has been fine-drawn,—fit for nothing
but to cut up into cribbage-pins; one who is all 'muslin;
all feathers and bone? Once, in travelling, she was
made use of as a finch-pin. I hope he will not have her,
though it is no uncommon thing to be smitten with a
stag ;—though she might be useful us his walking-stick,
his fishing-rod, his tooth-pick, his hat-stick (she runs so
much in his head). Let him turn farmer, she would cut
into hurdles; let him write poetry, she would be his
turn-style. Her gown his like a flag on a pole: she
would do for him it ho turn freemason; I hope she will
prove a flag of truce. When she sits languishing, with
one foot on a stool, and one elbow on the table, and her
head inclined, she looks like the sign of the Crooked
Billet, or the frontispiece to Cinderella,' or a tea-
paper woodcut of Mother Shipton at her studies."
POSITIVE, COMPARATIVE, SUPERLATIVE.
" I know three witty people, all distinct in their ex-
cellence—Rice Reynolds, and Richards—Rice is the
wisest—Reynolds the playfutlest—Richards the out-of-
the-wayest. The first makes you laugh and think; the
second makes you laugh and not think; the third puz-
zles your head; I admire the first, I enjoy the second,
and I stare at the third; the first is claret, the second
ginger beer, the third is creme de Ifyrapymdray; the
first is inspired by Minerva, the second by Mercury, and
the third by Harlequin Epigram, Esq.; the first is neat
in his dress, the second careless, the third uncomfort-
able; the first speaks adagio, the second allegretto, and
the third both together; the first is Swiftean, the second
Tom Crib-ean, the third Shandean. I know three
people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence,
A. B. and C. A. is is the foolishest, B. is the sulkiest,
and C. is the negative; A. makes you yawn, B. makes
you hate, and as for C. you never see him at all, though
he were six feet high; I bear the first, I forbear the
second, I am not certain that tho third is; the first is
gruel, the second ditch-water, and the third is spilt and
ought to be wiped up; A. is inspired by Jack of the
Clock, B. has been' drilled by a Russian sergeant, C.
they say, is not his mother's true child, but she bought
[nim] of the man who cries young lambs to sell.'"
Besides these convivial qualities, as they may be
termed, of correspondence, the letters of Keats
abound in merits of a higher and more perma-
nent character. Sometimes, as at pages 138-141,
Vol. 1., he will pen an allegory as new and felicitous
as any ever contributed to the "Spectator" by Addison.
At other moments he will dash off a sentiment in
half a dozen words, as epigramatically as Martial or
Rochefoucault. For example
A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illus-
trated it."—l. 268.
" To see an entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the
most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world."—
I. 147.
" How beautiful are the retired flowers! How would
they lose their beauty were they to throng into the high-
way, crying out, Admire me, I am a violet ! Dote
upon me,
tlarkmoaf prithemriomse rmen's'—l.
84.
We ui4.
nber of books, the
volumes ranged thousands by thousands—but perhaps
more goes through the human intelligence in twelve
portion 76. of good in them
da),sTthheanb
eesvte
or f wma w i
es
natvt written."—l. .b"u—t
aI
—a kind of spit itual yeast in their frames, which creates
the ferment of existence—by which a man is propelled
to act, and strive, and buffet with circumstance."—I, 77.
Before we allude to the more solemn interests of
the biographical work, edited by Mr. Mines, we may
refer cursorily to the 200 pages of the poetical appen-
dix. They comprise the " Literary Remains" of
John Keats—the last vibrations of those lyric strings
the sound of which was so prematurely muffled in the
hush of death. " Otho the Great," a tragedy in five
acts : " King Stephen," a dramatic fragment; "The
Cap and Bells, or the Jealousies, a fairy tale, un-
finished; " Ode to Apollo;" " Hymn to Apollo;
thirteen miscellaneous pieces; " Ode on Indolence ;"
" The Eve of St. Mark," unfinished ; verses " To
Fanny;" and twenty sonnets are here published for

the first time, and although in no degree comparable
to the more perfected effusions of this great poet's
genius, they nevertheless abound with new illustra-
tr;ons of the depth of his nature, and of the fruit-
fulness of his exuberant and precocious imagination.
Although " The Cap and Bells" is a mere unfinished
eccentricity—as curious in its way as the " Peter
Bell " of Shelley, both being humorous and both
posthumous—it is nevertheless so vivid and surpris-
ing, that the fairy dramatis persona become at once
enshrined as household recollections—Bellanaine, the
beautiful Princess ; Corallina, her nurse and confi-
dant; Elfinan, the mannikin Emperor; Eban, his
ebony page ; Hum, the soothsayer ; Bertha Pearl,
the toast of Canterbury ; and, best of all, old Crafti-
cant, a pigmy compound of Pollonius and Fad. la.
deen. To our thinking, however, the most exquisite
among all these ". Literary Remains," is the love
song at page 259, Vol. 11. beginning—
" Hush, hush! tread softly! hush, hush, my dear!"
and ending with this impassioned couplet—
" The stock-dove shall hatch his soft twin eggs and coo
Which I kiss to the melody, aching all through!" ,
To return to the memorials of Keats contained in
the two volumes now under criticism, we may ob-
serve that the principal interest of the work consists
in its demonstration that Keats was not killed by
adverse criticisms, but that he was the victim of con-
cumption ; that terrible disease tieing, in his instance,
rendered doubly deathful by the intensity of one
absorbing passion—his love for ***", a young lady
living at Hampstead. As affording indisputable evi-
dence of this, the book is altogether triumphant. So far
was thefyoung poet from being destroyed by the article
in the Quarterly, that he was about the very last being
in existence who could be affected by the condemna-
tion of a reviewer. Writing to Mr. Hessey, in 1818,
he says himself very beautifully (Vol. I. p. 214) :
"My own domestic criticism has given me pain,
without comparison, beyond what Blackwood or the
Quarterly could inflict ; and also when I feel I am
right, no external praise can give me such a glow as
my own solitary reperception and ratification of
what is fine." He understood himself, although,
with the exception of a few private friends, he was
not in the smallest degree comprehended by his con-
temporaries. From the petulant sneer of Words-
worth, when alluding to "Endymion" as a " pretty
piece of Paganism," up to the ferocious attack of the
Quarterly Review, which provoked Shelley's noble
elegy of " Adonais," poor Keats encountered in al-
most every direction, rebuffs, depreciation, and
contumelies. Still, if these brutal assaults fell harm-
lessly upon the masculine nature of Keats, it was from
no lack of virulence on the part of the assailants. As
Mr. Milnes well expresses it (I. 213), "the malice
was weak only because the genius was strong; the
arrows were poisoned, though the armour they struck
was proof, and able to save the life within." Thank
God it was so ; that the young poet who exclaimed
(1.215) " I would sooner fail than not be amongst
the greatest !" and who declared at another period
(I. 203), that he should write " from the mere yearn-
ing and fondness he had for the beautiful, even if his
night's labours should be burnt every morning, and
no eye ever shine upon them"—could believe in his
heart and write with confidence to one of his
bosom companions these words :—" I think
I shall be among the English poets after
my death 1' (I. 227.) We exult at this simple
acknowledgment as we hare exulted over those ego-
tistical odes of Horace in which he foresees his re

nown with posterity, or as we have exulted over those
superb sonnets of Shakspere (Nos. xviii. and lx.),
in which he expresses his credence in his own poetical
immortality. Knowing its defects, Keats also knew
the truth and vitality of his genius; and his prescience
of his future celebrity was an ample breastplate
against the shafts of his antagonists. No : he died
not from anguish at a criticism, as it has been so long
erroneously imagined ; the simple record of the origin
of his decease runs as follows :
" One night, about eleven o'clock, Keats returned
home in a state of strange physical excitement—it
might have appeared to those who did not know him,
one of fierce intoxication. He told his friend he had
been outside the stage-coach, had received a severe
chill, was a little fevered, but added, don't feel it
now.' He was easily persuaded to go to bed, and as he
leapt into the cold sheets, before his head was on the
pillow, he slightly coughed and said, That is blood
from my mouth; bring me the candle, let me see this
blood.' He gazed steadfastly for some moments at the
ruddy stain, and then looking in- his friend's face with
an expression of sudden calmness never to be forgotten,
said, I know the colour of that blood—it is arterial
blood—l cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is
my death-warrant. I must die. "

This was in the February of 1820. Before the Fe
bruary of 1821 had terminated Adonais was moul

dering in his grave, near the ruins of the Honorian
walls of the Eternal City ! The heart that wor-
shipped nature so devotedly, that he cried out once
(1. 67) "the setting sun will always set me to rights,
or if a sparrow were before my window, I take part
in its existence, and pick about the gravel," was
stilled for ever. The lips were cold which had arti-

culated those fine words of homage to the universe
(I. 50) " The open sky sets upon our senses like a
sapphire crown ; the air is our robe of state; theearth is
our throne ; and the sea a mighty minstrel playing
before it—able, like David's harp, to make us f.rget
almost the tempest cares of life." Those tempest
cares were dead at last to him, and high above them
all that master passion of his soul, his love for —!
How profound and distracting this passion was may
be learned from the despairing allusions made to his
love when dying consciously in his journey through
Italy. "The thought of leaving Miss —," he
writes, " is beyond everything horrible—the sense of
darkness coming over me—l eternally see her figure
eternally vanishing." And again—"l can bear to
die—l cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God ! God !
God ! Everything I have in my trunk that reminds
me of her goes through me like a spear." He expe-
rienced in the despair of this unrealised love the
dread pangs of death, again and again, a thousand
times before the moment of his real dissolution. Su
intense are the revelations of this great anguish in the
brief but most touching narrative of his demise, that
tears would be an inadequate evidence of pity but
that the gloom of the picture is relieved by
the remembrance of the exquisite. and sublime
frien Iship of the Painter Severn. Honour to that

true heart ! Honour to that generous nature which
carried consolation to the death•bed of John Keats!—
.

solacing that great poet in his last agony not only
with " the wine of love, but with the bread of friend-
ship !" At the commencement of the year 1846, in
noticing Mr. Moron's pocket edition of Keats's
poetical works, we demanded some slight portraiture
of the poet from the pencil of Severn. Our expecta-
tions have been realised—a likeness of Keats, from
the brush of that distinguished artist, being prefixed
to the present memorials. Nothing has been left un-
accomplished; the story is told to its last syllable,
and the name of Keats shines in its full brightness
from the blazonry of our national literature.

SONNET TO KEATS.

Born Oct. 29, 1795, at London.
Died Feb. 23, 1821, at Rome.

Another sadness round Apollo's lane!
A cypress wreath hung on his golden lyre!
A gleam of beauty born but to expire!
Another Chatterton in heart and brain!
The doom of get,irls fell on earth again,
And, like a thunderbolt of Sapphic fire,
Blasted the rapture of thy young desire!
Again from out thy lips the deathful strain
Poured like the murmur of undying love.
Again the glory and again the woe
Ot bardic joy fell on thee here below,
Fell but to lift thy fame to realms above.
A life had perfected thy form, but now
A torso of eternal grace art thou!
W. C. M. K.

November 13, 1848.

COURT CIRCULAR.

WINDSOR, MONDAY.
The Queen and Prince Albert took their usual
morning walk.
The Royal Family walked and rode this morning
in the pleasure-grounds around the Castle.
Sir George and Lady Grey are expected to arrive
at the Castle this evening on a visit to the Queen.
The royal dinner party at the Castle this evening will
include her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent,
her Serene Highness the Princess of Hohenlohe
Langenburg, her Serene Highness the Princess Eliza
of Hohenlohe Langenburg, her Serene Highness the
Princess Amelia of Hohenlohe Schillingsfurst, his
Serene Highness Prince Victor of Hohenlohe Lan-
genburg, the Right Hon. Sir George and Lady Grey,
Sir Robert and Lady Gardiner, and Colonel the Hon.
C. B. Phipps.
Her Majesty's private band will attend in the
Castle in the evening.

The nomination of Sheriffs for the ensuing year
took place before the Lords of her Majesty's most
Honourable Privy Council yesterday afternoon, in the
Exchequer Chamber, Westminster. The Lords pre-
sent were the Right Hon. Sir Charles Wood, Bart.
(Chancellor of the Exchequer), the Marquis of Lans-
downe (Lord President), Lord Cottenham (Lord
Chancellor), Lord Denman (the Lord Chief Justice
of the Court of Queen's Bench), Sir Thomas Wilde
(Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas), Sir Fre-
derick Pollock (Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer),
Lord Campbell (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lan-
caster), and Sir James Parke (Baron of the Ex-
chequer).
The Puisne Judges, Coleridge, Rolfe, and Wight-
man, assisted in nominating three gentlemen for each
of the different counties of England and Wales.
Mr. C. Greville was the Clerk of the Council in
Waiting.
Colonel Maberley had an interview with the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer yesterday, at his official resi-
dence in Downing-street.

Lord Chichester had an interview with Sir George
Grey yesterday, at the Rome-office.
Sir George Grey left town in the afternoon, on a
visit to her Majesty, at Windsor Castle.