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

LITERATURE.

LIFE, LETTERS, AND LITERARY REMAINS
OF JOHN FEATS. 2 Vols. Edited by Richard
Monckton Manes.

Twenty-seven years ago 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
twenty-five years, three months, and twenty-five
clays ; 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 earnett 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 imagined 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 despairingin-
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 Shaksperes.
From 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 " Endymion," 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 il-om the heaven's brink."
Lamia, again, that incomparable effusion which Mr.
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,
Bright and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake,"