up of Quarterly Reviewers. All that we wish is, that our Readers could read the Poem, as we have done, before they assent to its condemnation-they will find passages of singular feeling, force, and pathos. We have the highest hopes of this young Poet. We are obscure men, it is true, and not gifted with that perilous power of mind, and truth of judgment which are possessed by Mr. Croker, Mr. Canning, Mr. Barrow, or Mr. Gifford, (all "honourable men," and writers in the Quarterly Review). We live far from the world of letters,-out of the pale of fashionable criticism,-aloof from the atmosphere of a Court; but we are surrounded by a beautiful country, and love Poetry, which we read out of doors, as well as in. We think we see glimpses of a high mind in this young man, and surely the feeling is better that urges us to nourish its strength, than that which prompts the Quarterly Reviewer to crush it in its youth, and for ever. If however, the mind of Mr. Keats be of the quality we think it to be of, it will not be cast down by this wanton and empty attack. Malice is a thing of the scorpion kind-It drives the sting into its own heart. The very passages which the Quarterly Review quotes as ridiculous, have in them the beauty that sent us to the Poem itself. We shall close these observations with a few extracts from the romance itself:-If our Readers do not see the spirit and beauty in them to justify our remarks, we confess ourselves bad judges, and never more worthy to be trusted.

The following address to Sleep, is full of repose and feeling :

"O magic sleep! Oh comfortable bird,

That broodest o'er the troubled sea of the mind,

Till it is hush'd and smooth! O unconfined
Restraint! Imprisoned Liberty! Great key
To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,

Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves,
Echoing grottoes, full of tumbling waves,

And moonlight!"

This is beautiful-but there is something finer,

That men, who might have tower'd in the van

Of all the congregated world to fan

And winnow from the coming step of time,
All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime
Left by men slugs and human serpentry ;
Have been content to let occasion die,
Whilst they did sleep in Love's Elysium.
And truly I would rather be struck dumb,
Than speak again this ardent listlessness:
For I have ever thought that it might bless
The world with benefits unknowingly ;
As does the nightingale up-perched high,
And cloister'd among cool and bunched leaves,
She sings but to her love, nor e'er conceives

How tiptoe night holds back her dark grey hood."

The turn of this is truly Shakesperian, which Mr. Keats will feel to be the highest compliment we can pay him, if we know any thing of his mind. We cannot refrain from giving the following short passage, which appears to us scarcely to be surpassed in the whole range of English Poetry. It has all the naked and solitary vigour of old sculpture, with all the energy and life of Old poetry:

66 At this, with madden'd stare,
And lifted hands, and trembling lips he stood,
Like old Deucalion mounted o'er the flood,
Or blind Orion hungry for the morn."

Again, we give some exquisitely classic lines, clear and reposing as a Grecian sky-soft and lovely as the waves of Ilyssus.

Here is wine,

Alive with sparkles-Never I aver,

Since Ariadne was a vintager,

So cool a purple; taste these juicy pears,

Sent me by sad Vertumnus, when his fears
Were high about Pomona : here is cream,
Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam ;
Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimm'd
For the boy Jupiter."

This is the very fruit of poetry.-A melting repast for the imagination. We can only give one more extract— our limits are reached. Mr. Keats is speaking of the story of Endymion itself. Nothing can be more imaginative than what follows:

66 Ye who have yearn'd

With too much passion, will here stay and pity,
For the mere sake of truth; as 'tis a ditty

Not of these days, but long ago 'twas told
By a cavern'd wind unto a forest old;

And then the forest told it in a dream

To a sleeping lake, whose cool and level gleam
A Poet caught as he was journeying
To Phoebus' shrine and in it he did fling
His weary limbs, bathing an hour's space,
And after, straight in that inspired place
He sang the story up into the air,
Giving it universal freedom."

We have no more room for extracts.

Does the author

of such poetry as this deserve to be made the sport of so servile a dolt as a Quarterly Reviewer?-No. Two things have struck us on the perusal of this singular poem. The first is, that Mr. Keats excels, in what Milton excelled-the power of putting a spirit of life and novelty into the Heathen Mythology. The second is, that in the structure of his verse, and the sinewy quality of his thoughts, Mr. Keats greatly resembles old Chapman, the nervous translator of Homer. His mind has "thews and limbs like to its ancestors." Mr. Gifford, who knows something of the old dramatists, ought to have paused before he sanctioned the abuse of a spirit kindred with them. If he could not feel, he ought to know better.

VII.

KEATS AND THE QUARTERLY REVIEW;

TWO LETTERS TO THE EDITOR OF

THE MORNING CHRONICLE

published in that paper

on Saturday the 3rd and Thursday the 8th of October 1818.

Sir,

I.

Although I am aware that literary squabbles are of too uninteresting and interminable a nature for your Journal, yet there are occasions when acts of malice and gross injustice towards an author may be properly brought before the public through such a medium.— Allow me, then, without further preface, to refer you to an article in the last Number of The Quarterly Review, professing to be a Critique on "The Poems of John Keats." Of John Keats I know nothing; from his Preface I collect that he is very young-no doubt a heinous sin; and I have been informed that he has incurred the additional guilt of an acquaintance with Mr. Leigh Hunt. That this latter Gentleman and the Editor of The Quarterly Review have long been at war, must be known to every one in the least acquainted with the literary gossip of the day. Mr. L. Hunt, it appears, has thought highly of the poetical talents of Mr. Keats; hence Mr. K. is doomed to feel the merciless tomahawk of the Reviewers, termed Quarterly, I presume from the modus operandi. From a perusal of the criticism, I was

led to the work itself. I would, Sir, that your limits would permit a few extracts from this poem. I dare appeal to the taste and judgment of your readers, that beauties of the highest order may be found in almost every page that there are also many, very many passages indicating haste and carelessness, I will not deny ; I will go further, and assert that a real friend of the author would have dissuaded him from an immediate publication.

Had the genius of Lord Byron sunk under the discouraging sneers of an Edinburgh Review the nineteenth century would scarcely yet have been termed the Augustan æra of Poetry. Let Mr. Keats too persevere—he has talents of [no] common stamp ; this is the hastily written tribute of a stranger, who ventures to predict that Mr. K. is capable of producing a poem that shall challenge the admiration of every reader of true taste and feeling; nay if he will give up his acquaintance with Mr. Leigh Hunt, and apostatise in his friendships, his principles and his politics (if he have any), he may even command the approbation of the Quarterly Review.

I have not heard to whom public opinion has assigned this exquisite morceau of critical acumen. If the Translator of Juvenal1 be its author, I would refer him to the manly and pathetic narrative prefixed to that translation, to the touching history of genius oppressed by and struggling with innumerable difficulties, yet finally

'These references are so well chosen as to give some countenance to the suggestion that John Scott was the writer of the letter. The translator of Juvenal was of course William Gifford, the editor of The Quarterly Review. The biographer of Kirke White was Robert Southey; and the author of The Battle of Talavera was John Wilson Croker, who, like Southey, was one of the most prominent contributors to the Quarterly.