SONNET.

A Dream, after reading Dante's Episode of Paulo and Francesca.

As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon'd and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright

So play'd, so charm'd, so conquer'd, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
And, seeing it asleep, so fled away-

Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,

Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev'd a day;

This beautiful Sonnet seems to have been written originally in the first volume of the miniature Cary's Dante which Keats carried through Scotland in his knapsack; and the composition should probably be assigned to the early part of April 1819. There is a fair transcript written on one of the blank leaves at the end of the copy of Endymion in Sir Charles Dilke's possession. The sonnet was published over the signature "Caviare" in The Indicator for the 28th of June 1820. Inside the recto cover of the little Inferno Keats began by writing the words Amid a thousand; and he then seems to have turned the book round for a fresh start; for inside the verso cover he has written

Full in the midst of bloomless hours my

{

spright
soul

Seeing one night the dragon world asleep

Arose like Hermes...

The sonnet is finally written in a cramped manner on the last endpaper, and is almost identical with the fair copy; but it shows the cancelled seventh line

But to that second circle of sad hell,

Where 'mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell

Their sorrows.

Pale were the sweet lips I saw,

But not olympus-ward to serene skies...

though finally agreeing with the other copy in reading Not to pure Ida, instead of Not unto Ida as The Indicator reads. Both manuscripts read that day instead of a day in line 8; but I do not doubt that Keats revised the line, to avoid the repetition of that in line 9, when he gave the sonnet to Hunt. It will be remembered that the young poet was present at the making up of that number of the elder poet's periodical, for, in No. 36 of Leigh Hunt's London Journal (December 3, 1834), by way of footnote to a quotation from Keats in A "Now;" Descriptive of a Cold Day, Hunt says, referring to the very number containing the sonnet,-" Mr Keats gave us some touches in our account of the 'Hot Day' (first published in the 'Indicator') as we sat writing it, in his company thirteen or fourteen years back". On this evidence I do not hesitate to adopt also the reading 'mid for in in line 10, and some details of punctuation. The mis-spelling world-wind for whirlwind in the same line in The Indicator is certainly much more like Keats than Hunt, but of course accidental. I presume the copy of the poem sent to George Keats is still in America: in the letter embodying it, published by Lord Houghton in the Life, Letters &c. (1848), Keats gives a graphic account of the dream, in prose. See the Letters in this edition, under date the 15th of April 1819. It is worth while to record that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, writing to me concerning the false rhyme slept and bereft, characterized this as "by far the finest of Keats's sonnets (mostly very faulty or inferior) besides that on Chapman's Homer. This anomaly," added Rossetti, "is all the more curious when we consider the sort of echo it gives of a line in Endymion,

So sad, so melancholy, so bereft".

The line will be found at page 212 of Volume I. The strangeness of the omission to find out the fault in the rhyme is further enhanced when we consider how many times Keats must have written the sonnet over. This place must serve me to state that Rossetti qualified his estimate of the sonnets in a later letter by informing me that on further examination he found there were fourteen "more or

Pale were the lips I kiss'd, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

less worthy of him." I should have said more than fourteen, and had looked forward with interest to a comparison of notes we were to have had; but alas! the great artist's untimely death intervened.

Spenserian Stanzas on Charles Armitage Brown.

I.

He is to weet a melancholy carle :

E

Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,
As hath the seeded thistle, when a parle
It holds with Zephyr, ere it sendeth fair
Its light balloons into the summer air;
Therto his beard had not begun to bloom,
No brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer;

No care had touched his cheek with mortal doom, But new he was, and bright, as scarf from Persian loom.

2.

Ne cared he for wine or half-and-half;
Ne cared he for fish, or flesh, or fowl;

And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;
He 'sdeigned the swine-head at the wassail-bowl;
Ne with lewd ribbalds sat he cheek by jowl;
Ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair;
But after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul
Panted, and all his food was woodland air;
Though he would oft-times feast on gilliflowers rare.

It is a brusque transition from the fervour and preternatural beauty of the dream sonnet to these amusing stanzas on Brown ; but under the same date as that on which Keats told his brother of the dream, namely the 15th of April 1819, he records that " Brown, this morning, is writing some Spenserian stanzas against" Miss

3.

The slang of cities in no wise he knew,
Tipping the wink to him was heathen Greek;
He sipp'd no "olden Tom," or "ruin blue,"
Or Nantz, or cherry-brandy, drank full meek
By many a damsel brave, and rouge of cheek;
Nor did he know each aged watchman's beat,
Nor in obscured purlieus would he seek

For curled Jewesses, with ankles neat,

Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet.

Brawne and the poet; "so", says the poet, "I shall amuse myself with him a little, in the manner of Spenser". It would not be fair to assume that all here is ironical; but the first stanza suggests that Keats's estimable friend was a "jolly" man, bald-headed, and "a trifle wider in the waist than formerly"; while, generally, one would suppose him to have been alive to the good things of the world.