Many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two noble sonnets. I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects of their seeking

I feel deeply the high and enthusiastic praise with which you have spoken of me in the first sonnet. Be assured you shall never repent it. The time shall come, if God spare my life, when you will remember it with delight.

God bless you!

B. R. HAYDON.

This letter concerning the sonnets printed at pages 219-20 of the present volume is from that extremely interesting book Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk (1876). It occurs in Volume II, at page 2.

VIII.

THREE SONNETS FROM LEIGH HUNT'S

FOLIAGE.

ΤΟ

M.D.

ON HIS GIVING ME A LOCK OF MILTON'S HAIR.

I FELT my spirit leap, and look at thee

Through my changed colour with glad grateful stare,
When after shewing us this glorious hair,

Thou didst turn short, and bending pleasantly
With gracious hand gav'st the great lock to me.
An honouring gift indeed! which I will wear
About me, while I breathe this strenuous air,
That nursed his Apollonian tresses free.
I'll wear it, not as my inherited due,
(For there is one, whom had he kept his art
For Freedom still, nor left her for the crew
Of lucky slaves in his misgiving heart,

I would have begged thy leave to give it to)
Yet not without some claims, though far apart.

No apology is necessary for giving these sonnets by way of appendix to Keats's poem on the same lock of hair, printed at pages 249 to 251 of the present volume; but I regret the absence of details concerning the history of the lock of hair. Up to the time of sending these sheets to press, I have not succeeded in recovering Hunt's account of what may be called the pedigree of the lock, or in ascertaining the present whereabouts of the hair. Mr.

TO THE SAME,

ON THE SAME SUBJECT.

It lies before me there, and my own breath
Stirs it's thin outer threads, as though beside
The living head I stood in honoured pride,
Talking of lovely things that conquer death.
Perhaps he pressed it once, or underneath
Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed,
And saw, in fancy, Adam and his bride

With their heaped locks, or his own Delphic wreath.
There seems a love in hair, though it be dead.
It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread
Of our frail plant,—a blossom from the tree
Surviving the proud trunk ;—as if it said,
Patience and Gentleness is Power.
Behold affectionate eternity.

In me

TO THE SAME,

ON THE SAME OCCASION.

A LIBERAL taste, and a wise gentleness
Have ever been the true physician's dower,
As still is visible in the placid power

Of those old Grecian busts; and helps to bless
The balmy name of Haller, and the address

Thornton Hunt had it; but the family has lost sight of it. A reference to "Milton's hair" in a letter from Mr. Robert Browning to Leigh Hunt, published in the Correspondence, Volume II, page 267, led me to apply to the living poet for information. Mr. Browning tells me that he still possesses a very small portion" of the lock, given to himself and Mrs. Browning by Hunt at Hammersmith on the 13th of July 1856. "He detached it with trem

Of cordial Garth; and him in Cowley's bower,
Harvey; and Milton's own exotic flower,
Young Deodati, plucked from his caress.

To add to these an ear for the sweet hold

Of music, and an eye, ay and a hand

For forms which the smooth Graces tend and follow,
Shews thee indeed true offspring of the bland
And vital god, whom she of happy mould,
The Larissæan beauty, bore Apollo.

bling fingers, and wrote on the envelope' A bit of a lock of the hair of Milton. To Robert and E. B. Browning from Leigh Hunt. God bless them."" He subsequently wrote to Mr. Browning a long and interesting letter, containing a pedigree of the lock, "precise and plausible": this pedigree, though not immediately forthcoming, Mr. Browning is certain of recovering eventually, as it is safely preserved.

IX.

THE "NILE" SONNETS OF

LEIGH HUNT AND PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

THE NILE.

IT flows through old hush'd Ægypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream ; And times and things, as in that vision, seem

Keeping along it their eternal stands,—

Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands

That roam'd through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,

The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng,

And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.

HUNT.

TO THE NILE.

MONTH after month the gather'd rains descend,
Drenching yon secret Æthiopian dells,

Hunt's sonnet is from Foliage,-Shelley's from the Library Edition of his works.