"Anon his heart revives; her vespers done,
Of all her wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.
Half-hidden like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile, she dreams awake and sees
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,

But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

"Soon trembling in her soft and chilly nest,

In sort of watchful swoon, perplexed she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown like a thought until the morrow day,
Blissfully havened, both from joy and pain;
Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray,
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.

"Stolen to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress,
And listened to her breathing if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness,

Which, when he heard, that minute did he bless
And breathed himself; then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wild wilderness.

And over the hushed carpet silent stept,

And 'tween the curtains peeped, where, lo! how fast she slept.

"Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim silvery twilight, soft he set

A table, and half-anguished threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold and jet.

e-lidded sleep,

And still she slept, an azure-]

In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apples, quince and plum and gourd,
With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
From silken Sarmacand to cedared Lebanon.

Porphyro, with whose house her father and kiusfolk are at war, and who, at peril of his life, has stolen here, hoping only to get sight of Madeline.

The old nurse, Angela, who is the young lovers' only friend in all the hostile castle, tells him of Madeline's plan to try the charm of St. Agnes' Eve; and he persuades the dame to conceal him in Madeline's chamber, where, when she sleeps, he will spread at her bed-side the feast which the charm of St. Agnes' promises to her vision.

The dame hides him there and hobbles off, half afraid of what she has done, just as Madeline enters her chamber.

"Out went the taper as she hurried on;
Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died.
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air and visions wide.
No uttered syllable or woe betide;
But to her heart-her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side,

As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die heart-stifled in her dell

"A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imageries

Of fruits and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device
Innumerable, of stains and splendid dyes.

"As are the tiger-moth's deep damasked wings;
And in the midst 'mong thousand heraldries,

And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

A shielded 'scutcheon blushed with blood of kings and queens.

"Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint;

She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,
Love wings, for heaven; Porphyro grew faint;
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

The bloated wassailers will never heed;
Let us away, my love, with happy speed.
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see-
Drowned all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead,
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,

Far o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.'
"They glide like phantoms into the wide hall;
Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide,
Where lay the porter, in uneasy sprawl,

With a huge empty flagon by his side;

The watchful bloodhound rose, and shook his side,
But his sagacious eye, an inmate owns;

And one by one, the bolts full easy slide-
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
"And they are gone; aye! ages long ago

These lovers fled away into the storm;

That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior guests with shade and form
Of witch and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be night-mared. Angela, the old,
Died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold."

With Keats, who died in 1820, we enter upon the fair field of modern poetry, and find ourselves among the poets of our own age and our forms of thought. One of the best living critics has said:

* *

"Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other-Wordsworth, Keats and Byron-were the great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuosness, and passion. Of these three, Wordsworth was the only conscious reformer and the deepest thinker; Keats, the most essentially a poet; and Byron, the most keenly intellectual of the three. Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms; and Byron, interesting to men of imagination, less for his writing than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless by vague desires not yet regulated by experience, nor supplied with motives by the duties of life."

*James Russell Lowell.

TALK LVII.

ON SOME FRIENDS OF THE LAKE POETS.

THERE are many interesting writers in prose as well as in verse, who wrote at the time the Lake School was rising to fame. They are worth better and longer mention than I can give in one brief talk. The early part of this century

saw gathered in London a group of men more interesting than any similar group since the days when the Scriblerus Club used to meet at Will's Coffee House.

Charles Lamb, one of the sweetest and gentlest characters Born 1775. that the past keeps alive for us, was a school-mate Died 1835. of Coleridge in Christ's Hospital School, and they formed a friendship there which was never broken. Lamb was a man of varied talents. He wrote poems and one or two plays; but his merit as a writer is shown best in his Essays of Elia, which are full of a quaint humor, and have a pathos entirely their own. No essays so fresh, delicate and original had been written since the time of Abraham Cowley as these of Lamb, and I think I should rather part with Cowley even, than with the gentle Elia.

Lamb was a true Londoner, born and dwelling in or near that great city all his life, and loving it as if it were a feeling and responsive being, conscious of his love. He went to visit Wordsworth once, and enjoyed the beautiful lake and mountain region among which his friend lived; but his heart was always in London. In one of his letters to Wordsworth he says:

"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and as intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, wagons, play houses-all the bustle and

wickedness about Covent Garden, the watchmen, drunken scenes, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, old book-stalls, the soup-kitchens, the pantomimes-London itself a pantomime and masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without power of satiety. The wonder of the sights impels me into night-walks about the city's crowded streets, and I often shed tears on the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life."

Dr. Johnson also loved London as Lamb did, and preferred it to all the nature outside.

Lamb held for years a place as clerk in the India House, and his slight, stooping figure, clad in clerkly black, coming down Fleet street to his lodgings in the Temple, where he lived many years, is one of the most vivid pictures in my imagination. His sister Mary, who is the Bridget of his essays, was his housekeeper. She was subject to fits of insanity, and he devoted his life to unfailing care of her-a care repaid on her part by tenderest gratitude and love. When these melancholy attacks were over, she was a clever woman and charming companion.

When Lamb was about fifty, he was pensioned by the India House where he had so long been a clerk, and for the rest of his days he lived in freedom. One must read his own account of his delight at his emancipation, in his letters to friends, to see how keen and boyish was his enjoyment of the liberation from his daily drudgery.

The Essays of Elia are delightful reading. Their humor is so quaint, and yet so tender, that in reading them one often laughs with tears in the eyes.

One series in the essays on Popular Fallacies : That handsome is that handsome does. That a man never should laugh at his own jokes. That illgotten gains never prosper. That we must rise with the lark-are in Lamb's wittiest vein.

I quote for you from his Essays of Elia the greater part of his amusing dissertation upon Roast Pig:

was

“Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend Mr. obliging enough to read and explain to me-for the first seventy