Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/47

Rh Yet this is vain—O Mathew, lend thy aid

To find a place where I may greet the maid—

Where we may soft humanity put on,

And sit, and rhyme and think on Chatterton;

And that warm-hearted Shakspeare sent to meet him

Four laurell'd spirits, heavenward to entreat him.

With reverence would we speak of all the sages

Who have left streaks of light athwart their ages:

And thou shouldst moralize on Milton's blindness,

And mourn the fearful dearth of human kindness

To those who strove with the bright golden wing

Of genius, to flap away each sting

Thrown by the pitiless world. We next could tell

Of those who in the cause of freedom fell;

Of our own Alfred, of Helvetian Tell;

Of him whose name to ev'ry heart 's a solace,

High-minded and unbending William Wallace.

While to the rugged north our musing turns,

We well might drop a tear for him, and Burns.

Felton! without incitements such as these,

How vain for me the niggard Muse to tease:

For thee, she will thy every dwelling grace,

And make 'a sunshine in a shady place:'

For thou wast once a flowret blooming wild,

Close to the source, bright, pure, and undefil'd,

Whence gush the streams of song: in happy hour

Came chaste Diana from her shady bower,

Just as the sun was from the east uprising;

And, as for him some gift she was devising,

Beheld thee, pluck'd thee, cast thee in the stream

To meet her glorious brother's greeting beam.

I marvel much that thou hast never told

How, from a flower, into a fish of gold

Apollo chang'd thee: how thou next didst seem

A black-ey'd swan upon the widening stream;

And when thou first didst in that mirror trace

The placid features of a human face:

That thou hast never told thy travels strange,

And all the wonders of the mazy range

O'er pebbly crystal, and o'er golden sands;

Kissing thy daily food from Naiads' pearly hands.

thou liv'd in days of old,

O what wonders had been told

Of thy lively countenance,

And thy humid eyes that dance

In the midst of their own brightness;

In the very fane of lightness.

Over which thine eyebrows, leaning,

Picture out each lovely meaning:

In a dainty bend they lie,

Like to streaks across the sky,

Or the feathers from a crow,

Fallen on a bed of snow.

Of thy dark hair, that extends

Into many graceful bends:

As the leaves of Hellebore

Turn to whence they sprung before.

And behind each ample curl