Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/70

34 What when a stout unbending champion awes

Envy, and Malice to their native sty?

Unnumber'd souls breathe out a still applause,

Proud to behold him in his country's eye.

Kosciusko, thy great name alone

Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling;

It comes upon us like the glorious pealing

Of the wide spheres—an everlasting tone.

And now it tells me, that in worlds unknown,

The names of heroes, burst from clouds concealing,

Are changed to harmonies, for ever stealing

Through cloudless blue, and round each silver throne.

It tells me too, that on a happy day,

When some good spirit walks upon the earth,

Thy name with Alfred's, and the great of yore,

Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth

To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away

To where the great God lives for evermore.

Georgiana Augusta Wylie, who afterward married George Keats. For other verses addressed to this lady see pp. 11, 240, 243.

This sonnet in Tom Keats's copybook is dated December, 1816; it was published in the 1817 volume.

of the downward smile and sidelong glance,

In what diviner moments of the day

Art thou most lovely? When gone far astray

Into the labyrinths of sweet utterance?

Or when serenely wand'ring in a trance

Of sober thought? Or when starting away,

With careless robe, to meet the morning ray,

Thou spar'st the flowers in thy mazy dance?

Haply 't is when thy ruby lips part sweetly,

And so remain, because thou listenest:

But thou to please wert nurtured so completely

That I can never tell what mood is best.

I shall as soon pronounce which Grace more neatly

Trips it before Apollo than the rest.

a drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy tree,

Thy branches ne'er remember

Their green felicity:

The north cannot undo them,

With a sleety whistle through them;

Nor frozen thawings glue them

From budding at the prime.

In a drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy brook,

Thy bubblings ne'er remember

Apollo's summer look;

But with a sweet forgetting,

They stay their crystal fretting,

Never, never petting

About the frozen time.

Ah! would 't were so with many

A gentle girl and boy!

But were there ever any

Writh'd not at passèd joy?

To know the change and feel it,

When there is none to heal it,