ments of Westminster Abbey, passim. This style of writing still survives in country places; but happily even there is growing rarer." 36. "At the first glance it might seem that to dumb Forgetfulness a prey was in apposition to who, and the meaning was, 'Who that now lies forgotten,' etc.; in which case the second line of the stanza must be closely connected with the fourth; for the question of the passage is not 'Who ever died?' but Who ever died without wishing to be remembered?' But in this way of interpreting this difficult stanza (i.) there is comparatively little force in the appositional phrase, and (ii.) there is a certain awkwardness in deferring so long the clause (virtually adverbial though apparently co-ordinate) in which, as has just been noticed, the point of the question really lies. Perhaps therefore it is better to take the phrase to dumb Forgetfulness a prey as in fact the completion of the predicate resign'd, and interpret thus: "Who ever resigned this life of his with all its pleasures and all its pains to be utterly ignored and forgotten? = who ever, when resigning it, reconciled himself to its being forgotten?' In this case the second half of the stanza echoes the thought of the first half."Hales. 37. See note 44, page 70. Compare with the quotations there given. 38. So Chaucer in The Reves Tale: " Yet in our ashen cold is fire yreken." And Tennyson in Maud, i. 22: She is coming, my own, my sweet, Had I lain for a century dead, Would start and tremble under her feet, 39. peep of dawn. Compare with "opening eyelids of the dawn," in Lycidas, 26, and see note 13, page 88. See also Comus, 138: "Ere the blabbing eastern scout, The nice morn, on the Indian steep, And Herrick, To Music, etc. : Or like those maiden showers Which, by the peep of day, do strew A baptism o'er the flowers." 40. upland lawn. L'Allegro, 92: See Lycidas, 25. Compare also with Milton Sometime with sure delight The upland hamlets will invite." Milton also speaks of "russet lawns." A lawn was a pasture or grassy field. An upland lawn was probably such a field on the hill-slopes, although Hales thinks that it is used with reference simply to the country in opposition to towns, as the Old English expression uplondysche men," was used to designate countrymen. 41. This stanza, as at first written, read thus: " Him have we seen the greenwood side along, While o'er the heath we hied, our labor done, 66 Compare it as it now reads with Shakespeare, As You Like It, ii. 1 : — "As he lay along Under an oak whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this road." Compare the first two lines with Spenser, Ruins of Rome, 504: "A great oke drie and dead, Whose foote in ground hath left but feeble holde, 42. due. Proper. Compare with Milton, Lycidas, 7, season due." church-way path. See Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, v. 2, 9: "Now it is the time of night, That the graves all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the church-way paths to glide." 43. In the original manuscript these lines follow this stanza : — 'There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are show'rs of violets found: 44. lap. See Milton, Paradise Lost, ix. 777: " How glad would lay me down As in my mother's lap." Also the same, xi. 535: "So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop John Keats died at Rome, of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year, on the 27th of December, 1820, and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where canker-worms abound what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind. The agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued; and the succeeding acknowledgments, from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted. The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats's life were not made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press. I am given to understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit had received from the criticism of Endymion was exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits. The poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care. - From Shelley's Preface. Oh, weep for Adonais, though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!" II. Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay, When thy son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies In darkness? where was lorn Urania When Adonais died?) With veiled eyes 'Mid listening Echoes in her paradise She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath, Rekindled all the fading melodies With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of Death. |