"because he could not."

friend expressed surprise at this he explained, "that he had been used to write only lyric poetry, in which, the poems being short, he had accustomed himself and was able to polish every part, and that the labor of this method in a long poem would be intolerable." The poem is not one of his best; but it has passages that make one wish he had imposed on himself the "intolerable" labor of finishing it.

Keats also left a considerable number of unfinished poems, though not through indolence, as was the case with Gray.

Cut was the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burned was Apollo's laurel bough.

The most important of these, "Hyperion," was thrown aside because of its "Miltonic inversions" and generally Miltonic cast, and not (as the publisher announced) because the public had pronounced unfavorably upon "Endymion." Here again is a great canvas stretched out. The overthrow of the Saturnian gods by the Olympian, and the wars of the Giants, offered sufficient material in all conscience for an epic; but Keats thought that the poem had grown too imitative and would have no more of it. It seems to be generally agreed that he was right, although there can be no question but that the fragment, as it stands, is essentially lofty and magnificent. To Byron it seemed "actually inspired by the Titans and as sublime as Eschylus." Perhaps if Keats, against his own convictions and better inspiration, had finished the poem, it might not have been so impressive as it is.

Of "King Stephen" only three or four scenes were ever written, written in this case by Keats alone without the help of the friend who had provided the plot of "Otho the Great," too little upon which to form an elaborate judgment of the poet's dramatic power, but enough to show that in that direction did not lie his predominant gifts. There is more left of the "Cap and

and Charles Brown (the friend aforesaid) says that it was begun without a plan and written "subject to future amendments and omissions." It is surprising that this piece, which he composed, we are told, with extreme facility, should have been begun just after the commencement of his fatal illness. Probably it was written to relieve a mind overstrained, to get away, as Lord Houghton has said, as far as possible "from the gross realities that occupied and tormented his existence." At any rate it is written in a jaunty, reckless tone, seemingly without any serious intent; it is probably the least valuable of any of his longer writings, although it contains, of course, several felicitous turns of thought and fancy.

His "Eve of Saint Mark" was begun at about the same time as "The Eve of Saint Agnes;" but while he completed the latter legend, the former was for some reason or other allowed to remain in a very fragmentary state. It is written in octosyllabic couplets, not one of his characteristic metres, and in its apparent simplicity and real richness occasionally recalls Coleridge's "Christabel." The old tradition ran that whosoever watched at a church porch after sunset on the Eve of Saint Mark, would see the appearances of such of his friends as were destined to ill-health during the following year. These apparitions entered the church; if they returned it was a sign that the persons they represented would recover, the length of their sojourn in the church betokening the duration and severity of the sickness; if they did not return, the sickness would be fatal. Taking this story as his motive, the poet began a description of a maiden named Bertha, living within sound of the chimes of an old cathedral, reading upon a Sabbath day the aforesaid legend from an ancient book,

A curious volume, patched and torn, That all day long from earliest morn Had taken captive her two eyes.

Certainly it was seen, but whether the dictatress remonstrated again is not known. Meanwhile the poem proceeded on its leisurely course, deomnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis as Campbell aptly described it, showing on every page how true was the poet's own criticism.

The fact is, that I have nothing plann'd, Unless it were to be a moment merry, A novel word in my vocabulary.

employed a figure which has since obtained almost universal currency among our poets down to Tennyson:Here was she wont to go! and here! and here!

Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:

The world may find the Spring by following her;

For other print her airy steps ne'er left. Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,

1822 at Pisa, and the remainder up to the sixteenth at Genoa in 1823. A few stanzas still remain in manuscript, concluding the interview between Juan and her frolic Grace FitzFulke, and that ends it,-a poem of some sixteen thousand lines without the slightest indication of an approaching conclusion.

In turning next to Ben Jonson we write of a man far removed from Keats and Byron both by time and temper; but the suddenness of the transition will be less noticeable if, instead of thinking of the great Elizabethan as the dramatist of "The Poetaster" and "Bartholomew Fair," we approach him as the poet of many exquisite lyrics and as the author of "The Sad Shepherd." This unfinished pastoral was found by his literary executors among his papers and published in its incompleteness. Two acts and the beginning of the third are all that we have, but they show Jonson at his best. In its nature, and its execution, it is far more poetical (using that word in a well understood sense) than most of his work. Outside his lyrics, indeed, it would not be easy to match the delicate charm of the lines in which Æglamour praises the fresh beauties of his love.

Earine,

Who had her very being, and her name, With the first knots or buddings of the spring,

Born with the primroses and the violet, Or earliest roses blown;

or of these, again, where Jonson, borrowing something from Virgil, has

stalk!

But like the soft west wind she shot along,

And where she went the flowers took thickest root.

It has been commonly supposed that this was the work of Jonson's last years, on the strength of a line in the prologue which refers to his having been a playwright for forty years. But the evidence is not, we think, conclusive; and it is certainly hard to believe this play to be the product of a palsied and bedridden old age. It is at least possible that "The Sad Shepherd" may be a part of that pastoral entitled "The May Lord." which Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden he had written. According to this theory "The May Lord" the time Jonson visited Drummond had perhaps been finished in prose by (we know he was in the habit of composing first in prose), and had been translated into verse only up to the point at which it now leaves off. Then for some cause it was put aside, and not taken up again by the poet until his old age, when he began to adapt it for the stage, inserted the line in the prologue,

He that hath feasted you these forty

years,

and might perhaps have finished turning the prose outline into verse if death had not supervened. Of course there are objections that can be urged against this theory, otherwise it would not be a theory; but all things considered it appears to be no improbable solution of a difficult question.

Perhaps no one has obtained such

a high reputation by reason of such fragmentary work as Coleridge. Not to speak of those poems which he only planned and never attempted to execute (and they are legion) there are still at least four important poems left in different stages of imperfection, "The Three Graves," "The Wanderings of Cain," "The Ballad of the Dark Ladie," and "Christabel." One of these fragments gave Charles Lamb the hint for a joke at his friend's foible. In perhaps the most whimsical of all his delightful letters, to Manning in China, by way of upbraiding him for his long exile he affects to warn him that when he does return he must expect to see no more of the old familiar faces; Mary, Martin Burney, Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth, all are gone. "Poor Col., but two days before he died he wrote to a bookseller proposing an epic poem on the 'Wanderings of Cain' in twentyfour books. It is said he has left behind him more than forty thousand treatises in criticism, metaphysics, and divinity, but few of them in a state of completion." Never was there a writer whose performances bore such a small proportion to his promises, and if he had carried out all his projects and filled in all his outlines, he would have been one of the most voluminous writers in the whole dynasty of poets.

One of the gravest charges that may be brought against Coleridge by a disciple is his persistent neglect of "Christabel." Of the poem containing the story of that interesting maiden we have but two cantos or parts, the only two that were ever written, and these were not published until 1816. And yet, as Coleridge's preface informs us, the first part was actually written in 1797, and the second in 1800. He mentions this to clear himself from a charge of plagiarism, and to show that, though later in appearance, his poem was antecedent in date to the works of Scott and Byron composed in a similar metre, the first part at any rate having circulated in manuscript many years before its public appearance.

The paragraph in the aforesaid

preface is eminently characteristic of the author. "As in my very first conception of the tale," he writes, "I had the whole present to my mind with the wholeness no less than with the liveliness of a vision, I trust I shall be able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come, in the course of the present year." In the edition of 1828 the whole sentence was repeated with the exception of the words we have italicized. If, then, this was the case, why did he not finish it, or at least set himself to the task? In opposition to Coleridge's statement we have the evidence of Wordsworth, who declared that in his belief the author had never "conceived in his own mind any definite plan for it . . . he had never heard from him any plan for finishing it." Wordsworth did not doubt the sincerity of his friend when he asserted the contrary; "but," said he, "schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and so impressed him that he often fancied he had arranged things which really and upon trial proved to be mere embryos." That Wordsworth was right may be gathered from the fact that, while in the original preface Coleridge speaks of the plan as being quite perfected in his mind, he writes at another time: "If I should finish 'Christabel' I should certainly extend it and give new characters and a greater number. . . . If a genial recurrence of the ray divine should occur for a few weeks I shall certainly attempt it. I had the whole of the two cantos in my mind before I began it." And yet again in 1833, the year before ne died, he returns to the old subject: "The reason of my not finishing 'Christabel' is not that I did not know how to do it, for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entirely from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry out with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one."

...

Gillman gives a sketch of the remainder of the poem which he declares

it was the intention of the poet to follow. In it is related how the supernatural Geraldine is obliged to cease the impersonation of the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, and changes her appearance to that of the absent accepted lover of Christabel. The baron and his daughter, though uneasy, are both unsuspicious of the charm, and the marriage between Christabel and the serpent-woman is about to take place when the real suitor enters. Amid general consternation Geraldine disappears (like Lamia in Keats's poem), the castle bell tolls, the voice of Christabel's mother is heard in fulfilment of the old prophecy, and the rightful marriage is celebrated. Whether this is the actual scheme that Coleridge had floating before his mind's eye can never be known; nor do we know exactly whether to the regret that poem was never finished. Certainly we should all regret a conclusion unworthy of the first two cantos. Lamb, indeed, was content with the first, and was afraid that any addition would spoil it: "I was very angry," he writes, "when I first heard that he had written a second canto, and that he intended to finish it." An attempt was made to complete it by another hand, in 1815, before the actual publication of the first parts; and another similar attempt appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for June, 1819, signed Morgan O'Doherty, and understood to be by Maginn. Coleridge says of it: "I laughed heartily at the continuation in Blackwood.

I do not doubt that it gave more pleasure, and to a greater number, than a continuation by myself in the spirit of the first two cantos."

There is a touching instance of the suddenness with which an author is sometimes snatched away from his work in Goldsmith's "Retaliation;" that brilliant series of mock epitaphs which hit off their subjects with a wit Pope might have envied, and a goodnature to which Pope can lay little claim. What would one not give, as Macaulay says, for sketches from the same hand of Johnson and Gibbon as

happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and Garrick! What a cruel fate has left the portrait of Sir Joshua unfinished!

Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind,

He has not left a wiser or better behind. His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand;

His manners were gentle, complying, and bland:

Still born to improve us in every part, His pencil our faces, his manners our heart.

To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering:

When they judged without skill he was still hard of hearing;

When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff

He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.

By flattery unspoiled

and then in the middle of the line the writer laid down the pen he was never to use again. Poor dear Goldsmith! One of the most lovable figures in all our literature, dead in the prime of his life and the heyday of his reputation! "Let not his faults be remembered; he was a very great

man."

How swift, too, was the blow that struck Dickens down on that summer's day five-and-twenty years ago. Rich, happy, universally honored, rejoicing in his prosperity and in his power of giving pleasure to others, he worked faithfully to the last. Towards the close of his life his labors as a novelist had been somewhat interrupted, and from 1861, when "Great Expectations" was completed, until 1870 only one novel had come from his busy pen, and that not one of the best. But in that latter year (or, rather, in the close of 1869) after months of the most untiring exertions, travelling, lecturing, and reading, he turned again to his true vocation, and began "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." There is no trace of fatigue in it, no sign of lessening vitality. He was working on the ground that he had made his own and he was happy in his work. On the morning of the 8th of June, 1870, he had