COLOUR IN ITALY.

FROM "THE LIBERAL" (1822).

You learn for the first time in this Italian climate what colours really are. No wonder it produces painters. An English artist of any enthusiasm might shed tears of vexation, to think of the dull medium through which blue and red come to him in his own atmosphere, compared with this. One day we saw a boat pass us, which instantly reminded us of Titian, and accounted for him:

and yet it contained nothing but an old boatman in a red cap, and some women with him in other colours, one of them in a bright yellow petticoat. But a red cap in Italy goes by you, not like a mere cap, much less anything vulgar or butcherlike, but like what it is, an intense specimen of the colour of red. It is like a scarlet bud in the blue atmosphere. The old boatman, with his brown hue, his white shirt, and his red cap, made a complete picture, and so did the woman and the yellow petticoat. I have seen pieces of orangecoloured silk hanging out against a wall at a dyer's, which gave the eye a pleasure truly sensual. Some of these boatmen are very fine men. I was rowed to shore one day by a man the very image of Kemble. He had nothing but his shirt on, and it was really grand to see the mixed power and gracefulness with which all his limbs came into play as he pulled the oars, occasionally turning his heroic profile to give a glance behind him at other boats.

SPRING.

FROM "WISHING-CAP PAPERS" (1824).

Leigh Hunt

This morning as we sat at breakfast there came by the window, from a child's voice, a cry of "Wallflowers." There had just been a shower; sunshine had followed it; and the rain, the sun, the boy's voice, and the flowers came all so prettily together upon the subject we were thinking of, that in taking one of his roots, we could not help fancying we had received a present from Nature herself with a penny for the bearer. There were thirty lumps of buds on this penny root; their beauty was yet to come; but the promise was there-the new life-the Spring-and the raindrops were on them, as if the sweet goddess had dipped her hand in some fountain and sprinkled them for us by way of message, as who should say, "April and I are coming."

From a Sketch by D. Maclise

What a beautiful word is Spring! At least one fancies so, knowing the meaning of it, and being used to identify it with so many pleasant things. An Italian might find it harsh, and object to the sp and the terminating consonant; but if he were a proper Italian, a man of fancy, the worthy countryman of Petrarch and Ariosto, we would convince him that the word was an excellent good word, crammed as full of beauty as a bud-and that S had the whistling of the brooks in it, and the force and roughness of whatsoever is animated and picturesque, ing the singing of the birds, and the whole word the suddenness and salience of all that is lively, sprouting, and newSpring, Springtime, a Spring-green, a Spring of water,-to Spring-Springal, a word

for a young man in old (that is, ever new) English poetry, which with many other words has gone out, because the youthfulness of our hearts has gone out-to come back with better times, and the nine-hundredth number of the work before us.

Of the other writers who formed under the presidency of Hunt what was rudely called the Cockney school, J. H. Reynolds and Charles Wells had talent, but JOHN KEATS was one of the greatest poets that any country has produced. The compositions which place the name of this stablekeeper's son with those of Shakespeare and Milton were written between 1817, when his style first ceased to be stiff and affected, and 1820, when the

failure of his health silenced his wonderful voice. Within this brief space of time he contrived to enrich English literature with several of the most perennially attractive narrative-poems in the language, not mere snatches of lyrical song, but pieces requiring sustained effort and a careful constructive scheme, Endymion, Lamia, the Eve of St. Agnes, the Pot of Basil, Hyperion. When he wrote his latest copy of verses, Keats had not completed twenty-five years of life, and it is the copious perfection of work accomplished so early, and under so many disadvantages, which is the wonder of biographers. He died unappreciated, not having persuaded Byron, Scott, or Wordsworth of his value, and being still further than Shelley was from attracting any public curiosity or admiration. His triumph was to be posthumous; it began with the magnanimous tribute of Adonais, and it has gone on developing and extending, until, at the present moment, it is Keats, the semi-educated surgeon's apprentice, cut down in his crude youth, who obtains the most suffrages among all the great poets of the opening quarter of the century. To a career which started with so steady a splendour, no successes should have been denied. It is poor work to speculate about might-have-beens, but the probable attainments of Keats, if he could have lived, amount, as nearly as such unfulfilled prophecies can ever do, to certainty. Byron might have become a sovereign, and Shelley would probably have descended into politics; Keats must have gone on to further and further culmination of poetic art.

John Keats

Nothing in English poetry is more lovely than those passages in which Keats throws off his Cockney excesses and sings in the note of classic purity. At these moments, and they were growing more and more frequent till he ceased to write, he attains a depth of rich, voluptuous melody, by

The Eve of Saint Mark - 1811 It was an atom bortsday

"I wore holy zugs the dig bell

Upon a sabbath day it fell "Turie holy was the subbuth bell; That calla the folk to evening hayerThe City streets were clean and fair From wholesome drench of ufuil cams

And on

the

western window panes

The Mully sunset bland faintly told

of unmatund

Of the

vallies cold

queen thong bloom les hedge of rivers new with spungtide sedge Prun roses by shettende ulls

And dasies on the agurk hills.

I wice, holy

was the subbalk bell:

The silent Sheets were crowded will Will stand and frous companies tam frous their fire side, or atire!

and facing.

moving

with deccrest air

To even rong und reasper funger

A Portion of the MS. of Keats's "Eve of Saint Mark"

the side of which Byron seems thin, and even Shelley shrill. If we define what poetry is in its fullest and deepest expression, we find ourselves describing the finest stanzas in the maturer works of Keats. His great odes, in which, perhaps, he is seen to the most advantage as an artist in verse, are Titanic and Titianic-their strength is equalled only by the glow and depth of their tone. From Spenser, from Shakespeare, from Milton, from Ariosto, he freely borrowed beauties of style, which he fused into an enamel or amalgam, no longer resembling the sources from which they were stolen, but wearing the impress of the god-like thief himself.

John Keats

From a Sketch by B. R. Haydon

It is probable that, marvellous as is such a fragment as Hyperion, it but faintly foreshadows the majesty of the style of which Keats would shortly have been master. Yet, enormous as are the disadvantages under which. the existing work of Keats labours, we are scarcely conscious of them. We hold enough to prove to us how predominant the imagination was in him, how sympathetic his touch as an artist. He loved "the principle of beauty in all things," and he had already, in extreme youth, secured enough of the rich felicity of phrase and imperial illumination, which mark the maturity of great poets to hold his own with the best. No one has lived who has known better than he how to "load every rift of his subject with ore."

It is impossible, too, not to recognise that Keats has been the masterspirit in the evolution of Victorian. poetry. Both Tennyson and Browning, having in childhood been enchained by Byron, and then in adolescence by Shelley, reached manhood only to transfer their allegiance to Keats, whose influence on English poetry since 1830 has been not less universal than that of Byron on the literature of the Continent. His felicities are exactly of a kind to stimulate a youthful poet to emulation, and in spite of what he owes to the Italians to whom he went precisely as Chaucer did, to gain richness of poetical texture—the speech of Keats is full of a true British raciness. No poet, save Shakespeare himself, is more English than Keats; none presents to us in the harmony of his verse, his personal character, his letters and his general tradition, a figure more completely attractive, nor better calculated to fire the dreams of a generous successor.