"My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!

Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?

Thy beauty's shield, heart-shaped and vermeil dyed?
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest,
A famished pilgrim-saved by miracle.
Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
Saving of thy sweet self, if thou think'st well
To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infide

"Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from fairy land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed;
Arise! arise! the morning is at hand;
The bloated wassailers will never heed.
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see.

Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead;

Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,

For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."

She hurried at his words, beset with fears,

For there were sleeping dragons all around,

At glaring watch, perhaps with ready spears—
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found,
In all the house was heard no human sound.

A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.

They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide,
Where lay the porter, in uneasy sprawl,

With a huge empty flagon by his side;

The wakeful blood-hound rose, and shook his hide,

But his sagacious eye an inmate owns;

By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide;

The chains lie silent on the foot-worn stones;

The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.

And they are gone; ay, ages long ago,

These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a wo,

And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form

Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,

Were long be-nightmared. Angela, the old,
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold.

A biographer says: "It was the inten tion of Keats to diffuse the coloring of 'St. Agnes' Eve' throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." He did not live to carry

out this plan. The quantity of his writings is very remarkable, when we consider how short a life was vouchsafed him.

Often melancholy from his failing health, he was not to be persuaded from the thought of an early death. He possessed

in a remarkable degree that self-prescience of disease which stopped for days together

the rich stream of fancy and the glowing imagery of thought. He said once to his friend, Mr. Brown: "Flatter me with a hope of happiness when I shall be well, for I am now so weak that I can be flattered into hope."

In a letter to Mr. Bailey, he says: "I have written fifteen hundred lines in two months, most of which, besides many more of prior composition, you will probably see by next winter. One of my ambitions is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting. I am convinced every day that (excepting the human-friend philosopher,) a fine writer is the most genuine being in the world. Shakspeare and the 'Paradise Lost' every day become greater wonders to me. I look upon fine phrases like a lover."

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When we consider what this noble and gifted son of poetry might have been had he possessed the bodily strength so necessary for any excellence or preferment, we feel still more the almost fiendish injustice of his persecutors, who, with insatiable motive, would deprive him of his peace of mind and discourage all attempts at future excellence. Before considering their at tacks, it is almost a comfort to know the character of his enemies, the following from a reliable source: "The reviewers of Blackwood and the Quarterly were persons evidently destitute of all poetic perception, directing an unrefined and unscrupulous satire against political opponents, whose intellectual merits they had no means of understanding. The Quarterly admits that he had not read, or could not read the work he