with simple description, he must station,-thus here we not only see how the Birds "with clang despised the ground," but we see them "under a cloud in prospect." So we see Adam" Fair indeed, and tall-under a plantane -and so we see Satan "disfigured-on the Assyrian Mount." This last with all its accompaniments, and keeping in mind the Theory of Spirits' eyes and the simile of Galileo, has a dramatic vastness and solemnity fit and worthy to hold one amazed in the midst of this Paradise Lost.

Me, of these

Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
Depressed; and much they may if all be mine
Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.

Had not Shakespeare liv'd?

BOOK IX, lines 41-7.

So saying, through each thicket, dank or dry,
Like a black mist low-creeping, he held on
His midnight search, where soonest he might find
The Serpent. Him fast sleeping soon he found,
In labyrinth of many a round self-rolled,
His head the midst, well stored with subtle wiles:
Not yet in horrid shade or dismal den,
Nor nocent yet, but on the grassy herb,
Fearless, unfeared, he slept. In at his mouth
The Devil entered, and his brutal sense,
In heart or head, possessing soon inspired
With act intelligential; but his sleep

Disturbed not, waiting close the approach of morn.
BOOK IX, lines 179-91.

Satan having entered the Serpent, and inform'd his brutal sense-might seem sufficient-but Milton goes on "but his sleep disturb'd not." Whose spirit does not ache

at the smothering and confinement-the unwilling stillness-the "waiting close"? Whose head is not dizzy at the possible speculations of Satan in the serpent prison? No passage of poetry ever can give a greater pain of suffocation.

A NOW, DESCRIPTIVE OF A HOT DAY;

WRITTEN BY

LEIGH HUNT WITH KEATS'S HELP.

[Hunt says in his Autobiography (one volume edition, page 274), speaking of The Indicator, "the paper that was most liked by Keats, if I remember, was the one on a hot summer's day, entitled A Now. He was with me while I was writing and reading it to him, and contributed one or two of the passages." The greater part of the paper is so much in the taste and humour of Keats that I can scarcely err in adding its slight bulk to the scanty relics we have of his prose outside the fortunate mass of his letters. The paper appeared in The Indicator for the 28th of June 1820,--the number which had on its last page the sonnet on A Dream (Volume II, pages 334-6).—H. B. F.]

Now the rosy- (and lazy-) fingered Aurora, issuing from her saffron house, calls up the moist vapours to surround her, and goes veiled with them as long as she can; till Phœbus, coming forth in his power, looks every thing out of the sky, and holds sharp uninterrupted empire from his throne of beams. Now the mower begins to make his sweeping cuts more slowly, and resorts oftener to the beer. Now the carter sleeps a-top of his load of hay, or plods with double slouch of shoulder, looking out with eyes winking under his shading hat, and with a hitch upward of one side of his mouth. Now the little girl at her grandmother's cottagedoor watches the coaches that go by, with her hand held up over her sunny forehead. Now labourers look well resting in their white shirts at the doors of rural alehouses. Now an elm is fine there, with a seat under it ; and horses drink out of the trough, stretching their yearning necks with loosened collars; and the traveller calls for his glass of ale, having been without one for more than ten minutes; and his horse stands wincing at the flies, giving sharp shivers of his skin, and moving to and fro his ineffectual docked tail; and now Miss Betty Wilson, the host's daughter, comes streaming forth in a flowered gown and ear-rings, carrying with four of her