der'd,

While he from forth the closet brought

a heap

Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;

With jellies soother than the creamy curd,

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd From Fez; and spiced dainties, every

one,

From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Leba

non.

tasies.

XXXIII

Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,

Tumultuous, and, in chords that tenderest be,

He play'd an ancient ditty, long since mute,

In Provence call'd La belle dame sans

mercy: '

Close to her ear touching the melody; — Wherewith disturb'd, she utter'd a soft

moan:

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 up

roar;

And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.

XLI

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 bloodhound 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 footworn stones;

The key turns, and the door upon its hinges

groans.

XLII

And they are gone: aye, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm.

That night the Baron dreamt of many a

woe,

And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form

Of witch, and demon, and large coffinworm,

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.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN'

Lemprière's classical dictionary made Keats acquainted with the names and attributes of the inhabitants of the heavens in the ancient world, and the Shakesperean Chapman introduced him to Homer, but his acquaintance with the subtlest spirit of Greece was by a more direct means. Keats did not read Greek, and he had no scholar's knowledge of Greek art, but he had the poetic divination which scholars sometimes fail to possess, and when he strolled into the British Museum and saw the Elgin marbles, the greatest remains in continuous series of perhaps the greatest of Greek sculptures, he saw them as an artist of kindred spirit with their makers. He saw them also with the complex emotion of a modern, and read into them his own thoughts. The result is most surely read in his longer poem of Hyperion, but the spirit evoked found its finest expression in this ode.

The ode appears to have been composed in the spring of 1819 and first published in January, 1820, in Annals of the Fine Arts. There are then about four years in time between the sonnet, 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer,' and this ode; if the former suggests a Balboa, this suggests a Magellan who has traversed the Pacific. It is not needful to find any single piece of ancient sculpture as a model for the poem, although there is at Holland House, where Keats might have seen it, an urn with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is described in the fourth stanza. The ode was included by Keats in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems.

19

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

passion

III

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot

shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

all

--

-I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of Indolence my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the Mind.'

I

ONE morn before me were three figures

seen,

With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;

And one behind the other stepp'd serene, In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;

They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn, When shifted round to see the other side;

They came again; as when the urn

once more

Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;

And they were strange to me, as may betide

With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

II

How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye

not?

How came ye muffled in so hush a mask? Was it a silent deep-disguised plot

To steal away, and leave without a task My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;

noons,

And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;

O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy, That I may never know how change the

moons,

Or hear the voice of busy commonsense!