series of these spasmodic epistles? A theory that such a youth as Keats was "ill brought up" cannot be thus deduced; the reverse, all things considered, seems to have been the case. Furthermore, it may be that the evolution of a poet advances quite as surely through experience of the average man's folly and emotion as through a class training in reticence, dignity, and selfrestraint. In the first glow of ambition Keats inscribed " Endymion" to the memory of Chatterton, and gladly would have equalled that sleepless soul in fate, so were he equal to him in renown. Afterward, in his first experience of passion, he yielded to morbid sentiment, self-abandonment, the frenzy of a passing hour. It is not out of nature that genius, in these early crises, should be pitifully sensitive or take stagestrides. The training that would forestall this might, like Aylmer's process, too well remove a birth-mark. We can spare, now and then, a gray head on green shoulders, if thereby we gain a poet. Keats was a sturdy, gallant boy at school,—as a man, free from vices patrician or plebeian, and a gentleman in motive and bearing. No unusual precocity of character goes with the artistic temperament. It is observed of born musicians, who in childhood have mastered instrument and counterpoint, and of other phenomenal geniuses, that they are not old beyond their years, nor less simple and frolicsome than their playmates. But the heyday in the blood has always been as critical to poets as the "sinister conjunction" was to the youth of the Arabian tale. Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Shelley, Byron, were not specifically apostles of common sense

in their love-affairs, but their own experience scarcely lowered the tone or weakened the vigor of their poetry. Keats's ideality was disturbed by the passion which came upon him suddenly and late; he clung to its object with fiercer longing and anguish as he felt both her and life itself slipping away from his hold. Everything is extreme in the emotion of a poet. Mr. Arnold does justice to his probity and forbearance, to his trust in the canons of art and rigid self-measurement by an exacting standard; he surely must see, on reflection, that such a man's slavery to passion would be a short-lived episode. Before Keats could rise again to higher things, his doom confronted him. His spirit flew hither and thither, by many paths: across each, as in Tourguéneff's prose-poem, yawned the open grave, and behind him the witch Fate pressed ever more closely. He had prayed" for ten years" in which he might overwhelm himself in poesy. He was granted a scant five, and made transcendent use of them. Had he lived, who can doubt that he would have become mature in character as he was already in the practise of his art? It is to be noted, as regards form, that one of Shelley's most consummate productions was inspired by the works and death of Keats. I doubt not that Keats's sensuous and matchless verse would have taken on, in time, more of the elusive spirituality for which we go to Shelley. As it was, he and Wordsworth were the complements of each other with their respective gifts, and made the way clear for Tennyson and his successors. Impressed by the supreme art and fresh imagination of

the author of "Hyperion," not a few are disposed to award him a place on the topmost dais where but two English poets await his coming,-if not entitled there to an equal seat, at least with the right to stand beside the thrones as lineal inheritor, the first-born prince of the blood. His poetry has been studied with delight in this western world for the last half-century. One page of it is worth the whole product of the "æsthetic" dilettants who most recently have undertaken to direct us, as if by privilege of discovery, to the fountain-head of modern song. But

The One remains, the many change and pass.

This prophesying in the name of an acknowledged leader is old as the Christian era. And even the pagan Moschus, from whom, and from Bion, Shelley took the conception of his starry threnody, declares of a dead poet and certain live and unwelcome celebrants:

66

Verily thou all silent wilt be covered in earth, while it has pleased the Nymphs that the frog shall always sing. Him, though, I would not envy, for he chants no beauteous strain.'

V

IF

F the many lovers of the beautiful, into whose hands, we trust, this collection will fall, shall derive from the study of its gems something of the pleasure experienced in their choice and arrangement, the editors thus will be a second time rewarded for most enjoyable labor. The master-artist, to whose exquisite touch these compositions owe their excuse for being, possessed beyond his contemporaries the liberal faculty which endowed some of the great workmen of the past: the double gift upon which the poets, sculptors, and painters of the golden age, before the era of the specialists, were wont to plume themselves. He had the joyous range of Benvenuto Cellini, whom the chroniclers describe as "founder, gold-worker, and medailleur "; who, in his larger moods, devised and cast the Perseus and other massive bronzes which still ennoble the Italian city-squares; yet who found felicitous moments in which to carve the poniardhandles, vaunted by knights and courtiers as their rarest treasures, or to design some wonder of a cup,

1 Introduction to Cameos. Selected from the works of Walter Savage Landor by Edmund C. Stedman and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1873.

or bracelet, or other thing of beauty, for the queen or mistress of the monarch who protected him and honored his unrivalled art.

The legend of WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR justly might have been Fineness and Strength, since, while distinguished by his epic and dramatic powers, and at home in the domain of philosophic thought, he had also that delicate quality which enriches the smallest detail, and changes at will from its grander creations to those of subtile and ethereal perfection. He had the strongest touch and the lightest; his vision was of the broadest and the most minute. Leigh Hunt characterized him by saying that he had never known any one of such a vehement nature with so great delicacy of imagination, and that he was “like a stormy mountain-pine that should produce lilies." In this there is something of the universal genius of "men entirely great."

Landor's minor poems, therefore, bear a relation to his more extended work similar to that borne by Shakespeare's songs and sonnets to his immortal plays. Yet they are not songs, because not jubilant with that skylark gush of melody which made so musical the sunrise of English rhythm. They address themselves no less to the eye than to the ear; are the daintiest of lyrical idyls, things to be seen as well as to be heard; compact of fortunate imagery, of statuesque conceptions marvellously cut in verse. Are we not right in designating them as Cameos? And from what other modern author could a selection of relievos be

made, so flawless in outline and perfect in classical