There came, falling in with it, each in the last, And the violin, smoothlier sustaining the speed Then I said, in a tone of immense will and pleasure, The lovers of music serenely be set; And then, with their singers in lily-white stoles, And themselves clad in rose-colour, fetch me the souls Of all the composers accounted divinest, And, with their own hands, let them play me their finest." Then, lo! was performed my immense will and pleasure, And lights were about me and odours; and set And themselves clad in rose-colour, in came the souls Of all the composers accounted divinest, And, with their own hands, did they play me their finest Oh! truly was Italy heard then, and Germany, Melody's heart, and the rich brain of harmony; Pure Paisiello, whose airs are as new Though we know them by heart, as May-blossoms and de And nature's twin son, Pergolesi; and Bach, Old father of fugues, with his endless fine talk; And Gluck, who saw gods; and the learned sweet feeling A lover withal, and a conqueror, whose marches Bring demi-gods under victorious arches ; Then Arne, sweet and tricksome; and masterly Purcell, But chiefly with exquisite gallantries found, And strange was the shout, when it wept, hearing thee, Of her fingers with pleasure; and rich Fodor's lips And Naldi, thy whim; and thy grace, Tramezzani ; So now we had instrument, now we had song- Into all that is shapely, and lovely, and fair, And running our fancies their tenderest rounds Of endearments and luxuries, turned into sounds; 'Twas argument even, the logic of tones; "Twas memory, 'twas wishes, 'twas laughters, 'twas moans; "Twas pity and love, in pure impulse obeyed; "Twas the breath of the stuff of which passion is made. And these are the concerts I have at my will; Then dismiss them, and patiently think of your "bill.”- Leigh Hunt died, at the age of seventy-five, in 1859,-the last survivor, although the earliest born, of the four poets, with the other three of whom he had been so intimately associated, and the living memory of whom he thus carried far into another time, indeed across an entire succeeding generation.* To the last, even in outward form, he forcibly recalled Shelley's fine picture of him in his Elegy on Keats, written nearly forty years before : "What softer voice is hushed over the dead? Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown? In mockery of monumental stone, The heavy heart heaving without a moan? If it be he, who, gentlest of the wise, Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one; Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs, The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice." OTHER POETICAL WRITERS OF THE EARLIER PART OF THE The names that have been mentioned are the chief of those belonging, wholly or principally, to the earlier part of the present century, or to that remarkable literary era which may be regarded as having expired with the reign of the last of the Georges. Many others, however, also brighten this age of our poetical literature, which cannot be here enlarged upon, and some of which, indeed, have been already noticed:-Samuel Rogers, whose first publication, as has been recorded in a preceding page, appeared so long ago as the year 1786, and who died, at the age of ninety-two, only in 1855, after having produced his Pleasures of Memory in 1792, his Human Life in 1819, and his Italy in 1822, all characterized by a spirit of pensive tenderness, as well as by high finish; the Reverend W. Lisle Bowles, who, born in 1762, lived till 1850, and whose Fourteen Sonnets, his first publication, which appeared in 1793, were regarded alike by Coleridge, by Wordsworth, and by Southey, as having not only materially contributed to mould their own poetry, but heralded or even kindled the dawn of *Hunt-Byron-Shelley-Keats, born in that order (in 1784, 1788, 1793, and 1796), died in exactly the reverse, and also at ages running in a series contrary throughout to that of their births;-Keats, at 25, in 1821,-- Shelley, at 29, in 1822,-Byron, at 36, in 1824,-Hunt, at 75, in 1859. a new poetic day; Charles Lamb (b. 1775, d. 1835), whose earliest verses were published in 1797, at Bristol, along with those of their common friend Charles Lloyd, in the second edition of Coleridge's Poems (of which the first edition had appeared at London in the preceding year); the Rev. William Sotheby, whose translation of Wieland's Oberon, which appeared in 1798, was followed by a long succession of other works, both in rhyme and in blank verse, including translations of Virgil's Georgics and of the two great Homeric epics, and all distinguished by the combination of a flowing ease with a scholarly correctness, coming down to his death, at the age of seventy-seven, in 1833; Henry Kirke White, who, after putting forth some blossoms of fancy of considerable promise, was cut off, in his twenty-first year, in 1806; James Montgomery (b. 1771, d. 1854), whose Wanderer of Switzerland (1806), West Indies (1810), World before the Flood (1813), Greenland (1819), and Pelican Island (1827), with many minor pieces, always satistying us by their quiet thoughtfulness and simple grace, made him with a large class of readers the most acceptable poetical writer of his time; Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, whose first volume of verse, not of a striking character, but yet not wanting either in cordiality of feeling or grace of manner, appeared in 1820; James Grahame (b. 1765, d. 1811), best known as the author of The Sabbath, originally published without his name in 1804, but whose Birds of Scotland, which followed in 1806, and his British Georgics in 1809, have also been highly praised for the truth and vividness, though in a style simple sometimes to homeliness, of their pictures of natural objects and scenery,-among others, James Montgomery going so far as to declare that, although his readers may be few, yet "whoever does read him will probably be oftener surprised into admiration than in the perusal of any one of his contemporaries;" John Leyden, whose philological as well as poetic ardour, and sudden extinction in the midst of his career (at Batavia, in 1811, at the age of thirty-six), have been sung by Scott : Quenched is that lamp of varied lore, A distant and a deadly shore Has Leyden's cold remains : : the Rev. Charles Wolfe (b. 1791, d. 1823), an Irishman, the writer of the famous lines on the death of Sir John Moore, first given to the world in 1817; Reginald Heber, whose fine prize poem of Palestine was produced in 1803, and who held the bishopric of Calcutta from 1823 till his lamented death, at the age of forty-three, in 1826; the Hon. and Rev. William Herbert (b. 1778, d. 1847), whose elegant and spirited Translations from the Norse appeared in 1806, and his original poems of Helga and Attila in 1815 and 1838; Robert Bloomfield (b. 1766, d. 1823), the self-taught author of The Farmer's Boy, first published in 1798, and of other pieces full of truth to nature and also not without something of conventional cultivation; John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant, born in 1793, whose first volume of Poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery appeared in 1820, and his Village Minstrel and other Poems, in two volumes, the year following, showing less indebtedness to books and more originality than Bloomfield; Hector M'Neill (b. 1746, d. 1818), who wrote only in his native Scottish dialect, but acquired great popularity among his countrymen, more especially by his Will and Jean, first published in 1795; Robert Tannahill (b. 1774, d. 1810), some of whose Scottish songs have almost the sweetness and pathos, though none of the fire, of those of Burns; James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, as he was commonly called (b. 1772, d. 1835), who first made himself known by a volume of poems published in 1801, from which date his irregular but affluent and vigorous genius continued to pour forth both verse and prose at an accelerating rate as long as he lived, and whose Queen's Wake, produced in 1813, would, if he had never written anything else, have placed him perhaps at the head of the second or merely imitative class of the uneducated poets of Scotlandfar, indeed, below Burns, but above Allan Ramsay; his countryman Allan Cunningham (b. 1784, d. 1842), the author of many clever songs, also, however, all of an imitative character, as well as an expert and voluminous writer in prose; William Tennant (b. 1774, d. 1848), another Scotsman, whose bright and airy Anster Fair appeared in 1812; John Wilson (b. 1788, d. 1855), the renowned Christopher North of Blackwood's Magazine, whose potent pen was wielded chiefly in prose eloquence, of every variety, from the most reckless comedy and satire to the loftiest heights of description, criticism, and declamatory denunciation, but who first became known by his two poems of The Isle of Palms, published in 1812, and The City of the Plague, in 1816, both rich in passages of tender and dreamy beauty; the late Lord VOL. 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