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which are from the revised version. He records that Keats " said he was dissatisfied with what he had done of it; and should not complete it". Woodhouse, like several of Keats's friends, thoroughly appreciated the portentous genius of the young poet : of Hyperion he says, “The structure of the verse, as well as the subject, are colossal. It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power.—1 know of no poem with which in this respect it can be compared.—It is that in poetry, which the Elgin and Egyptian marbles are in sculpture." Again, at the close of his extracts from the manuscript, this judiciously admiring friend well says, “The above lines, separated from the rest, give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem : but they are sufficient to lead us to regret that such an attempt should have been abandoned. The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo, -and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's reestablishment – with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet's brain. How he is qualified for such a task, may be seen in a trifling degree by the few mythological glimpses afforded in Endymion."-H. B. F.]

HYPERION.

BOOK I.

5

DEEP in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair ;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day

Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, | But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest, F

A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade : the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.

10

(14) It seems to me that the power of realization shown in the first decade, and indeed throughout the fragment, answers all objections to the subject, and is the most absolute security for the nobility of the result which Keats would have achieved had he finished the poem. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of such a landscape, so touched in with a few strokes of titanic meaning and completeness; and the whole sentiment of gigantic despair reflected around the fallen god of the Titan dynasty, and permeating the landscape, is resumed in the most perfect manner in the incident

15

Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray'd,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

20

25

It seem'd no force could wake him from his place;
But there came one, who with a kindred hand
Touch'd his wide shoulders, after bending low
With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was a Goddess of the infant world ;
By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pigmy's height : she would have ta’en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,
Pedestal'd haply in a palace court,
When sages look'd to Egypt for their lore.
But oh! how unlike marble was that face :
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,

30

35

of the motionless fallen leaf, a line almost as intense and full of the essence of poetry as any line in our language. It were ungracious to take exception to the poor Naiad ; but she has not the convincing appropriateness of the rest of this sublime opening.

(35-7) Although the counterpoint of lines 35 and 36 recalls the manner of Shakespeare, it is to a contemporary influence that line 37 points. In Landor's Gebir, Book I, we read

There was a brightening paleness in his face,
Such as Diana rising o'er the rocks
Shower'd on the lonely Latmian; on his brow
Sorrow there was, yet nought was there severe.

40

As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
One hand she press'd upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain :
The other upon Saturn's bended neck

45
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenour and deep organ tone :
Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents; O how frail 50
To that large utterance of the early Gods !
Saturn, look up!-though wherefore, poor old King ?

(51) Leigh Hunt's remarks upon Keats's failure to finish the poem (see Appendix) are specially appropriate to this passage, “ If any living poet could finish this fragment, we believe it is the author himself. But perhaps he feels that he ought not. A story which involves passion, almost of necessity involves speech ; and though we may well enough describe beings greater than ourselves by comparison, unfortunately we cannot make them speak by comparison.” Of the magnificent three lines before Thea's speech he says, “ This grand confession of want of grandeur is all that he could do for them. Milton could do no more. Nay, he did less, when according to Pope he made

God the father turn a school divine. The moment the Gods speak, we forget that they did not speak like ourselves. The fact is, they feel like ourselves; and the poet would have to make them feel otherwise, which he cannot, unless he venture upon an obscurity which would destroy our sympathy : and what is sympathy with a God, but turning him into a man? We allow, that superiority and inferiority are, after all, human terms, and imply something not so truly fine and noble as the levelling of a great sympathy and love ; but poems of the present nature, like Paradise Lost, assume a different principle ; and fortunately perhaps, it is one which it is impossible to reconcile with the other.”

55

60

“I have no comfort for thee, no not one:
“I cannot say, 'O wherefore sleepest thou ?'
“For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
“Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
"And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
“ Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air
" Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
“Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
“Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
“And thy sharp lightning in unpractis'd hands
“ Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
“O aching time! O moments big as years !
“All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
“And press it so upon our weary griefs
“That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
“Saturn, sleep on :-0 thoughtless, why did I
“ Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude ?
“Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?

Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep."

65

70

75

As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;
So came these words and went; the while in tears
She touch'd her fair large forehead to the ground,
Just where her falling hair might be outspread
A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet.
One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
Her silver seasons four upon the night,
And still these two were postured motionless,

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85