SONNET.

To a Young Lady who sent me a Laurel Crown.

FRESH

RESH morning gusts have blown away all fear From my glad bosom,—now from gloominess I mount for ever-not an atom less

Than the proud laurel shall content my bier.

No! by the eternal stars! or why sit here

In the Sun's eye, and 'gainst my temples press
Apollo's very leaves, woven to bless

By thy white fingers and thy spirit clear.

Lo! who dares say, "Do this?" Who dares call down
My will from its high purpose? Who say, "Stand,"
Or "Go?" This mighty moment I would frown
On abject Cæsars-not the stoutest band

Of mailed heroes should tear off my crown:

Yet would I kneel and kiss thy gentle hand!

First given by Lord Houghton among the Literary Remains in Volume II of the Life, Letters &c. (1848). It appears to belong to the year 1816.

SONNET.

Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition.

THE

HE church bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,

Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound

In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crown'd.
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,—
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
That 'tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
Into oblivion;-that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.

In Tom Keats's copy-book this sonnet is headed as above and dated "Sunday Evening, Dec. 24, 1816". In the Aldine edition it is headed "Written on a Summer Evening". I give the text from the transcript, which varies in some details from the Aldine text. The latter reads toll'd for toll in line 1, To some blind spell in line 6, Fond for And in line 8, and as for ere in line 12.

SONNET.

AFTER dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,

Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves
Budding-fruit ripening in stillness-Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves-

Sweet Sappho's cheek-a smiling infant's breath-
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs—
A woodland rivulet-a Poet's death.

This sonnet appeared in The Examiner for the 23rd of February 1817, and is dated January 1817 in Lord Houghton's editions. In line 5 The Examiner reads relieving of; his Lordship reads relieved from, and again And for The at the beginning of line 9, and sleeping for smiling in line 12. The word relieving in the earlier version must, I think, have been a slip, and not an intentional use of relieve as an intransitive verb, though Keats was perhaps capable of such use in his early strife after freshness of speech.

SONNET.

Written on a Blank Space at the end of Chaucer's Tale of "The Floure and the Lefe."

THIS pleasant tale is like a little copse:

The honied lines so freshly interlace
To keep the reader in so sweet a place,
So that he here and there full-hearted stops;
And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops

Come cool and suddenly against his face,
And by the wandering melody may trace
Which way the tender-legged linnet hops.
Oh! what a power has white Simplicity!

This sonnet was published in The Examiner for the 16th of March 1817, having been written in February 1817 in the late Charles Cowden Clarke's "miniature 18mo. copy of Chaucer," as recorded in Clarke's Recollections of Keats in The Gentleman's Magazine. When Clarke died, he bequeathed the Chaucer to Alexander Ireland, author of the Leigh Hunt, Lamb, and Hazlitt Bibliography. The sonnet is said to have been "an extempore effusion, and without the alteration of a single word"; but as Clarke seems to have been asleep when it was written we are justified in construing the word extempore with a certain latitude. It was certainly most unusual for Keats to write that much without a single erasure, and it is quite possible that he jotted the sonnet down in pencil in a note-book which he certainly carried at that time and certainly did draft sonnets in. In any case he probably had ample time and quiet, while Clarke was sleeping, to elaborate the two highly finished quatrains in his mind: the third quatrain and the couplet are of inferior merit, and might well be extemporary. This early performance seems to have

What mighty power has this gentle story!
I that do ever feel a thirst for glory,
Could at this moment be content to lie

Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings
Were heard of none beside the mournful robins.

quite won the heart of the genial critic Hunt, for in inserting it in his paper he characterized it as "exquisite", and added that the author might" already lay true claim to that title :—

The youngest he

That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree."

It should perhaps be recorded in this place that Mr. Skeat finds in the language and prosody of The Floure and the Lefe very strong grounds for rejecting it from the roll of Chaucer's works.