Spirit here that dancest!
Noble soul that prancest!
Spirit, with thee

I join in the glee

A-nudging the elbow of Momus.

Spirit, I flush

With a Bacchanal blush

Just fresh from the Banquet of Comus.

which I have adopted; and there is a cancelled reading, wings for pinions in line 7 of stanza 1. Lord Houghton reads While nudging

in stanza 2.

STANZAS.

IN

I.

In a drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:

The north cannot undo them,

With a sleety whistle through them;

Nor frozen thawings glue them

From budding at the prime.

2.

In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting

About the frozen time.

I have not succeeded in tracing this poem further back than to Galignani's edition of Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge (1829). In 1830 it appeared in The Gem, a Literary Annual. Some years ago a correspondent sent me for inspection a manuscript varying slightly from the received text: thus, each stanza began with In drear nighted December; the second happy in line 2 of stanza 1 appeared

3.

Ah! would 'twere so with many

A gentle girl and boy!

But were there ever any

Writh'd not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,

Was never said in rhyme.

to be an after-thought; in stanza 3, line 2, happy stood cancelled in favour of gentle, and line 5 was

The feel of not to feel it.

In The Gem we read told for said in the last line.

SONNET.

THE HUMAN SEASONS.

FOUR
OUR Seasons fill the measure of the year;

There are four seasons in the mind of man :
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span :
He has his Summer, when luxuriously

Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming nigh
His nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look

This sonnet and that to Ailsa Rock were first published, with the signature "I", in Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book; or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art,—the first number, that for 1819, in which Shelley's Marianne's Dream appeared with the signature "A". The critic of Blackwood's Magazine must have discovered the secret of the signatures by some means, and was of course not above making use of his discovery; for in noticing the PocketBook he describes these sonnets with characteristic ribaldry as "two feats of Johnny Keats." The only variation of consequence shown by the Pocket-Book as compared with the current texts of the present sonnet is in lines 7 and 8, where the usual reading is by such dreaming high

Is nearest unto Heaven:

this is certainly a more usual sense than that of the text as given above; but I should not venture to adopt it without knowing upon what manuscript authority, as the other seems to me the more characteristic in its strain after originality of expression. I take

On mists in idleness-to let fair things

Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

nigh to be a verb; and I think students will admit that nigh his nearest unto heaven, for approach his nearest unto heaven, is tame compared with some of the novelties of Endymion.