SPENSERIAN STANZA.

Written at the Close of Canto II, Book V, of "The Faerie Queene."

In after-time, a sage of mickle lore
Yclep'd Typographus, the Giant took,
And did refit his limbs as heretofore,
And made him read in many a learned book,
And into many a lively legend look ;
Thereby in goodly themes so training him,
That all his brutishness he quite forsook,
When, meeting Artegall and Talus grim,

The one he struck stone-blind, the other's eyes wox dim.

This stanza, given by Lord Houghton in the Life, Letters &c. (1848), Volume I, page 281, was preceded by the following note :"The copy of Spenser which Keats had in daily use, contains the following stanza, inserted at the close of Canto II. Book V. His sympathies were very much on the side of the revolutionary ‘Gyant,' who 'undertook for to repair' the 'realms and nations run awry,' and to suppress 'tyrants that make men subject to their law,' 'and lordings curbe that commons over-aw,' while he grudged the legitimate victory, as he rejected the conservative philosophy, of the 'righteous Artegall' and his comrade, the fierce defender of privilege and order. And he expressed, in this ex post facto prophecy, his conviction of the ultimate triumph of freedom and equality by the power of transmitted knowledge."

I have no data whereby to fix the period of this commentary of Keats on the political attitude of Spenser; but I should judge it to belong to the end of 1818 or thereabouts. The copy of Spenser in which the stanza was written is not now forthcoming: it passed into the hands of Miss Brawne, and was lost, with other books, many years after Keats's death.

THE EVE OF SAINT MARK.

A FRAGMENT.

UPON a Sabbath-day it fell;

Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell,
That call'd the folk to evening prayer;
The city streets were clean and fair
From wholesome drench of April rains;
And, on the western window panes,
The chilly sunset faintly told

Of unmatur'd green vallies cold,

Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,
Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,

The Eve of St. Mark was probably begun in the winter of 1818-19; for in a letter to George Keats and his wife the poet says under date February 14, "In my next packet I shall send you..., if I should have finished it, a little thing, called the 'Eve of St. Mark.'" Lord Houghton first published the poem among the Literary Remains in 1848, with the date 1819. The late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, writing to send me some information about the superstition connected with the Eve of St. Mark, says,-" Keats's unfinished poem on that subject is perhaps, with La Belle Dame sans Merci, the chastest and choicest example of his maturing manner, and shows astonishingly real mediævalism for one not bred as an artist. I copy an extract [from The Unseen World (Masters, 1853), page 72] which I have no doubt embodies the superstition in accordance with which Keats meant to develope his poem. It is much akin to the belief connected with the Eve of St. Agnes.

'It was believed that if a person, on St. Mark's Eve, placed himself near the church-porch when twilight was thickening, he would

Of primroses by shelter'd rills,

And daisies on the aguish hills.
Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell:
The silent streets were crowded well
With staid and pious companies,
Warm from their fire-side orat❜ries;
And moving, with demurest air,
To even-song, and vesper prayer.
Each arched porch, and entry low,
Was fill'd with patient folk and slow,
With whispers hush, and shuffling feet,
While play'd the organ loud and sweet.

The bells had ceas'd, the prayers begun,
And Bertha had not yet half done

A curious volume, patch'd and torn,

That all day long, from earliest morn,
Had taken captive her two eyes,
Among its golden broideries;

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20

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behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year, go into the church. If they remained there it signified their death; if they came out again it portended their recovery; and the longer or shorter the time they remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness. Infants, under age to walk, rolled in."

Rossetti pointed out that the choice of the locality of a "minster square" accorded with this tradition; and at a later date, on reading the Letters to Fanny Brawne, he wrote to me "I should think it very conceivable-nay, I will say, to myself highly probable and almost certain, that the Poem which I have in my head' referred to by Keats at page 106 was none other than the fragmentary Eve of St. Mark. By the light of the extract . . ., I judge that the heroine -remorseful after trifling with a sick and now absent lover-might make her way to the minster-porch to learn his fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return". It appears that Mr. Theodore Watts, a very close student of Keats and most intimate friend of Rossetti, when made cognizant of this view," was at

Perplex'd her with a thousand things,—
The stars of Heaven, and angels' wings,
Martyrs in a fiery blaze,

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once convinced of the great probability". Rossetti was re-reading the two volumes of Life, Letters &c. published in 1848, and saw nothing to qualify his view in the fact that The Eve of St. Mark was already begun when the letter quoted at the head of this note was written. He supposed that Keats "had had the poem for some time by him as a commencement ", when he wrote to Fanny Brawne, "If my health would bear it, I could write a Poem which I have in my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a situation as mine. I would show some one in Love as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do." "Whether commenced or not with the view in question", writes Rossetti, "may be uncertain (though he must have known Miss B. when he wrote the Houghton letter); but he may (without even having at first intended it) have seen how well the scheme of the poem (which the superstition makes manifest enough) was fitted to work in with the ideas expressed in the Brawne letter."

(39) Concerning this passage Rossetti wrote "In The Cap and Bells (the only unworthy stuff Keats ever wrote except an early trifle or two) there is a mention of one Bertha dwelling at Canterbury—a minster City. This seems oddly muddled up with the subject matter of The Eve of St. Mark." The passage referred to begins at Stanza XLII; and in Stanza LVI Canterbury, Bertha, and St. Mark's Eve are all three mentioned.

Far as the Bishop's garden-wall;
Where sycamores and elm-trees tall,
Full-leav'd, the forest had outstript,
By no sharp north-wind ever nipt,
So shelter'd by the mighty pile.
Bertha arose, and read awhile,

With forehead 'gainst the window-pane.

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Again she try'd, and then again,

Until the dusk eve left her dark
Upon the legend of St. Mark.

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From plaited lawn-frill, fine and thin,
She lifted up her soft warm chin,

With aching neck and swimming eyes,
And daz'd with saintly imageries.

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60

All was gloom, and silent all,

Save now and then the still foot-fall

Of one returning homewards late,
Past the echoing minster-gate.

The clamorous daws, that all the day
Above tree-tops and towers play,

Pair by pair had gone to rest,
Each in its ancient belfry-nest,
Where asleep they fall betimes,
To music and the drowsy chimes.

All was silent, all was gloom,
Abroad and in the homely room:
Down she sat, poor cheated soul!

And struck a lamp from the dismal coal;
Lean'd forward, with bright drooping hair
And slant book, full against the glare.
Her shadow, in uneasy guise,

Hover'd about, a giant size,