POEMS. ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE. I. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk : Haydon, in one of his letters to Miss Mitford (Correspondence &c., Volume II, page 72), says of Keats-"The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale' at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous under-tone which affected me extremely." Lord Houghton says the Ode was suggested by the continued song of a nightingale which, in the spring of 1819, had built its nest close to Wentworth Place. "Keats," says his Lordship (Aldine edition, 1876, page 237), "took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of this Ode." The anecdote as told in the Life, Letters, &c. (Volume I, page 245 of the 1848 edition, and page 207 of the 1867 edition) represents Brown as detecting the poet in the act of thrusting the scraps of the Ode away "as waste paper, behind some books," and names Brown as the person who put them together. I presume Lord Houghton saw afterwards that Brown must have mistaken the bearing of Keats's action, inasmuch as the other evidence does not square with the carelessness implied. It is well to put the two forms of the story 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, 2. O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth ! together, because the earlier version is a favourite cutting for magazine and anthology notes. The fair copy of the Ode written at the end of the Endymion in Sir Charles Dilke's collection is dated "May 1819." The poem was printed as long ago as July 1819, in a quarterly magazine called Annals of the Fine Arts, which was edited by James Elmes, but to a great extent informed by Haydon. The ode is the last thing in Number XIII, and is signed with a "dagger" (†). This original version corresponds in the main with Sir Charles Dilke's manuscript; and both are headed Ode to the Nightingale, not a Nightingale. (1) Lord Houghton and Mr. Palgrave follow the editions of Galignani and Smith in printing thy for thine in the sixth line of this stanza; but I am not aware of any authority for the change. (2) Of Keats's partiality for claret enough and too much has been made; but with his delightful list of desiderata given to his sister in a letter, now before me, it is impossible to resist citing as a prose parallel to these two splendid lines of poetry, the words, "and, please heaven, a little claret wine cool out of a cellar a mile deepwith a few or a good many ratafia cakes." In the first line of this stanza the manuscript and the Annals read has for hath, in the sixth true and blushful; and both are without the word away which, in the subsequent version published with Lamia &c., makes the final line of this stanza an Alexandrine. I do not think the circumstances warrant the reduction of this wonderful line to the metric standard of the rest, albeit Lord Houghton has been taken to task for leaving it in its loveliness. The evidence of one manuscript and |