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on the grass in summer, as on the lap that soothes us. O lovers of books and of nature, lovers of one another, lovers of love, rest with me under my bowers; and the shadows of pleasant thoughts shall play upon your eyelids.

III. ON A BUST OF BACCHUS

Gigantic, earnest, luxuriant, his head a very bower of hair and ivy;1 his look a mixture of threat, and reassurance, and the giving of pleasure; the roughness of wine in his eyes, and the sweetness of it on his lips. Annibal Caracci would have painted such a face, and grown jealous when his mistress looked at it.

To those shoulders belong the bands that lifted the satyr2 by the nape of the neck, and played with the lion's mouth as with a dog's.3

Cannot you see the glow in the face, even though sculptured? a noontide of the south in its strength? with dark wells in the eyes, under shining locks and sunny leaves? The geniality of his father Jove is in it, with the impetuosity of wine: but it is the lord, not the servant, of wine; the urger of the bowl among the divinities, when the pulses of heaven are in movement with song and dance, and goddess by the side of god looks downward.

Such did he appear when Ariadne turned pale with loving him; and he said, with divine insolence in his eyes, "Am I not then better than a mortal?"""

OF THE SIGHT OF SHOPS

From PART II 1888

In the general glance that we have taken at shops, we found ourselves unwillingly compelled to pass some of them too quickly. It is the object, therefore, of the present article to enter into those more attractive thresholds, and look a little about us. We imagine a fine day; time, about noon; scene, any good brilliant street. The ladies are abroad in white and green; the beaux lounging, conscious of their waists and neckcloths; the busy pushing onward, conscious of their bills.

1 The forehead of Bacchus was crowned with vineleaves or ivy.

2 Probably Silenus, who was a boon companion of Bacchus.

3 A portion of the frieze of The Monument of Lysicrates represents Bacchus with his hand

on the face of a lion.

To begin, then, where our shopping experience began, with the toy-shop

Visions of glory, spare our aching sight! Ye just-breech'd ages,1 crowd not on our soul! 2 We still seem to have a lively sense of the smell of that gorgeous red paint which was on the handle of our first wooden sword! The pewter guard also-how beautifully fretted and like silver did it look! How did we hang it round our shoulder by the proud belt of an old ribbon;-then feel it well suspended; then draw it out of the sheath, eager to cut down four savage men for illusing ditto of damsels! An old muff made an excellent grenadier's cap; or one's hat and feather, with the assistance of three surreptitious large pins, became fiercely modern and military. There it is, in that corner of the window-the same identical sword, to all appearance, which kept us awake the first night behind our pillow. We still feel ourselves little boys while standing in this shop; and for that matter, so we do on other occasions. A field has as much merit in our eyes, and ginger-bread almost as much in our mouths, as at that daisyplucking and cake-eating period of life. There is the trigger-rattling gun, fine of its kind, but not so complete a thing as the sword. Its memories are not so ancient: for Alexander or St. George did not fight with a musket. Neither is it so true a thing; it is not "like life." The trigger is too much like that of a cross-bow; and the pea which it shoots, however hard, produces, even to the imaginative faculties of boyhood, a humiliating flash of the mock-heroic. It is difficult to fancy a dragon killed with a pea: but the shape and appurtenances of the sword being genuine, the whole sentiment of massacre is as much in its wooden blade as if it were steel of Damascus. The drum is still more real, though not so heroic.-In the corner opposite are battledores and shuttle-cocks, which have their maturer beauties; balls, which possess the additional zest of the danger of breaking people's windows;-ropes, good for swinging and skipping, especially the long ones which others turn for you, while you run in a masterly manner up and down, or skip in one spot with an easy and endless exactitude of toe, looking alternately at their conscious faces; -blood-allies, with which the possessor of

1 The ages at which boys begin to wear breeches. The expression is used here to indicate the time when boys first show an interest in toys. Gray, The Bard, 108-9 (p. 65). Hunt substitutes just-breech'd for unborn.

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a crisp finger and thumb-knuckle causes the smitten marbles to vanish out of the ring; kites, which must appear to more vital birds a ghastly kind of fowl, with their grim, 5 long, white faces, no bodies, and endless tails; cricket-bats, manly to handle;trap-bats, a genteel inferiority;-swimming-corks, despicable;-horses on wheels, an imposition on the infant public;rocking-horses, too much like Pegasus, ardent yet never getting on;-Dutch toys, so like life, that they ought to be better;Jacob's ladders, flapping down one over another with tintinnabulary2 shutters;dissected maps, from which the infant statesmen may learn how to dovetail provinces and kingdoms;-paper posture-makers, who hitch up their knees against their shoulder-blades, and dangle their legs like an opera dancer;-Lilliputian plates, dishes, and other household utensils, in which a grand dinner is served up out of half an apple;-boxes of paints, to color engravings with, always beyond the outline;-ditto of bricks, a very sensible and lasting toy, which we except from a grudge we have against the gravity of infant geometrics;whips, very useful for cutting people's eyes unawares;-hoops, one of the most ancient as well as excellent of toys;-sheets of pictures, from A apple-pie up to farming, military, and zoological exhibitions, always taking care that the Fly is as large as the Elephant, and the letter X exclusively appropriated to Xerxes;-musical deal-boxes,8 rather complaining than sweet, and more like a peal of bodkins than bells;-penny trumpets, awful at Bartlemy-tide;1-jews' harps, that thrill and breathe between the lips like a metal tongue;-carts-carriages -hobby-horses, upon which the infant equestrian prances about proudly on his own feet;-in short, not to go through the whole representative body of existencedolls, which are so dear to the maternal instincts of little girls. We protest, however, against that abuse of them, which makes them full-dressed young ladies in body, while they remain infant in face; especially when they are of frail wax. It is cultivating finery instead of affection. We prefer good, honest, plump limbs of cotton and sawdust, dressed in baby-linen; or even our ancient young friends, with their staring dotted eyes, red varnished

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1 small bats used in playing trapball jingling; rattling

boxes made of pine or fir

the time of the festival of St. Bartholomew, Aug. 24

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The next step is to the Pastry-cook's, where the plain bun is still the pleasantest thing in our eyes, from its respectability in those of childhood. The pastry, less patronized by judicious mothers, is only so much elegant indigestion: yet it is not easy to forget the pleasure of nibbling away the crust all around a raspberry or currant tart, in order to enjoy the three or four delicious semicircular bites at the fruity plenitude remaining. There is a custard with a wall of paste round it, which provokes a siege of this kind; and the cheese-cake has its amenities of approach. The acid flavor is a relief to the mawkishness of the biffin2 or pressed baked apple, and an addition to the glib and quivering lightness of the jelly. Twelfth Cake, which, when cut, looks like the side of a rich pit of earth covered with snow, is pleasant from warmer associations. Confec- 25 tionery does not seem in the same request as of old; its paint has hurt its reputation. Yet the school-boy has still much to say for its humbler suavities. Kisses are very amiable and allegorical. Eight or ten of them, judiciously wrapped up in pieces of letterpaper, have saved many a loving heart the trouble of a less eloquent billet-doux. Candied citron we look upon to be the very acme and atticism of confectionery grace. Preserves are too much of a good thing, with the exception of the jams that retain their fruit-skins. "Jam satis.'' They qualify the cloying. Yet marmalade must not be passed over in these times, when it has been raised to the dignity of the peerage. The other day there was a Duke of Marmalade in Hayti, and a Count of Lemonade,-so called, from places in which those eminent relishes are manufactured. 45 After all, we must own that there is but one thing for which we care much at a pastry-cook's, except our old acquaintance the bun; especially as we can take up that and go on. It is an ice. Fancy a very hot day; the blinds down; the loungers unusually languid; the pavement burning one's feet; the sun, with a strong outline long and bony like Rosinante (the steed of Don Quixote, the hero of Cervantes's Spanish romance Don Quixote)

2 An English variety of apple.

A cake made for the celebration held on the twelfth night after Christmas.

4 highest quality (characteristic of Attic Greek) already enough

This is said to be a fact.

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in the street, baking one whole side of it like a brick-kiln; so that everybody is crowding on the other, except a man going to intercept a creditor bound for the Continent. Then think of a heaped-up ice, brought upon a salver with a spoon. What statesman, of any warmth of imagination, would not pardon the Neapolitans in summer, for an insurrection on account of the want of ice? Think of the first sidelong dip of the spoon in it, bringing away a wellsliced lump; then of the sweet wintry refreshment, that goes lengthening down one's throat; and lastly, of the sense of power and satisfaction resulting from having had the ice.

Not heaven itself can do away that slice;
But what has been, has been; and I have had

my ice.

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Keats was born a poet of the most poeti cal kind. All his feelings came to him through a poetical medium, or were speedily colored by it. He enjoyed a jest as heartily as any one, and sympathized with the lowliest commonplace; but the next minute his thoughts were in a garden of enchantment with nymphs, and fauns, and shapes of exalted humanity;

Elysian beauty, melancholy grace.1

It might be said of him that he never beheld an oak tree without seeing the Dryad. His fame may now forgive the critics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry. Repeated editions of him in England, France, and America attest its triumphant survival of all obloquy; and there can be no doubt that he has taken a permanent station among the British poets, of a very high, if not thoroughly mature, description.

Keats's early poetry, indeed, partook plentifully of the exuberance of youth; and even in most of his later, his sensibility, sharpened by mortal illness, tended to a morbid excess. His region is "a wilderness of sweets-flowers of all hue, and "weeds of glorious feature,''-where, as he says, the luxuriant soil brings

The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.*

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But there also is the "rain-scented eglantine,'" and bushes of May-flowers, with bees, and myrtle, and bay,-and endless paths into forests haunted with the loveliest as well as gentlest beings; and the gods live in the distance, amid notes of majestic thunder. I do not need to say that no "surfeit" is ever there; but I do, that there is no end of the "nectared sweets. 712 In what other English poet (however supe- 10 rior to him in other respects) are you so certain of never opening a page without lighting upon the loveliest imagery and the most eloquent expressions? Name one. Compare any succession of their pages at 15 random, and see if the young poet is not sure to present his stock of beauty; crude it may be, in many instances; too indiscriminate in general; never, perhaps, thoroughly

love which made the critics so angry, and which they might so easily have pardoned at his time of life. But The Eve of St. Agnes had already bid most of them adieu, exquisitely loving as it is. It is young, but full-grown poetry of the rarest description; graceful as the beardless Apollo; glowing and gorgeous with the colors of romance. I have therefore reprinted the whole of it in the present volume, together with the comment alluded to in the Preface; especially as, in addition to felicity of treatment, its subject is in every respect a happy one, and helps to "paint" this our bower of "poetry with delight." Melancholy, it is true, will break in" when the reader thinks of the early death of such a writer; but it is one of the benevolent provisions of nature that all good things tend to pleasure in the

perfect in cultivation; but there it is, ex- 20 recollection, when the bitterness of their

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quisite of its kind, and filling envy with despair. He died at five-and-twenty; he had not revised his earlier works, nor given his genius its last pruning. His Endymion,3 in resolving to be free from all critical 25 trammels, had no versification; and his last noble fragment, Hyperion, is not faultless, -but it is nearly so. The Eve of St. Agnes3 betrays morbidity only in one instance (noticed in the comment). Even in his earliest productions, which are to be considered as those of youth just emerging from boyhood, are to be found passages of as masculine a beauty as ever were written. Witness the Sonnet on Reading Chapman's Homer,epical in the splendor and dignity of its images, and terminating with the noblest Greek simplicity. Among his finished productions, however, of any length, The Eve of St. Agnes still appears to me the most delightful and complete specimen of his genius. It stands midway between his most sensitive ones (which, though of rare beauty, occasionally sink into feebleness) and the less generally characteristic majesty of the fragment of Hyperion. Doubtless his greatest poetry is to be found in Hyperion; and had he lived, there is as little doubt he would have written chiefly in that strain; rising superior to those languishments of 1 Keats, Endymion, 1, 100 (p. 768). 2 Comus, 479. 3 See p. 767. * See p. 849. See p. 842. The commentary which accompanied selections from Keats and other noets published in 1844 in a volume entitled Imagination and Fancy. The Proem here printed is from the same volume. The notes on The Eve of St. Agnes originally were published with the poem in Hunt's The London Journal, Jan. 21. 1835. The instance of morbidity which Hunt notes is in Porphyro's growing faint, st. 25, 8 (p. 845). See p. 753.

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loss is past, their own sweetness embalms them.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.1 While writing this paragraph, a handorgan out-of-doors has been playing one of the mournfullest and loveliest airs of Bellini-another genius who died young. The sound of music always gives a feeling either of triumph or tenderness to the state of mind in which it is heard; in this instance it seemed like one departed spirit come to bear testimony to another, and to say how true indeed may be the union of sorrowful and sweet recollections.

Keats knew the youthful faults of his poetry as well as any man, as the reader may see by the Preface to Endymion, and its touching though manly acknowledgment of them to critical candor. I have this moment read it again, after a lapse of years, and have been astonished to think how anybody could answer such an appeal to the mercy of strength, with the cruelty of weakness. All the good for which Mr. Gifford3 pretended to be zealous, he might have effected with pain to no one, and glory to himself; and therefore all the evil he mixed with it was of his own making. But the secret at the bottom of such unprovoked censure is exasperated inferiority. Young poets, upon the whole,-at least very young poets, -had better not publish at all. They are pretty sure to have faults; and jealousy

1 Keats, Endymion, 1, 1 (p. 767).
See Critical Note on Keats's Endymion.

3 Gifford was long thought to be the author of the hostile article on Keats's Endymion, published in The Quarterly Review, April, 1818 (vol. 19, 204-08). See p. 913.

and envy are as sure to find them out, and wreak upon them their own disappointments. The critic is often an unsuccessful author, almost always an inferior one to a man of genius, and possesses his sensibility neither to beauty nor to pain. If he does,-if by any chance he is a man of genius himself (and such things have been), sure and certain will be his regret, some day, for having given pains which he might have turned into noble pleasures; and nothing will console him but that very charity towards himself, the grace of which can only be secured to us by our having denied it to no one.

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Let the student of poetry observe that in all the luxury of The Eve of St. Agnes there is nothing of the conventional craft of artificial writers; no heaping up of words or similes for their own sakes or the rhyme's sake; no gaudy commonplaces, no borrowed 20 airs of earnestness; no tricks of inversion; no substitution of reading or of ingenious thoughts for feeling or spontaneity; no irrelevancy or unfitness of any sort. All flows out of sincerity and passion. The 25 writer is as much in love with the heroine as his hero is; his description of the painted window, however gorgeous, has not an untrue or superfluous word; and the only speck of fault in the whole poem arises from an excess of emotion.

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We receive the proofs of Mr. Crabbe's poetical existence, which are contained in this volume,2 with the same sort of feeling that would be excited by tidings of an ancient friend, whom we no longer expected to hear of in this world. We rejoice in his resurrection, both for his sake and for our own; but we feel also a certain movement of self-condemnation, for having been remiss in our inquiries after him, and somewhat too negligent of the honors which ought, at any rate, to have been paid to his memory.

It is now, we are afraid, upwards of twenty years since we were first struck with the vigor, originality, and truth of description of The Village; and since, we regretted that an author who could write so well should have written so little. From that 1 For text of Crabbe's poems, see pp. 154 ff. 2 An edition of Crabbe's poems, published in Oct., 1807, and containing, besides reprints of The Library, The Village, and The Newspaper, some new poems, of which the most significant was The Parish Register. See p. 154.

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time to the present, we have heard little of Mr. Crabbe; and fear that he has been in a great measure lost sight of by the public, as well as by us. With a singular, and scarcely pardonable indifference to fame, he has remained, during this long interval, in patient or indolent repose; and, without making a single movement to maintain or advance the reputation he had acquired, has permitted others to usurp the attention which he was sure of commanding, and allowed himself to be nearly forgotten by a public, which reckons upon being reminded of all the claims which the living have on its favor. His former publications, though of distinguished merit, were perhaps too small in volume to remain long the objects of general attention, and seem, by some accident, to have been jostled aside in the crowd of more clamorous competitors.

Yet, though the name of Crabbe has not hitherto been very common in the mouths of our poetical critics, we believe there are few real lovers of poetry to whom some of his sentiments and descriptions are not secretly familiar. There is a truth and force in many of his delineations of rustic life, which is calculated to sink deep into the memory; and, being confirmed by daily observation, they are recalled upon innumerable occasions, when the ideal pictures of more fanciful authors have lost all their interest. For ourselves at least, we profess to be indebted to Mr. Crabbe for many of these strong im35 pressions; and have known more than one of our unpoetical acquaintances, who declared they could never pass by a parish workhouse without thinking of the description of it they had read at school in the Poetical Extracts. The volume before us will renew, we trust, and extend many such impressions. It contains all the former productions of the author, with about double their bulk of new matter, most of it in the same taste and manner of composition with the former, and some of a kind of which we had no previous example in this author. The whole, however, is of no ordinary merit, and will be found, we have little doubt, a sufficient warrant for Mr. Crabbe to take his place as one of the most original, nervous, and pathetic poets of the present century.

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His characteristic, certainly, is force, and 55 truth of description, joined for the most part to great selection and condensation of expression, that kind of strength and originality which we meet with in Cowper, and that sort of diction and versification which

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