Nor can I deny myself the melancholy satisfaction of adding that this poem (and more especially the history of Phoebe Dawson, with some parts of the second book) were the last compositions of their kind that engaged and amused the capacious, the candid, the benevolent mind of this great man.

On the other hand there is a class of commentators to whom this poem is the ideal of all that is pure and lovely.

Few persons will dispute that the two great Homeric poems are the most delightful of epics; they may not have the sublimity of the "Paradise Lost," nor the picturesqueness of the "Divine Comedy," nor the etherial brilliancy of the "Orlando"; but, dead as they are in language, metre, accent,obsolete in religion, manners, costume, and country, they nevertheless even now please all those who can read them beyond all other narrative poems.

Surely the poem, with all its faults, is a very remarkable production for a man of Keats's age; and the promise of ultimate excellence is such as has rarely been afforded even by such as have afterwards attained high literary eminence.

Her most beautiful poem is the hymn beginning: "Oh, may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence!"

Miss Edgeworth's stories became part of their very lives, and Young's "Night Thoughts," and the poems of Cowper and Bloomfield were conspicuous objects on the bookshelves of most houses in those days.

This poem is not only the gem of the series, but embodies the mythopoeic spirit of classical imagination in a manner unknown in the later days of the renaissance.

Sappho's absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal sensual passion.

The original poem was probably Norse, and not German like the only existing manuscript, for there is an undoubted parallel to the story of the kidnaping of Hilde in the Edda.

" The poem is one of those in the now scarce volume which Southey and Lovel published jointly at Bath in 1795, Poems: containing "The Retrospect."

But the true "idealisation" and the first business of the poet is a denuding not an investing of the Goddess, whether her name be "Life," "Truth," "Beauty," or what you will: a revealing, not a coverture of embroidered words, however pretty and fantastic; as has been excellently said by Shelley: "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its external truth.

The former poems named of Pierce Ploughman are the cry of John the Baptist in the English wilderness; this is the longing of Hannah at home, having left her little son in the temple.

But I realised before I was thirty that minor poetry is not sufficient occupation for a life-timeI realised that fact suddenlyI remember the very place at the corner of Wellington Street in the Strand; and these poems were the last efforts of my muse.

The poem is indeed an illustration of Coleridge's lines in his ode Dejection: "O Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live, Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.

This last poem, concerning humility as the house in which charity dwells, is very truth.

Like many of the ballads in Percy's collection, these poems are stories of old feuds between the Highlander and the Lowlander, and between the border lords of England and Scotland.

It is as purely American,nay, more than that,as purely New-English,as the poems of Burns are Scotch.

This poem was the subject of the frontispiece to Vol.

The poem "My child, we were two children" gives a true account of Harry and his sister Charlotte at play.

" Mrs. Browning's next great poem, in 1856, was Aurora Leigh, a novel in blank verse, "the most mature," she says in the preface, "of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered."

Let us turn our eyes towards other communities, towards the earliest stages, for instance, of Greek society, towards that heroic age of which Homer's poems are the faithful reflection.

The poem at the beginning of "Sylvie and Bruno" is an acrostic on her name Is all our Life, then, but a dream, Seen faintly in the golden gleam Athwart Times's dark, resistless stream?

[Footnote 3: Some recent critics have suggested that the poem may have been a general discussion of the fear of death, but Varius is constantly referred to as an epic poet (Horace, Sat.

The poem was probably a long time in process of evolution, and many different scops doubtless added new episodes to the song, altering it by expansion and contraction under the inspiration of different times and places.

As the young man proceeded, however, I perceived that his poem was, in fact, a denunciation of the horrors of war,not, as I had supposed, the composition of another person committed to memory, and now rehearsed as an exercise in elocution, but entirely his own.