English Literature For Boys And Girls by H.E. Marshall

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*Francis Thompson.

"The fresh Earth in new leaves drest,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born,"*

*Song.

when we have heard him sing of these, and have understood with
our heart, they have an added meaning for us. We love and
understand the song of the skylark better for having heard
Shelley sing of it.

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

"Higher still and higher,
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The deep blue thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

"In the golden lightening
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

"The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight,
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.
. . . . . . .
"All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

"What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

"Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
In sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

"Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul a secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.
. . . . . . .
"Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine;
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
. . . . . . .
"We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
The sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

"Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

"Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

"Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world would listen then, as I am listening now!"

As we listen to the lark singing we look upward and see the light
summer clouds driving over the blue sky. They, too, have a song
which once the listening poet heard.

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsty flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shades for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast,
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While asleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning my pilot sits,
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean with gentle motion
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The spirit he love remains;
And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.
. . . . . . .
"I bind the sun's throne with the burning zone,
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl:
The volcanoes are dim, and the starts reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march,
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the powers of the air are chained to my chair,
In the million-coloured bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,
While the moist earth was laughing below.

"I am the daughter of earth and water,
And the nursling of the sky:
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain, when with never a stain,
The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again."

That is one of Shelley's happiest poems. For most of his poems
have at least a tone of sadness, even the joyous song of the
skylark leaves us with a sigh on our lips, "our sincerest
laughter with some pain is fraught." But The Cloud is full only
of joy and movement, and of the laughter of innocent mischief.
It is as if we saw the boy Shelley again.

We find his sadness, too, in his Ode to the West Wind, but it
ends on a note of hope. Here are the last verses--

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

"Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

"Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth;
And by the incantation of this verse,

"Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

"The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

Shelley sang of Love as well as of the beauty of all things.
Here is a little poem, some lines of which are often quoted--

"One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it,
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And Pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

"I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not.
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion of something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?"

And when his heart was crushed with the knowledge of the wrong
and cruelty in the world, it was through love alone that he saw
the way to better and lovelier things. "To purify life of its
misery and evil was the ruling passion of his soul,"* said one
who loved him and knew him perhaps better than any living being.
And it was through love and the beauty of love that he hoped for
the triumph of human weal.

*Mary Shelley.

The ideas of the Revolution touched him as they had touched Byron
and Wordsworth, and although Wordsworth turned away from them
disappointed, Shelley held on hopefully.

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates:
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!"*

*Prometheus Unbound.

One of Shelley's last poems was an elegy called Adonais. Under
the name of Adonais, he mourns for the death of another poet,
John Keats, who died at twenty-six. Shelley believed when he
wrote the poem that Keats had been done to death by the cruel
criticisms of his poems, that he had died of a broken heart,
because the world neither understood nor sympathized with his
poetry. Shelley himself knew what it was to suffer from unkind
criticisms, and so he understood the feelings of another poet.
But although Keats did suffer something from neglect and cruelty,
he died of consumption, not of a broken heart.

Adonais ranks with Lycidas as one of the most beautiful elegies
in our language. In it, Shelley calls upon everything, upon
every thought and feeling, upon all poets, to weep for the loss
of Adonais.

"All he had loved, and moulded into thought
From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay.
. . . . . . .
"The mountain shepherds came,
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrims of Eternity,* whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne** sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue."

*Lord Byron.
**Ierne=Ireland sends Thomas Moore to mourn.

He pictures himself, too, among the mourners--

"'Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
A phantom among men, companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell."

Shelley mourned for Keats, little knowing that soon others would
mourn for himself. Little more than a year after writing this
poem he too lay dead.

Shelley had passed much of his time on the Continent, and in 1822
he was living in a lonely spot on the shores of the Bay of
Spezia. He always loved the sea, and he here spent many happy
hours sailing about the bay in his boat the Don Juan. Hearing
that a friend had arrived from England he sailed to Leghorn to
welcome him.

Shelley met his friend, and after a week spent with him and with
Lord Byron, he set out for home. The little boat never reached
its port, for on the journey it was wrecked, we shall never know
how. A few days later Shelley's body was thrown by the waves
upon the sandy shore. In his pocket was found a copy of Keats's
poems doubled back, as if he had been reading to the last moment
and hastily thrust the book into his pocket. The body was
cremated upon the shore, and the ashes were buried in the
Protestant cemetery at Rome, not far from the grave of Keats.
"It is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with
violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to
think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." So Shelley
himself had written in the preface to Adonais.

Over his grave was placed a simple stone with the date of his
birth and death and the words "Cor Cordium"--heart of hearts.
Beneath these words are some lines from the Tempest which Shelley
had loved--

"Nothing of him doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

BOOKS TO READ

Poems of Shelley, selected and arranged for use in schools, by E.
E. Speight.

Chapter LXXXI KEATS--THE POET OF BEAUTY

JOHN KEATS, the poet whose death Shelley mourned in Adonais, was
by a few years the younger, having been born in 1795. He was
born, too, in very different circumstances, for whereas Shelley
was the eldest son of a country gentleman, John Keats, was the
eldest son of a stableman.

As a boy Thomas Keats had come to London and found a situation as
ostler in some livery stable. He was clever and steady, and
before he was twenty had risen to be head ostler and married his
master's daughter. Keats then became manager of the stables, and
his father-in-law, who was comfortably off, went away to live in
the country. John's parents were not poor, nor were they common
people. In all they had four children, two boys besides John,
and a little girl, and they determined to give their children a
good education. They would have liked to send their boys to
Harrow, but finding that would cost too much they sent them to a
smaller school at Enfield. It was a good school, with a large
playground, and John seems to have had a happy time there. He
was a little chap for his years, but a manly little fellow, broad
shouldered and strong. He was full of spirits and fond of fun,
and in spite of his passionate temper, every one liked him. He
was not particularly fond of lessons, but he did them easily and
then turned to other things. What he liked best was fighting.
"He would fight any one," says one of his old schoolfellows,*
"Morning, noon, and night, his brothers among the rest. It was
meat and drink to him." "Yet," says another, "no one ever had an
angry word to say of him, and they loved him not only for his
terrier-like courage, but for his generosity, his high-
mindedness, and his utter ignorance of what was mean or base."
But although John was so much loved, and although he was
generally so bright and merry, he had miserable times too. He
had fits of melancholy, but when these came he would go to his
brothers and pour out all his grief to them. This made him feel
better, and he troubled no one else with his moods.

*E. Holmes.

Very soon after John went to school his father was killed by a
fall from his horse, his grandfather died too, and his mother
married again. But the marriage was not happy and she soon left
her new husband and went to live with her own mother at Edmonton.
So for five years John's life was spent between school and his
grandmother's house. They were a happy family. The brothers
loved each other though they jangled and fought, and they loved
their mother and little sister too.

So the years went on, and John showed not the lightest sign of
being a poet. Some doggerel rimes he wrote to his sister show
the boy he was, not very unlike other boys.

"There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he:
He kept little fishes
In washing-tubs three,
In spite
Of the might
Of the maid,
Nor afraid
Of his granny good.
He often would
Hurly-burly
Get up early
And go
By hook or crook
To the brook,
And bring home
Miller's Thumb,
Tittlebat
Not over fat,
Minnows small
As the stall
Of a glove,
Not above
The size
Of a nice
Little baby's
Little fingers."

After John had been at school some time he suddenly began to care
for books. He began to read and read greedily, he won all the
literature prizes, and even on half-holidays he could hardly be
driven out to join in the games of his comrades, preferring
rather to sit in the quiet schoolroom translating from Latin or
French, and even when he was driven forth he went book in hand.

It was while John was still at school that his mother died and
all her children were placed under the care of a guardian. As
John was now fifteen, their guardian took him from school, and it
was decided to make him a doctor. He was apprenticed, in the
fashion of the day, to a surgeon at Edmonton, for five years.
Keats seems to have been quite pleased with this arrangement.
His new studies still left him time to read. He was within
walking distance of his old school, and many a summer afternoon
he spent reading in the garden with Cowden Clarke, the son of his
old schoolmaster, in whom Keats had found a friend. From this
friend he borrowed Spenser's Faery Queen, and having read it a
new wonder-world seemed opened to him. "He ramped through the
scenes of the romance like a young horse turned into a spring
meadow,"* and all through Keats's poetry we find the love of
beautiful coloring and of gorgeous detail that we also find in
Spenser. It was Spenser that awakened in Keats his sleeping gift
of song, and the first verses which he wrote were in imitation of
the Elizabethan poet.

*Cowden Clarke.

From Spenser Keats learned how poetry might be gemmed, how it
might glow with color. But there was another source from which
he was to learn what pure and severe beauty might mean. This
source was the poetry of Homer. Keats knew nothing of Greek, yet
all his poetry shows the influence of Greece. At school he had
loved the Greek myths and had read them in English. Now among
the books he read with his friend Cowden Clarke was a translation
of Homer. It was not Pope's translation but an earlier one by
Chapman. The two friends began to read it one evening, and so
keen was Keats's delight that at times he shouted aloud in joy;
the morning light put out their candles. In the dawning of the
day the young poet went home quivering with delight. It was for
him truly the dawning of a new day. For him still another new
world had opened, and his spirit exulted. The voice of this
great master poet awoke in him an answering voice, and before
many hours had passed Cowden Clarke had in his hands Keats's
sonnet On first looking into Chapman's Homer. The lines that
Spenser had called forth were a mere imitation; Homer called
forth Keats's first really great poem.

"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many Western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

For some unexplained reason Keats broke his apprenticeship to the
surgeon at Edmonton after four years. He did not however give up
the idea of becoming a doctor, and he went on with his studies at
the London hospitals. Keats was by this time about nineteen. He
was small--only about five feet--so that his fellow-students
called him "little Keats." But his face was fine, and out of it
looked eyes "like those of a wild gipsy-maid set in the face of a
young god." He was a steady student, although he did "scribble
doggerel rhymes" among his notes, and he passed his examinations
well. Yet the work was all against the grain. More and more he
began to feel that real nothing but poetry mattered, that for him
it was the real business of life. It was hard to study when even
a sunbeam had power to set his thoughts astray. "There came a
sunbeam into the room," once he said to a friend, "and with it a
whole troop of creatures floating in the ray, and I was off with
them to Oberon and Fairyland."

Keats gradually made several friends among the young writers of
the day. One of these printed a few of the young poet's sonnets
in his paper the Examiner, and in 1817 Keats published a volume
of poems. This was his good-by to medicine, for although very
little notice was taken of the book and very few copies were
sold, Keats henceforth took poetry for his life work.

The life of Keats was short, and it had no great adventures in
it. He lived much now with his two brothers until the elder,
George, married and emigrated to America, and the younger, Tom,
who had always been an invalid, died. He went on excursions too,
with his friends or by himself to country or seaside places, or
sometimes he would spend days and nights in the hospitable homes
of his friends. And all the time he wrote letters which reveal
to us his steadfast, true self, and poems which show how he
climbed the steps of fame.

Undismayed at the ill success of his first book, the next year he
published his long poem Endymion.

Endymion was a fabled Grecian youth whose beauty was so great
that Selene, the cold moon, loved him. He fell asleep upon the
hill of Latmus, and while he slept Selene came to him and kissed
him. Out of this simple story Keats made a long poem of four
books or parts. Into it he wove many other stories, his
imagination leading him through strange and wondrous scenery.
The poem is not perfect--it is rambling and disconnected--the
story of Endymion being but the finest thread to hold a string of
beads and priceless pearls together.

The first book is merely a long introduction, but it opens with
unforgettable lines--

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

Then the poet tells us what are the things of beauty of which he
thinks.

"Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair must-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read;
An endless fountain of immortal drink
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink."

But although throughout the long poem there are lovely passages,
and one or two most beautiful lyrics, the critics of the day saw
only the faults of which Endymion is full, and the poem was
received with a storm of abuse.

Soon after Keats published this poem, he, with a friend, set out
on a walking tour to the Lake Country and to Scotland. This was
Keats's first sight of real mountains, and he gloried in the
grand scenery, but said "human nature is finer." When Keats set
out there was not a sign of the invalid about him. He walked
twenty or thirty miles a day and cheerfully bore the discomforts
of travel. But the tour proved too much for his strength. He
caught a bad cold and sore throat, and was ordered home by the
doctor. He went by boat, arriving brown, shabby, and almost
shoeless, among his London friends.

Keats never quite recovered his good health, and other griefs and
troubles crowded in upon him. It was after his return from this
tour that his dearly loved brother, Tom, died. Cruel criticisms
of his poetry hurt him at the same time, and he was in trouble
about money, for the family guardian had not proved a good
manager. And now to this already overcharged heart something
else was added. Keats fell in love. The lady he loved was young
and beautiful, but commonplace. Keats himself describes her when
he first met her as "beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly,
fashionable, and strange." Her beauty and strangeness won for
her a way to the poet's heart. Love, however, brought to him no
joyful rest, but rather passionate, jealous restlessness. Yet in
spite of all his troubles, Keats continued to write poems which
will ever be remembered as among the most beautiful in our
language.

Like Scott and Byron, Keats wrote metrical romances. One of
these, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, is founded upon a tale of
Boccaccio, that old master to whom so many poets have gone for
inspiration. In Keats's romances there is no war-cry, no clash
of swords as in Scott's, and the luxury is altogether different
from Byron's. There is in them that trembling sense of beauty
which opens to us wide windows into fairyland. They are simple
stories veiled in the glamour of lovely words, and full of the
rich color and the magic of the middle ages. But here as
elsewhere in Keats's poetry what we lack is the touch of human
sorrow. Keats wrote of nature with all Wordsworth's insight and
truth, and with greater magic of words. He understood the
mystery of nature, but of the mystery of the heart of man it was
not his to sing. He lived in a world apart. The terror and
beauty of real life hardly touched him. Alone of all the poets
of his day he was unmoved by the French Revolution, and all that
it stood for.

Some day you will read Keats's metrical romances, and now I will
give you a few verses from some of his odes, for in his odes we
have Keats's poetry at its very best. Here are some verses from
his ode On a Grecian Urn. You have seen such a vase, perhaps,
with beautiful sculptured figures on it, dancing maidens and
piping shepherds.