or consider the apparition of Hyperion himself:

He look'd upon them all,

And in each face he saw a gleam of light,
But splendider in Saturn's, whose hoar locks
Shone like the bubbling foam about a keel
When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove.
In pale and silver silence they remain'd,
Till suddenly a splendour, like the morn,
Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps,
All the sad spaces of oblivion,

And every gulf, and every chasm old,

And every height, and every sullen depth,
Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented

are there any words left in the poet's armory after this to describe the glory of Apollo? As a matter of fact, the third book in which he introduces the young usurper is distinctly below the other two in force and beauty, and Keats knew it and broke off in the middle. That was, probably, in September of 1819; about two months later he was engaged in reshaping his work into The Fall of Hyperion, which was also left unfinished and was not published until 1856. In its altered form the poem is cast into a vision. The poet finds himself in a garden of rare flowers and delicious fruits. These vanish away and in their place is "an old sanctuary with roof august," wherein is a mystic shrine and a woman ministering thereat. Her name had once been Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, the mother of the Muses, but now she

is called Moneta, that is to say, the guide or admonisher-alas, for all the change means! The poet cries to her for help:

"High Prophetess," said I, "purge off,

Benign, if so it please thee, my mind's film.". "None can usurp this height," returned that shade, "But those to whom the miseries of the world

Are misery, and will not let them rest.”

But are there not others, cries the poet, who have felt the agony of the world, and have laboured for its redemption? Where are they that they are not here? And then:

"Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,"
Rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human ace,
No music but a happy-noted voice:

They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing."

And thereupon, in a vision, she unfolds before his eyes the fall of Hyperion and the progress of humanity symbolised in the advent of Apollo. To compare this mutilated version with the poem Keats had written under the instinctive inspiration of his genius is one of the saddest tasks of the student of literature.

No, it was not any dislike of Miltonic idioms or any impulse from Dante that brought about this change in his ambition; it was the working of the ineluctable Time-spirit. His early associations

with Leigh Hunt had prepared him for this treachery to his nature, but there was a poverty in the imagination of those cockney enthusiasts for progress which would have saved him ultimately from their influence. It was the richer note of Wordsworth, the still sad music of humanity running through that poet's mighty song, that wrought the fatal revolution. As early as May of 1818 he had written to a friend (and the passage is worthy of quoting at some length):

My Branchings out therefrom have been numerous : one of them is the consideration of Wordsworth's genius . . and how he differs from Milton. And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Milton's apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or not than Wordsworth: and whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. [After some wandering there follows the famous comparison of human life to a large mansion of many apartments, which may be used as a key to the symbolism of the later Hyperion, and then] We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, we are now in that state, we feel the "Burden of the Mystery." To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote Tintern Abbey, and it seems to me that his genius is explorative of those dark Passages. Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them. He is a genius and superior to us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light in them. Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of Mind.

The Fall of Hyperion is nothing less than the attempt of Keats, against the native grain of his genius, to pass from the inspiration of Milton and Shakespeare to that of Wordsworth. The thought of the two poems, and of the living beauty of the one and the disrelish of the other, brings up the remembrance of that story, told by Edward FitzGerald from a Persian poet, of the traveller in the desert who dips his hand into a spring of water and drinks. By and by comes another who drinks of the same spring from an earthen bowl, and departs, leaving his bowl behind him. The first traveller takes it up for another draught, but finds that the water which had tasted sweet from his own hand is now bitter from the earthen bowl. He wonders; but a voice from heaven tells him the clay from which the bowl is made was once Man, and can never lose the bitter flavour of mortality.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

THERE is a certain embarrassment in dealing with Franklin as a man of letters, for the simple reason that he was never, in the strict sense of the word, concerned with letters at all.' He lived in an age of writers, and of writing he did his full share; but one cannot go through the ten volumes of his collected works, or the three volumes of the admirable new edition now printing under the care of Mr. Smyth,' without feeling the presence of an intellect enormously energetic, but directed to practical rather than literary ends. Were it not for the consummate ease with which his mind moved, there would indeed be something oppressive in this display of

'In celebration of Franklin's Bicentenary, January 17, 1906, the Independent printed a number of papers on the various aspects of his activity. The subject allotted to me was Franklin in Literature.

2 The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Collected and Edited, with a Life and Introduction, by Albert Henry Smyth, 10 vols. (Three only were published at this date.) New York: The Macmillan Co., 1905-6.-The text is here amended much for the better. But an undue squeamishness has led the editor to omit writings important for a right knowledge of Franklin, and the notes are unsatisfactory.