have had of the old bankrupt Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god. But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of

"And all the gloom and sorrow of the place And that fair kneeling Goddess.'

The 'gloom and sorrow' and the 'goddess' are abominably anticlimacteric."

"Yes, there must be a golden victory;

There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown

Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival

Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,

Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir

Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be
Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky-children; I will give command:
Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?"

Read that again !" cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing hard. Again!" he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then, before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action in the text immediately following:

"This passion lifted him upon his feet, And made his hands to struggle in the air."

"Come on, John Milton," cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the winds,-“ come on, and beat that, and we'll let you put all your adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative nowhere! Why man,”—this being addressed to the Puritan poet-" it carried Keats himself off his legs; that's more than anything you ever wrote when you were old did for you. There's the smell of midnight oil off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.

"When Milton went loafing about and didn't mind much what he was writing he could give any of them points" (I deplore the language) any of them, ay, Shakespeare him

self points in a poem. In a poem, sir" (this to me), "Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to write Shakespeare's poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare's plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the language are Shakespeare's. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare's poems, and then his obscurity would have been complete. If Milton only didn't take the trouble to be great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare. gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he would have adopted the airs of

the profession and been ruined. In his time no one thought of calling a play a poem-that was what saved the greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn't know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend him.”

I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a

sponsibility and trust, and it

position of re

would be most

injurious if a rumour got abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and ostracized.

As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down again and lit a

pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed without interruption until I came to

"His palace bright,

Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touch'd with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds

Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles' wings,
Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
Darken'd the place; and neighing steeds were heard,
Not heard before by Gods or wondering men."

"Prodigious!" he shouted. "Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn't think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at