us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter, when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced into a room where he was writing

to go

alone.

After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold. He dropped his pen and looked up. "Yes," he said, "very cold and dark as night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?" I answered that I did not. "It was St. Agnes's Eve, when

666 The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.'”

And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours; and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased "Mistering" one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me, worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back to the simple sentence, "You should hear M. talk about Keats." The

notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about Keats intoxicated me. "He would not let me listen to him?" I said half fearfully. "M. would talk to any one about Keats-to even a lawyer." How I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.'s path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost have said to him,

"So near, too! You could hear my sigh,
Or see my case with half an eye;

But must not-there are reasons why."

So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.

"Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain."

He would quote these two lines and cry, "Was

ever death so pangless as that spoken of here? To cease upon the midnight!' Here is no struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of noiseless sand."

For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily. in my ears. I had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled

round upon sonnets.

"Sonnets!" he cried,

starting up; "who can repeat the lines about Cortez in Keats? You all know it." Some one began to read or repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, "or like stout Cortez." "That's it, that's it! Now go on."

"Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

"And all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise," he repeated, "silent upon a peak in Darien.' The most enduring group ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once more abroad."

That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is always the last written. may be human, but it is not logical, that when a man starts he does not know what he has to

It

say first, until he finds out by an elaborate guess

of several hundred pages what he wants to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the great aphorism that "After all, there is a great deal of human nature in man." There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray.