In go the grappling-irons full of crooks;

Among the thick ropes run the sheering-hooks ;
In with the pole-axe presseth he and he;
Behind the mast beginneth he to flee,

And out again, and overboard him drives;

Through this one's side the ragged spear-point rives:
This rends the sail with sharp hooks like a scythe,
This brings the cup and biddeth them be blithe,
This on the hatches poureth slippery pease,

With pots of lime together struggle these,

And thus the whole long day in fight they spend."

In "The Knight's Tale," there is another very much like this, except that the scene is on land.

"The heralds leave their pricking up and down,
And rings the trumpet loud and clarion;

There is no more to say, but, east and west,
Down go the lances to their stubborn rest,
Plunges the sharp spur in the horse's side,
Now see we who can joust and who can ride;
There shiver shafts upon the bucklers thick,
And through the heart is felt the deadly prick;
Up spring the lances twenty feet in height,
Out go the sword-blades as the silver bright;
The helmets tough they hew and hack and shred,
Out bursts the heart's blood in stern torrents red;
With mighty maces through the bones they crush,
And 'mid the thickest of the throng 'gin rush;
There stumble the strong steeds, and down goes all,
And under foot they roll as doth a ball;

One with a truncheon foileth at his foe,

And one him hurtleth from his horse full low;
One through the body is hurt, and they him take,
Maugre his head, and bear him to the stake
As was agreed, and there he must abide."

JOHN.

They remind me of some of Leigh Hunt's descriptions, though he sometimes dwindles a little too much into the inventory style, and counts the nails in the horses' shoes, and the wrinkles in the knights' tunics. Yet no man has ever understood the delicacies and luxuries of language better than he, and his thoughts often have all the rounded grace and shifting lustre of a dove's neck.

PHILIP.

He is often too refined to be easily understood by the mob of readers. He is tracing out the nerves and veinlets, when it had been better for his popularity if he had developed only the muscles and arteries. There is a great difference between being too refined and too minute; and he is as often the one as the other. He gathers together, kernel by kernel, a bushel of corn, and then wonders why we do not admire his picture of a cornfield. Keats and Tennyson are both masters of description, but Keats had the finer ear for all the nice analogies and suggestions of sound, while his eye had an equally instinctive rectitude of perception in color. Tennyson's epithets suggest a silent picture; Keat's the very thing itself, with its sound or stillness.

JOHN.

I remember a stanza of Tennyson's which unites these excellences.

"A still, salt pool, locked in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; which hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white."

PHILIP.

That is one of the most perfect images in any language, and as a picture of a soul made lonely and selfish by indulgence in over-refined philosophizing, it is yet more exquisite. But, if Tennyson's mind be more sensitive, Keat's is grander and of a larger grasp. It may be a generation or two before there comes another so delicate thinker and speaker as Tennyson; but it will be centuries before another nature so spontaneously noble and majestic as that of Keats, and so tender and merciful, too, is embodied. What a scene of despair is that of his, where Saturn finds the vanquished Titans !

"Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways, like a dismal cirque
Of Druid-stones upon a forlorn moor,

When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,
In dull November

And what can be more perfect than this?

"So far her voice flowed on, like timorous brook,
That, lingering along a pebbled coast,

Doth fear to meet the sea; but sea it met,
And shuddered; for the overwhelming voice
Of huge Enceladus swallowed it in wrath :
The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,
Came booming thus."

JOHN.

The world is not yet aware of the wonderful merit of Keats. Men have squabbled about Chatterton, and written lives of Kirke White, while they have treated with contempt the rival, and, I will dare to say, the sometimes superior, of Milton. The critics gravely and with reverence hold up their bit of smoked glass between you and the lantern at a kite's tail, and bid you behold the sun, undazzled; but their ceremonious fooleries will one day be as ridiculous as those of the Tahitian priests. Keats can afford to wait, and he will yet be sacred to the hearts of all those who love the triumphs and ovations of our noble mother-tongue.

PHILIP.

I must please myself with one more quotation from his "Hyperion." After the murmur among the Titans at Saturn's entrance has ceased,

"Saturn's voice therefrom

Grew up like organ, that begins anew

Its strain, when other harmonies stopped short,
Leave the dinned air vibrating silverly."

Could sound and sense harmonize more fitly? In reading it, the voice flows on at first smoothly

and equably. At the end of the third verse, it pauses abruptly in spite of itself, and in the last vibrates and wavers in accordance with the meaning. You see the art with which the word “vibrating" is placed so as to prevent you from reading the verse monotonously. Among the ancient poets, I can detect none of the nice feeling of language which distinguishes many of our own. recognise it in that oft-quoted passage in Æschylus, where Prometheus invokes

σε ποντίων τε κυμάτων

ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα,”

I

in which the long roll of the first syllables, the liquid sound of avgiμov, and the plashing ripple of yέlaoua, seem to convey some audible suggestion of the sea. Now and then, I fancy I can trace a few similar glimpses in Ovid, who is to me the truest poet among the Latins, but they would probably elude any but a partial ear. Beside this passage of Eschylus, I would set one from Spenser.

"With that the rolling sea, resounding soft,

In his big base, then fitly answered,
And on the rocks the waves breaking aloft,
A solemne meane unto them measured,
The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whisteled
His treble."

I cannot doubt but the hissing sound given to the fifth verse by the number of s-s was intentional.