Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name.
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the

same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in !

TO AUTUMN.

EASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bosom-friend of the maturing

sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves

run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined
flowers;

And sometime like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they ?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies

ON MELANCHOLY.

A singular instance of Keats's delicate perception occurred in the composition of this Ode. In the original manuscript, he had intended to represent the vulgar connection of Melancholy with gloom and horror, in contrast with the emotion that incites to

"glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies; "

and which essentially

"lives in Beauty-Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."

The first stanza, therefore, was the following: as grim a picture as
Blake or Fuseli could have dreamed and painted :-

Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,

And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,

Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans

To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;

Although your rudder be a dragon's tail

Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,

Your cordage large uprootings from the skull

Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail

To find the Melancholy-whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."

But no sooner was this written, than the poet became conscious that
the coarseness of the contrast would destroy the general effect of
luxurious tenderness which it was the object of the poem to produce,
and he confined the gross notion of Melancholy to less violent images,
and let the ode at once begin,—

O, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its
poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul

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But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose

strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine: His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung

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TO A NIGHTINGALE.

In the spring of 1819, a nightingale built her nest next Mr Bevan's house. Keats took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of this Ode.

Y heart aches, and a drowsy numbness

pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I
had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,-
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt
mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and

dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,

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