And in the morning twilight wander'd forth
Beside the osiers of a rivulet,

Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.

The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars
Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush
Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retirèd cave
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.
He listen'd, and he wept, and his bright tears

Went trickling down the golden bow he held.”

These are only a few passages out of many equally beautiful that might be quoted from this brief poem of eight hundred lines. It is matter for regret that Keats threw it aside unfinished, for the influence under which it was composed, though somewhat alien to his own genius, was both lofty in itself and well fitted to check and prune away his faults. Yet we can hardly regret even "Hyperion," if its completion would have interfered with the production of those minor pieces where the genius of the young poet is seen in its perfection. It is not in either of his two larger mythological poems that we have Keats at his best; but in the "Eve of St. Agnes," in "Lamia,” in a few of his sonnets, and, above all, in his wonderful brief odes. Marvellous and most characteristic is the strange poem of "Lamia," with its store of heaped-up images of beauty, and wealth, and magnificence. It is a glittering vision, a more than Oriental dream. Of rarer and finer excellence, more chaste and finished, is "The Eve of St. Agnes." But in the odes we have, in brief, the essence of Keats. In their rich texture, their dreamy languor, their soft, voluptuous harmony, they completely express the poet :

"O for a draught of vintage, that hath been

Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd 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-stainèd 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 gray 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."

What then, we conclude by asking, are the distinctive gifts of Keats to English poetry? What was he fitted by exceptional endowment to accomplish? He is, all through, the singer of outward beauty, which appeals to and pleases the soul only by the senses. The first line of his "Endymion" is self-delineatory-" a thing of beauty is a joy for ever," a true artist's thought; but he gave too narrow a rendering to this beauty which he loved and brooded on. It was no more than such beauty as eye, or ear, or other sense could reach, that he worshipped. All is outward, sensuous. Read any poem of his you choose, and observe the epithets. They will be such as these: "delicious," "soft," "sweet,” "cool," "gorgeous," "fragrant," "voluptuous." There was no

doubt some constitutional reason for this: an exceptional keenness of sense enabled him to enjoy with more than ordinary zest all sensuous pleasure. This was the reason that when he wrote of Nature, she became only a great provider of dainties for the grateful senses of man. Colour, and light, and coolness, and fragrance,these he found in Nature, and delighted himself in them. Of course this is not the highest view of Nature. Wordsworth's conceptions were deeper and more spiritual by far, his sense of Nature's attraction and beauty and power far more lofty and wide-reaching; Byron and Shelley had an eye and an ear for the sublimer aspects of the world, were drawn more by the majestic, the terrible, the infinite. But there is a poetry, too, of the music and fragrance, the refreshing sweetness, the gentle and gracious delights, the opulent beauty of the outward world. This Keats was to write, and to become the poet, the true and worthy poet, of the luxury of Nature.

OVER THE SNOW!

A SKETCH IN NEW BRUNSWICK.

BY MRS. B. LEITH ADAMS.

OT in England, though! English snow has an uncomfortable tendency to become half slush. No, when I say "Over the Snow," I mean snow that clothes the earth in a deep, vast white mantle, that lasts steadily all the winter through; snow that bears you on its crisp, hard surface, and over which the sleighs glide swiftly to the merry music of tinkling bells.

To anyone who has spent several successive winters in Northern America, and then sees snow in England for the first time, there comes an odd sensation of something queer and unnatural in the whole affair. He puzzles over this feeling of strangeness, and then all at once it dawns upon him that it is the silence of the scene that is new, and that jars upon him.

It is the faint tink-tink of the sleigh-bells, now in the distance, now nearer, now loud and ringing, then dying away again, that his ear misses; these cheery sounds have become so associated in his mind with the glistening surface of the snow, that to see the one and not hear the other seems unnatural.

Since spending five happy years in the vast continent that lies "across the herring-pond," the only time I have rejoiced in the dear familiar sounds of the sleigh-bells ringing "over the snow" was when I went to see Mr. Irving in "The Bells," and then, at the very first faint distant tinkling chime, presto! I was far away from the crowded "Lyceum," from the hot, gas-lit theatre; the soft white snow lay stretching out before me as far as the eye could reach; the trees in the forest, along the edge of which the road winds, were clothed even to the tip of the slenderest twigs with a glistening garment of snowflakes, gleaming like diamond-dust in the clear light; the horses tossed their heads, proud of the crimson plumes floating from their headgear, and chime ! chime! chime ! went the silver bells as we glided swiftly over the snow!" Voices now silent for ever mingled with their music; and days that can never come again rose before me in all the vividness of reality!

66

It would be hard for those who have never lived in the land of

sleighs, to understand the thrill of delicious excitement that goes through everyone's mind as the soft flakes of the "first snow" darken the air. Will it "lie ?" is the universal question, or will it be but an avant-courier of the Winter King, who is on his way to us? Is it but a passing messenger, or the hem of his white imperial robe? Yes, it "lies;" it falls in such a steady shower of great starry flakes as turns the heaven black; it falls all day; it falls all night; thicker and thicker grows the deep carpet; hillocks disappear, a mound here or there tells of a post or a paling; the snow is still feathery, and some adventurous one venturing on to a tempting "slope" that looks a couch fit for a fairy queen, disappears bodily, his agitated heels being the only portion of him left visible. But the frost soon puts matters to rights; it freezes things so hard that the sunshine that follows does nothing more than brighten the landscape, like a smile on an old man's face. The sky is blue, "deeply, darkly, beautifully blue;" not a breath stirs the crystallised trees; you could carry a bare lighted candle in your hand, and the flame would not flicker. Hurrah! the "first snow" has come, and the "music of the bells" greets it lovingly !

The houses themselves are warm with an equable, delightful warmth of which English people know nothing: for in America no one goes about their household work with a blue nose and fingers to match. True, if you venture out on those rare occasions when the thermometer goes down to a depth I would rather not mention, you may get your nose frost-bitten, and perhaps lose it altogether, but as a rule (and the experience of five winters enables me to give an opinion) one feels the cold infinitely less than in an English winter: one never feels starved in the "land of snow," and three reasons combine to bring about this result. First and foremost, the cold is a still cold; secondly, winter dress is more sensible in that country than with us; and thirdly, the houses are thoroughly warmed, even to the remotest attic or passage.

"Weren't you dreadfully cold? Weren't you glad to get back to England again ?" are questions often put to one by a certain class of Britons, who can fancy no good thing exists out of their own "seagirt isle," and who find it difficult to understand that a civilised person can look back upon five years spent in New Brunswick as a "real good time."

"Are the colours of the leaves during what they call the 'fall' really so very beautiful?" asked one of these "Britishers some time after my return from America. "Are they really so very beautiful?" Can anyone imagine what they are until their delighted eyes have rested on a scene that seems like a bit of fairy-land? The exquisite masses of colour; the maples, gold and rose, and mottled in both colours; the soft amber moose-wood; the deep glowing crimson of one towering monarch of the woods, the flame-coloured pile of another, the tender pale cinnamon shade of the beech, the vivid rose of the Virginian creeper and the common brier; who can describe all this, the glory and magnificence of the garb in which the year dies; the perfect loveliness of the form death takes, ere it is covered with the pure white shroud of the glistening snow?

The silence of the woods in winter is most impressive; to the unaccustomed ear it has something almost awful about it. The migration of the summer birds has taken place, and with the first frost of October the last warbler has disappeared. The cross-bill, the pinefinch, and the faithful robin remain, but in those vast woods what are a few feathered inhabitants such as they? Perhaps a little squirrel stirs in the crystallised branches, or a ruffed-grouse rustles into his burrow in the snow, but as a rule the silence is such as makes the sense of hearing ache. Now and then a sharp report is heard, like a pistol-shot in the distance. It is the trees splitting from the intensity of cold, and from this cause the stems of the black spruce and the birch may often be seen furrowed almost the entire length of the trunk.

Sleighing is not the only way of going "over the snow."

Snow-shoeing is also a capital mode of progression and admirable exercise, but to the inexperienced it is fraught with danger of sudden capsizement, the victim going head foremost into a "drift," and the long snow-shoes standing ignominiously on end.

Sometimes during the New Brunswick winter a phenomenon occurs called a "silver frost," i.e. a sudden warm shower occurs, and is so rapidly followed by intense frost, that the rain is frozen on the boughs of the trees and the whole landscape hung with crystals. "Just like the transformation scene in a pantomime," I remember a merry voice crying out, as we looked at the glittering, jewel-decked world.