And not a breath crept through the rosy air,

And yet the forest leaves seem'd stirr'd with prayer.

Ave Maria! 't is the hour of prayer!

Ave Maria! 't is the hour of love! Ave Maria! may our spirits dare

Look up to thine and to thy Son's above!

Ave Maria! oh that face so fair!

Those downcast eyes beneath the Almighty dove

What though 't is but a pictured image strike,

That painting is no idol,-'t is too like.

And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep; and if I

weep,

"T is that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy, for we must steep Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,

Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep:

Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx: A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.

Some have accused me of a strange design Against the creed and morals of the land,

And trace it in this poem every line;

I don't pretend that I quite understand My own meaning when I would be very fine;

But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd,

Unless it were to be a moment merry, A novel word in my vocabulary.

To the kind reader of our sober clime This way of writing will appear exotic; Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme, Who sang when chivalry was more Quixotic,

And revell'd in the fancies of the time. True knights, chaste dames, huge giant

kings despotic:

But all these, save the last, being obsolete, I chose a modern subject as more meet.

zero,

Now that the Lion's fall'n, may rise again :

But I will fall at least as fell my hero;

Nor reign at all, or as a monarch reign; Or to some lonely isle of gaolers go, With turncoat Southey for my turnkey Lowe.

Sir Walter reign'd before me; Moore and Campbell

Before and after: but now grown more holy,

The Muses upon Sion's hill must ramble With poets almost clergymen, or wholly:

And Pegasus has a psalmodic amble Beneath the very Reverend Rowley Powley,

Who shoes the glorious animal with stilts,

A modern Ancient Pisto" by these hilts!"

Still he excels that artificial hard Laborer in the same vineyard, though the vine

To turn out both, or either, it may be. Some persons think that Coleridge hath the sway;

And Wordsworth has supporters. two or three ;

And that deep-mouth'd Boeotian "Savage Landor"

Has taken for a swan rogue Southey's gander.

John Keats, who was kill'd off by one critique,2

Just as he really promised something. great,

If not intelligible, without Greek Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,

Much as they might have been supposed to speak.

Poor fellow ! His was an untoward fate; 'T is strange the mind, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article.

My Juan, whom I left in deadly peril Amongst live poets and blue ladies, pass'd

With some small profit through that field so sterile,

Being tired in time, and neither least nor last,

Left it before he had been treated very ill;

And henceforth found himself more gaily class'd

Amongst the higher spirits of the day, The sun's true son, no vapor, but a ray.

His morns he pass'd in business-which dissected,

Was like all business, a laborious nothing

That leads to lassitude, the most infected And Centaur Nessus garb of mortal clothing,

And on our sofas makes us lie dejected, And talk in tender horrors of loathing

our

All kinds of toil, save for our country's good

Which grows no better, though 't is time it should.

His afternoons he pass'd in visits, luncheons,

Lounging, and boxing; and the twilight hour

In riding round those vegetable punch

eons

Call'd" Parks," where there is neither fruit nor flower

Enough to gratify a bee's slight munchings;

But after all it is the only "bower" (In Moore's phrase) where the fashionable fair

Can form a slight acquaintance with fresh air.

Then dress, then dinner, then awakes the world!

Then glare the lamps, then whirl the wheels, then roar

Through street and square fast flashing chariots hurl'd

Like harness'd meteors; then along the floor

Chalk mimics painting; then festoons are twirl'd;

Then roll the brazen thunders of the door,

Which opens to the thousand happy few An earthly Paradise of "Or Molu.'

There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink

With the three-thousandth curtsy; there the waltz,

The only dance which teaches girls to think,

Makes one in love even with its very