The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters. John Keats

      To George Felton Mathew

       Table of Contents

      Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,

       And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song;

       Nor can remembrance, Mathew! bring to view

       A fate more pleasing, a delight more true

       Than that in which the brother Poets joy’d,

       Who with combined powers, their wit employ’d

       To raise a trophy to the drama’s muses.

       The thought of this great partnership diffuses

       Over the genius loving heart, a feeling

       Of all that’s high, and great, and good, and healing.

      Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee

       Past each horizon of fine poesy;

       Fain would I echo back each pleasant note

       As o’er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float

       ‘Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted,

       Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted:

       But ’tis impossible; far different cares

       Beckon me sternly from soft “Lydian airs,”

       And hold my faculties so long in thrall,

       That I am oft in doubt whether at all

       I shall again see Phoebus in the morning:

       Or flush’d Aurora in the roseate dawning!

       Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream;

       Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam;

       Or again witness what with thee I’ve seen,

       The dew by fairy feet swept from the green,

       After a night of some quaint jubilee

       Which every elf and fay had come to see:

       When bright processions took their airy march

       Beneath the curved moon’s triumphal arch.

      But might I now each passing moment give

       To the coy muse, with me she would not live

       In this dark city, nor would condescend

       ‘Mid contradictions her delights to lend.

       Should e’er the fine-eyed maid to me be kind,

       Ah! surely it must be whene’er I find

       Some flowery spot, sequester’d, wild, romantic,

       That often must have seen a poet frantic;

       Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing,

       And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing;

       Where the dark-leav’d laburnum’s drooping clusters

       Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres,

       And intertwined the cassia’s arms unite,

       With its own drooping buds, but very white.

       Where on one side are covert branches hung,

       ‘Mong which the nightingales have always sung

       In leafy quiet; where to pry, aloof,

       Atween the pillars of the sylvan roof,

       Would be to find where violet beds were nestling,

       And where the bee with cowslip bells was wrestling.

       There must be too a ruin dark, and gloomy,

       To say “joy not too much in all that’s bloomy.”

      Yet this is vain — O Mathew lend thy aid

       To find a place where I may greet the maid —

       Where we may soft humanity put on,

       And sit, and rhyme and think on Chatterton;

       And that warmhearted Shakspeare sent to meet him

       Four laurell’d spirits, heavenward to intreat him.

       With reverence would we speak of all the sages

       Who have left streaks of light athwart their ages:

       And thou shouldst moralize on Milton’s blindness,

       And mourn the fearful dearth of human kindness

       To those who strove with the bright golden wing

       Of genius, to flap away each sting

       Thrown by the pitiless world. We next could tell

       Of those who in the cause of freedom fell:

       Of our own Alfred, of Helvetian Tell;

       Of him whose name to ev’ry heart’s a solace,

       Highminded and unbending William Wallace.

       While to the rugged north our musing turns

       We well might drop a tear for him, and Burns.

      Felton! without incitements such as these,

       How vain for me the niggard Muse to tease:

       For thee, she will thy every dwelling grace,

       And make “a sunshine in a shady place:”

       For thou wast once a flowret blooming wild,

       Close to the source, bright, pure, and undefil’d,

       Whence gush the streams of song: in happy hour

       Came chaste Diana from her shady bower,

       Just as the sun was from the east uprising;

       And, as for him some gift she was devising,

       Beheld thee, pluck’d

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