The Complete Works: Poetry, Plays, Letters and Extensive Biographies. John Keats

      Good Kosciusko, thy great name alone

      Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling;

      It comes upon us like the glorious pealing

      Of the wide spheres – an everlasting tone.

      And now it tells me, that in worlds unknown,

      The names of heroes, burst from clouds concealing,

      And changed to harmonies, for ever stealing

      Through cloudless blue, and round each silver throne.

      It tells me too, that on a happy day,

      When some good spirit walks upon the earth,

      Thy name with Alfred’s, and the great of yore

      Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth

      To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away

      To where the great God lives for evermore.

      Happy is England! I could be content

      To see no other verdure than its own;

      To feel no other breezes than are blown

      Through its tall woods with high romances blent:

      Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment

      For skies Italian, and an inward groan

      To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,

      And half forget what world or worldling meant.

      Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;

      Enough their simple loveliness for me,

      Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:

      Yet do I often warmly burn to see

      Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,

      And float with them about the summer waters.

      There is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain,

      Where patriot battle has been fought, where glory had the gain;

      There is a pleasure on the heath where druids old have been,

      Where mantles grey have rustled by and swept the nettles green;

      There is a joy in every spot made known by times of old,

      New to the feet, although each tale a hundred times be told;

      There is a deeper joy than all, more solemn in the heart,

      More parching to the tongue than all, of more divine a smart,

      When weary steps forget themselves upon a pleasant turf,

      Upon hot sand, or flinty road, or seashore iron scurf,

      Toward the castle or the cot, where long ago was born

      One who was great through mortal days, and died of fame unshorn,

      Light heather-bells may tremble then, but they are far away;

      Wood-lark may sing from sandy fern, – the sun may hear his lay;

      Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear,

      But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear;

      Blood-red the sun may set behind black mountain peaks;

      Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks;

      Eagles may seem to sleep wing-wide upon the air;

      Ring-doves may fly convuls’d across to some high-cedar’d lair;

      But the forgotten eye is still fast lidded to the ground,

      As Palmer’s, that with weariness, mid-desert shrine hath found.

      At such a time the soul’s a child, in childhood is the brain;

      Forgotten is the worldly heart – alone, it beats in vain. -

      Aye, if a madman could have leave to pass a healthful day

      To tell his forehead’s swoon and faint when first began decay,

      He might make tremble many a one whose spirit had gone forth

      To find a Bard’s low cradle-place about the silent North!

      Scanty the hour and few the steps beyond the bourn of care,

      Beyond the sweet and bitter world, – beyond it unaware!

      Scanty the hour and few the steps, because a longer stay

      Would bar return, and make a man forget his mortal way:

      O horrible! to lose the sight of well remember’d face,

      Of Brother’s eyes, of Sister’s brow – constant to every place;

      Filling the air, as on we move, with portraiture intense;

      More warm than those heroic tints that pain a painter’s sense,

      When shapes of old come striding by, and visages of old,

      Locks shining black, hair scanty grey, and passions manifold.

      No, no, that horror cannot be, for at the cable’s length

      Man feels the gentle anchor pull and gladdens in its strength:

      One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall.

      But in the very next he reads his soul’s memorial: -

      He reads it on the mountain’s height, where chance he may sit down

      Upon rough marble diadem – that hill’s eternal crown.

      Yet be his anchor e’er so fast, room is there for a prayer

      That man may never lose his mind on mountains black and bare;

      That he may stray league after league some great birth place to find

      And keep his vision clear from speck, his inward sight unblind.

      Oft have you seen a swan superbly frowning,

      And with proud breast his own white shadow crowning;

      He slants his neck beneath the waters bright

      So silently, it seems a beam of light

      Come from the galaxy: anon he sports, —

      With outspread wings the Naiad Zephyr courts,

      Or ruffles all the surface of the lake

      In striving from its crystal face to take

      Some diamond water drops, and them to treasure

      In milky nest, and sip them off at leisure.

      But not a moment can he there insure them,

      Nor

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