--whom he does not know in the original, but
who, through the poor medium of translation, has filled his soul with
Grecian fantasies.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
_Sonnet._

This is what he wrote after sitting up one night till daybreak with his
friend Cowden Clarke, shouting with delight over the vistas newly
revealed to him. And from that time on, he has luxuriated in dreams of
classic beauty, warmed to new life by the sorcery of Romance. Immortal
shapes arise upon him from the "infinite azure of the past:" and he sees
how

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.
_Hyperion._

He is studying French, Latin, and especially Italian--all with a view of
furthering his poetic ability: though no great reader, he has soaked
himself in the atmosphere of old Italian tales, and the very spirit of
mediaeval Florence breathes from the story, borrowed from Boccaccio, "an
echo in the north-wind sung," which narrates how the hapless Isabelle
bid away the head of her murdered lover.

[Illustration]

[_Painting by W. J. Neatby._ ISABELLA.

And she forgot the stars, the moon, the sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forg