though Longfellow, in "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha," and the "New

England Tragedies," sought his topics in the history and traditions
of the New World.

To me "Hiawatha" seems by far the best of his longer efforts; it is
quite full of sympathy with men and women, nature, beasts, birds,

weather, and wind and snow. Everything lives with a human breath,
as everything should live in a poem concerned with these wild folk,

to whom all the world, and all in it, is personal as themselves. Of
course there are lapses of style in so long a piece. It jars on us

in the lay of the mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the Indian
Eleusinia, to be told that

"the gentle Chibiabos
Sang in tones of deep emotion!"

"Tones of deep emotion" may pass in a novel, but not in this epic of
the wild wood and the wild kindreds, an epic in all ways a worthy

record of those dim, mournful races which have left no story of
their own, only here and there a ruined wigwam beneath the forest

leaves.
A poet's life is no affair, perhaps, of ours. Who does not wish he

knew as little of Burn's as of Shakespeare's? Of Longfellow's there
is nothing to know but good, and his poetry testifies to it--his

poetry, the voice of the kindest and gentlest heart that poet ever
bore. I think there are not many things in poets' lives more

touching than his silence, in verse, as to his own chief sorrow. A
stranger intermeddles not with it, and he kept secret his brief lay

on that insuperable and incommunicable regret. Much would have been
lost had all poets been as reticent, yet one likes him better for it

than if he had given us a new "Vita Nuova."
What an immense long way I have wandered from "Sordello," my dear

Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, like
those of a boy, "are long, long thoughts." I have not written on

Longfellow's sonnets, for even you, impeccable sonneteer, admit that
you admire them as much as I do.

A FRIEND OF KEATS
To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.

Dear Egerton,--Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin's new "Life of
Keats" {3} has only one fault, it's too short. Perhaps, also, it is

almost too studiously free from enthusiasm. But when one considers
how Keats (like Shelley) has been gushed about, and how easy it is

to gush about Keats, one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his example
of reserve. What a good fellow Keats was! How really manly and, in

the best sense, moral he seems, when one compares his life and his
letters with the vagaries of contemporary poets who lived longer

than he, though they, too, died young, and who left more work,
though not better, never so good, perhaps, as Keats's best.

However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his
friend, John Hamilton Reynolds. Noscitur a sociis--a man is known

by the company he keeps. Reynolds, I think, must have been
excellent company, if we may judge him by his writings. He comes

into Lord Houghton's "Life and Letters of Keats" very early (vol. i.
p. 30). We find the poet writing to him in the April of 1817, from

the Isle of Wight. "I shall forthwith begin my 'Endymion,' which I
hope I shall have got some way with before you come, when we will

read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near
the castle." Keats ends "your sincere friend," and a man to whom

Keats was a sincere friend had some occasion for pride.
About Reynolds's life neither time nor space permits me to say very

much, if I knew very much, which I don't. He was the son of a
master in one of our large schools. He went to the Bar. He married

a sister of Thomas Hood. He wrote, like Hood, in the London
Magazine. With Hood for ally, he published "Odes and Addresses to

Great People;" the third edition, which I have here, is of 1826.
The late relations of the brothers-in-law were less happy; possibly

the ladies of their families quarrelled; that is usually the way of
the belligerent sex.

Reynolds died in the enjoyment of a judicial office in the Isle of
Wight, some thirty years later than his famous friend, the author of

"Endymion." "It is to be lamented," says Lord Houghton, "that Mr.
Reynolds's own remarkable verse is not better known." Let us try to

know it a little better.
I have not succeeded in getting Reynolds's first volume of poems,

which was published before "Endymion." It contained some Oriental
melodies, and won a careless good word from Byron. The earliest

work of his I can lay my hand on is "The Fancy, a Selection from the
Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, Student

at Law, with a brief memoir of his Life." There is a motto from
Wordsworth:

"Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive." {4}
It was the old palmy time of the Ring. Every one knows how Byron

took lessons from Jackson the boxer; how Shelley had a fight at Eton
in which he quoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; how

Christopher North whipped the professional pugilist; how Keats
himself never had enough of fighting at school, and beat the butcher

afterwards. His friend Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the
gloves. His imaginarycharacter, Peter Corcoran, is a poetical lad,

who becomes possessed by a passion for prize-fighting. It seems odd
in a poet, but "the stains are fugitive."

We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strength and
improving his science, than loafing about with long hair and giving

anxious thought to the colour of his necktie. It is a disinterested
preference, as fighting was never my forte, any more than it was

Artemus Ward's. At school I was "more remarkable for what I
suffered than for what I achieved."

Peter Corcoran "fought nearly as soon as he could walk," wherein he
resembled Keats, and part of his character may even have been

borrowed from the author of the "Ode to the Nightingale." Peter
fell in love, wrote poetry, witnessed a "mill" at the Fives-Court,

and became the Laureate of the Ring. "He has made a good set-to
with Eales, Tom Belcher (the monarch of the gloves!), and Turner,

and it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging hand
even of Randall himself." "The difficult and ravaging hand"--there

is a style for you!
Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; let us remember

that Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited
rallies with admiration and good taste. From his dissipation in

cider-cellars and coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrote a
sonnet that applies well enough to Reynolds's own career:

"Were this a feather from an eagle's wing,
And thou, my tablet white! a marble tile

Taken from ancient Jove's majestic pile -
And might I dip my feather in some spring,

Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:-
And were my thoughts brought from some starry isle

In Heaven's blue sea--I then might with a smile
Write down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing!

"But I am mortal: and I cannot write
Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.

Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climb
To where her Temple is--Not mine the might:-

I have some glimmering of what is sublime -
But, ah! it is a most inconstant light."

Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.
"About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a fight he

had witnessed to a lady." Unlucky Peter! "Was ever woman in this
manner wooed?" The lady "glanced her eye over page after page in

hopes of meeting with something that was intelligible," and no
wonder she did not care for a long letter "devoted to the subject of