Or _brush_ one blossom from the trees,
How _grateful_ is the gentle air
That wakes and wafts the _fragrance_ there."

Among the other passages added to this edition (which was either the
third or fourth, and between which and the first there intervened but
about six weeks) was that most beautiful and melancholy illustration of
the lifeless aspect of Greece, beginning "He who hath bent him o'er the
dead,"--of which the most gifted critic of our day[64] has justly
pronounced, that "it contains an image more true, more mournful, and
more exquisitely finished, than any we can recollect in the whole
compass of poetry."[65] To the same edition also were added, among other
accessions of wealth[66], those lines, "The cygnet proudly walks the
water," and the impassioned verses, "My memory now is but the tomb."

On my rejoining him in town this spring, I found the enthusiasm about
his writings and himself, which I left so prevalent, both in the world
of literature and in society, grown, if any thing, still more general
and intense. In the immediate circle, perhaps, around him, familiarity
of intercourse might have begun to produce its usual disenchanting
effects. His own liveliness and unreserve, on a more intimate
acquaintance, would not be long in dispelling that charm of poetic
sadness, which to the eyes of distant observers hung about him; while
the romantic notions, connected by some of his fair readers with those
past and nameless loves alluded to in his poems, ran some risk of
abatement from too near an acquaintance with the supposed objects of
his fancy and fondness at present. A poet's mistress should remain, if
possible, as imaginary a being to others, as, in most of the attributes
he clothes her with, she has been to himself;--the reality, however
fair, being always sure to fall short of the picture which a too lavish