our first parents saw the sun rise over dewy Eden. Nor then indeed;
for this is the fulfilment of what was then but a golden promise.
But the picture has its shadows. There remains to mankind another
peril,--a last encounter with the evil principle. Should the battle
go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of ages. If
we triumph--But it demands a poet's eye to contemplate the splendor
of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.

To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender
a spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm
interest of a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so
high a theme. Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation
of his friends; for I have not read or heard even a single line of
the performance in question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from
the press, under an idea that the age has not enough of spiritual
insight to receive it worthily. I do not like this distrust; it
makes me distrust the poet. The universe is waiting to respond to
the highest word that the best child of time and immortality can
utter. If it refuse to listen, it is because he mumbles and
stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and foreign to the
purpose.

I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me.
Time blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of
his order of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower House and
listened to a few words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real
clodhopper, or rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the
clods. The men whom I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably
because my spirits are not very good, and lead me to think much