in sight "the cherub Contemplation?" Why, with Wordsworth's "Matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand," when we can have Jacques "under an oak," &c.? The secret of the "bough of wilding" will run through your head faster than I can write it. Old Matthew spoke to him some years ago on some nothing, and because he happens in an evening walk to imagine the figure of the old man, he must stamp it down in black and white, and it is henceforth sacred. I don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to say we need not be teazed with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood. Your letter and its sonnets gave me more pleasure than will the Fourth Book of "Childe Harold," and the whole of any body's life and opinions. In return for your dish of filberts, I have gathered a few catkins.[2] I hope they'll look pretty. "No, those days are gone away," &c. I hope you will like them--they are at least written in the spirit of outlawry. Here are the Mermaid lines;-- "Souls of Poets dead and gone," &c. In the hope that these scribblings will be some amusement for you this evening, I remain, copying on the hill, Your sincere friend and co-scribbler, JOHN KEATS. [Footnote 2: Mr. Reynolds had enclosed Keats some Sonnets on Robin Hood, to which these fine lines are an answer.] The reader rises from the biography of Keats with the impression that it tells one of the most melancholy stories in the history of literature. The account of his last days is beyond measure painful. The poems now published for the first time, though good enough to make a reputation, will hardly add to the fame of Keats. * * * * * _The Women of the Revolution. By Elizabeth F. Ellet. New York: Baker & Scribner. 2 vols. 12mo._