are about to execute their plot for murdering Lorenzo, the lines (though he praises the pretty conceit in itself)-- "Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count His dewy rosary on the eglantine." The author's invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief, and Melpomene, to condole the approaching death of Isabella, seems to me a _fadeur_ hardly more appropriate than the money-bag's epigram upon the "dewy rosary." But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses for the admiration with which he regards "The Pot of Basil." He thinks it both beautiful and pathetic--and so do I. "Isabella" is written in the octave stanza; "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserean. This difference of metre corresponds very closely to the difference of character between the two poems. "Isabella" is a narrative poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as chiefly to subserve purposes of sentiment; "The Eve of St. Agnes," though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which sentiment again permeates and over-rules. I rate it far above "Isabella"--and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except only the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and the uncompleted "Eve of St. Mark." "Hyperion" stands aloof in lonely majesty; but I think that, in the long run, even "Hyperion" represents the genius of Keats less adequately, and past question less characteristically, than "The Eve of St. Agnes." The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be almost nugatory. There is nothing in it but this--that Keats took hold of the superstition proper to St. Agnes' Eve, the power of a maiden to see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it that a lover, who was clandestinely present in this conjuncture of circumstances, eloped with his mistress. This extreme tenuity of constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness of "Endymion," and the futility of "The Cap and Bells," might be held to indicate that Keats had very little head for framing a story--and indeed I infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained undeveloped up to the day of his death. One of the few subsidiary incidents introduced into "The Eve of St. Agnes" is that the lover Porphyro, on emerging from his hiding-place while his lady is asleep, produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of appetizing eatables. Why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet been able to divine; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as to reinforce our persuasion that Keats's capacity for framing a story out of successive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was decidedly feeble. The power of "The Eve of St. Agnes" lies in a wholly