“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.