But he never tells it.  The piece evaporates in visions of pure loveliness; “large white plumes”; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about the hall in courtly talk.  Meanwhile the lance is resting against the wall.

  “Ah! shall I ever tell its cruelty,
  When the fire flashes from a warrior’s eye,
  And his tremendous hand is grasping it?”

“No,” answers the reader, “I don’t think you ever will.  Leave that sort of thing to Walter Scott, and go on and finish your charming fragment of ‘The Eve of St. Mark,’ which stops provokingly just where Bertha was reading the illuminated manuscript, as she sat in her room of an April evening, when

        “’On the western window panes,
  The chilly sunset faintly told
  Of unmatured green valleys cold.’” [42]

This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written while he was living in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester.  “Some time since,” he writes to his brother George, September, 1819, “I began a poem called ‘The Eve of St. Mark,’ quite in the spirit of town quietude.  I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish evening.”  The letter describes the maiden-lady-like air of the side streets, with doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doors themselves black, with small brass handles and lion’s head or ram’s head knockers, seldom disturbed.  He speaks of his walks through the cathedral yard and two college-like squares, grassy and shady, dwelling-places of deans and prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic tower and Alms Square.  Mr. Colvin thinks that Keats “in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools”; and that it is “perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and interested).”  Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti’s own dictum (works of John Keats, vol. ii., p. 320) that the poem “shows astonishingly real mediaevalism for one not bred as an artist.”

It is in the Pre-Raphaelites that Keats’ influence on our later poetry is seen in its most concentrated shape.  But it is traceable in Tennyson, in Hood, in the Brownings, and in many others, where his name is by no means written in water.  “Wordsworth,” says Lowell, “has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms.”

[1] Scott’s friend, William Stewart Rose—­to whom the first verse epistle in “Marmion” is addressed.  He also translated the “Orlando Furioso” (1823-31).  His “Partenopex” was made from a version in modern French.

[2] A new translation of the “Orlando,” by Hoole, appeared in 1773-83; of Tasso’s “Jerusalem” in 1763; and of Metastasio’s dramas in 1767.  These were in the heroic couplets of Pope.

[3] “Childe Harold,” Canto iv., xxxviii.  And Cf. vol. i., pp. 25, 49, 100, 170, 219, 222-26.