Many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two noble sonnets. I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects of their seeking I feel deeply the high and enthusiastic praise with which you have spoken of me in the first sonnet. Be assured you shall never repent it. The time shall come, if God spare my life, when you will remember it with delight. God bless you! B. R. HAYDON. This letter concerning the sonnets printed at pages 219-20 of the present volume is from that extremely interesting book Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk (1876). It occurs in Volume II, at page 2. VIII. THREE SONNETS FROM LEIGH HUNT'S FOLIAGE. ΤΟ M.D. ON HIS GIVING ME A LOCK OF MILTON'S HAIR. I FELT my spirit leap, and look at thee Through my changed colour with glad grateful stare, Thou didst turn short, and bending pleasantly I would have begged thy leave to give it to) No apology is necessary for giving these sonnets by way of appendix to Keats's poem on the same lock of hair, printed at pages 249 to 251 of the present volume; but I regret the absence of details concerning the history of the lock of hair. Up to the time of sending these sheets to press, I have not succeeded in recovering Hunt's account of what may be called the pedigree of the lock, or in ascertaining the present whereabouts of the hair. Mr. TO THE SAME, ON THE SAME SUBJECT. It lies before me there, and my own breath With their heaped locks, or his own Delphic wreath. In me TO THE SAME, ON THE SAME OCCASION. A LIBERAL taste, and a wise gentleness Of those old Grecian busts; and helps to bless Thornton Hunt had it; but the family has lost sight of it. A reference to "Milton's hair" in a letter from Mr. Robert Browning to Leigh Hunt, published in the Correspondence, Volume II, page 267, led me to apply to the living poet for information. Mr. Browning tells me that he still possesses a very small portion" of the lock, given to himself and Mrs. Browning by Hunt at Hammersmith on the 13th of July 1856. "He detached it with trem Of cordial Garth; and him in Cowley's bower, To add to these an ear for the sweet hold Of music, and an eye, ay and a hand For forms which the smooth Graces tend and follow, bling fingers, and wrote on the envelope' A bit of a lock of the hair of Milton. To Robert and E. B. Browning from Leigh Hunt. God bless them."" He subsequently wrote to Mr. Browning a long and interesting letter, containing a pedigree of the lock, "precise and plausible": this pedigree, though not immediately forthcoming, Mr. Browning is certain of recovering eventually, as it is safely preserved. IX. THE "NILE" SONNETS OF LEIGH HUNT AND PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. THE NILE. IT flows through old hush'd Ægypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream ; And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands,— Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands That roam'd through the young world, the glory extreme The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. And the void weighs on us; and then we wake, HUNT. TO THE NILE. MONTH after month the gather'd rains descend, Hunt's sonnet is from Foliage,-Shelley's from the Library Edition of his works. |