thor's twenty-fourth year), less perfect, to be sure, and far less
obedient to form, but with lines so haunting and images so full of beauty
that they do not suffer in the comparison. Listen to the magnificent
opening:--

"I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lonely hedge, nor solitary thorn. . . ."

I had never (to my shame) thought of comparing the two odes until Mr.
Ellwanger invited me. He notes the felicitous use of the O-sounds
throughout Hood's ode, and points out, shrewdly as correctly, that the two
poets were contemplating two different stages of autumn. Keats, more
sensuous, dwells on the stage of mellow fruitfulness, and writes of late
October at the latest. Hood's poem lies close 'on the birth of trembling
winter': he sings more austerely of November's desolation:--

"Where is the pride of Summer--the green prime--
The many, many leaves all twinkling?--Three
On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling,--and one upon the old oak tree!
Where is the Dryad's immortality?
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through
In the smooth holly's green eternity.

"The squirrel gloats o'er his accomplished hoard,
The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain,
And honey bees have stored
The sweets of summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have wing'd across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone
Upon a mossy stone
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone
With the last leaves for a love-rosary. . . ."

The last image involves a change of sex in personified Autumn: an
awkwardness, I allow. But if the awkwardness of the change can be
excused, Hood's lines excuse it:--

"O go and sit with her and be o'er-shaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair;
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care;
There is enough of wither'd everywhere
To make her bower,--and enough of gloom. . . ."

In spite of its ambiguity of sex and in spite of its irregular metre,
I find, with Mr. Ellwanger, more force of poetry i