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