our of the World! We are
scarcely satisfied that even to quote such passages may not be criminal.
The subject is too repulsive for us to proceed even in expressing our
disgust for the general folly that makes the Poem as miserable in point
of authorship, as in point of principle. We know that among a certain
class this outrage and this inanity meet with some attempt at
palliation, under the idea that frenzy holds the pen. That any man who
insults the common order of society, and denies the being of God, is
essentially mad we never doubted. But for the madness, that retains
enough of rationality to be wilfully mischievous, we can have no more
lenity than for the appetites of a wild beast. The poetry of the work is
_contemptible_--a mere collection of bloated words heaped on each other
without order, harmony, or meaning; the refuse of a schoolboy's
common-place book, full of the vulgarisms of pastoral poetry, yellow
gems and blue stars, bright Phoebus and rosy-fingered Aurora; and of
this stuff is Keats's wretched Elegy compiled.

We might add instances of like incomprehensible folly from every stanza.
A heart _keeping_, a mute _sleep_, and death _feeding_ on a mute
_voice_, occur in one verse (page 8); Spring in despair "throws down her
_kindling_ buds as if she Autumn were," a thing we never knew Autumn do
with buds of any sort, the kindling kind being unknown to our botany; a
_green lizard_ is like an _unimprisoned flame_, _waking_ out of its
_trance_ (page 13). In the same page the _leprous corpse_ touched by the
tender spirit of Spring, so as to exhale itself in flowers, is compared
to "_incarnations of the stars, when splendour is changed to
fragrance_!!!" Urania (page 15) _wounds_ the "invisible palms" of her
tender feet by treading on human hearts as she journeys to see the
corpse. Page 22, somebody is asked to "clasp with panting soul the
pendulous earth," an image which, we take it, exceeds that of
Shakespeare, to "put a girdle about it in forty minutes."

It is so far a fortunate thing that this piece of impious and utter
absurdity can have little circulation in Britain. The copy in our hands
is one of some score sent to the Author's intimates from Pisa, where it
has been printed in a quarto form "with the types of Didot," and two
learned Epigraphs from Plato and Moschus. Solemn as the subject is, (for
in truth we must grieve for the early death of any youth of literary
ambition,) it is hardly possible to help