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( Men and Women , vol. ii., 1855.) This poem is a tribute to Keats. Shelley and Keats soon displaced Pope and Byron from the mind of the youthful poet who gave us Pauline : it is not difficult to trace in that first work of Browning’s the influence of both. When, as a boy, he made acquaintance with the then little-known works of Keats, we can gue , even if biographers had not told us, how the author of Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes would charm the young poet’s soul. “Remember,” he says here, “one man saw you, knew you, and named a star!” Then he fancies him as a fisherman on Tyrian seas, plundering the ocean of her purple dye: kings’ houses shall be made glorious and their persons beautiful with the product of the coloured conchs. Then he sees merchants bottling the extract and selling it to the world. They eat turtle and drink claret, but who fished up the murex? How does he live? What mean food had John Keats all his struggling life? He taught men to paint their ideas in glowing word-tints and images luxuriant. These men gorge, while the man who ransacked the ocean of thought and the world of fancy is left to starve. Notes. —Verse 6, Tyrian shells : the genera Murex and Purpura have a gland called the “adrectal gland, which secretes a colourle liquid, which turns purple upon exposure to the atmosphere, and was used by the ancients as a dye” ( Encyc. Brit. ). It was a discovery of the Phœnicians, and was known to the Greeks in the Homeric age. The juice collected from the shells was placed in salt, and heated in metal ve els; then the wool or silk was dyed in it. Tyrian purple wool in Cæsar’s time cost £43 10 s. a pound. Purple robes were used from very early times as a mark of dignity. Tyre was a very ancient city of Phœnicia, with great harbours and very splendid buildings. Astarte : the Venus of the Greeks and Romans, a powerful Syrian divinity. She had a great temple at Hieropolis, in Syria, with three hundred priests. v. 12, Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes : fancy names, of course—meaning the men who profit by other men’s labours. They bottle and sell the precious things for which the brave fisherman risks his life and spends his days and nights, after all receiving but a miserable fraction of the gain. v. 13, Murex : the genus of molluscs from which the Tyrian purple dye was obtained. It was of the cla Gastropod a , order A zygobranch i a , sub-order Siphonochlamyda , * Rach i glo a , family Muricidæ . Purpura also was used (hence purple ), of the same sub-order—family Buccinidæ . “ What porridge had John Keats? ” John Keats, the poet, was born Oct. 29th, 1795, and died of consumption in Rome, Feb. 23rd, 1821, when only twenty-six years old. His Ode to a Nightingale will serve to immortalise him, even if he had written nothing else. After this his best poems are his Endymion , Hyper i on , and the Eve of St. Agnes . His straitened circumstances and his ill-health made him hysterical and fretful; but though he was certainly cruelly used by his reviewers, it is only a ridiculous legend that he was killed by an article against him in the Quarterly Review . Bitter reviews of our books do not introduce to our lungs the microbes of tuberculosis.