Note 9 — THE VISION OF CAGLIOSTRO.
Reading edition
"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a god gives sign With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp."
Such are the majestic syllables which preface the speech of Saturn in Hyperion. Keats was ridding himself of the puerilities of Cockaigne when he wrote that fragment of an epic—a fragment which is unsurpassed by any modern attempt at heroic composition. In reading it, the very earth seems shaking with the footsteps of fallen divinities. Even Byron, who, like ourselves, had no great predilection for the school in which the poetic genius of John Keats was germinated, has emphatically said of Hyperion that "it seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus."—See Byron's Works, vol. xv., p. 92.