Eastern, not Hebraic but romantic. The events are the same, but the atmosphere is changed. The characters are fully developed, and distinguished each from each in modern fashion. The great situations are worked out with a close analysis, and into a great complexity quite apart from the Hebrew genius. The ornament is lavish, and the scenery, which the Hebrew story does not touch, is invented, both for Palestine and Egypt, with all the care, observation, and pleasure of a poet who had read the nature-poetry of Shelley and Wordsworth and walked hand in hand with Keats, his lover and friend, through the landscape of England.
The book was published a year after the death of Keats, under the pseudonym of H. L. Howard. It fell out of sight for nearly fifty years when Rossetti, in Gilchrist's Life of Blake, spoke of it as "poetry of the very first class whose time will surely come." Thirteen years afterwards, in 1876, Mr. Swinburne republished it with a preface, in which he over-topped Rossetti's praise by praise of his own, but neither of these fine artists have succeeded in securing for it the general admiration and reading it deserves.
The story of Joseph, ranging from the pastoral life of a wandering tribe to the life and government of a settled kingdom, passing, as it follows the fortunes of Joseph, through a multitude of events, characters, and types of men, and holding in it the fates of the Jewish people, is one of the great stories of the world, and worth an epic treatment, Charles Wells did not feel
