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+Project Gutenberg's Life of John Keats, by William Michael Rossetti
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Life of John Keats
+
+Author: William Michael Rossetti
+
+Release Date: March 18, 2010 [EBook #31682]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE OF JOHN KEATS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  LIFE OF JOHN KEATS.
+
+  BY
+
+  WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI.
+
+
+  LONDON
+  WALTER SCOTT
+  24 WARWICK LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW
+
+  1887
+
+  (_All rights reserved._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.                                                          PAGE
+
+  Keats's grandfather Jennings; his father and mother; Keats
+  born in London, October 31, 1795; his brothers and sister;
+  goes to the school of John Clarke at Enfield, and is tutored
+  by Charles Cowden Clarke; death of his parents; is
+  apprenticed to a surgeon, Hammond; leaves Hammond,
+  and studies surgery; reads Spenser, and takes to poetry;
+  his literary acquaintances--Leigh Hunt, Haydon, J.
+  Hamilton Reynolds, Dilke, &c.; Keats's first volume,
+  "Poems," 1817                                                       11
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+  Keats begins "Endymion," May 1817; his health suffers in
+  Oxford; finishes "Endymion" in November; his friend,
+  Charles Armitage Brown; his brother George marries
+  and emigrates to America; Keats and Brown make a
+  walking tour in Scotland and Ireland; returns to Hampstead,
+  owing to a sore throat; death of his brother Tom;
+  his description of Miss Cox ("Charmian"), and of Miss
+  Brawne, with whom he falls in love; a difference with
+  Haydon; visits Winchester; George Keats returns for
+  a short while from America, but goes away again without
+  doing anything to relieve John Keats from straits in
+  money matters.                                                      23
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+  Keats's consumptive illness begins, February 1820; he rallies,
+  but has a relapse in June; he stays with Leigh Hunt, and
+  leaves him suddenly; publication of his last volume,
+  "Lamia" &c.; returns to Hampstead before starting
+  for Italy; his love-letters to Miss Brawne--extracts;
+  Haydon's last sight of him; he sails for Italy with Joseph
+  Severn; letter to Brown; Naples and Rome; extracts from
+  Severn's letters; Keats dies in Rome, February 23, 1821.            40
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+  Keats rhymes in infancy; his first writings, the "Imitation
+  of Spenser," and some sonnets; not precocious as a poet;
+  his sonnet on Chapman's Homer; contents of his first
+  volume, "Poems," 1817; Hunt's first sight of his poems
+  in MS.; "Sleep and Poetry," extract regarding poetry
+  of the Pope school, &c.; the publishers, Messrs. Ollier,
+  give up the volume as a failure.                                    64
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+  "Endymion"; Keats's classical predilections; extract (from
+  "I stood tiptoe" &c.) about Diana and Endymion; details
+  as to the composition of "Endymion," 1817; preface to
+  the poem; the critique in _The Quarterly Review_; attack
+  in _Blackwood's Magazine_; question whether Keats broke
+  down under hostile criticism; evidence on this subject in
+  his own letters, and by Shelley, Lord Houghton, Haydon,
+  Byron, Hunt, George Keats, Cowden Clarke, Severn;
+  conclusion.                                                         73
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+  Poems included in the "Lamia" volume, 1820; "Isabella";
+  "The Eve of St. Agnes"; "Hyperion"; "Lamia";
+  five odes; other poems--sonnet on "The Nile"; "The
+  Eve of St. Mark," "Otho the Great," "La Belle Dame
+  sans Merci," "The Cap and Bells," final sonnet, &c.;
+  prose writings.                                                    107
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+  Keats's grave in Rome; projects of Brown and others for
+  writing his Life; his brother George, and his sister, Mrs.
+  Llanos; Miss Brawne; discussion as to Hunt's friendship
+  to Keats; other friends--Bailey, Haydon, Shelley.                  118
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+  Keats's appearance; portraits; difficulties in estimating his
+  character; his poetic ambition, and feeling on subjects of
+  historical or public interest; his intensity of thought;
+  moral tone; question as to his strength of character--Haydon's
+  opinion; demeanour among friends; studious
+  resolves; suspicious tendency; his feeling toward women--poem
+  quoted; love of flowers and music; politics;
+  irritation against Leigh Hunt; his letters; antagonism
+  to science; remarks on contemporary writers; axioms on
+  poetry; self-analysis as to his perceptions as a poet; feelings
+  as to painting; sense of humour, punning, &c.; indifference
+  in religious matters; his sentiments as to the
+  immortality of the soul; fondness for wine and game;
+  summary.                                                           124
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+  Influence of Spenser discussed; flimsiness of Keats's first
+  volume; early sonnets; "Endymion"; Shelley's criticisms
+  of this poem; detailed argument of the poem; estimate
+  of "Endymion" as to invention and execution;
+  estimate of "Isabella"; of "The Eve of St. Agnes"; of
+  "The Eve of St. Mark"; of "Hyperion"; of "Otho the
+  Great"; of "Lamia"; "La Belle Dame sans Merci"
+  quoted and estimated; Keats's five great odes--extracts;
+  "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; imagination in verbal
+  form distinctive of Keats; discussion of the term "faultless"
+  applied to Keats; details of execution in the "Ode
+  to a Nightingale"; other odes, sonnets, and lyrics; treatment
+  of women in Keats's last volume; his references to
+  "swooning"; his sensuousness and its correlative sentiment;
+  superiority of Shelley to Keats; final remarks as to
+  the quality of Keats's poetry.                                     163
+
+
+INDEX                                                                211
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+In all important respects I leave this brief "Life of Keats" to speak
+for itself. There is only one point which I feel it needful to dwell
+upon. In the summer of 1886 I was invited to undertake a life of Keats
+for the present series, and I assented. Some while afterwards it was
+publicly announced that a life of Keats, which had been begun by Mr.
+Sidney Colvin long before for a different series, would be published at
+an early date. I read up my materials, began in March 1887 the writing
+of my book, finished it on June 3rd, and handed it over to the editor.
+On June 10th Mr. Colvin's volume was published. I at once read it, and
+formed a high opinion of its merits, and I found in it some new details
+which could not properly be ignored by any succeeding biographer of the
+poet. I therefore got my MS. back, and inserted here and there such
+items of fresh information as were really needful for the true
+presentment of my subject-matter. In justice both to Mr. Colvin and to
+myself I drew upon his pages for only a minimum, not a maximum, of the
+facts which they embody; and in all matters of opinion and criticism I
+left my MS. exactly as it stood. The reader will thus understand that
+the present "Life of Keats" is, in planning, structure, execution, and
+estimate, entirely independent of Mr. Colvin's; but that I have
+ultimately had the advantage of consulting Mr. Colvin's book as one of
+my various sources of information--the latest and within its own lines
+the completest of all.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE OF KEATS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+A truism must do duty as my first sentence. There are long lives, and
+there are eventful lives: there are also short lives, and uneventful
+ones. Keats's life was both short and uneventful. To the differing
+classes of lives different modes of treatment may properly be applied by
+the biographer. In the case of a writer whose life was both long and
+eventful, I might feel disposed to carry the whole narrative forward
+_pari passu_, and to exhibit in one panorama the outward and the inward
+career, the incidents and the product, the doings and environment, and
+the writings, acting and re-acting upon one another. In the instance of
+Keats this does not appear to me to be the most fitting method. It may
+be more appropriate to apportion his Life into two sections: and to
+treat firstly of his general course from the cradle to the grave, and
+secondly of his performances in literature. The two things will
+necessarily overlap to some extent, but I shall keep them apart so far
+as may be convenient. When we have seen what he did and what he wrote,
+we shall be prepared to enter upon some analysis of his character and
+personality. This will form my third section; and in a fourth I shall
+endeavour to estimate the quality and value of his writings, in
+particular and in general. Thus I address myself in the first instance
+to a narrative of the outer facts of his life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+John Keats came of undistinguished parentage. No biographer carries his
+pedigree further than his maternal grandfather, or alleges that there
+was any trace, however faint or remote, of ancestral eminence. The
+maternal grandfather was a Mr. Jennings, who kept a large livery-stable,
+called the Swan and Hoop, in the Pavement, Moorfields, London, opposite
+the entrance to Finsbury Circus. The principal stableman or assistant in
+the business was named Thomas Keats, of Devonshire or Cornish parentage.
+He was a well-conducted, sensible, good-looking little man, and won the
+favour of Jennings's daughter, named Frances or Fanny: they married, and
+this rather considerable rise in his fortunes left Keats unassuming and
+manly as before. He appears to have been a natural gentleman. Jennings
+was a prosperous tradesman, and might have died rich (his death took
+place in 1805) but for easy-going good-nature tending to the gullible.
+Mrs. Keats seems to have been in character less uniform and
+single-minded than her husband. She is described as passionately fond of
+amusement, prodigal, dotingly attached to her children, more especially
+John, much beloved by them in return, sensible, and at the same time
+saturnine in demeanour: a personable tall woman with a large oval face.
+Her pleasure-seeking tendency probably led her into some imprudences,
+for her first baby, John, was a seven months' child.
+
+John Keats was born at the Moorfields place of business on the 31st of
+October 1795. This date of birth is established by the register of
+baptisms at St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate: the date usually assigned, the
+29th of October, appears to be inaccurate, though Keats himself, and
+others of the family, believed in it. There were three other children of
+the marriage--or four if we reckon a a son who died in infancy: George,
+Thomas, and lastly Fanny, born in March 1803. An anecdote is told of
+John when in the fifth year of his age, purporting to show forth the
+depth of his childish affection for his mother. It is said that she then
+lay seriously ill; and John stood sentinel at her chamber-door, holding
+an old sword which he had picked up about the premises, and he remained
+there for hours to prevent her being disturbed. One may fear, however,
+that this anecdote has taken an ideal colouring through the lens of a
+partial biographer. The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon--who, as we shall
+see in the sequel, was extremely well acquainted with John Keats, and
+who heard the story from his brother Thomas--records it thus: "He was,
+when an infant, a most violent and ungovernable child. At five years of
+age or thereabouts he once got hold of a naked sword, and, shutting the
+door, swore nobody should go out. His mother wanted to do so; but he
+threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait
+till somebody, through the window, saw her position, and came to her
+rescue." It can scarcely be supposed that there were two different
+occasions when the quinquennial John Keats superintended his mother and
+her belongings with a naked sword--once in ardent and self-oblivious
+affection, and once in petulant and froward excitement.
+
+The parents would have liked to send John to Harrow school: but, this
+being finally deemed too expensive, he was placed in the Rev. John
+Clarke's school at Enfield, then in high repute, and his brothers
+followed him thither. The Enfield schoolhouse was a fine red-brick
+building of the early eighteenth century, said to have been erected by a
+retired West India merchant; the materials "moulded into designs
+decorating the front with garlands of flowers and pomegranates, together
+with heads of cherubim over two niches in the centre of the building."
+This central part of the facade was eventually purchased for the South
+Kensington Museum, and figures there as a screen in the structural
+division. The schoolroom was forty feet long; the playground was a
+spacious courtyard between the schoolroom and the house itself; a
+garden, a hundred yards in length, stretched beyond the playground,
+succeeded by a sweep of greensward, with a "lake" or well-sized pond:
+there was also a two-acre field with a couple of cows. In this
+commodious seat of sound learning, well cared for and well instructed so
+far as his school course extended, John Keats remained for some years.
+He came under the particular observation of the headmaster's son, Mr.
+Charles Cowden Clarke, not very many years his senior. He was born in
+1787, fostered Keats's interest in literature, became himself an
+industrious writer of some standing, and died in 1877. Keats at school
+did not show any exceptional talent, but he was, according to Mr. Cowden
+Clarke's phrase, "a very orderly scholar," and got easily through his
+tasks. In the last eighteen months of his schooling he took a new lease
+of assiduity: he read a vast deal, and would keep to his book even
+during meals. For two or three successive half-years he obtained the
+first prize for voluntary work; and was to be found early and late
+attending to some translation from the Latin or the French, to which he
+would, when allowed his own way, sacrifice his recreation-time. He was
+particularly fond of Lempriere's "Classical Dictionary," Tooke's
+"Pantheon," and Spence's "Polymetis": a line of reading presageful of
+his own afterwork in the region of Greek mythology. Of the Grecian
+language, however, he learned nothing: in Latin he proceeded as far as
+the AEneid, and of his own accord translated much of that epic in
+writing. Two of his favourite books were "Robinson Crusoe" and
+Marmontel's "Incas of Peru." He must also have made some acquaintance
+with Shakespeare, as he told a younger schoolfellow that he thought no
+one durst read "Macbeth" alone in the house at two in the morning. Not
+indeed that these bookish leanings formed the whole of his personality
+as a schoolboy. He was noticeable for beauty of face and expression,
+active and energetic, intensely pugnacious, and even quarrelsome. He was
+very apt to get into a fight with boys much bigger than himself. Nor was
+his younger brother George exempted: John would fight fiercely with
+George, and this (if we may trust George's testimony) was always owing
+to John's own unmanageable temper. The two brothers were none the less
+greatly attached, both at school and afterwards. The youngest brother,
+Thomas (always called Tom in family records), is reported to have been
+as pugilistic as John; whereas George, when allowed his own way, was
+pacific, albeit resolute. The ideal of all the three boys was a maternal
+uncle, a naval officer of very stalwart presence, who had been in
+Admiral Duncan's ship in the famous action off Camperdown; where he had
+distinguished himself not only by signal gallantry, but by not getting
+shot, though his tall form was a continual mark for hostile guns.
+
+While still a schoolboy at Enfield, John Keats lost both his parents.
+The father died on the 16th of April 1804, in returning from a visit to
+the school: a detail which serves to show us (for I do not find it
+otherwise affirmed) that John could at the utmost have been only in the
+ninth year of his age, possibly even younger, when his schooling began.
+On leaving Enfield, the father dined at Southgate, and, going late
+homewards, his horse fell in the City Road, and the rider's skull was
+fractured. He was found about one o'clock in the morning speechless, and
+expired towards eight, aged thirty-six. The mother suffered from
+rheumatism, and later on from consumption; of which she died in February
+1810. "John," so writes Haydon, "sat up whole nights with her in a great
+chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine or even cook her food
+but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease." She had
+been an easily consoled widow, for, within a year from the decease of
+her first husband, she married another, William Rawlings, who had
+probably succeeded to the management of the business. She soon, however,
+separated from Rawlings, and lived with her mother at Edmonton. After
+her death Keats hid himself for some days in a nook under his master's
+desk, passionately inconsolable. The four children, who inherited from
+their grandparents (chiefly from their grandmother) a moderate fortune
+of nearly L8,000 altogether, in which the daughter had the largest
+share, were then left under the guardianship of Mr. Abbey, a city
+merchant residing at Walthamstow. At the age of fifteen, or at some date
+before the close of 1810, John quitted his school.
+
+A little stave of doggrel which Keats wrote to his sister, probably in
+July 1818, gives a glimpse of what he was like at the time when he and
+his brothers were living with their grandmother.
+
+    "There was a naughty boy,
+    And a naughty boy was he:
+       He kept little fishes
+       In washing-tubs three,
+          In spite
+          Of the might
+          Of the maid,
+          Nor afraid
+      Of his granny good.
+      He often would
+      Hurly-burly
+      Get up early
+          And go
+      By hook or crook
+      To the brook,
+      And bring home
+      Miller's-thumb,
+      Tittlebat,
+      Not over fat,
+      Minnows small
+      As the stall
+      Of a glove,
+      Not above
+          The size
+          Of a nice
+      Little baby's
+      Little fingers."
+
+He was fond of "goldfinches, tomtits, minnows, mice,
+ticklebacks, dace, cock-salmons, and all the whole tribe of the bushes
+and the brooks."
+
+A career in life was promptly marked out for the youth. While still aged
+fifteen, he was apprenticed, with a premium of L210, to Mr. Hammond, a
+surgeon of some repute at Edmonton. Mr. Cowden Clarke says that this
+arrangement evidently gave Keats satisfaction: apparently he refers
+rather to the convenient vicinity of Edmonton to Enfield than to the
+surgical profession itself. The indenture was to have lasted five years;
+but, for some reason which is not wholly apparent, Keats left Hammond
+before the close of his apprenticeship.[1] If Haydon was rightly
+informed (presumably by Keats himself), the reason was that the youth
+resented surgery as the antagonist of a possible poetic vocation, and
+"at last his master, weary of his disgust, gave him up his time." He
+then took to walking St. Thomas's Hospital; and, after a short stay at
+No. 8 Dean Street, Borough, and next in St. Thomas's Street, he resided
+along with his two brothers--who were at the time clerks in Mr. Abbey's
+office--in the Poultry, Cheapside, over the passage which led to the
+Queen's Arms Tavern. Two of his surgical companions were Mr. Henry
+Stephens, who afterwards introduced creosote into medical practice, and
+Mr. George Wilson Mackereth. Keats attended the usual lectures, and made
+careful annotations in a book still preserved. Mr. Stephens relates that
+Keats was fond of scribbling rhyme of a sort among professional notes,
+especially those of a fellow-student, and he sometimes showed graver
+verses to his associates. Finally, in July 1815, he passed the
+examination at Apothecaries' Hall with considerable credit--more than
+his familiars had counted upon; and in March 1816 he was appointed a
+dresser at Guy's under Mr. Lucas. Cowden Clarke once inquired how far
+Keats liked his studies at the hospital. The youth replied that he did
+not relish anatomy: "The other day, for instance, during the lecture,
+there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of
+creatures floating in the ray, and I was off with them to Oberon and
+fairyland."
+
+Readers of Keats's poetry will have no difficulty in believing that,
+ever since his first introduction into a professional life, surgery and
+literature had claimed a divided allegiance from him. When at Edmonton
+with Mr. Hammond, he kept up his connection with the Clarke family,
+especially with Charles Cowden Clarke. He was perpetually borrowing
+books; and at last, about the beginning of 1812 he asked for Spenser's
+"Faery Queen," rather to the surprise of the family, who had no idea
+that that particular book could be at all in his line. The effect,
+however, was very noticeable. Keats walked to Enfield at least once a
+week, for the purpose of talking over Spenser with Cowden Clarke. "He
+ramped through the scenes of the romance," said Clarke, "like a young
+horse turned into a spring meadow." A fine touch of description or of
+imagery, or energetic epithets such as "the sea-shouldering whale,"
+would light up his face with ecstasy. His leisure had already been given
+to reading and translation, including the completion of his rendering of
+the AEneid. A literary craving was now at fever-heat, and he took to
+writing verses as well as reading them. Soon surgery and letters were to
+conflict no longer--the latter obtaining, contrary to the liking of Mr.
+Abbey, the absolute and permanent mastery. Keats indeed always denied
+that he abandoned surgery for the express purpose of taking to poetry:
+he alleged that his motive had been the dread of doing some mischief in
+his surgical operations. His last operation consisted in opening a
+temporal artery; he was entirely successful in it, but the success
+appeared to himself like a miracle, the recurrence of which was not to
+be reckoned on.
+
+While surgery was waning with Keats, and finally dying out--an upshot
+for which the exact date is not assigned, nor perhaps assignable--he was
+making, at first through his intimacy with Cowden Clarke, some good
+literary acquaintances. The brothers John and Leigh Hunt were the centre
+of the circle to which Keats was thus admitted. John was the publisher,
+and Leigh the editor, of _The Examiner_. They had both been lately
+fined, and imprisoned for two years, for a libel on the Prince Regent,
+George IV.; it was perhaps legally a libel, and was certainly a
+castigation laid on with no indulgent hand. Leigh Hunt (born in 1784,
+and therefore Keats's senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as
+a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in
+the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the
+stricter sense of the term), a charming companion, a too-constant
+cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. He understood good literature
+both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy
+mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an
+altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as
+model or as Mentor. Leigh Hunt first saw Keats in the spring of 1816,
+not at his residence in Hampstead as has generally been supposed, but at
+No. 8 York Buildings, New Road.[2] The earliest meeting of Keats with
+Haydon was in November 1816, at Hunt's house; Haydon born in 1786, the
+zealous and impatient champion of high art, wide-minded and combative,
+too much absorbed in his love for art to be without a considerable
+measure of self-seeking for art's apostle, himself. He painted into his
+large picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem the head of Keats, along
+with those of Wordsworth and others. Another acquaintance was Mr.
+Charles Ollier, the publisher, who wrote verse and prose of his own. The
+Ollier firm in the early spring of 1817 became the publishers of Keats's
+first volume of poems, of which more anon. Still earlier than the
+Hunts, Haydon, and Ollier, Keats had known John Hamilton Reynolds, his
+junior by a year, a poetical writer of some mark, now too nearly
+forgotten, author of "The Garden of Florence," "The Fancy," and the
+prose tale, "Miserrimus"; he was the son of the writing-master at Christ
+Hospital, and Keats became intimate with the whole family, though not
+invariably well pleased with them all. One of the sisters married Thomas
+Hood. Through Reynolds Keats made acquaintance with Mr. Benjamin Bailey,
+born towards 1794, then a student at Oxford reading for the Church,
+afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Charles Wentworth Dilke,
+born in 1789, the critic, and eventually editor of _The Athenaeum_, was
+another intimate; and in course of time Keats knew Charles Wells, seven
+years younger than himself, the author of the dramatic poem "Joseph and
+his Brethren," and of the prose "Stories after Nature." Other friends
+will receive mention as we progress. I have for the present said enough
+to indicate what was the particular niche in the mansion of English
+literary life in which Keats found himself housed at the opening of his
+career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+We have now reached the year 1817 and the month of May, when Keats was
+in the twenty-second year of his age. He then wrote that he had
+"forgotten all surgery," and was beginning at Margate his romantic epic
+of "Endymion," reading and writing about eight hours a day. Keats had
+previously been at Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight, but had run away
+from there, finding that the locality, while it charmed, also depressed
+him. He had left London for the island, apparently with the view of
+having greater leisure for study and composition. His brother Tom was
+with him at Carisbrooke and at Margate. He was already provided with a
+firm of publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, willing to undertake the
+risk of "Endymion," and they advanced him a sum sufficient for
+continuing at work on it with comfort. In September he went with Mr.
+Benjamin Bailey to Oxford: they made an excursion to Stratford-on-Avon,
+and Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of the month. It would appear
+that in Oxford Keats, in the heat of youthful blood, committed an
+indiscretion of which we do not know the details, nor need we give them
+if we knew them; for on the 8th of October he wrote to Bailey in these
+terms: "The little mercury I have taken has corrected the poison and
+improved my health,[3] though I feel, from my employment, that I shall
+never again be secure in robustness." The residence of Keats and his
+brother Tom in Hampstead, a first-floor lodging, was in Well Walk, No.
+1, next to the Wells Tavern, which was then called the Green Man. The
+reader who has a head for localities should bear this point well in
+mind, should carefully discriminate the house in Well Walk from another
+house, Wentworth Place, afterwards tenanted by Keats and others at
+Hampstead, and, every time that the question occurs to his thought,
+should pass a mental vote of thanks to Mr. Buxton Forman for the great
+pains which he took to settle the point, and the lucid and pleasant
+account which he has given of it. Keats was at Leatherhead in November;
+finished the first draft of "Endymion" at Burford Bridge, near Dorking,
+on the 28th of that month, and returned to Hampstead for the winter.
+Two anecdotes which have often been repeated belong apparently to about
+this date. One of them purports that Keats gave a sound drubbing in
+Hampstead to a butcher, or a butcher's boy, who was ill-treating a small
+boy, or else a cat. Hunt simply says that the butcher "had been
+insolent,"--by implication, to Keats himself. The "butcher's boy" has
+obtained traditional currency; but, according to George Keats, the
+offender was "a scoundrel in livery," the locality "a blind alley at
+Hampstead." Clarke says that the stand-up fight lasted nearly an hour.
+Keats was an undersized man, in fact he was not far removed from the
+dwarfish, being barely more than five feet high, and this small feat of
+stubborn gallantry deserves to be appraised and praised accordingly. The
+other anecdote is that Coleridge met Keats along with Leigh Hunt in a
+lane near Highgate, "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth," and after
+shaking hands with Keats, he said aside to Hunt, "There is death in that
+hand." Nothing is extant to show that at so early a date as this, or
+even for some considerable while after, any of Keats's immediate friends
+shared the ominous prevision of Coleridge.
+
+In March 1818 Keats joined his brothers at Teignmouth in Devonshire, and
+in April "Endymion" was published. In June he set off on a pedestrian
+tour of some extent with a friend whose name will frequently recur from
+this point forwards, Charles Armitage Brown. One is generally inclined
+to get some idea of what a man was like; if one knows what he was
+_un_like much the same purpose is served. In April 1819 Keats wrote
+some bantering verses about Brown, which are understood to go mainly by
+contraries we therefore infer Brown to have presented a physical and
+moral aspect the reverse of the following--
+
+        "He is to meet a melancholy carle,
+          Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,
+        As hath the seeded thistle when a parle
+          It holds with Zephyr ere it sendeth fair
+          Its light balloons into the summer air.
+        Thereto his beard had not begun to bloom;
+          No brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer;
+        No care had touched his cheek with mortal doom,
+    But new he was and bright as scarf from Persian loom.
+
+        "Ne cared he for wine or half-and-half,
+          Ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl,
+        And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;
+          He 'sdained the swine-head at the wassail bowl.
+          Ne with lewd ribalds sat he cheek by jowl,
+        Ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair;
+          But after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul
+        Panted, and all his food was woodland air,
+    Though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare.
+
+        "The slang of cities in no wise he knew;
+          'Tipping the wink' to him was heathen Greek.
+        He sipped no olden Tom or ruin blue,
+          Or Nantz or cherry-brandy, drank full meek
+          By many a damsel brave and rouge of cheek.
+        Nor did he know each aged watchman's beat;
+          Nor in obscured purlieus would he seek
+        For curled Jewesses with ankles neat,
+    Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet."
+
+Mr. Brown, son of a London stockbroker from Scotland, was a man several
+years older than Keats, born in 1786. He was a Russia merchant retired
+from business, of much culture and instinctive sympathy with genius, and
+he enjoyed assisting the efforts of young men of promise. He had
+produced the libretto of an opera, "Narensky," and he eventually
+published a book on the Sonnets of Shakespeare. From the date we have
+now reached, the summer of 1818, which was more than a year following
+their first introduction, Brown may be regarded as the most intimate of
+all Keats's friends, Dilke coming next to him.
+
+The pedestrian tour with Brown was the sequel of a family leave-taking
+at Liverpool. George Keats, finding in himself no vocation for trade,
+with its smug compliances and sleek assiduities (and John agreed with
+him in these views), had determined to emigrate to America, and rough it
+in a new settlement for a living, perhaps for fortune; and, as a
+preliminary step, he had married Miss Georgiana Augusta Wylie, a girl of
+sixteen, daughter of a deceased naval officer. The sonnet "Nymph of the
+downward smile" &c. was addressed to her. John Keats and Brown,
+therefore, accompanied George and his bride to Liverpool, and saw them
+off. They then started as pedestrians into the Lake country, the land of
+Burns, Belfast, and the Western Highlands. Before starting on the trip
+Keats had often been in such a state of health as to make it prudent
+that he should not hazard exposure to night air; but in his excursion he
+seems to have acted like a man of sound and rather hardy physique,
+walking from day to day about twenty miles, and sometimes more, and his
+various records of the trip have nothing of a morbid or invaliding tone.
+This was not, however, to last long; the Isle of Mull proved too much
+for him. On the 23rd of July, writing to his brother Tom, he describes
+the expedition thus: "The road through the island, or rather track, is
+the most dreary you can think of; between dreary mountains, over bog and
+rock and river, with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in
+hand.... We had a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the
+island of Mull, and then we crossed to Iona." In another letter he says:
+"Walked up to my knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to see Icolmkill
+and Staffa." From this time forward the mention of the sore throat
+occurs again and again; sometimes it is subsiding, or as good as gone;
+at other times it has returned, and causes more or less inconvenience.
+Brown wrote of it as "a violent cold and ulcerated throat." The latest
+reference to it comes in December 1819, only two months preceding the
+final and alarming break-down in the young poet's health. In Scotland,
+at any rate, amid the exposure and exertion of the walking tour, the
+sore throat was not to be staved off; so, having got as far as
+Inverness, Keats, under medical advice, reluctantly cut his journey
+short, parted from Brown, and went on board the smack from Cromarty. A
+nine days' passage brought him to London Bridge, and on the 18th of
+August he presented himself to the rather dismayed eyes of Mrs. Dilke.
+"John Keats," she wrote, "arrived here last night, as brown and as
+shabby as you can imagine: scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn
+at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell
+what he looked like." More ought to be said here of the details of
+Keats's Scottish and Irish trip; but such details, not being of
+essential importance as incidents in his life, could only be given
+satisfactorily in the form of copious extracts from his letters, and for
+these--readable and picturesque as they are--I have not adequate space.
+He preferred, on the whole, the Scotch people to the little which he saw
+of the Irish. Just as Keats was leaving Scotland, because of his own
+ailments, he had been summoned away thence on account of the more
+visibly grave malady of his brother Tom, who was in an advanced stage of
+consumption; but it appears that the letter did not reach his hands at
+the time.
+
+The next three months were passed by Keats along with Tom at their
+Hampstead lodgings. Anxiety and affection--warm affection, deep
+anxiety--were of no avail. Tom died at the beginning of December, aged
+just twenty, and was buried on the 7th of that month. The words in "King
+Lear," "Poor Tom," remain underlined by the surviving brother.
+
+John Keats was now solitary in the world. Tom was dead, George and his
+bride in America, Fanny, his girlish sister, a permanent inmate of the
+household of Mr. and Mrs. Abbey at Walthamstow. In December he quitted
+his lodgings at Hampstead, and set up house along with Mr. Brown in what
+was then called Wentworth Place, Hampstead, now Lawn Bank; Brown being
+rightly the tenant, and Keats a paying resident with Brown. Wentworth
+Place consisted of only two houses. One of them was thus inhabited by
+Brown and Keats, the other by the Dilkes. In the first of these houses,
+when Brown and Keats were away, and afterwards in the second, there was
+also a well-to-do family of the name of Brawne,--a mother, with a son
+and two daughters. Lawn Bank is the penultimate house on the right of
+John Street, next to Wentworth House: Dr. Sharpey passed some of his
+later years in it. This is, beyond all others, the dwelling which
+remains permanently linked with the memory of Keats.
+
+While Tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, Keats made
+the acquaintance of two young ladies. He has left us a description of
+both of them. His portraiture of the first, Miss Jane Cox, is written in
+a tone which might seem the preliminary to a _grande passion_; but this
+did not prove so; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his
+memory. His portraiture of the second, Miss Fanny Brawne, does not
+suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a
+definite antipathy; this also was delusive, for he was from the first
+smitten with Miss Brawne, and soon profoundly in love with her--I might
+say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair,
+was the main ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages.
+I shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of
+exceptional importance for our biography--one as acquainting us with
+Keats's general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as
+introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two
+years of his life. On October 29, 1818, he wrote as follows to his
+brother George and his wife in America:--
+
+   "The Misses Reynolds are very kind to me.... On my return, the
+   first day I called [this was probably towards the 20th of
+   September], they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a
+   cousin of theirs, Miss Cox, who, having fallen out with her
+   grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. Reynolds to
+   take asylum in her house. She is an East Indian, and ought to be
+   her grandfather's heir.... From what I hear she is not without
+   faults of a real kind; but she has others which are more apt to
+   make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra,
+   but is at least a Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has
+   fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into the room she
+   makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is
+   too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may
+   address her; from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I
+   always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture
+   before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot
+   possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much
+   occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble; I forget
+   myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this time
+   think I am in love with her; so, before I go any further, I will
+   tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of
+   Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an
+   amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation
+   with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose lips[4] is
+   to me a banquet. I don't cry to take the moon home with me in my
+   pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her
+   like, because one has no _sensations_; what we both are is taken
+   for granted. You will suppose I have by this time had much talk
+   with her. No such thing; there are the Misses Reynolds on the
+   look out. They think I don't admire her because I don't stare at
+   her; they call her a flirt to me--what a want of knowledge! She
+   walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn to her
+   with a magnetic power; this they call flirting! They do not know
+   things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she
+   has faults, the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had.
+   Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are
+   two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things:--the
+   worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly,
+   spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron,
+   and this Charmian, hold the first place in our mind; in the
+   latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle,
+   and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of
+   the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal
+   being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me,
+   and I should like you to save me."
+
+So much for Miss Cox, the Charmian whom Keats was not in love with. This
+is not absolutely the sole mention of her in his letters, but it is the
+only one of importance. We now turn to Miss Brawne, the young lady with
+whom he had fallen very much in love at a date even preceding that to
+which the present description must belong. The description comes from a
+letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written probably towards the
+middle of December 1818. It is true that the name Brawne does not appear
+in the printed version of the letter, but the "very positive
+conviction" expressed by Mr. Forman that that name really does stand in
+the MS., a conviction "shared by members of her family," may safely be
+adopted by all my readers. I therefore insert the name where a blank had
+heretofore appeared in print.
+
+   "Perhaps, as you are fond of giving me sketches of characters,
+   you may like a little picnic of scandal, even across the
+   Atlantic. Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height,
+   with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort. She
+   wants sentiment in every feature. She manages to make her hair
+   look well; her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful;
+   her mouth is bad, and good; her profile is better than her full
+   face, which indeed is not 'full,' but pale and thin, without
+   showing any bone; her shape is very graceful, and so are her
+   movements; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet
+   tolerable. She is not seventeen [Keats, if he really wrote 'not
+   seventeen,' was wrong here; 'not nineteen' would have been
+   correct, as she was born on August 9, 1800.] But she is ignorant,
+   monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions; calling
+   people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the
+   term 'minx.' This is, I think, from no innate vice, but from a
+   penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of
+   such style, and shall decline any more of it. She had a friend to
+   visit her lately. You have known plenty such. She plays the
+   music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her
+   fingers. She is a downright Miss, without one set-off. We hated
+   her ["We" would apparently be Keats, Brown, and the Dilkes], and
+   smoked her, and baited her, and I think drove her away. Miss
+   Brawne thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only
+   woman in the world she would change persons with. What a stupe!
+   She is as superior as a rose to a dandelion."
+
+At the time when Keats wrote these words he had known Miss Brawne for a
+couple of months, more or less, having first seen her in October or
+November at the house of the Dilkes. It might seem that he was about
+this time in a state of feeling propense to love. _Some_ woman was
+required to fill the void in his heart. The woman might have been Miss
+Cox, whom he met in September. As the event turned out, it was not she,
+but it _was_ Miss Brawne, whom he met in October or November. Fanny
+Brawne was the elder daughter of a gentleman of independent means, who
+died while she was still a child; he left another daughter and a son
+with their mother; and the whole family, as already mentioned, lived at
+times in the same house which the Dilkes occupied in Wentworth-place,
+Hampstead, and at other times in the adjoining house, while not tenanted
+by Brown and Keats. Miss Brawne (I quote here from Mr. Forman) "had much
+natural pride and buoyancy, and was quite capable of affecting higher
+spirits and less concern than she really felt. But, as to the
+genuineness of her attachment to Keats, some of those who knew her
+personally have no doubt whatever."[5] If so--or indeed whether so or
+not--it is a pity that she was wont, after Keats's death, to speak of
+him (as has been averred) as "that foolish young poet who was in love
+with me." That Keats was a poet and a young poet is abundantly true; but
+that he was a foolish one had even before his death, and especially very
+soon after it, been found out to be a gross delusion by a large number
+of people, and might just as well have been found out by his betrothed
+bride in addition. I know of only one portrait of Miss Brawne; it is a
+silhouette by Edouart, engraved in two of Mr. Forman's publications. A
+silhouette is one of the least indicative forms of portraiture for
+enabling one to judge whether the sitter was handsome or not. This
+likeness shows a very profuse mass of hair, a tall, rather sloping,
+forehead, a long and prominent aquiline nose, a mouth and chin of the
+_petite_ kind, a very well-developed throat, and a figure somewhat small
+in proportion to the head. The face is not of the sort which I should
+suppose to have ever been beautiful in an artist's eyes, or in a poet's
+either; and indeed Keats's description of Miss Brawne, which I have just
+cited, is qualified, chilly, and critical, with regard to beauty.
+Nevertheless, his love-letters to Miss Brawne, most of which have been
+preserved and published, speak of her beauty very emphatically. "The
+very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal;" "I cannot
+conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you, but beauty;" "all
+I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty." It seems
+probable that Keats was the declared lover of Miss Brawne in April 1819
+at the latest--more probably in February; and when his first published
+letter to her was written, July 1819, he and she must certainly have
+been already engaged, or all but engaged, to marry. This was contrary to
+Mrs. Brawne's liking. They appear to have contemplated--anything but
+willingly on the poet's part--a tolerably long engagement; for he was a
+young man of twenty-three, with stinted means, no regular profession,
+and no occupation save that of producing verse derided in the high
+places of criticism. He spoke indeed of re-studying in Edinburgh for the
+medical profession: this was a vague notion, with which no practical
+beginning was made. An early marriage, followed by a year or so of
+pleasuring and of intellectual advancement in some such place as Rome or
+Zurich, was what Keats really longed for.
+
+We must now go back a little--to December 1818. Haydon was then still
+engaged upon his picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, and found his
+progress impeded by want of funds, and by a bad attack, from which he
+frequently suffered, of weakness of eyesight. On the 22nd of the month,
+Keats, with conspicuous generosity--and although he had already lent
+nearly L200 to various friends--tendered him any money-aid which might
+be in his power; asking merely that his friend would claim the
+fulfilment of his promise only in the last resort. On January 7, 1819,
+Haydon definitely accepted his offer; and Keats wrote back, hoping to
+comply, and refusing to take any interest. His own money affairs were,
+however, at this time almost at a deadlock, controlled by lawyers and by
+his ex-guardian Mr. Abbey; and the amount which he had expected to
+command as coming to him after his brother Tom's death was not
+available. He had to explain as much in April 1819 to Haydon, who wrote
+with some urgency. Eventually he did make a small loan to the
+painter--L30; but very shortly afterwards (June 17th) was compelled to
+ask for a reimbursement--"do borrow or beg somehow what you can for me."
+There was a chancery-suit of old standing, begun soon after the death of
+Mr. Jennings in 1805, and it continued to obstruct Keats in his money
+affairs. The precise facts of these were also but ill-known to the poet,
+who had potentially at his disposal certain funds which remained _perdu_
+and unused until two years after his death. On September 20, 1819, he
+wrote to his brother George in America that Haydon had been unable to
+make the repayment; and he added, "He did not seem to care much about
+it, and let me go without my money with almost nonchalance, when he
+ought to have sold his drawings to supply me. I shall perhaps still be
+acquainted with him, but, for friendship, that is at an end." And in
+fact the hitherto very ardent cordiality between the poet and the
+painter does seem to have been materially damped after this date; Keats
+being somewhat reserved towards Haydon, and Haydon finding more to
+censure than to extol in the conduct of Keats. We can feel with both of
+them; and, while we pronounce Keats blameless and even praiseworthy
+throughout, may infer Haydon to have been not greatly blameable.
+
+Towards the end of June 1819 Keats went to Shanklin; his first
+companion there being an invalid but witty and cheerful friend, James
+Rice, a solicitor, and his second, Brown, who co-operated at this time
+with the poet in producing the drama "Otho the Great." Next, the two
+friends went to Winchester, "chiefly," wrote Keats to his sister Fanny,
+"for the purpose of being near a tolerable library, which after all is
+not to be found in this place. However, we like it very much; it is the
+pleasantest town I ever was in, and has the most recommendations of
+any." One of his letters from here (September 21) speaks of his being
+now almost as well acquainted with Italian as with French, and he adds,
+"I shall set myself to get complete in Latin, and there my learning must
+stop. I do not think of venturing upon Greek." It is stated that he
+learned Italian with uncommon quickness.
+
+Early in the winter which closed 1819 George Keats came over for a short
+while from America, his main object being to receive his share of the
+money accruing from the decease of his brother Tom, to the cost of whose
+illness he had largely contributed. He had been in Cincinnati, and had
+engaged in business, but as yet without any success. In some lines which
+John Keats addressed to Miss Brawne in October there is an energetic and
+no doubt consciously overloaded denunciation of "that most hateful land,
+dungeoner of my friends, that monstrous region," &c., &c. John, it
+appears, concealed from George, during his English visit, the fact that
+he himself was then much embarrassed in money-matters, and almost wholly
+dependent upon his friends for a subsistence meanwhile; and George left
+England again without doing anything for his brother's relief or
+convenience. He took with him L700, some substantial part of which
+appears to have been the property of John, absolutely or contingently;
+and he undertook to remit shortly to his brother L200, to be raised by
+the sale of a boat which he owned in America; but months passed, and the
+L200 never came, no purchaser for the boat being procurable. Out of the
+L1,100 which Tom Keats had left, George received L440, John hardly more
+than L200, George thus repaying himself some money which had been
+previously advanced for John's professional education. For all this he
+has been very severely censured, Mr. Brown being among his sternest and
+most persistent assailants. It must seemingly have been to George Keats,
+and yet not to him exclusively, that Colonel Finch referred in the
+letter which reached Shelley's eyes, saying that John had been
+"infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued
+from want and woe;" and Shelley re-enforced this accusation in his
+preface to "Adonais"--"hooted from the stage of life, no less by those
+on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he
+had lavished his fortune and his care." From these painful charges
+George Keats eventually vindicated himself with warmth of feeling, and
+with so much solidity of demonstration as availed to convince Mr. Dilke,
+and also Mr. Abbey. Who were the other offenders glanced at by Colonel
+Finch, as also in one of Severn's letters, I have no distinct idea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+From this point forwards nothing but misery remains to be recorded of
+John Keats. The narrative becomes depressing to write and depressing to
+read. The sensation is like that of being confined in a dark vault at
+noonday. One knows, indeed, that the sun of the poet's genius is blazing
+outside, and that, on emerging from the vault, we shall be restored to
+light and warmth; but the atmosphere within is not the less dark and
+laden, nor the shades the less murky. In tedious wretchedness, racked
+and dogged with the pang of body and soul, exasperated and protesting,
+raging now, and now ground down into patience and acceptance, Keats
+gropes through the valley of the shadow of death.
+
+Before detailing the facts, we must glance for a minute at the position.
+Keats had a passionate ambition and a passionate love--the ambition to
+be a poet, the love of Fanny Brawne. At the beginning of 1820, he was
+conscious of his authentic vocation as a poet, and conscious also that
+this vocation, though recognized in a small and to some extent an
+influential circle, was publicly denied and ridiculed; his portion was
+the hiss of the viper and the gander, the hooting of the impostor and
+the owl. His forthcoming volume was certain to share the same fate; he
+knew its claims would be perversely resisted and cruelly repudiated. If
+he could make no serious impression as a poet, not only was his leading
+ambition thwarted, but he would also be impeded in getting any other and
+more paying literary work to do--regular profession or employment he had
+none. He was at best a poor man, and, for the while, almost bereft of
+any command of funds. So long as this state of things, or anything like
+it, continued, he would be unable to marry the woman of his heart. While
+sickness kept him a prisoner, he was torn by ideas of her volatility and
+fickleness. Disease was sapping his vitals, pain wrung him, Death
+beckoned him with finger more and more imperative. Poetic fame became
+the vision of Tantalus, and love the clasp of Ixion.
+
+Such was the life, or such the incipient death, of Keats, in the last
+twelvemonth of his brief existence.
+
+For half a year prior to February 1820 he had been unrestful and
+cheerless. "Either that gloom overspread me," so he wrote to James Rice,
+"or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if I turned to
+versify, that exacerbated the poison of either sensation." He began
+taking laudanum at times, but was induced by Brown, towards the end of
+1819, to promise to give up this insidious practice. Then came the
+crash: it was at Hampstead, on the night of the 3rd of February.
+
+   "One night, about eleven o'clock," I quote the words of Lord
+   Houghton, which have become classical, "Keats returned home[6]
+   in a state of strange physical excitement; it might have
+   appeared, to those who did not know him, one of fierce
+   intoxication. He told his friend [Brown] he had been outside the
+   stage-coach, had received a severe chill, was a little fevered;
+   but added: 'I don't feel it now.' He was easily persuaded to go
+   to bed; and, as he leapt into the cold sheets, before his head
+   was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and said: 'That is blood
+   from my mouth. Bring me the candle: let me see this blood.' He
+   gazed steadfastly some moments at the ruddy stain, and then,
+   looking in his friend's face with an expression of sudden
+   calmness never to be forgotten, said: 'I know the colour of that
+   blood--it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour.
+   That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.'"
+
+A surgeon arrived shortly, bled Keats, and pronounced the rupture to be
+unimportant, but the patient was not satisfied. He wrote to Miss Brawne
+some few days afterwards, "So violent a rush of blood came to my lungs
+that I felt nearly suffocated." By the 6th of the month, however, he was
+already better, and he then said in a letter to his sister: "From
+imprudently leaving off my great-coat in the thaw, I caught cold, which
+flew to my lungs." Later on he suffered from palpitation of the heart;
+but was so far recovered by the 25th of March as to be able to go to
+town to the exhibition of Haydon's picture, Christ's Entry into
+Jerusalem, and early in April he could take a walk of five miles. In
+March he had written that he was then picking up flesh, and, if he could
+avoid inflammation for six weeks, might yet do well; in April his doctor
+assured him that his only malady was nervous irritability and general
+weakness, caused by anxiety and by the excitement of poetry. At an
+untoward time for his health, about the first week in May, Keats was
+obliged to quit his residence in Hampstead; as Brown was then leaving
+for Scotland, and, according to his wont, let the house. Keats
+accordingly went to live in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. A letter which
+he wrote just before his departure speaks of his uncertain outlook; he
+might be off to South America, or, more likely, embarking as surgeon on
+a vessel trading to the East Indies. This latter idea had been in his
+mind for about a year past, off and on. What he could have contemplated
+doing in South America is by no means apparent. On the 7th of May Keats
+parted at Gravesend from Brown, and they never met again. The hand with
+which he grasped Brown's, and which he had of old "clenched against
+Hammond's," was now, according to his own words, "that of a man of
+fifty."
+
+Things had thus gone on pretty well with Keats's health, since he first
+began to rally from the blood-spitting attack of the 3rd of February;
+but this was not to continue. On the 22nd of June he again broke a
+blood-vessel, and vomited blood morning and evening. Leigh Hunt thought
+it high time to intervene, and removed the patient to his house, No. 13
+Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town. By the 7th of July--just about the time
+when Keats's last volume was published, the one containing "Lamia,"
+"Hyperion," and all his best works--the physician had told him that he
+must not remain in England, but go to Italy. On the 12th, Mrs. Gisborne,
+the friend of Godwin and of Shelley, saw him at Hunt's house, looking
+emaciated, and "under sentence of death from Dr. Lamb." Three days
+afterwards he wrote to Haydon "I am afraid I shall pop off just when my
+mind is able to run alone." The stay at Leigh Hunt's house came to an
+end in a way which speaks volumes for the shattered nerves, and
+consequent morbid susceptibility, of Keats. On the 10th of August a note
+for him written by Miss Brawne, which "contained not a word of the least
+consequence," arrived at the house. Keats was then resting in his own
+room, and Mrs. Hunt, who was occupied, desired a female servant to give
+it to him. The servant quitted the household on the following day; and,
+in leaving, she handed the letter to Thornton Hunt, then a mere child,
+asking him to reconsign it to his mother. When Thornton did this on the
+12th, the letter was open; opened (one assumes) either by the servant
+through idle curiosity, or by Thornton through simple childishness.
+"Poor Keats was affected by this inconceivable circumstance beyond what
+can be imagined. He wept for several hours, and resolved,
+notwithstanding Hunt's entreaties, to leave the house. He went to
+Hampstead that same evening." In Hampstead he had at least the solace of
+being received into the dwelling occupied by the Brawne family, being
+the same dwelling (next door to that of Brown and Keats) which had been
+recently tenanted by the Dilkes; yet the excitement of feeling,
+consequent on the continual presence of Miss Brawne, was perhaps harmful
+to him. Here he remained until the time for journeying to Italy arrived.
+He was still, it seems, left in some uncertainty as to the precise
+nature and gravity of his disease, for on the 14th of August he wrote to
+his sister: "'Tis not yet consumption, I believe; but it would be, were
+I to remain in this climate all the winter." Anyhow, his expectations of
+recovery, or of marked benefit from the Italian sojourn, were but faint.
+
+Something may here be said of the love-letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne.
+They begin (as already stated) on the 1st of July 1819, and end at some
+date between his leaving Hampstead, early in May 1820, and quitting
+Hunt's house in August. We may assume the 10th July 1820, or
+thereabouts, as the date of the last letter. I cannot say that the
+character of Keats gains to my eyes from the perusal of this
+correspondence. Love-letters are not expected to be models of
+self-regulation and "the philosophic mind"; they would be bad
+love-letters, or letters of a bad specimen of a lover, if they were so.
+Still, one wants a man to show himself, _qua_ lover, at his highest in
+letters of this stamp; one wants to find in them his noblest self, his
+steadiest as his most ardent aspirations, in one direction. Keats seems
+to me, throughout his love-letters, unbalanced, wayward, and profuse; he
+exhibits great fervour of temperament, and abundant caressingness,
+without the inner depth of tenderness and regard. He lives in his
+mistress, for himself. As the letters pass further and further into the
+harsh black shadows of disease, he abandons all self-restraint, and
+lashes out right and left; he wills that his friends should have been
+disloyal to him, as the motive for his being disloyal to them. To make
+allowance for all this is possible, and even necessary; but to treat it
+as not needing that any allowance should be made would seem to me
+futile. In the earlier letters of the series we have to note a few
+points of biographic interest. He says that he believes Miss Brawne
+liked him for himself, not for his writings, and he loves her the more
+for it; that, on first falling in love with her, he had written to
+declare himself, but he burned the letter, fancying that she had shown
+some dislike to him; that he had all his life been indifferent to money
+matters, but must be chary of the resources of his friends; that he was
+afraid of her "being a little inclined to the Cressid"--one of the
+various passages which show that he chafed at her girlish liking for
+general society and diversions. On the 10th of October 1819 he had had
+"a thousand kisses" from her, and was resolved not to dispense with the
+thousand and first. Early in June 1820 he speaks of her having "been in
+the habit of flirting with Brown," who "did not know he was doing me to
+death by inches."--It may be well to give three of the letters as
+specimens:--
+
+(I.)
+
+  "25 College Street.
+
+  "[Postmark] _13 October 1819._
+
+   "My dearest Girl,--This moment I have set myself to copy some
+   verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I
+   must write you a line or two, and see if that will assist in
+   dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. Upon my
+   soul I can think of nothing else. The time is past when I had
+   power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of
+   my life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you;
+   I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again; my life seems
+   to stop there--I see no further. You have absorbed me; I have a
+   sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving. I
+   should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing
+   you; I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet
+   Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no
+   limit now to my love.
+
+   "Your note came in just here. I cannot be 'happier' away from
+   you; 'tis richer than an argosy of pearls. Do not threat me, even
+   in jest. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for
+   religion--I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more; I could be
+   martyred for _my_ religion. Love is my religion--I could die for
+   that; I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only
+   tenet. You have ravished me away by a power I cannot resist; and
+   yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you
+   I have endeavoured often 'to reason against the reasons of my
+   love.' I can do that no more, the pain would be too great. My
+   love is selfish; I cannot breathe without you."
+
+
+(II.)
+
+  [Date uncertain--say towards June 15, 1820.]
+
+   "My dearest Fanny,--My head is puzzled this morning, and I scarce
+   know what I shall say, though I am full of a hundred things. 'Tis
+   certain I would rather be writing to you this morning,
+   notwithstanding the alloy of grief in such an occupation, than
+   enjoy any other pleasure, with health to boot, unconnected with
+   you. Upon my soul I have loved you to the extreme. I wish you
+   could know the tenderness with which I continually brood over
+   your different aspects of countenance, action, and dress. I see
+   you come down in the morning; I see you meet me at the window; I
+   see everything over again eternally that I ever have seen. If I
+   get on the pleasant clue, I live in a sort of happy misery; if on
+   the unpleasant, 'tis miserable misery.
+
+   "You complain of my ill-treating you in word, thought, and
+   deed.[7] I am sorry--at times I feel bitterly sorry that I ever
+   made you unhappy. My excuse is that those words have been wrung
+   from me by the sharpness of my feelings. At all events, and in
+   any case, I have been wrong: could I believe that I did it
+   without any cause, I should be the most sincere of penitents. I
+   could give way to my repentant feelings now, I could recant all
+   my suspicions, I could mingle with you heart and soul, though
+   absent, were it not for some parts of your letters. Do you
+   suppose it possible I could ever leave you? You know what I think
+   of myself, and what of you: you know that I should feel how much
+   it was my loss, and how little yours.
+
+   "'My friends laugh at you.' I know some of them: when I know them
+   all, I shall never think of them again as friends, or even
+   acquaintance. My friends have behaved well to me in every
+   instance but one; and there they have become tattlers, and
+   inquisitors into my conduct--spying upon a secret I would rather
+   die than share it with anybody's confidence. For this I cannot
+   wish them well; I care not to see any of them again. If I am the
+   theme, I will not be the friend of idle gossips. Good gods, what
+   a shame it is our loves should be so put into the microscope of a
+   coterie! Their laughs should not affect you--(I may perhaps give
+   you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people
+   to hate me well enough, _for reasons I know of_, who have
+   pretended a great friendship for me)--when in competition with
+   one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the
+   saint of his memory. These laughers, who do not like you, who
+   envy you for your beauty, who would have God-blessed me from you
+   for ever, who were plying me with discouragements with respect to
+   you eternally! People are revengeful: do not mind them. Do
+   nothing but love me: if I knew that for certain, life and health
+   will in such event be a heaven, and death itself will be less
+   painful. I long to believe in immortality: I shall never be able
+   to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy with
+   you here, how short is the longest life! I wish to believe in
+   immortality--I wish to live with you for ever. Do not let my name
+   ever pass between you and those laughers: if I have no other
+   merit than the great love for you, that were sufficient to keep
+   me sacred and unmentioned in such society. If I have been cruel
+   and unjust, I swear my love has ever been greater than my
+   cruelty--which lasts but a minute, whereas my love, come what
+   will, shall last for ever. If concession to me has hurt your
+   pride, God knows I have had little pride in my heart when
+   thinking of you. Your name never passes my lips--do not let mine
+   pass yours. Those people do not like me.
+
+   "After reading my letter, you even then wish to see me. I am
+   strong enough to walk over: but I dare not--I shall feel so much
+   pain in parting with you again. My dearest love, I am afraid to
+   see you: I am strong, but not strong enough to see you. Will my
+   arm be ever round you again, and, if so, shall I be obliged to
+   leave you again?
+
+   "My sweet love, I am happy whilst I believe your first letter.
+   Let me be but certain that you are mine heart and soul, and I
+   could die more happily than I could otherwise live. If you think
+   me cruel, if you think I have slighted you, do muse it over
+   again, and see into my heart. My love to you is 'true as truth's
+   simplicity, and simpler than the infancy of truth'--as I think I
+   once said before. How could I slight you? how threaten to leave
+   you? Not in the spirit of a threat to you--no, but in the spirit
+   of wretchedness in myself. My fairest, my delicious, my angel
+   Fanny, do not believe me such a vulgar fellow. I will be as
+   patient in illness and as believing in love as I am able."
+
+
+(III.)
+
+
+(This is the last letter of the series. Its date is uncertain; but may,
+as already intimated, be towards July 10, 1820. It follows next after
+our No. 2.)
+
+   "My dearest Girl,--I wish you could invent some means to make me
+   at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more
+   concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my
+   mouth. I feel it almost impossible to go to Italy. The fact is, I
+   cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute's content
+   until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. But I
+   will not go on at this rate. A person in health, as you are, can
+   have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like
+   mine go through.
+
+   "What island do your friends propose retiring to? I should be
+   happy to go with you there alone, but in company I should object
+   to it: the backbitings and jealousies of new colonists, who have
+   nothing else to amuse themselves, is unbearable. Mr. Dilke came
+   to see me yesterday, and gave me a very great deal more pain than
+   pleasure. I shall never be able any more to endure the society of
+   any of those who used to meet at Elm Cottage[8] and Wentworth
+   Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my palate. If I
+   cannot live with you, I will live alone.
+
+   "I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated
+   from you. For all this, I am averse to seeing you: I cannot bear
+   flashes of light, and return into my glooms again. I am not so
+   unhappy now as I should be if I had seen you yesterday. To be
+   happy with you seems such an impossibility: it requires a luckier
+   star than mine--it will never be.
+
+   "I enclose a passage from one of your letters which I want you to
+   alter a little: I want (if you will have it so) the matter
+   expressed less coldly to me.
+
+   "If my health would bear it, I could write a poem which I have in
+   my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a
+   situation as mine. I would show some one in love, as I am, with a
+   person living in such liberty as you do.[9] Shakespeare always
+   sums up matters in the most sovereign manner. Hamlet's heart was
+   full of such misery as mine is, when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a
+   nunnery, go, go!' Indeed, I should like to give up the matter at
+   once--I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world you
+   are smiling with. I hate men, and women more. I see nothing but
+   thorns for the future: wherever I may be next winter, in Italy
+   or nowhere, Brown will be living near you, with his indecencies.
+   I see no prospect of any rest. Suppose me in Rome. Well, I should
+   there see you, as in a magic glass, going to and from town at all
+   hours--I wish I could infuse a little confidence of human nature
+   into my heart: I cannot muster any. The world is too brutal for
+   me. I am glad there is such a thing as the grave--I am sure I
+   shall never have any rest till I get there. At any rate, I will
+   indulge myself by never seeing any more Dilke or Brown or any of
+   their friends. I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or
+   that a thunderbolt would strike me.--God bless you.
+
+  "J. K."
+
+It is seldom one reads a letter (not to speak of a love-letter) more
+steeped than this in wretchedness and acrimony; wretchedness for which
+the cause was but too real and manifest; acrimony for which no ground
+has been shown or is to be surmised. What Mr. Dilke had done, or could
+be supposed to have done, to merit the invalid's ire, is unapparent. Mr.
+Brown may be inferred, from the verses of Keats already quoted, to have
+had the general character and bearing of a _bon vivant_ or "jolly dog";
+sufficiently versed in the good things of this world, whether fish,
+flesh, or womankind; jocose, or on occasion slangy. But Keats himself,
+in the nearly contemporary letter in which he arraigned Miss Brawne for
+"flirting with Brown," had said: "I know his love and friendship for
+me--at this moment I should be without pence were it not for his
+assistance;" and we refuse to think that any contingency could be likely
+to arise in which his "indecencies" would put Miss Brawne to the blush.
+Be it enough for us to know that Keats, in the drear prospect of
+expatriation and death, wrote in this strain, and to wish it were
+otherwise.
+
+The time had now arrived when Keats was to go to Italy. It was on the
+18th of September 1820 that he embarked on the _Maria Crowther_ from
+London. Haydon gives us a painful glimpse of the poet shortly before his
+departure: "The last time I saw him was at Hampstead, lying on his back
+in a white bed, helpless, irritable, and hectic. He had a book, and,
+enraged at his own feebleness, seemed as if he were going out of the
+world, with a contempt of this, and no hopes of a better. He muttered as
+I stood by him that, if he did not recover, he would 'cut his throat.' I
+tried to calm him, but to no purpose. I left him, in great depression of
+spirit to see him in such a state." Another attached friend, of whom I
+have not yet made mention, accompanied him; and in the annals of
+watchful and self-oblivious friendship there are few records more
+touching than the one which links with the name of John Keats that of
+Joseph Severn. Severn, two years older than Keats, had known him as far
+back as 1813, being introduced by Mr. William Haslam. Keats was then
+studying at Guy's Hospital, but none the less gave Severn "the complete
+idea of a poet." The acquaintance does not seem to have proceeded far at
+that date; but, through the intervention of Mr. Edward Holmes (author of
+a "Life of Mozart," and "A Ramble among the Musicians of Germany") was
+renewed whilst the poet was composing "Endymion"; and Severn may
+probably have co-operated in some minor degree with Haydon in training
+Keats to a perception of the great things in plastic art. In 1820
+Severn, a student-painter at the Royal Academy, had won the gold medal
+by his picture of The Cave of Despair, from Spenser, entitling him to
+the expenses of a three years' stay in Italy, for advancement in his
+art. He had an elegant gift in music, as well as in painting; and it is
+a satisfaction to learn that at this period he had "great animal
+spirits," for without these what he went through during the ensuing five
+months would have been but too likely to break him down. I must make
+room here for another letter from Keats, one addressed to his good
+friend Brown, deeply pathetic, and serving to assuage whatever may have
+been like "brass upon our palate" in the last-quoted letter to Fanny
+Brawne.
+
+  "_Saturday, September 28._
+
+     "_Maria Crowther_, off Yarmouth, Isle of Wight.
+
+   "My dear Brown,--The time has not yet come for a _pleasant_
+   letter from me. I have delayed writing to you from time to time,
+   because I felt how impossible it was to enliven you with one
+   heartening hope of my recovery. This morning in bed the matter
+   struck me in a different manner. I thought I would write 'while I
+   was in some liking,' or I might become too ill to write at all,
+   and then, if the desire to have written should become strong, it
+   would be a great affliction to me. I have many more letters to
+   write, and I bless my stars that I have begun, for time seems to
+   press--this may be my best opportunity.
+
+   "We are in a calm, and I am easy enough this morning. If my
+   spirits seem too low you may in some degree impute it to our
+   having been at sea a fortnight without making any way. I was very
+   disappointed at not meeting you at Bedhampton, and am very
+   provoked at the thought of you being at Chichester to-day.[10] I
+   should have delighted in setting off for London for the sensation
+   merely--for what should I do there? I could not leave my lungs or
+   stomach or other worse things behind me.
+
+   "I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. There
+   is one I must mention, and have done with it. Even if my body
+   would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing
+   which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my
+   death. I cannot help it--who can help it? Were I in health, it
+   would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I daresay
+   you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping: you know
+   what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at
+   your house. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me
+   from these pains; and then I wish death away, for death would
+   destroy even those pains, which are better than nothing. Land and
+   sea, weakness and decline, are great separators; but death is the
+   great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed
+   through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is past. I
+   often wish for you, that you might flatter me with the best.
+
+   "I think, without my mentioning it, for my sake you would be a
+   friend to Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many
+   faults: but for my sake think she has not one. If there is
+   anything you can do for her by word or deed, I know you will do
+   it. I am in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman,
+   can have no more power over me than stocks and stones; and yet
+   the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss Brawne and
+   my sister is amazing. The one seems to absorb the other to a
+   degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in
+   America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything
+   horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--I eternally see
+   her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in
+   the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring
+   in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all
+   this a dream? There must be--we cannot be created for this sort
+   of suffering. The receiving this letter is to be one of yours.
+
+   "I will say nothing about our friendship, or rather yours to me,
+   more than that, as you deserve to escape, you will never be so
+   unhappy as I am. I should think of--you[11] in my last moments. I
+   shall endeavour to write to Miss Brawne if possible to-day.[12] A
+   sudden stop to my life in the middle of one of these letters
+   would be no bad thing, for it keeps one in a sort of fever
+   awhile.
+
+   "Though fatigued with a letter longer than any I have written for
+   a long while, it would be better to go on for ever than awake to
+   a sense of contrary winds. We expect to put into Portland Roads
+   to-night. The captain, the crew, and the passengers are all
+   ill-tempered and weary. I shall write to Dilke. I feel as if I
+   was closing my last letter to you."
+
+The ship at last proceeded on her voyage, and in the Bay of Biscay
+encountered a severe squall. Keats soon afterwards read the storm-scene
+in Byron's "Don Juan": he threw the book away in indignation, denouncing
+the author's perversity of mind which could "make solemn things gay, and
+gay things solemn." Late in October he reached the harbour of Naples,
+and had to perform a tedious quarantine of ten days. After landing on
+the 31st,[13] he received a second letter from Shelley, then at Pisa,
+urging him to come to that city. The first letter on this subject,
+dated in July, had invited Keats to the hospitality of Shelley's own
+house; but in November this project had been given up, as "we are not
+rich enough for that sort of thing"--although Shelley still intended (so
+he wrote to Leigh Hunt) "to be the physician both of his body and his
+soul,--to keep the one warm, and to teach the other Greek and Spanish."
+Keats, however, had brought with him a letter of introduction to Dr.
+(afterwards Sir James) Clark, in Rome,--or indeed he may have met him
+before leaving England--and he decided to proceed to Rome rather than
+Pisa. Dr. Clark engaged for him a lodging opposite his own: it was in
+the first house on the right as you ascend the steps of the Trinita del
+Monte. The precise date when Keats reached Rome, his last place of
+torture and of rest, does not appear to be recorded: it was towards the
+middle of November. He was at first able to walk out a little, and
+occasionally to ride. Dr. Clark attended his sick bed with the most
+exemplary assiduity and kindness. He pronounced (so Keats wrote to Brown
+in a letter of November 30th, which is perhaps the last he ever penned)
+that the lungs were not much amiss, but the stomach in a very bad
+condition: perhaps this was a kindly equivocation, for by this time--as
+was ascertained after his death--Keats can have had scarcely any lungs
+at all. The patient was under no illusion as to his prospects, and he
+more than once asked the physician "When will this posthumous life of
+mine come to an end?"
+
+The only words in which the last days of Keats can be adequately
+recorded are those of Severn: our best choice would be between extract
+and silence. There were oscillations from time to time, from bad to less
+bad, but generally the tendency of the disease was steadily downwards.
+The poet's feelings regarding Fanny Brawne were so acute and harrowing
+that he never mentioned her to his friend. I give a few particulars from
+Severn's contemporary letters--the person addressed being not always
+known.
+
+   "_December 14._ His suffering is so great, so continued, and his
+   fortitude so completely gone, that any further change must make
+   him delirious.
+
+   "_December 17._ Not a moment can I be from him. I sit by his bed
+   and read all day, and at night I humour him in all his
+   wanderings.... He rushed out of bed and said 'This day shall be
+   my last,' and but for me most certainly it would. The blood broke
+   forth in similar quantity the next morning, and he was bled
+   again. I was afterwards so fortunate as to talk him into a little
+   calmness, and he soon became quite patient. Now the blood has
+   come up in coughing five times. Not a single thing will he
+   digest, yet he keeps on craving for food. Every day he raves he
+   will die from hunger, and I've been obliged to give him more than
+   was allowed.... Dr. Clark will not say much.... All that can be
+   done he does most kindly; while his lady, like himself in refined
+   feeling, prepares all that poor Keats takes, for--in this
+   wilderness of a place for an invalid--there was no alternative.
+
+   [To Mrs. Brawne.] "_January 11._ He has now given up all
+   thoughts, hopes, or even wish, for recovery. His mind is in a
+   state of peace, from the final leave he has taken of this world,
+   and all its future hopes.... I light the fire, make his
+   breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook; make his bed, and
+   even sweep the room.... Oh I would my unfortunate friend had
+   never left your Wentworth Place for the hopeless advantages of
+   this comfortless Italy! He has many many times talked over 'the
+   few happy days at your house, the only time when his mind was at
+   ease'.... Poor Keats cannot see any letters--at least he will
+   not; they affect him so much, and increase his danger. The two
+   last I repented giving: he made me put them into his box, unread.
+
+   "_January 15._ Torlonia the banker has refused us any more money.
+   The bill is returned unaccepted, and to-morrow I must pay my last
+   crown for this cursed lodging-place: and what is more, if he
+   dies, all the beds and furniture will be burnt, and the walls
+   scraped, and they will come on me for a hundred pounds or
+   more.... You see my hopes of being kept by the Royal Academy will
+   be cut off unless I send a picture in the spring. I have written
+   to Sir T. Lawrence.
+
+   "_February 12._ At times I have hoped he would recover; but the
+   doctor shook his head, and Keats would not hear that he was
+   better; the thought of recovery is beyond everything dreadful to
+   him.
+
+   [To Mrs. Brawne.] "_February 14._ His mind is growing to great
+   quietness and peace. I find this change has its rise from the
+   increasing weakness of his body; but it seems like a delightful
+   sleep to me, I have been beating about in the tempest of his mind
+   so long. To-night he has talked very much to me, but so easily
+   that he at last fell into a pleasant sleep. He seems to have
+   comfortable dreams without nightmare. This will bring on some
+   change: it cannot be worse--it may be better. Among the many
+   things he has requested of me to-night, this is the
+   principal--that on his grave shall be this, 'Here lies one whose
+   name was writ in water.'... Such a letter has come! I gave it to
+   Keats, supposing it to be one of yours; but it proved sadly
+   otherwise. The glance of that letter tore him to pieces. The
+   effects were on him for many days. He did not read it--he could
+   not; but requested me to place it in his coffin, together with a
+   purse and letter (unopened) of his sister's: since which time he
+   has requested me not to place _that_ letter in his coffin, but
+   only his sister's purse and letter, with some hair. Then he found
+   many causes of his illness in the exciting and thwarting of his
+   passions; but I persuaded him to feel otherwise on this delicate
+   point.... I have got an English nurse to come two hours every
+   other day.... He has taken half a pint of fresh milk: the milk
+   here is beautiful to all the senses--it is delicious. For three
+   weeks he has lived on it, sometimes taking a pint and a half in a
+   day.
+
+   "_February 22._ This morning, by the pale daylight, the change in
+   him frightened me: he has sunk in the last three days to a most
+   ghastly look.... He opens his eyes in great doubt and horror;
+   but, when they fall upon me, they close gently, open quietly, and
+   close again, till he sinks to sleep.
+
+   "_February 27._ He is gone. He died with the most perfect
+   ease--he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about four, the
+   approaches of death came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up. I am
+   dying--I shall die easy. Don't be frightened: be firm, and thank
+   God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed
+   boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he
+   gradually sank into death, so quiet that I still thought he
+   slept. I cannot say more now. I am broken down by four nights'
+   watching, no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days
+   since the body was opened: the lungs were completely gone. The
+   doctors could not imagine how he had lived these two months. I
+   followed his dear body to the grave on Monday [February 26th],
+   with many English.... The letters I placed in the coffin with my
+   own hand."
+
+No words of mine shall be added here to tarnish upon the mirror of
+memory this image of a sacred death and a sacred friendship.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+We have now reached the close of a melancholy history--that of the
+extinction, in a space of less than twenty-six years, of a bright life
+foredoomed by inherited disease. We turn to another subject--the
+intellectual development and the writings of Keats, what they were, and
+how they were treated. Here again there are some sombre tints.
+
+A minute anecdote, apparently quite authentic, shows that a certain
+propensity to the jingle of rhyme was innate in Keats: Haydon is our
+informant. "An old lady (Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury) told
+his brother George--when, in reply to her question what John was doing,
+he told her he had determined to become a poet--that this was very odd;
+because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to
+him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then
+laugh." This, however, is the only rhyming-anecdote that we hear of
+Keats's childhood or mere boyhood: there is nothing to show that at
+school he made the faintest attempt at verse-spinning. The earliest
+known experiment of his is the "Imitation of Spenser"--four Spenserian
+stanzas, beginning--
+
+    "Now Morning from her orient chamber came,"
+
+and very poor stanzas they are. This Imitation was written while he was
+living at Edmonton, in his nineteenth year, and thus there was nothing
+singularly precocious in Keats, either in the age at which he began
+versifying, or in the skill with which he first addressed himself to the
+task. I might say more of other verses, juvenile in the amplest sense of
+the term, but such remarks would belong more properly to a later section
+of this volume. I will therefore only observe here that the earliest
+poems of his in which I can discern anything even distantly approaching
+to poetic merit or to his own characteristic style (and these distantly
+indeed) are the lines "To ----"
+
+    "Hadst thou lived in days of old,"
+
+and "Calidore, a Fragment,"
+
+    "Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake."
+
+The dates of these two compositions are not stated, but they were
+probably later than the opening of 1815, and if so Keats would have been
+nearly or quite twenty when he wrote them--and this is far remote from
+precocity. Let us say then, once for all, that, whatever may be the
+praise and homage due to Keats for ranking as one of the immortals when
+he died aged twenty-five, no sort of encomium can be awarded to him on
+the ground that, when he first began, he began early and well. All his
+rawest attempts, be it added to his credit, appear to have been kept to
+himself; for Cowden Clarke, who was certainly his chief literary
+confidant in those tentative days, says that until Keats produced to him
+his sonnet "written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison" the
+youth's attempts at verse-writing were to him unknown. The 3rd of
+February 1815 was the day of Hunt's liberation, so that the endeavour
+had by this time been going on in silence for something like a year or
+more.
+
+It was not till 1816--or let us say when he was just of age--that Keats
+produced a truly excellent thing. This is the sonnet "On first looking
+into Chapman's Homer." A copy of Chapman's translation had been lent to
+Cowden Clarke; he and Keats sat up till daylight reading it, the young
+poet shouting with delight, and by ten o'clock on the following morning
+Keats sent the sonnet to Clarke. It was therefore a sudden immediate
+inspiration, a little rill of lava flowing out of a poetic volcano,
+solidified at once. This is not only the first excellent thing written
+by Keats--it is the _only_ excellent thing contained in his first volume
+of verse.
+
+This volume came out (as already mentioned) in the early spring of 1817.
+The sonnet dedicating the book to Leigh Hunt, written off at a moment's
+notice "when the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer," was
+evidently composed in winter-time. The title of the volume is "Poems by
+John Keats." The motto on its title-page is from Spenser--
+
+    "What more felicity can fall to creature
+    Than to enjoy delight with liberty?"
+
+--a motto embodying with considerable completeness the feeling which is
+predominant in the volume, and generally in Keats's poetic works. We
+always feel "delight" to be his true element, whatever may be the
+undertone of pathos opposed to it by poetic development and treatment,
+and by adverse fate. "Liberty" also--a free flight of the faculties, a
+rejection of conventional trammels, whether in life or in verse--was
+highly characteristic of him; and perhaps the youthful friend of Hunt
+intended the word "liberty" to be understood by his readers as having a
+certain political flavour as well. In addition to some writings just
+specified, the volume contained "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill"; the
+three epistles "To George Felton Mathew" (who was a gentleman of
+literary habits, afterwards employed in administering the Poor Law), "To
+my brother George," and "To Charles Cowden Clarke"; sixteen sonnets; and
+"Sleep and Poetry." The question of the poetic deservings of these
+compositions belongs more properly to our final chapter. I shall here
+give only a few details bearing upon the circumstances of their
+production. The poem "I stood tiptoe" &c. was written beside a gate near
+Caen Wood, Highgate. It must have been begun in a summer, no doubt that
+of 1816, and was still uncompleted in the middle of December of that
+year. "The Epistle to Mathew," dated November 1815, testifies to the
+early admiration of Keats for Thomas Chatterton; though the dedication
+of "Endymion," "Inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton," was but
+poorly forestalled by such lines as the following--
+
+    "Where we may soft humanity put on,
+    And sit and rhyme, and think on Chatterton,
+    And that warm-hearted Shakspeare sent to meet him
+    Four laurelled spirits heavenward to entreat him."
+
+Moreover, the first of his youthful sonnets is addressed to
+Chatterton. The "Epistle to George," August 1816, opens with a reference
+to "many a dreary hour" which John Keats has passed, fearing he would
+never be able to write good poetry, however much he might gaze on sky,
+honey-bees, and the beauty of woman. The "Epistle to Clarke," September
+1816, pays ample tribute to the guidance which he had afforded to Keats
+into the realms of poetry, and contains a couplet which has of late been
+very often quoted--
+
+    "Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly
+    Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?"
+
+The sonnet--
+
+    "O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell,"
+
+is the first thing that Keats ever published. It had previously appeared
+in _The Examiner_ for May 5, 1816, and is clearly one of the best of
+these early sonnets. The sonnet which begins with the unmetrical line--
+
+    "How many bards gild the lapses of time"
+
+was included in the very first batch of verses by Keats which Cowden
+Clarke showed to Leigh Hunt. Hunt expressed "unhesitating and prompt
+admiration" of some other one among the compositions; and Horace Smith,
+who was present, reading out the sonnet now before us, praised as "a
+well-condensed expression" the contorted and inefficient line--
+
+    "That distance of recognizance bereaves,"
+
+_i.e._ [sounds] which distance bereaves of recognizance, or, in plain
+English, which are too distant to be recognized. Two other sonnets are
+addressed to Haydon in a tone of glowing laudation.
+
+"Sleep and Poetry" is (if we except the sonnet upon Chapman's Homer) by
+far the most important poem in the volume. It was written partly in
+Leigh Hunt's cottage at Hampstead, in the library-room, where a sofa-bed
+had on one occasion been made up for Keats's convenience, and the latter
+lines in the poem refer to objects of art which were kept in the room.
+Apart from the impressive line which all readers remember, saying of
+poetry--
+
+    "'Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm,"
+
+there are several passages interesting as showing Keats's enthusiasm for
+the art in which he was now a beginner, soon to be an adept--
+
+    "Oh for ten years that I may overwhelm
+      Myself in poesy!"
+
+also
+
+                            "The great end
+    Of poesy, that it should be a friend
+    To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man;"
+
+and again
+
+    "They shall be accounted poet-kings
+    Who simply tell the most heart-easing things"--
+
+both of these being definitions in which we might imagine Leigh Hunt to
+have borne his part, or at least notified his concurrence. The
+following well-known diatribe is also important, and should be kept in
+mind when we come to speak of the reception accorded to Keats by
+established critics, more or less of the old school. He has been
+dilating on the splendours of British poetry of the great era, say
+Spenser to Milton, and then proceeds--
+
+    "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
+    Nurtured by foppery and barbarism
+    Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
+    Men were thought wise who could not understand
+    His glories: with a puling infant's force
+    They swayed about upon a rocking-horse,
+    And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal-souled!
+    The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled
+    Its gathering waves--ye felt it not; the blue
+    Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
+    Of summer-night collected still to make
+    The morning precious. Beauty was awake--
+    Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
+    To things ye knew not of--were closely wed
+    To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
+    And compass vile; so that ye taught a school
+    Of dolts to smoothe, inlay, and chip, and fit,
+    Till--like the certain wands of Jacob's wit--
+    Their verses tallied. Easy was the task;
+    A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
+    Of Poesy. Ill-fated impious race,
+    That blasphemed the bright lyrist to his face,
+    And did not know it! No, they went about
+    Holding a poor decrepit standard out
+    Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
+    The name of one Boileau."
+
+Zeal is generally pardonable. Keats's was manifestly honest zeal, and
+flaming forth in the right direction. Yet it would have been well for
+him to remember and indicate that amid his "school of dolts," bearing
+the flag of Boileau, there had been some very strong and capable men,
+notably Dryden and Pope, who could do several things besides inlaying
+and clipping; nor could it be said that the beauty of the world had been
+wholly blinked by so pre-eminently descriptive a poet as Thomson; and,
+if we were to read Boileau--which few of us do now-a-days, and I daresay
+Keats was not one of the few--we should probably find that his "mottoes"
+were much less concerned with inlaying and clipping than with solid
+meaning and studious congruity--qualities not totally contemptible, but
+(be it acknowledged) very largely contemned by Keats in that first
+slender performance of his adolescence named "Poems, 1817."
+
+It has been said that this volume hardly went beyond the circle of
+Keats's personal friends; nor do I think this statement can be far
+wrong, although one inquirer avers that the book was "constantly alluded
+to in the prominent periodicals." The dictum of Keats himself stands
+thus: "It was read by some dozen of my friends, who liked it; and some
+dozen whom I was unacquainted with, who did not." Shelley cannot have
+been among the friends who liked the volume, for he had recommended
+Keats not to give it to the press. At any rate the publishers, Messrs.
+Ollier, would after a very short while sell it no more. Their letter to
+George Keats--who seems to have been acting for John during the absence
+of the latter in the Isle of Wight or at Margate--is too amusing to be
+omitted:--
+
+   "We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his
+   book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to
+   acquiesce in undertaking it. We are, however, much obliged to you
+   for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any
+   further connexion with it, which we must have done, as we think
+   the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped. By far the
+   greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have
+   found fault with it in such plain terms that we have in many
+   cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with
+   the ridicule which has time after time been showered upon it. In
+   fact, it was only on Sunday last that we were under the
+   mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly
+   contradicted by a gentleman who told us he considered it 'no
+   better than a take-in.' These are unpleasant imputations for any
+   one in business to labour under; but we should have borne them
+   and concealed their existence from you had not the style of your
+   note shown us that such delicacy would be quite thrown away. We
+   shall take means without delay for ascertaining the number of
+   copies on hand, and you shall be informed accordingly.
+
+   "3 Welbeck Street, 29th April 1817."
+
+I do not find that the after-fate of the "Poems" is recorded: probably
+they were handed over to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who undertook the
+publication of "Endymion."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+To "Endymion" we now have to turn. The early verses of Keats (as well as
+the later ones) contain numerous allusions to Grecian mythology--Muses,
+Apollo, Pan, Narcissus, Endymion and Diana, &c. For the most part these
+early allusions are nothing more than tawdry conventionalisms; so indeed
+are some of the later ones, as for instance in the drama of "King
+Stephen," written in 1819, the schoolboy classicism of "2nd Captain"--
+
+                                        "Royal Maud
+    From the thronged towers of Lincoln hath looked down,
+    Like Pallas from the walls of Ilion;"
+
+and we cannot discover that any more credit is due to Keats for
+dribbling out his tritenesses about Apollo and the Muses than to any
+Akenside, Mason, or Hayley, of them all. At times, however, there is a
+genuine tone of _enjoyment_ in these utterances sufficient to persuade
+us that the subject had really taken possession of his mind, and that he
+could feel Grecian mythology, not merely as a convenient vehicle for
+rhetorical personifications, but as an ever-vital embodiment of ideas of
+beauty in forms of beauty. In the early and partly boyish poem, "I
+stood tip-toe upon a little hill," a good deal of space is devoted to
+showing that classical myths are an outcome of eager sensitiveness to
+the lovely things of Nature: the tales of Psyche, Pan and Sirynx,
+Narcissus, are cited in confirmation--and finally Diana and Endymion, in
+the following lines:--
+
+    "Where had he been from whose warm head outflew
+    That sweetest of all songs, that ever new,
+    That aye-refreshing pure deliciousness
+          Coming ever to bless
+    The wanderer by moonlight? to him bringing
+    Shapes from the invisible world, unearthly singing
+    From out the middle air, from flowery nests,
+    And from the pillowy silkiness that rests
+    Full in the speculation of the stars.
+    Ah surely he had burst our mortal bars:
+    Into some wondrous region he had gone
+    To search for thee, divine Endymion.
+    He was a poet, sure a lover too,
+    Who stood on Latmus' top what time there blew
+    Soft breezes from the myrtle-vale below,
+    And brought--in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow--
+    A hymn from Dian's temple, while upswelling
+    The incense went to her own starry dwelling.
+    But, though her face was clear as infants' eyes,
+    Though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice,
+    The poet wept at her so piteous fate--
+    Wept that such beauty should be desolate;
+    So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won,
+    And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.
+    Queen of the wide air, thou most lovely queen
+    Of all the brightness that mine eyes have seen,
+    As thou exceedest all things in thy shine,
+    So every tale does this sweet tale of thine.
+    Oh for three words of honey that I might
+    Tell but one wonder of thy bridal night!
+    Where distant ships do seem to show their keels
+    Phoebus awhile delayed his mighty wheels,
+    And turned to smile upon thy bashful eyes
+    Ere he his unseen pomp would solemnize.
+           *       *       *       *       *
+    Cynthia, I cannot tell the greater blisses
+    That followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses:
+    Was there a poet born?"
+
+Readers often go at a skating-pace over passages of this kind, without
+very clearly realizing to themselves the gist of the whole matter. I
+will therefore put the thing into the most prosaic form, and say that
+what Keats substantially intimates here is as follows:--The inventor of
+the myth of Artemis and Endymion must have been a poet and lover, who,
+standing on the hill of Latmos, and hearing thence a sweet hymn wafted
+from the low-lying temple of Artemis, while the pure maiden-like moon
+was shining resplendently, felt a pang of pity for this loveless moon or
+Artemis, and invented for her a lover in the person of Endymion; and
+ever since then the myth has lent additional beauty to the effects,
+beautiful as in themselves they are, of moonlight. Without tying down
+Keats too rigidly to this view of the genesis of the myth, I may
+nevertheless point out that he wholly ignores as participants both the
+spirit of religious devoutness, and the device of allegorizing natural
+phaenomena: the inventor is simply a poet and lover, who thinks it a
+world of pities that such a sweet maiden as Artemis should not have a
+lover sooner or later. Invention prompted by warmth of feeling is thus
+the sole motive-power recognized. The final phrase "Was there a poet
+born?" may without violence be understood as implying, "Ought not the
+loves of Artemis and Endymion to beget their poet, and why should not I
+be that poet?" At all events, Keats determined that he _would_ be that
+poet; and, contemplating the original invention of the myth from the
+point of view which we have just analysed, he not unnaturally treated it
+from a like point of view. The tale of Diana and Endymion was not to be
+a monument of classic antiquity re-stated in the timid, formal spirit of
+a school-exercise, but an invention of a poet and lover, who, acting
+under the spell of natural beauty, re-informs his theme with poetic
+fancy, amorous ardour, and Nature's profusion of object and of imagery.
+And in this Keats thought--and surely he rightly thought--that he would
+be getting closer to the spirit of a Grecian myth than by any
+cut-and-dry process of tame repetition or pulseless decorum. He wanted
+the dell of wild flowers, and not the _hortus siccus_.
+
+"Endymion" was actually begun in the spring of 1817, much about the same
+time when the volume "Poems" was published. The first draft was
+completed (as we have said) on the 28th of November 1817, and by the end
+of the winter which opened the year 1818 no more probably remained to be
+done to it. The MS. was subjected to much revision and excision, so that
+it cannot be alleged that Keats worked in a reckless temper, or without
+such self-criticism as he could at that date bring to bear. It would
+even appear, moreover, from the terms of a letter which he addressed to
+Mr. Taylor, on April 27, 1818, that he allowed that gentleman to make
+some volunteer corrections of his own. Haydon had spurred him on to the
+ambitious attempt, which Hunt on the contrary deprecated. Shelley--so
+the story goes--agreed with Keats that each of them should write an epic
+within a space of six months. Shelley produced "The Revolt of Islam,"
+Keats the "Endymion." Shelley proved to be the more rapid writer of the
+two; for his poem of 4815 lines was finished by the early autumn of
+1817, while Keats's, numbering 4,050 lines, went on through the winter
+which opened 1818. A good deal of it had been done during Keats's
+sojourn with Mr. Bailey, in Magdalen Hall, Oxford. Afterwards, on 8th
+October 1817, he wrote to Bailey--"I refused to visit Shelley, that I
+might have my own unfettered scope;" an expression which one might be
+inclined to understand as showing that Shelley, having now completed
+"The Revolt of Islam," had invited Keats to visit him at Marlow, and
+there to proceed with "Endymion,"--not without the advantage it may well
+be supposed, of Shelley's sympathizing but none the less stringent
+counsel. Bailey's account of the facts may be given here. "He wrote and
+I read--sometimes at the same table, sometimes at separate desks--from
+breakfast till two or three o'clock. He sat down to his task, which was
+about fifty lines a day, with his paper before him, and wrote with as
+much regularity and apparently with as much ease as he wrote his
+letters. Indeed, he quite acted up to the principle he lays down, 'That,
+if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree, it had better
+not come at all.' Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not
+often, and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself.
+When he had finished his writing for the day, he usually read it over
+to me, and then read or wrote letters till we went out for a walk." The
+first book of the poem was delivered into the hands of the publisher,
+Mr. Taylor, in the middle of January. Haydon undertook to make a
+finished chalk-sketch of the author's head, to be prefixed to the
+volume; he drew outlines accordingly, but the volume, an octavo,
+appeared in April without any portrait. We all know the now proverbial
+first line in "Endymion,"
+
+    "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."
+
+This seems to have been an inspiration of long anterior date; for Mr.
+Stephens, the surgical fellow-student and fellow-lodger of Keats, says
+that in one twilight when they were together the youthful poet produced
+the line--
+
+    "A thing of beauty is a constant joy;"
+
+which, failing wholly to satisfy its author's ear, was immediately
+afterwards improved into its present form. Even before handing over any
+part of his MS. to the printer, Keats, at the "immortal dinner" which
+came off in Haydon's painting-room, on the 28th of December 1817, and at
+which Wordsworth, Lamb, and others, were present, had bespoken a strange
+and heroic fate for one copy of his book; for he made Mr. Ritchie, who
+was about to set forth on an African exploration, promise that he would
+carry the volume "to the great desert of Sahara, and fling it in the
+midst."
+
+"Invention" was the quality which Keats most sought for in his
+"Endymion," as shown in his letter to Mr. Bailey, already cited. He
+said--"It ['Endymion'] will be a test of my powers of imagination, and
+chiefly of my invention--which is a rare thing indeed--by which I must
+make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry....
+A long poem is a test of Invention, which I take to be the polar star of
+poetry, as Fancy is the sails, and Imagination the rudder.... This same
+Invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a
+poetical excellence." The term "invention" might be used in various
+senses. Keats seems to have meant the power of producing a great number
+of minor incidents, illustrative images, and other particulars, all
+tending to reinforce and fill out the main conception and
+subject-matter.
+
+Keats wrote a preface to "Endymion" on March 19, 1818, which was
+objected to by Hamilton Reynolds, and by his friends generally. It was
+certainly off-hand and unconciliating, and some readers would have
+regarded it as defiant. Its general purport was that the poem was
+faulty, but the author would not keep it back for revision, which would
+make the performance a tedium to himself, "I have written to please
+myself, and in hopes to please others, and for a love of fame." There
+was a good deal more, jaunty and provocative enough. Keats was not well
+inclined to suppress this preface. He replied on April 9th to Reynolds
+in a letter from which some weighty words must be quoted:--
+
+   "I have not the slightest feeling of humility towards the public,
+   or to anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the principle
+   of Beauty, and the memory of great men.... A preface is written
+   to the public--a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy,
+   and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.... I
+   would be subdued before my friends, and thank them for subduing
+   me; but among multitudes of men I have no feel of stooping--I
+   hate the idea of humility to them. I never wrote one single line
+   of poetry with the least shadow of public thought.... I hate a
+   mawkish popularity. I cannot be subdued before them. My glory
+   would be to daunt and dazzle the thousand jabberers about
+   pictures and books."
+
+Keats, however, yielded to his censors, and wrote a rather shorter
+preface, by far a better one. It bears the date of April 10th, being the
+very next day after he had written to Reynolds in so unsubmissive a
+tone. This second preface says substantially much the same thing as the
+first, but without any aggressive or "devil-may-care" addenda. It is too
+important to be omitted here:--
+
+   "Knowing within myself the manner in which this poem has been
+   produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it
+   public. What manner I mean will be quite clear to the reader, who
+   must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every
+   error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed
+   accomplished. The two first books, and indeed the two last, I
+   feel sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their
+   passing the press; nor should they, if I thought a year's
+   castigation would do them any good. It will not: the foundations
+   are too sandy. It is just that this youngster should die away--a
+   sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that, while it is
+   dwindling, I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit
+   to live.
+
+   "This may be speaking too presumptuously, and may deserve a
+   punishment. But no feeling man will be forward to inflict it; he
+   will leave me alone with the conviction that there is not a
+   fiercer hell than the failure in a great object. This is not
+   written with the least atom of purpose to forestall criticisms of
+   course, but from the desire I have to conciliate men who are
+   competent to look, and who do look, with a zealous eye to the
+   honour of English literature.
+
+   "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination
+   of a man is healthy. But there is a space of life between in
+   which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way
+   of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted. Thence proceeds
+   mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak
+   of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.
+
+   "I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful
+   mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness; for I wish to try
+   once more before I bid it farewell."
+
+No one can deny that this is a modest preface; it is in fact too modest,
+and concedes to the adversary the utmost which could possibly be at
+issue, viz., whether the poem was worth publishing or not. The only
+scintilla of self-assertion in it is the hope expressed-"_some_
+hope"--that the writer might eventually produce "verses fit to live;"
+and less than that no man who puts a poem before the public could be
+expected to postulate. Keats must therefore be expressly acquitted of
+having done anything to excite animosity or retaliation on the part of
+his critics; the sole thing which could be attacked was the poem
+itself--too frankly pronounced indefensible--or else something in the
+author which did not appear within the covers of his volume. The preface
+is indeed manly as well as modest; there is not a servile or obsequious
+word in it; yet I cannot help thinking that Keats, when later on he
+found "Endymion" denounced as drivel, must at times have wished that he
+had been a little less deferential to Reynolds's objections, and had not
+so explicitly admitted that not one of the four books of the poem was
+qualified to "pass the press." An adverse reviewer was sure to take
+advantage of that admission, and did so.
+
+It would be interesting to compare with the preface which Keats printed
+for "Endymion" the one which Shelley printed for "The Revolt of Islam."
+Shelley, like Keats, was modest; he left his readers to settle any
+question as to his poetic claims (although "Alastor," previously
+published, might pretty well have vouched for these); but he resolutely
+explained that reviewers would find in him no subject for bullying. I
+can only make room for a few sentences:--
+
+   "The experience and the feelings to which I refer do not in
+   themselves constitute men poets, but only prepare them to be the
+   auditors of those who are. How far I shall be found to possess
+   that more essential attribute of poetry, the power of awakening
+   in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is
+   that which, to speak sincerely, I know not, and which, with an
+   acquiescent and contented spirit, I expect to be taught by the
+   effect which I shall produce upon those whom I now address.... It
+   is the misfortune of this age that its writers, too thoughtless
+   of immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or
+   blame. They write with the fear of reviews before their eyes.
+   This system of criticism sprang up in that torpid interval when
+   poetry was not. Poetry, and the art which professes to regulate
+   and limit its powers, cannot subsist together.... I have sought,
+   therefore, to write (as I believe that Homer, Shakespeare, and
+   Milton wrote) in utter disregard of anonymous censure."
+
+The publisher of "Endymion" (Mr. Taylor is probably meant) was nervous
+as to the reception which potent critics would accord to the volume. He
+went to William Gifford, the editor of the _Quarterly Review_, to
+bespeak indulgence, but found a Cerberus who rejected every sop. In the
+number of the _Quarterly_ for April 1818--not actually published, it
+would seem, until September--appeared a critique branded into
+ignominious permanence by the name and fame of Keats. Gifford himself is
+regarded as its author. As an account of Keats's career would for
+various reasons be incomplete in the absence of this critique, I
+reproduce it here. It has the merit of brevity, and lends itself hardly
+at all to curtailment, but I miss one or two details, relating chiefly
+to Leigh Hunt.
+
+   "Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works
+   which they affected to criticize. On the present occasion we
+   shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess
+   that we have not read his work. Not that we have been wanting in
+   our duty; far from it; indeed, we have made efforts, almost as
+   superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it:
+   but, with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced
+   to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the
+   first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We
+   should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may
+   be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that
+   we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through
+   which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the
+   three which we have not looked into.
+
+   "It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we
+   almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name
+   to such a rhapsody)--it is not, we say, that the author has not
+   powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius. He has
+   all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of
+   what has been somewhere called 'Cockney Poetry,' which may be
+   defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most
+   uncouth language.
+
+   "Of this school Mr. Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former
+   number, aspires to be the hierophant.... This author is a copyist
+   of Mr. Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged,
+   twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd, than
+   his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself
+   in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his
+   own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats had
+   advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples. His
+   nonsense, therefore, is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its
+   own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism,
+   more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.
+
+   "Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under
+   peculiar circumstances. 'Knowing within myself,' he says, 'the
+   manner [&c., down to 'a deed accomplished']. We humbly beg his
+   pardon, but this does not appear to us to be 'quite so clear;' we
+   really do not know what he means. But the next passage is more
+   intelligible. 'The two first books, and indeed the two last, I
+   feel sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their
+   passing the press.' Thus 'the two first books' are, even in his
+   own judgment, unfit to appear, and 'the two last' are, it seems,
+   in the same condition; and, as two and two make four, and as that
+   is the whole number of books, we have a clear, and we believe a
+   very just, estimate of the entire work.
+
+   "Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this 'immature and
+   feverish work' in terms which are themselves sufficiently
+   feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from
+   inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the 'fierce hell' of
+   criticism[14] which terrify his imagination if he had not begged
+   to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not
+   observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be
+   put in the right way, or which at least ought to be warned of the
+   wrong; and if finally he had not told us that he is of an age and
+   temper which imperiously require mental discipline.
+
+   "Of the story we have been able to make out but little. It seems
+   to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana
+   and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has
+   altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of
+   certainty, and must therefore content ourselves with giving some
+   instances of its diction and versification. And here again we are
+   perplexed and puzzled. At first it appeared to us that Mr. Keats
+   had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an
+   immeasurable game at _bouts rimes_; but, if we recollect rightly,
+   it is an indispensable condition at this play that the rhymes,
+   when filled up, shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have
+   already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at
+   random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this
+   line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes.
+   There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in
+   the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the
+   association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is
+   composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced
+   themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on
+   which they turn.
+
+   "We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that
+   least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the
+   poem.
+
+                   'Such the sun, the moon,
+      Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
+      For simple sheep; and such are daffodils,
+      With the green world they live in; and clear rills
+      That for themselves a cooling covert make
+      'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
+      Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
+      And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
+      We have imagined for the mighty dead,' &c.
+
+   Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_,
+   produces the simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that 'the
+   _dooms_ of the mighty dead' would never have intruded themselves
+   but for the 'fair musk-rose _blooms_.'
+
+   "Again--
+
+      'For 'twas the morn. Apollo's upward fire
+      Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre
+      Of brightness so unsullied that therein
+      A melancholy spirit well might win
+      Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
+      Into the winds. Rain-scented eglantine
+      Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
+      The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
+      To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
+      Man's voice was on the mountains: and the mass
+      Of Nature's lives and wonders pulsed tenfold
+      To feel this sunrise and its glories old.'
+
+   Here Apollo's _fire_ produces a _pyre_--a silvery pyre--of
+   clouds, _wherein_ a spirit might _win_ oblivion, and melt his
+   essence _fine_; and scented _eglantine_ gives sweets to the
+   _sun_, and cold springs had _run_ into the _grass_; and then the
+   pulse of the _mass_ pulsed _tenfold_ to feel the glories _old_ of
+   the new-born day, &c.
+
+   "One example more--
+
+      'Be still the unimaginable lodge
+      For solitary thinkings, such as dodge
+      Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
+      Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven
+      That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth,
+      Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth.'
+
+   _Lodge_, _dodge_--_heaven_, _leaven_--_earth_, _birth_--such, in
+   six words, is the sum and substance of six lines.
+
+   "We come now to the author's taste in versification. He cannot
+   indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a
+   line. Let us see. The following are specimens of his prosodial
+   notions of our English heroic metre:
+
+      'Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
+      The passion poesy, glories infinite.
+
+      'So plenteously all weed-hidden roots.
+
+      'Of some strange history, potent to send.
+
+      'Before the deep intoxication.
+
+      'Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion.
+
+      'The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepared.
+
+      'Endymion, the cave is secreter
+      Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir
+      No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
+      Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
+      And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.'
+
+   "By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the
+   meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. We now
+   present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation
+   of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns our language.
+
+   "We are told that turtles _passion_ their voices; that an arbour
+   was _nested_, and a lady's locks _gordianed_ up; and, to supply
+   the place of the nouns thus verbalized, Mr. Keats, with great
+   fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and human
+   _serpentry_, the _honey-feel_ of bliss, wives prepare
+   _needments_, and so forth.
+
+   "Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their
+   natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads.
+   Thus the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night
+   up-took; the wind up-blows, and the hours are down-sunken. But,
+   if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the
+   language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the
+   parent stock. Thus a lady whispers _pantingly_ and close, makes
+   _hushing_ signs, and steers her skiff into a _ripply_ cove, a
+   shower falls _refreshfully_, and a vulture has a _spreaded_ tail.
+
+   "But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte. If any one
+   should be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so
+   much more patient than ourselves as to get beyond the first book,
+   and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him
+   to make us acquainted with his success. We shall then return to
+   the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make
+   all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our readers."
+
+Such is the too famous article in _The Quarterly Review_. If its
+contents are to be assessed with perfect calmness, I should have to say
+that it is not mistaken in alleging that the poem of "Endymion" is
+rambling and indistinct; that Keats allowed himself to drift too readily
+according to the bidding of his rhymes (Leigh Hunt has acknowledged as
+much, in independent remarks of his own); that many words are coined,
+and badly coined; and that the versification is not free from
+blemishes--although several of the lines quoted by _The Quarterly_ as
+unmetrical, are, when read with the right emphasis, blameless, or even
+sonorous. But the article is none the less a despicable and odious
+performance; partly as being a sneering depreciation of a work showing
+rich poetic endowment, and partly as being, not a deliberate and candid
+(however severe) estimate of Keats as a poet, but really an utterance of
+malice prepense, and hardly disguised, against Hunt as a hostile
+politician who wrote poetry, and against any one who consorted with him.
+The inverting of the due balance between the merits and the defects of
+"Endymion," would have been at best an act of stupidity; at second best,
+after the author's preface had been laid to heart, an act of brutalism;
+and at worst, when the venom of abuse was poured into the poetic cup of
+Keats as an expedient for drugging the political cup of Hunt, an act of
+partisan turpitude. No more words need be wasted upon a proceeding of
+which the abiding and unevadeable literary record is graven in the brass
+of Shelley's "Adonais."
+
+The attack in _The Quarterly Review_ was accompanied by attacks in
+_Blackwood's Magazine_. If _The Quarterly_ was carping and ill-natured,
+_Blackwood_ was basely insulting. A series of articles "On the Cockney
+School of Poetry" began in the Scotch magazine in October 1817, being
+directed mainly, and with calumnious virulence, against Leigh Hunt. No.
+4 of the series came out in August 1818, and formed a vituperation of
+Keats. I will not draw upon its stores of underbred jocularity, so as to
+show that the best raillery which _Blackwood_ could get up consisted of
+terming him Johnny Keats, and referring to his having been assistant to
+an "apothecary." The author of these papers signed himself Z, being no
+doubt too noble and courageous to traduce people without muffling
+himself in anonymity; nor did he consent to uncloak, though vigorously
+pressed by Hunt to do so. It is affirmed that Z was Lockhart, the
+son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and afterwards editor of _The Quarterly
+Review_; and an unpleasant adjunct to this statement--we would gladly
+disbelieve it--is that Scott himself lent active aid in concocting the
+articles. A different account is that Z was at first John Wilson
+(Christopher North), revised by William Blackwood, but that the article
+on Keats was due to Lockhart.
+
+Few literary questions of the last three-quarters of a century have been
+regarded from more absolutely different points of view than the
+problem--How did Keats receive the attacks made upon his poem and
+himself? From an early date in the controversy three points seem to have
+been very generally agreed upon: (1) That "Endymion" is (as Shelley
+judiciously phrased it), "a poem considerably defective;" (2) that the
+attacks upon it were, in essence, partly true, but so biassed--so keen
+of scent after defects, and so dull of vision for beauties--as to be
+practically unfair and perverse in a marked degree; and (3) that the
+unfairness and perversity _quoad_ Keats were wilful devices of literary
+and especially of political spite _quoad_ a knot of writers among whom
+Leigh Hunt was the central figure. The question remains--In what spirit
+did Keats meet his critics? Was he greatly distressed, or defiant and
+retaliatory, or substantially indifferent?
+
+Among the documents of Keats's life I find few records strictly
+contemporary with the events themselves, serving to settle this point.
+When the abuse of Z against Hunt began, Keats was indignant and
+combative. He said in a letter which may belong to October 1817--
+
+   "There has been a flaming attack upon Hunt in the Edinburgh
+   magazine.... There has been but one number published--that on
+   Hunt, to which they have prefixed a motto by one Cornelius Webb,
+   'Poetaster,' who unfortunately was one of our party occasionally
+   at Hampstead, and took it into his head to write the following
+   (something about)--
+
+      'We'll talk on Wordsworth, Byron,
+      A theme we never tire on,'
+
+   and so forth till he came to Hunt and Keats. In the motto they
+   have put 'Hunt and Keats' in large letters. I have no doubt that
+   the second number was intended for me, but have hopes of its
+   non-appearance.... I don't mind the thing much; but, if he should
+   go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must
+   infallibly call him to an account, if he be a human being, and
+   appears in squares and theatres where we might 'possibly meet.' I
+   don't relish his abuse."
+
+It is worth observing also that, in a paper "On Kean as Richard Duke of
+York" which Keats published on December 28, 1817, he wrote: "The English
+people do not care one fig about Shakespeare, only as he flatters their
+pride and their prejudices;... it is our firm opinion." If he thought
+that English indifference to Shakespeare was of this degree of density,
+he must surely have been prepared for a considerable amount of apathy in
+relation to any poem by John Keats.
+
+On October 9, 1818, just after the spiteful notices of himself in
+_Blackwood_ and _The Quarterly_ had appeared, and had been replied to in
+_The Morning Chronicle_ by two correspondents signing J. S. and R. B.,
+Keats wrote as follows to his publisher Mr. Hessey; and to treat the
+affair in a more self-possessed, measured, and dignified spirit, would
+not have been possible:--
+
+   "You are very good in sending me the letters from _The
+   Chronicle_, and I am very bad in not acknowledging such a
+   kindness sooner; pray forgive me. It has so chanced that I have
+   had that paper every day. I have seen to-day's. I cannot but feel
+   indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the
+   rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and
+   weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man
+   whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on
+   his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain
+   without comparison beyond what _Blackwood_ or _The Quarterly_
+   could possibly inflict; and also, when I feel I am right, no
+   external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary
+   reperception and ratification of what is fine. J. S. is perfectly
+   right in regard to the 'slipshod "Endymion."'[15] That it is so
+   is no fault of mine. No; though it may sound a little
+   paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it by myself.
+   Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that
+   view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not
+   have been written, for it is not in my nature to fumble. I will
+   write independently. I have written independently, _without
+   judgment_: I may write independently, and _with judgment_,
+   hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation
+   in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
+   sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must
+   create itself. In 'Endymion' I leaped headlong into the sea, and
+   thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the
+   quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green
+   shore and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable
+   advice. I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail
+   than not be among the greatest. But I am nigh getting into a
+   rant; so, with remembrances to Taylor and Woodhouse, &c., I am
+   yours very sincerely,
+
+      "John Keats."
+
+
+
+This letter, equally moderate and wide-reaching, proves conclusively
+that Keats, at the time when he wrote it, treated depreciatory criticism
+in exactly the right spirit; acknowledging that it was not without a
+certain _raison d'etre_, but affirming that he could for himself see
+much further and much deeper in the same direction, and in others as
+well. On October 29, 1818, he wrote to his brother George:--
+
+   "Reynolds... persuades me to publish my 'Pot of Basil' as an
+   answer to the attack made on me in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and
+   _The Quarterly Review_.... I think I shall be among the English
+   poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest, the
+   attempt to crush me in _The Quarterly_ has only brought me more
+   into notice, and it is a common expression among book-men, 'I
+   wonder _The Quarterly_ should cut its own throat.' It does me not
+   the least harm in society to make me appear little and
+   ridiculous. I know when a man is superior to me, and give him all
+   due respect; he will be the last to laugh at me; and as for the
+   rest, I feel that I make an impression upon them which ensures me
+   personal respect while I am in sight, whatever they may say when
+   my back is turned.... The only thing that can ever affect me
+   personally for more than one short passing day is any doubt about
+   my powers for poetry. I seldom have any; and I look with hope to
+   the nighing time when I shall have none."
+
+Towards December 1818 he wrote in a similarly contented strain to George
+Keats and his wife: "You will be glad to hear that Gifford's attack upon
+me has done me service; it has got my book among several _sets_." The
+same letter mentions a sonnet, and a bank-note for L25 received from an
+unknown admirer. However, the next letter to the same correspondents,
+February 19, 1819, clearly attests some annoyance.
+
+   "My poem has not at all succeeded.... The reviewers have
+   enervated men's minds, and made them indolent; few think for
+   themselves. These reviews are getting more and more powerful,
+   especially _The Quarterly_. They are like a superstition which,
+   the more it prostrates the crowd and the longer it continues, the
+   more it becomes powerful, just in proportion to their increasing
+   weakness. I was in hopes that, as people saw (as they must do
+   now) all the trickery and iniquity of these plagues, they would
+   scout them. But no; they are like the spectators at the
+   Westminster cockpit; they like the battle, and do not care who
+   wins or who loses.... I have been at different times turning it
+   in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a
+   physician.... It is not worse than writing poems, and hanging
+   them up to be fly-blown in the Review shambles."
+
+We find in Keats's letters nothing further about the criticisms; but,
+when he replied in August 1820 to Shelley's first invitation to Italy,
+he referred to "Endymion" itself: "I am glad you take any pleasure in my
+poor poem, which I would willingly take the trouble to unwrite if
+possible, did I care so much as I have done about reputation." We must
+also take into account the publishers' advertisement (not Keats's own)
+to the "Lamia" volume, saying of "Hyperion"--"The poem was intended to
+have been of equal length with 'Endymion,' but the reception given to
+that work discouraged the author from proceeding." It can scarcely be
+supposed that the publishers printed this without Keats's express
+sanction; yet he never assigned elsewhere any similar reason for
+discontinuing "Hyperion," nor was "Hyperion" open to exception on any
+such grounds as had been urged against "Endymion."
+
+The earliest written reference which I can trace to any serious
+despondency of Keats consequent upon the attacks of reviewers (if we
+except a less strongly worded statement by Leigh Hunt, to be quoted
+further on) is in a letter which Shelley wrote, but did not eventually
+send, to the editor of the _Quarterly Review_. It was written after
+Shelley had seen the "Lamia" volume, and can hardly, I suppose, date
+earlier than October 1820, two full years after the publication of the
+_Quarterly_ (and also the _Blackwood_) tirades against "Endymion."
+Shelley adverts, with great reserve of tone, to the _Quarterly_
+critique, and then proceeds--
+
+   "Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this
+   review, which I am persuaded was not written with any intention
+   of producing the effect (to which it has at least greatly
+   contributed) of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease
+   from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. The
+   first effects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and
+   it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from
+   effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at
+   length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and
+   the usual process of consumption appears to have begun."
+
+The informants of Shelley with regard to Keats's acute feelings and
+distress were (it is stated) the Gisbornes, and possibly Leigh Hunt may
+have confirmed them in some measure; but the Gisbornes knew nothing
+directly of what had been taking place in England in or about the autumn
+of 1818, and that which Hunt published regarding Keats is far from
+corroborating so extreme a view of the facts. Later on Shelley received
+from Mr. Gisborne a letter written by Colonel Finch, the date of which
+would perhaps be in May 1821 (three months after the death of Keats).
+This letter appears to have been one of his principal incentives for the
+indignation expressed in the preface to "Adonais," but not in the poem
+itself, which had been completed before Shelley saw the letter; and it
+is remarkable that Colonel Finch's expressions, when one scrutinizes
+them, do not really say anything about mental anguish caused to Keats by
+any review, but only by ill-treatment of a different kind--seemingly
+that of his brother George and others, as previously detailed. The
+following is the only relevant passage: "He left his native shores by
+sea in a merchant vessel for Naples, where he arrived, having received
+no benefit during the passage, and brooding over the most melancholy and
+mortifying reflections, and nursing a deeply-rooted disgust to life and
+to the world, owing to having been infamously treated by the very
+persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe." Shelley
+however put into print in the preface to "Adonais" the same view of the
+blighting of Keats's life by the _Quarterly_ critique (he seems to have
+known nothing of the _Blackwood_ scurrility), which had appeared in his
+undespatched letter to the editor of the _Quarterly_--
+
+   "The savage criticism on his 'Endymion' which appeared in _The
+   Quarterly Review_ produced the most violent effect on his
+   susceptible mind. The agitation thus originated ended in the
+   rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs. A rapid consumption
+   ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid
+   critics of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to
+   heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.... Miserable man! you,
+   one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest
+   specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor shall it be your excuse
+   that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers but used
+   none."
+
+Thus far we have found no strong evidence (only assertions) that Keats
+took greatly to heart the attacks upon him, whether in the _Quarterly_
+or in _Blackwood_. Shelley seems to be the principal authority, and
+Shelley, unless founding upon some adequate information, is next to no
+authority at all. He had left England in March 1818, five months before
+the earlier--printed in August--of these spiteful articles. Were there
+nothing further, we should be more than well pleased to rally to the
+opinion of Lord Houghton, who came to the conclusion that the idea of
+Keats's extreme sensitiveness to criticism was a positive delusion--that
+he paid little heed to it, and pursued his own course much as if no
+reviewer had tried to be provoking. But there is, in fact, a direct
+witness of high importance--Haydon. Haydon knew Keats very intimately,
+and saw a great deal of him; he admired and loved him, and had a
+vigorous, discerning insight into character and habit of mind, such as
+makes his observations about all sorts of men substantial testimony and
+first-rate reading. He took forcible views of many things, and sometimes
+exaggerated views: but, when he attributed to Keats a particular mood of
+feeling, I should find it very difficult to think that he was either
+unfairly biassed or widely mistaken. In his reminiscences proper to the
+year 1817-18 occurs the following passage:--
+
+   "The assaults on Hunt in _Blackwood_ at this time, under the
+   signature of Z, were incessant. Who Z was nobody knew, but I
+   myself strongly suspect him to have been Terry the actor. Leigh
+   Hunt had exasperated Terry by neglecting to notice his theatrical
+   efforts. Terry was a friend of Sir Walter's, shared keenly his
+   political hatreds, and was also most intimate with the Blackwood
+   party, which had begun a course of attacks on all who showed the
+   least liberalism of thinking, or who were praised by or known to
+   _The Examiner_. Hunt had addressed a sonnet to me. This was
+   enough: we were taken to be of the same clique of rebels,
+   rascals, and reformers, who were supposed to support that
+   production of so much power and talent. On Keats the effect was
+   melancholy. He became morbid and silent; would call and sit
+   whilst I was painting, for hours, without speaking a word."
+
+This counts for something--not very much. But another passage forming an
+entry in Haydon's diary, written on March 29, 1821, perhaps as soon as
+he had heard of Keats's death, carries the matter much further--
+
+   "He began life full of hopes, fiery, impetuous, and ungovernable,
+   expecting the world to fall at once beneath his powers. Poor
+   fellow! his genius had no sooner begun to bud than hatred and
+   malice spat their poison on its leaves, and, sensitive and young,
+   it shrivelled beneath their effusions. Unable to bear the sneers
+   of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength of mind
+   enough to buckle himself together like a porcupine and present
+   nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he began to despond, and
+   flew to dissipation as a relief, which, after a temporary
+   elevation of spirits, plunged him into deeper despondency than
+   ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, and (to show what a
+   man does to gratify his appetites when once they get the better
+   of him) once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could
+   reach with cayenne pepper in order to appreciate the 'delicious
+   coldness[16] of claret in all its glory'--his own expression."
+
+Immediately afterwards, April 21, 1821, Haydon wrote a letter to Miss
+Mitford, repeating, with some verbal variations, what is said above, and
+adding several other particulars concerning Keats. The opening phrase
+runs thus: "Keats was a victim to personal abuse, and want of nerve to
+bear it. Ought he to have sunk in that way because a few quizzers told
+him that he was an apothecary's apprentice?" And further on--"I
+remonstrated on his absurd dissipation, but to no purpose." The reader
+will observe that this dissipation, six weeks of insobriety, is alleged
+to have occurred after Keats "began to despond." The precise time when
+he began to despond is not defined, but we may suppose it to have been
+in the late autumn of 1818. If so, it was much about the same period
+when he first made Miss Brawne's acquaintance.
+
+It is true that Mr. Cowden Clarke, when he published certain
+"Recollections" in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ in 1874, strongly
+contested these statements of Haydon's; he disbelieved the cayenne
+pepper and the dissipation, and had "never perceived in Keats even a
+tendency to imprudent indulgence." The "Recollections" were afterwards
+reproduced as a volume, and in the volume the confutation of Haydon
+disappeared; whether because Clarke had eventually changed his opinion,
+or for what other reason, I am unable to say. Anyhow, Haydon's evidence
+remains; it relates to a period of Keats's life when Haydon no doubt saw
+him much oftener than Clarke did, and we must observe that he refers to
+"Keats's own expression" as to the claret ensuing after the cayenne
+pepper, and affirms that he himself remonstrated in vain against the
+"dissipation," which means apparently excess in drinking alone.
+
+To advert to what Lord Byron wrote about Keats as having been killed by
+_The Quarterly Review_ is hardly worth while. His first reference to the
+subject is in a letter to Mr. Murray (publisher of _The Quarterly_)
+dated April 26, 1821. In this he expressly names Shelley as his
+informant, and with Shelley as an authority for the allegation I have
+already dealt.
+
+There are two writings of Leigh Hunt in which the question of Keats and
+his critics is touched upon. The first is the review, August 1820, of
+the "Lamia" volume. In speaking of the "Ode to a Nightingale" he says--
+
+   "The poem will be the more striking to the reader when he
+   understands, what we take a friend's liberty in telling him, that
+   the author's powerful mind has for some time past been inhabiting
+   a sickened and shaken body; and that in the meanwhile it has had
+   to contend with feelings that make a fine nature ache for its
+   species, even when it would disdain to do so for itself--we mean
+   critical malignity, that unhappy envy which would wreak its own
+   tortures upon others, especially upon those that really feel for
+   it already."
+
+Hunt's posthumous Memoir of Keats was first published in 1828. He refers
+to the attack in _Blackwood_ upon himself and upon Keats, and says: "I
+little suspected, as I did afterwards, that the hunters had struck him;
+that a delicate organization, which already anticipated a premature
+death, made him feel his ambition thwarted by these fellows; and that
+the very impatience of being impatient was resented by him and preyed on
+his mind." Hunt also says regarding Byron--"I told him he was mistaken
+in attributing Keats's death to the critics, though they had perhaps
+hastened and certainly embittered it."
+
+Another item of evidence may be cited. It is from a letter written by
+George Keats to Mr. Dilke in April 1824, and refers to the insolences of
+_Blackwood's Magazine_. George, it will be remembered, was already out
+of England before the articles appeared in _Blackwood_ and in _The
+Quarterly_, and he only saw a little of John Keats at the close of the
+ensuing year, 1819. "_Blackwood's Magazine_ has fallen into my hands. I
+could have walked 100 miles to have dirked him _a l'Americaine_ for his
+cruelly associating John in the Cockney School, and other
+blackguardisms. Such paltry ridicule will have wounded deeper than the
+severest criticisms, particularly as he regarded what is called the
+cockneyism of the coterie with so much disgust. He either knew John
+well, and touched him in the tenderest place purposely; or knew nothing
+of him, and supposed he went all lengths with the set in their festering
+opinions and cockney affectations." And from a later letter dated in
+April 1825: "After all, _Blackwood_ and _The Quarterly_, associated with
+our family disease, consumption, were ministers of death sufficiently
+venomous, cruel, and deadly, to have consigned one of less sensibility
+to a premature grave.... John was the very soul of courage and
+manliness, and as much like the Holy Ghost as 'Johnny Keats.'"
+
+The evidence of latest date on this subject (there is none such in
+Severn's correspondence[17]) is that of Cowden Clarke. In his
+"Recollections," already mentioned, he refers to the attacks upon Keats,
+having his eye, it would seem, rather upon those in _Blackwood_ than in
+_The Quarterly_, and he remarks: "To say that these disgusting
+misrepresentations did not affect the consciousness and self-respect of
+Keats would be to under-rate the sensitiveness of his nature. He did
+feel and resent the insult, but far more the _injustice_ of the
+treatment he had received. They no doubt had injured him in the most
+wanton manner; but, if they or my Lord Byron ever for one moment
+supposed that he was crushed or even cowed in spirit by the treatment he
+had received, never were they more deluded."
+
+I have now given all the evidence at first or second hand which seems to
+be producible on that much-vexed question--Was Keats (to adopt Byron's
+phrase) "snuffed out by an article"? The upshot appears to me to be as
+follows. In his inmost mind Keats was from first to last raised very far
+above that level where the petty gales of review-criticism blow, puffing
+out the canvas of feeble reputations, and fraying that of strong ones.
+Nevertheless he was sensitive to derisive criticism, and more especially
+to personal ridicule, and even (as Haydon records) gave way to his
+feelings of irritation with reckless and culpable self-abandonment. This
+passed off partially, and would have passed off entirely--it has left in
+his letters no trace worth mentioning, and in his poetry no trace at
+all, other than that of executive power braced up to do constantly
+better and yet better; but then, about a year and a half after the
+reviews, supervened his fatal illness (which cannot be reasonably
+supposed to have had its root in any critiques), and all the heartache
+of his unsatisfied love. This last formed the real agony of his waning
+life: it must have been reinforced to some extent by resentment against
+a mode of reviewing which would contribute to the thwarting of his
+poetic ambition, and make him go down into the grave with a "name writ
+in water;" but the reviews themselves counted for very little in the
+last wrestlings of his spirit with death and nothingness. By general
+constitution of mind few men were less adapted than Keats for being
+"snuffed out by an article," or more certain to snuff one out and leave
+all its ill-savour to its scribe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+The first important poem to which Keats sets his hand after finishing
+"Endymion" was "Isabella, or The Pot of Basil." This was completed by
+April 27, 1818, the same month in which "Endymion" was published.
+Hamilton Reynolds had suggested the project of producing a volume of
+tales in verse, founded upon stories in Boccaccio's "Decameron"; some of
+the tales would have been executed by Reynolds himself, who did in fact
+produce on this plan the two poems named collectively "The Garden of
+Florence." As it turned out, however, Keats's tale appeared in a volume
+of his own, 1820, and Reynolds's two came out independently in the
+succeeding year.
+
+"The Eve of St. Agnes" was written in the winter beginning the year
+1819. Then came "Hyperion," of which two versions remain, both
+fragmentary. The first version (begun perhaps as early as October or
+September 1818), the only one which Keats himself published, is in all
+respects by far the better. He was much under the spell of Milton while
+he wrote it; and finally he gave it up in September 1819, declaring that
+"there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He went so far as to
+say in a letter written in the same month that "the 'Paradise Lost,'
+though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language--a northern
+dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and
+intonations." "Hyperion" was included in Keats's third volume at the
+request of the publishers, contrary to the author's own preference. One
+may readily infer that it was to "Hyperion" that he referred when, in
+the preface to "Endymion," he spoke of returning to Grecian mythology
+for another subject: the full length of the poem was to have been ten
+books.
+
+"Lamia" was the last poem of considerable length which Keats brought to
+completion and published. It seems to have been begun towards the summer
+of 1819, and was written with great care, after a heedful study of
+Dryden's methods of composition. On September 18, 1819, Keats wrote: "I
+am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of
+people in some way, give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensations."
+The subject was taken from Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," in which
+there is a reference to the "Life of Apollonius" by Philostratus as the
+original source of the legend.
+
+The volume--entitled "Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other
+Poems"--came out towards the beginning of July 1820, when the malady of
+Keats had reached an advanced and alarming stage. At the beginning of
+September Keats wrote to Brown--"The sale of my book is very slow,
+though it has been very highly rated." I am not aware that there is any
+other record to show how far the publication may ultimately have
+approached towards becoming a commercial success; nor indeed would it be
+altogether easy to define the date at which Keats became a recognized
+and uncontested poet of high rank, and his works a solid property. His
+early death, at the beginning of 1821, must have formed a
+turning-point--not to speak of the favourable notice of "Endymion," and
+subordinately of the "Lamia" volume, which appeared in _The Edinburgh
+Review_, Jeffrey being the critic, in August 1820. Perhaps Jeffrey's
+praise may have facilitated an arrangement which Keats made in September
+1820--the sale of the copyright of "Endymion" to Messrs. Taylor and
+Hessey for L100; no second edition of the poem appeared, however, while
+he was alive. I should presume that, within five or six years after
+Keats's decease, ridicule and rancour were already much in the minority;
+and that, by some such date as 1835 to 1840, they had finally "hidden
+their diminished heads," living only, with too persistent a life, in the
+retributive memory of men.
+
+Some of the shorter poems in the "Lamia" volume must receive brief
+mention here. The "Ode to Psyche" was written in February 1819, and was
+termed by Keats the first poem with which he had taken pains--"I have
+for the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry." "To Autumn," the "Ode
+on Melancholy," and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," succeeded. The "Ode to a
+Nightingale" was composed at Hampstead in the spring of 1819 _after
+breakfast_, forming two or three hours' work: thus we see that the
+nocturnal imagery of the ode was a general or a particular reminiscence,
+not actual to the very moment of composition. This poem and the "Ode on
+a Grecian Urn" were recited by Keats to Haydon in a chaunting tone in
+Kilburn meadows, and were published in the serial entitled "Annals of
+the Fine Arts." The urn thus immortalized may probably be one preserved
+in the garden of Holland House.
+
+With the "Lamia" volume we have come to the close of what Keats
+published during his lifetime. Something remains to be said of other
+writings of his--almost all of them earlier in date than the publication
+of that volume--which remained imprinted or uncollected at the time of
+his death.
+
+In February 1818 Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Shelley, undertook to write a
+sonnet each upon the river Nile. In order of merit, the three sonnets
+are the reverse of what one might have been willing to forecast. I at
+least am clearly of opinion that Hunt's sonnet is the best (though with
+a weak ending), Keats's the second, and Shelley's a decidedly bad third.
+The leading thought in each sonnet is characteristic of its author.
+Keats adheres to the simple natural facts of the case, while Hunt and
+Shelley turn the Nile into a moral or intellectual symbol. Keats says
+essentially that to associate the Nile with ideas of antique desolation
+is but a delusion of ignorance, for this river is really rich and fresh
+like others. Hunt makes the Egyptian stream an emblem of history tending
+towards the progress of the individual and the race; while Shelley reads
+into the Nile a lesson of the good and the evil inhering in knowledge.
+
+"The Eve of St. Mark"--a fragment which very few of Keats's completed
+poems can rival in point of artist-like feeling and writing--belongs to
+the years 1818-9. I find nothing in print to account for his leaving it
+unfinished.
+
+In May 1819 Keats had an idea of inventing a new structure of
+sonnet-rhyme; and he sent to his brother and sister-in-law a sonnet
+composed accordingly, beginning--
+
+    "If by dull rhymes our English must be chained."
+
+He wrote: "I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet-stanza
+than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the
+pouncing rhymes. The other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the
+end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have
+succeeded." Keats's experiment reads agreeably. It comprises five rhymes
+altogether; the first rhyme being repeated thrice at arbitrary
+intervals; and the last rhyme twice in lines twelve and fourteen.
+
+The tragedy of "Otho the Great" was written by Keats (as already
+referred to) in July and August 1819, in co-operation with Armitage
+Brown. The diction of the play is, it would appear, Keats's entirely;
+whereas the invention and development of plot in the first four acts is
+wholly due to Brown. The two friends sat together; Brown described each
+successive scene, and Keats turned it into verse, without troubling his
+head as to the subject-matter for the scene next ensuing. When it came
+to the fifth act, however, Keats inquired what would be the conclusion
+of the play; and, not being satisfied with Brown's project which he
+deemed too humorous and too melodramatic, he both invented and wrote a
+fifth act for himself. He felt sure that "Otho the Great" was "a
+tolerable tragedy," and set his heart upon getting it acted--Kean was
+well inclined to take the principal character, Prince Ludolph; and it
+became his greatest ambition to write fine plays. "Otho" was in fact
+accepted for Drury Lane Theatre, on the offer of Brown, who left Keats's
+authorship in the background; but, as both the writers were impatient of
+delay, Brown, in February 1820, took away the MS., and Covent Garden
+Theatre was thought of instead--without any practical result. As soon as
+"Otho" was finished, Brown suggested King Stephen as the subject of
+another drama; and Keats, without any further collaboration from his
+friend, composed the few scenes of it which remain. "One of my
+ambitions" (writes Keats to Bailey in August 1819), "is to make as great
+a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting."
+
+The ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," than which Keats did nothing more
+thrilling or more perfect, may perhaps have been written in the earlier
+half of 1819; it was published in 1820, in Hunt's _Indicator_ for May
+10th, under the signature "Caviare"; the same signature which was
+adopted for the sonnet, "A dream, after reading Dante's episode of Paolo
+and Francesca." Keats may probably have meant to imply, in some
+bitterness of spirit, that his poems were "caviare to the general." The
+title of this ballad was suggested to Keats by seeing it at the head of
+a translation from Alain Chartier in a copy of Chaucer. As to the
+"Dream" sonnet he wrote in April 1819:--
+
+   "The 5th canto of Dante pleases me more, and more; it is that one
+   in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca. I had passed many
+   days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them I
+   dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the
+   most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life. I floated about
+   the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful
+   figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and
+   in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm.
+   Ever-flowery tree-tops sprang up, and we rested on them,
+   sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind blew us
+   away again. I tried a sonnet on it; there are fourteen lines in
+   it, but nothing of what I felt. Oh that I could dream it every
+   night!"
+
+The last long work which Keats undertook, and he wrote it with extreme
+facility, was "The Cap and Bells; or The Jealousies, a Fairy Tale," in
+the Spenserian stanza. What remains is probably far less than Keats
+intended the tale to amount to, but it is enough to enable us to
+pronounce upon its merits. The poem was begun soon after Keats's first
+attack of blood-spitting in February 1820. It seems singular that under
+such depressing conditions he should have written in so frivolous and
+jaunty a spirit, and provoking that his last long work (the last, that
+is, if we except the recast of "Hyperion") should be about the most
+valueless which he produced, at any date after commencing upon
+"Endymion." This poem has been said to be written in the spirit of
+Ariosto; a statement which, in justice to the brilliant Italian, cannot
+be admitted. It may well be, however, as Lord Houghton suggests, that
+the general notion was suggested by Brown, who had translated the first
+five cantos (not indeed of Ariosto, but) of the "Orlando Innamorato" of
+Bojardo. "The Cap and Bells" appears to be destitute of distinct plan,
+though some sort of satirical allusion to the marital and extra-marital
+exploits of George IV. is traceable in it; meagre and purposeless in
+invention; a poor farrago of pumped-up and straggling jocosity. Perhaps
+a hearty laugh has never been got out of it; although there are points
+here and there at which a faint snigger may be permissible, and the
+concluding portion improves somewhat. Keats seems to have intended to
+publish it under a pseudonym, Lucy Vaughan Lloyd; and Hunt gave, in _The
+Indicator_ of August 23, 1820, some taste of its quality, possibly
+meaning to print more of it anon.
+
+The last verses which Keats ever wrote formed the sonnet here ensuing.
+He composed this late in September 1820, after landing on the
+Dorsetshire coast, probably near Lulworth, and returning to the ship
+which bore him to his doom in Italy; and he wrote it down on a blank
+page in Shakespeare's Poems, facing "A Lover's Complaint."
+
+    "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art;
+      Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
+    And watching with eternal lids apart,
+      Like Nature's patient sleepless eremite,
+    The moving waters at their priestlike task
+      Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
+    Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
+      Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:--
+    No, yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
+      Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
+    To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
+      Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;
+    Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
+    And so live ever--or else swoon to death."
+
+Of poetic projects which remained unfulfilled when Keats died we
+hear--leaving out of count the works which he had begun and left
+uncompleted--of only one. During his voyage to Naples he often spoke of
+wishing to write the story of Sabrina, as indicated in Milton's "Comus,"
+connecting it with some points in English history and character.
+
+In prose--apart from his letters, which are noticeably various in mood,
+matter, and manner, and contain many admirable things--Keats wrote
+extremely little. In a weekly paper with which Reynolds was connected,
+_The Champion_, December 1817, he published two articles on "Kean as a
+Shakespearean Actor:" they are not remarkable. With the above-named
+articles are now associated some "Notes on Shakespeare," not written
+with a view to publication; these appear to me somewhat strained and
+bloated. There are also some "Notes on Milton's 'Paradise Lost.'" On
+September 22, 1819, Keats addressed to Mr. Dilke a letter, which however
+does not appear to have been actually sent off. As it shows a definite
+intention of writing in prose for regular publication and for an income,
+a few sentences are worth quoting.
+
+   "It concerns a resolution I have taken to endeavour to acquire
+   something by temporary writing in periodical works. You must
+   agree with me how unwise it is to keep feeding upon hopes which,
+   depending so much on the state of temper and imagination, appear
+   gloomy or bright, near or afar off, just as it happens.... You
+   may say I want tact; that is easily acquired.... I should, a year
+   or two ago, have spoken my mind on every subject with the utmost
+   simplicity. I hope I have learned a little better, and am
+   confident I shall be able to cheat as well as any literary Jew of
+   the market, and shine up an article on anything without much
+   knowledge of the subject--aye, like an orange. I would willingly
+   have recourse to other means. I cannot; I am fit for nothing but
+   literature.... Notwithstanding my 'aristocratic' temper, I cannot
+   help being very much pleased with the present public proceedings.
+   I hope sincerely I shall be able to put a mite of help to the
+   liberal side of the question before I die."
+
+On the following day Keats wrote to Brown on the same subject--
+
+   "I will write on the liberal side of the question for whoever
+   will pay me. I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I
+   purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for
+   a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper.... I shall
+   apply to Hazlitt, who knows the market as well as any one, for
+   something to bring me in a few pounds as soon as possible. I
+   shall not suffer my pride to hinder me. The whisper may go
+   round--I shall not hear it. If I can get an article in _The
+   Edinburgh_, I will. One must not be delicate."
+
+In pursuance of this plan, Keats did, for a few days in October, take a
+lodging in Westminster. He then reverted to Hampstead, and finally the
+scheme came to nothing, principally perhaps because his fatal illness
+began, and everything had to be given up which was not directly
+controlled by considerations of health.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Having now gone through the narrative of Keats's life and death, and
+also the narrative of his literary work, we have before us the more
+delicate and exacting task of forming some judgment of both,--to
+estimate his character, and appraise his writings. But first I pause a
+brief while for the purpose of relating a little that took place after
+his decease, and mentioning a few particulars regarding his surviving
+relatives and friends.
+
+Keats was buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome amid the overgrown
+ruins of the Honorian walls, surmounted by the pyramid-tomb of Caius
+Cestius, a Tribune of the People whose monument has long survived his
+fame: this used to be traditionally called the Tomb of Remus. There were
+but few graves on the spot when Keats was laid there. In recent years
+the portion of the cemetery where he reposes has been cut off by a
+fortification. A little altar-tomb was set up for him, sculptured with a
+Greek lyre, and inscribed with his name and his own epitaph, "Here lies
+one whose name was writ in water." Severn attended affectionately to all
+this, and the whole was completed about two years after the poet's
+death. In 1875 General Sir Vincent Eyre and some other Englishmen and
+Americans repaired the stone, and placed on an adjacent wall a medallion
+portrait of Keats, presented by its sculptor, Mr. Warrington Wood.
+Severn, who died in August 1879, having been British Consul in Rome for
+many years, now lies in close proximity to his friend. Shelley's remains
+are interred hard by, but in the new cemetery,--not the old one, which
+received the bones of Keats. As early as 1836 Severn was able to attest
+that his connection with the poet had been of benefit to his own
+professional career. The friend and death-bed companion of Keats had by
+that time become a personage, apart from the merit, be it greater or
+less, of his performances as a painter.
+
+Severn's letters addressed to Armitage Brown show that it was expected
+that Brown should write a Life of Keats. The non-appearance of any such
+work was made a matter of remonstrance in 1834; and at one time George
+Keats, though conscious of not being quite the right man for the
+purpose, thought of supplying the deficiency. Severn also had had a
+similar idea. Brown was in Italy in 1832, and there he met Mr. Richard
+Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton. He returned to England some
+three years later, and was about to produce the desired Life when a new
+project entered his mind, and he emigrated to New Zealand. He then
+handed over to Mr. Milnes all his collections of Keats's writings, and
+the biographical notices which he had compiled, and these furnished a
+substantive basis for Mr. Milnes's work published in 1848--a work
+written with abundant sympathy, invaluable at its own date and ever
+since to all lovers of the poet's writings. Brown died towards 1842.
+
+George Keats voluntarily paid all the debts left by his brother. These
+have not been precisely detailed: but it appears that Messrs. Taylor and
+Hessey had made an advance of L150, and there must have been something
+not inconsiderable due to Brown, and probably also to Dilke, who assured
+George that John Keats had known nothing of direct want of either money
+or friends. George, who has been described as "the most manly and
+self-possessed of men," settled at Louisville, Kentucky, where he became
+a prominent citizen, and left a family creditably established. He died
+in 1841, and his widow remarried with a Mr. Jeffrey. In one of his
+letters addressed to his sister, April 1824, there is a pleasant little
+critique of "Don Quixote." It gives one so prepossessing an idea of its
+writer that I am tempted to extract it:--
+
+   "Your face is decidedly not Spanish, but English all over. If I
+   fancied you to resemble Don Quixote, I should fancy a handsome,
+   intelligent, melancholy countenance, with something wild but
+   benevolent about the eyes, a lofty forehead but not very broad,
+   with finely-arched eyebrows, denoting candour and generosity. He
+   is an immense favourite of mine; and I cannot help feeling angry
+   with the great Cervantes for bringing him into situations where
+   he is the laughing-stock of minds so inferior to his own. It is
+   evident he was a great favourite of the author, and it is evident
+   _he_ was united with the chivalric spirits he so wittily
+   ridicules. He is made to speak as much sound sense, elevated
+   morality, and true piety, as any divine who ever wrote. If I were
+   to meet such a man, I should almost hate myself for laughing at
+   his eccentricities."
+
+The opening reference here to a Spanish face must relate to the fact
+that Miss Fanny Keats, who in girlhood had been the recipient of many
+affectionate and attentive letters from her brother John, was engaged
+to, and eventually married, a Spanish gentleman, Senhor Llanos, author
+of "Don Esteban," "Sandoval the Freemason," and other books illustrating
+the modern history of his country. He was a Liberal, and in the time of
+the Spanish Republic represented his Government at the Court of Rome.
+Mrs. Llanos is still living at a very advanced age. A few years ago a
+pension on the Civil List was conferred upon her, in national
+recognition of what is due to the sister of John Keats. There is a
+pathetic reference to her appearance at the close of the very last
+letter which he wrote: "My sister, who walks about my imagination like a
+ghost, she is so like Tom."
+
+Miss Brawne married a Mr. Lindon some years after the death of Keats. I
+do not know how many years, but it must have been later than June 1825.
+She died in 1865.
+
+The sincerity or otherwise of Leigh Hunt as a personal, and more
+especially a literary, friend of Keats, has been a good deal canvassed
+of late. It has been said that he showed little staunchness in
+championing the cause of Keats at the time--towards the close of
+1818--when detraction was most rampant, and when support from a man
+occupying the position of editor of _The Examiner_ would have been most
+serviceable. But one must not hurry to assume that Hunt was seriously in
+the wrong, whether we regard the question as one of individual
+friendship or of literary policy. The attacks upon Keats were in great
+measure flank-attacks upon Hunt himself. Keats was abused on the ground
+that he wrote bad poetry through imitating Hunt's bad poetry--that he
+out-Heroded Herod, or out-Hunted Hunt. Obviously it was a delicate task
+which would have lain before the elder poet: for any direct defence of
+Keats must have been conducted on the thesis either that the faults were
+not there (when indeed they _were_ there to a large extent); or else
+that the faults were in fact beauties, an allegation which would only
+have riveted the charge that they were Leigh-Huntish mannerisms; or
+finally that they were not due to Hunt's influence or example, but were
+proper to Keats in person, and this would have been more in the nature
+of censure than of vindication. A defence on general grounds, upholding
+the poems without any discussion of the particular faults alleged, would
+also, as coming from Hunt, have been a difficult thing to manage: it
+would rather have inflamed than abated the rancour of the enemy.
+Besides, we must remember that Keats's first volume, though very warmly
+accepted and praised by Hunt, was really but beginner's work, imperfect
+in the last degree; while the second volume, "Endymion," was viewed by
+Hunt as a hazardous and immature attempt notwithstanding its many
+beauties, and incapable of being upheld beyond a certain limit. There
+was not at that date any third volume to be put forward in proof of
+faculty, or in arrest of judgment. Mr. Forman, than whom no man looks
+with more patience into the evidence on a question such as this of
+Hunt's friendship, or is more likely to pronounce a sound judgment upon
+it, wholly scouts the accusation; and I am quite content to range myself
+on the same side as Mr. Forman.
+
+Of Keats's friends in general it may be said that the one whom he
+respected very highly in point of character was Bailey: the one who had
+a degree of genius fully worthy, whatever its limitations and defects,
+of communing with his own, was Haydon. Shelley can hardly be reckoned
+among his friends, though very willing and even earnest to be such, both
+in life and after death. Keats held visibly aloof from Shelley, more
+perhaps on the ground of his being a man of some family and position
+than from any other motive. Shortly after the publication of "The Revolt
+of Islam," Keats's rather naive expression was, "Poor Shelley, I think
+he has his quota of good qualities." Neither did he show any warm or
+frank admiration of Shelley's poetry. On receiving a copy of "The
+Cenci," he urged its author to "curb his magnanimity, and be more of an
+artist, and load every rift of his subject with ore." We should not
+ascribe this to any mean-spirited jealousy, but to that sense, which
+grew to a great degree of intensity in Keats, that the art of
+composition and execution is of paramount importance in poetry, and must
+supersede all considerations of abstract or proselytizing intention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+I must next proceed to offer some account of Keats's person, character,
+and turn of mind.
+
+As I have already said, Keats was a very small man, barely more than
+five feet in height. He was called "Little Keats" by his surgical
+fellow-students. Archdeacon Bailey has left a good description of him in
+brief:--
+
+   "There was in the character of his countenance the femineity
+   which Coleridge thought to be the mental constitution of true
+   genius. His hair was beautiful, and, if you placed your hand upon
+   his head, the curls fell round it like a rich plumage. I do not
+   particularly remember the thickness of the upper lip so generally
+   described; but the mouth was too wide, and out of harmony with
+   the rest of his face, which had a peculiar sweetness of
+   expression, with a character of mature thought, and an almost
+   painful sense of suffering."
+
+Leigh Hunt should also be heard:--
+
+   "His lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but
+   neat and well-turned. His shoulders were very broad for his
+   size. He had a face in which energy and sensibility were
+   remarkably mixed up--an eager power checked and made impatient by
+   ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately
+   alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth,
+   which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His
+   face was rather long than otherwise. The upper lip projected a
+   little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the
+   eyes mellow and glowing--large, dark, and sensitive. At the
+   recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would
+   suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. In this there was
+   ill-health as well as imagination, for he did not like these
+   betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral
+   courage. His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in
+   natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists,
+   being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity which he had
+   in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on.
+   Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his
+   upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which
+   was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a
+   man of fifty."
+
+Cowden Clarke confirms Hunt in stating that Keats's hair was brown, and
+he assigns the same colour, or dark hazel, to his eyes: confuting the
+"auburn" and "blue" of which Mrs. Procter had spoken. It is rather
+remarkable that, while Hunt speaks of the projection of the _upper_
+lip--a detail which is fully verified in a charcoal drawing by
+Severn--Lord Houghton observes upon "the undue prominence of the
+_lower_ lip," which point I cannot trace clearly in any one of the
+portraits. Keats himself, in one of his love-letters (August 1819),
+says, "I do not think myself a fright." According to Clarke, John Keats
+was the only one of the family who resembled the father in person and
+feature, while the other three resembled the mother. George Keats does
+not wholly coincide in this, for he says, "My mother resembled John very
+much in the face;" at the same time he would not have been qualified to
+deny a likeness to the father, of whom he remembered nothing except that
+he had dark hair. The lady who saw Keats's hair and eyes of the wrong
+colour saw at any rate his face to some effect, having left it recorded
+thus: "His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and
+brightness; it had an expression as if he had been looking on some
+glorious sight." In a like spirit, Haydon speaks of Keats as having "an
+eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess
+who saw visions." His voice was deep and grave.
+
+Let us now turn to the portraits, which are as numerous and as good as
+could fairly be expected under the circumstances.
+
+The earliest in date, and certainly one of the best from an art point of
+view, is a sketch in profile done by Haydon preparatory to introducing
+Keats's head into the picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. The
+sketch dates in November 1816, just after Keats had come of age. The
+picture is in Philadelphia, and I cannot speak of the head as it appears
+there. In the sketch we see abundant wavy hair; a forehead and nose
+sloping forward to the nasal tip in a nearly uniform curve; a dark,
+set, speaking eye; a mouth tolerably well moulded, the upper lip being
+fully long enough, and noticeably overhanging the lower lip, upon which
+the chin--large, full, and rounded--closely impinges. The whole face
+partakes of the Raphaelesque cast of physiognomy. At some time, which
+may have been the autumn of 1817, some one, most probably Haydon, took a
+mask of the face of Keats. In respect of actual form, this is
+necessarily the final test of what the poet was like--but masks are
+often only partially true to the _impression_ of a face. This mask
+confirms Haydon's sketch markedly; allowing only for the points that
+Haydon has rather emphasized the length of the nose, and attenuated (so
+far as one can judge from a profile) its thickness, and has given very
+much more of the overhanging of the upper lip--but this last would, by
+the very conditions of mask-taking, be there reduced to a minimum. On
+the whole we may say that, after considering reciprocally Haydon's
+sketch and the mask, we know very adequately what Keats's face was--he
+had ample reason for acquitting himself of being "a fright." We come
+still closer to a firm conclusion upon taking into account, along with
+these two records, two of the portraits left to us by Severn. One is a
+miniature, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819, and which
+we may surmise to have been painted in that year, or late in 1818: the
+well-known likeness which represents Keats in three-quarters face,
+looking earnestly forwards, and resting his chin upon his left hand.
+Here the eyes are larger than in Haydon's sketch, and the upper lip
+shorter, while the forehead seems straighter; but, as to those matters
+of lip and forehead, a profile tells the plainer tale. The whole aspect
+of the face is not greatly unlike Byron's. There is also the earlier
+charcoal drawing by Severn, the best of all for enabling us to judge of
+the beautiful rippling long hair; it is a profile, and extremely like
+Haydon's profile, except for the greater straightness of the forehead,
+and the decided smallness of the chin, points on which the mask shows
+conclusively that Haydon was in the right. Most touching of all as a
+reminiscence is the Indian-ink drawing which Severn made of his dying
+friend on "28 Jan^y. 1821, 3 o'clock morn^g.," as he lay asleep, with
+the death-damp on his dark hair. It exhibits the attenuation of disease,
+but without absolute painfulness, and produces, fully as much as any of
+the other portraits, the impression of a fine and distinguished mould of
+face. Severn left yet other likenesses of Keats--posthumous, and of
+inferior interest. There is moreover a chalk drawing by the painter
+Hilton, who used to meet Keats at the house of the publisher Mr. Taylor.
+It has an artificial air, and conveys a notion of the general character
+of the face different from the other records, but may assist us towards
+estimating what Keats was like about, or very soon before, the
+commencement of his fatal illness. Lastly, though the list of extant
+portraits is not even thus exhausted, I mention the medallion by
+Girometti, which is to all appearance a posthumous performance. Its
+lines correspond pretty well with the profile sketch by Haydon, while in
+character it assimilates more to Hilton's drawing. To me it seems of
+very little importance as a document, but Hamilton Reynolds thought it
+the best likeness of all. Mrs. Llanos was in favour of the mask; Mr.
+Cowden Clarke, of the crayon drawing by Severn--which, indeed, conveys a
+bright impression of eager, youthful impulsiveness.
+
+The character of Keats appears to me not a very easy one to expound. To
+begin with, it stands to reason that a man who died at the age of
+twenty-five can only have half evolved and evinced himself; there must
+have been a great deal which time and trial, had these been granted,
+would have developed, but which untimely fate left to conjecture. We are
+thus compelled to judge of an apprentice in the severe school of life as
+if he had gone through its full course; many things about him may, in
+their real nature, have been fleeting and tentative, which to us pass
+for final and established. This difficulty has to be allowed for, but
+cannot be got over; the only Keats with whom we have to deal is the
+Keats who had not completed his twenty-sixth year. For him, as for other
+youths, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had budded apace; the
+fruit remained for ever unmatured. Another gravely deflecting force in
+our estimation of the character of Keats consists in the fact that what
+we really care for in him is his poetry. We admire his poetry, and
+condole his inequitable treatment, and his hard and premature fate, and
+are disposed to see his life in the light of his verse and his
+sufferings. Hence arises a facile and perhaps vapid enthusiasm, with an
+inclination to praise through thick and thin, or to ignore such points
+as may not be susceptible of praise. The sympathetic biographer is a
+very pleasant fellow; but the truthful biographer also has something to
+say for himself in the long run. I aspire to the part of the truthful
+biographer, duly sympathetic.
+
+We have already seen that Keats in early childhood was vehement and
+ungovernable. His sensibility displayed itself in the strongest
+contrasts, and he would be convulsed with laughter or with tears,
+rapidly interchanged. At school his skill in bodily exercises, and his
+marked generosity of spirit, made him very popular--his comrades
+surmising that he would turn out superior in some active career, such as
+soldiering. To be rated as a good boy was not his ambition; but, as
+previously stated, he settled down into a very attentive scholar. Later
+on, his friend Bailey liked "the simplicity of his character," and his
+winning affectionate manner. "Simplicity" means, I suppose, frankness or
+straightforwardness; for I cannot see that Keats's character was at any
+time particularly simple--I should rather say that it was complex and
+many-sided.
+
+The one great craving of Keats, before the love for Miss Brawne
+engrossed him, was the desire to become an excellent poet; to do great
+things in poesy, and leave a name among the immortals. At times he was
+conscious of some presumption in this craving; but mostly it seems to
+have held such plenary possession of him that the question of
+presumption or otherwise hardly arose. Whether he felt very strongly
+upon any matters of intellectual or general concern other than poetic
+ones may admit of some doubt. In Book II. of "Endymion" he openly
+proclaims that poetic love-making is the one thing needful to the
+susceptible mind; the Athenian admiral and his auspicious owl, the
+Indian expeditions of Alexander, Ulysses and the Cyclops, the death-day
+of empires, are as nothing to Juliet's passion, Hero's tears, Imogen's
+swoon, and Pastorella in the bandits' den. He does indeed, in one of his
+letters (April 1818), aver "I would jump down AEtna for any great public
+good"; but it may perhaps be permissible to think that he would at all
+events have postponed the Empedoclean feat until he had written and
+ensured the publishing of some poem upon which he could be content to
+stake his claim to permanent poetic renown. His tension of thought was
+great. In a letter which he addressed in May 1817 to Leigh Hunt there is
+a little passage which may be worth quoting here, along with Mr. Dilke's
+comment upon it:
+
+   "I went to the Isle of Wight. Thought so much about poetry so
+   long together that I could not get to sleep at night; and
+   moreover, I know not how it was, I could not get wholesome food.
+   By this means, in a week or so, I became not over-capable in my
+   upper stories, and set off pell-mell for Margate, at least a
+   hundred and fifty miles, because forsooth I fancied that I should
+   like my old lodging here, and could continue to do without trees.
+   Another thing, I was too much in solitude, and consequently was
+   obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only
+   resource."
+
+This passage Mr. Dilke considered "an exact picture of the man's mind
+and character," adding: "He could at any time have 'thought himself
+out,' mind and body. Thought was intense with him, and seemed at times
+to assume a reality that influenced his conduct, and, I have no doubt,
+helped to wear him out."
+
+Whether Keats should be regarded as a young man tolerably regular in his
+mode of life, or manifestly tending to the irregular, is a question not
+entirely clear. We have seen something of a sexual misadventure in
+Oxford, and of six weeks of hard drinking, attested by Haydon; and it
+should be added that two or three of Keats's minor poems have a certain
+unmistakable twang of erotic laxity. Lord Houghton thought that in the
+winter of 1817-18 the poet had indulged somewhat "in that dissipation
+which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent
+temperaments;" but he held that it all amounted to no more than "a
+little too much rollicking" (Keats's own phrase), and he would not allow
+that either drinking or gaming had proceeded to any serious extent,
+"for, in his letters to his brothers, he speaks of having drunk too much
+as a rare piece of joviality, and of having won L10 at cards as a great
+hit." Medical students, it may be added, are not, as a rule, conspicuous
+for mortifying the flesh; Keats, however, according to Mr. Stephens, did
+not indulge in any vice during his term of studentship. He was eminently
+open, as his writings evidence, to impressions of enjoyment; and one may
+not unnaturally suppose that the joys of sense numbered him, no less
+than the average of young men, among their votaries--not indeed among
+their slaves. He had not, I think, any taste for those "manly
+recreations" which consist chiefly in making the lower animals
+uncomfortable, or in putting a quietus to their comforts and discomforts
+along with their lives. I only observe one occasion on which he went
+out with a gun. He then (towards the close of 1818) accompanied Mr.
+Dilke in shooting on Hampstead Heath, and his trophy was a solitary
+tomtit.
+
+As to strength or stability of character, it is rather amusing to find
+Keats picking a hole in Haydon, while Haydon could probe a joint in the
+armour of Keats. In November 1817 Haydon had been playing rather fast
+and loose (so at least it seemed to Keats and to his friend Bailey) with
+a pictorial aspirant named Cripps, and Keats wrote to Bailey in the
+following terms:
+
+   "To a man of your nature such a letter as Haydon's must have been
+   extremely cutting.... As soon as I had known Haydon three days, I
+   had got enough of his character not to have been surprised at
+   such a letter as he has hurt you with. Nor, when I knew it, was
+   it a principle with me to drop his acquaintance, although with
+   you it would have been an imperious feeling.... I must say one
+   thing that has pressed upon me lately, and increased my humility
+   and capability of submission, and that is this truth: _Men of
+   genius_ are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on a
+   mass of neutral intellect; but they _have not any individuality,
+   any determined character_."
+
+The following also, from a letter of January 1818 to the same
+correspondent, relates partly to Haydon:
+
+   "The sure way, Bailey, is first to know a man's faults, and then
+   be passive. If after that he insensibly draws you towards him,
+   then you have no power to break the link."
+
+Haydon's verdict upon Keats is no doubt extremely important. I give here
+the whole entry in his diary, 29th of March 1821, omitting only two
+passages which have been already extracted in their more essential
+context:--
+
+   "Keats, too, is gone! He died at Rome, the 23rd February, aged
+   twenty-five. A genius more purely poetical never existed. In
+   fireside conversation he was weak and inconsistent, but he was in
+   his glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a
+   flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature
+   tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed, his mouth
+   quivered. He was the most unselfish of human creatures; unadapted
+   to this world, he cared not for himself, and put himself to any
+   inconvenience for the sake of his friends. He was haughty, and
+   had a fierce hatred of rank [this corresponds with Hunt's remark,
+   that Keats looked upon a man of birth as his natural enemy], but
+   he had a kind, gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune
+   with any man who wanted it. His classical knowledge was
+   inconsiderable, but he could feel the beauties of the classical
+   writers. He had an exquisite sense of humour, and too refined a
+   notion of female purity to bear the little sweet arts of love
+   with patience. _He had no decision of character_, and, having no
+   object upon which to direct his great powers, was at the mercy of
+   every pretty theory Hunt's ingenuity might start. One day he was
+   full of an epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid
+   impositions on the world. Never for two days did he know his own
+   intentions.... The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and
+   it appeared to me that he began to droop from that hour. I was
+   much attracted to Keats, and he had a fellow-feeling for me. I
+   was angry because he would not bend his great powers to some
+   definite object, and always told him so. Latterly he grew
+   irritated because I would shake my head at his irregularities,
+   and tell him that he would destroy himself.... Poor dear Keats!
+   had nature given you firmness as well as fineness of nerve, you
+   would have been glorious in your maturity as great in your
+   promise. May your kind and gentle spirit be now mingling with
+   those of Shakespeare and Milton, before whose minds you have so
+   often bowed! May you be considered worthy of admission to share
+   their musings in heaven, as you were fit to comprehend their
+   imaginations on earth! Dear Keats, hail and adieu for some six or
+   seven years, and I shall meet you. I have enjoyed Shakespeare
+   more with Keats than with any other human creature."
+
+In writing to Miss Mitford, Haydon added:
+
+   "His ruin was owing to _his want of decision of character, and
+   power of will_, without which genius is a curse."
+
+It will be seen that Haydon's character of Keats is in some respects
+very highly laudatory: he speaks of the poet's unselfishness and
+generosity in terms which may possibly run into excess, but cannot
+assuredly have fallen short. What he remarks as to "irregularities"
+seems to show that these had (at least in Haydon's opinion) taken
+somewhat firm root with Keats, and had not merely come and gone with a
+spurt, as a relief from feelings of depression or mortification; nor can
+we altogether forget the statement that, on the night of February 3,
+1820, which closed with the first attack of blood-spitting, Keats
+"returned home in a state of strange physical excitement--it might have
+appeared to those who did not know him one of fierce intoxication."
+Physical excitement which looks like fierce intoxication, without being
+really anything of the sort, can be but a comparatively rare phaenomenon;
+nor do I suppose that an impending attack of blood-spitting would
+account for such an appearance. Brown, however, was still more positive
+than Lord Houghton in excluding the idea of intoxication on that
+occasion; he even says, "Such a state in him, I knew, was
+impossible"--an assertion which we have to balance against the general
+averments of Haydon. Keats's irritation at the remonstrances which
+Haydon addressed to him upon irregularities, real or assumed, is
+mentioned by the painter without any seeming knowledge of the fact that
+Keats had (as shown by his letter of September 20, 1819, already cited,
+to his brother George) cooled down very greatly in his cordiality to his
+monitor; and he may perhaps have received the remonstrances in a spirit
+of stubbornness, or of apparent irritation, more because he was out of
+humour with Haydon than because he could not confute the allegations,
+had he been so minded. As to the charge of want of decision of
+character, want of power of will, we must try to understand what is the
+exact sense in which Haydon applies these terms. He appears from the
+context to refer more to indefiniteness of literary aim, combined with
+sensitiveness to critical detraction and ridicule, than to anything
+really affecting the basis of a man's character in his general walk of
+life and commerce with the world. A few words on both these aspects of
+the question will not be wasted. We need not, however, recur to the
+allegation of over-sensitiveness to criticism, or of being "snuffed out
+by an article," which has already been sufficiently debated.
+
+Indefiniteness of literary aim must be assessed in relation to a man's
+faculties, and in especial to his age and experience. A beginner is
+naturally indefinite in aim, in the sense that he tries his hand at
+various things, and only after making several experiments does he learn
+which things he can manage well, and which less than well. Keats, in his
+first two volumes, was but a beginner, and a youthful beginner. If they
+show indefiniteness of aim--though indeed they hardly _do_ show that in
+any marked degree--one cannot regard the fact as derogatory to the
+author. With his third volume, he was getting some assurance of the
+direction in which his power lay. It is certainly true that, after
+producing one epic (if such it can be called), "Endymion," and after
+commencing another, "Hyperion," he laid the second aside, for whatever
+reason; partly, it would seem, because the harsh reception of "Endymion"
+discouraged him, and partly because he considered the turn of diction
+too obviously Miltonic; and no doubt, as his mood varied, he must have
+expressed to Haydon very divergent opinions as to the expediency of
+writing epics. But, apart from this special matter, the third volume
+shows no uncertainty or infirmity of purpose. It contains three
+narrative poems--"Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Lamia"--some
+odes, and a few minor lyrics. The very fact that he continued writing
+poetry so persistently, maugre _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly
+Review_, speaks to some decision of character and power of will in
+literary matters; and the immense advance in executive force tells the
+same tale aboundingly. Therefore, while laying great stress upon
+Haydon's view so far as it concerns certain shifting currents of thought
+and of talk, I cannot find that Keats is fairly open to the charge of
+want of decision or of will in the literary relation. Then as to the
+larger question of his character generally, Keats appears to me to have
+been eminently wilful, and somewhat wayward to boot. He had the
+temperament of a man of genius, liable to sudden and sharp impressions,
+and apt to go considerable lengths at the beck of an impulse, or even of
+a caprice. Wilfulness along with waywardness is certainly not quite the
+same thing as "power of will," but it testifies to a will which can
+exert itself steadily if it likes. The very short duration of Keats's
+life, and the painful conjuncture of circumstances which made his last
+year a despairing struggle between a passionate love and an inexorable
+disease, preclude our forming a very distinct opinion of what his power
+of will might naturally have become. If I may venture a surmise, I would
+say that he had within him the stuff of ample determination and
+high-heartedness in any matters upon which he was in earnest, mingled
+however with deficient self-control, and with a perilous facility for
+seeing the seamy side of life.
+
+Lord Houghton gives an attractive picture of Keats at what was probably
+his happiest time, the winter of 1817-18, when "Endymion" was preparing
+for the press. I cannot condense it to any purpose, and certainly cannot
+improve it, so I reproduce the passage as it stands:
+
+   "Keats passed the winter of 1817-18 at Hampstead, gaily enough
+   among his friends. His society was much sought after, from the
+   delightful combination of earnestness and pleasantry which
+   distinguished his intercourse with all men. There was no effort
+   about him to say fine things, but he _did_ say them most
+   effectively, and they gained considerably by his happy transition
+   of manner. He joked well or ill as it happened, and with a laugh
+   which still echoes sweetly in many ears; but at the mention of
+   oppression or wrong, or at any calumny against those he loved, he
+   rose into grave manliness at once, and seemed like a tall man.
+   His habitual gentleness made his occasional looks of indignation
+   almost terrible. On one occasion, when a gross falsehood
+   respecting the young artist, Severn, was repeated and dwelt upon,
+   he left the room, declaring 'he should be ashamed to sit with men
+   who could utter and believe such things.'"
+
+Severn himself avers that Keats never spoke of any one unless by way of
+saying something in his favour.
+
+Cowden Clarke's anecdote tells in the same direction, that once, when
+some local tyranny was being discussed, Keats amused the party by
+shouting: "Why is there not a human dust-hole into which to tumble such
+fellows?" His own Carlylean phrase seems to have tickled Keats as well
+as others, for he repeated it in a field walk with Haydon: "Haydon, what
+a pity it is there is not a human dust-hole!"
+
+To this may be added a few words from a letter addressed from Teignmouth
+by Keats to Mr. Taylor in April 1818:--
+
+   "I know nothing, I have read nothing: and I mean to follow
+   Solomon's directions, 'Get learning, get understanding.' I find
+   earlier days are gone by; I find that I can have no enjoyment in
+   the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no
+   worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some
+   do it with their society, some with their wit, some with their
+   benevolence, some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and
+   good humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful
+   to the command of great Nature. There is but one way for me: the
+   road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue
+   it; and for that end purpose retiring for some years. I have been
+   hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the
+   luxurious and a love for philosophy. Were I calculated for the
+   former, I should be glad; but, as I am not, I shall turn all my
+   soul to the latter."
+
+This "exquisite sense of the luxurious" must have prompted an
+interjection of Keats in a rather earlier letter to Bailey (November
+1817): "Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!"
+
+One does not usually associate the suspicious character with the
+unselfish and generous character. Even apart from Haydon's, there is
+ample evidence to show that Keats was generous, and, in a sense,
+unselfish; although a man of creative or productive genius, intent upon
+his own work, and subordinating everything else to it, is seldom
+unselfish in the fullest ordinary sense of the term. But he was
+certainly suspicious. Of this temper we have already seen some painful
+ebullitions in his letters to Fanny Brawne. These might be ascribed
+mainly to the acute feelings of a lover, the morbid impressions of an
+invalid. But, in truth, Keats always was and had been suspicious. In a
+letter to his brothers, dated in January 1818, he refers, in a tone of
+some soreness, to objections which Hunt had raised against points of
+treatment in the first Book of "Endymion," adding: "The fact is, he and
+Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the
+affair officiously; and, from several hints I have had, they appear much
+disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made."
+Still earlier, writing to Haydon, he had confessed to "a horrid
+morbidity of temperament." In a letter of June 1818 to Bailey he says:
+"You have all your life (I think so) believed everybody: I have
+suspected everybody." By January 1820 he has got into a condition of
+decided _ennui_, not far removed from misanthropy, and the company of
+acquaintances, and even of friends, is a tedium to him. This was a month
+before the beginning of his fatal illness. It is true, he was then in
+love. He writes to Mrs. George Keats:--
+
+   "I dislike mankind in general.... The worst of men are those
+   whose self-interests are their passions; the next, those whose
+   passions are their self-interest. Upon the whole, I dislike
+   mankind. Whatever people on the other side of the question may
+   advance, they cannot deny that we are always surprised at hearing
+   of a good action, and never of a bad one.... If you were in
+   England, I dare say you would be able to pick out more amusement
+   from society than I am able to do. To me it is as dull as
+   Louisville is to you. [Then follow several remarks on Hunt,
+   Haydon, the Misses Reynolds, and Dilke.] 'Tis best to remain
+   aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being
+   eternally troubled with the dull processes of their everyday
+   lives. When once a person has smoked the vapidness of the routine
+   of society, he must have either some self-interest or the love of
+   some sort of distinction to keep him in good humour with it. All
+   I can say is that, standing at Charing Cross, and looking east,
+   west, north, and south, I see nothing but dulness."
+
+"I carry all things to an extreme," he had written to Bailey in July
+1818, "so that when I have any little vexation it grows in five minutes
+into a theme fit for Sophocles. Then and in that temper if I write to
+any friend, I have so little self-possession that I give him matter for
+grieving, at the very time perhaps when I am laughing at a pun." A
+phrase which Keats used in a letter of the 24th of October 1820,
+addressed to Mrs. Brawne, may also be, in the main, a true item of
+self-portraiture: "If ever there was a person born without the faculty
+of hoping, I am he." Too much weight, however, should not be given to
+this, as the poet's disease had then brought him far onward towards his
+grave. Severn does not seem to have regarded such a tendency as innate
+in Keats, for he wrote, at a far later date, "No mind was ever more
+exultant in youthful feeling."
+
+Keats's sentiment towards women appears to have been that of a shy youth
+who was at the same time a critical man. Miss Brawne enslaved him, but
+did not inspire him with that tender and boundless confidence which the
+accepted and engaged lover of a virtuous girl naturally feels. With one
+woman, Miss Cox, he seems to have been thoroughly at his ease; and one
+can gather from his expressions that this unusual result depended upon a
+fair counterbalance of claims. While she was self-centred in her beauty
+and attractiveness, he was self-centred in his intellect and
+aspirations. There is an early poem of his--the reverse of a good
+one--which seems worth quoting here. I presume he may have been in his
+twenty-first year or so when he wrote it:--
+
+    "Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain,
+      Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies;
+      Without that modest softening that enhances
+    The downcast eye, repentant of the pain
+    That its mild light creates to heal again;
+      E'en then elate my spirit leaps and prances,
+      E'en then my soul with exultation dances,
+    For that to love so long I've dormant lain.
+    But, when I see thee meek and kind and tender,
+      Heavens! how desperately do I adore
+    Thy winning graces! To be thy defender
+      I hotly burn--to be a Calidore,
+    A very Red-cross Knight, a stout Leander--
+      Might I be loved by thee like these of yore.
+
+    Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
+      Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast,
+      Are things on which the dazzled senses rest
+    Till the fond fixed eyes forget they stare.
+    From such fine pictures, Heavens! I cannot dare
+      To turn my admiration, though unpossessed
+      They be of what is worthy--though not dressed
+    In lovely modesty and virtues rare.
+    Yet these I leave as thoughtless as a lark;
+      These lures I straight forget--e'en ere I dine
+    Or thrice my palate moisten. But, when I mark
+      Such charms with mild intelligences shine,
+    My ear is open like a greedy shark
+      To catch the tunings of a voice divine.
+
+    Ah who can e'er forget so fair a being?
+      Who can forget her half-retiring sweets?
+      God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats
+    For man's protection. Surely the All-seeing,
+    Who joys to see us with His gifts agreeing,
+      Will never give him pinions who entreats
+      Such innocence to ruin--who vilely cheats
+    A dove-like bosom. In truth there is no freeing
+    One's thoughts from such a beauty. When I hear
+      A lay that once I saw her hand awake,
+    Her form seems floating palpable and near.
+      Had I e'er seen her from an arbour take
+    A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear,
+      And o'er my eyes the trembling moisture shake."
+
+From the opening lines of this poem I gather that Keats, when he wrote
+it, had never been in love; but that he had a feeling towards pure,
+sweet-minded, lovely women, which made him, in idea, their champion and
+votary. Later on, in June 1818, he wrote to Bailey that his love for his
+brothers had "always stifled the impression that any woman might
+otherwise have made upon him." And in July of the same year, also to
+Bailey:--
+
+   "I am certain that our fair friends [_i.e._ the Misses Reynolds]
+   are glad I should come for the mere sake of my coming; but I am
+   certain I bring with me a vexation they are better without.... I
+   am certain I have not a right feeling towards women: at this
+   moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it
+   because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I
+   was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind
+   was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew
+   it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I
+   thought them ethereal--above men; I find them perhaps
+   equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted
+   in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being
+   insulted does not like to _think_ an insult against another. I do
+   not like to think insults in a lady's company; I commit a crime
+   with her which absence would not have known.... When I am among
+   women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be
+   silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing;
+   I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all
+   this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood....
+   After all, I do think better of womankind than to suppose they
+   care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or
+   not."
+
+In his letter about Miss Cox as "Charmian," written perhaps just before
+he knew Miss Brawne, Keats said: "I hope I shall never marry.... The
+mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things I have stifles the more
+divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet
+children I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a
+thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart.... These
+things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of
+women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a
+sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which I
+rejoice in."
+
+We have seen, in one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, that he shrank
+from the thought of having their mutual love made known to any of their
+friends. But he went further than this. As well after as before he had
+fallen in love with Miss Brawne, and had become engaged to her, he could
+express a contrary state of feeling. Thus, in addressing Mr. Taylor, on
+August 23, 1819, he says: "I equally dislike the favour of the public
+with the love of a woman; they are both a cloying treacle to the wings
+of independence." And to his brother George, September 17, 1819:
+"Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love.
+A man in love, I do think, cuts the sorriest figure in the world. Even
+when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out
+laughing in his face; his pathetic visage becomes irresistible." The
+letters to George, in fact, give no hint of any love for Miss Brawne,
+still less of an engagement.
+
+From all these details it would appear that Keats was by no means an
+ardent devotee of the feminine type of character. He thought there was
+but little congruity between the Ideal and the Real of womanhood. He
+parted company, in this regard, with Shakespeare and Shelley, and
+adhered rather to Milton. So it was before he was in love; and to be in
+love was not the occasion of any essential alteration of view. He
+ascribed to Fanny Brawne the same volatile appetite for amusement, the
+same propensity for flirtation, the same comparative shallowness of
+heart-affection, which he imputed to her sex in general. He loved her
+passionately: he believed in her not passionately, nor even intensely.
+That he was hard hit by the blind and winged archer was a patent fact;
+but he still knew the archer to be blind.
+
+In a room, says Keats's surgical fellow-student, Mr. Stephens, he was
+always at the window peering out into space, and it was customary to
+call the window-seat "Keats's place." In his last illness he told Severn
+that the intensest of his pleasures had been to watch the growth of
+flowers; and, after lying quiet one day, he whispered, "I feel the
+daisies [or "the flowers"] growing over me." In an early stage of his
+fatal illness, February 16, 1820, he had written pathetically to James
+Rice: "How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a
+sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do
+not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest
+affection on every flower I have known from my infancy--their shapes
+and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a
+superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most
+thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign
+flowers in hot-houses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a
+straw for them. The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see
+again." Music was another of his great enjoyments. He would sit for
+hours while Miss Charlotte Reynolds played to him on the pianoforte; and
+a wrong note in an orchestra has been known to rouse his pugnacity, and
+make him wish to "go down and smash all the fiddles." Haydn's symphonies
+were among his prime favourites, and Purcell's songs from Shakespeare.
+"Give me," he wrote from Winchester to his sister, in August 1819,
+"books, fruit, French wine, and fine weather, and a little music out of
+doors, played by somebody I do not know, and I can pass a summer very
+quietly." He would also listen long to Severn's playing, following the
+air with a low kind of recitative; and could himself "produce a pleasing
+musical effect, though possessing hardly any voice."
+
+Closely though he was mixed up with Leigh Hunt and his circle, Keats
+had, in fact, not much sympathy with their ideas on literary topics, nor
+with Hunt's own poetry, still less with their views on political matters
+of the time, in which he took but very faint interest. Cowden Clarke
+thought that the poet's "whole civil creed was comprised in the
+master-principle of universal liberty, viz., equal and stern justice to
+all, from the duke to the dustman." He was, however, a liberal by
+temperament, and, I suppose, by conviction as well. One of the really
+puerile and nonsensical passages in "Endymion" is that which opens book
+iii. He told his friend Richard Woodhouse (a barrister, connected with
+the firm of Taylor and Hessey) that it expressed his opinion of the Tory
+Ministry then in office:--
+
+    "There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
+    With most prevailing tinsel; who unpen
+    Their baaing vanities to browse away
+    The comfortable green and juicy hay
+    From human pastures; or, oh torturing fact!
+    Who through an idiot blink will see unpacked
+    Fire-branded foxes to scar up and singe
+    Our gold and ripe-eared hopes. With not one tinge
+    Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
+    Able to face an owl's, they still are dight
+    By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests,
+    And crowns and turbans. With unladen breasts,
+    Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount
+    To their spirit's perch, their being's high account,
+    Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones,
+    Amid the fierce intoxicating tones
+    Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums,
+    And sudden cannon."
+
+A rather more sensible embodiment of his political feelings is a stanza
+which he wrote, perhaps in 1818, at the close of canto 5, book ii. of
+"The Faery Queen." In this stanza the revolutionary Giant, who had been
+suppressed by Artegall and Talus, is represented as being pieced
+together again by Typographus, the Printing-press, and so trained up as
+to become more than a match for his former victors. There is also, in a
+letter to George Keats dated in September 1819, a rather long and
+detailed passage on politics covering a wide period in English and
+European history, on the oscillations of governmental and popular power
+&c., and on the writer's sympathy with the enlightenment and progress of
+the people. It closes with an admiring description of Sandt, the
+assassin of Kotzebue, as pourtrayed in a profile likeness. As to Hunt,
+some expressions in a letter from George Keats to Dilke are decidedly
+strong:--"I should be extremely sorry that poor John's name should go
+down to posterity associated with the littlenesses of Leigh Hunt--an
+association of which he was so impatient in his lifetime. He speaks of
+him patronizingly; that he would have defended him against the reviewers
+if he had known his nervous irritation at their abuse of him, and says
+that on that point only he was reserved to him. The fact was, he more
+dreaded Hunt's defence than their abuse. You know all this as well as I
+do."
+
+Apart from his own special capability for poetry, Keats had a mind both
+active and capacious. The depth, pregnancy, and incisiveness, of many of
+the remarks in his letters, glancing along a considerable range of
+subject-matter, are highly noticeable. If some one were to take the
+pains of extracting and classifying them, he would do a good service to
+readers. It does not appear, however, that Keats took much interest in
+any kind of knowledge which could not be made applicable or subservient
+to the purposes of poetry. Many will remember the anecdote, proper to
+Haydon's "immortal dinner" (December 1817), of Keats's joining with
+Charles Lamb in denouncing Sir Isaac Newton for having destroyed all
+the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours; the
+whole company had to drink "Newton's health, and confusion to
+mathematics." This was a freak, yet not so mere a freak but that the
+poet--in one of his most elaborated and heedful compositions,
+"Lamia"--could revert to the same idea--
+
+                  "Do not all charms fly
+    At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
+    There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
+    We know her woof, her texture--she is given
+    In the dull catalogue of common things.
+    Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
+    Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
+    Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
+    Unweave a rainbow."
+
+In a letter to his brother, December 1817, Keats observes:--
+
+   "The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making
+   all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close
+   relationship with beauty and truth. Examine 'King Lear,' and you
+   will find this exemplified throughout.... It struck me what
+   quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in
+   literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean
+   _negative capability_; that is, when a man is capable of being in
+   uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
+   after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a
+   fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of
+   mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with
+   half-knowledge. This, pursued through volumes, would perhaps take
+   us no further than this: that with a great poet the sense of
+   beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates
+   all consideration."
+
+Keats did not very often in his letters remark upon the work of his
+poetic contemporaries. We have just read a reference to Coleridge. In
+another letter addressed to Haydon, January 1818, he shows that his
+admiration of Wordsworth's "Excursion" was great, coupling that poem
+with Haydon's pictures, and with "Hazlitt's depth of taste," as "three
+things to rejoice at in this age."
+
+Soon afterwards, February 1818, while "Endymion" was passing through the
+press, he wrote to Mr. Taylor:--
+
+   "In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am
+   from their centre. 1st, I think poetry should surprise by a fine
+   excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a
+   wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a
+   remembrance. 2nd, Its touches of beauty should never be half-way,
+   thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. The
+   rise, the progress, the setting, of imagery, should, like the
+   sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly
+   although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.
+   But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it.
+   And this leads me to another axiom--That, if poetry comes not as
+   naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at
+   all."
+
+Keats held that the melody of verse is founded on the adroit management
+of open and close vowels. He thought that vowels can be as skilfully
+combined and interchanged as differing notes of music, and that monotony
+should only be allowed when it subserves some special purpose.
+
+The following, from a letter to Mr. Woodhouse, October 1818 (soon after
+the abusive reviews had appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The
+Quarterly_), is a remarkable piece of self-analysis. As we read it, we
+should bear in mind what Haydon said of Keats's want of decision of
+character. I am not indeed clear that Keats has here pourtrayed himself
+with marked accuracy. It may appear that he ascribes to himself too much
+of absorption into the object or the personage which he contemplates;
+whereas it might, with fully as much truth, be advanced that he was wont
+to assimilate the personage or the object to himself. I greatly doubt
+whether in Keats's poems we see the object or the personage the clearer
+because his faculty transpires through them: rather, we see the object
+or the personage through the haze of Keats. His range was not extremely
+extensive (whatever it might possibly have become, with a longer lease
+of life), nor was his personality by any means occulted. But in any
+event his statement here is of great importance as showing what he
+thought of the poetic phase of mind and working.
+
+   "As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort of which,
+   if I am anything, I am a member--that sort distinguished from the
+   Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing _per se_,
+   and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self. It is
+   everything, and nothing--it has no character. It enjoys light,
+   and shade. It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low,
+   rich or poor, mean or elevated--it has as much delight in
+   conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous
+   philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its
+   relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste
+   for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet
+   is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has
+   no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other
+   body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are
+   creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an
+   unchangeable attribute: the poet has none, no identity. He is
+   certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. If then he
+   has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I
+   should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very
+   instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops?
+   It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that
+   not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion
+   growing out of my identical nature. How can it when I have _no_
+   nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from
+   speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes
+   home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins
+   to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time
+   annihilated. Not only among men; it would be the same in a
+   nursery of children."
+
+Elsewhere Keats says, November 1817: "Nothing startles me beyond the
+moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights; or if a sparrow
+come before my window, I take part in its existence, and pick about the
+gravel."
+
+For painting Keats had a good deal of taste, largely fostered, no doubt,
+by his intimacy with Haydon. This came to him gradually. Towards the
+beginning of 1818 he was, according to his own account, quite unable to
+appreciate Raphael's Cartoons, but afterwards gained an insight into
+them through contrasting them with some maudlin saints by Guido. It is
+interesting to find him entering warmly into the beauties of the earlier
+Italian art, as indicated in a book of prints from some church in Milan
+(so he says, but perhaps it should rather be Pisa or Florence). "I do
+not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance
+and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I
+ever saw, not excepting Raphael's, but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet
+still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished
+works, as there was left so much room for imagination."
+
+Here is a small trait of character, recorded by Keats in a letter to
+George, from Winchester, September 1819. "I feel I can bear real ills
+better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I
+rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes,
+tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if I were going out;
+then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the
+greatest relief."
+
+Haydon, as we have seen, said that Keats had an exquisite sense of
+humour. There are few things more difficult to analyse than the sense
+of humour; few points as to which different people will vary more in
+opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of
+humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense.
+Certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings
+of Keats--often a quick perception of the ridiculous or the risible,
+sometimes a telling jest or _jeu d'esprit_. I confess, however, that to
+myself most of Keats's fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness
+of taste and manner, and tending towards the vulgar; a jangling jingle
+of word and notion. Punning plays a large part in it, as it did in Leigh
+Hunt's familiar converse. Some specimens of Keats's funning or punning
+seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, January
+1819, which Armitage Brown addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, with
+interpolations by Keats. No doubt both the friends were resolutely bent
+upon being silly on that occasion; but to be silly is not fully
+tantamount to being "a fellow of infinite jest," or having an exquisite
+sense of humour. There is some very exasperating writing also in a
+letter to Reynolds (May 1818), about "making Wordsworth and Colman play
+at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half-holiday at
+fly-the-garter," &c., &c. A feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one
+element of jocoseness; if so, Keats may have been genuinely jocose when
+(as he wrote in his very last letter to Brown) he "at his worst, even in
+quarantine [in Naples Harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of
+desperation, in one week than in any year of his life." He had a good
+power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. He did indisputably,
+towards September 1819, play off one practical joke--Brown was the
+victim--with eminent success; pretending that a certain Mr. Nathan
+Benjamin, who was then renting Brown's house at Hampstead, had written a
+letter complaining of illness--gravel, caused by some lime-tainted water
+on the premises. But the success depended upon a very singular
+coincidence, viz., that by mere chance Keats had happened to give the
+tenant's name correctly. The angry reply of Brown to the angry
+supposititious letter of Benjamin, and the astonishment of Benjamin upon
+receiving Brown's retort, are fertile of laughter.
+
+Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined
+religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject,
+or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. He was certainly not
+a Christian. His early friend, Mr. Felton Mathew, speaks of him as "of
+the sceptical and republican school." On Christmas Eve, 1816, soon after
+he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet--
+
+    "The church-bells toll a melancholy round,
+      Calling the people to some other prayers,
+      Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
+    More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
+    Surely the mind of man is closely bound
+      In some black spell: seeing that each one tears
+      Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs,
+    And converse high of those with glory crowned.
+
+    Still, still they toll: and I should feel a damp,
+      A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
+    That they are dying like an outburnt lamp,--
+     That 'tis their sighing, wailing, ere they go
+     Into oblivion,--that fresh flowers will grow,
+    And many glories of immortal stamp."
+
+His sonnet on Ben Nevis, 1818, is also an utterance of
+scepticism--speaking of heaven and hell as misty surmises, and of "the
+world of thought and mental might" as a realm of nebulosity. A letter to
+Leigh Hunt, May 1817, contains a phrase arraigning the God of
+Christians. To the clerical student Bailey, September 1818, he spoke
+out: "You know my ideas about religion. I do not think myself more in
+the right than other people, that nothing in this world is proveable."
+The latter clause appears to be carelessly elliptical in expression, the
+real meaning being "I think [not "I do _not_ think"] that nothing in
+this world is proveable." To Fanny Brawne, towards May 1820, he appealed
+"by the blood of that Christ you believe in." Haydon tells a noticeable
+anecdote--the only one, I think, which exhibits Keats as an admirer of
+that anti-imaginative order of intellect of which Voltaire was a
+prototype--
+
+   "He had a tending to religion when first I knew him [autumn of
+   1816], but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind. Never shall I
+   forget Keats once rising from his chair, and approaching my last
+   picture, Entry into Jerusalem. He went before the portrait of
+   Voltaire, placed his hand on his heart, and, bowing low,
+
+            'In reverence done, as to the power
+      That dwelt within, whose presence had infused
+      Into the plant sciential sap derived
+      From nectar, drink of gods,'
+
+
+   (as Milton says of Eve after she had eaten the apple), 'That's
+   the being to whom _I_ bend,' said he; alluding to the bending of
+   the other figures in the picture, and contrasting Voltaire with
+   our Saviour, and his own adoration with that of the crowd."
+
+Notwithstanding the general vagueness or indifference of his mind in
+religious matters, Keats seems to have been at most times a believer in
+the immortality of the soul. Following that phrase of his already quoted
+(from a letter to Bailey, November 1817) "Oh for a life of sensations
+rather than of thoughts!" he proceeds: "It is 'a vision in the form of
+youth,' a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further
+convinced me--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite
+speculation of mine--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having
+what we call happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a
+fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger,
+as you do, after truth. Adam's dream will do here: and seems to be a
+conviction that imagination, and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as
+human life, and its spiritual repetition." This allusion to "Adam's
+dream" refers back to a fine phrase which had occurred shortly before in
+the same letter--"Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream; he awoke,
+and found it truth." In a letter written to George Keats and his wife,
+shortly after the death of Tom, comes a very positive assertion--"I have
+a firm belief in immortality, and so had Tom." This firm belief,
+however, must certainly have faltered later on; for, as we have already
+seen, one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, written in 1820, contains
+the phrase "I long to believe in immortality." The reader may also refer
+to the letter to Armitage Brown, September 1820, extracted in a previous
+page. Of superstitious feeling I observe only one instance in Keats.
+After Tom's death, a white rabbit appeared in the garden of Mr. Dilke,
+and was shot by him: Keats would have it that this rabbit was the spirit
+of Tom, and he persisted in the fancy with not a little earnestness.
+
+Of Keats's fondness for wine--his appreciation of it as a flavour
+grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment--there
+are numerous traces throughout his writings. We all remember the famous
+lines in his "Ode to a Nightingale"--
+
+    "Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been
+    Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,...
+    Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!" &c.--
+
+lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the
+only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of
+wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful
+realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts
+of the nightingale. There is also in "Lamia" a conspicuous passage
+celebrating "The happy vintage--merry wine, sweet wine." On claret--as
+to which we have heard the evidence of Haydon--there is a long tirade in
+a letter addressed to George Keats and his wife in February 1819. I give
+it in a condensed form:--
+
+   "I never drink above three glasses of wine, and never any
+   spirits and water.... How I like claret! When I can get claret, I
+   must drink it. 'Tis the only palate affair that I am at all
+   sensual in.... It fills one's mouth with a gushing
+   freshness--then goes down cool and feverless: then you do not
+   feel it quarrelling with one's liver.... Other wines of a heavy
+   and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes
+   him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an
+   Ariadne.... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I
+   have: I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a
+   partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing
+   and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock _passim_."
+
+At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had "left off animal food,
+that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs
+by nature." But I presume this form of abstinence did not last long.
+
+I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to
+identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and
+habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement;
+with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though
+he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism;
+longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be
+one; resolute to be a man--unselfish, kindly, and generous. But, though
+kindly, he was irritable; though unselfish and generous, wilful and
+suspicious. An affront was what he would not bear; and, when he found
+himself affronted in a form--that of press ridicule and
+detraction--which could not be resented in person, nor readily
+retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity
+preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days
+cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love
+which had become the single intense interest of his life. The single
+intense interest, along with poetry--both of them hurrying without
+fruition to the grave. Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of
+complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse
+self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career--his poetic
+ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men
+of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical
+venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal
+malady--all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and
+to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. With the
+personal character of Keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal
+most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were
+such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced
+far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. But his latest
+years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were
+so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less
+lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adolescence.
+From "Endymion" to "Lamia" and the "Eve of St. Mark," we have, in
+poetry, advanced greatly towards the radiant meridian: in life, from
+1818 to 1821, we have receded to a baffling dusk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+We have seen what John Keats did in the shifting scene of the world, and
+in the high arena of poesy; we have seen what were the qualities of
+character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. His
+work as a poet is to us the thing of primary importance: and it remains
+for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in
+detail. The critic who _is_ a critic--and not a _Quarterly_ or a
+_Blackwood_ reviewer or lampooner--is well aware of the disproportion
+between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as
+that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make
+upon the estimating faculty. But this consideration cannot be allowed to
+operate beyond a certain point: the estimate has to be given--and given
+candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. I shall therefore proceed
+to express my real opinion of Keats's poems, whether an admiring opinion
+or otherwise; and shall write without reiterating--what I may
+nevertheless feel--a sense of the presumption involved in such a
+process. I shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the
+chronological order of the poems.
+
+As we have seen, Keats began versifying chiefly under a Spenserean
+influence; and it has been suggested that this influence remained
+puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic
+career. I do not see much force in the suggestion: unless in this
+limited sense--that Spenser, like other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets
+his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying
+whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or
+jarring, obvious or far-fetched, simple or grandiose, according to the
+mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole
+strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbitrary picturesqueness
+than of ordered suavity. And Keats no doubt often did the same: but not
+in the choicest productions of his later time, nor perhaps so much under
+incitement from Spenser as in pursuance of that revolt from a factitious
+and constrained model of work in which Wordsworth in one direction,
+Coleridge in another, and Leigh Hunt in a third, had already come
+forward with practice and precept. Making allowance for a few early
+attempts directly referable to Spenser, I find, even in Keats's first
+volume, little in which that influence is paramount. He seems to have
+written because his perceptions were quick, his sympathies vivid in
+certain directions, and his energies wound up to poetic endeavour. The
+mannerisms of thought, method, and diction, are much more those of Hunt
+than of Spenser; and it is extremely probable that the soreness against
+Hunt which Keats evidenced at a later period was due to his perceiving
+that that kindly friend and genial literary ally had misled him into
+some poetic trivialities and absurdities, not less than to anything in
+himself which could be taken hold of for complaint.
+
+Keats's first volume would present nothing worthy of permanent memory,
+were it not for his after achievements, and for the single sonnet upon
+Chapman's Homer. Several of the compositions are veritable rubbish:
+probably Keats knew at the time that they were not good, and knew soon
+afterwards that they were deplorably bad. Such are the address "To Some
+Ladies" who had sent the author a shell; that "On Receiving a Curious
+Shell and a Copy of Verses [Moore's "Golden Chain"] from the same
+Ladies;" the "Ode to Apollo" (in which Homer, Virgil, Milton,
+Shakespeare, Spenser, and Tasso, are commemorated); the "Hymn to
+Apollo;" the lines "To Hope" (in which there is a patriotic aspiration,
+mingled with scorn for the gauds of a Court). "Calidore" has a certain
+boyish ardour, clearly indicated if not well expressed. The verses "I
+stood tiptoe upon a little hill" are very far from good, and are stuffed
+with affectations, but do nevertheless show a considerable spice of the
+real Keats. Some lines have already been quoted from this effusion,
+about "flowery nests," and "the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the
+speculation of the stars." It is only by an effort that we can attach
+any meaning to either of these childish Della-Cruscanisms: the "pillowy
+silkiness" may perhaps be clouds intermingled with stars, and the
+"flowery nests" may, by a great wrenching of English, be meant for
+"flowery nooks"--nests or nooks of flowers. "Sleep and Poetry" contains
+various fine lines, telling and suggestive images, and luscious
+descriptive snatches, and is interesting as showing the bent of the
+writer's mind, and a sense of his mission begun. Serious metrical flaws
+are perceptible in it here and there, and throughout this first volume
+of verse--and indeed in "Endymion" as well. One metrical weakness of
+which he never got rid is the accenting of the preterite or participial
+form "ed" (in such words as "resolved," &c.), where its sound ekes out
+with feeble stress the prosody of a line. Two songs which have genuine
+lyric grace--dated in 1817, but not included in the volume of
+"Poems"--are those which begin "Think not of it, sweet one, so," and
+"Unfelt, unheard, unseen." The volume contains sixteen sonnets, besides
+the grand one on "Chapman's Homer." The best are those which begin "Keen
+fitful gusts are whispering here and there," and "Happy is England," and
+the "Grasshopper and Cricket," which was written in competition with
+Hunt. It seems to me that Keats's production has more of poetry, Hunt's
+of finish. The sonnet "On leaving some friends at an early hour" is
+characteristic enough. This is as much detail as need be given here to
+the "Poems" of 1817. The sonnet on Chapman's Homer revealed a hand which
+might easily prove to be a master's. All else was prentice-work, with
+some melody, some richness and freshness, some independence, much
+enthusiasm; also many solecisms and perversities of diction, imagery,
+and method: and not a few pieces were included which only self-conceit,
+or torpor of the critical faculty, or the mis-persuasion of friends,
+could have allowed to pass muster. But Keats chose to publish--to
+exhibit his poetic identity at this stage and in this guise; and of
+course we can see, in the light of his after-work, that the experiment
+was rather a rash forestalling than a positive mistake.
+
+There are a few other sonnets which Keats wrote in 1817, or, in general
+terms, between the publishing dates of the "Poems" volume and of
+"Endymion." Those "On a Picture of Leander," and "On the Sea," and the
+one which begins "After dark vapours have oppressed our plains," rank
+among the best of his juvenile productions. A general observation,
+applicable to all the early work, whether printed at the time or
+unprinted, is that the ideas are constantly _expressed_ in an imperfect
+way. There are perceptions, thoughts, and emotions; but the vehicle of
+words is, as a rule, huddled and approximate.
+
+"Endymion" now claims our attention. I believe that no better criticism
+of "Endymion" has ever been written than that which Shelley supplied in
+a letter dated in September 1819. Certainly no criticism which is
+equally short is also equally good. I therefore extract it here, and
+shall have little to say about the poem which is not potentially
+condensed into Shelley's brief utterance. "I have read Keats's poem," he
+wrote: "much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's
+intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end
+of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of
+poetry; indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet
+which is described in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of
+fragments from it I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more
+than I ought, of which there is now no danger." In July 1820 Shelley
+wrote to Keats himself on the subject, furnishing almost the only
+addendum which could have been needed to the preceding remarks: "I have
+lately read your 'Endymion' again, and even with a new sense of the
+treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with
+indistinct profusion." As Shelley shared with Gifford the conviction
+that it is difficult to read "Endymion" from book 1, line 1, to book 4,
+line 1003, and as human nature has not changed essentially since the
+time of that pre-eminent poet and that rather less eminent critic, I
+daresay that there are at this day several Keats-enthusiasts who know
+_in foro conscientiae_, though they may not avow in public, that they
+have left "Endymion" unread, or only partially read. Others have perused
+it, but have found in it so much "indistinct profusion" that they also
+remain after a while with rather a vague impression of the course of the
+story; although they agree with Gifford, and even exceed him in the
+assurance, that "it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to
+the loves of Diana and Endymion." As the poem is an extremely important
+one in relation to the life-work of Keats, I think it may not be out of
+place if I here give a succinct account of what the narrative really
+amounts to. This may be all the more desirable as Keats has not followed
+the convenient if prosaic practice of several other epic poets by
+prefixing to the several books of his long poem an "argument" of their
+respective contents.
+
+_Book 1._ On a lawn within a forest upon a slope of Mount Latmos was
+held one morning a festival to Pan. The young huntsman-chieftain
+Endymion attended, but his demeanour betrayed a secret preoccupation
+and trouble. After the rites were over, his sister Peona addressed him,
+and gradually won him to open his heart to her. He told her that at a
+certain spot by the river, one of his favourite haunts, he had lately
+seen a sudden efflorescence of dittany and poppies (the flowers sacred
+to Diana). He fell asleep there, and had a dream or vision of entering
+the gates of heaven, seeing the moon in transcendent splendour, and then
+being accosted by a woman or goddess lovely beyond words, who pressed
+his hand. He seemed to faint, and to be upborne into the upper regions
+of the sky, where he gave the beauty a rapturous kiss, and then they
+both paused upon a mountain-side. Next he dreamed that he fell asleep.
+This was the prelude to his actual waking out of the vision. Ever since
+he had retained a mysterious sense that the dream had not been all a
+dream. This was confirmed by various incidents of obscure suggestion,
+and especially by his hearing in a cavern the words (we have read them
+already, beslavered by the "human serpentry" of criticism, but they
+remain delicious words none the less)--
+
+    "Endymion, the cave is secreter
+    Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir
+    No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
+    Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
+    And trembles through my labyrinthine hair."
+
+As nothing further, however, had happened, Endymion promised Peona that
+he would henceforth cease to live a life of feverish expectation, and
+would resume the calm tenor of his days.
+
+_Book 2._--Endymion's promise had not been strictly fulfilled; he was
+still restless and craving. One day he plucked a rosebud: it suddenly
+blossomed, and a butterfly emerged from it, with strangely-charactered
+wings. He pursued the butterfly, which led him to a fountain by a
+cavern, and then disappeared. A naiad thereupon addressed him, saying
+that he must wander far before he could be reunited to his mystic fair
+one. He then appealed to the moon-goddess for some aid, was rapt into a
+dizzy vision as if he were sailing through heaven in her car, and heard
+a voice from the cavern bidding him descend into the entrails of the
+earth. He eagerly obeyed, and passed through a region of twilight
+dimness starred with gems, until he reached a natural temple enshrining
+a statue of Diana. An awful sense of solitude weighed upon him, and he
+implored the goddess to restore him to his earthly home. A profusion of
+flowers budded forth before his feet, followed by music as he resumed
+his journey. At last he came to a verdant space, peopled with slumbering
+Cupids. Here in a beautiful chamber he found Adonis lying tranced on a
+couch, attended by other Cupids.[18] One of them gave him wine and
+fruit, and explained to him the winter-sleep and summer-life of Adonis;
+and at this moment Adonis woke up from his trance, and Venus came to
+solace him with love. Venus spoke soothingly also to Endymion, telling
+him that she knew of his love for some one of the immortals, but who
+this was she had failed to fathom. She promised that one day he should
+be blessed, and with Adonis she then rose heavenward in her car. The
+earth closed, and Endymion gladly pursued his way through caves, jewels,
+and water-springs. Cybele passed on her lion-drawn chariot. The diamond
+path ended in middle air; Endymion invoked Jupiter, an eagle swooped and
+bore him down through darkness into a mossy jasmine-bower. With a sense
+of ecstasy, chequered by an unsatisfied longing for his unknown love,
+Endymion prepared himself to sleep:
+
+                          "And, just into the air
+    Stretching his indolent arms, he took, O bliss!
+    A naked waist. 'Fair Cupid, whence is this?'
+    A well-known voice sighed, 'Sweetest, here am I!'"
+
+The lovers indulged their passion in kisses and caresses; he urgent to
+know who she might be, and she confessing herself a goddess hitherto
+awful in loveless chastity, but not naming herself, though perhaps her
+avowals were sufficiently indicative,[19] and she promised to exalt him
+ere long to Olympus. The rapturous interview ended with the sleep of
+Endymion, and awaking he found himself alone. He strayed out, and
+reached an enormous grotto. Two springs of water gushed forth--the
+springs of Arethusa and Alpheus, whose loves found voice in words.
+Endymion, sending up a prayer for their union, stepped forward and found
+himself beneath the sea.
+
+_Book 3._ Soothed by a moonbeam which greeted him through the waters,
+Endymion pursued his course. Upon a rock within the sea he encountered
+an old, old man, with wand and book. The ancient man started up as from
+a trance, declaring that he should now be young again and happy. This
+was Glaucus, who imparted to Endymion the story of his ill-omened love
+for Scylla (it is told at considerable length, but need not be detailed
+here), the witchcraft of Circe which had doomed him to a ghastly marine
+life of a thousand years, and how, after a shipwreck, he came into
+possession of a book of magic, which revealed to him that at some
+far-off day a youth should make his appearance and break the accursed
+spell. In Endymion, Glaucus recognized the predicted youth. Glaucus then
+led Endymion to an edifice in which he had preserved the corpse of
+Scylla, and thousands of other corpses, being those of lovers who had
+been shipwrecked during his many cycles of sea-dwelling doom. Glaucus
+tore his scroll into fragments, bound his cloak round Endymion, and
+waved his wand nine times. He then instructed Endymion to unwind a
+tangled thread, read the markings on a shell, break the wand against a
+lyre, and strew the fragments of the scroll upon Glaucus himself, and
+upon the dead bodies. As the final act was performed, Glaucus resumed
+his youth, and Scylla and the drowned lovers returned to life. The whole
+joyous company then rushed off, and paid their devotions to Neptune in
+his palace. Cupid and Venus were also present here; and the goddess of
+love spoke words of comfort to Endymion, assuring him that his long
+expectancy would soon find its full reward. She had by this time probed
+the secret of Diana, but she refrained from naming that deity to
+Endymion. She invited him and his bride to pass a portion of their
+honeymoon in Cythera,[20] with Adonis and Cupid. A stupendous festival
+in Neptune's palace succeeded. Endymion finally sank down in a trance;
+Nereids conveyed him up to a forest by a lake; and as he floated
+earthwards he heard in dream words promising that his goddess would soon
+waft him up into heaven. He awoke in the sylvan scene.
+
+_Book 4._ The first sound that Endymion heard was a female voice; the
+wail of a damsel who had followed Bacchus from the banks of the Ganges,
+and who longed to be at home again, if only to die there. Unseen
+himself, he saw a beautiful girl, who lay bemoaning her loveless lot. He
+at once felt that, if he adored his unknown goddess, he loved also his
+Indian Bacchante. He sprang forward and declared his passion.[21] She,
+after chaunting her long journeyings in the train of Bacchus, explained
+that, being sick-hearted and weary, she had strayed away in the forest,
+and was now but the votary of sorrow. Endymion continued to woo her with
+sweet words and hot: he heard a dismal voice, "Woe to Endymion!" echoing
+through the forest. Mercury descended and touched the ground with his
+wand, and two winged horses sprang out of the earth. Endymion seated his
+Bacchante upon one horse and mounted the other; they flew upward,
+eagle-high. In the air they passed Sleep, who had heard a report that a
+mortal was to wed a daughter of Jove, and who desired to hearken to the
+marriage ditties before he returned to his cave. The influence of Sleep
+made the winged horses drowse, and also Endymion and the Bacchante.
+Endymion then dreamed of being in heaven, the mate of gods and
+goddesses, Diana among them. In dream he sprang towards Diana, and so
+awoke; but awake he still saw the same vision. Diana was there in
+heaven; his Bacchante was beside him lying on the horse's pinions. He
+kissed the Bacchante, and almost in the same breath protested to Diana
+his unshaken constancy. The Bacchante then awoke. Endymion, dazed in
+mind with his divided allegiance, urged her to be gone, and the winged
+horses resumed their flight. They advanced towards the galaxy, the moon
+peeped out of the sky, the Bacchante faded away in the moonbeams. Her
+steed dropped down to the earth; while the one which bore Endymion
+continued mounting upwards, and he again fell into a sort of trance. He
+heard not the celestial messengers bespeaking guests to Diana's wedding.
+The winged horse then carried Endymion down to a hill-top. Here once
+more he found his beautiful Indian, and for her sake forswore all
+praeterhuman passion. She, however, declared to him that a divine terror
+forbade her to be his. His sister Peona now re-appeared. She rallied him
+and the Bacchante on their love and melancholy, both equally obvious,
+and bade him attend at night a festival to Diana, whom the soothsayers
+had pronounced to be in a mood peculiarly propitious. Endymion announced
+his resolution to abandon the world, and live an eremitic life: Peona
+and the fair Indian should both be his sisters. The Indian vowed
+lifelong chastity, devoted to Diana. Both the women then retired. The
+day passed over Endymion motionless and mute. At eventide he walked
+towards the temple: he heeded not the hymning to Diana. Peona,
+companioned by the Indian damsel, accosted him. He replied, "Sister, I
+would have command, if it were heaven's will, on our sad fate." The
+Indian replied that this he should assuredly have; as she spoke she
+changed semblance, and stood revealed as Diana herself. She laid upon
+her own fears and upon fate the blame of past delays, and told Endymion
+that it had also been fitting that he should be spiritualized out of
+mortality by some unlooked-for change. As Endymion kneeled and kissed
+her hands, they both vanished away. The last words of the poem are--
+
+                              "Peona went
+    Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment:"
+
+words which may perhaps be modelled upon the grave and subdued
+conclusion of "Paradise Lost."
+
+This is a bald outline of the thread of story which meanders through
+that often-skimmed, seldom-read, not easily readable poem--in snatches
+alluring, in entirety disheartening--the "Endymion" of Keats. It will be
+perceived that the poet keeps throughout tolerably close to his main and
+professed subject matter--the loves of Diana and Endymion, although the
+episode of Glaucus, which is brought within the compass of the amorous
+quest, is certainly a very long and extraneous one. As we have seen,
+Keats, when well advanced with this poem, spoke of it as a test of his
+inventive faculty: and truly it is such, but I am not sure that his
+inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. The best
+part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous,
+sane, and adequate conception of the imaginable relation between a
+loving goddess and her human lover; her emotion towards him, and his
+emotion towards her; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human
+mode of existence in the divine conclave; along with a chain of
+incidents--partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet's own--which
+should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take
+possession of the reader's mind, for their own sake at the moment, and
+for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result. Of all this we
+find little in Keats's poem. Diana figures as a very willing woman,
+passing out of the stage of maidenly coyness. Endymion talks indeed at
+times of the exaltation of a passion transcending the bounds of
+mortality, but his conduct and demeanour go little beyond those of an
+adventurous lover of the knight-errant sort who, having taken the first
+leap in the dark, follows where Fortune leads him--and assuredly she
+leads him a very curious dance, where one cannot make out how his human
+organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist.
+Moreover, the last book of the poem spoils all that has preceded, so far
+as continuity of feeling is concerned; for here we learn that no sooner
+does Endymion see a pretty Indian Bacchante than he falls madly in love
+with her, and casts to the winds every shred and thought of Diana,
+already his bride or quasi-bride; she goes out like a cloud-veiled
+glimpse of moonlight. True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself; but
+of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately--or rather
+with fatuous precipitancy--gives up the glorious goddess for the
+sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her
+proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may
+possibly be true to the nature of a goddess--it is certainly not so to
+that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself
+different from womanhood--shall we say superior to it?
+
+In another and minor sense there is no lack of invention in this Poetic
+Romance. So far as I know, there is nothing in Grecian mythology
+furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of Endymion's descending into the
+bowels of the earth, passing thence beneath the sea, meeting Glaucus,
+and restoring to life the myriads of drowned lovers, encountering the
+Indian Bacchante, and taking with her an aerial voyage upon winged
+coursers. These incidents--except indeed that of the Bacchante--are
+passing strange, and could not be worked out in a long narrative poem
+without a lavish command of fanciful and surprising touches. The tale
+of the aerial voyage seems abortive; its natural _raison d'etre_ and
+needful sequel would appear to be that Diana, having thus launched
+Endymion along with herself into the heavenly regions, should bear him
+straight onward to the high court of the gods; but, instead of that, the
+horses and their riders return to earth, the air has been traversed to
+no purpose and with no ostensible result, and Endymion is allowed again
+to forswear Diana for the Bacchante before the consummation is reached.
+Presumably Morpheus (Sleep) is responsible for this mishap. His untoward
+presence in the sky sent the Bacchante, as well as Endymion, to sleep
+for awhile: when they awoke, Diana had to leave the form of the
+Bacchante, and, in her character of Phoebe, regulate the nascent moon;
+though a goddess, she could not be in two places at once, and so the
+winged horses descended _re infecta_. This is an ingenious point of
+incident enough; but it is just one of those points which indicate that
+the poet's mind moved in a region of scintillating details rather than
+of large and majestic contours.
+
+Such is in fact the quality of "Endymion" throughout. Everything is done
+for the sake of variegation and embroidery of the original fabric; or we
+might compare it to a richly-shot silk which, at every rustling
+movement, catches the eye with a change of colour. Constant as they are,
+the changes soon become fatiguing, and in effect monotonous; one colour,
+varied with its natural light and shade, would be more restful to the
+sight, and would even, in the long run, leave a sense of greater,
+because more congruous and harmonized, variety. Luscious and luxuriant
+in intention--for I cannot suppose that Keats aimed at being exalted or
+ideal--the poem becomes mawkish in result: he said so himself, and we
+need not hesitate to repeat it. Affectations, conceits, and puerilities,
+abound, both in thought and in diction: however willing to be pleased,
+the reader is often disconcerted and provoked. The number of clever
+things said cleverly, of rich things richly, and of fine things finely,
+is however abundant and superabundant; and no one who peruses "Endymion"
+with a true sense for poetic endowment and handling can fail to see that
+it is peculiarly the work of a poet. The versification, though far from
+faultless, is free, surging, and melodious--one of the devices which the
+author most constantly employs with a view to avoiding jogtrot
+uniformity being that of beginning a new sentence with the second line
+of a couplet. On every page the poet has enjoyed himself, and on most of
+them the reader can joy as well. The lyrical interludes, especially the
+hymn to Pan, and the chaunt of the Bacchante (which comprises a sort of
+verse-transcript of Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne"), are singularly
+wealthy in that fancy which hovers between description and emotion. The
+hymn to Pan was pronounced by Wordsworth, _viva voce_, to be "a pretty
+piece of paganism"--a comment which annoyed Keats not a little. Shelley
+(in his undispatched letter to the editor of the _Quarterly Review_)
+pointed out, as particularly worthy of attention, the passages--"And
+then the forest told it in a dream" (book ii.); "The rosy veils mantling
+the East" (book iii.); and "Upon a weeded rock this old man sat" (book
+iii.) The last--relating to Glaucus and his pictured cloak--is
+certainly remarkable; the other two, I should say, not more remarkable
+than scores of others--as indeed Shelley himself implied.
+
+To sum up, "Endymion" is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and
+greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by
+excess. To deny these blemishes would be childish--they are there, and
+must be not only admitted, but resented. The faults, like the beauties,
+of the poem, are positive--not negative or neutral. The work was in fact
+(as Keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. At the
+age of twenty-one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material;
+he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, conscious that, if some
+things came right, others would come wrong. We are the richer for his
+rather overweening experiment; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor
+its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. If "a thing
+of beauty is a joy for ever," a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its
+minor degree.
+
+The next long poem of Keats--"Isabella, or the Pot of Basil"--is a vast
+advance on "Endymion" in sureness of hand and moderation of work: it is
+in all respects the better poem, and justifies what Keats said (in his
+letter of October 9, 1818, quoted in our Chapter v.) of the experience
+which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in
+"Endymion." Of course it was a less arduous attempt; the subject being
+one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by
+Boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. Except in altering the
+locality from Messina to Florence (a change which seems objectless),
+Keats has adhered faithfully enough to the sweet and sad story of
+Boccaccio; he has however amplified it much in detail, for the Italian
+tale is a short one. "Isabella" has always been a favourite with the
+readers of Keats, and deservedly so; it is tender, touching, and
+picturesque. Yet I should not place it in the very first rank of the
+poet's works--the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less
+masculine than is needed. The writer seems too conscious that he has set
+himself to narrating something pathetic; he tells the story _ab extra_,
+and enlarges on "the pity of it," instead of leaving the pity to speak
+to the heart out of the very circumstances themselves. The brothers may
+have been "ledger-men" and "money-bags" (Boccaccio does not insist upon
+any such phase of character), and they certainly became criminals,
+though the Italian author treats their murder of Lorenzo as if it were a
+sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour; but, when
+Keats "again asks aloud" why these commercial brothers were proud, he
+seems to intrude upon us overmuch the personality of the narrator of a
+tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. This is only
+one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem--that it is all
+told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic--indignant
+now, and now compassionate. Leigh Hunt has pointed out the absurdity of
+putting into the mouth of one of the brother "money-bags," just as they
+are about to execute their plot for murdering Lorenzo, the lines (though
+he praises the pretty conceit in itself)--
+
+    "Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
+    His dewy rosary on the eglantine."
+
+The author's invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief,
+and Melpomene, to condole the approaching death of Isabella, seems to me
+a _fadeur_ hardly more appropriate than the money-bag's epigram upon the
+"dewy rosary." But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses
+for the admiration with which he regards "The Pot of Basil." He thinks
+it both beautiful and pathetic--and so do I.
+
+"Isabella" is written in the octave stanza; "The Eve of St. Agnes" in
+the Spenserean. This difference of metre corresponds very closely to the
+difference of character between the two poems. "Isabella" is a narrative
+poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as
+chiefly to subserve purposes of sentiment; "The Eve of St. Agnes,"
+though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a
+monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which
+sentiment again permeates and over-rules. I rate it far above
+"Isabella"--and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely
+lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except
+only the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and the uncompleted "Eve of
+St. Mark." "Hyperion" stands aloof in lonely majesty; but I think that,
+in the long run, even "Hyperion" represents the genius of Keats less
+adequately, and past question less characteristically, than "The Eve of
+St. Agnes." The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be
+almost nugatory. There is nothing in it but this--that Keats took hold
+of the superstition proper to St. Agnes' Eve, the power of a maiden to
+see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it that a
+lover, who was clandestinely present in this conjuncture of
+circumstances, eloped with his mistress. This extreme tenuity of
+constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness
+of "Endymion," and the futility of "The Cap and Bells," might be held to
+indicate that Keats had very little head for framing a story--and indeed
+I infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained
+undeveloped up to the day of his death. One of the few subsidiary
+incidents introduced into "The Eve of St. Agnes" is that the lover
+Porphyro, on emerging from his hiding-place while his lady is asleep,
+produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of
+appetizing eatables. Why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet
+been able to divine; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is
+made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as
+to reinforce our persuasion that Keats's capacity for framing a story
+out of successive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was
+decidedly feeble. The power of "The Eve of St. Agnes" lies in a wholly
+different direction. It lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and
+emotion into sound; in making pictures out of words, or turning words
+into pictures; of giving a visionary beauty to the closest items of
+description; of holding all the materials of the poem in a long-drawn
+suspense of music and reverie. "The Eve of St. Agnes" is _par
+excellence_ the poem of "glamour." It means next to nothing; but means
+that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of
+trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less than a sensuous
+restorative. Perhaps no reader has ever risen from "The Eve of St.
+Agnes" dissatisfied. After a while he can question the grounds of his
+satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting; but he has only to
+peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him.
+
+"The Eve of St. Mark" was begun at much the same date as "The Eve of St.
+Agnes," rather the earlier of the two. Its relation to other poems by
+the author is singular. In "Endymion" he had been a prodigal of
+treasures--some of them genuine, others spurious; in "The Eve of St.
+Agnes" he was at least opulent, a magnate superior to sumptuary laws;
+but in "The Eve of St. Mark" he subsides into a delightful simplicity--a
+simplicity full, certainly, of "favour and prettiness," but chary of
+ornament. It comes perfectly natural to him, and promises the most
+charming results. The non-completion of "The Eve of St. Mark" is the
+greatest grievance of which the admirers of Keats have to complain. I
+should suppose that, in the first instance, he advisedly postponed the
+eve of one saint, Mark, to the eve of the other, Agnes; and that he did
+not afterwards find a convenient opportunity for resuming the
+uncompleted poem. The superstition connected with St. Mark's vigil is
+not wholly unlike that pertaining to St. Agnes's. In the former instance
+(I quote from Dante Rossetti), "it is believed that, if a person placed
+himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would
+behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be
+seized with any severe disease that year go into the church. If they
+remained there, it signified their death; if they came out again, it
+portended their recovery; and, the longer or shorter the time they
+remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness."
+The same writer, forecasting the probable course of the story,[22]
+surmised that "the heroine, remorseful after trifling with a sick and
+now absent lover, might make her way to the minster porch to learn his
+fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return." If
+this was really to have been the sequel, we can perceive that the
+unassuming simplicity of the poem at its commencement would, ere its
+close, have deepened into a different sort of simplicity--emotional, and
+even tragic. As it stands, the simplicity of "The Eve of St. Mark" is
+full-blooded as well as quaint--there is nothing starved or threadbare
+about it. Diverse though it is from Coleridge's "Christabel," we seem to
+feel in it something of the like possessing or haunting quality,
+modified by Keats's own distinctive genius. In this respect, and in
+perfectness of touch, we link it with "La Belle Dame sans Merci."
+
+"Hyperion" has next to be considered. This was the only poem by Keats
+which Shelley admired in an extreme degree. He wrote at different dates:
+"The fragment called 'Hyperion' promises for him that he is destined to
+become one of the first writers of the age.... It is certainly an
+astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I
+confess I had not before.... If the 'Hyperion' be not grand poetry, none
+has been produced by our contemporaries.... The great proportion of this
+piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry." Byron, who had
+been particularly virulent against Keats during his lifetime, wrote
+after his death a much more memorable phrase: "His fragment of
+'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as
+AEschylus." Mr. Swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and
+with carefully weighed words:
+
+   "The triumph of 'Hyperion' is as nearly complete as the failure
+   of 'Endymion.' Yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly
+   devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his
+   resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not (as we may
+   gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful
+   reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the
+   reception given to his former work, but on the solid and
+   reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very
+   scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign
+   influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was
+   implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had
+   been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and
+   much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had
+   been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long
+   have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body
+   of a subject so little charged with tangible significance."
+
+Mr. Swinburne is a critic with whom one may well be content to go
+astray, if astray it is. I will therefore say that I entirely agree with
+him in this estimate of "Hyperion," and of the sound discretion which
+Keats exercised in giving it up. To deal with the gods of Olympus is no
+easy task--it had decidedly overtaxed Keats in "Endymion," though he
+limited himself to the two goddesses Diana and Venus, and casually the
+gods Neptune and Mercury; but to deal with the elder gods--Saturn, Ops,
+Hyperion--and with the Titans, on the scale of a long epic narration, is
+a task which may well be pronounced unachievable. The Olympian gods
+would also have had to be introduced: Apollo already appears in the
+poem, not too promisingly. The elder gods are necessarily mere
+figure-heads of bulk, might, majesty, and antiquity; to get any
+character out of them after these "property" attributes have been
+exhausted to the mind's eye, to "set them going" in act, and doing
+something apportionable into cantos, and readable by human energies, was
+not a problem which could be solved by a poet of the nineteenth century.
+Past question, Keats started grandly, and has left us a monument of
+Cyclopean architecture in verse almost impeccable--a Stonehenge of
+reverberance; he has made us feel that his elder gods were profoundly
+primaeval, powers so august and abstract-natured as to have become
+already obsolete in the days of Zeus and Hades: his Titans, too, were so
+vast and muscular that no feat would have been difficult to them except
+that of interesting us. This sufficed for the first book of the poem; in
+the second book, the enterprise is already revealing itself as an
+impossible one, for the council at which Oceanus and others speak is
+reminiscent of the Pandaemonic council in Milton, and clearly very
+inferior to that. It could not well help resembling the scene in
+"Paradise Lost," nor yet help being inferior; besides, even were it
+equal or preferable, Milton had done the thing first. The "large
+utterance of the early gods," large though it be, tends to monotony. In
+book iii., we go off to Mnemosyne and Apollo; but of this section little
+remains, and we close the poem with a conviction that Keats, if he had
+succeeded in writing "a _fragment_ as sublime as AEschylus," was both
+prudent and fortunate in leaving it a fragment. To say that "Hyperion"
+is after all a semi-artificial utterance of the grand would be harsh,
+and ungrateful for so noble an effort of noble faculty; but to say that,
+by being prolonged, its grandeur must infallibly have partaken more and
+more of an artificial infusion, appears to me criticism entirely sound
+and safe.
+
+Mr. Woodhouse has informed us: "The poem, if completed, would have
+treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former god of the sun, by
+Apollo; and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by
+Jupiter, &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's
+re-establishment; with other events of which we have but very dark hints
+in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact, the incidents
+would have been pure creations of the poet's brain." Here again Keats
+would have been partly forestalled by Milton: the combat of the Giants
+with the Olympian gods must have borne a very appreciable resemblance to
+the combat of Satan and his legions with the hosts of heaven. How far
+Keats's "invention" would have sufficed to filling in this vast canvas
+may be questioned. The precedent of "Endymion," in which he had
+attempted something of the same kind, was not wholly encouraging. The
+method and tone would of course have been very different; in what
+remains of "Hyperion," the general current of diction is as severe as in
+"Endymion" it had been florid.
+
+The other commencement of "Hyperion" (alluded to in my sixth chapter)
+was a later version, done in November and December 1819; it presents a
+great deal of poetic or scenic machinery in which the author's
+personality was copiously introduced. This recast contains impressive
+things; but the prominence given to the author as spectator or
+participant of what he pictures forth was fulsome and fatal. Mr.
+Swinburne is in error (along with most other writers) in supposing this
+to be the earlier version of the two.
+
+The tragedy of "Otho the Great," written on a peculiar system of
+collaboration to which I have already referred, succeeded "Hyperion." It
+is a tragedy on the Elizabethan model, and we find in scene i. a curious
+instance of Elizabethan contempt of chronology--a reference to
+"Hungarian petards." The main factors in the plot are a fierce and
+fervent love-passion of the man, and an unscrupulous ambition of the
+woman, reddened with crime. Webster may perhaps have been taken by Keats
+as his chief prototype. To call "Otho the Great" an excellent drama
+would not be possible; but it can be read without tedium, and contains
+vigorous passages, and lines and images moulded with a fine poetic
+ardour. The action would be sufficient for stage-representation at a
+time when an audience come prepared to like a play if it is good in
+verse and strong in romantic emotion; under such conditions, while it
+could not be a great success, it need not nevertheless fall manifestly
+flat. Under any other conditions, such as those which prevail nowadays,
+this tragedy would necessarily run no chance at all. In a copy of Keats
+which belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti I find the following note of
+his, which may bear extracting: "This repulsive yet powerful play is of
+course in draft only. It is much less to be supposed that it would have
+been left so imperfect than to be surmised, from its imperfection, how
+very gradual the maturing of Keats's best work probably may have been.
+It gives after all, perhaps, the strongest proof of _robustness_ that
+Keats has left; and as a tragedy is scarcely more deficient than
+'Endymion' as a poem. Both, viewed as wholes, are quite below Keats's
+three masterpieces;[23] yet 'Otho,' as well as 'Endymion,' gives proof
+of his finest powers." Another note from the same hand remarks: "The
+character and conduct of Albert [the lover of Auranthe murdered to clear
+the way for her ambition] are the finest point in the play."
+
+Of the later drama, "King Stephen," so little was written that I need
+not dwell upon it here.
+
+"Lamia" was begun about the same time as "Otho the Great," but finished
+afterwards. The influence of Dryden, under which it was composed, has
+told strongly upon its versification, as marked especially in the very
+free use of alexandrines--generally the third line of a triplet,
+sometimes even the second line of a couplet. You might search "Endymion"
+in vain for alexandrines; and I will admit that their frequency appears
+to me to give an artificial tone to "Lamia." The view which Keats has
+elected to take of his subject is worth considering. The heroine is a
+serpent-woman, or a double-natured being who can change from serpent
+into woman and _vice versa_. In the female form she beguiles a young
+student of philosophy, Lycius, lives with him in a splendid palace, and
+finally celebrates their marriage-feast. The philosopher Apollonius
+attends among the guests, perceives her to be "human serpentry," and,
+gazing on her with ruthless fixity, he compels her and all her apparatus
+of enchantment to vanish. This is the act for which (in lines partly
+quoted in these pages) Keats arraigns philosophy, and its power of
+stripping things bare of their illusions. No doubt a poet has a right to
+treat a legend of this sort from such point of view as he likes; it is
+for him, and not for his reader, to take the bull by the horns. But it
+does look rather like taking the bull by the weaker horn to contend that
+the philosopher who saves a youthful disciple from the wiles of a
+serpent is condemnably prosaic--a grovelling spirit that denudes life of
+its poetry. Conveniently for Keats's theory, Lycius is made to die
+forthwith after the vanishing of his Lamia. If we invent a different
+finale to the poem, and say that Lycius fell down on his knees, and
+thanked Apollonius for saving him from such pestilent delusions and
+perilous blandishments, and ever afterwards looked out for the cloven
+tongue (if not the cloven hoof) when a pretty woman made advances to
+him, we may perhaps come quite as near to a right construction of so
+strange a series of events, and to the true moral of the story. But
+Keats's championship was for the enjoying aspects of life; he may be
+held to have exercised it here rather perversely. "Lamia" is one of his
+completest and most finished pieces of writing--perhaps in this respect
+superior to all his other long poems, if we except "Hyperion"; it closes
+the roll of them with an affluence, even an excess, of sumptuous
+adornment. "Lamia" leaves on the mental palate a rich flavour, if not an
+absolutely healthy one.
+
+Passing from the long compositions, we find the cream of Keats's poetry
+in the ballad of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and in the five odes--"To
+Psyche," "To Autumn," "On Melancholy," "To a Nightingale," and "On a
+Grecian Urn." "La Belle Dame sans Merci" may possibly have been written
+later than any of the odes, but this point is uncertain. I give it here
+as marking the highest point of romantic imagination to which Keats
+attained in dealing with human or quasi-human personages, and also his
+highest level of simplicity along with completeness of art.
+
+    "Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,[24]
+    Alone and palely loitering?
+    The sedge is withered from the lake,
+          And no birds sing.
+
+    "Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
+    So haggard and so woe-begone?
+    The squirrel's granary is full,
+          And the harvest's done.
+
+    "I see a lily on thy brow,
+    With anguish moist and fever-dew;
+    And on thy cheeks a fading rose
+          Fast withereth too."
+
+    "I met a lady in the meads,
+    Full beautiful, a faery's child;
+    Her hair was long, her foot was light,
+          And her eyes were wild.
+
+    "I made a garland for her head,
+    And bracelets too, and fragrant zone:
+    She looked at me as she did love,
+          And made sweet moan.
+
+    "I set her on my pacing steed,
+    And nothing else saw all day long;
+    For sideways would she lean and sing
+          A faery's song.
+
+    "She found me roots of relish sweet,
+    And honey wild, and manna-dew;
+    And sure in language strange she said--
+          'I love thee true.'
+
+    "She took me to her elfin grot,
+    And there she gazed and sighed deep,
+    And there I shut her wild sad eyes--
+          So kissed to sleep.
+
+    "And there we slumbered on the moss,
+    And there I dreamed--ah woe betide!--
+    The latest dream I ever dreamed
+          On the cold hill-side.
+
+    "I saw pale kings and princes too,
+    Pale warriors--death-pale were they all;
+    They cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci
+          Hath thee in thrall.'
+
+    "I saw their starved lips in the gloam
+    With horrid warning gaped wide;
+    And I awoke, and found me here
+          On the cold hill-side.
+
+    "And this is why I sojourn here,
+    Alone and palely loitering;
+    Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
+          And no birds sing."
+
+This is a poem of _impression_. The impression is immediate, final, and
+permanent; and words would be more than wasted upon pointing out to the
+reader that such and such are the details which have conduced to impress
+him.
+
+In the five odes there is naturally some diversity in the degrees of
+excellence. I have given their titles above in the probable (not
+certain) order of their composition. Considered intellectually, we might
+form a kind of symphony out of them, and arrange it thus--1, "Grecian
+Urn"; 2, "Psyche"; 3, "Autumn"; 4, "Melancholy"; 5, "Nightingale"; and,
+if Keats had left us nothing else, we should have in this symphony an
+almost complete picture of his poetic mind, only omitting, or
+representing deficiently, that more instinctive sort of enjoyment which
+partakes of gaiety. Viewing all these wondrous odes together, the
+predominant quality which we trace in them is an extreme susceptibility
+to delight, close-linked with afterthought--pleasure with pang--or that
+poignant sense of ultimates, a sense delicious and harrowing, which
+clasps the joy in sadness, and feasts upon the very sadness in joy. The
+emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty: beauty intensely
+perceived, intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx,
+imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the
+mortal throes of the human soul. As no poet had more capacity for
+enjoyment than Keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. Few
+also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irretrievable; but this
+conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than
+of sensation, and the spirit of Keats was almost an alien in the region
+of morals. As he himself wrote (March 1818)--
+
+       "Oh never will the prize,
+    High reason, and the love of good and ill,
+    Be my award!"
+
+I think it will be well to cull out of these five odes--taken in the
+symphonic order above noted--the phrases which constitute the strongest
+chords of emotion and of music.
+
+    (1) "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
+          Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
+        Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
+          Pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone.
+
+                        "Human passion far above
+        That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
+        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
+
+        "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
+        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
+
+    (2)                "Too late for antique vows,
+          Too too late for the fond believing lyre,
+        When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
+          Holy the air, the water, and the fire.
+
+        "Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
+          In some untrodden region of my mind,
+        Where branched thoughts new-grown with pleasant pain,
+          Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind.
+
+    (3) "Where are the songs of spring--ay, where are they?
+          Think not of them: thou hast thy music too,
+        While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
+          And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
+
+    (4) "But, when the melancholy fit shall fall
+          Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
+        That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
+          And hides the green hill in an April shroud,
+        Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
+          Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave.
+
+        "She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
+          And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
+        Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
+          Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips
+        Ay, in the very temple of Delight
+          Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.
+
+    (5) "That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
+        And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
+          Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
+            What thou among the leaves hast never known,
+          The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
+            Here where men sit and hear each other groan;
+          Where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs;
+          Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies;
+            Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
+                    And leaden-eyed despairs;
+          Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
+            Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
+
+        "Darkling I listen: and for many a time
+          I have been half in love with easeful Death,--
+        Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme
+          To take into the air my quiet breath.
+        Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
+        To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
+        While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
+                  In such an ecstasy.
+
+                  "The same that oft-times hath
+        Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
+        Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
+        Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
+        To toll me back from thee to my sole self.
+
+        "Was it a vision or a waking dream?
+        Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?"
+
+To one or two of these phrases a few words of comment may be given. That
+axiom which concludes the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"--
+
+    "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
+    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,"
+
+is perhaps the most important contribution to thought which the poetry
+of Keats contains: it pairs with and transcends
+
+    "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."
+
+I am not prepared to say whether Keats was the first writer to formulate
+any axiom to this effect,--I should rather presume not; but at any rate
+it comes with peculiar appropriateness in the writings of a poet who
+might have varied the dictum of Iago, and said of himself
+
+    "For I am nothing if not beautiful."
+
+In the Ode, the axiom is put forward as the message of the sculptured
+Grecian Urn "to man," and is thus propounded as being of universal
+application. It amounts to saying--"Any beauty which is not truthful (if
+any such there be), and any truth which is not beautiful (if any such
+there be), are of no practical importance to mankind in their mundane
+condition: but in fact there are none such, for, to the human mind,
+beauty and truth are one and the same thing." To debate this question on
+abstract grounds is not in my province: all that I have to do is to
+point out that Keats's perception and thought crystallized into this
+axiom as the sum and substance of wisdom for man, and that he has
+bequeathed it to us to ponder in itself, and to lay to heart as the
+secret of his writings. Those other lines, from the "Ode on Melancholy,"
+where he says of Melancholy--
+
+    "She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
+      And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
+    Bidding adieu"--
+
+appear to me unsurpassable in the whole range of his poetry--as intense
+in imagery as supreme in diction and in music. They pair with the other
+celebrated verses from the "Ode to a Nightingale"--
+
+    "Now more then ever seems it rich to die,
+    To cease upon the midnight with no pain;"
+
+and--
+
+    "Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
+    Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."
+
+The phrase "_rich_ to die" is of the very essence of Keats's emotion;
+and the passage about "magic casements" shows a reach of expression
+which might almost be called the Pillars of Hercules of human language.
+Far greater things have been said by the greatest minds: but nothing
+more perfect in form has been said--nothing wider in scale and closer in
+utterance--by any mind of whatsoever pitch of greatness.
+
+And here we come to one of the most intrinsic properties of Keats's
+poetry. He is a master of _imagination in verbal form_: he gifts us with
+things so finely and magically said as to convey an imaginative
+impression. The imagination may sometimes be in the substance of the
+thought, as well as in its wording--as it is in the passage just quoted:
+sometimes it resides essentially in the wording, out of which thought
+expands in the reader, who is made
+
+    "To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
+    Awake for ever in a sweet unrest."
+
+From wealth of perception, at first confused or docked in the
+expression, he rose into a height of verbal embodiment which has seldom
+been equalled and seldomer exceeded. His conception of poetry as an
+ideal, his sense of poetry as an art, spurred him on to artistic
+achievement; and in the later stages of his work the character of the
+Artist is that which marks him most strongly. As one of his own letters
+says, he "looks upon fine phrases like a lover."
+
+According to Mr. Swinburne, "the faultless force and profound subtlety
+of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of
+absolute natural beauty is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or
+power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals." We may safely
+accept this verdict of poet upon poet as a true one: yet I should be
+inclined to demur to such strong adjectives as "faultless" and
+"absolute." Beautiful as several of them are, I might hesitate to say
+that even one poem by Keats exhibits this his special characteristic in
+a faultless degree, or expresses absolutely throughout a natural beauty
+of absolute quality. To the last, he appears to me to have been somewhat
+wanting in those faculties of selection and of discipline which we sum
+up, by a rough-and-ready process, in the word "taste." He had done a
+great deal in this direction, and would probably, with a few years more
+of life, have done all that was needed; but we have to take him as he
+stands, with those few years denied. Unless perhaps in "La Belle Dame
+sans Merci," Keats has not, I think, come nearer to perfection than in
+the "Ode to a Nightingale." It is with some trepidation that I recur to
+this Ode, for the invidious purpose of testing its claim to be adjudged
+"faultless," for in so doing I shall certainly lose the sympathy of some
+readers, and strain the patience of many. The question, however, seems
+to be a very fair one to raise, and the specimen a strong one to try it
+by, and so I persevere. The first point of weakness--excess which
+becomes weak in result--is a surfeit of mythological allusions: Lethe,
+Dryad (the nightingale is turned into a "light-winged Dryad of the
+trees"--which is as much as to say, a light-winged _Oak_-nymph of the
+_trees_), Flora, Hippocrene, Bacchus, the Queen-moon (the Queen-moon
+appears at first sight to be the classical Phoebe, who is here
+"clustered around by all her starry Fays," spirits proper to a Northern
+mythology; but possibly Keats thought more of a Faery-queen than of
+Phoebe). Then comes the passage (already cited in these pages) about
+the poet's wish for a draught of wine, to help him towards spiritual
+commune with the nightingale. Some exquisite phrases in this passage
+have endeared it to all readers of Keats; yet I cannot but regard it as
+very foreign to the main subject-matter. Surely nobody wants wine as a
+preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music, whether in a literal or
+in a fanciful relation. Taken in detail, to call wine "the true, the
+blushful Hippocrene"--the veritable fount of poetic inspiration--seems
+both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase "with beaded bubbles winking
+at the brim" is (though picturesque) trivial, in the same way as much of
+Keats's earlier work. Far worse is the succeeding image, "Not charioted
+by Bacchus and his pards"--_i.e._, not under the inspiration of wine:
+the poet will fly to the nightingale, but not in a leopard-drawn
+chariot. Further on, as if we had not already had enough of wine and its
+associations, the coming musk-rose is described as "full of dewy
+wine"--an expression of very dubious appositeness: and the like may be
+said of "become a sod," in the sense of "become a corpse--earth to
+earth." The renowned address--
+
+    "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
+    No hungry generations tread thee down,"
+
+seems almost outside the region of criticism. Still, it is a palpable
+fact that this address, according to its place in the context, is a
+logical solecism. While "Youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies,"
+while the poet would "become a sod" to the requiem sung by the
+nightingale, the nightingale itself is pronounced immortal. But this
+antithesis cannot stand the test of a moment's reflection. Man, as a
+race, is as deathless, as superior to the tramp of hungry generations,
+as is the nightingale as a race: while the nightingale as an individual
+bird has a life not less fleeting, still more fleeting, than a man as an
+individual. We have now arrived at the last stanza of the ode. Here the
+term "deceiving elf," applied to "the fancy," sounds rather petty, and
+in the nature of a make-rhyme: but this may possibly be a prejudice.
+
+Having thus--in the interest of my reader as a critical appraiser of
+poetry--burned my fingers a little at the clear and perennial flame of
+the "Ode to a Nightingale," I shall quit that superb composition, and
+the whole quintett of odes, and shall proceed to other phases of my
+subject. The "Ode to Indolence," and the fragment of an "Ode to Maia,"
+need not detain us; the former, however, is important as indicating a
+mood of mind--too vaguely open to the influences of the moment for
+either love, ambition, or poesy--to which we may well suppose that Keats
+was sufficiently prone. The few poems which remain to be mentioned were
+all printed posthumously.
+
+There are four addresses to Fanny Brawne, dating perhaps from early till
+late in 1819; two of them are irregular lyrics, and two sonnets. The
+best of the four is the sonnet, "The day is gone, and all its sweets are
+gone," which counts indeed among the better sonnets of Keats. Taken
+collectively, all four supply valuable evidence as to the poet's love
+affair, confirmatory of what appears in his letters; they exhibit him
+quelled by the thought of his mistress and her charms, and jealous of
+her mixing in or enjoying the company of others.
+
+Keats wrote some half-hundred of sonnets altogether, some of them among
+his very earliest and most trifling performances, others up to his
+latest period, including the last of all his compositions.
+Notwithstanding his marked growth in love of form, and his ultimate
+surprising power of expression--both being qualities peculiarly germane
+to this form of verse--his sonnets appear to me to be seldom masterly. A
+certain freakishness of disposition, and liability to be led astray by
+some point of detail into side-issues, mar the symmetry and
+concentration of his work. Perhaps the sonnet on "Chapman's Homer,"
+early though it was, remains the best which he produced; it is at any
+rate pre-eminent in singleness of thought, illustrated by a definite and
+grand image. It has a true opening and a true climax, and a clear link
+of inventive association between the thing mentally signified in chief,
+and the modes of its concrete presentment. In points of this kind Keats
+is seldom equally happy in his other sonnets; sometimes not happy at
+all, but distinctly at fault. There is a second Homeric sonnet,
+"Standing aloof in giant ignorance" (1818), which contains one line
+which has been very highly praised,
+
+    "There is a budding morrow in midnight:"
+
+but, regarded as a whole, it is a weakling in comparison with the
+Chapman sonnet. The sonnets, "To Sleep" ("O soft embalmer of the still
+midnight"), "Why did I laugh to-night?" and "On a Dream" ("As Hermes
+once took to his feathers light")--all of them dated in 1819--are
+remarkable; the third would indeed almost be excellent were it not for
+the inadmissible laxity of an alexandrine last line. This is the sonnet
+of which we have already spoken, the dream of Paolo and Francesca. The
+"Why did I laugh to-night?" is a strange personal utterance, in which
+the poet (not yet attacked by his mortal illness) exalts death above
+verse, fame, and beauty, in the same mood of mind as in the lovely
+passage of the "Ode to a Nightingale"; but the sonnet, considered as an
+example of its own form of art, is too exclamatory and uncombined.
+
+There are several minor poems by Keats of which--though some of them are
+extremely dear to his devotees--I have made no mention. Such are
+"Teignmouth," "Where be you going, you Devon maid?" "Meg Merrilies,"
+"Walking in Scotland," "Staffa," "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Robin
+Hood," "To Fancy," "To the Poets," "In a drear-nighted December," "Hush,
+hush, tread softly," four "Faery Songs." Most of these pieces seem to me
+over-rated. As a rule they have lyrical impulse, along with the
+brightness or the tenderness which the subject bespeaks; but they are
+slight in significance and in structure, pleasurable but not memorable
+work. One enjoys them once and again, and then their office is over;
+they have not in them that stuff which can be laid to heart, nor that
+spherical unity and replenishment which can make of a mere snatch of
+verse an inscription for the adamantine portal of time.
+
+The feeling with which Keats regarded women in real life has been
+already spoken of. As to the tone of his poems respecting them we have
+his own evidence. A letter of his to Armitage Brown, dated towards the
+first days of September 1820, says, in reference to the "Lamia" volume:
+"One of the causes, I understand from different quarters, of the
+unpopularity of this new book, is the offence the ladies take at me. On
+thinking that matter over, I am certain that I have said nothing in a
+spirit to displease any woman I would care to please; but still there is
+a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats; they
+never see themselves dominant." The long poems in the volume in question
+were "Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Hyperion," and "Lamia." In
+"Hyperion" women are of course not dominant; but, as regards the other
+three poems, they are surely dominant enough in one sense. In "Isabella"
+the heroine is the sole figure of prime importance--so also in "Lamia";
+and in the "Eve of St. Agnes" she counts for much more than Porphyro,
+though the number of stanzas about her may be fewer. Nevertheless it
+might be that the women in the three poems, though "dominant," are
+"classed with roses and sweetmeats." I do not see, however, that this
+can fairly be said of Madeline in the "Eve of St. Agnes"; she is made a
+very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very
+particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope.
+Again, Isabella, amenable as she may be to the censure of the severely
+virtuous, plays a part which takes her very considerably out of affinity
+to roses and sweetmeats. To Lamia the objection applies clearly enough;
+but then she is not exactly a woman, and Keats resents so fiercely the
+far from indefensible line of conduct which Apollonius adopts in
+relation to her that it seems hard if the ladies owed the poet a grudge.
+On the whole I incline to think that they must have been misreported;
+but the statement in Keats's letter remains not the less significant as
+a symptom of his real underlying feeling about women.
+
+It has often been pointed out that Keats's lovers have a habit of
+"swooning," and the fact has sometimes been remarked upon as evidencing
+a certain want of virility in himself. I cannot affect to be, so far, of
+a different opinion. The incident and the phrase do manifestly tend to
+the namby-pamby. This may have been more a matter of affected or
+self-willed diction on his part--and diction of that kind appears
+constantly in his earlier poems, and not seldom in his later ones--than
+of actual character chargeable against himself; yet I would not entirely
+disregard it in the latter relation either. Keats was a very young man,
+with a limited experience of life. He had to picture to himself how his
+lovers would be likely to behave under given conditions; and, if he
+thought they would be likely to swoon, the probability is that he also,
+under parallel conditions, would have been likely to swoon--or at least
+supposed he would be likely. Because he thrashed a butcher-boy, or was
+indignant at backbiting and meanness, we are not to credit him with an
+unmingled fund of that toughness which distinguishes the English middle
+class. The English middle-class man is not habitually addicted to
+writing an "Endymion," an "Eve of St. Agnes," or an "Ode on
+Melancholy."
+
+Sensuousness has been frequently defined as the paramount bias of
+Keats's poetic genius. This is, in large measure, unassailably true. He
+was a man of perception rather than of contemplation or speculation.
+Perception has to do with perceptible things; perceptible things must be
+objects of sense, and the mind which dwells on objects of sense must
+_ipso facto_ be a mind of the sensuous order. But the mind which is
+mainly sensuous by direct action may also work by reflex action, and
+pass from sensuousness into sentiment. It cannot fairly be denied that
+Keats's mind continually did this; it had direct action potently, and
+reflex action amply. He saw so far and so keenly into the sensuous as to
+be penetrated with the sentiment which, to a healthy and large nature,
+is its inseparable outcome. We might say that, if the sensuous was his
+atmosphere, the breathing apparatus with which he respired it was
+sentiment. In his best work--for instance, in all the great odes--the
+two things are so intimately combined that the reader can only savour
+the sensuous nucleus through the sentiment, its medium or vehicle. One
+of the most compendious and elegant phrases in which the genius of Keats
+has been defined is that of Leigh Hunt: "He never beheld an oak tree
+without seeing the Dryad." In immediate meaning Hunt glances here at the
+mythical sympathy or personifying imagination of the poet; but, if we
+accept the phrase as applying to the sensuous object-painting, along
+with its ideal aroma or suggestion in his finest work, we shall still
+find it full of right significance. We need not dwell upon other less
+mature performances in which the two things are less closely interfused.
+Certainly some of his work is merely, and some even crudely, sensuous:
+but this is work in which the poet was trying his materials and his
+powers, and rising towards mastery of his real faculty and ultimate
+function.
+
+While discriminating between what was excellent in Keats, and what was
+not excellent, or was merely tentative in the direction of final
+excellence, we must not confuse endowments, or the homage which is due
+to endowments, of a radically different order. Many readers, and there
+have been among them several men highly qualified to pronounce, have set
+Keats beside his great contemporary Shelley, and indeed above him. I
+cannot do this. To me it seems that the primary gift of Shelley, the
+spirit in which he exercised it, the objects upon which he exercised it,
+the detail and the sum of his achievement, the actual produce in
+appraisable work done, the influence and energy of the work in the
+future, were all superior to those of Keats, and even superior beyond
+any reasonable terms of comparison. If Shelley's poems had
+defects--which they indisputably had--Keats's poems also had defects.
+After all that can be said in their praise--and this should be said in
+the most generous or rather grateful and thankful spirit--it seems to me
+true that not many of Keats's poems are highly admirable; that most of
+them, amid all their beauty, have an adolescent and frequently a morbid
+tone, marking want of manful thew and sinew and of mental balance; that
+he is not seldom obscure, chiefly through indifference to the thought
+itself and its necessary means of development; that he is emotional
+without substance, and beautiful without control; and that personalism
+of a wilful and fitful kind pervades the mass of his handiwork. We have
+already seen, however, that there is a certain not inconsiderable
+proportion of his poems to which these exceptions do not apply, or apply
+only with greatly diminished force; and, as a last expression of our
+large and abiding debt to him and to his well-loved memory, we recur to
+his own words, and say that he has given us many a "thing of beauty,"
+which will remain "a joy for ever." By his early death he was doomed to
+be the poet of youthfulness; by being the poet of youthfulness he was
+privileged to become and to remain enduringly the poet of rapt
+expectation and passionate delight.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+A.
+
+  Abbey, Guardian of Keats, 17, 19, 20, 29, 37, 39
+
+  "Adonais," by Shelley, 39, 90, 98, 170
+
+  AEschylus, 186
+
+  "Agnes, The Eve of St.," 107, 138;
+    critical estimate of the poem, 182-184; 190, 206
+
+  "Alastor," by Shelley, 82
+
+  "Annals of the Fine Arts," 110
+
+  Ariosto, 113
+
+  _Asclepiad, The_, 24
+
+  _Athenaeum, The_, 23
+
+  "Autumn, Ode to," by Keats, 109, 192, 194
+
+
+B.
+
+  Bailey, Archdeacon Benjamin, 23, 77, 78, 112, 123;
+    his description of Keats, 124; 130, 133, 141, 142, 145, 158, 159
+
+  "Belle Dame (La) sans Merci," by Keats, 112, 182, 185, 190;
+    quoted, 192, &c.; 200
+
+  Benjamin, Nathan, 157
+
+  Bion, Idyll on "Adonis," by, 170
+
+  Blackwood, William, 91
+
+  _Blackwood's Magazine_, 90;
+    articles in by Z, on The Cockney School of Poetry, 91; 92, 93, 95, 97,
+      98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 153
+
+  Boccaccio's "Decameron," 107, 180, 181
+
+  Boileau, 70
+
+  Bojardo's "Orlando Innamorato," 114
+
+  Brawne, Fanny, engaged to Keats, 30, 32;
+    Keats's description of her, 33; 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45;
+    Keats's love-letters to her, 45-46, &c.; 53, 57, 60, 62, 102;
+    her marriage to Mr. Lindon, 121; 130, 141, 143, 146, 147, 158, 160;
+    poems to, 202
+
+  Brawne, Mrs., 29, 34, 36, 60, 61, 143
+
+  Brown, Charles Armitage, friend of Keats, 25;
+    Keats's verses on, 26; 27, 28, 29, 33, 38, 39, 41,
+      42, 43, 46, 48, 53;
+    letter from Keats to, 55-56, 59, 108, 111, 112, 114, 116, 119;
+    his death, 120; 136, 156, 157, 160, 206
+
+  Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," 108
+
+  Byron, Lord, 32, 102, 103, 105, 125, 128, 185
+
+  Byron's "Don Juan," 58
+
+
+C.
+
+  Caius Cestius, 118
+
+  "Calidore," by Keats, 65, 165
+
+  "Cap and Bells, The," by Keats, 113, 183
+
+  "Caviare" (pseudonym of Keats), 112
+
+  "Cenci, The," by Shelley, 123
+
+  _Champion, The_, 115
+
+  "Chapman's Homer," sonnet by Keats, 66, 69, 165, 166, 203
+
+  Chartier, Alain, 112
+
+  Chatterton, 67, 68
+
+  Chaucer, 112
+
+  Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, picture by Haydon, 21, 36, 43,
+    126, 158
+
+  "Christmas Eve," sonnet by Keats, quoted, 157
+
+  Clark, Mrs., 60
+
+  Clark, Sir James, 59, 60
+
+  Clarke, Charles Cowden, preceptor and friend of Keats, 14, 18, 19,
+      20, 25, 65, 66;
+    his "Recollections," 102; 104, 125, 126, 129, 140, 148
+
+  Clarke, Epistle to, by Keats, 67, 68
+
+  Clarke, Rev. John, Keats's schoolmaster, 14
+
+  Coleridge, 25, 151, 164
+
+  Coleridge's "Christabel," 185
+
+  Colman, 156
+
+  Colvin's, Mr., "Life of Keats," 9, 35, 42
+
+  "Comus," by Milton, 115
+
+  Cox, Miss Jane ["Charmian"], 30, 31, 32, 34, 143, 146
+
+  Cripps, 133
+
+
+D.
+
+  Dante, 112, 113
+
+  Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 23, 27, 29, 34, 39, 51, 53, 58, 103,
+    115, 120, 131, 133, 142, 150, 156, 160
+
+  Dilke, Mrs., 28
+
+  "Dream, A," sonnet by Keats, 112, 204
+
+  Dryden, 70, 108, 190
+
+  Duncan, Admiral, 16
+
+
+E.
+
+  _Edinburgh Review_, 109, 117
+
+  Edouart, 35
+
+  "Endymion," by Keats, 23, 24, 25, 54, 67, 72;
+    details as to the composition of, 76;
+    preface to, 79, 80;
+    criticism upon in _The Quarterly Review_, 83;
+    Keats's feeling as to this and other criticisms, 91-106; 107,
+      108, 109, 122, 130, 137, 139, 141, 149, 152, 166;
+    Shelley's opinion of, 167;
+    summary of the poem, 168-175;
+    critical estimate of it, 176-180; 182, 186, 188, 189, 190
+
+  _Examiner, The_, 21, 68, 100
+
+  Eyre, Sir Vincent, 119
+
+
+F.
+
+  "Fancy, The," by Reynolds, 22
+
+  Finch, Colonel, 39, 98
+
+  "Florence, The Garden of," by Reynolds, 22, 107
+
+  Forman, Mr. H. Buxton, 18, 25, 33, 34, 35, 52, 123
+
+
+G.
+
+  _Gentleman's Magazine, The_, 102
+
+  George IV., 21, 114
+
+  Gifford, William, 83, 95, 168
+
+  Girometti, 128
+
+  Gisborne, Mrs., 44, 98
+
+  Grafty, Mrs., 64
+
+  "Grasshopper and Cricket, The," sonnets by Keats and Hunt, 166
+
+  "Grecian Urn, Ode on a," by Keats, 109, 110, 192, 194-198
+
+  Guido, 155
+
+
+H.
+
+  Hammond, Surgeon, 18, 19
+
+  Haslam, William, 54
+
+  Haydn, 148
+
+  Haydon, Benjamin Robert, the painter, friend of John Keats, 13, 16,
+      18, 21, 36, 37, 44;
+    his last interview with Keats, 54, 55, 64, 69, 76, 78, 99;
+    his view as to Keats's feeling regarding critical attacks, 100, &c.;
+      105, 110, 123, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133;
+    his view of Keats's character, 134-135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141,
+      142, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158
+
+  Hazlitt, 116, 152
+
+  Hilton, 128
+
+  Holmes, Edward, 54
+
+  Homer, 165
+
+  Hood, Mrs. (Miss Reynolds), 23
+
+  Hood, Thomas, 23
+
+  Hooker, Bishop, 32
+
+  Houghton, Lord, 41, 42, 58, 99, 114, 119, 125, 132, 136, 139
+
+  Howard, John, 32
+
+  Hunt, John, 20
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, 20, 21, 25, 44, 59, 66-69, 77, 83, 84, 85, 89-92,
+      97, 98, 100;
+    his view as to Keats's sensitiveness to criticism, 102; 110,
+      112, 114, 121, 122, 123;
+    his description of Keats, 124; 125, 131, 134, 141, 142, 148,
+      150, 156, 158, 164, 166, 181, 207
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, dedicatory sonnet to, by Keats, 66
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, leaving prison, sonnet by Keats, 66
+
+  Hunt, Mrs., 44
+
+  Hunt, Thornton, 44
+
+  "Hyperion," by Keats, 96, 97, 107, 108, 113, 137, 182;
+    critical estimate of the poem, 185-189;
+    recast of, 189; 190, 192, 206
+
+
+I.
+
+  "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill," poem by Keats, 67;
+    extract from, 74; 165
+
+  _Indicator, The_, 112, 114
+
+  "Indolence, Ode to," by Keats, 202
+
+  "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," by Keats, 95, 107, 138;
+    critical estimate of the poem, 180-182; 206
+
+  "Islam, The Revolt of," by Shelley, 77, 82, 123
+
+
+J.
+
+  J. S., 93, 94
+
+  Jeffrey, Lord, 109
+
+  Jeffrey, Mr., 120
+
+  Jennings, grandfather of Keats, 12, 37
+
+  Jennings, Captain, 16
+
+  Jennings, Mrs., 16
+
+  "Joseph and his Brethren," by Wells, 23
+
+
+K.
+
+  Kean as Richard Duke of York,
+    critique by Keats, 93, 115
+
+  Kean, Edmund, 112
+
+  Keats, Fanny, sister of the poet, 13, 29, 38, 43, 45, 57, 62,
+      120, 121, 129, 148
+
+  Keats, Frances, mother of the poet, 12;
+    her death, 16; 25, 126
+
+  Keats, George, brother of the poet, 13, 15, 18, 19, 25, 27, 30,
+      32, 37, 38, 64, 71, 95, 98;
+    his view as to John Keats's sensitiveness to criticism, 103; 111,
+      119, 120, 126, 136, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 155, 159, 160
+
+  Keats, George, Epistle to, by John Keats, 67, 68
+
+  Keats, John, his parentage, 12;
+    his birth in London, October 31, 1795, 13;
+    anecdote of his childhood, 13;
+    goes to the school of Mr. Clarke at Enfield, 14;
+    his studies, pugnacity, &c., 15;
+    death of his parents, 16;
+    apprenticed to a surgeon, Hammond, 18;
+    leaves Hammond, and walks the hospitals, 18, 19;
+    reads Spenser's "Faery Queen," and drops surgical study, 20;
+    makes acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, Haydon, and others, 20, 21, 22;
+    his first volume, Poems, 1817, 22;
+    writes "Endymion," 23;
+    his health suffers in Oxford, 24;
+    anecdotes (Coleridge, &c.), 25;
+    makes a pedestrian tour in Scotland &c. with
+      Charles Armitage Brown, 25-29;
+    takes leave of his brother George and his wife, 27;
+    his brother Tom dies, 29;
+    lodges with Brown at Hampstead, 29;
+    meets Miss Cox ("Charmian") and Miss Brawne, and falls in love
+      with the latter, 30-35;
+    their engagement, 36;
+    his friendship towards Haydon cools, 36, 37;
+    at Shanklin and Winchester, 37, 38;
+    sees his brother George again, and is left by him in pecuniary
+      straits, 38, 39;
+    the painful circumstances of his closing months, owing to illness,
+      his love affair, and the depreciation of his poems, 40, 41;
+    beginning of his consumptive illness, 41, 42;
+    removes to Kentish Town, 43, 44;
+    returns to Mrs. Brawne's house at Hampstead, 45;
+    his love-letters, 45-54;
+    travels to Italy with Joseph Severn, 54-59;
+    Severn's account of his last days in Rome, 60, 61;
+    his death there, February 23, 1821, 62, 63;
+    his early turn for mere rhyming, 64;
+    his early writings, and first volume, 65, 69;
+    diatribe against Boileau, and poets of that school, 70;
+    the publishers relinquish sale of the volume, 72;
+    "Endymion," and passage from an early poem forecasting
+      this attempt, 73-76;
+    details as to composition of "Endymion," 76-79;
+    prefaces to the poem, 79-83;
+    adverse critique in _The Quarterly Review_, 83-91;
+    question debated whether this and other attacks affected Keats
+      deeply, 91-97;
+    statements by Shelley, 97;
+    and by Haydon, 99;
+    other evidence, 102;
+    conclusion as to this point, 105;
+    Keats writes "Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and
+      "Hyperion," 107;
+    "Lamia," 108;
+    and publishes the volume containing these poems, 1820, 108;
+    other poems in the volume, 109;
+    posthumous poems of Keats, "The Eve of St. Mark," "Otho the Great,"
+      "The Cap and Bells," &c., 110-115;
+    his letters and other prose writings, 115-117;
+    Keats's burial-place, 118-119;
+    projects for writing his life, accomplished finally by
+      Lord Houghton, 119;
+    his relations with Hunt, Shelley, and others, 121-123;
+    Keats's small stature and personal appearance, 124-126;
+    the portraits of him, 126-129;
+    difficulty of clearly estimating his character, 129;
+    his poetic ambition and intensity of thought, 130, 131;
+    his moral tone, 132;
+    his character ("no decision" &c.,) estimated by Haydon, 133-139;
+    Lord Houghton's account of his manner in society, 139;
+    his suspiciousness, 141;
+    and dislike of mankind, 142;
+    his feeling towards women, 143-146;
+    and towards Miss Brawne, 147, 148;
+    his habits, opinions, likings, &c., 148-155;
+    humour and jocularity, 155-157;
+    negative turn in religious matters, 157-160;
+    wine and diet, 160, 161;
+    conclusion as to his character, 161, 162;
+    his early tone in poetry, 164;
+    critical estimate of his first volume, Poems, 1817, 165-166;
+    of "Endymion," 167, 168;
+    narrative of this poem, 168-175;
+    defects and beauties of "Endymion," 176-180;
+    critical estimate of "Isabella," 180;
+    "Eve of St. Agnes," 182;
+    "Eve of St. Mark," 184;
+    "Hyperion," 185;
+    "Otho the Great," 189;
+    "Lamia," 190;
+    "Belle Dame sans Merci" (quoted), 192;
+    the five chief Odes, 194;
+    analysis of the "Ode to a Nightingale," 200;
+    various posthumous lyrics, sonnets, &c., 202;
+    Keats's feeling towards women, as developed in his poems, 205;
+    "swooning," 206;
+    sensuousness and sentiment, 207;
+    comparison between Keats and Shelley, and final remarks, 208
+
+  Keats, Mrs. George, 27, 32, 95, 120
+
+  Keats, Thomas, father of the poet, 12;
+    his death, 16; 126
+
+  Keats, Thomas, brother of the poet, 13, 15, 19, 23, 24, 25, 28;
+    his death, 29; 37, 38, 39, 121, 135, 159, 160
+
+  "King Stephen," by Keats, 73, 112, 190
+
+  Kotzebue, 150
+
+
+L.
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 78, 150
+
+  Lamb, Dr., 44
+
+  "Lamia," by Keats, 108, 138, 151, 160;
+    critical estimate of the poem, 190, &c.; 206
+
+  "Lamia, and other Poems," by Keats (1820), 44, 97, 103, 108,
+      109, 110, 206
+
+  Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 61
+
+  Lempriere's "Classical Dictionary," 15
+
+  Lindon, Mrs. (_see_ Brawne, Fanny)
+
+  Llanos, 121
+
+  Lockhart, 91
+
+  Lucas, 19
+
+  Lucy Vaughan Lloyd (pseudonym of Keats), 114
+
+  Lyrics (various) by Keats, 204
+
+
+M.
+
+  Mackereth, George Wilson, 19
+
+  "Maia, Ode to," by Keats, 202
+
+  "Mark, Eve of St.," by Keats, 52, 110, 182;
+    critical estimate of the poem, 184-185; 190
+
+  Marmontel's "Incas of Peru," 15
+
+  Mathew, George Felton, Epistle to, by Keats, 67; 157
+
+  Medwin's "Life of Shelley," 34
+
+  "Melancholy, Ode on," by Keats, 109, 192, 194-199
+
+  Milton, 107, 135, 147, 159, 165, 186, 188
+
+  "Miserrimus," by Reynolds, 23
+
+  Mitford, Miss, 101, 135
+
+  Moore, Thomas, 165
+
+  _Morning Chronicle, The_, 93
+
+  Murray, John, 102
+
+
+N.
+
+  Napoleon I., 32
+
+  "Narensky," opera by C. A. Brown, 27
+
+  Newton, Sir Isaac, 151
+
+  "Nightingale, Ode to a," by Keats, 103, 109, 160, 192, 194-202;
+    analysed, 200-202; 204
+
+  "Nile," Sonnets on the, by Keats, &c.; 110
+
+
+O.
+
+  Ollier, Charles, 21, 71
+
+  "Otho the Great," by Keats, 38, 111, 112;
+    critical estimate of, 189
+
+
+P.
+
+  "Paradise Lost," 108, 175, 187
+
+  "Paradise Lost," Notes on, by Keats, 115
+
+  Philostratus's "Life of Apollonius," 108
+
+  "Poems" (1817), by Keats, 23, 66;
+    letter regarding this volume, by the publishers, 72; 122, 164-167
+
+  Pope, 70
+
+  Procter, Mrs., 125, 126
+
+  Purcell, 148
+
+  "Psyche, Ode to," by Keats, 109, 192, 194-199
+
+
+Q.
+
+  _Quarterly Review, The_, 83;
+    its critique of "Endymion" extracted, 83-91; 93, 95, 96, 97,
+      98, 99, 102, 104, 153, 179
+
+  "Quixote, Don," 120
+
+
+R.
+
+  R. B., 93
+
+  Raphael, 155
+
+  Rawlings, William, 16
+
+  Reynolds, John Hamilton, 22, 79, 95, 107, 115, 128, 156
+
+  Reynolds, Misses, 30, 31, 142, 145, 148
+
+  Reynolds, Mrs., 31
+
+  Rice, James, 38, 41, 147
+
+  Richardson, Dr., 25
+
+  Ritchie, 78
+
+  Robinson Crusoe, 15
+
+  Robinson, H. Crabb, 104
+
+  Rossetti, Dante G., 52, 184, 185, 190
+
+
+S.
+
+  Sandt, 150
+
+  Scott, Sir Walter, 91, 100
+
+  Severn, Joseph, 39;
+    leaves England with Keats for Italy, 54; 59;
+    his narrative of Keats's last days, 60, &c.; 104, 118, 119, 125;
+    his portraits of Keats, 127-129; 139, 143, 147, 148
+
+  Shakespeare (Macbeth), 15;
+    (Hamlet), 52; 93, 114, 135, 147;
+    (King Lear), 151; 155, 165
+
+  Shakespeare, Notes on, by Keats, 115
+
+  Shakespeare's sonnets, Book on, by C. A. Brown, 27
+
+  Sharpey, Dr., 30
+
+  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 39, 58, 59, 71, 77, 82, 91, 96;
+    his references to "Endymion," and _The Quarterly
+      Review_, 97-99; 102, 110, 119, 123, 125, 141, 147,
+      167, 179, 180, 185;
+    comparison between Shelley and Keats, 208
+
+  "Sleep and Poetry," by Keats, 67, 69;
+    extract from, 70; 165
+
+  Smith, Horace, 68
+
+  Snook, 56
+
+  Sonnet by Keats ("Bright Star," &c.), 114
+
+  Sonnets (various) by Keats, 164, 167, 203, &c.
+
+  Spence's "Polymetis," 15
+
+  Spenser, Edmund, 66, 164, 165
+
+  Spenser's Cave of Despair, picture by Severn, 55
+
+  Spenser's "Faery Queen," 20, 149
+
+  "Spenser, Imitation of," by Keats, 64
+
+  Stephens, Henry, 19, 78, 132, 147
+
+  "Stories after Nature," by Wells, 23
+
+  Swinburne, Mr. (on "Hyperion"), 186; 189, 199
+
+
+T.
+
+  Tasso, 165
+
+  Taylor and Hessey, 23, 72, 76, 78, 83, 93, 96, 109, 120, 128,
+      140, 146, 149, 152
+
+  Terry, 100
+
+  Thomson, James, 70
+
+  Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne," 179
+
+  Tooke's "Pantheon," 15
+
+  Torlonia, 61
+
+
+V.
+
+  Virgil, 165
+
+  Virgil's AEneid, 15, 20
+
+  Voltaire, 158
+
+
+W.
+
+  Webb, Cornelius, 92
+
+  Webster, 189
+
+  Wells, Charles, 23
+
+  Wilson, John, 91
+
+  "Woman, when I behold thee" &c., poem by Keats, quoted, 143
+
+  Wood, Warrington, 119
+
+  Woodhouse, Richard, 94, 149, 153, 188
+
+  Wordsworth, 21, 78; ("The Excursion,") 152; 153, 156, 164, 179
+
+
+Z.
+
+  Z (probably Lockhart), 91, 92, 100.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY.
+
+BY
+
+JOHN P. ANDERSON
+
+(British Museum).
+
+
+    I. Works.
+   II. Poetical Works.
+  III. Single Works.
+   IV. Letters, etc.
+    V. Miscellaneous.
+   VI. Appendix--
+         Biography, Criticism, etc.
+         Magazine Articles.
+  VII. Chronological List of Works.
+
+
+
+I. WORKS.
+
+The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats, now first brought
+together, including poems and numerous letters not before published.
+Edited, with notes and appendices, by H. B. Forman. 4 vols. London,
+1883, 8vo.
+
+The Letters of John Keats. Edited by J. G. Speed. (The Poems of
+J. Keats, with the annotations of Lord Houghton, and a memoir by
+J. G. Speed.) 3 vols. New York, 1883, 8vo.
+
+      A number of letters now included in this work were first
+      published in the New York _World_ of June 25-6, 1877, and
+      afterwards reprinted in the _Academy_, vol. xii., 1877,
+      pp. 38-40, 65-67.
+
+
+II. POETICAL WORKS.
+
+The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. In one volume.
+Paris, 1829, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats (including Memoir), i.-vii. and 1-75.
+
+Standard Library. The Poetical Works of J. K. London, 1840, 8vo.
+
+      The first _collected_ edition of Keats's Works.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. London, 1840, 8vo.
+
+      With an engraved frontispiece from the portrait in chalk
+      by Hilton. This book, although dated 1840, was not issued
+      until the following year. The frontispiece is dated
+      correctly.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. London, 1841, 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. A new edition. London, 1851, 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. With Memoir by R. M. Milnes [Lord Houghton].
+Illustrated by a portrait and 120 designs by George Scharf, Jun. London,
+1854, 8vo.
+
+      A small number of copies were struck off upon large
+      paper.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. With a life [signed J. R. L.--_i.e._, James
+Russell Lowell]. Boston [U.S.], 1854, 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. With a Memoir by Richard Monckton Milnes
+[Lord Houghton]. A new edition. London, 1861, 8vo.
+
+      Upon the reverse of the half-title to the "Memoir" is a
+      wood-cut profile of Keats.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited, with a critical memoir, by W. M.
+Rossetti. Illustrated by T. Seccombe. London [1872], 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited, with an introductory memoir and
+illustrations, by William B. Scott. London [1873], 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. With a memoir by James Russell Lowell.
+Portrait and 10 illustrations. New York, 1873, 8vo.
+
+      The Memoir was afterwards reprinted in "Among my Books,"
+      second series, 1876, pp. 303-327.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K., reprinted from the early editions, with
+memoir, explanatory notes, etc. (_Chandos Classics._) London [1874],
+8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. Chronologically arranged and edited, with a
+memoir, by Lord Houghton. (_Aldine Edition._) London, 1876, 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of Coleridge and Keats, with a memoir of each.
+(_Riverside Edition._) 4 vols. in 2. New York, 1878, 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. London [1878], 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited, with an introductory memoir, by
+W. B. Scott. (_Excelsior Series._) London [1880], 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited, with a critical memoir, by W. M.
+Rossetti. [Portrait, fac-simile, and six illustrations by Thomas
+Seccombe.] (_Moxon's Popular Poets._) London [1880], 8vo.
+
+      The same as the edition of 1872. The Memoir was reprinted
+      in "Lives of Famous Poets."
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K., reprinted from the original editions, with
+notes, by F. T. Palgrave. (_Golden Treasury Series._) London, 1884, 8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited by W. T. Arnold. London, 1884, 8vo.
+
+      There was a large paper edition, consisting of fifty
+      copies, numbered and signed.
+
+The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by H. B. Forman. London, 1884,
+8vo.
+
+The Poetical Works of J. K. With an introductory sketch by John Hogben.
+(_Canterbury Poets._) London, 1885, 8vo.
+
+
+III. SINGLE WORKS.
+
+Poems, by John Keats. London, 1817, 16mo.
+
+      The Museum copy contains a MS. note by F. Locker.
+
+Endymion; a Poetic Romance. By J. K. London, 1818, 8vo.
+
+Endymion. Illustrated by F. Joubert. From paintings by E. J. Poynter.
+London, 1873, fol.
+
+The Eve of St. Agnes. By J. K. With 20 illustrations by E. H. Wehnert.
+London, 1856, 8vo.
+
+The Eve of St. Agnes. Illustrated by E. H. Wehnert. London [1875], 8vo.
+
+The Eve of St. Agnes. Illustrated by nineteen etchings by Charles O.
+Murray. London, 1830, fol.
+
+The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems. Illustrated. Boston [U.S.], 1876,
+24mo.
+
+Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society. London, 1856-7, 8vo.
+
+      Vol. iii. contains "Another version of Keats's _Hyperion,
+      a Vision_," edited, with an introduction, by R. M. Milnes
+      (Lord Houghton).
+
+Keatsii Hyperionis. Libri i-ii. Latine reddidit Carolus Merivale.
+Cambridge, 1862, 8vo.
+
+Keats's Hyperion. Book I. With notes [life and introduction]. London
+[1877], 8vo.
+
+Keats's Hyperion. Book I. With introduction, elucidatory notes, and an
+appendix of exercises. London [1878], 8vo.
+
+Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems. By J. K. London,
+1820, 12mo.
+
+Lamia. With illustrative designs by W. H. Low. Philadelphia, 1885, fol.
+
+Ode to a Nightingale. By J. K. Edited, with an introduction, by Thomas
+J. Wise. London, 1884, 8vo.
+
+      Printed for private distribution, and issued in parchment
+      wrappers. Four copies on vellum and twenty-five on paper
+      only printed.
+
+
+IV. LETTERS, ETC.
+
+Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of J. K. Edited by R. M. Milnes.
+2 vols. London, 1848, 16mo.
+
+Life and Letters of John Keats. A new and completely revised edition.
+Edited by Lord Houghton. London, 1867, 8vo.
+
+Letters of J. K. to Fanny Brawne, written in the years 1819 and 1820,
+and now given from the original manuscripts, with introduction and
+notes, by Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878, 8vo.
+
+      In addition to the ordinary issue, the following special
+      copies were "printed for private distribution"--In 8vo on
+      Whatman's hand-made paper 60 copies, on vellum 2 copies;
+      in post 8vo there were 6 copies with title-page set up in
+      different style, and 2 copies of coloured bank-note
+      paper, one blue and the other yellow.
+
+
+V. MISCELLANEOUS.
+
+CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES.
+
+_Annals of the Fine Arts. A quarterly magazine, edited by James Elmes_--
+
+      "Ode to the Nightingale," vol. iv., 1820, pp. 354-356.
+      The first appearance of this poem, which was afterwards
+      included in the "Lamia" volume, 1820, pp. 107-112.
+
+      "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Appeared first in the "Annals of
+      the Fine Arts" vol. iv., 1820, pp. 638, 639, afterwards
+      included in the Lamia volume.
+
+_The Athenaeum_--
+
+      First appearance of the Sonnet "On hearing the Bag-pipe
+      and seeing 'The Stranger' played at Inverary," June 7,
+      1873, p. 725.
+
+_The Champion_--
+
+      "On Edmund Kean as a Shakesperian actor, and on Kean in
+      'Richard, Duke of York.'" Appeared on the 21st and 28th
+      Dec. 1817.
+
+_The Dial_--
+
+      "Notes on Milton's Paradise Lost." In vol. iii., 1843,
+      pp, 500-504; reprinted by Lord Houghton.
+
+_The Examiner_--
+
+      The "Sonnet to Solitude," Keats's first published poem,
+      according to Charles Cowden Clarke, appeared on the 5th
+      of May 1816, signed J. K., p. 282.
+
+      The first appearance of the sonnet "To Kosciusko," Feb.
+      16, 1817, p. 107.
+
+      The first appearance of the sonnet, "After dark vapors
+      have oppress'd our plains," etc., Feb. 23, 1817, p. 124.
+
+      Two sonnets "To Haydon, with a Sonnet written on seeing
+      the Elgin Marbles," and "On seeing the Elgin Marbles"
+      appear for the first time, March 9, 1817, p. 155. In 1818
+      they were reprinted in the _Annals of the Fine Arts_, No.
+      8.
+
+      The first appearance of the sonnet, "Written on a blank
+      space at the end of Chaucer's tale of 'The Floure and the
+      Lefe,'" March 16, 1817, p. 173.
+
+      Sonnet "On the Grasshopper and Cricket" appeared on the
+      21st Sept. 1817, p. 599.
+
+_The Gem, a Literary Annual, Edited by Thomas Hood_--
+
+      The sonnet "On a picture of Leander" appeared for the
+      first time in 1829, p. 108.
+
+_Hood's Comic Annual_--
+
+      "Sonnet to a Cat," 1830, p. 14.
+
+_Hood's Magazine_--
+
+      In vol. ii., 1844, p. 240, the sonnet "Life's sea hath
+      been five times at its slow ebb" appears for the first
+      time; included by Lord Houghton in the Literary Remains.
+
+      In vol. ii., 1844, p. 562, the poem "Old Meg," written
+      during a tour in Scotland, appears for the first time.
+
+_The Indicator. Edited by Leigh Hunt_--
+
+      In vol. i., 1820, p. 120. there are thirty-four lines,
+      headed _Vox et praeterea nihil_, supposed by Mr. Forman to
+      be a cancelled passage of Endymion, and reprinted by him
+      in his edition of Keats, 1883, vol. i, p. 221.
+
+      In vol. i. 1820, pp. 246-248, the poem "La Belle Dame Sans
+      Merci" first appeared, and signed "Caviare."
+
+      First appearance of the sonnet, "A Dream after reading
+      Dante's Episode of 'Paolo and Francesca,'" signed
+      "Caviare," vol. i. 1820, p. 304.
+
+_Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket Book_--
+
+      First appearance of the sonnets, "To Ailsa Rock" and "The
+      Human Season" in 1819.
+
+
+VI. APPENDIX.
+
+BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISM, ETC.
+
+Armstrong, Edmund J.--Essays and Sketches of Edmund J. Armstrong.
+London, 1877, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 176-179.
+
+Atlantic Monthly.--Boston, 1858, 8vo.
+
+      "The Poet Keats." Seven stanzas, vol. ii., pp. 531-532.
+
+Belfast, Earl of.--Poets and Poetry of the xixth century. A course of
+lectures. London, 1852, 8vo.
+
+      Moore, Keats, Scott, pp. 59-131.
+
+Best Bits.--Best Bits. London, 1884, 8vo.
+
+      "The Last Moments of Keats," vol. ii., p. 119.
+
+Biographical Magazine.--Lives of the Illustrious (The Biographical
+Magazine). London, 1853, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, vol. iii., pp. 260-271.
+
+Caine, T. Hall. Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London,
+1882, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 167-183.
+
+Caine, T. Hall.--Cobwebs of Criticism, etc. London, 1883, 8vo. Keats,
+pp. 158-190.
+
+Carr, J. Comyns.--Essays on Art. London, 1879, 8vo.
+
+      The artistic spirit in Modern English Poetry, pp. 3-34.
+
+Clarke, Charles Cowden.--The Riches of Chaucer, in which his impurities
+have been expunged, etc. 2 vols. London, 1835, 12mo.
+
+      John Keats, vol. i., pp. 52, 53.
+
+---- Recollections of Writers. London, 1878, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 120-157.
+
+Colvin, Sidney.--Keats (_English Men of Letters_). London, 1887, 8vo.
+
+Cotterill, H. B.--An Introduction to the Study of Poetry. London,
+1882, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 242-268.
+
+Courthope, William J.--The Liberal Movement in English Literature.
+London, 1885, 8vo.
+
+      Poetry, Music, and Painting. Coleridge and Keats, pp.
+      159-194.
+
+Cunningham, Allan.--Biographical and Critical History of the British
+Literature of the last fifty years. [Reprinted from the "Athenaeum."]
+Paris, 1834, 12mo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 102-104.
+
+Dennis, John.--Heroes of Literature. English Poets. London, 1883, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 365-373.
+
+De Quincey, Thomas.--Essays on the Poets, and other English Writers.
+Boston, 1853, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 75-97.
+
+---- De Quincey's Works. 16 vols. Edinburgh, 1862-71, 12mo.
+
+      John Keats, vol. v, pp. 269-288.
+
+Devey, J.--A comparative estimate of Modern English Poetry. London,
+1873, 8vo.
+
+      Alexandrine Poets. Keats, pp. 263-274.
+
+Dilke, Charles Wentworth.--The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the
+writings of the late Charles W. Dilke. 2 vols. London, 1875, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, vol. i., pp. 2-14.
+
+Encyclopaedia Britannica.--Encyclopaedia Britannica. Eighth edition.
+Edinburgh, 1857, 4to.
+
+      John Keats, vol. xiii., pp. 55-57.
+
+---- Ninth edition. Edinburgh, 1882, 4to.
+
+      John Keats, by Algernon C. Swinburne, vol. xiv.,
+      pp. 22-24.
+
+English Writers.--Essays on English Writers. By the author of "The
+Gentle Life." London, 1869, 8vo.
+
+      Shelley, Keats, etc., pp. 338-349.
+
+Gilfillan, George.--A Gallery of Literary Portraits. Edinburgh,
+1845, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 372-385.
+
+Gossip.--The Gossip. London, 1821, 8vo.
+
+      Three Stanzas, signed G. V. D., May 19, 1821, p. 96, "On
+      Reading Lamia and other poems, by John Keats."
+
+Griswold, Rufus W.--The Poets and Poetry of England in the Nineteenth
+Century. New York, 1875, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, with portrait, pp. 301-311.
+
+Haydon, Benjamin Robert,--Life of B. R. Haydon. Edited and compiled by
+Tom Taylor. 3 vols. London, 1853, 8vo.
+
+      Numerous references to Keats.
+
+---- Correspondence and Table-Talk. With a memoir by his son, F. W.
+Haydon. 2 vols. London, 1876, 8vo.
+
+      Contains ten letters and two extracts from letters to
+      Haydon, and ten letters from Haydon to Keats, vol. ii.,
+      pp. 1-17.
+
+Hinde, F.--Essays and Poems. Liverpool, 1864, 8vo.
+
+      The life and works of the poet Keats: a paper read before
+      the Liverpool Philomathic Society, April 15, 1862,
+      pp. 57-95.
+
+Hoffmann, Frederick A.--Poetry, its origin, nature, and history, etc.
+London, 1884, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, vol. i., pp. 483-491.
+
+Howitt, William.--Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets.
+Third edition. London, 1857, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 292-300.
+
+---- The Northern Heights of London, etc. London, 1869, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 95-103.
+
+Hunt, Leigh.--Imagination and Fancy; or, selections from the English
+Poets. London, 1844, 12mo.
+
+      Keats, born 1796, died 1821, pp. 312-345.
+
+---- Foliage, or Poems original and translated. London, 1818, 8vo.
+
+      Contains four sonnets; "To John Keats," "On receiving a
+      Crown of Ivy from the same," "On the same," "To the
+      Grasshopper and the Cricket."
+
+---- Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries; with recollections of
+the author's life, and of his visit to Italy. London, 1826, 4to.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 246-268.
+
+---- The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt; with reminiscences of friends and
+contemporaries. In three volumes. London, 1850, 8vo.
+
+      The references to John Keats, vol. ii., pp. 201-216, etc.
+      are substantially reproduced from the preceding work.
+
+Hutton, Laurence.--Literary Landmarks of London. London, [1885], 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 177-182.
+
+Jeffrey, Francis.--Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. London,
+1853, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats. Review of Endymion and Lamia, pp. 526-534.
+
+Lester, John W.--Criticisms. Third edition, London, 1853, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 343-349.
+
+Lowell, James Russell.--Among my Books. Second series. London,
+1876, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 303-327.
+
+---- The Poetical Works of J. R. L. New revised edition. Boston [U.S.],
+1882, 8vo.
+
+      Sonnet "To the Spirit of Keats," p. 20.
+
+Maginn, William.--Miscellanies: prose and verse. Edited by R. W.
+Montagu. 2 vols. London, 1885; 8vo.
+
+      Remarks on Shelley's Adonais, vol. ii., pp. 300-311.
+
+Mario, Jessie White.--Sepoleri Inglesi in Roma. (Estratto dalla _Nuova
+Antologia_, 15 Maggio, 1879.) Roma, 1879, 8vo.
+
+      On Keats and Shelley.
+
+Mason, Edward T.--Personal Traits of British Authors. New York, 1885,
+8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 195-207.
+
+Masson, David.--Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays. London,
+1874, 8vo.
+
+      "The Life and Poetry of Keats," pp. 143-191.
+
+Medwin, Thomas.--Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: noted
+during a residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and
+1822. By T. Medwin. London, 1824, 4to.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 143, 237-240, 255, etc.
+
+Milnes, Richard Monckton, _Lord Houghton_.--Life, Letters, and Literary
+Remains of John Keats. In two volumes. London, 1848, 8vo.
+
+---- Life and Letters of John Keats. A new and completely revised
+edition. Edited by Lord Houghton, London, 1867, 8vo.
+
+Mitford, Mary Russell.--Recollections of a Literary Life, etc. 3 vols.
+London, 1852, 8vo.
+
+      Shelley and Keats, vol. ii., pp. 183-192.
+
+Moir, D. M.--Sketches of the poetical literature of the past
+half-century. London, 1851, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 215-221.
+
+Noel, Hon. Roden.--Essays on poetry and poets. London, 1886, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 150-171.
+
+Notes and Queries.--General Index to Notes and Queries. 5 series.
+London, 1856-80, 4to.
+
+      Numerous references to John Keats.
+
+Olio.--The Olio. London [1828]. 8vo.
+
+      "Recollections of Books and their Authors," No. 6, "John
+      Keats, the Poet," vol. i., pp. 391-394.
+
+Oliphant, Mrs.--The Literary History of England, etc. 3 vols. London,
+1885, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, vol. iii., pp. 133-155.
+
+Owen, Frances Mary.--John Keats. A Study. London, 1880, 8vo.
+
+      Reviewed in the _Academy_, July 5 1884, p. 2.
+
+Payn, James.--Stories from Boccaccio, and other Poems. London,
+1852, 8vo.
+
+      Sonnet to John Keats, p. 97.
+
+Phillips, Samuel.--Essays from "The Times." Being a selection from the
+literary papers which have appeared in that journal. London, 1851, 8vo.
+
+      "The Life of John Keats," pp. 255-269. This article
+      originally appeared in "The Times" on Sept. 17, 1849.
+
+---- New Edition. 2 vols. London, 1871, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, vol. i., pp. 255-269.
+
+Richardson, David Lester.--Literary Chit-Chat, etc. Calcutta, 1848, 8vo.
+
+      Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, pp. 271-281.
+
+Rossetti, Dante Gabriel.--Ballads and Sonnets. London, 1881, 8vo.
+
+      Sonnets "To Five English Poets." No. iv., John Keats,
+      p. 316.
+
+Rossetti, William Michael.--Lives of Famous Poets. London [1885], 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 349-361.
+
+Sarrazin, Gabriel.--Poetes Modernes de l'Angleterre. Paris, 1885, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 131-152.
+
+Scott, William Bell.--Poems, Ballads, Studies from Nature, Sonnets, etc.
+Illustrated by seventeen etchings by the author and L. Alma Tadema.
+London, 1875, 8vo.
+
+      An etching by the author of Keats' Grave, p. 177; sonnet
+      "On the Inscription, Keats' Tombstone," p. 179. An Ode
+      "To the memory of John Keats," pp. 226-230.
+
+Scribner's Monthly Magazine.--Scribner's Monthly Magazine. New York,
+1880, 1887, 8vo.
+
+      The No. for June 1880 contains fourteen lines "To the
+      Immortal memory of Keats," and the May No. for 1887, p.
+      110, "Keats" (ten verses) by Robert Burns Wilson.
+
+Shelley, Percy Bysshe.--Adonais. An elegy on the death of John Keats,
+author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. Pisa, 1821, 4to.
+
+---- Adonais. An elegy on the death of John Keats, etc. Cambridge,
+1829, 8vo.
+
+---- Adonais. Edited, with notes, by H. Buxton Forman. London,
+1880, 8vo.
+
+Shelley, Lady.--Shelley Memorials; from authentic sources. Edited by
+Lady Shelley. London, 1859, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 74, 150-152, 155, 156, 200, 203.
+
+Stedman, Edmund Clarence.--Victorian Poets. London, 1876, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, pp. 18, 104, 106, 155, 367, etc.
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles.--Miscellanies. London, 1886, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 210-218. Originally appeared in the
+      Encyclopaedia Britannica.
+
+Tuckerman, Henry T.--Characteristics of Literature, illustrated by the
+genius of distinguished men. Philadelphia, 1849, 8vo.
+
+      Final Memorials of Lamb and Keats, pp. 256-269.
+
+---- Thoughts on the Poets. London [1852], 12mo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 212-226.
+
+Verdicts.--Verdicts. [Verse.] London, 1852, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, occupies 93 lines, pp. 28-32.
+
+Ward, Thomas H.--The English Poets, etc. 4 vols. London, 1883, 8vo.
+
+      John Keats, by Matthew Arnold, vol. iv., pp. 427-464.
+
+Willis, N. P.--Pencillings by the Way. A new edition. London, 1844, 8vo.
+
+      "Keats's Poems," pp. 84-88.
+
+Wiseman, Cardinal.--On the Perception of Natural Beauty by the Ancients
+and the Moderns, etc. London, 1856, 8vo.
+
+      Keats, pp. 13, 14; reviewed by Leigh Hunt in _Fraser's
+      Magazine_ for December, 1859.
+
+
+MAGAZINE ARTICLES.
+
+Keats, John
+
+  --Examiner, June 1, 1817, p. 345, July 6, 1817, pp. 428, 429,
+      July 13, 1817, pp. 443, 444.
+
+  --Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3, 1818, pp. 519-524.
+
+  --Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 7, 1820, p. 665;
+      vol. 27, 1830, p. 633.
+
+  --Indicator, by Leigh Hunt, vol. 1, 1820, pp. 337-352.
+
+  --Quarterly Review, vol. 37, 1828, pp. 416-421.
+
+  --Southern Literary Messenger, by H. T. Tuckerman, vol. 8,
+      1842, pp. 37-41.
+
+  --Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, by T. De Quincey, vol. 13, N.S.,
+      1846, pp. 249-254; same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 8,
+      pp. 202-209.
+
+  --Democratic Review, vol. 21, N.S., 1847, pp. 427-429.
+
+  --United States Magazine, vol. 21, N.S., 1847, pp. 427-429;
+      vol. 26, N.S., 1850, pp. 415-421.
+
+  --Hogg's Weekly Instructor, with portrait, vol. 1, 1848,
+      pp. 145-148; same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 14,
+      pp. 409-415.
+
+  --Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, vol. 10, N.S., 1848,
+      pp. 376-380.
+
+  --Sharpe's London Magazine, vol. 8, 1849, pp. 56-60.
+
+  --Knickerbocker, vol. 55, 1860, pp. 392-397.
+
+  --Temple Bar, vol. 38, 1873, pp. 501-512.
+
+  --Edinburgh Review, July 1876, pp. 38-42.
+
+  --Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 40. 1870, pp. 523-525
+      and vol. 55, 1877, by E. F. Madden, pp. 357-361,
+      illustrated.
+
+  --Scribner's Monthly, by R. H. Stoddard, vol. 15, 1877,
+      pp. 203-213.
+
+  --American Bibliopolist, vol. 7, p. 94, etc., and vol. 8,
+      p. 94, etc.
+
+  --_La Revue Politique et Litteraire_, by Leo Quesnel, 1877,
+      pp. 61-65.
+
+  --Argonaut, by Reginald W. Corlass, vol. 2, 1875, pp. 172-178.
+
+  --Canadian Monthly, by Edgar Fawcett, vol. 2, 1879,
+      pp. 449-454.
+
+  --_Century_, by Edmund C. Stedman, illustrated, vol. 27, 1884,
+      pp. 599-602.
+
+  ---- _and his Critics._ Dial, vol. 1, 1881, pp. 265, 266.
+
+  ---- _and Joseph Severn._ Dublin University Magazine, by
+        E. S. R., vol. 96, 1880, pp. 37-39.
+
+  ---- _and Lamb._ Southern Literary Messenger, by H. T.
+        Tuckerman, vol. 14, 1848, pp. 711-715.
+
+  ---- _and Shelley._ To-Day, June 1883, pp. 188-206, etc.
+
+  ---- _and the Quarterly Review._ Morning Chronicle, Oct. 3 and
+        8, 1818 (two letters). Examiner, 11 Oct., 1818, pp. 648,
+        649.
+
+  ---- _an Esculapian Poet._ Asclepiad, with portrait on steel,
+        vol. 1, 1884, pp. 138-155.
+
+  ---- _Art of._ Our Corner, by J. Robertson, vol. 4, 1884,
+        pp. 40-45, 72-76.
+
+  ---- _Cardinal Wiseman on._ Fraser's Magazine, by Leigh Hunt,
+        vol. 60, 1859, pp. 759, 760.
+
+  ---- _daintiest of Poets._ Victoria Magazine, vol. 15, 1870,
+        pp. 55-67.
+
+  ---- _Death of._ London Magazine, vol. 3, 1821, pp. 426,
+        427.
+
+  ---- _Verses on death of._ London Magazine, vol. 3, 1821,
+        p. 526.
+
+  ---- _Did he really care for music._ Manchester Quarterly, by
+        John Mortimer, vol 2, 1883, pp. 11-17.
+
+  ---- _Endymion._ Quarterly Review, by Gifford, vol. 19, 1818,
+        pp. 204-208.--London Magazine, vol. 1, 1820, pp. 380-389.
+
+  ---- _Forman's Edition of._ Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 49,
+        1884, pp. 330-341.--Times, Aug. 7, 1884.
+
+  ---- _Fragment from._ Gentleman's Magazine, by Grant Allen,
+        vol. 244, 1879, pp. 676-686.
+
+  ---- _Genius of._ Christian Remembrancer, vol. 6, N.S., 1843,
+        pp. 251-263.
+
+  ---- _Holman Hunt's "Isabel."_ Fortnightly Review, by
+        B. Cracroft, vol. 3, 1868, pp. 648-657.
+
+  ---- _Hyperion._ American Whig Review, vol. 14, 1851,
+        pp. 311-322.
+
+  ---- _Hyperionis, Libri i-ii._ Saturday Review, April 26, 1862,
+        pp. 477, 478.
+
+  ---- _in Cloudland._ A poem of thirty-one verses. St. James's
+        Magazine, by R. W. Buchanan, vol. 7, 1863, pp. 470-475.
+
+  ---- _Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and other poems._
+        London Magazine, vol. 2, 1820, pp. 315-321.--Indicator,
+        by Leigh Hunt, vol. 1, 1820, pp. 337-352.--Monthly
+        Review, vol. 92, N.S., 1820, pp. 305-310.--Eclectic
+        Review, vol. 14 N.S., 1820, 158-171.
+
+  ---- _Leigh Hunt's Farewell Words to._ Indicator, September 20,
+        1820.
+
+  ---- _Letters to Fanny Brawne._ Athenaeum, July 14, p. 50, July
+        21, pp. 80, 81, and July 28, 1877, pp. 114,
+        115.--Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 57, 1878,
+        p. 466.--Eclectic Magazine, vol. 27, N.S., 1878, pp. 495-498
+        (from the Academy).--Appleton's Journal, by R. H.
+        Stoddard, vol. 4, N.S., 1878, pp. 379-382.
+
+  ---- _Life and Poems of._ Macmillan's Magazine, by D. Masson,
+        vol. 3, 1860, pp. 1-16.
+
+  ---- _Marginalia made by Dante G. Rossetti in a copy of Keats'
+        Poems._ Manchester Quarterly, by George Milner, vol. 2,
+        1883, pp. 1-10.
+
+  ---- _Milnes' Life of._ American Review, by C. A. Bristed, vol.
+        8, 1848, pp. 603-610.--Littell's Living Age, vol. 19,
+        1848, pp. 20-24.--United States Magazine, vol. 23, N.S.,
+        1848, pp. 375-377.--Athenaeum, Aug. 12, 1848, pp.
+        824-827.--Revue des Deux Mondes, by Philarete Chasles,
+        Tom. 24, Serie 5, 1848, pp. 584-607.--Eclectic Review,
+        vol. 24, N.S., 1848, pp. 533-552.--Dublin Review, vol.
+        25, 1848, pp. 164-179.--British Quarterly Review, vol. 8,
+        1848, pp. 328-343.--Prospective Review, vol. 4, 1848,
+        pp. 539-555.--Democratic Review, vol. 23, N.S., 1848,
+        pp. 375-377.--Westminster Review, vol. 50, 1849,
+        pp. 349-371.--Sharpe's London Magazine, vol. 8, 1849,
+        pp. 56-60.--North British Review, vol. 10, 1848, pp. 69-96;
+        same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 16,
+        pp. 145-159.--New Monthly Magazine, vol. 84, 1848,
+        pp. 105-115; same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 15,
+        pp. 340-343.--Dublin University Magazine, vol. 33, 1849,
+        pp. 28-35.--Democratic Review, vol. 26, N.S., 1850,
+        pp. 415-421.
+
+  ---- _My Copy of._ Tinsley's Magazine, by Richard Dowling,
+        vol. 25, 1879, pp. 427-436.
+
+  ---- _New Editions of._ Dial, by W. M. Payne, vol. 4, 1884,
+        pp. 255, 256.
+
+  ---- _Le Paganisme poetique en Angleterre._ Revue des Deux
+        Mondes, by Louis Etienne, Tom. 69, periode 2, pp.
+        291-317.--Eclectic Review, vol. 8, 1817, pp. 267-275.
+
+  ---- _Poems of._ Examiner, by Leigh Hunt, June 1, July 6 and
+        13, 1817.--Edinburgh Review, by F. Jeffrey, vol. 34,
+        1820, pp. 203-213.--Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 8,
+        N.S., 1841, pp. 650, 651.--Dublin University Magazine,
+        vol. 21, 1843, pp. 690-703.--Edinburgh Review, vol. 90,
+        1849, pp. 424-430.--Massachusetts Quarterly Review, vol.
+        2, 1849, pp. 414-428.--Dublin University Magazine, vol.
+        83, 1874, pp. 699-706.--North American Review, vol. 124,
+        1877, pp. 500-501.
+
+  ---- _Poetry, Music, and Painting: Coleridge and Keats._
+        National Review, by W. J. Courthope, vol. 5, 1885,
+        pp. 504-518.
+
+  ---- _Recollections of._ Gentleman's Magazine, by Charles
+        Cowden Clarke, vol. 12, N.S., 1874, pp. 177-204; same
+        article, Littell's Living Age, vol. 121, pp. 174-188;
+        Every Saturday, vol. 16, p. 262, etc., 669,
+        etc.--Atlantic Monthly, by C. C. Clarke, vol. 7, 1861,
+        pp. 86-100.
+
+  ---- _School House of, at Enfield._ St. James's Magazine
+        Holiday Annual, 1875, by Charles Cowden Clarke.
+
+  ---- _Thoughts on._ New Dominion Monthly (portrait), by Robert
+        S. Weir, 1877, pp. 293-300.
+
+  ---- _Unpublished Notes on Milton._ Athenaeum, Oct. 26, 1872,
+        pp. 529, 530.
+
+  ---- _Unpublished Notes on Shakespeare._ Athenaeum, Nov. 16,
+        1872, p. 634.
+
+  ---- _Vicissitudes of his fame._ Atlantic Monthly, by
+        J. Severn, vol. 11, 1863, pp. 401-407; same article,
+        Sharpe's London Magazine, vol. 34, N.S., 1869,
+        pp. 246-249.
+
+
+VII.--CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS.
+
+  Poems                                      1817
+
+  Endymion                                   1818
+
+  Lamia, etc.                                1820
+
+  Life, letters, and literary remains        1848
+
+  Letters to Fanny Brawne                    1878
+
+  Letters                                    1883
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: A small point here may deserve a note. A letter from John
+Keats to his brother George, under date of September 21st, 1819,
+contains the following words: "Our bodies, every seven years, are
+completely fresh-materialed: seven years ago it was not this hand that
+clenched itself against Hammond." Another version of the same letter
+(the true wording of which is matter of some dispute) substitutes: "Mine
+is not the same hand I clenched at Hammond's." Mr. Buxton Forman, who
+gives the former phrase as the genuine one, thinks that "this phrase
+points to a serious rupture as the cause of his quitting his
+apprenticeship to Hammond." My own inclination is to surmise that the
+accurate reading may be--"It was not this hand that clenched itself
+against Hammond's"; indicating, not any quarrel, but the friendly
+habitual clasp of hand against hand. "Seven years ago" would reach back
+to September 1812: whereas Keats did not part from Hammond until 1814.]
+
+[Footnote 2: This is Hunt's own express statement. It has been disputed,
+but I am not prepared to reject it.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Biographers have been reticent on this subject. Keats's
+statement however speaks for itself, and a high medical authority, Dr.
+Richardson, writing in _The Asclepiad_ for April 1884, and reviewing the
+whole subject of the poet's constitutional and other ailments, says that
+Keats in Oxford "runs loose, and pays a forfeit for his indiscretion
+which ever afterwards physically and morally embarrasses him." He
+pronounces that Keats's early death was "expedited, perhaps excited, by
+his own imprudence," but was substantially due to hereditary disease.
+His mother, as we have already seen, had died of the malady which killed
+the poet, consumption. It is not clear to me what Keats meant by saying
+that "from his _employment_" his health would be insecure. One might
+suppose that he was thinking of the long and haphazard working hours of
+a young surgeon or medical man; in which case, this seems to be the
+latest instance in which he spoke of himself as still belonging to that
+profession.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Hitherto printed "life"; it seems to me clear that "lips"
+is the right word.]
+
+[Footnote 5: In Medwin's "Life of Shelley," vol. ii. pp. 89 to 92, are
+some interesting remarks upon Keats's character and demeanour, written
+in a warm and sympathetic tone. Some of them were certainly penned by
+Miss Brawne (Mrs. Lindon), and possibly all of them. Mr. Colvin (p. 233
+of his book) has called special attention to these remarks: I forbear
+from quoting them. A leading point is to vindicate Keats from the
+imputation of "violence of temper."]
+
+[Footnote 6: This passage is taken from Lord Houghton's "Life, &c., of
+Keats," first published in 1848, and by "home" he certainly means
+Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Yet in his Aldine Edition of Keats, his
+lordship says that the poet "was at that time, very much against Mr.
+Brown's desire and advice, living alone in London." This latter
+statement may possibly be correct--I question it. The passage, as
+written by Lord Houghton, is condensed from the narrative of Brown. The
+latter is given verbatim in Mr. Colvin's "Keats," and is, of course, the
+more important and interesting of the two. I abstain from quoting it,
+solely out of regard to Mr. Colvin's rights of priority.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Apparently Miss Brawne had remonstrated against the
+imputation of "flirting with Brown," and much else to like effect in a
+recent letter from Keats.]
+
+[Footnote 8: I observe this name occurring once elsewhere in relation to
+Keats, but am not clear whose house it represents.]
+
+[Footnote 9: It has been suggested (by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as
+printed in Mr. Forman's edition of Keats) that the poem here referred to
+is "The Eve of St. Mark." Keats had begun it fully a year and a half
+before the date of this letter, but, not having continued it, he might
+have spoken of "having it in his head."]
+
+[Footnote 10: This may require a word of explanation. Keats, detained at
+Portsmouth by stress of weather, had landed for a day, and seen his
+friend Mr. Snook, at Bedhampton. Brown was then in Chichester, only ten
+miles off, but of this Keats had not at the time been aware.]
+
+[Footnote 11: The -- before "you" appears in the letter, as printed in
+Mr. Forman's edition of Keats. It might seem that Keats hesitated a
+moment whether to write "you" or "Miss Brawne."]
+
+[Footnote 12: No such letter is known. It has been stated that Keats,
+after leaving home, could never summon up resolution enough to write to
+Miss Brawne: possibly this statement ought to be limited to the time
+after he had reached Italy.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Lord Houghton says that Keats in Naples "could not bear to
+go to the opera, on account of the sentinels who stood constantly on the
+stage:" he spoke of "the continual visible tyranny of this government,"
+and said "I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this
+despotism." Sentinels on the stage have, I believe, been common in
+various parts of the continent, as a mere matter of government parade,
+or of routine for preserving public order. The other points (for which
+no authority is cited by Lord Houghton) must, I think, be over-stated.
+In November 1820 the short-lived constitution of the kingdom of Naples
+was in full operation, and neither tyranny nor despotism was in the
+ascendant--rather a certain degree of popular license.]
+
+[Footnote 14: The reader of Keats's preface will note that this is a
+misrepresentation. Keats did not speak of any fierce hell of criticism,
+nor did he ask to remain uncriticized in order that he might write more.
+What he said was that a feeling critic would not fall foul of him for
+hoping to write good poetry in the long run, and would be aware that
+Keats's own sense of failure in "Endymion" was as fierce a hell as he
+could be chastised by.]
+
+[Footnote 15: This phrase stands printed with inverted commas, as a
+quotation. It is not, however, a quotation from the letter of J. S.]
+
+[Footnote 16: "Coolness" (which seems to be the right word) in the
+letter to Miss Mitford.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Severn's view of the matter some years afterwards has
+however received record in the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson. Under the
+date May 6, 1837, we read--"He [Severn] denies that Keats's death was
+hastened by the article in the _Quarterly_."]
+
+[Footnote 18: The passage which begins--
+
+                              "Hard by
+    Stood serene Cupids watching silently"
+
+has some affinity with a passage in Shelley's "Adonais." The latter
+passage is, however, more directly based upon one in the Idyll of Bion
+on Adonis.]
+
+[Footnote 19: I do not clearly understand from the poem whether Endymion
+does or does not know, until the story nears its conclusion, that the
+goddess who favours him is Diana. He appears at any rate to _guess_ as
+much, either during this present interview or shortly afterwards.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Keats has been laughed at for ignorance in printing "Visit
+my Cytherea"; but it appears on good evidence that what he really wrote
+was "Visit thou my Cythera." A false quantity in this same canto,
+"Nept[)u]nus," cannot be explained away.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Declared it in some very odd lines; for instance--
+
+    "Do gently murder half my soul, and I
+    Shall feel the other half so utterly!"]
+
+[Footnote 22: See p. 52 as to Miss Brawne.]
+
+[Footnote 23: I presume the "three masterpieces" are "The Eve of St.
+Agnes," "Hyperion," and "Lamia"; this leaves out of count the short
+"Belle Dame sans Merci," and the unfinished "Eve of St. Mark," but
+certainly not because Dante Rossetti rated those lower than the three
+others.]
+
+[Footnote 24: There are some various readings in this poem (as here,
+"wretched wight"); I adopt the phrases which I prefer.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
+
+Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
+possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, and inconsistent
+hyphenation. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation have been
+fixed. Corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below:
+
+page 110: typo fixed
+
+  In Feburary[February] 1818 Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Shelley,
+  undertook to write a sonnet each upon the river Nile.
+
+page 150: typo fixed
+
+  which could not be made applicable or subservient to the purposes
+  of poetry. Many will remember the ancedote[ancedote], proper to
+  Haydon's "immortal dinner"
+
+page 201: typo fixed
+
+  seems almost outside the region of criticism. Still, it is a
+  palpaple[palpable] fact that this address, according to its place
+  in
+
+In Footnote 20, [)u] indicates a u-breve.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Life of John Keats, by William Michael Rossetti
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