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diff --git a/41688-0.txt b/41688-0.txt index c33ff79..5bb4127 100644 --- a/41688-0.txt +++ b/41688-0.txt @@ -1,23 +1,4 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Keats, by Sidney Colvin - -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/license - - -Title: Keats - -Author: Sidney Colvin - -Release Date: December 22, 2012 [EBook #41688] - -Language: English - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS *** - - - +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41688 *** Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images @@ -8061,365 +8042,4 @@ MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON. 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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/license - - -Title: Keats - -Author: Sidney Colvin - -Release Date: December 22, 2012 [EBook #41688] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - - - - -English Men of Letters - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY - - -KEATS - - - - - KEATS - - - BY SIDNEY COLVIN - - - MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED - ST MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON - 1909 - - - - - _First Edition 1887._ - _Reprinted 1889, 1898, 1899, 1902, 1909._ - _Library Edition 1902._ - _Reprinted 1906._ - _Pocket Edition 1909._ - - - - -PREFACE. - - -With the name of Keats that of his first biographer, the late Lord -Houghton, must always justly remain associated. But while the sympathetic -charm of Lord Houghton's work will keep it fresh, as a record of the -poet's life it can no longer be said to be sufficient. Since the revised -edition of the _Life and Letters_ appeared in 1867, other students and -lovers of Keats have been busy, and much new information concerning him -been brought to light, while of the old information some has been proved -mistaken. No connected account of Keats's life and work, in accordance -with the present state of knowledge, exists, and I have been asked to -contribute such an account to the present series. I regret that lack of -strength and leisure has so long delayed the execution of the task -entrusted to me. The chief authorities and printed texts which I have -consulted (besides the original editions of the Poems) are the -following:-- - -1. Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries. By Leigh Hunt. London, 1828. - -2. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Thomas Medwin. London, 2 vols., -1847. - -3. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard -Monckton Milnes. 2 vols., London, 1848. - -4. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited and compiled by Tom Taylor. -Second edition. 3 vols., London, 1853. - -5. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and -Contemporaries. 3 vols., London, 1850. - -6. The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a memoir by Richard Monckton -Milnes. London, 1854. - -7. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. [Revised edition, edited by Thornton -Hunt.] London, 1860. - -8. The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame: an article by Joseph Severn in the -_Atlantic Monthly Magazine_ for 1863 (vol. xi. p. 401). - -9. The Life and Letters of John Keats. By Lord Houghton. New edition, -London, 1867. - -10. Recollections of John Keats: an article by Charles Cowden Clarke in -the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1874 (N. S. vol. xii. p. 177). Afterwards -reprinted with modifications in Recollections of Writers, by Charles and -Mary Cowden Clarke. London, 1878. - -11. The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the writings of the late Charles -Wentworth Dilke. With a biographical notice by Sir Charles Wentworth -Dilke, Bart., M.P. 2 vols., London, 1875. - -12. Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk. With a memoir -by Frederic Wordsworth Haydon. 2 vols., London, 1876. - -13. The Poetical Works of John Keats, chronologically arranged and edited, -with a memoir, by Lord Houghton [Aldine edition of the British Poets]. -London, 1876. - -14. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, with Introduction and Notes by -Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878. - -A biographer cannot ignore these letters now that they are published: but -their publication must be regretted by all who hold that human respect and -delicacy are due to the dead no less than to the living, and to genius no -less than to obscurity. - -15. The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats. Edited with notes -and appendices by Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols., London, 1883. - -In this edition, besides the texts reprinted from the first editions, all -the genuine letters and additional poems published in 3, 6, 9, 13, and 14 -of the above are brought together, as well as most of the biographical -notices contained in 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 12: also a series of -previously unpublished letters of Keats to his sister: with a great amount -of valuable illustrative and critical material besides. Except for a few -errors, which I shall have occasion to point out, Mr Forman's work might -for the purpose of the student be final, and I have necessarily been -indebted to it at every turn. - -16. The Letters and Poems of John Keats. Edited by John Gilmer Speed. 3 -vols., New York, 1883. - -17. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. Arnold. London, -1884. - -The Introduction to this edition contains the only attempt with which I am -acquainted at an analysis of the formal elements of Keats's style. - -18. An sculapian Poet--John Keats: an article by Dr B. W. Richardson in -the _Asclepiad_ for 1884 (vol. i. p. 134). - -19. Notices and correspondence concerning Keats which have appeared at -intervals during a number of years in the _Athenum_. - -In addition to printed materials I have made use of the following -unprinted, viz.:-- - -I. HOUGHTON MSS. Under this title I refer to the contents of an album from -the library at Fryston Hall, in which the late Lord Houghton bound up a -quantity of the materials he had used in the preparation of the _Life and -Letters_, as well as of correspondence concerning Keats addressed to him -both before and after the publication of his book. The chief contents are -the manuscript memoir of Keats by Charles Brown, which was offered by the -writer in vain to _Galignani_, and I believe other publishers; transcripts -by the same hand of a few of Keats's poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs -of the poet by his friends Charles Cowden Clarke (the first draft of the -paper above cited as no. 10), Henry Stephens, George Felton Mathew, Joseph -Severn, and Benjamin Bailey; together with letters from all the above, -from John Hamilton Reynolds, and several others. For the use of this -collection, without which my work must have been attempted to little -purpose, I am indebted to the kindness of its owner, the present Lord -Houghton. - -II. WOODHOUSE MSS. A. A common-place book in which Richard Woodhouse, the -friend of Keats and of his publishers Messrs Taylor and Hessey, -transcribed--as would appear from internal evidence, about midsummer -1819--the chief part of Keats's poems at that date unpublished. The -transcripts are in many cases made from early drafts of the poems: some -contain gaps which Woodhouse has filled up in pencil from later drafts: to -others are added corrections, or suggestions for corrections, some made in -the hand of Mr Taylor and some in that of Keats himself. - -III. WOODHOUSE MSS. B. A note-book in which the same Woodhouse has -copied--evidently for Mr Taylor, at the time when that gentleman was -meditating a biography of the poet--a number of letters addressed by Keats -to Mr Taylor himself, to the transcriber, to Reynolds and his sisters, to -Rice, and Bailey. Three or four of these letters, as well as portions of a -few others, are unpublished. - -Both the volumes last named were formerly the property of Mrs Taylor, a -niece by marriage of the publisher, and are now my own. A third note-book -by Woodhouse, containing personal notices and recollections of Keats, was -unluckily destroyed in the fire at Messrs Kegan Paul and Co's. premises in -1883. A copy of _Endymion_, annotated by the same hand, has been used by -Mr Forman in his edition (above, no. 15). - -IV. SEVERN MSS. The papers and correspondence left by the late Joseph -Severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable biography, have -been put into the hands of Mr William Sharp, to be edited and published at -his discretion. In the meantime Mr Sharp has been so kind as to let me -have access to such parts of them as relate to Keats. The most important -single piece, an essay on 'The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame,' has been -printed already in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (above, no. 8), but in the -remainder I have found many interesting details, particularly concerning -Keats's voyage to Italy and life at Rome. - -V. _Rawlings v. Jennings._ When Keats's maternal grandfather, Mr John -Jennings, died in 1805, leaving property exceeding the amount of the -specific bequests under his will, it was thought necessary that his estate -should be administered by the Court of Chancery, and with that intent a -friendly suit was brought in the names of his daughter and her second -husband (Frances Jennings, _m._ 1st Thomas Keats, and 2nd William -Rawlings) against her mother and brother, who were the executors. The -proceedings in this suit are referred to under the above title. They are -complicated and voluminous, extending over a period of twenty years, and -my best thanks are due to Mr Ralph Thomas, of 27 Chancery Lane, for his -friendly pains in searching through and making abstracts of them. - -For help and information, besides what has been above acknowledged, I am -indebted first and foremost to my friend and colleague, Mr Richard -Garnett; and next to the poet's surviving sister, Mrs Llanos; to Sir -Charles Dilke, who lent me the chief part of his valuable collection of -Keats's books and papers (already well turned to account by Mr Forman); to -Dr B. W. Richardson, and the Rev. R. H. Hadden. Other incidental -obligations will be found acknowledged in the footnotes. - -Among essays on and reviews of Keats's work I need only refer in -particular to that by the late Mrs F. M. Owen (Keats: a Study, London, -1876). In its main outlines, though not in details, I accept and have -followed this lady's interpretation of _Endymion_. For the rest, every -critic of modern English poetry is of necessity a critic of Keats. The -earliest, Leigh Hunt, was one of the best; and to name only a few among -the living--where Mr Matthew Arnold, Mr Swinburne, Mr Lowell, Mr Palgrave, -Mr W. M. Rossetti, Mr W. B. Scott, Mr Roden Noel, Mr Theodore Watts, have -gone before, for one who follows to be both original and just is not easy. -In the following pages I have not attempted to avoid saying over again -much that in substance has been said already, and doubtless better, by -others: by Mr Matthew Arnold and Mr Palgrave especially. I doubt not but -they will forgive me: and at the same time I hope to have contributed -something of my own towards a fuller understanding both of Keats's art and -life. - - - - -CONTENTS. - - - PAGE - - CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital - Student in London. [1795-1817] 1 - - CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh - Hunt: his Literary and Personal Influence--John Hamilton - Reynolds--James Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph - Severn--Charles Wells--Personal Characteristics-- - Determination to publish. [1814-April, 1817] 18 - - CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817 50 - - CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer - at Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey - at Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter - at Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity-- - Spring at Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and - Emigration of George Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818] 67 - - CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion_ 93 - - CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death - of Tom Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne-- - Excursion to Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon - and money difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening - Prospects--Summer at Shanklin and Winchester--Wise - Resolutions--Return from Winchester. [June, 1818-October, - 1819] 111 - - CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The - Plays 147 - - CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn Occupations--The _Cap and - Bells_--Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing Despondency--Visit of - George Keats to England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally - in the Spring--Summer in Kentish Town--Publication of the - _Lamia_ Volume--Relapse--Ordered South--Voyage to Italy-- - Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October, 1819-Feb. 1821] 180 - - CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius 209 - - APPENDIX 221 - - INDEX 234 - - - - -KEATS. - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital Student - in London. [1795-1817.] - - -Science may one day ascertain the laws of distribution and descent which -govern the births of genius; but in the meantime a birth like that of -Keats presents to the ordinary mind a striking instance of nature's -inscrutability. If we consider the other chief poets of the time, we can -commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood, or some -strong inspiring influence in the scenery and traditions of their home. -Thus we see Scott prepared alike by his origin, associations, and -circumstances to be the 'minstrel of his clan' and poet of the romance of -the border wilds; while the spirit of the Cumbrian hills, and the temper -of the generations bred among them, speak naturally through the lips of -Wordsworth. Byron seems inspired in literature by demons of the same -froward brood that had urged others of his lineage through lives of -adventure or of crime. But Keats, with instincts and faculties more purely -poetical than any of these, was paradoxically born in a dull and middling -walk of English city life; and 'if by traduction came his mind,'--to quote -Dryden with a difference,--it was through channels too obscure for us to -trace. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to -London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a -livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Presently he married -his employer's daughter, Frances Jennings; and Mr Jennings, who was a man -of substance, retiring about the same time to live in the country, at -Ponder's End, left the management of the business in the hands of his -son-in-law. The young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the -Swan-and-Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower -Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet JOHN KEATS, was born -prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, -named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, -1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the -3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family -had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a -mile farther north[1]. - -In the gifts and temperament of Keats we shall find much that seems -characteristic of the Celtic rather than the English nature. Whether he -really had any of that blood in his veins we cannot tell. His father was a -native either of Devon or of Cornwall[2]; and his mother's name, Jennings, -is common in but not peculiar to Wales. There our evidence ends, and all -that we know further of his parents is that they were certainly not quite -ordinary people. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of -intelligence and conduct--"of so remarkably fine a common sense and -native respectability," writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father's school -the poet and his brothers were brought up, "that I perfectly remember the -warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after -he had been to visit his boys." It is added that he resembled his -illustrious son in person and feature, being of small stature and lively -energetic countenance, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Of his wife, the -poet's mother, we learn more vaguely that she was "tall, of good figure, -with large oval face, and sensible deportment": and again that she was a -lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and -supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some -imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her -family as follows:--"my grandfather [Mr Jennings] was very well off, as -his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would -have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of -his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of -the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother." And -elsewhere:--"my mother I distinctly remember, she resembled John very much -in the face, was extremely fond of him, and humoured him in every whim, of -which he had not a few, she was a most excellent and affectionate parent, -and as I thought a woman of uncommon talents." - -The mother's passion for her firstborn son was devotedly returned by him. -Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an -illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an -old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to -lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different -turn:--"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 the -rescue." Another trait of the poet's childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, -on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that -when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had -a trick of making a rhyme to the last word people said and then laughing. - -The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send -them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school -kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats had -been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of -exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. Traces of its ancient -forest character lingered long, and indeed linger yet, about the -neighbourhood of the picturesque small suburban town of Enfield, and the -district was one especially affected by City men of fortune for their -homes. The school-house occupied by Mr Clarke had been originally built -for a rich West-India merchant, in the finest style of early Georgian -classic architecture, and stood in a pleasant and spacious garden at the -lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a -railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but -later it was taken down, and the faade, with its fine proportions and -rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington -Museum as a choice example of the style. - -Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, who was -killed by a fall from his horse as he rode home at night from Southgate. -This was on the 16th of April, 1804. Within twelve months his mother had -put off her weeds, and taken a second husband--one William Rawlings, -described as 'of Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper,' -presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management -of her father's business. This marriage turned out unhappily. It was soon -followed by a separation, and Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live -at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about -this time left a widow[3]. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers -after they were grown up, no mention is ever made of their step-father, of -whom after the separation the family seem to have lost all knowledge. The -household in Church Street, Edmonton, was well enough provided for, Mr -Jennings having left a fortune of over 13,000, of which, in addition to -other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding 200 a year to his widow -absolutely; one yielding 50 a year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with -reversion to her Keats children after her death; and 1000 to be -separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on -their coming of age[4]. Between this home, then, and the neighbouring -Enfield school, where he was in due time joined by his younger brothers, -the next four or five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1810) were passed in -sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, -or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only -recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in -his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are conveyed in some rhymes -which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young -sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of -genius, for dabbling by the brookside-- - - "In spite - Of the might - Of the Maid, - Nor afraid - Of his granny-good"-- - -and for keeping small fishes in tubs. - -If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own lips, we have -sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school -companions; which was that of a boy all spirit and generosity, vehement -both in tears and laughter, handsome, passionate, pugnacious, placable, -loveable, a natural leader and champion among his fellows. But beneath -this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from -the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of -unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was -accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, between whom and -himself there existed the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the -second brother, had all John's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less -impulsive disposition and a cooler blood: from a boy he was the bigger and -stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in -fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery elder -brother. Tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of -protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. The -singularly strong family sentiment that united the three brothers extended -naturally also to their sister, then a child: and in a more remote and -ideal fashion to their uncle by the mother's side, Captain Midgley John -Jennings, a tall navy officer who had served with some distinction under -Duncan at Camperdown, and who impressed the imagination of the boys, in -those days of militant British valour by land and sea, as a model of manly -prowess[5]. It may be remembered that there was a much more distinguished -naval hero of the time who bore their own name--the gallant Admiral Sir -Richard Godwin Keats of the _Superb_, afterwards governor of Greenwich -Hospital: and he, like their father, came from the west country, being the -son of a Bideford clergyman. But it seems clear that the family of our -Keats claimed no connection with that of the Admiral. - -Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written after the death of -his elder brother, and referring partly to their school-days and partly to -John's character after he was grown up:-- - - "I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of - his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we - quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my - schoolfellows will bear witness that John's temper was the cause of - all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are." - - "From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and - fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure - relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible - spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He - avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and - often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him - relief." - -Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to -their confirmation in the words of two of Keats's school-friends; and -first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards author of the _Life -of Mozart_:-- - - "Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for - fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his - brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him.... His - favourites were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed - to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour.... He was a - boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty - might easily fancy would become great--but rather in some military - capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out - rather suddenly and unexpectedly.... In all active exercises he - excelled. The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme - beauty and animation of his face made I remember an impression on - me--and being some years his junior I was obliged to woo his - friendship--in which I succeeded, but not till I had fought several - battles. This violence and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of - disposition--in passions of tears or outrageous fits of - laughter--always in extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. - Associated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and - expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more - popular[6]." - -Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school -friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and -encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first ventured into -poetry. This was the son of the master, Charles Cowden Clarke, who towards -the close of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature -in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:-- - - "He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a - highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most - picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw.... Upon one - occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had - boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself into the - received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who - could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was - almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the - taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, - laughing when John was "in one of his moods," and was endeavouring to - beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he - had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon - the most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, - like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his - highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his - placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his - behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, - superior or equal, who had known him." - -The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his -earlier school-days Keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual -bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. But during his -last few terms, that is in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, all the -energies of his nature turned to study. He became suddenly and completely -absorbed in reading, and would be continually at work before school-time -in the morning and during play-hours in the afternoon: could hardly be -induced to join the school games: and never willingly had a book out of -his hand. At this time he won easily all the literature prizes of the -school, and in addition to his proper work imposed on himself such -voluntary tasks as the translation of the whole neid in prose. He -devoured all the books of history, travel, and fiction in the school -library, and was for ever borrowing more from the friend who tells the -story. "In my mind's eye I now see him at supper sitting back on the form -from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's 'History of his Own -Time' between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This -work, and Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner'--which my father took in, and I used to -lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and -religious liberty." But the books which Keats read with the greatest -eagerness of all were books of ancient mythology, and he seemed literally -to learn by heart the contents of Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's -_Dictionary_, and the school abridgment by Tindal of Spence's -_Polymetis_--the first the most foolish and dull, the last the most -scholarly and polite, of the various handbooks in which the ancient fables -were presented in those days to the apprehension of youth. - -Trouble fell upon Keats in the midst of these ardent studies of his latter -school-days. His mother had been for some time in failing health. First -she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid -consumption, which carried her off in February 1810. We are told with what -devotion her eldest boy attended her sick bed,--"he 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,"--and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--"he -gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook -under the master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in -all who saw him." In the July following, Mrs Jennings, being desirous to -make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, 'in -consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,' -executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom she -made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of the -instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from her late -husband under his will[7]. The guardians were Mr Rowland Sandell, -merchant, and Mr Richard Abbey, a wholesale tea-dealer in Pancras Lane. -Mrs Jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years[8], -but Mr Abbey, with the consent of his co-trustee, seems at once to have -taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John -Keats was withdrawn from school at the close of this same year 1810, when -he was just fifteen, and made to put on harness for the practical work of -life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own part, he was -bound apprentice for a term of five years to a surgeon at Edmonton named -Hammond. The only picture we have of him in this capacity has been left by -R. H. Horne, the author of _Orion_, who came as a small boy to the Enfield -school just after Keats had left it. One day in winter Mr Hammond had -driven over to attend the school, and Keats with him. Keats was standing -with his head sunk in a brown study, holding the horse, when some of the -boys, who knew his school reputation for pugnacity, dared Horne to throw a -snowball at him; which Horne did, hitting Keats in the back, and then -taking headlong to his heels, to his surprise got off scot free[9]. Keats -during his apprenticeship used on his own account to be often to and fro -between the Edmonton surgery and the Enfield school. His newly awakened -passion for the pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be -stifled, and whenever he could spare time from his work, he plunged back -into his school occupations of reading and translating. He finished at -this time his translation of the neid, and was in the habit of walking -over to Enfield once a week or oftener, to see his friend Cowden Clarke, -and to exchange books and 'travel in the realms of gold' with him. In -summer weather the two would sit in a shady arbour in the old school -garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks -and exclamations of enthusiasm. On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden -Clarke introduced him for the first time to Spenser, reading him the -_Epithalamium_ in the afternoon, and lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to -take away the same evening. It has been said, and truly, that no one who -has not had the good fortune to be attracted to that poem in boyhood can -ever completely enjoy it. The maturer student, appreciate as he may its -inexhaustible beauties and noble temper, can hardly fail to be in some -degree put out by its arbitrary forms of rhyme and diction, and wearied by -its melodious redundance: he will perceive the perplexity and -discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing -humanity, even the failure, at times, of clearness of vision and strength -of grasp, amidst all that luxuriance of decorative and symbolic invention, -and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. It is otherwise with the -uncritical faculties and greedy apprehension of boyhood. For them there is -no poetical revelation like the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to that -of floating for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by -those shores and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive -with glancing figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and -Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous -shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in distress. -Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging with delight: -'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he shewed moreover his own instinct for -the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm on epithets of -special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend, "he hoisted -himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image that -is--_sea-shouldering whales_!'" Spenser has been often proved not only a -great awakener of the love of poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of -the germs of original poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, -the most intimate friend of Keats during two later years of his life, -states positively that it was to the inspiration of the _Faerie Queene_ -that his first notion of attempting to write was due. "Though born to be a -poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his -eighteenth year. It was the _Faerie Queene_ that awakened his genius. In -Spenser's fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became -another being; till, enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, -and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his poetic powers -I first received from his brothers, and afterwards from himself. This, -his earliest attempt, the 'Imitation of Spenser,' is in his first volume -of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those acquainted with his -history[10]." Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his -memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest, and we may fairly assume -him to have been mistaken. - -After he had thus first become conscious within himself of the impulse of -poetical composition, Keats went on writing occasional sonnets and other -verses: secretly and shyly at first like all young poets: at least it was -not until two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed anything -he had written to his friend and confidant, Cowden Clarke. In the meantime -a change had taken place in his way of life. In the summer or autumn of -1814, more than a year before the expiration of his term of -apprenticeship, he had quarrelled with Mr Hammond and left him. The cause -of their quarrel is not known, and Keats's own single allusion to it is -when once afterwards, speaking of the periodical change and renewal of the -bodily tissues, he says "seven years ago it was not this hand which -clenched itself at Hammond." It seems unlikely that the cause was any -neglect of duty on the part of the poet-apprentice, who was not devoid of -thoroughness and resolution in the performance even of uncongenial tasks. -At all events Mr Hammond allowed the indentures to be cancelled, and -Keats, being now nearly nineteen years of age, went to live in London, and -continue the study of his profession as a student at the hospitals (then -for teaching purposes united) of St Thomas's and Guy's. For the first -winter and spring after leaving Edmonton he lodged alone at 8, Dean -Street, Borough, and then for about a year, in company with some -fellow-students, over a tallow-chandler's shop in St Thomas's Street. -Thence he went in the summer of 1816 to join his brothers in lodgings in -the Poultry, over a passage leading to the Queen's Head tavern. In the -spring of 1817 they all three moved for a short time to 76, Cheapside. -Between these several addresses in London Keats spent a period of about -two years and a half, from the date (which is not precisely fixed) of his -leaving Edmonton in 1814 until April, 1817. - -It was in this interval, from his nineteenth to his twenty-second year, -that Keats gave way gradually to his growing passion for poetry. At first -he seems to have worked steadily enough along the lines which others had -marked out for him. His chief reputation, indeed, among his fellow -students was that of a 'cheerful, crotchety rhymester,' much given to -scribbling doggrel verses in his friends' note-books[11]. But I have -before me the MS. book in which he took down his own notes of a course, or -at least the beginning of a course, of lectures on anatomy; and they are -not those of a lax or inaccurate student. The only signs of a wandering -mind occur on the margins of one or two pages, in the shape of sketches -(rather prettily touched) of pansies and other flowers: but the notes -themselves are both full and close as far as they go. Poetry had indeed -already become Keats's chief interest, but it is clear at the same time -that he attended the hospitals and did his work regularly, acquiring a -fairly solid knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the rudiments -of medical and surgical science, so that he was always afterwards able to -speak on such subjects with a certain mastery. On the 25th of July, 1816, -he passed with credit his examination as licentiate at Apothecaries' Hall. -He was appointed a dresser at Guy's under Mr Lucas on the 3rd of March, -1816, and the operations which he performed or assisted in are said to -have proved him no bungler. But his heart was not in the work. Its -scientific part he could not feel to be a satisfying occupation for his -thoughts: he knew nothing of that passion of philosophical curiosity in -the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame which by turns attracted -Coleridge and Shelley toward the study of medicine. The practical -responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him, and -he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill. -Voices and visions that he could not resist were luring his spirit along -other paths, and once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and -feelings in regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of -his unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that "the other day, -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 fairy-land." "My last operation," he once told Brown, "was the -opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but -reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed -a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again." - -Keats at the same time was forming intimacies with other young men of -literary tastes and occupations. His verses were beginning to be no longer -written with a boy's secrecy, but freely addressed to and passed round -among his friends; some of them attracted the notice and warm approval of -writers of acknowledged mark and standing; and with their encouragement he -had about the time of his coming of age (that is in the winter of 1816-17) -conceived the purpose of devoting himself to a literary life. We are not -told what measure of opposition he encountered on the point from Mr Abbey, -though there is evidence that he encountered some[12]. Probably that -gentleman regarded the poetical aspirations of his ward as mere symptoms -of a boyish fever which experience would quickly cure. There was always a -certain lack of cordiality in his relations with the three brothers as -they grew up. He gave places in his counting-house successively to George -and Tom as they left school, but they both quitted him after a while; -George, who had his full share of the family pride, on account of slights -experienced or imagined at the hands of a junior partner; Tom in -consequence of a settled infirmity of health which early disabled him for -the practical work of life. Mr Abbey continued to manage the money matters -of the Keats family,--unskilfully enough as will appear,--and to do his -duty by them as he understood it. Between him and John Keats there was -never any formal quarrel. But that young brilliant spirit could hardly -have expected a responsible tea-dealer's approval when he yielded himself -to the influences now to be described. - - - - -CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh Hunt: his - literary and personal influence--John Hamilton Reynolds--James - Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph Severn--Charles - Wells--Personal characteristics--Determination to publish. [1814-April - 1817.] - - -When Keats moved from Dean Street to St Thomas's Street in the summer of -1815, he at first occupied a joint sitting-room with two senior students, -to the care of one of whom he had been recommended by Astley Cooper[13]. -When they left he arranged to live in the same house with two other -students, of his own age, named George Wilson Mackereth and Henry -Stephens. The latter, who was afterwards a physician of repute near St -Albans, and later at Finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of -the time[14]. "He attended lectures," says Mr Stephens of Keats, "and went -through the usual routine, but he had no desire to excel in that -pursuit.... Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations--the -only thing worthy the attention of superior minds--so he thought--all -other pursuits were mean and tame.... It may readily be imagined that -this feeling was accompanied by a good deal of pride and some conceit, and -that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the -gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals." On the whole, it -seems, 'little Keats' was popular among his fellow-students, although -subject to occasional teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and -even his birth as the son of a stable-keeper. Mr Stephens goes on to tell -how he himself and a student of St Bartholomew's, a merry fellow called -Newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions -by Keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats taking -always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes. -He despised Pope, and admired Byron, but delighted especially in Spenser, -caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile, -than for the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used sometimes to -laugh at Keats and his flights,--to the indignation of his brothers, who -came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and -destined to exalt the family name. Questions of poetry apart, continues Mr -Stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady -and well-behaved--"his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having -any other taste or indulging in any vice." Another companion of Keats's -early London days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain -George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young -medical student some hospitality. "Keats and I," wrote in 1848 Mr -Mathew,--then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, struggling -meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of -twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy,--"Keats -and I, though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in -many respects as different as two individuals could be. He enjoyed good -health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was fond of company--could amuse -himself admirably with the frivolities of life--and had great confidence -in himself. I, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy--fond of -repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree.... -He was of the sceptical and republican school--an advocate for the -innovations which were making progress in his time--a faultfinder with -everything established. I on the other hand hated controversy and -dispute--dreaded discord and disorder"[15]--and Keats, our good Mr -Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to -apologize for shocking him. As to his poetical predilections, the -impression left on Mr Mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr -Stephens:--"he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep -emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of -elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the -pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never -observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme -sensibility." - -The exact order and chronology of Keats's own first efforts in poetry it -is difficult to trace. They were certainly neither precocious nor -particularly promising. The circumstantial account of Brown above quoted -compels us to regard the lines _In Imitation of Spenser_ as the earliest -of all, and as written at Edmonton about the end of 1813 or beginning of -1814. They are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or -experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a -little later in Keats's work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats loved -the best both first and last were those of the Elizabethan age, it is -clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of -writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not -so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of -these not the latest, Byron[16], but rather such milder minstrels as -Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental -Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose _Psyche_ had become very popular since her -death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical -versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces -preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with -this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves -very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, which he -addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a -shell. His two elegiac stanzas _On Death_, assigned by George Keats to the -year 1814, are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of -moralizing. Equally so is the address _To Hope_ of February 1815, with its -'relentless fair' and its personified abstractions, 'fair Cheerfulness,' -'Disappointment, parent of Despair,' 'that fiend Despondence,' and the -rest. And once more, in the ode _To Apollo_ of the same date, the voice -with which this young singer celebrates his Elizabethan masters is an -echo not of their own voice but rather of Gray's:-- - - "Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand, - And quickly forward spring - The Passions--a terrific band-- - And each vibrates the string - That with its tyrant temper best accords, - While from their Master's lips pour forth the inspiring words. - A silver trumpet Spenser blows, - And, as its martial notes to silence flee, - From a virgin chorus flows - A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity. - 'Tis still! Wild warblings from the olian lyre - Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire." - -The pieces above cited are all among the earliest of Keats's work, written -either at Edmonton or during the first year of his life in London. To the -same class no doubt belongs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish, -sentimental sonnet _To Byron_, and probably that also, which is but a -degree better, _To Chatterton_ (both only posthumously printed). The more -firmly handled but still mediocre sonnet on Leigh Hunt's release from -prison brings us again to a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the -young poet's life. It was on either the 2nd or the 3rd of February, 1815, -that the brothers Hunt were discharged after serving out the term of -imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling -the Prince Regent two years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many -other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to -Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed -quickly into friendship. Within a few days of Hunt's release, Clarke -walked in from Enfield to call on him (presumably at the lodging he -occupied at this time in the Edgware Road). On his return Clarke met -Keats, who walked part of the way home with him, and as they parted, says -Clarke, "he turned and gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day -that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had -received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I -recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! -There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with -life." - -Not long afterwards Cowden Clarke left Enfield, and came to settle in -London. Keats found him out in his lodgings at Clerkenwell, and the two -were soon meeting as often and reading together as eagerly as ever. One of -the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of Chapman's -Homer. After a night's enthusiastic study, Clarke found when he came down -to breakfast the next morning, that Keats, who had only left him in the -small hours, had already had time to compose and send him from the Borough -the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost hackneyed, _On First Looking -into Chapman's Homer_;-- - - "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, - And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; - Round many Western islands have I been - Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. - Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, - That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: - Yet did I never breathe its pure serene - Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: - Then felt I like some watcher of the skies - When a new planet swims into his ken; - Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes - He stared at the Pacific--and all his men - Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- - Silent, upon a peak in Darien." - -The date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed; but it was when nights -were short in the summer of 1815. The seventh line of the sonnet is an -afterthought: in the original copy sent to Cowden Clarke it stood more -baldly, 'Yet could I never tell what men might mean.' Keats here for the -first time approves himself a poet indeed. The concluding sestet is almost -unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius -than the image of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of schoolboy -reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, which should be Balboa -and not Cortez, but what does it matter?) is converted into the perfection -of appropriate poetry. - -One of the next services which the ever zealous and affectionate Cowden -Clarke did his young friend was to make him personally known to Leigh -Hunt. The acquaintance carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages -and even penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encouragement and -pleasure. It is impossible rightly to understand the career of Keats if we -fail to realise the various modes in which it was affected by his -intercourse with Hunt. The latter was the elder of the two by eleven -years. He was the son, by marriage with an American wife, of an eloquent -and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher of West -Indian origin, who had chiefly exercised his vocation in the northern -suburbs of London. Leigh Hunt was brought up at Christ's Hospital, about a -dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, and gained at sixteen some -slight degree of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile -poems. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being -then a clerk in the War Office; an occupation which he abandoned at -twenty-four (in 1808) in order to join his brother John Hunt in the -conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper. For five years the managers of that -journal helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of -Eldon and of Castlereagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect -sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they were caught -tripping, and condemned to two years' imprisonment for strictures ruled -libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and -person of the Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with -cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. Liberal statesmen, -philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society -in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial -conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. Tall, -straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black -eyes, and 'nose of taste,' Leigh Hunt was ever one of the most winning of -companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and -ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most -sympathetic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was far -too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank -neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him nearly -always a receiver,--still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly -abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer -for what they believed. Liberals could not but contrast his smiling -steadfastness under persecution with the apostasy, as in the heat of the -hour they considered it, of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In -domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under difficulties; and -none was better loved by his friends, or requited them, so far as the -depth of his nature went, with a truer warmth and loyalty. His literary -industry was incessant, hardly second to that of Southey himself. He had -the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a singular quickness of -intellectual apprehension for the points and qualities of what he enjoyed; -and for the gentler pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word he -loved) of literature, he is the most accomplished of guides and -interpreters. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, -and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which -Coleridge and De Quincey, with their more philosophic powers and method, -were subject, the faults of pedantry and effort. The infirmity of Leigh -Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. "Incomparable," according to Lamb's -well-known phrase, "as a fire-side companion," it was his misfortune to -carry too much of the fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both -in prose and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty -familiarity and ease which passes too easily into Cockney pertness. - -A combination of accidents, political, personal, and literary, caused this -writer of amiable memory and second-rate powers to exercise, about the -time of which we are writing, a determining influence both on the work and -the fortunes of stronger men. And first of his influence on their work. He -was as enthusiastic a student of 'our earlier and nobler school of poetry' -as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the -characteristic excellences of the 'French school,' the school of polished -artifice and restraint which had come in since Dryden, he was not less -bent on its overthrow, and on the return of English poetry to the paths of -nature and freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which -this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his -rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. "It -was his intention," he wrote in prison, "by the beginning of next year to -bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce -to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various -and legitimate harmony of the English heroic." The result of this -intention was the _Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and -published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. "With the -endeavour," so he repeated himself in the preface, "to recur to a freer -spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater -importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language." - -In versification Hunt's aim was to bring back into use the earlier form of -the rhymed English decasyllabic or 'heroic' couplet. The innovating poets -of the time had abandoned this form of verse (Wordsworth and Coleridge -using it only in their earliest efforts, before 1796); while the others -who still employed it, as Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Byron, adhered, -each in his manner, to the isolated couplet and hammering rhymes with -which the English ear had been for more than a century exclusively -familiar. The two contrasted systems of handling the measure may best be -understood if we compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of -those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two -different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern, -with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. The -regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand -for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the verse into equal -pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its -other divisions--dependent not on metre but on the sense--into clauses and -periods of variable length and structure. Under the older system of -versification the sentence or period had been allowed to follow its own -laws, with a movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the beauty of -the result depended upon the skill and feeling with which this free -element of the pattern was made to play about and interweave itself with -the fixed element, the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and -now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now drawing attention to -the rhyme and now withholding it. For examples of this system and of its -charm we have only to turn at random to Chaucer:-- - - "I-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse. - Hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse, - Byhynde her bak, a yerd long, I gesse, - And in the garden as the sonne upriste - She walketh up and down, and as hir liste - She gathereth floures, party white and reede, - To make a sotil garland for here heede, - And as an aungel hevenlyche sche song." - -Chaucer's conception of the measure prevails throughout the Elizabethan -age, but not exclusively or uniformly. Some poets are more inobservant of -the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as -independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than -with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the -_enjambement_, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to -another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an -opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to -clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single -propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall -regularly on the rhyme. This principle gradually gained ground during the -seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work -of Dryden. But Dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying -the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the -use of the triplet and the Alexandrine, thus:-- - - "Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood - Were poured upon the pile of burning wood, - And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food. - Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around - The fire, and Arcite's name they thrice resound: - 'Hail and farewell,' they shouted thrice amain, - Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again--:" - -and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the -Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:-- - - "I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; - I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. - Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; - I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." - -In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, -these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element -in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element -entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and -clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, -are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical -divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not -sententious, but fanciful and discursive:-- - - "Some in the fields of purest ther play, - And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. - Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, - Or roll the planets through the boundless sky. - Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light - Pursue the stars that shoot across the night, - Or seek the mists in grosser air below, - Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, - Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, - Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain." - -Leigh Hunt's theory was that Pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead -of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic -couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of _Rimini_ is avowedly -modelled. The result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial -cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in -either:-- - - "The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye - Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly; - Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common - To accept the attentions of this lovely woman, - But the meantime he took no generous pains, - By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains; - He entered not, in turn, in her delights, - Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights; - Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he - Unless his pride was roused by company; - Or when to please him, after martial play, - She strained her lute to some old fiery lay - Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras, - Or Ryan's cloak, or how by the red grass - In battle you might know where Richard was." - -It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh Hunt in _Rimini_ -is due the rhythmical form alike of _Endymion_ and _Epipsychidion_, of -Keats's _Epistles_ to his friends and Shelley's _Letter to Maria -Gisborne_. Certainly the _Epistles_ of Keats, both as to sentiment and -rhythm, are very much in Hunt's manner. But the earliest of them, that to -G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when _Rimini_ was not yet published, and -when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have -known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his -work to Hunt's may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural -affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the -disyllabic rhyme and the 'overflow' as used by some of the Elizabethan -writers, particularly by Spenser in _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and by Browne -in _Britannia's Pastorals_. At all events the appearance of _Rimini_ -tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice. - -As to Hunt's success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his -'free and idiomatic cast of language' to supersede the styles alike of -Pope and Wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps -enough. The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of -others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so -completely as in _Rimini_. The piece indeed is not without agreeable -passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the -pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his -prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and -handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and -vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any -departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, -found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_: and ladies -are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what, -one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can -endure to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and -Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like this?-- - - "What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes, - A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise?--" - - "How charming, would he think, to see her here, - How heightened then, and perfect would appear - The two divinest things the world has got, - A lovely woman in a rural spot." - -When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and -instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a -familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it -need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred -strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more -than once. - -Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily exercised on his -friends' fortunes and their estimation by the world. We have seen how he -found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of -political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no -means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him out as a special -butt for Tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so -inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. During his -imprisonment Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the _Reflector_, with notes and -additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the _Feast of the -Poets_, which he had written about two years before. In it Apollo is -represented as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to -the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who -present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially -welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. Moore and -Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof, -Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not -more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on -their contemporaries. The bitterness of the 'Lost Leader' feeling to which -we have referred accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of the Lake -writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott -as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged -the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the -poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His treatment of Scott, on the other -hand, is idly flippant and patronising. Now it so happened that of the two -champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other -the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh,--I mean Wilson and -Lockhart,--Wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and -Lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion -was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem -paradoxical rancour with which the gentle Hunt, and Keats as his friend -and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in _Blackwood_. - -To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first became known to each -other. Cowden Clarke began by carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from -the Edgware Road to a cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, a few of -Keats's poems in manuscript. Horace Smith was with Hunt when the young -poet's work was shown him. Both were eager in its praises, and in -questions concerning the person and character of the author. Cowden Clarke -at Hunt's request brought Keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has -left a vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. The -introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of 1816[17]. -Keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead household; -and for the next year or two Hunt's was the strongest intellectual -influence to which he was subject. So far as opinions were concerned, -those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood -by Leigh Hunt's writings in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic -as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel -of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his -own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of -eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy -of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and optimistic view of things, and he -had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:--ready to entertain and appreciate -any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or -power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. -In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in -common. Both alike were given to 'luxuriating' somewhat effusively and -fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever they liked in art, books, or -nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt -brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness -of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were intense beyond -parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also felt with Keats the -undying charm of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about -this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, -less adequate, of Homer. The poets Hunt loved best were Ariosto and the -other Italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in -English he was devoted to Keats's own favourite Spenser. - -The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of 'Libertas,' 'the lov'd -Libertas,' meaning Leigh Hunt, in the verses written by Keats at this -time. He attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the -_Faerie Queene_ in the metre of _Rimini_, and in others to express in the -same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the -beautiful, then rural Hampstead woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he -seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a -bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length -on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; -and the sonnet beginning, 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and -there', records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend's -house one night in winter. We find him presenting Hunt with a crown of -ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. Or they would -challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme. -Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion in December 1816, when they -each wrote to time a sonnet _on the Grasshopper and Cricket_, has left us -a pleasant picture of their relations:-- - - "The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences - which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard - and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious - encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:-- - - 'The poetry of earth is never dead.' - - "Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth - and eleventh lines:-- - - 'On a lone winter morning, when the frost - Hath wrought a silence'-- - - "Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation - on the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and - torpidity." - -Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced to a number of -congenial spirits. Among them he attached himself especially to one John -Hamilton Reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than -himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. Reynolds was -born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in London, as -writing-master at the Blue Coat School. He lacked health and energy, but -has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a -charming character and no slight literary talent. He held a clerkship in -an Insurance office, and lived in Little Britain with his family, -including three sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest -of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him -inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the -time. One, _Safie_, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then -fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published -in the year of Keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's -relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical -entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum -theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory -parody of _Peter Bell_, which Byron assumed to be the work of Moore. In -1820 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to -relate, under the name _Peter Corcoran_, the fortunes of an amateur of the -prize-ring; and a little later, in conjunction with Hood, the volume of -anonymous _Odes and Addresses to Eminent Persons_ which Coleridge on its -appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. But Reynolds had -early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of -an opening in business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell -sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave to Keats, and in -1821 he writes again, - - "As time increases - I give up drawling verse for drawing leases." - -In point of fact Reynolds continued for years to contribute to the _London -Magazine_ and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with -Hood. But neither in literature nor law did he attain a position -commensurate with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time of -which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,--with -Keats and Shelley,--he died in 1852 as Clerk of the County at Newport, -Isle of Wight, and it is only in association with Keats that his name will -live. Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining -from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet -written early in their acquaintance proves[18], but also one of the -wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake. -In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats's associates must be -mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of -literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, -but always, in Keats's words, "coming on his legs again like a cat"; ever -cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in -good offices to those about him: "dear noble generous James Rice," records -Dilke,--"the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest -men I ever knew." Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming -member of Hunt's set, when Keats first joined it, was one Cornelius Webb, -remembered now, if remembered at all, by _Blackwood's_ derisory quotation -of his lines on-- - - "Keats, - The Muses' son of promise, and what feats - He yet may do"-- - -as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. -He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough -of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost -be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his -weak moments[19]. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in -the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the -revision of the _Quarterly_ proofs. Towards 1830--1840 he re-appeared in -literature, as Cornelius 'Webbe', author of the _Man about Town_ and other -volumes of cheerful gossipping Cockney essays, to which the _Quarterly_ -critics extended a patronizing notice. - -An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which Keats made a few -months later, at Leigh Hunt's, was that of Shelley, his senior by only -three years. During the harrowing period of Shelley's life which followed -the suicide of his first wife--when his principle of love a law to itself -had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his -own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the -world's--the kindness and affection of Leigh Hunt were among his chief -consolations. After his marriage with Mary Godwin, he flitted often, alone -or with his wife, between Great Marlow and Hampstead, where Keats met him -early in the spring of 1817. "Keats," says Hunt, did not take to Shelley -as kindly as Shelley did to him, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a -little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in -every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a -fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his -pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for -friendship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of -reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at -first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or -material patronage on the other's part: but he should soon have learnt -better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy, -according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his -kindness. Of Shelley's kindness Keats had in the sequel sufficient proof: -in the meantime, until Shelley went abroad the following year, the two met -often at Hunt's without becoming really intimate. Pride and social -sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy -between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, -sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as -much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Shelley, -his passionate negation of the world's creeds and the world's law, and his -intense proselytizing ardour. - -It was also at Hunt's house that Keats for the first time met by -pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November 1816, the painter Haydon, -whose influence soon became hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon -was now thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two great -objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory -in the other. He had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence -of the Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor's art acknowledged in -the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation -secured. This is Haydon's chief real title to the regard of posterity. His -other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to -take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the -crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His -indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance, -his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his -self-assertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, -even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at -large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and -encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of -dilettantism and fashion. His first two great pictures, 'Dentatus' and -'Macbeth', had been dubiously received; his last, the 'Judgment of -Solomon', with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than -all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' and while as usual sunk deep in -debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in -truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of -the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he -possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely -exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this -time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future -greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and -ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming -flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and -shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God." -But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of -genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties -which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to -Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of -working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch -and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an -occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from -greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to -immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of -true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin -marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he -enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety -of the original. Very much better is his account of them in words: as -indeed Haydon's chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best -instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know with -what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style -he can relate an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the -literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries -to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied -void turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings. -Take for instance, in relation to Keats himself, Haydon's profound -admonition to him as follows:--"God bless you, my dear Keats! do not -despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakspere, and trust in -Providence, and you will do, you must:" or the following precious -expansion of an image in one of the poet's sonnets on the Elgin -marbles:--"I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable -to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he -must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling -sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing -angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless -wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects -of their seeking"-- - -But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those -he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not -his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his -associates as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits of -the time were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by -him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others -after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of -purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of -thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and -protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for -deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies', and the like. "I always rose up -from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed -fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me -streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he -was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both -particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it -might be, on their bounty. Experience of these qualities partly alienated -Keats from him in the long run. But at first sight Haydon had much to -attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and -Keats were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire from the -other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an -evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th -of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his -name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:-- - - "Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the - following:-- - - Great spirits now on earth are sojourning: - He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, - Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake, - Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing: - He of the rose, the violet, the spring, - The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake, - And lo! whose steadfastness would never take - A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering. - And other spirits there are standing apart - Upon the forehead of the age to come; - These, these will give the world another heart, - And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum - Of mighty workings in the human mart? - Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb." - -Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. The three well-known -sonnets of Wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and -about the same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote him a -sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. In his reply to Keats he -proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which "puts -me," answers Keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence I would -send my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but -think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out -the words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however, -accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two -other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin -marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to -his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject, -confessing his inability rightly to grasp or analyse the impressions he -had received. By the spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon -was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a -standing invitation to his studio in Great Marlborough Street, declaring -him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried -together. - -To complete the group of Keats's friends in these days, we have to think -of two or three others known to him otherwise than through Hunt, and not -belonging to the Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends of a -Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was attached. She was the -daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive -irregular cast of beauty, and Keats on his own account had a great liking -for her. On Valentine's day, 1816, we find him writing, for George to send -her, the first draft of the lines beginning, 'Hadst thou lived in days of -old,' afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[20]. Through -the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was -afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, but whose -character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with -Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was -the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to -be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, a strong love of -literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which Mr -Ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at -Rome[21]. From the moment of their introduction Severn found in Keats his -very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him -with an admiring affection. - -A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles Wells, afterwards -author of _Stories after Nature_, and of that singular and strongly -imagined Biblical drama or 'dramatic poem' of _Joseph and his Brethren_, -which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group -of poets and critics in ours. Wells had been a school companion of Tom -Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone -buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, -boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days -chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about -fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses acknowledged in -the sonnet beginning, 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' A year or -two later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on Tom -Keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the _Stories -after Nature_, published in 1822, are said to have been written in order -to show Keats "that he too could do something." - -Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely-born and half-schooled -young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art, -letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with -some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most -ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temperament alike saved -him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and -deference towards his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of -genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both verbal and other -exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression -which he made. "The character and expression of his features," it is said, -"would arrest even the casual passenger in the street." A small, handsome, -ardent-looking youth--the stature little over five feet: the figure -compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a -strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the -features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an -expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead -not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes -hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired--"an eye that had an inward -look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." "Keats -was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high -calling, except Wordsworth." These words are Haydon's, and to the same -effect Leigh Hunt:--"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." It is noticeable that -his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way -to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. To return to -Haydon:--"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 cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered." -In like manner George Keats:--"John's eyes moistened, and his lip -quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or -noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;" and a shrewd and -honoured survivor of those days, "herself of many poets the frequent theme -and valued friend,"--need I name Mrs Procter?--has recorded the impression -the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on -some glorious sight[22]. - -In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns himself, to -have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the -company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was -pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by -turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and -unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw -apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the -window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and -low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but -gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at -wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to -command respect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are said to -have been great, and never used unkindly. - -Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, -Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather -everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, -passion for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of course was -adverse: but his brothers, including George, the practical and sensible -one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to -them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his -compositions, show. In August 1816 we find him addressing from Margate a -sonnet and a poetical Epistle in terms of the utmost affection and -confidence to George. About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St -Thomas's Street to go and live with his brothers in the Poultry; and in -November he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side -occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. -It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a -time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England -has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself -induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement -of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh -Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without -comment, in the _Examiner_ for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, -'O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell,' and on the 1st of December in the -same year the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some -prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, associating with -his name those of Shelley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of Hunt in -this paper, says Mr Stephens, that Keats's fate was sealed. But already -the still more ardent encouragement of Haydon, if more was wanted, had -come to add fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the -Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers, and in the -convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats -should put forth a volume of his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers -was found in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last -proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, -with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be -furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _To -Leigh Hunt Esqr._, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:-- - - "Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away; - For if we wander out in early morn, - No wreathd incense do we see upborne - Into the East to meet the smiling day: - No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, - In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, - Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn - The shrine of Flora in her early May. - But there are left delights as high as these, - And I shall ever bless my destiny, - That in a time when under pleasant trees - Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, - A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, - With these poor offerings, a man like thee." - -With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old -pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's -first venture was sent forth in the month of March 1817. - - - - -CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817. - - -The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from -Spenser which he prefixed to it:-- - - "What more felicity can fall to creature - Than to enjoy delight with liberty?" - -The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of -release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true -nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And -the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: -delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in -the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and -affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art -itself which expresses and communicates all these joys. - -We have already glanced, in connection with the occasions which gave rise -to them, at a few of the miscellaneous boyish pieces in various metres -which are included in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. The -remaining and much the chief portion of the book consists of half a dozen -poems in the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. These had all been written -during the period between November 1815 and April 1817, under the combined -influence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The former -influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the -poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. Keats had by -this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his -earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a -vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the -Elizabethans and from Milton. The chief verbal echoes of Spenser to be -found in his first volume are a line quoted from him entire in the epistle -to G. F. Mathew, and the use of the archaic 'teen' in the stanzas -professedly Spenserian. We can indeed trace Keats's familiarity with -Chapman, and especially with one poem of Chapman's, his translation of the -Homeric _Hymn to Pan_, in a predilection for a particular form of abstract -descriptive substantive:-- - - "the pillowy silkiness that rests - Full in the speculation of the stars:"-- - - "Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:"-- - - "Ere I can have explored its widenesses."[23] - -The only other distinguishing marks of Keats's diction in this first -volume consist, I think, in the use of the Miltonic 'sphery,' and of an -unmeaning coinage of his own, 'boundly,' with a habit--for which Milton, -Spenser, and among the moderns Leigh Hunt all alike furnished him the -example--of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his -convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his -day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, -and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines and -passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and -instinct. But they are mixed up with much that only illustrates his -crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt -to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and -grace. - -In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems making a -succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic -couplet. In the colloquial _Epistles_, addressed severally to G. F. -Mathew, to his brother George, and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself -with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional -_enjambement_ or 'overflow.' In the _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, -and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled _Calidore_ (a name -borrowed from the hero of Spenser's sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed -piece beginning 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' which opens the -volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the -second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught -either from Spenser's nuptial odes or Milton's _Lycidas_,-- - - "Open afresh your round of starry folds, - Ye ardent marigolds." - -In _Sleep and Poetry_, which is the most personal and interesting, as well -as probably the last-written, poem in the volume, Keats drops this -practice, but in other respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making -free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line -rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather than an -exception the Chaucerian and Elizabethan fashion of breaking the couplet -by closing a sentence or paragraph with its first line. - -Passing from the form of the poems to their substance, we find that they -are experiments or poetic preludes merely, with no pretension to be -organic or complete works of art. To rehearse ramblingly the pleasures and -aspirations of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow another -with no particular plan or sequence, is all that Keats as yet attempts: -except in the _Calidore_ fragment. And that is on the whole feeble and -confused: from the outset the poet loses himself in a maze of young -luxuriant imagery: once and again, however, he gets clear, and we have -some good lines in an approach to the Dryden manner:-- - - "Softly the breezes from the forest came, - Softly they blew aside the taper's flame; - Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower; - Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; - Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone; - Lovely the moon in ether, all alone." - -To set against this are occasionally expressions in the complete taste of -Leigh Hunt, as for instance-- - - "The lamps that from the high-roof'd wall were pendent, - And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent." - -The _Epistles_ are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint pleasures of -literature and friendship. In that to Cowden Clarke, Keats acknowledges to -his friend that he had been shy at first of addressing verses to him:-- - - "Nor should I now, but that I've known you long; - That you first taught me all the sweets of song: - The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine, - What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine: - Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, - And float along like birds o'er summer seas; - Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness; - Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness. - Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly - Up to its climax, and then dying proudly? - Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, - Growing, like Atlas, stronger for its load? - Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, - The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? - Show'd me that Epic was of all the king, - Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?" - -This is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter manner of Keats -in his early work. Blots like the ungrammatical fourth line are not -infrequent with him. The preference for Miltonian tenderness over -Miltonian storms may remind the reader of a later poet's more masterly -expression of the same sentiment:--'Me rather all that bowery -loneliness--'. The two lines on Spenser are of interest as conveying one -of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of which no one has -left us more or better than Keats. The habit of Spenser to which he here -alludes is that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their -open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive lines, for -example,-- - - "Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, - More swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye; - Withouten oare or pilot it to guide, - Or winged canvas with the wind to fly." - -The run here is on _a_ and _i_; principally on _i_, which occurs five -times in its open, and ten times in its closed, sound in the four -lines,--if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel these two unlike sounds -denoted by the same sign. Keats was a close and conscious student of the -musical effects of verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have -suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration -of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we are not clearly told, -neither do I think it can easily be discovered from his practice; though -every one must feel a great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of -the vowel and diphthong sequences. He often spoke of the subject, and once -maintained his view against Wordsworth when the latter seemed to be -advocating a mechanical principle of vowel variation. - -Hear, next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, and of nature, -come naively jostling one another in the _Epistle_ addressed from the -sea-side to his brother George:-- - - "As to my sonnets, though none else should heed them - I feel delighted, still, that you should read them. - Of late, too, I have had much calm enjoyment, - Stretch'd on the grass at my best loved employment - Of scribbling lines for you. These things I thought - While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught. - E'en now I am pillow'd on a bed of flowers - That crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers - Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades - Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades. - On one side is a field of drooping oats, - Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats; - So pert and useless that they bring to mind - The scarlet coats that pester human kind. - And on the other side, outspread is seen - Ocean's blue mantle, streak'd with purple and green. - Now 'tis I see a canvass'd ship, and now - Mark the bright silver curling round her brow; - I see the lark down-dropping to his nest, - And the broad wing'd sea-gull never at rest; - For when no more he spreads his feathers free, - His breast is dancing on the restless sea." - -It is interesting to watch the newly-awakened literary faculty in Keats -thus exercising itself in the narrow circle of personal sensation, and on -the description of the objects immediately before his eyes. The effect of -rhythmical movement attempted in the last lines, to correspond with the -buoyancy and variety of the motions described, has a certain felicity, and -the whole passage is touched already with Keats's exquisite perception and -enjoyment of external nature. His character as a poet of nature begins, -indeed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. He differs by -it alike from Wordsworth and from Shelley. The instinct of Wordsworth was -to interpret all the operations of nature by those of his own strenuous -soul; and the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from the -scenery of his home, deepened and enriched by continual after meditation, -and mingling with all the currents of his adult thought and feeling, -constituted for him throughout his life the most vital part alike of -patriotism, of philosophy, and of religion. For Shelley on his part -natural beauty was in a twofold sense symbolical. In the visible glories -of the world his philosophy saw the veil of the unseen, while his -philanthropy found in them types and auguries of a better life on earth; -and all that imagery of nature's more remote and skyey phenomena, of which -no other poet has had an equal mastery, and which comes borne to us along -the music of the verse-- - - "With many a mingled close - Of wild olian sound and mountain odour keen"-- - -was inseparable in his soul from visions of a radiant future and a -renovated--alas! not a human--humanity. In Keats the sentiment of nature -was simpler than in either of these two other masters; more direct, and so -to speak more disinterested. It was his instinct to love and interpret -nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of sympathy which the -human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. He had -grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor -in the glow of millennial dreams like Shelley, but London-born and -Middlesex-bred, was gifted, we know not whence, as if by some mysterious -birthright, with a delighted insight into all the beauties, and sympathy -with all the life, of the woods and fields. Evidences of the gift appear, -as every reader knows, in the longer poems of his first volume, with their -lingering trains of peaceful summer imagery, and loving inventories of -'Nature's gentle doings;' and pleasant touches of the same kind are -scattered also among the sonnets; as in that _To Charles Wells_,-- - - "As late I rambled in the happy fields, - What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew - From his lush clover covert,"-- - -or again in that _To Solitude_,-- - - --"let me thy vigils keep - 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap - Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."[24] - -Such intuitive familiarity with the blithe activities, unnoted by common -eyes, which make up the life and magic of nature, is a gift we attribute -to men of primitive race and forest nurture; and Mr Matthew Arnold would -have us recognize it as peculiarly characteristic of the Celtic element in -the English genius and English poetry. It was allied in Keats to another -instinct of the early world which we associate especially with the Greeks, -the instinct for personifying the powers of nature in clearly-defined -imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half-human faculties. The -classical teaching of the Enfield school had not gone beyond Latin, and -neither in boyhood nor afterwards did Keats acquire any Greek: but towards -the creations of the Greek mythology he was attracted by an overmastering -delight in their beauty, and a natural sympathy with the phase of -imagination that engendered them. Especially he shows himself possessed -and fancy-bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical enchantment, -of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moonstruck. He had -planned a poem on the ancient story of the loves of Diana, with whom the -Greek moon-goddess Selene is identified in the Latin mythology, and the -shepherd-prince Endymion; and had begun a sort of prelude to it in the -piece that opens 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.' Afterwards, without -abandoning the subject, Keats laid aside this particular exordium, and -printed it, as we have seen, as an independent piece at the head of his -first volume. It is at the climax of a passage rehearsing the delights of -evening that he first bethinks himself of the moon-- - - "lifting her silver rim - Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim - Coming into the blue with all her light." - -The thought of the mythic passion of the moon-goddess for Endymion, and -the praises of the poet who first sang it, follow at considerable length. -The passage conjuring up the wonders and beneficences of their bridal -night is written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the collective -feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary conditions of human pain -and pleasure, health and sickness, as rarely occurs again in Keats's -poetry, though his correspondence shows it to have been most natural to -his mind:-- - - "The evening weather was so bright, and clear, - That men of health were of unusual cheer. - - * * * * * - - The breezes were ethereal, and pure, - And crept through half-closed lattices to cure - The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, - And sooth'd them into slumbers full and deep. - Soon they awoke clear-ey'd: nor burnt with thirsting, - Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: - And springing up, they met the wond'ring sight - Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; - Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, - And on their placid foreheads part the hair."[25] - -Finally, Keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exordium of his -unwritten poem with the cry:-- - - "Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses - That followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses: - Was there a poet born? But now no more - My wandering spirit must no farther soar." - -Was there a poet born? Is the labour and the reward of poetry really and -truly destined to be his? The question is one which recurs in this early -volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences -closely recalling those of Milton in his boyish _Vacation Exercise_; -sometimes with a cry like this, which occurs twice over in the piece -called _Sleep and Poetry_,-- - - "O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen, - That am not yet a glorious denizen - Of thy wide heaven:"-- - -and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring tone of young -ambition,-- - - "But off, Despondence! miserable bane! - They should not know thee, who, athirst to gain - A noble end, are thirsty every hour. - What though I am not wealthy in the dower - Of spanning wisdom: though I do not know - The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow - Hither and thither all the changing thoughts - Of man: though no great ministering reason sorts - Out the dark mysteries of human souls - To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls - A vast idea before me"--. - -The feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the overmastering -pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, -gives way in other passages to confident anticipations of fame, and of the -place which he will hold in the affections of posterity. - -There is obviously a great immaturity and uncertainty in all these -outpourings, an intensity and effervescence of emotion out of proportion -as yet both to the intellectual and the voluntary powers, much confusion -of idea, and not a little of expression. Yet even in this first book of -Keats there is much that the lover of poetry will always cherish. -Literature, indeed, hardly affords another example of work at once so -crude and so attractive. Passages that go to pieces under criticism -nevertheless have about them a spirit of beauty and of morning, an -abounding young vitality and freshness, that exhilarate and charm us -whether with the sanction of our judgment or without it. And alike at its -best and worst, the work proceeds manifestly from a spontaneous and -intense poetic impulse. The matter of these early poems of Keats is as -fresh and unconventional as their form, springing directly from the native -poignancy of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. That his -inexperience should always make the most discreet use of its freedom could -not be expected; but with all its immaturity his work has strokes already -which suggest comparison with the great names of literature. Who much -exceeds him, even from the first, but Shakspere in momentary felicity of -touch for nature, and in that charm of morning freshness who but Chaucer? -Already, too, we find him showing signs of that capacity for clear and -sane self-knowledge which becomes by-and-by so admirable in him. And he -has already begun to meditate to good purpose on the aims and methods of -his art. He has grasped and vehemently asserts the principle that poetry -should not strive to enforce particular doctrines, that it should not -contend in the field of reason, but that its proper organ is the -imagination, and its aim the creation of beauty. With reference to the -theory and practice of the poetic art the piece called _Sleep and Poetry_ -contains one passage which has become classically familiar to all readers. -Often as it has been quoted elsewhere, it must be quoted again here, as -indispensable to the understanding of the literary atmosphere in which -Keats lived:-- - - "Is there so small a range - In the present strength of manhood, that the high - Imagination cannot freely fly - As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, - Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds - Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all? - From the clear space of ether, to the small - Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning - Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening - Of April meadows? here her altar shone, - E'en in this isle; and who could paragon - The fervid choir that lifted up a noise - Of harmony, to where it aye will poise - Its mighty self of convoluting sound, - Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, - Eternally around a dizzy void? - Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd - With honours; nor had any other care - Than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair. - 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 sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, - And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd! - The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd - 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 smooth, inlay, and clip, 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, - Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large - The name of one Boileau! - O ye whose charge - It is to hover round our pleasant hills! - Whose congregated majesty so fills - My boundly reverence, that I cannot trace - Your hallow'd names, in this unholy place, - So near those common folk; did not their shames - Affright you? Did our old lamenting Thames - Delight you? did ye never cluster round - Delicious Avon, with a mournful sound, - And weep? Or did ye wholly bid adieu - To regions where no more the laurel grew? - Or did ye stay to give a welcoming - To some lone spirits who could proudly sing - Their youth away, and die? 'Twas even so. - But let me think away those times of woe: - Now 'tis a fairer season; ye have breathed - Rich benedictions o'er us; ye have wreathed - Fresh garlands: for sweet music has been heard - In many places; some has been upstirr'd - From out its crystal dwelling in a lake, - By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake, - Nested and quiet in a valley mild, - Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild - About the earth: happy are ye and glad." - -Both the strength and the weakness of this are typically characteristic of -the time and of the man. The passage is likely to remain for posterity the -central expression of the spirit of literary emancipation then militant -and about to triumph in England. The two great elder captains of -revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have both expounded their cause, in -prose, with much more maturity of thought and language; Coleridge in the -luminous retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_, Wordsworth in the -austere contentions of his famous prefaces. But neither has left any -enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory -like the rhymes of this young untrained recruit in the cause of poetic -liberty and the return to nature. It is easy, indeed, to pick these verses -of Keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention -on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to -do? fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against -the light? and why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly -be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' -Delight with liberty is very well, but liberty in a poet ought not to -include liberties with the parts of speech. Why should the hair of the -muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more -intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to -'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit, but not a standard, -and a standard flimsy, but not a motto. 'Boundly reverence': what is -boundly? And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that -attitude. Many minds not indifferent to literature were at that time, and -some will at all times be, incapable of any other. Such must naturally -turn to the work of the eighteenth century school, the school of tact and -urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think the only 'blasphemy' -was on the side of the youth who could call, or seem to call, the poet of -Belinda and the _Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot_ fool and dolt. Byron, in his -controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack -effectively enough: his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its -most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, -for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have -in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as -distinct from that of taste and reason, however clearly we may see the -weak points of a passage like this, however much we may wish that taste -and reason had had more to do with it, yet we cannot but feel that Keats -touches truly the root of the matter; we cannot but admire the elastic -life and variety of his verse, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of -rhetoric, the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow -of his delight in the achievements and promise of the new age. - -His volume on its appearance by no means made the impression which his -friends had hoped for it. Hunt published a thoroughly judicious as well as -cordial criticism in the _Examiner_, and several of the provincial papers -noticed the book. Haydon wrote in his ranting vein: "I have read your -_Sleep and Poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from -their occupations, and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that -_will_ follow." But people were in fact as far from being disturbed in -their occupations as possible. The attention of the reading public was for -the moment almost entirely absorbed by men of talent or of genius who -played with a more careless, and some of them with a more masterly touch -than Keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit; as Moore, -Scott, and Byron. In Keats's volume every one could see the faults, while -the beauties appealed only to the poetically minded. It seems to have had -a moderate sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. The -poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, apparently -with little reason, to blame their friends the publishers for the failure. -On the 29th of April we find the brothers Ollier replying to a letter of -George Keats in dudgeon:--"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." One of their customers, they go on -to say, had a few days ago hurt their feelings as men of business and of -taste by calling it "no better than a take in." - -A fortnight before the date of this letter Keats had left London. Haydon -had been urging on him, not injudiciously, the importance of seclusion and -concentration of mind. We find him writing to Reynolds soon after the -publication of his volume:--"My brothers are anxious that I should go by -myself into the country; they have always been extremely fond of me, and -now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone -to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me -continually for a great good which I hope will follow: so I shall soon be -out of town." And on the 14th of April he in fact started for the Isle of -Wight, intending to devote himself entirely to study, and to make -immediately a fresh start upon _Endymion_. - - - - -CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer at - Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey at - Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter at - Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity--Spring at - Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and Emigration of George - Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818.] - - -As soon as Keats reached the Isle of Wight, on April 16, 1817, he went to -see Shanklin and Carisbrooke, and after some hesitation between the two, -decided on a lodging at the latter place. The next day he writes to -Reynolds that he has spent the morning arranging the books and prints he -had brought with him, adding to the latter one of Shakspere which he had -found in the passage and which had particularly pleased him. He speaks -with enthusiasm of the beauties of Shanklin, but in a postscript written -the following day, mentions that he has been nervous from want of sleep, -and much haunted by the passage in _Lear_, 'Do you not hear the -sea?'--adding without farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet -beginning-- - - "It keeps eternal whisperings around - Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell - Gluts twice ten thousand caverns"--. - -In the same postscript Keats continues:-- - - "I find I cannot do without poetry--without eternal poetry; half the - day will not do--the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit has - made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not having - written anything of late: the Sonnet overleaf did me good; I slept the - better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad - again.... I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_, which I hope I shall - have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses - in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle." - -The Isle of Wight, however, Keats presently found did not suit him, and -Haydon's prescription of solitude proved too trying. He fell into a kind -of fever of thought and sleeplessness, which he thought it wisest to try -and shake off by flight. Early in May we find him writing to Leigh Hunt -from Margate, where he had already stayed the year before, and explaining -the reasons of his change of abode. Later in the same letter, endeavouring -to measure his own powers against the magnitude of the task to which he -has committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we have seen -recurring once and again in his verses during the preceding year, the vein -of awed self-questioning, and tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest -and half in jest. The next day we find him writing a long and intimate, -very characteristic letter to Haydon, signed 'your everlasting friend,' -and showing the first signs of the growing influence which Haydon was -beginning to exercise over him in antagonism to the influence of Leigh -Hunt. Keats was quite shrewd enough to feel for himself after a little -while the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of depth and -strength, in the kind and charming nature of Hunt, and quite loyal enough -to value his excellences none the less, and hold him in grateful and -undiminished friendship. But Haydon, between whom and Hunt there was by -degrees arising a coolness, must needs have Keats see things as he saw -them. "I love you like my own brother," insists he: "beware, for God's -sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents -and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his -own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of -his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to -support injured by his own neglect of character." There is a lugubrious -irony in these words, when we remember how Haydon, a self-deluder indeed, -came to realise at last the very fate he here prophesies for -another,--just when Hunt, the harassing and often sordid, ever brightly -borne troubles of his earlier life left behind him, was passing surrounded -by affection into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. But for a -time, under the pressure of Haydon's masterful exhortations, we find Keats -inclining to take an exaggerated and slightly impatient view of the -foibles of his earlier friend. - -Among other interesting confessions to be found in Keats's letter to -Haydon from Margate, is that of the fancy--almost the sense--which often -haunted him of dependence on the tutelary genius of Shakspere:-- - - "I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius - presiding over you. I have lately had the same thought, for things - which I do half at random, are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in - a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakspeare - this presider? When in the Isle of Wight I met with a Shakspeare in - the passage of the house at which I lodged. It comes nearer to my idea - of him than any I have seen; I was but there a week, yet the old woman - made me take it with me, though I went off in a hurry. Do you not - think this ominous of good?" - -Next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own nature, -describing it in words which the after issue of his life will keep but -too vividly and constantly before our minds:--"truth is, I have a horrid -Morbidity of Temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I -have no doubt, the greatest Enemy and stumbling-block I have to fear; I -may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment." Was it -that, in this seven-months' child of a consumptive mother, some unhealth -of mind as well as body was congenital?--or was it that, along with what -seems his Celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he had inherited a -special share of that inward gloom which the reverses of their history -have stamped, according to some, on the mind of the Celtic race? We cannot -tell, but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever -creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there dwelt in Keats's -bosom an almost equally busy and inventive spirit of self-torment. - -The fit of dejection which led to the remark above quoted had its -immediate cause in apprehensions of money difficulties conveyed to Keats -in a letter from his brother George. The trust funds of which Mr Abbey had -the disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed executed by -Mrs Jennings, amounted approximately to 8,000[26], of which the capital -was divisible among them on their coming of age, and the interest was to -be applied to their maintenance in the meantime. But the interest of -John's share had been insufficient for his professional and other expenses -during his term of medical study at Edmonton and London, and much of his -capital had been anticipated to meet them; presumably in the form of loans -raised on the security of his expectant share. Similar advances had also -been for some time necessary to the invalid Tom for his support, and -latterly--since he left the employment of Mr Abbey--to George as well. It -is clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances were made both -wastefully and grudgingly. It is further plain that the brothers were very -insufficiently informed of the state of their affairs. In the meantime -John Keats was already beginning to discount his expectations from -literature. Before or about the time of his rupture with the Olliers, he -had made the acquaintance of those excellent men, Messrs Taylor and -Hessey, who were shortly, as publishers of the _London Magazine_, to -gather about them on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors -comprising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. With them, -especially with Mr Taylor, who was himself a student and writer of -independent, somewhat eccentric ability and research, Keats's relations -were excellent from first to last, generous on their part, and -affectionate and confidential on his. He had made arrangements with them, -apparently before leaving London, for the eventual publication of -_Endymion_, and from Margate we find him acknowledging a first payment -received in advance. Now and again afterwards he turns to the same friends -for help at a pinch, adding once, "I am sure you are confident of my -responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;" nor -did they at any time belie his expectation. - -From Margate, where he had already made good progress with _Endymion_, -Keats went with his brother Tom to spend some time at Canterbury. Thence -they moved early in the summer to lodgings kept by a Mr and Mrs Bentley in -Well Walk, Hampstead, where the three brothers had decided to take up -their abode together. Here he continued through the summer to work -steadily at _Endymion_, being now well advanced with the second book; and -some of his friends, as Haydon, Cowden Clarke, and Severn, remembered all -their lives afterwards the occasions when they walked with him on the -heath, while he repeated to them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting -tone, the newly-written passages which best pleased him. From his poetical -absorption and Elysian dreams they were accustomed to see him at a touch -come back to daily life; sometimes to sympathize heart and soul with their -affairs, sometimes in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns, (it was a -punning age, and the Keats's were a very punning family), sometimes with a -sudden flash of his old schoolboy pugnacity and fierceness of righteous -indignation. To this summer or the following winter, it is not quite -certain which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in stand-up -fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had found tormenting a cat (a -'ruffian in livery' according to one account, but the butcher version is -the best attested). - -For the rest, the choice of Hampstead as a place of residence had much to -recommend it to Keats: the freshness of the air for the benefit of the -invalid Tom: for his own walks and meditations those beauties of heath, -field, and wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habitations, -which his imagination could transmute at will into the landscapes of -Arcadia, or into those, 'with high romances blent,' of an earlier England -or of fable-land. For society there was the convenient proximity to, and -yet seclusion from, London, together with the immediate neighbourhood of -one or two intimate friends. Among these, Keats frequented as familiarly -as ever the cottage in the Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt was still -living--a kind of self-appointed poet-laureate of Hampstead, the features -of which he was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets, and now in the -cheerful singsong of his familiar _Epistles_:-- - - "And yet how can I touch, and not linger awhile - On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile? - On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, - Dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley'd shades, - With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees - The hills up above him with roofs in the trees." - -Several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed to Keats -himself, some translations from the Greek, and a not ungraceful -mythological poem, the _Nymphs_, were published early in the following -year by Leigh Hunt in a volume called _Foliage_, which helped to draw down -on him and his friends the lash of Tory criticism. - -Near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction from Hunt's cottage, -lived two new friends of Keats who had been introduced to him by Reynolds, -and with whom he was soon to become extremely intimate. These were Charles -Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown (or plain Charles Brown as he -at this time styled himself). Dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by -birth belonging to a younger branch of the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle, by -profession a clerk in the Navy Pay office, and by opinions at this time a -firm disciple of Godwin. He soon gave himself up altogether to literary -and antiquarian studies, and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the -most accomplished and influential of English critics and journalists, and -for many years editor and chief owner of the _Athenum_. No two men could -well be more unlike in mind than Dilke and Keats: Dilke positive, bent on -certainty, and unable, as Keats says, "to feel he has a personal identity -unless he has made up his mind about everything:" while Keats on his part -held that "the only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up -one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all -thoughts." Nevertheless the two took to each other and became fast -friends. Dilke had married young, and built himself, a year or two before -Keats knew him, a modest semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near -the lower end of Hampstead Heath, at the bottom of what is now John -Street; the other part of the same block being built and inhabited by his -friend Charles Brown. This Brown was the son of a Scotch stockbroker -living in Lambeth. He was born in 1786, and while almost a boy went out to -join one of his brothers in a merchant's business at St Petersburg; but -the business failing, he returned to England in 1808, and lived as he -could for the next few years, until the death of another brother put him -in possession of a small competency. He had a taste, and some degree of -talent for literature, and held strongly Radical opinions. In 1810 he -wrote an opera on a Russian subject, called _Narensky_, which was brought -out at the Lyceum with Braham in the principal part; and at intervals -during the next twenty years many criticisms, tales, and translations from -the Italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals edited by Leigh -Hunt. When Keats first knew him, Brown was a young man already of somewhat -middle-aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled,--a kindly companion, -and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good measure both of obstinacy and -caution lying in reserve, _more Scotico_, under his pleasant and convivial -outside. It is clear by his relations with Keats that his heart was warm, -and that when once attached, he was capable not only of appreciation but -of devotion. After the poet's death Brown went to Italy, and became the -friend of Trelawney, whom he helped with the composition of the -_Adventures of a Younger Son_, and of Landor, at whose villa near Florence -Lord Houghton first met him in 1832. Two years later he returned to -England, and settled at Plymouth, where he continued to occupy himself -with literature and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, an -essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobiographical poems of -Shakspere. Thoughts of Keats, and a wish to be his biographer, never left -him, until in 1841 he resolved suddenly to emigrate to New Zealand, and -departed leaving his materials in Lord Houghton's hands. A year afterwards -he died of apoplexy at the settlement of New Plymouth, now called -Taranaki[27]. - -Yet another friend of Reynolds who in these months attached himself with a -warm affection to Keats was Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford undergraduate -reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. Bailey was a -great lover of books, devoted especially to Milton among past and to -Wordsworth among present poets. For his earnestness and integrity of -character Keats conceived a strong respect, and a hearty liking for his -person, and much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in his -mind and cogitations, was called out in the intercourse that ensued -between them. In the course of this summer, 1817, Keats had been invited -by Shelley to stay with him at Great Marlow, and Hunt, ever anxious that -the two young poets should be friends, pressed him strongly to accept the -invitation. It is said by Medwin, but the statement is not confirmed by -other evidence, that Shelley and Keats had set about their respective -'summer tasks,' the composition of _Laon and Cythna_ and of _Endymion_, by -mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Keats at any rate -declined his brother poet's invitation, in order, as he said, that he -might have his own unfettered scope. Later in the same summer, while his -brothers were away on a trip to Paris, he accepted an invitation of Bailey -to come to Oxford, and stayed there during the last five or six weeks of -the Long Vacation. Here he wrote the third book of _Endymion_, working -steadily every morning, and composing with great facility his regular -average of fifty lines a day. The afternoons they would spend in walking -or boating on the Isis, and Bailey has feelingly recorded the pleasantness -of their days, and of their discussions on life, literature, and the -mysteries of things. He tells of the sweetness of Keats's temper and charm -of his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with which the hot -young liberal and free-thinker would listen to his host's exposition of -his own orthodox convictions: describes his enthusiasm in quoting -Chatterton and in dwelling on passages of Wordsworth's poetry, -particularly from the _Tintern Abbey_ and the _Ode on Immortality_: and -recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and other -technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling looks and low-voiced -recitations, his vividness of inner life, and intensity of quiet enjoyment -during their field and river rambles and excursions[28]. One special -occasion of pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to -Stratford-on-Avon. From Oxford are some of the letters written by Keats -in his happiest vein; to Reynolds and his sister Miss Jane Reynolds, -afterwards Mrs Tom Hood; to Haydon; and to his young sister Frances Mary, -or Fanny as she was always called (now Mrs Llanos). George Keats, writing -to this sister after John's death, speaks of the times "when we lived with -our grandmother at Edmonton, and John, Tom, and myself were always -devising plans to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us -to the others." Since those times Keats had seen little of her, Mr Abbey -having put her to a boarding-school before her grandmother's death, and -afterwards taken her into his own house at Walthamstow, where the visits -of her poet brother were not encouraged. "He often," writes Bailey, "spoke -to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great -delicacy and tenderness of affection:" and from this time forward we find -him maintaining with her a correspondence which shows his character in its -most attractive light. He bids her keep all his letters and he will keep -hers--"and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good -bundle--which hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God -knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on -times past--that now are to come." He tells her about Oxford and about his -work, and gives her a sketch of the story of _Endymion_--"but I daresay -you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have come down to -us from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece." - -Early in October Keats returned to Hampstead, whence he writes to Bailey -noticing with natural indignation the ruffianly first article of the -_Cockney School_ series, which had just appeared in _Blackwood's -Magazine_ for that month. In this the special object of attack was Leigh -Hunt, but there were allusions to Keats which seemed to indicate that his -own turn was coming. What made him more seriously uneasy were signs of -discord springing up among his friends, and of attempts on the part of -some of them to set him against others. Haydon had now given up his studio -in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove; and Hunt, having left -the Vale of Health, was living close by him at a lodging in the same -street. "I know nothing of anything in this part of the world," writes -Keats: "everybody seems at loggerheads." And he goes on to say how Hunt -and Haydon are on uncomfortable terms, and "live, _pour ainsi dire_, -jealous neighbours. Haydon says to me, 'Keats, don't show your lines to -Hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you'--so it appears -Hunt wishes it to be thought." With more accounts of warnings he had -received from common friends that Hunt was not feeling or speaking -cordially about _Endymion_. "Now is not all this a most paltry thing to -think about?... This is, to be sure, but the vexation of a day, nor would -I say so much about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and -reputation at heart[29]." When three months later Keats showed Hunt the -first book of his poem in proof, the latter found many faults. It is clear -he was to some extent honestly disappointed in the work itself. He may -also have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully into -confidence during its composition; and what he said to others was probably -due partly to such chagrin, partly to nervousness on behalf of his -friend's reputation: for of double-facedness or insincerity in friendship -we know by a hundred evidences that Hunt was incapable. Keats, however, -after what he had heard, was by no means without excuse when he wrote to -his brothers concerning Hunt,--not unkindly, or making much of the -matter,--"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. But who's afraid?" Keats was not the man to let this -kind of thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend: and writing -about the same time to Bailey, still concerning the dissensions in the -circle, he expounds the practical philosophy of friendship with truly -admirable good sense and feeling:-- - - "Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard - of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting - for ever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is - unfortunate: men should bear with each other; there lives not the man - who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The - best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual - yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by - which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with - circumstance. 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. Before I felt - interested in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well-read in their - faults; yet knowing them both I have been cementing gradually with - both. I have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite; - and to both must I of necessity cling, supported always by the hope - that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully - in their esteem, I may be able to bring them together. This time must - come, because they have both hearts; and they will recollect the best - parts of each other when this gust is overblown." - -Keats had in the meantime been away on another autumn excursion into the -country: this time to Burford Bridge near Dorking. Here he passed -pleasantly the latter part of November, much absorbed in the study of -Shakspere's minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of finishing -_Endymion_. He had thus all but succeeded in carrying out the hope which -he had expressed in the opening passage of the poem:-- - - "Many and many a verse I hope to write, - Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, - Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees - Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, - I must be near the middle of my story. - O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, - See it half finished; but let Autumn bold, - With universal tinge of sober gold, - Be all about me when I make an end." - -Returning to Hampstead, Keats spent the first part of the winter in -comparative rest from literary work. His chief occupation was in revising -and seeing _Endymion_ through the press, with much help from the -publisher, Mr Taylor; varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism, -and as the spring began, by the composition of a number of minor -incidental poems. In December he lost the companionship of his brothers, -who went to winter in Devonshire for the sake of Tom's health. But in -other company he was at this time mixing freely. The convivial gatherings -of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun high, the -discussions on art and literature boisterous, and varied with a moderate, -evidently never a very serious, amount of card-playing, drinking, and -dissipation. From these gatherings Keats was indispensable, and more than -welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, Messrs Taylor -and Hessey, men as strict in conduct and opinion as they were -good-hearted. His social relations began, indeed, in the course of this -winter to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought -consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Horace Smith in -company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:--"They -only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to -enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one -feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know -fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, -in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low -company. 'Would I were with that company instead of yours', said I to -myself." Men of ardent and deep natures, whether absorbed in the realities -of experience, or in the ideals of art and imagination, are apt to be -affected in this way by the conventional social sparkle which is only -struck from and only illuminates the surface. Hear, on the other hand, -with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius for genius, Keats -writes after seeing the great tragedian last mentioned interpret the inner -and true passions of the soul:-- - - "The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean ... his - tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them - honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we - feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while - speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello, 'Put up your bright - swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had - commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he - speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of - 'blood! blood! blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the last degree; - the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, - making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild - dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can - distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In - Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' came - from him, as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns." - -It was in the Christmas weeks of 1817-18 that Keats undertook the office -of theatrical critic for the _Champion_ newspaper in place of Reynolds, -who was away at Exeter. Early in January he writes to his brothers of the -pleasure he has had in seeing their sister, who had been brought to London -for the Christmas holidays; and tells them how he has called on and been -asked to dine by Wordsworth, whom he had met on the 28th of December at a -supper given by Haydon. This is the famous Sunday supper, or 'immortal -dinner' as Haydon calls it, which is described at length in one of the -most characteristic passages of the painter's _Autobiography_. Besides -Wordsworth and Keats and the host, there were present Charles Lamb and -Monkhouse. "Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, -Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so -speeded the stream of conversation," says Haydon, "that I never passed a -more delightful time." Later in the evening came in Ritchie the African -traveller, just about to start on the journey to Fezzan on which he died, -besides a self-invited guest in the person of one Kingston, Comptroller of -Stamps, a foolish good-natured gentleman, recommended only by his -admiration for Wordsworth. Presently Lamb getting fuddled, lost patience -with the platitudes of Mr Kingston, and began making fun of him, with -pranks and personalities which to Haydon appeared hugely funny, but which -Keats in his letter to his brothers mentions with less relish, saying, -"Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston, proceeding so far as to take the -candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft -fellow he was[30]." Keats saw Wordsworth often in the next few weeks after -their introduction at Haydon's, but has left us no personal impressions of -the elder poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one day -preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest clothes, with his -aforesaid unlucky admirer Mr Comptroller Kingston. We know from other -sources that he was once persuaded to recite to Wordsworth the Hymn to Pan -from _Endymion_. "A pretty piece of Paganism," remarked Wordsworth, -according to his usual encouraging way with a brother poet; and Keats was -thought to have winced under the frigidity. Independently of their -personal relations, the letters of Keats show that Wordsworth's poetry -continued to be much in his thoughts throughout these months; what he has -to say of it varying according to the frame of mind in which he writes. In -the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days again insists, -that there are three things to rejoice at in the present age, "The -_Excursion_, Haydon's Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste." This -mention of the name of Hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence -which somewhat powerfully affected Keats at this time. On the liberal side -in politics and criticism there was no more effective or more uncertain -free lance than that eloquent and splenetic writer, with his rich, -singular, contradictory gifts, his intellect equally acute and fervid, his -temperament both enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and -incisive. The reader acquainted with Hazlitt's manner will easily -recognize its influence on Keats in the fragment of stage criticism above -quoted. Hazlitt was at this time delivering his course of lectures on the -English poets at the Surrey Institution, and Keats was among his regular -attendants. With Hazlitt personally, as with Lamb, his intercourse at -Haydon's and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and friendly, but not -intimate: and Haydon complains that it was only after the death of Keats -that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius. - -Of Haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we see by the words -above quoted that Keats continued to think as highly as ever. He had, as -Severn assures us, a keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting -and music. Cowden Clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to him at -school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind's eye -visions of pictures:--"when a schoolboy the abstract idea I had of an -heroic painting was what I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways, -large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence--somewhat like the -feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning on his -crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving -with the sea." In Haydon's pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends -and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt -to see, not so much the actual performance, as the idea he had -pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend's intentions and -enthusiasm. At this time Haydon, who had already made several drawings of -Keats's head in order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering -Jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, "to be engraved," -writes Keats, "in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying, -at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and -that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it." -Both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part -of the sublime Haydon; who failed, however, to carry out his promise. "My -neglect," said Haydon long afterwards, "really gave him a pang, as it now -does me." - -With Hunt also Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds -his intimacy grew daily closer. Both of these friendships had a -stimulating influence on his poetic powers. "The Wednesday before last -Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile," he tells his -brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. "I have been writing, at -intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read -them over to you." With the help of Keats's manuscripts or of the -transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the -actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was -written the humorous sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat; on the 21st, after -seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, -the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!'--and on the -22nd the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which -Keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his Spenser, in order -to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _Lear_. On -the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to Apollo beginning -'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' and in the same letter the sonnet -beginning 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' which he calls his -last. On the 3rd of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin Hood, -suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest; on the 4th, -the sonnet beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in -which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love-fancy, -and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written at Hunt's in -competition with that friend and with Shelley; on the 5th, another sonnet -postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's -to compose something in honour, or in emulation of Spenser; and on the -8th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest -against one of Reynolds. About the same time Keats agreed with Reynolds -that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and -publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with -_Isabella_ or _the Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month -of February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, -and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the -influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in -a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, -translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of a singular -and haunting melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find him in -correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon -afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing -to flit. His brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at -Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a -scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom's health having made a -momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and -determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and -stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather--the -soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing -themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, -throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more -than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the -scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of objurgations -against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible, -in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents -his father to have been a Devonshire man:-- - - "You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a - splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod - county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the - primroses are out,--but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep - colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them."... "I - fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, - all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat - off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the - honour of Britain, that Julius Caesar did not first land in this - county: A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct - object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would - dispossess him[31]." - -Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid -brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during -these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of -_Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had -begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_, the first of his longer poems -written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time -he was reading and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With -the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been -attracted by _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and then more -energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he -now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of -genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its -power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey -and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. It -was in all senses manifestly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power, -and in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries of existence -and of suffering, and the 'deeps of good and evil,' were beginning for the -first time to press habitually on his thoughts. In that beautiful and -interesting letter to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human -life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he -thus describes:-- - - "We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the - Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light - and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of - delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this - breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's - vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves - that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and - oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually - darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set - open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages. We see not the - balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are in that state, we - feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'" - -A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed -_Epistles_, Keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he -sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea's edge:-- - - "twas a quiet eve, - The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave - An untumultuous fringe of silver foam - Along the flat brown sand; I was at home - And should have been most happy,--but I saw - Too far into the sea, where every maw - The greater or the less feeds evermore:-- - But I saw too distinct into the core - Of an eternal fierce destruction, - And so from happiness I far was gone. - Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day, - I've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay - Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, - Still do I that most fierce destruction see,-- - The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,-- - The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, - Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods! - Moods of one's mind!"-- - -In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his "Why should -woman suffer?"--"Aye, why should she?" writes Keats: "'By heavens, I'd -coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas.' These things are, and -he who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal -this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of -thought." And again, "were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal -coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I -should not by rights speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary -spirit that would do so." - -Not the general tribulations of the race only, but particular private -anxieties, were pressing in these days on Keats's thoughts. The shadow of -illness, though it had hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly -not only over his brother but his best friends. He speaks of it in a tone -of courage and gaiety which his real apprehensions, we can feel, belie. -"Banish money"--he had written in Falstaff's vein, at starting for the -Isle of Wight a year ago--"Banish sofas--Banish wine--Banish music; but -right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish Health and -banish all the world." Writing now from Teignmouth to Reynolds, who was -down during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains laughingly, but -with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, how he can go nowhere but Sickness -is of the company, and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or -he must cut them. - -Nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was the pain of a family -break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his mind to emigrate to -America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get -possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his own -fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the desire to -be in a position as quickly as possible to help, or if need be support, -his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, -Miss Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be -married and sail early in the summer. Keats came up from Teignmouth in May -to see the last of his brother, and he and Tom settled again in their old -lodgings in Well Walk. He had a warm affection and regard for his new -sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted for George's sake. But at the -same time he felt life and its prospects overcast. He writes to Bailey, -after his outburst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone -now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing -his ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. And after -recounting his causes of depression, he recovers himself, and -concludes:--"Life must be undergone; and I certainly derive some -consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it -ceases." - -With reference to his poem then just appearing, and the year's work which -it represented, Keats was under no illusions whatever. From an early -period in its composition he had fully realised its imperfections, and had -written: "My ideas of it are very low, and I would write the subject -thoroughly again, but I am tired of it, and think the time would be better -spent in writing a new romance, which I have in my eye for next summer. -Rome was not built in a day, and all the good I expect from my employment -this summer is the fruit of experience which I hope to gather in my next -poem." The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most -natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so -in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his -strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend -might judge. He shows himself perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_ -he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than -producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry; and when the time comes -to write a preface to the poem, after a first attempt lacking reticence -and simplicity, and abandoned at the advice of Reynolds, he in the second -quietly and beautifully says of his own work all that can justly be said -in its dispraise. He warns the reader to expect "great inexperience, -immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a -deed accomplished," and adds most unboastfully:--"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." - -The apprehensions expressed in these words have not been fulfilled; and -_Endymion_, so far from having died away, lives to illustrate the maxim -conveyed in its own now proverbial opening line. Immature as the poem -truly is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as are the sweets -which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing of far too much beauty, -or at least of too many beauties, to perish. Every reader must take -pleasure in some of its single passages and episodes, while to the student -of the poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its weakness -as its strength. - - - - - -CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion._ - - -In the old Grecian world, the myth of Endymion and Selene was one deeply -rooted in various shapes in the popular traditions both of Elis in the -Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The -central feature of the tale, as originally sung by Sappho, was the nightly -descent of the goddess to kiss her lover where he lay spell-bound, by the -grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. -The poem of Sappho is lost, and the story is not told at length in any of -our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the -poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and of the late -prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias. Of such ancient -sources Keats of course knew only what he found in his classical -dictionaries. But references to the tale, as every one knows, form part of -the stock repertory of classical allusion in modern literature: and -several modern writers before Keats had attempted to handle the subject at -length. In his own special range of Elizabethan reading, he was probably -acquainted with Lyly's court comedy of _Endimion_, in prose, which had -been edited, as it happened, by his friend Dilke a few years before: but -in it he would have found nothing to his purpose. On the other hand I -think he certainly took hints from the _Man in the Moon_ of Michael -Drayton. In this piece Drayton takes hold of two post-classical notions -concerning the Endymion myth, both in the first instance derived from -Lucian,--one that which identifies its hero with the visible 'man in the -moon' of popular fancy,--the other that which rationalises his story, and -explains him away as a personification or mythical representative of early -astronomy. These two distinct notions Drayton weaves together into a short -tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into the mouth of a shepherd at a -feast of Pan. Like most of his writings, the _Man in the Moon_ has strong -gleams of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile and pedantic. -Critics, so far as I know, have overlooked Keats's debt to it: but even -granting that he may well have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the -notion of introducing his story with a festival in honour of Pan--do not, -at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain evidently the hint for -the wanderings on which Keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity -affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air[32]?-- - - "Endymion now forsakes - All the delights that shepherds do prefer, - And sets his mind so generally on her - That, all neglected, to the groves and springs - He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings - (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, - Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers - The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke. - Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back - Among the blue Nereides: and when - Weary of waters goddess-like again - She the high mountains actively assays, - And there amongst the light Oriades, - That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort: - Sometime amongst those that with them comport - The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; - And there she stays not, but incontinent - Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, - And with Endymion pleased that she saw, - Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye - Stripping the winds----" - -Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose -inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely -kindred to his own--Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ makes Chloe -tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus-- - - "How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, - First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes - She took eternal fire that never dies; - How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, - His temples bound with poppy, to the steep - Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, - Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, - To kiss her sweetest." - -The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have -seen already, in Keats's thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old -pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his -natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but -deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the -story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is -for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human -soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow -forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[33]. - -The manner in which Keats set about relating the Greek story, as he had -thus conceived it, was as far from being a Greek or 'classical' manner as -possible. He indeed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid -sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature: and he loved to -follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete -shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions -for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to -conjure up visions of the classic past, or images from classic fable, he -was able to do so often magically well. To this extent Keats may justly be -called, as he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The -rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in -all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to -select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential, -and paring away their material to the quick that the main masses might -stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously -clear--these instincts had neither been implanted in Keats by nature, nor -brought home to him by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his -gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' Gothic, English. -A general characteristic of his favourite Elizabethan poetry is its -prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it -takes the powers of a Shakspere to keep the vital play of character and -passion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the -quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he wrote -_Endymion_, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constituted an -essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. "I think poetry," he says, -"should surprise by a fine excess:" and with reference to his own poem -during its progress, "it will be a test, a trial 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." - -The 'one bare circumstance' of the story was in the result expanded -through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course -of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate, -amplifying every incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion -into a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central Endymion myth -whatever others pleased him best, as those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of -Cybele, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of -Neptune, and of Bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations, -and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and arial gulfs and -over the floor of ocean. The scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not -merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental -bewilderment,--an Arabian Nights jugglery with space and time,--in the -vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. Such organic plan as -the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main -divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by -keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric -thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. The first -book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the -predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a -festival of his people held in honour of the god Pan, and is afterwards -induced by his sister Peona[34] to confide to her the secret of the -passion which consumes him. The account of the feast of Pan contains -passages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely -to be surpassed in poetry:-- - - "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 puls'd tenfold, - To feel this sun-rise and its glories old." - -What can be more fresh and stirring?--what happier in rhythmical -movement?--or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which -Keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work, -leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and -forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry -alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined -rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the -earth? Not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same -episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn -to Pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the Greek myth -to Greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are -foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. Keats having got -from Drayton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of -Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from -Chapman's Homer's hymn, from the sacrifice to Pan in Browne's -_Britannia's Pastorals_[35], and from the hymns in Ben Jonson's masque, -_Pan's Anniversary_: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and -refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an -imagination fed from the living sources of nature:-- - - "O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang - From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth - Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death - Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; - Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress - Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; - And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken - The dreary melody of bedded reeds-- - In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds - The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; - Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth - Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now, - By thy love's milky brow! - By all the trembling mazes that she ran, - Hear us, great Pan! - - * * * * * - - O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, - While ever and anon to his shorn peers - A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, - When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn - Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms, - To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: - Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, - That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, - And wither drearily on barren moors: - Dread opener of the mysterious doors - Leading to universal knowledge--see, - Great son of Dryope, - The many that are come to pay their vows - With leaves about their brows!" - -In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona he tells her the story -of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has -experienced or dreamed. In Keats's conception of his youthful heroes there -is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical -softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman -them quite: as indeed a helpless and enslaved submission of all the -faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of -his own nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it: but the -consequence is that the love-passages of _Endymion_, notwithstanding the -halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can -scarcely be read with pleasure. On the other hand, in matters of -subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the -signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance -wherein Peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:-- - - "Is this the cause? - This all? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas! - That one who through this middle earth should pass - Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave - His name upon the harp-string, should achieve - No higher bard than simple maidenhood, - Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood - Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray - He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_, - If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love; - What could it be but love? How a ring-dove - Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; - And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe - The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses. - And then the ballad of his sad life closes - With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!" - -In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led -by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless -region of adventure. In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions -of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in -mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings -Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. A Naiad, in the -disguise of a butterfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals -herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to -descend 'Into the sparry hollows of the world': which done, he gropes his -way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-Grecian magnificence, -where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and whither -Venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. Thence, urged -by the haunting passion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and -precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through all -this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich -first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and -inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry -admirably felt and expressed:-- - - "He sinks adown a solitary glen, - Where there was never sound of mortal men, - Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences - Melting to silence, when upon the breeze - Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet - To cheer itself to Delphi:"-- - -or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:-- - - "Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, - Came mother Cybele--alone--alone-- - In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown - About her majesty, and front death-pale, - With turrets crowned." - -After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the -bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable -descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his -celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the -streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled -flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to -his goddess in their behalf, and then-- - - "He turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept, - There was a cooler light; and so he kept - Towards it by a sandy path, and lo! - More suddenly than doth a moment go, - The visions of the earth were gone and fled-- - He saw the giant sea above his head." - -Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and -adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of -Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third -book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with -great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by -Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her -rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance -resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by -Endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful -fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's -submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,-- - - "He saw far in the green concave of the sea - An old man sitting calm and peacefully. - Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, - And his white hair was awful, and a mat - Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"-- - ---from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and -occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home his version of the myth with -strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. No picture can well -be more vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims: -and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected -enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. In the same book the -description of the sunk treasures cumbering the ocean-floor challenges -comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage in -Shakspere's _Richard III._ In the halls of Neptune Endymion again meets -Venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore. -Thence Nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in -spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in starlight on the -dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, he has allowed himself to be -diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of -others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last -nearer to fulfilment. - -It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really in his mind a -meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that -the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is -accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. And in his fourth -book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly -to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. Returning, in that -book, to upper air, Endymion before long half forgets his goddess for the -charms of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him -while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come -wandering in the train of Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian -maiden proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise. -But it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is -conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents, -descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, with his -infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave of -Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality -and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape, -make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially -intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in -pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal--such would seem -the argument--once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a -time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by -that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude -will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which -has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,--that it is -after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. What chiefly -or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric -poetry which Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian maiden -when she tells her story. His later and more famous lyrics, though they -are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do -not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of -imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of -the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the -best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial -romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps -partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful -associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild -wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, -yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a -'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening -measures are repeated at the close. It begins with a tender invocation to -sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of -a deserted maidenhood beside Indian streams; till suddenly, with another -change, comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on his march; next -follows the detailed picture of the god and of his rout, suggested in part -by the famous Titian at the National Gallery; and then, arranged as if for -music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, and their -choral answers: - - "'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your bowers desolate, - Your lutes, and gentler fate?' - 'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing, - A conquering! - Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide, - We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our wild minstrelsy!' - - 'Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left - Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'-- - - 'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; - For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, - And cold mushrooms; - For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth; - Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our mad minstrelsy!'" - -The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and -finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with -an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:-- - - "Come then, sorrow! - Sweetest sorrow! - Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast: - I thought to leave thee, - And deceive thee, - But now of all the world I love thee best. - There is not one, - No, no, not one - But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; - Thou art her mother - And her brother, - Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade." - -The high-water-mark of poetry in _Endymion_ is thus reached in the two -lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with -justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, -that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good -a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for -poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." In the main -body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a -critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable -truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, -mark such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry -breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read -farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly -tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by -Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as-- - - "a's isle was wondering at the moon," - -standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed -narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme -and expression-- - - "I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe! - O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?" - -is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and -the heart:-- - - "Cold, O cold indeed - Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed - The sea-swell took her hair." - -One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has -shaken off--his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar -sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that tendency which he by nature shared -with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined -pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And -to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined -others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of -English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its -waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in -its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He -outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let Invention ramble and loiter -uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her -heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds -there: and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: -and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to -grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:-- - - "--a nymph of Dian's - Wearing a coronal of tender scions":-- - - "Does yonder thrush, - Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush - About the dewy forest, whisper tales?-- - Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails - Will slime the rose to-night." - -Chapman especially among Keats's masters had this trick of letting thought -follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman--to say nothing -of Chatterton--had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash -dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a -language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and -make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use -of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman's -spirit--'far-spooming Ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their -surly eyes brow-hidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'--coinages -sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as -well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms -as 'shent', 'sith', and 'seemlihed' from Spenser, 'eterne' from Spenser -and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly', 'to -monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as -active, as to 'travel' an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and _vice -versa_. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, -in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of -oddities and discords. - -In rhythm Keats adheres in _Endymion_ to the method he had adopted in -_Sleep and Poetry_, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the -metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, -and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had -carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later -critics have supposed the rhythm of _Endymion_ to have been influenced by -the _Pharonnida_ of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly -for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, -exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse -persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest -syllables--prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions--on which neither pause -nor emphasis is possible[36]. - -But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in -delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of -sentence structure. There is nothing in his treatment of the measure for -which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who -employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival -for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be -said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an -exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of -provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous. - -As the best criticism on Keats's _Endymion_ is in his own preface, so its -best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. "It -is as good," he says, "as I had power to make it by myself." Hunt had -warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley against those of -hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and -crude the classical training and now ripening taste of Shelley might -doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was -determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous -expression of his mind. "Had I been nervous," he goes on, "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." -How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of -his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he -says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next -labours. - - - - -CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death of Tom - Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne--Excursion to - Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon and Money - Difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening Prospects--Summer at - Shanklin and Winchester--Wise Resolutions--Return from Winchester. - [June 1818-October, 1819.] - - -While Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with _Endymion_ -on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different -plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour -through Scotland with Charles Brown. "I have many reasons," he writes to -Reynolds, "for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from -spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and -Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I'll -have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, 'over the hills -we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in -turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." A -fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an -over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the -necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the -flight of poetry:-- - - "I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but - one thing to prevent me. 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." - -After he had come back to Hampstead in May, however, Keats allowed himself -to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the -recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year -before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed between him and -Brown that they should accompany George Keats and his bride as far as -Liverpool, and then start on foot from Lancaster. They left London -accordingly on Monday, June 22[37]. The coach stopped for dinner the first -day at Redbourn near St Albans, where Keats's friend of medical-student -days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake hands with the -travelling party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards wrote an -account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of Mrs -George Keats. "Rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome, -but looked like a being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily -love. She had the imaginative poetical cast. Somewhat singular and girlish -in her attire.... There was something original about her, and John seemed -to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her -with evident satisfaction[38]." With no other woman or girl friend was -Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this 'Nymph -of the downward smile and side-long glance' of his early sonnet--'Sister -George' as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the -series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards -in America, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth -preserving. - -The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to -Lancaster, and thence began their walk, Keats taking for his reading one -book only, the little three-volume edition of Cary's _Dante_. "I cannot," -writes Brown, "forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly, -and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain -scenery. It was just before our descent to the village of Bowness, at a -turn of the road, when the lake of Windermere at once came into view.... -All was enchantment to us both." Keats in his own letters says -comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, -not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque -tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and -fastidious Gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth -is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs -not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but -on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit -sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more -varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but -impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit. -Moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of Windermere, it -is evident that as Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery -somewhat foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beauties of -England, two ideals of landscape, classic and medival, haunted and -allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled -south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the Scottish -border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, -and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to -neither. "I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem -anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." - -A change, besides, was coming over Keats's thoughts and feelings whereby -scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his -fellow-creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, -among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously -absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a -life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the -appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. "Scenery is -fine," he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, "but human -nature is finer." In the Lake country, after climbing Skiddaw one morning -early, and walking to Treby the same afternoon, where they watched with -amusement the exercises in a country dancing-school: "There was as fine a -row of boys and girls," says Keats, "as you ever saw; some beautiful -faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of -patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is -what I like better than scenery." The same note recurs frequently in -letters of a later date. - -From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside; from Ambleside to -the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on -Wordsworth at Rydal, and been disappointed to find him away -electioneering. From Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of -Derwentwater; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and Wigton to Carlisle, -where they arrived on the 1st of July. Thence by coach to Dumfries, -visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory -Keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dumfries they -started southwestwards for Galloway, a region little frequented even now, -and then hardly at all, by tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrightshire -coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and -rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Solway to the hazy -hills of Man, Brown bethought him that this was Guy Mannering's country, -and began to tell Keats about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who according to the -fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for Scott's poetry, and of the -Waverley novels had read the _Antiquary_ but not _Guy Mannering_, was much -struck; and presently, writes Brown,--"there was a little spot, close to -our pathway. 'There,' he said, 'in that very spot, without a shadow of -doubt, has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.' It was among pieces -of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of -honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and -fulness of blossom." As they went along, Keats composed on Scott's theme -the spirited ballad beginning 'Old Meg, she was a gipsy,' and stopping to -breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing -to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he -began at the same place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed -always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add scraps to -them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote -regularly and uniformly in the evenings. "He affronts my indolence and -luxury," says Keats, "by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; -secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care if he would -change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But -I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead -of afterwards." - -From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--skirting the wild moors about -the Water of Fleet, and passing where Cairnsmore looks down over wooded -slopes to the steaming estuary of the Cree,--as far as Newton Stewart: -thence across the Wigtonshire levels by Glenluce to Stranraer and -Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee packet for Ireland, with the -intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and -expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to -Belfast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. In letters -written during and immediately after this excursion, Keats has some -striking passages of human observation and reflection:-- - - "These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women, - old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants, - all careful; so they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and - gainers.... These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm; they have banished - puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:--poor, - unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a - luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its - delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have - leisure to go mad after things that are not!... I would sooner be a - wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would - sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's - penance before those execrable elders." - - "On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the Duchess of Dunghill. - It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you - ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a - wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved - from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, - with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, - skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of - her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two - ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a - history of her life and sensations!"--. - -From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking -along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr, -with the lonely mass of Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran, -looming ever above the Atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find -Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the -coast scenery. They went to Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the -home of Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to write a -sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did so, but was worried by -the prate of the man in charge--"a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew -Burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him"--"his gab -hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet." And -again, as they journeyed on toward Glasgow he composed with considerable -pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'There is a -charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' They were meant to express -the temper in which his pilgrimage through the Burns country had been -made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of -imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself. - -From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, and from Glasgow by -Dumbarton through the _Lady of the Lake_ country, which they found -vexatiously full of tourists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban. -At Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of _The -Stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the -next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in -a set of doggrel rhymes. The walk along the shores of Loch Awe impressed -him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set -description, for the benefit of his brother Tom. At the same point occur -for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. -At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its -effects upon his sleep and appetite: telling her how he tumbled into bed -"so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe -and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I get -so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to -me.... I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes." -Presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty -miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts of -the Highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and -frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and Brown, and he -grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the -friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for -Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and -Iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither -side of the island of Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the -farther side opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some -thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather. -By good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had -a favourable view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its associations -in the one 'illustrious island,' and of nature's architecture in the -other, Keats shows himself naturally much impressed. Fingal's cave in -especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the -race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer -since Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines -beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian.' Avoiding mere epithet-work and -description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for -comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, -bethinking himself of Milton's cry to Lycidas, - - "--where'er thy bones are hurl'd, - Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides"-- - -imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean, and -put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly -character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the -place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine -abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:-- - - "So for ever I will leave - Such a taint, and soon unweave - All the magic of the place![39] - - * * * * - - So saying, with a spirit's glance - He dived--." - -From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scotch tour, and -especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct -and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, and of the development -of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his -brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem, he speaks of -a 'slight sore throat,' and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at -Oban. Thence they pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the -ascent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th of August to -Inverness. Keats's throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the -ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, -tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at -Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue -his tour. Accordingly he took passage on the 8th or 9th of August from the -port of Cromarty for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey -alone,--"much lamenting," to quote Brown's own words, "the loss of his -beloved intelligence at my side." Keats in some degree picked up strength -during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards -described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat -trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of -time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, -and made his appearance among his friends the next day, "as brown and as -shabby as you can imagine," writes Mrs Dilke, "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." When he found himself -seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed -chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, -quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates -his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis[40]. - -Simultaneously, almost, with Keats's return from the North appeared -attacks on him in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_. The -_Blackwood_ article, being No. IV. of a series bearing the signature 'Z' -on the 'Cockney School of Poetry,' was printed in the August number of the -magazine. The previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter -similarly signed, had been directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of -insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness -of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were -most probably the work either of Lockhart or of Wilson, suggested and -perhaps revised by the publisher William Blackwood, at this time his own -sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt's opinions, or his real -weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh critics must needs heap on -him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. In the course of these -articles allusion had several times been made to 'Johnny Keats' as an -'amiable bardling' and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of -Cockaigne, Hunt. When now Keats's own turn came, his treatment was mild -in comparison with that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work -are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic -persons full of prejudice and wishing to hurt. 'Cockney' had been in -itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt; -neither was it altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the -facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the -measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of -it. The worst part of the Keats review was in its personalities,--"so back -to the shop, Mr John, stick to 'plasters, pills, ointment boxes,' -&c."--and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for -them had been obtained. Keats's friend Bailey had by this time taken his -degree, and after publishing a friendly notice of _Endymion_ in the -_Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a -curacy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at -the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and -Chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a -previous love-affair with one of the Reynolds sisters having fallen -through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, then in the -hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy -of Scott; and earning, on the staff of _Blackwood_ and otherwise, the -reputation and the nickname of 'Scorpion.' Bailey, anxious to save Keats -from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took -the opportunity of telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances -and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt -was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an -object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any -rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his -disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so -used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all -appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had -thus confidentially communicated. - -To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that whether or not -Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and -supplied the materials for it[41]. It seems in fact all but certain that -he actually wrote it[42]. If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart's part, -and to forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude that is his -due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of Scott. But -even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the -party violence of the time and place Scott himself was drawn into -encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh friends; and that -he was in some measure privy to the Cockney School outrages seems certain. -Such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time[43]; and when -Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the -subject of Keats and his detractors in conversation with Scott at Rome, he -observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which -he could only interpret in the same sense[44]. It is hard to say whether -the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul most free from jealousy -or harshness, thus associated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is -one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the -more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the -distracting cries and blind collisions of the world. - -The _Quarterly_ article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of -September (in the number dated April), and was in an equally contemptuous -strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first -canto, or to make head or tail of that. In this case again the question of -authorship must remain uncertain: but Gifford, as editor, and an editor -who never shrank from cutting a contributor's work to his own pattern, -must bear the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in his -manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable -of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the -pain he gives. Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with -which Keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work, -the attacks are both alike inexcusable. They had the effect of promptly -rousing the poet's friends in his defence. Reynolds published a warm -rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the _Alfred_; -an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_ -with the initials J. S.--those probably of John Scott, then editor of the -_London Magazine_, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart's in -a duel, arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which it was -thought that Lockhart himself ought to have come forward. Leigh Hunt -reprinted Reynolds's letter, with some introductory words, in the -_Examiner_, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. But -he could not have done more to any purpose. He was not himself an -enthusiastic admirer of _Endymion_, and had plainly said so to Keats and -to his friends. Reynolds's piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective -and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would -only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly -well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a -friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind. - -Neither was Keats's demeanour under the lash such as could make his -friends suppose him particularly hurt. Proud in the extreme, he had no -irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet -always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he -saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:--"I hate," he says, "a mawkish -popularity." Even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly -cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was -conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his -critics. Accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than -older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt had replied -indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn. -Hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. Keats at the first sting -declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what -good he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly recovering -himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one -merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When Mr Hessey sent for his -encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended, -he wrote:-- - - "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." - - And again:--"There have been two letters in my defence in the - 'Chronicle,' and one in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper, - and written by Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the - 'Chronicle.' This is a mere matter of the moment: 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.'" - -In point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent Keats about -this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a -further tribute in the shape of a 25 note. Keats was both pleased and -displeased: "if I had refused it," he says, "I should have behaved in a -very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a -little." About the same time he received, through his friend Richard -Woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or -assistant to Messrs Taylor and Hessey[45], a glowing letter of sympathy -and encouragement from Miss Porter, 'of Romance celebrity': by which he -shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands. - -Keats was really living, during the stress of these _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt -trouble. His Hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return -from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on -account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. He had left the -invalid behind in their lodgings at Well Walk, and found that he had grown -rapidly worse during his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for -the next few months Keats's chief occupation was the harrowing one of -watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written in the -third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and -occupations:--"I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses -upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had -intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and -plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, -and feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be -poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of -contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and -yet I must do so or suffer." And again about the same time to -Reynolds:--"I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has -haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverous -relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has -conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only -life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am -thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of -immortality." As the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever -more sorrowful and absorbing[46]. On the 29th of October Keats wrote to -his brother and sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a -beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst. -For the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and -in the first week of December the end came. "Early one morning," writes -Brown, "I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, -who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we -both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, -my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--'Have nothing -more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live -with me?' He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,--'I think it -would be better.' From that moment he was my inmate[47]." - -Brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part--the -smaller eastern part--of the block of two semi-detached houses near the -bottom of John Street, Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied -the other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place[48]. The -accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room -on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them. The -arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, -occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. As -soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in -some measure alleviated his grief, Keats became gradually once more -absorbed in poetry: his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had -already begun to work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed; -for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more -powerful than that of poetry itself. It was at this time that the flame -caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid 'lest it -should burn him up.' With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, -not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards -womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind's ideal of the -sex, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and -too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious at the same -time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself -partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of passion by his -sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. The set of -three sonnets in his first volume, beginning 'Woman, when I beheld thee -flippant, vain,' had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to -this state of mind. Its persistency is affirmed often in his letters. - - "I am certain," he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, "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.... Is it not - extraordinary?--when among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no - spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from - every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all - suspicion, and comfortable. 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.... I must absolutely get over this--but how?" - -In a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in America, he alleges this -general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or -rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he -will never marry:-- - - "The roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my - window-panes are my children; 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. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination - strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand - worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are - stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is - equivalent to a King's Bodyguard: "then Tragedy with scepter'd pall - comes sweeping by." According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles - shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; - or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, "I - wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage," I - melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content - to be alone. 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 that I rejoice in." - -But now Keats's hour was come. Since his return from Scotland, in the -midst of his watching by his brother's sick-bed, we have seen him -confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. This was a -certain Miss Charlotte Cox, a West-Indian cousin of Reynolds's, to whom he -did not think the Reynolds sisters were quite kind. A few days later he -writes again how he has been attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace. -Very soon, however, the attraction passed, and this 'Charmian' left him -fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. A Mrs Brawne, a widow -lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two -younger children, had taken Brown's house for the summer while he was away -in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the -Dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved -from Brown's house to one in Downshire Street close by: and it was at the -Dilkes' that Keats met Miss Fanny Brawne after his return. Her ways and -presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated -him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as -well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in -Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length -silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise -her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the -far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and -retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, -shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, -carriage and complexion,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her -character we have little means of judging. She was certainly -high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though -kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew -dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men -and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of -one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and -in regarding the attachment as unlucky. - -So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion -for a woman have been. Stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth -begun to fall on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional -misgivings of his darker moods. First the departure of his brother George -had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from -boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next -the exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and -unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in -his blood. Coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed -inexorably upon his brother Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit -through all his pains. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little -as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and -carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his -practical hopes from literature. Last were added the pangs of love--love -requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even -love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion wrought -fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and -torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every -strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty, -exposed them. Within a year the combined assault proved too much for his -strength, and he broke down. But in the meantime he showed a brave face to -the world, and while anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to -throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, -energy. During the first few weeks of winter following his brother's -death, he wrote indeed, as he tells Haydon, "only a little now and then: -but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting." Yet -such work as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of his -powers, and included parts both of _Hyperion_ and _The Eve of St Agnes_. - -Within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was -finished, having been written out during a visit which Keats and Brown -paid in Sussex in the latter part of January (1819). They stayed for a few -days with the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for nearly a -fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, at Bedhampton -close by. Keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but -his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to 'a couple of -dowager card-parties,' and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day, -at the consecration of a chapel for converted Jews. The latter ceremony -jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an -entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. -During his stay at Chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate -conceived, the poem on the _Eve of St Mark_, which he never finished, and -which remains so interesting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work. - -Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed his life at -Hampstead under Brown's roof. He saw much less society than the winter -before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally -to avoid the night air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt -the passion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest -in the other relations of life. The stages by which it grew on him we -cannot follow. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he -had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting. His -real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the -time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong -mixed attraction and aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the -14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in -America, "Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff;" -but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general -reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not -sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. The -secret violence of Keats's passion, and the restless physical jealousy -which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed _To -Fanny_, which belong apparently to this date. They are written very -unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and -there. The occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:-- - - "Who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast, - What stare outfaces now my silver moon? - Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least; - Let, let the amorous burn-- - But, pr'ythee, do not turn - The current of your heart from me so soon, - O! save, in charity, - The quickest pulse for me. - Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe - Voluptuous visions into the warm air, - Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath; - Be like an April day, - Smiling and cold and gay, - A temperate lily, temperate as fair; - Then, Heaven! there will be - A warmer June for me." - -If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his -feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother -or his friends. Except in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no -direct mention of Miss Brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere -excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because -he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers, -in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown -after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as -when the Dilkes left Hampstead in April, and went to live at Westminster, -the Brawnes again took their house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth -had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke himself, -but apparently not till many months later, writes, "It is quite a settled -thing between John Keats and Miss Brawne, God help them. It's a bad thing -for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that -it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or speak to her." -Other friends, including one so intimate and so affectionate as Severn, -never realised until Keats was on his death-bed that there had been an -engagement, or that his relations with Miss Brawne had been other than -those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours. - -Intense and jealous as Keats's newly awakened passion was, it seemed at -first to stimulate rather than distract him in the exercise of his now -ripened poetic gift. The spring of this year 1819 seems to repeat in a -richer key the history of the last; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits -of lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season advanced. Between -the beginning of February and the beginning of June he wrote many of his -best shorter poems, including apparently all except one of his six famous -odes. About the middle of February he speaks of having taken a stroll -among the marbles of the British Museum, and the ode _On Indolence_ and -the ode _On a Grecian Urn_, written two or three months later, show how -the charm of ancient sculpture was at this time working in his mind. The -fit of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former piece is -recorded in his correspondence under the date of March 19. The lines -beginning 'Bards of passion and of mirth,' are dated the 26th of the same -month. On the 15th of April he sends off to his brother, as the last poem -he has written, the ode _To Psyche_, only less perfect and felicitous than -that _On a Grecian Urn_. About a week later the nightingale would be -beginning to sing. Presently it appeared that one had built her nest in -Brown's garden, near his house. - - "Keats," writes Brown, "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; - and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the - grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. When he - came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his - hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, - I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic - feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well - legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many - scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his _Ode to a - Nightingale_.... Immediately afterwards I searched for more of his (in - reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again - assisted me.... From that day he gave me permission to copy any verses - he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so little - for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was - released from their influence, that he required a friend at hand to - preserve them." - -The above account perfectly agrees with what Keats had written towards -the end of the summer before:--"I feel assured I should write from the -mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's -labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them." -And yet for these odes Keats seems to have had a partiality: with that to -Psyche, he tells his brother, he has taken more pains than with anything -he had ever written before; and Haydon has told how thrillingly, 'in his -low tremulous under-tone,' he recited to him that to the nightingale as -they walked one day in the Kilburn meadows. - -During the winter and spring while his faculties were thus absorbed -between love and poetry, Keats had suffered his correspondence to flag, -except only with Haydon, with his young sister Fanny, and with his brother -and sister-in-law in America. About Christmas Haydon, whose work had been -interrupted by a weakness of the eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for -the time being exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to Keats of all -men. With his usual generosity Keats had promised, only asking him to try -the rich lovers of art first, that if the worst came to the worst he would -help him with all he had. Haydon in a few weeks returns to the -charge:--"My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised -assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and -manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst." Keats had intended for -Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share -in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over -to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were -raised, and after much correspondence, attendance in bankers' and -solicitors' offices, and other ordeals harassing to the poetic mind, he -had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When -by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with -his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies with perfect temper, -explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his -hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting -possession of his money. Moreover he finds that even if all he had were -laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live -on for two years.[49] Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent -sums to various friends amounting in all to near 200, of which he expects -the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats -contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds. Three months later a -law-suit threatened by the widow of Captain Jennings against Mr Abbey, in -connection with the administration of the trust, had the effect for a time -of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very -gently asks Haydon to make an effort to repay his loan; who not only made -none--"he did not," says Keats, "seem to care much about it, but let me go -without my money almost with nonchalance." This was too much even for -Keats's patience. He declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend -again: nevertheless he by-and-by let old affection resume its sway, and -entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly -as ever. - -To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are full of -playful brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of regrets that she is -kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey; and of plans -for coming over to see her at Walthamstow when the weather and his throat -allow. He thinks of various little presents to please her,--a selection of -Tassie's pretty, and then popular, paste imitations of ancient -gems,--flowers,--drawing materials,-- - - "anything but live stock. Though I will not now be very severe on it, - remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, - Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock Salmons and all the whole tribe of the - Bushes and the Brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the - water,--though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome - globe of gold-fish--then I would have it hold ten pails of water and - be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let - through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their - beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome - painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and Japonicas. I - should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd - sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading." - -For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant -anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant -Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices -been bound. In the middle of April news of them arrives, and he thereupon -sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has been writing up at -intervals during the last two months. Among all the letters of Keats, this -is perhaps the richest and most characteristic. It is full of the varied -matter of his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love: these are -only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more indistinctly in the -vaguely passionate tenor of two sonnets which he sends among other -specimens of his latest work in verse. One is that beginning 'Why did I -laugh to-night?'--the other that, beautiful and moving despite flaws of -execution, in which he describes a dream suggested by the Paolo and -Francesca passage in Dante. For the rest he passes disconnectedly as -usual--"it being an impossibility in grain," as Keats once wrote to -Reynolds, "for my ink to stain otherwise"--from the vein of fun and -freakishness to that of poetry and wisdom, with passages now of masterly -intuition, and now of wandering and uncertain, almost always beautiful, -speculative fancy, interspersed with expressions of the most generous -spirit of family affection, or the most searching and unaffected -disclosures of self-knowledge. Poetry and Beauty were the twin powers his -soul had ever worshipped; but his devotion to poetry seemed thus far to -promise him no reward either in fame or bread; while beauty had betrayed -her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a sustaining power, -since his love for the beautiful in general had turned into a craving -passion for the beauty of a particular girl. As his flesh began to faint -in the service of these two, his soul turned often with a sense of -comfort, at times even almost of ecstasy, towards the milder divinity of -Death, whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts:-- - - "Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, - But Death intenser--Death is Life's high meed." - -When he came down from these heights of feeling, and brought himself -soberly to face the facts of his existence, Keats felt himself compelled, -in those days while he was producing, 'out of the mere yearning and -fondness he had for the beautiful,' poem after poem that are among the -treasures of the English language, to consider whether as a practical -matter he could or ought to continue to apply himself to literature at -all. In spite of his magnanimous first reception of the _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ gibes, we can see that as time went on he began more and more -to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened by them. -Reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material harm which the reviews were -capable of inflicting, when he wrote the year before:--"Certain it is, -that hundreds of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set down -this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writer, merely on the -assertions of some single heartless critic, who has just energy enough to -despise what is good." Such in fact was exactly the reputation which -_Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had succeeded in making for Keats, except -among a small private circle of admirers. Of praise and the thirst for -praise he continues to speak in as manly and sane a tone as ever; -especially in the two sonnets _On Fame_; and in the _Ode to Indolence_ -declares-- - - "For I would not be dieted with praise, - A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce." - -Again in the same ode, he speaks of his 'demon Poesy' as 'a maiden most -unmeek,' whom he loves the better the more blame is heaped on her. At the -same time he shows his sense of the practical position which the reviews -had made for him when he writes to his brother:--"These reviews are -getting more and more powerful, especially the 'Quarterly'.... I was in -hopes that as people saw, as they must do, all the trickery and iniquity -of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the -spectators at the Westminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or loses." -And as a consequence he adds presently, "I have been, at different times, -turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a -physician. I am afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I could -not take fees; and yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than -writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review -shambles." A little later he mentions to his sister Fanny an idea he has -of taking a voyage or two as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But Brown, -more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and -promise of his friend's genius, would not hear of this plan, and persuaded -him to abandon it and throw himself again upon literature. Keats being for -the moment unable to get at any of his money, Brown advanced him enough to -live on through the summer; and it was agreed that he should go and work -in the country, and that Brown should follow him. - -Towards the end of July Keats accordingly left Hampstead, and went first -to join his friend Rice in lodgings at Shanklin. Rice's health was at this -time worse than ever; and Keats himself was far from well; his chest weak, -his nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to Fanny -Brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains and joys of love. These -love-letters of Keats are written with little or none of the bright ease -and play of mind which make his correspondence with his friends and family -so attractive. Pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, but in the main -they are constrained and distressing, showing him a prey, despite his -efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity -and fretfulness of passion. An enraptured but an untrustful lover, -alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing through a -hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he found in the fever -of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his -love-sickness. As long as Rice and he were together at Shanklin, the two -ailing and anxious men, firm friends as they were, depressed and did each -other harm. It was better when Brown with his settled health and spirits -came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got -to work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, that of -writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What other struggling man of -letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated -them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose -Russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him in 500, was -supposed to possess the requisite stage experience, and to him were -assigned the plot and construction of the play, while Keats undertook to -compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from the history of the -Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at the -same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown sketched it out to -him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next, until the end -of the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into his own -hands. Besides the joint work by means of which he thus hoped, at least in -sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, Keats was -busily engaged by himself in writing a new Greek tale in rhymed heroics, -_Lamia_. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate -of Shanklin was against him: their lodgings were under the cliff, and from -the south-east, as he afterwards wrote, "came the damps of the sea, which -having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy -idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke." After a -stay of five or six weeks, the friends made up their minds to change their -quarters, and went in the second week of August to Winchester. The old -cathedral city, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its -clear-coursing streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the -nimble and pure air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited Keats, who -quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days which he spent here, -from the middle of August to the middle of October, were the last good -days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he -managed to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his -passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort. - -His work continued to be chiefly on _Lamia_, with the concluding part of -_Otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen; -in this last he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. Early -in September Brown left Winchester to go on a visit to Bedhampton. -Immediately afterwards a letter from America compelled Keats to go to town -and arrange with Mr Abbey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his -brother George. He dared not, to use his own words, 'venture into the -fire' by going to see his mistress at Hampstead, but stayed apparently -with Mr Taylor in Fleet Street, and was back on the fourth day at -Winchester, where he spent the following ten days or fortnight in -solitude. During this interval he took up _Hyperion_ again, but made up -his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style and method -too Miltonic and artificial. _Lamia_ he had finished, and his chief -present occupation was in revising the _Eve of St Agnes_, studying Italian -in the pages of Ariosto, and writing up one of his long and full -journal-letters to brother and sister George. The season was fine, and the -beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his spirit, prompted -also in these days the last, and one certainly of the happiest, of his -odes, that _To Autumn_. To the fragment of _St Mark's Eve_, begun or -planned, as we have seen, the January before, he now added lines inspired -at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his letters show to have -affected him deeply here at Winchester, and by the literary example of -Chatterton, for whom his old admiration had of late returned in full -force. - -The wholesome brightness of the early autumn continuing to sustain and -soothe him, Keats made in these days a vigorous effort to rally his moral -powers, to banish over-passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself -on a right footing with the world. The letter to America already -mentioned, and others written at the same time to Reynolds, Taylor, Dilke, -Brown, and Haydon, are full of evidences of this spirit. The ill success -of his brother in his American speculations shall serve, he is determined, -as a spur to his own exertions, and now that real troubles are upon them, -he will show that he can bear them better than those of imagination. The -imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him -up into an agent. He has been passing his time between reading, writing, -and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, and stick to the other -two. He does not consider he has any just cause of complaint against the -world; he has done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few people -predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that any thing really fine -will make its way. "What reviewers can put a hindrance to must be a -nothing--or mediocre which is worse." With reference to his own plans for -the future, he is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes of ultimate -success, whether from plays or poems, but to turn to the natural resource -of a man 'fit for nothing but literature' and needing to support himself -by his pen: the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. "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. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I will." -These words are from a letter written to Brown on the 22nd of September, -and further on in the same letter we find evidence of the honourable -spirit of independence and unselfishness towards his friends which went -together in Keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willingness -to accept their services at a pinch. He had been living since May on a -loan from Brown and an advance from Taylor, and was uneasy at putting the -former to a sacrifice. The subject, he says, is often in his mind,-- - - "and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your - happiness. This anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to - the plan I propose pursuing. I had got into a habit of mind of looking - towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it is a duty I - owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my - subsistence--make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall - applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct." - -Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken -in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose his company, and -doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected their -motives too much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled that -the two friends should part, Brown returning to his own house at -Hampstead, while Keats went to live by himself in London and look out for -employment on the press. - - - - -CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The Plays. - - -During the twenty months ending with his return from Winchester as last -narrated, Keats had been able, even while health and peace of mind and -heart deserted him, to produce in quick succession the series of poems -which give us the true measure of his powers. In the sketches and epistles -of his first volume we have seen him beginning, timidly and with no -clearness of aim, to make trial of his poetical resources. A year -afterwards he had leapt, to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and -boldly tried his strength on the composition of a long mythological -romance--half romance, half parable of that passion for universal beauty -of which he felt in his own bosom the restless and compulsive workings. In -the execution, he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in -him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and invention, and the caprice -of rhyme, run away with him, and by substituting for the worn-out verbal -currency of the last century a semi-Elizabethan coinage of his own, less -acceptable by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit greater -real poetic value. The experiment was rash, but when he next wrote, it -became manifest that it had not been made in vain. After _Endymion_ his -work threw off, not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and -ineffectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full 'effluence' (the -phrase is Landor's) 'of power and light[50].' - -His next poem of importance was _Isabella_, planned and begun, as we saw, -in February 1818, and finished in the course of the next two months at -Teignmouth. The subject is taken from the well-known chapter of Boccaccio -which tells of the love borne by a damsel of Messina for a youth in the -employ of her merchant-brothers, with its tragic close and pathetic -sequel[51]. Keats for some reason transfers the scene of the story from -Messina to Florence. Nothing can be less sentimental than Boccaccio's -temper, nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his style. -Keats invoking him asks pardon for his own work as what it truly is,--'An -echo of thee in the North-wind sung.' Not only does the English poet set -the southern story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of the -Arno, for instance, how its stream-- - - "Gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan - Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream - Keeps head against the freshets"-- - -he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, enriching it with -tones of sentiment and colours of romance, and brooding over every image -of beauty or passion as he calls it up. These things he does--but no -longer inordinately as heretofore. His powers of imagination and of -expression have alike gained strength and discipline; and through the -shining veils of his poetry his creations make themselves seen and felt in -living shape, action, and motive. False touches and misplaced beauties are -indeed not wanting. For example, in the phrase - - "his erewhile timid lips grew bold - And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme," - -we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not infrequent in -his earliest verses. And in the call of the wicked brothers to Lorenzo-- - - "To-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount - To spur three leagues towards the Apennine. - Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count - His dewy rosary on the eglantine,"-- - -the last two lines are a beauty indeed, and of the kind most -characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as Leigh Hunt long ago pointed -out) misplaced in the mouths that utter it. Moreover the language of -_Isabella_ is still occasionally slipshod, and there are turns and -passages where we feel, as we felt so often in _Endymion_, that the poetic -will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or suggestion of the -rhyme. But these are the minor blemishes of a poem otherwise conspicuous -for power and charm. - -For his Italian story Keats chose an Italian metre, the octave stanza -introduced in English by Wyatt and Sidney, and naturalised before long by -Daniel, Drayton, and Edward Fairfax. Since their day, the stanza had been -little used in serious poetry, though Frere and Byron had lately revived -it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the purpose for which the -epigrammatic snap and suddenness of the closing couplet in truth best fit -it. Keats, however, contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles -the measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale of pathos. -Over the purely musical and emotional resources of his art he shows a -singular command in stanzas like that beginning, 'O Melancholy, linger -here awhile,' repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude of -the main narrative. And there is a brilliant alertness of imagination in -such episodical passages as that where he pauses to realize the varieties -of human toil contributing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. But the -true test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the essential -points and central moments of action and passion, imaginative vitality and -truth with beauty and charm. This test _Isabella_ admirably bears. For -instance, in the account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her -lover's mouldering corpse:-- - - "Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright - With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof - From the poor girl by magic of their light." - -With what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the story of the -apparition invested by this touch, and all its charnel horror and grimness -mitigated! Or again in the stanzas describing Isabella's actions at her -lover's burial place:-- - - "She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though - One glance did fully all its secrets tell; - Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know - Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well; - Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, - Like to a native lily of the dell: - Then with her knife, all sudden, she began - To dig more fervently than misers can. - - Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon - Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies; - She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, - And put it in her bosom, where it dries - And freezes utterly unto the bone - Those dainties made to still an infant's cries: - Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care, - But to throw back at times her veiling hair." - -The lines are not all of equal workmanship: but the scene is realised with -unerring vision. The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with -too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third -and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the -same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of -the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the -impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden -solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as -she begins to dig 'more fervently than misers can' (what a commentary on -the relative strength of passions might be drawn from this simple -text):--then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not -ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it -is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, -while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us -as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and -continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic -truth as well as grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the -privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often -combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a -limpid and flowing ease of narrative. Poetry had always come to Keats, as -he considered it ought to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now -that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which -his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers -of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true -imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school -seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay, -those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two -kinds of writing comparable. - -After the completion of _Isabella_ followed the Scotch tour, of which the -only poetic fruits of value were the lines on Meg Merrilies and those on -Fingal's Cave. Returning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother -mortally ill, Keats plunged at once into the most arduous poetic labour he -had yet undertaken. This was the composition of _Hyperion_[52]. The -subject had been long in his mind, and both in the text and the preface of -_Endymion_ he indicated his intention to attempt it. At first he thought -of the poem to be written as a 'romance': but under the influence of -_Paradise Lost_, and no doubt also considering the height and vastness of -the subject, his plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books. -His purpose was to sing the Titanomachia, or warfare of the earlier -Titanic dynasty with the later Olympian dynasty of the Greek gods; and in -particular one episode of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god -Hyperion and the assumption of his kingdom by Apollo. Critics, even -intelligent critics, sometimes complain that Keats should have taken this -and other subjects of his art from what they call the 'dead' mythology of -ancient Greece. As if that mythology could ever die: as if the ancient -fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things believed, into -the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put -on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, -as faiths, perish one after another: but each in passing away bequeaths -for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained -of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, -embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to -explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the -thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and -control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; -and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern -mind which is in so far dead and not they. One of the great symptoms of -returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, toward the close of the -last century, was its awakening to the forgotten charm of past modes of -faith and life. When men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke of -Greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms which showed that they -had never felt its power; just as, when they spoke of nature, it was in -set phrases that showed that they had never looked at her. On matters of -daily social experience the gifts of observation and of reason were -brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts of the time were thoughts -of the street, the mart, and the assembly. The human genius was for the -time being like some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused -to see or think of anything beyond them. At length resuming its march, it -emerged on open ground, where it fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest -the beauties of the earth and sky, and whence at the same time it could -turn back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning with new -clearness and a new emotion, here under cloud and rainbow the forests and -spired cities of the Middle Age, there in serener light the hills and -havens and level fanes of Hellas. - -The great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on this new phase of its -pilgrimage was Goethe, who with deliberate effort and self-discipline -climbed to heights commanding an equal survey over the medival and the -classic past. We had in England had an earlier, shyer, and far less -effectual pioneer in Gray. As time went on, poet after poet arose and sang -more freely, one the glories of nature, another the enchantments of the -Middle Age, another the Greek beauty and joy of life. Keats when his time -came showed himself, all young and untutored as he was, freshly and -powerfully inspired to sing of all three alike. He does not, as we have -said, write of Greek things in a Greek manner. Something indeed in -_Hyperion_--at least in the first two books--he has caught from _Paradise -Lost_ of the high restraint and calm which was common to the Greeks and -Milton. But to realise how far he is in workmanship from the Greek purity -and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images, we -have only to think of his palace of Hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling -pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. This is the most sustained and -celebrated passage of the poem. Or let us examine one of its most -characteristic images from nature:-- - - "As when, upon a tranced summer night, - Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, - Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, - Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--." - -Not to the simplicity of the Greek, but to the complexity of the modern, -sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and express, by such a concourse of -metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which -a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of -the oaks among the other trees--their aspect of human venerableness--their -verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural -stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with -mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky[53]. - -But though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he sees it truly. The -Greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated English way he -writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas. For the -story of the war of Titans and Olympians he had nothing to guide him -except scraps from the ancient writers, principally Hesiod, as retailed by -the compilers of classical dictionaries; and from the scholar's point of -view his version, we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary, -mixing up Latin conceptions and nomenclature with Greek, and introducing -much new matter of his own invention. But as to the essential meaning of -that warfare and its result--the dethronement of an older and ruder -worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of -arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,--as -to this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with -more beauty and force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the -Second Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of -early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human, -what masterly justice of instinct does he show,--to take one point -only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate -sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices. Thus -of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:-- - - "There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines - When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise - Among immortals when a God gives sign, - With hushing finger, how he means to load - His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, - With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: - Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines." - -Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:-- - - "So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea, - Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, - But cogitation in his watery shades, - Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, - In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue - Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands." - -And once more, of Clymene followed by Enceladus in debate:-- - - "So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook - That, lingering along a pebbled coast, - Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, - And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice - Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: - The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves - In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, - Came booming thus." - -This second book of _Hyperion_, relating the council of the dethroned -Titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, where the solemn opening -vision of Saturn fallen is followed by the resplendent one of Hyperion -threatened in his 'lucent empire'; nor the intensity of the unfinished -third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the -afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. -But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to -my mind, quite on a level with the other two. - -With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal -incorrectness, _Hyperion_, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the -grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the -easiest and most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able to apply -himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. Partly this was -due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of -dawning passion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may -trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception -of _Endymion_: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial -to his powers in the task itself. When after letting the poem lie by -through the greater part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September -made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds explaining his -reasons as follows. "There were too many Miltonic inversions in -it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's -humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be -kept up." In the same connection he declares that Chatterton is the purest -writer in the English language. "He has no French idiom or particles, like -Chaucer; it is genuine English idiom in English words." In writing about -the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as -to Milton and Chatterton. - -The influence, and something of the majesty, of _Paradise Lost_ are in -truth to be found in _Hyperion_: and the debate of the fallen Titans in -the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the -fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. -Passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of -Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austerity with Keats's luxuriance -of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:--in -the matter of rhythm, Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's. -Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and -far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and -ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since -Milton,--beside that of Shelley's _Alastor_,--perhaps a little below that -of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and -the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as -Milton himself: but while of Milton's diction the characteristic colour is -derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with -the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is -rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme -refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a passage -of this kind:-- - - "Eden stretch'd her line - From Auran eastward to the royal towers - Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings, - Or where the sons of Eden long before - Dwelt in Telassar." - -But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this:-- - - "throughout all the isle - There was no covert, no retired cave - Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, - Though scarcely heard in many a green recess." - -After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical -note of Milton's style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative -pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and -constructions generally. Already in _Isabella_ Keats is to be found -attempting both notes, thus:-- - - "With duller steel than the Persean sword - They cut away no formless monster's head--." - -Similar Miltonic echoes occur in _Hyperion_, as in the introduction -already quoted to the speech of Oceanus: or again thus:-- - - "Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope - In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, - Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet - And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies." - -But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton's -technical manner as he seems to have supposed. Yet he had adopted more of -it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain. - -In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was going back to one of his -first loves in literature. What he says of Chatterton's words and idioms -seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by -the Bristol boy out of Kersey's _Dictionary_[54]. But it is true that -through that jargon can be discerned, in the Rowley poems, not only an -ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition, -but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats -had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to -us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we find him in fact tempted aside -on an excursion into the regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how -much of _Hyperion_ had been written when he laid it aside in January to -take up the composition of _St Agnes' Eve_, that unsurpassed example--nay, -must we not rather call it unequalled?--of the pure charm of coloured and -romantic narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt the -elemental grandeur of _Hyperion_, so neither does it approach the human -pathos and passion of _Isabella_. Its personages appeal to us, not so much -humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery and atmosphere -amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the -weakness, of modern romance,--its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the -medival colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at -all,--its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both -writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral -truth: and without these no great literature can exist. - -Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love -of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story -wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young -Lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into association with the old popular -belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her -lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian -stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as -it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of -construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the -great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and -concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza, -which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us -first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and -next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd -taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, -where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly -bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with -the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about -the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in -handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers -vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and -sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he -touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, -movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought -before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our -sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:-- - - "Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, - He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails - To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." - -Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the -poet strikes life:-- - - "The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, - Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, - With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts." - -The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out -their beauties in detail, he calls-- - - "Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes - As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--" - -a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination -of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile -drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of -the same stanza-- - - "A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings," - ---the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is -at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of -her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that -moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted glass as Keats -in this celebrated passage represents it. Let us be grateful for the -error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly -splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow -is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. When -Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their -lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks -straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the -wearer,--'her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties -beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare -sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own -natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far -countries whence they have been gathered-- - - "From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." - -If the unique charm of the _Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the richness and -vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions -of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go. -What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse, -who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die -quietly of age when their parts are over[55]: especially the debate of old -Angela with Porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the -stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, I think, at two -moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,-- - - "No uttered syllable, or, woe betide: - But to her heart, her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side:"-- - -and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and -contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:-- - - "'Ah Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now - Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear - Made tunable with every sweetest vow; - And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear; - How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear'." - -Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the 'growing faint' of Porphyro, and -in his 'warm unnerved arm,' we have a touch of that swooning abandonment -to which Keats's heroes are too subject. But it is the slightest -possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet -individually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of that date are -constantly overcome in like manner. And we may well pardon Porphyro his -weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady's -side in defiance of her 'whole bloodthirsty race,' and will bear her -safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 'beyond the southern -moors' that he has prepared for her[56]. - -Nearly allied with the _Eve of St Agnes_ is the fragment in the four-foot -ballad metre, which Keats composed on the parallel popular belief -connected with the eve of St Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at -Chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Winchester -six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, seems farther to -suggest associations with Canterbury. Impressions of all these three -cathedral cities which Keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture -of which the fragment consists. I have said picture, but there are two: -one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and -Sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her -quaint fire-lit chamber. Each in its way is of an admirable vividness and -charm. The belief about St Mark's Eve was that a person stationed near a -church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church -the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the -ensuing year. Keats's fragment breaks off before the story is well -engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to -incidents illustrating this belief. Neither is it clear whether he -intended to place them in medival or in relatively modern times. The -demure Protestant air which he gives the Sunday streets, the Oriental -furniture and curiosities of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate -the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his -archology--witness, for instance, the line which tells how 'the long -carpets rose along the gusty floor' in the _Eve of St Agnes_. The interest -of the _St Mark's_ fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the -promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and -charm of workmanship: and second, its relation to and influence on later -English poetry. Keats in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the -feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The indoor scene -of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and -the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is -perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply -impressed and interested),--of his pictures even more than of his poems: -while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and -cadences of Mr Morris in some tale of the _Earthly Paradise_:-- - - "The city streets were clean and fair - From wholesome drench of April rains; - And on the western window panes - The chilly sunset faintly told - Of unmatured green valleys cold, - Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, - Of rivers new with springtide sedge." - -Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _La -Belle Dame sans Merci_. The title is taken from that of a poem by Alain -Chartier,--the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. -of France,--of which an English translation used to be attributed to -Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This title -had caught Keats's fancy, and in the _Eve of St Agnes_ he makes Lorenzo -waken Madeline by playing beside her bed-- - - "an ancient ditty, long since mute, - In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci'." - -The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the -spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more -to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with -Provence[57]. Keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but -rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the medival world of -enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when -either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a -bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his -own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery -expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world -symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of -whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a -weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild -yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound -and sense, make of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ the master-piece, not only -among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece -must be chosen) among them all. - -Before finally giving up _Hyperion_ Keats had conceived and written, -during his summer months at Shanklin and Winchester, another narrative -poem on a Greek subject: but one of those where Greek life and legend come -nearest to the medival, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and -witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of passion. I speak, of -course, of _Lamia_, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and -victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him -by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the -scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats had found the germ of -the story, quoted from Philostratus, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. -In versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them, -however, not as in _Endymion_, but in a manner founded on that of Dryden, -with a free use of the Alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and -the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the measure -as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe -and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its -way as the victorious march of Dryden himself. Here is an example where -the poetry of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:-- - - "Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, goddess, see - Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! - For pity do not this sad heart belie-- - Even as thou vanishest so I shall die. - Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! - To thy far wishes will thy streams obey: - Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, - Alone they can drink up the morning rain: - Though a descended Pleiad, will not one - Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune - Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?" - -And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:-- - - "As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, - Throughout her palaces imperial, - And all her populous streets and temples lewd, - Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, - To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. - Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, - Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, - Companion'd or alone; while many a light - Flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals, - And threw their moving shadows on the walls, - Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade - Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade." - -No one can deny the truth of Keats's own criticism on _Lamia_ when he -says, "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 sensation." -There is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns -itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the -touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the -transformation itself. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat -disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode -of Hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the -merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and -beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This -thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine -melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give -_Lamia_ almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats's narrative -poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others -too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for -instance that of the palace reared by Lamia's magic; which will not bear -comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet's building. -And it has reflective passages, as that in the first book beginning, 'Let -the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and the first fifteen lines of -the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at -its best, Keats relapses into something too like Leigh Hunt's and his own -early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows at the -same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language. -The positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been -attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the _Eve of -St Agnes_ we had to 'brook' tears for to check or forbear them, in -_Hyperion_ 'portion'd' for 'proportion'd;' eyes that 'fever out;' a -chariot 'foam'd along.' Some of these verbal licences possess a force that -makes them pass; but not so in _Lamia_ the adjectives 'psalterian' and -'piazzian,' the verb 'to labyrinth,' and the participle 'daft,' as if from -an imaginary active verb meaning to daze. - -In the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is moreover a -weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much -importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him -uttering. But the doctrine he sets forth in _Lamia_ is one which from the -reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain -consistency:-- - - "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, as it erewhile made - The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade." - -Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in _The Rainbow_: but -one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which Keats would have done -well to stand, is preached by Wordsworth in his famous Preface. - -Passing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of Keats's work -during this period--it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly -occupied in the spring months of 1819, from the completion of _St Agnes' -Eve_ at Chichester in January until the commencement of _Lamia_ and _Otho -the Great_ at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats constitute a class -apart in English literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived -from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he -calls the 'roundelay' of the Indian maiden in _Endymion_ he had made his -most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching -Shelley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in -touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are -comparatively simple and regular in form. They are written in a strain -intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the -declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate -with the idea of an ode. Of the five composed in the spring of 1819, two, -those on _Psyche_ and the _Grecian Urn_, are inspired by the old Greek -world of imagination and art; two, those on _Melancholy_ and the -_Nightingale_, by moods of the poet's own mind; while the fifth, that on -_Indolence_, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations. - -In the _Psyche_, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching -those of Spenser's nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) Keats recurs -to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in -the opening poem of his first book, beginning-- - - "So felt he, who first told how Psyche went - On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment." - -Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by -cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like -touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by -the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are -disclosed--'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other -poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm -of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all -his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time -habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his 'sea-shouldering whales,' he -is now in his own manner the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden -in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'moss-lain Dryads' and -the 'soft-conchd ear' of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on -us a little with a sense of oddity, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in -_Lamia_. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn -of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage -of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of -antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the -metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:-- - - "Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane - In some untrodden region of my mind, - Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, - Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind." - -Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself -swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold -of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his ear charmed by the -glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated -vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the -invocation and the imagery. - -Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the -_Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the -_Psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two -arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which -Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the -sestet, and in one instance--the ode to Melancholy--expanding it into a -septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had -set the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of -ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured -images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art -to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which -flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of -antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men -or gods are these, what maidens loth,' &c. The second and third stanzas -express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences -between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety -and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange -permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even -richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the -incomparable choice of pictures,-- - - "What little town by river or sea shore, - Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, - Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?" - -In the answering lines-- - - "And, little town, thy streets for evermore - Will silent be; and not a soul to tell - Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--" - -in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the -arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, -and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a -necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own -compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can -easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice -it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward -between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to -the future, to remain,-- - - "in midst of other woe - Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, - Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--" - -thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason -and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of -Keats's temper--an immutable law. - -It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied -Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland -House an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is -described in his fourth stanza[58]: and of course no subject is commoner -in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. But the two -subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of -ancient art: and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of -sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him -only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi's etchings. Lord -Holland's urn is duly figured in the _Vasi e Candelabri_ of that admirable -master. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond of what he -calls-- - - "the pleasant flow - Of words at opening a portfolio:" - -and in the scene of sacrifice in _Endymion_ (Book L, 136-163) we may -perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as -well as an anticipation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the -subject in the ode. - -The ode _On Indolence_ stands midway, not necessarily in date of -composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two Greek and the two -personal odes, as I have above distinguished them. In it Keats again calls -up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate -the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of Love, Ambition, -and Poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. This ode, less highly -wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record -of a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted -intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an -agreeable physical languor. Well had it been for him had such moods come -more frequently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons of men, -the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and -unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled to bursting. One of the -attributes he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is a - - "sciential brain - To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain." - -In the fragmentary ode _On Melancholy_ (which has no proper beginning, its -first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of Beaumont and of -Milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the -habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a -characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:-- - - "Aye, in the very Temple of Delight - Veil'd Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, - Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue - Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine: - His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, - And be among her cloudy trophies hung." - -The same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds -expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet's feeling for -nature and romance, in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Just as his Grecian urn -was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the -particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that -he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some -far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow -her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he -makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. Then -follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations -which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of -Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her -power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to -the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, -by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of -the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the thought -of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome -now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song--and here, by a -breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts -the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with -the permanence of the song-bird's life, meaning the life of the type. This -last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those -memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza -closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his -own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he -returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest -dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes rank beside the -_Grecian Urn_ in the other. Neither is strictly faultless, but such -revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch -that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to -faultlessness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. Both -are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. Let us -therefore place here, as an example of this class of Keats's work, the -ode _To Autumn_, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of -his quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, no such -far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but -in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. In the first stanza -the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in -words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at -all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the -middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have -an exquisite congruity and lightness. - - "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, - Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; - Conspiring with him how to load and bless - With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; - To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, - And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; - To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells - With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, - And still more, later flowers for the bees, - Until they think warm days will never cease, - For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. - - Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? - Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find - Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, - Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; - Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, - Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook - Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: - And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep - Steady thy laden head across a brook; - Or by a cider-press, with patient look, - Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. - - 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; - Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn - Among the river sallows, borne aloft - Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; - And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; - Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft - The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; - And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." - -To pass from our poet's work at this time in the several fields of -romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pass -from a region of happy and assured conquest to one of failure, though of -failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been -in store for him. At his age no man has ever been a master in the drama: -even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the -difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in -which Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot -contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to -his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted. -He brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we -have seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, and a mind -prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while -Brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. But these -things were not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not yet -developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of -the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in -conception. Keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing -with all the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the effect only -of puppets inexpertly agitated: Otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and -fatherly affection, Ludolph of febrile passion and vacillation, Erminia of -maidenly purity, Conrad and Auranthe of ambitious lust and treachery. At -least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. From -that point Keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence, -shows a great improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the violent -kind affected by the old English drama, in the disclosure of the body of -Auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly -imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his -frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Marlowe, not only by their -pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses -expressed in them. Of the second historical play, _King Stephen_, which -Keats began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to afford -matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he finished are not only marked -by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a -spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not -shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his -capacity had not this fragment been preserved. - -But in the mingling of his soul's and body's destinies it had been -determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be -suffered to ripen farther upon earth. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn occupations: The _Cap and Bells_: - Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing despondency--Visit of George Keats to - England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally in the Spring--Summer in - Kentish Town--Publication of the _Lamia_ volume--Relapse--Ordered - South--Voyage to Italy--Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October - 1819-Feb. 1821.] - - -We left Keats at Winchester, with _Otho_, _Lamia_, and the _Ode to Autumn_ -just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and -take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting -imagination magnify and passion exasperate them as heretofore. At his -request Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in -Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came on the 8th of October -to take up his quarters. But alas! his blood proved traitor to his will: -and the plan of life and literary work in London broke down at once on -trial. The gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at -Winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a -distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he -went to Hampstead--'into the fire'--and in a moment the flames had seized -him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his -mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was -utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he -found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send -her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, "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.... 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 absorb'd me." A three days' visit at her -mother's house, followed by another of a day or two at the Dilkes', ended -in his giving up all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently, -of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at Hampstead under -Brown's roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. He writes with -a true foreboding: "I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast -the die for Love or Death.--I have no patience with anything else." - -It was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to -Wentworth Place in October, 1819, begins the melancholy closing chapter of -Keats's history. Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the -flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last kept -smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the -first began from this time forth to sink. Not that he was idle during the -ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked -both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. For the present he -determined not to publish _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and the other poems written -since _Endymion_. He preferred to await the result of Brown's attempt to -get _Otho_ brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success -in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the -meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in -estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold -his friend's name. The great hope of the authors was that Kean would see -an opportunity for himself in the part of Ludolph. In this they were not -disappointed: the play was accepted: but Elliston, the manager, proposing -to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, Keats and Brown -objected to the delay, and about Christmas transferred the offer of their -MS. to Covent Garden, where Macready, under Harris's management, was at -this time beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while -returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped. - -In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which Keats bent his -hopes. "One of my ambitions," he had written to Bailey from Winchester, -"is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has -done in acting." And now, in a letter to Mr Taylor of Nov. 17, he says -that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he -does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he -may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he -conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to -diffuse the colouring of _St Agnes' Eve_ throughout a poem in which -character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." Two or -three such poems would be, he thinks, the best _gradus_ to the _Parnassum -altissimum_ of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment -engaged on a task of a different nature. "As the marvellous is the most -enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been -endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her manage -for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all." The piece to -which Keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the _Cap -and Bells_, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing -of the autumn days immediately following their return to Wentworth Place, -Brown says:-- - - "By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem - in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had not - composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It was to - be published under the feigned authorship of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' and - to bear the title of the _Cap and Bells_, or, which he preferred, the - _Jealousies_. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He wrote it with - the greatest facility; in one instance I remember having copied (for I - copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner[59]." - -Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the most judicious -adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the _Cap and -Bells_ to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly -flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to Keats's nature. As long -as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of -pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable[60], and he -was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. Moreover the spirit of -poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the -spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of -the metrical romances of the Italian Renaissance, and again, with -unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early cantos of _Don -Juan_. It was partly the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great -student of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent Italian -studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron's success, that now -induced Keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. Having already -employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the _ottava rima_ of -the Italians, in his serious poem of _Isabella_, he now, by what seems an -odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave Spenserian -stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. -Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his -choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to -gay with a light hand, and the movement of the _Cap and Bells_ has much of -his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not -a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and -Brown's invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a -fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being -meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all -that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the -emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his -affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the -Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to -weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the -fragment of _St Mark's Eve_ at the beginning of the year,--the tale of an -English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through -the reading of a magic book. With this and other purely fanciful elements -of the story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day. -It was in this year, 1819, that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and -his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject: -and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the -scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. The -references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the _Cap and Bells_ -are general rather than particular, although here and there individual -names and characters are glanced at: as when 'Esquire Biancopany' stands -manifestly, as Mr Forman has pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social -and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. As -Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for -this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the Byronic wit and devilry his -raillery seems but child's play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful -and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in -passages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination -becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and -colour,--but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time. - -Besides his morning task in Brown's company on the _Cap and Bells_, Keats -had other work on hand during this November and December. "In the -evenings," writes Brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate -apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of -_Hyperion_ into the form of a Vision." The result of this attempt, which -has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in Keats's -history. We have seen how, in the previous August, he had grown -discontented with the style and diction of _Hyperion_, as being too -artificial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he took the -poem up again[61], and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly, -it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading, -partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which -were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate the fall of the -Titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision -revealed and interpreted to him by a goddess of the fallen race. The -reader remembers how he had broken off his work on _Hyperion_ at the point -where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with the inspiration of -her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of -mythology he had lately bought[62], he now identifies this Greek -Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being -possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome -was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess -and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove -or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a -slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval -temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet -see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an -image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty, -he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from -her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn. -Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an -irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself -conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn's -overthrow. 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' &c.,--from this point -Keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his _Vision_ the text of the -original _Hyperion_; with alterations which are in almost all cases for -the worse. Neither does the new portion of his work well match the old. -Side by side with impressive passages, it contains others where both -rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more -on single lines and passages, and less on sustained effects. Keats has -indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the -opening of the _Vision_, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps -conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the -priestess when she removes her veils. But the especial interest of the -poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his -mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the -poet's character and lot. When Moneta bids him mount the steps to her -side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish -utterly where he stands. In fact he all but dies before he reaches the -stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the -ordeal:-- - - "None can usurp this height," returned that shade, - "But those to whom the miseries of the world - Are misery, and will not let them rest. - All else who find a haven in the world, - Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, - If by a chance into this fane they come, - Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half." - "Are there not thousands in the world," said I, - Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, - "Who love their fellows even to the death, - Who feel the giant agony of the world, - And more, like slaves to poor humanity, - Labour for mortal good? I sure should see - Other men here, but I am here alone." - "Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," - Rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; - They seek no wonder but the human face, - No music but a happy-noted voice: - They come not here, they have no thought to come; - And thou art here, for thou art less than they. - What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, - To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, - A fever of thyself: think of the earth: - What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? - What haven? Every creature hath its home, - Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, - Whether his labours be sublime or low-- - The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: - Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. - Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, - Such things as thou art are admitted oft - Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, - And suffer'd in these temples--"[63]. - -Tracing the process of Keats's thought through this somewhat obscure -imagery,--the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws -himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is -lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden): -awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with -Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly -above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow -men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to -approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only -on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. And -even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of -common men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the human mission -and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. Almost from the first -dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry -towards-- - - "a nobler life, - Where I may find the agonies, the strife - Of human hearts." - -What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet's lot even -at its best. - - "Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve," - ---through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when this bitter cry -broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before, -when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of -the poetic life:-- - - "These are the living pleasures of the bard, - But richer far posterity's award. - What shall he murmur with his latest breath, - When his proud eye looks through the film of death?"-- - -His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the -spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh. -The wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his -sensations and emotions into pain--at once darkening the shadow of -impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding -instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied -cravings of his passion. In verses at this time addressed, though -doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones -like this:-- - - "Where shall I learn to get my peace again?"-- - - --"O for some sunny spell - To dissipate the shadows of this hell":-- - -or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:-- - - "Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, - Withhold no atom's atom or I die, - Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, - Forget, in the mist of idle misery, - Life's purposes,--the palate of the mind - Losing its gust, and my ambition blind." - -That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does -not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible in the present state of his -fortunes. "However selfishly I may feel," he had written to her some -months earlier, "I am sure I could never act selfishly." The Brawnes on -their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and -independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly -be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats's sufferings, -disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate -comrade Brown. Without understanding the cause, Brown was not slow to -perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances Keats had -given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen -him against troubles of imagination, and that he was not and would not -allow himself to be unhappy. - - "I quickly perceived," writes Brown, "that he was more so than I had - feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, - frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great - uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do - no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding - that word however.... All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge, - was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, - or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend - could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too - thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. - Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, - a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by - accident, and without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be - warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise - never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could - induce him to break his word when once given,--which was a difficulty. - Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional - proof of his rooted misery"[64]. - -Some of the same symptoms were observed by Haydon, and have been described -by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting -another's weakness with his own strength[65]. To his friends in general -Keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice -that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, Severn, at this time -competed for and carried off (December 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of -the Academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for -several years. The subject was Spenser's 'Cave of Despair.' We hear of -Keats flinging out in anger from among a company of elder artists where -the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an -appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture,--adding, however, -parenthetically from his troubled heart, "You had best put me into your -Cave of Despair." In December his letters to his sister make mention -several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made -to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, -that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in -connection with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, George -Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his -wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first -trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of -the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to -England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey, -of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers -from their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, during -which John made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. "He was -not the same being," wrote George, looking back on the time some years -afterwards; "although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, -he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the -reviving custom of venting his griefs." In a letter which the poet wrote -to his sister-in-law while her husband was in England, he attempts to keep -up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls -involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. Of -his work he says nothing, and it is clear from Brown's narrative that -both his morning and his evening task--the _Cap and Bells_ and the -_Vision_--had been dropped some time before this[66], and left in the -fragmentary state in which we possess them. - -George left for Liverpool on Friday Jan. 28. A few days later Keats was -seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set -up in his constitution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which -recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated. - - "One night," writes Brown--it was on the Thursday Feb. 3--"at eleven - o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce - intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible[67]; it - therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the - matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the - outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but - now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and - instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my - request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate - remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On - entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he - slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from my mouth.' - I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the - sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After - regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of - countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know the colour of - that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived in that - colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.' I ran - for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left - him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep." - -Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue -truly. He survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life -was but a life-in-death. How many are there among us to whom such -_lacrymae rerum_ come not home? Happy at least are they whose lives this -curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses -past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,--who know not -what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under Mediterranean -palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest -and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the -usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would -not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering -regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous -prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to -see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a -week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed, -and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, which his -good feelings wrung from him, that under the circumstances he ought to -release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he -became quieter and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he wrote -often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his -men friends: among them one to James Rice, which contains this often -quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:-- - - "I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed - a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering - under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify that - acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had - lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that - illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my - mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive - things in a truer light),--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 super-human fancy." - -The greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, Keats said at another -time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the -literary merits of the Bible he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the -Hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. What he wants to see again, -he writes now further from his sickbed, are 'the simple flowers of our -spring.' And in the course of April, after being nearly two months a -prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as -early as the twenty-fifth of March, we hear of him going into London, to -the private view of Haydon's 'Entry into Jerusalem,' where the painter -tells how he found him and Hazlitt in a corner, 'really rejoicing.' -Keats's friends, in whose minds his image had always been associated with -the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring -themselves to believe but that he would recover. Brown had arranged to -start early in May on a second walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor -actually advised Keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own -state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the smack as far as -Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in -Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the -sake of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer -Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks -during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking -advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive -on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been -strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even -that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin -(meaning begin again) soon on the _Cap and Bells_. But in fact the only -work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight -revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at -last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing -_Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, _Hyperion_, and the _Odes_. Of -the poems written during Keats's twenty months of inspiration from March -1818 to October 1819, none of importance are omitted except the _Eve of St -Mark_, the _Ode on Indolence_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The first -Keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: La -Belle Dame sans Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical _The -Indicator_, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on -May 20, 1820. _Hyperion_, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at -their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original -shape, the poet's friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they -thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came out in the first week -of July. An admirably kind and discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in -the _Indicator_ at the beginning of August[68]: and in the same month -Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_ for the first time broke silence in -Keats's favour. The impression made on the more intelligent order of -readers may be inferred from the remarks of Crabb Robinson in his -_Diaries_ for the following December[69]. "My book has had good success -among the literary people," wrote Keats a few weeks after its appearance, -"and I believe has a moderate sale." - -But had the success been even far greater than it was, Keats was in no -heart and no health for it to cheer him. Passion with lack of hope were -working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards -recovery. The relapse was not long delayed. Fresh hmorrhages occurring on -the 22nd and 23rd of June, he moved from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to -be nursed by the Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here everything -was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but -all in vain: he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards -avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a drive -in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a -flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing -to Fanny Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but -breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself -chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart -is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of -half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. "Hamlet's heart was full of such -misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a nunnery, go, go!'" -Keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, 'a -fever of himself:' and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but -his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his -betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words -that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory[70]. - -Such at this time was Keats's condition that the slightest shock unmanned -him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or -stranger. After he had been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened -on the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note -from Fanny Brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. This -circumstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to -stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to -his old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, would not suffer -this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and -tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some -mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has -told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with -white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic -flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I[71]." Ever since -his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that -a winter in England would be too much for him, and had been trying to -bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to Italy. The Shelleys had -heard through the Gisbornes of Keats's relapse, and Shelley now wrote in -terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come -and take up his residence with them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats -immediately after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain -tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Shelleys' friendship, but as -to the _Cenci_, which had just been sent him, and generally as to -Shelley's and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much -to the purpose to say. - -As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this time made up his -mind to try it, "as a soldier marches up to a battery." His hope was that -Brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend -in the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for Keats's -departure was fast approaching while Brown still remained in ignorance of -his purpose. In the meantime another companion offered himself in the -person of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the -Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with -a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn -accordingly took passage for Naples on board the ship 'Maria Crowther,' -which sailed from London on Sept. 18[72]. Several of the friends who loved -Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among them Mr -Taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase -for 100 of the copyright of _Endymion_. As soon as the ill news of his -health reached Brown in Scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way -south, and for that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in the -Thames on the same evening as the 'Maria Crowther' sailed: so that the two -friends lay on that night within hail of one another off Gravesend -unawares. - -The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn was struck by his -vigour of appetite and apparent cheerfulness. The fever of travel and -change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, -and in Keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to -those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to -raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time -afterwards. Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten -days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats -landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board -ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter -confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever -confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his -passion, he says 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 wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these -pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these -pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, -are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever." - -On the night when Keats wrote these words (Sept. 28) Brown was staying -with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly -missed seeing each other once more. The ship putting to sea again, still -with adverse winds, there came next to Keats that day of momentary calm -and lightening of the spirit of which Severn has left us the record, and -the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of -his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near -Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of -which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one -initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same -night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well; -placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a -_Lover's Complaint_, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of Shakespeare's -poems which had been given him by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and -under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and -feeling:-- - - "Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 cold 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 stedfast, still unchangeable, - Pillow'd 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." - -These were Keats's last verses. With the single exception of the sonnet -beginning 'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,' composed -probably immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only -love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no -death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty -and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. - -Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent -storm in the Bay of Biscay; and Severn waking at night, and finding the -water rushing through their cabin, called out to Keats "half fearing he -might be dead," and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first -line of Arne's long-popular song from _Artaxerxes_--'Water parted from the -sea.' As the storm abated Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _Don -Juan_, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and -presently flung the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed: -after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the -dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in -order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage -of over four weeks, the 'Maria Crowther' arrived in the Bay of Naples, and -was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says Keats, he -summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole -course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was -among his fellow-passengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of -cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly -preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his -own. He admits as much in writing from Naples harbour to Mrs Brawne: and -in the same letter says, "O what an account I could give you of the Bay of -Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a -spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly." The effort he -constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world -of colour and classic beauty about him, partly imposed on Severn; but in a -letter he wrote to Brown from Naples on Nov. 1, soon after their landing, -his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:-- - - "I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh God! God! God! - Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me - like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my - head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear - her.... Oh Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me - that the human heart is capable of so much misery." - -At Naples Keats and Severn stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and received -much kindness and hospitality from a brother of Miss Cotterill's who was -there to meet her. The political state and servile temper of the -people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms -imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous -summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the -theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance -that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He had -received there another letter from Shelley, who since he last wrote had -read the _Lamia_ volume, and was full of generous admiration for -_Hyperion_. Shelley now warmly renewed his invitation to Keats to come to -Pisa. But his and Severn's plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive -thither (apparently in the second week of November) Keats suffered -seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in -the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered -for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which -Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di -Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinit -dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were -left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and -at first they were ill served by the _trattora_ from which they got their -meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the -dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says -Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first cares was to get a -piano, since nothing soothed Keats's pain so much as music. For a while -the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of -seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these -alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian -close by. The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the -air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn's -absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In -their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline -Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but -not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who -was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them -change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they -would ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working among the -ruins. - -It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at Rome began reading -a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to -himself:-- - - "Misera me! sollievo a me non resta - Altro che 'l pianto, _ed il pianto delitto_." - -Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful. -His thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on -the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and -wrote encouragingly to his friends in England; and on Nov. 30 Keats -himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less despondent than before. But -suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. On Dec. 10 came a -relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Hmorrhage followed hmorrhage -on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes -the most piteous and distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his -friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to -have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn's -refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his -ardent imagination and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of pain in -Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but -above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would -bring upon his friend. "He explained to me the exact procedure of his -gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon -the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued -attendance on him." Severn gently persisting in refusal, Keats for a while -fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example -of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. In -religion Keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting -Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to -and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the -behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the -power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to -him from Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, strove to pass the -remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy. - -By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, -partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of -the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to -combat it. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then -were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous -kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr -Ewing. At one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in -danger of actual destitution, till a remittance from Mr Taylor arrived -just in time to save them. The devotion and resource of Severn were -infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium -or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and -his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with "beating -about in the tempest of his mind;" and once and again some fresh -remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, -would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the -first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, -one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his -companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite reading was -still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked -Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for -nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, -himself from thoughts of fame. "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing -over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he -gave the words for his epitaph:--"here lies one whose name was writ in -water." Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to -speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual -question to the doctor when he came in was, "Doctor, when will this -posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned to ask it neither -physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at -all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing -unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate to the -last, "his generous concern for me," says Severn, "in my isolated position -at Rome was one of his greatest cares." His response to kindness was -irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with -him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to -fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. "To remedy this -one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a -lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be -conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found -the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while -doubting suddenly cried out, 'Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy -lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'" And again "Poor Keats has -me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens -his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close -gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep." - -Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the -watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations -to write them down. Life held out for two months and a half after the -relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing -near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes -Severn, "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." Three days later his body was -carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his -story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his -sake and Shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English race -for ever. It was but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in -their last resting-place beside his friend[73]. - - - - -CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius. - - -The touching circumstances of Keats's illness and death at Rome aroused -naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous -mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy -was Shelley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics -had contributed to Keats's sufferings, and believing that they had killed -him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of -passionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that -double inspiration Shelley wrote,-- - - "And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres." - -As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, _Adonas_ is unsurpassed -in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and -the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is -perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley's art: while -its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most -lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the -elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his -character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the -same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than -that reached by Shelley, in the well-known stanza of _Don Juan_. In regard -to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. -When the _Edinburgh_ praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the -Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:--"No more Keats, I -entreat:--flay him alive;--if some of you don't, I must skin him myself." -Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he -turns against the latter, and cries:--"I would not be the person who wrote -that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world." In the -_Don Juan_ passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at -the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath. - -Taken together with the notion of 'Johnny Keats' to which _Blackwood_ and -the _Quarterly_ had previously given currency, the _Adonas_ and the _Don -Juan_ passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of -Keats's character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction -had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was 'as -like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,' did anything effectual to set his -memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the -end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been -quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography -George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but -against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the -hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had -unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication -between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats's -friends in England took George's part, disposed under the circumstances -to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to -superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his -want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his -occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at -one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse -collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them. -The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary -skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the -poet's friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects -not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats's -death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,--the -Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us -all,--and with help from nearly all Keats's surviving friends, and by the -grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet -in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every -student is familiar. - -Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can -with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, -inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with -pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for -pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 'exquisite sense of -the luxurious': and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which -he describes as his 'horrid morbidity of temperament.' The greater his -credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and -that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued -him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way -when he speaks of the 'violence of his temperament, continually smothered -up.' Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during -the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but -that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such -generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct -and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely -better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, -indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the -weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when -the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, -as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,--not indeed, so far as -we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of -the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of -trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of -self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, -he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences -preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his -fortunes justified. - -In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for -manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his -friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have -heard little in this history[74], wrote while the poet lay dying: "Keats -must get himself again, Severn, if but for me--I cannot afford to lose -him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats." The following -is from a letter of Brown written also during his illness:--"he is -present to me every where and at all times,--he now seems sitting here at -my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I -never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[75]." Elsewhere, -speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:--"while I waited on -him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance -of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as -absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like -this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me[76]:" and we know in fact how -the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's -death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord -Houghton's book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to -thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius I did not, -and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the _Man_[77]." The -points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high -good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for -many. "He had a soul of noble integrity," says Bailey: "and his common -sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, -in the best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of -sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very -intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, -requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it -nothing,--but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to -friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when -genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the -ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, -then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what -his companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest friend," cries -Reynolds, "the most loveable associate,--the deepest listener to the -griefs and distresses of all around him,--'That ever lived in this tide of -times[78].'" To the same effect Haydon:--"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 had a -kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who -wanted it." And again Bailey:-- - - "With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John - Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one - particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his - letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his - conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor - frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man - I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any - act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he - rose into sudden and animated indignation[79]." - -Lastly, "he had no fears of self," says George Keats, "through -interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and -without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, -defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and -purse." - -In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must assert his own -superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over -Keats's dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, -idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks of the poet's -"want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never -for two days did he know his own intentions," his criticism is deserving -of more attention. This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in -Keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He -acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." What he means is -no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in -regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in -regard to himself. "The Celtic instability," a reader may perhaps surmise -who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. Whether the quality -was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar -complexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression in character -of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, -namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as -was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the -order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own -personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised -clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility -to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical -consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. - - "As to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(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. - 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.... 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." - -"Even now," he says on another occasion, "I am perhaps not speaking from -myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live." Keats was often -impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. "I would call the head -and top of those who have a proper self," he says, "men of power": and it -is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, -that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of -thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent -of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all -intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself -the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of -what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:-- - - "For the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic - passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in - the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man - does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and - deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, - and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry - that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to - put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and - unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul." - -This is but one of many passages in which Keats proclaims the necessity, -for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His -critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise -of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the -foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware -that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, -of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its -elements existed:--"I have loved," as he says, "the principle of beauty in -all things." His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean, -including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the -soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long -enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their -manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit -of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the -faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to -divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the -Middle Age,--would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the -mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to -illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life? - -My belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the -height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief period between -its first effervescence and its exhaustion,--from the glowing humanity of -his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of -his own consciousness and his friends' experience, he was accustomed to -live in the lives of others,--from the gleams of true greatness of mind -which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and -pleasantry of his familiar letters,--from all our evidences, in a word, as -to what he was as well as from what he did,--I think it probable that by -power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shaksperean -spirit that has lived since Shakspere; the true Marcellus, as his first -biographer has called him, of the realm of English song; and that in his -premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something -like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living -successors, as Lord Tennyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have -formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the -banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really -adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? In a final -estimate of any writer's work, we must take into account not what he might -have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats, -the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with -fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we -can think, indeed, of the pathos of _Isabella_, but of that alone, as -equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the _Hymn to Pan_ -and the _Ode to a Nightingale_, with the glow of romance colour in _St -Agnes' Eve_, the weirdness of romance sentiment in _La Belle Dame Sans -Merci_, the conflict of elemental force with fate in _Hyperion_, the -revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the _Ode on a Grecian -Urn_ and the fragment of an _Ode to Maia_. - -It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who -have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence -been operative. First on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling and -informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and -also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. And -secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of -execution--a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never -cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he -speaks of 'loading every rift of a subject with ore.' We may define it as -the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of -phrase. A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that -tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline,-- - - "But to her heart her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side." - -The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is -the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every -touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line -describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of -suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the -emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on -ourselves. In so far as Keats has taught other poets really to write like -this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,--but not so when -for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of -brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. The first -considerable writer among Keats's successors on whom his example took -effect was Hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. The -dominant poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly -influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed -the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal degrees. After or -together with Coleridge, Keats has also contributed most, among English -writers, to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group. -Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the -Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between -the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, -of our own day. - -Such, I think, is Keats's historic place in English literature. What his -place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned -from their own lips. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, -but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines -immortally. - - -THE END. - - - - -APPENDIX. - - -p. 2, note 1. As to the exact date of Keats's birth the evidence is -conflicting. He was christened at St Botolph's, Bishopsgate, Dec. 18, -1795, and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register (which I am -informed is in the handwriting of the rector, Dr Conybeare) is a note -stating that he was born Oct. 31. The date is given accordingly without -question by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. I. p. xlviii). But it seems -certain that Keats himself and his family believed his birthday to have -been Oct. 29. Writing on that day in 1818, Keats says, "this is my -birthday." Brown (in Houghton MSS.) gives the same day, but only as on -hearsay from a lady to whom Keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as -to the year. Lastly, in the proceedings in _Rawlings v. Jennings_, Oct. 29 -is again given as his birthday, in the affidavit of one Anne Birch, who -swears that she knew his father and mother intimately. The entry in the St -Botolph's register is probably the authority to be preferred.--Lower -Moorfields was the space now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the London -Institution, together with the east side of Finsbury Pavement.--The births -of the younger brothers are in my text given rightly for the first time, -from the parish registers of St Leonard's, Shoreditch; where they were all -three christened in a batch on Sept. 24, 1801. The family were at that -date living in Craven Street. - - -p. 2, note 2. Brown (Houghton MSS.) says simply that Thomas Keats was a -'native of Devon.' His daughter, Mrs Llanos, tells me she remembers -hearing as a child that he came from the Land's End. Persons of the name -are still living in Plymouth. - - -p. 5, note 2. The total amount of the funds paid into Court by the -executors under Mr Jennings's will (see Preface, p. viii) was 13160. -19_s._ 5_d._ - - -p. 11, note 1, and p. 70, note 1. Of the total last mentioned, there came -to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other legatees who -predeceased her) sums amounting to 9343. 2_s._ In the Chancery -proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by Mrs Jennings for the -benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but only its general purport; -whence it appears that the sum she made over to Messrs Sandell and Abbey -in trust for them amounted approximately to 8000, and included all the -reversions fallen or still to fall in as above mentioned. The balance it -is to be presumed she retained for her own support (she being then 74). - - -p. 17, note 1. The following letter written by Mr Abbey to Mr Taylor the -publisher, under April 18, 1821, soon after the news of Keats's death -reached England, speaks for itself. The letter is from Woodhouse MSS. B. - - "Sir, - - I beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the 30th ult. - respecting the late Mr Jno. Keats. - - I am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my - controul, and acted contrary to my advice, I cannot interfere with his - affairs. - - I am, Sir, - Yr. mo. Hble St., - RICHD. ABBEY." - - -p. 34, note 1. The difficulty of determining the exact date and place of -Keats's first introduction to Hunt arises as follows.--Cowden Clarke -states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in Leigh Hunt's -cottage at Hampstead. Hunt in his _Autobiography_ says it was 'in the -spring of the year 1816' that he went to live at Hampstead in the cottage -in question. Putting these two statements together, we get the result -stated as probable in the text. But on the other hand there is the -strongly Huntian character of Keats's _Epistle_ to G. F. Mathew, dated -November 1815, which would seem to indicate an earlier acquaintance (see -p. 31). Unluckily Leigh Hunt himself has darkened counsel on the point by -a paragraph inserted in the last edition of his _Autobiography_, as -follows:--(Pref. no. 7, p. 257) "It was not at Hampstead that I first saw -Keats. It was at York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote -part of the _Indicator_, and he resided with me while in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the -curious in such things, among whom I am one." The student must not be -misled by this remark of Hunt's, which is evidently only due to a slip of -memory. It is quite true that Keats lived with Hunt in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town, during part of July and August 1820 (see page 197): and that -before moving to that address Hunt had lived for more than a year (from -the autumn of 1818 to the spring of 1820) at 8, New Road. But that Keats -was intimate with him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact -living not in London at all but at the Vale of Health, is abundantly -certain. - - -p. 37, note 1. Cowden Clarke tells how Keats once calling and finding him -fallen asleep over Chaucer, wrote on the blank space at the end of the -_Floure and the Leafe_ the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a -little copse.' Reynolds on reading it addressed to Keats the following -sonnet of his own, which is unpublished (Houghton MSS.), and has a certain -biographical interest. It is dated Feb. 27, 1817. - - "Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, - Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed; - They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed - The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves, - O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves - Songs that shall make the age be nature-led, - And win that coronal for thy young head - Which time's strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne'er bereaves. - Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way, - Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung; - Be thou companion of the summer day, - Roaming the fields and older woods among:-- - So shall thy muse be ever in her May, - And thy luxuriant spirit ever young." - - -p. 45, note 1. Woodhouse MSS. A. contains the text of the first draft in -question, with some preliminary words of Woodhouse as follows:-- - -"The lines at p. 36 of Keats's printed poems are altered from a copy of -verses written by K. at the request of his brother George, and by the -latter sent as a valentine to the lady. The following is a copy of the -lines as originally written:-- - - Hadst thou lived in days of old, - Oh what wonders had been told - Of thy lively dimpled face, - And thy footsteps full of grace: - Of thy hair's luxurious darkling, - Of thine eyes' expressive sparkling. - And thy voice's swelling rapture, - Taking hearts a ready capture. - Oh! if thou hadst breathed then, - Thou hadst made the Muses ten. - Could'st thou wish for lineage higher - Than twin sister of Thalia? - At least for ever, ever more - Will I call the Graces four." - -Here follow lines 41--68 of the poem as afterwards published: and in -conclusion:-- - - "Ah me! whither shall I flee? - Thou hast metamorphosed me. - Do not let me sigh and pine, - Prythee be my valentine. - 14 Feby. 1816." - - -p. 47, note 1. Mrs Procter's memory, however, betrayed her when she -informed Lord Houghton that the colour of Keats's eyes was blue. That they -were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence alike of C. C. Clarke, -of George Keats and his wife (as transmitted by their daughter Mrs Speed -to her son), and from the various portraits painted from life and -posthumously by Severn and Hilton. Mrs Procter calls his hair auburn: Mrs -Speed had heard from her father and mother that it was 'golden red,' which -may mean nearly the same thing: I have seen a lock in the possession of -Sir Charles Dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have -looked gold in the lights. Bailey in Houghton MSS. speaks of it as -extraordinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his -head was like laying it 'on the rich plumage of a bird.' An evidently -misleading description of Keats's general aspect is that of Coleridge when -he describes him as a 'loose, slack, not well-dressed youth.' The sage -must have been drawing from his inward eye: those intimate with Keats -being of one accord as to his appearance of trim strength and 'fine -compactness of person.' Coleridge's further mention of his hand as -shrunken and old-looking seems exact. - - -p. 78, note 1. The isolated expressions of Keats on this subject, which -alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him somewhat unjustly to -the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. Fairness seems to require -that the whole passage in which he deals with it should be given. The -passage occurs in a letter to Bailey written from Hampstead and dated -Oct. 8, 1817, of which only a fragment was printed by Lord Houghton, and -after him by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. III. p. 82, no. xvi.). - -"I went to Hunt's and Haydon's who live now neighbours.--Shelley was -there--I know nothing about anything in this part of the world--every Body -seems at Loggerheads. There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in -statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room criticizing -every head most unmercifully--There's Horace Smith tired of Hunt--'The Web -of our life is of mingled yarn.'... I am quite disgusted with literary -men, and will never know another except Wordsworth--no not even Byron. -Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known -each other many years--now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours. -Haydon says to me, Keats, don't show your lines to Hunt on any account, or -he will have done half for you--so it appears Hunt wishes it to be -thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him I was getting -on to the completion of 4000 lines--Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me -they would have been 7000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he -to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on the -subject from some Lady, which contains a caution to me, thro' him, on this -subject. Now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?" - - -p. 83, note 1. See Haydon, _Autobiography_, vol. I. pp. 384-5. The letter -containing Keats's account of the same entertainment was printed for the -first time by Speed, _Works_, vol. I. p. i. no. 1, where it is dated -merely 'Featherstone Buildings, Monday.' (At Featherstone Buildings lived -the family of Charles Wells.) In Houghton MSS. I find a transcript of the -same letter in the hand of Mr Coventry Patmore, with a note in Lord -Houghton's hand: "These letters I did not print. R. M. M." In the -transcript is added in a parenthesis after the weekday the date 5 April, -1818: but this is a mistake; the 5th of April in that year was not a -Monday: and the contents of Keats's letter itself, as well as a comparison -with Haydon's words in his _Autobiography_, prove beyond question that it -was written on Monday, the 5th of January. - - -p. 87, note 1. Similar expressions about the Devonshire weather occur in -nearly all Keats's letters written thence in the course of March and -April. The letter to Bailey containing the sentences quoted in my text is -wrongly printed both by Lord Houghton and Mr Forman under date Sept. -1818. I find the same date given between brackets at the head of the same -letter as transcribed in Woodhouse MSS. B., proving that an error was -early made either in docketing or copying it. The contents of the letter -leave no doubt as to its real date. The sentences quoted prove it to have -been written not in autumn but in spring. It contains Keats's reasons both -for going down to join his brother Tom at Teignmouth, and for failing to -visit Bailey at Oxford on the way: now in September Keats was not at -Teignmouth at all, and Bailey had left Oxford for good, and was living at -his curacy in Cumberland (see p. 122). Moreover there is an allusion by -Keats himself to this letter in another which he wrote the next day to -Reynolds, whereby its true date can be fixed with precision as Friday, -March 13. - - -p. 112, note 1. The following unpublished letter of Keats to Mr Taylor -(from Woodhouse MSS. B.) has a certain interest, both in itself and as -fixing the date of his departure for the North:-- - - "Sunday evening, - - "My dear Taylor, - - I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health till my - return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, au - revoir, God keep us all well! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother Tom - will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for - him, since I still keep those you lent me a year ago. If I am - overweening, you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall - write, do send him some you think will be most amusing--he will be - careful in returning them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am - ashamed to catalogue these messages. There is but one more, which - ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs - Reynolds one of my books bound. As I cannot write in it let the - opposite" [a leaf with the name and 'from the author,' notes - Woodhouse] "be pasted in 'prythee. Remember me to Percy St.--Tell - Hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged - on a history piece to his own content. And tell Dewint I shall become - a disputant on the landscape. Bow for me very genteely to Mrs D. or - she will not admit your diploma. Remember me to Hessey, saying I hope - he'll _Carey_ his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. Adieu! - - Your sincere friend, - JOHN O'GROTS. - - June 22, 1818. Hampstead" [The date and place are added by Woodhouse - in red ink, presumably from the post-mark]. - - -p. 120, note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton -Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between 'All the magic of the -place' and the next line, 'So saying, with a spirit's glance,' and has -proposed, by way of improvement, to read 'with a spirit's grace'. I find -the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued -thus in pencil after the word 'place'. - - "'Tis now free to stupid face, - To cutters, and to fashion boats, - To cravats and to petticoats:-- - The great sea shall war it down, - For its fame shall not be blown - At each farthing Quadrille dance. - So saying with a spirit's glance - He dived"--. - -Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he -well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his -correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any -indication of the hiatus so caused. - - -p. 128, note 1. Lord Houghton says, "On returning to the south, Keats -found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at -Teignmouth." It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was -made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of -Keats's March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, p. 225. - - -p. 138, note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his -knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been -mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the -capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at -his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the -provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband's -death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings -himself had left them by will; one of 1000 direct; the other, of a -capital to yield 50 a year, in reversion after their mother's death (see -p. 5). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and -brought 1550. 7_s._ 10_d._ worth of that security at the price at which -it then stood. 1666. 13_s_. 4_d._ worth of the same stock was farther -purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of 50 -a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances -Rawlings during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments -lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to -whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the -first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each, -with its accumulations. Two years afterwards Fanny Keats received in like -manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers -John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being -3375. 5_s._ 7_d._, and to George 1147. 5_s._ 1_d._ It was a part of the -ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these -funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors -at the time when he most needed them. - - -p. 148, note 1. Landor's letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a -presentation copy of the _Life and Letters_, in 1848, begins -characteristically as follows:-- - - "Bath, Aug. 29. - - Dear Milnes, - - On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find - your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an - editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, - excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of - the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed - overcome so great a difficulty as Shelley in his _Cenci_, nor united - so many powers of the mind as Southey in _Kehama_--but there is an - effluence of power and light pervading all his work, and a freshness - such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.--" - - -p. 152, note 1. I think there is no doubt that _Hyperion_ was begun by -Keats beside his brother's sickbed in September or October 1818, and that -it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 'plunging into -abstract images,' and finding a 'feverous relief' in the 'abstractions' of -poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as -the translation of Ronsard's sonnet, _Nature ornant Cassandre_, which is -the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown -says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after -Tom's death in December--"It was then he wrote _Hyperion_"; but these -words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already -begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to -the poem by name, and says he has been 'going on a little' with it: and on -the 14th of February, 1819, says 'I have not gone on with _Hyperion_.' -During the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the _Odes_, and -whether he at the same time wrote any more of _Hyperion_ we cannot tell. -It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as -in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, -_Works_, vol. II. p. 143) that "it contains 2 books and 1/2--(about 900 -lines in all):" the actual length of the piece as published being 883 -lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before -revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after -nearly a year's interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him -in a letter from Winchester in August or September, "I have also been -writing parts of my _Hyperion_," this must not be taken as meaning that he -has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing -them,--like _Isabella_ and the _Eve of St Agnes_, which he mentions at the -same time,--since the date of his last letter. - - -p. 164, note 1. The version of _The Eve of St Agnes_ given in Woodhouse -MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the -original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all -probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see p. 133). The -readings of the MS. in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton -Forman (_Works_, vol. II. p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the -poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have, -from Woodhouse's transcript, the following table of the changes in those -stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:-- - -Stanza I.: line 1, for "chill" stood "cold": line 4, for "was" stood -"were": line 7, for "from" stood "in": line 9 (and Stanza II., line 1), -for "prayer" stood "prayers". Stanza III.: line 7, for "went" stood -"turn'd": line 8, for "Rough" stood "Black". After stanza III. stood the -following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed. - - 4. - - But there are ears may hear sweet melodies, - And there are eyes to brighten festivals, - And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies, - And many a lip that for the red wine calls-- - Follow, then follow to the illumined halls, - Follow me youth--and leave the eremite-- - Give him a tear--then trophied bannerals - And many a brilliant tasseling of light - Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night. - -Stanza V.; line 1, for "revelry" stood "revellers": lines 3-5, for-- - - "Numerous as shadows haunting fairily - The brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay - Of old romance. These let us wish away,"-- - -stood the following:-- - - "Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs, - The muse should never make the spirit gay; - Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away." - - -p. 166, note 1. At what precise date _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ was -written is uncertain. As of the _Ode to Melancholy_, Keats makes no -mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse MSS. A. it is -dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts before or while Keats was -on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in that year, is I think certain -both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence -among them of _Lamia_ and the _Ode to Autumn_. Hence it is to the first -half of 1819 that _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ must belong, like so much of -the poet's best work besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the -theme was already in his mind when he composed the _Eve of St Agnes_ in -January. Mr Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have -been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (_Works_, -vol. II. p. 357, note). - - -p. 186, note 1. The relation of _Hyperion, A Vision_, to the original -_Hyperion_ is a vital point in the history of Keats's mind and art, and -one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the error is -somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the _Vision_ is in -Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_, ed. 1848, Vol. I. p. 244. Having then -doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of Brown's MS. memoir quoted in -the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following -his account of _Hyperion_:--"He afterwards published it as a fragment, and -still later re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally -unfinished." When eight years later the same editor printed the piece for -the first time (in _Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society_, Vol. III. -1856-7) from the MS. given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown's -account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: "Is it the original sketch -out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the -commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? I have no external evidence -to decide this question:" and further,--"the problem of the priority of -the two poems--both fragments, and both so beautiful--may afford a wide -field for ingenious and critical conjecture." Ten years later again, when -he brought out the second edition of the _Life and Letters_, Lord Houghton -had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing -the piece in his Appendix as 'Another Version,' says in his text (p. 206) -"on reconsideration, I have no doubt that it was the first draft." -Accordingly it is given as 'an earlier version' in Mr W. M. Rossetti's -edition of 1872, as 'the first version' in Lord Houghton's own edition of -1876; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by -Messrs Buxton Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of -_Hyperion_ to the _Vision_ no doubt at first sight suggested the -conclusion to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In -the mean time at least two good critics, Mr W. B. Scott and Mr. R. -Garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the _Vision_ was not a -first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his -powers: an opinion in which Mr Garnett was confirmed by his recollection -of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse (see above, -Preface, p. v, and W. T. Arnold, _Works_ &c. p. xlix, note). Brown's -words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen -were right. They are confirmed from another side by Woodhouse MSS. A, -which contains the copy of a real early draft of _Hyperion_. In this copy -the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in -pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several -books of the poem as printed). - -BOOK I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines-- - - "Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief, - Sat moulting his weak plumage, never more - To be restored or soar against the sun; - While his three sons upon Olympus stood." - -In line 30, for "stay'd Ixion's wheel" stood "eased Ixion's toil". In line -48, for "tone" stood "tune". In line 76, for "gradual" stood "sudden". In -line 102, after the word "Saturn," stood the cancelled words-- - - "What dost think? - Am I that same? O Chaos!" - -In line 156, for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like mist." -In line 189, for "Savour of poisonous brass" stood "A poison-feel of -brass." In line 200 for "When earthquakes jar their battlements and -towers" stood "When an earthquake hath shook their city towers." After -line 205 stood the cancelled line "Most like a rose-bud to a fairy's -lute." In line 209, for "And like a rose" stood "Yes, like a rose." In -line 268, for "Suddenly" stood "And, sudden." - -BOOK II. In line 128, for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." In line 134 for -"starry Uranus" stood "starr'd Uranus" (some friend doubtless called -Keats's attention to the false quantity). - -BOOK III. After line 125 stood the cancelled lines:-- - - "Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain - Gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears - Gush luscious with no sob; or more severe." - -In line 126, for "most like" stood "more like." - -In these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the -student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that -where a corrected passage occurs again in the _Vision_, it in every case -corresponds to the printed _Hyperion_, and not to the draft of the poem -preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it certain that the -_Vision_ was not a first version of _Hyperion_, but a recast of the poem -as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after its first composition. -Taken together with the statement of Brown, which is perfectly explicit as -to time, place, and circumstances, and the corresponding statement of -Woodhouse as recollected by Mr Garnett, the proof is from all sides -absolute: and the 'first version' theory must disappear henceforward from -editions of and commentaries on our poet. - - -p. 193, note 2. A more explicit refutation of Haydon's account was given, -some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see Preface, no. 10), -not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from -general knowledge of the poet's character:-- - -"I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which -that ill-ordered being, Haydon, the artist, left behind him in his 'Diary' -respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, John Keats" ... -"Haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not -contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical -antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against -him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and -trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in -sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his -claret. In the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have -not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of -him Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as -could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic expenses never -would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, I never -perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence." - - -p. 198, note 1. In Medwin's _Life of Shelley_ (1847), pp. 89-92, are some -notices of Keats communicated to the writer by Fanny Brawne (then Mrs -Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his 'kind correspondent.' Medwin's -carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly -casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but I think an -attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. 91, which discusses Mr -Finch's account of Keats's death, leaves no doubt that it continues in -substance the quotation previously begun from Mrs Lindon. "That his -sensibility," so runs the text, "was most acute, is true, and his passions -were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is -implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn -on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only -by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his -friends. Violence such as the letter" [of Mr Finch] "describes, was quite -foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting -England, I saw him every day", [this would be true of Fanny Brawne from -Oct. 1819 to Sept. 1820, if we except the Kentish Town period in the -summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] "I -often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not -hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, -much less a violent one, to any human being." The above passage has been -overlooked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as -serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman -he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to Dilke so -often quoted. - - - - -INDEX. - - - Abbey, Mr Richard, 11, 17, 70, 77, 138, 144, 192. - - _Adonas_ (Shelley's), 209, 210. - - _Adventures of a younger Son_ (Trelawney's), 75. - - Alfieri, 205. - - _Alfred, The_, 124. - - _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Burton's), 167. - - _Antiquary_ (Scott's), 115. - - _Apollo, Ode to_, 21-22. - - _Autumn, Ode to_, 177. - - - Bailey, Benjamin, 75, 76, 77, 122, 213, 214. - - Beattie, 21. - - _Biographia Literaria_ (Coleridge's), 64. - - Boccaccio, 148. - - Bonaparte, Pauline, Princess Borghese, 204. - - Brawne, Miss Fanny, 131 seq., 180-181, 197, 198. - - _Britannia's Pastorals_ (Browne's), 31. - - Brown, Charles, 13, 73, 111 seq., 128, 143 seq., 181, 200, 210. - - Browne, 31. - - Browning, Robert, 218. - - Burnet, 10. - - Byron, 1, 19, 65, 210; - Sonnet to, 22. - - - Canterbury, 71. - - _Cap and Bells_, 183 seq. - - Castlereagh, 25. - - _Champion, The_, 82. - - Chatterton, 157, 158; - Sonnet to, 22. - - Chaucer, 28. - - Chichester, 133. - - Clarke, Cowden, 3, 8, 12, 22, 23, 72, 84. - - Clarke, Rev. John, 4. - - 'Cockaigne, King of,' 121. - - _Cockney School of Poetry_ (Articles in _Blackwood's Magazine_), 77, - 121 seq. - - Coleridge, 16, 25, 26, 33, 64. - - Cooper, Astley, 18. - - Cotterill, Miss, 202, 203. - - Cox, Miss Charlotte, 130. - - - _Dante_ (Cary's), 113. - - _Death_, Stanzas on, 21; - Keats' contemplation of, 140; - longing for, 200. - - De Quincey, 26. - - Devonshire, 87. - - _Dictionary_ (Lempriere's), 10. - - Dilke, 73, 210. - - Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 73, 128, 135. - - _Don Juan_ (Byron's), 184, 202, 210. - - Dryden, 29, 30, 53. - - - Edmonton, 5, 6, 11, 14, 20. - - Eldon, 25. - - Elton, Lieutenant, 204. - - Emancipation, Literary, 63-64. - - _Endymion_, 66, 68, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86, 91; - Keats' low opinion of the poem, 91; - its beauties and defects, 91, 106-109; - Drayton's and Fletcher's previous treatment of the subject, 94-95; - Keats' unclassical manner of treatment, 96; - its one bare circumstance, 87; - scenery of the poem, 97; - its quality of nature-interpretation, 98; - its love passages, 100; - comparison of description with a similar one in _Richard III._, 103; - its lyrics, 104-106; - appreciation of the lyrics a test of true relish for poetry, 106; - its rhythm and music, 109; - Keats' own preface the best criticism of the poem, 110. - - Enfield, 4, 12. - - _Epistles_, their tributes to the conjoined pleasures of literature and - friendship, 53; - ungrammatical slips in, 54; - characteristic specimens of, 54-55. - - _Epithalamium_ (Spenser's), 12. - - _Eve of St Agnes_, its simple theme, 160; - its ease and directness of construction, 161; - its unique charm, 163. - - _Eve of St Mark_, contains Keats' impressions of three Cathedral towns, - 164; - its pictures, 164; - the legend, 164; - its pictorial brilliance, 165; - its influence on later English poetry, 165. - - _Examiner, The_ (Leigh Hunt's), 25. - - - _Faerie Queene_ (Spenser's), 12, 13, 35. - - _Faithful Shepherdess_ (Fletcher's), 95. - - _Fanny, Lines to_, 134. - - _Feast of the Poets_ (Leigh Hunt's), 32. - - Fletcher, 95. - - _Foliage_ (Leigh Hunt's), 73. - - - Genius, births of, 1. - - _Gisborne, Letter to Maria_ (Shelley's), 30. - - Goethe, 154. - - _Grasshopper and Cricket_, 35. - - Gray, 113. - - Greece, Keats' love of, 58, 77, 154. - - _Guy Mannering_ (Scott's), 115. - - - Hammond, Mr, 11, 14. - - Hampstead, 72, 77. - - Haslam, William, 45, 212 (note). - - Haydon, 3, 40, 65, 68, 78, 137, 138, 191, 214. - - Hazlitt, William, 83, 84. - - _History of his own Time_ (Burnet's), 10. - - Holmes, Edward, 8. - - _Holy Living and Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor's), 206. - - _Homer, On first looking into Chapman's_ (Sonnet), 23-24. - - Hood, 219. - - _Hope_, address to, 21. - - Horne, R. H., 11. - - Houghton, Lord, 75, 211-213. - - Hunt, John, 25. - - Hunt, Leigh, 22, 24, 25, 32, 35, 39, 49, 51, 68, 72, 78, 196. - - _Hyperion_, 129, 133, 144; - its purpose, 152; - one of the grandest poems of our language, 157; - the influences of _Paradise Lost_ on it, 158; - its blank verse compared with Milton's, 158; - its elemental grandeur, 160; - remodelling of it, 185 seq.; - description of the changes, 186-187; - special interest of the poem, 187. - - - _Imitation of Spenser_ (Keats' first lines), 14, 20. - - _Indolence, Ode on_, 174-175. - - _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, 86; - source of its inspiration, 148; - minor blemishes, 149; - its Italian metre, 149; - its conspicuous power and charm, 149; - description of its beauties, 151. - - Isle of Wight, 67. - - - Jennings, Mrs, 5, 11. - - Jennings, Capt. M. J., 7. - - Joseph and his Brethren (Wells'), 45. - - - Kean, 81. - - Keats, John, various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224; - birth, 2; - education at Enfield, 4; - death of his father, 5; - school-life, 5-9; - his studious inclinations, 10; - death of his mother, 10; - leaves school at the age of fifteen, 11; - is apprenticed to a surgeon, 11; - finishes his school-translation of the _neid_, 12; - reads Spenser's _Epithalamium_ and _Faerie Queene_, 12; - his first attempts at composition, 13; - goes to London and walks the hospitals, 14; - his growing passion for poetry, 15; - appointed dresser at Guy's Hospital, 16; - his last operation, 16; - his early life in London, 18; - his early poems, 20 seq.; - his introduction to Leigh Hunt, 24; - Hunt's great influence over him, 26 seq.; - his acquaintance with Shelley, 38; - his other friends, 40-45; - personal characteristics, 47-48; - goes to live with his brothers in the Poultry, 48; - publication of his first volume of poems, 65; - retires to the Isle of Wight, 66; - lives at Carisbrooke, 67; - changes to Margate, 68; - money troubles, 70; - spends some time at Canterbury, 71; - receives first payment in advance for _Endymion_, 71; - lives with his two brothers at Hampstead, 71; - works steadily at _Endymion_, 71-72; - makes more friends, 73; - writes part of _Endymion_ at Oxford, 76; - his love for his sister Fanny, 77; - stays at Burford Bridge, 80; - goes to the 'immortal dinner,' 82; - he visits Devonshire, 87; - goes on a walking tour in Scotland with Charles Brown, 113; - crosses over to Ireland, 116; - returns to Scotland and visits Burns' country, 118; - sows there the seeds of consumption, 120; - returns to London, 120; - is attacked in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_, 121; - Lockhart's conduct towards him, 122; - death of his young brother Tom, 128; - goes to live with Charles Brown, 128; - falls in love, 130-131; - visits friends in Chichester, 133; - suffers with his throat, 133; - his correspondence with his brother George, 139; - goes to Shanklin, 143; - collaborates with Brown in writing _Otho_, 143; - goes to Winchester, 144; - returns again to London, 146; - more money troubles, 146; - determines to make a living by journalism, 146; - lives by himself, 146; - goes back to Mr Brown, 181; - _Otho_ is returned unopened after having been accepted, 182; - want of means prevents his marriage, 190; - his increasing illness, 191 seq.; - temporary improvement in his health, 194; - publishes another volume of poems, 196; - stays with Leigh Hunt's family, 197; - favourable notice in the _Edinburgh Review_, 197; - lives with the family of Miss Brawne, 198; - goes with Severn to spend the winter in Italy, 199; - the journey improves his health, 200; - writes his last lines, 201; - stays for a time at Naples, 203; - goes on to Rome, 203-204; - further improvement in his health, 205; - sudden and last relapse, 205; - he is tenderly nursed by his friend Severn, 206; - speaks of himself as already living a 'posthumous life,' 207; - grows worse and dies, 208; - various tributes to his memory, 214. - - His genius awakened by the _Faerie Queene_, 13; - influence of other poets on him, 21; - experiments in language, 21, 64, 147, 169; - employment of the 'Heroic' couplet, 27, 30; - element and spirit of his own poetry, 50; - experiments in metre, 52; - studied musical effect of his verse, 55; - his Grecian spirit, 58, 77, 95, 114, 154; - view of the aims and principles of poetry, 61; - imaginary dependence on Shakspere, 69; - thoughts on the mystery of Evil, 88; - puns, 72, 202; - his poems Greek in idea, English in manner, 96; - his poetry a true spontaneous expression of his mind, 110; - power of vivifying, 161; - verbal licenses, 169; - influence on subsequent poets, 218; - felicity of phrase, 219. - - Personal characteristics: - Celtic temperament, 3, 58, 70; - affectionate nature, 6, 7, 9, 10, 77; - morbid temperament, 6, 70, 211; - lovable disposition, 6, 8, 19, 212, 213; - temper, 7, 9, 233; - personal beauty, 8; - _penchant_ for fighting, 8, 9, 72; - studious nature, 9, 112; - humanity, 39, 89, 114-115; - sympathy and tenderness, 47, 213; - eyes, description of, 46, 207, 224; - love of nature, 47, 55-56; - voice, 47; - desire of fame, 60, 125, 141, 207; - natural sensibility to physical and spiritual spell of moonlight, 95; - highmindedness, 125-126; - love romances, 127, 130-134, 180-181, 197, 200, 203, 212; - pride and sensitiveness, 211; - unselfishness, 213, 214; - instability, 215. - - Various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224. - - Keats, Admiral Sir Richard, 7. - - Keats, Fanny (Mrs Llanos), 77. - - Keats, Mrs (Keats' mother), 5, 10. - - Keats, George, 90, 113, 192, 193, 210. - - Keats, Thomas (Keats' father), 2, 5. - - Keats, Tom, 6, 127. - - _King Stephen_, 179. - - 'Kirk-men,' 116-117. - - - _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, 165, 166, 218; - origin of the title, 165; - a story of the wasting power of love, 166; - description of its beauties, 166. - - Lamb, Charles, 26, 82, 83. - - _Lamia_, 143; - its source, 167; - versification, 167; - the picture of the serpent woman, 168; - Keats' opinion of the Poem, 168. - - Landor, 75. - - _Laon and Cythna_, 76. - - Letters, extracts, etc., from Keats', 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 81, - 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 114, 116-117, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130, - 134, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 157, 181, 182, 190, 194-195, 200, - 203, 226. - - 'Little Keats,' 19. - - Lockhart, 33, 122, 123. - - _London Magazine_, 71. - - - Mackereth, George Wilson, 18. - - Madeline, 162 seq. - - 'Maiden-Thought,' 88, 114. - - _Man about Town_ (Webb's), 38. - - _Man in the Moon_ (Drayton's), 93. - - Margate, 68. - - Mathew, George Felton, 19. - - Meg Merrilies, 115-116. - - _Melancholy, Ode on_, 175. - - Milton, 51, 52, 54, 88. - - Monckton, Milnes, 211. - - Moore, 65. - - _Morning Chronicle, The_, 124. - - _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ (Spenser's), 31. - - Mythology, Greek, 10, 58, 152, 153. - - - Naples, 203. - - _Narensky_ (Brown's), 74. - - Newmarch, 19. - - _Nightingale, Ode to a_, 136, 175, 218. - - _Nymphs_, 73. - - - Odes, 21, 137, 145, 170-171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 218. - - _Orion_, 11. - - _Otho_, 143, 144, 180, 181. - - Oxford, 75, 77. - - _Oxford Herald, The_, 122. - - - _Pan, Hymn to_, 83. - - _Pantheon_ (Tooke's), 10. - - _Paradise Lost_, 88, 152, 154, 158. - - Patriotism, 115. - - _Peter Corcoran_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Plays, 178, 179, 181, 182. - - Poems (Keats' first volume), faint echoes of other poets in them, 51; - their form, 52; - their experiments in metre, 52; - merely poetic preludes, 53; - their rambling tendency, 53; - immaturity, 60; - attractiveness, 61; - characteristic extracts, 63; - their moderate success, 65-66. - - Poetic Art, Theory and Practice, 61, 64. - - Poetry, joys of, 55; - principle and aims of, 61; - genius of, 110. - - _Polymetis_ (Spence's), 10. - - Pope, 19, 29, 30. - - 'Posthumous Life,' 207. - - Prince Regent, 25. - - Proctor, Mrs, 47. - - _Psyche, Ode to_, 136, 171, 172. - - _Psyche_ (Mrs Tighe's), 21. - - - Quarterly Review, 121, 124. - - - _Rainbow_ (Campbell's), 170. - - Rawlings, William, 5. - - Reynolds, John Hamilton, 36, 211, 214. - - Rice, James, 37, 142. - - _Rimini, Story of_, 27, 30, 31, 35. - - Ritchie, 82. - - Rome, 204. - - Rossetti, 220. - - - _Safie_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Scott, Sir Walter, 1, 33, 65, 115, 123, 124. - - Scott, John, 124. - - Sculpture, ancient, 136. - - _Sea-Sonnet_, 67. - - Severn, Joseph, 45, 72, 135, 191, 199 seq. - - Shakspere, 67, 69. - - Shanklin, 67, 143. - - Shelley, 16, 32, 38, 56, 85, 110, 199, 203, 209. - - Shenstone, 21. - - _Sleep and Poetry_, 52, 60, 61, 109. - - Smith, Horace, 33, 81. - - Sonnets, 22, 23, 43, 48, 49, 57, 201. - - _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, 52. - - Spenser, 19, 20, 21, 31, 35, 54, 55. - - Stephens, Henry, 18-20. - - Surrey Institution, 84. - - - Taylor, Mr, 71, 81, 126, 144, 146, 206, 211. - - Teignmouth, 87. - - Tennyson, 218. - - Thomson, 21. - - - _Urn, Ode on a Grecian_, 136, 172-174. - - - _Vision, The_, 187, 193 (_see_ Hyperion). - - - Webb, Cornelius, 38. - - Wells, Charles, 45. - - Wilson, 33. - - Winchester, 143-145. - - Windermere, 113, 114. - - Wordsworth, 1, 44, 46, 56, 64, 82, 83, 158, 219. - - -CAMBRIDGE PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] See Appendix, p. 221. - -[2] _Ibid._ - -[3] John Jennings died March 8, 1805. - -[4] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See below, p. 138, and Appendix, p. 221. - -[5] Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808. - -[6] Houghton MSS. - -[7] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See Appendix, p. 221. - -[8] Mrs Alice Jennings was buried at St Stephen's, Coleman Street, -December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. Pratt, -M.A.) - -[9] I owe this anecdote to Mr Gosse, who had it direct from Horne. - -[10] Houghton MSS. - -[11] A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance -narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and in prose, not -verse, will be found in _The Philosophy of Mystery_, by W. C. Dendy -(London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr H. Stephens, in the -_Poetical Works_, ed. Forman (1 vol. 1884), p. 558. - -[12] See Appendix. - -[13] See C. L. Feltoe, _Memorials of J. F. South_ (London, 1884), p. 81. - -[14] Houghton MSS. See also Dr B. W. Richardson in the _Asclepiad_, vol. -i. p. 134. - -[15] Houghton MSS. - -[16] What, for instance, can be less Spenserian and at the same time less -Byronic than-- - - "For sure so fair a place was never seen - Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye"? - -[17] See Appendix, p. 222. - -[18] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[19] See particularly the _Invocation to Sleep_ in the little volume of -Webb's poems published by the Olliers in 1821. - -[20] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[21] See _Praeterita_, vol. ii. chap. 2. - -[22] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[23] Compare Chapman, _Hymn to Pan_:-- - - "the bright-hair'd god of pastoral, - Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe, - By lot, all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow, - All tops of hills, and _cliffy highnesses_, - All sylvan copses, and the fortresses - Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove, - And sometimes, by allurement of his love, - Will wade the _wat'ry softnesses_." - -[24] Compare Wordsworth:-- - - "Bees that soar for bloom, - High as the highest peak of Furness Fells, - Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells." - -Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence? - -[25] Mr W. T. Arnold in his _Introduction_ (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel -passage from Leigh Hunt's _Gentle Armour_ as an example of the degree to -which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt: forgetting that the _Gentle -Armour_ was not written till 1831, and that the debt in this instance is -therefore the other way. - -[26] See Appendix, p. 220. - -[27] The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph were -furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr Leslie Stephen, -from whom I have them. The point about the _Adventures of a Younger Son_ -is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken -from the Keats MSS. then in Brown's hands, especially _Otho_. - -[28] Houghton MSS. - -[29] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[30] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[31] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[32] In the extract I have modernized Drayton's spelling and endeavoured -to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending. - -[33] Mrs Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of an -allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats's narrative. - -[34] Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions Pon as one of the fifty sons of -Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth): and in Spenser's _Faerie -Queene_ there is a Pana--the daughter of the giant Corflambo in the -fourth book. Keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave -Endymion a sister and called her Peona. - -[35] Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by Mr W. T. -Arnold. - -[36] The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of -Chamberlayne:-- - - "Upon the throne, in such a glorious state - As earth's adored favorites, there sat - The image of a monarch, vested in - The spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been - A diadem's redemption; his large size, - Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize - The admired proportions of those mighty men - Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when - Found out, are carefully preserved to tell - Posterity how much these times are fell - From nature's youthful strength." - -[37] See Appendix, p. 226. - -[38] Houghton MSS. - -[39] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[40] Severn in Houghton MSS. - -[41] Houghton MSS. - -[42] Dilke (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton's _Life and -Letters_, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned as -much; and there are tricks of style, _e.g._ the use of the Spanish -_Sangrado_ for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand. - -[43] Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, and -Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott's faithful satellite, the actor -Terry. - -[44] Severn in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XI., p. 401. - -[45] See Preface, p. viii. - -[46] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[47] Houghton MSS. - -[48] The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been -thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the -summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the -then surviving brother of Keats's friend. - -[49] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[50] See Appendix, p. 228. - -[51] _Decamerone_, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment -of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously -with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his _Sicilian Story_ (1820). Of -the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write -concurrently with Keats (see above, p. 86), two were finished and -published by him after Keats's death in the volume called _A Garden of -Florence_ (1821). - -[52] As to the date when _Hyperion_ was written, see Appendix, p. 228: and -as to the error by which Keats's later recast of his work has been taken -for an earlier draft, _ibid._, p. 230. - -[53] If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by -predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so--though only on a -cameo scale--in the best idyls of Chnier in France, as _L'Aveugle_ or _Le -Jeune Malade_, or of Landor in England, as the _Hamadryad_ or _Enallos and -Cymodamia_; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at -Alexandria in the days of Theocritus. - -[54] We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the -best, that what he most liked in Chatterton's work was the minstrel's song -in _lla_, that _fantasia_, so to speak, executed really with genius on -the theme of one of Ophelia's songs in _Hamlet_. - -[55] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the -beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of -rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the -beadsman in the lines, - - "But no--already had his death-bell rung; - The joys of all his life were said and sung;" - -that of Angela where she calls herself - - "A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, - Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll." - -[56] See Appendix, p. 229. - -[57] Chartier was born at Bayeux. His _Belle Dame sans Merci_ is a poem of -over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in -dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his -consequent despair and death.--For the date of composition of Keats's -poem, see Appendix, p. 230. - -[58] This has been pointed out by my colleague Mr A. S. Murray: see -Forman, _Works_, vol. iii. p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, _Poetical -Works_, &c., p. xxii, note. - -[59] Houghton MSS. - -[60] "He never spoke of any one," says Severn, (Houghton MSS.,) "but by -saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and -cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of -the person he was speaking of." - -[61] See Appendix, p. 230. - -[62] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. -Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his -death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey -(Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats's -mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus. - -[63] Mrs Owen was the first of Keats's critics to call attention to this -passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it -derives from the date of its composition. - -[64] Houghton MSS. - -[65] See below, p. 193, note 2. - -[66] "Interrupted," says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., "by a -circumstance which it is needless to mention." - -[67] This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest -daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of -Haydon. But see Appendix, p. 232. - -[68] A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the _Indicator_ a few -stanzas from the _Cap and Bells_, and about the same time dedicated to -Keats his translation of Tasso's _Amyntas_, speaking of the original as -"an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally -pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical." - -[69] See Crabb Robinson. _Diaries_, Vol. II. p. 197, etc. - -[70] See Appendix, p. 233. - -[71] Houghton MSS. In both the _Autobiography_ and the _Correspondence_ -the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy -additions. - -[72] I have the date of sailing from Lloyd's, through the kindness of the -secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time -following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials -published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in _Atlantic -Monthly_, Vol. XI. p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn -MSS. - -[73] Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and his -remains were in 1882 removed from their original burying-place to a grave -beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius -Cestius. - -[74] Haslam, in Severn MSS. - -[75] Severn MSS. - -[76] Houghton MSS. - -[77] _Ibid._ - -[78] Houghton MSS. - -[79] _Ibid._ - - - - -English Men of Letters. - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. - -_Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. Paper Covers, 1s.; Cloth, 1s. 6d. each._ - -_Pocket Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. 1s. net each._ - -_Library Edition. Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each._ - - - ADDISON. - By W. J. 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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/license - - -Title: Keats - -Author: Sidney Colvin - -Release Date: December 22, 2012 [EBook #41688] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - - - - -English Men of Letters - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY - - -KEATS - - - - - KEATS - - - BY SIDNEY COLVIN - - - MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED - ST MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON - 1909 - - - - - _First Edition 1887._ - _Reprinted 1889, 1898, 1899, 1902, 1909._ - _Library Edition 1902._ - _Reprinted 1906._ - _Pocket Edition 1909._ - - - - -PREFACE. - - -With the name of Keats that of his first biographer, the late Lord -Houghton, must always justly remain associated. But while the sympathetic -charm of Lord Houghton's work will keep it fresh, as a record of the -poet's life it can no longer be said to be sufficient. Since the revised -edition of the _Life and Letters_ appeared in 1867, other students and -lovers of Keats have been busy, and much new information concerning him -been brought to light, while of the old information some has been proved -mistaken. No connected account of Keats's life and work, in accordance -with the present state of knowledge, exists, and I have been asked to -contribute such an account to the present series. I regret that lack of -strength and leisure has so long delayed the execution of the task -entrusted to me. The chief authorities and printed texts which I have -consulted (besides the original editions of the Poems) are the -following:-- - -1. Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries. By Leigh Hunt. London, 1828. - -2. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Thomas Medwin. London, 2 vols., -1847. - -3. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard -Monckton Milnes. 2 vols., London, 1848. - -4. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited and compiled by Tom Taylor. -Second edition. 3 vols., London, 1853. - -5. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and -Contemporaries. 3 vols., London, 1850. - -6. The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a memoir by Richard Monckton -Milnes. London, 1854. - -7. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. [Revised edition, edited by Thornton -Hunt.] London, 1860. - -8. The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame: an article by Joseph Severn in the -_Atlantic Monthly Magazine_ for 1863 (vol. xi. p. 401). - -9. The Life and Letters of John Keats. By Lord Houghton. New edition, -London, 1867. - -10. Recollections of John Keats: an article by Charles Cowden Clarke in -the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1874 (N. S. vol. xii. p. 177). Afterwards -reprinted with modifications in Recollections of Writers, by Charles and -Mary Cowden Clarke. London, 1878. - -11. The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the writings of the late Charles -Wentworth Dilke. With a biographical notice by Sir Charles Wentworth -Dilke, Bart., M.P. 2 vols., London, 1875. - -12. Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk. With a memoir -by Frederic Wordsworth Haydon. 2 vols., London, 1876. - -13. The Poetical Works of John Keats, chronologically arranged and edited, -with a memoir, by Lord Houghton [Aldine edition of the British Poets]. -London, 1876. - -14. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, with Introduction and Notes by -Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878. - -A biographer cannot ignore these letters now that they are published: but -their publication must be regretted by all who hold that human respect and -delicacy are due to the dead no less than to the living, and to genius no -less than to obscurity. - -15. The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats. Edited with notes -and appendices by Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols., London, 1883. - -In this edition, besides the texts reprinted from the first editions, all -the genuine letters and additional poems published in 3, 6, 9, 13, and 14 -of the above are brought together, as well as most of the biographical -notices contained in 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 12: also a series of -previously unpublished letters of Keats to his sister: with a great amount -of valuable illustrative and critical material besides. Except for a few -errors, which I shall have occasion to point out, Mr Forman's work might -for the purpose of the student be final, and I have necessarily been -indebted to it at every turn. - -16. The Letters and Poems of John Keats. Edited by John Gilmer Speed. 3 -vols., New York, 1883. - -17. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. Arnold. London, -1884. - -The Introduction to this edition contains the only attempt with which I am -acquainted at an analysis of the formal elements of Keats's style. - -18. An AEsculapian Poet--John Keats: an article by Dr B. W. Richardson in -the _Asclepiad_ for 1884 (vol. i. p. 134). - -19. Notices and correspondence concerning Keats which have appeared at -intervals during a number of years in the _Athenaeum_. - -In addition to printed materials I have made use of the following -unprinted, viz.:-- - -I. HOUGHTON MSS. Under this title I refer to the contents of an album from -the library at Fryston Hall, in which the late Lord Houghton bound up a -quantity of the materials he had used in the preparation of the _Life and -Letters_, as well as of correspondence concerning Keats addressed to him -both before and after the publication of his book. The chief contents are -the manuscript memoir of Keats by Charles Brown, which was offered by the -writer in vain to _Galignani_, and I believe other publishers; transcripts -by the same hand of a few of Keats's poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs -of the poet by his friends Charles Cowden Clarke (the first draft of the -paper above cited as no. 10), Henry Stephens, George Felton Mathew, Joseph -Severn, and Benjamin Bailey; together with letters from all the above, -from John Hamilton Reynolds, and several others. For the use of this -collection, without which my work must have been attempted to little -purpose, I am indebted to the kindness of its owner, the present Lord -Houghton. - -II. WOODHOUSE MSS. A. A common-place book in which Richard Woodhouse, the -friend of Keats and of his publishers Messrs Taylor and Hessey, -transcribed--as would appear from internal evidence, about midsummer -1819--the chief part of Keats's poems at that date unpublished. The -transcripts are in many cases made from early drafts of the poems: some -contain gaps which Woodhouse has filled up in pencil from later drafts: to -others are added corrections, or suggestions for corrections, some made in -the hand of Mr Taylor and some in that of Keats himself. - -III. WOODHOUSE MSS. B. A note-book in which the same Woodhouse has -copied--evidently for Mr Taylor, at the time when that gentleman was -meditating a biography of the poet--a number of letters addressed by Keats -to Mr Taylor himself, to the transcriber, to Reynolds and his sisters, to -Rice, and Bailey. Three or four of these letters, as well as portions of a -few others, are unpublished. - -Both the volumes last named were formerly the property of Mrs Taylor, a -niece by marriage of the publisher, and are now my own. A third note-book -by Woodhouse, containing personal notices and recollections of Keats, was -unluckily destroyed in the fire at Messrs Kegan Paul and Co's. premises in -1883. A copy of _Endymion_, annotated by the same hand, has been used by -Mr Forman in his edition (above, no. 15). - -IV. SEVERN MSS. The papers and correspondence left by the late Joseph -Severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable biography, have -been put into the hands of Mr William Sharp, to be edited and published at -his discretion. In the meantime Mr Sharp has been so kind as to let me -have access to such parts of them as relate to Keats. The most important -single piece, an essay on 'The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame,' has been -printed already in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (above, no. 8), but in the -remainder I have found many interesting details, particularly concerning -Keats's voyage to Italy and life at Rome. - -V. _Rawlings v. Jennings._ When Keats's maternal grandfather, Mr John -Jennings, died in 1805, leaving property exceeding the amount of the -specific bequests under his will, it was thought necessary that his estate -should be administered by the Court of Chancery, and with that intent a -friendly suit was brought in the names of his daughter and her second -husband (Frances Jennings, _m._ 1st Thomas Keats, and 2nd William -Rawlings) against her mother and brother, who were the executors. The -proceedings in this suit are referred to under the above title. They are -complicated and voluminous, extending over a period of twenty years, and -my best thanks are due to Mr Ralph Thomas, of 27 Chancery Lane, for his -friendly pains in searching through and making abstracts of them. - -For help and information, besides what has been above acknowledged, I am -indebted first and foremost to my friend and colleague, Mr Richard -Garnett; and next to the poet's surviving sister, Mrs Llanos; to Sir -Charles Dilke, who lent me the chief part of his valuable collection of -Keats's books and papers (already well turned to account by Mr Forman); to -Dr B. W. Richardson, and the Rev. R. H. Hadden. Other incidental -obligations will be found acknowledged in the footnotes. - -Among essays on and reviews of Keats's work I need only refer in -particular to that by the late Mrs F. M. Owen (Keats: a Study, London, -1876). In its main outlines, though not in details, I accept and have -followed this lady's interpretation of _Endymion_. For the rest, every -critic of modern English poetry is of necessity a critic of Keats. The -earliest, Leigh Hunt, was one of the best; and to name only a few among -the living--where Mr Matthew Arnold, Mr Swinburne, Mr Lowell, Mr Palgrave, -Mr W. M. Rossetti, Mr W. B. Scott, Mr Roden Noel, Mr Theodore Watts, have -gone before, for one who follows to be both original and just is not easy. -In the following pages I have not attempted to avoid saying over again -much that in substance has been said already, and doubtless better, by -others: by Mr Matthew Arnold and Mr Palgrave especially. I doubt not but -they will forgive me: and at the same time I hope to have contributed -something of my own towards a fuller understanding both of Keats's art and -life. - - - - -CONTENTS. - - - PAGE - - CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital - Student in London. [1795-1817] 1 - - CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh - Hunt: his Literary and Personal Influence--John Hamilton - Reynolds--James Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph - Severn--Charles Wells--Personal Characteristics-- - Determination to publish. [1814-April, 1817] 18 - - CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817 50 - - CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer - at Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey - at Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter - at Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity-- - Spring at Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and - Emigration of George Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818] 67 - - CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion_ 93 - - CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death - of Tom Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne-- - Excursion to Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon - and money difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening - Prospects--Summer at Shanklin and Winchester--Wise - Resolutions--Return from Winchester. [June, 1818-October, - 1819] 111 - - CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The - Plays 147 - - CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn Occupations--The _Cap and - Bells_--Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing Despondency--Visit of - George Keats to England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally - in the Spring--Summer in Kentish Town--Publication of the - _Lamia_ Volume--Relapse--Ordered South--Voyage to Italy-- - Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October, 1819-Feb. 1821] 180 - - CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius 209 - - APPENDIX 221 - - INDEX 234 - - - - -KEATS. - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital Student - in London. [1795-1817.] - - -Science may one day ascertain the laws of distribution and descent which -govern the births of genius; but in the meantime a birth like that of -Keats presents to the ordinary mind a striking instance of nature's -inscrutability. If we consider the other chief poets of the time, we can -commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood, or some -strong inspiring influence in the scenery and traditions of their home. -Thus we see Scott prepared alike by his origin, associations, and -circumstances to be the 'minstrel of his clan' and poet of the romance of -the border wilds; while the spirit of the Cumbrian hills, and the temper -of the generations bred among them, speak naturally through the lips of -Wordsworth. Byron seems inspired in literature by demons of the same -froward brood that had urged others of his lineage through lives of -adventure or of crime. But Keats, with instincts and faculties more purely -poetical than any of these, was paradoxically born in a dull and middling -walk of English city life; and 'if by traduction came his mind,'--to quote -Dryden with a difference,--it was through channels too obscure for us to -trace. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to -London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a -livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Presently he married -his employer's daughter, Frances Jennings; and Mr Jennings, who was a man -of substance, retiring about the same time to live in the country, at -Ponder's End, left the management of the business in the hands of his -son-in-law. The young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the -Swan-and-Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower -Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet JOHN KEATS, was born -prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, -named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, -1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the -3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family -had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a -mile farther north[1]. - -In the gifts and temperament of Keats we shall find much that seems -characteristic of the Celtic rather than the English nature. Whether he -really had any of that blood in his veins we cannot tell. His father was a -native either of Devon or of Cornwall[2]; and his mother's name, Jennings, -is common in but not peculiar to Wales. There our evidence ends, and all -that we know further of his parents is that they were certainly not quite -ordinary people. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of -intelligence and conduct--"of so remarkably fine a common sense and -native respectability," writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father's school -the poet and his brothers were brought up, "that I perfectly remember the -warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after -he had been to visit his boys." It is added that he resembled his -illustrious son in person and feature, being of small stature and lively -energetic countenance, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Of his wife, the -poet's mother, we learn more vaguely that she was "tall, of good figure, -with large oval face, and sensible deportment": and again that she was a -lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and -supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some -imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her -family as follows:--"my grandfather [Mr Jennings] was very well off, as -his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would -have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of -his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of -the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother." And -elsewhere:--"my mother I distinctly remember, she resembled John very much -in the face, was extremely fond of him, and humoured him in every whim, of -which he had not a few, she was a most excellent and affectionate parent, -and as I thought a woman of uncommon talents." - -The mother's passion for her firstborn son was devotedly returned by him. -Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an -illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an -old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to -lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different -turn:--"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 the -rescue." Another trait of the poet's childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, -on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that -when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had -a trick of making a rhyme to the last word people said and then laughing. - -The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send -them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school -kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats had -been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of -exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. Traces of its ancient -forest character lingered long, and indeed linger yet, about the -neighbourhood of the picturesque small suburban town of Enfield, and the -district was one especially affected by City men of fortune for their -homes. The school-house occupied by Mr Clarke had been originally built -for a rich West-India merchant, in the finest style of early Georgian -classic architecture, and stood in a pleasant and spacious garden at the -lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a -railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but -later it was taken down, and the facade, with its fine proportions and -rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington -Museum as a choice example of the style. - -Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, who was -killed by a fall from his horse as he rode home at night from Southgate. -This was on the 16th of April, 1804. Within twelve months his mother had -put off her weeds, and taken a second husband--one William Rawlings, -described as 'of Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper,' -presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management -of her father's business. This marriage turned out unhappily. It was soon -followed by a separation, and Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live -at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about -this time left a widow[3]. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers -after they were grown up, no mention is ever made of their step-father, of -whom after the separation the family seem to have lost all knowledge. The -household in Church Street, Edmonton, was well enough provided for, Mr -Jennings having left a fortune of over L13,000, of which, in addition to -other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding L200 a year to his widow -absolutely; one yielding L50 a year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with -reversion to her Keats children after her death; and L1000 to be -separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on -their coming of age[4]. Between this home, then, and the neighbouring -Enfield school, where he was in due time joined by his younger brothers, -the next four or five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1810) were passed in -sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, -or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only -recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in -his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are conveyed in some rhymes -which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young -sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of -genius, for dabbling by the brookside-- - - "In spite - Of the might - Of the Maid, - Nor afraid - Of his granny-good"-- - -and for keeping small fishes in tubs. - -If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own lips, we have -sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school -companions; which was that of a boy all spirit and generosity, vehement -both in tears and laughter, handsome, passionate, pugnacious, placable, -loveable, a natural leader and champion among his fellows. But beneath -this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from -the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of -unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was -accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, between whom and -himself there existed the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the -second brother, had all John's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less -impulsive disposition and a cooler blood: from a boy he was the bigger and -stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in -fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery elder -brother. Tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of -protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. The -singularly strong family sentiment that united the three brothers extended -naturally also to their sister, then a child: and in a more remote and -ideal fashion to their uncle by the mother's side, Captain Midgley John -Jennings, a tall navy officer who had served with some distinction under -Duncan at Camperdown, and who impressed the imagination of the boys, in -those days of militant British valour by land and sea, as a model of manly -prowess[5]. It may be remembered that there was a much more distinguished -naval hero of the time who bore their own name--the gallant Admiral Sir -Richard Godwin Keats of the _Superb_, afterwards governor of Greenwich -Hospital: and he, like their father, came from the west country, being the -son of a Bideford clergyman. But it seems clear that the family of our -Keats claimed no connection with that of the Admiral. - -Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written after the death of -his elder brother, and referring partly to their school-days and partly to -John's character after he was grown up:-- - - "I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of - his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we - quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my - schoolfellows will bear witness that John's temper was the cause of - all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are." - - "From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and - fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure - relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible - spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He - avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and - often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him - relief." - -Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to -their confirmation in the words of two of Keats's school-friends; and -first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards author of the _Life -of Mozart_:-- - - "Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for - fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his - brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him.... His - favourites were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed - to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour.... He was a - boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty - might easily fancy would become great--but rather in some military - capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out - rather suddenly and unexpectedly.... In all active exercises he - excelled. The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme - beauty and animation of his face made I remember an impression on - me--and being some years his junior I was obliged to woo his - friendship--in which I succeeded, but not till I had fought several - battles. This violence and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of - disposition--in passions of tears or outrageous fits of - laughter--always in extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. - Associated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and - expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more - popular[6]." - -Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school -friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and -encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first ventured into -poetry. This was the son of the master, Charles Cowden Clarke, who towards -the close of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature -in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:-- - - "He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a - highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most - picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw.... Upon one - occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had - boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself into the - received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who - could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was - almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the - taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, - laughing when John was "in one of his moods," and was endeavouring to - beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he - had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon - the most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, - like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his - highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his - placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his - behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, - superior or equal, who had known him." - -The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his -earlier school-days Keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual -bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. But during his -last few terms, that is in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, all the -energies of his nature turned to study. He became suddenly and completely -absorbed in reading, and would be continually at work before school-time -in the morning and during play-hours in the afternoon: could hardly be -induced to join the school games: and never willingly had a book out of -his hand. At this time he won easily all the literature prizes of the -school, and in addition to his proper work imposed on himself such -voluntary tasks as the translation of the whole AEneid in prose. He -devoured all the books of history, travel, and fiction in the school -library, and was for ever borrowing more from the friend who tells the -story. "In my mind's eye I now see him at supper sitting back on the form -from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's 'History of his Own -Time' between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This -work, and Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner'--which my father took in, and I used to -lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and -religious liberty." But the books which Keats read with the greatest -eagerness of all were books of ancient mythology, and he seemed literally -to learn by heart the contents of Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's -_Dictionary_, and the school abridgment by Tindal of Spence's -_Polymetis_--the first the most foolish and dull, the last the most -scholarly and polite, of the various handbooks in which the ancient fables -were presented in those days to the apprehension of youth. - -Trouble fell upon Keats in the midst of these ardent studies of his latter -school-days. His mother had been for some time in failing health. First -she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid -consumption, which carried her off in February 1810. We are told with what -devotion her eldest boy attended her sick bed,--"he 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,"--and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--"he -gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook -under the master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in -all who saw him." In the July following, Mrs Jennings, being desirous to -make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, 'in -consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,' -executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom she -made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of the -instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from her late -husband under his will[7]. The guardians were Mr Rowland Sandell, -merchant, and Mr Richard Abbey, a wholesale tea-dealer in Pancras Lane. -Mrs Jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years[8], -but Mr Abbey, with the consent of his co-trustee, seems at once to have -taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John -Keats was withdrawn from school at the close of this same year 1810, when -he was just fifteen, and made to put on harness for the practical work of -life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own part, he was -bound apprentice for a term of five years to a surgeon at Edmonton named -Hammond. The only picture we have of him in this capacity has been left by -R. H. Horne, the author of _Orion_, who came as a small boy to the Enfield -school just after Keats had left it. One day in winter Mr Hammond had -driven over to attend the school, and Keats with him. Keats was standing -with his head sunk in a brown study, holding the horse, when some of the -boys, who knew his school reputation for pugnacity, dared Horne to throw a -snowball at him; which Horne did, hitting Keats in the back, and then -taking headlong to his heels, to his surprise got off scot free[9]. Keats -during his apprenticeship used on his own account to be often to and fro -between the Edmonton surgery and the Enfield school. His newly awakened -passion for the pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be -stifled, and whenever he could spare time from his work, he plunged back -into his school occupations of reading and translating. He finished at -this time his translation of the AEneid, and was in the habit of walking -over to Enfield once a week or oftener, to see his friend Cowden Clarke, -and to exchange books and 'travel in the realms of gold' with him. In -summer weather the two would sit in a shady arbour in the old school -garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks -and exclamations of enthusiasm. On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden -Clarke introduced him for the first time to Spenser, reading him the -_Epithalamium_ in the afternoon, and lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to -take away the same evening. It has been said, and truly, that no one who -has not had the good fortune to be attracted to that poem in boyhood can -ever completely enjoy it. The maturer student, appreciate as he may its -inexhaustible beauties and noble temper, can hardly fail to be in some -degree put out by its arbitrary forms of rhyme and diction, and wearied by -its melodious redundance: he will perceive the perplexity and -discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing -humanity, even the failure, at times, of clearness of vision and strength -of grasp, amidst all that luxuriance of decorative and symbolic invention, -and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. It is otherwise with the -uncritical faculties and greedy apprehension of boyhood. For them there is -no poetical revelation like the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to that -of floating for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by -those shores and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive -with glancing figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and -Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous -shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in distress. -Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging with delight: -'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he shewed moreover his own instinct for -the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm on epithets of -special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend, "he hoisted -himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image that -is--_sea-shouldering whales_!'" Spenser has been often proved not only a -great awakener of the love of poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of -the germs of original poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, -the most intimate friend of Keats during two later years of his life, -states positively that it was to the inspiration of the _Faerie Queene_ -that his first notion of attempting to write was due. "Though born to be a -poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his -eighteenth year. It was the _Faerie Queene_ that awakened his genius. In -Spenser's fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became -another being; till, enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, -and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his poetic powers -I first received from his brothers, and afterwards from himself. This, -his earliest attempt, the 'Imitation of Spenser,' is in his first volume -of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those acquainted with his -history[10]." Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his -memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest, and we may fairly assume -him to have been mistaken. - -After he had thus first become conscious within himself of the impulse of -poetical composition, Keats went on writing occasional sonnets and other -verses: secretly and shyly at first like all young poets: at least it was -not until two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed anything -he had written to his friend and confidant, Cowden Clarke. In the meantime -a change had taken place in his way of life. In the summer or autumn of -1814, more than a year before the expiration of his term of -apprenticeship, he had quarrelled with Mr Hammond and left him. The cause -of their quarrel is not known, and Keats's own single allusion to it is -when once afterwards, speaking of the periodical change and renewal of the -bodily tissues, he says "seven years ago it was not this hand which -clenched itself at Hammond." It seems unlikely that the cause was any -neglect of duty on the part of the poet-apprentice, who was not devoid of -thoroughness and resolution in the performance even of uncongenial tasks. -At all events Mr Hammond allowed the indentures to be cancelled, and -Keats, being now nearly nineteen years of age, went to live in London, and -continue the study of his profession as a student at the hospitals (then -for teaching purposes united) of St Thomas's and Guy's. For the first -winter and spring after leaving Edmonton he lodged alone at 8, Dean -Street, Borough, and then for about a year, in company with some -fellow-students, over a tallow-chandler's shop in St Thomas's Street. -Thence he went in the summer of 1816 to join his brothers in lodgings in -the Poultry, over a passage leading to the Queen's Head tavern. In the -spring of 1817 they all three moved for a short time to 76, Cheapside. -Between these several addresses in London Keats spent a period of about -two years and a half, from the date (which is not precisely fixed) of his -leaving Edmonton in 1814 until April, 1817. - -It was in this interval, from his nineteenth to his twenty-second year, -that Keats gave way gradually to his growing passion for poetry. At first -he seems to have worked steadily enough along the lines which others had -marked out for him. His chief reputation, indeed, among his fellow -students was that of a 'cheerful, crotchety rhymester,' much given to -scribbling doggrel verses in his friends' note-books[11]. But I have -before me the MS. book in which he took down his own notes of a course, or -at least the beginning of a course, of lectures on anatomy; and they are -not those of a lax or inaccurate student. The only signs of a wandering -mind occur on the margins of one or two pages, in the shape of sketches -(rather prettily touched) of pansies and other flowers: but the notes -themselves are both full and close as far as they go. Poetry had indeed -already become Keats's chief interest, but it is clear at the same time -that he attended the hospitals and did his work regularly, acquiring a -fairly solid knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the rudiments -of medical and surgical science, so that he was always afterwards able to -speak on such subjects with a certain mastery. On the 25th of July, 1816, -he passed with credit his examination as licentiate at Apothecaries' Hall. -He was appointed a dresser at Guy's under Mr Lucas on the 3rd of March, -1816, and the operations which he performed or assisted in are said to -have proved him no bungler. But his heart was not in the work. Its -scientific part he could not feel to be a satisfying occupation for his -thoughts: he knew nothing of that passion of philosophical curiosity in -the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame which by turns attracted -Coleridge and Shelley toward the study of medicine. The practical -responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him, and -he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill. -Voices and visions that he could not resist were luring his spirit along -other paths, and once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and -feelings in regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of -his unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that "the other day, -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 fairy-land." "My last operation," he once told Brown, "was the -opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but -reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed -a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again." - -Keats at the same time was forming intimacies with other young men of -literary tastes and occupations. His verses were beginning to be no longer -written with a boy's secrecy, but freely addressed to and passed round -among his friends; some of them attracted the notice and warm approval of -writers of acknowledged mark and standing; and with their encouragement he -had about the time of his coming of age (that is in the winter of 1816-17) -conceived the purpose of devoting himself to a literary life. We are not -told what measure of opposition he encountered on the point from Mr Abbey, -though there is evidence that he encountered some[12]. Probably that -gentleman regarded the poetical aspirations of his ward as mere symptoms -of a boyish fever which experience would quickly cure. There was always a -certain lack of cordiality in his relations with the three brothers as -they grew up. He gave places in his counting-house successively to George -and Tom as they left school, but they both quitted him after a while; -George, who had his full share of the family pride, on account of slights -experienced or imagined at the hands of a junior partner; Tom in -consequence of a settled infirmity of health which early disabled him for -the practical work of life. Mr Abbey continued to manage the money matters -of the Keats family,--unskilfully enough as will appear,--and to do his -duty by them as he understood it. Between him and John Keats there was -never any formal quarrel. But that young brilliant spirit could hardly -have expected a responsible tea-dealer's approval when he yielded himself -to the influences now to be described. - - - - -CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh Hunt: his - literary and personal influence--John Hamilton Reynolds--James - Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph Severn--Charles - Wells--Personal characteristics--Determination to publish. [1814-April - 1817.] - - -When Keats moved from Dean Street to St Thomas's Street in the summer of -1815, he at first occupied a joint sitting-room with two senior students, -to the care of one of whom he had been recommended by Astley Cooper[13]. -When they left he arranged to live in the same house with two other -students, of his own age, named George Wilson Mackereth and Henry -Stephens. The latter, who was afterwards a physician of repute near St -Albans, and later at Finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of -the time[14]. "He attended lectures," says Mr Stephens of Keats, "and went -through the usual routine, but he had no desire to excel in that -pursuit.... Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations--the -only thing worthy the attention of superior minds--so he thought--all -other pursuits were mean and tame.... It may readily be imagined that -this feeling was accompanied by a good deal of pride and some conceit, and -that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the -gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals." On the whole, it -seems, 'little Keats' was popular among his fellow-students, although -subject to occasional teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and -even his birth as the son of a stable-keeper. Mr Stephens goes on to tell -how he himself and a student of St Bartholomew's, a merry fellow called -Newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions -by Keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats taking -always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes. -He despised Pope, and admired Byron, but delighted especially in Spenser, -caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile, -than for the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used sometimes to -laugh at Keats and his flights,--to the indignation of his brothers, who -came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and -destined to exalt the family name. Questions of poetry apart, continues Mr -Stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady -and well-behaved--"his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having -any other taste or indulging in any vice." Another companion of Keats's -early London days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain -George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young -medical student some hospitality. "Keats and I," wrote in 1848 Mr -Mathew,--then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, struggling -meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of -twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy,--"Keats -and I, though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in -many respects as different as two individuals could be. He enjoyed good -health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was fond of company--could amuse -himself admirably with the frivolities of life--and had great confidence -in himself. I, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy--fond of -repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree.... -He was of the sceptical and republican school--an advocate for the -innovations which were making progress in his time--a faultfinder with -everything established. I on the other hand hated controversy and -dispute--dreaded discord and disorder"[15]--and Keats, our good Mr -Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to -apologize for shocking him. As to his poetical predilections, the -impression left on Mr Mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr -Stephens:--"he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep -emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of -elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the -pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never -observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme -sensibility." - -The exact order and chronology of Keats's own first efforts in poetry it -is difficult to trace. They were certainly neither precocious nor -particularly promising. The circumstantial account of Brown above quoted -compels us to regard the lines _In Imitation of Spenser_ as the earliest -of all, and as written at Edmonton about the end of 1813 or beginning of -1814. They are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or -experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a -little later in Keats's work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats loved -the best both first and last were those of the Elizabethan age, it is -clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of -writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not -so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of -these not the latest, Byron[16], but rather such milder minstrels as -Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental -Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose _Psyche_ had become very popular since her -death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical -versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces -preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with -this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves -very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, which he -addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a -shell. His two elegiac stanzas _On Death_, assigned by George Keats to the -year 1814, are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of -moralizing. Equally so is the address _To Hope_ of February 1815, with its -'relentless fair' and its personified abstractions, 'fair Cheerfulness,' -'Disappointment, parent of Despair,' 'that fiend Despondence,' and the -rest. And once more, in the ode _To Apollo_ of the same date, the voice -with which this young singer celebrates his Elizabethan masters is an -echo not of their own voice but rather of Gray's:-- - - "Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand, - And quickly forward spring - The Passions--a terrific band-- - And each vibrates the string - That with its tyrant temper best accords, - While from their Master's lips pour forth the inspiring words. - A silver trumpet Spenser blows, - And, as its martial notes to silence flee, - From a virgin chorus flows - A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity. - 'Tis still! Wild warblings from the AEolian lyre - Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire." - -The pieces above cited are all among the earliest of Keats's work, written -either at Edmonton or during the first year of his life in London. To the -same class no doubt belongs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish, -sentimental sonnet _To Byron_, and probably that also, which is but a -degree better, _To Chatterton_ (both only posthumously printed). The more -firmly handled but still mediocre sonnet on Leigh Hunt's release from -prison brings us again to a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the -young poet's life. It was on either the 2nd or the 3rd of February, 1815, -that the brothers Hunt were discharged after serving out the term of -imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling -the Prince Regent two years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many -other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to -Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed -quickly into friendship. Within a few days of Hunt's release, Clarke -walked in from Enfield to call on him (presumably at the lodging he -occupied at this time in the Edgware Road). On his return Clarke met -Keats, who walked part of the way home with him, and as they parted, says -Clarke, "he turned and gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day -that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had -received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I -recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! -There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with -life." - -Not long afterwards Cowden Clarke left Enfield, and came to settle in -London. Keats found him out in his lodgings at Clerkenwell, and the two -were soon meeting as often and reading together as eagerly as ever. One of -the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of Chapman's -Homer. After a night's enthusiastic study, Clarke found when he came down -to breakfast the next morning, that Keats, who had only left him in the -small hours, had already had time to compose and send him from the Borough -the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost hackneyed, _On First Looking -into Chapman's Homer_;-- - - "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, - And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; - Round many Western islands have I been - Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. - Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, - That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: - Yet did I never breathe its pure serene - Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: - Then felt I like some watcher of the skies - When a new planet swims into his ken; - Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes - He stared at the Pacific--and all his men - Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- - Silent, upon a peak in Darien." - -The date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed; but it was when nights -were short in the summer of 1815. The seventh line of the sonnet is an -afterthought: in the original copy sent to Cowden Clarke it stood more -baldly, 'Yet could I never tell what men might mean.' Keats here for the -first time approves himself a poet indeed. The concluding sestet is almost -unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius -than the image of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of schoolboy -reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, which should be Balboa -and not Cortez, but what does it matter?) is converted into the perfection -of appropriate poetry. - -One of the next services which the ever zealous and affectionate Cowden -Clarke did his young friend was to make him personally known to Leigh -Hunt. The acquaintance carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages -and even penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encouragement and -pleasure. It is impossible rightly to understand the career of Keats if we -fail to realise the various modes in which it was affected by his -intercourse with Hunt. The latter was the elder of the two by eleven -years. He was the son, by marriage with an American wife, of an eloquent -and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher of West -Indian origin, who had chiefly exercised his vocation in the northern -suburbs of London. Leigh Hunt was brought up at Christ's Hospital, about a -dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, and gained at sixteen some -slight degree of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile -poems. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being -then a clerk in the War Office; an occupation which he abandoned at -twenty-four (in 1808) in order to join his brother John Hunt in the -conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper. For five years the managers of that -journal helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of -Eldon and of Castlereagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect -sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they were caught -tripping, and condemned to two years' imprisonment for strictures ruled -libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and -person of the Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with -cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. Liberal statesmen, -philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society -in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial -conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. Tall, -straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black -eyes, and 'nose of taste,' Leigh Hunt was ever one of the most winning of -companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and -ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most -sympathetic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was far -too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank -neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him nearly -always a receiver,--still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly -abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer -for what they believed. Liberals could not but contrast his smiling -steadfastness under persecution with the apostasy, as in the heat of the -hour they considered it, of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In -domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under difficulties; and -none was better loved by his friends, or requited them, so far as the -depth of his nature went, with a truer warmth and loyalty. His literary -industry was incessant, hardly second to that of Southey himself. He had -the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a singular quickness of -intellectual apprehension for the points and qualities of what he enjoyed; -and for the gentler pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word he -loved) of literature, he is the most accomplished of guides and -interpreters. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, -and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which -Coleridge and De Quincey, with their more philosophic powers and method, -were subject, the faults of pedantry and effort. The infirmity of Leigh -Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. "Incomparable," according to Lamb's -well-known phrase, "as a fire-side companion," it was his misfortune to -carry too much of the fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both -in prose and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty -familiarity and ease which passes too easily into Cockney pertness. - -A combination of accidents, political, personal, and literary, caused this -writer of amiable memory and second-rate powers to exercise, about the -time of which we are writing, a determining influence both on the work and -the fortunes of stronger men. And first of his influence on their work. He -was as enthusiastic a student of 'our earlier and nobler school of poetry' -as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the -characteristic excellences of the 'French school,' the school of polished -artifice and restraint which had come in since Dryden, he was not less -bent on its overthrow, and on the return of English poetry to the paths of -nature and freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which -this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his -rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. "It -was his intention," he wrote in prison, "by the beginning of next year to -bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce -to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various -and legitimate harmony of the English heroic." The result of this -intention was the _Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and -published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. "With the -endeavour," so he repeated himself in the preface, "to recur to a freer -spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater -importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language." - -In versification Hunt's aim was to bring back into use the earlier form of -the rhymed English decasyllabic or 'heroic' couplet. The innovating poets -of the time had abandoned this form of verse (Wordsworth and Coleridge -using it only in their earliest efforts, before 1796); while the others -who still employed it, as Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Byron, adhered, -each in his manner, to the isolated couplet and hammering rhymes with -which the English ear had been for more than a century exclusively -familiar. The two contrasted systems of handling the measure may best be -understood if we compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of -those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two -different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern, -with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. The -regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand -for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the verse into equal -pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its -other divisions--dependent not on metre but on the sense--into clauses and -periods of variable length and structure. Under the older system of -versification the sentence or period had been allowed to follow its own -laws, with a movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the beauty of -the result depended upon the skill and feeling with which this free -element of the pattern was made to play about and interweave itself with -the fixed element, the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and -now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now drawing attention to -the rhyme and now withholding it. For examples of this system and of its -charm we have only to turn at random to Chaucer:-- - - "I-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse. - Hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse, - Byhynde her bak, a yerde long, I gesse, - And in the garden as the sonne upriste - She walketh up and down, and as hir liste - She gathereth floures, party white and reede, - To make a sotil garland for here heede, - And as an aungel hevenlyche sche song." - -Chaucer's conception of the measure prevails throughout the Elizabethan -age, but not exclusively or uniformly. Some poets are more inobservant of -the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as -independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than -with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the -_enjambement_, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to -another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an -opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to -clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single -propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall -regularly on the rhyme. This principle gradually gained ground during the -seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work -of Dryden. But Dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying -the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the -use of the triplet and the Alexandrine, thus:-- - - "Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood - Were poured upon the pile of burning wood, - And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food. - Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around - The fire, and Arcite's name they thrice resound: - 'Hail and farewell,' they shouted thrice amain, - Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again--:" - -and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the -Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:-- - - "I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; - I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. - Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; - I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." - -In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, -these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element -in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element -entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and -clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, -are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical -divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not -sententious, but fanciful and discursive:-- - - "Some in the fields of purest aether play, - And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. - Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, - Or roll the planets through the boundless sky. - Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light - Pursue the stars that shoot across the night, - Or seek the mists in grosser air below, - Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, - Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, - Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain." - -Leigh Hunt's theory was that Pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead -of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic -couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of _Rimini_ is avowedly -modelled. The result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial -cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in -either:-- - - "The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye - Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly; - Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common - To accept the attentions of this lovely woman, - But the meantime he took no generous pains, - By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains; - He entered not, in turn, in her delights, - Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights; - Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he - Unless his pride was roused by company; - Or when to please him, after martial play, - She strained her lute to some old fiery lay - Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras, - Or Ryan's cloak, or how by the red grass - In battle you might know where Richard was." - -It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh Hunt in _Rimini_ -is due the rhythmical form alike of _Endymion_ and _Epipsychidion_, of -Keats's _Epistles_ to his friends and Shelley's _Letter to Maria -Gisborne_. Certainly the _Epistles_ of Keats, both as to sentiment and -rhythm, are very much in Hunt's manner. But the earliest of them, that to -G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when _Rimini_ was not yet published, and -when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have -known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his -work to Hunt's may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural -affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the -disyllabic rhyme and the 'overflow' as used by some of the Elizabethan -writers, particularly by Spenser in _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and by Browne -in _Britannia's Pastorals_. At all events the appearance of _Rimini_ -tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice. - -As to Hunt's success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his -'free and idiomatic cast of language' to supersede the styles alike of -Pope and Wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps -enough. The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of -others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so -completely as in _Rimini_. The piece indeed is not without agreeable -passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the -pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his -prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and -handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and -vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any -departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, -found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_: and ladies -are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what, -one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can -endure to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and -Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like this?-- - - "What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes, - A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise?--" - - "How charming, would he think, to see her here, - How heightened then, and perfect would appear - The two divinest things the world has got, - A lovely woman in a rural spot." - -When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and -instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a -familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it -need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred -strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more -than once. - -Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily exercised on his -friends' fortunes and their estimation by the world. We have seen how he -found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of -political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no -means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him out as a special -butt for Tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so -inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. During his -imprisonment Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the _Reflector_, with notes and -additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the _Feast of the -Poets_, which he had written about two years before. In it Apollo is -represented as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to -the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who -present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially -welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. Moore and -Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof, -Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not -more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on -their contemporaries. The bitterness of the 'Lost Leader' feeling to which -we have referred accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of the Lake -writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott -as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged -the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the -poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His treatment of Scott, on the other -hand, is idly flippant and patronising. Now it so happened that of the two -champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other -the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh,--I mean Wilson and -Lockhart,--Wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and -Lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion -was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem -paradoxical rancour with which the gentle Hunt, and Keats as his friend -and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in _Blackwood_. - -To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first became known to each -other. Cowden Clarke began by carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from -the Edgware Road to a cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, a few of -Keats's poems in manuscript. Horace Smith was with Hunt when the young -poet's work was shown him. Both were eager in its praises, and in -questions concerning the person and character of the author. Cowden Clarke -at Hunt's request brought Keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has -left a vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. The -introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of 1816[17]. -Keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead household; -and for the next year or two Hunt's was the strongest intellectual -influence to which he was subject. So far as opinions were concerned, -those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood -by Leigh Hunt's writings in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic -as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel -of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his -own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of -eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy -of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and optimistic view of things, and he -had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:--ready to entertain and appreciate -any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or -power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. -In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in -common. Both alike were given to 'luxuriating' somewhat effusively and -fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever they liked in art, books, or -nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt -brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness -of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were intense beyond -parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also felt with Keats the -undying charm of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about -this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, -less adequate, of Homer. The poets Hunt loved best were Ariosto and the -other Italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in -English he was devoted to Keats's own favourite Spenser. - -The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of 'Libertas,' 'the lov'd -Libertas,' meaning Leigh Hunt, in the verses written by Keats at this -time. He attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the -_Faerie Queene_ in the metre of _Rimini_, and in others to express in the -same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the -beautiful, then rural Hampstead woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he -seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a -bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length -on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; -and the sonnet beginning, 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and -there', records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend's -house one night in winter. We find him presenting Hunt with a crown of -ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. Or they would -challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme. -Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion in December 1816, when they -each wrote to time a sonnet _on the Grasshopper and Cricket_, has left us -a pleasant picture of their relations:-- - - "The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences - which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard - and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious - encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:-- - - 'The poetry of earth is never dead.' - - "Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth - and eleventh lines:-- - - 'On a lone winter morning, when the frost - Hath wrought a silence'-- - - "Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation - on the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and - torpidity." - -Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced to a number of -congenial spirits. Among them he attached himself especially to one John -Hamilton Reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than -himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. Reynolds was -born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in London, as -writing-master at the Blue Coat School. He lacked health and energy, but -has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a -charming character and no slight literary talent. He held a clerkship in -an Insurance office, and lived in Little Britain with his family, -including three sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest -of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him -inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the -time. One, _Safie_, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then -fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published -in the year of Keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's -relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical -entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum -theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory -parody of _Peter Bell_, which Byron assumed to be the work of Moore. In -1820 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to -relate, under the name _Peter Corcoran_, the fortunes of an amateur of the -prize-ring; and a little later, in conjunction with Hood, the volume of -anonymous _Odes and Addresses to Eminent Persons_ which Coleridge on its -appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. But Reynolds had -early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of -an opening in business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell -sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave to Keats, and in -1821 he writes again, - - "As time increases - I give up drawling verse for drawing leases." - -In point of fact Reynolds continued for years to contribute to the _London -Magazine_ and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with -Hood. But neither in literature nor law did he attain a position -commensurate with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time of -which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,--with -Keats and Shelley,--he died in 1852 as Clerk of the County at Newport, -Isle of Wight, and it is only in association with Keats that his name will -live. Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining -from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet -written early in their acquaintance proves[18], but also one of the -wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake. -In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats's associates must be -mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of -literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, -but always, in Keats's words, "coming on his legs again like a cat"; ever -cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in -good offices to those about him: "dear noble generous James Rice," records -Dilke,--"the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest -men I ever knew." Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming -member of Hunt's set, when Keats first joined it, was one Cornelius Webb, -remembered now, if remembered at all, by _Blackwood's_ derisory quotation -of his lines on-- - - "Keats, - The Muses' son of promise, and what feats - He yet may do"-- - -as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. -He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough -of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost -be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his -weak moments[19]. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in -the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the -revision of the _Quarterly_ proofs. Towards 1830--1840 he re-appeared in -literature, as Cornelius 'Webbe', author of the _Man about Town_ and other -volumes of cheerful gossipping Cockney essays, to which the _Quarterly_ -critics extended a patronizing notice. - -An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which Keats made a few -months later, at Leigh Hunt's, was that of Shelley, his senior by only -three years. During the harrowing period of Shelley's life which followed -the suicide of his first wife--when his principle of love a law to itself -had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his -own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the -world's--the kindness and affection of Leigh Hunt were among his chief -consolations. After his marriage with Mary Godwin, he flitted often, alone -or with his wife, between Great Marlow and Hampstead, where Keats met him -early in the spring of 1817. "Keats," says Hunt, did not take to Shelley -as kindly as Shelley did to him, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a -little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in -every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a -fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his -pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for -friendship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of -reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at -first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or -material patronage on the other's part: but he should soon have learnt -better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy, -according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his -kindness. Of Shelley's kindness Keats had in the sequel sufficient proof: -in the meantime, until Shelley went abroad the following year, the two met -often at Hunt's without becoming really intimate. Pride and social -sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy -between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, -sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as -much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Shelley, -his passionate negation of the world's creeds and the world's law, and his -intense proselytizing ardour. - -It was also at Hunt's house that Keats for the first time met by -pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November 1816, the painter Haydon, -whose influence soon became hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon -was now thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two great -objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory -in the other. He had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence -of the Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor's art acknowledged in -the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation -secured. This is Haydon's chief real title to the regard of posterity. His -other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to -take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the -crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His -indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance, -his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his -self-assertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, -even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at -large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and -encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of -dilettantism and fashion. His first two great pictures, 'Dentatus' and -'Macbeth', had been dubiously received; his last, the 'Judgment of -Solomon', with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than -all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' and while as usual sunk deep in -debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in -truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of -the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he -possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely -exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this -time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future -greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and -ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming -flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and -shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God." -But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of -genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties -which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to -Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of -working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch -and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an -occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from -greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to -immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of -true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin -marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he -enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety -of the original. Very much better is his account of them in words: as -indeed Haydon's chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best -instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know with -what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style -he can relate an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the -literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries -to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied -void turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings. -Take for instance, in relation to Keats himself, Haydon's profound -admonition to him as follows:--"God bless you, my dear Keats! do not -despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakspere, and trust in -Providence, and you will do, you must:" or the following precious -expansion of an image in one of the poet's sonnets on the Elgin -marbles:--"I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable -to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he -must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling -sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing -angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless -wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects -of their seeking"-- - -But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those -he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not -his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his -associates as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits of -the time were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by -him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others -after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of -purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of -thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and -protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for -deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies', and the like. "I always rose up -from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed -fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me -streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he -was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both -particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it -might be, on their bounty. Experience of these qualities partly alienated -Keats from him in the long run. But at first sight Haydon had much to -attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and -Keats were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire from the -other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an -evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th -of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his -name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:-- - - "Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the - following:-- - - Great spirits now on earth are sojourning: - He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, - Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake, - Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing: - He of the rose, the violet, the spring, - The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake, - And lo! whose steadfastness would never take - A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering. - And other spirits there are standing apart - Upon the forehead of the age to come; - These, these will give the world another heart, - And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum - Of mighty workings in the human mart? - Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb." - -Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. The three well-known -sonnets of Wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and -about the same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote him a -sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. In his reply to Keats he -proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which "puts -me," answers Keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence I would -send my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but -think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out -the words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however, -accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two -other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin -marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to -his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject, -confessing his inability rightly to grasp or analyse the impressions he -had received. By the spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon -was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a -standing invitation to his studio in Great Marlborough Street, declaring -him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried -together. - -To complete the group of Keats's friends in these days, we have to think -of two or three others known to him otherwise than through Hunt, and not -belonging to the Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends of a -Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was attached. She was the -daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive -irregular cast of beauty, and Keats on his own account had a great liking -for her. On Valentine's day, 1816, we find him writing, for George to send -her, the first draft of the lines beginning, 'Hadst thou lived in days of -old,' afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[20]. Through -the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was -afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, but whose -character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with -Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was -the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to -be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, a strong love of -literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which Mr -Ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at -Rome[21]. From the moment of their introduction Severn found in Keats his -very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him -with an admiring affection. - -A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles Wells, afterwards -author of _Stories after Nature_, and of that singular and strongly -imagined Biblical drama or 'dramatic poem' of _Joseph and his Brethren_, -which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group -of poets and critics in ours. Wells had been a school companion of Tom -Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone -buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, -boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days -chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about -fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses acknowledged in -the sonnet beginning, 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' A year or -two later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on Tom -Keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the _Stories -after Nature_, published in 1822, are said to have been written in order -to show Keats "that he too could do something." - -Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely-born and half-schooled -young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art, -letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with -some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most -ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temperament alike saved -him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and -deference towards his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of -genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both verbal and other -exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression -which he made. "The character and expression of his features," it is said, -"would arrest even the casual passenger in the street." A small, handsome, -ardent-looking youth--the stature little over five feet: the figure -compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a -strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the -features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an -expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead -not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes -hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired--"an eye that had an inward -look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." "Keats -was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high -calling, except Wordsworth." These words are Haydon's, and to the same -effect Leigh Hunt:--"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." It is noticeable that -his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way -to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. To return to -Haydon:--"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 cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered." -In like manner George Keats:--"John's eyes moistened, and his lip -quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or -noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;" and a shrewd and -honoured survivor of those days, "herself of many poets the frequent theme -and valued friend,"--need I name Mrs Procter?--has recorded the impression -the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on -some glorious sight[22]. - -In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns himself, to -have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the -company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was -pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by -turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and -unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw -apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the -window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and -low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but -gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at -wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to -command respect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are said to -have been great, and never used unkindly. - -Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, -Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather -everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, -passion for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of course was -adverse: but his brothers, including George, the practical and sensible -one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to -them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his -compositions, show. In August 1816 we find him addressing from Margate a -sonnet and a poetical Epistle in terms of the utmost affection and -confidence to George. About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St -Thomas's Street to go and live with his brothers in the Poultry; and in -November he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side -occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. -It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a -time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England -has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself -induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement -of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh -Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without -comment, in the _Examiner_ for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, -'O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell,' and on the 1st of December in the -same year the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some -prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, associating with -his name those of Shelley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of Hunt in -this paper, says Mr Stephens, that Keats's fate was sealed. But already -the still more ardent encouragement of Haydon, if more was wanted, had -come to add fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the -Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers, and in the -convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats -should put forth a volume of his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers -was found in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last -proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, -with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be -furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _To -Leigh Hunt Esqr._, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:-- - - "Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away; - For if we wander out in early morn, - No wreathed incense do we see upborne - Into the East to meet the smiling day: - No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, - In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, - Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn - The shrine of Flora in her early May. - But there are left delights as high as these, - And I shall ever bless my destiny, - That in a time when under pleasant trees - Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, - A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, - With these poor offerings, a man like thee." - -With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old -pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's -first venture was sent forth in the month of March 1817. - - - - -CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817. - - -The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from -Spenser which he prefixed to it:-- - - "What more felicity can fall to creature - Than to enjoy delight with liberty?" - -The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of -release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true -nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And -the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: -delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in -the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and -affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art -itself which expresses and communicates all these joys. - -We have already glanced, in connection with the occasions which gave rise -to them, at a few of the miscellaneous boyish pieces in various metres -which are included in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. The -remaining and much the chief portion of the book consists of half a dozen -poems in the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. These had all been written -during the period between November 1815 and April 1817, under the combined -influence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The former -influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the -poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. Keats had by -this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his -earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a -vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the -Elizabethans and from Milton. The chief verbal echoes of Spenser to be -found in his first volume are a line quoted from him entire in the epistle -to G. F. Mathew, and the use of the archaic 'teen' in the stanzas -professedly Spenserian. We can indeed trace Keats's familiarity with -Chapman, and especially with one poem of Chapman's, his translation of the -Homeric _Hymn to Pan_, in a predilection for a particular form of abstract -descriptive substantive:-- - - "the pillowy silkiness that rests - Full in the speculation of the stars:"-- - - "Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:"-- - - "Ere I can have explored its widenesses."[23] - -The only other distinguishing marks of Keats's diction in this first -volume consist, I think, in the use of the Miltonic 'sphery,' and of an -unmeaning coinage of his own, 'boundly,' with a habit--for which Milton, -Spenser, and among the moderns Leigh Hunt all alike furnished him the -example--of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his -convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his -day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, -and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines and -passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and -instinct. But they are mixed up with much that only illustrates his -crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt -to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and -grace. - -In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems making a -succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic -couplet. In the colloquial _Epistles_, addressed severally to G. F. -Mathew, to his brother George, and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself -with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional -_enjambement_ or 'overflow.' In the _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, -and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled _Calidore_ (a name -borrowed from the hero of Spenser's sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed -piece beginning 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' which opens the -volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the -second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught -either from Spenser's nuptial odes or Milton's _Lycidas_,-- - - "Open afresh your round of starry folds, - Ye ardent marigolds." - -In _Sleep and Poetry_, which is the most personal and interesting, as well -as probably the last-written, poem in the volume, Keats drops this -practice, but in other respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making -free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line -rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather than an -exception the Chaucerian and Elizabethan fashion of breaking the couplet -by closing a sentence or paragraph with its first line. - -Passing from the form of the poems to their substance, we find that they -are experiments or poetic preludes merely, with no pretension to be -organic or complete works of art. To rehearse ramblingly the pleasures and -aspirations of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow another -with no particular plan or sequence, is all that Keats as yet attempts: -except in the _Calidore_ fragment. And that is on the whole feeble and -confused: from the outset the poet loses himself in a maze of young -luxuriant imagery: once and again, however, he gets clear, and we have -some good lines in an approach to the Dryden manner:-- - - "Softly the breezes from the forest came, - Softly they blew aside the taper's flame; - Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower; - Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; - Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone; - Lovely the moon in ether, all alone." - -To set against this are occasionally expressions in the complete taste of -Leigh Hunt, as for instance-- - - "The lamps that from the high-roof'd wall were pendent, - And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent." - -The _Epistles_ are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint pleasures of -literature and friendship. In that to Cowden Clarke, Keats acknowledges to -his friend that he had been shy at first of addressing verses to him:-- - - "Nor should I now, but that I've known you long; - That you first taught me all the sweets of song: - The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine, - What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine: - Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, - And float along like birds o'er summer seas; - Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness; - Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness. - Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly - Up to its climax, and then dying proudly? - Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, - Growing, like Atlas, stronger for its load? - Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, - The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? - Show'd me that Epic was of all the king, - Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?" - -This is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter manner of Keats -in his early work. Blots like the ungrammatical fourth line are not -infrequent with him. The preference for Miltonian tenderness over -Miltonian storms may remind the reader of a later poet's more masterly -expression of the same sentiment:--'Me rather all that bowery -loneliness--'. The two lines on Spenser are of interest as conveying one -of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of which no one has -left us more or better than Keats. The habit of Spenser to which he here -alludes is that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their -open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive lines, for -example,-- - - "Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, - More swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye; - Withouten oare or pilot it to guide, - Or winged canvas with the wind to fly." - -The run here is on _a_ and _i_; principally on _i_, which occurs five -times in its open, and ten times in its closed, sound in the four -lines,--if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel these two unlike sounds -denoted by the same sign. Keats was a close and conscious student of the -musical effects of verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have -suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration -of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we are not clearly told, -neither do I think it can easily be discovered from his practice; though -every one must feel a great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of -the vowel and diphthong sequences. He often spoke of the subject, and once -maintained his view against Wordsworth when the latter seemed to be -advocating a mechanical principle of vowel variation. - -Hear, next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, and of nature, -come naively jostling one another in the _Epistle_ addressed from the -sea-side to his brother George:-- - - "As to my sonnets, though none else should heed them - I feel delighted, still, that you should read them. - Of late, too, I have had much calm enjoyment, - Stretch'd on the grass at my best loved employment - Of scribbling lines for you. These things I thought - While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught. - E'en now I am pillow'd on a bed of flowers - That crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers - Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades - Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades. - On one side is a field of drooping oats, - Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats; - So pert and useless that they bring to mind - The scarlet coats that pester human kind. - And on the other side, outspread is seen - Ocean's blue mantle, streak'd with purple and green. - Now 'tis I see a canvass'd ship, and now - Mark the bright silver curling round her brow; - I see the lark down-dropping to his nest, - And the broad wing'd sea-gull never at rest; - For when no more he spreads his feathers free, - His breast is dancing on the restless sea." - -It is interesting to watch the newly-awakened literary faculty in Keats -thus exercising itself in the narrow circle of personal sensation, and on -the description of the objects immediately before his eyes. The effect of -rhythmical movement attempted in the last lines, to correspond with the -buoyancy and variety of the motions described, has a certain felicity, and -the whole passage is touched already with Keats's exquisite perception and -enjoyment of external nature. His character as a poet of nature begins, -indeed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. He differs by -it alike from Wordsworth and from Shelley. The instinct of Wordsworth was -to interpret all the operations of nature by those of his own strenuous -soul; and the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from the -scenery of his home, deepened and enriched by continual after meditation, -and mingling with all the currents of his adult thought and feeling, -constituted for him throughout his life the most vital part alike of -patriotism, of philosophy, and of religion. For Shelley on his part -natural beauty was in a twofold sense symbolical. In the visible glories -of the world his philosophy saw the veil of the unseen, while his -philanthropy found in them types and auguries of a better life on earth; -and all that imagery of nature's more remote and skyey phenomena, of which -no other poet has had an equal mastery, and which comes borne to us along -the music of the verse-- - - "With many a mingled close - Of wild AEolian sound and mountain odour keen"-- - -was inseparable in his soul from visions of a radiant future and a -renovated--alas! not a human--humanity. In Keats the sentiment of nature -was simpler than in either of these two other masters; more direct, and so -to speak more disinterested. It was his instinct to love and interpret -nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of sympathy which the -human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. He had -grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor -in the glow of millennial dreams like Shelley, but London-born and -Middlesex-bred, was gifted, we know not whence, as if by some mysterious -birthright, with a delighted insight into all the beauties, and sympathy -with all the life, of the woods and fields. Evidences of the gift appear, -as every reader knows, in the longer poems of his first volume, with their -lingering trains of peaceful summer imagery, and loving inventories of -'Nature's gentle doings;' and pleasant touches of the same kind are -scattered also among the sonnets; as in that _To Charles Wells_,-- - - "As late I rambled in the happy fields, - What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew - From his lush clover covert,"-- - -or again in that _To Solitude_,-- - - --"let me thy vigils keep - 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap - Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."[24] - -Such intuitive familiarity with the blithe activities, unnoted by common -eyes, which make up the life and magic of nature, is a gift we attribute -to men of primitive race and forest nurture; and Mr Matthew Arnold would -have us recognize it as peculiarly characteristic of the Celtic element in -the English genius and English poetry. It was allied in Keats to another -instinct of the early world which we associate especially with the Greeks, -the instinct for personifying the powers of nature in clearly-defined -imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half-human faculties. The -classical teaching of the Enfield school had not gone beyond Latin, and -neither in boyhood nor afterwards did Keats acquire any Greek: but towards -the creations of the Greek mythology he was attracted by an overmastering -delight in their beauty, and a natural sympathy with the phase of -imagination that engendered them. Especially he shows himself possessed -and fancy-bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical enchantment, -of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moonstruck. He had -planned a poem on the ancient story of the loves of Diana, with whom the -Greek moon-goddess Selene is identified in the Latin mythology, and the -shepherd-prince Endymion; and had begun a sort of prelude to it in the -piece that opens 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.' Afterwards, without -abandoning the subject, Keats laid aside this particular exordium, and -printed it, as we have seen, as an independent piece at the head of his -first volume. It is at the climax of a passage rehearsing the delights of -evening that he first bethinks himself of the moon-- - - "lifting her silver rim - Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim - Coming into the blue with all her light." - -The thought of the mythic passion of the moon-goddess for Endymion, and -the praises of the poet who first sang it, follow at considerable length. -The passage conjuring up the wonders and beneficences of their bridal -night is written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the collective -feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary conditions of human pain -and pleasure, health and sickness, as rarely occurs again in Keats's -poetry, though his correspondence shows it to have been most natural to -his mind:-- - - "The evening weather was so bright, and clear, - That men of health were of unusual cheer. - - * * * * * - - The breezes were ethereal, and pure, - And crept through half-closed lattices to cure - The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, - And sooth'd them into slumbers full and deep. - Soon they awoke clear-ey'd: nor burnt with thirsting, - Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: - And springing up, they met the wond'ring sight - Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; - Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, - And on their placid foreheads part the hair."[25] - -Finally, Keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exordium of his -unwritten poem with the cry:-- - - "Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses - That followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses: - Was there a poet born? But now no more - My wandering spirit must no farther soar." - -Was there a poet born? Is the labour and the reward of poetry really and -truly destined to be his? The question is one which recurs in this early -volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences -closely recalling those of Milton in his boyish _Vacation Exercise_; -sometimes with a cry like this, which occurs twice over in the piece -called _Sleep and Poetry_,-- - - "O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen, - That am not yet a glorious denizen - Of thy wide heaven:"-- - -and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring tone of young -ambition,-- - - "But off, Despondence! miserable bane! - They should not know thee, who, athirst to gain - A noble end, are thirsty every hour. - What though I am not wealthy in the dower - Of spanning wisdom: though I do not know - The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow - Hither and thither all the changing thoughts - Of man: though no great ministering reason sorts - Out the dark mysteries of human souls - To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls - A vast idea before me"--. - -The feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the overmastering -pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, -gives way in other passages to confident anticipations of fame, and of the -place which he will hold in the affections of posterity. - -There is obviously a great immaturity and uncertainty in all these -outpourings, an intensity and effervescence of emotion out of proportion -as yet both to the intellectual and the voluntary powers, much confusion -of idea, and not a little of expression. Yet even in this first book of -Keats there is much that the lover of poetry will always cherish. -Literature, indeed, hardly affords another example of work at once so -crude and so attractive. Passages that go to pieces under criticism -nevertheless have about them a spirit of beauty and of morning, an -abounding young vitality and freshness, that exhilarate and charm us -whether with the sanction of our judgment or without it. And alike at its -best and worst, the work proceeds manifestly from a spontaneous and -intense poetic impulse. The matter of these early poems of Keats is as -fresh and unconventional as their form, springing directly from the native -poignancy of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. That his -inexperience should always make the most discreet use of its freedom could -not be expected; but with all its immaturity his work has strokes already -which suggest comparison with the great names of literature. Who much -exceeds him, even from the first, but Shakspere in momentary felicity of -touch for nature, and in that charm of morning freshness who but Chaucer? -Already, too, we find him showing signs of that capacity for clear and -sane self-knowledge which becomes by-and-by so admirable in him. And he -has already begun to meditate to good purpose on the aims and methods of -his art. He has grasped and vehemently asserts the principle that poetry -should not strive to enforce particular doctrines, that it should not -contend in the field of reason, but that its proper organ is the -imagination, and its aim the creation of beauty. With reference to the -theory and practice of the poetic art the piece called _Sleep and Poetry_ -contains one passage which has become classically familiar to all readers. -Often as it has been quoted elsewhere, it must be quoted again here, as -indispensable to the understanding of the literary atmosphere in which -Keats lived:-- - - "Is there so small a range - In the present strength of manhood, that the high - Imagination cannot freely fly - As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, - Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds - Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all? - From the clear space of ether, to the small - Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning - Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening - Of April meadows? here her altar shone, - E'en in this isle; and who could paragon - The fervid choir that lifted up a noise - Of harmony, to where it aye will poise - Its mighty self of convoluting sound, - Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, - Eternally around a dizzy void? - Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd - With honours; nor had any other care - Than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair. - 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 sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, - And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd! - The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd - 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 smooth, inlay, and clip, 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, - Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large - The name of one Boileau! - O ye whose charge - It is to hover round our pleasant hills! - Whose congregated majesty so fills - My boundly reverence, that I cannot trace - Your hallow'd names, in this unholy place, - So near those common folk; did not their shames - Affright you? Did our old lamenting Thames - Delight you? did ye never cluster round - Delicious Avon, with a mournful sound, - And weep? Or did ye wholly bid adieu - To regions where no more the laurel grew? - Or did ye stay to give a welcoming - To some lone spirits who could proudly sing - Their youth away, and die? 'Twas even so. - But let me think away those times of woe: - Now 'tis a fairer season; ye have breathed - Rich benedictions o'er us; ye have wreathed - Fresh garlands: for sweet music has been heard - In many places; some has been upstirr'd - From out its crystal dwelling in a lake, - By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake, - Nested and quiet in a valley mild, - Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild - About the earth: happy are ye and glad." - -Both the strength and the weakness of this are typically characteristic of -the time and of the man. The passage is likely to remain for posterity the -central expression of the spirit of literary emancipation then militant -and about to triumph in England. The two great elder captains of -revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have both expounded their cause, in -prose, with much more maturity of thought and language; Coleridge in the -luminous retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_, Wordsworth in the -austere contentions of his famous prefaces. But neither has left any -enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory -like the rhymes of this young untrained recruit in the cause of poetic -liberty and the return to nature. It is easy, indeed, to pick these verses -of Keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention -on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to -do? fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against -the light? and why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly -be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' -Delight with liberty is very well, but liberty in a poet ought not to -include liberties with the parts of speech. Why should the hair of the -muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more -intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to -'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit, but not a standard, -and a standard flimsy, but not a motto. 'Boundly reverence': what is -boundly? And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that -attitude. Many minds not indifferent to literature were at that time, and -some will at all times be, incapable of any other. Such must naturally -turn to the work of the eighteenth century school, the school of tact and -urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think the only 'blasphemy' -was on the side of the youth who could call, or seem to call, the poet of -Belinda and the _Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot_ fool and dolt. Byron, in his -controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack -effectively enough: his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its -most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, -for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have -in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as -distinct from that of taste and reason, however clearly we may see the -weak points of a passage like this, however much we may wish that taste -and reason had had more to do with it, yet we cannot but feel that Keats -touches truly the root of the matter; we cannot but admire the elastic -life and variety of his verse, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of -rhetoric, the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow -of his delight in the achievements and promise of the new age. - -His volume on its appearance by no means made the impression which his -friends had hoped for it. Hunt published a thoroughly judicious as well as -cordial criticism in the _Examiner_, and several of the provincial papers -noticed the book. Haydon wrote in his ranting vein: "I have read your -_Sleep and Poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from -their occupations, and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that -_will_ follow." But people were in fact as far from being disturbed in -their occupations as possible. The attention of the reading public was for -the moment almost entirely absorbed by men of talent or of genius who -played with a more careless, and some of them with a more masterly touch -than Keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit; as Moore, -Scott, and Byron. In Keats's volume every one could see the faults, while -the beauties appealed only to the poetically minded. It seems to have had -a moderate sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. The -poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, apparently -with little reason, to blame their friends the publishers for the failure. -On the 29th of April we find the brothers Ollier replying to a letter of -George Keats in dudgeon:--"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." One of their customers, they go on -to say, had a few days ago hurt their feelings as men of business and of -taste by calling it "no better than a take in." - -A fortnight before the date of this letter Keats had left London. Haydon -had been urging on him, not injudiciously, the importance of seclusion and -concentration of mind. We find him writing to Reynolds soon after the -publication of his volume:--"My brothers are anxious that I should go by -myself into the country; they have always been extremely fond of me, and -now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone -to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me -continually for a great good which I hope will follow: so I shall soon be -out of town." And on the 14th of April he in fact started for the Isle of -Wight, intending to devote himself entirely to study, and to make -immediately a fresh start upon _Endymion_. - - - - -CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer at - Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey at - Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter at - Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity--Spring at - Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and Emigration of George - Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818.] - - -As soon as Keats reached the Isle of Wight, on April 16, 1817, he went to -see Shanklin and Carisbrooke, and after some hesitation between the two, -decided on a lodging at the latter place. The next day he writes to -Reynolds that he has spent the morning arranging the books and prints he -had brought with him, adding to the latter one of Shakspere which he had -found in the passage and which had particularly pleased him. He speaks -with enthusiasm of the beauties of Shanklin, but in a postscript written -the following day, mentions that he has been nervous from want of sleep, -and much haunted by the passage in _Lear_, 'Do you not hear the -sea?'--adding without farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet -beginning-- - - "It keeps eternal whisperings around - Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell - Gluts twice ten thousand caverns"--. - -In the same postscript Keats continues:-- - - "I find I cannot do without poetry--without eternal poetry; half the - day will not do--the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit has - made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not having - written anything of late: the Sonnet overleaf did me good; I slept the - better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad - again.... I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_, which I hope I shall - have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses - in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle." - -The Isle of Wight, however, Keats presently found did not suit him, and -Haydon's prescription of solitude proved too trying. He fell into a kind -of fever of thought and sleeplessness, which he thought it wisest to try -and shake off by flight. Early in May we find him writing to Leigh Hunt -from Margate, where he had already stayed the year before, and explaining -the reasons of his change of abode. Later in the same letter, endeavouring -to measure his own powers against the magnitude of the task to which he -has committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we have seen -recurring once and again in his verses during the preceding year, the vein -of awed self-questioning, and tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest -and half in jest. The next day we find him writing a long and intimate, -very characteristic letter to Haydon, signed 'your everlasting friend,' -and showing the first signs of the growing influence which Haydon was -beginning to exercise over him in antagonism to the influence of Leigh -Hunt. Keats was quite shrewd enough to feel for himself after a little -while the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of depth and -strength, in the kind and charming nature of Hunt, and quite loyal enough -to value his excellences none the less, and hold him in grateful and -undiminished friendship. But Haydon, between whom and Hunt there was by -degrees arising a coolness, must needs have Keats see things as he saw -them. "I love you like my own brother," insists he: "beware, for God's -sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents -and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his -own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of -his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to -support injured by his own neglect of character." There is a lugubrious -irony in these words, when we remember how Haydon, a self-deluder indeed, -came to realise at last the very fate he here prophesies for -another,--just when Hunt, the harassing and often sordid, ever brightly -borne troubles of his earlier life left behind him, was passing surrounded -by affection into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. But for a -time, under the pressure of Haydon's masterful exhortations, we find Keats -inclining to take an exaggerated and slightly impatient view of the -foibles of his earlier friend. - -Among other interesting confessions to be found in Keats's letter to -Haydon from Margate, is that of the fancy--almost the sense--which often -haunted him of dependence on the tutelary genius of Shakspere:-- - - "I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius - presiding over you. I have lately had the same thought, for things - which I do half at random, are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in - a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakspeare - this presider? When in the Isle of Wight I met with a Shakspeare in - the passage of the house at which I lodged. It comes nearer to my idea - of him than any I have seen; I was but there a week, yet the old woman - made me take it with me, though I went off in a hurry. Do you not - think this ominous of good?" - -Next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own nature, -describing it in words which the after issue of his life will keep but -too vividly and constantly before our minds:--"truth is, I have a horrid -Morbidity of Temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I -have no doubt, the greatest Enemy and stumbling-block I have to fear; I -may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment." Was it -that, in this seven-months' child of a consumptive mother, some unhealth -of mind as well as body was congenital?--or was it that, along with what -seems his Celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he had inherited a -special share of that inward gloom which the reverses of their history -have stamped, according to some, on the mind of the Celtic race? We cannot -tell, but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever -creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there dwelt in Keats's -bosom an almost equally busy and inventive spirit of self-torment. - -The fit of dejection which led to the remark above quoted had its -immediate cause in apprehensions of money difficulties conveyed to Keats -in a letter from his brother George. The trust funds of which Mr Abbey had -the disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed executed by -Mrs Jennings, amounted approximately to L8,000[26], of which the capital -was divisible among them on their coming of age, and the interest was to -be applied to their maintenance in the meantime. But the interest of -John's share had been insufficient for his professional and other expenses -during his term of medical study at Edmonton and London, and much of his -capital had been anticipated to meet them; presumably in the form of loans -raised on the security of his expectant share. Similar advances had also -been for some time necessary to the invalid Tom for his support, and -latterly--since he left the employment of Mr Abbey--to George as well. It -is clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances were made both -wastefully and grudgingly. It is further plain that the brothers were very -insufficiently informed of the state of their affairs. In the meantime -John Keats was already beginning to discount his expectations from -literature. Before or about the time of his rupture with the Olliers, he -had made the acquaintance of those excellent men, Messrs Taylor and -Hessey, who were shortly, as publishers of the _London Magazine_, to -gather about them on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors -comprising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. With them, -especially with Mr Taylor, who was himself a student and writer of -independent, somewhat eccentric ability and research, Keats's relations -were excellent from first to last, generous on their part, and -affectionate and confidential on his. He had made arrangements with them, -apparently before leaving London, for the eventual publication of -_Endymion_, and from Margate we find him acknowledging a first payment -received in advance. Now and again afterwards he turns to the same friends -for help at a pinch, adding once, "I am sure you are confident of my -responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;" nor -did they at any time belie his expectation. - -From Margate, where he had already made good progress with _Endymion_, -Keats went with his brother Tom to spend some time at Canterbury. Thence -they moved early in the summer to lodgings kept by a Mr and Mrs Bentley in -Well Walk, Hampstead, where the three brothers had decided to take up -their abode together. Here he continued through the summer to work -steadily at _Endymion_, being now well advanced with the second book; and -some of his friends, as Haydon, Cowden Clarke, and Severn, remembered all -their lives afterwards the occasions when they walked with him on the -heath, while he repeated to them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting -tone, the newly-written passages which best pleased him. From his poetical -absorption and Elysian dreams they were accustomed to see him at a touch -come back to daily life; sometimes to sympathize heart and soul with their -affairs, sometimes in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns, (it was a -punning age, and the Keats's were a very punning family), sometimes with a -sudden flash of his old schoolboy pugnacity and fierceness of righteous -indignation. To this summer or the following winter, it is not quite -certain which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in stand-up -fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had found tormenting a cat (a -'ruffian in livery' according to one account, but the butcher version is -the best attested). - -For the rest, the choice of Hampstead as a place of residence had much to -recommend it to Keats: the freshness of the air for the benefit of the -invalid Tom: for his own walks and meditations those beauties of heath, -field, and wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habitations, -which his imagination could transmute at will into the landscapes of -Arcadia, or into those, 'with high romances blent,' of an earlier England -or of fable-land. For society there was the convenient proximity to, and -yet seclusion from, London, together with the immediate neighbourhood of -one or two intimate friends. Among these, Keats frequented as familiarly -as ever the cottage in the Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt was still -living--a kind of self-appointed poet-laureate of Hampstead, the features -of which he was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets, and now in the -cheerful singsong of his familiar _Epistles_:-- - - "And yet how can I touch, and not linger awhile - On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile? - On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, - Dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley'd shades, - With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees - The hills up above him with roofs in the trees." - -Several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed to Keats -himself, some translations from the Greek, and a not ungraceful -mythological poem, the _Nymphs_, were published early in the following -year by Leigh Hunt in a volume called _Foliage_, which helped to draw down -on him and his friends the lash of Tory criticism. - -Near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction from Hunt's cottage, -lived two new friends of Keats who had been introduced to him by Reynolds, -and with whom he was soon to become extremely intimate. These were Charles -Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown (or plain Charles Brown as he -at this time styled himself). Dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by -birth belonging to a younger branch of the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle, by -profession a clerk in the Navy Pay office, and by opinions at this time a -firm disciple of Godwin. He soon gave himself up altogether to literary -and antiquarian studies, and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the -most accomplished and influential of English critics and journalists, and -for many years editor and chief owner of the _Athenaeum_. No two men could -well be more unlike in mind than Dilke and Keats: Dilke positive, bent on -certainty, and unable, as Keats says, "to feel he has a personal identity -unless he has made up his mind about everything:" while Keats on his part -held that "the only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up -one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all -thoughts." Nevertheless the two took to each other and became fast -friends. Dilke had married young, and built himself, a year or two before -Keats knew him, a modest semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near -the lower end of Hampstead Heath, at the bottom of what is now John -Street; the other part of the same block being built and inhabited by his -friend Charles Brown. This Brown was the son of a Scotch stockbroker -living in Lambeth. He was born in 1786, and while almost a boy went out to -join one of his brothers in a merchant's business at St Petersburg; but -the business failing, he returned to England in 1808, and lived as he -could for the next few years, until the death of another brother put him -in possession of a small competency. He had a taste, and some degree of -talent for literature, and held strongly Radical opinions. In 1810 he -wrote an opera on a Russian subject, called _Narensky_, which was brought -out at the Lyceum with Braham in the principal part; and at intervals -during the next twenty years many criticisms, tales, and translations from -the Italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals edited by Leigh -Hunt. When Keats first knew him, Brown was a young man already of somewhat -middle-aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled,--a kindly companion, -and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good measure both of obstinacy and -caution lying in reserve, _more Scotico_, under his pleasant and convivial -outside. It is clear by his relations with Keats that his heart was warm, -and that when once attached, he was capable not only of appreciation but -of devotion. After the poet's death Brown went to Italy, and became the -friend of Trelawney, whom he helped with the composition of the -_Adventures of a Younger Son_, and of Landor, at whose villa near Florence -Lord Houghton first met him in 1832. Two years later he returned to -England, and settled at Plymouth, where he continued to occupy himself -with literature and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, an -essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobiographical poems of -Shakspere. Thoughts of Keats, and a wish to be his biographer, never left -him, until in 1841 he resolved suddenly to emigrate to New Zealand, and -departed leaving his materials in Lord Houghton's hands. A year afterwards -he died of apoplexy at the settlement of New Plymouth, now called -Taranaki[27]. - -Yet another friend of Reynolds who in these months attached himself with a -warm affection to Keats was Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford undergraduate -reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. Bailey was a -great lover of books, devoted especially to Milton among past and to -Wordsworth among present poets. For his earnestness and integrity of -character Keats conceived a strong respect, and a hearty liking for his -person, and much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in his -mind and cogitations, was called out in the intercourse that ensued -between them. In the course of this summer, 1817, Keats had been invited -by Shelley to stay with him at Great Marlow, and Hunt, ever anxious that -the two young poets should be friends, pressed him strongly to accept the -invitation. It is said by Medwin, but the statement is not confirmed by -other evidence, that Shelley and Keats had set about their respective -'summer tasks,' the composition of _Laon and Cythna_ and of _Endymion_, by -mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Keats at any rate -declined his brother poet's invitation, in order, as he said, that he -might have his own unfettered scope. Later in the same summer, while his -brothers were away on a trip to Paris, he accepted an invitation of Bailey -to come to Oxford, and stayed there during the last five or six weeks of -the Long Vacation. Here he wrote the third book of _Endymion_, working -steadily every morning, and composing with great facility his regular -average of fifty lines a day. The afternoons they would spend in walking -or boating on the Isis, and Bailey has feelingly recorded the pleasantness -of their days, and of their discussions on life, literature, and the -mysteries of things. He tells of the sweetness of Keats's temper and charm -of his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with which the hot -young liberal and free-thinker would listen to his host's exposition of -his own orthodox convictions: describes his enthusiasm in quoting -Chatterton and in dwelling on passages of Wordsworth's poetry, -particularly from the _Tintern Abbey_ and the _Ode on Immortality_: and -recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and other -technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling looks and low-voiced -recitations, his vividness of inner life, and intensity of quiet enjoyment -during their field and river rambles and excursions[28]. One special -occasion of pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to -Stratford-on-Avon. From Oxford are some of the letters written by Keats -in his happiest vein; to Reynolds and his sister Miss Jane Reynolds, -afterwards Mrs Tom Hood; to Haydon; and to his young sister Frances Mary, -or Fanny as she was always called (now Mrs Llanos). George Keats, writing -to this sister after John's death, speaks of the times "when we lived with -our grandmother at Edmonton, and John, Tom, and myself were always -devising plans to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us -to the others." Since those times Keats had seen little of her, Mr Abbey -having put her to a boarding-school before her grandmother's death, and -afterwards taken her into his own house at Walthamstow, where the visits -of her poet brother were not encouraged. "He often," writes Bailey, "spoke -to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great -delicacy and tenderness of affection:" and from this time forward we find -him maintaining with her a correspondence which shows his character in its -most attractive light. He bids her keep all his letters and he will keep -hers--"and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good -bundle--which hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God -knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on -times past--that now are to come." He tells her about Oxford and about his -work, and gives her a sketch of the story of _Endymion_--"but I daresay -you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have come down to -us from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece." - -Early in October Keats returned to Hampstead, whence he writes to Bailey -noticing with natural indignation the ruffianly first article of the -_Cockney School_ series, which had just appeared in _Blackwood's -Magazine_ for that month. In this the special object of attack was Leigh -Hunt, but there were allusions to Keats which seemed to indicate that his -own turn was coming. What made him more seriously uneasy were signs of -discord springing up among his friends, and of attempts on the part of -some of them to set him against others. Haydon had now given up his studio -in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove; and Hunt, having left -the Vale of Health, was living close by him at a lodging in the same -street. "I know nothing of anything in this part of the world," writes -Keats: "everybody seems at loggerheads." And he goes on to say how Hunt -and Haydon are on uncomfortable terms, and "live, _pour ainsi dire_, -jealous neighbours. Haydon says to me, 'Keats, don't show your lines to -Hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you'--so it appears -Hunt wishes it to be thought." With more accounts of warnings he had -received from common friends that Hunt was not feeling or speaking -cordially about _Endymion_. "Now is not all this a most paltry thing to -think about?... This is, to be sure, but the vexation of a day, nor would -I say so much about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and -reputation at heart[29]." When three months later Keats showed Hunt the -first book of his poem in proof, the latter found many faults. It is clear -he was to some extent honestly disappointed in the work itself. He may -also have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully into -confidence during its composition; and what he said to others was probably -due partly to such chagrin, partly to nervousness on behalf of his -friend's reputation: for of double-facedness or insincerity in friendship -we know by a hundred evidences that Hunt was incapable. Keats, however, -after what he had heard, was by no means without excuse when he wrote to -his brothers concerning Hunt,--not unkindly, or making much of the -matter,--"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. But who's afraid?" Keats was not the man to let this -kind of thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend: and writing -about the same time to Bailey, still concerning the dissensions in the -circle, he expounds the practical philosophy of friendship with truly -admirable good sense and feeling:-- - - "Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard - of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting - for ever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is - unfortunate: men should bear with each other; there lives not the man - who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The - best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual - yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by - which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with - circumstance. 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. Before I felt - interested in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well-read in their - faults; yet knowing them both I have been cementing gradually with - both. I have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite; - and to both must I of necessity cling, supported always by the hope - that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully - in their esteem, I may be able to bring them together. This time must - come, because they have both hearts; and they will recollect the best - parts of each other when this gust is overblown." - -Keats had in the meantime been away on another autumn excursion into the -country: this time to Burford Bridge near Dorking. Here he passed -pleasantly the latter part of November, much absorbed in the study of -Shakspere's minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of finishing -_Endymion_. He had thus all but succeeded in carrying out the hope which -he had expressed in the opening passage of the poem:-- - - "Many and many a verse I hope to write, - Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, - Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees - Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, - I must be near the middle of my story. - O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, - See it half finished; but let Autumn bold, - With universal tinge of sober gold, - Be all about me when I make an end." - -Returning to Hampstead, Keats spent the first part of the winter in -comparative rest from literary work. His chief occupation was in revising -and seeing _Endymion_ through the press, with much help from the -publisher, Mr Taylor; varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism, -and as the spring began, by the composition of a number of minor -incidental poems. In December he lost the companionship of his brothers, -who went to winter in Devonshire for the sake of Tom's health. But in -other company he was at this time mixing freely. The convivial gatherings -of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun high, the -discussions on art and literature boisterous, and varied with a moderate, -evidently never a very serious, amount of card-playing, drinking, and -dissipation. From these gatherings Keats was indispensable, and more than -welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, Messrs Taylor -and Hessey, men as strict in conduct and opinion as they were -good-hearted. His social relations began, indeed, in the course of this -winter to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought -consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Horace Smith in -company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:--"They -only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to -enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one -feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know -fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, -in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low -company. 'Would I were with that company instead of yours', said I to -myself." Men of ardent and deep natures, whether absorbed in the realities -of experience, or in the ideals of art and imagination, are apt to be -affected in this way by the conventional social sparkle which is only -struck from and only illuminates the surface. Hear, on the other hand, -with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius for genius, Keats -writes after seeing the great tragedian last mentioned interpret the inner -and true passions of the soul:-- - - "The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean ... his - tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them - honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we - feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while - speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello, 'Put up your bright - swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had - commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he - speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of - 'blood! blood! blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the last degree; - the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, - making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild - dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can - distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In - Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' came - from him, as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns." - -It was in the Christmas weeks of 1817-18 that Keats undertook the office -of theatrical critic for the _Champion_ newspaper in place of Reynolds, -who was away at Exeter. Early in January he writes to his brothers of the -pleasure he has had in seeing their sister, who had been brought to London -for the Christmas holidays; and tells them how he has called on and been -asked to dine by Wordsworth, whom he had met on the 28th of December at a -supper given by Haydon. This is the famous Sunday supper, or 'immortal -dinner' as Haydon calls it, which is described at length in one of the -most characteristic passages of the painter's _Autobiography_. Besides -Wordsworth and Keats and the host, there were present Charles Lamb and -Monkhouse. "Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, -Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so -speeded the stream of conversation," says Haydon, "that I never passed a -more delightful time." Later in the evening came in Ritchie the African -traveller, just about to start on the journey to Fezzan on which he died, -besides a self-invited guest in the person of one Kingston, Comptroller of -Stamps, a foolish good-natured gentleman, recommended only by his -admiration for Wordsworth. Presently Lamb getting fuddled, lost patience -with the platitudes of Mr Kingston, and began making fun of him, with -pranks and personalities which to Haydon appeared hugely funny, but which -Keats in his letter to his brothers mentions with less relish, saying, -"Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston, proceeding so far as to take the -candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft -fellow he was[30]." Keats saw Wordsworth often in the next few weeks after -their introduction at Haydon's, but has left us no personal impressions of -the elder poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one day -preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest clothes, with his -aforesaid unlucky admirer Mr Comptroller Kingston. We know from other -sources that he was once persuaded to recite to Wordsworth the Hymn to Pan -from _Endymion_. "A pretty piece of Paganism," remarked Wordsworth, -according to his usual encouraging way with a brother poet; and Keats was -thought to have winced under the frigidity. Independently of their -personal relations, the letters of Keats show that Wordsworth's poetry -continued to be much in his thoughts throughout these months; what he has -to say of it varying according to the frame of mind in which he writes. In -the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days again insists, -that there are three things to rejoice at in the present age, "The -_Excursion_, Haydon's Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste." This -mention of the name of Hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence -which somewhat powerfully affected Keats at this time. On the liberal side -in politics and criticism there was no more effective or more uncertain -free lance than that eloquent and splenetic writer, with his rich, -singular, contradictory gifts, his intellect equally acute and fervid, his -temperament both enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and -incisive. The reader acquainted with Hazlitt's manner will easily -recognize its influence on Keats in the fragment of stage criticism above -quoted. Hazlitt was at this time delivering his course of lectures on the -English poets at the Surrey Institution, and Keats was among his regular -attendants. With Hazlitt personally, as with Lamb, his intercourse at -Haydon's and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and friendly, but not -intimate: and Haydon complains that it was only after the death of Keats -that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius. - -Of Haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we see by the words -above quoted that Keats continued to think as highly as ever. He had, as -Severn assures us, a keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting -and music. Cowden Clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to him at -school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind's eye -visions of pictures:--"when a schoolboy the abstract idea I had of an -heroic painting was what I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways, -large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence--somewhat like the -feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning on his -crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving -with the sea." In Haydon's pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends -and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt -to see, not so much the actual performance, as the idea he had -pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend's intentions and -enthusiasm. At this time Haydon, who had already made several drawings of -Keats's head in order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering -Jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, "to be engraved," -writes Keats, "in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying, -at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and -that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it." -Both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part -of the sublime Haydon; who failed, however, to carry out his promise. "My -neglect," said Haydon long afterwards, "really gave him a pang, as it now -does me." - -With Hunt also Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds -his intimacy grew daily closer. Both of these friendships had a -stimulating influence on his poetic powers. "The Wednesday before last -Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile," he tells his -brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. "I have been writing, at -intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read -them over to you." With the help of Keats's manuscripts or of the -transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the -actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was -written the humorous sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat; on the 21st, after -seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, -the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!'--and on the -22nd the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which -Keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his Spenser, in order -to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _Lear_. On -the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to Apollo beginning -'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' and in the same letter the sonnet -beginning 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' which he calls his -last. On the 3rd of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin Hood, -suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest; on the 4th, -the sonnet beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in -which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love-fancy, -and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written at Hunt's in -competition with that friend and with Shelley; on the 5th, another sonnet -postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's -to compose something in honour, or in emulation of Spenser; and on the -8th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest -against one of Reynolds. About the same time Keats agreed with Reynolds -that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and -publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with -_Isabella_ or _the Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month -of February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, -and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the -influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in -a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, -translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of a singular -and haunting melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find him in -correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon -afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing -to flit. His brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at -Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a -scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom's health having made a -momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and -determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and -stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather--the -soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing -themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, -throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more -than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the -scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of objurgations -against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible, -in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents -his father to have been a Devonshire man:-- - - "You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a - splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod - county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the - primroses are out,--but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep - colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them."... "I - fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, - all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat - off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the - honour of Britain, that Julius Caesar did not first land in this - county: A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct - object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would - dispossess him[31]." - -Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid -brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during -these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of -_Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had -begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_, the first of his longer poems -written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time -he was reading and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With -the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been -attracted by _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and then more -energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he -now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of -genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its -power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey -and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. It -was in all senses manifestly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power, -and in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries of existence -and of suffering, and the 'deeps of good and evil,' were beginning for the -first time to press habitually on his thoughts. In that beautiful and -interesting letter to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human -life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he -thus describes:-- - - "We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the - Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light - and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of - delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this - breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's - vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves - that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and - oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually - darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set - open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages. We see not the - balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are in that state, we - feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'" - -A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed -_Epistles_, Keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he -sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea's edge:-- - - "twas a quiet eve, - The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave - An untumultuous fringe of silver foam - Along the flat brown sand; I was at home - And should have been most happy,--but I saw - Too far into the sea, where every maw - The greater or the less feeds evermore:-- - But I saw too distinct into the core - Of an eternal fierce destruction, - And so from happiness I far was gone. - Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day, - I've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay - Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, - Still do I that most fierce destruction see,-- - The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,-- - The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, - Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods! - Moods of one's mind!"-- - -In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his "Why should -woman suffer?"--"Aye, why should she?" writes Keats: "'By heavens, I'd -coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas.' These things are, and -he who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal -this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of -thought." And again, "were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal -coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I -should not by rights speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary -spirit that would do so." - -Not the general tribulations of the race only, but particular private -anxieties, were pressing in these days on Keats's thoughts. The shadow of -illness, though it had hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly -not only over his brother but his best friends. He speaks of it in a tone -of courage and gaiety which his real apprehensions, we can feel, belie. -"Banish money"--he had written in Falstaff's vein, at starting for the -Isle of Wight a year ago--"Banish sofas--Banish wine--Banish music; but -right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish Health and -banish all the world." Writing now from Teignmouth to Reynolds, who was -down during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains laughingly, but -with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, how he can go nowhere but Sickness -is of the company, and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or -he must cut them. - -Nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was the pain of a family -break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his mind to emigrate to -America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get -possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his own -fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the desire to -be in a position as quickly as possible to help, or if need be support, -his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, -Miss Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be -married and sail early in the summer. Keats came up from Teignmouth in May -to see the last of his brother, and he and Tom settled again in their old -lodgings in Well Walk. He had a warm affection and regard for his new -sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted for George's sake. But at the -same time he felt life and its prospects overcast. He writes to Bailey, -after his outburst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone -now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing -his ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. And after -recounting his causes of depression, he recovers himself, and -concludes:--"Life must be undergone; and I certainly derive some -consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it -ceases." - -With reference to his poem then just appearing, and the year's work which -it represented, Keats was under no illusions whatever. From an early -period in its composition he had fully realised its imperfections, and had -written: "My ideas of it are very low, and I would write the subject -thoroughly again, but I am tired of it, and think the time would be better -spent in writing a new romance, which I have in my eye for next summer. -Rome was not built in a day, and all the good I expect from my employment -this summer is the fruit of experience which I hope to gather in my next -poem." The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most -natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so -in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his -strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend -might judge. He shows himself perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_ -he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than -producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry; and when the time comes -to write a preface to the poem, after a first attempt lacking reticence -and simplicity, and abandoned at the advice of Reynolds, he in the second -quietly and beautifully says of his own work all that can justly be said -in its dispraise. He warns the reader to expect "great inexperience, -immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a -deed accomplished," and adds most unboastfully:--"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." - -The apprehensions expressed in these words have not been fulfilled; and -_Endymion_, so far from having died away, lives to illustrate the maxim -conveyed in its own now proverbial opening line. Immature as the poem -truly is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as are the sweets -which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing of far too much beauty, -or at least of too many beauties, to perish. Every reader must take -pleasure in some of its single passages and episodes, while to the student -of the poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its weakness -as its strength. - - - - - -CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion._ - - -In the old Grecian world, the myth of Endymion and Selene was one deeply -rooted in various shapes in the popular traditions both of Elis in the -Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The -central feature of the tale, as originally sung by Sappho, was the nightly -descent of the goddess to kiss her lover where he lay spell-bound, by the -grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. -The poem of Sappho is lost, and the story is not told at length in any of -our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the -poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and of the late -prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias. Of such ancient -sources Keats of course knew only what he found in his classical -dictionaries. But references to the tale, as every one knows, form part of -the stock repertory of classical allusion in modern literature: and -several modern writers before Keats had attempted to handle the subject at -length. In his own special range of Elizabethan reading, he was probably -acquainted with Lyly's court comedy of _Endimion_, in prose, which had -been edited, as it happened, by his friend Dilke a few years before: but -in it he would have found nothing to his purpose. On the other hand I -think he certainly took hints from the _Man in the Moon_ of Michael -Drayton. In this piece Drayton takes hold of two post-classical notions -concerning the Endymion myth, both in the first instance derived from -Lucian,--one that which identifies its hero with the visible 'man in the -moon' of popular fancy,--the other that which rationalises his story, and -explains him away as a personification or mythical representative of early -astronomy. These two distinct notions Drayton weaves together into a short -tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into the mouth of a shepherd at a -feast of Pan. Like most of his writings, the _Man in the Moon_ has strong -gleams of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile and pedantic. -Critics, so far as I know, have overlooked Keats's debt to it: but even -granting that he may well have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the -notion of introducing his story with a festival in honour of Pan--do not, -at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain evidently the hint for -the wanderings on which Keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity -affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air[32]?-- - - "Endymion now forsakes - All the delights that shepherds do prefer, - And sets his mind so generally on her - That, all neglected, to the groves and springs - He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings - (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, - Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers - The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke. - Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back - Among the blue Nereides: and when - Weary of waters goddess-like again - She the high mountains actively assays, - And there amongst the light Oriades, - That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort: - Sometime amongst those that with them comport - The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; - And there she stays not, but incontinent - Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, - And with Endymion pleased that she saw, - Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye - Stripping the winds----" - -Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose -inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely -kindred to his own--Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ makes Chloe -tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus-- - - "How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, - First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes - She took eternal fire that never dies; - How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, - His temples bound with poppy, to the steep - Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, - Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, - To kiss her sweetest." - -The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have -seen already, in Keats's thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old -pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his -natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but -deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the -story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is -for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human -soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow -forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[33]. - -The manner in which Keats set about relating the Greek story, as he had -thus conceived it, was as far from being a Greek or 'classical' manner as -possible. He indeed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid -sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature: and he loved to -follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete -shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions -for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to -conjure up visions of the classic past, or images from classic fable, he -was able to do so often magically well. To this extent Keats may justly be -called, as he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The -rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in -all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to -select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential, -and paring away their material to the quick that the main masses might -stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously -clear--these instincts had neither been implanted in Keats by nature, nor -brought home to him by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his -gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' Gothic, English. -A general characteristic of his favourite Elizabethan poetry is its -prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it -takes the powers of a Shakspere to keep the vital play of character and -passion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the -quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he wrote -_Endymion_, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constituted an -essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. "I think poetry," he says, -"should surprise by a fine excess:" and with reference to his own poem -during its progress, "it will be a test, a trial 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." - -The 'one bare circumstance' of the story was in the result expanded -through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course -of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate, -amplifying every incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion -into a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central Endymion myth -whatever others pleased him best, as those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of -Cybele, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of -Neptune, and of Bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations, -and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and aerial gulfs and -over the floor of ocean. The scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not -merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental -bewilderment,--an Arabian Nights jugglery with space and time,--in the -vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. Such organic plan as -the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main -divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by -keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric -thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. The first -book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the -predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a -festival of his people held in honour of the god Pan, and is afterwards -induced by his sister Peona[34] to confide to her the secret of the -passion which consumes him. The account of the feast of Pan contains -passages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely -to be surpassed in poetry:-- - - "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 puls'd tenfold, - To feel this sun-rise and its glories old." - -What can be more fresh and stirring?--what happier in rhythmical -movement?--or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which -Keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work, -leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and -forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry -alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined -rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the -earth? Not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same -episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn -to Pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the Greek myth -to Greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are -foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. Keats having got -from Drayton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of -Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from -Chapman's Homer's hymn, from the sacrifice to Pan in Browne's -_Britannia's Pastorals_[35], and from the hymns in Ben Jonson's masque, -_Pan's Anniversary_: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and -refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an -imagination fed from the living sources of nature:-- - - "O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang - From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth - Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death - Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; - Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress - Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; - And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken - The dreary melody of bedded reeds-- - In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds - The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; - Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth - Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now, - By thy love's milky brow! - By all the trembling mazes that she ran, - Hear us, great Pan! - - * * * * * - - O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, - While ever and anon to his shorn peers - A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, - When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn - Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms, - To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: - Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, - That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, - And wither drearily on barren moors: - Dread opener of the mysterious doors - Leading to universal knowledge--see, - Great son of Dryope, - The many that are come to pay their vows - With leaves about their brows!" - -In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona he tells her the story -of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has -experienced or dreamed. In Keats's conception of his youthful heroes there -is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical -softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman -them quite: as indeed a helpless and enslaved submission of all the -faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of -his own nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it: but the -consequence is that the love-passages of _Endymion_, notwithstanding the -halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can -scarcely be read with pleasure. On the other hand, in matters of -subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the -signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance -wherein Peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:-- - - "Is this the cause? - This all? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas! - That one who through this middle earth should pass - Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave - His name upon the harp-string, should achieve - No higher bard than simple maidenhood, - Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood - Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray - He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_, - If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love; - What could it be but love? How a ring-dove - Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; - And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe - The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses. - And then the ballad of his sad life closes - With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!" - -In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led -by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless -region of adventure. In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions -of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in -mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings -Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. A Naiad, in the -disguise of a butterfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals -herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to -descend 'Into the sparry hollows of the world': which done, he gropes his -way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-Grecian magnificence, -where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and whither -Venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. Thence, urged -by the haunting passion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and -precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through all -this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich -first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and -inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry -admirably felt and expressed:-- - - "He sinks adown a solitary glen, - Where there was never sound of mortal men, - Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences - Melting to silence, when upon the breeze - Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet - To cheer itself to Delphi:"-- - -or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:-- - - "Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, - Came mother Cybele--alone--alone-- - In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown - About her majesty, and front death-pale, - With turrets crowned." - -After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the -bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable -descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his -celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the -streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled -flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to -his goddess in their behalf, and then-- - - "He turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept, - There was a cooler light; and so he kept - Towards it by a sandy path, and lo! - More suddenly than doth a moment go, - The visions of the earth were gone and fled-- - He saw the giant sea above his head." - -Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and -adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of -Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third -book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with -great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by -Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her -rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance -resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by -Endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful -fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's -submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,-- - - "He saw far in the green concave of the sea - An old man sitting calm and peacefully. - Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, - And his white hair was awful, and a mat - Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"-- - ---from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and -occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home his version of the myth with -strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. No picture can well -be more vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims: -and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected -enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. In the same book the -description of the sunk treasures cumbering the ocean-floor challenges -comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage in -Shakspere's _Richard III._ In the halls of Neptune Endymion again meets -Venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore. -Thence Nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in -spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in starlight on the -dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, he has allowed himself to be -diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of -others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last -nearer to fulfilment. - -It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really in his mind a -meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that -the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is -accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. And in his fourth -book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly -to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. Returning, in that -book, to upper air, Endymion before long half forgets his goddess for the -charms of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him -while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come -wandering in the train of Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian -maiden proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise. -But it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is -conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents, -descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, with his -infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave of -Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality -and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape, -make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially -intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in -pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal--such would seem -the argument--once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a -time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by -that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude -will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which -has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,--that it is -after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. What chiefly -or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric -poetry which Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian maiden -when she tells her story. His later and more famous lyrics, though they -are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do -not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of -imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of -the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the -best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial -romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps -partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful -associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild -wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, -yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a -'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening -measures are repeated at the close. It begins with a tender invocation to -sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of -a deserted maidenhood beside Indian streams; till suddenly, with another -change, comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on his march; next -follows the detailed picture of the god and of his rout, suggested in part -by the famous Titian at the National Gallery; and then, arranged as if for -music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, and their -choral answers: - - "'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your bowers desolate, - Your lutes, and gentler fate?' - 'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing, - A conquering! - Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide, - We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our wild minstrelsy!' - - 'Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left - Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'-- - - 'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; - For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, - And cold mushrooms; - For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth; - Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our mad minstrelsy!'" - -The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and -finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with -an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:-- - - "Come then, sorrow! - Sweetest sorrow! - Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast: - I thought to leave thee, - And deceive thee, - But now of all the world I love thee best. - There is not one, - No, no, not one - But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; - Thou art her mother - And her brother, - Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade." - -The high-water-mark of poetry in _Endymion_ is thus reached in the two -lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with -justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, -that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good -a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for -poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." In the main -body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a -critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable -truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, -mark such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry -breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read -farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly -tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by -Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as-- - - "AEaea's isle was wondering at the moon," - -standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed -narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme -and expression-- - - "I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe! - O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?" - -is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and -the heart:-- - - "Cold, O cold indeed - Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed - The sea-swell took her hair." - -One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has -shaken off--his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar -sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that tendency which he by nature shared -with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined -pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And -to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined -others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of -English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its -waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in -its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He -outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let Invention ramble and loiter -uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her -heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds -there: and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: -and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to -grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:-- - - "--a nymph of Dian's - Wearing a coronal of tender scions":-- - - "Does yonder thrush, - Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush - About the dewy forest, whisper tales?-- - Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails - Will slime the rose to-night." - -Chapman especially among Keats's masters had this trick of letting thought -follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman--to say nothing -of Chatterton--had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash -dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a -language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and -make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use -of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman's -spirit--'far-spooming Ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their -surly eyes brow-hidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'--coinages -sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as -well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms -as 'shent', 'sith', and 'seemlihed' from Spenser, 'eterne' from Spenser -and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly', 'to -monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as -active, as to 'travel' an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and _vice -versa_. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, -in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of -oddities and discords. - -In rhythm Keats adheres in _Endymion_ to the method he had adopted in -_Sleep and Poetry_, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the -metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, -and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had -carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later -critics have supposed the rhythm of _Endymion_ to have been influenced by -the _Pharonnida_ of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly -for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, -exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse -persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest -syllables--prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions--on which neither pause -nor emphasis is possible[36]. - -But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in -delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of -sentence structure. There is nothing in his treatment of the measure for -which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who -employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival -for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be -said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an -exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of -provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous. - -As the best criticism on Keats's _Endymion_ is in his own preface, so its -best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. "It -is as good," he says, "as I had power to make it by myself." Hunt had -warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley against those of -hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and -crude the classical training and now ripening taste of Shelley might -doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was -determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous -expression of his mind. "Had I been nervous," he goes on, "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." -How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of -his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he -says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next -labours. - - - - -CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death of Tom - Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne--Excursion to - Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon and Money - Difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening Prospects--Summer at - Shanklin and Winchester--Wise Resolutions--Return from Winchester. - [June 1818-October, 1819.] - - -While Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with _Endymion_ -on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different -plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour -through Scotland with Charles Brown. "I have many reasons," he writes to -Reynolds, "for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from -spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and -Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I'll -have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, 'over the hills -we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in -turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." A -fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an -over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the -necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the -flight of poetry:-- - - "I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but - one thing to prevent me. 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." - -After he had come back to Hampstead in May, however, Keats allowed himself -to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the -recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year -before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed between him and -Brown that they should accompany George Keats and his bride as far as -Liverpool, and then start on foot from Lancaster. They left London -accordingly on Monday, June 22[37]. The coach stopped for dinner the first -day at Redbourn near St Albans, where Keats's friend of medical-student -days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake hands with the -travelling party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards wrote an -account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of Mrs -George Keats. "Rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome, -but looked like a being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily -love. She had the imaginative poetical cast. Somewhat singular and girlish -in her attire.... There was something original about her, and John seemed -to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her -with evident satisfaction[38]." With no other woman or girl friend was -Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this 'Nymph -of the downward smile and side-long glance' of his early sonnet--'Sister -George' as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the -series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards -in America, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth -preserving. - -The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to -Lancaster, and thence began their walk, Keats taking for his reading one -book only, the little three-volume edition of Cary's _Dante_. "I cannot," -writes Brown, "forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly, -and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain -scenery. It was just before our descent to the village of Bowness, at a -turn of the road, when the lake of Windermere at once came into view.... -All was enchantment to us both." Keats in his own letters says -comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, -not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque -tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and -fastidious Gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth -is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs -not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but -on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit -sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more -varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but -impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit. -Moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of Windermere, it -is evident that as Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery -somewhat foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beauties of -England, two ideals of landscape, classic and mediaeval, haunted and -allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled -south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the Scottish -border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, -and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to -neither. "I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem -anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." - -A change, besides, was coming over Keats's thoughts and feelings whereby -scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his -fellow-creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, -among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously -absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a -life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the -appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. "Scenery is -fine," he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, "but human -nature is finer." In the Lake country, after climbing Skiddaw one morning -early, and walking to Treby the same afternoon, where they watched with -amusement the exercises in a country dancing-school: "There was as fine a -row of boys and girls," says Keats, "as you ever saw; some beautiful -faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of -patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is -what I like better than scenery." The same note recurs frequently in -letters of a later date. - -From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside; from Ambleside to -the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on -Wordsworth at Rydal, and been disappointed to find him away -electioneering. From Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of -Derwentwater; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and Wigton to Carlisle, -where they arrived on the 1st of July. Thence by coach to Dumfries, -visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory -Keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dumfries they -started southwestwards for Galloway, a region little frequented even now, -and then hardly at all, by tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrightshire -coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and -rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Solway to the hazy -hills of Man, Brown bethought him that this was Guy Mannering's country, -and began to tell Keats about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who according to the -fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for Scott's poetry, and of the -Waverley novels had read the _Antiquary_ but not _Guy Mannering_, was much -struck; and presently, writes Brown,--"there was a little spot, close to -our pathway. 'There,' he said, 'in that very spot, without a shadow of -doubt, has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.' It was among pieces -of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of -honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and -fulness of blossom." As they went along, Keats composed on Scott's theme -the spirited ballad beginning 'Old Meg, she was a gipsy,' and stopping to -breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing -to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he -began at the same place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed -always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add scraps to -them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote -regularly and uniformly in the evenings. "He affronts my indolence and -luxury," says Keats, "by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; -secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care if he would -change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But -I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead -of afterwards." - -From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--skirting the wild moors about -the Water of Fleet, and passing where Cairnsmore looks down over wooded -slopes to the steaming estuary of the Cree,--as far as Newton Stewart: -thence across the Wigtonshire levels by Glenluce to Stranraer and -Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee packet for Ireland, with the -intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and -expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to -Belfast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. In letters -written during and immediately after this excursion, Keats has some -striking passages of human observation and reflection:-- - - "These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women, - old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants, - all careful; so they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and - gainers.... These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm; they have banished - puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:--poor, - unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a - luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its - delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have - leisure to go mad after things that are not!... I would sooner be a - wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would - sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's - penance before those execrable elders." - - "On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the Duchess of Dunghill. - It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you - ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a - wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved - from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, - with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, - skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of - her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two - ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a - history of her life and sensations!"--. - -From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking -along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr, -with the lonely mass of Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran, -looming ever above the Atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find -Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the -coast scenery. They went to Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the -home of Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to write a -sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did so, but was worried by -the prate of the man in charge--"a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew -Burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him"--"his gab -hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet." And -again, as they journeyed on toward Glasgow he composed with considerable -pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'There is a -charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' They were meant to express -the temper in which his pilgrimage through the Burns country had been -made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of -imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself. - -From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, and from Glasgow by -Dumbarton through the _Lady of the Lake_ country, which they found -vexatiously full of tourists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban. -At Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of _The -Stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the -next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in -a set of doggrel rhymes. The walk along the shores of Loch Awe impressed -him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set -description, for the benefit of his brother Tom. At the same point occur -for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. -At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its -effects upon his sleep and appetite: telling her how he tumbled into bed -"so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe -and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I get -so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to -me.... I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes." -Presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty -miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts of -the Highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and -frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and Brown, and he -grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the -friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for -Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and -Iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither -side of the island of Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the -farther side opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some -thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather. -By good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had -a favourable view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its associations -in the one 'illustrious island,' and of nature's architecture in the -other, Keats shows himself naturally much impressed. Fingal's cave in -especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the -race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer -since Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines -beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian.' Avoiding mere epithet-work and -description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for -comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, -bethinking himself of Milton's cry to Lycidas, - - "--where'er thy bones are hurl'd, - Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides"-- - -imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean, and -put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly -character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the -place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine -abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:-- - - "So for ever I will leave - Such a taint, and soon unweave - All the magic of the place![39] - - * * * * - - So saying, with a spirit's glance - He dived--." - -From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scotch tour, and -especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct -and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, and of the development -of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his -brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem, he speaks of -a 'slight sore throat,' and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at -Oban. Thence they pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the -ascent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th of August to -Inverness. Keats's throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the -ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, -tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at -Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue -his tour. Accordingly he took passage on the 8th or 9th of August from the -port of Cromarty for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey -alone,--"much lamenting," to quote Brown's own words, "the loss of his -beloved intelligence at my side." Keats in some degree picked up strength -during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards -described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat -trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of -time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, -and made his appearance among his friends the next day, "as brown and as -shabby as you can imagine," writes Mrs Dilke, "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." When he found himself -seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed -chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, -quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates -his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis[40]. - -Simultaneously, almost, with Keats's return from the North appeared -attacks on him in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_. The -_Blackwood_ article, being No. IV. of a series bearing the signature 'Z' -on the 'Cockney School of Poetry,' was printed in the August number of the -magazine. The previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter -similarly signed, had been directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of -insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness -of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were -most probably the work either of Lockhart or of Wilson, suggested and -perhaps revised by the publisher William Blackwood, at this time his own -sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt's opinions, or his real -weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh critics must needs heap on -him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. In the course of these -articles allusion had several times been made to 'Johnny Keats' as an -'amiable bardling' and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of -Cockaigne, Hunt. When now Keats's own turn came, his treatment was mild -in comparison with that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work -are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic -persons full of prejudice and wishing to hurt. 'Cockney' had been in -itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt; -neither was it altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the -facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the -measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of -it. The worst part of the Keats review was in its personalities,--"so back -to the shop, Mr John, stick to 'plasters, pills, ointment boxes,' -&c."--and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for -them had been obtained. Keats's friend Bailey had by this time taken his -degree, and after publishing a friendly notice of _Endymion_ in the -_Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a -curacy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at -the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and -Chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a -previous love-affair with one of the Reynolds sisters having fallen -through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, then in the -hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy -of Scott; and earning, on the staff of _Blackwood_ and otherwise, the -reputation and the nickname of 'Scorpion.' Bailey, anxious to save Keats -from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took -the opportunity of telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances -and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt -was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an -object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any -rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his -disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so -used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all -appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had -thus confidentially communicated. - -To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that whether or not -Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and -supplied the materials for it[41]. It seems in fact all but certain that -he actually wrote it[42]. If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart's part, -and to forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude that is his -due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of Scott. But -even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the -party violence of the time and place Scott himself was drawn into -encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh friends; and that -he was in some measure privy to the Cockney School outrages seems certain. -Such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time[43]; and when -Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the -subject of Keats and his detractors in conversation with Scott at Rome, he -observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which -he could only interpret in the same sense[44]. It is hard to say whether -the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul most free from jealousy -or harshness, thus associated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is -one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the -more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the -distracting cries and blind collisions of the world. - -The _Quarterly_ article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of -September (in the number dated April), and was in an equally contemptuous -strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first -canto, or to make head or tail of that. In this case again the question of -authorship must remain uncertain: but Gifford, as editor, and an editor -who never shrank from cutting a contributor's work to his own pattern, -must bear the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in his -manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable -of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the -pain he gives. Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with -which Keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work, -the attacks are both alike inexcusable. They had the effect of promptly -rousing the poet's friends in his defence. Reynolds published a warm -rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the _Alfred_; -an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_ -with the initials J. S.--those probably of John Scott, then editor of the -_London Magazine_, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart's in -a duel, arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which it was -thought that Lockhart himself ought to have come forward. Leigh Hunt -reprinted Reynolds's letter, with some introductory words, in the -_Examiner_, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. But -he could not have done more to any purpose. He was not himself an -enthusiastic admirer of _Endymion_, and had plainly said so to Keats and -to his friends. Reynolds's piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective -and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would -only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly -well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a -friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind. - -Neither was Keats's demeanour under the lash such as could make his -friends suppose him particularly hurt. Proud in the extreme, he had no -irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet -always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he -saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:--"I hate," he says, "a mawkish -popularity." Even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly -cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was -conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his -critics. Accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than -older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt had replied -indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn. -Hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. Keats at the first sting -declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what -good he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly recovering -himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one -merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When Mr Hessey sent for his -encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended, -he wrote:-- - - "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." - - And again:--"There have been two letters in my defence in the - 'Chronicle,' and one in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper, - and written by Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the - 'Chronicle.' This is a mere matter of the moment: 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.'" - -In point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent Keats about -this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a -further tribute in the shape of a L25 note. Keats was both pleased and -displeased: "if I had refused it," he says, "I should have behaved in a -very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a -little." About the same time he received, through his friend Richard -Woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or -assistant to Messrs Taylor and Hessey[45], a glowing letter of sympathy -and encouragement from Miss Porter, 'of Romance celebrity': by which he -shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands. - -Keats was really living, during the stress of these _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt -trouble. His Hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return -from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on -account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. He had left the -invalid behind in their lodgings at Well Walk, and found that he had grown -rapidly worse during his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for -the next few months Keats's chief occupation was the harrowing one of -watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written in the -third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and -occupations:--"I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses -upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had -intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and -plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, -and feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be -poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of -contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and -yet I must do so or suffer." And again about the same time to -Reynolds:--"I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has -haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverous -relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has -conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only -life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am -thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of -immortality." As the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever -more sorrowful and absorbing[46]. On the 29th of October Keats wrote to -his brother and sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a -beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst. -For the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and -in the first week of December the end came. "Early one morning," writes -Brown, "I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, -who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we -both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, -my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--'Have nothing -more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live -with me?' He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,--'I think it -would be better.' From that moment he was my inmate[47]." - -Brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part--the -smaller eastern part--of the block of two semi-detached houses near the -bottom of John Street, Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied -the other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place[48]. The -accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room -on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them. The -arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, -occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. As -soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in -some measure alleviated his grief, Keats became gradually once more -absorbed in poetry: his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had -already begun to work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed; -for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more -powerful than that of poetry itself. It was at this time that the flame -caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid 'lest it -should burn him up.' With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, -not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards -womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind's ideal of the -sex, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and -too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious at the same -time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself -partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of passion by his -sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. The set of -three sonnets in his first volume, beginning 'Woman, when I beheld thee -flippant, vain,' had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to -this state of mind. Its persistency is affirmed often in his letters. - - "I am certain," he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, "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.... Is it not - extraordinary?--when among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no - spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from - every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all - suspicion, and comfortable. 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.... I must absolutely get over this--but how?" - -In a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in America, he alleges this -general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or -rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he -will never marry:-- - - "The roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my - window-panes are my children; 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. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination - strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand - worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are - stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is - equivalent to a King's Bodyguard: "then Tragedy with scepter'd pall - comes sweeping by." According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles - shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; - or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, "I - wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage," I - melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content - to be alone. 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 that I rejoice in." - -But now Keats's hour was come. Since his return from Scotland, in the -midst of his watching by his brother's sick-bed, we have seen him -confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. This was a -certain Miss Charlotte Cox, a West-Indian cousin of Reynolds's, to whom he -did not think the Reynolds sisters were quite kind. A few days later he -writes again how he has been attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace. -Very soon, however, the attraction passed, and this 'Charmian' left him -fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. A Mrs Brawne, a widow -lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two -younger children, had taken Brown's house for the summer while he was away -in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the -Dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved -from Brown's house to one in Downshire Street close by: and it was at the -Dilkes' that Keats met Miss Fanny Brawne after his return. Her ways and -presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated -him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as -well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in -Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length -silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise -her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the -far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and -retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, -shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, -carriage and complexion,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her -character we have little means of judging. She was certainly -high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though -kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew -dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men -and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of -one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and -in regarding the attachment as unlucky. - -So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion -for a woman have been. Stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth -begun to fall on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional -misgivings of his darker moods. First the departure of his brother George -had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from -boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next -the exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and -unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in -his blood. Coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed -inexorably upon his brother Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit -through all his pains. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little -as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and -carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his -practical hopes from literature. Last were added the pangs of love--love -requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even -love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion wrought -fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and -torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every -strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty, -exposed them. Within a year the combined assault proved too much for his -strength, and he broke down. But in the meantime he showed a brave face to -the world, and while anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to -throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, -energy. During the first few weeks of winter following his brother's -death, he wrote indeed, as he tells Haydon, "only a little now and then: -but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting." Yet -such work as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of his -powers, and included parts both of _Hyperion_ and _The Eve of St Agnes_. - -Within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was -finished, having been written out during a visit which Keats and Brown -paid in Sussex in the latter part of January (1819). They stayed for a few -days with the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for nearly a -fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, at Bedhampton -close by. Keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but -his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to 'a couple of -dowager card-parties,' and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day, -at the consecration of a chapel for converted Jews. The latter ceremony -jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an -entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. -During his stay at Chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate -conceived, the poem on the _Eve of St Mark_, which he never finished, and -which remains so interesting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work. - -Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed his life at -Hampstead under Brown's roof. He saw much less society than the winter -before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally -to avoid the night air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt -the passion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest -in the other relations of life. The stages by which it grew on him we -cannot follow. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he -had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting. His -real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the -time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong -mixed attraction and aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the -14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in -America, "Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff;" -but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general -reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not -sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. The -secret violence of Keats's passion, and the restless physical jealousy -which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed _To -Fanny_, which belong apparently to this date. They are written very -unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and -there. The occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:-- - - "Who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast, - What stare outfaces now my silver moon? - Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least; - Let, let the amorous burn-- - But, pr'ythee, do not turn - The current of your heart from me so soon, - O! save, in charity, - The quickest pulse for me. - Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe - Voluptuous visions into the warm air, - Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath; - Be like an April day, - Smiling and cold and gay, - A temperate lily, temperate as fair; - Then, Heaven! there will be - A warmer June for me." - -If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his -feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother -or his friends. Except in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no -direct mention of Miss Brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere -excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because -he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers, -in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown -after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as -when the Dilkes left Hampstead in April, and went to live at Westminster, -the Brawnes again took their house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth -had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke himself, -but apparently not till many months later, writes, "It is quite a settled -thing between John Keats and Miss Brawne, God help them. It's a bad thing -for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that -it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or speak to her." -Other friends, including one so intimate and so affectionate as Severn, -never realised until Keats was on his death-bed that there had been an -engagement, or that his relations with Miss Brawne had been other than -those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours. - -Intense and jealous as Keats's newly awakened passion was, it seemed at -first to stimulate rather than distract him in the exercise of his now -ripened poetic gift. The spring of this year 1819 seems to repeat in a -richer key the history of the last; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits -of lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season advanced. Between -the beginning of February and the beginning of June he wrote many of his -best shorter poems, including apparently all except one of his six famous -odes. About the middle of February he speaks of having taken a stroll -among the marbles of the British Museum, and the ode _On Indolence_ and -the ode _On a Grecian Urn_, written two or three months later, show how -the charm of ancient sculpture was at this time working in his mind. The -fit of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former piece is -recorded in his correspondence under the date of March 19. The lines -beginning 'Bards of passion and of mirth,' are dated the 26th of the same -month. On the 15th of April he sends off to his brother, as the last poem -he has written, the ode _To Psyche_, only less perfect and felicitous than -that _On a Grecian Urn_. About a week later the nightingale would be -beginning to sing. Presently it appeared that one had built her nest in -Brown's garden, near his house. - - "Keats," writes Brown, "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; - and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the - grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. When he - came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his - hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, - I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic - feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well - legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many - scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his _Ode to a - Nightingale_.... Immediately afterwards I searched for more of his (in - reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again - assisted me.... From that day he gave me permission to copy any verses - he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so little - for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was - released from their influence, that he required a friend at hand to - preserve them." - -The above account perfectly agrees with what Keats had written towards -the end of the summer before:--"I feel assured I should write from the -mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's -labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them." -And yet for these odes Keats seems to have had a partiality: with that to -Psyche, he tells his brother, he has taken more pains than with anything -he had ever written before; and Haydon has told how thrillingly, 'in his -low tremulous under-tone,' he recited to him that to the nightingale as -they walked one day in the Kilburn meadows. - -During the winter and spring while his faculties were thus absorbed -between love and poetry, Keats had suffered his correspondence to flag, -except only with Haydon, with his young sister Fanny, and with his brother -and sister-in-law in America. About Christmas Haydon, whose work had been -interrupted by a weakness of the eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for -the time being exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to Keats of all -men. With his usual generosity Keats had promised, only asking him to try -the rich lovers of art first, that if the worst came to the worst he would -help him with all he had. Haydon in a few weeks returns to the -charge:--"My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised -assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and -manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst." Keats had intended for -Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share -in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over -to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were -raised, and after much correspondence, attendance in bankers' and -solicitors' offices, and other ordeals harassing to the poetic mind, he -had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When -by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with -his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies with perfect temper, -explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his -hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting -possession of his money. Moreover he finds that even if all he had were -laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live -on for two years.[49] Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent -sums to various friends amounting in all to near L200, of which he expects -the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats -contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds. Three months later a -law-suit threatened by the widow of Captain Jennings against Mr Abbey, in -connection with the administration of the trust, had the effect for a time -of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very -gently asks Haydon to make an effort to repay his loan; who not only made -none--"he did not," says Keats, "seem to care much about it, but let me go -without my money almost with nonchalance." This was too much even for -Keats's patience. He declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend -again: nevertheless he by-and-by let old affection resume its sway, and -entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly -as ever. - -To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are full of -playful brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of regrets that she is -kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey; and of plans -for coming over to see her at Walthamstow when the weather and his throat -allow. He thinks of various little presents to please her,--a selection of -Tassie's pretty, and then popular, paste imitations of ancient -gems,--flowers,--drawing materials,-- - - "anything but live stock. Though I will not now be very severe on it, - remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, - Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock Salmons and all the whole tribe of the - Bushes and the Brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the - water,--though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome - globe of gold-fish--then I would have it hold ten pails of water and - be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let - through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their - beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome - painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and Japonicas. I - should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd - sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading." - -For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant -anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant -Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices -been bound. In the middle of April news of them arrives, and he thereupon -sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has been writing up at -intervals during the last two months. Among all the letters of Keats, this -is perhaps the richest and most characteristic. It is full of the varied -matter of his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love: these are -only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more indistinctly in the -vaguely passionate tenor of two sonnets which he sends among other -specimens of his latest work in verse. One is that beginning 'Why did I -laugh to-night?'--the other that, beautiful and moving despite flaws of -execution, in which he describes a dream suggested by the Paolo and -Francesca passage in Dante. For the rest he passes disconnectedly as -usual--"it being an impossibility in grain," as Keats once wrote to -Reynolds, "for my ink to stain otherwise"--from the vein of fun and -freakishness to that of poetry and wisdom, with passages now of masterly -intuition, and now of wandering and uncertain, almost always beautiful, -speculative fancy, interspersed with expressions of the most generous -spirit of family affection, or the most searching and unaffected -disclosures of self-knowledge. Poetry and Beauty were the twin powers his -soul had ever worshipped; but his devotion to poetry seemed thus far to -promise him no reward either in fame or bread; while beauty had betrayed -her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a sustaining power, -since his love for the beautiful in general had turned into a craving -passion for the beauty of a particular girl. As his flesh began to faint -in the service of these two, his soul turned often with a sense of -comfort, at times even almost of ecstasy, towards the milder divinity of -Death, whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts:-- - - "Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, - But Death intenser--Death is Life's high meed." - -When he came down from these heights of feeling, and brought himself -soberly to face the facts of his existence, Keats felt himself compelled, -in those days while he was producing, 'out of the mere yearning and -fondness he had for the beautiful,' poem after poem that are among the -treasures of the English language, to consider whether as a practical -matter he could or ought to continue to apply himself to literature at -all. In spite of his magnanimous first reception of the _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ gibes, we can see that as time went on he began more and more -to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened by them. -Reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material harm which the reviews were -capable of inflicting, when he wrote the year before:--"Certain it is, -that hundreds of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set down -this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writer, merely on the -assertions of some single heartless critic, who has just energy enough to -despise what is good." Such in fact was exactly the reputation which -_Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had succeeded in making for Keats, except -among a small private circle of admirers. Of praise and the thirst for -praise he continues to speak in as manly and sane a tone as ever; -especially in the two sonnets _On Fame_; and in the _Ode to Indolence_ -declares-- - - "For I would not be dieted with praise, - A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce." - -Again in the same ode, he speaks of his 'demon Poesy' as 'a maiden most -unmeek,' whom he loves the better the more blame is heaped on her. At the -same time he shows his sense of the practical position which the reviews -had made for him when he writes to his brother:--"These reviews are -getting more and more powerful, especially the 'Quarterly'.... I was in -hopes that as people saw, as they must do, all the trickery and iniquity -of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the -spectators at the Westminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or loses." -And as a consequence he adds presently, "I have been, at different times, -turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a -physician. I am afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I could -not take fees; and yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than -writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review -shambles." A little later he mentions to his sister Fanny an idea he has -of taking a voyage or two as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But Brown, -more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and -promise of his friend's genius, would not hear of this plan, and persuaded -him to abandon it and throw himself again upon literature. Keats being for -the moment unable to get at any of his money, Brown advanced him enough to -live on through the summer; and it was agreed that he should go and work -in the country, and that Brown should follow him. - -Towards the end of July Keats accordingly left Hampstead, and went first -to join his friend Rice in lodgings at Shanklin. Rice's health was at this -time worse than ever; and Keats himself was far from well; his chest weak, -his nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to Fanny -Brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains and joys of love. These -love-letters of Keats are written with little or none of the bright ease -and play of mind which make his correspondence with his friends and family -so attractive. Pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, but in the main -they are constrained and distressing, showing him a prey, despite his -efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity -and fretfulness of passion. An enraptured but an untrustful lover, -alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing through a -hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he found in the fever -of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his -love-sickness. As long as Rice and he were together at Shanklin, the two -ailing and anxious men, firm friends as they were, depressed and did each -other harm. It was better when Brown with his settled health and spirits -came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got -to work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, that of -writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What other struggling man of -letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated -them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose -Russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him in L500, was -supposed to possess the requisite stage experience, and to him were -assigned the plot and construction of the play, while Keats undertook to -compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from the history of the -Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at the -same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown sketched it out to -him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next, until the end -of the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into his own -hands. Besides the joint work by means of which he thus hoped, at least in -sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, Keats was -busily engaged by himself in writing a new Greek tale in rhymed heroics, -_Lamia_. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate -of Shanklin was against him: their lodgings were under the cliff, and from -the south-east, as he afterwards wrote, "came the damps of the sea, which -having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy -idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke." After a -stay of five or six weeks, the friends made up their minds to change their -quarters, and went in the second week of August to Winchester. The old -cathedral city, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its -clear-coursing streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the -nimble and pure air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited Keats, who -quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days which he spent here, -from the middle of August to the middle of October, were the last good -days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he -managed to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his -passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort. - -His work continued to be chiefly on _Lamia_, with the concluding part of -_Otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen; -in this last he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. Early -in September Brown left Winchester to go on a visit to Bedhampton. -Immediately afterwards a letter from America compelled Keats to go to town -and arrange with Mr Abbey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his -brother George. He dared not, to use his own words, 'venture into the -fire' by going to see his mistress at Hampstead, but stayed apparently -with Mr Taylor in Fleet Street, and was back on the fourth day at -Winchester, where he spent the following ten days or fortnight in -solitude. During this interval he took up _Hyperion_ again, but made up -his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style and method -too Miltonic and artificial. _Lamia_ he had finished, and his chief -present occupation was in revising the _Eve of St Agnes_, studying Italian -in the pages of Ariosto, and writing up one of his long and full -journal-letters to brother and sister George. The season was fine, and the -beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his spirit, prompted -also in these days the last, and one certainly of the happiest, of his -odes, that _To Autumn_. To the fragment of _St Mark's Eve_, begun or -planned, as we have seen, the January before, he now added lines inspired -at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his letters show to have -affected him deeply here at Winchester, and by the literary example of -Chatterton, for whom his old admiration had of late returned in full -force. - -The wholesome brightness of the early autumn continuing to sustain and -soothe him, Keats made in these days a vigorous effort to rally his moral -powers, to banish over-passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself -on a right footing with the world. The letter to America already -mentioned, and others written at the same time to Reynolds, Taylor, Dilke, -Brown, and Haydon, are full of evidences of this spirit. The ill success -of his brother in his American speculations shall serve, he is determined, -as a spur to his own exertions, and now that real troubles are upon them, -he will show that he can bear them better than those of imagination. The -imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him -up into an agent. He has been passing his time between reading, writing, -and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, and stick to the other -two. He does not consider he has any just cause of complaint against the -world; he has done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few people -predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that any thing really fine -will make its way. "What reviewers can put a hindrance to must be a -nothing--or mediocre which is worse." With reference to his own plans for -the future, he is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes of ultimate -success, whether from plays or poems, but to turn to the natural resource -of a man 'fit for nothing but literature' and needing to support himself -by his pen: the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. "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. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I will." -These words are from a letter written to Brown on the 22nd of September, -and further on in the same letter we find evidence of the honourable -spirit of independence and unselfishness towards his friends which went -together in Keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willingness -to accept their services at a pinch. He had been living since May on a -loan from Brown and an advance from Taylor, and was uneasy at putting the -former to a sacrifice. The subject, he says, is often in his mind,-- - - "and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your - happiness. This anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to - the plan I propose pursuing. I had got into a habit of mind of looking - towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it is a duty I - owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my - subsistence--make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall - applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct." - -Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken -in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose his company, and -doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected their -motives too much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled that -the two friends should part, Brown returning to his own house at -Hampstead, while Keats went to live by himself in London and look out for -employment on the press. - - - - -CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The Plays. - - -During the twenty months ending with his return from Winchester as last -narrated, Keats had been able, even while health and peace of mind and -heart deserted him, to produce in quick succession the series of poems -which give us the true measure of his powers. In the sketches and epistles -of his first volume we have seen him beginning, timidly and with no -clearness of aim, to make trial of his poetical resources. A year -afterwards he had leapt, to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and -boldly tried his strength on the composition of a long mythological -romance--half romance, half parable of that passion for universal beauty -of which he felt in his own bosom the restless and compulsive workings. In -the execution, he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in -him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and invention, and the caprice -of rhyme, run away with him, and by substituting for the worn-out verbal -currency of the last century a semi-Elizabethan coinage of his own, less -acceptable by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit greater -real poetic value. The experiment was rash, but when he next wrote, it -became manifest that it had not been made in vain. After _Endymion_ his -work threw off, not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and -ineffectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full 'effluence' (the -phrase is Landor's) 'of power and light[50].' - -His next poem of importance was _Isabella_, planned and begun, as we saw, -in February 1818, and finished in the course of the next two months at -Teignmouth. The subject is taken from the well-known chapter of Boccaccio -which tells of the love borne by a damsel of Messina for a youth in the -employ of her merchant-brothers, with its tragic close and pathetic -sequel[51]. Keats for some reason transfers the scene of the story from -Messina to Florence. Nothing can be less sentimental than Boccaccio's -temper, nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his style. -Keats invoking him asks pardon for his own work as what it truly is,--'An -echo of thee in the North-wind sung.' Not only does the English poet set -the southern story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of the -Arno, for instance, how its stream-- - - "Gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan - Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream - Keeps head against the freshets"-- - -he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, enriching it with -tones of sentiment and colours of romance, and brooding over every image -of beauty or passion as he calls it up. These things he does--but no -longer inordinately as heretofore. His powers of imagination and of -expression have alike gained strength and discipline; and through the -shining veils of his poetry his creations make themselves seen and felt in -living shape, action, and motive. False touches and misplaced beauties are -indeed not wanting. For example, in the phrase - - "his erewhile timid lips grew bold - And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme," - -we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not infrequent in -his earliest verses. And in the call of the wicked brothers to Lorenzo-- - - "To-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount - To spur three leagues towards the Apennine. - Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count - His dewy rosary on the eglantine,"-- - -the last two lines are a beauty indeed, and of the kind most -characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as Leigh Hunt long ago pointed -out) misplaced in the mouths that utter it. Moreover the language of -_Isabella_ is still occasionally slipshod, and there are turns and -passages where we feel, as we felt so often in _Endymion_, that the poetic -will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or suggestion of the -rhyme. But these are the minor blemishes of a poem otherwise conspicuous -for power and charm. - -For his Italian story Keats chose an Italian metre, the octave stanza -introduced in English by Wyatt and Sidney, and naturalised before long by -Daniel, Drayton, and Edward Fairfax. Since their day, the stanza had been -little used in serious poetry, though Frere and Byron had lately revived -it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the purpose for which the -epigrammatic snap and suddenness of the closing couplet in truth best fit -it. Keats, however, contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles -the measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale of pathos. -Over the purely musical and emotional resources of his art he shows a -singular command in stanzas like that beginning, 'O Melancholy, linger -here awhile,' repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude of -the main narrative. And there is a brilliant alertness of imagination in -such episodical passages as that where he pauses to realize the varieties -of human toil contributing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. But the -true test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the essential -points and central moments of action and passion, imaginative vitality and -truth with beauty and charm. This test _Isabella_ admirably bears. For -instance, in the account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her -lover's mouldering corpse:-- - - "Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright - With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof - From the poor girl by magic of their light." - -With what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the story of the -apparition invested by this touch, and all its charnel horror and grimness -mitigated! Or again in the stanzas describing Isabella's actions at her -lover's burial place:-- - - "She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though - One glance did fully all its secrets tell; - Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know - Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well; - Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, - Like to a native lily of the dell: - Then with her knife, all sudden, she began - To dig more fervently than misers can. - - Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon - Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies; - She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, - And put it in her bosom, where it dries - And freezes utterly unto the bone - Those dainties made to still an infant's cries: - Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care, - But to throw back at times her veiling hair." - -The lines are not all of equal workmanship: but the scene is realised with -unerring vision. The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with -too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third -and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the -same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of -the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the -impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden -solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as -she begins to dig 'more fervently than misers can' (what a commentary on -the relative strength of passions might be drawn from this simple -text):--then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not -ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it -is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, -while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us -as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and -continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic -truth as well as grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the -privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often -combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a -limpid and flowing ease of narrative. Poetry had always come to Keats, as -he considered it ought to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now -that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which -his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers -of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true -imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school -seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay, -those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two -kinds of writing comparable. - -After the completion of _Isabella_ followed the Scotch tour, of which the -only poetic fruits of value were the lines on Meg Merrilies and those on -Fingal's Cave. Returning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother -mortally ill, Keats plunged at once into the most arduous poetic labour he -had yet undertaken. This was the composition of _Hyperion_[52]. The -subject had been long in his mind, and both in the text and the preface of -_Endymion_ he indicated his intention to attempt it. At first he thought -of the poem to be written as a 'romance': but under the influence of -_Paradise Lost_, and no doubt also considering the height and vastness of -the subject, his plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books. -His purpose was to sing the Titanomachia, or warfare of the earlier -Titanic dynasty with the later Olympian dynasty of the Greek gods; and in -particular one episode of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god -Hyperion and the assumption of his kingdom by Apollo. Critics, even -intelligent critics, sometimes complain that Keats should have taken this -and other subjects of his art from what they call the 'dead' mythology of -ancient Greece. As if that mythology could ever die: as if the ancient -fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things believed, into -the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put -on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, -as faiths, perish one after another: but each in passing away bequeaths -for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained -of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, -embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to -explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the -thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and -control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; -and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern -mind which is in so far dead and not they. One of the great symptoms of -returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, toward the close of the -last century, was its awakening to the forgotten charm of past modes of -faith and life. When men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke of -Greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms which showed that they -had never felt its power; just as, when they spoke of nature, it was in -set phrases that showed that they had never looked at her. On matters of -daily social experience the gifts of observation and of reason were -brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts of the time were thoughts -of the street, the mart, and the assembly. The human genius was for the -time being like some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused -to see or think of anything beyond them. At length resuming its march, it -emerged on open ground, where it fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest -the beauties of the earth and sky, and whence at the same time it could -turn back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning with new -clearness and a new emotion, here under cloud and rainbow the forests and -spired cities of the Middle Age, there in serener light the hills and -havens and level fanes of Hellas. - -The great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on this new phase of its -pilgrimage was Goethe, who with deliberate effort and self-discipline -climbed to heights commanding an equal survey over the mediaeval and the -classic past. We had in England had an earlier, shyer, and far less -effectual pioneer in Gray. As time went on, poet after poet arose and sang -more freely, one the glories of nature, another the enchantments of the -Middle Age, another the Greek beauty and joy of life. Keats when his time -came showed himself, all young and untutored as he was, freshly and -powerfully inspired to sing of all three alike. He does not, as we have -said, write of Greek things in a Greek manner. Something indeed in -_Hyperion_--at least in the first two books--he has caught from _Paradise -Lost_ of the high restraint and calm which was common to the Greeks and -Milton. But to realise how far he is in workmanship from the Greek purity -and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images, we -have only to think of his palace of Hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling -pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. This is the most sustained and -celebrated passage of the poem. Or let us examine one of its most -characteristic images from nature:-- - - "As when, upon a tranced summer night, - Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, - Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, - Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--." - -Not to the simplicity of the Greek, but to the complexity of the modern, -sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and express, by such a concourse of -metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which -a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of -the oaks among the other trees--their aspect of human venerableness--their -verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural -stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with -mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky[53]. - -But though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he sees it truly. The -Greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated English way he -writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas. For the -story of the war of Titans and Olympians he had nothing to guide him -except scraps from the ancient writers, principally Hesiod, as retailed by -the compilers of classical dictionaries; and from the scholar's point of -view his version, we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary, -mixing up Latin conceptions and nomenclature with Greek, and introducing -much new matter of his own invention. But as to the essential meaning of -that warfare and its result--the dethronement of an older and ruder -worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of -arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,--as -to this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with -more beauty and force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the -Second Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of -early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human, -what masterly justice of instinct does he show,--to take one point -only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate -sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices. Thus -of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:-- - - "There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines - When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise - Among immortals when a God gives sign, - With hushing finger, how he means to load - His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, - With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: - Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines." - -Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:-- - - "So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea, - Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, - But cogitation in his watery shades, - Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, - In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue - Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands." - -And once more, of Clymene followed by Enceladus in debate:-- - - "So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook - That, lingering along a pebbled coast, - Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, - And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice - Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: - The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves - In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, - Came booming thus." - -This second book of _Hyperion_, relating the council of the dethroned -Titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, where the solemn opening -vision of Saturn fallen is followed by the resplendent one of Hyperion -threatened in his 'lucent empire'; nor the intensity of the unfinished -third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the -afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. -But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to -my mind, quite on a level with the other two. - -With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal -incorrectness, _Hyperion_, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the -grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the -easiest and most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able to apply -himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. Partly this was -due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of -dawning passion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may -trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception -of _Endymion_: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial -to his powers in the task itself. When after letting the poem lie by -through the greater part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September -made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds explaining his -reasons as follows. "There were too many Miltonic inversions in -it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's -humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be -kept up." In the same connection he declares that Chatterton is the purest -writer in the English language. "He has no French idiom or particles, like -Chaucer; it is genuine English idiom in English words." In writing about -the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as -to Milton and Chatterton. - -The influence, and something of the majesty, of _Paradise Lost_ are in -truth to be found in _Hyperion_: and the debate of the fallen Titans in -the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the -fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. -Passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of -Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austerity with Keats's luxuriance -of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:--in -the matter of rhythm, Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's. -Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and -far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and -ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since -Milton,--beside that of Shelley's _Alastor_,--perhaps a little below that -of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and -the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as -Milton himself: but while of Milton's diction the characteristic colour is -derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with -the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is -rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme -refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a passage -of this kind:-- - - "Eden stretch'd her line - From Auran eastward to the royal towers - Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings, - Or where the sons of Eden long before - Dwelt in Telassar." - -But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this:-- - - "throughout all the isle - There was no covert, no retired cave - Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, - Though scarcely heard in many a green recess." - -After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical -note of Milton's style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative -pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and -constructions generally. Already in _Isabella_ Keats is to be found -attempting both notes, thus:-- - - "With duller steel than the Persean sword - They cut away no formless monster's head--." - -Similar Miltonic echoes occur in _Hyperion_, as in the introduction -already quoted to the speech of Oceanus: or again thus:-- - - "Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope - In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, - Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet - And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies." - -But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton's -technical manner as he seems to have supposed. Yet he had adopted more of -it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain. - -In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was going back to one of his -first loves in literature. What he says of Chatterton's words and idioms -seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by -the Bristol boy out of Kersey's _Dictionary_[54]. But it is true that -through that jargon can be discerned, in the Rowley poems, not only an -ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition, -but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats -had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to -us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we find him in fact tempted aside -on an excursion into the regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how -much of _Hyperion_ had been written when he laid it aside in January to -take up the composition of _St Agnes' Eve_, that unsurpassed example--nay, -must we not rather call it unequalled?--of the pure charm of coloured and -romantic narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt the -elemental grandeur of _Hyperion_, so neither does it approach the human -pathos and passion of _Isabella_. Its personages appeal to us, not so much -humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery and atmosphere -amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the -weakness, of modern romance,--its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the -mediaeval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at -all,--its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both -writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral -truth: and without these no great literature can exist. - -Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love -of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story -wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young -Lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into association with the old popular -belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her -lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian -stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as -it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of -construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the -great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and -concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza, -which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us -first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and -next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd -taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, -where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly -bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with -the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about -the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in -handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers -vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and -sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he -touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, -movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought -before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our -sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:-- - - "Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, - He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails - To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." - -Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the -poet strikes life:-- - - "The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, - Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, - With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts." - -The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out -their beauties in detail, he calls-- - - "Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes - As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--" - -a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination -of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile -drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of -the same stanza-- - - "A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings," - ---the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is -at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of -her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that -moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted glass as Keats -in this celebrated passage represents it. Let us be grateful for the -error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly -splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow -is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. When -Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their -lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks -straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the -wearer,--'her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties -beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare -sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own -natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far -countries whence they have been gathered-- - - "From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." - -If the unique charm of the _Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the richness and -vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions -of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go. -What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse, -who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die -quietly of age when their parts are over[55]: especially the debate of old -Angela with Porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the -stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, I think, at two -moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,-- - - "No uttered syllable, or, woe betide: - But to her heart, her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side:"-- - -and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and -contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:-- - - "'Ah Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now - Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear - Made tunable with every sweetest vow; - And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear; - How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear'." - -Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the 'growing faint' of Porphyro, and -in his 'warm unnerved arm,' we have a touch of that swooning abandonment -to which Keats's heroes are too subject. But it is the slightest -possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet -individually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of that date are -constantly overcome in like manner. And we may well pardon Porphyro his -weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady's -side in defiance of her 'whole bloodthirsty race,' and will bear her -safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 'beyond the southern -moors' that he has prepared for her[56]. - -Nearly allied with the _Eve of St Agnes_ is the fragment in the four-foot -ballad metre, which Keats composed on the parallel popular belief -connected with the eve of St Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at -Chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Winchester -six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, seems farther to -suggest associations with Canterbury. Impressions of all these three -cathedral cities which Keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture -of which the fragment consists. I have said picture, but there are two: -one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and -Sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her -quaint fire-lit chamber. Each in its way is of an admirable vividness and -charm. The belief about St Mark's Eve was that a person stationed near a -church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church -the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the -ensuing year. Keats's fragment breaks off before the story is well -engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to -incidents illustrating this belief. Neither is it clear whether he -intended to place them in mediaeval or in relatively modern times. The -demure Protestant air which he gives the Sunday streets, the Oriental -furniture and curiosities of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate -the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his -archaeology--witness, for instance, the line which tells how 'the long -carpets rose along the gusty floor' in the _Eve of St Agnes_. The interest -of the _St Mark's_ fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the -promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and -charm of workmanship: and second, its relation to and influence on later -English poetry. Keats in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the -feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The indoor scene -of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and -the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is -perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply -impressed and interested),--of his pictures even more than of his poems: -while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and -cadences of Mr Morris in some tale of the _Earthly Paradise_:-- - - "The city streets were clean and fair - From wholesome drench of April rains; - And on the western window panes - The chilly sunset faintly told - Of unmatured green valleys cold, - Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, - Of rivers new with springtide sedge." - -Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _La -Belle Dame sans Merci_. The title is taken from that of a poem by Alain -Chartier,--the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. -of France,--of which an English translation used to be attributed to -Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This title -had caught Keats's fancy, and in the _Eve of St Agnes_ he makes Lorenzo -waken Madeline by playing beside her bed-- - - "an ancient ditty, long since mute, - In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci'." - -The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the -spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more -to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with -Provence[57]. Keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but -rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the mediaeval world of -enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when -either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a -bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his -own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery -expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world -symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of -whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a -weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild -yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound -and sense, make of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ the master-piece, not only -among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece -must be chosen) among them all. - -Before finally giving up _Hyperion_ Keats had conceived and written, -during his summer months at Shanklin and Winchester, another narrative -poem on a Greek subject: but one of those where Greek life and legend come -nearest to the mediaeval, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and -witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of passion. I speak, of -course, of _Lamia_, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and -victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him -by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the -scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats had found the germ of -the story, quoted from Philostratus, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. -In versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them, -however, not as in _Endymion_, but in a manner founded on that of Dryden, -with a free use of the Alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and -the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the measure -as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe -and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its -way as the victorious march of Dryden himself. Here is an example where -the poetry of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:-- - - "Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, goddess, see - Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! - For pity do not this sad heart belie-- - Even as thou vanishest so I shall die. - Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! - To thy far wishes will thy streams obey: - Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, - Alone they can drink up the morning rain: - Though a descended Pleiad, will not one - Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune - Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?" - -And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:-- - - "As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, - Throughout her palaces imperial, - And all her populous streets and temples lewd, - Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, - To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. - Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, - Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, - Companion'd or alone; while many a light - Flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals, - And threw their moving shadows on the walls, - Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade - Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade." - -No one can deny the truth of Keats's own criticism on _Lamia_ when he -says, "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 sensation." -There is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns -itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the -touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the -transformation itself. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat -disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode -of Hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the -merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and -beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This -thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine -melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give -_Lamia_ almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats's narrative -poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others -too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for -instance that of the palace reared by Lamia's magic; which will not bear -comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet's building. -And it has reflective passages, as that in the first book beginning, 'Let -the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and the first fifteen lines of -the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at -its best, Keats relapses into something too like Leigh Hunt's and his own -early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows at the -same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language. -The positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been -attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the _Eve of -St Agnes_ we had to 'brook' tears for to check or forbear them, in -_Hyperion_ 'portion'd' for 'proportion'd;' eyes that 'fever out;' a -chariot 'foam'd along.' Some of these verbal licences possess a force that -makes them pass; but not so in _Lamia_ the adjectives 'psalterian' and -'piazzian,' the verb 'to labyrinth,' and the participle 'daft,' as if from -an imaginary active verb meaning to daze. - -In the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is moreover a -weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much -importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him -uttering. But the doctrine he sets forth in _Lamia_ is one which from the -reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain -consistency:-- - - "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, as it erewhile made - The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade." - -Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in _The Rainbow_: but -one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which Keats would have done -well to stand, is preached by Wordsworth in his famous Preface. - -Passing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of Keats's work -during this period--it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly -occupied in the spring months of 1819, from the completion of _St Agnes' -Eve_ at Chichester in January until the commencement of _Lamia_ and _Otho -the Great_ at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats constitute a class -apart in English literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived -from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he -calls the 'roundelay' of the Indian maiden in _Endymion_ he had made his -most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching -Shelley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in -touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are -comparatively simple and regular in form. They are written in a strain -intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the -declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate -with the idea of an ode. Of the five composed in the spring of 1819, two, -those on _Psyche_ and the _Grecian Urn_, are inspired by the old Greek -world of imagination and art; two, those on _Melancholy_ and the -_Nightingale_, by moods of the poet's own mind; while the fifth, that on -_Indolence_, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations. - -In the _Psyche_, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching -those of Spenser's nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) Keats recurs -to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in -the opening poem of his first book, beginning-- - - "So felt he, who first told how Psyche went - On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment." - -Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by -cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like -touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by -the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are -disclosed--'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other -poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm -of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all -his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time -habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his 'sea-shouldering whales,' he -is now in his own manner the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden -in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'moss-lain Dryads' and -the 'soft-conched ear' of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on -us a little with a sense of oddity, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in -_Lamia_. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn -of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage -of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of -antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the -metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:-- - - "Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane - In some untrodden region of my mind, - Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, - Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind." - -Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself -swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold -of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his ear charmed by the -glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated -vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the -invocation and the imagery. - -Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the -_Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the -_Psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two -arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which -Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the -sestet, and in one instance--the ode to Melancholy--expanding it into a -septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had -set the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of -ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured -images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art -to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which -flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of -antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men -or gods are these, what maidens loth,' &c. The second and third stanzas -express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences -between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety -and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange -permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even -richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the -incomparable choice of pictures,-- - - "What little town by river or sea shore, - Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, - Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?" - -In the answering lines-- - - "And, little town, thy streets for evermore - Will silent be; and not a soul to tell - Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--" - -in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the -arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, -and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a -necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own -compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can -easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice -it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward -between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to -the future, to remain,-- - - "in midst of other woe - Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, - Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--" - -thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason -and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of -Keats's temper--an immutable law. - -It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied -Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland -House an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is -described in his fourth stanza[58]: and of course no subject is commoner -in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. But the two -subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of -ancient art: and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of -sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him -only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi's etchings. Lord -Holland's urn is duly figured in the _Vasi e Candelabri_ of that admirable -master. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond of what he -calls-- - - "the pleasant flow - Of words at opening a portfolio:" - -and in the scene of sacrifice in _Endymion_ (Book L, 136-163) we may -perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as -well as an anticipation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the -subject in the ode. - -The ode _On Indolence_ stands midway, not necessarily in date of -composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two Greek and the two -personal odes, as I have above distinguished them. In it Keats again calls -up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate -the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of Love, Ambition, -and Poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. This ode, less highly -wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record -of a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted -intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an -agreeable physical languor. Well had it been for him had such moods come -more frequently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons of men, -the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and -unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled to bursting. One of the -attributes he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is a - - "sciential brain - To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain." - -In the fragmentary ode _On Melancholy_ (which has no proper beginning, its -first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of Beaumont and of -Milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the -habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a -characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:-- - - "Aye, in the very Temple of Delight - Veil'd Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, - Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue - Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine: - His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, - And be among her cloudy trophies hung." - -The same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds -expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet's feeling for -nature and romance, in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Just as his Grecian urn -was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the -particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that -he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some -far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow -her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he -makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. Then -follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations -which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of -Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her -power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to -the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, -by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of -the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the thought -of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome -now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song--and here, by a -breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts -the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with -the permanence of the song-bird's life, meaning the life of the type. This -last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those -memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza -closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his -own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he -returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest -dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes rank beside the -_Grecian Urn_ in the other. Neither is strictly faultless, but such -revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch -that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to -faultlessness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. Both -are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. Let us -therefore place here, as an example of this class of Keats's work, the -ode _To Autumn_, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of -his quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, no such -far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but -in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. In the first stanza -the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in -words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at -all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the -middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have -an exquisite congruity and lightness. - - "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, - Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; - Conspiring with him how to load and bless - With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; - To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, - And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; - To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells - With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, - And still more, later flowers for the bees, - Until they think warm days will never cease, - For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. - - Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? - Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find - Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, - Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; - Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, - Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook - Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: - And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep - Steady thy laden head across a brook; - Or by a cider-press, with patient look, - Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. - - 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; - Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn - Among the river sallows, borne aloft - Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; - And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; - Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft - The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; - And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." - -To pass from our poet's work at this time in the several fields of -romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pass -from a region of happy and assured conquest to one of failure, though of -failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been -in store for him. At his age no man has ever been a master in the drama: -even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the -difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in -which Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot -contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to -his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted. -He brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we -have seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, and a mind -prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while -Brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. But these -things were not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not yet -developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of -the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in -conception. Keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing -with all the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the effect only -of puppets inexpertly agitated: Otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and -fatherly affection, Ludolph of febrile passion and vacillation, Erminia of -maidenly purity, Conrad and Auranthe of ambitious lust and treachery. At -least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. From -that point Keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence, -shows a great improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the violent -kind affected by the old English drama, in the disclosure of the body of -Auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly -imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his -frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Marlowe, not only by their -pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses -expressed in them. Of the second historical play, _King Stephen_, which -Keats began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to afford -matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he finished are not only marked -by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a -spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not -shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his -capacity had not this fragment been preserved. - -But in the mingling of his soul's and body's destinies it had been -determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be -suffered to ripen farther upon earth. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn occupations: The _Cap and Bells_: - Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing despondency--Visit of George Keats to - England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally in the Spring--Summer in - Kentish Town--Publication of the _Lamia_ volume--Relapse--Ordered - South--Voyage to Italy--Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October - 1819-Feb. 1821.] - - -We left Keats at Winchester, with _Otho_, _Lamia_, and the _Ode to Autumn_ -just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and -take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting -imagination magnify and passion exasperate them as heretofore. At his -request Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in -Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came on the 8th of October -to take up his quarters. But alas! his blood proved traitor to his will: -and the plan of life and literary work in London broke down at once on -trial. The gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at -Winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a -distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he -went to Hampstead--'into the fire'--and in a moment the flames had seized -him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his -mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was -utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he -found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send -her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, "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.... 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 absorb'd me." A three days' visit at her -mother's house, followed by another of a day or two at the Dilkes', ended -in his giving up all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently, -of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at Hampstead under -Brown's roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. He writes with -a true foreboding: "I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast -the die for Love or Death.--I have no patience with anything else." - -It was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to -Wentworth Place in October, 1819, begins the melancholy closing chapter of -Keats's history. Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the -flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last kept -smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the -first began from this time forth to sink. Not that he was idle during the -ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked -both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. For the present he -determined not to publish _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and the other poems written -since _Endymion_. He preferred to await the result of Brown's attempt to -get _Otho_ brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success -in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the -meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in -estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold -his friend's name. The great hope of the authors was that Kean would see -an opportunity for himself in the part of Ludolph. In this they were not -disappointed: the play was accepted: but Elliston, the manager, proposing -to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, Keats and Brown -objected to the delay, and about Christmas transferred the offer of their -MS. to Covent Garden, where Macready, under Harris's management, was at -this time beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while -returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped. - -In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which Keats bent his -hopes. "One of my ambitions," he had written to Bailey from Winchester, -"is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has -done in acting." And now, in a letter to Mr Taylor of Nov. 17, he says -that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he -does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he -may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he -conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to -diffuse the colouring of _St Agnes' Eve_ throughout a poem in which -character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." Two or -three such poems would be, he thinks, the best _gradus_ to the _Parnassum -altissimum_ of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment -engaged on a task of a different nature. "As the marvellous is the most -enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been -endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her manage -for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all." The piece to -which Keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the _Cap -and Bells_, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing -of the autumn days immediately following their return to Wentworth Place, -Brown says:-- - - "By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem - in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had not - composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It was to - be published under the feigned authorship of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' and - to bear the title of the _Cap and Bells_, or, which he preferred, the - _Jealousies_. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He wrote it with - the greatest facility; in one instance I remember having copied (for I - copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner[59]." - -Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the most judicious -adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the _Cap and -Bells_ to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly -flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to Keats's nature. As long -as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of -pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable[60], and he -was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. Moreover the spirit of -poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the -spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of -the metrical romances of the Italian Renaissance, and again, with -unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early cantos of _Don -Juan_. It was partly the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great -student of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent Italian -studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron's success, that now -induced Keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. Having already -employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the _ottava rima_ of -the Italians, in his serious poem of _Isabella_, he now, by what seems an -odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave Spenserian -stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. -Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his -choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to -gay with a light hand, and the movement of the _Cap and Bells_ has much of -his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not -a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and -Brown's invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a -fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being -meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all -that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the -emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his -affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the -Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to -weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the -fragment of _St Mark's Eve_ at the beginning of the year,--the tale of an -English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through -the reading of a magic book. With this and other purely fanciful elements -of the story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day. -It was in this year, 1819, that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and -his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject: -and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the -scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. The -references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the _Cap and Bells_ -are general rather than particular, although here and there individual -names and characters are glanced at: as when 'Esquire Biancopany' stands -manifestly, as Mr Forman has pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social -and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. As -Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for -this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the Byronic wit and devilry his -raillery seems but child's play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful -and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in -passages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination -becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and -colour,--but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time. - -Besides his morning task in Brown's company on the _Cap and Bells_, Keats -had other work on hand during this November and December. "In the -evenings," writes Brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate -apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of -_Hyperion_ into the form of a Vision." The result of this attempt, which -has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in Keats's -history. We have seen how, in the previous August, he had grown -discontented with the style and diction of _Hyperion_, as being too -artificial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he took the -poem up again[61], and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly, -it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading, -partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which -were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate the fall of the -Titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision -revealed and interpreted to him by a goddess of the fallen race. The -reader remembers how he had broken off his work on _Hyperion_ at the point -where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with the inspiration of -her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of -mythology he had lately bought[62], he now identifies this Greek -Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being -possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome -was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess -and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove -or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a -slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval -temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet -see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an -image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty, -he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from -her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn. -Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an -irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself -conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn's -overthrow. 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' &c.,--from this point -Keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his _Vision_ the text of the -original _Hyperion_; with alterations which are in almost all cases for -the worse. Neither does the new portion of his work well match the old. -Side by side with impressive passages, it contains others where both -rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more -on single lines and passages, and less on sustained effects. Keats has -indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the -opening of the _Vision_, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps -conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the -priestess when she removes her veils. But the especial interest of the -poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his -mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the -poet's character and lot. When Moneta bids him mount the steps to her -side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish -utterly where he stands. In fact he all but dies before he reaches the -stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the -ordeal:-- - - "None can usurp this height," returned that shade, - "But those to whom the miseries of the world - Are misery, and will not let them rest. - All else who find a haven in the world, - Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, - If by a chance into this fane they come, - Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half." - "Are there not thousands in the world," said I, - Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, - "Who love their fellows even to the death, - Who feel the giant agony of the world, - And more, like slaves to poor humanity, - Labour for mortal good? I sure should see - Other men here, but I am here alone." - "Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," - Rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; - They seek no wonder but the human face, - No music but a happy-noted voice: - They come not here, they have no thought to come; - And thou art here, for thou art less than they. - What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, - To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, - A fever of thyself: think of the earth: - What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? - What haven? Every creature hath its home, - Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, - Whether his labours be sublime or low-- - The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: - Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. - Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, - Such things as thou art are admitted oft - Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, - And suffer'd in these temples--"[63]. - -Tracing the process of Keats's thought through this somewhat obscure -imagery,--the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws -himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is -lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden): -awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with -Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly -above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow -men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to -approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only -on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. And -even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of -common men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the human mission -and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. Almost from the first -dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry -towards-- - - "a nobler life, - Where I may find the agonies, the strife - Of human hearts." - -What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet's lot even -at its best. - - "Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve," - ---through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when this bitter cry -broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before, -when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of -the poetic life:-- - - "These are the living pleasures of the bard, - But richer far posterity's award. - What shall he murmur with his latest breath, - When his proud eye looks through the film of death?"-- - -His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the -spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh. -The wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his -sensations and emotions into pain--at once darkening the shadow of -impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding -instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied -cravings of his passion. In verses at this time addressed, though -doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones -like this:-- - - "Where shall I learn to get my peace again?"-- - - --"O for some sunny spell - To dissipate the shadows of this hell":-- - -or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:-- - - "Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, - Withhold no atom's atom or I die, - Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, - Forget, in the mist of idle misery, - Life's purposes,--the palate of the mind - Losing its gust, and my ambition blind." - -That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does -not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible in the present state of his -fortunes. "However selfishly I may feel," he had written to her some -months earlier, "I am sure I could never act selfishly." The Brawnes on -their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and -independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly -be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats's sufferings, -disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate -comrade Brown. Without understanding the cause, Brown was not slow to -perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances Keats had -given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen -him against troubles of imagination, and that he was not and would not -allow himself to be unhappy. - - "I quickly perceived," writes Brown, "that he was more so than I had - feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, - frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great - uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do - no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding - that word however.... All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge, - was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, - or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend - could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too - thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. - Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, - a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by - accident, and without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be - warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise - never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could - induce him to break his word when once given,--which was a difficulty. - Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional - proof of his rooted misery"[64]. - -Some of the same symptoms were observed by Haydon, and have been described -by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting -another's weakness with his own strength[65]. To his friends in general -Keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice -that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, Severn, at this time -competed for and carried off (December 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of -the Academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for -several years. The subject was Spenser's 'Cave of Despair.' We hear of -Keats flinging out in anger from among a company of elder artists where -the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an -appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture,--adding, however, -parenthetically from his troubled heart, "You had best put me into your -Cave of Despair." In December his letters to his sister make mention -several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made -to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, -that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in -connection with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, George -Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his -wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first -trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of -the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to -England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey, -of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers -from their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, during -which John made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. "He was -not the same being," wrote George, looking back on the time some years -afterwards; "although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, -he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the -reviving custom of venting his griefs." In a letter which the poet wrote -to his sister-in-law while her husband was in England, he attempts to keep -up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls -involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. Of -his work he says nothing, and it is clear from Brown's narrative that -both his morning and his evening task--the _Cap and Bells_ and the -_Vision_--had been dropped some time before this[66], and left in the -fragmentary state in which we possess them. - -George left for Liverpool on Friday Jan. 28. A few days later Keats was -seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set -up in his constitution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which -recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated. - - "One night," writes Brown--it was on the Thursday Feb. 3--"at eleven - o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce - intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible[67]; it - therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the - matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the - outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but - now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and - instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my - request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate - remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On - entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he - slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from my mouth.' - I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the - sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After - regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of - countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know the colour of - that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived in that - colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.' I ran - for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left - him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep." - -Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue -truly. He survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life -was but a life-in-death. How many are there among us to whom such -_lacrymae rerum_ come not home? Happy at least are they whose lives this -curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses -past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,--who know not -what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under Mediterranean -palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest -and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the -usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would -not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering -regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous -prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to -see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a -week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed, -and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, which his -good feelings wrung from him, that under the circumstances he ought to -release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he -became quieter and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he wrote -often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his -men friends: among them one to James Rice, which contains this often -quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:-- - - "I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed - a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering - under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify that - acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had - lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that - illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my - mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive - things in a truer light),--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 super-human fancy." - -The greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, Keats said at another -time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the -literary merits of the Bible he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the -Hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. What he wants to see again, -he writes now further from his sickbed, are 'the simple flowers of our -spring.' And in the course of April, after being nearly two months a -prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as -early as the twenty-fifth of March, we hear of him going into London, to -the private view of Haydon's 'Entry into Jerusalem,' where the painter -tells how he found him and Hazlitt in a corner, 'really rejoicing.' -Keats's friends, in whose minds his image had always been associated with -the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring -themselves to believe but that he would recover. Brown had arranged to -start early in May on a second walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor -actually advised Keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own -state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the smack as far as -Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in -Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the -sake of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer -Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks -during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking -advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive -on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been -strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even -that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin -(meaning begin again) soon on the _Cap and Bells_. But in fact the only -work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight -revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at -last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing -_Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, _Hyperion_, and the _Odes_. Of -the poems written during Keats's twenty months of inspiration from March -1818 to October 1819, none of importance are omitted except the _Eve of St -Mark_, the _Ode on Indolence_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The first -Keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: La -Belle Dame sans Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical _The -Indicator_, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on -May 20, 1820. _Hyperion_, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at -their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original -shape, the poet's friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they -thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came out in the first week -of July. An admirably kind and discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in -the _Indicator_ at the beginning of August[68]: and in the same month -Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_ for the first time broke silence in -Keats's favour. The impression made on the more intelligent order of -readers may be inferred from the remarks of Crabb Robinson in his -_Diaries_ for the following December[69]. "My book has had good success -among the literary people," wrote Keats a few weeks after its appearance, -"and I believe has a moderate sale." - -But had the success been even far greater than it was, Keats was in no -heart and no health for it to cheer him. Passion with lack of hope were -working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards -recovery. The relapse was not long delayed. Fresh haemorrhages occurring on -the 22nd and 23rd of June, he moved from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to -be nursed by the Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here everything -was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but -all in vain: he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards -avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a drive -in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a -flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing -to Fanny Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but -breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself -chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart -is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of -half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. "Hamlet's heart was full of such -misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a nunnery, go, go!'" -Keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, 'a -fever of himself:' and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but -his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his -betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words -that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory[70]. - -Such at this time was Keats's condition that the slightest shock unmanned -him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or -stranger. After he had been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened -on the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note -from Fanny Brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. This -circumstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to -stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to -his old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, would not suffer -this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and -tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some -mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has -told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with -white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic -flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I[71]." Ever since -his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that -a winter in England would be too much for him, and had been trying to -bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to Italy. The Shelleys had -heard through the Gisbornes of Keats's relapse, and Shelley now wrote in -terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come -and take up his residence with them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats -immediately after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain -tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Shelleys' friendship, but as -to the _Cenci_, which had just been sent him, and generally as to -Shelley's and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much -to the purpose to say. - -As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this time made up his -mind to try it, "as a soldier marches up to a battery." His hope was that -Brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend -in the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for Keats's -departure was fast approaching while Brown still remained in ignorance of -his purpose. In the meantime another companion offered himself in the -person of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the -Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with -a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn -accordingly took passage for Naples on board the ship 'Maria Crowther,' -which sailed from London on Sept. 18[72]. Several of the friends who loved -Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among them Mr -Taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase -for L100 of the copyright of _Endymion_. As soon as the ill news of his -health reached Brown in Scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way -south, and for that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in the -Thames on the same evening as the 'Maria Crowther' sailed: so that the two -friends lay on that night within hail of one another off Gravesend -unawares. - -The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn was struck by his -vigour of appetite and apparent cheerfulness. The fever of travel and -change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, -and in Keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to -those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to -raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time -afterwards. Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten -days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats -landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board -ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter -confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever -confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his -passion, he says 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 wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these -pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these -pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, -are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever." - -On the night when Keats wrote these words (Sept. 28) Brown was staying -with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly -missed seeing each other once more. The ship putting to sea again, still -with adverse winds, there came next to Keats that day of momentary calm -and lightening of the spirit of which Severn has left us the record, and -the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of -his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near -Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of -which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one -initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same -night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well; -placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a -_Lover's Complaint_, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of Shakespeare's -poems which had been given him by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and -under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and -feeling:-- - - "Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 cold 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 stedfast, still unchangeable, - Pillow'd 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." - -These were Keats's last verses. With the single exception of the sonnet -beginning 'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,' composed -probably immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only -love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no -death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty -and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. - -Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent -storm in the Bay of Biscay; and Severn waking at night, and finding the -water rushing through their cabin, called out to Keats "half fearing he -might be dead," and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first -line of Arne's long-popular song from _Artaxerxes_--'Water parted from the -sea.' As the storm abated Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _Don -Juan_, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and -presently flung the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed: -after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the -dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in -order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage -of over four weeks, the 'Maria Crowther' arrived in the Bay of Naples, and -was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says Keats, he -summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole -course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was -among his fellow-passengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of -cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly -preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his -own. He admits as much in writing from Naples harbour to Mrs Brawne: and -in the same letter says, "O what an account I could give you of the Bay of -Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a -spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly." The effort he -constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world -of colour and classic beauty about him, partly imposed on Severn; but in a -letter he wrote to Brown from Naples on Nov. 1, soon after their landing, -his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:-- - - "I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh God! God! God! - Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me - like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my - head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear - her.... Oh Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me - that the human heart is capable of so much misery." - -At Naples Keats and Severn stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and received -much kindness and hospitality from a brother of Miss Cotterill's who was -there to meet her. The political state and servile temper of the -people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms -imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous -summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the -theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance -that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He had -received there another letter from Shelley, who since he last wrote had -read the _Lamia_ volume, and was full of generous admiration for -_Hyperion_. Shelley now warmly renewed his invitation to Keats to come to -Pisa. But his and Severn's plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive -thither (apparently in the second week of November) Keats suffered -seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in -the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered -for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which -Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di -Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinita -dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were -left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and -at first they were ill served by the _trattoria_ from which they got their -meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the -dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says -Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first cares was to get a -piano, since nothing soothed Keats's pain so much as music. For a while -the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of -seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these -alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian -close by. The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the -air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn's -absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In -their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline -Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but -not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who -was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them -change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they -would ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working among the -ruins. - -It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at Rome began reading -a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to -himself:-- - - "Misera me! sollievo a me non resta - Altro che 'l pianto, _ed il pianto e delitto_." - -Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful. -His thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on -the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and -wrote encouragingly to his friends in England; and on Nov. 30 Keats -himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less despondent than before. But -suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. On Dec. 10 came a -relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Haemorrhage followed haemorrhage -on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes -the most piteous and distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his -friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to -have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn's -refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his -ardent imagination and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of pain in -Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but -above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would -bring upon his friend. "He explained to me the exact procedure of his -gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon -the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued -attendance on him." Severn gently persisting in refusal, Keats for a while -fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example -of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. In -religion Keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting -Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to -and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the -behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the -power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to -him from Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, strove to pass the -remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy. - -By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, -partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of -the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to -combat it. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then -were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous -kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr -Ewing. At one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in -danger of actual destitution, till a remittance from Mr Taylor arrived -just in time to save them. The devotion and resource of Severn were -infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium -or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and -his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with "beating -about in the tempest of his mind;" and once and again some fresh -remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, -would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the -first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, -one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his -companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite reading was -still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked -Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for -nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, -himself from thoughts of fame. "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing -over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he -gave the words for his epitaph:--"here lies one whose name was writ in -water." Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to -speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual -question to the doctor when he came in was, "Doctor, when will this -posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned to ask it neither -physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at -all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing -unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate to the -last, "his generous concern for me," says Severn, "in my isolated position -at Rome was one of his greatest cares." His response to kindness was -irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with -him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to -fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. "To remedy this -one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a -lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be -conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found -the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while -doubting suddenly cried out, 'Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy -lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'" And again "Poor Keats has -me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens -his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close -gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep." - -Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the -watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations -to write them down. Life held out for two months and a half after the -relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing -near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes -Severn, "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." Three days later his body was -carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his -story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his -sake and Shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English race -for ever. It was but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in -their last resting-place beside his friend[73]. - - - - -CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius. - - -The touching circumstances of Keats's illness and death at Rome aroused -naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous -mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy -was Shelley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics -had contributed to Keats's sufferings, and believing that they had killed -him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of -passionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that -double inspiration Shelley wrote,-- - - "And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres." - -As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, _Adonais_ is unsurpassed -in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and -the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is -perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley's art: while -its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most -lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the -elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his -character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the -same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than -that reached by Shelley, in the well-known stanza of _Don Juan_. In regard -to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. -When the _Edinburgh_ praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the -Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:--"No more Keats, I -entreat:--flay him alive;--if some of you don't, I must skin him myself." -Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he -turns against the latter, and cries:--"I would not be the person who wrote -that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world." In the -_Don Juan_ passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at -the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath. - -Taken together with the notion of 'Johnny Keats' to which _Blackwood_ and -the _Quarterly_ had previously given currency, the _Adonais_ and the _Don -Juan_ passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of -Keats's character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction -had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was 'as -like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,' did anything effectual to set his -memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the -end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been -quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography -George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but -against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the -hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had -unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication -between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats's -friends in England took George's part, disposed under the circumstances -to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to -superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his -want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his -occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at -one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse -collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them. -The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary -skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the -poet's friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects -not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats's -death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,--the -Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us -all,--and with help from nearly all Keats's surviving friends, and by the -grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet -in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every -student is familiar. - -Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can -with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, -inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with -pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for -pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 'exquisite sense of -the luxurious': and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which -he describes as his 'horrid morbidity of temperament.' The greater his -credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and -that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued -him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way -when he speaks of the 'violence of his temperament, continually smothered -up.' Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during -the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but -that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such -generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct -and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely -better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, -indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the -weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when -the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, -as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,--not indeed, so far as -we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of -the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of -trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of -self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, -he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences -preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his -fortunes justified. - -In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for -manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his -friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have -heard little in this history[74], wrote while the poet lay dying: "Keats -must get himself again, Severn, if but for me--I cannot afford to lose -him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats." The following -is from a letter of Brown written also during his illness:--"he is -present to me every where and at all times,--he now seems sitting here at -my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I -never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[75]." Elsewhere, -speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:--"while I waited on -him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance -of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as -absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like -this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me[76]:" and we know in fact how -the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's -death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord -Houghton's book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to -thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius I did not, -and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the _Man_[77]." The -points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high -good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for -many. "He had a soul of noble integrity," says Bailey: "and his common -sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, -in the best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of -sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very -intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, -requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it -nothing,--but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to -friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when -genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the -ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, -then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what -his companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest friend," cries -Reynolds, "the most loveable associate,--the deepest listener to the -griefs and distresses of all around him,--'That ever lived in this tide of -times[78].'" To the same effect Haydon:--"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 had a -kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who -wanted it." And again Bailey:-- - - "With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John - Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one - particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his - letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his - conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor - frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man - I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any - act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he - rose into sudden and animated indignation[79]." - -Lastly, "he had no fears of self," says George Keats, "through -interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and -without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, -defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and -purse." - -In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must assert his own -superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over -Keats's dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, -idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks of the poet's -"want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never -for two days did he know his own intentions," his criticism is deserving -of more attention. This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in -Keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He -acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." What he means is -no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in -regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in -regard to himself. "The Celtic instability," a reader may perhaps surmise -who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. Whether the quality -was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar -complexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression in character -of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, -namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as -was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the -order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own -personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised -clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility -to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical -consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. - - "As to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(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. - 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.... 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." - -"Even now," he says on another occasion, "I am perhaps not speaking from -myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live." Keats was often -impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. "I would call the head -and top of those who have a proper self," he says, "men of power": and it -is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, -that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of -thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent -of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all -intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself -the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of -what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:-- - - "For the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic - passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in - the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man - does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and - deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, - and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry - that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to - put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and - unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul." - -This is but one of many passages in which Keats proclaims the necessity, -for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His -critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise -of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the -foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware -that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, -of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its -elements existed:--"I have loved," as he says, "the principle of beauty in -all things." His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean, -including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the -soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long -enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their -manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit -of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the -faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to -divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the -Middle Age,--would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the -mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to -illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life? - -My belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the -height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief period between -its first effervescence and its exhaustion,--from the glowing humanity of -his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of -his own consciousness and his friends' experience, he was accustomed to -live in the lives of others,--from the gleams of true greatness of mind -which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and -pleasantry of his familiar letters,--from all our evidences, in a word, as -to what he was as well as from what he did,--I think it probable that by -power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shaksperean -spirit that has lived since Shakspere; the true Marcellus, as his first -biographer has called him, of the realm of English song; and that in his -premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something -like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living -successors, as Lord Tennyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have -formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the -banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really -adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? In a final -estimate of any writer's work, we must take into account not what he might -have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats, -the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with -fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we -can think, indeed, of the pathos of _Isabella_, but of that alone, as -equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the _Hymn to Pan_ -and the _Ode to a Nightingale_, with the glow of romance colour in _St -Agnes' Eve_, the weirdness of romance sentiment in _La Belle Dame Sans -Merci_, the conflict of elemental force with fate in _Hyperion_, the -revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the _Ode on a Grecian -Urn_ and the fragment of an _Ode to Maia_. - -It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who -have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence -been operative. First on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling and -informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and -also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. And -secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of -execution--a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never -cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he -speaks of 'loading every rift of a subject with ore.' We may define it as -the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of -phrase. A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that -tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline,-- - - "But to her heart her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side." - -The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is -the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every -touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line -describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of -suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the -emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on -ourselves. In so far as Keats has taught other poets really to write like -this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,--but not so when -for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of -brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. The first -considerable writer among Keats's successors on whom his example took -effect was Hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. The -dominant poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly -influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed -the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal degrees. After or -together with Coleridge, Keats has also contributed most, among English -writers, to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group. -Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the -Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between -the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, -of our own day. - -Such, I think, is Keats's historic place in English literature. What his -place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned -from their own lips. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, -but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines -immortally. - - -THE END. - - - - -APPENDIX. - - -p. 2, note 1. As to the exact date of Keats's birth the evidence is -conflicting. He was christened at St Botolph's, Bishopsgate, Dec. 18, -1795, and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register (which I am -informed is in the handwriting of the rector, Dr Conybeare) is a note -stating that he was born Oct. 31. The date is given accordingly without -question by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. I. p. xlviii). But it seems -certain that Keats himself and his family believed his birthday to have -been Oct. 29. Writing on that day in 1818, Keats says, "this is my -birthday." Brown (in Houghton MSS.) gives the same day, but only as on -hearsay from a lady to whom Keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as -to the year. Lastly, in the proceedings in _Rawlings v. Jennings_, Oct. 29 -is again given as his birthday, in the affidavit of one Anne Birch, who -swears that she knew his father and mother intimately. The entry in the St -Botolph's register is probably the authority to be preferred.--Lower -Moorfields was the space now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the London -Institution, together with the east side of Finsbury Pavement.--The births -of the younger brothers are in my text given rightly for the first time, -from the parish registers of St Leonard's, Shoreditch; where they were all -three christened in a batch on Sept. 24, 1801. The family were at that -date living in Craven Street. - - -p. 2, note 2. Brown (Houghton MSS.) says simply that Thomas Keats was a -'native of Devon.' His daughter, Mrs Llanos, tells me she remembers -hearing as a child that he came from the Land's End. Persons of the name -are still living in Plymouth. - - -p. 5, note 2. The total amount of the funds paid into Court by the -executors under Mr Jennings's will (see Preface, p. viii) was L13160. -19_s._ 5_d._ - - -p. 11, note 1, and p. 70, note 1. Of the total last mentioned, there came -to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other legatees who -predeceased her) sums amounting to L9343. 2_s._ In the Chancery -proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by Mrs Jennings for the -benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but only its general purport; -whence it appears that the sum she made over to Messrs Sandell and Abbey -in trust for them amounted approximately to L8000, and included all the -reversions fallen or still to fall in as above mentioned. The balance it -is to be presumed she retained for her own support (she being then 74). - - -p. 17, note 1. The following letter written by Mr Abbey to Mr Taylor the -publisher, under April 18, 1821, soon after the news of Keats's death -reached England, speaks for itself. The letter is from Woodhouse MSS. B. - - "Sir, - - I beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the 30th ult. - respecting the late Mr Jno. Keats. - - I am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my - controul, and acted contrary to my advice, I cannot interfere with his - affairs. - - I am, Sir, - Yr. mo. Hble St., - RICHD. ABBEY." - - -p. 34, note 1. The difficulty of determining the exact date and place of -Keats's first introduction to Hunt arises as follows.--Cowden Clarke -states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in Leigh Hunt's -cottage at Hampstead. Hunt in his _Autobiography_ says it was 'in the -spring of the year 1816' that he went to live at Hampstead in the cottage -in question. Putting these two statements together, we get the result -stated as probable in the text. But on the other hand there is the -strongly Huntian character of Keats's _Epistle_ to G. F. Mathew, dated -November 1815, which would seem to indicate an earlier acquaintance (see -p. 31). Unluckily Leigh Hunt himself has darkened counsel on the point by -a paragraph inserted in the last edition of his _Autobiography_, as -follows:--(Pref. no. 7, p. 257) "It was not at Hampstead that I first saw -Keats. It was at York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote -part of the _Indicator_, and he resided with me while in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the -curious in such things, among whom I am one." The student must not be -misled by this remark of Hunt's, which is evidently only due to a slip of -memory. It is quite true that Keats lived with Hunt in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town, during part of July and August 1820 (see page 197): and that -before moving to that address Hunt had lived for more than a year (from -the autumn of 1818 to the spring of 1820) at 8, New Road. But that Keats -was intimate with him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact -living not in London at all but at the Vale of Health, is abundantly -certain. - - -p. 37, note 1. Cowden Clarke tells how Keats once calling and finding him -fallen asleep over Chaucer, wrote on the blank space at the end of the -_Floure and the Leafe_ the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a -little copse.' Reynolds on reading it addressed to Keats the following -sonnet of his own, which is unpublished (Houghton MSS.), and has a certain -biographical interest. It is dated Feb. 27, 1817. - - "Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, - Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed; - They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed - The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves, - O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves - Songs that shall make the age be nature-led, - And win that coronal for thy young head - Which time's strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne'er bereaves. - Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way, - Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung; - Be thou companion of the summer day, - Roaming the fields and older woods among:-- - So shall thy muse be ever in her May, - And thy luxuriant spirit ever young." - - -p. 45, note 1. Woodhouse MSS. A. contains the text of the first draft in -question, with some preliminary words of Woodhouse as follows:-- - -"The lines at p. 36 of Keats's printed poems are altered from a copy of -verses written by K. at the request of his brother George, and by the -latter sent as a valentine to the lady. The following is a copy of the -lines as originally written:-- - - Hadst thou lived in days of old, - Oh what wonders had been told - Of thy lively dimpled face, - And thy footsteps full of grace: - Of thy hair's luxurious darkling, - Of thine eyes' expressive sparkling. - And thy voice's swelling rapture, - Taking hearts a ready capture. - Oh! if thou hadst breathed then, - Thou hadst made the Muses ten. - Could'st thou wish for lineage higher - Than twin sister of Thalia? - At least for ever, ever more - Will I call the Graces four." - -Here follow lines 41--68 of the poem as afterwards published: and in -conclusion:-- - - "Ah me! whither shall I flee? - Thou hast metamorphosed me. - Do not let me sigh and pine, - Prythee be my valentine. - 14 Feby. 1816." - - -p. 47, note 1. Mrs Procter's memory, however, betrayed her when she -informed Lord Houghton that the colour of Keats's eyes was blue. That they -were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence alike of C. C. Clarke, -of George Keats and his wife (as transmitted by their daughter Mrs Speed -to her son), and from the various portraits painted from life and -posthumously by Severn and Hilton. Mrs Procter calls his hair auburn: Mrs -Speed had heard from her father and mother that it was 'golden red,' which -may mean nearly the same thing: I have seen a lock in the possession of -Sir Charles Dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have -looked gold in the lights. Bailey in Houghton MSS. speaks of it as -extraordinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his -head was like laying it 'on the rich plumage of a bird.' An evidently -misleading description of Keats's general aspect is that of Coleridge when -he describes him as a 'loose, slack, not well-dressed youth.' The sage -must have been drawing from his inward eye: those intimate with Keats -being of one accord as to his appearance of trim strength and 'fine -compactness of person.' Coleridge's further mention of his hand as -shrunken and old-looking seems exact. - - -p. 78, note 1. The isolated expressions of Keats on this subject, which -alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him somewhat unjustly to -the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. Fairness seems to require -that the whole passage in which he deals with it should be given. The -passage occurs in a letter to Bailey written from Hampstead and dated -Oct. 8, 1817, of which only a fragment was printed by Lord Houghton, and -after him by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. III. p. 82, no. xvi.). - -"I went to Hunt's and Haydon's who live now neighbours.--Shelley was -there--I know nothing about anything in this part of the world--every Body -seems at Loggerheads. There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in -statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room criticizing -every head most unmercifully--There's Horace Smith tired of Hunt--'The Web -of our life is of mingled yarn.'... I am quite disgusted with literary -men, and will never know another except Wordsworth--no not even Byron. -Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known -each other many years--now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours. -Haydon says to me, Keats, don't show your lines to Hunt on any account, or -he will have done half for you--so it appears Hunt wishes it to be -thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him I was getting -on to the completion of 4000 lines--Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me -they would have been 7000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he -to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on the -subject from some Lady, which contains a caution to me, thro' him, on this -subject. Now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?" - - -p. 83, note 1. See Haydon, _Autobiography_, vol. I. pp. 384-5. The letter -containing Keats's account of the same entertainment was printed for the -first time by Speed, _Works_, vol. I. p. i. no. 1, where it is dated -merely 'Featherstone Buildings, Monday.' (At Featherstone Buildings lived -the family of Charles Wells.) In Houghton MSS. I find a transcript of the -same letter in the hand of Mr Coventry Patmore, with a note in Lord -Houghton's hand: "These letters I did not print. R. M. M." In the -transcript is added in a parenthesis after the weekday the date 5 April, -1818: but this is a mistake; the 5th of April in that year was not a -Monday: and the contents of Keats's letter itself, as well as a comparison -with Haydon's words in his _Autobiography_, prove beyond question that it -was written on Monday, the 5th of January. - - -p. 87, note 1. Similar expressions about the Devonshire weather occur in -nearly all Keats's letters written thence in the course of March and -April. The letter to Bailey containing the sentences quoted in my text is -wrongly printed both by Lord Houghton and Mr Forman under date Sept. -1818. I find the same date given between brackets at the head of the same -letter as transcribed in Woodhouse MSS. B., proving that an error was -early made either in docketing or copying it. The contents of the letter -leave no doubt as to its real date. The sentences quoted prove it to have -been written not in autumn but in spring. It contains Keats's reasons both -for going down to join his brother Tom at Teignmouth, and for failing to -visit Bailey at Oxford on the way: now in September Keats was not at -Teignmouth at all, and Bailey had left Oxford for good, and was living at -his curacy in Cumberland (see p. 122). Moreover there is an allusion by -Keats himself to this letter in another which he wrote the next day to -Reynolds, whereby its true date can be fixed with precision as Friday, -March 13. - - -p. 112, note 1. The following unpublished letter of Keats to Mr Taylor -(from Woodhouse MSS. B.) has a certain interest, both in itself and as -fixing the date of his departure for the North:-- - - "Sunday evening, - - "My dear Taylor, - - I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health till my - return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, au - revoir, God keep us all well! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother Tom - will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for - him, since I still keep those you lent me a year ago. If I am - overweening, you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall - write, do send him some you think will be most amusing--he will be - careful in returning them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am - ashamed to catalogue these messages. There is but one more, which - ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs - Reynolds one of my books bound. As I cannot write in it let the - opposite" [a leaf with the name and 'from the author,' notes - Woodhouse] "be pasted in 'prythee. Remember me to Percy St.--Tell - Hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged - on a history piece to his own content. And tell Dewint I shall become - a disputant on the landscape. Bow for me very genteely to Mrs D. or - she will not admit your diploma. Remember me to Hessey, saying I hope - he'll _Carey_ his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. Adieu! - - Your sincere friend, - JOHN O'GROTS. - - June 22, 1818. Hampstead" [The date and place are added by Woodhouse - in red ink, presumably from the post-mark]. - - -p. 120, note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton -Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between 'All the magic of the -place' and the next line, 'So saying, with a spirit's glance,' and has -proposed, by way of improvement, to read 'with a spirit's grace'. I find -the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued -thus in pencil after the word 'place'. - - "'Tis now free to stupid face, - To cutters, and to fashion boats, - To cravats and to petticoats:-- - The great sea shall war it down, - For its fame shall not be blown - At each farthing Quadrille dance. - So saying with a spirit's glance - He dived"--. - -Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he -well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his -correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any -indication of the hiatus so caused. - - -p. 128, note 1. Lord Houghton says, "On returning to the south, Keats -found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at -Teignmouth." It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was -made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of -Keats's March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, p. 225. - - -p. 138, note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his -knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been -mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the -capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at -his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the -provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband's -death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings -himself had left them by will; one of L1000 direct; the other, of a -capital to yield L50 a year, in reversion after their mother's death (see -p. 5). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and -brought L1550. 7_s._ 10_d._ worth of that security at the price at which -it then stood. L1666. 13_s_. 4_d._ worth of the same stock was farther -purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of L50 -a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances -Rawlings during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments -lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to -whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the -first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each, -with its accumulations. Two years afterwards Fanny Keats received in like -manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers -John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being -L3375. 5_s._ 7_d._, and to George L1147. 5_s._ 1_d._ It was a part of the -ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these -funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors -at the time when he most needed them. - - -p. 148, note 1. Landor's letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a -presentation copy of the _Life and Letters_, in 1848, begins -characteristically as follows:-- - - "Bath, Aug. 29. - - Dear Milnes, - - On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find - your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an - editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, - excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of - the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed - overcome so great a difficulty as Shelley in his _Cenci_, nor united - so many powers of the mind as Southey in _Kehama_--but there is an - effluence of power and light pervading all his work, and a freshness - such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.--" - - -p. 152, note 1. I think there is no doubt that _Hyperion_ was begun by -Keats beside his brother's sickbed in September or October 1818, and that -it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 'plunging into -abstract images,' and finding a 'feverous relief' in the 'abstractions' of -poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as -the translation of Ronsard's sonnet, _Nature ornant Cassandre_, which is -the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown -says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after -Tom's death in December--"It was then he wrote _Hyperion_"; but these -words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already -begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to -the poem by name, and says he has been 'going on a little' with it: and on -the 14th of February, 1819, says 'I have not gone on with _Hyperion_.' -During the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the _Odes_, and -whether he at the same time wrote any more of _Hyperion_ we cannot tell. -It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as -in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, -_Works_, vol. II. p. 143) that "it contains 2 books and 1/2--(about 900 -lines in all):" the actual length of the piece as published being 883 -lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before -revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after -nearly a year's interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him -in a letter from Winchester in August or September, "I have also been -writing parts of my _Hyperion_," this must not be taken as meaning that he -has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing -them,--like _Isabella_ and the _Eve of St Agnes_, which he mentions at the -same time,--since the date of his last letter. - - -p. 164, note 1. The version of _The Eve of St Agnes_ given in Woodhouse -MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the -original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all -probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see p. 133). The -readings of the MS. in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton -Forman (_Works_, vol. II. p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the -poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have, -from Woodhouse's transcript, the following table of the changes in those -stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:-- - -Stanza I.: line 1, for "chill" stood "cold": line 4, for "was" stood -"were": line 7, for "from" stood "in": line 9 (and Stanza II., line 1), -for "prayer" stood "prayers". Stanza III.: line 7, for "went" stood -"turn'd": line 8, for "Rough" stood "Black". After stanza III. stood the -following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed. - - 4. - - But there are ears may hear sweet melodies, - And there are eyes to brighten festivals, - And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies, - And many a lip that for the red wine calls-- - Follow, then follow to the illumined halls, - Follow me youth--and leave the eremite-- - Give him a tear--then trophied bannerals - And many a brilliant tasseling of light - Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night. - -Stanza V.; line 1, for "revelry" stood "revellers": lines 3-5, for-- - - "Numerous as shadows haunting fairily - The brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay - Of old romance. These let us wish away,"-- - -stood the following:-- - - "Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs, - The muse should never make the spirit gay; - Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away." - - -p. 166, note 1. At what precise date _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ was -written is uncertain. As of the _Ode to Melancholy_, Keats makes no -mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse MSS. A. it is -dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts before or while Keats was -on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in that year, is I think certain -both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence -among them of _Lamia_ and the _Ode to Autumn_. Hence it is to the first -half of 1819 that _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ must belong, like so much of -the poet's best work besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the -theme was already in his mind when he composed the _Eve of St Agnes_ in -January. Mr Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have -been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (_Works_, -vol. II. p. 357, note). - - -p. 186, note 1. The relation of _Hyperion, A Vision_, to the original -_Hyperion_ is a vital point in the history of Keats's mind and art, and -one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the error is -somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the _Vision_ is in -Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_, ed. 1848, Vol. I. p. 244. Having then -doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of Brown's MS. memoir quoted in -the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following -his account of _Hyperion_:--"He afterwards published it as a fragment, and -still later re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally -unfinished." When eight years later the same editor printed the piece for -the first time (in _Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society_, Vol. III. -1856-7) from the MS. given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown's -account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: "Is it the original sketch -out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the -commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? I have no external evidence -to decide this question:" and further,--"the problem of the priority of -the two poems--both fragments, and both so beautiful--may afford a wide -field for ingenious and critical conjecture." Ten years later again, when -he brought out the second edition of the _Life and Letters_, Lord Houghton -had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing -the piece in his Appendix as 'Another Version,' says in his text (p. 206) -"on reconsideration, I have no doubt that it was the first draft." -Accordingly it is given as 'an earlier version' in Mr W. M. Rossetti's -edition of 1872, as 'the first version' in Lord Houghton's own edition of -1876; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by -Messrs Buxton Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of -_Hyperion_ to the _Vision_ no doubt at first sight suggested the -conclusion to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In -the mean time at least two good critics, Mr W. B. Scott and Mr. R. -Garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the _Vision_ was not a -first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his -powers: an opinion in which Mr Garnett was confirmed by his recollection -of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse (see above, -Preface, p. v, and W. T. Arnold, _Works_ &c. p. xlix, note). Brown's -words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen -were right. They are confirmed from another side by Woodhouse MSS. A, -which contains the copy of a real early draft of _Hyperion_. In this copy -the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in -pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several -books of the poem as printed). - -BOOK I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines-- - - "Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief, - Sat moulting his weak plumage, never more - To be restored or soar against the sun; - While his three sons upon Olympus stood." - -In line 30, for "stay'd Ixion's wheel" stood "eased Ixion's toil". In line -48, for "tone" stood "tune". In line 76, for "gradual" stood "sudden". In -line 102, after the word "Saturn," stood the cancelled words-- - - "What dost think? - Am I that same? O Chaos!" - -In line 156, for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like mist." -In line 189, for "Savour of poisonous brass" stood "A poison-feel of -brass." In line 200 for "When earthquakes jar their battlements and -towers" stood "When an earthquake hath shook their city towers." After -line 205 stood the cancelled line "Most like a rose-bud to a fairy's -lute." In line 209, for "And like a rose" stood "Yes, like a rose." In -line 268, for "Suddenly" stood "And, sudden." - -BOOK II. In line 128, for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." In line 134 for -"starry Uranus" stood "starr'd Uranus" (some friend doubtless called -Keats's attention to the false quantity). - -BOOK III. After line 125 stood the cancelled lines:-- - - "Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain - Gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears - Gush luscious with no sob; or more severe." - -In line 126, for "most like" stood "more like." - -In these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the -student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that -where a corrected passage occurs again in the _Vision_, it in every case -corresponds to the printed _Hyperion_, and not to the draft of the poem -preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it certain that the -_Vision_ was not a first version of _Hyperion_, but a recast of the poem -as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after its first composition. -Taken together with the statement of Brown, which is perfectly explicit as -to time, place, and circumstances, and the corresponding statement of -Woodhouse as recollected by Mr Garnett, the proof is from all sides -absolute: and the 'first version' theory must disappear henceforward from -editions of and commentaries on our poet. - - -p. 193, note 2. A more explicit refutation of Haydon's account was given, -some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see Preface, no. 10), -not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from -general knowledge of the poet's character:-- - -"I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which -that ill-ordered being, Haydon, the artist, left behind him in his 'Diary' -respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, John Keats" ... -"Haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not -contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical -antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against -him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and -trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in -sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his -claret. In the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have -not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of -him Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as -could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic expenses never -would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, I never -perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence." - - -p. 198, note 1. In Medwin's _Life of Shelley_ (1847), pp. 89-92, are some -notices of Keats communicated to the writer by Fanny Brawne (then Mrs -Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his 'kind correspondent.' Medwin's -carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly -casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but I think an -attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. 91, which discusses Mr -Finch's account of Keats's death, leaves no doubt that it continues in -substance the quotation previously begun from Mrs Lindon. "That his -sensibility," so runs the text, "was most acute, is true, and his passions -were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is -implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn -on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only -by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his -friends. Violence such as the letter" [of Mr Finch] "describes, was quite -foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting -England, I saw him every day", [this would be true of Fanny Brawne from -Oct. 1819 to Sept. 1820, if we except the Kentish Town period in the -summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] "I -often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not -hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, -much less a violent one, to any human being." The above passage has been -overlooked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as -serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman -he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to Dilke so -often quoted. - - - - -INDEX. - - - Abbey, Mr Richard, 11, 17, 70, 77, 138, 144, 192. - - _Adonais_ (Shelley's), 209, 210. - - _Adventures of a younger Son_ (Trelawney's), 75. - - Alfieri, 205. - - _Alfred, The_, 124. - - _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Burton's), 167. - - _Antiquary_ (Scott's), 115. - - _Apollo, Ode to_, 21-22. - - _Autumn, Ode to_, 177. - - - Bailey, Benjamin, 75, 76, 77, 122, 213, 214. - - Beattie, 21. - - _Biographia Literaria_ (Coleridge's), 64. - - Boccaccio, 148. - - Bonaparte, Pauline, Princess Borghese, 204. - - Brawne, Miss Fanny, 131 seq., 180-181, 197, 198. - - _Britannia's Pastorals_ (Browne's), 31. - - Brown, Charles, 13, 73, 111 seq., 128, 143 seq., 181, 200, 210. - - Browne, 31. - - Browning, Robert, 218. - - Burnet, 10. - - Byron, 1, 19, 65, 210; - Sonnet to, 22. - - - Canterbury, 71. - - _Cap and Bells_, 183 seq. - - Castlereagh, 25. - - _Champion, The_, 82. - - Chatterton, 157, 158; - Sonnet to, 22. - - Chaucer, 28. - - Chichester, 133. - - Clarke, Cowden, 3, 8, 12, 22, 23, 72, 84. - - Clarke, Rev. John, 4. - - 'Cockaigne, King of,' 121. - - _Cockney School of Poetry_ (Articles in _Blackwood's Magazine_), 77, - 121 seq. - - Coleridge, 16, 25, 26, 33, 64. - - Cooper, Astley, 18. - - Cotterill, Miss, 202, 203. - - Cox, Miss Charlotte, 130. - - - _Dante_ (Cary's), 113. - - _Death_, Stanzas on, 21; - Keats' contemplation of, 140; - longing for, 200. - - De Quincey, 26. - - Devonshire, 87. - - _Dictionary_ (Lempriere's), 10. - - Dilke, 73, 210. - - Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 73, 128, 135. - - _Don Juan_ (Byron's), 184, 202, 210. - - Dryden, 29, 30, 53. - - - Edmonton, 5, 6, 11, 14, 20. - - Eldon, 25. - - Elton, Lieutenant, 204. - - Emancipation, Literary, 63-64. - - _Endymion_, 66, 68, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86, 91; - Keats' low opinion of the poem, 91; - its beauties and defects, 91, 106-109; - Drayton's and Fletcher's previous treatment of the subject, 94-95; - Keats' unclassical manner of treatment, 96; - its one bare circumstance, 87; - scenery of the poem, 97; - its quality of nature-interpretation, 98; - its love passages, 100; - comparison of description with a similar one in _Richard III._, 103; - its lyrics, 104-106; - appreciation of the lyrics a test of true relish for poetry, 106; - its rhythm and music, 109; - Keats' own preface the best criticism of the poem, 110. - - Enfield, 4, 12. - - _Epistles_, their tributes to the conjoined pleasures of literature and - friendship, 53; - ungrammatical slips in, 54; - characteristic specimens of, 54-55. - - _Epithalamium_ (Spenser's), 12. - - _Eve of St Agnes_, its simple theme, 160; - its ease and directness of construction, 161; - its unique charm, 163. - - _Eve of St Mark_, contains Keats' impressions of three Cathedral towns, - 164; - its pictures, 164; - the legend, 164; - its pictorial brilliance, 165; - its influence on later English poetry, 165. - - _Examiner, The_ (Leigh Hunt's), 25. - - - _Faerie Queene_ (Spenser's), 12, 13, 35. - - _Faithful Shepherdess_ (Fletcher's), 95. - - _Fanny, Lines to_, 134. - - _Feast of the Poets_ (Leigh Hunt's), 32. - - Fletcher, 95. - - _Foliage_ (Leigh Hunt's), 73. - - - Genius, births of, 1. - - _Gisborne, Letter to Maria_ (Shelley's), 30. - - Goethe, 154. - - _Grasshopper and Cricket_, 35. - - Gray, 113. - - Greece, Keats' love of, 58, 77, 154. - - _Guy Mannering_ (Scott's), 115. - - - Hammond, Mr, 11, 14. - - Hampstead, 72, 77. - - Haslam, William, 45, 212 (note). - - Haydon, 3, 40, 65, 68, 78, 137, 138, 191, 214. - - Hazlitt, William, 83, 84. - - _History of his own Time_ (Burnet's), 10. - - Holmes, Edward, 8. - - _Holy Living and Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor's), 206. - - _Homer, On first looking into Chapman's_ (Sonnet), 23-24. - - Hood, 219. - - _Hope_, address to, 21. - - Horne, R. H., 11. - - Houghton, Lord, 75, 211-213. - - Hunt, John, 25. - - Hunt, Leigh, 22, 24, 25, 32, 35, 39, 49, 51, 68, 72, 78, 196. - - _Hyperion_, 129, 133, 144; - its purpose, 152; - one of the grandest poems of our language, 157; - the influences of _Paradise Lost_ on it, 158; - its blank verse compared with Milton's, 158; - its elemental grandeur, 160; - remodelling of it, 185 seq.; - description of the changes, 186-187; - special interest of the poem, 187. - - - _Imitation of Spenser_ (Keats' first lines), 14, 20. - - _Indolence, Ode on_, 174-175. - - _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, 86; - source of its inspiration, 148; - minor blemishes, 149; - its Italian metre, 149; - its conspicuous power and charm, 149; - description of its beauties, 151. - - Isle of Wight, 67. - - - Jennings, Mrs, 5, 11. - - Jennings, Capt. M. J., 7. - - Joseph and his Brethren (Wells'), 45. - - - Kean, 81. - - Keats, John, various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224; - birth, 2; - education at Enfield, 4; - death of his father, 5; - school-life, 5-9; - his studious inclinations, 10; - death of his mother, 10; - leaves school at the age of fifteen, 11; - is apprenticed to a surgeon, 11; - finishes his school-translation of the _AEneid_, 12; - reads Spenser's _Epithalamium_ and _Faerie Queene_, 12; - his first attempts at composition, 13; - goes to London and walks the hospitals, 14; - his growing passion for poetry, 15; - appointed dresser at Guy's Hospital, 16; - his last operation, 16; - his early life in London, 18; - his early poems, 20 seq.; - his introduction to Leigh Hunt, 24; - Hunt's great influence over him, 26 seq.; - his acquaintance with Shelley, 38; - his other friends, 40-45; - personal characteristics, 47-48; - goes to live with his brothers in the Poultry, 48; - publication of his first volume of poems, 65; - retires to the Isle of Wight, 66; - lives at Carisbrooke, 67; - changes to Margate, 68; - money troubles, 70; - spends some time at Canterbury, 71; - receives first payment in advance for _Endymion_, 71; - lives with his two brothers at Hampstead, 71; - works steadily at _Endymion_, 71-72; - makes more friends, 73; - writes part of _Endymion_ at Oxford, 76; - his love for his sister Fanny, 77; - stays at Burford Bridge, 80; - goes to the 'immortal dinner,' 82; - he visits Devonshire, 87; - goes on a walking tour in Scotland with Charles Brown, 113; - crosses over to Ireland, 116; - returns to Scotland and visits Burns' country, 118; - sows there the seeds of consumption, 120; - returns to London, 120; - is attacked in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_, 121; - Lockhart's conduct towards him, 122; - death of his young brother Tom, 128; - goes to live with Charles Brown, 128; - falls in love, 130-131; - visits friends in Chichester, 133; - suffers with his throat, 133; - his correspondence with his brother George, 139; - goes to Shanklin, 143; - collaborates with Brown in writing _Otho_, 143; - goes to Winchester, 144; - returns again to London, 146; - more money troubles, 146; - determines to make a living by journalism, 146; - lives by himself, 146; - goes back to Mr Brown, 181; - _Otho_ is returned unopened after having been accepted, 182; - want of means prevents his marriage, 190; - his increasing illness, 191 seq.; - temporary improvement in his health, 194; - publishes another volume of poems, 196; - stays with Leigh Hunt's family, 197; - favourable notice in the _Edinburgh Review_, 197; - lives with the family of Miss Brawne, 198; - goes with Severn to spend the winter in Italy, 199; - the journey improves his health, 200; - writes his last lines, 201; - stays for a time at Naples, 203; - goes on to Rome, 203-204; - further improvement in his health, 205; - sudden and last relapse, 205; - he is tenderly nursed by his friend Severn, 206; - speaks of himself as already living a 'posthumous life,' 207; - grows worse and dies, 208; - various tributes to his memory, 214. - - His genius awakened by the _Faerie Queene_, 13; - influence of other poets on him, 21; - experiments in language, 21, 64, 147, 169; - employment of the 'Heroic' couplet, 27, 30; - element and spirit of his own poetry, 50; - experiments in metre, 52; - studied musical effect of his verse, 55; - his Grecian spirit, 58, 77, 95, 114, 154; - view of the aims and principles of poetry, 61; - imaginary dependence on Shakspere, 69; - thoughts on the mystery of Evil, 88; - puns, 72, 202; - his poems Greek in idea, English in manner, 96; - his poetry a true spontaneous expression of his mind, 110; - power of vivifying, 161; - verbal licenses, 169; - influence on subsequent poets, 218; - felicity of phrase, 219. - - Personal characteristics: - Celtic temperament, 3, 58, 70; - affectionate nature, 6, 7, 9, 10, 77; - morbid temperament, 6, 70, 211; - lovable disposition, 6, 8, 19, 212, 213; - temper, 7, 9, 233; - personal beauty, 8; - _penchant_ for fighting, 8, 9, 72; - studious nature, 9, 112; - humanity, 39, 89, 114-115; - sympathy and tenderness, 47, 213; - eyes, description of, 46, 207, 224; - love of nature, 47, 55-56; - voice, 47; - desire of fame, 60, 125, 141, 207; - natural sensibility to physical and spiritual spell of moonlight, 95; - highmindedness, 125-126; - love romances, 127, 130-134, 180-181, 197, 200, 203, 212; - pride and sensitiveness, 211; - unselfishness, 213, 214; - instability, 215. - - Various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224. - - Keats, Admiral Sir Richard, 7. - - Keats, Fanny (Mrs Llanos), 77. - - Keats, Mrs (Keats' mother), 5, 10. - - Keats, George, 90, 113, 192, 193, 210. - - Keats, Thomas (Keats' father), 2, 5. - - Keats, Tom, 6, 127. - - _King Stephen_, 179. - - 'Kirk-men,' 116-117. - - - _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, 165, 166, 218; - origin of the title, 165; - a story of the wasting power of love, 166; - description of its beauties, 166. - - Lamb, Charles, 26, 82, 83. - - _Lamia_, 143; - its source, 167; - versification, 167; - the picture of the serpent woman, 168; - Keats' opinion of the Poem, 168. - - Landor, 75. - - _Laon and Cythna_, 76. - - Letters, extracts, etc., from Keats', 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 81, - 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 114, 116-117, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130, - 134, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 157, 181, 182, 190, 194-195, 200, - 203, 226. - - 'Little Keats,' 19. - - Lockhart, 33, 122, 123. - - _London Magazine_, 71. - - - Mackereth, George Wilson, 18. - - Madeline, 162 seq. - - 'Maiden-Thought,' 88, 114. - - _Man about Town_ (Webb's), 38. - - _Man in the Moon_ (Drayton's), 93. - - Margate, 68. - - Mathew, George Felton, 19. - - Meg Merrilies, 115-116. - - _Melancholy, Ode on_, 175. - - Milton, 51, 52, 54, 88. - - Monckton, Milnes, 211. - - Moore, 65. - - _Morning Chronicle, The_, 124. - - _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ (Spenser's), 31. - - Mythology, Greek, 10, 58, 152, 153. - - - Naples, 203. - - _Narensky_ (Brown's), 74. - - Newmarch, 19. - - _Nightingale, Ode to a_, 136, 175, 218. - - _Nymphs_, 73. - - - Odes, 21, 137, 145, 170-171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 218. - - _Orion_, 11. - - _Otho_, 143, 144, 180, 181. - - Oxford, 75, 77. - - _Oxford Herald, The_, 122. - - - _Pan, Hymn to_, 83. - - _Pantheon_ (Tooke's), 10. - - _Paradise Lost_, 88, 152, 154, 158. - - Patriotism, 115. - - _Peter Corcoran_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Plays, 178, 179, 181, 182. - - Poems (Keats' first volume), faint echoes of other poets in them, 51; - their form, 52; - their experiments in metre, 52; - merely poetic preludes, 53; - their rambling tendency, 53; - immaturity, 60; - attractiveness, 61; - characteristic extracts, 63; - their moderate success, 65-66. - - Poetic Art, Theory and Practice, 61, 64. - - Poetry, joys of, 55; - principle and aims of, 61; - genius of, 110. - - _Polymetis_ (Spence's), 10. - - Pope, 19, 29, 30. - - 'Posthumous Life,' 207. - - Prince Regent, 25. - - Proctor, Mrs, 47. - - _Psyche, Ode to_, 136, 171, 172. - - _Psyche_ (Mrs Tighe's), 21. - - - Quarterly Review, 121, 124. - - - _Rainbow_ (Campbell's), 170. - - Rawlings, William, 5. - - Reynolds, John Hamilton, 36, 211, 214. - - Rice, James, 37, 142. - - _Rimini, Story of_, 27, 30, 31, 35. - - Ritchie, 82. - - Rome, 204. - - Rossetti, 220. - - - _Safie_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Scott, Sir Walter, 1, 33, 65, 115, 123, 124. - - Scott, John, 124. - - Sculpture, ancient, 136. - - _Sea-Sonnet_, 67. - - Severn, Joseph, 45, 72, 135, 191, 199 seq. - - Shakspere, 67, 69. - - Shanklin, 67, 143. - - Shelley, 16, 32, 38, 56, 85, 110, 199, 203, 209. - - Shenstone, 21. - - _Sleep and Poetry_, 52, 60, 61, 109. - - Smith, Horace, 33, 81. - - Sonnets, 22, 23, 43, 48, 49, 57, 201. - - _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, 52. - - Spenser, 19, 20, 21, 31, 35, 54, 55. - - Stephens, Henry, 18-20. - - Surrey Institution, 84. - - - Taylor, Mr, 71, 81, 126, 144, 146, 206, 211. - - Teignmouth, 87. - - Tennyson, 218. - - Thomson, 21. - - - _Urn, Ode on a Grecian_, 136, 172-174. - - - _Vision, The_, 187, 193 (_see_ Hyperion). - - - Webb, Cornelius, 38. - - Wells, Charles, 45. - - Wilson, 33. - - Winchester, 143-145. - - Windermere, 113, 114. - - Wordsworth, 1, 44, 46, 56, 64, 82, 83, 158, 219. - - -CAMBRIDGE PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] See Appendix, p. 221. - -[2] _Ibid._ - -[3] John Jennings died March 8, 1805. - -[4] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See below, p. 138, and Appendix, p. 221. - -[5] Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808. - -[6] Houghton MSS. - -[7] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See Appendix, p. 221. - -[8] Mrs Alice Jennings was buried at St Stephen's, Coleman Street, -December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. Pratt, -M.A.) - -[9] I owe this anecdote to Mr Gosse, who had it direct from Horne. - -[10] Houghton MSS. - -[11] A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance -narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and in prose, not -verse, will be found in _The Philosophy of Mystery_, by W. C. Dendy -(London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr H. Stephens, in the -_Poetical Works_, ed. Forman (1 vol. 1884), p. 558. - -[12] See Appendix. - -[13] See C. L. Feltoe, _Memorials of J. F. South_ (London, 1884), p. 81. - -[14] Houghton MSS. See also Dr B. W. Richardson in the _Asclepiad_, vol. -i. p. 134. - -[15] Houghton MSS. - -[16] What, for instance, can be less Spenserian and at the same time less -Byronic than-- - - "For sure so fair a place was never seen - Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye"? - -[17] See Appendix, p. 222. - -[18] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[19] See particularly the _Invocation to Sleep_ in the little volume of -Webb's poems published by the Olliers in 1821. - -[20] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[21] See _Praeterita_, vol. ii. chap. 2. - -[22] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[23] Compare Chapman, _Hymn to Pan_:-- - - "the bright-hair'd god of pastoral, - Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe, - By lot, all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow, - All tops of hills, and _cliffy highnesses_, - All sylvan copses, and the fortresses - Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove, - And sometimes, by allurement of his love, - Will wade the _wat'ry softnesses_." - -[24] Compare Wordsworth:-- - - "Bees that soar for bloom, - High as the highest peak of Furness Fells, - Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells." - -Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence? - -[25] Mr W. T. Arnold in his _Introduction_ (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel -passage from Leigh Hunt's _Gentle Armour_ as an example of the degree to -which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt: forgetting that the _Gentle -Armour_ was not written till 1831, and that the debt in this instance is -therefore the other way. - -[26] See Appendix, p. 220. - -[27] The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph were -furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr Leslie Stephen, -from whom I have them. The point about the _Adventures of a Younger Son_ -is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken -from the Keats MSS. then in Brown's hands, especially _Otho_. - -[28] Houghton MSS. - -[29] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[30] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[31] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[32] In the extract I have modernized Drayton's spelling and endeavoured -to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending. - -[33] Mrs Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of an -allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats's narrative. - -[34] Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions Paeon as one of the fifty sons of -Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth): and in Spenser's _Faerie -Queene_ there is a Paeana--the daughter of the giant Corflambo in the -fourth book. Keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave -Endymion a sister and called her Peona. - -[35] Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by Mr W. T. -Arnold. - -[36] The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of -Chamberlayne:-- - - "Upon the throne, in such a glorious state - As earth's adored favorites, there sat - The image of a monarch, vested in - The spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been - A diadem's redemption; his large size, - Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize - The admired proportions of those mighty men - Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when - Found out, are carefully preserved to tell - Posterity how much these times are fell - From nature's youthful strength." - -[37] See Appendix, p. 226. - -[38] Houghton MSS. - -[39] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[40] Severn in Houghton MSS. - -[41] Houghton MSS. - -[42] Dilke (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton's _Life and -Letters_, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned as -much; and there are tricks of style, _e.g._ the use of the Spanish -_Sangrado_ for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand. - -[43] Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, and -Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott's faithful satellite, the actor -Terry. - -[44] Severn in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XI., p. 401. - -[45] See Preface, p. viii. - -[46] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[47] Houghton MSS. - -[48] The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been -thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the -summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the -then surviving brother of Keats's friend. - -[49] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[50] See Appendix, p. 228. - -[51] _Decamerone_, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment -of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously -with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his _Sicilian Story_ (1820). Of -the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write -concurrently with Keats (see above, p. 86), two were finished and -published by him after Keats's death in the volume called _A Garden of -Florence_ (1821). - -[52] As to the date when _Hyperion_ was written, see Appendix, p. 228: and -as to the error by which Keats's later recast of his work has been taken -for an earlier draft, _ibid._, p. 230. - -[53] If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by -predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so--though only on a -cameo scale--in the best idyls of Chenier in France, as _L'Aveugle_ or _Le -Jeune Malade_, or of Landor in England, as the _Hamadryad_ or _Enallos and -Cymodamia_; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at -Alexandria in the days of Theocritus. - -[54] We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the -best, that what he most liked in Chatterton's work was the minstrel's song -in _AElla_, that _fantasia_, so to speak, executed really with genius on -the theme of one of Ophelia's songs in _Hamlet_. - -[55] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the -beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of -rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the -beadsman in the lines, - - "But no--already had his death-bell rung; - The joys of all his life were said and sung;" - -that of Angela where she calls herself - - "A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, - Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll." - -[56] See Appendix, p. 229. - -[57] Chartier was born at Bayeux. His _Belle Dame sans Merci_ is a poem of -over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in -dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his -consequent despair and death.--For the date of composition of Keats's -poem, see Appendix, p. 230. - -[58] This has been pointed out by my colleague Mr A. S. Murray: see -Forman, _Works_, vol. iii. p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, _Poetical -Works_, &c., p. xxii, note. - -[59] Houghton MSS. - -[60] "He never spoke of any one," says Severn, (Houghton MSS.,) "but by -saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and -cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of -the person he was speaking of." - -[61] See Appendix, p. 230. - -[62] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. -Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his -death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey -(Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats's -mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus. - -[63] Mrs Owen was the first of Keats's critics to call attention to this -passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it -derives from the date of its composition. - -[64] Houghton MSS. - -[65] See below, p. 193, note 2. - -[66] "Interrupted," says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., "by a -circumstance which it is needless to mention." - -[67] This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest -daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of -Haydon. But see Appendix, p. 232. - -[68] A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the _Indicator_ a few -stanzas from the _Cap and Bells_, and about the same time dedicated to -Keats his translation of Tasso's _Amyntas_, speaking of the original as -"an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally -pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical." - -[69] See Crabb Robinson. _Diaries_, Vol. II. p. 197, etc. - -[70] See Appendix, p. 233. - -[71] Houghton MSS. In both the _Autobiography_ and the _Correspondence_ -the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy -additions. - -[72] I have the date of sailing from Lloyd's, through the kindness of the -secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time -following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials -published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in _Atlantic -Monthly_, Vol. XI. p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn -MSS. - -[73] Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and his -remains were in 1882 removed from their original burying-place to a grave -beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius -Cestius. - -[74] Haslam, in Severn MSS. - -[75] Severn MSS. - -[76] Houghton MSS. - -[77] _Ibid._ - -[78] Houghton MSS. - -[79] _Ibid._ - - - - -English Men of Letters. - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. - -_Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. Paper Covers, 1s.; Cloth, 1s. 6d. each._ - -_Pocket Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. 1s. net each._ - -_Library Edition. Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each._ - - - ADDISON. - By W. J. 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Thus, we do not necessarily -keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. - - -Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: - - http://www.gutenberg.org - -This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, -including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to -subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/41688.zip b/41688.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 8a8e706..0000000 --- a/41688.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/41688-8.txt b/old/41688-8.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5f8ede5..0000000 --- a/old/41688-8.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8427 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Keats, by Sidney Colvin - -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/license - - -Title: Keats - -Author: Sidney Colvin - -Release Date: December 22, 2012 [EBook #41688] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - - - - -English Men of Letters - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY - - -KEATS - - - - - KEATS - - - BY SIDNEY COLVIN - - - MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED - ST MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON - 1909 - - - - - _First Edition 1887._ - _Reprinted 1889, 1898, 1899, 1902, 1909._ - _Library Edition 1902._ - _Reprinted 1906._ - _Pocket Edition 1909._ - - - - -PREFACE. - - -With the name of Keats that of his first biographer, the late Lord -Houghton, must always justly remain associated. But while the sympathetic -charm of Lord Houghton's work will keep it fresh, as a record of the -poet's life it can no longer be said to be sufficient. Since the revised -edition of the _Life and Letters_ appeared in 1867, other students and -lovers of Keats have been busy, and much new information concerning him -been brought to light, while of the old information some has been proved -mistaken. No connected account of Keats's life and work, in accordance -with the present state of knowledge, exists, and I have been asked to -contribute such an account to the present series. I regret that lack of -strength and leisure has so long delayed the execution of the task -entrusted to me. The chief authorities and printed texts which I have -consulted (besides the original editions of the Poems) are the -following:-- - -1. Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries. By Leigh Hunt. London, 1828. - -2. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Thomas Medwin. London, 2 vols., -1847. - -3. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard -Monckton Milnes. 2 vols., London, 1848. - -4. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited and compiled by Tom Taylor. -Second edition. 3 vols., London, 1853. - -5. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and -Contemporaries. 3 vols., London, 1850. - -6. The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a memoir by Richard Monckton -Milnes. London, 1854. - -7. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. [Revised edition, edited by Thornton -Hunt.] London, 1860. - -8. The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame: an article by Joseph Severn in the -_Atlantic Monthly Magazine_ for 1863 (vol. xi. p. 401). - -9. The Life and Letters of John Keats. By Lord Houghton. New edition, -London, 1867. - -10. Recollections of John Keats: an article by Charles Cowden Clarke in -the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1874 (N. S. vol. xii. p. 177). Afterwards -reprinted with modifications in Recollections of Writers, by Charles and -Mary Cowden Clarke. London, 1878. - -11. The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the writings of the late Charles -Wentworth Dilke. With a biographical notice by Sir Charles Wentworth -Dilke, Bart., M.P. 2 vols., London, 1875. - -12. Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk. With a memoir -by Frederic Wordsworth Haydon. 2 vols., London, 1876. - -13. The Poetical Works of John Keats, chronologically arranged and edited, -with a memoir, by Lord Houghton [Aldine edition of the British Poets]. -London, 1876. - -14. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, with Introduction and Notes by -Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878. - -A biographer cannot ignore these letters now that they are published: but -their publication must be regretted by all who hold that human respect and -delicacy are due to the dead no less than to the living, and to genius no -less than to obscurity. - -15. The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats. Edited with notes -and appendices by Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols., London, 1883. - -In this edition, besides the texts reprinted from the first editions, all -the genuine letters and additional poems published in 3, 6, 9, 13, and 14 -of the above are brought together, as well as most of the biographical -notices contained in 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 12: also a series of -previously unpublished letters of Keats to his sister: with a great amount -of valuable illustrative and critical material besides. Except for a few -errors, which I shall have occasion to point out, Mr Forman's work might -for the purpose of the student be final, and I have necessarily been -indebted to it at every turn. - -16. The Letters and Poems of John Keats. Edited by John Gilmer Speed. 3 -vols., New York, 1883. - -17. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. Arnold. London, -1884. - -The Introduction to this edition contains the only attempt with which I am -acquainted at an analysis of the formal elements of Keats's style. - -18. An sculapian Poet--John Keats: an article by Dr B. W. Richardson in -the _Asclepiad_ for 1884 (vol. i. p. 134). - -19. Notices and correspondence concerning Keats which have appeared at -intervals during a number of years in the _Athenum_. - -In addition to printed materials I have made use of the following -unprinted, viz.:-- - -I. HOUGHTON MSS. Under this title I refer to the contents of an album from -the library at Fryston Hall, in which the late Lord Houghton bound up a -quantity of the materials he had used in the preparation of the _Life and -Letters_, as well as of correspondence concerning Keats addressed to him -both before and after the publication of his book. The chief contents are -the manuscript memoir of Keats by Charles Brown, which was offered by the -writer in vain to _Galignani_, and I believe other publishers; transcripts -by the same hand of a few of Keats's poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs -of the poet by his friends Charles Cowden Clarke (the first draft of the -paper above cited as no. 10), Henry Stephens, George Felton Mathew, Joseph -Severn, and Benjamin Bailey; together with letters from all the above, -from John Hamilton Reynolds, and several others. For the use of this -collection, without which my work must have been attempted to little -purpose, I am indebted to the kindness of its owner, the present Lord -Houghton. - -II. WOODHOUSE MSS. A. A common-place book in which Richard Woodhouse, the -friend of Keats and of his publishers Messrs Taylor and Hessey, -transcribed--as would appear from internal evidence, about midsummer -1819--the chief part of Keats's poems at that date unpublished. The -transcripts are in many cases made from early drafts of the poems: some -contain gaps which Woodhouse has filled up in pencil from later drafts: to -others are added corrections, or suggestions for corrections, some made in -the hand of Mr Taylor and some in that of Keats himself. - -III. WOODHOUSE MSS. B. A note-book in which the same Woodhouse has -copied--evidently for Mr Taylor, at the time when that gentleman was -meditating a biography of the poet--a number of letters addressed by Keats -to Mr Taylor himself, to the transcriber, to Reynolds and his sisters, to -Rice, and Bailey. Three or four of these letters, as well as portions of a -few others, are unpublished. - -Both the volumes last named were formerly the property of Mrs Taylor, a -niece by marriage of the publisher, and are now my own. A third note-book -by Woodhouse, containing personal notices and recollections of Keats, was -unluckily destroyed in the fire at Messrs Kegan Paul and Co's. premises in -1883. A copy of _Endymion_, annotated by the same hand, has been used by -Mr Forman in his edition (above, no. 15). - -IV. SEVERN MSS. The papers and correspondence left by the late Joseph -Severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable biography, have -been put into the hands of Mr William Sharp, to be edited and published at -his discretion. In the meantime Mr Sharp has been so kind as to let me -have access to such parts of them as relate to Keats. The most important -single piece, an essay on 'The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame,' has been -printed already in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (above, no. 8), but in the -remainder I have found many interesting details, particularly concerning -Keats's voyage to Italy and life at Rome. - -V. _Rawlings v. Jennings._ When Keats's maternal grandfather, Mr John -Jennings, died in 1805, leaving property exceeding the amount of the -specific bequests under his will, it was thought necessary that his estate -should be administered by the Court of Chancery, and with that intent a -friendly suit was brought in the names of his daughter and her second -husband (Frances Jennings, _m._ 1st Thomas Keats, and 2nd William -Rawlings) against her mother and brother, who were the executors. The -proceedings in this suit are referred to under the above title. They are -complicated and voluminous, extending over a period of twenty years, and -my best thanks are due to Mr Ralph Thomas, of 27 Chancery Lane, for his -friendly pains in searching through and making abstracts of them. - -For help and information, besides what has been above acknowledged, I am -indebted first and foremost to my friend and colleague, Mr Richard -Garnett; and next to the poet's surviving sister, Mrs Llanos; to Sir -Charles Dilke, who lent me the chief part of his valuable collection of -Keats's books and papers (already well turned to account by Mr Forman); to -Dr B. W. Richardson, and the Rev. R. H. Hadden. Other incidental -obligations will be found acknowledged in the footnotes. - -Among essays on and reviews of Keats's work I need only refer in -particular to that by the late Mrs F. M. Owen (Keats: a Study, London, -1876). In its main outlines, though not in details, I accept and have -followed this lady's interpretation of _Endymion_. For the rest, every -critic of modern English poetry is of necessity a critic of Keats. The -earliest, Leigh Hunt, was one of the best; and to name only a few among -the living--where Mr Matthew Arnold, Mr Swinburne, Mr Lowell, Mr Palgrave, -Mr W. M. Rossetti, Mr W. B. Scott, Mr Roden Noel, Mr Theodore Watts, have -gone before, for one who follows to be both original and just is not easy. -In the following pages I have not attempted to avoid saying over again -much that in substance has been said already, and doubtless better, by -others: by Mr Matthew Arnold and Mr Palgrave especially. I doubt not but -they will forgive me: and at the same time I hope to have contributed -something of my own towards a fuller understanding both of Keats's art and -life. - - - - -CONTENTS. - - - PAGE - - CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital - Student in London. [1795-1817] 1 - - CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh - Hunt: his Literary and Personal Influence--John Hamilton - Reynolds--James Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph - Severn--Charles Wells--Personal Characteristics-- - Determination to publish. [1814-April, 1817] 18 - - CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817 50 - - CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer - at Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey - at Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter - at Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity-- - Spring at Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and - Emigration of George Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818] 67 - - CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion_ 93 - - CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death - of Tom Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne-- - Excursion to Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon - and money difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening - Prospects--Summer at Shanklin and Winchester--Wise - Resolutions--Return from Winchester. [June, 1818-October, - 1819] 111 - - CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The - Plays 147 - - CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn Occupations--The _Cap and - Bells_--Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing Despondency--Visit of - George Keats to England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally - in the Spring--Summer in Kentish Town--Publication of the - _Lamia_ Volume--Relapse--Ordered South--Voyage to Italy-- - Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October, 1819-Feb. 1821] 180 - - CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius 209 - - APPENDIX 221 - - INDEX 234 - - - - -KEATS. - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital Student - in London. [1795-1817.] - - -Science may one day ascertain the laws of distribution and descent which -govern the births of genius; but in the meantime a birth like that of -Keats presents to the ordinary mind a striking instance of nature's -inscrutability. If we consider the other chief poets of the time, we can -commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood, or some -strong inspiring influence in the scenery and traditions of their home. -Thus we see Scott prepared alike by his origin, associations, and -circumstances to be the 'minstrel of his clan' and poet of the romance of -the border wilds; while the spirit of the Cumbrian hills, and the temper -of the generations bred among them, speak naturally through the lips of -Wordsworth. Byron seems inspired in literature by demons of the same -froward brood that had urged others of his lineage through lives of -adventure or of crime. But Keats, with instincts and faculties more purely -poetical than any of these, was paradoxically born in a dull and middling -walk of English city life; and 'if by traduction came his mind,'--to quote -Dryden with a difference,--it was through channels too obscure for us to -trace. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to -London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a -livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Presently he married -his employer's daughter, Frances Jennings; and Mr Jennings, who was a man -of substance, retiring about the same time to live in the country, at -Ponder's End, left the management of the business in the hands of his -son-in-law. The young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the -Swan-and-Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower -Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet JOHN KEATS, was born -prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, -named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, -1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the -3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family -had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a -mile farther north[1]. - -In the gifts and temperament of Keats we shall find much that seems -characteristic of the Celtic rather than the English nature. Whether he -really had any of that blood in his veins we cannot tell. His father was a -native either of Devon or of Cornwall[2]; and his mother's name, Jennings, -is common in but not peculiar to Wales. There our evidence ends, and all -that we know further of his parents is that they were certainly not quite -ordinary people. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of -intelligence and conduct--"of so remarkably fine a common sense and -native respectability," writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father's school -the poet and his brothers were brought up, "that I perfectly remember the -warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after -he had been to visit his boys." It is added that he resembled his -illustrious son in person and feature, being of small stature and lively -energetic countenance, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Of his wife, the -poet's mother, we learn more vaguely that she was "tall, of good figure, -with large oval face, and sensible deportment": and again that she was a -lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and -supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some -imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her -family as follows:--"my grandfather [Mr Jennings] was very well off, as -his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would -have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of -his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of -the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother." And -elsewhere:--"my mother I distinctly remember, she resembled John very much -in the face, was extremely fond of him, and humoured him in every whim, of -which he had not a few, she was a most excellent and affectionate parent, -and as I thought a woman of uncommon talents." - -The mother's passion for her firstborn son was devotedly returned by him. -Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an -illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an -old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to -lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different -turn:--"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 the -rescue." Another trait of the poet's childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, -on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that -when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had -a trick of making a rhyme to the last word people said and then laughing. - -The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send -them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school -kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats had -been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of -exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. Traces of its ancient -forest character lingered long, and indeed linger yet, about the -neighbourhood of the picturesque small suburban town of Enfield, and the -district was one especially affected by City men of fortune for their -homes. The school-house occupied by Mr Clarke had been originally built -for a rich West-India merchant, in the finest style of early Georgian -classic architecture, and stood in a pleasant and spacious garden at the -lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a -railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but -later it was taken down, and the faade, with its fine proportions and -rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington -Museum as a choice example of the style. - -Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, who was -killed by a fall from his horse as he rode home at night from Southgate. -This was on the 16th of April, 1804. Within twelve months his mother had -put off her weeds, and taken a second husband--one William Rawlings, -described as 'of Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper,' -presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management -of her father's business. This marriage turned out unhappily. It was soon -followed by a separation, and Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live -at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about -this time left a widow[3]. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers -after they were grown up, no mention is ever made of their step-father, of -whom after the separation the family seem to have lost all knowledge. The -household in Church Street, Edmonton, was well enough provided for, Mr -Jennings having left a fortune of over 13,000, of which, in addition to -other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding 200 a year to his widow -absolutely; one yielding 50 a year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with -reversion to her Keats children after her death; and 1000 to be -separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on -their coming of age[4]. Between this home, then, and the neighbouring -Enfield school, where he was in due time joined by his younger brothers, -the next four or five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1810) were passed in -sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, -or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only -recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in -his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are conveyed in some rhymes -which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young -sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of -genius, for dabbling by the brookside-- - - "In spite - Of the might - Of the Maid, - Nor afraid - Of his granny-good"-- - -and for keeping small fishes in tubs. - -If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own lips, we have -sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school -companions; which was that of a boy all spirit and generosity, vehement -both in tears and laughter, handsome, passionate, pugnacious, placable, -loveable, a natural leader and champion among his fellows. But beneath -this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from -the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of -unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was -accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, between whom and -himself there existed the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the -second brother, had all John's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less -impulsive disposition and a cooler blood: from a boy he was the bigger and -stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in -fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery elder -brother. Tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of -protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. The -singularly strong family sentiment that united the three brothers extended -naturally also to their sister, then a child: and in a more remote and -ideal fashion to their uncle by the mother's side, Captain Midgley John -Jennings, a tall navy officer who had served with some distinction under -Duncan at Camperdown, and who impressed the imagination of the boys, in -those days of militant British valour by land and sea, as a model of manly -prowess[5]. It may be remembered that there was a much more distinguished -naval hero of the time who bore their own name--the gallant Admiral Sir -Richard Godwin Keats of the _Superb_, afterwards governor of Greenwich -Hospital: and he, like their father, came from the west country, being the -son of a Bideford clergyman. But it seems clear that the family of our -Keats claimed no connection with that of the Admiral. - -Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written after the death of -his elder brother, and referring partly to their school-days and partly to -John's character after he was grown up:-- - - "I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of - his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we - quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my - schoolfellows will bear witness that John's temper was the cause of - all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are." - - "From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and - fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure - relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible - spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He - avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and - often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him - relief." - -Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to -their confirmation in the words of two of Keats's school-friends; and -first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards author of the _Life -of Mozart_:-- - - "Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for - fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his - brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him.... His - favourites were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed - to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour.... He was a - boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty - might easily fancy would become great--but rather in some military - capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out - rather suddenly and unexpectedly.... In all active exercises he - excelled. The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme - beauty and animation of his face made I remember an impression on - me--and being some years his junior I was obliged to woo his - friendship--in which I succeeded, but not till I had fought several - battles. This violence and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of - disposition--in passions of tears or outrageous fits of - laughter--always in extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. - Associated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and - expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more - popular[6]." - -Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school -friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and -encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first ventured into -poetry. This was the son of the master, Charles Cowden Clarke, who towards -the close of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature -in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:-- - - "He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a - highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most - picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw.... Upon one - occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had - boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself into the - received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who - could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was - almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the - taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, - laughing when John was "in one of his moods," and was endeavouring to - beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he - had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon - the most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, - like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his - highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his - placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his - behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, - superior or equal, who had known him." - -The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his -earlier school-days Keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual -bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. But during his -last few terms, that is in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, all the -energies of his nature turned to study. He became suddenly and completely -absorbed in reading, and would be continually at work before school-time -in the morning and during play-hours in the afternoon: could hardly be -induced to join the school games: and never willingly had a book out of -his hand. At this time he won easily all the literature prizes of the -school, and in addition to his proper work imposed on himself such -voluntary tasks as the translation of the whole neid in prose. He -devoured all the books of history, travel, and fiction in the school -library, and was for ever borrowing more from the friend who tells the -story. "In my mind's eye I now see him at supper sitting back on the form -from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's 'History of his Own -Time' between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This -work, and Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner'--which my father took in, and I used to -lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and -religious liberty." But the books which Keats read with the greatest -eagerness of all were books of ancient mythology, and he seemed literally -to learn by heart the contents of Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's -_Dictionary_, and the school abridgment by Tindal of Spence's -_Polymetis_--the first the most foolish and dull, the last the most -scholarly and polite, of the various handbooks in which the ancient fables -were presented in those days to the apprehension of youth. - -Trouble fell upon Keats in the midst of these ardent studies of his latter -school-days. His mother had been for some time in failing health. First -she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid -consumption, which carried her off in February 1810. We are told with what -devotion her eldest boy attended her sick bed,--"he 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,"--and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--"he -gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook -under the master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in -all who saw him." In the July following, Mrs Jennings, being desirous to -make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, 'in -consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,' -executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom she -made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of the -instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from her late -husband under his will[7]. The guardians were Mr Rowland Sandell, -merchant, and Mr Richard Abbey, a wholesale tea-dealer in Pancras Lane. -Mrs Jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years[8], -but Mr Abbey, with the consent of his co-trustee, seems at once to have -taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John -Keats was withdrawn from school at the close of this same year 1810, when -he was just fifteen, and made to put on harness for the practical work of -life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own part, he was -bound apprentice for a term of five years to a surgeon at Edmonton named -Hammond. The only picture we have of him in this capacity has been left by -R. H. Horne, the author of _Orion_, who came as a small boy to the Enfield -school just after Keats had left it. One day in winter Mr Hammond had -driven over to attend the school, and Keats with him. Keats was standing -with his head sunk in a brown study, holding the horse, when some of the -boys, who knew his school reputation for pugnacity, dared Horne to throw a -snowball at him; which Horne did, hitting Keats in the back, and then -taking headlong to his heels, to his surprise got off scot free[9]. Keats -during his apprenticeship used on his own account to be often to and fro -between the Edmonton surgery and the Enfield school. His newly awakened -passion for the pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be -stifled, and whenever he could spare time from his work, he plunged back -into his school occupations of reading and translating. He finished at -this time his translation of the neid, and was in the habit of walking -over to Enfield once a week or oftener, to see his friend Cowden Clarke, -and to exchange books and 'travel in the realms of gold' with him. In -summer weather the two would sit in a shady arbour in the old school -garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks -and exclamations of enthusiasm. On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden -Clarke introduced him for the first time to Spenser, reading him the -_Epithalamium_ in the afternoon, and lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to -take away the same evening. It has been said, and truly, that no one who -has not had the good fortune to be attracted to that poem in boyhood can -ever completely enjoy it. The maturer student, appreciate as he may its -inexhaustible beauties and noble temper, can hardly fail to be in some -degree put out by its arbitrary forms of rhyme and diction, and wearied by -its melodious redundance: he will perceive the perplexity and -discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing -humanity, even the failure, at times, of clearness of vision and strength -of grasp, amidst all that luxuriance of decorative and symbolic invention, -and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. It is otherwise with the -uncritical faculties and greedy apprehension of boyhood. For them there is -no poetical revelation like the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to that -of floating for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by -those shores and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive -with glancing figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and -Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous -shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in distress. -Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging with delight: -'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he shewed moreover his own instinct for -the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm on epithets of -special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend, "he hoisted -himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image that -is--_sea-shouldering whales_!'" Spenser has been often proved not only a -great awakener of the love of poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of -the germs of original poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, -the most intimate friend of Keats during two later years of his life, -states positively that it was to the inspiration of the _Faerie Queene_ -that his first notion of attempting to write was due. "Though born to be a -poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his -eighteenth year. It was the _Faerie Queene_ that awakened his genius. In -Spenser's fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became -another being; till, enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, -and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his poetic powers -I first received from his brothers, and afterwards from himself. This, -his earliest attempt, the 'Imitation of Spenser,' is in his first volume -of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those acquainted with his -history[10]." Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his -memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest, and we may fairly assume -him to have been mistaken. - -After he had thus first become conscious within himself of the impulse of -poetical composition, Keats went on writing occasional sonnets and other -verses: secretly and shyly at first like all young poets: at least it was -not until two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed anything -he had written to his friend and confidant, Cowden Clarke. In the meantime -a change had taken place in his way of life. In the summer or autumn of -1814, more than a year before the expiration of his term of -apprenticeship, he had quarrelled with Mr Hammond and left him. The cause -of their quarrel is not known, and Keats's own single allusion to it is -when once afterwards, speaking of the periodical change and renewal of the -bodily tissues, he says "seven years ago it was not this hand which -clenched itself at Hammond." It seems unlikely that the cause was any -neglect of duty on the part of the poet-apprentice, who was not devoid of -thoroughness and resolution in the performance even of uncongenial tasks. -At all events Mr Hammond allowed the indentures to be cancelled, and -Keats, being now nearly nineteen years of age, went to live in London, and -continue the study of his profession as a student at the hospitals (then -for teaching purposes united) of St Thomas's and Guy's. For the first -winter and spring after leaving Edmonton he lodged alone at 8, Dean -Street, Borough, and then for about a year, in company with some -fellow-students, over a tallow-chandler's shop in St Thomas's Street. -Thence he went in the summer of 1816 to join his brothers in lodgings in -the Poultry, over a passage leading to the Queen's Head tavern. In the -spring of 1817 they all three moved for a short time to 76, Cheapside. -Between these several addresses in London Keats spent a period of about -two years and a half, from the date (which is not precisely fixed) of his -leaving Edmonton in 1814 until April, 1817. - -It was in this interval, from his nineteenth to his twenty-second year, -that Keats gave way gradually to his growing passion for poetry. At first -he seems to have worked steadily enough along the lines which others had -marked out for him. His chief reputation, indeed, among his fellow -students was that of a 'cheerful, crotchety rhymester,' much given to -scribbling doggrel verses in his friends' note-books[11]. But I have -before me the MS. book in which he took down his own notes of a course, or -at least the beginning of a course, of lectures on anatomy; and they are -not those of a lax or inaccurate student. The only signs of a wandering -mind occur on the margins of one or two pages, in the shape of sketches -(rather prettily touched) of pansies and other flowers: but the notes -themselves are both full and close as far as they go. Poetry had indeed -already become Keats's chief interest, but it is clear at the same time -that he attended the hospitals and did his work regularly, acquiring a -fairly solid knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the rudiments -of medical and surgical science, so that he was always afterwards able to -speak on such subjects with a certain mastery. On the 25th of July, 1816, -he passed with credit his examination as licentiate at Apothecaries' Hall. -He was appointed a dresser at Guy's under Mr Lucas on the 3rd of March, -1816, and the operations which he performed or assisted in are said to -have proved him no bungler. But his heart was not in the work. Its -scientific part he could not feel to be a satisfying occupation for his -thoughts: he knew nothing of that passion of philosophical curiosity in -the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame which by turns attracted -Coleridge and Shelley toward the study of medicine. The practical -responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him, and -he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill. -Voices and visions that he could not resist were luring his spirit along -other paths, and once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and -feelings in regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of -his unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that "the other day, -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 fairy-land." "My last operation," he once told Brown, "was the -opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but -reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed -a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again." - -Keats at the same time was forming intimacies with other young men of -literary tastes and occupations. His verses were beginning to be no longer -written with a boy's secrecy, but freely addressed to and passed round -among his friends; some of them attracted the notice and warm approval of -writers of acknowledged mark and standing; and with their encouragement he -had about the time of his coming of age (that is in the winter of 1816-17) -conceived the purpose of devoting himself to a literary life. We are not -told what measure of opposition he encountered on the point from Mr Abbey, -though there is evidence that he encountered some[12]. Probably that -gentleman regarded the poetical aspirations of his ward as mere symptoms -of a boyish fever which experience would quickly cure. There was always a -certain lack of cordiality in his relations with the three brothers as -they grew up. He gave places in his counting-house successively to George -and Tom as they left school, but they both quitted him after a while; -George, who had his full share of the family pride, on account of slights -experienced or imagined at the hands of a junior partner; Tom in -consequence of a settled infirmity of health which early disabled him for -the practical work of life. Mr Abbey continued to manage the money matters -of the Keats family,--unskilfully enough as will appear,--and to do his -duty by them as he understood it. Between him and John Keats there was -never any formal quarrel. But that young brilliant spirit could hardly -have expected a responsible tea-dealer's approval when he yielded himself -to the influences now to be described. - - - - -CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh Hunt: his - literary and personal influence--John Hamilton Reynolds--James - Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph Severn--Charles - Wells--Personal characteristics--Determination to publish. [1814-April - 1817.] - - -When Keats moved from Dean Street to St Thomas's Street in the summer of -1815, he at first occupied a joint sitting-room with two senior students, -to the care of one of whom he had been recommended by Astley Cooper[13]. -When they left he arranged to live in the same house with two other -students, of his own age, named George Wilson Mackereth and Henry -Stephens. The latter, who was afterwards a physician of repute near St -Albans, and later at Finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of -the time[14]. "He attended lectures," says Mr Stephens of Keats, "and went -through the usual routine, but he had no desire to excel in that -pursuit.... Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations--the -only thing worthy the attention of superior minds--so he thought--all -other pursuits were mean and tame.... It may readily be imagined that -this feeling was accompanied by a good deal of pride and some conceit, and -that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the -gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals." On the whole, it -seems, 'little Keats' was popular among his fellow-students, although -subject to occasional teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and -even his birth as the son of a stable-keeper. Mr Stephens goes on to tell -how he himself and a student of St Bartholomew's, a merry fellow called -Newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions -by Keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats taking -always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes. -He despised Pope, and admired Byron, but delighted especially in Spenser, -caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile, -than for the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used sometimes to -laugh at Keats and his flights,--to the indignation of his brothers, who -came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and -destined to exalt the family name. Questions of poetry apart, continues Mr -Stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady -and well-behaved--"his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having -any other taste or indulging in any vice." Another companion of Keats's -early London days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain -George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young -medical student some hospitality. "Keats and I," wrote in 1848 Mr -Mathew,--then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, struggling -meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of -twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy,--"Keats -and I, though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in -many respects as different as two individuals could be. He enjoyed good -health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was fond of company--could amuse -himself admirably with the frivolities of life--and had great confidence -in himself. I, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy--fond of -repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree.... -He was of the sceptical and republican school--an advocate for the -innovations which were making progress in his time--a faultfinder with -everything established. I on the other hand hated controversy and -dispute--dreaded discord and disorder"[15]--and Keats, our good Mr -Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to -apologize for shocking him. As to his poetical predilections, the -impression left on Mr Mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr -Stephens:--"he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep -emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of -elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the -pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never -observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme -sensibility." - -The exact order and chronology of Keats's own first efforts in poetry it -is difficult to trace. They were certainly neither precocious nor -particularly promising. The circumstantial account of Brown above quoted -compels us to regard the lines _In Imitation of Spenser_ as the earliest -of all, and as written at Edmonton about the end of 1813 or beginning of -1814. They are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or -experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a -little later in Keats's work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats loved -the best both first and last were those of the Elizabethan age, it is -clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of -writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not -so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of -these not the latest, Byron[16], but rather such milder minstrels as -Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental -Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose _Psyche_ had become very popular since her -death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical -versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces -preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with -this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves -very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, which he -addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a -shell. His two elegiac stanzas _On Death_, assigned by George Keats to the -year 1814, are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of -moralizing. Equally so is the address _To Hope_ of February 1815, with its -'relentless fair' and its personified abstractions, 'fair Cheerfulness,' -'Disappointment, parent of Despair,' 'that fiend Despondence,' and the -rest. And once more, in the ode _To Apollo_ of the same date, the voice -with which this young singer celebrates his Elizabethan masters is an -echo not of their own voice but rather of Gray's:-- - - "Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand, - And quickly forward spring - The Passions--a terrific band-- - And each vibrates the string - That with its tyrant temper best accords, - While from their Master's lips pour forth the inspiring words. - A silver trumpet Spenser blows, - And, as its martial notes to silence flee, - From a virgin chorus flows - A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity. - 'Tis still! Wild warblings from the olian lyre - Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire." - -The pieces above cited are all among the earliest of Keats's work, written -either at Edmonton or during the first year of his life in London. To the -same class no doubt belongs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish, -sentimental sonnet _To Byron_, and probably that also, which is but a -degree better, _To Chatterton_ (both only posthumously printed). The more -firmly handled but still mediocre sonnet on Leigh Hunt's release from -prison brings us again to a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the -young poet's life. It was on either the 2nd or the 3rd of February, 1815, -that the brothers Hunt were discharged after serving out the term of -imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling -the Prince Regent two years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many -other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to -Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed -quickly into friendship. Within a few days of Hunt's release, Clarke -walked in from Enfield to call on him (presumably at the lodging he -occupied at this time in the Edgware Road). On his return Clarke met -Keats, who walked part of the way home with him, and as they parted, says -Clarke, "he turned and gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day -that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had -received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I -recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! -There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with -life." - -Not long afterwards Cowden Clarke left Enfield, and came to settle in -London. Keats found him out in his lodgings at Clerkenwell, and the two -were soon meeting as often and reading together as eagerly as ever. One of -the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of Chapman's -Homer. After a night's enthusiastic study, Clarke found when he came down -to breakfast the next morning, that Keats, who had only left him in the -small hours, had already had time to compose and send him from the Borough -the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost hackneyed, _On First Looking -into Chapman's Homer_;-- - - "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, - And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; - Round many Western islands have I been - Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. - Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, - That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: - Yet did I never breathe its pure serene - Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: - Then felt I like some watcher of the skies - When a new planet swims into his ken; - Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes - He stared at the Pacific--and all his men - Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- - Silent, upon a peak in Darien." - -The date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed; but it was when nights -were short in the summer of 1815. The seventh line of the sonnet is an -afterthought: in the original copy sent to Cowden Clarke it stood more -baldly, 'Yet could I never tell what men might mean.' Keats here for the -first time approves himself a poet indeed. The concluding sestet is almost -unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius -than the image of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of schoolboy -reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, which should be Balboa -and not Cortez, but what does it matter?) is converted into the perfection -of appropriate poetry. - -One of the next services which the ever zealous and affectionate Cowden -Clarke did his young friend was to make him personally known to Leigh -Hunt. The acquaintance carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages -and even penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encouragement and -pleasure. It is impossible rightly to understand the career of Keats if we -fail to realise the various modes in which it was affected by his -intercourse with Hunt. The latter was the elder of the two by eleven -years. He was the son, by marriage with an American wife, of an eloquent -and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher of West -Indian origin, who had chiefly exercised his vocation in the northern -suburbs of London. Leigh Hunt was brought up at Christ's Hospital, about a -dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, and gained at sixteen some -slight degree of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile -poems. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being -then a clerk in the War Office; an occupation which he abandoned at -twenty-four (in 1808) in order to join his brother John Hunt in the -conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper. For five years the managers of that -journal helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of -Eldon and of Castlereagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect -sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they were caught -tripping, and condemned to two years' imprisonment for strictures ruled -libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and -person of the Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with -cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. Liberal statesmen, -philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society -in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial -conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. Tall, -straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black -eyes, and 'nose of taste,' Leigh Hunt was ever one of the most winning of -companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and -ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most -sympathetic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was far -too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank -neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him nearly -always a receiver,--still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly -abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer -for what they believed. Liberals could not but contrast his smiling -steadfastness under persecution with the apostasy, as in the heat of the -hour they considered it, of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In -domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under difficulties; and -none was better loved by his friends, or requited them, so far as the -depth of his nature went, with a truer warmth and loyalty. His literary -industry was incessant, hardly second to that of Southey himself. He had -the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a singular quickness of -intellectual apprehension for the points and qualities of what he enjoyed; -and for the gentler pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word he -loved) of literature, he is the most accomplished of guides and -interpreters. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, -and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which -Coleridge and De Quincey, with their more philosophic powers and method, -were subject, the faults of pedantry and effort. The infirmity of Leigh -Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. "Incomparable," according to Lamb's -well-known phrase, "as a fire-side companion," it was his misfortune to -carry too much of the fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both -in prose and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty -familiarity and ease which passes too easily into Cockney pertness. - -A combination of accidents, political, personal, and literary, caused this -writer of amiable memory and second-rate powers to exercise, about the -time of which we are writing, a determining influence both on the work and -the fortunes of stronger men. And first of his influence on their work. He -was as enthusiastic a student of 'our earlier and nobler school of poetry' -as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the -characteristic excellences of the 'French school,' the school of polished -artifice and restraint which had come in since Dryden, he was not less -bent on its overthrow, and on the return of English poetry to the paths of -nature and freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which -this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his -rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. "It -was his intention," he wrote in prison, "by the beginning of next year to -bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce -to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various -and legitimate harmony of the English heroic." The result of this -intention was the _Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and -published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. "With the -endeavour," so he repeated himself in the preface, "to recur to a freer -spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater -importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language." - -In versification Hunt's aim was to bring back into use the earlier form of -the rhymed English decasyllabic or 'heroic' couplet. The innovating poets -of the time had abandoned this form of verse (Wordsworth and Coleridge -using it only in their earliest efforts, before 1796); while the others -who still employed it, as Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Byron, adhered, -each in his manner, to the isolated couplet and hammering rhymes with -which the English ear had been for more than a century exclusively -familiar. The two contrasted systems of handling the measure may best be -understood if we compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of -those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two -different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern, -with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. The -regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand -for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the verse into equal -pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its -other divisions--dependent not on metre but on the sense--into clauses and -periods of variable length and structure. Under the older system of -versification the sentence or period had been allowed to follow its own -laws, with a movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the beauty of -the result depended upon the skill and feeling with which this free -element of the pattern was made to play about and interweave itself with -the fixed element, the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and -now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now drawing attention to -the rhyme and now withholding it. For examples of this system and of its -charm we have only to turn at random to Chaucer:-- - - "I-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse. - Hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse, - Byhynde her bak, a yerd long, I gesse, - And in the garden as the sonne upriste - She walketh up and down, and as hir liste - She gathereth floures, party white and reede, - To make a sotil garland for here heede, - And as an aungel hevenlyche sche song." - -Chaucer's conception of the measure prevails throughout the Elizabethan -age, but not exclusively or uniformly. Some poets are more inobservant of -the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as -independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than -with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the -_enjambement_, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to -another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an -opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to -clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single -propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall -regularly on the rhyme. This principle gradually gained ground during the -seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work -of Dryden. But Dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying -the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the -use of the triplet and the Alexandrine, thus:-- - - "Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood - Were poured upon the pile of burning wood, - And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food. - Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around - The fire, and Arcite's name they thrice resound: - 'Hail and farewell,' they shouted thrice amain, - Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again--:" - -and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the -Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:-- - - "I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; - I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. - Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; - I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." - -In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, -these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element -in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element -entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and -clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, -are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical -divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not -sententious, but fanciful and discursive:-- - - "Some in the fields of purest ther play, - And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. - Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, - Or roll the planets through the boundless sky. - Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light - Pursue the stars that shoot across the night, - Or seek the mists in grosser air below, - Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, - Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, - Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain." - -Leigh Hunt's theory was that Pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead -of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic -couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of _Rimini_ is avowedly -modelled. The result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial -cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in -either:-- - - "The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye - Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly; - Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common - To accept the attentions of this lovely woman, - But the meantime he took no generous pains, - By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains; - He entered not, in turn, in her delights, - Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights; - Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he - Unless his pride was roused by company; - Or when to please him, after martial play, - She strained her lute to some old fiery lay - Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras, - Or Ryan's cloak, or how by the red grass - In battle you might know where Richard was." - -It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh Hunt in _Rimini_ -is due the rhythmical form alike of _Endymion_ and _Epipsychidion_, of -Keats's _Epistles_ to his friends and Shelley's _Letter to Maria -Gisborne_. Certainly the _Epistles_ of Keats, both as to sentiment and -rhythm, are very much in Hunt's manner. But the earliest of them, that to -G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when _Rimini_ was not yet published, and -when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have -known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his -work to Hunt's may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural -affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the -disyllabic rhyme and the 'overflow' as used by some of the Elizabethan -writers, particularly by Spenser in _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and by Browne -in _Britannia's Pastorals_. At all events the appearance of _Rimini_ -tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice. - -As to Hunt's success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his -'free and idiomatic cast of language' to supersede the styles alike of -Pope and Wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps -enough. The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of -others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so -completely as in _Rimini_. The piece indeed is not without agreeable -passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the -pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his -prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and -handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and -vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any -departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, -found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_: and ladies -are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what, -one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can -endure to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and -Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like this?-- - - "What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes, - A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise?--" - - "How charming, would he think, to see her here, - How heightened then, and perfect would appear - The two divinest things the world has got, - A lovely woman in a rural spot." - -When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and -instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a -familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it -need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred -strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more -than once. - -Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily exercised on his -friends' fortunes and their estimation by the world. We have seen how he -found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of -political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no -means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him out as a special -butt for Tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so -inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. During his -imprisonment Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the _Reflector_, with notes and -additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the _Feast of the -Poets_, which he had written about two years before. In it Apollo is -represented as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to -the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who -present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially -welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. Moore and -Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof, -Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not -more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on -their contemporaries. The bitterness of the 'Lost Leader' feeling to which -we have referred accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of the Lake -writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott -as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged -the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the -poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His treatment of Scott, on the other -hand, is idly flippant and patronising. Now it so happened that of the two -champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other -the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh,--I mean Wilson and -Lockhart,--Wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and -Lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion -was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem -paradoxical rancour with which the gentle Hunt, and Keats as his friend -and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in _Blackwood_. - -To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first became known to each -other. Cowden Clarke began by carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from -the Edgware Road to a cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, a few of -Keats's poems in manuscript. Horace Smith was with Hunt when the young -poet's work was shown him. Both were eager in its praises, and in -questions concerning the person and character of the author. Cowden Clarke -at Hunt's request brought Keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has -left a vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. The -introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of 1816[17]. -Keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead household; -and for the next year or two Hunt's was the strongest intellectual -influence to which he was subject. So far as opinions were concerned, -those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood -by Leigh Hunt's writings in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic -as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel -of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his -own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of -eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy -of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and optimistic view of things, and he -had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:--ready to entertain and appreciate -any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or -power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. -In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in -common. Both alike were given to 'luxuriating' somewhat effusively and -fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever they liked in art, books, or -nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt -brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness -of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were intense beyond -parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also felt with Keats the -undying charm of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about -this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, -less adequate, of Homer. The poets Hunt loved best were Ariosto and the -other Italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in -English he was devoted to Keats's own favourite Spenser. - -The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of 'Libertas,' 'the lov'd -Libertas,' meaning Leigh Hunt, in the verses written by Keats at this -time. He attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the -_Faerie Queene_ in the metre of _Rimini_, and in others to express in the -same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the -beautiful, then rural Hampstead woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he -seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a -bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length -on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; -and the sonnet beginning, 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and -there', records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend's -house one night in winter. We find him presenting Hunt with a crown of -ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. Or they would -challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme. -Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion in December 1816, when they -each wrote to time a sonnet _on the Grasshopper and Cricket_, has left us -a pleasant picture of their relations:-- - - "The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences - which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard - and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious - encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:-- - - 'The poetry of earth is never dead.' - - "Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth - and eleventh lines:-- - - 'On a lone winter morning, when the frost - Hath wrought a silence'-- - - "Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation - on the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and - torpidity." - -Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced to a number of -congenial spirits. Among them he attached himself especially to one John -Hamilton Reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than -himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. Reynolds was -born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in London, as -writing-master at the Blue Coat School. He lacked health and energy, but -has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a -charming character and no slight literary talent. He held a clerkship in -an Insurance office, and lived in Little Britain with his family, -including three sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest -of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him -inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the -time. One, _Safie_, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then -fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published -in the year of Keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's -relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical -entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum -theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory -parody of _Peter Bell_, which Byron assumed to be the work of Moore. In -1820 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to -relate, under the name _Peter Corcoran_, the fortunes of an amateur of the -prize-ring; and a little later, in conjunction with Hood, the volume of -anonymous _Odes and Addresses to Eminent Persons_ which Coleridge on its -appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. But Reynolds had -early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of -an opening in business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell -sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave to Keats, and in -1821 he writes again, - - "As time increases - I give up drawling verse for drawing leases." - -In point of fact Reynolds continued for years to contribute to the _London -Magazine_ and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with -Hood. But neither in literature nor law did he attain a position -commensurate with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time of -which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,--with -Keats and Shelley,--he died in 1852 as Clerk of the County at Newport, -Isle of Wight, and it is only in association with Keats that his name will -live. Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining -from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet -written early in their acquaintance proves[18], but also one of the -wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake. -In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats's associates must be -mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of -literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, -but always, in Keats's words, "coming on his legs again like a cat"; ever -cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in -good offices to those about him: "dear noble generous James Rice," records -Dilke,--"the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest -men I ever knew." Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming -member of Hunt's set, when Keats first joined it, was one Cornelius Webb, -remembered now, if remembered at all, by _Blackwood's_ derisory quotation -of his lines on-- - - "Keats, - The Muses' son of promise, and what feats - He yet may do"-- - -as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. -He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough -of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost -be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his -weak moments[19]. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in -the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the -revision of the _Quarterly_ proofs. Towards 1830--1840 he re-appeared in -literature, as Cornelius 'Webbe', author of the _Man about Town_ and other -volumes of cheerful gossipping Cockney essays, to which the _Quarterly_ -critics extended a patronizing notice. - -An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which Keats made a few -months later, at Leigh Hunt's, was that of Shelley, his senior by only -three years. During the harrowing period of Shelley's life which followed -the suicide of his first wife--when his principle of love a law to itself -had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his -own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the -world's--the kindness and affection of Leigh Hunt were among his chief -consolations. After his marriage with Mary Godwin, he flitted often, alone -or with his wife, between Great Marlow and Hampstead, where Keats met him -early in the spring of 1817. "Keats," says Hunt, did not take to Shelley -as kindly as Shelley did to him, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a -little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in -every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a -fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his -pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for -friendship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of -reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at -first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or -material patronage on the other's part: but he should soon have learnt -better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy, -according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his -kindness. Of Shelley's kindness Keats had in the sequel sufficient proof: -in the meantime, until Shelley went abroad the following year, the two met -often at Hunt's without becoming really intimate. Pride and social -sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy -between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, -sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as -much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Shelley, -his passionate negation of the world's creeds and the world's law, and his -intense proselytizing ardour. - -It was also at Hunt's house that Keats for the first time met by -pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November 1816, the painter Haydon, -whose influence soon became hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon -was now thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two great -objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory -in the other. He had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence -of the Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor's art acknowledged in -the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation -secured. This is Haydon's chief real title to the regard of posterity. His -other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to -take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the -crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His -indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance, -his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his -self-assertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, -even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at -large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and -encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of -dilettantism and fashion. His first two great pictures, 'Dentatus' and -'Macbeth', had been dubiously received; his last, the 'Judgment of -Solomon', with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than -all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' and while as usual sunk deep in -debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in -truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of -the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he -possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely -exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this -time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future -greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and -ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming -flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and -shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God." -But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of -genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties -which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to -Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of -working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch -and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an -occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from -greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to -immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of -true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin -marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he -enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety -of the original. Very much better is his account of them in words: as -indeed Haydon's chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best -instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know with -what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style -he can relate an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the -literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries -to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied -void turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings. -Take for instance, in relation to Keats himself, Haydon's profound -admonition to him as follows:--"God bless you, my dear Keats! do not -despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakspere, and trust in -Providence, and you will do, you must:" or the following precious -expansion of an image in one of the poet's sonnets on the Elgin -marbles:--"I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable -to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he -must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling -sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing -angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless -wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects -of their seeking"-- - -But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those -he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not -his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his -associates as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits of -the time were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by -him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others -after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of -purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of -thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and -protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for -deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies', and the like. "I always rose up -from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed -fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me -streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he -was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both -particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it -might be, on their bounty. Experience of these qualities partly alienated -Keats from him in the long run. But at first sight Haydon had much to -attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and -Keats were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire from the -other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an -evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th -of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his -name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:-- - - "Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the - following:-- - - Great spirits now on earth are sojourning: - He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, - Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake, - Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing: - He of the rose, the violet, the spring, - The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake, - And lo! whose steadfastness would never take - A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering. - And other spirits there are standing apart - Upon the forehead of the age to come; - These, these will give the world another heart, - And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum - Of mighty workings in the human mart? - Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb." - -Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. The three well-known -sonnets of Wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and -about the same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote him a -sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. In his reply to Keats he -proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which "puts -me," answers Keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence I would -send my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but -think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out -the words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however, -accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two -other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin -marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to -his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject, -confessing his inability rightly to grasp or analyse the impressions he -had received. By the spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon -was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a -standing invitation to his studio in Great Marlborough Street, declaring -him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried -together. - -To complete the group of Keats's friends in these days, we have to think -of two or three others known to him otherwise than through Hunt, and not -belonging to the Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends of a -Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was attached. She was the -daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive -irregular cast of beauty, and Keats on his own account had a great liking -for her. On Valentine's day, 1816, we find him writing, for George to send -her, the first draft of the lines beginning, 'Hadst thou lived in days of -old,' afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[20]. Through -the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was -afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, but whose -character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with -Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was -the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to -be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, a strong love of -literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which Mr -Ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at -Rome[21]. From the moment of their introduction Severn found in Keats his -very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him -with an admiring affection. - -A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles Wells, afterwards -author of _Stories after Nature_, and of that singular and strongly -imagined Biblical drama or 'dramatic poem' of _Joseph and his Brethren_, -which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group -of poets and critics in ours. Wells had been a school companion of Tom -Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone -buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, -boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days -chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about -fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses acknowledged in -the sonnet beginning, 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' A year or -two later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on Tom -Keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the _Stories -after Nature_, published in 1822, are said to have been written in order -to show Keats "that he too could do something." - -Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely-born and half-schooled -young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art, -letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with -some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most -ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temperament alike saved -him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and -deference towards his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of -genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both verbal and other -exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression -which he made. "The character and expression of his features," it is said, -"would arrest even the casual passenger in the street." A small, handsome, -ardent-looking youth--the stature little over five feet: the figure -compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a -strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the -features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an -expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead -not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes -hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired--"an eye that had an inward -look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." "Keats -was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high -calling, except Wordsworth." These words are Haydon's, and to the same -effect Leigh Hunt:--"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." It is noticeable that -his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way -to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. To return to -Haydon:--"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 cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered." -In like manner George Keats:--"John's eyes moistened, and his lip -quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or -noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;" and a shrewd and -honoured survivor of those days, "herself of many poets the frequent theme -and valued friend,"--need I name Mrs Procter?--has recorded the impression -the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on -some glorious sight[22]. - -In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns himself, to -have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the -company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was -pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by -turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and -unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw -apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the -window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and -low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but -gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at -wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to -command respect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are said to -have been great, and never used unkindly. - -Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, -Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather -everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, -passion for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of course was -adverse: but his brothers, including George, the practical and sensible -one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to -them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his -compositions, show. In August 1816 we find him addressing from Margate a -sonnet and a poetical Epistle in terms of the utmost affection and -confidence to George. About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St -Thomas's Street to go and live with his brothers in the Poultry; and in -November he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side -occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. -It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a -time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England -has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself -induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement -of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh -Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without -comment, in the _Examiner_ for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, -'O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell,' and on the 1st of December in the -same year the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some -prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, associating with -his name those of Shelley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of Hunt in -this paper, says Mr Stephens, that Keats's fate was sealed. But already -the still more ardent encouragement of Haydon, if more was wanted, had -come to add fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the -Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers, and in the -convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats -should put forth a volume of his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers -was found in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last -proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, -with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be -furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _To -Leigh Hunt Esqr._, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:-- - - "Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away; - For if we wander out in early morn, - No wreathd incense do we see upborne - Into the East to meet the smiling day: - No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, - In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, - Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn - The shrine of Flora in her early May. - But there are left delights as high as these, - And I shall ever bless my destiny, - That in a time when under pleasant trees - Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, - A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, - With these poor offerings, a man like thee." - -With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old -pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's -first venture was sent forth in the month of March 1817. - - - - -CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817. - - -The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from -Spenser which he prefixed to it:-- - - "What more felicity can fall to creature - Than to enjoy delight with liberty?" - -The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of -release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true -nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And -the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: -delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in -the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and -affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art -itself which expresses and communicates all these joys. - -We have already glanced, in connection with the occasions which gave rise -to them, at a few of the miscellaneous boyish pieces in various metres -which are included in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. The -remaining and much the chief portion of the book consists of half a dozen -poems in the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. These had all been written -during the period between November 1815 and April 1817, under the combined -influence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The former -influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the -poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. Keats had by -this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his -earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a -vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the -Elizabethans and from Milton. The chief verbal echoes of Spenser to be -found in his first volume are a line quoted from him entire in the epistle -to G. F. Mathew, and the use of the archaic 'teen' in the stanzas -professedly Spenserian. We can indeed trace Keats's familiarity with -Chapman, and especially with one poem of Chapman's, his translation of the -Homeric _Hymn to Pan_, in a predilection for a particular form of abstract -descriptive substantive:-- - - "the pillowy silkiness that rests - Full in the speculation of the stars:"-- - - "Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:"-- - - "Ere I can have explored its widenesses."[23] - -The only other distinguishing marks of Keats's diction in this first -volume consist, I think, in the use of the Miltonic 'sphery,' and of an -unmeaning coinage of his own, 'boundly,' with a habit--for which Milton, -Spenser, and among the moderns Leigh Hunt all alike furnished him the -example--of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his -convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his -day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, -and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines and -passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and -instinct. But they are mixed up with much that only illustrates his -crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt -to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and -grace. - -In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems making a -succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic -couplet. In the colloquial _Epistles_, addressed severally to G. F. -Mathew, to his brother George, and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself -with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional -_enjambement_ or 'overflow.' In the _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, -and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled _Calidore_ (a name -borrowed from the hero of Spenser's sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed -piece beginning 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' which opens the -volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the -second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught -either from Spenser's nuptial odes or Milton's _Lycidas_,-- - - "Open afresh your round of starry folds, - Ye ardent marigolds." - -In _Sleep and Poetry_, which is the most personal and interesting, as well -as probably the last-written, poem in the volume, Keats drops this -practice, but in other respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making -free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line -rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather than an -exception the Chaucerian and Elizabethan fashion of breaking the couplet -by closing a sentence or paragraph with its first line. - -Passing from the form of the poems to their substance, we find that they -are experiments or poetic preludes merely, with no pretension to be -organic or complete works of art. To rehearse ramblingly the pleasures and -aspirations of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow another -with no particular plan or sequence, is all that Keats as yet attempts: -except in the _Calidore_ fragment. And that is on the whole feeble and -confused: from the outset the poet loses himself in a maze of young -luxuriant imagery: once and again, however, he gets clear, and we have -some good lines in an approach to the Dryden manner:-- - - "Softly the breezes from the forest came, - Softly they blew aside the taper's flame; - Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower; - Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; - Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone; - Lovely the moon in ether, all alone." - -To set against this are occasionally expressions in the complete taste of -Leigh Hunt, as for instance-- - - "The lamps that from the high-roof'd wall were pendent, - And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent." - -The _Epistles_ are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint pleasures of -literature and friendship. In that to Cowden Clarke, Keats acknowledges to -his friend that he had been shy at first of addressing verses to him:-- - - "Nor should I now, but that I've known you long; - That you first taught me all the sweets of song: - The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine, - What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine: - Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, - And float along like birds o'er summer seas; - Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness; - Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness. - Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly - Up to its climax, and then dying proudly? - Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, - Growing, like Atlas, stronger for its load? - Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, - The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? - Show'd me that Epic was of all the king, - Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?" - -This is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter manner of Keats -in his early work. Blots like the ungrammatical fourth line are not -infrequent with him. The preference for Miltonian tenderness over -Miltonian storms may remind the reader of a later poet's more masterly -expression of the same sentiment:--'Me rather all that bowery -loneliness--'. The two lines on Spenser are of interest as conveying one -of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of which no one has -left us more or better than Keats. The habit of Spenser to which he here -alludes is that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their -open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive lines, for -example,-- - - "Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, - More swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye; - Withouten oare or pilot it to guide, - Or winged canvas with the wind to fly." - -The run here is on _a_ and _i_; principally on _i_, which occurs five -times in its open, and ten times in its closed, sound in the four -lines,--if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel these two unlike sounds -denoted by the same sign. Keats was a close and conscious student of the -musical effects of verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have -suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration -of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we are not clearly told, -neither do I think it can easily be discovered from his practice; though -every one must feel a great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of -the vowel and diphthong sequences. He often spoke of the subject, and once -maintained his view against Wordsworth when the latter seemed to be -advocating a mechanical principle of vowel variation. - -Hear, next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, and of nature, -come naively jostling one another in the _Epistle_ addressed from the -sea-side to his brother George:-- - - "As to my sonnets, though none else should heed them - I feel delighted, still, that you should read them. - Of late, too, I have had much calm enjoyment, - Stretch'd on the grass at my best loved employment - Of scribbling lines for you. These things I thought - While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught. - E'en now I am pillow'd on a bed of flowers - That crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers - Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades - Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades. - On one side is a field of drooping oats, - Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats; - So pert and useless that they bring to mind - The scarlet coats that pester human kind. - And on the other side, outspread is seen - Ocean's blue mantle, streak'd with purple and green. - Now 'tis I see a canvass'd ship, and now - Mark the bright silver curling round her brow; - I see the lark down-dropping to his nest, - And the broad wing'd sea-gull never at rest; - For when no more he spreads his feathers free, - His breast is dancing on the restless sea." - -It is interesting to watch the newly-awakened literary faculty in Keats -thus exercising itself in the narrow circle of personal sensation, and on -the description of the objects immediately before his eyes. The effect of -rhythmical movement attempted in the last lines, to correspond with the -buoyancy and variety of the motions described, has a certain felicity, and -the whole passage is touched already with Keats's exquisite perception and -enjoyment of external nature. His character as a poet of nature begins, -indeed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. He differs by -it alike from Wordsworth and from Shelley. The instinct of Wordsworth was -to interpret all the operations of nature by those of his own strenuous -soul; and the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from the -scenery of his home, deepened and enriched by continual after meditation, -and mingling with all the currents of his adult thought and feeling, -constituted for him throughout his life the most vital part alike of -patriotism, of philosophy, and of religion. For Shelley on his part -natural beauty was in a twofold sense symbolical. In the visible glories -of the world his philosophy saw the veil of the unseen, while his -philanthropy found in them types and auguries of a better life on earth; -and all that imagery of nature's more remote and skyey phenomena, of which -no other poet has had an equal mastery, and which comes borne to us along -the music of the verse-- - - "With many a mingled close - Of wild olian sound and mountain odour keen"-- - -was inseparable in his soul from visions of a radiant future and a -renovated--alas! not a human--humanity. In Keats the sentiment of nature -was simpler than in either of these two other masters; more direct, and so -to speak more disinterested. It was his instinct to love and interpret -nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of sympathy which the -human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. He had -grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor -in the glow of millennial dreams like Shelley, but London-born and -Middlesex-bred, was gifted, we know not whence, as if by some mysterious -birthright, with a delighted insight into all the beauties, and sympathy -with all the life, of the woods and fields. Evidences of the gift appear, -as every reader knows, in the longer poems of his first volume, with their -lingering trains of peaceful summer imagery, and loving inventories of -'Nature's gentle doings;' and pleasant touches of the same kind are -scattered also among the sonnets; as in that _To Charles Wells_,-- - - "As late I rambled in the happy fields, - What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew - From his lush clover covert,"-- - -or again in that _To Solitude_,-- - - --"let me thy vigils keep - 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap - Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."[24] - -Such intuitive familiarity with the blithe activities, unnoted by common -eyes, which make up the life and magic of nature, is a gift we attribute -to men of primitive race and forest nurture; and Mr Matthew Arnold would -have us recognize it as peculiarly characteristic of the Celtic element in -the English genius and English poetry. It was allied in Keats to another -instinct of the early world which we associate especially with the Greeks, -the instinct for personifying the powers of nature in clearly-defined -imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half-human faculties. The -classical teaching of the Enfield school had not gone beyond Latin, and -neither in boyhood nor afterwards did Keats acquire any Greek: but towards -the creations of the Greek mythology he was attracted by an overmastering -delight in their beauty, and a natural sympathy with the phase of -imagination that engendered them. Especially he shows himself possessed -and fancy-bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical enchantment, -of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moonstruck. He had -planned a poem on the ancient story of the loves of Diana, with whom the -Greek moon-goddess Selene is identified in the Latin mythology, and the -shepherd-prince Endymion; and had begun a sort of prelude to it in the -piece that opens 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.' Afterwards, without -abandoning the subject, Keats laid aside this particular exordium, and -printed it, as we have seen, as an independent piece at the head of his -first volume. It is at the climax of a passage rehearsing the delights of -evening that he first bethinks himself of the moon-- - - "lifting her silver rim - Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim - Coming into the blue with all her light." - -The thought of the mythic passion of the moon-goddess for Endymion, and -the praises of the poet who first sang it, follow at considerable length. -The passage conjuring up the wonders and beneficences of their bridal -night is written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the collective -feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary conditions of human pain -and pleasure, health and sickness, as rarely occurs again in Keats's -poetry, though his correspondence shows it to have been most natural to -his mind:-- - - "The evening weather was so bright, and clear, - That men of health were of unusual cheer. - - * * * * * - - The breezes were ethereal, and pure, - And crept through half-closed lattices to cure - The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, - And sooth'd them into slumbers full and deep. - Soon they awoke clear-ey'd: nor burnt with thirsting, - Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: - And springing up, they met the wond'ring sight - Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; - Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, - And on their placid foreheads part the hair."[25] - -Finally, Keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exordium of his -unwritten poem with the cry:-- - - "Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses - That followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses: - Was there a poet born? But now no more - My wandering spirit must no farther soar." - -Was there a poet born? Is the labour and the reward of poetry really and -truly destined to be his? The question is one which recurs in this early -volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences -closely recalling those of Milton in his boyish _Vacation Exercise_; -sometimes with a cry like this, which occurs twice over in the piece -called _Sleep and Poetry_,-- - - "O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen, - That am not yet a glorious denizen - Of thy wide heaven:"-- - -and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring tone of young -ambition,-- - - "But off, Despondence! miserable bane! - They should not know thee, who, athirst to gain - A noble end, are thirsty every hour. - What though I am not wealthy in the dower - Of spanning wisdom: though I do not know - The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow - Hither and thither all the changing thoughts - Of man: though no great ministering reason sorts - Out the dark mysteries of human souls - To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls - A vast idea before me"--. - -The feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the overmastering -pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, -gives way in other passages to confident anticipations of fame, and of the -place which he will hold in the affections of posterity. - -There is obviously a great immaturity and uncertainty in all these -outpourings, an intensity and effervescence of emotion out of proportion -as yet both to the intellectual and the voluntary powers, much confusion -of idea, and not a little of expression. Yet even in this first book of -Keats there is much that the lover of poetry will always cherish. -Literature, indeed, hardly affords another example of work at once so -crude and so attractive. Passages that go to pieces under criticism -nevertheless have about them a spirit of beauty and of morning, an -abounding young vitality and freshness, that exhilarate and charm us -whether with the sanction of our judgment or without it. And alike at its -best and worst, the work proceeds manifestly from a spontaneous and -intense poetic impulse. The matter of these early poems of Keats is as -fresh and unconventional as their form, springing directly from the native -poignancy of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. That his -inexperience should always make the most discreet use of its freedom could -not be expected; but with all its immaturity his work has strokes already -which suggest comparison with the great names of literature. Who much -exceeds him, even from the first, but Shakspere in momentary felicity of -touch for nature, and in that charm of morning freshness who but Chaucer? -Already, too, we find him showing signs of that capacity for clear and -sane self-knowledge which becomes by-and-by so admirable in him. And he -has already begun to meditate to good purpose on the aims and methods of -his art. He has grasped and vehemently asserts the principle that poetry -should not strive to enforce particular doctrines, that it should not -contend in the field of reason, but that its proper organ is the -imagination, and its aim the creation of beauty. With reference to the -theory and practice of the poetic art the piece called _Sleep and Poetry_ -contains one passage which has become classically familiar to all readers. -Often as it has been quoted elsewhere, it must be quoted again here, as -indispensable to the understanding of the literary atmosphere in which -Keats lived:-- - - "Is there so small a range - In the present strength of manhood, that the high - Imagination cannot freely fly - As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, - Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds - Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all? - From the clear space of ether, to the small - Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning - Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening - Of April meadows? here her altar shone, - E'en in this isle; and who could paragon - The fervid choir that lifted up a noise - Of harmony, to where it aye will poise - Its mighty self of convoluting sound, - Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, - Eternally around a dizzy void? - Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd - With honours; nor had any other care - Than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair. - 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 sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, - And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd! - The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd - 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 smooth, inlay, and clip, 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, - Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large - The name of one Boileau! - O ye whose charge - It is to hover round our pleasant hills! - Whose congregated majesty so fills - My boundly reverence, that I cannot trace - Your hallow'd names, in this unholy place, - So near those common folk; did not their shames - Affright you? Did our old lamenting Thames - Delight you? did ye never cluster round - Delicious Avon, with a mournful sound, - And weep? Or did ye wholly bid adieu - To regions where no more the laurel grew? - Or did ye stay to give a welcoming - To some lone spirits who could proudly sing - Their youth away, and die? 'Twas even so. - But let me think away those times of woe: - Now 'tis a fairer season; ye have breathed - Rich benedictions o'er us; ye have wreathed - Fresh garlands: for sweet music has been heard - In many places; some has been upstirr'd - From out its crystal dwelling in a lake, - By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake, - Nested and quiet in a valley mild, - Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild - About the earth: happy are ye and glad." - -Both the strength and the weakness of this are typically characteristic of -the time and of the man. The passage is likely to remain for posterity the -central expression of the spirit of literary emancipation then militant -and about to triumph in England. The two great elder captains of -revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have both expounded their cause, in -prose, with much more maturity of thought and language; Coleridge in the -luminous retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_, Wordsworth in the -austere contentions of his famous prefaces. But neither has left any -enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory -like the rhymes of this young untrained recruit in the cause of poetic -liberty and the return to nature. It is easy, indeed, to pick these verses -of Keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention -on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to -do? fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against -the light? and why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly -be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' -Delight with liberty is very well, but liberty in a poet ought not to -include liberties with the parts of speech. Why should the hair of the -muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more -intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to -'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit, but not a standard, -and a standard flimsy, but not a motto. 'Boundly reverence': what is -boundly? And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that -attitude. Many minds not indifferent to literature were at that time, and -some will at all times be, incapable of any other. Such must naturally -turn to the work of the eighteenth century school, the school of tact and -urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think the only 'blasphemy' -was on the side of the youth who could call, or seem to call, the poet of -Belinda and the _Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot_ fool and dolt. Byron, in his -controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack -effectively enough: his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its -most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, -for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have -in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as -distinct from that of taste and reason, however clearly we may see the -weak points of a passage like this, however much we may wish that taste -and reason had had more to do with it, yet we cannot but feel that Keats -touches truly the root of the matter; we cannot but admire the elastic -life and variety of his verse, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of -rhetoric, the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow -of his delight in the achievements and promise of the new age. - -His volume on its appearance by no means made the impression which his -friends had hoped for it. Hunt published a thoroughly judicious as well as -cordial criticism in the _Examiner_, and several of the provincial papers -noticed the book. Haydon wrote in his ranting vein: "I have read your -_Sleep and Poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from -their occupations, and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that -_will_ follow." But people were in fact as far from being disturbed in -their occupations as possible. The attention of the reading public was for -the moment almost entirely absorbed by men of talent or of genius who -played with a more careless, and some of them with a more masterly touch -than Keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit; as Moore, -Scott, and Byron. In Keats's volume every one could see the faults, while -the beauties appealed only to the poetically minded. It seems to have had -a moderate sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. The -poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, apparently -with little reason, to blame their friends the publishers for the failure. -On the 29th of April we find the brothers Ollier replying to a letter of -George Keats in dudgeon:--"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." One of their customers, they go on -to say, had a few days ago hurt their feelings as men of business and of -taste by calling it "no better than a take in." - -A fortnight before the date of this letter Keats had left London. Haydon -had been urging on him, not injudiciously, the importance of seclusion and -concentration of mind. We find him writing to Reynolds soon after the -publication of his volume:--"My brothers are anxious that I should go by -myself into the country; they have always been extremely fond of me, and -now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone -to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me -continually for a great good which I hope will follow: so I shall soon be -out of town." And on the 14th of April he in fact started for the Isle of -Wight, intending to devote himself entirely to study, and to make -immediately a fresh start upon _Endymion_. - - - - -CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer at - Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey at - Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter at - Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity--Spring at - Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and Emigration of George - Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818.] - - -As soon as Keats reached the Isle of Wight, on April 16, 1817, he went to -see Shanklin and Carisbrooke, and after some hesitation between the two, -decided on a lodging at the latter place. The next day he writes to -Reynolds that he has spent the morning arranging the books and prints he -had brought with him, adding to the latter one of Shakspere which he had -found in the passage and which had particularly pleased him. He speaks -with enthusiasm of the beauties of Shanklin, but in a postscript written -the following day, mentions that he has been nervous from want of sleep, -and much haunted by the passage in _Lear_, 'Do you not hear the -sea?'--adding without farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet -beginning-- - - "It keeps eternal whisperings around - Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell - Gluts twice ten thousand caverns"--. - -In the same postscript Keats continues:-- - - "I find I cannot do without poetry--without eternal poetry; half the - day will not do--the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit has - made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not having - written anything of late: the Sonnet overleaf did me good; I slept the - better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad - again.... I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_, which I hope I shall - have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses - in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle." - -The Isle of Wight, however, Keats presently found did not suit him, and -Haydon's prescription of solitude proved too trying. He fell into a kind -of fever of thought and sleeplessness, which he thought it wisest to try -and shake off by flight. Early in May we find him writing to Leigh Hunt -from Margate, where he had already stayed the year before, and explaining -the reasons of his change of abode. Later in the same letter, endeavouring -to measure his own powers against the magnitude of the task to which he -has committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we have seen -recurring once and again in his verses during the preceding year, the vein -of awed self-questioning, and tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest -and half in jest. The next day we find him writing a long and intimate, -very characteristic letter to Haydon, signed 'your everlasting friend,' -and showing the first signs of the growing influence which Haydon was -beginning to exercise over him in antagonism to the influence of Leigh -Hunt. Keats was quite shrewd enough to feel for himself after a little -while the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of depth and -strength, in the kind and charming nature of Hunt, and quite loyal enough -to value his excellences none the less, and hold him in grateful and -undiminished friendship. But Haydon, between whom and Hunt there was by -degrees arising a coolness, must needs have Keats see things as he saw -them. "I love you like my own brother," insists he: "beware, for God's -sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents -and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his -own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of -his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to -support injured by his own neglect of character." There is a lugubrious -irony in these words, when we remember how Haydon, a self-deluder indeed, -came to realise at last the very fate he here prophesies for -another,--just when Hunt, the harassing and often sordid, ever brightly -borne troubles of his earlier life left behind him, was passing surrounded -by affection into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. But for a -time, under the pressure of Haydon's masterful exhortations, we find Keats -inclining to take an exaggerated and slightly impatient view of the -foibles of his earlier friend. - -Among other interesting confessions to be found in Keats's letter to -Haydon from Margate, is that of the fancy--almost the sense--which often -haunted him of dependence on the tutelary genius of Shakspere:-- - - "I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius - presiding over you. I have lately had the same thought, for things - which I do half at random, are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in - a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakspeare - this presider? When in the Isle of Wight I met with a Shakspeare in - the passage of the house at which I lodged. It comes nearer to my idea - of him than any I have seen; I was but there a week, yet the old woman - made me take it with me, though I went off in a hurry. Do you not - think this ominous of good?" - -Next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own nature, -describing it in words which the after issue of his life will keep but -too vividly and constantly before our minds:--"truth is, I have a horrid -Morbidity of Temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I -have no doubt, the greatest Enemy and stumbling-block I have to fear; I -may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment." Was it -that, in this seven-months' child of a consumptive mother, some unhealth -of mind as well as body was congenital?--or was it that, along with what -seems his Celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he had inherited a -special share of that inward gloom which the reverses of their history -have stamped, according to some, on the mind of the Celtic race? We cannot -tell, but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever -creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there dwelt in Keats's -bosom an almost equally busy and inventive spirit of self-torment. - -The fit of dejection which led to the remark above quoted had its -immediate cause in apprehensions of money difficulties conveyed to Keats -in a letter from his brother George. The trust funds of which Mr Abbey had -the disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed executed by -Mrs Jennings, amounted approximately to 8,000[26], of which the capital -was divisible among them on their coming of age, and the interest was to -be applied to their maintenance in the meantime. But the interest of -John's share had been insufficient for his professional and other expenses -during his term of medical study at Edmonton and London, and much of his -capital had been anticipated to meet them; presumably in the form of loans -raised on the security of his expectant share. Similar advances had also -been for some time necessary to the invalid Tom for his support, and -latterly--since he left the employment of Mr Abbey--to George as well. It -is clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances were made both -wastefully and grudgingly. It is further plain that the brothers were very -insufficiently informed of the state of their affairs. In the meantime -John Keats was already beginning to discount his expectations from -literature. Before or about the time of his rupture with the Olliers, he -had made the acquaintance of those excellent men, Messrs Taylor and -Hessey, who were shortly, as publishers of the _London Magazine_, to -gather about them on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors -comprising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. With them, -especially with Mr Taylor, who was himself a student and writer of -independent, somewhat eccentric ability and research, Keats's relations -were excellent from first to last, generous on their part, and -affectionate and confidential on his. He had made arrangements with them, -apparently before leaving London, for the eventual publication of -_Endymion_, and from Margate we find him acknowledging a first payment -received in advance. Now and again afterwards he turns to the same friends -for help at a pinch, adding once, "I am sure you are confident of my -responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;" nor -did they at any time belie his expectation. - -From Margate, where he had already made good progress with _Endymion_, -Keats went with his brother Tom to spend some time at Canterbury. Thence -they moved early in the summer to lodgings kept by a Mr and Mrs Bentley in -Well Walk, Hampstead, where the three brothers had decided to take up -their abode together. Here he continued through the summer to work -steadily at _Endymion_, being now well advanced with the second book; and -some of his friends, as Haydon, Cowden Clarke, and Severn, remembered all -their lives afterwards the occasions when they walked with him on the -heath, while he repeated to them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting -tone, the newly-written passages which best pleased him. From his poetical -absorption and Elysian dreams they were accustomed to see him at a touch -come back to daily life; sometimes to sympathize heart and soul with their -affairs, sometimes in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns, (it was a -punning age, and the Keats's were a very punning family), sometimes with a -sudden flash of his old schoolboy pugnacity and fierceness of righteous -indignation. To this summer or the following winter, it is not quite -certain which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in stand-up -fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had found tormenting a cat (a -'ruffian in livery' according to one account, but the butcher version is -the best attested). - -For the rest, the choice of Hampstead as a place of residence had much to -recommend it to Keats: the freshness of the air for the benefit of the -invalid Tom: for his own walks and meditations those beauties of heath, -field, and wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habitations, -which his imagination could transmute at will into the landscapes of -Arcadia, or into those, 'with high romances blent,' of an earlier England -or of fable-land. For society there was the convenient proximity to, and -yet seclusion from, London, together with the immediate neighbourhood of -one or two intimate friends. Among these, Keats frequented as familiarly -as ever the cottage in the Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt was still -living--a kind of self-appointed poet-laureate of Hampstead, the features -of which he was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets, and now in the -cheerful singsong of his familiar _Epistles_:-- - - "And yet how can I touch, and not linger awhile - On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile? - On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, - Dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley'd shades, - With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees - The hills up above him with roofs in the trees." - -Several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed to Keats -himself, some translations from the Greek, and a not ungraceful -mythological poem, the _Nymphs_, were published early in the following -year by Leigh Hunt in a volume called _Foliage_, which helped to draw down -on him and his friends the lash of Tory criticism. - -Near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction from Hunt's cottage, -lived two new friends of Keats who had been introduced to him by Reynolds, -and with whom he was soon to become extremely intimate. These were Charles -Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown (or plain Charles Brown as he -at this time styled himself). Dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by -birth belonging to a younger branch of the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle, by -profession a clerk in the Navy Pay office, and by opinions at this time a -firm disciple of Godwin. He soon gave himself up altogether to literary -and antiquarian studies, and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the -most accomplished and influential of English critics and journalists, and -for many years editor and chief owner of the _Athenum_. No two men could -well be more unlike in mind than Dilke and Keats: Dilke positive, bent on -certainty, and unable, as Keats says, "to feel he has a personal identity -unless he has made up his mind about everything:" while Keats on his part -held that "the only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up -one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all -thoughts." Nevertheless the two took to each other and became fast -friends. Dilke had married young, and built himself, a year or two before -Keats knew him, a modest semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near -the lower end of Hampstead Heath, at the bottom of what is now John -Street; the other part of the same block being built and inhabited by his -friend Charles Brown. This Brown was the son of a Scotch stockbroker -living in Lambeth. He was born in 1786, and while almost a boy went out to -join one of his brothers in a merchant's business at St Petersburg; but -the business failing, he returned to England in 1808, and lived as he -could for the next few years, until the death of another brother put him -in possession of a small competency. He had a taste, and some degree of -talent for literature, and held strongly Radical opinions. In 1810 he -wrote an opera on a Russian subject, called _Narensky_, which was brought -out at the Lyceum with Braham in the principal part; and at intervals -during the next twenty years many criticisms, tales, and translations from -the Italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals edited by Leigh -Hunt. When Keats first knew him, Brown was a young man already of somewhat -middle-aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled,--a kindly companion, -and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good measure both of obstinacy and -caution lying in reserve, _more Scotico_, under his pleasant and convivial -outside. It is clear by his relations with Keats that his heart was warm, -and that when once attached, he was capable not only of appreciation but -of devotion. After the poet's death Brown went to Italy, and became the -friend of Trelawney, whom he helped with the composition of the -_Adventures of a Younger Son_, and of Landor, at whose villa near Florence -Lord Houghton first met him in 1832. Two years later he returned to -England, and settled at Plymouth, where he continued to occupy himself -with literature and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, an -essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobiographical poems of -Shakspere. Thoughts of Keats, and a wish to be his biographer, never left -him, until in 1841 he resolved suddenly to emigrate to New Zealand, and -departed leaving his materials in Lord Houghton's hands. A year afterwards -he died of apoplexy at the settlement of New Plymouth, now called -Taranaki[27]. - -Yet another friend of Reynolds who in these months attached himself with a -warm affection to Keats was Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford undergraduate -reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. Bailey was a -great lover of books, devoted especially to Milton among past and to -Wordsworth among present poets. For his earnestness and integrity of -character Keats conceived a strong respect, and a hearty liking for his -person, and much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in his -mind and cogitations, was called out in the intercourse that ensued -between them. In the course of this summer, 1817, Keats had been invited -by Shelley to stay with him at Great Marlow, and Hunt, ever anxious that -the two young poets should be friends, pressed him strongly to accept the -invitation. It is said by Medwin, but the statement is not confirmed by -other evidence, that Shelley and Keats had set about their respective -'summer tasks,' the composition of _Laon and Cythna_ and of _Endymion_, by -mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Keats at any rate -declined his brother poet's invitation, in order, as he said, that he -might have his own unfettered scope. Later in the same summer, while his -brothers were away on a trip to Paris, he accepted an invitation of Bailey -to come to Oxford, and stayed there during the last five or six weeks of -the Long Vacation. Here he wrote the third book of _Endymion_, working -steadily every morning, and composing with great facility his regular -average of fifty lines a day. The afternoons they would spend in walking -or boating on the Isis, and Bailey has feelingly recorded the pleasantness -of their days, and of their discussions on life, literature, and the -mysteries of things. He tells of the sweetness of Keats's temper and charm -of his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with which the hot -young liberal and free-thinker would listen to his host's exposition of -his own orthodox convictions: describes his enthusiasm in quoting -Chatterton and in dwelling on passages of Wordsworth's poetry, -particularly from the _Tintern Abbey_ and the _Ode on Immortality_: and -recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and other -technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling looks and low-voiced -recitations, his vividness of inner life, and intensity of quiet enjoyment -during their field and river rambles and excursions[28]. One special -occasion of pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to -Stratford-on-Avon. From Oxford are some of the letters written by Keats -in his happiest vein; to Reynolds and his sister Miss Jane Reynolds, -afterwards Mrs Tom Hood; to Haydon; and to his young sister Frances Mary, -or Fanny as she was always called (now Mrs Llanos). George Keats, writing -to this sister after John's death, speaks of the times "when we lived with -our grandmother at Edmonton, and John, Tom, and myself were always -devising plans to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us -to the others." Since those times Keats had seen little of her, Mr Abbey -having put her to a boarding-school before her grandmother's death, and -afterwards taken her into his own house at Walthamstow, where the visits -of her poet brother were not encouraged. "He often," writes Bailey, "spoke -to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great -delicacy and tenderness of affection:" and from this time forward we find -him maintaining with her a correspondence which shows his character in its -most attractive light. He bids her keep all his letters and he will keep -hers--"and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good -bundle--which hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God -knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on -times past--that now are to come." He tells her about Oxford and about his -work, and gives her a sketch of the story of _Endymion_--"but I daresay -you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have come down to -us from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece." - -Early in October Keats returned to Hampstead, whence he writes to Bailey -noticing with natural indignation the ruffianly first article of the -_Cockney School_ series, which had just appeared in _Blackwood's -Magazine_ for that month. In this the special object of attack was Leigh -Hunt, but there were allusions to Keats which seemed to indicate that his -own turn was coming. What made him more seriously uneasy were signs of -discord springing up among his friends, and of attempts on the part of -some of them to set him against others. Haydon had now given up his studio -in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove; and Hunt, having left -the Vale of Health, was living close by him at a lodging in the same -street. "I know nothing of anything in this part of the world," writes -Keats: "everybody seems at loggerheads." And he goes on to say how Hunt -and Haydon are on uncomfortable terms, and "live, _pour ainsi dire_, -jealous neighbours. Haydon says to me, 'Keats, don't show your lines to -Hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you'--so it appears -Hunt wishes it to be thought." With more accounts of warnings he had -received from common friends that Hunt was not feeling or speaking -cordially about _Endymion_. "Now is not all this a most paltry thing to -think about?... This is, to be sure, but the vexation of a day, nor would -I say so much about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and -reputation at heart[29]." When three months later Keats showed Hunt the -first book of his poem in proof, the latter found many faults. It is clear -he was to some extent honestly disappointed in the work itself. He may -also have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully into -confidence during its composition; and what he said to others was probably -due partly to such chagrin, partly to nervousness on behalf of his -friend's reputation: for of double-facedness or insincerity in friendship -we know by a hundred evidences that Hunt was incapable. Keats, however, -after what he had heard, was by no means without excuse when he wrote to -his brothers concerning Hunt,--not unkindly, or making much of the -matter,--"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. But who's afraid?" Keats was not the man to let this -kind of thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend: and writing -about the same time to Bailey, still concerning the dissensions in the -circle, he expounds the practical philosophy of friendship with truly -admirable good sense and feeling:-- - - "Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard - of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting - for ever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is - unfortunate: men should bear with each other; there lives not the man - who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The - best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual - yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by - which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with - circumstance. 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. Before I felt - interested in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well-read in their - faults; yet knowing them both I have been cementing gradually with - both. I have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite; - and to both must I of necessity cling, supported always by the hope - that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully - in their esteem, I may be able to bring them together. This time must - come, because they have both hearts; and they will recollect the best - parts of each other when this gust is overblown." - -Keats had in the meantime been away on another autumn excursion into the -country: this time to Burford Bridge near Dorking. Here he passed -pleasantly the latter part of November, much absorbed in the study of -Shakspere's minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of finishing -_Endymion_. He had thus all but succeeded in carrying out the hope which -he had expressed in the opening passage of the poem:-- - - "Many and many a verse I hope to write, - Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, - Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees - Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, - I must be near the middle of my story. - O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, - See it half finished; but let Autumn bold, - With universal tinge of sober gold, - Be all about me when I make an end." - -Returning to Hampstead, Keats spent the first part of the winter in -comparative rest from literary work. His chief occupation was in revising -and seeing _Endymion_ through the press, with much help from the -publisher, Mr Taylor; varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism, -and as the spring began, by the composition of a number of minor -incidental poems. In December he lost the companionship of his brothers, -who went to winter in Devonshire for the sake of Tom's health. But in -other company he was at this time mixing freely. The convivial gatherings -of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun high, the -discussions on art and literature boisterous, and varied with a moderate, -evidently never a very serious, amount of card-playing, drinking, and -dissipation. From these gatherings Keats was indispensable, and more than -welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, Messrs Taylor -and Hessey, men as strict in conduct and opinion as they were -good-hearted. His social relations began, indeed, in the course of this -winter to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought -consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Horace Smith in -company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:--"They -only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to -enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one -feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know -fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, -in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low -company. 'Would I were with that company instead of yours', said I to -myself." Men of ardent and deep natures, whether absorbed in the realities -of experience, or in the ideals of art and imagination, are apt to be -affected in this way by the conventional social sparkle which is only -struck from and only illuminates the surface. Hear, on the other hand, -with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius for genius, Keats -writes after seeing the great tragedian last mentioned interpret the inner -and true passions of the soul:-- - - "The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean ... his - tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them - honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we - feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while - speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello, 'Put up your bright - swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had - commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he - speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of - 'blood! blood! blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the last degree; - the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, - making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild - dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can - distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In - Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' came - from him, as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns." - -It was in the Christmas weeks of 1817-18 that Keats undertook the office -of theatrical critic for the _Champion_ newspaper in place of Reynolds, -who was away at Exeter. Early in January he writes to his brothers of the -pleasure he has had in seeing their sister, who had been brought to London -for the Christmas holidays; and tells them how he has called on and been -asked to dine by Wordsworth, whom he had met on the 28th of December at a -supper given by Haydon. This is the famous Sunday supper, or 'immortal -dinner' as Haydon calls it, which is described at length in one of the -most characteristic passages of the painter's _Autobiography_. Besides -Wordsworth and Keats and the host, there were present Charles Lamb and -Monkhouse. "Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, -Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so -speeded the stream of conversation," says Haydon, "that I never passed a -more delightful time." Later in the evening came in Ritchie the African -traveller, just about to start on the journey to Fezzan on which he died, -besides a self-invited guest in the person of one Kingston, Comptroller of -Stamps, a foolish good-natured gentleman, recommended only by his -admiration for Wordsworth. Presently Lamb getting fuddled, lost patience -with the platitudes of Mr Kingston, and began making fun of him, with -pranks and personalities which to Haydon appeared hugely funny, but which -Keats in his letter to his brothers mentions with less relish, saying, -"Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston, proceeding so far as to take the -candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft -fellow he was[30]." Keats saw Wordsworth often in the next few weeks after -their introduction at Haydon's, but has left us no personal impressions of -the elder poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one day -preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest clothes, with his -aforesaid unlucky admirer Mr Comptroller Kingston. We know from other -sources that he was once persuaded to recite to Wordsworth the Hymn to Pan -from _Endymion_. "A pretty piece of Paganism," remarked Wordsworth, -according to his usual encouraging way with a brother poet; and Keats was -thought to have winced under the frigidity. Independently of their -personal relations, the letters of Keats show that Wordsworth's poetry -continued to be much in his thoughts throughout these months; what he has -to say of it varying according to the frame of mind in which he writes. In -the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days again insists, -that there are three things to rejoice at in the present age, "The -_Excursion_, Haydon's Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste." This -mention of the name of Hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence -which somewhat powerfully affected Keats at this time. On the liberal side -in politics and criticism there was no more effective or more uncertain -free lance than that eloquent and splenetic writer, with his rich, -singular, contradictory gifts, his intellect equally acute and fervid, his -temperament both enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and -incisive. The reader acquainted with Hazlitt's manner will easily -recognize its influence on Keats in the fragment of stage criticism above -quoted. Hazlitt was at this time delivering his course of lectures on the -English poets at the Surrey Institution, and Keats was among his regular -attendants. With Hazlitt personally, as with Lamb, his intercourse at -Haydon's and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and friendly, but not -intimate: and Haydon complains that it was only after the death of Keats -that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius. - -Of Haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we see by the words -above quoted that Keats continued to think as highly as ever. He had, as -Severn assures us, a keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting -and music. Cowden Clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to him at -school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind's eye -visions of pictures:--"when a schoolboy the abstract idea I had of an -heroic painting was what I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways, -large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence--somewhat like the -feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning on his -crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving -with the sea." In Haydon's pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends -and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt -to see, not so much the actual performance, as the idea he had -pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend's intentions and -enthusiasm. At this time Haydon, who had already made several drawings of -Keats's head in order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering -Jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, "to be engraved," -writes Keats, "in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying, -at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and -that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it." -Both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part -of the sublime Haydon; who failed, however, to carry out his promise. "My -neglect," said Haydon long afterwards, "really gave him a pang, as it now -does me." - -With Hunt also Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds -his intimacy grew daily closer. Both of these friendships had a -stimulating influence on his poetic powers. "The Wednesday before last -Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile," he tells his -brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. "I have been writing, at -intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read -them over to you." With the help of Keats's manuscripts or of the -transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the -actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was -written the humorous sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat; on the 21st, after -seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, -the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!'--and on the -22nd the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which -Keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his Spenser, in order -to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _Lear_. On -the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to Apollo beginning -'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' and in the same letter the sonnet -beginning 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' which he calls his -last. On the 3rd of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin Hood, -suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest; on the 4th, -the sonnet beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in -which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love-fancy, -and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written at Hunt's in -competition with that friend and with Shelley; on the 5th, another sonnet -postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's -to compose something in honour, or in emulation of Spenser; and on the -8th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest -against one of Reynolds. About the same time Keats agreed with Reynolds -that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and -publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with -_Isabella_ or _the Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month -of February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, -and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the -influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in -a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, -translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of a singular -and haunting melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find him in -correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon -afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing -to flit. His brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at -Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a -scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom's health having made a -momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and -determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and -stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather--the -soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing -themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, -throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more -than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the -scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of objurgations -against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible, -in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents -his father to have been a Devonshire man:-- - - "You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a - splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod - county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the - primroses are out,--but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep - colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them."... "I - fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, - all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat - off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the - honour of Britain, that Julius Caesar did not first land in this - county: A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct - object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would - dispossess him[31]." - -Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid -brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during -these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of -_Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had -begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_, the first of his longer poems -written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time -he was reading and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With -the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been -attracted by _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and then more -energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he -now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of -genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its -power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey -and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. It -was in all senses manifestly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power, -and in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries of existence -and of suffering, and the 'deeps of good and evil,' were beginning for the -first time to press habitually on his thoughts. In that beautiful and -interesting letter to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human -life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he -thus describes:-- - - "We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the - Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light - and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of - delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this - breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's - vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves - that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and - oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually - darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set - open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages. We see not the - balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are in that state, we - feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'" - -A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed -_Epistles_, Keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he -sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea's edge:-- - - "twas a quiet eve, - The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave - An untumultuous fringe of silver foam - Along the flat brown sand; I was at home - And should have been most happy,--but I saw - Too far into the sea, where every maw - The greater or the less feeds evermore:-- - But I saw too distinct into the core - Of an eternal fierce destruction, - And so from happiness I far was gone. - Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day, - I've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay - Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, - Still do I that most fierce destruction see,-- - The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,-- - The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, - Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods! - Moods of one's mind!"-- - -In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his "Why should -woman suffer?"--"Aye, why should she?" writes Keats: "'By heavens, I'd -coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas.' These things are, and -he who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal -this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of -thought." And again, "were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal -coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I -should not by rights speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary -spirit that would do so." - -Not the general tribulations of the race only, but particular private -anxieties, were pressing in these days on Keats's thoughts. The shadow of -illness, though it had hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly -not only over his brother but his best friends. He speaks of it in a tone -of courage and gaiety which his real apprehensions, we can feel, belie. -"Banish money"--he had written in Falstaff's vein, at starting for the -Isle of Wight a year ago--"Banish sofas--Banish wine--Banish music; but -right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish Health and -banish all the world." Writing now from Teignmouth to Reynolds, who was -down during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains laughingly, but -with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, how he can go nowhere but Sickness -is of the company, and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or -he must cut them. - -Nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was the pain of a family -break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his mind to emigrate to -America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get -possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his own -fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the desire to -be in a position as quickly as possible to help, or if need be support, -his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, -Miss Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be -married and sail early in the summer. Keats came up from Teignmouth in May -to see the last of his brother, and he and Tom settled again in their old -lodgings in Well Walk. He had a warm affection and regard for his new -sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted for George's sake. But at the -same time he felt life and its prospects overcast. He writes to Bailey, -after his outburst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone -now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing -his ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. And after -recounting his causes of depression, he recovers himself, and -concludes:--"Life must be undergone; and I certainly derive some -consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it -ceases." - -With reference to his poem then just appearing, and the year's work which -it represented, Keats was under no illusions whatever. From an early -period in its composition he had fully realised its imperfections, and had -written: "My ideas of it are very low, and I would write the subject -thoroughly again, but I am tired of it, and think the time would be better -spent in writing a new romance, which I have in my eye for next summer. -Rome was not built in a day, and all the good I expect from my employment -this summer is the fruit of experience which I hope to gather in my next -poem." The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most -natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so -in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his -strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend -might judge. He shows himself perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_ -he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than -producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry; and when the time comes -to write a preface to the poem, after a first attempt lacking reticence -and simplicity, and abandoned at the advice of Reynolds, he in the second -quietly and beautifully says of his own work all that can justly be said -in its dispraise. He warns the reader to expect "great inexperience, -immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a -deed accomplished," and adds most unboastfully:--"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." - -The apprehensions expressed in these words have not been fulfilled; and -_Endymion_, so far from having died away, lives to illustrate the maxim -conveyed in its own now proverbial opening line. Immature as the poem -truly is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as are the sweets -which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing of far too much beauty, -or at least of too many beauties, to perish. Every reader must take -pleasure in some of its single passages and episodes, while to the student -of the poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its weakness -as its strength. - - - - - -CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion._ - - -In the old Grecian world, the myth of Endymion and Selene was one deeply -rooted in various shapes in the popular traditions both of Elis in the -Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The -central feature of the tale, as originally sung by Sappho, was the nightly -descent of the goddess to kiss her lover where he lay spell-bound, by the -grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. -The poem of Sappho is lost, and the story is not told at length in any of -our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the -poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and of the late -prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias. Of such ancient -sources Keats of course knew only what he found in his classical -dictionaries. But references to the tale, as every one knows, form part of -the stock repertory of classical allusion in modern literature: and -several modern writers before Keats had attempted to handle the subject at -length. In his own special range of Elizabethan reading, he was probably -acquainted with Lyly's court comedy of _Endimion_, in prose, which had -been edited, as it happened, by his friend Dilke a few years before: but -in it he would have found nothing to his purpose. On the other hand I -think he certainly took hints from the _Man in the Moon_ of Michael -Drayton. In this piece Drayton takes hold of two post-classical notions -concerning the Endymion myth, both in the first instance derived from -Lucian,--one that which identifies its hero with the visible 'man in the -moon' of popular fancy,--the other that which rationalises his story, and -explains him away as a personification or mythical representative of early -astronomy. These two distinct notions Drayton weaves together into a short -tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into the mouth of a shepherd at a -feast of Pan. Like most of his writings, the _Man in the Moon_ has strong -gleams of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile and pedantic. -Critics, so far as I know, have overlooked Keats's debt to it: but even -granting that he may well have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the -notion of introducing his story with a festival in honour of Pan--do not, -at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain evidently the hint for -the wanderings on which Keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity -affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air[32]?-- - - "Endymion now forsakes - All the delights that shepherds do prefer, - And sets his mind so generally on her - That, all neglected, to the groves and springs - He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings - (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, - Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers - The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke. - Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back - Among the blue Nereides: and when - Weary of waters goddess-like again - She the high mountains actively assays, - And there amongst the light Oriades, - That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort: - Sometime amongst those that with them comport - The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; - And there she stays not, but incontinent - Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, - And with Endymion pleased that she saw, - Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye - Stripping the winds----" - -Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose -inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely -kindred to his own--Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ makes Chloe -tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus-- - - "How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, - First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes - She took eternal fire that never dies; - How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, - His temples bound with poppy, to the steep - Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, - Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, - To kiss her sweetest." - -The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have -seen already, in Keats's thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old -pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his -natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but -deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the -story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is -for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human -soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow -forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[33]. - -The manner in which Keats set about relating the Greek story, as he had -thus conceived it, was as far from being a Greek or 'classical' manner as -possible. He indeed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid -sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature: and he loved to -follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete -shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions -for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to -conjure up visions of the classic past, or images from classic fable, he -was able to do so often magically well. To this extent Keats may justly be -called, as he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The -rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in -all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to -select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential, -and paring away their material to the quick that the main masses might -stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously -clear--these instincts had neither been implanted in Keats by nature, nor -brought home to him by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his -gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' Gothic, English. -A general characteristic of his favourite Elizabethan poetry is its -prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it -takes the powers of a Shakspere to keep the vital play of character and -passion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the -quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he wrote -_Endymion_, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constituted an -essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. "I think poetry," he says, -"should surprise by a fine excess:" and with reference to his own poem -during its progress, "it will be a test, a trial 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." - -The 'one bare circumstance' of the story was in the result expanded -through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course -of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate, -amplifying every incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion -into a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central Endymion myth -whatever others pleased him best, as those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of -Cybele, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of -Neptune, and of Bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations, -and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and arial gulfs and -over the floor of ocean. The scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not -merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental -bewilderment,--an Arabian Nights jugglery with space and time,--in the -vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. Such organic plan as -the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main -divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by -keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric -thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. The first -book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the -predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a -festival of his people held in honour of the god Pan, and is afterwards -induced by his sister Peona[34] to confide to her the secret of the -passion which consumes him. The account of the feast of Pan contains -passages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely -to be surpassed in poetry:-- - - "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 puls'd tenfold, - To feel this sun-rise and its glories old." - -What can be more fresh and stirring?--what happier in rhythmical -movement?--or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which -Keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work, -leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and -forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry -alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined -rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the -earth? Not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same -episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn -to Pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the Greek myth -to Greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are -foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. Keats having got -from Drayton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of -Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from -Chapman's Homer's hymn, from the sacrifice to Pan in Browne's -_Britannia's Pastorals_[35], and from the hymns in Ben Jonson's masque, -_Pan's Anniversary_: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and -refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an -imagination fed from the living sources of nature:-- - - "O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang - From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth - Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death - Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; - Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress - Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; - And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken - The dreary melody of bedded reeds-- - In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds - The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; - Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth - Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now, - By thy love's milky brow! - By all the trembling mazes that she ran, - Hear us, great Pan! - - * * * * * - - O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, - While ever and anon to his shorn peers - A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, - When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn - Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms, - To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: - Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, - That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, - And wither drearily on barren moors: - Dread opener of the mysterious doors - Leading to universal knowledge--see, - Great son of Dryope, - The many that are come to pay their vows - With leaves about their brows!" - -In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona he tells her the story -of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has -experienced or dreamed. In Keats's conception of his youthful heroes there -is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical -softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman -them quite: as indeed a helpless and enslaved submission of all the -faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of -his own nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it: but the -consequence is that the love-passages of _Endymion_, notwithstanding the -halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can -scarcely be read with pleasure. On the other hand, in matters of -subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the -signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance -wherein Peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:-- - - "Is this the cause? - This all? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas! - That one who through this middle earth should pass - Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave - His name upon the harp-string, should achieve - No higher bard than simple maidenhood, - Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood - Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray - He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_, - If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love; - What could it be but love? How a ring-dove - Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; - And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe - The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses. - And then the ballad of his sad life closes - With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!" - -In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led -by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless -region of adventure. In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions -of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in -mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings -Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. A Naiad, in the -disguise of a butterfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals -herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to -descend 'Into the sparry hollows of the world': which done, he gropes his -way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-Grecian magnificence, -where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and whither -Venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. Thence, urged -by the haunting passion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and -precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through all -this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich -first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and -inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry -admirably felt and expressed:-- - - "He sinks adown a solitary glen, - Where there was never sound of mortal men, - Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences - Melting to silence, when upon the breeze - Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet - To cheer itself to Delphi:"-- - -or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:-- - - "Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, - Came mother Cybele--alone--alone-- - In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown - About her majesty, and front death-pale, - With turrets crowned." - -After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the -bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable -descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his -celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the -streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled -flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to -his goddess in their behalf, and then-- - - "He turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept, - There was a cooler light; and so he kept - Towards it by a sandy path, and lo! - More suddenly than doth a moment go, - The visions of the earth were gone and fled-- - He saw the giant sea above his head." - -Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and -adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of -Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third -book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with -great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by -Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her -rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance -resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by -Endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful -fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's -submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,-- - - "He saw far in the green concave of the sea - An old man sitting calm and peacefully. - Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, - And his white hair was awful, and a mat - Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"-- - ---from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and -occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home his version of the myth with -strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. No picture can well -be more vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims: -and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected -enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. In the same book the -description of the sunk treasures cumbering the ocean-floor challenges -comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage in -Shakspere's _Richard III._ In the halls of Neptune Endymion again meets -Venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore. -Thence Nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in -spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in starlight on the -dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, he has allowed himself to be -diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of -others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last -nearer to fulfilment. - -It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really in his mind a -meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that -the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is -accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. And in his fourth -book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly -to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. Returning, in that -book, to upper air, Endymion before long half forgets his goddess for the -charms of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him -while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come -wandering in the train of Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian -maiden proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise. -But it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is -conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents, -descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, with his -infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave of -Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality -and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape, -make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially -intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in -pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal--such would seem -the argument--once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a -time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by -that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude -will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which -has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,--that it is -after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. What chiefly -or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric -poetry which Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian maiden -when she tells her story. His later and more famous lyrics, though they -are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do -not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of -imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of -the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the -best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial -romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps -partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful -associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild -wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, -yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a -'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening -measures are repeated at the close. It begins with a tender invocation to -sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of -a deserted maidenhood beside Indian streams; till suddenly, with another -change, comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on his march; next -follows the detailed picture of the god and of his rout, suggested in part -by the famous Titian at the National Gallery; and then, arranged as if for -music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, and their -choral answers: - - "'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your bowers desolate, - Your lutes, and gentler fate?' - 'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing, - A conquering! - Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide, - We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our wild minstrelsy!' - - 'Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left - Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'-- - - 'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; - For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, - And cold mushrooms; - For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth; - Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our mad minstrelsy!'" - -The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and -finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with -an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:-- - - "Come then, sorrow! - Sweetest sorrow! - Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast: - I thought to leave thee, - And deceive thee, - But now of all the world I love thee best. - There is not one, - No, no, not one - But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; - Thou art her mother - And her brother, - Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade." - -The high-water-mark of poetry in _Endymion_ is thus reached in the two -lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with -justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, -that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good -a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for -poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." In the main -body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a -critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable -truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, -mark such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry -breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read -farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly -tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by -Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as-- - - "a's isle was wondering at the moon," - -standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed -narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme -and expression-- - - "I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe! - O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?" - -is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and -the heart:-- - - "Cold, O cold indeed - Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed - The sea-swell took her hair." - -One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has -shaken off--his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar -sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that tendency which he by nature shared -with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined -pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And -to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined -others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of -English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its -waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in -its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He -outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let Invention ramble and loiter -uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her -heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds -there: and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: -and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to -grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:-- - - "--a nymph of Dian's - Wearing a coronal of tender scions":-- - - "Does yonder thrush, - Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush - About the dewy forest, whisper tales?-- - Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails - Will slime the rose to-night." - -Chapman especially among Keats's masters had this trick of letting thought -follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman--to say nothing -of Chatterton--had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash -dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a -language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and -make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use -of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman's -spirit--'far-spooming Ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their -surly eyes brow-hidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'--coinages -sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as -well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms -as 'shent', 'sith', and 'seemlihed' from Spenser, 'eterne' from Spenser -and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly', 'to -monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as -active, as to 'travel' an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and _vice -versa_. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, -in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of -oddities and discords. - -In rhythm Keats adheres in _Endymion_ to the method he had adopted in -_Sleep and Poetry_, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the -metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, -and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had -carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later -critics have supposed the rhythm of _Endymion_ to have been influenced by -the _Pharonnida_ of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly -for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, -exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse -persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest -syllables--prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions--on which neither pause -nor emphasis is possible[36]. - -But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in -delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of -sentence structure. There is nothing in his treatment of the measure for -which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who -employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival -for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be -said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an -exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of -provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous. - -As the best criticism on Keats's _Endymion_ is in his own preface, so its -best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. "It -is as good," he says, "as I had power to make it by myself." Hunt had -warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley against those of -hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and -crude the classical training and now ripening taste of Shelley might -doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was -determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous -expression of his mind. "Had I been nervous," he goes on, "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." -How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of -his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he -says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next -labours. - - - - -CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death of Tom - Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne--Excursion to - Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon and Money - Difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening Prospects--Summer at - Shanklin and Winchester--Wise Resolutions--Return from Winchester. - [June 1818-October, 1819.] - - -While Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with _Endymion_ -on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different -plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour -through Scotland with Charles Brown. "I have many reasons," he writes to -Reynolds, "for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from -spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and -Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I'll -have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, 'over the hills -we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in -turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." A -fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an -over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the -necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the -flight of poetry:-- - - "I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but - one thing to prevent me. 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." - -After he had come back to Hampstead in May, however, Keats allowed himself -to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the -recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year -before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed between him and -Brown that they should accompany George Keats and his bride as far as -Liverpool, and then start on foot from Lancaster. They left London -accordingly on Monday, June 22[37]. The coach stopped for dinner the first -day at Redbourn near St Albans, where Keats's friend of medical-student -days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake hands with the -travelling party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards wrote an -account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of Mrs -George Keats. "Rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome, -but looked like a being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily -love. She had the imaginative poetical cast. Somewhat singular and girlish -in her attire.... There was something original about her, and John seemed -to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her -with evident satisfaction[38]." With no other woman or girl friend was -Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this 'Nymph -of the downward smile and side-long glance' of his early sonnet--'Sister -George' as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the -series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards -in America, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth -preserving. - -The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to -Lancaster, and thence began their walk, Keats taking for his reading one -book only, the little three-volume edition of Cary's _Dante_. "I cannot," -writes Brown, "forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly, -and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain -scenery. It was just before our descent to the village of Bowness, at a -turn of the road, when the lake of Windermere at once came into view.... -All was enchantment to us both." Keats in his own letters says -comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, -not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque -tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and -fastidious Gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth -is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs -not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but -on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit -sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more -varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but -impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit. -Moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of Windermere, it -is evident that as Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery -somewhat foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beauties of -England, two ideals of landscape, classic and medival, haunted and -allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled -south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the Scottish -border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, -and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to -neither. "I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem -anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." - -A change, besides, was coming over Keats's thoughts and feelings whereby -scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his -fellow-creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, -among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously -absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a -life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the -appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. "Scenery is -fine," he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, "but human -nature is finer." In the Lake country, after climbing Skiddaw one morning -early, and walking to Treby the same afternoon, where they watched with -amusement the exercises in a country dancing-school: "There was as fine a -row of boys and girls," says Keats, "as you ever saw; some beautiful -faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of -patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is -what I like better than scenery." The same note recurs frequently in -letters of a later date. - -From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside; from Ambleside to -the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on -Wordsworth at Rydal, and been disappointed to find him away -electioneering. From Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of -Derwentwater; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and Wigton to Carlisle, -where they arrived on the 1st of July. Thence by coach to Dumfries, -visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory -Keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dumfries they -started southwestwards for Galloway, a region little frequented even now, -and then hardly at all, by tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrightshire -coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and -rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Solway to the hazy -hills of Man, Brown bethought him that this was Guy Mannering's country, -and began to tell Keats about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who according to the -fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for Scott's poetry, and of the -Waverley novels had read the _Antiquary_ but not _Guy Mannering_, was much -struck; and presently, writes Brown,--"there was a little spot, close to -our pathway. 'There,' he said, 'in that very spot, without a shadow of -doubt, has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.' It was among pieces -of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of -honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and -fulness of blossom." As they went along, Keats composed on Scott's theme -the spirited ballad beginning 'Old Meg, she was a gipsy,' and stopping to -breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing -to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he -began at the same place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed -always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add scraps to -them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote -regularly and uniformly in the evenings. "He affronts my indolence and -luxury," says Keats, "by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; -secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care if he would -change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But -I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead -of afterwards." - -From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--skirting the wild moors about -the Water of Fleet, and passing where Cairnsmore looks down over wooded -slopes to the steaming estuary of the Cree,--as far as Newton Stewart: -thence across the Wigtonshire levels by Glenluce to Stranraer and -Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee packet for Ireland, with the -intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and -expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to -Belfast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. In letters -written during and immediately after this excursion, Keats has some -striking passages of human observation and reflection:-- - - "These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women, - old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants, - all careful; so they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and - gainers.... These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm; they have banished - puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:--poor, - unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a - luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its - delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have - leisure to go mad after things that are not!... I would sooner be a - wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would - sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's - penance before those execrable elders." - - "On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the Duchess of Dunghill. - It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you - ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a - wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved - from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, - with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, - skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of - her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two - ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a - history of her life and sensations!"--. - -From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking -along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr, -with the lonely mass of Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran, -looming ever above the Atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find -Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the -coast scenery. They went to Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the -home of Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to write a -sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did so, but was worried by -the prate of the man in charge--"a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew -Burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him"--"his gab -hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet." And -again, as they journeyed on toward Glasgow he composed with considerable -pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'There is a -charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' They were meant to express -the temper in which his pilgrimage through the Burns country had been -made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of -imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself. - -From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, and from Glasgow by -Dumbarton through the _Lady of the Lake_ country, which they found -vexatiously full of tourists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban. -At Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of _The -Stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the -next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in -a set of doggrel rhymes. The walk along the shores of Loch Awe impressed -him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set -description, for the benefit of his brother Tom. At the same point occur -for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. -At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its -effects upon his sleep and appetite: telling her how he tumbled into bed -"so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe -and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I get -so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to -me.... I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes." -Presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty -miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts of -the Highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and -frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and Brown, and he -grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the -friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for -Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and -Iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither -side of the island of Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the -farther side opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some -thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather. -By good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had -a favourable view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its associations -in the one 'illustrious island,' and of nature's architecture in the -other, Keats shows himself naturally much impressed. Fingal's cave in -especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the -race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer -since Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines -beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian.' Avoiding mere epithet-work and -description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for -comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, -bethinking himself of Milton's cry to Lycidas, - - "--where'er thy bones are hurl'd, - Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides"-- - -imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean, and -put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly -character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the -place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine -abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:-- - - "So for ever I will leave - Such a taint, and soon unweave - All the magic of the place![39] - - * * * * - - So saying, with a spirit's glance - He dived--." - -From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scotch tour, and -especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct -and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, and of the development -of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his -brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem, he speaks of -a 'slight sore throat,' and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at -Oban. Thence they pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the -ascent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th of August to -Inverness. Keats's throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the -ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, -tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at -Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue -his tour. Accordingly he took passage on the 8th or 9th of August from the -port of Cromarty for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey -alone,--"much lamenting," to quote Brown's own words, "the loss of his -beloved intelligence at my side." Keats in some degree picked up strength -during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards -described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat -trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of -time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, -and made his appearance among his friends the next day, "as brown and as -shabby as you can imagine," writes Mrs Dilke, "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." When he found himself -seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed -chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, -quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates -his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis[40]. - -Simultaneously, almost, with Keats's return from the North appeared -attacks on him in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_. The -_Blackwood_ article, being No. IV. of a series bearing the signature 'Z' -on the 'Cockney School of Poetry,' was printed in the August number of the -magazine. The previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter -similarly signed, had been directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of -insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness -of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were -most probably the work either of Lockhart or of Wilson, suggested and -perhaps revised by the publisher William Blackwood, at this time his own -sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt's opinions, or his real -weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh critics must needs heap on -him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. In the course of these -articles allusion had several times been made to 'Johnny Keats' as an -'amiable bardling' and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of -Cockaigne, Hunt. When now Keats's own turn came, his treatment was mild -in comparison with that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work -are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic -persons full of prejudice and wishing to hurt. 'Cockney' had been in -itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt; -neither was it altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the -facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the -measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of -it. The worst part of the Keats review was in its personalities,--"so back -to the shop, Mr John, stick to 'plasters, pills, ointment boxes,' -&c."--and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for -them had been obtained. Keats's friend Bailey had by this time taken his -degree, and after publishing a friendly notice of _Endymion_ in the -_Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a -curacy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at -the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and -Chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a -previous love-affair with one of the Reynolds sisters having fallen -through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, then in the -hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy -of Scott; and earning, on the staff of _Blackwood_ and otherwise, the -reputation and the nickname of 'Scorpion.' Bailey, anxious to save Keats -from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took -the opportunity of telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances -and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt -was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an -object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any -rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his -disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so -used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all -appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had -thus confidentially communicated. - -To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that whether or not -Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and -supplied the materials for it[41]. It seems in fact all but certain that -he actually wrote it[42]. If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart's part, -and to forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude that is his -due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of Scott. But -even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the -party violence of the time and place Scott himself was drawn into -encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh friends; and that -he was in some measure privy to the Cockney School outrages seems certain. -Such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time[43]; and when -Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the -subject of Keats and his detractors in conversation with Scott at Rome, he -observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which -he could only interpret in the same sense[44]. It is hard to say whether -the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul most free from jealousy -or harshness, thus associated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is -one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the -more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the -distracting cries and blind collisions of the world. - -The _Quarterly_ article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of -September (in the number dated April), and was in an equally contemptuous -strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first -canto, or to make head or tail of that. In this case again the question of -authorship must remain uncertain: but Gifford, as editor, and an editor -who never shrank from cutting a contributor's work to his own pattern, -must bear the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in his -manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable -of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the -pain he gives. Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with -which Keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work, -the attacks are both alike inexcusable. They had the effect of promptly -rousing the poet's friends in his defence. Reynolds published a warm -rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the _Alfred_; -an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_ -with the initials J. S.--those probably of John Scott, then editor of the -_London Magazine_, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart's in -a duel, arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which it was -thought that Lockhart himself ought to have come forward. Leigh Hunt -reprinted Reynolds's letter, with some introductory words, in the -_Examiner_, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. But -he could not have done more to any purpose. He was not himself an -enthusiastic admirer of _Endymion_, and had plainly said so to Keats and -to his friends. Reynolds's piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective -and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would -only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly -well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a -friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind. - -Neither was Keats's demeanour under the lash such as could make his -friends suppose him particularly hurt. Proud in the extreme, he had no -irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet -always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he -saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:--"I hate," he says, "a mawkish -popularity." Even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly -cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was -conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his -critics. Accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than -older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt had replied -indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn. -Hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. Keats at the first sting -declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what -good he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly recovering -himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one -merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When Mr Hessey sent for his -encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended, -he wrote:-- - - "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." - - And again:--"There have been two letters in my defence in the - 'Chronicle,' and one in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper, - and written by Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the - 'Chronicle.' This is a mere matter of the moment: 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.'" - -In point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent Keats about -this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a -further tribute in the shape of a 25 note. Keats was both pleased and -displeased: "if I had refused it," he says, "I should have behaved in a -very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a -little." About the same time he received, through his friend Richard -Woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or -assistant to Messrs Taylor and Hessey[45], a glowing letter of sympathy -and encouragement from Miss Porter, 'of Romance celebrity': by which he -shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands. - -Keats was really living, during the stress of these _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt -trouble. His Hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return -from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on -account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. He had left the -invalid behind in their lodgings at Well Walk, and found that he had grown -rapidly worse during his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for -the next few months Keats's chief occupation was the harrowing one of -watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written in the -third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and -occupations:--"I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses -upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had -intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and -plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, -and feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be -poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of -contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and -yet I must do so or suffer." And again about the same time to -Reynolds:--"I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has -haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverous -relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has -conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only -life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am -thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of -immortality." As the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever -more sorrowful and absorbing[46]. On the 29th of October Keats wrote to -his brother and sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a -beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst. -For the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and -in the first week of December the end came. "Early one morning," writes -Brown, "I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, -who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we -both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, -my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--'Have nothing -more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live -with me?' He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,--'I think it -would be better.' From that moment he was my inmate[47]." - -Brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part--the -smaller eastern part--of the block of two semi-detached houses near the -bottom of John Street, Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied -the other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place[48]. The -accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room -on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them. The -arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, -occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. As -soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in -some measure alleviated his grief, Keats became gradually once more -absorbed in poetry: his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had -already begun to work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed; -for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more -powerful than that of poetry itself. It was at this time that the flame -caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid 'lest it -should burn him up.' With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, -not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards -womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind's ideal of the -sex, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and -too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious at the same -time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself -partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of passion by his -sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. The set of -three sonnets in his first volume, beginning 'Woman, when I beheld thee -flippant, vain,' had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to -this state of mind. Its persistency is affirmed often in his letters. - - "I am certain," he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, "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.... Is it not - extraordinary?--when among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no - spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from - every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all - suspicion, and comfortable. 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.... I must absolutely get over this--but how?" - -In a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in America, he alleges this -general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or -rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he -will never marry:-- - - "The roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my - window-panes are my children; 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. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination - strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand - worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are - stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is - equivalent to a King's Bodyguard: "then Tragedy with scepter'd pall - comes sweeping by." According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles - shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; - or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, "I - wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage," I - melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content - to be alone. 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 that I rejoice in." - -But now Keats's hour was come. Since his return from Scotland, in the -midst of his watching by his brother's sick-bed, we have seen him -confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. This was a -certain Miss Charlotte Cox, a West-Indian cousin of Reynolds's, to whom he -did not think the Reynolds sisters were quite kind. A few days later he -writes again how he has been attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace. -Very soon, however, the attraction passed, and this 'Charmian' left him -fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. A Mrs Brawne, a widow -lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two -younger children, had taken Brown's house for the summer while he was away -in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the -Dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved -from Brown's house to one in Downshire Street close by: and it was at the -Dilkes' that Keats met Miss Fanny Brawne after his return. Her ways and -presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated -him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as -well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in -Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length -silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise -her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the -far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and -retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, -shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, -carriage and complexion,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her -character we have little means of judging. She was certainly -high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though -kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew -dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men -and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of -one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and -in regarding the attachment as unlucky. - -So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion -for a woman have been. Stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth -begun to fall on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional -misgivings of his darker moods. First the departure of his brother George -had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from -boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next -the exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and -unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in -his blood. Coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed -inexorably upon his brother Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit -through all his pains. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little -as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and -carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his -practical hopes from literature. Last were added the pangs of love--love -requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even -love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion wrought -fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and -torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every -strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty, -exposed them. Within a year the combined assault proved too much for his -strength, and he broke down. But in the meantime he showed a brave face to -the world, and while anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to -throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, -energy. During the first few weeks of winter following his brother's -death, he wrote indeed, as he tells Haydon, "only a little now and then: -but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting." Yet -such work as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of his -powers, and included parts both of _Hyperion_ and _The Eve of St Agnes_. - -Within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was -finished, having been written out during a visit which Keats and Brown -paid in Sussex in the latter part of January (1819). They stayed for a few -days with the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for nearly a -fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, at Bedhampton -close by. Keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but -his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to 'a couple of -dowager card-parties,' and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day, -at the consecration of a chapel for converted Jews. The latter ceremony -jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an -entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. -During his stay at Chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate -conceived, the poem on the _Eve of St Mark_, which he never finished, and -which remains so interesting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work. - -Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed his life at -Hampstead under Brown's roof. He saw much less society than the winter -before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally -to avoid the night air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt -the passion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest -in the other relations of life. The stages by which it grew on him we -cannot follow. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he -had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting. His -real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the -time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong -mixed attraction and aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the -14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in -America, "Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff;" -but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general -reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not -sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. The -secret violence of Keats's passion, and the restless physical jealousy -which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed _To -Fanny_, which belong apparently to this date. They are written very -unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and -there. The occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:-- - - "Who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast, - What stare outfaces now my silver moon? - Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least; - Let, let the amorous burn-- - But, pr'ythee, do not turn - The current of your heart from me so soon, - O! save, in charity, - The quickest pulse for me. - Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe - Voluptuous visions into the warm air, - Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath; - Be like an April day, - Smiling and cold and gay, - A temperate lily, temperate as fair; - Then, Heaven! there will be - A warmer June for me." - -If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his -feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother -or his friends. Except in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no -direct mention of Miss Brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere -excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because -he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers, -in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown -after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as -when the Dilkes left Hampstead in April, and went to live at Westminster, -the Brawnes again took their house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth -had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke himself, -but apparently not till many months later, writes, "It is quite a settled -thing between John Keats and Miss Brawne, God help them. It's a bad thing -for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that -it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or speak to her." -Other friends, including one so intimate and so affectionate as Severn, -never realised until Keats was on his death-bed that there had been an -engagement, or that his relations with Miss Brawne had been other than -those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours. - -Intense and jealous as Keats's newly awakened passion was, it seemed at -first to stimulate rather than distract him in the exercise of his now -ripened poetic gift. The spring of this year 1819 seems to repeat in a -richer key the history of the last; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits -of lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season advanced. Between -the beginning of February and the beginning of June he wrote many of his -best shorter poems, including apparently all except one of his six famous -odes. About the middle of February he speaks of having taken a stroll -among the marbles of the British Museum, and the ode _On Indolence_ and -the ode _On a Grecian Urn_, written two or three months later, show how -the charm of ancient sculpture was at this time working in his mind. The -fit of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former piece is -recorded in his correspondence under the date of March 19. The lines -beginning 'Bards of passion and of mirth,' are dated the 26th of the same -month. On the 15th of April he sends off to his brother, as the last poem -he has written, the ode _To Psyche_, only less perfect and felicitous than -that _On a Grecian Urn_. About a week later the nightingale would be -beginning to sing. Presently it appeared that one had built her nest in -Brown's garden, near his house. - - "Keats," writes Brown, "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; - and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the - grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. When he - came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his - hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, - I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic - feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well - legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many - scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his _Ode to a - Nightingale_.... Immediately afterwards I searched for more of his (in - reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again - assisted me.... From that day he gave me permission to copy any verses - he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so little - for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was - released from their influence, that he required a friend at hand to - preserve them." - -The above account perfectly agrees with what Keats had written towards -the end of the summer before:--"I feel assured I should write from the -mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's -labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them." -And yet for these odes Keats seems to have had a partiality: with that to -Psyche, he tells his brother, he has taken more pains than with anything -he had ever written before; and Haydon has told how thrillingly, 'in his -low tremulous under-tone,' he recited to him that to the nightingale as -they walked one day in the Kilburn meadows. - -During the winter and spring while his faculties were thus absorbed -between love and poetry, Keats had suffered his correspondence to flag, -except only with Haydon, with his young sister Fanny, and with his brother -and sister-in-law in America. About Christmas Haydon, whose work had been -interrupted by a weakness of the eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for -the time being exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to Keats of all -men. With his usual generosity Keats had promised, only asking him to try -the rich lovers of art first, that if the worst came to the worst he would -help him with all he had. Haydon in a few weeks returns to the -charge:--"My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised -assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and -manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst." Keats had intended for -Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share -in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over -to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were -raised, and after much correspondence, attendance in bankers' and -solicitors' offices, and other ordeals harassing to the poetic mind, he -had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When -by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with -his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies with perfect temper, -explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his -hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting -possession of his money. Moreover he finds that even if all he had were -laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live -on for two years.[49] Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent -sums to various friends amounting in all to near 200, of which he expects -the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats -contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds. Three months later a -law-suit threatened by the widow of Captain Jennings against Mr Abbey, in -connection with the administration of the trust, had the effect for a time -of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very -gently asks Haydon to make an effort to repay his loan; who not only made -none--"he did not," says Keats, "seem to care much about it, but let me go -without my money almost with nonchalance." This was too much even for -Keats's patience. He declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend -again: nevertheless he by-and-by let old affection resume its sway, and -entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly -as ever. - -To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are full of -playful brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of regrets that she is -kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey; and of plans -for coming over to see her at Walthamstow when the weather and his throat -allow. He thinks of various little presents to please her,--a selection of -Tassie's pretty, and then popular, paste imitations of ancient -gems,--flowers,--drawing materials,-- - - "anything but live stock. Though I will not now be very severe on it, - remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, - Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock Salmons and all the whole tribe of the - Bushes and the Brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the - water,--though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome - globe of gold-fish--then I would have it hold ten pails of water and - be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let - through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their - beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome - painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and Japonicas. I - should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd - sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading." - -For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant -anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant -Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices -been bound. In the middle of April news of them arrives, and he thereupon -sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has been writing up at -intervals during the last two months. Among all the letters of Keats, this -is perhaps the richest and most characteristic. It is full of the varied -matter of his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love: these are -only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more indistinctly in the -vaguely passionate tenor of two sonnets which he sends among other -specimens of his latest work in verse. One is that beginning 'Why did I -laugh to-night?'--the other that, beautiful and moving despite flaws of -execution, in which he describes a dream suggested by the Paolo and -Francesca passage in Dante. For the rest he passes disconnectedly as -usual--"it being an impossibility in grain," as Keats once wrote to -Reynolds, "for my ink to stain otherwise"--from the vein of fun and -freakishness to that of poetry and wisdom, with passages now of masterly -intuition, and now of wandering and uncertain, almost always beautiful, -speculative fancy, interspersed with expressions of the most generous -spirit of family affection, or the most searching and unaffected -disclosures of self-knowledge. Poetry and Beauty were the twin powers his -soul had ever worshipped; but his devotion to poetry seemed thus far to -promise him no reward either in fame or bread; while beauty had betrayed -her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a sustaining power, -since his love for the beautiful in general had turned into a craving -passion for the beauty of a particular girl. As his flesh began to faint -in the service of these two, his soul turned often with a sense of -comfort, at times even almost of ecstasy, towards the milder divinity of -Death, whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts:-- - - "Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, - But Death intenser--Death is Life's high meed." - -When he came down from these heights of feeling, and brought himself -soberly to face the facts of his existence, Keats felt himself compelled, -in those days while he was producing, 'out of the mere yearning and -fondness he had for the beautiful,' poem after poem that are among the -treasures of the English language, to consider whether as a practical -matter he could or ought to continue to apply himself to literature at -all. In spite of his magnanimous first reception of the _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ gibes, we can see that as time went on he began more and more -to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened by them. -Reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material harm which the reviews were -capable of inflicting, when he wrote the year before:--"Certain it is, -that hundreds of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set down -this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writer, merely on the -assertions of some single heartless critic, who has just energy enough to -despise what is good." Such in fact was exactly the reputation which -_Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had succeeded in making for Keats, except -among a small private circle of admirers. Of praise and the thirst for -praise he continues to speak in as manly and sane a tone as ever; -especially in the two sonnets _On Fame_; and in the _Ode to Indolence_ -declares-- - - "For I would not be dieted with praise, - A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce." - -Again in the same ode, he speaks of his 'demon Poesy' as 'a maiden most -unmeek,' whom he loves the better the more blame is heaped on her. At the -same time he shows his sense of the practical position which the reviews -had made for him when he writes to his brother:--"These reviews are -getting more and more powerful, especially the 'Quarterly'.... I was in -hopes that as people saw, as they must do, all the trickery and iniquity -of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the -spectators at the Westminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or loses." -And as a consequence he adds presently, "I have been, at different times, -turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a -physician. I am afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I could -not take fees; and yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than -writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review -shambles." A little later he mentions to his sister Fanny an idea he has -of taking a voyage or two as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But Brown, -more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and -promise of his friend's genius, would not hear of this plan, and persuaded -him to abandon it and throw himself again upon literature. Keats being for -the moment unable to get at any of his money, Brown advanced him enough to -live on through the summer; and it was agreed that he should go and work -in the country, and that Brown should follow him. - -Towards the end of July Keats accordingly left Hampstead, and went first -to join his friend Rice in lodgings at Shanklin. Rice's health was at this -time worse than ever; and Keats himself was far from well; his chest weak, -his nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to Fanny -Brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains and joys of love. These -love-letters of Keats are written with little or none of the bright ease -and play of mind which make his correspondence with his friends and family -so attractive. Pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, but in the main -they are constrained and distressing, showing him a prey, despite his -efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity -and fretfulness of passion. An enraptured but an untrustful lover, -alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing through a -hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he found in the fever -of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his -love-sickness. As long as Rice and he were together at Shanklin, the two -ailing and anxious men, firm friends as they were, depressed and did each -other harm. It was better when Brown with his settled health and spirits -came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got -to work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, that of -writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What other struggling man of -letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated -them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose -Russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him in 500, was -supposed to possess the requisite stage experience, and to him were -assigned the plot and construction of the play, while Keats undertook to -compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from the history of the -Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at the -same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown sketched it out to -him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next, until the end -of the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into his own -hands. Besides the joint work by means of which he thus hoped, at least in -sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, Keats was -busily engaged by himself in writing a new Greek tale in rhymed heroics, -_Lamia_. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate -of Shanklin was against him: their lodgings were under the cliff, and from -the south-east, as he afterwards wrote, "came the damps of the sea, which -having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy -idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke." After a -stay of five or six weeks, the friends made up their minds to change their -quarters, and went in the second week of August to Winchester. The old -cathedral city, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its -clear-coursing streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the -nimble and pure air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited Keats, who -quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days which he spent here, -from the middle of August to the middle of October, were the last good -days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he -managed to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his -passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort. - -His work continued to be chiefly on _Lamia_, with the concluding part of -_Otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen; -in this last he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. Early -in September Brown left Winchester to go on a visit to Bedhampton. -Immediately afterwards a letter from America compelled Keats to go to town -and arrange with Mr Abbey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his -brother George. He dared not, to use his own words, 'venture into the -fire' by going to see his mistress at Hampstead, but stayed apparently -with Mr Taylor in Fleet Street, and was back on the fourth day at -Winchester, where he spent the following ten days or fortnight in -solitude. During this interval he took up _Hyperion_ again, but made up -his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style and method -too Miltonic and artificial. _Lamia_ he had finished, and his chief -present occupation was in revising the _Eve of St Agnes_, studying Italian -in the pages of Ariosto, and writing up one of his long and full -journal-letters to brother and sister George. The season was fine, and the -beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his spirit, prompted -also in these days the last, and one certainly of the happiest, of his -odes, that _To Autumn_. To the fragment of _St Mark's Eve_, begun or -planned, as we have seen, the January before, he now added lines inspired -at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his letters show to have -affected him deeply here at Winchester, and by the literary example of -Chatterton, for whom his old admiration had of late returned in full -force. - -The wholesome brightness of the early autumn continuing to sustain and -soothe him, Keats made in these days a vigorous effort to rally his moral -powers, to banish over-passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself -on a right footing with the world. The letter to America already -mentioned, and others written at the same time to Reynolds, Taylor, Dilke, -Brown, and Haydon, are full of evidences of this spirit. The ill success -of his brother in his American speculations shall serve, he is determined, -as a spur to his own exertions, and now that real troubles are upon them, -he will show that he can bear them better than those of imagination. The -imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him -up into an agent. He has been passing his time between reading, writing, -and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, and stick to the other -two. He does not consider he has any just cause of complaint against the -world; he has done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few people -predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that any thing really fine -will make its way. "What reviewers can put a hindrance to must be a -nothing--or mediocre which is worse." With reference to his own plans for -the future, he is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes of ultimate -success, whether from plays or poems, but to turn to the natural resource -of a man 'fit for nothing but literature' and needing to support himself -by his pen: the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. "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. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I will." -These words are from a letter written to Brown on the 22nd of September, -and further on in the same letter we find evidence of the honourable -spirit of independence and unselfishness towards his friends which went -together in Keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willingness -to accept their services at a pinch. He had been living since May on a -loan from Brown and an advance from Taylor, and was uneasy at putting the -former to a sacrifice. The subject, he says, is often in his mind,-- - - "and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your - happiness. This anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to - the plan I propose pursuing. I had got into a habit of mind of looking - towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it is a duty I - owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my - subsistence--make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall - applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct." - -Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken -in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose his company, and -doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected their -motives too much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled that -the two friends should part, Brown returning to his own house at -Hampstead, while Keats went to live by himself in London and look out for -employment on the press. - - - - -CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The Plays. - - -During the twenty months ending with his return from Winchester as last -narrated, Keats had been able, even while health and peace of mind and -heart deserted him, to produce in quick succession the series of poems -which give us the true measure of his powers. In the sketches and epistles -of his first volume we have seen him beginning, timidly and with no -clearness of aim, to make trial of his poetical resources. A year -afterwards he had leapt, to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and -boldly tried his strength on the composition of a long mythological -romance--half romance, half parable of that passion for universal beauty -of which he felt in his own bosom the restless and compulsive workings. In -the execution, he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in -him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and invention, and the caprice -of rhyme, run away with him, and by substituting for the worn-out verbal -currency of the last century a semi-Elizabethan coinage of his own, less -acceptable by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit greater -real poetic value. The experiment was rash, but when he next wrote, it -became manifest that it had not been made in vain. After _Endymion_ his -work threw off, not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and -ineffectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full 'effluence' (the -phrase is Landor's) 'of power and light[50].' - -His next poem of importance was _Isabella_, planned and begun, as we saw, -in February 1818, and finished in the course of the next two months at -Teignmouth. The subject is taken from the well-known chapter of Boccaccio -which tells of the love borne by a damsel of Messina for a youth in the -employ of her merchant-brothers, with its tragic close and pathetic -sequel[51]. Keats for some reason transfers the scene of the story from -Messina to Florence. Nothing can be less sentimental than Boccaccio's -temper, nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his style. -Keats invoking him asks pardon for his own work as what it truly is,--'An -echo of thee in the North-wind sung.' Not only does the English poet set -the southern story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of the -Arno, for instance, how its stream-- - - "Gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan - Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream - Keeps head against the freshets"-- - -he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, enriching it with -tones of sentiment and colours of romance, and brooding over every image -of beauty or passion as he calls it up. These things he does--but no -longer inordinately as heretofore. His powers of imagination and of -expression have alike gained strength and discipline; and through the -shining veils of his poetry his creations make themselves seen and felt in -living shape, action, and motive. False touches and misplaced beauties are -indeed not wanting. For example, in the phrase - - "his erewhile timid lips grew bold - And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme," - -we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not infrequent in -his earliest verses. And in the call of the wicked brothers to Lorenzo-- - - "To-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount - To spur three leagues towards the Apennine. - Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count - His dewy rosary on the eglantine,"-- - -the last two lines are a beauty indeed, and of the kind most -characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as Leigh Hunt long ago pointed -out) misplaced in the mouths that utter it. Moreover the language of -_Isabella_ is still occasionally slipshod, and there are turns and -passages where we feel, as we felt so often in _Endymion_, that the poetic -will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or suggestion of the -rhyme. But these are the minor blemishes of a poem otherwise conspicuous -for power and charm. - -For his Italian story Keats chose an Italian metre, the octave stanza -introduced in English by Wyatt and Sidney, and naturalised before long by -Daniel, Drayton, and Edward Fairfax. Since their day, the stanza had been -little used in serious poetry, though Frere and Byron had lately revived -it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the purpose for which the -epigrammatic snap and suddenness of the closing couplet in truth best fit -it. Keats, however, contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles -the measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale of pathos. -Over the purely musical and emotional resources of his art he shows a -singular command in stanzas like that beginning, 'O Melancholy, linger -here awhile,' repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude of -the main narrative. And there is a brilliant alertness of imagination in -such episodical passages as that where he pauses to realize the varieties -of human toil contributing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. But the -true test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the essential -points and central moments of action and passion, imaginative vitality and -truth with beauty and charm. This test _Isabella_ admirably bears. For -instance, in the account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her -lover's mouldering corpse:-- - - "Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright - With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof - From the poor girl by magic of their light." - -With what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the story of the -apparition invested by this touch, and all its charnel horror and grimness -mitigated! Or again in the stanzas describing Isabella's actions at her -lover's burial place:-- - - "She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though - One glance did fully all its secrets tell; - Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know - Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well; - Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, - Like to a native lily of the dell: - Then with her knife, all sudden, she began - To dig more fervently than misers can. - - Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon - Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies; - She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, - And put it in her bosom, where it dries - And freezes utterly unto the bone - Those dainties made to still an infant's cries: - Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care, - But to throw back at times her veiling hair." - -The lines are not all of equal workmanship: but the scene is realised with -unerring vision. The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with -too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third -and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the -same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of -the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the -impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden -solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as -she begins to dig 'more fervently than misers can' (what a commentary on -the relative strength of passions might be drawn from this simple -text):--then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not -ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it -is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, -while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us -as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and -continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic -truth as well as grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the -privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often -combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a -limpid and flowing ease of narrative. Poetry had always come to Keats, as -he considered it ought to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now -that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which -his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers -of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true -imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school -seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay, -those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two -kinds of writing comparable. - -After the completion of _Isabella_ followed the Scotch tour, of which the -only poetic fruits of value were the lines on Meg Merrilies and those on -Fingal's Cave. Returning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother -mortally ill, Keats plunged at once into the most arduous poetic labour he -had yet undertaken. This was the composition of _Hyperion_[52]. The -subject had been long in his mind, and both in the text and the preface of -_Endymion_ he indicated his intention to attempt it. At first he thought -of the poem to be written as a 'romance': but under the influence of -_Paradise Lost_, and no doubt also considering the height and vastness of -the subject, his plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books. -His purpose was to sing the Titanomachia, or warfare of the earlier -Titanic dynasty with the later Olympian dynasty of the Greek gods; and in -particular one episode of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god -Hyperion and the assumption of his kingdom by Apollo. Critics, even -intelligent critics, sometimes complain that Keats should have taken this -and other subjects of his art from what they call the 'dead' mythology of -ancient Greece. As if that mythology could ever die: as if the ancient -fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things believed, into -the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put -on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, -as faiths, perish one after another: but each in passing away bequeaths -for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained -of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, -embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to -explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the -thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and -control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; -and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern -mind which is in so far dead and not they. One of the great symptoms of -returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, toward the close of the -last century, was its awakening to the forgotten charm of past modes of -faith and life. When men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke of -Greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms which showed that they -had never felt its power; just as, when they spoke of nature, it was in -set phrases that showed that they had never looked at her. On matters of -daily social experience the gifts of observation and of reason were -brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts of the time were thoughts -of the street, the mart, and the assembly. The human genius was for the -time being like some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused -to see or think of anything beyond them. At length resuming its march, it -emerged on open ground, where it fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest -the beauties of the earth and sky, and whence at the same time it could -turn back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning with new -clearness and a new emotion, here under cloud and rainbow the forests and -spired cities of the Middle Age, there in serener light the hills and -havens and level fanes of Hellas. - -The great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on this new phase of its -pilgrimage was Goethe, who with deliberate effort and self-discipline -climbed to heights commanding an equal survey over the medival and the -classic past. We had in England had an earlier, shyer, and far less -effectual pioneer in Gray. As time went on, poet after poet arose and sang -more freely, one the glories of nature, another the enchantments of the -Middle Age, another the Greek beauty and joy of life. Keats when his time -came showed himself, all young and untutored as he was, freshly and -powerfully inspired to sing of all three alike. He does not, as we have -said, write of Greek things in a Greek manner. Something indeed in -_Hyperion_--at least in the first two books--he has caught from _Paradise -Lost_ of the high restraint and calm which was common to the Greeks and -Milton. But to realise how far he is in workmanship from the Greek purity -and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images, we -have only to think of his palace of Hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling -pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. This is the most sustained and -celebrated passage of the poem. Or let us examine one of its most -characteristic images from nature:-- - - "As when, upon a tranced summer night, - Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, - Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, - Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--." - -Not to the simplicity of the Greek, but to the complexity of the modern, -sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and express, by such a concourse of -metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which -a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of -the oaks among the other trees--their aspect of human venerableness--their -verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural -stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with -mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky[53]. - -But though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he sees it truly. The -Greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated English way he -writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas. For the -story of the war of Titans and Olympians he had nothing to guide him -except scraps from the ancient writers, principally Hesiod, as retailed by -the compilers of classical dictionaries; and from the scholar's point of -view his version, we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary, -mixing up Latin conceptions and nomenclature with Greek, and introducing -much new matter of his own invention. But as to the essential meaning of -that warfare and its result--the dethronement of an older and ruder -worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of -arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,--as -to this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with -more beauty and force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the -Second Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of -early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human, -what masterly justice of instinct does he show,--to take one point -only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate -sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices. Thus -of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:-- - - "There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines - When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise - Among immortals when a God gives sign, - With hushing finger, how he means to load - His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, - With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: - Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines." - -Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:-- - - "So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea, - Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, - But cogitation in his watery shades, - Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, - In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue - Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands." - -And once more, of Clymene followed by Enceladus in debate:-- - - "So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook - That, lingering along a pebbled coast, - Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, - And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice - Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: - The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves - In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, - Came booming thus." - -This second book of _Hyperion_, relating the council of the dethroned -Titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, where the solemn opening -vision of Saturn fallen is followed by the resplendent one of Hyperion -threatened in his 'lucent empire'; nor the intensity of the unfinished -third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the -afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. -But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to -my mind, quite on a level with the other two. - -With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal -incorrectness, _Hyperion_, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the -grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the -easiest and most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able to apply -himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. Partly this was -due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of -dawning passion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may -trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception -of _Endymion_: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial -to his powers in the task itself. When after letting the poem lie by -through the greater part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September -made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds explaining his -reasons as follows. "There were too many Miltonic inversions in -it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's -humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be -kept up." In the same connection he declares that Chatterton is the purest -writer in the English language. "He has no French idiom or particles, like -Chaucer; it is genuine English idiom in English words." In writing about -the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as -to Milton and Chatterton. - -The influence, and something of the majesty, of _Paradise Lost_ are in -truth to be found in _Hyperion_: and the debate of the fallen Titans in -the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the -fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. -Passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of -Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austerity with Keats's luxuriance -of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:--in -the matter of rhythm, Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's. -Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and -far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and -ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since -Milton,--beside that of Shelley's _Alastor_,--perhaps a little below that -of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and -the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as -Milton himself: but while of Milton's diction the characteristic colour is -derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with -the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is -rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme -refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a passage -of this kind:-- - - "Eden stretch'd her line - From Auran eastward to the royal towers - Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings, - Or where the sons of Eden long before - Dwelt in Telassar." - -But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this:-- - - "throughout all the isle - There was no covert, no retired cave - Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, - Though scarcely heard in many a green recess." - -After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical -note of Milton's style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative -pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and -constructions generally. Already in _Isabella_ Keats is to be found -attempting both notes, thus:-- - - "With duller steel than the Persean sword - They cut away no formless monster's head--." - -Similar Miltonic echoes occur in _Hyperion_, as in the introduction -already quoted to the speech of Oceanus: or again thus:-- - - "Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope - In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, - Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet - And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies." - -But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton's -technical manner as he seems to have supposed. Yet he had adopted more of -it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain. - -In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was going back to one of his -first loves in literature. What he says of Chatterton's words and idioms -seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by -the Bristol boy out of Kersey's _Dictionary_[54]. But it is true that -through that jargon can be discerned, in the Rowley poems, not only an -ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition, -but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats -had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to -us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we find him in fact tempted aside -on an excursion into the regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how -much of _Hyperion_ had been written when he laid it aside in January to -take up the composition of _St Agnes' Eve_, that unsurpassed example--nay, -must we not rather call it unequalled?--of the pure charm of coloured and -romantic narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt the -elemental grandeur of _Hyperion_, so neither does it approach the human -pathos and passion of _Isabella_. Its personages appeal to us, not so much -humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery and atmosphere -amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the -weakness, of modern romance,--its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the -medival colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at -all,--its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both -writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral -truth: and without these no great literature can exist. - -Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love -of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story -wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young -Lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into association with the old popular -belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her -lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian -stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as -it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of -construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the -great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and -concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza, -which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us -first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and -next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd -taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, -where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly -bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with -the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about -the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in -handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers -vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and -sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he -touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, -movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought -before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our -sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:-- - - "Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, - He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails - To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." - -Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the -poet strikes life:-- - - "The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, - Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, - With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts." - -The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out -their beauties in detail, he calls-- - - "Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes - As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--" - -a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination -of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile -drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of -the same stanza-- - - "A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings," - ---the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is -at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of -her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that -moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted glass as Keats -in this celebrated passage represents it. Let us be grateful for the -error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly -splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow -is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. When -Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their -lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks -straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the -wearer,--'her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties -beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare -sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own -natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far -countries whence they have been gathered-- - - "From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." - -If the unique charm of the _Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the richness and -vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions -of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go. -What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse, -who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die -quietly of age when their parts are over[55]: especially the debate of old -Angela with Porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the -stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, I think, at two -moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,-- - - "No uttered syllable, or, woe betide: - But to her heart, her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side:"-- - -and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and -contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:-- - - "'Ah Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now - Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear - Made tunable with every sweetest vow; - And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear; - How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear'." - -Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the 'growing faint' of Porphyro, and -in his 'warm unnerved arm,' we have a touch of that swooning abandonment -to which Keats's heroes are too subject. But it is the slightest -possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet -individually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of that date are -constantly overcome in like manner. And we may well pardon Porphyro his -weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady's -side in defiance of her 'whole bloodthirsty race,' and will bear her -safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 'beyond the southern -moors' that he has prepared for her[56]. - -Nearly allied with the _Eve of St Agnes_ is the fragment in the four-foot -ballad metre, which Keats composed on the parallel popular belief -connected with the eve of St Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at -Chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Winchester -six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, seems farther to -suggest associations with Canterbury. Impressions of all these three -cathedral cities which Keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture -of which the fragment consists. I have said picture, but there are two: -one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and -Sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her -quaint fire-lit chamber. Each in its way is of an admirable vividness and -charm. The belief about St Mark's Eve was that a person stationed near a -church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church -the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the -ensuing year. Keats's fragment breaks off before the story is well -engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to -incidents illustrating this belief. Neither is it clear whether he -intended to place them in medival or in relatively modern times. The -demure Protestant air which he gives the Sunday streets, the Oriental -furniture and curiosities of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate -the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his -archology--witness, for instance, the line which tells how 'the long -carpets rose along the gusty floor' in the _Eve of St Agnes_. The interest -of the _St Mark's_ fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the -promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and -charm of workmanship: and second, its relation to and influence on later -English poetry. Keats in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the -feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The indoor scene -of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and -the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is -perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply -impressed and interested),--of his pictures even more than of his poems: -while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and -cadences of Mr Morris in some tale of the _Earthly Paradise_:-- - - "The city streets were clean and fair - From wholesome drench of April rains; - And on the western window panes - The chilly sunset faintly told - Of unmatured green valleys cold, - Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, - Of rivers new with springtide sedge." - -Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _La -Belle Dame sans Merci_. The title is taken from that of a poem by Alain -Chartier,--the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. -of France,--of which an English translation used to be attributed to -Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This title -had caught Keats's fancy, and in the _Eve of St Agnes_ he makes Lorenzo -waken Madeline by playing beside her bed-- - - "an ancient ditty, long since mute, - In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci'." - -The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the -spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more -to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with -Provence[57]. Keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but -rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the medival world of -enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when -either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a -bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his -own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery -expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world -symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of -whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a -weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild -yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound -and sense, make of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ the master-piece, not only -among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece -must be chosen) among them all. - -Before finally giving up _Hyperion_ Keats had conceived and written, -during his summer months at Shanklin and Winchester, another narrative -poem on a Greek subject: but one of those where Greek life and legend come -nearest to the medival, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and -witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of passion. I speak, of -course, of _Lamia_, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and -victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him -by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the -scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats had found the germ of -the story, quoted from Philostratus, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. -In versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them, -however, not as in _Endymion_, but in a manner founded on that of Dryden, -with a free use of the Alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and -the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the measure -as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe -and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its -way as the victorious march of Dryden himself. Here is an example where -the poetry of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:-- - - "Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, goddess, see - Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! - For pity do not this sad heart belie-- - Even as thou vanishest so I shall die. - Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! - To thy far wishes will thy streams obey: - Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, - Alone they can drink up the morning rain: - Though a descended Pleiad, will not one - Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune - Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?" - -And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:-- - - "As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, - Throughout her palaces imperial, - And all her populous streets and temples lewd, - Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, - To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. - Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, - Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, - Companion'd or alone; while many a light - Flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals, - And threw their moving shadows on the walls, - Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade - Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade." - -No one can deny the truth of Keats's own criticism on _Lamia_ when he -says, "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 sensation." -There is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns -itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the -touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the -transformation itself. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat -disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode -of Hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the -merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and -beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This -thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine -melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give -_Lamia_ almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats's narrative -poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others -too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for -instance that of the palace reared by Lamia's magic; which will not bear -comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet's building. -And it has reflective passages, as that in the first book beginning, 'Let -the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and the first fifteen lines of -the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at -its best, Keats relapses into something too like Leigh Hunt's and his own -early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows at the -same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language. -The positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been -attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the _Eve of -St Agnes_ we had to 'brook' tears for to check or forbear them, in -_Hyperion_ 'portion'd' for 'proportion'd;' eyes that 'fever out;' a -chariot 'foam'd along.' Some of these verbal licences possess a force that -makes them pass; but not so in _Lamia_ the adjectives 'psalterian' and -'piazzian,' the verb 'to labyrinth,' and the participle 'daft,' as if from -an imaginary active verb meaning to daze. - -In the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is moreover a -weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much -importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him -uttering. But the doctrine he sets forth in _Lamia_ is one which from the -reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain -consistency:-- - - "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, as it erewhile made - The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade." - -Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in _The Rainbow_: but -one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which Keats would have done -well to stand, is preached by Wordsworth in his famous Preface. - -Passing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of Keats's work -during this period--it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly -occupied in the spring months of 1819, from the completion of _St Agnes' -Eve_ at Chichester in January until the commencement of _Lamia_ and _Otho -the Great_ at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats constitute a class -apart in English literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived -from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he -calls the 'roundelay' of the Indian maiden in _Endymion_ he had made his -most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching -Shelley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in -touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are -comparatively simple and regular in form. They are written in a strain -intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the -declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate -with the idea of an ode. Of the five composed in the spring of 1819, two, -those on _Psyche_ and the _Grecian Urn_, are inspired by the old Greek -world of imagination and art; two, those on _Melancholy_ and the -_Nightingale_, by moods of the poet's own mind; while the fifth, that on -_Indolence_, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations. - -In the _Psyche_, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching -those of Spenser's nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) Keats recurs -to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in -the opening poem of his first book, beginning-- - - "So felt he, who first told how Psyche went - On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment." - -Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by -cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like -touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by -the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are -disclosed--'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other -poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm -of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all -his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time -habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his 'sea-shouldering whales,' he -is now in his own manner the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden -in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'moss-lain Dryads' and -the 'soft-conchd ear' of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on -us a little with a sense of oddity, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in -_Lamia_. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn -of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage -of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of -antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the -metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:-- - - "Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane - In some untrodden region of my mind, - Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, - Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind." - -Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself -swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold -of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his ear charmed by the -glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated -vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the -invocation and the imagery. - -Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the -_Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the -_Psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two -arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which -Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the -sestet, and in one instance--the ode to Melancholy--expanding it into a -septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had -set the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of -ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured -images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art -to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which -flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of -antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men -or gods are these, what maidens loth,' &c. The second and third stanzas -express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences -between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety -and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange -permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even -richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the -incomparable choice of pictures,-- - - "What little town by river or sea shore, - Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, - Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?" - -In the answering lines-- - - "And, little town, thy streets for evermore - Will silent be; and not a soul to tell - Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--" - -in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the -arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, -and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a -necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own -compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can -easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice -it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward -between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to -the future, to remain,-- - - "in midst of other woe - Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, - Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--" - -thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason -and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of -Keats's temper--an immutable law. - -It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied -Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland -House an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is -described in his fourth stanza[58]: and of course no subject is commoner -in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. But the two -subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of -ancient art: and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of -sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him -only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi's etchings. Lord -Holland's urn is duly figured in the _Vasi e Candelabri_ of that admirable -master. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond of what he -calls-- - - "the pleasant flow - Of words at opening a portfolio:" - -and in the scene of sacrifice in _Endymion_ (Book L, 136-163) we may -perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as -well as an anticipation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the -subject in the ode. - -The ode _On Indolence_ stands midway, not necessarily in date of -composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two Greek and the two -personal odes, as I have above distinguished them. In it Keats again calls -up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate -the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of Love, Ambition, -and Poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. This ode, less highly -wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record -of a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted -intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an -agreeable physical languor. Well had it been for him had such moods come -more frequently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons of men, -the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and -unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled to bursting. One of the -attributes he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is a - - "sciential brain - To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain." - -In the fragmentary ode _On Melancholy_ (which has no proper beginning, its -first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of Beaumont and of -Milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the -habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a -characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:-- - - "Aye, in the very Temple of Delight - Veil'd Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, - Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue - Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine: - His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, - And be among her cloudy trophies hung." - -The same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds -expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet's feeling for -nature and romance, in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Just as his Grecian urn -was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the -particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that -he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some -far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow -her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he -makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. Then -follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations -which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of -Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her -power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to -the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, -by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of -the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the thought -of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome -now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song--and here, by a -breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts -the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with -the permanence of the song-bird's life, meaning the life of the type. This -last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those -memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza -closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his -own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he -returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest -dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes rank beside the -_Grecian Urn_ in the other. Neither is strictly faultless, but such -revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch -that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to -faultlessness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. Both -are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. Let us -therefore place here, as an example of this class of Keats's work, the -ode _To Autumn_, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of -his quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, no such -far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but -in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. In the first stanza -the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in -words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at -all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the -middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have -an exquisite congruity and lightness. - - "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, - Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; - Conspiring with him how to load and bless - With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; - To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, - And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; - To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells - With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, - And still more, later flowers for the bees, - Until they think warm days will never cease, - For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. - - Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? - Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find - Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, - Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; - Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, - Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook - Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: - And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep - Steady thy laden head across a brook; - Or by a cider-press, with patient look, - Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. - - 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; - Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn - Among the river sallows, borne aloft - Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; - And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; - Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft - The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; - And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." - -To pass from our poet's work at this time in the several fields of -romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pass -from a region of happy and assured conquest to one of failure, though of -failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been -in store for him. At his age no man has ever been a master in the drama: -even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the -difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in -which Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot -contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to -his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted. -He brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we -have seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, and a mind -prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while -Brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. But these -things were not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not yet -developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of -the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in -conception. Keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing -with all the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the effect only -of puppets inexpertly agitated: Otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and -fatherly affection, Ludolph of febrile passion and vacillation, Erminia of -maidenly purity, Conrad and Auranthe of ambitious lust and treachery. At -least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. From -that point Keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence, -shows a great improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the violent -kind affected by the old English drama, in the disclosure of the body of -Auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly -imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his -frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Marlowe, not only by their -pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses -expressed in them. Of the second historical play, _King Stephen_, which -Keats began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to afford -matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he finished are not only marked -by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a -spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not -shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his -capacity had not this fragment been preserved. - -But in the mingling of his soul's and body's destinies it had been -determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be -suffered to ripen farther upon earth. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn occupations: The _Cap and Bells_: - Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing despondency--Visit of George Keats to - England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally in the Spring--Summer in - Kentish Town--Publication of the _Lamia_ volume--Relapse--Ordered - South--Voyage to Italy--Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October - 1819-Feb. 1821.] - - -We left Keats at Winchester, with _Otho_, _Lamia_, and the _Ode to Autumn_ -just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and -take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting -imagination magnify and passion exasperate them as heretofore. At his -request Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in -Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came on the 8th of October -to take up his quarters. But alas! his blood proved traitor to his will: -and the plan of life and literary work in London broke down at once on -trial. The gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at -Winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a -distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he -went to Hampstead--'into the fire'--and in a moment the flames had seized -him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his -mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was -utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he -found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send -her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, "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.... 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 absorb'd me." A three days' visit at her -mother's house, followed by another of a day or two at the Dilkes', ended -in his giving up all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently, -of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at Hampstead under -Brown's roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. He writes with -a true foreboding: "I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast -the die for Love or Death.--I have no patience with anything else." - -It was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to -Wentworth Place in October, 1819, begins the melancholy closing chapter of -Keats's history. Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the -flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last kept -smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the -first began from this time forth to sink. Not that he was idle during the -ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked -both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. For the present he -determined not to publish _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and the other poems written -since _Endymion_. He preferred to await the result of Brown's attempt to -get _Otho_ brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success -in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the -meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in -estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold -his friend's name. The great hope of the authors was that Kean would see -an opportunity for himself in the part of Ludolph. In this they were not -disappointed: the play was accepted: but Elliston, the manager, proposing -to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, Keats and Brown -objected to the delay, and about Christmas transferred the offer of their -MS. to Covent Garden, where Macready, under Harris's management, was at -this time beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while -returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped. - -In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which Keats bent his -hopes. "One of my ambitions," he had written to Bailey from Winchester, -"is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has -done in acting." And now, in a letter to Mr Taylor of Nov. 17, he says -that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he -does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he -may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he -conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to -diffuse the colouring of _St Agnes' Eve_ throughout a poem in which -character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." Two or -three such poems would be, he thinks, the best _gradus_ to the _Parnassum -altissimum_ of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment -engaged on a task of a different nature. "As the marvellous is the most -enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been -endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her manage -for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all." The piece to -which Keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the _Cap -and Bells_, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing -of the autumn days immediately following their return to Wentworth Place, -Brown says:-- - - "By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem - in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had not - composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It was to - be published under the feigned authorship of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' and - to bear the title of the _Cap and Bells_, or, which he preferred, the - _Jealousies_. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He wrote it with - the greatest facility; in one instance I remember having copied (for I - copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner[59]." - -Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the most judicious -adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the _Cap and -Bells_ to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly -flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to Keats's nature. As long -as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of -pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable[60], and he -was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. Moreover the spirit of -poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the -spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of -the metrical romances of the Italian Renaissance, and again, with -unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early cantos of _Don -Juan_. It was partly the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great -student of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent Italian -studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron's success, that now -induced Keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. Having already -employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the _ottava rima_ of -the Italians, in his serious poem of _Isabella_, he now, by what seems an -odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave Spenserian -stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. -Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his -choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to -gay with a light hand, and the movement of the _Cap and Bells_ has much of -his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not -a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and -Brown's invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a -fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being -meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all -that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the -emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his -affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the -Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to -weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the -fragment of _St Mark's Eve_ at the beginning of the year,--the tale of an -English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through -the reading of a magic book. With this and other purely fanciful elements -of the story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day. -It was in this year, 1819, that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and -his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject: -and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the -scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. The -references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the _Cap and Bells_ -are general rather than particular, although here and there individual -names and characters are glanced at: as when 'Esquire Biancopany' stands -manifestly, as Mr Forman has pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social -and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. As -Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for -this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the Byronic wit and devilry his -raillery seems but child's play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful -and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in -passages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination -becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and -colour,--but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time. - -Besides his morning task in Brown's company on the _Cap and Bells_, Keats -had other work on hand during this November and December. "In the -evenings," writes Brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate -apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of -_Hyperion_ into the form of a Vision." The result of this attempt, which -has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in Keats's -history. We have seen how, in the previous August, he had grown -discontented with the style and diction of _Hyperion_, as being too -artificial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he took the -poem up again[61], and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly, -it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading, -partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which -were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate the fall of the -Titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision -revealed and interpreted to him by a goddess of the fallen race. The -reader remembers how he had broken off his work on _Hyperion_ at the point -where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with the inspiration of -her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of -mythology he had lately bought[62], he now identifies this Greek -Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being -possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome -was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess -and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove -or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a -slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval -temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet -see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an -image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty, -he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from -her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn. -Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an -irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself -conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn's -overthrow. 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' &c.,--from this point -Keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his _Vision_ the text of the -original _Hyperion_; with alterations which are in almost all cases for -the worse. Neither does the new portion of his work well match the old. -Side by side with impressive passages, it contains others where both -rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more -on single lines and passages, and less on sustained effects. Keats has -indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the -opening of the _Vision_, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps -conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the -priestess when she removes her veils. But the especial interest of the -poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his -mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the -poet's character and lot. When Moneta bids him mount the steps to her -side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish -utterly where he stands. In fact he all but dies before he reaches the -stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the -ordeal:-- - - "None can usurp this height," returned that shade, - "But those to whom the miseries of the world - Are misery, and will not let them rest. - All else who find a haven in the world, - Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, - If by a chance into this fane they come, - Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half." - "Are there not thousands in the world," said I, - Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, - "Who love their fellows even to the death, - Who feel the giant agony of the world, - And more, like slaves to poor humanity, - Labour for mortal good? I sure should see - Other men here, but I am here alone." - "Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," - Rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; - They seek no wonder but the human face, - No music but a happy-noted voice: - They come not here, they have no thought to come; - And thou art here, for thou art less than they. - What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, - To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, - A fever of thyself: think of the earth: - What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? - What haven? Every creature hath its home, - Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, - Whether his labours be sublime or low-- - The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: - Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. - Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, - Such things as thou art are admitted oft - Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, - And suffer'd in these temples--"[63]. - -Tracing the process of Keats's thought through this somewhat obscure -imagery,--the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws -himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is -lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden): -awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with -Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly -above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow -men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to -approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only -on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. And -even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of -common men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the human mission -and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. Almost from the first -dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry -towards-- - - "a nobler life, - Where I may find the agonies, the strife - Of human hearts." - -What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet's lot even -at its best. - - "Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve," - ---through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when this bitter cry -broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before, -when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of -the poetic life:-- - - "These are the living pleasures of the bard, - But richer far posterity's award. - What shall he murmur with his latest breath, - When his proud eye looks through the film of death?"-- - -His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the -spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh. -The wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his -sensations and emotions into pain--at once darkening the shadow of -impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding -instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied -cravings of his passion. In verses at this time addressed, though -doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones -like this:-- - - "Where shall I learn to get my peace again?"-- - - --"O for some sunny spell - To dissipate the shadows of this hell":-- - -or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:-- - - "Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, - Withhold no atom's atom or I die, - Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, - Forget, in the mist of idle misery, - Life's purposes,--the palate of the mind - Losing its gust, and my ambition blind." - -That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does -not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible in the present state of his -fortunes. "However selfishly I may feel," he had written to her some -months earlier, "I am sure I could never act selfishly." The Brawnes on -their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and -independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly -be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats's sufferings, -disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate -comrade Brown. Without understanding the cause, Brown was not slow to -perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances Keats had -given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen -him against troubles of imagination, and that he was not and would not -allow himself to be unhappy. - - "I quickly perceived," writes Brown, "that he was more so than I had - feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, - frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great - uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do - no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding - that word however.... All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge, - was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, - or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend - could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too - thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. - Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, - a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by - accident, and without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be - warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise - never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could - induce him to break his word when once given,--which was a difficulty. - Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional - proof of his rooted misery"[64]. - -Some of the same symptoms were observed by Haydon, and have been described -by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting -another's weakness with his own strength[65]. To his friends in general -Keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice -that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, Severn, at this time -competed for and carried off (December 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of -the Academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for -several years. The subject was Spenser's 'Cave of Despair.' We hear of -Keats flinging out in anger from among a company of elder artists where -the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an -appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture,--adding, however, -parenthetically from his troubled heart, "You had best put me into your -Cave of Despair." In December his letters to his sister make mention -several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made -to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, -that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in -connection with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, George -Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his -wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first -trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of -the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to -England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey, -of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers -from their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, during -which John made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. "He was -not the same being," wrote George, looking back on the time some years -afterwards; "although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, -he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the -reviving custom of venting his griefs." In a letter which the poet wrote -to his sister-in-law while her husband was in England, he attempts to keep -up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls -involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. Of -his work he says nothing, and it is clear from Brown's narrative that -both his morning and his evening task--the _Cap and Bells_ and the -_Vision_--had been dropped some time before this[66], and left in the -fragmentary state in which we possess them. - -George left for Liverpool on Friday Jan. 28. A few days later Keats was -seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set -up in his constitution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which -recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated. - - "One night," writes Brown--it was on the Thursday Feb. 3--"at eleven - o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce - intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible[67]; it - therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the - matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the - outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but - now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and - instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my - request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate - remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On - entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he - slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from my mouth.' - I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the - sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After - regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of - countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know the colour of - that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived in that - colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.' I ran - for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left - him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep." - -Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue -truly. He survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life -was but a life-in-death. How many are there among us to whom such -_lacrymae rerum_ come not home? Happy at least are they whose lives this -curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses -past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,--who know not -what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under Mediterranean -palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest -and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the -usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would -not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering -regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous -prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to -see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a -week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed, -and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, which his -good feelings wrung from him, that under the circumstances he ought to -release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he -became quieter and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he wrote -often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his -men friends: among them one to James Rice, which contains this often -quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:-- - - "I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed - a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering - under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify that - acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had - lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that - illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my - mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive - things in a truer light),--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 super-human fancy." - -The greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, Keats said at another -time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the -literary merits of the Bible he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the -Hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. What he wants to see again, -he writes now further from his sickbed, are 'the simple flowers of our -spring.' And in the course of April, after being nearly two months a -prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as -early as the twenty-fifth of March, we hear of him going into London, to -the private view of Haydon's 'Entry into Jerusalem,' where the painter -tells how he found him and Hazlitt in a corner, 'really rejoicing.' -Keats's friends, in whose minds his image had always been associated with -the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring -themselves to believe but that he would recover. Brown had arranged to -start early in May on a second walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor -actually advised Keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own -state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the smack as far as -Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in -Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the -sake of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer -Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks -during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking -advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive -on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been -strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even -that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin -(meaning begin again) soon on the _Cap and Bells_. But in fact the only -work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight -revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at -last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing -_Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, _Hyperion_, and the _Odes_. Of -the poems written during Keats's twenty months of inspiration from March -1818 to October 1819, none of importance are omitted except the _Eve of St -Mark_, the _Ode on Indolence_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The first -Keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: La -Belle Dame sans Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical _The -Indicator_, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on -May 20, 1820. _Hyperion_, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at -their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original -shape, the poet's friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they -thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came out in the first week -of July. An admirably kind and discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in -the _Indicator_ at the beginning of August[68]: and in the same month -Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_ for the first time broke silence in -Keats's favour. The impression made on the more intelligent order of -readers may be inferred from the remarks of Crabb Robinson in his -_Diaries_ for the following December[69]. "My book has had good success -among the literary people," wrote Keats a few weeks after its appearance, -"and I believe has a moderate sale." - -But had the success been even far greater than it was, Keats was in no -heart and no health for it to cheer him. Passion with lack of hope were -working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards -recovery. The relapse was not long delayed. Fresh hmorrhages occurring on -the 22nd and 23rd of June, he moved from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to -be nursed by the Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here everything -was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but -all in vain: he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards -avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a drive -in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a -flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing -to Fanny Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but -breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself -chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart -is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of -half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. "Hamlet's heart was full of such -misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a nunnery, go, go!'" -Keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, 'a -fever of himself:' and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but -his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his -betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words -that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory[70]. - -Such at this time was Keats's condition that the slightest shock unmanned -him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or -stranger. After he had been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened -on the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note -from Fanny Brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. This -circumstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to -stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to -his old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, would not suffer -this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and -tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some -mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has -told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with -white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic -flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I[71]." Ever since -his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that -a winter in England would be too much for him, and had been trying to -bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to Italy. The Shelleys had -heard through the Gisbornes of Keats's relapse, and Shelley now wrote in -terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come -and take up his residence with them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats -immediately after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain -tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Shelleys' friendship, but as -to the _Cenci_, which had just been sent him, and generally as to -Shelley's and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much -to the purpose to say. - -As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this time made up his -mind to try it, "as a soldier marches up to a battery." His hope was that -Brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend -in the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for Keats's -departure was fast approaching while Brown still remained in ignorance of -his purpose. In the meantime another companion offered himself in the -person of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the -Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with -a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn -accordingly took passage for Naples on board the ship 'Maria Crowther,' -which sailed from London on Sept. 18[72]. Several of the friends who loved -Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among them Mr -Taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase -for 100 of the copyright of _Endymion_. As soon as the ill news of his -health reached Brown in Scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way -south, and for that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in the -Thames on the same evening as the 'Maria Crowther' sailed: so that the two -friends lay on that night within hail of one another off Gravesend -unawares. - -The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn was struck by his -vigour of appetite and apparent cheerfulness. The fever of travel and -change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, -and in Keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to -those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to -raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time -afterwards. Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten -days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats -landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board -ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter -confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever -confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his -passion, he says 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 wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these -pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these -pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, -are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever." - -On the night when Keats wrote these words (Sept. 28) Brown was staying -with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly -missed seeing each other once more. The ship putting to sea again, still -with adverse winds, there came next to Keats that day of momentary calm -and lightening of the spirit of which Severn has left us the record, and -the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of -his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near -Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of -which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one -initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same -night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well; -placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a -_Lover's Complaint_, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of Shakespeare's -poems which had been given him by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and -under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and -feeling:-- - - "Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 cold 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 stedfast, still unchangeable, - Pillow'd 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." - -These were Keats's last verses. With the single exception of the sonnet -beginning 'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,' composed -probably immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only -love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no -death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty -and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. - -Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent -storm in the Bay of Biscay; and Severn waking at night, and finding the -water rushing through their cabin, called out to Keats "half fearing he -might be dead," and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first -line of Arne's long-popular song from _Artaxerxes_--'Water parted from the -sea.' As the storm abated Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _Don -Juan_, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and -presently flung the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed: -after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the -dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in -order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage -of over four weeks, the 'Maria Crowther' arrived in the Bay of Naples, and -was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says Keats, he -summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole -course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was -among his fellow-passengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of -cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly -preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his -own. He admits as much in writing from Naples harbour to Mrs Brawne: and -in the same letter says, "O what an account I could give you of the Bay of -Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a -spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly." The effort he -constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world -of colour and classic beauty about him, partly imposed on Severn; but in a -letter he wrote to Brown from Naples on Nov. 1, soon after their landing, -his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:-- - - "I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh God! God! God! - Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me - like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my - head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear - her.... Oh Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me - that the human heart is capable of so much misery." - -At Naples Keats and Severn stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and received -much kindness and hospitality from a brother of Miss Cotterill's who was -there to meet her. The political state and servile temper of the -people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms -imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous -summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the -theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance -that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He had -received there another letter from Shelley, who since he last wrote had -read the _Lamia_ volume, and was full of generous admiration for -_Hyperion_. Shelley now warmly renewed his invitation to Keats to come to -Pisa. But his and Severn's plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive -thither (apparently in the second week of November) Keats suffered -seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in -the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered -for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which -Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di -Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinit -dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were -left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and -at first they were ill served by the _trattora_ from which they got their -meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the -dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says -Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first cares was to get a -piano, since nothing soothed Keats's pain so much as music. For a while -the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of -seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these -alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian -close by. The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the -air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn's -absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In -their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline -Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but -not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who -was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them -change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they -would ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working among the -ruins. - -It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at Rome began reading -a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to -himself:-- - - "Misera me! sollievo a me non resta - Altro che 'l pianto, _ed il pianto delitto_." - -Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful. -His thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on -the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and -wrote encouragingly to his friends in England; and on Nov. 30 Keats -himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less despondent than before. But -suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. On Dec. 10 came a -relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Hmorrhage followed hmorrhage -on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes -the most piteous and distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his -friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to -have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn's -refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his -ardent imagination and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of pain in -Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but -above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would -bring upon his friend. "He explained to me the exact procedure of his -gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon -the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued -attendance on him." Severn gently persisting in refusal, Keats for a while -fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example -of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. In -religion Keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting -Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to -and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the -behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the -power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to -him from Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, strove to pass the -remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy. - -By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, -partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of -the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to -combat it. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then -were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous -kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr -Ewing. At one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in -danger of actual destitution, till a remittance from Mr Taylor arrived -just in time to save them. The devotion and resource of Severn were -infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium -or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and -his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with "beating -about in the tempest of his mind;" and once and again some fresh -remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, -would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the -first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, -one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his -companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite reading was -still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked -Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for -nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, -himself from thoughts of fame. "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing -over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he -gave the words for his epitaph:--"here lies one whose name was writ in -water." Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to -speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual -question to the doctor when he came in was, "Doctor, when will this -posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned to ask it neither -physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at -all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing -unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate to the -last, "his generous concern for me," says Severn, "in my isolated position -at Rome was one of his greatest cares." His response to kindness was -irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with -him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to -fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. "To remedy this -one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a -lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be -conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found -the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while -doubting suddenly cried out, 'Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy -lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'" And again "Poor Keats has -me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens -his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close -gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep." - -Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the -watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations -to write them down. Life held out for two months and a half after the -relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing -near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes -Severn, "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." Three days later his body was -carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his -story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his -sake and Shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English race -for ever. It was but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in -their last resting-place beside his friend[73]. - - - - -CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius. - - -The touching circumstances of Keats's illness and death at Rome aroused -naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous -mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy -was Shelley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics -had contributed to Keats's sufferings, and believing that they had killed -him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of -passionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that -double inspiration Shelley wrote,-- - - "And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres." - -As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, _Adonas_ is unsurpassed -in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and -the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is -perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley's art: while -its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most -lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the -elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his -character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the -same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than -that reached by Shelley, in the well-known stanza of _Don Juan_. In regard -to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. -When the _Edinburgh_ praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the -Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:--"No more Keats, I -entreat:--flay him alive;--if some of you don't, I must skin him myself." -Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he -turns against the latter, and cries:--"I would not be the person who wrote -that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world." In the -_Don Juan_ passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at -the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath. - -Taken together with the notion of 'Johnny Keats' to which _Blackwood_ and -the _Quarterly_ had previously given currency, the _Adonas_ and the _Don -Juan_ passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of -Keats's character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction -had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was 'as -like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,' did anything effectual to set his -memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the -end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been -quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography -George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but -against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the -hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had -unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication -between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats's -friends in England took George's part, disposed under the circumstances -to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to -superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his -want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his -occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at -one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse -collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them. -The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary -skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the -poet's friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects -not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats's -death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,--the -Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us -all,--and with help from nearly all Keats's surviving friends, and by the -grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet -in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every -student is familiar. - -Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can -with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, -inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with -pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for -pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 'exquisite sense of -the luxurious': and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which -he describes as his 'horrid morbidity of temperament.' The greater his -credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and -that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued -him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way -when he speaks of the 'violence of his temperament, continually smothered -up.' Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during -the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but -that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such -generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct -and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely -better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, -indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the -weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when -the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, -as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,--not indeed, so far as -we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of -the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of -trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of -self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, -he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences -preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his -fortunes justified. - -In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for -manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his -friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have -heard little in this history[74], wrote while the poet lay dying: "Keats -must get himself again, Severn, if but for me--I cannot afford to lose -him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats." The following -is from a letter of Brown written also during his illness:--"he is -present to me every where and at all times,--he now seems sitting here at -my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I -never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[75]." Elsewhere, -speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:--"while I waited on -him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance -of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as -absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like -this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me[76]:" and we know in fact how -the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's -death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord -Houghton's book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to -thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius I did not, -and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the _Man_[77]." The -points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high -good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for -many. "He had a soul of noble integrity," says Bailey: "and his common -sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, -in the best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of -sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very -intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, -requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it -nothing,--but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to -friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when -genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the -ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, -then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what -his companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest friend," cries -Reynolds, "the most loveable associate,--the deepest listener to the -griefs and distresses of all around him,--'That ever lived in this tide of -times[78].'" To the same effect Haydon:--"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 had a -kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who -wanted it." And again Bailey:-- - - "With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John - Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one - particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his - letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his - conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor - frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man - I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any - act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he - rose into sudden and animated indignation[79]." - -Lastly, "he had no fears of self," says George Keats, "through -interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and -without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, -defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and -purse." - -In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must assert his own -superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over -Keats's dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, -idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks of the poet's -"want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never -for two days did he know his own intentions," his criticism is deserving -of more attention. This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in -Keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He -acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." What he means is -no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in -regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in -regard to himself. "The Celtic instability," a reader may perhaps surmise -who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. Whether the quality -was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar -complexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression in character -of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, -namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as -was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the -order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own -personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised -clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility -to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical -consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. - - "As to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(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. - 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.... 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." - -"Even now," he says on another occasion, "I am perhaps not speaking from -myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live." Keats was often -impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. "I would call the head -and top of those who have a proper self," he says, "men of power": and it -is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, -that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of -thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent -of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all -intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself -the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of -what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:-- - - "For the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic - passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in - the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man - does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and - deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, - and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry - that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to - put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and - unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul." - -This is but one of many passages in which Keats proclaims the necessity, -for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His -critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise -of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the -foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware -that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, -of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its -elements existed:--"I have loved," as he says, "the principle of beauty in -all things." His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean, -including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the -soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long -enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their -manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit -of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the -faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to -divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the -Middle Age,--would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the -mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to -illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life? - -My belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the -height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief period between -its first effervescence and its exhaustion,--from the glowing humanity of -his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of -his own consciousness and his friends' experience, he was accustomed to -live in the lives of others,--from the gleams of true greatness of mind -which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and -pleasantry of his familiar letters,--from all our evidences, in a word, as -to what he was as well as from what he did,--I think it probable that by -power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shaksperean -spirit that has lived since Shakspere; the true Marcellus, as his first -biographer has called him, of the realm of English song; and that in his -premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something -like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living -successors, as Lord Tennyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have -formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the -banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really -adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? In a final -estimate of any writer's work, we must take into account not what he might -have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats, -the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with -fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we -can think, indeed, of the pathos of _Isabella_, but of that alone, as -equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the _Hymn to Pan_ -and the _Ode to a Nightingale_, with the glow of romance colour in _St -Agnes' Eve_, the weirdness of romance sentiment in _La Belle Dame Sans -Merci_, the conflict of elemental force with fate in _Hyperion_, the -revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the _Ode on a Grecian -Urn_ and the fragment of an _Ode to Maia_. - -It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who -have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence -been operative. First on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling and -informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and -also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. And -secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of -execution--a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never -cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he -speaks of 'loading every rift of a subject with ore.' We may define it as -the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of -phrase. A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that -tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline,-- - - "But to her heart her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side." - -The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is -the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every -touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line -describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of -suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the -emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on -ourselves. In so far as Keats has taught other poets really to write like -this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,--but not so when -for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of -brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. The first -considerable writer among Keats's successors on whom his example took -effect was Hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. The -dominant poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly -influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed -the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal degrees. After or -together with Coleridge, Keats has also contributed most, among English -writers, to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group. -Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the -Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between -the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, -of our own day. - -Such, I think, is Keats's historic place in English literature. What his -place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned -from their own lips. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, -but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines -immortally. - - -THE END. - - - - -APPENDIX. - - -p. 2, note 1. As to the exact date of Keats's birth the evidence is -conflicting. He was christened at St Botolph's, Bishopsgate, Dec. 18, -1795, and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register (which I am -informed is in the handwriting of the rector, Dr Conybeare) is a note -stating that he was born Oct. 31. The date is given accordingly without -question by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. I. p. xlviii). But it seems -certain that Keats himself and his family believed his birthday to have -been Oct. 29. Writing on that day in 1818, Keats says, "this is my -birthday." Brown (in Houghton MSS.) gives the same day, but only as on -hearsay from a lady to whom Keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as -to the year. Lastly, in the proceedings in _Rawlings v. Jennings_, Oct. 29 -is again given as his birthday, in the affidavit of one Anne Birch, who -swears that she knew his father and mother intimately. The entry in the St -Botolph's register is probably the authority to be preferred.--Lower -Moorfields was the space now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the London -Institution, together with the east side of Finsbury Pavement.--The births -of the younger brothers are in my text given rightly for the first time, -from the parish registers of St Leonard's, Shoreditch; where they were all -three christened in a batch on Sept. 24, 1801. The family were at that -date living in Craven Street. - - -p. 2, note 2. Brown (Houghton MSS.) says simply that Thomas Keats was a -'native of Devon.' His daughter, Mrs Llanos, tells me she remembers -hearing as a child that he came from the Land's End. Persons of the name -are still living in Plymouth. - - -p. 5, note 2. The total amount of the funds paid into Court by the -executors under Mr Jennings's will (see Preface, p. viii) was 13160. -19_s._ 5_d._ - - -p. 11, note 1, and p. 70, note 1. Of the total last mentioned, there came -to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other legatees who -predeceased her) sums amounting to 9343. 2_s._ In the Chancery -proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by Mrs Jennings for the -benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but only its general purport; -whence it appears that the sum she made over to Messrs Sandell and Abbey -in trust for them amounted approximately to 8000, and included all the -reversions fallen or still to fall in as above mentioned. The balance it -is to be presumed she retained for her own support (she being then 74). - - -p. 17, note 1. The following letter written by Mr Abbey to Mr Taylor the -publisher, under April 18, 1821, soon after the news of Keats's death -reached England, speaks for itself. The letter is from Woodhouse MSS. B. - - "Sir, - - I beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the 30th ult. - respecting the late Mr Jno. Keats. - - I am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my - controul, and acted contrary to my advice, I cannot interfere with his - affairs. - - I am, Sir, - Yr. mo. Hble St., - RICHD. ABBEY." - - -p. 34, note 1. The difficulty of determining the exact date and place of -Keats's first introduction to Hunt arises as follows.--Cowden Clarke -states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in Leigh Hunt's -cottage at Hampstead. Hunt in his _Autobiography_ says it was 'in the -spring of the year 1816' that he went to live at Hampstead in the cottage -in question. Putting these two statements together, we get the result -stated as probable in the text. But on the other hand there is the -strongly Huntian character of Keats's _Epistle_ to G. F. Mathew, dated -November 1815, which would seem to indicate an earlier acquaintance (see -p. 31). Unluckily Leigh Hunt himself has darkened counsel on the point by -a paragraph inserted in the last edition of his _Autobiography_, as -follows:--(Pref. no. 7, p. 257) "It was not at Hampstead that I first saw -Keats. It was at York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote -part of the _Indicator_, and he resided with me while in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the -curious in such things, among whom I am one." The student must not be -misled by this remark of Hunt's, which is evidently only due to a slip of -memory. It is quite true that Keats lived with Hunt in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town, during part of July and August 1820 (see page 197): and that -before moving to that address Hunt had lived for more than a year (from -the autumn of 1818 to the spring of 1820) at 8, New Road. But that Keats -was intimate with him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact -living not in London at all but at the Vale of Health, is abundantly -certain. - - -p. 37, note 1. Cowden Clarke tells how Keats once calling and finding him -fallen asleep over Chaucer, wrote on the blank space at the end of the -_Floure and the Leafe_ the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a -little copse.' Reynolds on reading it addressed to Keats the following -sonnet of his own, which is unpublished (Houghton MSS.), and has a certain -biographical interest. It is dated Feb. 27, 1817. - - "Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, - Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed; - They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed - The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves, - O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves - Songs that shall make the age be nature-led, - And win that coronal for thy young head - Which time's strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne'er bereaves. - Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way, - Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung; - Be thou companion of the summer day, - Roaming the fields and older woods among:-- - So shall thy muse be ever in her May, - And thy luxuriant spirit ever young." - - -p. 45, note 1. Woodhouse MSS. A. contains the text of the first draft in -question, with some preliminary words of Woodhouse as follows:-- - -"The lines at p. 36 of Keats's printed poems are altered from a copy of -verses written by K. at the request of his brother George, and by the -latter sent as a valentine to the lady. The following is a copy of the -lines as originally written:-- - - Hadst thou lived in days of old, - Oh what wonders had been told - Of thy lively dimpled face, - And thy footsteps full of grace: - Of thy hair's luxurious darkling, - Of thine eyes' expressive sparkling. - And thy voice's swelling rapture, - Taking hearts a ready capture. - Oh! if thou hadst breathed then, - Thou hadst made the Muses ten. - Could'st thou wish for lineage higher - Than twin sister of Thalia? - At least for ever, ever more - Will I call the Graces four." - -Here follow lines 41--68 of the poem as afterwards published: and in -conclusion:-- - - "Ah me! whither shall I flee? - Thou hast metamorphosed me. - Do not let me sigh and pine, - Prythee be my valentine. - 14 Feby. 1816." - - -p. 47, note 1. Mrs Procter's memory, however, betrayed her when she -informed Lord Houghton that the colour of Keats's eyes was blue. That they -were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence alike of C. C. Clarke, -of George Keats and his wife (as transmitted by their daughter Mrs Speed -to her son), and from the various portraits painted from life and -posthumously by Severn and Hilton. Mrs Procter calls his hair auburn: Mrs -Speed had heard from her father and mother that it was 'golden red,' which -may mean nearly the same thing: I have seen a lock in the possession of -Sir Charles Dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have -looked gold in the lights. Bailey in Houghton MSS. speaks of it as -extraordinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his -head was like laying it 'on the rich plumage of a bird.' An evidently -misleading description of Keats's general aspect is that of Coleridge when -he describes him as a 'loose, slack, not well-dressed youth.' The sage -must have been drawing from his inward eye: those intimate with Keats -being of one accord as to his appearance of trim strength and 'fine -compactness of person.' Coleridge's further mention of his hand as -shrunken and old-looking seems exact. - - -p. 78, note 1. The isolated expressions of Keats on this subject, which -alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him somewhat unjustly to -the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. Fairness seems to require -that the whole passage in which he deals with it should be given. The -passage occurs in a letter to Bailey written from Hampstead and dated -Oct. 8, 1817, of which only a fragment was printed by Lord Houghton, and -after him by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. III. p. 82, no. xvi.). - -"I went to Hunt's and Haydon's who live now neighbours.--Shelley was -there--I know nothing about anything in this part of the world--every Body -seems at Loggerheads. There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in -statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room criticizing -every head most unmercifully--There's Horace Smith tired of Hunt--'The Web -of our life is of mingled yarn.'... I am quite disgusted with literary -men, and will never know another except Wordsworth--no not even Byron. -Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known -each other many years--now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours. -Haydon says to me, Keats, don't show your lines to Hunt on any account, or -he will have done half for you--so it appears Hunt wishes it to be -thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him I was getting -on to the completion of 4000 lines--Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me -they would have been 7000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he -to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on the -subject from some Lady, which contains a caution to me, thro' him, on this -subject. Now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?" - - -p. 83, note 1. See Haydon, _Autobiography_, vol. I. pp. 384-5. The letter -containing Keats's account of the same entertainment was printed for the -first time by Speed, _Works_, vol. I. p. i. no. 1, where it is dated -merely 'Featherstone Buildings, Monday.' (At Featherstone Buildings lived -the family of Charles Wells.) In Houghton MSS. I find a transcript of the -same letter in the hand of Mr Coventry Patmore, with a note in Lord -Houghton's hand: "These letters I did not print. R. M. M." In the -transcript is added in a parenthesis after the weekday the date 5 April, -1818: but this is a mistake; the 5th of April in that year was not a -Monday: and the contents of Keats's letter itself, as well as a comparison -with Haydon's words in his _Autobiography_, prove beyond question that it -was written on Monday, the 5th of January. - - -p. 87, note 1. Similar expressions about the Devonshire weather occur in -nearly all Keats's letters written thence in the course of March and -April. The letter to Bailey containing the sentences quoted in my text is -wrongly printed both by Lord Houghton and Mr Forman under date Sept. -1818. I find the same date given between brackets at the head of the same -letter as transcribed in Woodhouse MSS. B., proving that an error was -early made either in docketing or copying it. The contents of the letter -leave no doubt as to its real date. The sentences quoted prove it to have -been written not in autumn but in spring. It contains Keats's reasons both -for going down to join his brother Tom at Teignmouth, and for failing to -visit Bailey at Oxford on the way: now in September Keats was not at -Teignmouth at all, and Bailey had left Oxford for good, and was living at -his curacy in Cumberland (see p. 122). Moreover there is an allusion by -Keats himself to this letter in another which he wrote the next day to -Reynolds, whereby its true date can be fixed with precision as Friday, -March 13. - - -p. 112, note 1. The following unpublished letter of Keats to Mr Taylor -(from Woodhouse MSS. B.) has a certain interest, both in itself and as -fixing the date of his departure for the North:-- - - "Sunday evening, - - "My dear Taylor, - - I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health till my - return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, au - revoir, God keep us all well! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother Tom - will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for - him, since I still keep those you lent me a year ago. If I am - overweening, you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall - write, do send him some you think will be most amusing--he will be - careful in returning them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am - ashamed to catalogue these messages. There is but one more, which - ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs - Reynolds one of my books bound. As I cannot write in it let the - opposite" [a leaf with the name and 'from the author,' notes - Woodhouse] "be pasted in 'prythee. Remember me to Percy St.--Tell - Hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged - on a history piece to his own content. And tell Dewint I shall become - a disputant on the landscape. Bow for me very genteely to Mrs D. or - she will not admit your diploma. Remember me to Hessey, saying I hope - he'll _Carey_ his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. Adieu! - - Your sincere friend, - JOHN O'GROTS. - - June 22, 1818. Hampstead" [The date and place are added by Woodhouse - in red ink, presumably from the post-mark]. - - -p. 120, note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton -Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between 'All the magic of the -place' and the next line, 'So saying, with a spirit's glance,' and has -proposed, by way of improvement, to read 'with a spirit's grace'. I find -the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued -thus in pencil after the word 'place'. - - "'Tis now free to stupid face, - To cutters, and to fashion boats, - To cravats and to petticoats:-- - The great sea shall war it down, - For its fame shall not be blown - At each farthing Quadrille dance. - So saying with a spirit's glance - He dived"--. - -Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he -well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his -correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any -indication of the hiatus so caused. - - -p. 128, note 1. Lord Houghton says, "On returning to the south, Keats -found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at -Teignmouth." It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was -made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of -Keats's March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, p. 225. - - -p. 138, note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his -knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been -mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the -capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at -his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the -provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband's -death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings -himself had left them by will; one of 1000 direct; the other, of a -capital to yield 50 a year, in reversion after their mother's death (see -p. 5). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and -brought 1550. 7_s._ 10_d._ worth of that security at the price at which -it then stood. 1666. 13_s_. 4_d._ worth of the same stock was farther -purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of 50 -a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances -Rawlings during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments -lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to -whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the -first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each, -with its accumulations. Two years afterwards Fanny Keats received in like -manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers -John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being -3375. 5_s._ 7_d._, and to George 1147. 5_s._ 1_d._ It was a part of the -ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these -funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors -at the time when he most needed them. - - -p. 148, note 1. Landor's letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a -presentation copy of the _Life and Letters_, in 1848, begins -characteristically as follows:-- - - "Bath, Aug. 29. - - Dear Milnes, - - On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find - your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an - editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, - excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of - the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed - overcome so great a difficulty as Shelley in his _Cenci_, nor united - so many powers of the mind as Southey in _Kehama_--but there is an - effluence of power and light pervading all his work, and a freshness - such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.--" - - -p. 152, note 1. I think there is no doubt that _Hyperion_ was begun by -Keats beside his brother's sickbed in September or October 1818, and that -it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 'plunging into -abstract images,' and finding a 'feverous relief' in the 'abstractions' of -poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as -the translation of Ronsard's sonnet, _Nature ornant Cassandre_, which is -the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown -says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after -Tom's death in December--"It was then he wrote _Hyperion_"; but these -words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already -begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to -the poem by name, and says he has been 'going on a little' with it: and on -the 14th of February, 1819, says 'I have not gone on with _Hyperion_.' -During the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the _Odes_, and -whether he at the same time wrote any more of _Hyperion_ we cannot tell. -It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as -in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, -_Works_, vol. II. p. 143) that "it contains 2 books and 1/2--(about 900 -lines in all):" the actual length of the piece as published being 883 -lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before -revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after -nearly a year's interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him -in a letter from Winchester in August or September, "I have also been -writing parts of my _Hyperion_," this must not be taken as meaning that he -has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing -them,--like _Isabella_ and the _Eve of St Agnes_, which he mentions at the -same time,--since the date of his last letter. - - -p. 164, note 1. The version of _The Eve of St Agnes_ given in Woodhouse -MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the -original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all -probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see p. 133). The -readings of the MS. in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton -Forman (_Works_, vol. II. p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the -poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have, -from Woodhouse's transcript, the following table of the changes in those -stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:-- - -Stanza I.: line 1, for "chill" stood "cold": line 4, for "was" stood -"were": line 7, for "from" stood "in": line 9 (and Stanza II., line 1), -for "prayer" stood "prayers". Stanza III.: line 7, for "went" stood -"turn'd": line 8, for "Rough" stood "Black". After stanza III. stood the -following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed. - - 4. - - But there are ears may hear sweet melodies, - And there are eyes to brighten festivals, - And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies, - And many a lip that for the red wine calls-- - Follow, then follow to the illumined halls, - Follow me youth--and leave the eremite-- - Give him a tear--then trophied bannerals - And many a brilliant tasseling of light - Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night. - -Stanza V.; line 1, for "revelry" stood "revellers": lines 3-5, for-- - - "Numerous as shadows haunting fairily - The brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay - Of old romance. These let us wish away,"-- - -stood the following:-- - - "Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs, - The muse should never make the spirit gay; - Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away." - - -p. 166, note 1. At what precise date _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ was -written is uncertain. As of the _Ode to Melancholy_, Keats makes no -mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse MSS. A. it is -dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts before or while Keats was -on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in that year, is I think certain -both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence -among them of _Lamia_ and the _Ode to Autumn_. Hence it is to the first -half of 1819 that _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ must belong, like so much of -the poet's best work besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the -theme was already in his mind when he composed the _Eve of St Agnes_ in -January. Mr Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have -been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (_Works_, -vol. II. p. 357, note). - - -p. 186, note 1. The relation of _Hyperion, A Vision_, to the original -_Hyperion_ is a vital point in the history of Keats's mind and art, and -one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the error is -somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the _Vision_ is in -Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_, ed. 1848, Vol. I. p. 244. Having then -doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of Brown's MS. memoir quoted in -the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following -his account of _Hyperion_:--"He afterwards published it as a fragment, and -still later re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally -unfinished." When eight years later the same editor printed the piece for -the first time (in _Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society_, Vol. III. -1856-7) from the MS. given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown's -account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: "Is it the original sketch -out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the -commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? I have no external evidence -to decide this question:" and further,--"the problem of the priority of -the two poems--both fragments, and both so beautiful--may afford a wide -field for ingenious and critical conjecture." Ten years later again, when -he brought out the second edition of the _Life and Letters_, Lord Houghton -had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing -the piece in his Appendix as 'Another Version,' says in his text (p. 206) -"on reconsideration, I have no doubt that it was the first draft." -Accordingly it is given as 'an earlier version' in Mr W. M. Rossetti's -edition of 1872, as 'the first version' in Lord Houghton's own edition of -1876; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by -Messrs Buxton Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of -_Hyperion_ to the _Vision_ no doubt at first sight suggested the -conclusion to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In -the mean time at least two good critics, Mr W. B. Scott and Mr. R. -Garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the _Vision_ was not a -first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his -powers: an opinion in which Mr Garnett was confirmed by his recollection -of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse (see above, -Preface, p. v, and W. T. Arnold, _Works_ &c. p. xlix, note). Brown's -words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen -were right. They are confirmed from another side by Woodhouse MSS. A, -which contains the copy of a real early draft of _Hyperion_. In this copy -the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in -pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several -books of the poem as printed). - -BOOK I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines-- - - "Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief, - Sat moulting his weak plumage, never more - To be restored or soar against the sun; - While his three sons upon Olympus stood." - -In line 30, for "stay'd Ixion's wheel" stood "eased Ixion's toil". In line -48, for "tone" stood "tune". In line 76, for "gradual" stood "sudden". In -line 102, after the word "Saturn," stood the cancelled words-- - - "What dost think? - Am I that same? O Chaos!" - -In line 156, for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like mist." -In line 189, for "Savour of poisonous brass" stood "A poison-feel of -brass." In line 200 for "When earthquakes jar their battlements and -towers" stood "When an earthquake hath shook their city towers." After -line 205 stood the cancelled line "Most like a rose-bud to a fairy's -lute." In line 209, for "And like a rose" stood "Yes, like a rose." In -line 268, for "Suddenly" stood "And, sudden." - -BOOK II. In line 128, for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." In line 134 for -"starry Uranus" stood "starr'd Uranus" (some friend doubtless called -Keats's attention to the false quantity). - -BOOK III. After line 125 stood the cancelled lines:-- - - "Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain - Gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears - Gush luscious with no sob; or more severe." - -In line 126, for "most like" stood "more like." - -In these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the -student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that -where a corrected passage occurs again in the _Vision_, it in every case -corresponds to the printed _Hyperion_, and not to the draft of the poem -preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it certain that the -_Vision_ was not a first version of _Hyperion_, but a recast of the poem -as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after its first composition. -Taken together with the statement of Brown, which is perfectly explicit as -to time, place, and circumstances, and the corresponding statement of -Woodhouse as recollected by Mr Garnett, the proof is from all sides -absolute: and the 'first version' theory must disappear henceforward from -editions of and commentaries on our poet. - - -p. 193, note 2. A more explicit refutation of Haydon's account was given, -some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see Preface, no. 10), -not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from -general knowledge of the poet's character:-- - -"I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which -that ill-ordered being, Haydon, the artist, left behind him in his 'Diary' -respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, John Keats" ... -"Haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not -contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical -antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against -him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and -trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in -sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his -claret. In the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have -not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of -him Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as -could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic expenses never -would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, I never -perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence." - - -p. 198, note 1. In Medwin's _Life of Shelley_ (1847), pp. 89-92, are some -notices of Keats communicated to the writer by Fanny Brawne (then Mrs -Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his 'kind correspondent.' Medwin's -carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly -casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but I think an -attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. 91, which discusses Mr -Finch's account of Keats's death, leaves no doubt that it continues in -substance the quotation previously begun from Mrs Lindon. "That his -sensibility," so runs the text, "was most acute, is true, and his passions -were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is -implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn -on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only -by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his -friends. Violence such as the letter" [of Mr Finch] "describes, was quite -foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting -England, I saw him every day", [this would be true of Fanny Brawne from -Oct. 1819 to Sept. 1820, if we except the Kentish Town period in the -summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] "I -often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not -hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, -much less a violent one, to any human being." The above passage has been -overlooked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as -serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman -he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to Dilke so -often quoted. - - - - -INDEX. - - - Abbey, Mr Richard, 11, 17, 70, 77, 138, 144, 192. - - _Adonas_ (Shelley's), 209, 210. - - _Adventures of a younger Son_ (Trelawney's), 75. - - Alfieri, 205. - - _Alfred, The_, 124. - - _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Burton's), 167. - - _Antiquary_ (Scott's), 115. - - _Apollo, Ode to_, 21-22. - - _Autumn, Ode to_, 177. - - - Bailey, Benjamin, 75, 76, 77, 122, 213, 214. - - Beattie, 21. - - _Biographia Literaria_ (Coleridge's), 64. - - Boccaccio, 148. - - Bonaparte, Pauline, Princess Borghese, 204. - - Brawne, Miss Fanny, 131 seq., 180-181, 197, 198. - - _Britannia's Pastorals_ (Browne's), 31. - - Brown, Charles, 13, 73, 111 seq., 128, 143 seq., 181, 200, 210. - - Browne, 31. - - Browning, Robert, 218. - - Burnet, 10. - - Byron, 1, 19, 65, 210; - Sonnet to, 22. - - - Canterbury, 71. - - _Cap and Bells_, 183 seq. - - Castlereagh, 25. - - _Champion, The_, 82. - - Chatterton, 157, 158; - Sonnet to, 22. - - Chaucer, 28. - - Chichester, 133. - - Clarke, Cowden, 3, 8, 12, 22, 23, 72, 84. - - Clarke, Rev. John, 4. - - 'Cockaigne, King of,' 121. - - _Cockney School of Poetry_ (Articles in _Blackwood's Magazine_), 77, - 121 seq. - - Coleridge, 16, 25, 26, 33, 64. - - Cooper, Astley, 18. - - Cotterill, Miss, 202, 203. - - Cox, Miss Charlotte, 130. - - - _Dante_ (Cary's), 113. - - _Death_, Stanzas on, 21; - Keats' contemplation of, 140; - longing for, 200. - - De Quincey, 26. - - Devonshire, 87. - - _Dictionary_ (Lempriere's), 10. - - Dilke, 73, 210. - - Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 73, 128, 135. - - _Don Juan_ (Byron's), 184, 202, 210. - - Dryden, 29, 30, 53. - - - Edmonton, 5, 6, 11, 14, 20. - - Eldon, 25. - - Elton, Lieutenant, 204. - - Emancipation, Literary, 63-64. - - _Endymion_, 66, 68, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86, 91; - Keats' low opinion of the poem, 91; - its beauties and defects, 91, 106-109; - Drayton's and Fletcher's previous treatment of the subject, 94-95; - Keats' unclassical manner of treatment, 96; - its one bare circumstance, 87; - scenery of the poem, 97; - its quality of nature-interpretation, 98; - its love passages, 100; - comparison of description with a similar one in _Richard III._, 103; - its lyrics, 104-106; - appreciation of the lyrics a test of true relish for poetry, 106; - its rhythm and music, 109; - Keats' own preface the best criticism of the poem, 110. - - Enfield, 4, 12. - - _Epistles_, their tributes to the conjoined pleasures of literature and - friendship, 53; - ungrammatical slips in, 54; - characteristic specimens of, 54-55. - - _Epithalamium_ (Spenser's), 12. - - _Eve of St Agnes_, its simple theme, 160; - its ease and directness of construction, 161; - its unique charm, 163. - - _Eve of St Mark_, contains Keats' impressions of three Cathedral towns, - 164; - its pictures, 164; - the legend, 164; - its pictorial brilliance, 165; - its influence on later English poetry, 165. - - _Examiner, The_ (Leigh Hunt's), 25. - - - _Faerie Queene_ (Spenser's), 12, 13, 35. - - _Faithful Shepherdess_ (Fletcher's), 95. - - _Fanny, Lines to_, 134. - - _Feast of the Poets_ (Leigh Hunt's), 32. - - Fletcher, 95. - - _Foliage_ (Leigh Hunt's), 73. - - - Genius, births of, 1. - - _Gisborne, Letter to Maria_ (Shelley's), 30. - - Goethe, 154. - - _Grasshopper and Cricket_, 35. - - Gray, 113. - - Greece, Keats' love of, 58, 77, 154. - - _Guy Mannering_ (Scott's), 115. - - - Hammond, Mr, 11, 14. - - Hampstead, 72, 77. - - Haslam, William, 45, 212 (note). - - Haydon, 3, 40, 65, 68, 78, 137, 138, 191, 214. - - Hazlitt, William, 83, 84. - - _History of his own Time_ (Burnet's), 10. - - Holmes, Edward, 8. - - _Holy Living and Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor's), 206. - - _Homer, On first looking into Chapman's_ (Sonnet), 23-24. - - Hood, 219. - - _Hope_, address to, 21. - - Horne, R. H., 11. - - Houghton, Lord, 75, 211-213. - - Hunt, John, 25. - - Hunt, Leigh, 22, 24, 25, 32, 35, 39, 49, 51, 68, 72, 78, 196. - - _Hyperion_, 129, 133, 144; - its purpose, 152; - one of the grandest poems of our language, 157; - the influences of _Paradise Lost_ on it, 158; - its blank verse compared with Milton's, 158; - its elemental grandeur, 160; - remodelling of it, 185 seq.; - description of the changes, 186-187; - special interest of the poem, 187. - - - _Imitation of Spenser_ (Keats' first lines), 14, 20. - - _Indolence, Ode on_, 174-175. - - _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, 86; - source of its inspiration, 148; - minor blemishes, 149; - its Italian metre, 149; - its conspicuous power and charm, 149; - description of its beauties, 151. - - Isle of Wight, 67. - - - Jennings, Mrs, 5, 11. - - Jennings, Capt. M. J., 7. - - Joseph and his Brethren (Wells'), 45. - - - Kean, 81. - - Keats, John, various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224; - birth, 2; - education at Enfield, 4; - death of his father, 5; - school-life, 5-9; - his studious inclinations, 10; - death of his mother, 10; - leaves school at the age of fifteen, 11; - is apprenticed to a surgeon, 11; - finishes his school-translation of the _neid_, 12; - reads Spenser's _Epithalamium_ and _Faerie Queene_, 12; - his first attempts at composition, 13; - goes to London and walks the hospitals, 14; - his growing passion for poetry, 15; - appointed dresser at Guy's Hospital, 16; - his last operation, 16; - his early life in London, 18; - his early poems, 20 seq.; - his introduction to Leigh Hunt, 24; - Hunt's great influence over him, 26 seq.; - his acquaintance with Shelley, 38; - his other friends, 40-45; - personal characteristics, 47-48; - goes to live with his brothers in the Poultry, 48; - publication of his first volume of poems, 65; - retires to the Isle of Wight, 66; - lives at Carisbrooke, 67; - changes to Margate, 68; - money troubles, 70; - spends some time at Canterbury, 71; - receives first payment in advance for _Endymion_, 71; - lives with his two brothers at Hampstead, 71; - works steadily at _Endymion_, 71-72; - makes more friends, 73; - writes part of _Endymion_ at Oxford, 76; - his love for his sister Fanny, 77; - stays at Burford Bridge, 80; - goes to the 'immortal dinner,' 82; - he visits Devonshire, 87; - goes on a walking tour in Scotland with Charles Brown, 113; - crosses over to Ireland, 116; - returns to Scotland and visits Burns' country, 118; - sows there the seeds of consumption, 120; - returns to London, 120; - is attacked in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_, 121; - Lockhart's conduct towards him, 122; - death of his young brother Tom, 128; - goes to live with Charles Brown, 128; - falls in love, 130-131; - visits friends in Chichester, 133; - suffers with his throat, 133; - his correspondence with his brother George, 139; - goes to Shanklin, 143; - collaborates with Brown in writing _Otho_, 143; - goes to Winchester, 144; - returns again to London, 146; - more money troubles, 146; - determines to make a living by journalism, 146; - lives by himself, 146; - goes back to Mr Brown, 181; - _Otho_ is returned unopened after having been accepted, 182; - want of means prevents his marriage, 190; - his increasing illness, 191 seq.; - temporary improvement in his health, 194; - publishes another volume of poems, 196; - stays with Leigh Hunt's family, 197; - favourable notice in the _Edinburgh Review_, 197; - lives with the family of Miss Brawne, 198; - goes with Severn to spend the winter in Italy, 199; - the journey improves his health, 200; - writes his last lines, 201; - stays for a time at Naples, 203; - goes on to Rome, 203-204; - further improvement in his health, 205; - sudden and last relapse, 205; - he is tenderly nursed by his friend Severn, 206; - speaks of himself as already living a 'posthumous life,' 207; - grows worse and dies, 208; - various tributes to his memory, 214. - - His genius awakened by the _Faerie Queene_, 13; - influence of other poets on him, 21; - experiments in language, 21, 64, 147, 169; - employment of the 'Heroic' couplet, 27, 30; - element and spirit of his own poetry, 50; - experiments in metre, 52; - studied musical effect of his verse, 55; - his Grecian spirit, 58, 77, 95, 114, 154; - view of the aims and principles of poetry, 61; - imaginary dependence on Shakspere, 69; - thoughts on the mystery of Evil, 88; - puns, 72, 202; - his poems Greek in idea, English in manner, 96; - his poetry a true spontaneous expression of his mind, 110; - power of vivifying, 161; - verbal licenses, 169; - influence on subsequent poets, 218; - felicity of phrase, 219. - - Personal characteristics: - Celtic temperament, 3, 58, 70; - affectionate nature, 6, 7, 9, 10, 77; - morbid temperament, 6, 70, 211; - lovable disposition, 6, 8, 19, 212, 213; - temper, 7, 9, 233; - personal beauty, 8; - _penchant_ for fighting, 8, 9, 72; - studious nature, 9, 112; - humanity, 39, 89, 114-115; - sympathy and tenderness, 47, 213; - eyes, description of, 46, 207, 224; - love of nature, 47, 55-56; - voice, 47; - desire of fame, 60, 125, 141, 207; - natural sensibility to physical and spiritual spell of moonlight, 95; - highmindedness, 125-126; - love romances, 127, 130-134, 180-181, 197, 200, 203, 212; - pride and sensitiveness, 211; - unselfishness, 213, 214; - instability, 215. - - Various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224. - - Keats, Admiral Sir Richard, 7. - - Keats, Fanny (Mrs Llanos), 77. - - Keats, Mrs (Keats' mother), 5, 10. - - Keats, George, 90, 113, 192, 193, 210. - - Keats, Thomas (Keats' father), 2, 5. - - Keats, Tom, 6, 127. - - _King Stephen_, 179. - - 'Kirk-men,' 116-117. - - - _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, 165, 166, 218; - origin of the title, 165; - a story of the wasting power of love, 166; - description of its beauties, 166. - - Lamb, Charles, 26, 82, 83. - - _Lamia_, 143; - its source, 167; - versification, 167; - the picture of the serpent woman, 168; - Keats' opinion of the Poem, 168. - - Landor, 75. - - _Laon and Cythna_, 76. - - Letters, extracts, etc., from Keats', 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 81, - 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 114, 116-117, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130, - 134, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 157, 181, 182, 190, 194-195, 200, - 203, 226. - - 'Little Keats,' 19. - - Lockhart, 33, 122, 123. - - _London Magazine_, 71. - - - Mackereth, George Wilson, 18. - - Madeline, 162 seq. - - 'Maiden-Thought,' 88, 114. - - _Man about Town_ (Webb's), 38. - - _Man in the Moon_ (Drayton's), 93. - - Margate, 68. - - Mathew, George Felton, 19. - - Meg Merrilies, 115-116. - - _Melancholy, Ode on_, 175. - - Milton, 51, 52, 54, 88. - - Monckton, Milnes, 211. - - Moore, 65. - - _Morning Chronicle, The_, 124. - - _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ (Spenser's), 31. - - Mythology, Greek, 10, 58, 152, 153. - - - Naples, 203. - - _Narensky_ (Brown's), 74. - - Newmarch, 19. - - _Nightingale, Ode to a_, 136, 175, 218. - - _Nymphs_, 73. - - - Odes, 21, 137, 145, 170-171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 218. - - _Orion_, 11. - - _Otho_, 143, 144, 180, 181. - - Oxford, 75, 77. - - _Oxford Herald, The_, 122. - - - _Pan, Hymn to_, 83. - - _Pantheon_ (Tooke's), 10. - - _Paradise Lost_, 88, 152, 154, 158. - - Patriotism, 115. - - _Peter Corcoran_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Plays, 178, 179, 181, 182. - - Poems (Keats' first volume), faint echoes of other poets in them, 51; - their form, 52; - their experiments in metre, 52; - merely poetic preludes, 53; - their rambling tendency, 53; - immaturity, 60; - attractiveness, 61; - characteristic extracts, 63; - their moderate success, 65-66. - - Poetic Art, Theory and Practice, 61, 64. - - Poetry, joys of, 55; - principle and aims of, 61; - genius of, 110. - - _Polymetis_ (Spence's), 10. - - Pope, 19, 29, 30. - - 'Posthumous Life,' 207. - - Prince Regent, 25. - - Proctor, Mrs, 47. - - _Psyche, Ode to_, 136, 171, 172. - - _Psyche_ (Mrs Tighe's), 21. - - - Quarterly Review, 121, 124. - - - _Rainbow_ (Campbell's), 170. - - Rawlings, William, 5. - - Reynolds, John Hamilton, 36, 211, 214. - - Rice, James, 37, 142. - - _Rimini, Story of_, 27, 30, 31, 35. - - Ritchie, 82. - - Rome, 204. - - Rossetti, 220. - - - _Safie_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Scott, Sir Walter, 1, 33, 65, 115, 123, 124. - - Scott, John, 124. - - Sculpture, ancient, 136. - - _Sea-Sonnet_, 67. - - Severn, Joseph, 45, 72, 135, 191, 199 seq. - - Shakspere, 67, 69. - - Shanklin, 67, 143. - - Shelley, 16, 32, 38, 56, 85, 110, 199, 203, 209. - - Shenstone, 21. - - _Sleep and Poetry_, 52, 60, 61, 109. - - Smith, Horace, 33, 81. - - Sonnets, 22, 23, 43, 48, 49, 57, 201. - - _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, 52. - - Spenser, 19, 20, 21, 31, 35, 54, 55. - - Stephens, Henry, 18-20. - - Surrey Institution, 84. - - - Taylor, Mr, 71, 81, 126, 144, 146, 206, 211. - - Teignmouth, 87. - - Tennyson, 218. - - Thomson, 21. - - - _Urn, Ode on a Grecian_, 136, 172-174. - - - _Vision, The_, 187, 193 (_see_ Hyperion). - - - Webb, Cornelius, 38. - - Wells, Charles, 45. - - Wilson, 33. - - Winchester, 143-145. - - Windermere, 113, 114. - - Wordsworth, 1, 44, 46, 56, 64, 82, 83, 158, 219. - - -CAMBRIDGE PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] See Appendix, p. 221. - -[2] _Ibid._ - -[3] John Jennings died March 8, 1805. - -[4] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See below, p. 138, and Appendix, p. 221. - -[5] Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808. - -[6] Houghton MSS. - -[7] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See Appendix, p. 221. - -[8] Mrs Alice Jennings was buried at St Stephen's, Coleman Street, -December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. Pratt, -M.A.) - -[9] I owe this anecdote to Mr Gosse, who had it direct from Horne. - -[10] Houghton MSS. - -[11] A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance -narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and in prose, not -verse, will be found in _The Philosophy of Mystery_, by W. C. Dendy -(London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr H. Stephens, in the -_Poetical Works_, ed. Forman (1 vol. 1884), p. 558. - -[12] See Appendix. - -[13] See C. L. Feltoe, _Memorials of J. F. South_ (London, 1884), p. 81. - -[14] Houghton MSS. See also Dr B. W. Richardson in the _Asclepiad_, vol. -i. p. 134. - -[15] Houghton MSS. - -[16] What, for instance, can be less Spenserian and at the same time less -Byronic than-- - - "For sure so fair a place was never seen - Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye"? - -[17] See Appendix, p. 222. - -[18] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[19] See particularly the _Invocation to Sleep_ in the little volume of -Webb's poems published by the Olliers in 1821. - -[20] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[21] See _Praeterita_, vol. ii. chap. 2. - -[22] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[23] Compare Chapman, _Hymn to Pan_:-- - - "the bright-hair'd god of pastoral, - Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe, - By lot, all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow, - All tops of hills, and _cliffy highnesses_, - All sylvan copses, and the fortresses - Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove, - And sometimes, by allurement of his love, - Will wade the _wat'ry softnesses_." - -[24] Compare Wordsworth:-- - - "Bees that soar for bloom, - High as the highest peak of Furness Fells, - Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells." - -Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence? - -[25] Mr W. T. Arnold in his _Introduction_ (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel -passage from Leigh Hunt's _Gentle Armour_ as an example of the degree to -which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt: forgetting that the _Gentle -Armour_ was not written till 1831, and that the debt in this instance is -therefore the other way. - -[26] See Appendix, p. 220. - -[27] The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph were -furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr Leslie Stephen, -from whom I have them. The point about the _Adventures of a Younger Son_ -is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken -from the Keats MSS. then in Brown's hands, especially _Otho_. - -[28] Houghton MSS. - -[29] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[30] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[31] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[32] In the extract I have modernized Drayton's spelling and endeavoured -to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending. - -[33] Mrs Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of an -allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats's narrative. - -[34] Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions Pon as one of the fifty sons of -Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth): and in Spenser's _Faerie -Queene_ there is a Pana--the daughter of the giant Corflambo in the -fourth book. Keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave -Endymion a sister and called her Peona. - -[35] Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by Mr W. T. -Arnold. - -[36] The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of -Chamberlayne:-- - - "Upon the throne, in such a glorious state - As earth's adored favorites, there sat - The image of a monarch, vested in - The spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been - A diadem's redemption; his large size, - Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize - The admired proportions of those mighty men - Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when - Found out, are carefully preserved to tell - Posterity how much these times are fell - From nature's youthful strength." - -[37] See Appendix, p. 226. - -[38] Houghton MSS. - -[39] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[40] Severn in Houghton MSS. - -[41] Houghton MSS. - -[42] Dilke (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton's _Life and -Letters_, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned as -much; and there are tricks of style, _e.g._ the use of the Spanish -_Sangrado_ for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand. - -[43] Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, and -Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott's faithful satellite, the actor -Terry. - -[44] Severn in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XI., p. 401. - -[45] See Preface, p. viii. - -[46] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[47] Houghton MSS. - -[48] The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been -thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the -summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the -then surviving brother of Keats's friend. - -[49] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[50] See Appendix, p. 228. - -[51] _Decamerone_, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment -of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously -with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his _Sicilian Story_ (1820). Of -the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write -concurrently with Keats (see above, p. 86), two were finished and -published by him after Keats's death in the volume called _A Garden of -Florence_ (1821). - -[52] As to the date when _Hyperion_ was written, see Appendix, p. 228: and -as to the error by which Keats's later recast of his work has been taken -for an earlier draft, _ibid._, p. 230. - -[53] If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by -predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so--though only on a -cameo scale--in the best idyls of Chnier in France, as _L'Aveugle_ or _Le -Jeune Malade_, or of Landor in England, as the _Hamadryad_ or _Enallos and -Cymodamia_; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at -Alexandria in the days of Theocritus. - -[54] We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the -best, that what he most liked in Chatterton's work was the minstrel's song -in _lla_, that _fantasia_, so to speak, executed really with genius on -the theme of one of Ophelia's songs in _Hamlet_. - -[55] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the -beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of -rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the -beadsman in the lines, - - "But no--already had his death-bell rung; - The joys of all his life were said and sung;" - -that of Angela where she calls herself - - "A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, - Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll." - -[56] See Appendix, p. 229. - -[57] Chartier was born at Bayeux. His _Belle Dame sans Merci_ is a poem of -over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in -dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his -consequent despair and death.--For the date of composition of Keats's -poem, see Appendix, p. 230. - -[58] This has been pointed out by my colleague Mr A. S. Murray: see -Forman, _Works_, vol. iii. p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, _Poetical -Works_, &c., p. xxii, note. - -[59] Houghton MSS. - -[60] "He never spoke of any one," says Severn, (Houghton MSS.,) "but by -saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and -cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of -the person he was speaking of." - -[61] See Appendix, p. 230. - -[62] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. -Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his -death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey -(Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats's -mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus. - -[63] Mrs Owen was the first of Keats's critics to call attention to this -passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it -derives from the date of its composition. - -[64] Houghton MSS. - -[65] See below, p. 193, note 2. - -[66] "Interrupted," says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., "by a -circumstance which it is needless to mention." - -[67] This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest -daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of -Haydon. But see Appendix, p. 232. - -[68] A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the _Indicator_ a few -stanzas from the _Cap and Bells_, and about the same time dedicated to -Keats his translation of Tasso's _Amyntas_, speaking of the original as -"an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally -pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical." - -[69] See Crabb Robinson. _Diaries_, Vol. II. p. 197, etc. - -[70] See Appendix, p. 233. - -[71] Houghton MSS. In both the _Autobiography_ and the _Correspondence_ -the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy -additions. - -[72] I have the date of sailing from Lloyd's, through the kindness of the -secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time -following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials -published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in _Atlantic -Monthly_, Vol. XI. p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn -MSS. - -[73] Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and his -remains were in 1882 removed from their original burying-place to a grave -beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius -Cestius. - -[74] Haslam, in Severn MSS. - -[75] Severn MSS. - -[76] Houghton MSS. - -[77] _Ibid._ - -[78] Houghton MSS. - -[79] _Ibid._ - - - - -English Men of Letters. - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. - -_Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. Paper Covers, 1s.; Cloth, 1s. 6d. each._ - -_Pocket Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. 1s. net each._ - -_Library Edition. Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each._ - - - ADDISON. - By W. J. 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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/license - - -Title: Keats - -Author: Sidney Colvin - -Release Date: December 22, 2012 [EBook #41688] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - -</pre> - - - -<p class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></p> -<p> </p><p> </p> - -<p class="center"><span class="huge">English Men of Letters</span></p> -<p class="center">EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY</p> - -<p> </p> -<h1><small>KEATS</small></h1> -<p> </p> -<p class="figcenter"><img src="images/printer.jpg" alt="" /></p> - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<p class="center"><span class="giant">KEATS</span></p> -<p> </p> -<p class="center"><small>BY</small><br /> -<span class="large">SIDNEY COLVIN</span></p> -<p> </p> -<p class="center"> -MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED<br /> -ST MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON<br /> -1909</p> - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<p class="center"><i>First Edition 1887.</i><span class="spacer"> </span><i>Reprinted 1889, 1898, 1899, 1902, 1909.</i><br /> -<i>Library Edition 1902.</i><span class="spacer"> </span><i>Reprinted 1906.</i><br /> -<i>Pocket Edition 1909.</i></p> - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p> -<h2>PREFACE.</h2> - - -<p>With the name of Keats that of his first biographer, the late Lord -Houghton, must always justly remain associated. But while the sympathetic -charm of Lord Houghton’s work will keep it fresh, as a record of the -poet’s life it can no longer be said to be sufficient. Since the revised -edition of the <i>Life and Letters</i> appeared in 1867, other students and -lovers of Keats have been busy, and much new information concerning him -been brought to light, while of the old information some has been proved -mistaken. No connected account of Keats’s life and work, in accordance -with the present state of knowledge, exists, and I have been asked to -contribute such an account to the present series. I regret that lack of -strength and leisure has so long delayed the execution of the task -entrusted to me. The chief authorities and printed texts which I have -consulted (besides the original editions of the Poems) are the -following:—</p> - -<p>1. Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries. By Leigh Hunt. London, 1828.</p> - -<p>2. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Thomas Medwin. London, 2 vols., -1847.</p> - -<p>3. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard -Monckton Milnes. 2 vols., London, 1848.</p> - -<p>4. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited and compiled by Tom Taylor. -Second edition. 3 vols., London, 1853.</p> - -<p>5. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and -Contemporaries. 3 vols., London, 1850.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span>6. The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a memoir by Richard Monckton -Milnes. London, 1854.</p> - -<p>7. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. [Revised edition, edited by Thornton -Hunt.] London, 1860.</p> - -<p>8. The Vicissitudes of Keats’s Fame: an article by Joseph Severn in the -<i>Atlantic Monthly Magazine</i> for 1863 (vol. xi. p. 401).</p> - -<p>9. The Life and Letters of John Keats. By Lord Houghton. New edition, -London, 1867.</p> - -<p>10. Recollections of John Keats: an article by Charles Cowden Clarke in -the <i>Gentleman’s Magazine</i> for 1874 (N. S. vol. xii. p. 177). Afterwards -reprinted with modifications in Recollections of Writers, by Charles and -Mary Cowden Clarke. London, 1878.</p> - -<p>11. The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the writings of the late Charles -Wentworth Dilke. With a biographical notice by Sir Charles Wentworth -Dilke, Bart., M.P. 2 vols., London, 1875.</p> - -<p>12. Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk. With a memoir -by Frederic Wordsworth Haydon. 2 vols., London, 1876.</p> - -<p>13. The Poetical Works of John Keats, chronologically arranged and edited, -with a memoir, by Lord Houghton [Aldine edition of the British Poets]. -London, 1876.</p> - -<p>14. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, with Introduction and Notes by -Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878.</p> - -<p>A biographer cannot ignore these letters now that they are published: but -their publication must be regretted by all who hold that human respect and -delicacy are due to the dead no less than to the living, and to genius no -less than to obscurity.</p> - -<p>15. The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats. Edited with notes -and appendices by Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols., London, 1883.</p> - -<p>In this edition, besides the texts reprinted from the first editions, all -the genuine letters and additional poems published in 3, 6, 9, 13, and 14 -of the above are brought together, as well as most of the biographical -notices contained in 1, 2, 4,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span> 5, 7, 10, and 12: also a series of -previously unpublished letters of Keats to his sister: with a great amount -of valuable illustrative and critical material besides. Except for a few -errors, which I shall have occasion to point out, Mr Forman’s work might -for the purpose of the student be final, and I have necessarily been -indebted to it at every turn.</p> - -<p>16. The Letters and Poems of John Keats. Edited by John Gilmer Speed. 3 -vols., New York, 1883.</p> - -<p>17. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. Arnold. London, -1884.</p> - -<p>The Introduction to this edition contains the only attempt with which I am -acquainted at an analysis of the formal elements of Keats’s style.</p> - -<p>18. An Æsculapian Poet—John Keats: an article by Dr B. W. Richardson in -the <i>Asclepiad</i> for 1884 (vol. i. p. 134).</p> - -<p>19. Notices and correspondence concerning Keats which have appeared at -intervals during a number of years in the <i>Athenæum</i>.</p> - -<p>In addition to printed materials I have made use of the following -unprinted, viz.:—</p> - -<p>I. <span class="smcap">Houghton mss.</span> Under this title I refer to the contents of an album from -the library at Fryston Hall, in which the late Lord Houghton bound up a -quantity of the materials he had used in the preparation of the <i>Life and -Letters</i>, as well as of correspondence concerning Keats addressed to him -both before and after the publication of his book. The chief contents are -the manuscript memoir of Keats by Charles Brown, which was offered by the -writer in vain to <i>Galignani</i>, and I believe other publishers; transcripts -by the same hand of a few of Keats’s poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs -of the poet by his friends Charles Cowden Clarke (the first draft of the -paper above cited as no. 10), Henry Stephens, George Felton Mathew, Joseph -Severn, and Benjamin Bailey; together with letters from all the above, -from John Hamilton Reynolds, and several others. For the use of this -collection, without which my work must have been attempted to little -purpose, I am indebted to the kindness of its owner, the present Lord -Houghton.</p> - -<p>II. <span class="smcap">Woodhouse mss. a.</span> A common-place book in -which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> Richard Woodhouse, the -friend of Keats and of his publishers Messrs Taylor and Hessey, -transcribed—as would appear from internal evidence, about midsummer -1819—the chief part of Keats’s poems at that date unpublished. The -transcripts are in many cases made from early drafts of the poems: some -contain gaps which Woodhouse has filled up in pencil from later drafts: to -others are added corrections, or suggestions for corrections, some made in -the hand of Mr Taylor and some in that of Keats himself.</p> - -<p>III. <span class="smcap">Woodhouse mss. b.</span> A note-book in which the same Woodhouse has -copied—evidently for Mr Taylor, at the time when that gentleman was -meditating a biography of the poet—a number of letters addressed by Keats -to Mr Taylor himself, to the transcriber, to Reynolds and his sisters, to -Rice, and Bailey. Three or four of these letters, as well as portions of a -few others, are unpublished.</p> - -<p>Both the volumes last named were formerly the property of Mrs Taylor, a -niece by marriage of the publisher, and are now my own. A third note-book -by Woodhouse, containing personal notices and recollections of Keats, was -unluckily destroyed in the fire at Messrs Kegan Paul and Co’s. premises in -1883. A copy of <i>Endymion</i>, annotated by the same hand, has been used by -Mr Forman in his edition (above, no. 15).</p> - -<p>IV. <span class="smcap">Severn mss.</span> The papers and correspondence left by the late Joseph -Severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable biography, have -been put into the hands of Mr William Sharp, to be edited and published at -his discretion. In the meantime Mr Sharp has been so kind as to let me -have access to such parts of them as relate to Keats. The most important -single piece, an essay on ‘The Vicissitudes of Keats’s Fame,’ has been -printed already in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> (above, no. 8), but in the -remainder I have found many interesting details, particularly concerning -Keats’s voyage to Italy and life at Rome.</p> - -<p>V. <i>Rawlings v. Jennings.</i> When Keats’s maternal grandfather, Mr John -Jennings, died in 1805, leaving property exceeding the amount of the -specific bequests under his will, it was thought necessary that his estate -should be administered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span> by the Court of Chancery, and with that intent a -friendly suit was brought in the names of his daughter and her second -husband (Frances Jennings, <i>m.</i> 1st Thomas Keats, and 2nd William -Rawlings) against her mother and brother, who were the executors. The -proceedings in this suit are referred to under the above title. They are -complicated and voluminous, extending over a period of twenty years, and -my best thanks are due to Mr Ralph Thomas, of 27 Chancery Lane, for his -friendly pains in searching through and making abstracts of them.</p> - -<p>For help and information, besides what has been above acknowledged, I am -indebted first and foremost to my friend and colleague, Mr Richard -Garnett; and next to the poet’s surviving sister, Mrs Llanos; to Sir -Charles Dilke, who lent me the chief part of his valuable collection of -Keats’s books and papers (already well turned to account by Mr Forman); to -Dr B. W. Richardson, and the Rev. R. H. Hadden. Other incidental -obligations will be found acknowledged in the footnotes.</p> - -<p>Among essays on and reviews of Keats’s work I need only refer in -particular to that by the late Mrs F. M. Owen (Keats: a Study, London, -1876). In its main outlines, though not in details, I accept and have -followed this lady’s interpretation of <i>Endymion</i>. For the rest, every -critic of modern English poetry is of necessity a critic of Keats. The -earliest, Leigh Hunt, was one of the best; and to name only a few among -the living—where Mr Matthew Arnold, Mr Swinburne, Mr Lowell, Mr Palgrave, -Mr W. M. Rossetti, Mr W. B. Scott, Mr Roden Noel, Mr Theodore Watts, have -gone before, for one who follows to be both original and just is not easy. -In the following pages I have not attempted to avoid saying over again -much that in substance has been said already, and doubtless better, by -others: by Mr Matthew Arnold and Mr Palgrave especially. I doubt not but -they will forgive me: and at the same time I hope to have contributed -something of my own towards a fuller understanding both of Keats’s art and -life.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span></p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p> -<h2>CONTENTS.</h2> - -<table width="85%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table"> -<tr><td> </td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>Birth and Parentage—School Life at Enfield—Life as Surgeon’s Apprentice at Edmonton—Awakening to Poetry—Life -as Hospital Student in London. [1795-1817]</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>Particulars of Early Life in London—Friendships and First Poems—Henry Stephens—Felton Mathew—Cowden -Clarke—Leigh Hunt: his Literary and Personal Influence—John Hamilton Reynolds—James Rice—Cornelius -Webb—Shelley—Haydon—Joseph Severn—Charles Wells—Personal Characteristics—Determination to publish. [1814-April, 1817]</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>The <i>Poems</i> of 1817</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury—Summer at Hampstead—New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey—With Bailey -at Oxford—Return: Old Friends at Odds—Burford Bridge—Winter at Hampstead—Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt—Poetical -Activity—Spring at Teignmouth—Studies and Anxieties—Marriage and Emigration of George Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818]</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span></td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td><i>Endymion</i></td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>Northern Tour—The <i>Blackwood</i> and <i>Quarterly</i> reviews—Death of Tom Keats—Removal to Wentworth Place—Fanny -Brawne—Excursion to Chichester—Absorption in Love and Poetry—Haydon and money difficulties—Family -Correspondence—Darkening Prospects—Summer at Shanklin and Winchester—Wise Resolutions—Return from Winchester. [June, 1818-October, 1819]</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td><i>Isabella</i>—<i>Hyperion</i>—<i>The Eve of St Agnes</i>—<i>The Eve of St -Mark</i>—<i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>—<i>Lamia</i>—The Odes—The Plays</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>Return to Wentworth Place—Autumn Occupations—The <i>Cap and Bells</i>—Recast of <i>Hyperion</i>—Growing Despondency—Visit -of George Keats to England—Attack of Illness in February—Rally in the Spring—Summer in Kentish Town—Publication -of the <i>Lamia</i> Volume—Relapse—Ordered South—Voyage to Italy—Naples—Rome—Last Days and Death. [October, 1819-Feb. 1821]</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX.</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>Character and Genius</td> - <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Appendix</span></td> - <td align="right"><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td></tr> -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Index</span></td> - <td align="right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr></table> - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p> -<p class="center"><span class="giant">KEATS.</span></p> - -<p> </p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2> - -<div class="note"><p class="hang">Birth and Parentage—School Life at Enfield—Life as Surgeon’s -Apprentice at Edmonton—Awakening to Poetry—Life as Hospital Student -in London. [1795-1817.]</p></div> - - -<p>Science may one day ascertain the laws of distribution and descent which -govern the births of genius; but in the meantime a birth like that of -Keats presents to the ordinary mind a striking instance of nature’s -inscrutability. If we consider the other chief poets of the time, we can -commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood, or some -strong inspiring influence in the scenery and traditions of their home. -Thus we see Scott prepared alike by his origin, associations, and -circumstances to be the ‘minstrel of his clan’ and poet of the romance of -the border wilds; while the spirit of the Cumbrian hills, and the temper -of the generations bred among them, speak naturally through the lips of -Wordsworth. Byron seems inspired in literature by demons of the same -froward brood that had urged others of his lineage through lives of -adventure or of crime. But Keats, with instincts and faculties more purely -poetical than any of these, was paradoxically born in a dull and middling -walk of English city life; and ‘if by traduction came his mind,’—to quote -Dryden with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> difference,—it was through channels too obscure for us to -trace. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to -London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a -livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Presently he married -his employer’s daughter, Frances Jennings; and Mr Jennings, who was a man -of substance, retiring about the same time to live in the country, at -Ponder’s End, left the management of the business in the hands of his -son-in-law. The young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the -Swan-and-Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower -Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet <span class="smcap">John Keats</span>, was born -prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, -named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, -1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the -3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family -had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a -mile farther north<a name='fna_1' id='fna_1' href='#f_1'><small>[1]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>In the gifts and temperament of Keats we shall find much that seems -characteristic of the Celtic rather than the English nature. Whether he -really had any of that blood in his veins we cannot tell. His father was a -native either of Devon or of Cornwall<a name='fna_2' id='fna_2' href='#f_2'><small>[2]</small></a>; and his mother’s name, Jennings, -is common in but not peculiar to Wales. There our evidence ends, and all -that we know further of his parents is that they were certainly not quite -ordinary people. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of -intelligence and conduct—“of so remarkably fine a common sense and -native<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> respectability,” writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father’s school -the poet and his brothers were brought up, “that I perfectly remember the -warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after -he had been to visit his boys.” It is added that he resembled his -illustrious son in person and feature, being of small stature and lively -energetic countenance, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Of his wife, the -poet’s mother, we learn more vaguely that she was “tall, of good figure, -with large oval face, and sensible deportment”: and again that she was a -lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and -supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some -imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her -family as follows:—“my grandfather [Mr Jennings] was very well off, as -his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would -have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of -his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of -the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother.” And -elsewhere:—“my mother I distinctly remember, she resembled John very much -in the face, was extremely fond of him, and humoured him in every whim, of -which he had not a few, she was a most excellent and affectionate parent, -and as I thought a woman of uncommon talents.”</p> - -<p>The mother’s passion for her firstborn son was devotedly returned by him. -Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an -illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an -old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to -lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different -turn:—“He was when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> 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 the -rescue.” Another trait of the poet’s childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, -on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that -when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had -a trick of making a rhyme to the last word people said and then laughing.</p> - -<p>The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send -them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school -kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats had -been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of -exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. Traces of its ancient -forest character lingered long, and indeed linger yet, about the -neighbourhood of the picturesque small suburban town of Enfield, and the -district was one especially affected by City men of fortune for their -homes. The school-house occupied by Mr Clarke had been originally built -for a rich West-India merchant, in the finest style of early Georgian -classic architecture, and stood in a pleasant and spacious garden at the -lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a -railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but -later it was taken down, and the façade, with its fine proportions and -rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington -Museum as a choice example of the style.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, who was -killed by a fall from his horse as he rode home at night from Southgate. -This was on the 16th of April, 1804. Within twelve months his mother had -put off her weeds, and taken a second husband—one William Rawlings, -described as ‘of Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper,’ -presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management -of her father’s business. This marriage turned out unhappily. It was soon -followed by a separation, and Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live -at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about -this time left a widow<a name='fna_3' id='fna_3' href='#f_3'><small>[3]</small></a>. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers -after they were grown up, no mention is ever made of their step-father, of -whom after the separation the family seem to have lost all knowledge. The -household in Church Street, Edmonton, was well enough provided for, Mr -Jennings having left a fortune of over £13,000, of which, in addition to -other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding £200 a year to his widow -absolutely; one yielding £50 a year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with -reversion to her Keats children after her death; and £1000 to be -separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on -their coming of age<a name='fna_4' id='fna_4' href='#f_4'><small>[4]</small></a>. Between this home, then, and the neighbouring -Enfield school, where he was in due time joined by his younger brothers, -the next four or five years of Keats’s boyhood (1806-1810) were passed in -sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, -or the success, of men who write their <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>reminiscences; and almost the only -recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in -his grandmother’s house at Edmonton. They are conveyed in some rhymes -which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young -sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of -genius, for dabbling by the brookside—</p> - -<p class="poem">“In spite<br /> -Of the might<br /> -Of the Maid,<br /> -Nor afraid<br /> -Of his granny-good”—</p> - -<p>and for keeping small fishes in tubs.</p> - -<p>If we learn little of Keats’s early days from his own lips, we have -sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school -companions; which was that of a boy all spirit and generosity, vehement -both in tears and laughter, handsome, passionate, pugnacious, placable, -loveable, a natural leader and champion among his fellows. But beneath -this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from -the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of -unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was -accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, between whom and -himself there existed the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the -second brother, had all John’s spirit of manliness and honour, with a less -impulsive disposition and a cooler blood: from a boy he was the bigger and -stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in -fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery elder -brother. Tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> -protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. The -singularly strong family sentiment that united the three brothers extended -naturally also to their sister, then a child: and in a more remote and -ideal fashion to their uncle by the mother’s side, Captain Midgley John -Jennings, a tall navy officer who had served with some distinction under -Duncan at Camperdown, and who impressed the imagination of the boys, in -those days of militant British valour by land and sea, as a model of manly -prowess<a name='fna_5' id='fna_5' href='#f_5'><small>[5]</small></a>. It may be remembered that there was a much more distinguished -naval hero of the time who bore their own name—the gallant Admiral Sir -Richard Godwin Keats of the <i>Superb</i>, afterwards governor of Greenwich -Hospital: and he, like their father, came from the west country, being the -son of a Bideford clergyman. But it seems clear that the family of our -Keats claimed no connection with that of the Admiral.</p> - -<p>Here are some of George Keats’s recollections, written after the death of -his elder brother, and referring partly to their school-days and partly to -John’s character after he was grown up:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of -his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we -quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my -schoolfellows will bear witness that John’s temper was the cause of -all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are.”</p> - -<p>“From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and -fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure -relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible -spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He -avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and -often asked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him -relief.”</p></div> - -<p>Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to -their confirmation in the words of two of Keats’s school-friends; and -first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards author of the <i>Life -of Mozart</i>:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His <i>penchant</i> was for -fighting. He would fight any one—morning, noon, and night, his -brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him.... His -favourites were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed -to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour.... He was a -boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty -might easily fancy would become great—but rather in some military -capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out -rather suddenly and unexpectedly.... In all active exercises he -excelled. The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme -beauty and animation of his face made I remember an impression on -me—and being some years his junior I was obliged to woo his -friendship—in which I succeeded, but not till I had fought several -battles. This violence and vehemence—this pugnacity and generosity of -disposition—in passions of tears or outrageous fits of -laughter—always in extremes—will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. -Associated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and -expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more -popular<a name='fna_6' id='fna_6' href='#f_6'><small>[6]</small></a>.”</p></div> - -<p>Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school -friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and -encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first ventured into -poetry. This was the son of the master, Charles Cowden Clarke, who towards -the close of a long life, during<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> which he had deserved well of literature -in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a -highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most -picturesque exhibitions—off the stage—I ever saw.... Upon one -occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had -boxed his brother Tom’s ears, John rushed up, put himself into the -received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher—who -could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was -almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the -taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, -laughing when John was “in one of his moods,” and was endeavouring to -beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he -had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon -the most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, -like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his -highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his -placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his -behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, -superior or equal, who had known him.”</p></div> - -<p>The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his -earlier school-days Keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual -bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. But during his -last few terms, that is in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, all the -energies of his nature turned to study. He became suddenly and completely -absorbed in reading, and would be continually at work before school-time -in the morning and during play-hours in the afternoon: could hardly be -induced to join the school games: and never willingly had a book out of -his hand. At this time he won easily all the literature prizes of the -school, and in addition to his proper work imposed on himself such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> -voluntary tasks as the translation of the whole Æneid in prose. He -devoured all the books of history, travel, and fiction in the school -library, and was for ever borrowing more from the friend who tells the -story. “In my mind’s eye I now see him at supper sitting back on the form -from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet’s ‘History of his Own -Time’ between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This -work, and Leigh Hunt’s ‘Examiner’—which my father took in, and I used to -lend to Keats—no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and -religious liberty.” But the books which Keats read with the greatest -eagerness of all were books of ancient mythology, and he seemed literally -to learn by heart the contents of Tooke’s <i>Pantheon</i>, Lempriere’s -<i>Dictionary</i>, and the school abridgment by Tindal of Spence’s -<i>Polymetis</i>—the first the most foolish and dull, the last the most -scholarly and polite, of the various handbooks in which the ancient fables -were presented in those days to the apprehension of youth.</p> - -<p>Trouble fell upon Keats in the midst of these ardent studies of his latter -school-days. His mother had been for some time in failing health. First -she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid -consumption, which carried her off in February 1810. We are told with what -devotion her eldest boy attended her sick bed,—“he 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,”—and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,—“he -gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook -under the master’s desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in -all who saw him.” In the July<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> following, Mrs Jennings, being desirous to -make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, ‘in -consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,’ -executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom she -made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of the -instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from her late -husband under his will<a name='fna_7' id='fna_7' href='#f_7'><small>[7]</small></a>. The guardians were Mr Rowland Sandell, -merchant, and Mr Richard Abbey, a wholesale tea-dealer in Pancras Lane. -Mrs Jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years<a name='fna_8' id='fna_8' href='#f_8'><small>[8]</small></a>, -but Mr Abbey, with the consent of his co-trustee, seems at once to have -taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John -Keats was withdrawn from school at the close of this same year 1810, when -he was just fifteen, and made to put on harness for the practical work of -life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own part, he was -bound apprentice for a term of five years to a surgeon at Edmonton named -Hammond. The only picture we have of him in this capacity has been left by -R. H. Horne, the author of <i>Orion</i>, who came as a small boy to the Enfield -school just after Keats had left it. One day in winter Mr Hammond had -driven over to attend the school, and Keats with him. Keats was standing -with his head sunk in a brown study, holding the horse, when some of the -boys, who knew his school reputation for pugnacity, dared Horne to throw a -snowball at him; which Horne did, hitting Keats in the back, and then -taking headlong<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> to his heels, to his surprise got off scot free<a name='fna_9' id='fna_9' href='#f_9'><small>[9]</small></a>. Keats -during his apprenticeship used on his own account to be often to and fro -between the Edmonton surgery and the Enfield school. His newly awakened -passion for the pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be -stifled, and whenever he could spare time from his work, he plunged back -into his school occupations of reading and translating. He finished at -this time his translation of the Æneid, and was in the habit of walking -over to Enfield once a week or oftener, to see his friend Cowden Clarke, -and to exchange books and ‘travel in the realms of gold’ with him. In -summer weather the two would sit in a shady arbour in the old school -garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks -and exclamations of enthusiasm. On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden -Clarke introduced him for the first time to Spenser, reading him the -<i>Epithalamium</i> in the afternoon, and lending him the <i>Faerie Queene</i> to -take away the same evening. It has been said, and truly, that no one who -has not had the good fortune to be attracted to that poem in boyhood can -ever completely enjoy it. The maturer student, appreciate as he may its -inexhaustible beauties and noble temper, can hardly fail to be in some -degree put out by its arbitrary forms of rhyme and diction, and wearied by -its melodious redundance: he will perceive the perplexity and -discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing -humanity, even the failure, at times, of clearness of vision and strength -of grasp, amidst all that luxuriance of decorative and symbolic invention, -and prodigality of romantic incident<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> and detail. It is otherwise with the -uncritical faculties and greedy apprehension of boyhood. For them there is -no poetical revelation like the <i>Faerie Queene</i>, no pleasure equal to that -of floating for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by -those shores and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive -with glancing figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and -Saracen,—with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous -shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in distress. -Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging with delight: -‘ramping’ is Cowden Clarke’s word: he shewed moreover his own instinct for -the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm on epithets of -special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend, “he hoisted -himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, ‘What an image that -is—<i>sea-shouldering whales</i>!’” Spenser has been often proved not only a -great awakener of the love of poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of -the germs of original poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, -the most intimate friend of Keats during two later years of his life, -states positively that it was to the inspiration of the <i>Faerie Queene</i> -that his first notion of attempting to write was due. “Though born to be a -poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his -eighteenth year. It was the <i>Faerie Queene</i> that awakened his genius. In -Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became -another being; till, enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, -and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his poetic powers -I first received from his brothers, and afterwards from himself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> This, -his earliest attempt, the ‘Imitation of Spenser,’ is in his first volume -of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those acquainted with his -history<a name='fna_10' id='fna_10' href='#f_10'><small>[10]</small></a>.” Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his -memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest, and we may fairly assume -him to have been mistaken.</p> - -<p>After he had thus first become conscious within himself of the impulse of -poetical composition, Keats went on writing occasional sonnets and other -verses: secretly and shyly at first like all young poets: at least it was -not until two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed anything -he had written to his friend and confidant, Cowden Clarke. In the meantime -a change had taken place in his way of life. In the summer or autumn of -1814, more than a year before the expiration of his term of -apprenticeship, he had quarrelled with Mr Hammond and left him. The cause -of their quarrel is not known, and Keats’s own single allusion to it is -when once afterwards, speaking of the periodical change and renewal of the -bodily tissues, he says “seven years ago it was not this hand which -clenched itself at Hammond.” It seems unlikely that the cause was any -neglect of duty on the part of the poet-apprentice, who was not devoid of -thoroughness and resolution in the performance even of uncongenial tasks. -At all events Mr Hammond allowed the indentures to be cancelled, and -Keats, being now nearly nineteen years of age, went to live in London, and -continue the study of his profession as a student at the hospitals (then -for teaching purposes united) of St Thomas’s and Guy’s. For the first -winter and spring after leaving Edmonton he lodged alone at 8, Dean -Street,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> Borough, and then for about a year, in company with some -fellow-students, over a tallow-chandler’s shop in St Thomas’s Street. -Thence he went in the summer of 1816 to join his brothers in lodgings in -the Poultry, over a passage leading to the Queen’s Head tavern. In the -spring of 1817 they all three moved for a short time to 76, Cheapside. -Between these several addresses in London Keats spent a period of about -two years and a half, from the date (which is not precisely fixed) of his -leaving Edmonton in 1814 until April, 1817.</p> - -<p>It was in this interval, from his nineteenth to his twenty-second year, -that Keats gave way gradually to his growing passion for poetry. At first -he seems to have worked steadily enough along the lines which others had -marked out for him. His chief reputation, indeed, among his fellow -students was that of a ‘cheerful, crotchety rhymester,’ much given to -scribbling doggrel verses in his friends’ note-books<a name='fna_11' id='fna_11' href='#f_11'><small>[11]</small></a>. But I have -before me the MS. book in which he took down his own notes of a course, or -at least the beginning of a course, of lectures on anatomy; and they are -not those of a lax or inaccurate student. The only signs of a wandering -mind occur on the margins of one or two pages, in the shape of sketches -(rather prettily touched) of pansies and other flowers: but the notes -themselves are both full and close as far as they go. Poetry had indeed -already become Keats’s chief interest, but it is clear at the same time -that he attended the hospitals and did his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> work regularly, acquiring a -fairly solid knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the rudiments -of medical and surgical science, so that he was always afterwards able to -speak on such subjects with a certain mastery. On the 25th of July, 1816, -he passed with credit his examination as licentiate at Apothecaries’ Hall. -He was appointed a dresser at Guy’s under Mr Lucas on the 3rd of March, -1816, and the operations which he performed or assisted in are said to -have proved him no bungler. But his heart was not in the work. Its -scientific part he could not feel to be a satisfying occupation for his -thoughts: he knew nothing of that passion of philosophical curiosity in -the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame which by turns attracted -Coleridge and Shelley toward the study of medicine. The practical -responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him, and -he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill. -Voices and visions that he could not resist were luring his spirit along -other paths, and once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and -feelings in regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of -his unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that “the other day, -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 fairy-land.” “My last operation,” he once told Brown, “was the -opening of a man’s temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but -reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed -a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.”</p> - -<p>Keats at the same time was forming intimacies with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> other young men of -literary tastes and occupations. His verses were beginning to be no longer -written with a boy’s secrecy, but freely addressed to and passed round -among his friends; some of them attracted the notice and warm approval of -writers of acknowledged mark and standing; and with their encouragement he -had about the time of his coming of age (that is in the winter of 1816-17) -conceived the purpose of devoting himself to a literary life. We are not -told what measure of opposition he encountered on the point from Mr Abbey, -though there is evidence that he encountered some<a name='fna_12' id='fna_12' href='#f_12'><small>[12]</small></a>. Probably that -gentleman regarded the poetical aspirations of his ward as mere symptoms -of a boyish fever which experience would quickly cure. There was always a -certain lack of cordiality in his relations with the three brothers as -they grew up. He gave places in his counting-house successively to George -and Tom as they left school, but they both quitted him after a while; -George, who had his full share of the family pride, on account of slights -experienced or imagined at the hands of a junior partner; Tom in -consequence of a settled infirmity of health which early disabled him for -the practical work of life. Mr Abbey continued to manage the money matters -of the Keats family,—unskilfully enough as will appear,—and to do his -duty by them as he understood it. Between him and John Keats there was -never any formal quarrel. But that young brilliant spirit could hardly -have expected a responsible tea-dealer’s approval when he yielded himself -to the influences now to be described.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2> - -<div class="note"><p class="hang">Particulars of Early Life in London—Friendships and First -Poems—Henry Stephens—Felton Mathew—Cowden Clarke—Leigh Hunt: his -literary and personal influence—John Hamilton Reynolds—James -Rice—Cornelius Webb—Shelley—Haydon—Joseph Severn—Charles -Wells—Personal characteristics—Determination to publish. [1814-April -1817.]</p></div> - - -<p>When Keats moved from Dean Street to St Thomas’s Street in the summer of -1815, he at first occupied a joint sitting-room with two senior students, -to the care of one of whom he had been recommended by Astley Cooper<a name='fna_13' id='fna_13' href='#f_13'><small>[13]</small></a>. -When they left he arranged to live in the same house with two other -students, of his own age, named George Wilson Mackereth and Henry -Stephens. The latter, who was afterwards a physician of repute near St -Albans, and later at Finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of -the time<a name='fna_14' id='fna_14' href='#f_14'><small>[14]</small></a>. “He attended lectures,” says Mr Stephens of Keats, “and went -through the usual routine, but he had no desire to excel in that -pursuit.... Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations—the -only thing worthy the attention of superior minds—so he thought—all -other pursuits were mean and tame.... It may readily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> be imagined that -this feeling was accompanied by a good deal of pride and some conceit, and -that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the -gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals.” On the whole, it -seems, ‘little Keats’ was popular among his fellow-students, although -subject to occasional teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and -even his birth as the son of a stable-keeper. Mr Stephens goes on to tell -how he himself and a student of St Bartholomew’s, a merry fellow called -Newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions -by Keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats taking -always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes. -He despised Pope, and admired Byron, but delighted especially in Spenser, -caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile, -than for the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used sometimes to -laugh at Keats and his flights,—to the indignation of his brothers, who -came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and -destined to exalt the family name. Questions of poetry apart, continues Mr -Stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady -and well-behaved—“his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having -any other taste or indulging in any vice.” Another companion of Keats’s -early London days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain -George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young -medical student some hospitality. “Keats and I,” wrote in 1848 Mr -Mathew,—then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, struggling -meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> of -twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy,—“Keats -and I, though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in -many respects as different as two individuals could be. He enjoyed good -health—a fine flow of animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse -himself admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence -in himself. I, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy—fond of -repose—thoughtful beyond my years—and diffident to the last degree.... -He was of the sceptical and republican school—an advocate for the -innovations which were making progress in his time—a faultfinder with -everything established. I on the other hand hated controversy and -dispute—dreaded discord and disorder”<a name='fna_15' id='fna_15' href='#f_15'><small>[15]</small></a>—and Keats, our good Mr -Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to -apologize for shocking him. As to his poetical predilections, the -impression left on Mr Mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr -Stephens:—“he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep -emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of -elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the -pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never -observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme -sensibility.”</p> - -<p>The exact order and chronology of Keats’s own first efforts in poetry it -is difficult to trace. They were certainly neither precocious nor -particularly promising. The circumstantial account of Brown above quoted -compels us to regard the lines <i>In Imitation of Spenser</i> as the earliest -of all, and as written at Edmonton<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> about the end of 1813 or beginning of -1814. They are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or -experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a -little later in Keats’s work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats loved -the best both first and last were those of the Elizabethan age, it is -clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of -writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not -so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of -these not the latest, Byron<a name='fna_16' id='fna_16' href='#f_16'><small>[16]</small></a>, but rather such milder minstrels as -Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental -Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose <i>Psyche</i> had become very popular since her -death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical -versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces -preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with -this lady’s work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves -very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, which he -addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a -shell. His two elegiac stanzas <i>On Death</i>, assigned by George Keats to the -year 1814, are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of -moralizing. Equally so is the address <i>To Hope</i> of February 1815, with its -‘relentless fair’ and its personified abstractions, ‘fair Cheerfulness,’ -‘Disappointment, parent of Despair,’ ‘that fiend Despondence,’ and the -rest. And once more, in the ode <i>To Apollo</i> of the same date, the voice -with which this young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> singer celebrates his Elizabethan masters is an -echo not of their own voice but rather of Gray’s:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And quickly forward spring</span><br /> -The Passions—a terrific band—<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And each vibrates the string</span><br /> -That with its tyrant temper best accords,<br /> -While from their Master’s lips pour forth the inspiring words.<br /> -A silver trumpet Spenser blows,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And, as its martial notes to silence flee,</span><br /> -From a virgin chorus flows<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity.</span><br /> -’Tis still! Wild warblings from the Æolian lyre<br /> -Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire.”</p> - -<p>The pieces above cited are all among the earliest of Keats’s work, written -either at Edmonton or during the first year of his life in London. To the -same class no doubt belongs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish, -sentimental sonnet <i>To Byron</i>, and probably that also, which is but a -degree better, <i>To Chatterton</i> (both only posthumously printed). The more -firmly handled but still mediocre sonnet on Leigh Hunt’s release from -prison brings us again to a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the -young poet’s life. It was on either the 2nd or the 3rd of February, 1815, -that the brothers Hunt were discharged after serving out the term of -imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling -the Prince Regent two years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many -other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to -Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed -quickly into friendship. Within a few days of Hunt’s release, Clarke -walked in from Enfield to call on him (presumably at the lodging he -occupied at this time in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> the Edgware Road). On his return Clarke met -Keats, who walked part of the way home with him, and as they parted, says -Clarke, “he turned and gave me the sonnet entitled <i>Written on the day -that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison</i>. This I feel to be the first proof I had -received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I -recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! -There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with -life.”</p> - -<p>Not long afterwards Cowden Clarke left Enfield, and came to settle in -London. Keats found him out in his lodgings at Clerkenwell, and the two -were soon meeting as often and reading together as eagerly as ever. One of -the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of Chapman’s -Homer. After a night’s enthusiastic study, Clarke found when he came down -to breakfast the next morning, that Keats, who had only left him in the -small hours, had already had time to compose and send him from the Borough -the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost hackneyed, <i>On First Looking -into Chapman’s Homer</i>;—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Round many Western islands have I been</span><br /> -Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.<br /> -Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Yet did I never breathe its pure serene</span><br /> -Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:<br /> -Then felt I like some watcher of the skies<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When a new planet swims into his ken;</span><br /> -Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">He stared at the Pacific—and all his men</span><br /> -Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”</span></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>The date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed; but it was when nights -were short in the summer of 1815. The seventh line of the sonnet is an -afterthought: in the original copy sent to Cowden Clarke it stood more -baldly, ‘Yet could I never tell what men might mean.’ Keats here for the -first time approves himself a poet indeed. The concluding sestet is almost -unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius -than the image of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of schoolboy -reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, which should be Balboa -and not Cortez, but what does it matter?) is converted into the perfection -of appropriate poetry.</p> - -<p>One of the next services which the ever zealous and affectionate Cowden -Clarke did his young friend was to make him personally known to Leigh -Hunt. The acquaintance carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages -and even penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encouragement and -pleasure. It is impossible rightly to understand the career of Keats if we -fail to realise the various modes in which it was affected by his -intercourse with Hunt. The latter was the elder of the two by eleven -years. He was the son, by marriage with an American wife, of an eloquent -and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher of West -Indian origin, who had chiefly exercised his vocation in the northern -suburbs of London. Leigh Hunt was brought up at Christ’s Hospital, about a -dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, and gained at sixteen some -slight degree of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile -poems. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being -then a clerk in the War Office; an occupation which he abandoned at -twenty-four<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> (in 1808) in order to join his brother John Hunt in the -conduct of the <i>Examiner</i> newspaper. For five years the managers of that -journal helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of -Eldon and of Castlereagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect -sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they were caught -tripping, and condemned to two years’ imprisonment for strictures ruled -libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and -person of the Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with -cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. Liberal statesmen, -philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society -in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial -conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. Tall, -straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black -eyes, and ‘nose of taste,’ Leigh Hunt was ever one of the most winning of -companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and -ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most -sympathetic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was far -too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank -neither from receiving nor conferring,—only circumstances made him nearly -always a receiver,—still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly -abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer -for what they believed. Liberals could not but contrast his smiling -steadfastness under persecution with the apostasy, as in the heat of the -hour they considered it, of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In -domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under difficulties; and -none was better loved by his friends, or requited<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> them, so far as the -depth of his nature went, with a truer warmth and loyalty. His literary -industry was incessant, hardly second to that of Southey himself. He had -the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a singular quickness of -intellectual apprehension for the points and qualities of what he enjoyed; -and for the gentler pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word he -loved) of literature, he is the most accomplished of guides and -interpreters. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, -and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which -Coleridge and De Quincey, with their more philosophic powers and method, -were subject, the faults of pedantry and effort. The infirmity of Leigh -Hunt’s style is of an opposite kind. “Incomparable,” according to Lamb’s -well-known phrase, “as a fire-side companion,” it was his misfortune to -carry too much of the fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both -in prose and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty -familiarity and ease which passes too easily into Cockney pertness.</p> - -<p>A combination of accidents, political, personal, and literary, caused this -writer of amiable memory and second-rate powers to exercise, about the -time of which we are writing, a determining influence both on the work and -the fortunes of stronger men. And first of his influence on their work. He -was as enthusiastic a student of ‘our earlier and nobler school of poetry’ -as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the -characteristic excellences of the ‘French school,’ the school of polished -artifice and restraint which had come in since Dryden, he was not less -bent on its overthrow, and on the return of English poetry to the paths of -nature and freedom. But he had his own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> conception of the manner in which -this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his -rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. “It -was his intention,” he wrote in prison, “by the beginning of next year to -bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce -to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various -and legitimate harmony of the English heroic.” The result of this -intention was the <i>Story of Rimini</i>, begun before his prosecution and -published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. “With the -endeavour,” so he repeated himself in the preface, “to recur to a freer -spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater -importance,—that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language.”</p> - -<p>In versification Hunt’s aim was to bring back into use the earlier form of -the rhymed English decasyllabic or ‘heroic’ couplet. The innovating poets -of the time had abandoned this form of verse (Wordsworth and Coleridge -using it only in their earliest efforts, before 1796); while the others -who still employed it, as Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Byron, adhered, -each in his manner, to the isolated couplet and hammering rhymes with -which the English ear had been for more than a century exclusively -familiar. The two contrasted systems of handling the measure may best be -understood if we compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of -those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two -different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern, -with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. The -regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand -for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> verse into equal -pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its -other divisions—dependent not on metre but on the sense—into clauses and -periods of variable length and structure. Under the older system of -versification the sentence or period had been allowed to follow its own -laws, with a movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the beauty of -the result depended upon the skill and feeling with which this free -element of the pattern was made to play about and interweave itself with -the fixed element, the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and -now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now drawing attention to -the rhyme and now withholding it. For examples of this system and of its -charm we have only to turn at random to Chaucer:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“I-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse.<br /> -Hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse,<br /> -Byhynde her bak, a yerdë long, I gesse,<br /> -And in the garden as the sonne upriste<br /> -She walketh up and down, and as hir liste<br /> -She gathereth floures, party white and reede,<br /> -To make a sotil garland for here heede,<br /> -And as an aungel hevenlyche sche song.”</p> - -<p>Chaucer’s conception of the measure prevails throughout the Elizabethan -age, but not exclusively or uniformly. Some poets are more inobservant of -the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as -independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than -with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the -<i>enjambement</i>, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to -another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an -opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to -clip their sentences to the pattern<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> of the metre, fitting single -propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall -regularly on the rhyme. This principle gradually gained ground during the -seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work -of Dryden. But Dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying -the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the -use of the triplet and the Alexandrine, thus:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood<br /> -Were poured upon the pile of burning wood,<br /> -And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food.<br /> -Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around<br /> -The fire, and Arcite’s name they thrice resound:<br /> -‘Hail and farewell,’ they shouted thrice amain,<br /> -Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again—:”</p> - -<p>and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the -Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye;<br /> -I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly.<br /> -Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I’ll be civil;<br /> -I’m what I was, a little harmless devil.”</p> - -<p>In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, -these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element -in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element -entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and -clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, -are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical -divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not -sententious, but fanciful and discursive:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Some in the fields of purest æther play,<br /> -And bask and whiten in the blaze of day.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>Some guide the course of wand’ring orbs on high,<br /> -Or roll the planets through the boundless sky.<br /> -Some less refined, beneath the moon’s pale light<br /> -Pursue the stars that shoot across the night,<br /> -Or seek the mists in grosser air below,<br /> -Or dip their pinions in the painted bow,<br /> -Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,<br /> -Or o’er the glebe distil the kindly rain.”</p> - -<p>Leigh Hunt’s theory was that Pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead -of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic -couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of <i>Rimini</i> is avowedly -modelled. The result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial -cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in -either:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye<br /> -Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly;<br /> -Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common<br /> -To accept the attentions of this lovely woman,<br /> -But the meantime he took no generous pains,<br /> -By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains;<br /> -He entered not, in turn, in her delights,<br /> -Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights;<br /> -Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he<br /> -Unless his pride was roused by company;<br /> -Or when to please him, after martial play,<br /> -She strained her lute to some old fiery lay<br /> -Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras,<br /> -Or Ryan’s cloak, or how by the red grass<br /> -In battle you might know where Richard was.”</p> - -<p>It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh Hunt in <i>Rimini</i> -is due the rhythmical form alike of <i>Endymion</i> and <i>Epipsychidion</i>, of -Keats’s <i>Epistles</i> to his friends and Shelley’s <i>Letter to Maria -Gisborne</i>. Certainly the <i>Epistles</i> of Keats, both as to sentiment and -rhythm, are very much in Hunt’s manner. But the earliest of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> them, that to -G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when <i>Rimini</i> was not yet published, and -when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have -known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his -work to Hunt’s may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural -affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the -disyllabic rhyme and the ‘overflow’ as used by some of the Elizabethan -writers, particularly by Spenser in <i>Mother Hubbard’s Tale</i> and by Browne -in <i>Britannia’s Pastorals</i>. At all events the appearance of <i>Rimini</i> -tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice.</p> - -<p>As to Hunt’s success with his ‘ideas of what is natural in style,’ and his -‘free and idiomatic cast of language’ to supersede the styles alike of -Pope and Wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps -enough. The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of -others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so -completely as in <i>Rimini</i>. The piece indeed is not without agreeable -passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the -pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his -prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and -handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and -vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any -departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, -found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt’s <i>Rimini</i>: and ladies -are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what, -one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can -endure to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca—Dante’s Paolo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> and -Francesca—diluted through four cantos in a style like this?—</p> - -<p class="poem">“What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes,<br /> -A clipsome waist, and bosom’s balmy rise?—”<br /> -<br /> -“How charming, would he think, to see her here,<br /> -How heightened then, and perfect would appear<br /> -The two divinest things the world has got,<br /> -A lovely woman in a rural spot.”</p> - -<p>When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and -instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a -familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it -need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred -strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more -than once.</p> - -<p>Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily exercised on his -friends’ fortunes and their estimation by the world. We have seen how he -found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of -political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no -means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him out as a special -butt for Tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so -inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. During his -imprisonment Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the <i>Reflector</i>, with notes and -additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the <i>Feast of the -Poets</i>, which he had written about two years before. In it Apollo is -represented as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to -the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who -present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially -welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> Moore and -Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof, -Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not -more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on -their contemporaries. The bitterness of the ‘Lost Leader’ feeling to which -we have referred accounts for much of Hunt’s disparagement of the Lake -writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott -as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged -the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the -poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His treatment of Scott, on the other -hand, is idly flippant and patronising. Now it so happened that of the two -champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other -the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh,—I mean Wilson and -Lockhart,—Wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and -Lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion -was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem -paradoxical rancour with which the gentle Hunt, and Keats as his friend -and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in <i>Blackwood</i>.</p> - -<p>To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first became known to each -other. Cowden Clarke began by carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from -the Edgware Road to a cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, a few of -Keats’s poems in manuscript. Horace Smith was with Hunt when the young -poet’s work was shown him. Both were eager in its praises, and in -questions concerning the person and character of the author. Cowden Clarke -at Hunt’s request brought Keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has -left a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. The -introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of 1816<a name='fna_17' id='fna_17' href='#f_17'><small>[17]</small></a>. -Keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead household; -and for the next year or two Hunt’s was the strongest intellectual -influence to which he was subject. So far as opinions were concerned, -those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood -by Leigh Hunt’s writings in the <i>Examiner</i>. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic -as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel -of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his -own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of -eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy -of generous youth for Hunt’s liberal and optimistic view of things, and he -had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:—ready to entertain and appreciate -any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or -power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. -In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in -common. Both alike were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat effusively and -fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever they liked in art, books, or -nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt -brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness -of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were intense beyond -parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also felt with Keats the -undying charm of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about -this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, -less adequate, of Homer. The poets<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> Hunt loved best were Ariosto and the -other Italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in -English he was devoted to Keats’s own favourite Spenser.</p> - -<p>The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of ‘Libertas,’ ‘the lov’d -Libertas,’ meaning Leigh Hunt, in the verses written by Keats at this -time. He attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the -<i>Faerie Queene</i> in the metre of <i>Rimini</i>, and in others to express in the -same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the -beautiful, then rural Hampstead woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he -seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a -bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length -on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; -and the sonnet beginning, ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and -there’, records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend’s -house one night in winter. We find him presenting Hunt with a crown of -ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. Or they would -challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme. -Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion in December 1816, when they -each wrote to time a sonnet <i>on the Grasshopper and Cricket</i>, has left us -a pleasant picture of their relations:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences -which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard -and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious -encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:—</p> - -<p class="poem">‘The poetry of earth is never dead.’</p> - -<p>“Such a prosperous opening!” he said; and when he came to the tenth -and eleventh lines:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>‘On a lone winter morning, when the frost<br /> -Hath wrought a silence’—</p> - -<p>“Ah that’s perfect! Bravo Keats!” And then he went on in a dilatation -on the dumbness of Nature during the season’s suspension and -torpidity.”</p></div> - -<p>Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced to a number of -congenial spirits. Among them he attached himself especially to one John -Hamilton Reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than -himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. Reynolds was -born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in London, as -writing-master at the Blue Coat School. He lacked health and energy, but -has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a -charming character and no slight literary talent. He held a clerkship in -an Insurance office, and lived in Little Britain with his family, -including three sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest -of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him -inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the -time. One, <i>Safie</i>, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then -fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published -in the year of Keats’s death, and partly prompted by the writer’s -relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical -entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum -theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory -parody of <i>Peter Bell</i>, which Byron assumed to be the work of Moore. In -1820 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to -relate, under the name <i>Peter Corcoran</i>, the fortunes of an amateur of the -prize-ring; and a little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> later, in conjunction with Hood, the volume of -anonymous <i>Odes and Addresses to Eminent Persons</i> which Coleridge on its -appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. But Reynolds had -early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of -an opening in business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell -sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave to Keats, and in -1821 he writes again,</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 6em;">“As time increases</span><br /> -I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.”</p> - -<p>In point of fact Reynolds continued for years to contribute to the <i>London -Magazine</i> and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with -Hood. But neither in literature nor law did he attain a position -commensurate with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time of -which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,—with -Keats and Shelley,—he died in 1852 as Clerk of the County at Newport, -Isle of Wight, and it is only in association with Keats that his name will -live. Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining -from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet -written early in their acquaintance proves<a name='fna_18' id='fna_18' href='#f_18'><small>[18]</small></a>, but also one of the -wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake. -In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats’s associates must be -mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of -literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, -but always, in Keats’s words, “coming on his legs again like a cat”; ever -cheerful and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in -good offices to those about him: “dear noble generous James Rice,” records -Dilke,—“the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest -men I ever knew.” Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming -member of Hunt’s set, when Keats first joined it, was one Cornelius Webb, -remembered now, if remembered at all, by <i>Blackwood’s</i> derisory quotation -of his lines on—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 13em;">“Keats,</span><br /> -The Muses’ son of promise, and what feats<br /> -He yet may do”—</p> - -<p>as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats’s own later letters. -He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough -of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost -be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his -weak moments<a name='fna_19' id='fna_19' href='#f_19'><small>[19]</small></a>. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in -the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the -revision of the <i>Quarterly</i> proofs. Towards 1830—1840 he re-appeared in -literature, as Cornelius ‘Webbe’, author of the <i>Man about Town</i> and other -volumes of cheerful gossipping Cockney essays, to which the <i>Quarterly</i> -critics extended a patronizing notice.</p> - -<p>An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which Keats made a few -months later, at Leigh Hunt’s, was that of Shelley, his senior by only -three years. During the harrowing period of Shelley’s life which followed -the suicide of his first wife—when his principle of love a law to itself -had in action entailed so dire a consequence,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> and his obedience to his -own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the -world’s—the kindness and affection of Leigh Hunt were among his chief -consolations. After his marriage with Mary Godwin, he flitted often, alone -or with his wife, between Great Marlow and Hampstead, where Keats met him -early in the spring of 1817. “Keats,” says Hunt, did not take to Shelley -as kindly as Shelley did to him, and adds the comment: “Keats, being a -little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in -every man of birth a sort of natural enemy.” “He was haughty, and had a -fierce hatred of rank,” says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his -pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for -friendship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of -reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at -first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or -material patronage on the other’s part: but he should soon have learnt -better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy, -according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his -kindness. Of Shelley’s kindness Keats had in the sequel sufficient proof: -in the meantime, until Shelley went abroad the following year, the two met -often at Hunt’s without becoming really intimate. Pride and social -sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy -between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, -sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as -much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Shelley, -his passionate negation of the world’s creeds and the world’s law, and his -intense proselytizing ardour.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>It was also at Hunt’s house that Keats for the first time met by -pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November 1816, the painter Haydon, -whose influence soon became hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon -was now thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two great -objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory -in the other. He had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence -of the Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor’s art acknowledged in -the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation -secured. This is Haydon’s chief real title to the regard of posterity. His -other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to -take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the -crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His -indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance, -his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his -self-assertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, -even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at -large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and -encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of -dilettantism and fashion. His first two great pictures, ‘Dentatus’ and -‘Macbeth’, had been dubiously received; his last, the ‘Judgment of -Solomon’, with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than -all, ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,’ and while as usual sunk deep in -debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence—for he was in -truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of -the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> power he -possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely -exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. “Never,” wrote he about this -time, “have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future -greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and -ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming -flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and -shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God.” -But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of -genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties -which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to -Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of -working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch -and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an -occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from -greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to -immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of -true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin -marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he -enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety -of the original. Very much better is his account of them in words: as -indeed Haydon’s chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best -instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know with -what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style -he can relate an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the -literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries -to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied -void <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings. -Take for instance, in relation to Keats himself, Haydon’s profound -admonition to him as follows:—“God bless you, my dear Keats! do not -despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakspere, and trust in -Providence, and you will do, you must:” or the following precious -expansion of an image in one of the poet’s sonnets on the Elgin -marbles:—“I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable -to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he -must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling -sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing -angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless -wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects -of their seeking”—</p> - -<p>But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those -he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not -his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his -associates as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits of -the time were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by -him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others -after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of -purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of -thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and -protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for -deliverance from ‘pecuniary emergencies’, and the like. “I always rose up -from my knees,” he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, “with a refreshed -fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me -streaming on with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> a repulsive power against the troubles of life.” And he -was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both -particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it -might be, on their bounty. Experience of these qualities partly alienated -Keats from him in the long run. But at first sight Haydon had much to -attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and -Keats were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire from the -other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an -evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th -of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his -name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> -<p>“Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the -following:—</p> - -<p class="poem">Great spirits now on earth are sojourning:<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Who on Helvellyn’s summit, wide awake,</span><br /> -Catches his freshness from Archangel’s wing:<br /> -He of the rose, the violet, the spring,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The social smile, the chain for Freedom’s sake,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And lo! whose steadfastness would never take</span><br /> -A meaner sound than Raphael’s whispering.<br /> -And other spirits there are standing apart<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Upon the forehead of the age to come;</span><br /> -These, these will give the world another heart,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum</span><br /> -Of mighty workings in the human mart?<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb.”</span></p></div> - -<p>Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. The three well-known -sonnets of Wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and -about the same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> him a -sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. In his reply to Keats he -proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth—a proposal which “puts -me,” answers Keats, “out of breath—you know with what reverence I would -send my well-wishes to him.” Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but -think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out -the words after ‘workings’ in the last line but one. The poet, however, -accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two -other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin -marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to -his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject, -confessing his inability rightly to grasp or analyse the impressions he -had received. By the spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon -was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a -standing invitation to his studio in Great Marlborough Street, declaring -him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried -together.</p> - -<p>To complete the group of Keats’s friends in these days, we have to think -of two or three others known to him otherwise than through Hunt, and not -belonging to the Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends of a -Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was attached. She was the -daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive -irregular cast of beauty, and Keats on his own account had a great liking -for her. On Valentine’s day, 1816, we find him writing, for George to send -her, the first draft of the lines beginning, ‘Hadst thou lived in days of -old,’ afterwards amplified and published in his first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> volume<a name='fna_20' id='fna_20' href='#f_20'><small>[20]</small></a>. Through -the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was -afterwards one of his own and his brothers’ best friends, but whose -character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with -Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was -the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to -be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, a strong love of -literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which Mr -Ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at -Rome<a name='fna_21' id='fna_21' href='#f_21'><small>[21]</small></a>. From the moment of their introduction Severn found in Keats his -very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him -with an admiring affection.</p> - -<p>A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles Wells, afterwards -author of <i>Stories after Nature</i>, and of that singular and strongly -imagined Biblical drama or ‘dramatic poem’ of <i>Joseph and his Brethren</i>, -which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group -of poets and critics in ours. Wells had been a school companion of Tom -Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone -buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, -boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days -chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about -fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses acknowledged in -the sonnet beginning, ‘As late I rambled in the happy fields.’ A year or -two later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on Tom -Keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> <i>Stories -after Nature</i>, published in 1822, are said to have been written in order -to show Keats “that he too could do something.”</p> - -<p>Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely-born and half-schooled -young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art, -letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with -some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most -ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temperament alike saved -him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and -deference towards his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of -genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both verbal and other -exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression -which he made. “The character and expression of his features,” it is said, -“would arrest even the casual passenger in the street.” A small, handsome, -ardent-looking youth—the stature little over five feet: the figure -compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a -strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the -features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an -expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead -not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes -hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired—“an eye that had an inward -look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions.” “Keats -was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high -calling, except Wordsworth.” These words are Haydon’s, and to the same -effect Leigh Hunt:—“the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and -sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> beautiful thought, they -would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled.” It is noticeable that -his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way -to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. To return to -Haydon:—“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 cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered.” -In like manner George Keats:—“John’s eyes moistened, and his lip -quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or -noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;” and a shrewd and -honoured survivor of those days, “herself of many poets the frequent theme -and valued friend,”—need I name Mrs Procter?—has recorded the impression -the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on -some glorious sight<a name='fna_22' id='fna_22' href='#f_22'><small>[22]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns himself, to -have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the -company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was -pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by -turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and -unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw -apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the -window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and -low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but -gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at -wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to -command respect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> recital are said to -have been great, and never used unkindly.</p> - -<p>Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, -Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather -everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, -passion for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of course was -adverse: but his brothers, including George, the practical and sensible -one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to -them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his -compositions, show. In August 1816 we find him addressing from Margate a -sonnet and a poetical Epistle in terms of the utmost affection and -confidence to George. About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St -Thomas’s Street to go and live with his brothers in the Poultry; and in -November he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side -occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. -It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a -time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England -has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself -induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement -of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh -Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without -comment, in the <i>Examiner</i> for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, -‘O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell,’ and on the 1st of December in the -same year the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some -prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> associating with -his name those of Shelley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of Hunt in -this paper, says Mr Stephens, that Keats’s fate was sealed. But already -the still more ardent encouragement of Haydon, if more was wanted, had -come to add fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the -Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers, and in the -convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats -should put forth a volume of his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers -was found in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last -proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, -with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be -furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet <i>To -Leigh Hunt Esqr.</i>, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Glory and Loveliness have pass’d away;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">For if we wander out in early morn,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">No wreathèd incense do we see upborne</span><br /> -Into the East to meet the smiling day:<br /> -No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn</span><br /> -The shrine of Flora in her early May.<br /> -But there are left delights as high as these,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And I shall ever bless my destiny,</span><br /> -That in a time when under pleasant trees<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,</span><br /> -A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With these poor offerings, a man like thee.”</span><br /> -</p> - -<p>With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old -pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet’s -first venture was sent forth in the month of March 1817.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2> - -<p class="center">The <i>Poems</i> of 1817.</p> - - -<p>The note of Keats’s early volume is accurately struck in the motto from -Spenser which he prefixed to it:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“What more felicity can fall to creature<br /> -Than to enjoy delight with liberty?”</p> - -<p>The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of -release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true -nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And -the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: -delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in -the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and -affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art -itself which expresses and communicates all these joys.</p> - -<p>We have already glanced, in connection with the occasions which gave rise -to them, at a few of the miscellaneous boyish pieces in various metres -which are included in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. The -remaining and much the chief portion of the book consists of half a dozen -poems in the rhymed decasyllabic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> couplet. These had all been written -during the period between November 1815 and April 1817, under the combined -influence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The former -influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the -poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. Keats had by -this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his -earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a -vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the -Elizabethans and from Milton. The chief verbal echoes of Spenser to be -found in his first volume are a line quoted from him entire in the epistle -to G. F. Mathew, and the use of the archaic ‘teen’ in the stanzas -professedly Spenserian. We can indeed trace Keats’s familiarity with -Chapman, and especially with one poem of Chapman’s, his translation of the -Homeric <i>Hymn to Pan</i>, in a predilection for a particular form of abstract -descriptive substantive:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">“the pillowy silkiness that rests</span><br /> -Full in the speculation of the stars:”—<br /> -<br /> -“Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:”—<br /> -<br /> -“Ere I can have explored its widenesses.”<a name='fna_23' id='fna_23' href='#f_23'><small>[23]</small></a></p> - -<p>The only other distinguishing marks of Keats’s diction in this first -volume consist, I think, in the use of the Miltonic ‘sphery,’ and of an -unmeaning coinage of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> own, ‘boundly,’ with a habit—for which Milton, -Spenser, and among the moderns Leigh Hunt all alike furnished him the -example—of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his -convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his -day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, -and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines and -passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and -instinct. But they are mixed up with much that only illustrates his -crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt -to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and -grace.</p> - -<p>In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems making a -succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic -couplet. In the colloquial <i>Epistles</i>, addressed severally to G. F. -Mathew, to his brother George, and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself -with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional -<i>enjambement</i> or ‘overflow.’ In the <i>Specimen of an Induction to a Poem</i>, -and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled <i>Calidore</i> (a name -borrowed from the hero of Spenser’s sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed -piece beginning ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,’ which opens the -volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the -second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught -either from Spenser’s nuptial odes or Milton’s <i>Lycidas</i>,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Open afresh your round of starry folds,<br /> -Ye ardent marigolds.”</p> - -<p>In <i>Sleep and Poetry</i>, which is the most personal and interesting, as well -as probably the last-written, poem in the volume, Keats drops this -practice, but in other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making -free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line -rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather than an -exception the Chaucerian and Elizabethan fashion of breaking the couplet -by closing a sentence or paragraph with its first line.</p> - -<p>Passing from the form of the poems to their substance, we find that they -are experiments or poetic preludes merely, with no pretension to be -organic or complete works of art. To rehearse ramblingly the pleasures and -aspirations of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow another -with no particular plan or sequence, is all that Keats as yet attempts: -except in the <i>Calidore</i> fragment. And that is on the whole feeble and -confused: from the outset the poet loses himself in a maze of young -luxuriant imagery: once and again, however, he gets clear, and we have -some good lines in an approach to the Dryden manner:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Softly the breezes from the forest came,<br /> -Softly they blew aside the taper’s flame;<br /> -Clear was the song from Philomel’s far bower;<br /> -Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower;<br /> -Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet’s tone;<br /> -Lovely the moon in ether, all alone.”</p> - -<p>To set against this are occasionally expressions in the complete taste of -Leigh Hunt, as for instance—</p> - -<p class="poem">“The lamps that from the high-roof’d wall were pendent,<br /> -And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.”</p> - -<p>The <i>Epistles</i> are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint pleasures of -literature and friendship. In that to Cowden Clarke, Keats acknowledges to -his friend that he had been shy at first of addressing verses to him:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>“Nor should I now, but that I’ve known you long;<br /> -That you first taught me all the sweets of song:<br /> -The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine,<br /> -What swell’d with pathos, and what right divine:<br /> -Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,<br /> -And float along like birds o’er summer seas;<br /> -Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness;<br /> -Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve’s fair slenderness.<br /> -Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly<br /> -Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?<br /> -Who found for me the grandeur of the ode,<br /> -Growing, like Atlas, stronger for its load?<br /> -Who let me taste that more than cordial dram,<br /> -The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?<br /> -Show’d me that Epic was of all the king,<br /> -Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn’s ring?”</p> - -<p>This is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter manner of Keats -in his early work. Blots like the ungrammatical fourth line are not -infrequent with him. The preference for Miltonian tenderness over -Miltonian storms may remind the reader of a later poet’s more masterly -expression of the same sentiment:—‘Me rather all that bowery -loneliness—’. The two lines on Spenser are of interest as conveying one -of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of which no one has -left us more or better than Keats. The habit of Spenser to which he here -alludes is that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their -open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive lines, for -example,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide,<br /> -More swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye;<br /> -Withouten oare or pilot it to guide,<br /> -Or winged canvas with the wind to fly.”</p> - -<p>The run here is on <i>a</i> and <i>i</i>; principally on <i>i</i>, which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> occurs five -times in its open, and ten times in its closed, sound in the four -lines,—if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel these two unlike sounds -denoted by the same sign. Keats was a close and conscious student of the -musical effects of verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have -suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration -of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we are not clearly told, -neither do I think it can easily be discovered from his practice; though -every one must feel a great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of -the vowel and diphthong sequences. He often spoke of the subject, and once -maintained his view against Wordsworth when the latter seemed to be -advocating a mechanical principle of vowel variation.</p> - -<p>Hear, next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, and of nature, -come naively jostling one another in the <i>Epistle</i> addressed from the -sea-side to his brother George:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“As to my sonnets, though none else should heed them<br /> -I feel delighted, still, that you should read them.<br /> -Of late, too, I have had much calm enjoyment,<br /> -Stretch’d on the grass at my best loved employment<br /> -Of scribbling lines for you. These things I thought<br /> -While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught.<br /> -E’en now I am pillow’d on a bed of flowers<br /> -That crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers<br /> -Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades<br /> -Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades.<br /> -On one side is a field of drooping oats,<br /> -Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats;<br /> -So pert and useless that they bring to mind<br /> -The scarlet coats that pester human kind.<br /> -And on the other side, outspread is seen<br /> -Ocean’s blue mantle, streak’d with purple and green.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>Now ’tis I see a canvass’d ship, and now<br /> -Mark the bright silver curling round her brow;<br /> -I see the lark down-dropping to his nest,<br /> -And the broad wing’d sea-gull never at rest;<br /> -For when no more he spreads his feathers free,<br /> -His breast is dancing on the restless sea.”</p> - -<p>It is interesting to watch the newly-awakened literary faculty in Keats -thus exercising itself in the narrow circle of personal sensation, and on -the description of the objects immediately before his eyes. The effect of -rhythmical movement attempted in the last lines, to correspond with the -buoyancy and variety of the motions described, has a certain felicity, and -the whole passage is touched already with Keats’s exquisite perception and -enjoyment of external nature. His character as a poet of nature begins, -indeed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. He differs by -it alike from Wordsworth and from Shelley. The instinct of Wordsworth was -to interpret all the operations of nature by those of his own strenuous -soul; and the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from the -scenery of his home, deepened and enriched by continual after meditation, -and mingling with all the currents of his adult thought and feeling, -constituted for him throughout his life the most vital part alike of -patriotism, of philosophy, and of religion. For Shelley on his part -natural beauty was in a twofold sense symbolical. In the visible glories -of the world his philosophy saw the veil of the unseen, while his -philanthropy found in them types and auguries of a better life on earth; -and all that imagery of nature’s more remote and skyey phenomena, of which -no other poet has had an equal mastery, and which comes borne to us along -the music of the verse—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> -<span style="margin-left: 8em;">“With many a mingled close</span><br /> -Of wild Æolian sound and mountain odour keen”—</p> - -<p>was inseparable in his soul from visions of a radiant future and a -renovated—alas! not a human—humanity. In Keats the sentiment of nature -was simpler than in either of these two other masters; more direct, and so -to speak more disinterested. It was his instinct to love and interpret -nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of sympathy which the -human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. He had -grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor -in the glow of millennial dreams like Shelley, but London-born and -Middlesex-bred, was gifted, we know not whence, as if by some mysterious -birthright, with a delighted insight into all the beauties, and sympathy -with all the life, of the woods and fields. Evidences of the gift appear, -as every reader knows, in the longer poems of his first volume, with their -lingering trains of peaceful summer imagery, and loving inventories of -‘Nature’s gentle doings;’ and pleasant touches of the same kind are -scattered also among the sonnets; as in that <i>To Charles Wells</i>,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“As late I rambled in the happy fields,<br /> -What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew<br /> -From his lush clover covert,”—</p> - -<p>or again in that <i>To Solitude</i>,—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 6em;">—“let me thy vigils keep</span><br /> -’Mongst boughs pavilion’d, where the deer’s swift leap<br /> -Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.”<a name='fna_24' id='fna_24' href='#f_24'><small>[24]</small></a></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>Such intuitive familiarity with the blithe activities, unnoted by common -eyes, which make up the life and magic of nature, is a gift we attribute -to men of primitive race and forest nurture; and Mr Matthew Arnold would -have us recognize it as peculiarly characteristic of the Celtic element in -the English genius and English poetry. It was allied in Keats to another -instinct of the early world which we associate especially with the Greeks, -the instinct for personifying the powers of nature in clearly-defined -imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half-human faculties. The -classical teaching of the Enfield school had not gone beyond Latin, and -neither in boyhood nor afterwards did Keats acquire any Greek: but towards -the creations of the Greek mythology he was attracted by an overmastering -delight in their beauty, and a natural sympathy with the phase of -imagination that engendered them. Especially he shows himself possessed -and fancy-bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical enchantment, -of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moonstruck. He had -planned a poem on the ancient story of the loves of Diana, with whom the -Greek moon-goddess Selene is identified in the Latin mythology, and the -shepherd-prince Endymion; and had begun a sort of prelude to it in the -piece that opens ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.’ Afterwards, without -abandoning the subject, Keats laid aside this particular exordium, and -printed it, as we have seen, as an independent piece at the head of his -first volume. It is at the climax of a passage rehearsing the delights of -evening that he first bethinks himself of the moon—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 7em;">“lifting her silver rim</span><br /> -Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim<br /> -Coming into the blue with all her light.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>The thought of the mythic passion of the moon-goddess for Endymion, and -the praises of the poet who first sang it, follow at considerable length. -The passage conjuring up the wonders and beneficences of their bridal -night is written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the collective -feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary conditions of human pain -and pleasure, health and sickness, as rarely occurs again in Keats’s -poetry, though his correspondence shows it to have been most natural to -his mind:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“The evening weather was so bright, and clear,<br /> -That men of health were of unusual cheer.<br /> -<strong><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></strong><br /> -The breezes were ethereal, and pure,<br /> -And crept through half-closed lattices to cure<br /> -The languid sick; it cool’d their fever’d sleep,<br /> -And sooth’d them into slumbers full and deep.<br /> -Soon they awoke clear-ey’d: nor burnt with thirsting,<br /> -Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting:<br /> -And springing up, they met the wond’ring sight<br /> -Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight;<br /> -Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare,<br /> -And on their placid foreheads part the hair.”<a name='fna_25' id='fna_25' href='#f_25'><small>[25]</small></a></p> - -<p>Finally, Keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exordium of his -unwritten poem with the cry:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses<br /> -That followed thine and thy dear shepherd’s kisses:<br /> -Was there a poet born? But now no more<br /> -My wandering spirit must no farther soar.”</p> - -<p>Was there a poet born? Is the labour and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>reward of poetry really and -truly destined to be his? The question is one which recurs in this early -volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences -closely recalling those of Milton in his boyish <i>Vacation Exercise</i>; -sometimes with a cry like this, which occurs twice over in the piece -called <i>Sleep and Poetry</i>,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen,<br /> -That am not yet a glorious denizen<br /> -Of thy wide heaven:”—</p> - -<p>and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring tone of young -ambition,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“But off, Despondence! miserable bane!<br /> -They should not know thee, who, athirst to gain<br /> -A noble end, are thirsty every hour.<br /> -What though I am not wealthy in the dower<br /> -Of spanning wisdom: though I do not know<br /> -The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow<br /> -Hither and thither all the changing thoughts<br /> -Of man: though no great ministering reason sorts<br /> -Out the dark mysteries of human souls<br /> -To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls<br /> -A vast idea before me”—.</p> - -<p>The feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the overmastering -pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, -gives way in other passages to confident anticipations of fame, and of the -place which he will hold in the affections of posterity.</p> - -<p>There is obviously a great immaturity and uncertainty in all these -outpourings, an intensity and effervescence of emotion out of proportion -as yet both to the intellectual and the voluntary powers, much confusion -of idea, and not a little of expression. Yet even in this first book of -Keats there is much that the lover<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> of poetry will always cherish. -Literature, indeed, hardly affords another example of work at once so -crude and so attractive. Passages that go to pieces under criticism -nevertheless have about them a spirit of beauty and of morning, an -abounding young vitality and freshness, that exhilarate and charm us -whether with the sanction of our judgment or without it. And alike at its -best and worst, the work proceeds manifestly from a spontaneous and -intense poetic impulse. The matter of these early poems of Keats is as -fresh and unconventional as their form, springing directly from the native -poignancy of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. That his -inexperience should always make the most discreet use of its freedom could -not be expected; but with all its immaturity his work has strokes already -which suggest comparison with the great names of literature. Who much -exceeds him, even from the first, but Shakspere in momentary felicity of -touch for nature, and in that charm of morning freshness who but Chaucer? -Already, too, we find him showing signs of that capacity for clear and -sane self-knowledge which becomes by-and-by so admirable in him. And he -has already begun to meditate to good purpose on the aims and methods of -his art. He has grasped and vehemently asserts the principle that poetry -should not strive to enforce particular doctrines, that it should not -contend in the field of reason, but that its proper organ is the -imagination, and its aim the creation of beauty. With reference to the -theory and practice of the poetic art the piece called <i>Sleep and Poetry</i> -contains one passage which has become classically familiar to all readers. -Often as it has been quoted elsewhere, it must be quoted again here, as -indispensable to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> understanding of the literary atmosphere in which -Keats lived:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 5em;">“Is there so small a range</span><br /> -In the present strength of manhood, that the high<br /> -Imagination cannot freely fly<br /> -As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds,<br /> -Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds<br /> -Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?<br /> -From the clear space of ether, to the small<br /> -Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning<br /> -Of Jove’s large eyebrow, to the tender greening<br /> -Of April meadows? here her altar shone,<br /> -E’en in this isle; and who could paragon<br /> -The fervid choir that lifted up a noise<br /> -Of harmony, to where it aye will poise<br /> -Its mighty self of convoluting sound,<br /> -Huge as a planet, and like that roll round,<br /> -Eternally around a dizzy void?<br /> -Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy’d<br /> -With honours; nor had any other care<br /> -Than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair.<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism</span><br /> -Nurtured by foppery and barbarism<br /> -Made great Apollo blush for this his land.<br /> -Men were thought wise who could not understand<br /> -His glories; with a puling infant’s force<br /> -They sway’d about upon a rocking-horse,<br /> -And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul’d!<br /> -The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d<br /> -Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue<br /> -Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew<br /> -Of summer night collected still to make<br /> -The morning precious: Beauty was awake!<br /> -Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead<br /> -To things ye knew not of,—were closely wed<br /> -To musty laws lined out with wretched rule<br /> -And compass vile; so that ye taught a school<br /> -Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,<br /> -Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:<br /> -A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask<br /> -Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!<br /> -That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,<br /> -And did not know it,—no, they went about,<br /> -Holding a poor, decrepit standard out,<br /> -Mark’d with most flimsy mottoes, and in large<br /> -The name of one Boileau!<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 9em;">O ye whose charge</span><br /> -It is to hover round our pleasant hills!<br /> -Whose congregated majesty so fills<br /> -My boundly reverence, that I cannot trace<br /> -Your hallow’d names, in this unholy place,<br /> -So near those common folk; did not their shames<br /> -Affright you? Did our old lamenting Thames<br /> -Delight you? did ye never cluster round<br /> -Delicious Avon, with a mournful sound,<br /> -And weep? Or did ye wholly bid adieu<br /> -To regions where no more the laurel grew?<br /> -Or did ye stay to give a welcoming<br /> -To some lone spirits who could proudly sing<br /> -Their youth away, and die? ’Twas even so.<br /> -But let me think away those times of woe:<br /> -Now ’tis a fairer season; ye have breathed<br /> -Rich benedictions o’er us; ye have wreathed<br /> -Fresh garlands: for sweet music has been heard<br /> -In many places; some has been upstirr’d<br /> -From out its crystal dwelling in a lake,<br /> -By a swan’s ebon bill; from a thick brake,<br /> -Nested and quiet in a valley mild,<br /> -Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild<br /> -About the earth: happy are ye and glad.”</p> - -<p>Both the strength and the weakness of this are typically characteristic of -the time and of the man. The passage is likely to remain for posterity the -central expression of the spirit of literary emancipation then militant -and about to triumph in England. The two great elder captains of -revolution, Coleridge and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>Wordsworth, have both expounded their cause, in -prose, with much more maturity of thought and language; Coleridge in the -luminous retrospect of the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>, Wordsworth in the -austere contentions of his famous prefaces. But neither has left any -enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory -like the rhymes of this young untrained recruit in the cause of poetic -liberty and the return to nature. It is easy, indeed, to pick these verses -of Keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention -on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to -do? fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against -the light? and why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly -be other than strange. What sort of a verb is ‘I green, thou greenest?’ -Delight with liberty is very well, but liberty in a poet ought not to -include liberties with the parts of speech. Why should the hair of the -muses require ‘soothing’?—if it were their tempers it would be more -intelligible. And surely ‘foppery’ belongs to civilization and not to -‘barbarism’: and a standard-bearer may be decrepit, but not a standard, -and a standard flimsy, but not a motto. ‘Boundly reverence’: what is -boundly? And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that -attitude. Many minds not indifferent to literature were at that time, and -some will at all times be, incapable of any other. Such must naturally -turn to the work of the eighteenth century school, the school of tact and -urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think the only ‘blasphemy’ -was on the side of the youth who could call, or seem to call, the poet of -Belinda and the <i>Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot</i> fool and dolt. Byron, in his -controversy with Bowles a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> year or two later, adopted this mode of attack -effectively enough: his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its -most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, -for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have -in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as -distinct from that of taste and reason, however clearly we may see the -weak points of a passage like this, however much we may wish that taste -and reason had had more to do with it, yet we cannot but feel that Keats -touches truly the root of the matter; we cannot but admire the elastic -life and variety of his verse, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of -rhetoric, the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow -of his delight in the achievements and promise of the new age.</p> - -<p>His volume on its appearance by no means made the impression which his -friends had hoped for it. Hunt published a thoroughly judicious as well as -cordial criticism in the <i>Examiner</i>, and several of the provincial papers -noticed the book. Haydon wrote in his ranting vein: “I have read your -<i>Sleep and Poetry</i>—it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from -their occupations, and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that -<i>will</i> follow.” But people were in fact as far from being disturbed in -their occupations as possible. The attention of the reading public was for -the moment almost entirely absorbed by men of talent or of genius who -played with a more careless, and some of them with a more masterly touch -than Keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit; as Moore, -Scott, and Byron. In Keats’s volume every one could see the faults, while -the beauties appealed only to the poetically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> minded. It seems to have had -a moderate sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. The -poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, apparently -with little reason, to blame their friends the publishers for the failure. -On the 29th of April we find the brothers Ollier replying to a letter of -George Keats in dudgeon:—“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.” One of their customers, they go on -to say, had a few days ago hurt their feelings as men of business and of -taste by calling it “no better than a take in.”</p> - -<p>A fortnight before the date of this letter Keats had left London. Haydon -had been urging on him, not injudiciously, the importance of seclusion and -concentration of mind. We find him writing to Reynolds soon after the -publication of his volume:—“My brothers are anxious that I should go by -myself into the country; they have always been extremely fond of me, and -now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone -to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me -continually for a great good which I hope will follow: so I shall soon be -out of town.” And on the 14th of April he in fact started for the Isle of -Wight, intending to devote himself entirely to study, and to make -immediately a fresh start upon <i>Endymion</i>.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2> - -<div class="note"><p class="hang">Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury—Summer at -Hampstead—New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey—With Bailey at -Oxford—Return: Old Friends at Odds—Burford Bridge—Winter at -Hampstead—Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt—Poetical Activity—Spring at -Teignmouth—Studies and Anxieties—Marriage and Emigration of George -Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818.]</p></div> - - -<p>As soon as Keats reached the Isle of Wight, on April 16, 1817, he went to -see Shanklin and Carisbrooke, and after some hesitation between the two, -decided on a lodging at the latter place. The next day he writes to -Reynolds that he has spent the morning arranging the books and prints he -had brought with him, adding to the latter one of Shakspere which he had -found in the passage and which had particularly pleased him. He speaks -with enthusiasm of the beauties of Shanklin, but in a postscript written -the following day, mentions that he has been nervous from want of sleep, -and much haunted by the passage in <i>Lear</i>, ‘Do you not hear the -sea?’—adding without farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet -beginning—</p> - -<p class="poem">“It keeps eternal whisperings around<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gluts twice ten thousand caverns”—.</span></p> - -<p>In the same postscript Keats continues:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>“I find I cannot do without poetry—without eternal poetry; half the -day will not do—the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit has -made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not having -written anything of late: the Sonnet overleaf did me good; I slept the -better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad -again.... I shall forthwith begin my <i>Endymion</i>, which I hope I shall -have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses -in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle.”</p></div> - -<p>The Isle of Wight, however, Keats presently found did not suit him, and -Haydon’s prescription of solitude proved too trying. He fell into a kind -of fever of thought and sleeplessness, which he thought it wisest to try -and shake off by flight. Early in May we find him writing to Leigh Hunt -from Margate, where he had already stayed the year before, and explaining -the reasons of his change of abode. Later in the same letter, endeavouring -to measure his own powers against the magnitude of the task to which he -has committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we have seen -recurring once and again in his verses during the preceding year, the vein -of awed self-questioning, and tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest -and half in jest. The next day we find him writing a long and intimate, -very characteristic letter to Haydon, signed ‘your everlasting friend,’ -and showing the first signs of the growing influence which Haydon was -beginning to exercise over him in antagonism to the influence of Leigh -Hunt. Keats was quite shrewd enough to feel for himself after a little -while the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of depth and -strength, in the kind and charming nature of Hunt, and quite loyal enough -to value his excellences none the less, and hold him in grateful and -undiminished friendship. But Haydon, between whom and Hunt there was by -degrees arising a coolness,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> must needs have Keats see things as he saw -them. “I love you like my own brother,” insists he: “beware, for God’s -sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents -and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his -own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of -his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to -support injured by his own neglect of character.” There is a lugubrious -irony in these words, when we remember how Haydon, a self-deluder indeed, -came to realise at last the very fate he here prophesies for -another,—just when Hunt, the harassing and often sordid, ever brightly -borne troubles of his earlier life left behind him, was passing surrounded -by affection into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. But for a -time, under the pressure of Haydon’s masterful exhortations, we find Keats -inclining to take an exaggerated and slightly impatient view of the -foibles of his earlier friend.</p> - -<p>Among other interesting confessions to be found in Keats’s letter to -Haydon from Margate, is that of the fancy—almost the sense—which often -haunted him of dependence on the tutelary genius of Shakspere:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius -presiding over you. I have lately had the same thought, for things -which I do half at random, are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in -a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakspeare -this presider? When in the Isle of Wight I met with a Shakspeare in -the passage of the house at which I lodged. It comes nearer to my idea -of him than any I have seen; I was but there a week, yet the old woman -made me take it with me, though I went off in a hurry. Do you not -think this ominous of good?”</p></div> - -<p>Next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own nature, -describing it in words which the after issue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> of his life will keep but -too vividly and constantly before our minds:—“truth is, I have a horrid -Morbidity of Temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I -have no doubt, the greatest Enemy and stumbling-block I have to fear; I -may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.” Was it -that, in this seven-months’ child of a consumptive mother, some unhealth -of mind as well as body was congenital?—or was it that, along with what -seems his Celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he had inherited a -special share of that inward gloom which the reverses of their history -have stamped, according to some, on the mind of the Celtic race? We cannot -tell, but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever -creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there dwelt in Keats’s -bosom an almost equally busy and inventive spirit of self-torment.</p> - -<p>The fit of dejection which led to the remark above quoted had its -immediate cause in apprehensions of money difficulties conveyed to Keats -in a letter from his brother George. The trust funds of which Mr Abbey had -the disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed executed by -Mrs Jennings, amounted approximately to £8,000<a name='fna_26' id='fna_26' href='#f_26'><small>[26]</small></a>, of which the capital -was divisible among them on their coming of age, and the interest was to -be applied to their maintenance in the meantime. But the interest of -John’s share had been insufficient for his professional and other expenses -during his term of medical study at Edmonton and London, and much of his -capital had been anticipated to meet them; presumably in the form of loans -raised on the security of his expectant share. Similar advances had also -been for some time necessary to the invalid Tom for his support, and -latterly—since he left the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> employment of Mr Abbey—to George as well. It -is clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances were made both -wastefully and grudgingly. It is further plain that the brothers were very -insufficiently informed of the state of their affairs. In the meantime -John Keats was already beginning to discount his expectations from -literature. Before or about the time of his rupture with the Olliers, he -had made the acquaintance of those excellent men, Messrs Taylor and -Hessey, who were shortly, as publishers of the <i>London Magazine</i>, to -gather about them on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors -comprising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. With them, -especially with Mr Taylor, who was himself a student and writer of -independent, somewhat eccentric ability and research, Keats’s relations -were excellent from first to last, generous on their part, and -affectionate and confidential on his. He had made arrangements with them, -apparently before leaving London, for the eventual publication of -<i>Endymion</i>, and from Margate we find him acknowledging a first payment -received in advance. Now and again afterwards he turns to the same friends -for help at a pinch, adding once, “I am sure you are confident of my -responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;” nor -did they at any time belie his expectation.</p> - -<p>From Margate, where he had already made good progress with <i>Endymion</i>, -Keats went with his brother Tom to spend some time at Canterbury. Thence -they moved early in the summer to lodgings kept by a Mr and Mrs Bentley in -Well Walk, Hampstead, where the three brothers had decided to take up -their abode together. Here he continued through the summer to work -steadily at <i>Endymion</i>, being now well advanced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> with the second book; and -some of his friends, as Haydon, Cowden Clarke, and Severn, remembered all -their lives afterwards the occasions when they walked with him on the -heath, while he repeated to them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting -tone, the newly-written passages which best pleased him. From his poetical -absorption and Elysian dreams they were accustomed to see him at a touch -come back to daily life; sometimes to sympathize heart and soul with their -affairs, sometimes in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns, (it was a -punning age, and the Keats’s were a very punning family), sometimes with a -sudden flash of his old schoolboy pugnacity and fierceness of righteous -indignation. To this summer or the following winter, it is not quite -certain which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in stand-up -fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had found tormenting a cat (a -‘ruffian in livery’ according to one account, but the butcher version is -the best attested).</p> - -<p>For the rest, the choice of Hampstead as a place of residence had much to -recommend it to Keats: the freshness of the air for the benefit of the -invalid Tom: for his own walks and meditations those beauties of heath, -field, and wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habitations, -which his imagination could transmute at will into the landscapes of -Arcadia, or into those, ‘with high romances blent,’ of an earlier England -or of fable-land. For society there was the convenient proximity to, and -yet seclusion from, London, together with the immediate neighbourhood of -one or two intimate friends. Among these, Keats frequented as familiarly -as ever the cottage in the Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt was still -living—a kind of self-appointed poet-laureate of Hampstead, the features -of which he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets, and now in the -cheerful singsong of his familiar <i>Epistles</i>:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“And yet how can I touch, and not linger awhile<br /> -On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile?<br /> -On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades,<br /> -Dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley’d shades,<br /> -With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees<br /> -The hills up above him with roofs in the trees.”</p> - -<p>Several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed to Keats -himself, some translations from the Greek, and a not ungraceful -mythological poem, the <i>Nymphs</i>, were published early in the following -year by Leigh Hunt in a volume called <i>Foliage</i>, which helped to draw down -on him and his friends the lash of Tory criticism.</p> - -<p>Near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction from Hunt’s cottage, -lived two new friends of Keats who had been introduced to him by Reynolds, -and with whom he was soon to become extremely intimate. These were Charles -Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown (or plain Charles Brown as he -at this time styled himself). Dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by -birth belonging to a younger branch of the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle, by -profession a clerk in the Navy Pay office, and by opinions at this time a -firm disciple of Godwin. He soon gave himself up altogether to literary -and antiquarian studies, and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the -most accomplished and influential of English critics and journalists, and -for many years editor and chief owner of the <i>Athenæum</i>. No two men could -well be more unlike in mind than Dilke and Keats: Dilke positive, bent on -certainty, and unable, as Keats says, “to feel he has a personal identity -unless he has made up his mind about everything:” while Keats on his part -held that “the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up -one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all -thoughts.” Nevertheless the two took to each other and became fast -friends. Dilke had married young, and built himself, a year or two before -Keats knew him, a modest semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near -the lower end of Hampstead Heath, at the bottom of what is now John -Street; the other part of the same block being built and inhabited by his -friend Charles Brown. This Brown was the son of a Scotch stockbroker -living in Lambeth. He was born in 1786, and while almost a boy went out to -join one of his brothers in a merchant’s business at St Petersburg; but -the business failing, he returned to England in 1808, and lived as he -could for the next few years, until the death of another brother put him -in possession of a small competency. He had a taste, and some degree of -talent for literature, and held strongly Radical opinions. In 1810 he -wrote an opera on a Russian subject, called <i>Narensky</i>, which was brought -out at the Lyceum with Braham in the principal part; and at intervals -during the next twenty years many criticisms, tales, and translations from -the Italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals edited by Leigh -Hunt. When Keats first knew him, Brown was a young man already of somewhat -middle-aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled,—a kindly companion, -and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good measure both of obstinacy and -caution lying in reserve, <i>more Scotico</i>, under his pleasant and convivial -outside. It is clear by his relations with Keats that his heart was warm, -and that when once attached, he was capable not only of appreciation but -of devotion. After the poet’s death Brown went to Italy, and became the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> -friend of Trelawney, whom he helped with the composition of the -<i>Adventures of a Younger Son</i>, and of Landor, at whose villa near Florence -Lord Houghton first met him in 1832. Two years later he returned to -England, and settled at Plymouth, where he continued to occupy himself -with literature and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, an -essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobiographical poems of -Shakspere. Thoughts of Keats, and a wish to be his biographer, never left -him, until in 1841 he resolved suddenly to emigrate to New Zealand, and -departed leaving his materials in Lord Houghton’s hands. A year afterwards -he died of apoplexy at the settlement of New Plymouth, now called -Taranaki<a name='fna_27' id='fna_27' href='#f_27'><small>[27]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>Yet another friend of Reynolds who in these months attached himself with a -warm affection to Keats was Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford undergraduate -reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. Bailey was a -great lover of books, devoted especially to Milton among past and to -Wordsworth among present poets. For his earnestness and integrity of -character Keats conceived a strong respect, and a hearty liking for his -person, and much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in his -mind and cogitations, was called out in the intercourse that ensued -between them. In the course of this summer, 1817, Keats had been invited -by Shelley to stay with him at Great Marlow, and Hunt, ever anxious that -the two young poets should be friends,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> pressed him strongly to accept the -invitation. It is said by Medwin, but the statement is not confirmed by -other evidence, that Shelley and Keats had set about their respective -‘summer tasks,’ the composition of <i>Laon and Cythna</i> and of <i>Endymion</i>, by -mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Keats at any rate -declined his brother poet’s invitation, in order, as he said, that he -might have his own unfettered scope. Later in the same summer, while his -brothers were away on a trip to Paris, he accepted an invitation of Bailey -to come to Oxford, and stayed there during the last five or six weeks of -the Long Vacation. Here he wrote the third book of <i>Endymion</i>, working -steadily every morning, and composing with great facility his regular -average of fifty lines a day. The afternoons they would spend in walking -or boating on the Isis, and Bailey has feelingly recorded the pleasantness -of their days, and of their discussions on life, literature, and the -mysteries of things. He tells of the sweetness of Keats’s temper and charm -of his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with which the hot -young liberal and free-thinker would listen to his host’s exposition of -his own orthodox convictions: describes his enthusiasm in quoting -Chatterton and in dwelling on passages of Wordsworth’s poetry, -particularly from the <i>Tintern Abbey</i> and the <i>Ode on Immortality</i>: and -recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and other -technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling looks and low-voiced -recitations, his vividness of inner life, and intensity of quiet enjoyment -during their field and river rambles and excursions<a name='fna_28' id='fna_28' href='#f_28'><small>[28]</small></a>. One special -occasion of pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to -Stratford-on-Avon.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> From Oxford are some of the letters written by Keats -in his happiest vein; to Reynolds and his sister Miss Jane Reynolds, -afterwards Mrs Tom Hood; to Haydon; and to his young sister Frances Mary, -or Fanny as she was always called (now Mrs Llanos). George Keats, writing -to this sister after John’s death, speaks of the times “when we lived with -our grandmother at Edmonton, and John, Tom, and myself were always -devising plans to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us -to the others.” Since those times Keats had seen little of her, Mr Abbey -having put her to a boarding-school before her grandmother’s death, and -afterwards taken her into his own house at Walthamstow, where the visits -of her poet brother were not encouraged. “He often,” writes Bailey, “spoke -to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great -delicacy and tenderness of affection:” and from this time forward we find -him maintaining with her a correspondence which shows his character in its -most attractive light. He bids her keep all his letters and he will keep -hers—“and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good -bundle—which hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God -knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on -times past—that now are to come.” He tells her about Oxford and about his -work, and gives her a sketch of the story of <i>Endymion</i>—“but I daresay -you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have come down to -us from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece.”</p> - -<p>Early in October Keats returned to Hampstead, whence he writes to Bailey -noticing with natural indignation the ruffianly first article of the -<i>Cockney School</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> series, which had just appeared in <i>Blackwood’s -Magazine</i> for that month. In this the special object of attack was Leigh -Hunt, but there were allusions to Keats which seemed to indicate that his -own turn was coming. What made him more seriously uneasy were signs of -discord springing up among his friends, and of attempts on the part of -some of them to set him against others. Haydon had now given up his studio -in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove; and Hunt, having left -the Vale of Health, was living close by him at a lodging in the same -street. “I know nothing of anything in this part of the world,” writes -Keats: “everybody seems at loggerheads.” And he goes on to say how Hunt -and Haydon are on uncomfortable terms, and “live, <i>pour ainsi dire</i>, -jealous neighbours. Haydon says to me, ‘Keats, don’t show your lines to -Hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you’—so it appears -Hunt wishes it to be thought.” With more accounts of warnings he had -received from common friends that Hunt was not feeling or speaking -cordially about <i>Endymion</i>. “Now is not all this a most paltry thing to -think about?... This is, to be sure, but the vexation of a day, nor would -I say so much about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and -reputation at heart<a name='fna_29' id='fna_29' href='#f_29'><small>[29]</small></a>.” When three months later Keats showed Hunt the -first book of his poem in proof, the latter found many faults. It is clear -he was to some extent honestly disappointed in the work itself. He may -also have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully into -confidence during its composition; and what he said to others was probably -due partly to such chagrin, partly to nervousness on behalf of his -friend’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> reputation: for of double-facedness or insincerity in friendship -we know by a hundred evidences that Hunt was incapable. Keats, however, -after what he had heard, was by no means without excuse when he wrote to -his brothers concerning Hunt,—not unkindly, or making much of the -matter,—“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. But who’s afraid?” Keats was not the man to let this -kind of thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend: and writing -about the same time to Bailey, still concerning the dissensions in the -circle, he expounds the practical philosophy of friendship with truly -admirable good sense and feeling:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard -of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting -for ever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is -unfortunate: men should bear with each other; there lives not the man -who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The -best of men have but a portion of good in them—a kind of spiritual -yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence—by -which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with -circumstance. 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. Before I felt -interested in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well-read in their -faults; yet knowing them both I have been cementing gradually with -both. I have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite; -and to both must I of necessity cling, supported always by the hope -that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully -in their esteem, I may be able to bring them together. This time must -come, because they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> have both hearts; and they will recollect the best -parts of each other when this gust is overblown.”</p></div> - -<p>Keats had in the meantime been away on another autumn excursion into the -country: this time to Burford Bridge near Dorking. Here he passed -pleasantly the latter part of November, much absorbed in the study of -Shakspere’s minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of finishing -<i>Endymion</i>. He had thus all but succeeded in carrying out the hope which -he had expressed in the opening passage of the poem:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Many and many a verse I hope to write,<br /> -Before the daisies, vermeil rimm’d and white,<br /> -Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees<br /> -Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,<br /> -I must be near the middle of my story.<br /> -O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,<br /> -See it half finished; but let Autumn bold,<br /> -With universal tinge of sober gold,<br /> -Be all about me when I make an end.”</p> - -<p>Returning to Hampstead, Keats spent the first part of the winter in -comparative rest from literary work. His chief occupation was in revising -and seeing <i>Endymion</i> through the press, with much help from the -publisher, Mr Taylor; varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism, -and as the spring began, by the composition of a number of minor -incidental poems. In December he lost the companionship of his brothers, -who went to winter in Devonshire for the sake of Tom’s health. But in -other company he was at this time mixing freely. The convivial gatherings -of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun high, the -discussions on art and literature boisterous, and varied with a moderate, -evidently never a very serious,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> amount of card-playing, drinking, and -dissipation. From these gatherings Keats was indispensable, and more than -welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, Messrs Taylor -and Hessey, men as strict in conduct and opinion as they were -good-hearted. His social relations began, indeed, in the course of this -winter to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought -consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Horace Smith in -company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:—“They -only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to -enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one -feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know -fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, -in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low -company. ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours’, said I to -myself.” Men of ardent and deep natures, whether absorbed in the realities -of experience, or in the ideals of art and imagination, are apt to be -affected in this way by the conventional social sparkle which is only -struck from and only illuminates the surface. Hear, on the other hand, -with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius for genius, Keats -writes after seeing the great tragedian last mentioned interpret the inner -and true passions of the soul:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean ... his -tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them -honeyless! There is an indescribable <i>gusto</i> in his voice, by which we -feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while -speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello, ‘Put up your bright -swords, for the dew will rust them,’ we feel that his throat had -commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> -speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of -‘blood! blood! blood!’ is direful and slaughterous to the last degree; -the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, -making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild -dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can -distinctly hear it ‘gorging and growling o’er carcase and limb.’ In -Richard, ‘Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!’ came -from him, as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns.”</p></div> - -<p>It was in the Christmas weeks of 1817-18 that Keats undertook the office -of theatrical critic for the <i>Champion</i> newspaper in place of Reynolds, -who was away at Exeter. Early in January he writes to his brothers of the -pleasure he has had in seeing their sister, who had been brought to London -for the Christmas holidays; and tells them how he has called on and been -asked to dine by Wordsworth, whom he had met on the 28th of December at a -supper given by Haydon. This is the famous Sunday supper, or ‘immortal -dinner’ as Haydon calls it, which is described at length in one of the -most characteristic passages of the painter’s <i>Autobiography</i>. Besides -Wordsworth and Keats and the host, there were present Charles Lamb and -Monkhouse. “Wordsworth’s fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, -Keats’s eager inspired look, Lamb’s quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so -speeded the stream of conversation,” says Haydon, “that I never passed a -more delightful time.” Later in the evening came in Ritchie the African -traveller, just about to start on the journey to Fezzan on which he died, -besides a self-invited guest in the person of one Kingston, Comptroller of -Stamps, a foolish good-natured gentleman, recommended only by his - -admiration for Wordsworth. Presently Lamb<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> getting fuddled, lost patience -with the platitudes of Mr Kingston, and began making fun of him, with -pranks and personalities which to Haydon appeared hugely funny, but which -Keats in his letter to his brothers mentions with less relish, saying, -“Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston, proceeding so far as to take the -candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft -fellow he was<a name='fna_30' id='fna_30' href='#f_30'><small>[30]</small></a>.” Keats saw Wordsworth often in the next few weeks after -their introduction at Haydon’s, but has left us no personal impressions of -the elder poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one day -preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest clothes, with his -aforesaid unlucky admirer Mr Comptroller Kingston. We know from other -sources that he was once persuaded to recite to Wordsworth the Hymn to Pan -from <i>Endymion</i>. “A pretty piece of Paganism,” remarked Wordsworth, -according to his usual encouraging way with a brother poet; and Keats was -thought to have winced under the frigidity. Independently of their -personal relations, the letters of Keats show that Wordsworth’s poetry -continued to be much in his thoughts throughout these months; what he has -to say of it varying according to the frame of mind in which he writes. In -the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days again insists, -that there are three things to rejoice at in the present age, “The -<i>Excursion</i>, Haydon’s Pictures, and Hazlitt’s depth of Taste.” This -mention of the name of Hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence -which somewhat powerfully affected Keats at this time. On the liberal side -in politics and criticism<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> there was no more effective or more uncertain -free lance than that eloquent and splenetic writer, with his rich, -singular, contradictory gifts, his intellect equally acute and fervid, his -temperament both enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and -incisive. The reader acquainted with Hazlitt’s manner will easily -recognize its influence on Keats in the fragment of stage criticism above -quoted. Hazlitt was at this time delivering his course of lectures on the -English poets at the Surrey Institution, and Keats was among his regular -attendants. With Hazlitt personally, as with Lamb, his intercourse at -Haydon’s and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and friendly, but not -intimate: and Haydon complains that it was only after the death of Keats -that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius.</p> - -<p>Of Haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we see by the words -above quoted that Keats continued to think as highly as ever. He had, as -Severn assures us, a keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting -and music. Cowden Clarke’s piano-playing had been a delight to him at -school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind’s eye -visions of pictures:—“when a schoolboy the abstract idea I had of an -heroic painting was what I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways, -large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence—somewhat like the -feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning on his -crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving -with the sea.” In Haydon’s pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends -and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt -to see, not so much the actual performance, as the idea he had -pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend’s intentions<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> and -enthusiasm. At this time Haydon, who had already made several drawings of -Keats’s head in order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering -Jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, “to be engraved,” -writes Keats, “in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying, -at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and -that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it.” -Both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part -of the sublime Haydon; who failed, however, to carry out his promise. “My -neglect,” said Haydon long afterwards, “really gave him a pang, as it now -does me.”</p> - -<p>With Hunt also Keats’s intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds -his intimacy grew daily closer. Both of these friendships had a -stimulating influence on his poetic powers. “The Wednesday before last -Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile,” he tells his -brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. “I have been writing, at -intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read -them over to you.” With the help of Keats’s manuscripts or of the -transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the -actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was -written the humorous sonnet on Mrs Reynolds’s cat; on the 21st, after -seeing in Leigh Hunt’s possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton’s, -the address to that poet beginning ‘Chief of organic numbers!’—and on the -22nd the sonnet, ‘O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,’ in which -Keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his Spenser, in order -to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of <i>Lear</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> On -the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to Apollo beginning -‘Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,’ and in the same letter the sonnet -beginning ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be,’ which he calls his -last. On the 3rd of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin Hood, -suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest; on the 4th, -the sonnet beginning ‘Time’s sea has been five years at its slow ebb,’ in -which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love-fancy, -and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written at Hunt’s in -competition with that friend and with Shelley; on the 5th, another sonnet -postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt’s -to compose something in honour, or in emulation of Spenser; and on the -8th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest -against one of Reynolds. About the same time Keats agreed with Reynolds -that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and -publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with -<i>Isabella</i> or <i>the Pot of Basil</i>. A little later in this so prolific month -of February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, -and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the -influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in -a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, -translating the thrush’s music into some blank-verse lines of a singular -and haunting melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find him in -correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to <i>Endymion</i>; and soon -afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing -to flit. His brother George, who had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> taking care of Tom at -Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a -scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom’s health having made a -momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and -determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and -stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather—the -soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing -themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, -throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more -than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the -scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of objurgations -against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible, -in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents -his father to have been a Devonshire man:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a -splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod -county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of ’em; the -primroses are out,—but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep -colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them.”... “I -fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, -all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat -off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the -honour of Britain, that Julius Caesar did not first land in this -county: A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct -object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would -dispossess him<a name='fna_31' id='fna_31' href='#f_31'><small>[31]</small></a>.”</p></div> - -<p>Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid -brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during -these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> of -<i>Endymion</i>. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had -begun at Hampstead, the whole of <i>Isabella</i>, the first of his longer poems -written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time -he was reading and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With -the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been -attracted by <i>Paradise Lost</i>, until first Severn, and then more -energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he -now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of -genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its -power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey -and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. It -was in all senses manifestly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power, -and in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries of existence -and of suffering, and the ‘deeps of good and evil,’ were beginning for the -first time to press habitually on his thoughts. In that beautiful and -interesting letter to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human -life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he -thus describes:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the -Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light -and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of -delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this -breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s -vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one’s nerves -that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and -oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually -darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set -open—but all dark—all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> leading to dark passages. We see not the -balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, <i>we</i> are in that state, we -feel the ‘Burden of the Mystery.’”</p></div> - -<p>A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed -<i>Epistles</i>, Keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he -sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea’s edge:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 7em;">“twas a quiet eve,</span><br /> -The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave<br /> -An untumultuous fringe of silver foam<br /> -Along the flat brown sand; I was at home<br /> -And should have been most happy,—but I saw<br /> -Too far into the sea, where every maw<br /> -The greater or the less feeds evermore:—<br /> -But I saw too distinct into the core<br /> -Of an eternal fierce destruction,<br /> -And so from happiness I far was gone.<br /> -Still am I sick of it, and tho’ to-day,<br /> -I’ve gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay<br /> -Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,<br /> -Still do I that most fierce destruction see,—<br /> -The Shark at savage prey,—the Hawk at pounce,—<br /> -The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,<br /> -Ravening a worm,—Away, ye horrid moods!<br /> -Moods of one’s mind!”—</p> - -<p>In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his “Why should -woman suffer?”—“Aye, why should she?” writes Keats: “‘By heavens, I’d -coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas.’ These things are, and -he who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal -this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of -thought.” And again, “were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal -coronation—on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I -should not by rights<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary -spirit that would do so.”</p> - -<p>Not the general tribulations of the race only, but particular private -anxieties, were pressing in these days on Keats’s thoughts. The shadow of -illness, though it had hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly -not only over his brother but his best friends. He speaks of it in a tone -of courage and gaiety which his real apprehensions, we can feel, belie. -“Banish money”—he had written in Falstaff’s vein, at starting for the -Isle of Wight a year ago—“Banish sofas—Banish wine—Banish music; but -right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health—Banish Health and -banish all the world.” Writing now from Teignmouth to Reynolds, who was -down during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains laughingly, but -with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, how he can go nowhere but Sickness -is of the company, and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or -he must cut them.</p> - -<p>Nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was the pain of a family -break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his mind to emigrate to -America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get -possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his own -fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George’s part was the desire to -be in a position as quickly as possible to help, or if need be support, -his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, -Miss Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be -married and sail early in the summer. Keats came up from Teignmouth in May -to see the last of his brother, and he and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> Tom settled again in their old -lodgings in Well Walk. He had a warm affection and regard for his new -sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted for George’s sake. But at the -same time he felt life and its prospects overcast. He writes to Bailey, -after his outburst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone -now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death—without placing -his ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. And after -recounting his causes of depression, he recovers himself, and -concludes:—“Life must be undergone; and I certainly derive some -consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it -ceases.”</p> - -<p>With reference to his poem then just appearing, and the year’s work which -it represented, Keats was under no illusions whatever. From an early -period in its composition he had fully realised its imperfections, and had -written: “My ideas of it are very low, and I would write the subject -thoroughly again, but I am tired of it, and think the time would be better -spent in writing a new romance, which I have in my eye for next summer. -Rome was not built in a day, and all the good I expect from my employment -this summer is the fruit of experience which I hope to gather in my next -poem.” The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most -natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so -in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his -strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend -might judge. He shows himself perfectly aware that in writing <i>Endymion</i> -he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than -producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> when the time comes -to write a preface to the poem, after a first attempt lacking reticence -and simplicity, and abandoned at the advice of Reynolds, he in the second -quietly and beautifully says of his own work all that can justly be said -in its dispraise. He warns the reader to expect “great inexperience, -immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a -deed accomplished,” and adds most unboastfully:—“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.”</p> - -<p>The apprehensions expressed in these words have not been fulfilled; and -<i>Endymion</i>, so far from having died away, lives to illustrate the maxim -conveyed in its own now proverbial opening line. Immature as the poem -truly is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as are the sweets -which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing of far too much beauty, -or at least of too many beauties, to perish. Every reader must take -pleasure in some of its single passages and episodes, while to the student -of the poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its weakness -as its strength.</p> - - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2> - -<p class="center"><i>Endymion.</i></p> - - -<p>In the old Grecian world, the myth of Endymion and Selene was one deeply -rooted in various shapes in the popular traditions both of Elis in the -Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The -central feature of the tale, as originally sung by Sappho, was the nightly -descent of the goddess to kiss her lover where he lay spell-bound, by the -grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. -The poem of Sappho is lost, and the story is not told at length in any of -our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the -poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and of the late -prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias. Of such ancient -sources Keats of course knew only what he found in his classical -dictionaries. But references to the tale, as every one knows, form part of -the stock repertory of classical allusion in modern literature: and -several modern writers before Keats had attempted to handle the subject at -length. In his own special range of Elizabethan reading, he was probably -acquainted with Lyly’s court comedy of <i>Endimion</i>, in prose, which had -been edited, as it happened, by his friend Dilke a few years before: but -in it he would have found nothing to his purpose. On the other hand I -think he certainly took hints from the <i>Man in the Moon</i> of Michael -Drayton. In this piece Drayton takes hold of two post-classical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> notions -concerning the Endymion myth, both in the first instance derived from -Lucian,—one that which identifies its hero with the visible ‘man in the -moon’ of popular fancy,—the other that which rationalises his story, and -explains him away as a personification or mythical representative of early -astronomy. These two distinct notions Drayton weaves together into a short -tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into the mouth of a shepherd at a -feast of Pan. Like most of his writings, the <i>Man in the Moon</i> has strong -gleams of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile and pedantic. -Critics, so far as I know, have overlooked Keats’s debt to it: but even -granting that he may well have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the -notion of introducing his story with a festival in honour of Pan—do not, -at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain evidently the hint for -the wanderings on which Keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity -affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air<a name='fna_32' id='fna_32' href='#f_32'><small>[32]</small></a>?—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 7em;">“Endymion now forsakes</span><br /> -All the delights that shepherds do prefer,<br /> -And sets his mind so generally on her<br /> -That, all neglected, to the groves and springs<br /> -He follows Phœbe, that him safely brings<br /> -(As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers,<br /> -Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers<br /> -The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke.<br /> -Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back<br /> -Among the blue Nereides: and when<br /> -Weary of waters goddess-like again<br /> -She the high mountains actively assays,<br /> -And there amongst the light Oriades,<br /> -That ride the swift roes, Phœbe doth resort:<br /> -Sometime amongst those that with them comport<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent;<br /> -And there she stays not, but incontinent<br /> -Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw,<br /> -And with Endymion pleased that she saw,<br /> -Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye<br /> -Stripping the winds——”</p> - -<p>Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose -inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely -kindred to his own—Fletcher in the <i>Faithful Shepherdess</i> makes Chloe -tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus—</p> - -<p class="poem">“How the pale Phœbe, hunting in a grove,<br /> -First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes<br /> -She took eternal fire that never dies;<br /> -How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,<br /> -His temples bound with poppy, to the steep<br /> -Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,<br /> -Gilding the mountain with her brother’s light,<br /> -To kiss her sweetest.”</p> - -<p>The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have -seen already, in Keats’s thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old -pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his -natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but -deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the -story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is -for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human -soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow -forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love<a name='fna_33' id='fna_33' href='#f_33'><small>[33]</small></a>.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>The manner in which Keats set about relating the Greek story, as he had -thus conceived it, was as far from being a Greek or ‘classical’ manner as -possible. He indeed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid -sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature: and he loved to -follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete -shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions -for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to -conjure up visions of the classic past, or images from classic fable, he -was able to do so often magically well. To this extent Keats may justly be -called, as he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The -rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in -all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to -select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential, -and paring away their material to the quick that the main masses might -stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously -clear—these instincts had neither been implanted in Keats by nature, nor -brought home to him by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his -gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially ‘romantic,’ Gothic, English. -A general characteristic of his favourite Elizabethan poetry is its -prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it -takes the powers of a Shakspere to keep the vital play of character and -passion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the -quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he wrote -<i>Endymion</i>, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constituted an -essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. “I think poetry,” he says, -“should surprise by a fine excess:” and with reference<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> to his own poem -during its progress, “it will be a test, a trial 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.”</p> - -<p>The ‘one bare circumstance’ of the story was in the result expanded -through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course -of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate, -amplifying every incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion -into a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central Endymion myth -whatever others pleased him best, as those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of -Cybele, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of -Neptune, and of Bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations, -and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and aërial gulfs and -over the floor of ocean. The scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not -merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental -bewilderment,—an Arabian Nights jugglery with space and time,—in the -vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. Such organic plan as -the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main -divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by -keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric -thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. The first -book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the -predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a -festival of his people held in honour of the god Pan, and is afterwards -induced by his sister Peona<a name='fna_34' id='fna_34' href='#f_34'><small>[34]</small></a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> to confide to her the secret of the -passion which consumes him. The account of the feast of Pan contains -passages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely -to be surpassed in poetry:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 6em;">“rain-scented eglantine</span><br /> -Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;<br /> -The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run<br /> -To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;<br /> -Man’s voice was on the mountains; and the mass<br /> -Of nature’s lives and wonders puls’d tenfold,<br /> -To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.”</p> - -<p>What can be more fresh and stirring?—what happier in rhythmical -movement?—or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which -Keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work, -leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and -forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry -alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined -rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the -earth? Not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same -episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn -to Pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the Greek myth -to Greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are -foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. Keats having got -from Drayton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of -Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from -Chapman’s Homer’s hymn, from the sacrifice to Pan in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> Browne’s -<i>Britannia’s Pastorals</i><a name='fna_35' id='fna_35' href='#f_35'><small>[35]</small></a>, and from the hymns in Ben Jonson’s masque, -<i>Pan’s Anniversary</i>: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and -refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an -imagination fed from the living sources of nature:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang<br /> -From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth<br /> -Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death<br /> -Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;<br /> -Who lov’st to see the hamadryads dress<br /> -Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;<br /> -And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken<br /> -The dreary melody of bedded reeds—<br /> -In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds<br /> -The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;<br /> -Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth<br /> -Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou now,<br /> -By thy love’s milky brow!<br /> -By all the trembling mazes that she ran,<br /> -Hear us, great Pan!<br /> -<strong><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></strong><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears,</span><br /> -While ever and anon to his shorn peers<br /> -A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn,<br /> -When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn<br /> -Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms,<br /> -To keep off mildews, and all weather harms:<br /> -Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,<br /> -That come a-swooning over hollow grounds,<br /> -And wither drearily on barren moors:<br /> -Dread opener of the mysterious doors<br /> -Leading to universal knowledge—see,<br /> -Great son of Dryope,<br /> -The many that are come to pay their vows<br /> -With leaves about their brows!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona he tells her the story -of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has -experienced or dreamed. In Keats’s conception of his youthful heroes there -is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical -softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman -them quite: as indeed a helpless and enslaved submission of all the -faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of -his own nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it: but the -consequence is that the love-passages of <i>Endymion</i>, notwithstanding the -halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can -scarcely be read with pleasure. On the other hand, in matters of -subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the -signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance -wherein Peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 5em;">“Is this the cause?</span><br /> -This all? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas!<br /> -That one who through this middle earth should pass<br /> -Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave<br /> -His name upon the harp-string, should achieve<br /> -No higher bard than simple maidenhood,<br /> -Sighing alone, and fearfully,—how the blood<br /> -Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray<br /> -He knew not where; and how he would say, <i>Nay</i>,<br /> -If any said ’twas love: and yet ’twas love;<br /> -What could it be but love? How a ring-dove<br /> -Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path;<br /> -And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe<br /> -The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses.<br /> -And then the ballad of his sad life closes<br /> -With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led -by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless -region of adventure. In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions -of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in -mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings -Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. A Naiad, in the -disguise of a butterfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals -herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to -descend ‘Into the sparry hollows of the world’: which done, he gropes his -way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-Grecian magnificence, -where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and whither -Venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. Thence, urged -by the haunting passion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and -precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through all -this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich -first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and -inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry -admirably felt and expressed:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“He sinks adown a solitary glen,<br /> -Where there was never sound of mortal men,<br /> -Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences<br /> -Melting to silence, when upon the breeze<br /> -Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet<br /> -To cheer itself to Delphi:”—</p> - -<p>or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below,<br /> -Came mother Cybele—alone—alone—<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown<br /> -About her majesty, and front death-pale,<br /> -With turrets crowned.”</p> - -<p>After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the -bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle’s back down an unfathomable -descent, and alighting, presently finds a ‘jasmine bower,’ whither his -celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the -streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled -flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to -his goddess in their behalf, and then—</p> - -<p class="poem">“He turn’d—there was a whelming sound—he stept,<br /> -There was a cooler light; and so he kept<br /> -Towards it by a sandy path, and lo!<br /> -More suddenly than doth a moment go,<br /> -The visions of the earth were gone and fled—<br /> -He saw the giant sea above his head.”</p> - -<p>Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and -adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of -Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third -book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with -great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by -Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her -rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance -resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by -Endymion’s help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful -fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero’s -submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> -“He saw far in the green concave of the sea<br /> -An old man sitting calm and peacefully.<br /> -Upon a weeded rock this old man sat,<br /> -And his white hair was awful, and a mat<br /> -Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet”—</p> - -<p>—from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and -occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home his version of the myth with -strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. No picture can well -be more vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims: -and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected -enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. In the same book the -description of the sunk treasures cumbering the ocean-floor challenges -comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage in -Shakspere’s <i>Richard III.</i> In the halls of Neptune Endymion again meets -Venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore. -Thence Nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in -spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in starlight on the -dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, he has allowed himself to be -diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of -others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last -nearer to fulfilment.</p> - -<p>It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really in his mind a -meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that -the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is -accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. And in his fourth -book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly -to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. Returning, in that -book, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> upper air, Endymion before long half forgets his goddess for the -charms of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him -while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come -wandering in the train of Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian -maiden proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise. -But it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is -conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents, -descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, with his -infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave of -Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality -and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape, -make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially -intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul’s experience in -pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal—such would seem -the argument—once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a -time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by -that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude -will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which -has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,—that it is -after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. What chiefly -or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric -poetry which Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian maiden -when she tells her story. His later and more famous lyrics, though they -are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do -not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of -imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> of -the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the -best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine’s of the immemorial -romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps -partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful -associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild -wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, -yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a -‘roundelay,’—a form which it only so far resembles that its opening -measures are repeated at the close. It begins with a tender invocation to -sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of -a deserted maidenhood beside Indian streams; till suddenly, with another -change, comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on his march; next -follows the detailed picture of the god and of his rout, suggested in part -by the famous Titian at the National Gallery; and then, arranged as if for -music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, and their -choral answers:</p> - -<p class="poem">“‘Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!<br /> -So many, and so many, and such glee?<br /> -Why have ye left your bowers desolate,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Your lutes, and gentler fate?’</span><br /> -‘We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">A conquering!</span><br /> -Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide,<br /> -We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:—<br /> -Come hither, lady fair, and joined be<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">To our wild minstrelsy!’</span><br /> -<br /> -‘Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">So many, and so many, and such glee?</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?’—</span><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span><br /> -‘For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;<br /> -For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And cold mushrooms;</span><br /> -For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth;<br /> -Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!—<br /> -Come hither, lady fair, and joined be<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">To our mad minstrelsy!’”</span></p> - -<p>The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and -finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with -an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">“Come then, sorrow!</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Sweetest sorrow!</span><br /> -Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">I thought to leave thee,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">And deceive thee,</span><br /> -But now of all the world I love thee best.<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">There is not one,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No, no, not one</span><br /> -But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Thou art her mother</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">And her brother,</span><br /> -Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade.”</p> - -<p>The high-water-mark of poetry in <i>Endymion</i> is thus reached in the two -lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with -justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, -that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good -a test as can be obtained of his having in him “a native relish for -poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm.” In the main -body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a -critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable -truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, -mark<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry -breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read -farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly -tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by -Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Ææa’s isle was wondering at the moon,”</p> - -<p>standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed -narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme -and expression—</p> - -<p class="poem">“I look’d—’twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe!<br /> -O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?”</p> - -<p>is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and -the heart:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 7em;">“Cold, O cold indeed</span><br /> -Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed<br /> -The sea-swell took her hair.”</p> - -<p>One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has -shaken off—his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar -sentimental chirp of Hunt’s. But that tendency which he by nature shared -with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined -pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And -to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined -others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of -English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its -waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in -its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He -outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let Invention ramble<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> and loiter -uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her -heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds -there: and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: -and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to -grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:—</p> - -<p class="poem"> -<span style="margin-left: 7em;">“—a nymph of Dian’s</span><br /> -Wearing a coronal of tender scions”:—<br /> -<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 5em;">“Does yonder thrush,</span><br /> -Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush<br /> -About the dewy forest, whisper tales?—<br /> -Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails<br /> -Will slime the rose to-night.”</p> - -<p>Chapman especially among Keats’s masters had this trick of letting thought -follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman—to say nothing -of Chatterton—had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash -dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a -language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and -make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use -of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman’s -spirit—‘far-spooming Ocean’, ‘eye-earnestly’, ‘dead-drifting’, ‘their -surly eyes brow-hidden’, ‘nervy knees’, ‘surgy murmurs’—coinages -sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as -well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms -as ‘shent’, ‘sith’, and ‘seemlihed’ from Spenser, ‘eterne’ from Spenser -and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as ‘to folly’, ‘to -monitor’, ‘gordian’d up’, to ‘fragment up’; or with neuter verbs used as -active, as to ‘travel’<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> an eye, to ‘pace’ a team of horses, and <i>vice -versa</i>. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, -in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of -oddities and discords.</p> - -<p>In rhythm Keats adheres in <i>Endymion</i> to the method he had adopted in -<i>Sleep and Poetry</i>, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the -metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, -and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had -carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later -critics have supposed the rhythm of <i>Endymion</i> to have been influenced by -the <i>Pharonnida</i> of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly -for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, -exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse -persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest -syllables—prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions—on which neither pause -nor emphasis is possible<a name='fna_36' id='fna_36' href='#f_36'><small>[36]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in -delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of -sentence structure. There is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> nothing in his treatment of the measure for -which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who -employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival -for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be -said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an -exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of -provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous.</p> - -<p>As the best criticism on Keats’s <i>Endymion</i> is in his own preface, so its -best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. “It -is as good,” he says, “as I had power to make it by myself.” Hunt had -warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley against those of -hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and -crude the classical training and now ripening taste of Shelley might -doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was -determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous -expression of his mind. “Had I been nervous,” he goes on, “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 <i>without -judgment</i>. I may write independently and <i>with judgment</i> 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.” -How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of -his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he -says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next -labours.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2> - -<div class="note"><p class="hang">Northern Tour—The <i>Blackwood</i> and <i>Quarterly</i> reviews—Death of Tom -Keats—Removal to Wentworth Place—Fanny Brawne—Excursion to -Chichester—Absorption in Love and Poetry—Haydon and Money -Difficulties—Family Correspondence—Darkening Prospects—Summer at -Shanklin and Winchester—Wise Resolutions—Return from Winchester. -[June 1818-October, 1819.]</p></div> - - -<p>While Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with <i>Endymion</i> -on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different -plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer’s walking tour -through Scotland with Charles Brown. “I have many reasons,” he writes to -Reynolds, “for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from -spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and -Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I’ll -have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, ‘over the hills -we go.’ If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in -turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.” A -fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an -over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the -necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the -flight of poetry:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>“I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but -one thing to prevent me. 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.”</p></div> - -<p>After he had come back to Hampstead in May, however, Keats allowed himself -to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the -recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year -before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed between him and -Brown that they should accompany George Keats and his bride as far as -Liverpool, and then start on foot from Lancaster. They left London -accordingly on Monday, June 22<a name='fna_37' id='fna_37' href='#f_37'><small>[37]</small></a>. The coach stopped for dinner the first -day at Redbourn near St Albans, where Keats’s friend of medical-student -days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake hands with the -travelling party at the poet’s request, and many years afterwards wrote an -account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of Mrs -George Keats. “Rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome, -but looked like a being whom<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> any man of moderate sensibility might easily -love. She had the imaginative poetical cast. Somewhat singular and girlish -in her attire.... There was something original about her, and John seemed -to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her -with evident satisfaction<a name='fna_38' id='fna_38' href='#f_38'><small>[38]</small></a>.” With no other woman or girl friend was -Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this ‘Nymph -of the downward smile and side-long glance’ of his early sonnet—‘Sister -George’ as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the -series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards -in America, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth -preserving.</p> - -<p>The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to -Lancaster, and thence began their walk, Keats taking for his reading one -book only, the little three-volume edition of Cary’s <i>Dante</i>. “I cannot,” -writes Brown, “forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly, -and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain -scenery. It was just before our descent to the village of Bowness, at a -turn of the road, when the lake of Windermere at once came into view.... -All was enchantment to us both.” Keats in his own letters says -comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, -not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque -tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and -fastidious Gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth -is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs -not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but -on a minimum of experience can summon up and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> multiply for itself spirit -sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more -varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but -impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit. -Moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of Windermere, it -is evident that as Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery -somewhat foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beauties of -England, two ideals of landscape, classic and mediæval, haunted and -allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled -south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the Scottish -border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, -and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to -neither. “I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem -anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish.”</p> - -<p>A change, besides, was coming over Keats’s thoughts and feelings whereby -scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his -fellow-creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, -among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously -absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a -life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the -appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. “Scenery is -fine,” he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, “but human -nature is finer.” In the Lake country, after climbing Skiddaw one morning -early, and walking to Treby the same afternoon, where they watched with -amusement the exercises in a country dancing-school: “There was as fine a -row of boys and girls,” says Keats, “as you ever saw; some beautiful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> -faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of -patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is -what I like better than scenery.” The same note recurs frequently in -letters of a later date.</p> - -<p>From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside; from Ambleside to -the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on -Wordsworth at Rydal, and been disappointed to find him away -electioneering. From Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of -Derwentwater; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and Wigton to Carlisle, -where they arrived on the 1st of July. Thence by coach to Dumfries, -visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory -Keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dumfries they -started southwestwards for Galloway, a region little frequented even now, -and then hardly at all, by tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrightshire -coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and -rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Solway to the hazy -hills of Man, Brown bethought him that this was Guy Mannering’s country, -and began to tell Keats about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who according to the -fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for Scott’s poetry, and of the -Waverley novels had read the <i>Antiquary</i> but not <i>Guy Mannering</i>, was much -struck; and presently, writes Brown,—“there was a little spot, close to -our pathway. ‘There,’ he said, ‘in that very spot, without a shadow of -doubt, has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.’ It was among pieces -of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of -honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> -fulness of blossom.” As they went along, Keats composed on Scott’s theme -the spirited ballad beginning ‘Old Meg, she was a gipsy,’ and stopping to -breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing -to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he -began at the same place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed -always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add scraps to -them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote -regularly and uniformly in the evenings. “He affronts my indolence and -luxury,” says Keats, “by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; -secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care if he would -change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But -I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead -of afterwards.”</p> - -<p>From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,—skirting the wild moors about -the Water of Fleet, and passing where Cairnsmore looks down over wooded -slopes to the steaming estuary of the Cree,—as far as Newton Stewart: -thence across the Wigtonshire levels by Glenluce to Stranraer and -Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee packet for Ireland, with the -intention of seeing the Giant’s Causeway, but finding the distances and -expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to -Belfast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. In letters -written during and immediately after this excursion, Keats has some -striking passages of human observation and reflection:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women, -old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants, -all careful; so they are <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>formed into regular phalanges of savers and -gainers.... These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm; they have banished -puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:—poor, -unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a -luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its -delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have -leisure to go mad after things that are not!... I would sooner be a -wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would -sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature’s -penance before those execrable elders.”</p> - -<p>“On our return from Belfast we met a sedan—the Duchess of Dunghill. -It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you -ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a -wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved -from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, -with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, -skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of -her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two -ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a -history of her life and sensations!”—.</p></div> - -<p>From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns’s country, walking -along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr, -with the lonely mass of Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran, -looming ever above the Atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find -Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the -coast scenery. They went to Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the -home of Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to write a -sonnet in the cottage of that poet’s birth, and did so, but was worried by -the prate of the man in charge—“a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew -Burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him”—“his gab -hindered my sublimity: the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> flat dog made me write a flat sonnet.” And -again, as they journeyed on toward Glasgow he composed with considerable -pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning ‘There is a -charm in footing slow across a silent plain.’ They were meant to express -the temper in which his pilgrimage through the Burns country had been -made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of -imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself.</p> - -<p>From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, and from Glasgow by -Dumbarton through the <i>Lady of the Lake</i> country, which they found -vexatiously full of tourists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban. -At Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of <i>The -Stranger</i> to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the -next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in -a set of doggrel rhymes. The walk along the shores of Loch Awe impressed -him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set -description, for the benefit of his brother Tom. At the same point occur -for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. -At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its -effects upon his sleep and appetite: telling her how he tumbled into bed -“so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe -and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I get -so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to -me.... I can eat a bull’s head as easily as I used to do bull’s eyes.” -Presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty -miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts of -the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> Highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and -frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and Brown, and he -grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the -friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for -Keats’s strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and -Iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither -side of the island of Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the -farther side opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some -thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather. -By good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had -a favourable view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its associations -in the one ‘illustrious island,’ and of nature’s architecture in the -other, Keats shows himself naturally much impressed. Fingal’s cave in -especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the -race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer -since Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines -beginning ‘Not Aladdin Magian.’ Avoiding mere epithet-work and -description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for -comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, -bethinking himself of Milton’s cry to Lycidas,</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">“—where’er thy bones are hurl’d,</span><br /> -Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides”—</p> - -<p>imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean, and -put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly -character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the -place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine -abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> -“So for ever I will leave<br /> -Such a taint, and soon unweave<br /> -All the magic of the place!<a name='fna_39' id='fna_39' href='#f_39'><small>[39]</small></a><br /> -<strong><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></strong><br /> -So saying, with a spirit’s glance<br /> -He dived—.”</p> - -<p>From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scotch tour, and -especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct -and settled symptoms of failure in Keats’s health, and of the development -of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his -brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem, he speaks of -a ‘slight sore throat,’ and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at -Oban. Thence they pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the -ascent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th of August to -Inverness. Keats’s throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the -ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, -tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at -Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue -his tour. Accordingly he took passage on the 8th or 9th of August from the -port of Cromarty for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey -alone,—“much lamenting,” to quote Brown’s own words, “the loss of his -beloved intelligence at my side.” Keats in some degree picked up strength -during a nine days’ sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards -described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat -trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of -time left him afterwards. On the 18th of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> August he arrived at Hampstead, -and made his appearance among his friends the next day, “as brown and as -shabby as you can imagine,” writes Mrs Dilke, “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.” When he found himself -seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed -chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, -quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates -his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis<a name='fna_40' id='fna_40' href='#f_40'><small>[40]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>Simultaneously, almost, with Keats’s return from the North appeared -attacks on him in <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i> and the <i>Quarterly Review</i>. The -<i>Blackwood</i> article, being No. <span class="smcaplc">IV.</span> of a series bearing the signature ‘Z’ -on the ‘Cockney School of Poetry,’ was printed in the August number of the -magazine. The previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter -similarly signed, had been directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of -insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness -of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were -most probably the work either of Lockhart or of Wilson, suggested and -perhaps revised by the publisher William Blackwood, at this time his own -sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt’s opinions, or his real -weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh critics must needs heap on -him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. In the course of these -articles allusion had several times been made to ‘Johnny Keats’ as an -‘amiable bardling’ and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of -Cockaigne, Hunt. When now Keats’s own turn came, his treatment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> was mild -in comparison with that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work -are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic -persons full of prejudice and wishing to hurt. ‘Cockney’ had been in -itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt; -neither was it altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the -facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the -measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of -it. The worst part of the Keats review was in its personalities,—“so back -to the shop, Mr John, stick to ‘plasters, pills, ointment boxes,’ -&c.”—and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for -them had been obtained. Keats’s friend Bailey had by this time taken his -degree, and after publishing a friendly notice of <i>Endymion</i> in the -<i>Oxford Herald</i> for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a -curacy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at -the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and -Chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a -previous love-affair with one of the Reynolds sisters having fallen -through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, then in the -hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy -of Scott; and earning, on the staff of <i>Blackwood</i> and otherwise, the -reputation and the nickname of ‘Scorpion.’ Bailey, anxious to save Keats -from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took -the opportunity of telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances -and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt -was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an -object<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any -rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his -disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so -used by <i>him</i>. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all -appearance, and to Bailey’s great indignation, of the very facts he had -thus confidentially communicated.</p> - -<p>To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that whether or not -Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and -supplied the materials for it<a name='fna_41' id='fna_41' href='#f_41'><small>[41]</small></a>. It seems in fact all but certain that -he actually wrote it<a name='fna_42' id='fna_42' href='#f_42'><small>[42]</small></a>. If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart’s part, -and to forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude that is his -due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of Scott. But -even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the -party violence of the time and place Scott himself was drawn into -encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh friends; and that -he was in some measure privy to the Cockney School outrages seems certain. -Such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time<a name='fna_43' id='fna_43' href='#f_43'><small>[43]</small></a>; and when -Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the -subject of Keats and his detractors in conversation with Scott at Rome, he -observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> which -he could only interpret in the same sense<a name='fna_44' id='fna_44' href='#f_44'><small>[44]</small></a>. It is hard to say whether -the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul most free from jealousy -or harshness, thus associated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is -one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the -more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the -distracting cries and blind collisions of the world.</p> - -<p>The <i>Quarterly</i> article on <i>Endymion</i> followed in the last week of -September (in the number dated April), and was in an equally contemptuous -strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first -canto, or to make head or tail of that. In this case again the question of -authorship must remain uncertain: but Gifford, as editor, and an editor -who never shrank from cutting a contributor’s work to his own pattern, -must bear the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in his -manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable -of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the -pain he gives. Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with -which Keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work, -the attacks are both alike inexcusable. They had the effect of promptly -rousing the poet’s friends in his defence. Reynolds published a warm -rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the <i>Alfred</i>; -an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the <i>Morning Chronicle</i> -with the initials J. S.—those probably of John Scott, then editor of the -<i>London Magazine</i>, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart’s in -a duel, arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which it was -thought that Lockhart himself ought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> to have come forward. Leigh Hunt -reprinted Reynolds’s letter, with some introductory words, in the -<i>Examiner</i>, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. But -he could not have done more to any purpose. He was not himself an -enthusiastic admirer of <i>Endymion</i>, and had plainly said so to Keats and -to his friends. Reynolds’s piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective -and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would -only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly -well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a -friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind.</p> - -<p>Neither was Keats’s demeanour under the lash such as could make his -friends suppose him particularly hurt. Proud in the extreme, he had no -irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet -always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he -saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:—“I hate,” he says, “a mawkish -popularity.” Even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly -cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was -conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his -critics. Accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than -older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt had replied -indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn. -Hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. Keats at the first sting -declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what -good he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly recovering -himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one -merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When Mr Hessey sent for his -encouragement the extracts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> from the papers in which he had been defended, -he wrote:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“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.”</p> - -<p>And again:—“There have been two letters in my defence in the -‘Chronicle,’ and one in the ‘Examiner,’ copied from the Exeter paper, -and written by Reynolds. I don’t know who wrote those in the -‘Chronicle.’ This is a mere matter of the moment: 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.’”</p></div> - -<p>In point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent Keats about -this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a -further tribute in the shape of a £25 note. Keats was both pleased and -displeased: “if I had refused it,” he says, “I should have behaved in a -very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a -little.” About the same time he received, through his friend Richard -Woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or -assistant to Messrs Taylor and Hessey<a name='fna_45' id='fna_45' href='#f_45'><small>[45]</small></a>, a glowing letter of sympathy -and encouragement from Miss Porter, ‘of Romance celebrity’: by which he -shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>Keats was really living, during the stress of these <i>Blackwood</i> and -<i>Quarterly</i> storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt -trouble. His Hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return -from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on -account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. He had left the -invalid behind in their lodgings at Well Walk, and found that he had grown -rapidly worse during his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for -the next few months Keats’s chief occupation was the harrowing one of -watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written in the -third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and -occupations:—“I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses -upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out—and although I had -intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and -plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, -and feebleness—so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be -poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine ‘the hateful siege of -contraries’—if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and -yet I must do so or suffer.” And again about the same time to -Reynolds:—“I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has -haunted me these two days—at such a time when the relief, the feverous -relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has -conquered—I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only -life—I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am -thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of -immortality.” As the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever -more sorrowful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> and absorbing<a name='fna_46' id='fna_46' href='#f_46'><small>[46]</small></a>. On the 29th of October Keats wrote to -his brother and sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a -beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst. -For the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and -in the first week of December the end came. “Early one morning,” writes -Brown, “I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, -who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we -both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, -my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,—‘Have nothing -more to do with those lodgings,—and alone too! Had you not better live -with me?’ He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,—‘I think it -would be better.’ From that moment he was my inmate<a name='fna_47' id='fna_47' href='#f_47'><small>[47]</small></a>.”</p> - -<p>Brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part—the -smaller eastern part—of the block of two semi-detached houses near the -bottom of John Street, Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied -the other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place<a name='fna_48' id='fna_48' href='#f_48'><small>[48]</small></a>. The -accommodation in Brown’s quarters included a front and back sitting-room -on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them. The -arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, -occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. As -soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in -some measure alleviated his grief, Keats became gradually once more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> -absorbed in poetry: his special task being <i>Hyperion</i>, at which he had -already begun to work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed; -for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more -powerful than that of poetry itself. It was at this time that the flame -caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid ‘lest it -should burn him up.’ With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, -not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards -womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind’s ideal of the -sex, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and -too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious at the same -time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself -partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of passion by his -sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. The set of -three sonnets in his first volume, beginning ‘Woman, when I beheld thee -flippant, vain,’ had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to -this state of mind. Its persistency is affirmed often in his letters.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“I am certain,” he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, “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.... Is it not -extraordinary?—when among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no -spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from -every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all -suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I have evil -thoughts, malice,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> 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.... I must absolutely get over this—but how?”</p></div> - -<p>In a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in America, he alleges this -general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or -rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he -will never marry:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“The roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my -window-panes are my children; 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. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination -strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand -worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are -stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is -equivalent to a King’s Bodyguard: “then Tragedy with scepter’d pall -comes sweeping by.” According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles -shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; -or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, “I -wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage,” I -melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content -to be alone. 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 that I rejoice in.”</p></div> - -<p>But now Keats’s hour was come. Since his return from Scotland, in the -midst of his watching by his brother’s sick-bed, we have seen him -confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. This was a -certain Miss Charlotte Cox, a West-Indian cousin of Reynolds’s, to whom he -did not think the Reynolds sisters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> were quite kind. A few days later he -writes again how he has been attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace. -Very soon, however, the attraction passed, and this ‘Charmian’ left him -fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. A Mrs Brawne, a widow -lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two -younger children, had taken Brown’s house for the summer while he was away -in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the -Dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved -from Brown’s house to one in Downshire Street close by: and it was at the -Dilkes’ that Keats met Miss Fanny Brawne after his return. Her ways and -presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated -him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as -well as from Severn’s mention of her likeness to the draped figure in -Titian’s picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length -silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise -her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the -far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and -retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, -shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, -carriage and complexion,—such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her -character we have little means of judging. She was certainly -high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though -kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew -dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men -and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of -one opinion in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and -in regarding the attachment as unlucky.</p> - -<p>So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion -for a woman have been. Stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth -begun to fall on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional -misgivings of his darker moods. First the departure of his brother George -had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from -boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next -the exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and -unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in -his blood. Coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed -inexorably upon his brother Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit -through all his pains. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little -as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and -carelessness of the world’s judgments, and the precariousness of his -practical hopes from literature. Last were added the pangs of love—love -requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even -love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion wrought -fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and -torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every -strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty, -exposed them. Within a year the combined assault proved too much for his -strength, and he broke down. But in the meantime he showed a brave face to -the world, and while anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to -throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, -energy. During the first few weeks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> of winter following his brother’s -death, he wrote indeed, as he tells Haydon, “only a little now and then: -but nothing to speak of—being discontented and as it were moulting.” Yet -such work as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of his -powers, and included parts both of <i>Hyperion</i> and <i>The Eve of St Agnes</i>.</p> - -<p>Within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was -finished, having been written out during a visit which Keats and Brown -paid in Sussex in the latter part of January (1819). They stayed for a few -days with the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for nearly a -fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, at Bedhampton -close by. Keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but -his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to ‘a couple of -dowager card-parties,’ and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day, -at the consecration of a chapel for converted Jews. The latter ceremony -jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an -entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. -During his stay at Chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate -conceived, the poem on the <i>Eve of St Mark</i>, which he never finished, and -which remains so interesting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work.</p> - -<p>Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed his life at -Hampstead under Brown’s roof. He saw much less society than the winter -before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally -to avoid the night air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt -the passion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest -in the other relations of life. The stages by which it grew on him we -cannot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> follow. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he -had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting. His -real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the -time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong -mixed attraction and aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the -14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in -America, “Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff;” -but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general -reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not -sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. The -secret violence of Keats’s passion, and the restless physical jealousy -which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed <i>To -Fanny</i>, which belong apparently to this date. They are written very -unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and -there. The occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">What stare outfaces now my silver moon?</span><br /> -Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Let, let the amorous burn—</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">But, pr’ythee, do not turn</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The current of your heart from me so soon,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">O! save, in charity,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The quickest pulse for me.</span><br /> -Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voluptuous visions into the warm air,</span><br /> -Though swimming through the dance’s dangerous wreath;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Be like an April day,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Smiling and cold and gay,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A temperate lily, temperate as fair;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Then, Heaven! there will be</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 3em;">A warmer June for me.”</span></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his -feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother -or his friends. Except in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no -direct mention of Miss Brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere -excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because -he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers, -in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown -after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as -when the Dilkes left Hampstead in April, and went to live at Westminster, -the Brawnes again took their house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth -had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke himself, -but apparently not till many months later, writes, “It is quite a settled -thing between John Keats and Miss Brawne, God help them. It’s a bad thing -for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that -it will go off. He don’t like any one to look at her or speak to her.” -Other friends, including one so intimate and so affectionate as Severn, -never realised until Keats was on his death-bed that there had been an -engagement, or that his relations with Miss Brawne had been other than -those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours.</p> - -<p>Intense and jealous as Keats’s newly awakened passion was, it seemed at -first to stimulate rather than distract him in the exercise of his now -ripened poetic gift. The spring of this year 1819 seems to repeat in a -richer key the history of the last; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits -of lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season advanced. Between -the beginning of February<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> and the beginning of June he wrote many of his -best shorter poems, including apparently all except one of his six famous -odes. About the middle of February he speaks of having taken a stroll -among the marbles of the British Museum, and the ode <i>On Indolence</i> and -the ode <i>On a Grecian Urn</i>, written two or three months later, show how -the charm of ancient sculpture was at this time working in his mind. The -fit of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former piece is -recorded in his correspondence under the date of March 19. The lines -beginning ‘Bards of passion and of mirth,’ are dated the 26th of the same -month. On the 15th of April he sends off to his brother, as the last poem -he has written, the ode <i>To Psyche</i>, only less perfect and felicitous than -that <i>On a Grecian Urn</i>. About a week later the nightingale would be -beginning to sing. Presently it appeared that one had built her nest in -Brown’s garden, near his house.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“Keats,” writes Brown, “felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; -and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the -grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. When he -came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his -hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, -I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic -feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well -legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many -scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his <i>Ode to a -Nightingale</i>.... Immediately afterwards I searched for more of his (in -reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again -assisted me.... From that day he gave me permission to copy any verses -he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so little -for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was -released from their influence, that he required a friend at hand to -preserve them.”</p></div> - -<p>The above account perfectly agrees with what Keats<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> had written towards -the end of the summer before:—“I feel assured I should write from the -mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night’s -labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them.” -And yet for these odes Keats seems to have had a partiality: with that to -Psyche, he tells his brother, he has taken more pains than with anything -he had ever written before; and Haydon has told how thrillingly, ‘in his -low tremulous under-tone,’ he recited to him that to the nightingale as -they walked one day in the Kilburn meadows.</p> - -<p>During the winter and spring while his faculties were thus absorbed -between love and poetry, Keats had suffered his correspondence to flag, -except only with Haydon, with his young sister Fanny, and with his brother -and sister-in-law in America. About Christmas Haydon, whose work had been -interrupted by a weakness of the eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for -the time being exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to Keats of all -men. With his usual generosity Keats had promised, only asking him to try -the rich lovers of art first, that if the worst came to the worst he would -help him with all he had. Haydon in a few weeks returns to the -charge:—“My dear Keats—now I feel the want of your promised -assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and -manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst.” Keats had intended for -Haydon’s relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom’s share -in their grandmother’s gift; which he expected his guardian to make over -to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were -raised, and after much correspondence, attendance in bankers’ and -solicitors’ offices, and other ordeals harassing to the poetic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> mind, he -had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When -by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower’s vein, reproaching him with -his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies with perfect temper, -explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his -hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting -possession of his money. Moreover he finds that even if all he had were -laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live -on for two years.<a name='fna_49' id='fna_49' href='#f_49'><small>[49]</small></a> Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent -sums to various friends amounting in all to near £200, of which he expects -the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats -contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds. Three months later a -law-suit threatened by the widow of Captain Jennings against Mr Abbey, in -connection with the administration of the trust, had the effect for a time -of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very -gently asks Haydon to make an effort to repay his loan; who not only made -none—“he did not,” says Keats, “seem to care much about it, but let me go -without my money almost with nonchalance.” This was too much even for -Keats’s patience. He declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend -again: nevertheless he by-and-by let old affection resume its sway, and -entered into the other’s interests and endured his exhortations as kindly -as ever.</p> - -<p>To his young sister Keats’s letters during the same period are full of -playful brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of regrets that she is -kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey; and of plans -for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> coming over to see her at Walthamstow when the weather and his throat -allow. He thinks of various little presents to please her,—a selection of -Tassie’s pretty, and then popular, paste imitations of ancient -gems,—flowers,—drawing materials,—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“anything but live stock. Though I will not now be very severe on it, -remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, -Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock Salmons and all the whole tribe of the -Bushes and the Brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the -water,—though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome -globe of gold-fish—then I would have it hold ten pails of water and -be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let -through the floor—well ventilated they would preserve all their -beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome -painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and Japonicas. I -should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva—and there I’d -sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading.”</p></div> - -<p>For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant -anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant -Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices -been bound. In the middle of April news of them arrives, and he thereupon -sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has been writing up at -intervals during the last two months. Among all the letters of Keats, this -is perhaps the richest and most characteristic. It is full of the varied -matter of his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love: these are -only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more indistinctly in the -vaguely passionate tenor of two sonnets which he sends among other -specimens of his latest work in verse. One is that beginning ‘Why did I -laugh to-night?’—the other that, beautiful and moving despite flaws of -execution,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> in which he describes a dream suggested by the Paolo and -Francesca passage in Dante. For the rest he passes disconnectedly as -usual—“it being an impossibility in grain,” as Keats once wrote to -Reynolds, “for my ink to stain otherwise”—from the vein of fun and -freakishness to that of poetry and wisdom, with passages now of masterly -intuition, and now of wandering and uncertain, almost always beautiful, -speculative fancy, interspersed with expressions of the most generous -spirit of family affection, or the most searching and unaffected -disclosures of self-knowledge. Poetry and Beauty were the twin powers his -soul had ever worshipped; but his devotion to poetry seemed thus far to -promise him no reward either in fame or bread; while beauty had betrayed -her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a sustaining power, -since his love for the beautiful in general had turned into a craving -passion for the beauty of a particular girl. As his flesh began to faint -in the service of these two, his soul turned often with a sense of -comfort, at times even almost of ecstasy, towards the milder divinity of -Death, whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,<br /> -But Death intenser—Death is Life’s high meed.”</p> - -<p>When he came down from these heights of feeling, and brought himself -soberly to face the facts of his existence, Keats felt himself compelled, -in those days while he was producing, ‘out of the mere yearning and -fondness he had for the beautiful,’ poem after poem that are among the -treasures of the English language, to consider whether as a practical -matter he could or ought to continue to apply himself to literature at -all. In spite of his magnanimous first reception of the <i>Blackwood</i> and -<i>Quarterly</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> gibes, we can see that as time went on he began more and more -to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened by them. -Reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material harm which the reviews were -capable of inflicting, when he wrote the year before:—“Certain it is, -that hundreds of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set down -this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writer, merely on the -assertions of some single heartless critic, who has just energy enough to -despise what is good.” Such in fact was exactly the reputation which -<i>Blackwood</i> and the <i>Quarterly</i> had succeeded in making for Keats, except -among a small private circle of admirers. Of praise and the thirst for - -praise he continues to speak in as manly and sane a tone as ever; -especially in the two sonnets <i>On Fame</i>; and in the <i>Ode to Indolence</i> -declares—</p> - -<p class="poem">“For I would not be dieted with praise,<br /> -A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.”</p> - -<p>Again in the same ode, he speaks of his ‘demon Poesy’ as ‘a maiden most -unmeek,’ whom he loves the better the more blame is heaped on her. At the -same time he shows his sense of the practical position which the reviews -had made for him when he writes to his brother:—“These reviews are -getting more and more powerful, especially the ‘Quarterly’.... I was in -hopes that as people saw, as they must do, all the trickery and iniquity -of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the -spectators at the Westminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or loses.” -And as a consequence he adds presently, “I have been, at different times, -turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a -physician. I am afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I could -not take fees; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than -writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review -shambles.” A little later he mentions to his sister Fanny an idea he has -of taking a voyage or two as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But Brown, -more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and -promise of his friend’s genius, would not hear of this plan, and persuaded -him to abandon it and throw himself again upon literature. Keats being for -the moment unable to get at any of his money, Brown advanced him enough to -live on through the summer; and it was agreed that he should go and work -in the country, and that Brown should follow him.</p> - -<p>Towards the end of July Keats accordingly left Hampstead, and went first -to join his friend Rice in lodgings at Shanklin. Rice’s health was at this -time worse than ever; and Keats himself was far from well; his chest weak, -his nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to Fanny -Brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains and joys of love. These -love-letters of Keats are written with little or none of the bright ease -and play of mind which make his correspondence with his friends and family -so attractive. Pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, but in the main -they are constrained and distressing, showing him a prey, despite his -efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity -and fretfulness of passion. An enraptured but an untrustful lover, -alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing through a -hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he found in the fever -of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his -love-sickness. As long as Rice and he were together at Shanklin, the two -ailing and anxious men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> firm friends as they were, depressed and did each -other harm. It was better when Brown with his settled health and spirits -came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got -to work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, that of -writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What other struggling man of -letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated -them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose -Russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him in £500, was -supposed to possess the requisite stage experience, and to him were -assigned the plot and construction of the play, while Keats undertook to -compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from the history of the -Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at the -same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown sketched it out to -him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next, until the end -of the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into his own -hands. Besides the joint work by means of which he thus hoped, at least in -sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, Keats was -busily engaged by himself in writing a new Greek tale in rhymed heroics, -<i>Lamia</i>. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate -of Shanklin was against him: their lodgings were under the cliff, and from -the south-east, as he afterwards wrote, “came the damps of the sea, which -having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy -idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke.” After a -stay of five or six weeks, the friends made up their minds to change their -quarters, and went in the second week of August to Winchester. The old -cathedral city, with its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its -clear-coursing streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the -nimble and pure air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited Keats, who -quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days which he spent here, -from the middle of August to the middle of October, were the last good -days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he -managed to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his -passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort.</p> - -<p>His work continued to be chiefly on <i>Lamia</i>, with the concluding part of -<i>Otho</i>, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen; -in this last he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. Early -in September Brown left Winchester to go on a visit to Bedhampton. -Immediately afterwards a letter from America compelled Keats to go to town -and arrange with Mr Abbey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his -brother George. He dared not, to use his own words, ‘venture into the -fire’ by going to see his mistress at Hampstead, but stayed apparently -with Mr Taylor in Fleet Street, and was back on the fourth day at -Winchester, where he spent the following ten days or fortnight in -solitude. During this interval he took up <i>Hyperion</i> again, but made up -his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style and method -too Miltonic and artificial. <i>Lamia</i> he had finished, and his chief -present occupation was in revising the <i>Eve of St Agnes</i>, studying Italian -in the pages of Ariosto, and writing up one of his long and full -journal-letters to brother and sister George. The season was fine, and the -beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his spirit, prompted -also in these days the last, and one certainly of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> happiest, of his -odes, that <i>To Autumn</i>. To the fragment of <i>St Mark’s Eve</i>, begun or -planned, as we have seen, the January before, he now added lines inspired -at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his letters show to have -affected him deeply here at Winchester, and by the literary example of -Chatterton, for whom his old admiration had of late returned in full -force.</p> - -<p>The wholesome brightness of the early autumn continuing to sustain and -soothe him, Keats made in these days a vigorous effort to rally his moral -powers, to banish over-passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself -on a right footing with the world. The letter to America already -mentioned, and others written at the same time to Reynolds, Taylor, Dilke, -Brown, and Haydon, are full of evidences of this spirit. The ill success -of his brother in his American speculations shall serve, he is determined, -as a spur to his own exertions, and now that real troubles are upon them, -he will show that he can bear them better than those of imagination. The -imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him -up into an agent. He has been passing his time between reading, writing, -and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, and stick to the other -two. He does not consider he has any just cause of complaint against the -world; he has done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few people -predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that any thing really fine -will make its way. “What reviewers can put a hindrance to must be a -nothing—or mediocre which is worse.” With reference to his own plans for -the future, he is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes of ultimate -success, whether from plays or poems, but to turn to the natural resource -of a man ‘fit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> for nothing but literature’ and needing to support himself -by his pen: the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. “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. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I will.” -These words are from a letter written to Brown on the 22nd of September, -and further on in the same letter we find evidence of the honourable -spirit of independence and unselfishness towards his friends which went -together in Keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willingness -to accept their services at a pinch. He had been living since May on a -loan from Brown and an advance from Taylor, and was uneasy at putting the -former to a sacrifice. The subject, he says, is often in his mind,—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your -happiness. This anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to -the plan I propose pursuing. I had got into a habit of mind of looking -towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it is a duty I -owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my -subsistence—make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall -applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct.”</p></div> - -<p>Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken -in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose his company, and -doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected their -motives too much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled that -the two friends should part, Brown returning to his own house at -Hampstead, while Keats went to live by himself in London and look out for -employment on the press.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2> - -<div class="note"><p class="hang"><i>Isabella</i>—<i>Hyperion</i>—<i>The Eve of St Agnes</i>—<i>The Eve of St -Mark</i>—<i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>—<i>Lamia</i>—The Odes—The Plays.</p></div> - - -<p>During the twenty months ending with his return from Winchester as last -narrated, Keats had been able, even while health and peace of mind and -heart deserted him, to produce in quick succession the series of poems -which give us the true measure of his powers. In the sketches and epistles -of his first volume we have seen him beginning, timidly and with no -clearness of aim, to make trial of his poetical resources. A year -afterwards he had leapt, to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and -boldly tried his strength on the composition of a long mythological -romance—half romance, half parable of that passion for universal beauty -of which he felt in his own bosom the restless and compulsive workings. In -the execution, he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in -him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and invention, and the caprice -of rhyme, run away with him, and by substituting for the worn-out verbal -currency of the last century a semi-Elizabethan coinage of his own, less -acceptable by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit greater -real poetic value. The experiment was rash, but when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> he next wrote, it -became manifest that it had not been made in vain. After <i>Endymion</i> his -work threw off, not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and -ineffectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full ‘effluence’ (the -phrase is Landor’s) ‘of power and light<a name='fna_50' id='fna_50' href='#f_50'><small>[50]</small></a>.’</p> - -<p>His next poem of importance was <i>Isabella</i>, planned and begun, as we saw, -in February 1818, and finished in the course of the next two months at -Teignmouth. The subject is taken from the well-known chapter of Boccaccio -which tells of the love borne by a damsel of Messina for a youth in the -employ of her merchant-brothers, with its tragic close and pathetic -sequel<a name='fna_51' id='fna_51' href='#f_51'><small>[51]</small></a>. Keats for some reason transfers the scene of the story from -Messina to Florence. Nothing can be less sentimental than Boccaccio’s -temper, nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his style. -Keats invoking him asks pardon for his own work as what it truly is,—‘An -echo of thee in the North-wind sung.’ Not only does the English poet set -the southern story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of the -Arno, for instance, how its stream—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream</span><br /> -Keeps head against the freshets”—</p> - -<p>he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, enriching it with -tones of sentiment and colours of romance, and brooding over every image -of beauty or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>passion as he calls it up. These things he does—but no -longer inordinately as heretofore. His powers of imagination and of -expression have alike gained strength and discipline; and through the -shining veils of his poetry his creations make themselves seen and felt in -living shape, action, and motive. False touches and misplaced beauties are -indeed not wanting. For example, in the phrase</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 2em;">“his erewhile timid lips grew bold</span><br /> -And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme,”</p> - -<p>we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not infrequent in -his earliest verses. And in the call of the wicked brothers to Lorenzo—</p> - -<p class="poem">“To-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To spur three leagues towards the Apennine.</span><br /> -Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His dewy rosary on the eglantine,”—</span></p> - -<p>the last two lines are a beauty indeed, and of the kind most -characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as Leigh Hunt long ago pointed -out) misplaced in the mouths that utter it. Moreover the language of -<i>Isabella</i> is still occasionally slipshod, and there are turns and -passages where we feel, as we felt so often in <i>Endymion</i>, that the poetic -will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or suggestion of the -rhyme. But these are the minor blemishes of a poem otherwise conspicuous -for power and charm.</p> - -<p>For his Italian story Keats chose an Italian metre, the octave stanza -introduced in English by Wyatt and Sidney, and naturalised before long by -Daniel, Drayton, and Edward Fairfax. Since their day, the stanza had been -little used in serious poetry, though Frere and Byron had lately revived -it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the purpose for which the -epigrammatic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> snap and suddenness of the closing couplet in truth best fit -it. Keats, however, contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles -the measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale of pathos. -Over the purely musical and emotional resources of his art he shows a -singular command in stanzas like that beginning, ‘O Melancholy, linger -here awhile,’ repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude of -the main narrative. And there is a brilliant alertness of imagination in -such episodical passages as that where he pauses to realize the varieties -of human toil contributing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. But the -true test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the essential -points and central moments of action and passion, imaginative vitality and -truth with beauty and charm. This test <i>Isabella</i> admirably bears. For -instance, in the account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her -lover’s mouldering corpse:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof</span><br /> -From the poor girl by magic of their light.”</p> - -<p>With what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the story of the -apparition invested by this touch, and all its charnel horror and grimness -mitigated! Or again in the stanzas describing Isabella’s actions at her -lover’s burial place:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">One glance did fully all its secrets tell;</span><br /> -Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;</span><br /> -Upon the murderous spot she seem’d to grow,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Like to a native lily of the dell:</span><br /> -Then with her knife, all sudden, she began<br /> -To dig more fervently than misers can.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span><br /> -Soon she turn’d up a soiled glove, whereon<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Her silk had play’d in purple phantasies;</span><br /> -She kiss’d it with a lip more chill than stone,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And put it in her bosom, where it dries</span><br /> -And freezes utterly unto the bone<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Those dainties made to still an infant’s cries:</span><br /> -Then ’gan she work again; nor stay’d her care,<br /> -But to throw back at times her veiling hair.”</p> - -<p>The lines are not all of equal workmanship: but the scene is realised with -unerring vision. The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with -too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third -and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the -same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of -the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the -impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden -solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as -she begins to dig ‘more fervently than misers can’ (what a commentary on -the relative strength of passions might be drawn from this simple -text):—then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not -ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it -is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, -while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us -as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and -continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic -truth as well as grace:—to imagine and to write like this is the -privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often -combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a -limpid and flowing ease of narrative. Poetry had always come to Keats, as -he considered it ought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now -that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which -his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers -of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true -imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school -seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay, -those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two -kinds of writing comparable.</p> - -<p>After the completion of <i>Isabella</i> followed the Scotch tour, of which the -only poetic fruits of value were the lines on Meg Merrilies and those on -Fingal’s Cave. Returning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother -mortally ill, Keats plunged at once into the most arduous poetic labour he -had yet undertaken. This was the composition of <i>Hyperion</i><a name='fna_52' id='fna_52' href='#f_52'><small>[52]</small></a>. The -subject had been long in his mind, and both in the text and the preface of -<i>Endymion</i> he indicated his intention to attempt it. At first he thought -of the poem to be written as a ‘romance’: but under the influence of -<i>Paradise Lost</i>, and no doubt also considering the height and vastness of -the subject, his plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books. -His purpose was to sing the Titanomachia, or warfare of the earlier -Titanic dynasty with the later Olympian dynasty of the Greek gods; and in -particular one episode of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god -Hyperion and the assumption of his kingdom by Apollo. Critics, even -intelligent critics, sometimes complain that Keats should have taken this -and other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> subjects of his art from what they call the ‘dead’ mythology of -ancient Greece. As if that mythology could ever die: as if the ancient -fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things believed, into -the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put -on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, -as faiths, perish one after another: but each in passing away bequeaths -for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained -of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, -embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to -explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the -thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and -control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; -and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern -mind which is in so far dead and not they. One of the great symptoms of -returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, toward the close of the -last century, was its awakening to the forgotten charm of past modes of -faith and life. When men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke of -Greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms which showed that they -had never felt its power; just as, when they spoke of nature, it was in -set phrases that showed that they had never looked at her. On matters of -daily social experience the gifts of observation and of reason were -brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts of the time were thoughts -of the street, the mart, and the assembly. The human genius was for the -time being like some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused -to see or think of anything beyond them. At length resuming its march, it -emerged on open<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> ground, where it fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest -the beauties of the earth and sky, and whence at the same time it could -turn back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning with new -clearness and a new emotion, here under cloud and rainbow the forests and -spired cities of the Middle Age, there in serener light the hills and -havens and level fanes of Hellas.</p> - -<p>The great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on this new phase of its -pilgrimage was Goethe, who with deliberate effort and self-discipline -climbed to heights commanding an equal survey over the mediæval and the -classic past. We had in England had an earlier, shyer, and far less -effectual pioneer in Gray. As time went on, poet after poet arose and sang -more freely, one the glories of nature, another the enchantments of the -Middle Age, another the Greek beauty and joy of life. Keats when his time -came showed himself, all young and untutored as he was, freshly and -powerfully inspired to sing of all three alike. He does not, as we have -said, write of Greek things in a Greek manner. Something indeed in -<i>Hyperion</i>—at least in the first two books—he has caught from <i>Paradise -Lost</i> of the high restraint and calm which was common to the Greeks and -Milton. But to realise how far he is in workmanship from the Greek purity -and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images, we -have only to think of his palace of Hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling -pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. This is the most sustained and -celebrated passage of the poem. Or let us examine one of its most -characteristic images from nature:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“As when, upon a tranced summer night,<br /> -Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,<br /> -Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,<br /> -Dream, and so dream all night without a stir—.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>Not to the simplicity of the Greek, but to the complexity of the modern, -sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and express, by such a concourse of -metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which -a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of -the oaks among the other trees—their aspect of human venerableness—their -verdure, unseen in the darkness—the sense of their preternatural -stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with -mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky<a name='fna_53' id='fna_53' href='#f_53'><small>[53]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>But though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he sees it truly. The -Greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated English way he -writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas. For the -story of the war of Titans and Olympians he had nothing to guide him -except scraps from the ancient writers, principally Hesiod, as retailed by -the compilers of classical dictionaries; and from the scholar’s point of -view his version, we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary, -mixing up Latin conceptions and nomenclature with Greek, and introducing -much new matter of his own invention. But as to the essential meaning of -that warfare and its result—the dethronement of an older and ruder -worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of -arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,—as -to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with -more beauty and force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the -Second Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of -early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human, -what masterly justice of instinct does he show,—to take one point -only—in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate -sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices. Thus -of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines<br /> -When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise<br /> -Among immortals when a God gives sign,<br /> -With hushing finger, how he means to load<br /> -His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,<br /> -With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:<br /> -Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.”</p> - -<p>Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,<br /> -Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,<br /> -But cogitation in his watery shades,<br /> -Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,<br /> -In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue<br /> -Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.”</p> - -<p>And once more, of Clymene followed by Enceladus in debate:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“So far her voice flow’d on, like timorous brook<br /> -That, lingering along a pebbled coast,<br /> -Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,<br /> -And shudder’d; for the overwhelming voice<br /> -Of huge Enceladus swallow’d it in wrath:<br /> -The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves<br /> -In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,<br /> -Came booming thus.”</p> - -<p>This second book of <i>Hyperion</i>, relating the council<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> of the dethroned -Titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, where the solemn opening -vision of Saturn fallen is followed by the resplendent one of Hyperion -threatened in his ‘lucent empire’; nor the intensity of the unfinished -third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the -afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. -But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to -my mind, quite on a level with the other two.</p> - -<p>With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal -incorrectness, <i>Hyperion</i>, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the -grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the -easiest and most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able to apply -himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. Partly this was -due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of -dawning passion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may -trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception -of <i>Endymion</i>: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial -to his powers in the task itself. When after letting the poem lie by -through the greater part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September -made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds explaining his -reasons as follows. “There were too many Miltonic inversions in -it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist’s -humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be -kept up.” In the same connection he declares that Chatterton is the purest -writer in the English language. “He has no French idiom or particles, like -Chaucer; it is genuine English idiom in English words.” In writing about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> -the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as -to Milton and Chatterton.</p> - -<p>The influence, and something of the majesty, of <i>Paradise Lost</i> are in -truth to be found in <i>Hyperion</i>: and the debate of the fallen Titans in -the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the -fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. -Passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of -Milton’s age with Keats’s youth, of his austerity with Keats’s luxuriance -of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:—in -the matter of rhythm, Keats’s blank verse has not the flight of Milton’s. -Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and -far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and -ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since -Milton,—beside that of Shelley’s <i>Alastor</i>,—perhaps a little below that -of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and -the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as -Milton himself: but while of Milton’s diction the characteristic colour is -derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with -the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats’s diction is -rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme -refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a passage -of this kind:—</p> - -<p class="poem"> -<span style="margin-left: 5em;">“Eden stretch’d her line</span><br /> -From Auran eastward to the royal towers<br /> -Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings,<br /> -Or where the sons of Eden long before<br /> -Dwelt in Telassar.”</p> - -<p>But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">“throughout all the isle</span><br /> -There was no covert, no retired cave<br /> -Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,<br /> -Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.”</p> - -<p>After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical -note of Milton’s style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative -pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and -constructions generally. Already in <i>Isabella</i> Keats is to be found -attempting both notes, thus:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“With duller steel than the Persean sword<br /> -They cut away no formless monster’s head—.”</p> - -<p>Similar Miltonic echoes occur in <i>Hyperion</i>, as in the introduction -already quoted to the speech of Oceanus: or again thus:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope<br /> -In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes,<br /> -Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet<br /> -And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies.”</p> - -<p>But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton’s -technical manner as he seems to have supposed. Yet he had adopted more of -it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain.</p> - -<p>In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was going back to one of his -first loves in literature. What he says of Chatterton’s words and idioms -seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by -the Bristol boy out of Kersey’s <i>Dictionary</i><a name='fna_54' id='fna_54' href='#f_54'><small>[54]</small></a>. But it is true that -through that jargon can be discerned, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> Rowley poems, not only an -ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition, -but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats -had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to -us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we find him in fact tempted aside -on an excursion into the regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how -much of <i>Hyperion</i> had been written when he laid it aside in January to -take up the composition of <i>St Agnes’ Eve</i>, that unsurpassed example—nay, -must we not rather call it unequalled?—of the pure charm of coloured and -romantic narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt the -elemental grandeur of <i>Hyperion</i>, so neither does it approach the human -pathos and passion of <i>Isabella</i>. Its personages appeal to us, not so much -humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery and atmosphere -amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the -weakness, of modern romance,—its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the -mediæval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at -all,—its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both -writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral -truth: and without these no great literature can exist.</p> - -<p>Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love -of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,—a story -wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young -Lochinvar,—and brings it deftly into association with the old popular -belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her -lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian -stanza, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> adds to the melodious grace, the ‘sweet-slipping movement,’ as -it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of -construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the -great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and -concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza, -which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,—telling us -first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and -next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle ‘seem’d -taking flight for heaven, without a death,’—from thence to the close, -where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly -bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with -the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about -the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in -handling these Keats’s method is the reverse of that by which some writers -vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and -sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he -touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, -movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought -before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our -sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">“Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails</span><br /> -To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.”</p> - -<p>Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the -poet strikes life:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,</span><br /> -With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out -their beauties in detail, he calls—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes<br /> -As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings,—”</p> - -<p>a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination -of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile -drawn from a particular specimen of nature’s blazonry. In the last line of -the same stanza—</p> - -<p class="poem">“A shielded scutcheon blush’d with blood of queens and kings,”</p> - -<p>—the word ‘blush’ makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is -at the same time sent travelling from the maiden’s chamber on thoughts of -her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that -moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted glass as Keats -in this celebrated passage represents it. Let us be grateful for the -error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly -splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow -is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. When -Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their -lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks -straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the -wearer,—‘her warmed jewels.’ When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties -beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare -sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own -natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far -countries whence they have been gathered—</p> - -<p class="poem">“From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>If the unique charm of the <i>Eve of St Agnes</i> lies thus in the richness and -vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions -of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go. -What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse, -who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die -quietly of age when their parts are over<a name='fna_55' id='fna_55' href='#f_55'><small>[55]</small></a>: especially the debate of old -Angela with Porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the -stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, I think, at two -moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“No uttered syllable, or, woe betide:<br /> -But to her heart, her heart was voluble,<br /> -Paining with eloquence her balmy side:”—</p> - -<p>and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and -contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“‘Ah Porphyro!’ said she, ‘but even now<br /> -Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear<br /> -Made tunable with every sweetest vow;<br /> -And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear;<br /> -How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear’.”</p> - -<p>Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the ‘growing faint’ of Porphyro, and -in his ‘warm unnerved arm,’ we have a touch of that swooning abandonment -to which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> Keats’s heroes are too subject. But it is the slightest -possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet -individually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of that date are -constantly overcome in like manner. And we may well pardon Porphyro his -weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady’s -side in defiance of her ‘whole bloodthirsty race,’ and will bear her -safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home ‘beyond the southern -moors’ that he has prepared for her<a name='fna_56' id='fna_56' href='#f_56'><small>[56]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>Nearly allied with the <i>Eve of St Agnes</i> is the fragment in the four-foot -ballad metre, which Keats composed on the parallel popular belief -connected with the eve of St Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at -Chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Winchester -six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, seems farther to -suggest associations with Canterbury. Impressions of all these three -cathedral cities which Keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture -of which the fragment consists. I have said picture, but there are two: -one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and -Sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her -quaint fire-lit chamber. Each in its way is of an admirable vividness and -charm. The belief about St Mark’s Eve was that a person stationed near a -church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church -the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the -ensuing year. Keats’s fragment breaks off before the story is well -engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to -incidents illustrating this belief. Neither is it clear<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> whether he -intended to place them in mediæval or in relatively modern times. The -demure Protestant air which he gives the Sunday streets, the Oriental -furniture and curiosities of the lady’s chamber, might seem to indicate -the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his -archæology—witness, for instance, the line which tells how ‘the long -carpets rose along the gusty floor’ in the <i>Eve of St Agnes</i>. The interest -of the <i>St Mark’s</i> fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the -promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and -charm of workmanship: and second, its relation to and influence on later -English poetry. Keats in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the -feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The indoor scene -of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and -the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is -perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply -impressed and interested),—of his pictures even more than of his poems: -while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and -cadences of Mr Morris in some tale of the <i>Earthly Paradise</i>:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“The city streets were clean and fair<br /> -From wholesome drench of April rains;<br /> -And on the western window panes<br /> -The chilly sunset faintly told<br /> -Of unmatured green valleys cold,<br /> -Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,<br /> -Of rivers new with springtide sedge.”</p> - -<p>Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is <i>La -Belle Dame sans Merci</i>. The title is taken from that of a poem by Alain -Chartier,—the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. -of France,—of which an English translation used to be attributed to -Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This title -had caught Keats’s fancy, and in the <i>Eve of St Agnes</i> he makes Lorenzo -waken Madeline by playing beside her bed—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 5em;">“an ancient ditty, long since mute,</span><br /> -In Provence call’d ‘La belle dame sans merci’.”</p> - -<p>The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the -spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more -to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with -Provence<a name='fna_57' id='fna_57' href='#f_57'><small>[57]</small></a>. Keats’s ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but -rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the mediæval world of -enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when -either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a -bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his -own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery -expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world -symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of -whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a -weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild -yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect ‘inevitable’ union of sound -and sense, make of <i>La Belle Dame sans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> Merci</i> the master-piece, not only -among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece -must be chosen) among them all.</p> - -<p>Before finally giving up <i>Hyperion</i> Keats had conceived and written, -during his summer months at Shanklin and Winchester, another narrative -poem on a Greek subject: but one of those where Greek life and legend come -nearest to the mediæval, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and -witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of passion. I speak, of -course, of <i>Lamia</i>, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and -victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him -by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the -scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats had found the germ of -the story, quoted from Philostratus, in Burton’s <i>Anatomy of Melancholy</i>. -In versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them, -however, not as in <i>Endymion</i>, but in a manner founded on that of Dryden, -with a free use of the Alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and -the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the measure -as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe -and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its -way as the victorious march of Dryden himself. Here is an example where -the poetry of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, goddess, see<br /> -Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!<br /> -For pity do not this sad heart belie—<br /> -Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.<br /> -Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!<br /> -To thy far wishes will thy streams obey:<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,<br /> -Alone they can drink up the morning rain:<br /> -Though a descended Pleiad, will not one<br /> -Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune<br /> -Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?”</p> - -<p>And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,<br /> -Throughout her palaces imperial,<br /> -And all her populous streets and temples lewd,<br /> -Mutter’d, like tempest in the distance brew’d,<br /> -To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.<br /> -Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,<br /> -Shuffled their sandals o’er the pavement white,<br /> -Companion’d or alone; while many a light<br /> -Flar’d, here and there, from wealthy festivals,<br /> -And threw their moving shadows on the walls,<br /> -Or found them cluster’d in the cornic’d shade<br /> -Of some arch’d temple door, or dusty colonnade.”</p> - -<p>No one can deny the truth of Keats’s own criticism on <i>Lamia</i> when he -says, “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 sensation.” -There is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns -itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the -touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the -transformation itself. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat -disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode -of Hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the -merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil’s dream of love and -beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This -thrilling vividness of narration in particular<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> points, and the fine -melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give -<i>Lamia</i> almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats’s narrative -poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others -too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for -instance that of the palace reared by Lamia’s magic; which will not bear -comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet’s building. -And it has reflective passages, as that in the first book beginning, ‘Let -the mad poets say whate’er they please,’ and the first fifteen lines of -the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at -its best, Keats relapses into something too like Leigh Hunt’s and his own -early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows at the -same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language. -The positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been -attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the <i>Eve of -St Agnes</i> we had to ‘brook’ tears for to check or forbear them, in -<i>Hyperion</i> ‘portion’d’ for ‘proportion’d;’ eyes that ‘fever out;’ a -chariot ‘foam’d along.’ Some of these verbal licences possess a force that -makes them pass; but not so in <i>Lamia</i> the adjectives ‘psalterian’ and -‘piazzian,’ the verb ‘to labyrinth,’ and the participle ‘daft,’ as if from -an imaginary active verb meaning to daze.</p> - -<p>In the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is moreover a -weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much -importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him -uttering. But the doctrine he sets forth in <i>Lamia</i> is one which from the -reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain -consistency:—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> -<span style="margin-left: 7em;">“Do not all charms fly</span><br /> -At the mere touch of cold philosophy?<br /> -There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;<br /> -We know her woof, her texture; she is given<br /> -In the dull catalogue of common things.<br /> -Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,<br /> -Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,<br /> -Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine—<br /> -Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made<br /> -The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.”</p> - -<p>Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in <i>The Rainbow</i>: but -one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which Keats would have done -well to stand, is preached by Wordsworth in his famous Preface.</p> - -<p>Passing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of Keats’s work -during this period—it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly -occupied in the spring months of 1819, from the completion of <i>St Agnes’ -Eve</i> at Chichester in January until the commencement of <i>Lamia</i> and <i>Otho -the Great</i> at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats constitute a class -apart in English literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived -from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he -calls the ‘roundelay’ of the Indian maiden in <i>Endymion</i> he had made his -most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching -Shelley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in -touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are -comparatively simple and regular in form. They are written in a strain -intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the -declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate -with the idea of an ode. Of the five composed in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> spring of 1819, two, -those on <i>Psyche</i> and the <i>Grecian Urn</i>, are inspired by the old Greek -world of imagination and art; two, those on <i>Melancholy</i> and the -<i>Nightingale</i>, by moods of the poet’s own mind; while the fifth, that on -<i>Indolence</i>, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations.</p> - -<p>In the <i>Psyche</i>, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching -those of Spenser’s nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) Keats recurs -to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in -the opening poem of his first book, beginning—</p> - -<p class="poem">“So felt he, who first told how Psyche went<br /> -On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment.”</p> - -<p>Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by -cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like -touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by -the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are -disclosed—‘Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.’ What other -poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm -of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all -his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time -habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his ‘sea-shouldering whales,’ he -is now in his own manner the equal. The ‘azure-lidded sleep’ of the maiden -in <i>St Agnes’ Eve</i> is matched in this ode by the ‘moss-lain Dryads’ and -the ‘soft-conchèd ear’ of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on -us a little with a sense of oddity, like the ‘cirque-couchant’ snake in -<i>Lamia</i>. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn -of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage -of his own mind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of -antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the -metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In some untrodden region of my mind,</span><br /> -Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.”</span></p> - -<p>Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself -swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold -of the sanctuary prepared by the ‘gardener Fancy,’ his ear charmed by the -glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated -vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the -invocation and the imagery.</p> - -<p>Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the -<i>Ode on a Grecian Urn</i>. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the -<i>Psyche</i>, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two -arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which -Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the -sestet, and in one instance—the ode to Melancholy—expanding it into a -septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had -set the poet’s mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of -ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured -images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art -to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which -flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of -antiquity—interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,—‘What men -or gods are these, what maidens<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> loth,’ &c. The second and third stanzas -express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences -between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety -and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange -permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even -richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the -incomparable choice of pictures,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“What little town by river or sea shore,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?”</span></p> - -<p>In the answering lines—</p> - -<p class="poem">“And, little town, thy streets for evermore<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Will silent be; and not a soul to tell</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Why thou art desolate, can e’er return,—”</span></p> - -<p>in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the -arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, -and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a -necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own -compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can -easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice -it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward -between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to -the future, to remain,—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 8em;">“in midst of other woe</span><br /> -Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—”</span></p> - -<p>thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason -and the flux of things is to the poet and artist—at least to one of -Keats’s temper—an immutable law.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied -Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland -House an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is -described in his fourth stanza<a name='fna_58' id='fna_58' href='#f_58'><small>[58]</small></a>: and of course no subject is commoner -in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. But the two -subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of -ancient art: and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of -sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him -only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi’s etchings. Lord -Holland’s urn is duly figured in the <i>Vasi e Candelabri</i> of that admirable -master. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond of what he -calls—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 5em;">“the pleasant flow</span><br /> -Of words at opening a portfolio:”</p> - -<p>and in the scene of sacrifice in <i>Endymion</i> (Book L, 136-163) we may -perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as -well as an anticipation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the -subject in the ode.</p> - -<p>The ode <i>On Indolence</i> stands midway, not necessarily in date of -composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two Greek and the two -personal odes, as I have above distinguished them. In it Keats again calls -up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate -the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of Love, Ambition, -and Poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. This ode, less highly -wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> the imaginative record -of a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted -intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an -agreeable physical languor. Well had it been for him had such moods come -more frequently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons of men, -the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and -unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled to bursting. One of the -attributes he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is a</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 9em;">“sciential brain</span><br /> -To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain.”</p> - -<p>In the fragmentary ode <i>On Melancholy</i> (which has no proper beginning, its -first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of Beaumont and of -Milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the -habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a -characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Aye, in the very Temple of Delight<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Veil’d Melancholy has her sovereign shrine,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue</span><br /> -Can burst joy’s grape against his palate fine:<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”</span></p> - -<p>The same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds -expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet’s feeling for -nature and romance, in the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>. Just as his Grecian urn -was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the -particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that -he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some -far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow -her: first by aid of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> the spell of some southern vintage—a spell which he -makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. Then -follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind’s tribulations -which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of -Bacchus,—Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her -power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to -the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, -by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of -the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the thought -of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome -now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song—and here, by a -breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts -the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with -the permanence of the song-bird’s life, meaning the life of the type. This -last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those -memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza -closing with the words ‘in faery lands forlorn’: and then, catching up his -own last word, ‘forlorn,’ with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he -returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest -dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes rank beside the -<i>Grecian Urn</i> in the other. Neither is strictly faultless, but such -revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch -that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to -faultlessness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. Both -are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. Let us -therefore place here, as an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> example of this class of Keats’s work, the -ode <i>To Autumn</i>, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of -his quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, no such -far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but -in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. In the first stanza -the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in -words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at -all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the -middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have -an exquisite congruity and lightness.</p> - -<p class="poem">“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;</span><br /> -Conspiring with him how to load and bless<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;</span><br /> -To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;</span><br /> -To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,</span><br /> -And still more, later flowers for the bees,<br /> -Until they think warm days will never cease,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.</span><br /> -<br /> -Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find</span><br /> -Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;</span><br /> -Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:</span><br /> -And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Steady thy laden head across a brook;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or by a cider-press, with patient look,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.</span><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span><br /> -Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—</span><br /> -While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;</span><br /> -Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Among the river sallows, borne aloft</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;</span><br /> -And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”</span></p> - -<p>To pass from our poet’s work at this time in the several fields of -romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pass -from a region of happy and assured conquest to one of failure, though of -failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been -in store for him. At his age no man has ever been a master in the drama: -even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the -difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in -which Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot -contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to -his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted. -He brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we -have seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, and a mind -prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while -Brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. But these -things were not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not yet -developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of -the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in -conception.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> Keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing -with all the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the effect only -of puppets inexpertly agitated: Otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and -fatherly affection, Ludolph of febrile passion and vacillation, Erminia of -maidenly purity, Conrad and Auranthe of ambitious lust and treachery. At -least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. From -that point Keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence, -shows a great improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the violent -kind affected by the old English drama, in the disclosure of the body of -Auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly -imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his -frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Marlowe, not only by their -pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses -expressed in them. Of the second historical play, <i>King Stephen</i>, which -Keats began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to afford -matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he finished are not only marked -by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a -spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not -shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his -capacity had not this fragment been preserved.</p> - -<p>But in the mingling of his soul’s and body’s destinies it had been -determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be -suffered to ripen farther upon earth.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2> - -<div class="note"><p class="hang">Return to Wentworth Place—Autumn occupations: The <i>Cap and Bells</i>: -Recast of <i>Hyperion</i>—Growing despondency—Visit of George Keats to -England—Attack of Illness in February—Rally in the Spring—Summer in -Kentish Town—Publication of the <i>Lamia</i> volume—Relapse—Ordered -South—Voyage to Italy—Naples—Rome—Last Days and Death. [October -1819-Feb. 1821.]</p></div> - - -<p>We left Keats at Winchester, with <i>Otho</i>, <i>Lamia</i>, and the <i>Ode to Autumn</i> -just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and -take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting -imagination magnify and passion exasperate them as heretofore. At his -request Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in -Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came on the 8th of October -to take up his quarters. But alas! his blood proved traitor to his will: -and the plan of life and literary work in London broke down at once on -trial. The gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at -Winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a -distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he -went to Hampstead—‘into the fire’—and in a moment the flames had seized -him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his -mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was -utterly passion’s slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he -found that he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send -her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, “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.... 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 absorb’d me.” A three days’ visit at her -mother’s house, followed by another of a day or two at the Dilkes’, ended -in his giving up all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently, -of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at Hampstead under -Brown’s roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. He writes with -a true foreboding: “I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast -the die for Love or Death.—I have no patience with anything else.”</p> - -<p>It was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to -Wentworth Place in October, 1819, begins the melancholy closing chapter of -Keats’s history. Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the -flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last kept -smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the -first began from this time forth to sink. Not that he was idle during the -ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked -both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. For the present he -determined not to publish <i>Lamia</i>, <i>Isabella</i>, and the other poems written -since <i>Endymion</i>. He preferred to await the result of Brown’s attempt to -get <i>Otho</i> brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success -in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the -meantime<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in -estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold -his friend’s name. The great hope of the authors was that Kean would see -an opportunity for himself in the part of Ludolph. In this they were not -disappointed: the play was accepted: but Elliston, the manager, proposing -to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, Keats and Brown -objected to the delay, and about Christmas transferred the offer of their -<span class="smcaplc">MS.</span> to Covent Garden, where Macready, under Harris’s management, was at -this time beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while -returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped.</p> - -<p>In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which Keats bent his -hopes. “One of my ambitions,” he had written to Bailey from Winchester, -“is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has -done in acting.” And now, in a letter to Mr Taylor of Nov. 17, he says -that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he -does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he -may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he -conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is “to -diffuse the colouring of <i>St Agnes’ Eve</i> throughout a poem in which -character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery.” Two or -three such poems would be, he thinks, the best <i>gradus</i> to the <i>Parnassum -altissimum</i> of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment -engaged on a task of a different nature. “As the marvellous is the most -enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been -endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> manage -for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all.” The piece to -which Keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the <i>Cap -and Bells</i>, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing -of the autumn days immediately following their return to Wentworth Place, -Brown says:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem -in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had not -composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It was to -be published under the feigned authorship of ‘Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,’ and -to bear the title of the <i>Cap and Bells</i>, or, which he preferred, the -<i>Jealousies</i>. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He wrote it with -the greatest facility; in one instance I remember having copied (for I -copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner<a name='fna_59' id='fna_59' href='#f_59'><small>[59]</small></a>.”</p></div> - -<p>Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the most judicious -adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the <i>Cap and -Bells</i> to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly -flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to Keats’s nature. As long -as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of -pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable<a name='fna_60' id='fna_60' href='#f_60'><small>[60]</small></a>, and he -was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. Moreover the spirit of -poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the -spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of -the metrical romances of the Italian Renaissance, and again, with -unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> cantos of <i>Don -Juan</i>. It was partly the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great -student of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent Italian -studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron’s success, that now -induced Keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. Having already -employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the <i>ottava rima</i> of -the Italians, in his serious poem of <i>Isabella</i>, he now, by what seems an -odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave Spenserian -stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. -Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his -choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to -gay with a light hand, and the movement of the <i>Cap and Bells</i> has much of -his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not -a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and -Brown’s invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a -fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being -meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all -that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the -emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his -affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the -Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to -weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the -fragment of <i>St Mark’s Eve</i> at the beginning of the year,—the tale of an -English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through -the reading of a magic book. With this and other purely fanciful elements -of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day. -It was in this year, 1819, that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and -his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject: -and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the -scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. The -references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the <i>Cap and Bells</i> -are general rather than particular, although here and there individual -names and characters are glanced at: as when ‘Esquire Biancopany’ stands -manifestly, as Mr Forman has pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social -and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. As -Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for -this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the Byronic wit and devilry his -raillery seems but child’s play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful -and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in -passages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination -becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and -colour,—but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time.</p> - -<p>Besides his morning task in Brown’s company on the <i>Cap and Bells</i>, Keats -had other work on hand during this November and December. “In the -evenings,” writes Brown, “at his own desire, he occupied a separate -apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of -<i>Hyperion</i> into the form of a Vision.” The result of this attempt, which -has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in Keats’s -history. We have seen how, in the previous August, he had grown -discontented with the style and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> diction of <i>Hyperion</i>, as being too -artificial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he took the -poem up again<a name='fna_61' id='fna_61' href='#f_61'><small>[61]</small></a>, and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly, -it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading, -partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which -were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate the fall of the -Titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision -revealed and interpreted to him by a goddess of the fallen race. The -reader remembers how he had broken off his work on <i>Hyperion</i> at the point -where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with the inspiration of -her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of -mythology he had lately bought<a name='fna_62' id='fna_62' href='#f_62'><small>[62]</small></a>, he now identifies this Greek -Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being -possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome -was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess -and guardian of Saturn’s temple. His vision takes him first into a grove -or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a -slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval -temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet -see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an -image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty, -he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from -her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn. -Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an -irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself -conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn’s -overthrow. ‘Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,’ &c.,—from this point -Keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his <i>Vision</i> the text of the -original <i>Hyperion</i>; with alterations which are in almost all cases for -the worse. Neither does the new portion of his work well match the old. -Side by side with impressive passages, it contains others where both -rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more -on single lines and passages, and less on sustained effects. Keats has -indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the -opening of the <i>Vision</i>, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps -conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the -priestess when she removes her veils. But the especial interest of the -poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his -mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the -poet’s character and lot. When Moneta bids him mount the steps to her -side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish -utterly where he stands. In fact he all but dies before he reaches the -stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the -ordeal:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“None can usurp this height,” returned that shade,<br /> -“But those to whom the miseries of the world<br /> -Are misery, and will not let them rest.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>All else who find a haven in the world,<br /> -Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,<br /> -If by a chance into this fane they come,<br /> -Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.”<br /> -“Are there not thousands in the world,” said I,<br /> -Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,<br /> -“Who love their fellows even to the death,<br /> -Who feel the giant agony of the world,<br /> -And more, like slaves to poor humanity,<br /> -Labour for mortal good? I sure should see<br /> -Other men here, but I am here alone.”<br /> -“Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,”<br /> -Rejoin’d that voice; “they are no dreamers weak;<br /> -They seek no wonder but the human face,<br /> -No music but a happy-noted voice:<br /> -They come not here, they have no thought to come;<br /> -And thou art here, for thou art less than they.<br /> -What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,<br /> -To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,<br /> -A fever of thyself: think of the earth:<br /> -What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?<br /> -What haven? Every creature hath its home,<br /> -Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,<br /> -Whether his labours be sublime or low—<br /> -The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:<br /> -Only the dreamer venoms all his days,<br /> -Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.<br /> -Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared,<br /> -Such things as thou art are admitted oft<br /> -Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile,<br /> -And suffer’d in these temples—”<a name='fna_63' id='fna_63' href='#f_63'><small>[63]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>Tracing the process of Keats’s thought through this somewhat obscure -imagery,—the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws -himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is -lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> garden): -awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with -Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly -above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow -men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to -approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only -on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. And -even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of -common men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the human mission -and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. Almost from the first -dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry -towards—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">“a nobler life,</span><br /> -Where I may find the agonies, the strife<br /> -Of human hearts.”</p> - -<p>What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet’s lot even -at its best.</p> - -<p class="poem">“Only the dreamer venoms all his days,<br /> -Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve,”</p> - -<p>—through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when this bitter cry -broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before, -when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of -the poetic life:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“These are the living pleasures of the bard,<br /> -But richer far posterity’s award.<br /> -What shall he murmur with his latest breath,<br /> -When his proud eye looks through the film of death?”—<br /> -</p> - -<p>His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the -spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh. -The wasting of his vital powers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> by latent disease was turning all his -sensations and emotions into pain—at once darkening the shadow of -impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding -instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied -cravings of his passion. In verses at this time addressed, though -doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones -like this:—</p> - -<p class="poem"> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">“Where shall I learn to get my peace again?”—</span><br /> -<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">—“O for some sunny spell</span><br /> -To dissipate the shadows of this hell”:—</p> - -<p>or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Withhold no atom’s atom or I die,</span><br /> -Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Forget, in the mist of idle misery,</span><br /> -Life’s purposes,—the palate of the mind<br /> -Losing its gust, and my ambition blind.”</p> - -<p>That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does -not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible in the present state of his -fortunes. “However selfishly I may feel,” he had written to her some -months earlier, “I am sure I could never act selfishly.” The Brawnes on -their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and -independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly -be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats’s sufferings, -disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate -comrade Brown. Without understanding the cause, Brown was not slow to -perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances Keats had -given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen -him against troubles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> of imagination, and that he was not and would not -allow himself to be unhappy.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“I quickly perceived,” writes Brown, “that he was more so than I had -feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, -frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great -uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do -no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding -that word however.... All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge, -was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, -or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend -could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too -thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. -Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, -a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by -accident, and without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be -warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise -never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could -induce him to break his word when once given,—which was a difficulty. -Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional -proof of his rooted misery”<a name='fna_64' id='fna_64' href='#f_64'><small>[64]</small></a>.</p></div> - -<p>Some of the same symptoms were observed by Haydon, and have been described -by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting -another’s weakness with his own strength<a name='fna_65' id='fna_65' href='#f_65'><small>[65]</small></a>. To his friends in general -Keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice -that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, Severn, at this time -competed for and carried off (December 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of -the Academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for -several years. The subject was Spenser’s ‘Cave of Despair.’ We hear of -Keats flinging<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> out in anger from among a company of elder artists where -the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an -appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture,—adding, however, -parenthetically from his troubled heart, “You had best put me into your -Cave of Despair.” In December his letters to his sister make mention -several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made -to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, -that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in -connection with that gentleman’s business. Early in January, 1820, George -Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his -wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first -trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of -the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to -England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey, -of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers -from their grandmother’s gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, during -which John made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. “He was -not the same being,” wrote George, looking back on the time some years -afterwards; “although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, -he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the -reviving custom of venting his griefs.” In a letter which the poet wrote -to his sister-in-law while her husband was in England, he attempts to keep -up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls -involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. Of -his work he says nothing, and it is clear from Brown’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> narrative that -both his morning and his evening task—the <i>Cap and Bells</i> and the -<i>Vision</i>—had been dropped some time before this<a name='fna_66' id='fna_66' href='#f_66'><small>[66]</small></a>, and left in the -fragmentary state in which we possess them.</p> - -<p>George left for Liverpool on Friday Jan. 28. A few days later Keats was -seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set -up in his constitution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which -recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“One night,” writes Brown—it was on the Thursday Feb. 3—“at eleven -o’clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce -intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible<a name='fna_67' id='fna_67' href='#f_67'><small>[67]</small></a>; it -therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, ‘What is the -matter? you are fevered?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered, ‘I was on the -outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,—but -now I don’t feel it. Fevered!—of course, a little.’ He mildly and -instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my -request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate -remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On -entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he -slightly coughed, and I heard him say,—‘That is blood from my mouth.’ -I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the -sheet. ‘Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.’ After -regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of -countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know the colour of -that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived in that -colour;—that drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die.’ I ran -for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left -him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep.”</p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue -truly. He survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life -was but a life-in-death. How many are there among us to whom such -<i>lacrymae rerum</i> come not home? Happy at least are they whose lives this -curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses -past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,—who know not -what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under Mediterranean -palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest -and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats’s case ran through the -usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would -not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering -regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous -prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to -see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a -week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed, -and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, which his -good feelings wrung from him, that under the circumstances he ought to -release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he -became quieter and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he wrote -often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his -men friends: among them one to James Rice, which contains this often -quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed -a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering -under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify that -acerbated the poison of either sensation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> The beauties of nature had -lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that -illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my -mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive -things in a truer light),—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 super-human fancy.”</p></div> - -<p>The greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, Keats said at another -time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the -literary merits of the Bible he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the -Hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. What he wants to see again, -he writes now further from his sickbed, are ‘the simple flowers of our -spring.’ And in the course of April, after being nearly two months a -prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as -early as the twenty-fifth of March, we hear of him going into London, to -the private view of Haydon’s ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’ where the painter -tells how he found him and Hazlitt in a corner, ‘really rejoicing.’ -Keats’s friends, in whose minds his image had always been associated with -the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring -themselves to believe but that he would recover. Brown had arranged to -start early in May on a second walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor -actually advised Keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own -state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the smack as far as -Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in -Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the -sake of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer -Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks -during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking -advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive -on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been -strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even -that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin -(meaning begin again) soon on the <i>Cap and Bells</i>. But in fact the only -work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight -revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at -last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing -<i>Lamia</i>, <i>Isabella</i>, <i>The Eve of St Agnes</i>, <i>Hyperion</i>, and the <i>Odes</i>. Of -the poems written during Keats’s twenty months of inspiration from March -1818 to October 1819, none of importance are omitted except the <i>Eve of St -Mark</i>, the <i>Ode on Indolence</i>, and <i>La Belle Dame sans Merci</i>. The first -Keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: La -Belle Dame sans Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical <i>The -Indicator</i>, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on -May 20, 1820. <i>Hyperion</i>, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at -their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original -shape, the poet’s friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they -thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came out in the first week -of July. An admirably kind and discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in -the <i>Indicator</i> at the beginning of August<a name='fna_68' id='fna_68' href='#f_68'><small>[68]</small></a>: and in the same month -Jeffrey in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> for the first time broke silence in -Keats’s favour. The impression made on the more intelligent order of -readers may be inferred from the remarks of Crabb Robinson in his -<i>Diaries</i> for the following December<a name='fna_69' id='fna_69' href='#f_69'><small>[69]</small></a>. “My book has had good success -among the literary people,” wrote Keats a few weeks after its appearance, -“and I believe has a moderate sale.”</p> - -<p>But had the success been even far greater than it was, Keats was in no -heart and no health for it to cheer him. Passion with lack of hope were -working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards -recovery. The relapse was not long delayed. Fresh hæmorrhages occurring on -the 22nd and 23rd of June, he moved from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to -be nursed by the Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here everything -was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but -all in vain: he “would keep his eyes fixed all day,” as he afterwards -avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt’s suggestion they took a drive -in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a -flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing -to Fanny Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but -breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself -chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart -is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of -half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. “Hamlet’s heart was full of such -misery as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> mine is when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” -Keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, ‘a -fever of himself:’ and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but -his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his -betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words -that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory<a name='fna_70' id='fna_70' href='#f_70'><small>[70]</small></a>.</p> - -<p>Such at this time was Keats’s condition that the slightest shock unmanned -him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or -stranger. After he had been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened -on the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note -from Fanny Brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. This -circumstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to -stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to -his old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, would not suffer -this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and -tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some -mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has -told, with a painter’s touch, how he found him “lying in a white bed, with -white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic -flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I<a name='fna_71' id='fna_71' href='#f_71'><small>[71]</small></a>.” Ever since -his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that -a winter in England would be too much for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> him, and had been trying to -bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to Italy. The Shelleys had -heard through the Gisbornes of Keats’s relapse, and Shelley now wrote in -terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come -and take up his residence with them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats -immediately after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain -tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Shelleys’ friendship, but as -to the <i>Cenci</i>, which had just been sent him, and generally as to -Shelley’s and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much -to the purpose to say.</p> - -<p>As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this time made up his -mind to try it, “as a soldier marches up to a battery.” His hope was that -Brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend -in the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for Keats’s -departure was fast approaching while Brown still remained in ignorance of -his purpose. In the meantime another companion offered himself in the -person of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the -Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with -a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn -accordingly took passage for Naples on board the ship ‘Maria Crowther,’ -which sailed from London on Sept. 18<a name='fna_72' id='fna_72' href='#f_72'><small>[72]</small></a>. Several of the friends who loved -Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> them Mr -Taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase -for £100 of the copyright of <i>Endymion</i>. As soon as the ill news of his -health reached Brown in Scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way -south, and for that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in the -Thames on the same evening as the ‘Maria Crowther’ sailed: so that the two -friends lay on that night within hail of one another off Gravesend -unawares.</p> - -<p>The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn was struck by his -vigour of appetite and apparent cheerfulness. The fever of travel and -change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, -and in Keats’s case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to -those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to -raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time -afterwards. Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten -days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats -landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board -ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter -confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever -confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his -passion, he says 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 wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these -pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these -pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> weakness and decline, -are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever.”</p> - -<p>On the night when Keats wrote these words (Sept. 28) Brown was staying -with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly -missed seeing each other once more. The ship putting to sea again, still -with adverse winds, there came next to Keats that day of momentary calm -and lightening of the spirit of which Severn has left us the record, and -the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of -his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near -Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of -which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one -initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same -night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well; -placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a -<i>Lover’s Complaint</i>, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of Shakespeare’s -poems which had been given him by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and -under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and -feeling:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night</span><br /> -And watching, with eternal lids apart,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,</span><br /> -The moving waters at their priestlike task<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of cold ablution round earth’s human shores,</span><br /> -Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—</span><br /> -No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,</span><br /> -To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,</span><br /> -Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”</span></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>These were Keats’s last verses. With the single exception of the sonnet -beginning ‘The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,’ composed -probably immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only -love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no -death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty -and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity.</p> - -<p>Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent -storm in the Bay of Biscay; and Severn waking at night, and finding the -water rushing through their cabin, called out to Keats “half fearing he -might be dead,” and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first -line of Arne’s long-popular song from <i>Artaxerxes</i>—‘Water parted from the -sea.’ As the storm abated Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of <i>Don -Juan</i>, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and -presently flung the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed: -after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the -dropping of a shot across the ship’s bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in -order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage -of over four weeks, the ‘Maria Crowther’ arrived in the Bay of Naples, and -was there subjected to ten days’ quarantine; during which, says Keats, he -summoned up, ‘in a kind of desperation,’ more puns than in the whole -course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was -among his fellow-passengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of -cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly -preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his -own. He admits as much in writing from Naples <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>harbour to Mrs Brawne: and -in the same letter says, “O what an account I could give you of the Bay of -Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world—I feel a -spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly.” The effort he -constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world -of colour and classic beauty about him, partly imposed on Severn; but in a -letter he wrote to Brown from Naples on Nov. 1, soon after their landing, -his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh God! God! God! -Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me -like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my -head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her—I see her—I hear -her.... Oh Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me -that the human heart is capable of so much misery.”</p></div> - -<p>At Naples Keats and Severn stayed at the Hotel d’Angleterre, and received -much kindness and hospitality from a brother of Miss Cotterill’s who was -there to meet her. The political state and servile temper of the -people—though they were living just then under the constitutional forms -imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous -summer—grated on Keats’s liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the -theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance -that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He had -received there another letter from Shelley, who since he last wrote had -read the <i>Lamia</i> volume, and was full of generous admiration for -<i>Hyperion</i>. Shelley now warmly renewed his invitation to Keats to come to -Pisa. But his and Severn’s plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive -thither (apparently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> in the second week of November) Keats suffered -seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in -the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered -for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which -Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di -Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinità -dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were -left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and -at first they were ill served by the <i>trattorìa</i> from which they got their -meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the -dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says -Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn’s first cares was to get a -piano, since nothing soothed Keats’s pain so much as music. For a while -the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of -seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these -alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian -close by. The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the -air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn’s -absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In -their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline -Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing—but -not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who -was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats’s nerves, and made them -change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they -would ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working among the -ruins.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at Rome began reading -a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to -himself:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Misera me! sollievo a me non resta<br /> -Altro che ’l pianto, <i>ed il pianto è delitto</i>.”</p> - -<p>Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful. -His thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on -the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and -wrote encouragingly to his friends in England; and on Nov. 30 Keats -himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less despondent than before. But -suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. On Dec. 10 came a -relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Hæmorrhage followed hæmorrhage -on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes -the most piteous and distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his -friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to -have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn’s -refusal, “his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his -ardent imagination and bursting heart.” It was no unmanly fear of pain in -Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but -above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would -bring upon his friend. “He explained to me the exact procedure of his -gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon -the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued -attendance on him.” Severn gently persisting in refusal, Keats for a while -fiercely refused his friend’s ministrations, until presently the example -of that friend’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. In -religion Keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting -Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to -and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the -behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the -power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to -him from Jeremy Taylor’s <i>Holy Living and Dying</i>, strove to pass the -remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy.</p> - -<p>By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, -partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of -the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to -combat it. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then -were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous -kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr -Ewing. At one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in -danger of actual destitution, till a remittance from Mr Taylor arrived -just in time to save them. The devotion and resource of Severn were -infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium -or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and -his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with “beating -about in the tempest of his mind;” and once and again some fresh -remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, -would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the -first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, -one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his -companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> reading was -still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked -Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for -nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, -himself from thoughts of fame. “I feel,” he said, “the flowers growing -over me,” and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he -gave the words for his epitaph:—“here lies one whose name was writ in -water.” Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to -speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual -question to the doctor when he came in was, “Doctor, when will this -posthumous life of mine come to an end?” As he turned to ask it neither -physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at -all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing -unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate to the -last, “his generous concern for me,” says Severn, “in my isolated position -at Rome was one of his greatest cares.” His response to kindness was -irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with -him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to -fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. “To remedy this -one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a -lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be -conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found -the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while -doubting suddenly cried out, ‘Severn, Severn, here’s a little fairy -lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.’” And again “Poor Keats has -me ever by him, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens -his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close -gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep.”</p> - -<p>Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the -watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations -to write them down. Life held out for two months and a half after the -relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing -near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes -Severn, “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.” Three days later his body was -carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his -story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his -sake and Shelley’s has become a place of pilgrimage to the English race -for ever. It was but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in -their last resting-place beside his friend<a name='fna_73' id='fna_73' href='#f_73'><small>[73]</small></a>.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p> -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2> - -<p class="center">Character and Genius.</p> - - -<p>The touching circumstances of Keats’s illness and death at Rome aroused -naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous -mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy -was Shelley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics -had contributed to Keats’s sufferings, and believing that they had killed -him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of -passionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that -double inspiration Shelley wrote,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres.”</p> - -<p>As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, <i>Adonaïs</i> is unsurpassed -in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and -the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is -perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley’s art: while -its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most -lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the -elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his -character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the -same time conveyed, to a circle of readers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> incommensurably wider than -that reached by Shelley, in the well-known stanza of <i>Don Juan</i>. In regard -to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. -When the <i>Edinburgh</i> praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the -Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:—“No more Keats, I -entreat:—flay him alive;—if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself.” -Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he -turns against the latter, and cries:—“I would not be the person who wrote -that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world.” In the -<i>Don Juan</i> passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at -the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath.</p> - -<p>Taken together with the notion of ‘Johnny Keats’ to which <i>Blackwood</i> and -the <i>Quarterly</i> had previously given currency, the <i>Adonaïs</i> and the <i>Don -Juan</i> passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of -Keats’s character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction -had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was ‘as -like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,’ did anything effectual to set his -memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the -end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been -quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography -George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but -against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the -hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had -unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication -between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats’s -friends in England took<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> George’s part, disposed under the circumstances -to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to -superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his -want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his -occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at -one time wished to be Keats’s biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse -collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them. -The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary -skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the -poet’s friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects -not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats’s -death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,—the -Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us -all,—and with help from nearly all Keats’s surviving friends, and by the -grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet -in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every -student is familiar.</p> - -<p>Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can -with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, -inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with -pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for -pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own ‘exquisite sense of -the luxurious’: and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which -he describes as his ‘horrid morbidity of temperament.’ The greater his -credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and -that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued -him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way -when he speaks of the ‘violence of his temperament, continually smothered -up.’ Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during -the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but -that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such -generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct -and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely -better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, -indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the -weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when -the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, -as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,—not indeed, so far as -we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of -the woman’s finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of -trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of -self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, -he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences -preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his -fortunes justified.</p> - -<p>In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for -manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his -friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have -heard little in this history<a name='fna_74' id='fna_74' href='#f_74'><small>[74]</small></a>, wrote while the poet lay dying: “Keats -must get himself again, Severn, if but for me—I cannot afford to lose -him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats.” The following -is from a letter of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> Brown written also during his illness:—“he is -present to me every where and at all times,—he now seems sitting here at -my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I -never knew how closely he was wound about my heart<a name='fna_75' id='fna_75' href='#f_75'><small>[75]</small></a>.” Elsewhere, -speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:—“while I waited on -him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance -of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as -absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like -this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me<a name='fna_76' id='fna_76' href='#f_76'><small>[76]</small></a>:” and we know in fact how -the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend’s -death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord -Houghton’s book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to -thank the writer for doing merited honour to one “whose genius I did not, -and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the <i>Man</i><a name='fna_77' id='fna_77' href='#f_77'><small>[77]</small></a>.” The -points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high -good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for -many. “He had a soul of noble integrity,” says Bailey: “and his common -sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, -in the best sense, manly.” Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of -sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very -intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, -requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it -nothing,—but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to -friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when -genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> the -ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, -then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what -his companions found in Keats. “He was the sincerest friend,” cries -Reynolds, “the most loveable associate,—the deepest listener to the -griefs and distresses of all around him,—‘That ever lived in this tide of -times<a name='fna_78' id='fna_78' href='#f_78'><small>[78]</small></a>.’” To the same effect Haydon:—“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 had a -kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who -wanted it.” And again Bailey:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John -Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one -particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his -letters he talks of <i>suspecting</i> everybody. It appeared not in his -conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor -frail human nature, and allowed for people’s faults more than any man -I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any -act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he -rose into sudden and animated indignation<a name='fna_79' id='fna_79' href='#f_79'><small>[79]</small></a>.”</p></div> - -<p>Lastly, “he had no fears of self,” says George Keats, “through -interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and -without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, -defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and -purse.”</p> - -<p>In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must assert his own -superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over -Keats’s dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, -idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> of the poet’s -“want of decision of character and power of will,” and says that “never -for two days did he know his own intentions,” his criticism is deserving -of more attention. This is only Haydon’s way of describing a fact in -Keats’s nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He -acknowledges his own “unsteady and vagarish disposition.” What he means is -no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in -regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in -regard to himself. “The Celtic instability,” a reader may perhaps surmise -who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet’s descent. Whether the quality -was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar -complexion of Keats’s genius. Or rather it was an expression in character -of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, -namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as -was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the -order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own -personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised -clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility -to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical -consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“As to the poetic character itself,” he writes, “(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 <i>per se</i>, -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. -A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> because he -has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other -body.... 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.”</p></div> - -<p>“Even now,” he says on another occasion, “I am perhaps not speaking from -myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live.” Keats was often -impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. “I would call the head -and top of those who have a proper self,” he says, “men of power”: and it -is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, -that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of -thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent -of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all -intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself -the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of -what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“For the sake,” he asks, “of a few fine imaginative or domestic -passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in -the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man -does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and -deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, -and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry -that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to -put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and -unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul.”</p></div> - -<p>This is but one of many passages in which Keats<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> proclaims the necessity, -for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His -critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise -of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the -foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware -that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, -of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its -elements existed:—“I have loved,” as he says, “the principle of beauty in -all things.” His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean, -including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the -soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long -enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their -manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit -of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the -faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to -divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the -Middle Age,—would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the -mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to -illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life?</p> - -<p>My belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the -height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief period between -its first effervescence and its exhaustion,—from the glowing humanity of -his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of -his own consciousness and his friends’ experience, he was accustomed to -live in the lives of others,—from the gleams of true greatness of mind -which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> gossip and -pleasantry of his familiar letters,—from all our evidences, in a word, as -to what he was as well as from what he did,—I think it probable that by -power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shaksperean -spirit that has lived since Shakspere; the true Marcellus, as his first -biographer has called him, of the realm of English song; and that in his -premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something -like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living -successors, as Lord Tennyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have -formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the -banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really -adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? In a final -estimate of any writer’s work, we must take into account not what he might -have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats, -the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with -fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we -can think, indeed, of the pathos of <i>Isabella</i>, but of that alone, as -equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the <i>Hymn to Pan</i> -and the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>, with the glow of romance colour in <i>St -Agnes’ Eve</i>, the weirdness of romance sentiment in <i>La Belle Dame Sans -Merci</i>, the conflict of elemental force with fate in <i>Hyperion</i>, the -revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the <i>Ode on a Grecian -Urn</i> and the fragment of an <i>Ode to Maia</i>.</p> - -<p>It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who -have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence -been operative. First on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> and -informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and -also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. And -secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of -execution—a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never -cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he -speaks of ‘loading every rift of a subject with ore.’ We may define it as -the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of -phrase. A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that -tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline,—</p> - -<p class="poem">“But to her heart her heart was voluble,<br /> -Paining with eloquence her balmy side.”</p> - -<p>The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is -the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every -touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line -describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of -suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the -emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on -ourselves. In so far as Keats has taught other poets really to write like -this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,—but not so when -for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of -brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. The first -considerable writer among Keats’s successors on whom his example took -effect was Hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. The -dominant poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly -influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed -the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal degrees. After or -together with Coleridge, Keats has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> also contributed most, among English -writers, to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group. -Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the -Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between -the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, -of our own day.</p> - -<p>Such, I think, is Keats’s historic place in English literature. What his -place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned -from their own lips. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, -but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines -immortally.</p> - - -<p> </p> -<p class="center">THE END.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p> -<h2>APPENDIX.</h2> - - -<p><a href="#Page_2">p. 2</a>, note 1. As to the exact date of Keats’s birth the evidence is -conflicting. He was christened at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, Dec. 18, -1795, and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register (which I am -informed is in the handwriting of the rector, Dr Conybeare) is a note -stating that he was born Oct. 31. The date is given accordingly without -question by Mr Buxton Forman (<i>Works</i>, vol. <span class="smcaplc">I.</span> p. xlviii). But it seems -certain that Keats himself and his family believed his birthday to have -been Oct. 29. Writing on that day in 1818, Keats says, “this is my -birthday.” Brown (in Houghton MSS.) gives the same day, but only as on -hearsay from a lady to whom Keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as -to the year. Lastly, in the proceedings in <i>Rawlings v. Jennings</i>, Oct. 29 -is again given as his birthday, in the affidavit of one Anne Birch, who -swears that she knew his father and mother intimately. The entry in the St -Botolph’s register is probably the authority to be preferred.—Lower -Moorfields was the space now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the London -Institution, together with the east side of Finsbury Pavement.—The births -of the younger brothers are in my text given rightly for the first time, -from the parish registers of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch; where they were all -three christened in a batch on Sept. 24, 1801. The family were at that -date living in Craven Street.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_2">p. 2</a>, note 2. Brown (Houghton MSS.) says simply that Thomas Keats was a -‘native of Devon.’ His daughter, Mrs Llanos, tells me she remembers -hearing as a child that he came from the Land’s End. Persons of the name -are still living in Plymouth.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_5">p. 5</a>, note 2. The total amount of the funds paid into Court by the -executors under Mr Jennings’s will (see Preface, <a href="#Page_viii">p. viii</a>) was £13160. -19<i>s.</i> 5<i>d.</i></p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_11">p. 11</a>, note 1, and <a href="#Page_70">p. 70</a>, note 1. Of the total last mentioned, there came -to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other legatees who -predeceased her) sums amounting to £9343. 2<i>s.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> In the Chancery -proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by Mrs Jennings for the -benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but only its general purport; -whence it appears that the sum she made over to Messrs Sandell and Abbey -in trust for them amounted approximately to £8000, and included all the -reversions fallen or still to fall in as above mentioned. The balance it -is to be presumed she retained for her own support (she being then 74).</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_17">p. 17</a>, note 1. The following letter written by Mr Abbey to Mr Taylor the -publisher, under April 18, 1821, soon after the news of Keats’s death -reached England, speaks for itself. The letter is from Woodhouse MSS. B.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“Sir,</p> - -<p>I beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the 30th ult. -respecting the late Mr Jno. Keats.</p> - -<p>I am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my -controul, and acted contrary to my advice, I cannot interfere with his -affairs.</p> - -<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">I am, Sir,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Yr. mo. Hble St.,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 6em;"><span class="smcap">Richd. Abbey</span>.”</span></p></div> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_34">p. 34</a>, note 1. The difficulty of determining the exact date and place of -Keats’s first introduction to Hunt arises as follows.—Cowden Clarke -states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in Leigh Hunt’s -cottage at Hampstead. Hunt in his <i>Autobiography</i> says it was ‘in the -spring of the year 1816’ that he went to live at Hampstead in the cottage -in question. Putting these two statements together, we get the result -stated as probable in the text. But on the other hand there is the -strongly Huntian character of Keats’s <i>Epistle</i> to G. F. Mathew, dated -November 1815, which would seem to indicate an earlier acquaintance (see -<a href="#Page_31">p. 31</a>). Unluckily Leigh Hunt himself has darkened counsel on the point by -a paragraph inserted in the last edition of his <i>Autobiography</i>, as -follows:—(Pref. no. 7, p. 257) “It was not at Hampstead that I first saw -Keats. It was at York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote -part of the <i>Indicator</i>, and he resided with me while in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the -curious in such things, among whom I am one.” The student must not be -misled by this remark of Hunt’s, which is evidently only due to a slip of -memory. It is quite true that Keats lived with Hunt in Mortimer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> Street, -Kentish Town, during part of July and August 1820 (see <a href="#Page_197">page 197</a>): and that -before moving to that address Hunt had lived for more than a year (from -the autumn of 1818 to the spring of 1820) at 8, New Road. But that Keats -was intimate with him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact -living not in London at all but at the Vale of Health, is abundantly -certain.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_37">p. 37</a>, note 1. Cowden Clarke tells how Keats once calling and finding him -fallen asleep over Chaucer, wrote on the blank space at the end of the -<i>Floure and the Leafe</i> the sonnet beginning ‘This pleasant tale is like a -little copse.’ Reynolds on reading it addressed to Keats the following -sonnet of his own, which is unpublished (Houghton MSS.), and has a certain -biographical interest. It is dated Feb. 27, 1817.</p> - -<p class="poem">“Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or white flowers pluck’d from some sweet lily bed;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed</span><br /> -The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves,<br /> -O’er the excited soul.—Thy genius weaves<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And win that coronal for thy young head</span><br /> -Which time’s strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne’er bereaves.<br /> -Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;</span><br /> -Be thou companion of the summer day,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Roaming the fields and older woods among:—</span><br /> -So shall thy muse be ever in her May,<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.”</span></p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_45">p. 45</a>, note 1. Woodhouse MSS. A. contains the text of the first draft in -question, with some preliminary words of Woodhouse as follows:—</p> - -<p>“The lines at p. 36 of Keats’s printed poems are altered from a copy of -verses written by K. at the request of his brother George, and by the -latter sent as a valentine to the lady. The following is a copy of the -lines as originally written:—</p> - -<p class="poem">Hadst thou lived in days of old,<br /> -Oh what wonders had been told<br /> -Of thy lively dimpled face,<br /> -And thy footsteps full of grace:<br /> -Of thy hair’s luxurious darkling,<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>Of thine eyes’ expressive sparkling.<br /> -And thy voice’s swelling rapture,<br /> -Taking hearts a ready capture.<br /> -Oh! if thou hadst breathed then,<br /> -Thou hadst made the Muses ten.<br /> -Could’st thou wish for lineage higher<br /> -Than twin sister of Thalia?<br /> -At least for ever, ever more<br /> -Will I call the Graces four.”</p> - -<p>Here follow lines 41—68 of the poem as afterwards published: and in -conclusion:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Ah me! whither shall I flee?<br /> -Thou hast metamorphosed me.<br /> -Do not let me sigh and pine,<br /> -Prythee be my valentine.<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 10em;">14 Feby. 1816.”</span></p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_47">p. 47</a>, note 1. Mrs Procter’s memory, however, betrayed her when she -informed Lord Houghton that the colour of Keats’s eyes was blue. That they -were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence alike of C. C. Clarke, -of George Keats and his wife (as transmitted by their daughter Mrs Speed -to her son), and from the various portraits painted from life and -posthumously by Severn and Hilton. Mrs Procter calls his hair auburn: Mrs -Speed had heard from her father and mother that it was ‘golden red,’ which -may mean nearly the same thing: I have seen a lock in the possession of -Sir Charles Dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have -looked gold in the lights. Bailey in Houghton MSS. speaks of it as -extraordinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his -head was like laying it ‘on the rich plumage of a bird.’ An evidently -misleading description of Keats’s general aspect is that of Coleridge when -he describes him as a ‘loose, slack, not well-dressed youth.’ The sage -must have been drawing from his inward eye: those intimate with Keats -being of one accord as to his appearance of trim strength and ‘fine -compactness of person.’ Coleridge’s further mention of his hand as -shrunken and old-looking seems exact.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_78">p. 78</a>, note 1. The isolated expressions of Keats on this subject, which -alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him somewhat unjustly to -the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. Fairness seems to require -that the whole passage in which he deals with it should be given. The -passage occurs in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> letter to Bailey written from Hampstead and dated -Oct. 8, 1817, of which only a fragment was printed by Lord Houghton, and -after him by Mr Buxton Forman (<i>Works</i>, vol. <span class="smcaplc">III.</span> p. 82, no. xvi.).</p> - -<p>“I went to Hunt’s and Haydon’s who live now neighbours.—Shelley was -there—I know nothing about anything in this part of the world—every Body -seems at Loggerheads. There’s Hunt infatuated—there’s Haydon’s picture in -statu quo—There’s Hunt walks up and down his painting-room criticizing -every head most unmercifully—There’s Horace Smith tired of Hunt—‘The Web -of our life is of mingled yarn.’... I am quite disgusted with literary -men, and will never know another except Wordsworth—no not even Byron. -Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known -each other many years—now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours. -Haydon says to me, Keats, don’t show your lines to Hunt on any account, or -he will have done half for you—so it appears Hunt wishes it to be -thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him I was getting -on to the completion of 4000 lines—Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me -they would have been 7000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he -to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on the -subject from some Lady, which contains a caution to me, thro’ him, on this -subject. Now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?”</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_83">p. 83</a>, note 1. See Haydon, <i>Autobiography</i>, vol. <span class="smcaplc">I.</span> pp. 384-5. The letter -containing Keats’s account of the same entertainment was printed for the -first time by Speed, <i>Works</i>, vol. <span class="smcaplc">I.</span> p. i. no. 1, where it is dated -merely ‘Featherstone Buildings, Monday.’ (At Featherstone Buildings lived -the family of Charles Wells.) In Houghton MSS. I find a transcript of the -same letter in the hand of Mr Coventry Patmore, with a note in Lord -Houghton’s hand: “These letters I did not print. R. M. M.” In the -transcript is added in a parenthesis after the weekday the date 5 April, -1818: but this is a mistake; the 5th of April in that year was not a -Monday: and the contents of Keats’s letter itself, as well as a comparison -with Haydon’s words in his <i>Autobiography</i>, prove beyond question that it -was written on Monday, the 5th of January.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_87">p. 87</a>, note 1. Similar expressions about the Devonshire weather occur in -nearly all Keats’s letters written thence in the course of March and -April. The letter to Bailey containing the sentences quoted in my text is -wrongly printed both by Lord<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> Houghton and Mr Forman under date Sept. -1818. I find the same date given between brackets at the head of the same -letter as transcribed in Woodhouse MSS. B., proving that an error was -early made either in docketing or copying it. The contents of the letter -leave no doubt as to its real date. The sentences quoted prove it to have -been written not in autumn but in spring. It contains Keats’s reasons both -for going down to join his brother Tom at Teignmouth, and for failing to -visit Bailey at Oxford on the way: now in September Keats was not at -Teignmouth at all, and Bailey had left Oxford for good, and was living at -his curacy in Cumberland (see <a href="#Page_122">p. 122</a>). Moreover there is an allusion by -Keats himself to this letter in another which he wrote the next day to -Reynolds, whereby its true date can be fixed with precision as Friday, -March 13.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_112">p. 112</a>, note 1. The following unpublished letter of Keats to Mr Taylor -(from Woodhouse MSS. B.) has a certain interest, both in itself and as -fixing the date of his departure for the North:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> -<p class="right">“Sunday evening,</p> - -<p>“My dear Taylor,</p> - -<p>I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health till my -return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, au -revoir, God keep us all well! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother Tom -will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for -him, since I still keep those you lent me a year ago. If I am -overweening, you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall -write, do send him some you think will be most amusing—he will be -careful in returning them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am -ashamed to catalogue these messages. There is but one more, which -ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs -Reynolds one of my books bound. As I cannot write in it let the -opposite” [a leaf with the name and ‘from the author,’ notes -Woodhouse] “be pasted in ’prythee. Remember me to Percy St.—Tell -Hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged -on a history piece to his own content. And tell Dewint I shall become -a disputant on the landscape. Bow for me very genteely to Mrs D. or -she will not admit your diploma. Remember me to Hessey, saying I hope -he’ll <i>Carey</i> his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. Adieu!</p> - -<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Your sincere friend,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">John o’Grots</span>.</span></p> - -<p>June 22, 1818. Hampstead” [The date and place are added by Woodhouse -in red ink, presumably from the post-mark].</p></div> - - -<p> </p> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span><a href="#Page_120">p. 120</a>, note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton -Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between ‘All the magic of the -place’ and the next line, ‘So saying, with a spirit’s glance,’ and has -proposed, by way of improvement, to read ‘with a spirit’s grace’. I find -the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued -thus in pencil after the word ‘place’.</p> - -<p class="poem">“’Tis now free to stupid face,<br /> -To cutters, and to fashion boats,<br /> -To cravats and to petticoats:—<br /> -The great sea shall war it down,<br /> -For its fame shall not be blown<br /> -At each farthing Quadrille dance.<br /> -So saying with a spirit’s glance<br /> -He dived”—.</p> - -<p>Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he -well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his -correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any -indication of the hiatus so caused.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_128">p. 128</a>, note 1. Lord Houghton says, “On returning to the south, Keats -found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at -Teignmouth.” It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was -made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of -Keats’s March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, <a href="#Page_225">p. 225</a>.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_138">p. 138</a>, note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his -knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been -mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the -capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at -his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the -provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband’s -death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings -himself had left them by will; one of £1000 direct; the other, of a -capital to yield £50 a year, in reversion after their mother’s death (see -<a href="#Page_5">p. 5</a>). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and -brought £1550. 7<i>s.</i> 10<i>d.</i> worth of that security at the price at which -it then stood. £1666. 13<i>s</i>. 4<i>d.</i> worth of the same stock was farther -purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of £50 -a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances -Rawlings<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments -lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to -whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the -first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each, -with its accumulations. Two years afterwards Fanny Keats received in like -manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers -John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being -£3375. 5<i>s.</i> 7<i>d.</i>, and to George £1147. 5<i>s.</i> 1<i>d.</i> It was a part of the -ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these -funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors -at the time when he most needed them.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_148">p. 148</a>, note 1. Landor’s letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a -presentation copy of the <i>Life and Letters</i>, in 1848, begins -characteristically as follows:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> -<p class="right">“Bath, Aug. 29.</p> - -<p>Dear Milnes,</p> - -<p>On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks’ absence, I find -your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an -editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, -excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of -the poetical character—fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed -overcome so great a difficulty as Shelley in his <i>Cenci</i>, nor united -so many powers of the mind as Southey in <i>Kehama</i>—but there is an -effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness -such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.—”</p></div> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_152">p. 152</a>, note 1. I think there is no doubt that <i>Hyperion</i> was begun by -Keats beside his brother’s sickbed in September or October 1818, and that -it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of ‘plunging into -abstract images,’ and finding a ‘feverous relief’ in the ‘abstractions’ of -poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as -the translation of Ronsard’s sonnet, <i>Nature ornant Cassandre</i>, which is -the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown -says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after -Tom’s death in December—“It was then he wrote <i>Hyperion</i>”; but these -words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already -begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to -the poem by name, and says he has been ‘going on a little’ with it: and on -the 14th of February, 1819, says ‘I have not gone on with <i>Hyperion</i>.’ -During the next<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> three months he was chiefly occupied on the <i>Odes</i>, and -whether he at the same time wrote any more of <i>Hyperion</i> we cannot tell. -It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as -in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, -<i>Works</i>, vol. <span class="smcaplc">II.</span> p. 143) that “it contains 2 books and ½—(about 900 -lines in all):” the actual length of the piece as published being 883 -lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before -revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after -nearly a year’s interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him -in a letter from Winchester in August or September, “I have also been -writing parts of my <i>Hyperion</i>,” this must not be taken as meaning that he -has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing -them,—like <i>Isabella</i> and the <i>Eve of St Agnes</i>, which he mentions at the -same time,—since the date of his last letter.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_164">p. 164</a>, note 1. The version of <i>The Eve of St Agnes</i> given in Woodhouse -MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the -original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all -probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see <a href="#Page_133">p. 133</a>). The -readings of the <span class="smcaplc">MS.</span> in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton -Forman (<i>Works</i>, vol. <span class="smcaplc">II.</span> p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the -poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have, -from Woodhouse’s transcript, the following table of the changes in those -stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:—</p> - -<p>Stanza <span class="smcaplc">I.</span>: line 1, for “chill” stood “cold”: line 4, for “was” stood -“were”: line 7, for “from” stood “in”: line 9 (and Stanza <span class="smcaplc">II.</span>, line 1), -for “prayer” stood “prayers”. Stanza <span class="smcaplc">III.</span>: line 7, for “went” stood -“turn’d”: line 8, for “Rough” stood “Black”. After stanza <span class="smcaplc">III.</span> stood the -following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed.</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 10em;">4.</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">But there are ears may hear sweet melodies,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And there are eyes to brighten festivals,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And many a lip that for the red wine calls—</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Follow, then follow to the illumined halls,</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Follow me youth—and leave the eremite—</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Give him a tear—then trophied bannerals</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And many a brilliant tasseling of light</span><br /> -Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>Stanza <span class="smcaplc">V.</span>; -line 1, for “revelry” stood “revellers”: lines 3-5, for—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Numerous as shadows haunting fairily<br /> -The brain new-stuff’d in youth with triumphs gay<br /> -Of old romance. These let us wish away,”—</p> - -<p>stood the following:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs,<br /> -The muse should never make the spirit gay;<br /> -Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away.”</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_166">p. 166</a>, note 1. At what precise date <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i> was -written is uncertain. As of the <i>Ode to Melancholy</i>, Keats makes no -mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse MSS. A. it is -dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts before or while Keats was -on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in that year, is I think certain -both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence -among them of <i>Lamia</i> and the <i>Ode to Autumn</i>. Hence it is to the first -half of 1819 that <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i> must belong, like so much of -the poet’s best work besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the -theme was already in his mind when he composed the <i>Eve of St Agnes</i> in -January. Mr Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have -been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (<i>Works</i>, -vol. <span class="smcaplc">II.</span> p. 357, note).</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_186">p. 186</a>, note 1. The relation of <i>Hyperion, A Vision</i>, to the original -<i>Hyperion</i> is a vital point in the history of Keats’s mind and art, and -one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the error is -somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the <i>Vision</i> is in -Lord Houghton’s <i>Life and Letters</i>, ed. 1848, Vol. <span class="smcaplc">I.</span> p. 244. Having then -doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of Brown’s MS. memoir quoted in -the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following -his account of <i>Hyperion</i>:—“He afterwards published it as a fragment, and -still later re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally -unfinished.” When eight years later the same editor printed the piece for -the first time (in <i>Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society</i>, Vol. <span class="smcaplc">III.</span> -1856-7) from the MS. given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown’s -account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: “Is it the original sketch -out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the -commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? I have no external evidence -to decide this question:” and further,—“the problem of the priority<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> of -the two poems—both fragments, and both so beautiful—may afford a wide -field for ingenious and critical conjecture.” Ten years later again, when -he brought out the second edition of the <i>Life and Letters</i>, Lord Houghton -had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing -the piece in his Appendix as ‘Another Version,’ says in his text (p. 206) -“on reconsideration, I have no doubt that it was the first draft.” -Accordingly it is given as ‘an earlier version’ in Mr W. M. Rossetti’s -edition of 1872, as ‘the first version’ in Lord Houghton’s own edition of -1876; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by -Messrs Buxton Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of -<i>Hyperion</i> to the <i>Vision</i> no doubt at first sight suggested the -conclusion to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In -the mean time at least two good critics, Mr W. B. Scott and Mr. R. -Garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the <i>Vision</i> was not a -first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his -powers: an opinion in which Mr Garnett was confirmed by his recollection -of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse (see above, -Preface, <a href="#Page_v">p. v</a>, and W. T. Arnold, <i>Works</i> &c. p. xlix, note). Brown’s -words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen -were right. They are confirmed from another side by Woodhouse MSS. A, -which contains the copy of a real early draft of <i>Hyperion</i>. In this copy -the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in -pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several -books of the poem as printed).</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Book</span> I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief,<br /> -Sat moulting his weak plumage, never more<br /> -To be restored or soar against the sun;<br /> -While his three sons upon Olympus stood.”</p> - -<p>In line 30, for “stay’d Ixion’s wheel” stood “eased Ixion’s toil”. In line -48, for “tone” stood “tune”. In line 76, for “gradual” stood “sudden”. In -line 102, after the word “Saturn,” stood the cancelled words—</p> - -<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 6em;">“What dost think?</span><br /> -Am I that same? O Chaos!”</p> - -<p>In line 156, for “yielded like the mist” stood “gave to them like mist.” -In line 189, for “Savour of poisonous brass” stood “A poison-feel of -brass.” In line 200 for “When earthquakes jar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> their battlements and -towers” stood “When an earthquake hath shook their city towers.” After -line 205 stood the cancelled line “Most like a rose-bud to a fairy’s -lute.” In line 209, for “And like a rose” stood “Yes, like a rose.” In -line 268, for “Suddenly” stood “And, sudden.”</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Book II.</span> In line 128, for “vibrating” stood “vibrated.” In line 134 for -“starry Uranus” stood “starr’d Uranus” (some friend doubtless called -Keats’s attention to the false quantity).</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Book III.</span> After line 125 stood the cancelled lines:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain<br /> -Gives to a ravish’d nymph, when her warm tears<br /> -Gush luscious with no sob; or more severe.”</p> - -<p>In line 126, for “most like” stood “more like.”</p> - -<p>In these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the -student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that -where a corrected passage occurs again in the <i>Vision</i>, it in every case -corresponds to the printed <i>Hyperion</i>, and not to the draft of the poem -preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it certain that the -<i>Vision</i> was not a first version of <i>Hyperion</i>, but a recast of the poem -as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after its first composition. -Taken together with the statement of Brown, which is perfectly explicit as -to time, place, and circumstances, and the corresponding statement of -Woodhouse as recollected by Mr Garnett, the proof is from all sides -absolute: and the ‘first version’ theory must disappear henceforward from -editions of and commentaries on our poet.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_193">p. 193</a>, note 2. A more explicit refutation of Haydon’s account was given, -some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see Preface, no. 10), -not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from -general knowledge of the poet’s character:—</p> - -<p>“I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which -that ill-ordered being, Haydon, the artist, left behind him in his ‘Diary’ -respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, John Keats” ... -“Haydon’s detraction was the more odious because its object could not -contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical -antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against -him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and -trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in -sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> tongue when taking his -claret. In the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have -not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of -him Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as -could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic expenses never -would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, I never -perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence.”</p> - -<p> </p> -<p><a href="#Page_198">p. 198</a>, note 1. In Medwin’s <i>Life of Shelley</i> (1847), pp. 89-92, are some -notices of Keats communicated to the writer by Fanny Brawne (then Mrs -Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his ‘kind correspondent.’ Medwin’s -carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly -casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but I think an -attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. 91, which discusses Mr -Finch’s account of Keats’s death, leaves no doubt that it continues in -substance the quotation previously begun from Mrs Lindon. “That his -sensibility,” so runs the text, “was most acute, is true, and his passions -were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is -implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn -on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only -by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his -friends. Violence such as the letter” [of Mr Finch] “describes, was quite -foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting -England, I saw him every day”, [this would be true of Fanny Brawne from -Oct. 1819 to Sept. 1820, if we except the Kentish Town period in the -summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] “I -often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not -hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, -much less a violent one, to any human being.” The above passage has been -overlooked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as -serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman -he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to Dilke so -often quoted.</p> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p> -<h2>INDEX.</h2> - - -<p> -Abbey, Mr Richard, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Adonaïs</i> (Shelley’s), <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Adventures of a younger Son</i> (Trelawney’s), <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Alfieri, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Alfred, The</i>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Anatomy of Melancholy</i> (Burton’s), <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Antiquary</i> (Scott’s), <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Apollo, Ode to</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21-22</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Autumn, Ode to</i>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Bailey, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Beattie, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Biographia Literaria</i> (Coleridge’s), <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Boccaccio, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Bonaparte, Pauline, Princess Borghese, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Brawne, Miss Fanny, <a href="#Page_131">131</a> seq., <a href="#Page_180">180-181</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Britannia’s Pastorals</i> (Browne’s), <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Brown, Charles, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a> seq., <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a> seq., <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Browne, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Browning, Robert, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Burnet, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Byron, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sonnet to, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Canterbury, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Cap and Bells</i>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a> seq.<br /> -<br /> -Castlereagh, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Champion, The</i>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Chatterton, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sonnet to, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -Chaucer, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Chichester, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Clarke, Cowden, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Clarke, Rev. John, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.<br /> -<br /> -‘Cockaigne, King of,’ <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Cockney School of Poetry</i> (Articles in <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i>), <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a> seq.<br /> -<br /> -Coleridge, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Cooper, Astley, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Cotterill, Miss, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Cox, Miss Charlotte, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Dante</i> (Cary’s), <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Death</i>, Stanzas on, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Keats’ contemplation of, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">longing for, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -De Quincey, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span><br /> -Devonshire, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Dictionary</i> (Lempriere’s), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Dilke, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Dilke, Charles Wentworth, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Don Juan</i> (Byron’s), <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Dryden, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Edmonton, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Eldon, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Elton, Lieutenant, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Emancipation, Literary, <a href="#Page_63">63-64</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Endymion</i>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Keats’ low opinion of the poem, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its beauties and defects, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106-109</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Drayton’s and Fletcher’s previous treatment of the subject, <a href="#Page_94">94-95</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Keats’ unclassical manner of treatment, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its one bare circumstance, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scenery of the poem, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its quality of nature-interpretation, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its love passages, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">comparison of description with a similar one in <i>Richard III.</i>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its lyrics, <a href="#Page_104">104-106</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appreciation of the lyrics a test of true relish for poetry, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its rhythm and music, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Keats’ own preface the best criticism of the poem, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -Enfield, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Epistles</i>, their tributes to the conjoined pleasures of literature and friendship, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ungrammatical slips in, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristic specimens of, <a href="#Page_54">54-55</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<i>Epithalamium</i> (Spenser’s), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Eve of St Agnes</i>, its simple theme, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its ease and directness of construction, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its unique charm, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<i>Eve of St Mark</i>, contains Keats’ impressions of three Cathedral towns, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its pictures, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the legend, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its pictorial brilliance, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its influence on later English poetry, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<i>Examiner, The</i> (Leigh Hunt’s), <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Faerie Queene</i> (Spenser’s), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Faithful Shepherdess</i> (Fletcher’s), <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Fanny, Lines to</i>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Feast of the Poets</i> (Leigh Hunt’s), <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Fletcher, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Foliage</i> (Leigh Hunt’s), <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Genius, births of, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Gisborne, Letter to Maria</i> (Shelley’s), <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Goethe, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Grasshopper and Cricket</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Gray, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Greece, Keats’ love of, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Guy Mannering</i> (Scott’s), <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Hammond, Mr, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Hampstead, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Haslam, William, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a> (note).<br /> -<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>Haydon, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Hazlitt, William, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>History of his own Time</i> (Burnet’s), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Holmes, Edward, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Holy Living and Dying</i> (Jeremy Taylor’s), <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Homer, On first looking into Chapman’s</i> (Sonnet), <a href="#Page_23">23-24</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Hood, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Hope</i>, address to, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Horne, R. H., <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Houghton, Lord, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211-213</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Hunt, John, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Hunt, Leigh, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br /> -<br /><a name="hyperion" id="hyperion"></a> -<i>Hyperion</i>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its purpose, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">one of the grandest poems of our language, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the influences of <i>Paradise Lost</i> on it, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its blank verse compared with Milton’s, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its elemental grandeur, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">remodelling of it, <a href="#Page_185">185</a> seq.;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">description of the changes, <a href="#Page_186">186-187</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">special interest of the poem, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Imitation of Spenser</i> (Keats’ first lines), <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Indolence, Ode on</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174-175</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Isabella, or the Pot of Basil</i>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">source of its inspiration, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">minor blemishes, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its Italian metre, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its conspicuous power and charm, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">description of its beauties, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -Isle of Wight, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Jennings, Mrs, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Jennings, Capt. M. J., <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Joseph and his Brethren (Wells’), <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Kean, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Keats, John, various descriptions of, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">birth, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">education at Enfield, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of his father, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">school-life, <a href="#Page_5">5-9</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his studious inclinations, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of his mother, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves school at the age of fifteen, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">is apprenticed to a surgeon, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">finishes his school-translation of the <i>Æneid</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reads Spenser’s <i>Epithalamium</i> and <i>Faerie Queene</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his first attempts at composition, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to London and walks the hospitals, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his growing passion for poetry, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appointed dresser at Guy’s Hospital, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his last operation, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his early life in London, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his early poems, <a href="#Page_20">20</a> seq.;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his introduction to Leigh Hunt, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hunt’s great influence over him, <a href="#Page_26">26</a> seq.;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his acquaintance with Shelley, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his other friends, <a href="#Page_40">40-45</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">personal characteristics, <a href="#Page_47">47-48</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to live with his brothers in the Poultry, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">publication of his first volume of poems, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">retires to the Isle of Wight, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lives at Carisbrooke, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">changes to Margate, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">money troubles, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</span><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">spends some time at Canterbury, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">receives first payment in advance for <i>Endymion</i>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lives with his two brothers at Hampstead, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">works steadily at <i>Endymion</i>, <a href="#Page_71">71-72</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">makes more friends, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes part of <i>Endymion</i> at Oxford, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his love for his sister Fanny, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stays at Burford Bridge, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to the ‘immortal dinner,’ <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">he visits Devonshire, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes on a walking tour in Scotland with Charles Brown, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">crosses over to Ireland, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Scotland and visits Burns’ country, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sows there the seeds of consumption, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to London, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">is attacked in <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i> and the <i>Quarterly Review</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lockhart’s conduct towards him, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of his young brother Tom, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to live with Charles Brown, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">falls in love, <a href="#Page_130">130-131</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visits friends in Chichester, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suffers with his throat, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his correspondence with his brother George, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Shanklin, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">collaborates with Brown in writing <i>Otho</i>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Winchester, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns again to London, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">more money troubles, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">determines to make a living by journalism, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lives by himself, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes back to Mr Brown, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Otho</i> is returned unopened after having been accepted, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">want of means prevents his marriage, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his increasing illness, <a href="#Page_191">191</a> seq.;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">temporary improvement in his health, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">publishes another volume of poems, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stays with Leigh Hunt’s family, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">favourable notice in the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lives with the family of Miss Brawne, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes with Severn to spend the winter in Italy, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the journey improves his health, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes his last lines, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stays for a time at Naples, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes on to Rome, <a href="#Page_203">203-204</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">further improvement in his health, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sudden and last relapse, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">he is tenderly nursed by his friend Severn, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">speaks of himself as already living a ‘posthumous life,’ <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">grows worse and dies, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">various tributes to his memory, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His genius awakened by the <i>Faerie Queene</i>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of other poets on him, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">experiments in language, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">employment of the ‘Heroic’ couplet, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">element and spirit of his own poetry, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">experiments in metre, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">studied musical effect of his verse, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Grecian spirit, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">view of the aims and principles of poetry, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;</span><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">imaginary dependence on Shakspere, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">thoughts on the mystery of Evil, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">puns, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his poems Greek in idea, English in manner, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his poetry a true spontaneous expression of his mind, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">power of vivifying, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">verbal licenses, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence on subsequent poets, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">felicity of phrase, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Personal characteristics:</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Celtic temperament, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">affectionate nature, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">morbid temperament, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">lovable disposition, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">temper, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">personal beauty, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>penchant</i> for fighting, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">studious nature, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">humanity, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114-115</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">sympathy and tenderness, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">eyes, description of, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">love of nature, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55-56</a>;;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">voice, 47;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">desire of fame, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">natural sensibility to physical and spiritual spell of moonlight, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">highmindedness, <a href="#Page_125">125-126</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">love romances, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130-134</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180-181</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">pride and sensitiveness, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">unselfishness, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 2em;">instability, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Various descriptions of, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -Keats, Admiral Sir Richard, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Keats, Fanny (Mrs Llanos), <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Keats, Mrs (Keats’ mother), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Keats, George, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Keats, Thomas (Keats’ father), <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Keats, Tom, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>King Stephen</i>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br /> -<br /> -‘Kirk-men,’ <a href="#Page_116">116-117</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>La Belle Dame sans Merci</i>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of the title, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a story of the wasting power of love, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">description of its beauties, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Lamia</i>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its source, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">versification, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the picture of the serpent woman, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Keats’ opinion of the Poem, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -Landor, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Laon and Cythna</i>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Letters, extracts, etc., from Keats’, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116-117</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194-195</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.<br /> -<br /> -‘Little Keats,’ <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Lockhart, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>London Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Mackereth, George Wilson, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Madeline, <a href="#Page_162">162</a> seq.<br /> -<br /> -‘Maiden-Thought,’ <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Man about Town</i> (Webb’s), <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Man in the Moon</i> (Drayton’s), <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Margate, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Mathew, George Felton, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Meg Merrilies, <a href="#Page_115">115-116</a>.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span><br /> -<i>Melancholy, Ode on</i>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Milton, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Monckton, Milnes, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Moore, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Morning Chronicle, The</i>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Mother Hubbard’s Tale</i> (Spenser’s), <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Mythology, Greek, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Naples, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Narensky</i> (Brown’s), <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Newmarch, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Nightingale, Ode to a</i>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Nymphs</i>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Odes, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170-171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Orion</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Otho</i>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Oxford, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Oxford Herald, The</i>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Pan, Hymn to</i>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Pantheon</i> (Tooke’s), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Paradise Lost</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Patriotism, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Peter Corcoran</i> (Reynolds’), <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Plays, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Poems (Keats’ first volume), faint echoes of other poets in them, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their form, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their experiments in metre, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">merely poetic preludes, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their rambling tendency, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">immaturity, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attractiveness, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristic extracts, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their moderate success, <a href="#Page_65">65-66</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -Poetic Art, Theory and Practice, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Poetry, joys of, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;<br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">principle and aims of, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;</span><br /> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">genius of, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</span><br /> -<br /> -<i>Polymetis</i> (Spence’s), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Pope, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.<br /> -<br /> -‘Posthumous Life,’ <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Prince Regent, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Proctor, Mrs, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Psyche, Ode to</i>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Psyche</i> (Mrs Tighe’s), <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Quarterly Review, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Rainbow</i> (Campbell’s), <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Rawlings, William, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Reynolds, John Hamilton, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Rice, James, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Rimini, Story of</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Ritchie, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Rome, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Rossetti, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Safie</i> (Reynolds’), <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Scott, John, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Sculpture, ancient, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Sea-Sonnet</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Severn, Joseph, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a> seq.<br /> -<br /> -Shakspere, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Shanklin, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Shelley, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Shenstone, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Sleep and Poetry</i>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Smith, Horace, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span><br /> -Sonnets, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Specimen of an Induction to a Poem</i>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Spenser, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Stephens, Henry, <a href="#Page_18">18-20</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Surrey Institution, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Taylor, Mr, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Teignmouth, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Tennyson, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Thomson, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Urn, Ode on a Grecian</i>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172-174</a>.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Vision, The</i>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a> (<i>see</i> <a href="#hyperion">Hyperion</a>).<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -Webb, Cornelius, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Wells, Charles, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Wilson, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Winchester, <a href="#Page_143">143-145</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Windermere, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br /> -<br /> -Wordsworth, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a 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By Prof. <span class="smcap">Gregory Smith</span>.</p> - -<p> </p> -<p class="center">MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.</p></div> - - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -<p><b>Footnotes:</b></p> - -<p><a name='f_1' id='f_1' href='#fna_1'>[1]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_221">p. 221</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_2' id='f_2' href='#fna_2'>[2]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p> - -<p><a name='f_3' id='f_3' href='#fna_3'>[3]</a> John Jennings died March 8, 1805.</p> - -<p><a name='f_4' id='f_4' href='#fna_4'>[4]</a> <i>Rawlings v. Jennings.</i> See below, <a href="#Page_138">p. 138</a>, and Appendix, <a href="#Page_221">p. 221</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_5' id='f_5' href='#fna_5'>[5]</a> Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808.</p> - -<p><a name='f_6' id='f_6' href='#fna_6'>[6]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_7' id='f_7' href='#fna_7'>[7]</a> <i>Rawlings v. Jennings.</i> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_221">p. 221</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_8' id='f_8' href='#fna_8'>[8]</a> Mrs Alice Jennings was buried at St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, -December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. Pratt, M.A.)</p> - -<p><a name='f_9' id='f_9' href='#fna_9'>[9]</a> I owe this anecdote to Mr Gosse, who had it direct from Horne.</p> - -<p><a name='f_10' id='f_10' href='#fna_10'>[10]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_11' id='f_11' href='#fna_11'>[11]</a> A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance -narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and in prose, not -verse, will be found in <i>The Philosophy of Mystery</i>, by W. C. Dendy -(London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr H. Stephens, in the -<i>Poetical Works</i>, ed. Forman (1 vol. 1884), p. 558.</p> - -<p><a name='f_12' id='f_12' href='#fna_12'>[12]</a> See <a href="#Page_221">Appendix</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_13' id='f_13' href='#fna_13'>[13]</a> See C. L. Feltoe, <i>Memorials of J. F. South</i> (London, 1884), p. 81.</p> - -<p><a name='f_14' id='f_14' href='#fna_14'>[14]</a> Houghton MSS. See also Dr B. W. Richardson in the <i>Asclepiad</i>, vol. i. p. 134.</p> - -<p><a name='f_15' id='f_15' href='#fna_15'>[15]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_16' id='f_16' href='#fna_16'>[16]</a> What, for instance, can be less Spenserian and at the same time less Byronic than—</p> - -<p class="poem">“For sure so fair a place was never seen<br /> -Of all that ever charm’d romantic eye”?</p> - -<p><a name='f_17' id='f_17' href='#fna_17'>[17]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_222">p. 222</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_18' id='f_18' href='#fna_18'>[18]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_223">p. 223</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_19' id='f_19' href='#fna_19'>[19]</a> See particularly the <i>Invocation to Sleep</i> in the little volume of -Webb’s poems published by the Olliers in 1821.</p> - -<p><a name='f_20' id='f_20' href='#fna_20'>[20]</a> See Appendix, p. <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_21' id='f_21' href='#fna_21'>[21]</a> See <i>Praeterita</i>, vol. ii. chap. 2.</p> - -<p><a name='f_22' id='f_22' href='#fna_22'>[22]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_224">p. 224</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_23' id='f_23' href='#fna_23'>[23]</a> Compare Chapman, <i>Hymn to Pan</i>:—</p> - -<p class="poem"> -<span style="margin-left: 5em;">“the bright-hair’d god of pastoral,</span><br /> -Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe,<br /> -By lot, all loftiest mountains crown’d with snow,<br /> -All tops of hills, and <i>cliffy highnesses</i>,<br /> -All sylvan copses, and the fortresses<br /> -Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove,<br /> -And sometimes, by allurement of his love,<br /> -Will wade the <i>wat’ry softnesses</i>.”</p> - -<p><a name='f_24' id='f_24' href='#fna_24'>[24]</a> Compare Wordsworth:—</p> - -<p class="poem"> -<span style="margin-left: 4em;">“Bees that soar for bloom,</span><br /> -High as the highest peak of Furness Fells,<br /> -Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells.”</p> - -<p>Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence?</p> - -<p><a name='f_25' id='f_25' href='#fna_25'>[25]</a> Mr W. T. Arnold in his <i>Introduction</i> (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel -passage from Leigh Hunt’s <i>Gentle Armour</i> as an example of the degree to -which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt: forgetting that the <i>Gentle -Armour</i> was not written till 1831, and that the debt in this instance is -therefore the other way.</p> - -<p><a name='f_26' id='f_26' href='#fna_26'>[26]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_221">p. 220</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_27' id='f_27' href='#fna_27'>[27]</a> The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph were -furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr Leslie Stephen, -from whom I have them. The point about the <i>Adventures of a Younger Son</i> -is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken -from the Keats MSS. then in Brown’s hands, especially <i>Otho</i>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_28' id='f_28' href='#fna_28'>[28]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_29' id='f_29' href='#fna_29'>[29]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_224">p. 224</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_30' id='f_30' href='#fna_30'>[30]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_225">p. 225</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_31' id='f_31' href='#fna_31'>[31]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_225">p. 225</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_32' id='f_32' href='#fna_32'>[32]</a> In the extract I have modernized Drayton’s spelling and endeavoured -to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending.</p> - -<p><a name='f_33' id='f_33' href='#fna_33'>[33]</a> Mrs Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of an -allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats’s narrative.</p> - -<p><a name='f_34' id='f_34' href='#fna_34'>[34]</a> Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions Pæon as one of the fifty sons of -Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth): and in Spenser’s <i>Faerie -Queene</i> there is a Pæana—the daughter of the giant Corflambo in the -fourth book. Keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave -Endymion a sister and called her Peona.</p> - -<p><a name='f_35' id='f_35' href='#fna_35'>[35]</a> Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by Mr W. T. -Arnold.</p> - -<p><a name='f_36' id='f_36' href='#fna_36'>[36]</a> The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of -Chamberlayne:—</p> - -<p class="poem">“Upon the throne, in such a glorious state<br /> -As earth’s adored favorites, there sat<br /> -The image of a monarch, vested in<br /> -The spoils of nature’s robes, whose price had been<br /> -A diadem’s redemption; his large size,<br /> -Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize<br /> -The admired proportions of those mighty men<br /> -Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when<br /> -Found out, are carefully preserved to tell<br /> -Posterity how much these times are fell<br /> -From nature’s youthful strength.”</p> - -<p><a name='f_37' id='f_37' href='#fna_37'>[37]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_226">p. 226</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_38' id='f_38' href='#fna_38'>[38]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_39' id='f_39' href='#fna_39'>[39]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_227">p. 227</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_40' id='f_40' href='#fna_40'>[40]</a> Severn in Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_41' id='f_41' href='#fna_41'>[41]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_42' id='f_42' href='#fna_42'>[42]</a> Dilke (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton’s <i>Life and -Letters</i>, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned as -much; and there are tricks of style, <i>e.g.</i> the use of the Spanish -<i>Sangrado</i> for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand.</p> - -<p><a name='f_43' id='f_43' href='#fna_43'>[43]</a> Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, and -Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott’s faithful satellite, the actor -Terry.</p> - -<p><a name='f_44' id='f_44' href='#fna_44'>[44]</a> Severn in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, Vol. <span class="smcaplc">XI.</span>, p. 401.</p> - -<p><a name='f_45' id='f_45' href='#fna_45'>[45]</a> See Preface, <a href="#Page_viii">p. viii</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_46' id='f_46' href='#fna_46'>[46]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_227">p. 227</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_47' id='f_47' href='#fna_47'>[47]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_48' id='f_48' href='#fna_48'>[48]</a> The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been -thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the -summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the -then surviving brother of Keats’s friend.</p> - -<p><a name='f_49' id='f_49' href='#fna_49'>[49]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_227">p. 227</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_50' id='f_50' href='#fna_50'>[50]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_228">p. 228</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_51' id='f_51' href='#fna_51'>[51]</a> <i>Decamerone</i>, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment -of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously -with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his <i>Sicilian Story</i> (1820). Of -the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write -concurrently with Keats (see above, <a href="#Page_86">p. 86</a>), two were finished and -published by him after Keats’s death in the volume called <i>A Garden of -Florence</i> (1821).</p> - -<p><a name='f_52' id='f_52' href='#fna_52'>[52]</a> As to the date when <i>Hyperion</i> was written, see Appendix, <a href="#Page_228">p. 228</a>: and -as to the error by which Keats’s later recast of his work has been taken -for an earlier draft, <i>ibid.</i>, <a href="#Page_230">p. 230</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_53' id='f_53' href='#fna_53'>[53]</a> If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by -predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so—though only on a -cameo scale—in the best idyls of Chénier in France, as <i>L’Aveugle</i> or <i>Le -Jeune Malade</i>, or of Landor in England, as the <i>Hamadryad</i> or <i>Enallos and -Cymodamia</i>; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at -Alexandria in the days of Theocritus.</p> - -<p><a name='f_54' id='f_54' href='#fna_54'>[54]</a> We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the -best, that what he most liked in Chatterton’s work was the minstrel’s song -in <i>Ælla</i>, that <i>fantasia</i>, so to speak, executed really with genius on -the theme of one of Ophelia’s songs in <i>Hamlet</i>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_55' id='f_55' href='#fna_55'>[55]</a> A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the -beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of -rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the -beadsman in the lines,</p> - -<p class="poem">“But no—already had his death-bell rung;<br /> -The joys of all his life were said and sung;”</p> - -<p>that of Angela where she calls herself</p> - -<p class="poem">“A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,<br /> -Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll.”</p> - -<p><a name='f_56' id='f_56' href='#fna_56'>[56]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_229">p. 229</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_57' id='f_57' href='#fna_57'>[57]</a> Chartier was born at Bayeux. His <i>Belle Dame sans Merci</i> is a poem of -over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in -dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his -consequent despair and death.—For the date of composition of Keats’s -poem, see Appendix, <a href="#Page_230">p. 230</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_58' id='f_58' href='#fna_58'>[58]</a> This has been pointed out by my colleague Mr A. S. Murray: see -Forman, <i>Works</i>, vol. iii. p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, <i>Poetical Works</i>, &c., p. xxii, note.</p> - -<p><a name='f_59' id='f_59' href='#fna_59'>[59]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_60' id='f_60' href='#fna_60'>[60]</a> “He never spoke of any one,” says Severn, (Houghton MSS.,) “but by -saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and -cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of -the person he was speaking of.”</p> - -<p><a name='f_61' id='f_61' href='#fna_61'>[61]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_230">p. 230</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_62' id='f_62' href='#fna_62'>[62]</a> <i>Auctores Mythographi Latini</i>, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. -Keats’s copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his -death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey -(Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats’s -mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.</p> - -<p><a name='f_63' id='f_63' href='#fna_63'>[63]</a> Mrs Owen was the first of Keats’s critics to call attention to this -passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it -derives from the date of its composition.</p> - -<p><a name='f_64' id='f_64' href='#fna_64'>[64]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_65' id='f_65' href='#fna_65'>[65]</a> See below, <a href="#Page_193">p. 193</a>, note 2.</p> - -<p><a name='f_66' id='f_66' href='#fna_66'>[66]</a> “Interrupted,” says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., “by a -circumstance which it is needless to mention.”</p> - -<p><a name='f_67' id='f_67' href='#fna_67'>[67]</a> This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest -daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of -Haydon. But see Appendix, <a href="#Page_232">p. 232</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_68' id='f_68' href='#fna_68'>[68]</a> A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the <i>Indicator</i> a few -stanzas from the <i>Cap and Bells</i>, and about the same time dedicated to -Keats his translation of Tasso’s <i>Amyntas</i>, speaking of the original as -“an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally -pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical.”</p> - -<p><a name='f_69' id='f_69' href='#fna_69'>[69]</a> See Crabb Robinson. <i>Diaries</i>, Vol. II. p. 197, etc.</p> - -<p><a name='f_70' id='f_70' href='#fna_70'>[70]</a> See Appendix, <a href="#Page_233">p. 233</a>.</p> - -<p><a name='f_71' id='f_71' href='#fna_71'>[71]</a> Houghton MSS. In both the <i>Autobiography</i> and the <i>Correspondence</i> -the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy additions.</p> - -<p><a name='f_72' id='f_72' href='#fna_72'>[72]</a> I have the date of sailing from Lloyd’s, through the kindness of the -secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time -following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials -published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in <i>Atlantic -Monthly</i>, Vol. <span class="smcaplc">XI.</span> p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_73' id='f_73' href='#fna_73'>[73]</a> Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and his -remains were in 1882 removed from their original burying-place to a grave -beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius Cestius.</p> - -<p><a name='f_74' id='f_74' href='#fna_74'>[74]</a> Haslam, in Severn MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_75' id='f_75' href='#fna_75'>[75]</a> Severn MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_76' id='f_76' href='#fna_76'>[76]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_77' id='f_77' href='#fna_77'>[77]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p> - -<p><a name='f_78' id='f_78' href='#fna_78'>[78]</a> Houghton MSS.</p> - -<p><a name='f_79' id='f_79' href='#fna_79'>[79]</a> <i>Ibid.</i></p> - - -<p> </p><p> </p> -<p class="figcenter"><img src="images/back.jpg" alt="" /></p> - - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Keats, by Sidney Colvin - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS *** - -***** This file should be named 41688-h.htm or 41688-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/1/6/8/41688/ - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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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/license - - -Title: Keats - -Author: Sidney Colvin - -Release Date: December 22, 2012 [EBook #41688] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KEATS *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - - - - -English Men of Letters - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY - - -KEATS - - - - - KEATS - - - BY SIDNEY COLVIN - - - MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED - ST MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON - 1909 - - - - - _First Edition 1887._ - _Reprinted 1889, 1898, 1899, 1902, 1909._ - _Library Edition 1902._ - _Reprinted 1906._ - _Pocket Edition 1909._ - - - - -PREFACE. - - -With the name of Keats that of his first biographer, the late Lord -Houghton, must always justly remain associated. But while the sympathetic -charm of Lord Houghton's work will keep it fresh, as a record of the -poet's life it can no longer be said to be sufficient. Since the revised -edition of the _Life and Letters_ appeared in 1867, other students and -lovers of Keats have been busy, and much new information concerning him -been brought to light, while of the old information some has been proved -mistaken. No connected account of Keats's life and work, in accordance -with the present state of knowledge, exists, and I have been asked to -contribute such an account to the present series. I regret that lack of -strength and leisure has so long delayed the execution of the task -entrusted to me. The chief authorities and printed texts which I have -consulted (besides the original editions of the Poems) are the -following:-- - -1. Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries. By Leigh Hunt. London, 1828. - -2. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Thomas Medwin. London, 2 vols., -1847. - -3. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard -Monckton Milnes. 2 vols., London, 1848. - -4. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited and compiled by Tom Taylor. -Second edition. 3 vols., London, 1853. - -5. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and -Contemporaries. 3 vols., London, 1850. - -6. The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a memoir by Richard Monckton -Milnes. London, 1854. - -7. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. [Revised edition, edited by Thornton -Hunt.] London, 1860. - -8. The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame: an article by Joseph Severn in the -_Atlantic Monthly Magazine_ for 1863 (vol. xi. p. 401). - -9. The Life and Letters of John Keats. By Lord Houghton. New edition, -London, 1867. - -10. Recollections of John Keats: an article by Charles Cowden Clarke in -the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1874 (N. S. vol. xii. p. 177). Afterwards -reprinted with modifications in Recollections of Writers, by Charles and -Mary Cowden Clarke. London, 1878. - -11. The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the writings of the late Charles -Wentworth Dilke. With a biographical notice by Sir Charles Wentworth -Dilke, Bart., M.P. 2 vols., London, 1875. - -12. Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk. With a memoir -by Frederic Wordsworth Haydon. 2 vols., London, 1876. - -13. The Poetical Works of John Keats, chronologically arranged and edited, -with a memoir, by Lord Houghton [Aldine edition of the British Poets]. -London, 1876. - -14. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, with Introduction and Notes by -Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878. - -A biographer cannot ignore these letters now that they are published: but -their publication must be regretted by all who hold that human respect and -delicacy are due to the dead no less than to the living, and to genius no -less than to obscurity. - -15. The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats. Edited with notes -and appendices by Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols., London, 1883. - -In this edition, besides the texts reprinted from the first editions, all -the genuine letters and additional poems published in 3, 6, 9, 13, and 14 -of the above are brought together, as well as most of the biographical -notices contained in 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 12: also a series of -previously unpublished letters of Keats to his sister: with a great amount -of valuable illustrative and critical material besides. Except for a few -errors, which I shall have occasion to point out, Mr Forman's work might -for the purpose of the student be final, and I have necessarily been -indebted to it at every turn. - -16. The Letters and Poems of John Keats. Edited by John Gilmer Speed. 3 -vols., New York, 1883. - -17. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. Arnold. London, -1884. - -The Introduction to this edition contains the only attempt with which I am -acquainted at an analysis of the formal elements of Keats's style. - -18. An AEsculapian Poet--John Keats: an article by Dr B. W. Richardson in -the _Asclepiad_ for 1884 (vol. i. p. 134). - -19. Notices and correspondence concerning Keats which have appeared at -intervals during a number of years in the _Athenaeum_. - -In addition to printed materials I have made use of the following -unprinted, viz.:-- - -I. HOUGHTON MSS. Under this title I refer to the contents of an album from -the library at Fryston Hall, in which the late Lord Houghton bound up a -quantity of the materials he had used in the preparation of the _Life and -Letters_, as well as of correspondence concerning Keats addressed to him -both before and after the publication of his book. The chief contents are -the manuscript memoir of Keats by Charles Brown, which was offered by the -writer in vain to _Galignani_, and I believe other publishers; transcripts -by the same hand of a few of Keats's poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs -of the poet by his friends Charles Cowden Clarke (the first draft of the -paper above cited as no. 10), Henry Stephens, George Felton Mathew, Joseph -Severn, and Benjamin Bailey; together with letters from all the above, -from John Hamilton Reynolds, and several others. For the use of this -collection, without which my work must have been attempted to little -purpose, I am indebted to the kindness of its owner, the present Lord -Houghton. - -II. WOODHOUSE MSS. A. A common-place book in which Richard Woodhouse, the -friend of Keats and of his publishers Messrs Taylor and Hessey, -transcribed--as would appear from internal evidence, about midsummer -1819--the chief part of Keats's poems at that date unpublished. The -transcripts are in many cases made from early drafts of the poems: some -contain gaps which Woodhouse has filled up in pencil from later drafts: to -others are added corrections, or suggestions for corrections, some made in -the hand of Mr Taylor and some in that of Keats himself. - -III. WOODHOUSE MSS. B. A note-book in which the same Woodhouse has -copied--evidently for Mr Taylor, at the time when that gentleman was -meditating a biography of the poet--a number of letters addressed by Keats -to Mr Taylor himself, to the transcriber, to Reynolds and his sisters, to -Rice, and Bailey. Three or four of these letters, as well as portions of a -few others, are unpublished. - -Both the volumes last named were formerly the property of Mrs Taylor, a -niece by marriage of the publisher, and are now my own. A third note-book -by Woodhouse, containing personal notices and recollections of Keats, was -unluckily destroyed in the fire at Messrs Kegan Paul and Co's. premises in -1883. A copy of _Endymion_, annotated by the same hand, has been used by -Mr Forman in his edition (above, no. 15). - -IV. SEVERN MSS. The papers and correspondence left by the late Joseph -Severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable biography, have -been put into the hands of Mr William Sharp, to be edited and published at -his discretion. In the meantime Mr Sharp has been so kind as to let me -have access to such parts of them as relate to Keats. The most important -single piece, an essay on 'The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame,' has been -printed already in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (above, no. 8), but in the -remainder I have found many interesting details, particularly concerning -Keats's voyage to Italy and life at Rome. - -V. _Rawlings v. Jennings._ When Keats's maternal grandfather, Mr John -Jennings, died in 1805, leaving property exceeding the amount of the -specific bequests under his will, it was thought necessary that his estate -should be administered by the Court of Chancery, and with that intent a -friendly suit was brought in the names of his daughter and her second -husband (Frances Jennings, _m._ 1st Thomas Keats, and 2nd William -Rawlings) against her mother and brother, who were the executors. The -proceedings in this suit are referred to under the above title. They are -complicated and voluminous, extending over a period of twenty years, and -my best thanks are due to Mr Ralph Thomas, of 27 Chancery Lane, for his -friendly pains in searching through and making abstracts of them. - -For help and information, besides what has been above acknowledged, I am -indebted first and foremost to my friend and colleague, Mr Richard -Garnett; and next to the poet's surviving sister, Mrs Llanos; to Sir -Charles Dilke, who lent me the chief part of his valuable collection of -Keats's books and papers (already well turned to account by Mr Forman); to -Dr B. W. Richardson, and the Rev. R. H. Hadden. Other incidental -obligations will be found acknowledged in the footnotes. - -Among essays on and reviews of Keats's work I need only refer in -particular to that by the late Mrs F. M. Owen (Keats: a Study, London, -1876). In its main outlines, though not in details, I accept and have -followed this lady's interpretation of _Endymion_. For the rest, every -critic of modern English poetry is of necessity a critic of Keats. The -earliest, Leigh Hunt, was one of the best; and to name only a few among -the living--where Mr Matthew Arnold, Mr Swinburne, Mr Lowell, Mr Palgrave, -Mr W. M. Rossetti, Mr W. B. Scott, Mr Roden Noel, Mr Theodore Watts, have -gone before, for one who follows to be both original and just is not easy. -In the following pages I have not attempted to avoid saying over again -much that in substance has been said already, and doubtless better, by -others: by Mr Matthew Arnold and Mr Palgrave especially. I doubt not but -they will forgive me: and at the same time I hope to have contributed -something of my own towards a fuller understanding both of Keats's art and -life. - - - - -CONTENTS. - - - PAGE - - CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital - Student in London. [1795-1817] 1 - - CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh - Hunt: his Literary and Personal Influence--John Hamilton - Reynolds--James Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph - Severn--Charles Wells--Personal Characteristics-- - Determination to publish. [1814-April, 1817] 18 - - CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817 50 - - CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer - at Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey - at Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter - at Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity-- - Spring at Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and - Emigration of George Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818] 67 - - CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion_ 93 - - CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death - of Tom Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne-- - Excursion to Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon - and money difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening - Prospects--Summer at Shanklin and Winchester--Wise - Resolutions--Return from Winchester. [June, 1818-October, - 1819] 111 - - CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The - Plays 147 - - CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn Occupations--The _Cap and - Bells_--Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing Despondency--Visit of - George Keats to England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally - in the Spring--Summer in Kentish Town--Publication of the - _Lamia_ Volume--Relapse--Ordered South--Voyage to Italy-- - Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October, 1819-Feb. 1821] 180 - - CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius 209 - - APPENDIX 221 - - INDEX 234 - - - - -KEATS. - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - Birth and Parentage--School Life at Enfield--Life as Surgeon's - Apprentice at Edmonton--Awakening to Poetry--Life as Hospital Student - in London. [1795-1817.] - - -Science may one day ascertain the laws of distribution and descent which -govern the births of genius; but in the meantime a birth like that of -Keats presents to the ordinary mind a striking instance of nature's -inscrutability. If we consider the other chief poets of the time, we can -commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood, or some -strong inspiring influence in the scenery and traditions of their home. -Thus we see Scott prepared alike by his origin, associations, and -circumstances to be the 'minstrel of his clan' and poet of the romance of -the border wilds; while the spirit of the Cumbrian hills, and the temper -of the generations bred among them, speak naturally through the lips of -Wordsworth. Byron seems inspired in literature by demons of the same -froward brood that had urged others of his lineage through lives of -adventure or of crime. But Keats, with instincts and faculties more purely -poetical than any of these, was paradoxically born in a dull and middling -walk of English city life; and 'if by traduction came his mind,'--to quote -Dryden with a difference,--it was through channels too obscure for us to -trace. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to -London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a -livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Presently he married -his employer's daughter, Frances Jennings; and Mr Jennings, who was a man -of substance, retiring about the same time to live in the country, at -Ponder's End, left the management of the business in the hands of his -son-in-law. The young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the -Swan-and-Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower -Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet JOHN KEATS, was born -prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, -named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, -1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the -3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family -had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a -mile farther north[1]. - -In the gifts and temperament of Keats we shall find much that seems -characteristic of the Celtic rather than the English nature. Whether he -really had any of that blood in his veins we cannot tell. His father was a -native either of Devon or of Cornwall[2]; and his mother's name, Jennings, -is common in but not peculiar to Wales. There our evidence ends, and all -that we know further of his parents is that they were certainly not quite -ordinary people. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of -intelligence and conduct--"of so remarkably fine a common sense and -native respectability," writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father's school -the poet and his brothers were brought up, "that I perfectly remember the -warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after -he had been to visit his boys." It is added that he resembled his -illustrious son in person and feature, being of small stature and lively -energetic countenance, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Of his wife, the -poet's mother, we learn more vaguely that she was "tall, of good figure, -with large oval face, and sensible deportment": and again that she was a -lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and -supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some -imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her -family as follows:--"my grandfather [Mr Jennings] was very well off, as -his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would -have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of -his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of -the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother." And -elsewhere:--"my mother I distinctly remember, she resembled John very much -in the face, was extremely fond of him, and humoured him in every whim, of -which he had not a few, she was a most excellent and affectionate parent, -and as I thought a woman of uncommon talents." - -The mother's passion for her firstborn son was devotedly returned by him. -Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an -illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an -old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to -lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different -turn:--"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 the -rescue." Another trait of the poet's childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, -on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that -when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had -a trick of making a rhyme to the last word people said and then laughing. - -The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send -them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school -kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats had -been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of -exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. Traces of its ancient -forest character lingered long, and indeed linger yet, about the -neighbourhood of the picturesque small suburban town of Enfield, and the -district was one especially affected by City men of fortune for their -homes. The school-house occupied by Mr Clarke had been originally built -for a rich West-India merchant, in the finest style of early Georgian -classic architecture, and stood in a pleasant and spacious garden at the -lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a -railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but -later it was taken down, and the facade, with its fine proportions and -rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington -Museum as a choice example of the style. - -Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, who was -killed by a fall from his horse as he rode home at night from Southgate. -This was on the 16th of April, 1804. Within twelve months his mother had -put off her weeds, and taken a second husband--one William Rawlings, -described as 'of Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper,' -presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management -of her father's business. This marriage turned out unhappily. It was soon -followed by a separation, and Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live -at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about -this time left a widow[3]. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers -after they were grown up, no mention is ever made of their step-father, of -whom after the separation the family seem to have lost all knowledge. The -household in Church Street, Edmonton, was well enough provided for, Mr -Jennings having left a fortune of over L13,000, of which, in addition to -other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding L200 a year to his widow -absolutely; one yielding L50 a year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with -reversion to her Keats children after her death; and L1000 to be -separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on -their coming of age[4]. Between this home, then, and the neighbouring -Enfield school, where he was in due time joined by his younger brothers, -the next four or five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1810) were passed in -sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, -or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only -recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in -his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are conveyed in some rhymes -which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young -sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of -genius, for dabbling by the brookside-- - - "In spite - Of the might - Of the Maid, - Nor afraid - Of his granny-good"-- - -and for keeping small fishes in tubs. - -If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own lips, we have -sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school -companions; which was that of a boy all spirit and generosity, vehement -both in tears and laughter, handsome, passionate, pugnacious, placable, -loveable, a natural leader and champion among his fellows. But beneath -this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from -the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of -unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was -accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, between whom and -himself there existed the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the -second brother, had all John's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less -impulsive disposition and a cooler blood: from a boy he was the bigger and -stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in -fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery elder -brother. Tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of -protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. The -singularly strong family sentiment that united the three brothers extended -naturally also to their sister, then a child: and in a more remote and -ideal fashion to their uncle by the mother's side, Captain Midgley John -Jennings, a tall navy officer who had served with some distinction under -Duncan at Camperdown, and who impressed the imagination of the boys, in -those days of militant British valour by land and sea, as a model of manly -prowess[5]. It may be remembered that there was a much more distinguished -naval hero of the time who bore their own name--the gallant Admiral Sir -Richard Godwin Keats of the _Superb_, afterwards governor of Greenwich -Hospital: and he, like their father, came from the west country, being the -son of a Bideford clergyman. But it seems clear that the family of our -Keats claimed no connection with that of the Admiral. - -Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written after the death of -his elder brother, and referring partly to their school-days and partly to -John's character after he was grown up:-- - - "I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of - his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we - quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my - schoolfellows will bear witness that John's temper was the cause of - all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are." - - "From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and - fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure - relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible - spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He - avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and - often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him - relief." - -Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to -their confirmation in the words of two of Keats's school-friends; and -first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards author of the _Life -of Mozart_:-- - - "Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for - fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his - brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him.... His - favourites were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed - to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour.... He was a - boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty - might easily fancy would become great--but rather in some military - capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out - rather suddenly and unexpectedly.... In all active exercises he - excelled. The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme - beauty and animation of his face made I remember an impression on - me--and being some years his junior I was obliged to woo his - friendship--in which I succeeded, but not till I had fought several - battles. This violence and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of - disposition--in passions of tears or outrageous fits of - laughter--always in extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. - Associated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and - expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more - popular[6]." - -Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school -friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and -encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first ventured into -poetry. This was the son of the master, Charles Cowden Clarke, who towards -the close of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature -in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:-- - - "He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a - highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most - picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw.... Upon one - occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had - boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself into the - received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who - could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was - almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the - taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, - laughing when John was "in one of his moods," and was endeavouring to - beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he - had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon - the most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, - like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his - highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his - placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his - behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, - superior or equal, who had known him." - -The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his -earlier school-days Keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual -bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. But during his -last few terms, that is in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, all the -energies of his nature turned to study. He became suddenly and completely -absorbed in reading, and would be continually at work before school-time -in the morning and during play-hours in the afternoon: could hardly be -induced to join the school games: and never willingly had a book out of -his hand. At this time he won easily all the literature prizes of the -school, and in addition to his proper work imposed on himself such -voluntary tasks as the translation of the whole AEneid in prose. He -devoured all the books of history, travel, and fiction in the school -library, and was for ever borrowing more from the friend who tells the -story. "In my mind's eye I now see him at supper sitting back on the form -from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's 'History of his Own -Time' between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This -work, and Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner'--which my father took in, and I used to -lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and -religious liberty." But the books which Keats read with the greatest -eagerness of all were books of ancient mythology, and he seemed literally -to learn by heart the contents of Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's -_Dictionary_, and the school abridgment by Tindal of Spence's -_Polymetis_--the first the most foolish and dull, the last the most -scholarly and polite, of the various handbooks in which the ancient fables -were presented in those days to the apprehension of youth. - -Trouble fell upon Keats in the midst of these ardent studies of his latter -school-days. His mother had been for some time in failing health. First -she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid -consumption, which carried her off in February 1810. We are told with what -devotion her eldest boy attended her sick bed,--"he 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,"--and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--"he -gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook -under the master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in -all who saw him." In the July following, Mrs Jennings, being desirous to -make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, 'in -consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,' -executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom she -made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of the -instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from her late -husband under his will[7]. The guardians were Mr Rowland Sandell, -merchant, and Mr Richard Abbey, a wholesale tea-dealer in Pancras Lane. -Mrs Jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years[8], -but Mr Abbey, with the consent of his co-trustee, seems at once to have -taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John -Keats was withdrawn from school at the close of this same year 1810, when -he was just fifteen, and made to put on harness for the practical work of -life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own part, he was -bound apprentice for a term of five years to a surgeon at Edmonton named -Hammond. The only picture we have of him in this capacity has been left by -R. H. Horne, the author of _Orion_, who came as a small boy to the Enfield -school just after Keats had left it. One day in winter Mr Hammond had -driven over to attend the school, and Keats with him. Keats was standing -with his head sunk in a brown study, holding the horse, when some of the -boys, who knew his school reputation for pugnacity, dared Horne to throw a -snowball at him; which Horne did, hitting Keats in the back, and then -taking headlong to his heels, to his surprise got off scot free[9]. Keats -during his apprenticeship used on his own account to be often to and fro -between the Edmonton surgery and the Enfield school. His newly awakened -passion for the pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be -stifled, and whenever he could spare time from his work, he plunged back -into his school occupations of reading and translating. He finished at -this time his translation of the AEneid, and was in the habit of walking -over to Enfield once a week or oftener, to see his friend Cowden Clarke, -and to exchange books and 'travel in the realms of gold' with him. In -summer weather the two would sit in a shady arbour in the old school -garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks -and exclamations of enthusiasm. On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden -Clarke introduced him for the first time to Spenser, reading him the -_Epithalamium_ in the afternoon, and lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to -take away the same evening. It has been said, and truly, that no one who -has not had the good fortune to be attracted to that poem in boyhood can -ever completely enjoy it. The maturer student, appreciate as he may its -inexhaustible beauties and noble temper, can hardly fail to be in some -degree put out by its arbitrary forms of rhyme and diction, and wearied by -its melodious redundance: he will perceive the perplexity and -discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing -humanity, even the failure, at times, of clearness of vision and strength -of grasp, amidst all that luxuriance of decorative and symbolic invention, -and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. It is otherwise with the -uncritical faculties and greedy apprehension of boyhood. For them there is -no poetical revelation like the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to that -of floating for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by -those shores and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive -with glancing figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and -Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous -shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in distress. -Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging with delight: -'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he shewed moreover his own instinct for -the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm on epithets of -special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend, "he hoisted -himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image that -is--_sea-shouldering whales_!'" Spenser has been often proved not only a -great awakener of the love of poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of -the germs of original poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, -the most intimate friend of Keats during two later years of his life, -states positively that it was to the inspiration of the _Faerie Queene_ -that his first notion of attempting to write was due. "Though born to be a -poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his -eighteenth year. It was the _Faerie Queene_ that awakened his genius. In -Spenser's fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became -another being; till, enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, -and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his poetic powers -I first received from his brothers, and afterwards from himself. This, -his earliest attempt, the 'Imitation of Spenser,' is in his first volume -of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those acquainted with his -history[10]." Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his -memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest, and we may fairly assume -him to have been mistaken. - -After he had thus first become conscious within himself of the impulse of -poetical composition, Keats went on writing occasional sonnets and other -verses: secretly and shyly at first like all young poets: at least it was -not until two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed anything -he had written to his friend and confidant, Cowden Clarke. In the meantime -a change had taken place in his way of life. In the summer or autumn of -1814, more than a year before the expiration of his term of -apprenticeship, he had quarrelled with Mr Hammond and left him. The cause -of their quarrel is not known, and Keats's own single allusion to it is -when once afterwards, speaking of the periodical change and renewal of the -bodily tissues, he says "seven years ago it was not this hand which -clenched itself at Hammond." It seems unlikely that the cause was any -neglect of duty on the part of the poet-apprentice, who was not devoid of -thoroughness and resolution in the performance even of uncongenial tasks. -At all events Mr Hammond allowed the indentures to be cancelled, and -Keats, being now nearly nineteen years of age, went to live in London, and -continue the study of his profession as a student at the hospitals (then -for teaching purposes united) of St Thomas's and Guy's. For the first -winter and spring after leaving Edmonton he lodged alone at 8, Dean -Street, Borough, and then for about a year, in company with some -fellow-students, over a tallow-chandler's shop in St Thomas's Street. -Thence he went in the summer of 1816 to join his brothers in lodgings in -the Poultry, over a passage leading to the Queen's Head tavern. In the -spring of 1817 they all three moved for a short time to 76, Cheapside. -Between these several addresses in London Keats spent a period of about -two years and a half, from the date (which is not precisely fixed) of his -leaving Edmonton in 1814 until April, 1817. - -It was in this interval, from his nineteenth to his twenty-second year, -that Keats gave way gradually to his growing passion for poetry. At first -he seems to have worked steadily enough along the lines which others had -marked out for him. His chief reputation, indeed, among his fellow -students was that of a 'cheerful, crotchety rhymester,' much given to -scribbling doggrel verses in his friends' note-books[11]. But I have -before me the MS. book in which he took down his own notes of a course, or -at least the beginning of a course, of lectures on anatomy; and they are -not those of a lax or inaccurate student. The only signs of a wandering -mind occur on the margins of one or two pages, in the shape of sketches -(rather prettily touched) of pansies and other flowers: but the notes -themselves are both full and close as far as they go. Poetry had indeed -already become Keats's chief interest, but it is clear at the same time -that he attended the hospitals and did his work regularly, acquiring a -fairly solid knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the rudiments -of medical and surgical science, so that he was always afterwards able to -speak on such subjects with a certain mastery. On the 25th of July, 1816, -he passed with credit his examination as licentiate at Apothecaries' Hall. -He was appointed a dresser at Guy's under Mr Lucas on the 3rd of March, -1816, and the operations which he performed or assisted in are said to -have proved him no bungler. But his heart was not in the work. Its -scientific part he could not feel to be a satisfying occupation for his -thoughts: he knew nothing of that passion of philosophical curiosity in -the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame which by turns attracted -Coleridge and Shelley toward the study of medicine. The practical -responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him, and -he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill. -Voices and visions that he could not resist were luring his spirit along -other paths, and once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and -feelings in regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of -his unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that "the other day, -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 fairy-land." "My last operation," he once told Brown, "was the -opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but -reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed -a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again." - -Keats at the same time was forming intimacies with other young men of -literary tastes and occupations. His verses were beginning to be no longer -written with a boy's secrecy, but freely addressed to and passed round -among his friends; some of them attracted the notice and warm approval of -writers of acknowledged mark and standing; and with their encouragement he -had about the time of his coming of age (that is in the winter of 1816-17) -conceived the purpose of devoting himself to a literary life. We are not -told what measure of opposition he encountered on the point from Mr Abbey, -though there is evidence that he encountered some[12]. Probably that -gentleman regarded the poetical aspirations of his ward as mere symptoms -of a boyish fever which experience would quickly cure. There was always a -certain lack of cordiality in his relations with the three brothers as -they grew up. He gave places in his counting-house successively to George -and Tom as they left school, but they both quitted him after a while; -George, who had his full share of the family pride, on account of slights -experienced or imagined at the hands of a junior partner; Tom in -consequence of a settled infirmity of health which early disabled him for -the practical work of life. Mr Abbey continued to manage the money matters -of the Keats family,--unskilfully enough as will appear,--and to do his -duty by them as he understood it. Between him and John Keats there was -never any formal quarrel. But that young brilliant spirit could hardly -have expected a responsible tea-dealer's approval when he yielded himself -to the influences now to be described. - - - - -CHAPTER II. - - Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First - Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh Hunt: his - literary and personal influence--John Hamilton Reynolds--James - Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph Severn--Charles - Wells--Personal characteristics--Determination to publish. [1814-April - 1817.] - - -When Keats moved from Dean Street to St Thomas's Street in the summer of -1815, he at first occupied a joint sitting-room with two senior students, -to the care of one of whom he had been recommended by Astley Cooper[13]. -When they left he arranged to live in the same house with two other -students, of his own age, named George Wilson Mackereth and Henry -Stephens. The latter, who was afterwards a physician of repute near St -Albans, and later at Finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of -the time[14]. "He attended lectures," says Mr Stephens of Keats, "and went -through the usual routine, but he had no desire to excel in that -pursuit.... Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations--the -only thing worthy the attention of superior minds--so he thought--all -other pursuits were mean and tame.... It may readily be imagined that -this feeling was accompanied by a good deal of pride and some conceit, and -that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the -gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals." On the whole, it -seems, 'little Keats' was popular among his fellow-students, although -subject to occasional teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and -even his birth as the son of a stable-keeper. Mr Stephens goes on to tell -how he himself and a student of St Bartholomew's, a merry fellow called -Newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions -by Keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats taking -always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes. -He despised Pope, and admired Byron, but delighted especially in Spenser, -caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile, -than for the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used sometimes to -laugh at Keats and his flights,--to the indignation of his brothers, who -came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and -destined to exalt the family name. Questions of poetry apart, continues Mr -Stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady -and well-behaved--"his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having -any other taste or indulging in any vice." Another companion of Keats's -early London days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain -George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young -medical student some hospitality. "Keats and I," wrote in 1848 Mr -Mathew,--then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, struggling -meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of -twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy,--"Keats -and I, though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in -many respects as different as two individuals could be. He enjoyed good -health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was fond of company--could amuse -himself admirably with the frivolities of life--and had great confidence -in himself. I, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy--fond of -repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree.... -He was of the sceptical and republican school--an advocate for the -innovations which were making progress in his time--a faultfinder with -everything established. I on the other hand hated controversy and -dispute--dreaded discord and disorder"[15]--and Keats, our good Mr -Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to -apologize for shocking him. As to his poetical predilections, the -impression left on Mr Mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr -Stephens:--"he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep -emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of -elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the -pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never -observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme -sensibility." - -The exact order and chronology of Keats's own first efforts in poetry it -is difficult to trace. They were certainly neither precocious nor -particularly promising. The circumstantial account of Brown above quoted -compels us to regard the lines _In Imitation of Spenser_ as the earliest -of all, and as written at Edmonton about the end of 1813 or beginning of -1814. They are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or -experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a -little later in Keats's work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats loved -the best both first and last were those of the Elizabethan age, it is -clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of -writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not -so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of -these not the latest, Byron[16], but rather such milder minstrels as -Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental -Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose _Psyche_ had become very popular since her -death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical -versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces -preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with -this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves -very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, which he -addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a -shell. His two elegiac stanzas _On Death_, assigned by George Keats to the -year 1814, are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of -moralizing. Equally so is the address _To Hope_ of February 1815, with its -'relentless fair' and its personified abstractions, 'fair Cheerfulness,' -'Disappointment, parent of Despair,' 'that fiend Despondence,' and the -rest. And once more, in the ode _To Apollo_ of the same date, the voice -with which this young singer celebrates his Elizabethan masters is an -echo not of their own voice but rather of Gray's:-- - - "Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand, - And quickly forward spring - The Passions--a terrific band-- - And each vibrates the string - That with its tyrant temper best accords, - While from their Master's lips pour forth the inspiring words. - A silver trumpet Spenser blows, - And, as its martial notes to silence flee, - From a virgin chorus flows - A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity. - 'Tis still! Wild warblings from the AEolian lyre - Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire." - -The pieces above cited are all among the earliest of Keats's work, written -either at Edmonton or during the first year of his life in London. To the -same class no doubt belongs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish, -sentimental sonnet _To Byron_, and probably that also, which is but a -degree better, _To Chatterton_ (both only posthumously printed). The more -firmly handled but still mediocre sonnet on Leigh Hunt's release from -prison brings us again to a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the -young poet's life. It was on either the 2nd or the 3rd of February, 1815, -that the brothers Hunt were discharged after serving out the term of -imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling -the Prince Regent two years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many -other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to -Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed -quickly into friendship. Within a few days of Hunt's release, Clarke -walked in from Enfield to call on him (presumably at the lodging he -occupied at this time in the Edgware Road). On his return Clarke met -Keats, who walked part of the way home with him, and as they parted, says -Clarke, "he turned and gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day -that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had -received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I -recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! -There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with -life." - -Not long afterwards Cowden Clarke left Enfield, and came to settle in -London. Keats found him out in his lodgings at Clerkenwell, and the two -were soon meeting as often and reading together as eagerly as ever. One of -the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of Chapman's -Homer. After a night's enthusiastic study, Clarke found when he came down -to breakfast the next morning, that Keats, who had only left him in the -small hours, had already had time to compose and send him from the Borough -the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost hackneyed, _On First Looking -into Chapman's Homer_;-- - - "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, - And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; - Round many Western islands have I been - Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. - Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, - That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: - Yet did I never breathe its pure serene - Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: - Then felt I like some watcher of the skies - When a new planet swims into his ken; - Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes - He stared at the Pacific--and all his men - Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- - Silent, upon a peak in Darien." - -The date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed; but it was when nights -were short in the summer of 1815. The seventh line of the sonnet is an -afterthought: in the original copy sent to Cowden Clarke it stood more -baldly, 'Yet could I never tell what men might mean.' Keats here for the -first time approves himself a poet indeed. The concluding sestet is almost -unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius -than the image of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of schoolboy -reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, which should be Balboa -and not Cortez, but what does it matter?) is converted into the perfection -of appropriate poetry. - -One of the next services which the ever zealous and affectionate Cowden -Clarke did his young friend was to make him personally known to Leigh -Hunt. The acquaintance carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages -and even penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encouragement and -pleasure. It is impossible rightly to understand the career of Keats if we -fail to realise the various modes in which it was affected by his -intercourse with Hunt. The latter was the elder of the two by eleven -years. He was the son, by marriage with an American wife, of an eloquent -and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher of West -Indian origin, who had chiefly exercised his vocation in the northern -suburbs of London. Leigh Hunt was brought up at Christ's Hospital, about a -dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, and gained at sixteen some -slight degree of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile -poems. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being -then a clerk in the War Office; an occupation which he abandoned at -twenty-four (in 1808) in order to join his brother John Hunt in the -conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper. For five years the managers of that -journal helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of -Eldon and of Castlereagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect -sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they were caught -tripping, and condemned to two years' imprisonment for strictures ruled -libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and -person of the Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with -cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. Liberal statesmen, -philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society -in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial -conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. Tall, -straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black -eyes, and 'nose of taste,' Leigh Hunt was ever one of the most winning of -companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and -ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most -sympathetic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was far -too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank -neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him nearly -always a receiver,--still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly -abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer -for what they believed. Liberals could not but contrast his smiling -steadfastness under persecution with the apostasy, as in the heat of the -hour they considered it, of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In -domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under difficulties; and -none was better loved by his friends, or requited them, so far as the -depth of his nature went, with a truer warmth and loyalty. His literary -industry was incessant, hardly second to that of Southey himself. He had -the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a singular quickness of -intellectual apprehension for the points and qualities of what he enjoyed; -and for the gentler pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word he -loved) of literature, he is the most accomplished of guides and -interpreters. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, -and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which -Coleridge and De Quincey, with their more philosophic powers and method, -were subject, the faults of pedantry and effort. The infirmity of Leigh -Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. "Incomparable," according to Lamb's -well-known phrase, "as a fire-side companion," it was his misfortune to -carry too much of the fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both -in prose and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty -familiarity and ease which passes too easily into Cockney pertness. - -A combination of accidents, political, personal, and literary, caused this -writer of amiable memory and second-rate powers to exercise, about the -time of which we are writing, a determining influence both on the work and -the fortunes of stronger men. And first of his influence on their work. He -was as enthusiastic a student of 'our earlier and nobler school of poetry' -as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the -characteristic excellences of the 'French school,' the school of polished -artifice and restraint which had come in since Dryden, he was not less -bent on its overthrow, and on the return of English poetry to the paths of -nature and freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which -this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his -rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. "It -was his intention," he wrote in prison, "by the beginning of next year to -bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce -to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various -and legitimate harmony of the English heroic." The result of this -intention was the _Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and -published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. "With the -endeavour," so he repeated himself in the preface, "to recur to a freer -spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater -importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language." - -In versification Hunt's aim was to bring back into use the earlier form of -the rhymed English decasyllabic or 'heroic' couplet. The innovating poets -of the time had abandoned this form of verse (Wordsworth and Coleridge -using it only in their earliest efforts, before 1796); while the others -who still employed it, as Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Byron, adhered, -each in his manner, to the isolated couplet and hammering rhymes with -which the English ear had been for more than a century exclusively -familiar. The two contrasted systems of handling the measure may best be -understood if we compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of -those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two -different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern, -with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. The -regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand -for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the verse into equal -pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its -other divisions--dependent not on metre but on the sense--into clauses and -periods of variable length and structure. Under the older system of -versification the sentence or period had been allowed to follow its own -laws, with a movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the beauty of -the result depended upon the skill and feeling with which this free -element of the pattern was made to play about and interweave itself with -the fixed element, the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and -now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now drawing attention to -the rhyme and now withholding it. For examples of this system and of its -charm we have only to turn at random to Chaucer:-- - - "I-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse. - Hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse, - Byhynde her bak, a yerde long, I gesse, - And in the garden as the sonne upriste - She walketh up and down, and as hir liste - She gathereth floures, party white and reede, - To make a sotil garland for here heede, - And as an aungel hevenlyche sche song." - -Chaucer's conception of the measure prevails throughout the Elizabethan -age, but not exclusively or uniformly. Some poets are more inobservant of -the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as -independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than -with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the -_enjambement_, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to -another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an -opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to -clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single -propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall -regularly on the rhyme. This principle gradually gained ground during the -seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work -of Dryden. But Dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying -the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the -use of the triplet and the Alexandrine, thus:-- - - "Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood - Were poured upon the pile of burning wood, - And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food. - Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around - The fire, and Arcite's name they thrice resound: - 'Hail and farewell,' they shouted thrice amain, - Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again--:" - -and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the -Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:-- - - "I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; - I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. - Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; - I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." - -In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, -these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element -in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element -entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and -clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, -are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical -divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not -sententious, but fanciful and discursive:-- - - "Some in the fields of purest aether play, - And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. - Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, - Or roll the planets through the boundless sky. - Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light - Pursue the stars that shoot across the night, - Or seek the mists in grosser air below, - Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, - Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, - Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain." - -Leigh Hunt's theory was that Pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead -of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic -couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of _Rimini_ is avowedly -modelled. The result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial -cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in -either:-- - - "The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye - Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly; - Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common - To accept the attentions of this lovely woman, - But the meantime he took no generous pains, - By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains; - He entered not, in turn, in her delights, - Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights; - Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he - Unless his pride was roused by company; - Or when to please him, after martial play, - She strained her lute to some old fiery lay - Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras, - Or Ryan's cloak, or how by the red grass - In battle you might know where Richard was." - -It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh Hunt in _Rimini_ -is due the rhythmical form alike of _Endymion_ and _Epipsychidion_, of -Keats's _Epistles_ to his friends and Shelley's _Letter to Maria -Gisborne_. Certainly the _Epistles_ of Keats, both as to sentiment and -rhythm, are very much in Hunt's manner. But the earliest of them, that to -G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when _Rimini_ was not yet published, and -when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have -known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his -work to Hunt's may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural -affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the -disyllabic rhyme and the 'overflow' as used by some of the Elizabethan -writers, particularly by Spenser in _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and by Browne -in _Britannia's Pastorals_. At all events the appearance of _Rimini_ -tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice. - -As to Hunt's success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his -'free and idiomatic cast of language' to supersede the styles alike of -Pope and Wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps -enough. The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of -others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so -completely as in _Rimini_. The piece indeed is not without agreeable -passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the -pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his -prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and -handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and -vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any -departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, -found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_: and ladies -are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what, -one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can -endure to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and -Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like this?-- - - "What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes, - A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise?--" - - "How charming, would he think, to see her here, - How heightened then, and perfect would appear - The two divinest things the world has got, - A lovely woman in a rural spot." - -When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and -instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a -familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it -need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred -strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more -than once. - -Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily exercised on his -friends' fortunes and their estimation by the world. We have seen how he -found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of -political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no -means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him out as a special -butt for Tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so -inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. During his -imprisonment Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the _Reflector_, with notes and -additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the _Feast of the -Poets_, which he had written about two years before. In it Apollo is -represented as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to -the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who -present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially -welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. Moore and -Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof, -Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not -more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on -their contemporaries. The bitterness of the 'Lost Leader' feeling to which -we have referred accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of the Lake -writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott -as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged -the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the -poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His treatment of Scott, on the other -hand, is idly flippant and patronising. Now it so happened that of the two -champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other -the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh,--I mean Wilson and -Lockhart,--Wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and -Lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion -was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem -paradoxical rancour with which the gentle Hunt, and Keats as his friend -and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in _Blackwood_. - -To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first became known to each -other. Cowden Clarke began by carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from -the Edgware Road to a cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, a few of -Keats's poems in manuscript. Horace Smith was with Hunt when the young -poet's work was shown him. Both were eager in its praises, and in -questions concerning the person and character of the author. Cowden Clarke -at Hunt's request brought Keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has -left a vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. The -introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of 1816[17]. -Keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead household; -and for the next year or two Hunt's was the strongest intellectual -influence to which he was subject. So far as opinions were concerned, -those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood -by Leigh Hunt's writings in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic -as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel -of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his -own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of -eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy -of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and optimistic view of things, and he -had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:--ready to entertain and appreciate -any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or -power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. -In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in -common. Both alike were given to 'luxuriating' somewhat effusively and -fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever they liked in art, books, or -nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt -brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness -of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were intense beyond -parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also felt with Keats the -undying charm of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about -this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, -less adequate, of Homer. The poets Hunt loved best were Ariosto and the -other Italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in -English he was devoted to Keats's own favourite Spenser. - -The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of 'Libertas,' 'the lov'd -Libertas,' meaning Leigh Hunt, in the verses written by Keats at this -time. He attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the -_Faerie Queene_ in the metre of _Rimini_, and in others to express in the -same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the -beautiful, then rural Hampstead woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he -seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a -bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length -on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; -and the sonnet beginning, 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and -there', records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend's -house one night in winter. We find him presenting Hunt with a crown of -ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. Or they would -challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme. -Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion in December 1816, when they -each wrote to time a sonnet _on the Grasshopper and Cricket_, has left us -a pleasant picture of their relations:-- - - "The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences - which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard - and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious - encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:-- - - 'The poetry of earth is never dead.' - - "Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth - and eleventh lines:-- - - 'On a lone winter morning, when the frost - Hath wrought a silence'-- - - "Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation - on the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and - torpidity." - -Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced to a number of -congenial spirits. Among them he attached himself especially to one John -Hamilton Reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than -himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. Reynolds was -born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in London, as -writing-master at the Blue Coat School. He lacked health and energy, but -has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a -charming character and no slight literary talent. He held a clerkship in -an Insurance office, and lived in Little Britain with his family, -including three sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest -of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him -inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the -time. One, _Safie_, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then -fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published -in the year of Keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's -relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical -entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum -theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory -parody of _Peter Bell_, which Byron assumed to be the work of Moore. In -1820 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to -relate, under the name _Peter Corcoran_, the fortunes of an amateur of the -prize-ring; and a little later, in conjunction with Hood, the volume of -anonymous _Odes and Addresses to Eminent Persons_ which Coleridge on its -appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. But Reynolds had -early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of -an opening in business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell -sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave to Keats, and in -1821 he writes again, - - "As time increases - I give up drawling verse for drawing leases." - -In point of fact Reynolds continued for years to contribute to the _London -Magazine_ and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with -Hood. But neither in literature nor law did he attain a position -commensurate with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time of -which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,--with -Keats and Shelley,--he died in 1852 as Clerk of the County at Newport, -Isle of Wight, and it is only in association with Keats that his name will -live. Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining -from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet -written early in their acquaintance proves[18], but also one of the -wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake. -In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats's associates must be -mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of -literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, -but always, in Keats's words, "coming on his legs again like a cat"; ever -cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in -good offices to those about him: "dear noble generous James Rice," records -Dilke,--"the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest -men I ever knew." Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming -member of Hunt's set, when Keats first joined it, was one Cornelius Webb, -remembered now, if remembered at all, by _Blackwood's_ derisory quotation -of his lines on-- - - "Keats, - The Muses' son of promise, and what feats - He yet may do"-- - -as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. -He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough -of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost -be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his -weak moments[19]. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in -the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the -revision of the _Quarterly_ proofs. Towards 1830--1840 he re-appeared in -literature, as Cornelius 'Webbe', author of the _Man about Town_ and other -volumes of cheerful gossipping Cockney essays, to which the _Quarterly_ -critics extended a patronizing notice. - -An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which Keats made a few -months later, at Leigh Hunt's, was that of Shelley, his senior by only -three years. During the harrowing period of Shelley's life which followed -the suicide of his first wife--when his principle of love a law to itself -had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his -own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the -world's--the kindness and affection of Leigh Hunt were among his chief -consolations. After his marriage with Mary Godwin, he flitted often, alone -or with his wife, between Great Marlow and Hampstead, where Keats met him -early in the spring of 1817. "Keats," says Hunt, did not take to Shelley -as kindly as Shelley did to him, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a -little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in -every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a -fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his -pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for -friendship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of -reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at -first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or -material patronage on the other's part: but he should soon have learnt -better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy, -according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his -kindness. Of Shelley's kindness Keats had in the sequel sufficient proof: -in the meantime, until Shelley went abroad the following year, the two met -often at Hunt's without becoming really intimate. Pride and social -sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy -between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, -sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as -much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Shelley, -his passionate negation of the world's creeds and the world's law, and his -intense proselytizing ardour. - -It was also at Hunt's house that Keats for the first time met by -pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November 1816, the painter Haydon, -whose influence soon became hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon -was now thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two great -objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory -in the other. He had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence -of the Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor's art acknowledged in -the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation -secured. This is Haydon's chief real title to the regard of posterity. His -other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to -take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the -crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His -indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance, -his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his -self-assertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, -even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at -large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and -encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of -dilettantism and fashion. His first two great pictures, 'Dentatus' and -'Macbeth', had been dubiously received; his last, the 'Judgment of -Solomon', with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than -all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' and while as usual sunk deep in -debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in -truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of -the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he -possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely -exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this -time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future -greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and -ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming -flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and -shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God." -But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of -genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties -which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to -Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of -working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch -and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an -occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from -greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to -immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of -true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin -marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he -enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety -of the original. Very much better is his account of them in words: as -indeed Haydon's chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best -instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know with -what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style -he can relate an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the -literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries -to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied -void turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings. -Take for instance, in relation to Keats himself, Haydon's profound -admonition to him as follows:--"God bless you, my dear Keats! do not -despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakspere, and trust in -Providence, and you will do, you must:" or the following precious -expansion of an image in one of the poet's sonnets on the Elgin -marbles:--"I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable -to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he -must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling -sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing -angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless -wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects -of their seeking"-- - -But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those -he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not -his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his -associates as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits of -the time were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by -him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others -after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of -purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of -thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and -protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for -deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies', and the like. "I always rose up -from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed -fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me -streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he -was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both -particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it -might be, on their bounty. Experience of these qualities partly alienated -Keats from him in the long run. But at first sight Haydon had much to -attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and -Keats were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire from the -other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an -evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th -of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his -name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:-- - - "Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the - following:-- - - Great spirits now on earth are sojourning: - He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, - Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake, - Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing: - He of the rose, the violet, the spring, - The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake, - And lo! whose steadfastness would never take - A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering. - And other spirits there are standing apart - Upon the forehead of the age to come; - These, these will give the world another heart, - And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum - Of mighty workings in the human mart? - Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb." - -Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. The three well-known -sonnets of Wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and -about the same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote him a -sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. In his reply to Keats he -proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which "puts -me," answers Keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence I would -send my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but -think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out -the words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however, -accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two -other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin -marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to -his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject, -confessing his inability rightly to grasp or analyse the impressions he -had received. By the spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon -was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a -standing invitation to his studio in Great Marlborough Street, declaring -him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried -together. - -To complete the group of Keats's friends in these days, we have to think -of two or three others known to him otherwise than through Hunt, and not -belonging to the Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends of a -Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was attached. She was the -daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive -irregular cast of beauty, and Keats on his own account had a great liking -for her. On Valentine's day, 1816, we find him writing, for George to send -her, the first draft of the lines beginning, 'Hadst thou lived in days of -old,' afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[20]. Through -the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was -afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, but whose -character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with -Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was -the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to -be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, a strong love of -literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which Mr -Ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at -Rome[21]. From the moment of their introduction Severn found in Keats his -very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him -with an admiring affection. - -A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles Wells, afterwards -author of _Stories after Nature_, and of that singular and strongly -imagined Biblical drama or 'dramatic poem' of _Joseph and his Brethren_, -which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group -of poets and critics in ours. Wells had been a school companion of Tom -Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone -buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, -boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days -chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about -fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses acknowledged in -the sonnet beginning, 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' A year or -two later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on Tom -Keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the _Stories -after Nature_, published in 1822, are said to have been written in order -to show Keats "that he too could do something." - -Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely-born and half-schooled -young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art, -letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with -some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most -ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temperament alike saved -him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and -deference towards his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of -genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both verbal and other -exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression -which he made. "The character and expression of his features," it is said, -"would arrest even the casual passenger in the street." A small, handsome, -ardent-looking youth--the stature little over five feet: the figure -compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a -strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the -features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an -expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead -not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes -hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired--"an eye that had an inward -look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." "Keats -was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high -calling, except Wordsworth." These words are Haydon's, and to the same -effect Leigh Hunt:--"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." It is noticeable that -his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way -to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. To return to -Haydon:--"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 cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered." -In like manner George Keats:--"John's eyes moistened, and his lip -quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or -noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;" and a shrewd and -honoured survivor of those days, "herself of many poets the frequent theme -and valued friend,"--need I name Mrs Procter?--has recorded the impression -the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on -some glorious sight[22]. - -In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns himself, to -have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the -company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was -pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by -turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and -unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw -apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the -window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and -low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but -gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at -wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to -command respect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are said to -have been great, and never used unkindly. - -Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, -Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather -everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, -passion for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of course was -adverse: but his brothers, including George, the practical and sensible -one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to -them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his -compositions, show. In August 1816 we find him addressing from Margate a -sonnet and a poetical Epistle in terms of the utmost affection and -confidence to George. About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St -Thomas's Street to go and live with his brothers in the Poultry; and in -November he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side -occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. -It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a -time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England -has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself -induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement -of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh -Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without -comment, in the _Examiner_ for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, -'O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell,' and on the 1st of December in the -same year the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some -prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, associating with -his name those of Shelley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of Hunt in -this paper, says Mr Stephens, that Keats's fate was sealed. But already -the still more ardent encouragement of Haydon, if more was wanted, had -come to add fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the -Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers, and in the -convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats -should put forth a volume of his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers -was found in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last -proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, -with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be -furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _To -Leigh Hunt Esqr._, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:-- - - "Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away; - For if we wander out in early morn, - No wreathed incense do we see upborne - Into the East to meet the smiling day: - No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, - In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, - Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn - The shrine of Flora in her early May. - But there are left delights as high as these, - And I shall ever bless my destiny, - That in a time when under pleasant trees - Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, - A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, - With these poor offerings, a man like thee." - -With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old -pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's -first venture was sent forth in the month of March 1817. - - - - -CHAPTER III. - - The _Poems_ of 1817. - - -The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from -Spenser which he prefixed to it:-- - - "What more felicity can fall to creature - Than to enjoy delight with liberty?" - -The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of -release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true -nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And -the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: -delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in -the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and -affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art -itself which expresses and communicates all these joys. - -We have already glanced, in connection with the occasions which gave rise -to them, at a few of the miscellaneous boyish pieces in various metres -which are included in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. The -remaining and much the chief portion of the book consists of half a dozen -poems in the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. These had all been written -during the period between November 1815 and April 1817, under the combined -influence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The former -influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the -poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. Keats had by -this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his -earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a -vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the -Elizabethans and from Milton. The chief verbal echoes of Spenser to be -found in his first volume are a line quoted from him entire in the epistle -to G. F. Mathew, and the use of the archaic 'teen' in the stanzas -professedly Spenserian. We can indeed trace Keats's familiarity with -Chapman, and especially with one poem of Chapman's, his translation of the -Homeric _Hymn to Pan_, in a predilection for a particular form of abstract -descriptive substantive:-- - - "the pillowy silkiness that rests - Full in the speculation of the stars:"-- - - "Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:"-- - - "Ere I can have explored its widenesses."[23] - -The only other distinguishing marks of Keats's diction in this first -volume consist, I think, in the use of the Miltonic 'sphery,' and of an -unmeaning coinage of his own, 'boundly,' with a habit--for which Milton, -Spenser, and among the moderns Leigh Hunt all alike furnished him the -example--of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his -convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his -day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, -and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines and -passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and -instinct. But they are mixed up with much that only illustrates his -crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt -to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and -grace. - -In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems making a -succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic -couplet. In the colloquial _Epistles_, addressed severally to G. F. -Mathew, to his brother George, and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself -with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional -_enjambement_ or 'overflow.' In the _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, -and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled _Calidore_ (a name -borrowed from the hero of Spenser's sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed -piece beginning 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' which opens the -volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the -second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught -either from Spenser's nuptial odes or Milton's _Lycidas_,-- - - "Open afresh your round of starry folds, - Ye ardent marigolds." - -In _Sleep and Poetry_, which is the most personal and interesting, as well -as probably the last-written, poem in the volume, Keats drops this -practice, but in other respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making -free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line -rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather than an -exception the Chaucerian and Elizabethan fashion of breaking the couplet -by closing a sentence or paragraph with its first line. - -Passing from the form of the poems to their substance, we find that they -are experiments or poetic preludes merely, with no pretension to be -organic or complete works of art. To rehearse ramblingly the pleasures and -aspirations of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow another -with no particular plan or sequence, is all that Keats as yet attempts: -except in the _Calidore_ fragment. And that is on the whole feeble and -confused: from the outset the poet loses himself in a maze of young -luxuriant imagery: once and again, however, he gets clear, and we have -some good lines in an approach to the Dryden manner:-- - - "Softly the breezes from the forest came, - Softly they blew aside the taper's flame; - Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower; - Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; - Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone; - Lovely the moon in ether, all alone." - -To set against this are occasionally expressions in the complete taste of -Leigh Hunt, as for instance-- - - "The lamps that from the high-roof'd wall were pendent, - And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent." - -The _Epistles_ are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint pleasures of -literature and friendship. In that to Cowden Clarke, Keats acknowledges to -his friend that he had been shy at first of addressing verses to him:-- - - "Nor should I now, but that I've known you long; - That you first taught me all the sweets of song: - The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine, - What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine: - Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, - And float along like birds o'er summer seas; - Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness; - Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness. - Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly - Up to its climax, and then dying proudly? - Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, - Growing, like Atlas, stronger for its load? - Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, - The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? - Show'd me that Epic was of all the king, - Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?" - -This is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter manner of Keats -in his early work. Blots like the ungrammatical fourth line are not -infrequent with him. The preference for Miltonian tenderness over -Miltonian storms may remind the reader of a later poet's more masterly -expression of the same sentiment:--'Me rather all that bowery -loneliness--'. The two lines on Spenser are of interest as conveying one -of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of which no one has -left us more or better than Keats. The habit of Spenser to which he here -alludes is that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their -open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive lines, for -example,-- - - "Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, - More swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye; - Withouten oare or pilot it to guide, - Or winged canvas with the wind to fly." - -The run here is on _a_ and _i_; principally on _i_, which occurs five -times in its open, and ten times in its closed, sound in the four -lines,--if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel these two unlike sounds -denoted by the same sign. Keats was a close and conscious student of the -musical effects of verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have -suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration -of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we are not clearly told, -neither do I think it can easily be discovered from his practice; though -every one must feel a great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of -the vowel and diphthong sequences. He often spoke of the subject, and once -maintained his view against Wordsworth when the latter seemed to be -advocating a mechanical principle of vowel variation. - -Hear, next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, and of nature, -come naively jostling one another in the _Epistle_ addressed from the -sea-side to his brother George:-- - - "As to my sonnets, though none else should heed them - I feel delighted, still, that you should read them. - Of late, too, I have had much calm enjoyment, - Stretch'd on the grass at my best loved employment - Of scribbling lines for you. These things I thought - While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught. - E'en now I am pillow'd on a bed of flowers - That crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers - Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades - Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades. - On one side is a field of drooping oats, - Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats; - So pert and useless that they bring to mind - The scarlet coats that pester human kind. - And on the other side, outspread is seen - Ocean's blue mantle, streak'd with purple and green. - Now 'tis I see a canvass'd ship, and now - Mark the bright silver curling round her brow; - I see the lark down-dropping to his nest, - And the broad wing'd sea-gull never at rest; - For when no more he spreads his feathers free, - His breast is dancing on the restless sea." - -It is interesting to watch the newly-awakened literary faculty in Keats -thus exercising itself in the narrow circle of personal sensation, and on -the description of the objects immediately before his eyes. The effect of -rhythmical movement attempted in the last lines, to correspond with the -buoyancy and variety of the motions described, has a certain felicity, and -the whole passage is touched already with Keats's exquisite perception and -enjoyment of external nature. His character as a poet of nature begins, -indeed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. He differs by -it alike from Wordsworth and from Shelley. The instinct of Wordsworth was -to interpret all the operations of nature by those of his own strenuous -soul; and the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from the -scenery of his home, deepened and enriched by continual after meditation, -and mingling with all the currents of his adult thought and feeling, -constituted for him throughout his life the most vital part alike of -patriotism, of philosophy, and of religion. For Shelley on his part -natural beauty was in a twofold sense symbolical. In the visible glories -of the world his philosophy saw the veil of the unseen, while his -philanthropy found in them types and auguries of a better life on earth; -and all that imagery of nature's more remote and skyey phenomena, of which -no other poet has had an equal mastery, and which comes borne to us along -the music of the verse-- - - "With many a mingled close - Of wild AEolian sound and mountain odour keen"-- - -was inseparable in his soul from visions of a radiant future and a -renovated--alas! not a human--humanity. In Keats the sentiment of nature -was simpler than in either of these two other masters; more direct, and so -to speak more disinterested. It was his instinct to love and interpret -nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of sympathy which the -human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. He had -grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor -in the glow of millennial dreams like Shelley, but London-born and -Middlesex-bred, was gifted, we know not whence, as if by some mysterious -birthright, with a delighted insight into all the beauties, and sympathy -with all the life, of the woods and fields. Evidences of the gift appear, -as every reader knows, in the longer poems of his first volume, with their -lingering trains of peaceful summer imagery, and loving inventories of -'Nature's gentle doings;' and pleasant touches of the same kind are -scattered also among the sonnets; as in that _To Charles Wells_,-- - - "As late I rambled in the happy fields, - What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew - From his lush clover covert,"-- - -or again in that _To Solitude_,-- - - --"let me thy vigils keep - 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap - Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."[24] - -Such intuitive familiarity with the blithe activities, unnoted by common -eyes, which make up the life and magic of nature, is a gift we attribute -to men of primitive race and forest nurture; and Mr Matthew Arnold would -have us recognize it as peculiarly characteristic of the Celtic element in -the English genius and English poetry. It was allied in Keats to another -instinct of the early world which we associate especially with the Greeks, -the instinct for personifying the powers of nature in clearly-defined -imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half-human faculties. The -classical teaching of the Enfield school had not gone beyond Latin, and -neither in boyhood nor afterwards did Keats acquire any Greek: but towards -the creations of the Greek mythology he was attracted by an overmastering -delight in their beauty, and a natural sympathy with the phase of -imagination that engendered them. Especially he shows himself possessed -and fancy-bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical enchantment, -of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moonstruck. He had -planned a poem on the ancient story of the loves of Diana, with whom the -Greek moon-goddess Selene is identified in the Latin mythology, and the -shepherd-prince Endymion; and had begun a sort of prelude to it in the -piece that opens 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.' Afterwards, without -abandoning the subject, Keats laid aside this particular exordium, and -printed it, as we have seen, as an independent piece at the head of his -first volume. It is at the climax of a passage rehearsing the delights of -evening that he first bethinks himself of the moon-- - - "lifting her silver rim - Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim - Coming into the blue with all her light." - -The thought of the mythic passion of the moon-goddess for Endymion, and -the praises of the poet who first sang it, follow at considerable length. -The passage conjuring up the wonders and beneficences of their bridal -night is written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the collective -feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary conditions of human pain -and pleasure, health and sickness, as rarely occurs again in Keats's -poetry, though his correspondence shows it to have been most natural to -his mind:-- - - "The evening weather was so bright, and clear, - That men of health were of unusual cheer. - - * * * * * - - The breezes were ethereal, and pure, - And crept through half-closed lattices to cure - The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, - And sooth'd them into slumbers full and deep. - Soon they awoke clear-ey'd: nor burnt with thirsting, - Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: - And springing up, they met the wond'ring sight - Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; - Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, - And on their placid foreheads part the hair."[25] - -Finally, Keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exordium of his -unwritten poem with the cry:-- - - "Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses - That followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses: - Was there a poet born? But now no more - My wandering spirit must no farther soar." - -Was there a poet born? Is the labour and the reward of poetry really and -truly destined to be his? The question is one which recurs in this early -volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences -closely recalling those of Milton in his boyish _Vacation Exercise_; -sometimes with a cry like this, which occurs twice over in the piece -called _Sleep and Poetry_,-- - - "O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen, - That am not yet a glorious denizen - Of thy wide heaven:"-- - -and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring tone of young -ambition,-- - - "But off, Despondence! miserable bane! - They should not know thee, who, athirst to gain - A noble end, are thirsty every hour. - What though I am not wealthy in the dower - Of spanning wisdom: though I do not know - The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow - Hither and thither all the changing thoughts - Of man: though no great ministering reason sorts - Out the dark mysteries of human souls - To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls - A vast idea before me"--. - -The feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the overmastering -pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, -gives way in other passages to confident anticipations of fame, and of the -place which he will hold in the affections of posterity. - -There is obviously a great immaturity and uncertainty in all these -outpourings, an intensity and effervescence of emotion out of proportion -as yet both to the intellectual and the voluntary powers, much confusion -of idea, and not a little of expression. Yet even in this first book of -Keats there is much that the lover of poetry will always cherish. -Literature, indeed, hardly affords another example of work at once so -crude and so attractive. Passages that go to pieces under criticism -nevertheless have about them a spirit of beauty and of morning, an -abounding young vitality and freshness, that exhilarate and charm us -whether with the sanction of our judgment or without it. And alike at its -best and worst, the work proceeds manifestly from a spontaneous and -intense poetic impulse. The matter of these early poems of Keats is as -fresh and unconventional as their form, springing directly from the native -poignancy of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. That his -inexperience should always make the most discreet use of its freedom could -not be expected; but with all its immaturity his work has strokes already -which suggest comparison with the great names of literature. Who much -exceeds him, even from the first, but Shakspere in momentary felicity of -touch for nature, and in that charm of morning freshness who but Chaucer? -Already, too, we find him showing signs of that capacity for clear and -sane self-knowledge which becomes by-and-by so admirable in him. And he -has already begun to meditate to good purpose on the aims and methods of -his art. He has grasped and vehemently asserts the principle that poetry -should not strive to enforce particular doctrines, that it should not -contend in the field of reason, but that its proper organ is the -imagination, and its aim the creation of beauty. With reference to the -theory and practice of the poetic art the piece called _Sleep and Poetry_ -contains one passage which has become classically familiar to all readers. -Often as it has been quoted elsewhere, it must be quoted again here, as -indispensable to the understanding of the literary atmosphere in which -Keats lived:-- - - "Is there so small a range - In the present strength of manhood, that the high - Imagination cannot freely fly - As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, - Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds - Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all? - From the clear space of ether, to the small - Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning - Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening - Of April meadows? here her altar shone, - E'en in this isle; and who could paragon - The fervid choir that lifted up a noise - Of harmony, to where it aye will poise - Its mighty self of convoluting sound, - Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, - Eternally around a dizzy void? - Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd - With honours; nor had any other care - Than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair. - 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 sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, - And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd! - The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd - 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 smooth, inlay, and clip, 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, - Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large - The name of one Boileau! - O ye whose charge - It is to hover round our pleasant hills! - Whose congregated majesty so fills - My boundly reverence, that I cannot trace - Your hallow'd names, in this unholy place, - So near those common folk; did not their shames - Affright you? Did our old lamenting Thames - Delight you? did ye never cluster round - Delicious Avon, with a mournful sound, - And weep? Or did ye wholly bid adieu - To regions where no more the laurel grew? - Or did ye stay to give a welcoming - To some lone spirits who could proudly sing - Their youth away, and die? 'Twas even so. - But let me think away those times of woe: - Now 'tis a fairer season; ye have breathed - Rich benedictions o'er us; ye have wreathed - Fresh garlands: for sweet music has been heard - In many places; some has been upstirr'd - From out its crystal dwelling in a lake, - By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake, - Nested and quiet in a valley mild, - Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild - About the earth: happy are ye and glad." - -Both the strength and the weakness of this are typically characteristic of -the time and of the man. The passage is likely to remain for posterity the -central expression of the spirit of literary emancipation then militant -and about to triumph in England. The two great elder captains of -revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have both expounded their cause, in -prose, with much more maturity of thought and language; Coleridge in the -luminous retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_, Wordsworth in the -austere contentions of his famous prefaces. But neither has left any -enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory -like the rhymes of this young untrained recruit in the cause of poetic -liberty and the return to nature. It is easy, indeed, to pick these verses -of Keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention -on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to -do? fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against -the light? and why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly -be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' -Delight with liberty is very well, but liberty in a poet ought not to -include liberties with the parts of speech. Why should the hair of the -muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more -intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to -'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit, but not a standard, -and a standard flimsy, but not a motto. 'Boundly reverence': what is -boundly? And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that -attitude. Many minds not indifferent to literature were at that time, and -some will at all times be, incapable of any other. Such must naturally -turn to the work of the eighteenth century school, the school of tact and -urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think the only 'blasphemy' -was on the side of the youth who could call, or seem to call, the poet of -Belinda and the _Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot_ fool and dolt. Byron, in his -controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack -effectively enough: his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its -most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, -for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have -in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as -distinct from that of taste and reason, however clearly we may see the -weak points of a passage like this, however much we may wish that taste -and reason had had more to do with it, yet we cannot but feel that Keats -touches truly the root of the matter; we cannot but admire the elastic -life and variety of his verse, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of -rhetoric, the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow -of his delight in the achievements and promise of the new age. - -His volume on its appearance by no means made the impression which his -friends had hoped for it. Hunt published a thoroughly judicious as well as -cordial criticism in the _Examiner_, and several of the provincial papers -noticed the book. Haydon wrote in his ranting vein: "I have read your -_Sleep and Poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from -their occupations, and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that -_will_ follow." But people were in fact as far from being disturbed in -their occupations as possible. The attention of the reading public was for -the moment almost entirely absorbed by men of talent or of genius who -played with a more careless, and some of them with a more masterly touch -than Keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit; as Moore, -Scott, and Byron. In Keats's volume every one could see the faults, while -the beauties appealed only to the poetically minded. It seems to have had -a moderate sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. The -poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, apparently -with little reason, to blame their friends the publishers for the failure. -On the 29th of April we find the brothers Ollier replying to a letter of -George Keats in dudgeon:--"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." One of their customers, they go on -to say, had a few days ago hurt their feelings as men of business and of -taste by calling it "no better than a take in." - -A fortnight before the date of this letter Keats had left London. Haydon -had been urging on him, not injudiciously, the importance of seclusion and -concentration of mind. We find him writing to Reynolds soon after the -publication of his volume:--"My brothers are anxious that I should go by -myself into the country; they have always been extremely fond of me, and -now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone -to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me -continually for a great good which I hope will follow: so I shall soon be -out of town." And on the 14th of April he in fact started for the Isle of -Wight, intending to devote himself entirely to study, and to make -immediately a fresh start upon _Endymion_. - - - - -CHAPTER IV. - - Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer at - Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey at - Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter at - Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity--Spring at - Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and Emigration of George - Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818.] - - -As soon as Keats reached the Isle of Wight, on April 16, 1817, he went to -see Shanklin and Carisbrooke, and after some hesitation between the two, -decided on a lodging at the latter place. The next day he writes to -Reynolds that he has spent the morning arranging the books and prints he -had brought with him, adding to the latter one of Shakspere which he had -found in the passage and which had particularly pleased him. He speaks -with enthusiasm of the beauties of Shanklin, but in a postscript written -the following day, mentions that he has been nervous from want of sleep, -and much haunted by the passage in _Lear_, 'Do you not hear the -sea?'--adding without farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet -beginning-- - - "It keeps eternal whisperings around - Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell - Gluts twice ten thousand caverns"--. - -In the same postscript Keats continues:-- - - "I find I cannot do without poetry--without eternal poetry; half the - day will not do--the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit has - made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not having - written anything of late: the Sonnet overleaf did me good; I slept the - better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad - again.... I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_, which I hope I shall - have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses - in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle." - -The Isle of Wight, however, Keats presently found did not suit him, and -Haydon's prescription of solitude proved too trying. He fell into a kind -of fever of thought and sleeplessness, which he thought it wisest to try -and shake off by flight. Early in May we find him writing to Leigh Hunt -from Margate, where he had already stayed the year before, and explaining -the reasons of his change of abode. Later in the same letter, endeavouring -to measure his own powers against the magnitude of the task to which he -has committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we have seen -recurring once and again in his verses during the preceding year, the vein -of awed self-questioning, and tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest -and half in jest. The next day we find him writing a long and intimate, -very characteristic letter to Haydon, signed 'your everlasting friend,' -and showing the first signs of the growing influence which Haydon was -beginning to exercise over him in antagonism to the influence of Leigh -Hunt. Keats was quite shrewd enough to feel for himself after a little -while the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of depth and -strength, in the kind and charming nature of Hunt, and quite loyal enough -to value his excellences none the less, and hold him in grateful and -undiminished friendship. But Haydon, between whom and Hunt there was by -degrees arising a coolness, must needs have Keats see things as he saw -them. "I love you like my own brother," insists he: "beware, for God's -sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents -and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his -own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of -his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to -support injured by his own neglect of character." There is a lugubrious -irony in these words, when we remember how Haydon, a self-deluder indeed, -came to realise at last the very fate he here prophesies for -another,--just when Hunt, the harassing and often sordid, ever brightly -borne troubles of his earlier life left behind him, was passing surrounded -by affection into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. But for a -time, under the pressure of Haydon's masterful exhortations, we find Keats -inclining to take an exaggerated and slightly impatient view of the -foibles of his earlier friend. - -Among other interesting confessions to be found in Keats's letter to -Haydon from Margate, is that of the fancy--almost the sense--which often -haunted him of dependence on the tutelary genius of Shakspere:-- - - "I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius - presiding over you. I have lately had the same thought, for things - which I do half at random, are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in - a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakspeare - this presider? When in the Isle of Wight I met with a Shakspeare in - the passage of the house at which I lodged. It comes nearer to my idea - of him than any I have seen; I was but there a week, yet the old woman - made me take it with me, though I went off in a hurry. Do you not - think this ominous of good?" - -Next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own nature, -describing it in words which the after issue of his life will keep but -too vividly and constantly before our minds:--"truth is, I have a horrid -Morbidity of Temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I -have no doubt, the greatest Enemy and stumbling-block I have to fear; I -may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment." Was it -that, in this seven-months' child of a consumptive mother, some unhealth -of mind as well as body was congenital?--or was it that, along with what -seems his Celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he had inherited a -special share of that inward gloom which the reverses of their history -have stamped, according to some, on the mind of the Celtic race? We cannot -tell, but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever -creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there dwelt in Keats's -bosom an almost equally busy and inventive spirit of self-torment. - -The fit of dejection which led to the remark above quoted had its -immediate cause in apprehensions of money difficulties conveyed to Keats -in a letter from his brother George. The trust funds of which Mr Abbey had -the disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed executed by -Mrs Jennings, amounted approximately to L8,000[26], of which the capital -was divisible among them on their coming of age, and the interest was to -be applied to their maintenance in the meantime. But the interest of -John's share had been insufficient for his professional and other expenses -during his term of medical study at Edmonton and London, and much of his -capital had been anticipated to meet them; presumably in the form of loans -raised on the security of his expectant share. Similar advances had also -been for some time necessary to the invalid Tom for his support, and -latterly--since he left the employment of Mr Abbey--to George as well. It -is clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances were made both -wastefully and grudgingly. It is further plain that the brothers were very -insufficiently informed of the state of their affairs. In the meantime -John Keats was already beginning to discount his expectations from -literature. Before or about the time of his rupture with the Olliers, he -had made the acquaintance of those excellent men, Messrs Taylor and -Hessey, who were shortly, as publishers of the _London Magazine_, to -gather about them on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors -comprising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. With them, -especially with Mr Taylor, who was himself a student and writer of -independent, somewhat eccentric ability and research, Keats's relations -were excellent from first to last, generous on their part, and -affectionate and confidential on his. He had made arrangements with them, -apparently before leaving London, for the eventual publication of -_Endymion_, and from Margate we find him acknowledging a first payment -received in advance. Now and again afterwards he turns to the same friends -for help at a pinch, adding once, "I am sure you are confident of my -responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;" nor -did they at any time belie his expectation. - -From Margate, where he had already made good progress with _Endymion_, -Keats went with his brother Tom to spend some time at Canterbury. Thence -they moved early in the summer to lodgings kept by a Mr and Mrs Bentley in -Well Walk, Hampstead, where the three brothers had decided to take up -their abode together. Here he continued through the summer to work -steadily at _Endymion_, being now well advanced with the second book; and -some of his friends, as Haydon, Cowden Clarke, and Severn, remembered all -their lives afterwards the occasions when they walked with him on the -heath, while he repeated to them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting -tone, the newly-written passages which best pleased him. From his poetical -absorption and Elysian dreams they were accustomed to see him at a touch -come back to daily life; sometimes to sympathize heart and soul with their -affairs, sometimes in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns, (it was a -punning age, and the Keats's were a very punning family), sometimes with a -sudden flash of his old schoolboy pugnacity and fierceness of righteous -indignation. To this summer or the following winter, it is not quite -certain which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in stand-up -fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had found tormenting a cat (a -'ruffian in livery' according to one account, but the butcher version is -the best attested). - -For the rest, the choice of Hampstead as a place of residence had much to -recommend it to Keats: the freshness of the air for the benefit of the -invalid Tom: for his own walks and meditations those beauties of heath, -field, and wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habitations, -which his imagination could transmute at will into the landscapes of -Arcadia, or into those, 'with high romances blent,' of an earlier England -or of fable-land. For society there was the convenient proximity to, and -yet seclusion from, London, together with the immediate neighbourhood of -one or two intimate friends. Among these, Keats frequented as familiarly -as ever the cottage in the Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt was still -living--a kind of self-appointed poet-laureate of Hampstead, the features -of which he was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets, and now in the -cheerful singsong of his familiar _Epistles_:-- - - "And yet how can I touch, and not linger awhile - On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile? - On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, - Dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley'd shades, - With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees - The hills up above him with roofs in the trees." - -Several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed to Keats -himself, some translations from the Greek, and a not ungraceful -mythological poem, the _Nymphs_, were published early in the following -year by Leigh Hunt in a volume called _Foliage_, which helped to draw down -on him and his friends the lash of Tory criticism. - -Near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction from Hunt's cottage, -lived two new friends of Keats who had been introduced to him by Reynolds, -and with whom he was soon to become extremely intimate. These were Charles -Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown (or plain Charles Brown as he -at this time styled himself). Dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by -birth belonging to a younger branch of the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle, by -profession a clerk in the Navy Pay office, and by opinions at this time a -firm disciple of Godwin. He soon gave himself up altogether to literary -and antiquarian studies, and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the -most accomplished and influential of English critics and journalists, and -for many years editor and chief owner of the _Athenaeum_. No two men could -well be more unlike in mind than Dilke and Keats: Dilke positive, bent on -certainty, and unable, as Keats says, "to feel he has a personal identity -unless he has made up his mind about everything:" while Keats on his part -held that "the only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up -one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all -thoughts." Nevertheless the two took to each other and became fast -friends. Dilke had married young, and built himself, a year or two before -Keats knew him, a modest semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near -the lower end of Hampstead Heath, at the bottom of what is now John -Street; the other part of the same block being built and inhabited by his -friend Charles Brown. This Brown was the son of a Scotch stockbroker -living in Lambeth. He was born in 1786, and while almost a boy went out to -join one of his brothers in a merchant's business at St Petersburg; but -the business failing, he returned to England in 1808, and lived as he -could for the next few years, until the death of another brother put him -in possession of a small competency. He had a taste, and some degree of -talent for literature, and held strongly Radical opinions. In 1810 he -wrote an opera on a Russian subject, called _Narensky_, which was brought -out at the Lyceum with Braham in the principal part; and at intervals -during the next twenty years many criticisms, tales, and translations from -the Italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals edited by Leigh -Hunt. When Keats first knew him, Brown was a young man already of somewhat -middle-aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled,--a kindly companion, -and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good measure both of obstinacy and -caution lying in reserve, _more Scotico_, under his pleasant and convivial -outside. It is clear by his relations with Keats that his heart was warm, -and that when once attached, he was capable not only of appreciation but -of devotion. After the poet's death Brown went to Italy, and became the -friend of Trelawney, whom he helped with the composition of the -_Adventures of a Younger Son_, and of Landor, at whose villa near Florence -Lord Houghton first met him in 1832. Two years later he returned to -England, and settled at Plymouth, where he continued to occupy himself -with literature and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, an -essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobiographical poems of -Shakspere. Thoughts of Keats, and a wish to be his biographer, never left -him, until in 1841 he resolved suddenly to emigrate to New Zealand, and -departed leaving his materials in Lord Houghton's hands. A year afterwards -he died of apoplexy at the settlement of New Plymouth, now called -Taranaki[27]. - -Yet another friend of Reynolds who in these months attached himself with a -warm affection to Keats was Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford undergraduate -reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. Bailey was a -great lover of books, devoted especially to Milton among past and to -Wordsworth among present poets. For his earnestness and integrity of -character Keats conceived a strong respect, and a hearty liking for his -person, and much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in his -mind and cogitations, was called out in the intercourse that ensued -between them. In the course of this summer, 1817, Keats had been invited -by Shelley to stay with him at Great Marlow, and Hunt, ever anxious that -the two young poets should be friends, pressed him strongly to accept the -invitation. It is said by Medwin, but the statement is not confirmed by -other evidence, that Shelley and Keats had set about their respective -'summer tasks,' the composition of _Laon and Cythna_ and of _Endymion_, by -mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Keats at any rate -declined his brother poet's invitation, in order, as he said, that he -might have his own unfettered scope. Later in the same summer, while his -brothers were away on a trip to Paris, he accepted an invitation of Bailey -to come to Oxford, and stayed there during the last five or six weeks of -the Long Vacation. Here he wrote the third book of _Endymion_, working -steadily every morning, and composing with great facility his regular -average of fifty lines a day. The afternoons they would spend in walking -or boating on the Isis, and Bailey has feelingly recorded the pleasantness -of their days, and of their discussions on life, literature, and the -mysteries of things. He tells of the sweetness of Keats's temper and charm -of his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with which the hot -young liberal and free-thinker would listen to his host's exposition of -his own orthodox convictions: describes his enthusiasm in quoting -Chatterton and in dwelling on passages of Wordsworth's poetry, -particularly from the _Tintern Abbey_ and the _Ode on Immortality_: and -recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and other -technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling looks and low-voiced -recitations, his vividness of inner life, and intensity of quiet enjoyment -during their field and river rambles and excursions[28]. One special -occasion of pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to -Stratford-on-Avon. From Oxford are some of the letters written by Keats -in his happiest vein; to Reynolds and his sister Miss Jane Reynolds, -afterwards Mrs Tom Hood; to Haydon; and to his young sister Frances Mary, -or Fanny as she was always called (now Mrs Llanos). George Keats, writing -to this sister after John's death, speaks of the times "when we lived with -our grandmother at Edmonton, and John, Tom, and myself were always -devising plans to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us -to the others." Since those times Keats had seen little of her, Mr Abbey -having put her to a boarding-school before her grandmother's death, and -afterwards taken her into his own house at Walthamstow, where the visits -of her poet brother were not encouraged. "He often," writes Bailey, "spoke -to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great -delicacy and tenderness of affection:" and from this time forward we find -him maintaining with her a correspondence which shows his character in its -most attractive light. He bids her keep all his letters and he will keep -hers--"and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good -bundle--which hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God -knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on -times past--that now are to come." He tells her about Oxford and about his -work, and gives her a sketch of the story of _Endymion_--"but I daresay -you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have come down to -us from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece." - -Early in October Keats returned to Hampstead, whence he writes to Bailey -noticing with natural indignation the ruffianly first article of the -_Cockney School_ series, which had just appeared in _Blackwood's -Magazine_ for that month. In this the special object of attack was Leigh -Hunt, but there were allusions to Keats which seemed to indicate that his -own turn was coming. What made him more seriously uneasy were signs of -discord springing up among his friends, and of attempts on the part of -some of them to set him against others. Haydon had now given up his studio -in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove; and Hunt, having left -the Vale of Health, was living close by him at a lodging in the same -street. "I know nothing of anything in this part of the world," writes -Keats: "everybody seems at loggerheads." And he goes on to say how Hunt -and Haydon are on uncomfortable terms, and "live, _pour ainsi dire_, -jealous neighbours. Haydon says to me, 'Keats, don't show your lines to -Hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you'--so it appears -Hunt wishes it to be thought." With more accounts of warnings he had -received from common friends that Hunt was not feeling or speaking -cordially about _Endymion_. "Now is not all this a most paltry thing to -think about?... This is, to be sure, but the vexation of a day, nor would -I say so much about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and -reputation at heart[29]." When three months later Keats showed Hunt the -first book of his poem in proof, the latter found many faults. It is clear -he was to some extent honestly disappointed in the work itself. He may -also have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully into -confidence during its composition; and what he said to others was probably -due partly to such chagrin, partly to nervousness on behalf of his -friend's reputation: for of double-facedness or insincerity in friendship -we know by a hundred evidences that Hunt was incapable. Keats, however, -after what he had heard, was by no means without excuse when he wrote to -his brothers concerning Hunt,--not unkindly, or making much of the -matter,--"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. But who's afraid?" Keats was not the man to let this -kind of thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend: and writing -about the same time to Bailey, still concerning the dissensions in the -circle, he expounds the practical philosophy of friendship with truly -admirable good sense and feeling:-- - - "Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard - of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting - for ever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is - unfortunate: men should bear with each other; there lives not the man - who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The - best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual - yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by - which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with - circumstance. 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. Before I felt - interested in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well-read in their - faults; yet knowing them both I have been cementing gradually with - both. I have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite; - and to both must I of necessity cling, supported always by the hope - that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully - in their esteem, I may be able to bring them together. This time must - come, because they have both hearts; and they will recollect the best - parts of each other when this gust is overblown." - -Keats had in the meantime been away on another autumn excursion into the -country: this time to Burford Bridge near Dorking. Here he passed -pleasantly the latter part of November, much absorbed in the study of -Shakspere's minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of finishing -_Endymion_. He had thus all but succeeded in carrying out the hope which -he had expressed in the opening passage of the poem:-- - - "Many and many a verse I hope to write, - Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, - Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees - Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, - I must be near the middle of my story. - O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, - See it half finished; but let Autumn bold, - With universal tinge of sober gold, - Be all about me when I make an end." - -Returning to Hampstead, Keats spent the first part of the winter in -comparative rest from literary work. His chief occupation was in revising -and seeing _Endymion_ through the press, with much help from the -publisher, Mr Taylor; varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism, -and as the spring began, by the composition of a number of minor -incidental poems. In December he lost the companionship of his brothers, -who went to winter in Devonshire for the sake of Tom's health. But in -other company he was at this time mixing freely. The convivial gatherings -of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun high, the -discussions on art and literature boisterous, and varied with a moderate, -evidently never a very serious, amount of card-playing, drinking, and -dissipation. From these gatherings Keats was indispensable, and more than -welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, Messrs Taylor -and Hessey, men as strict in conduct and opinion as they were -good-hearted. His social relations began, indeed, in the course of this -winter to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought -consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Horace Smith in -company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:--"They -only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to -enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one -feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know -fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, -in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low -company. 'Would I were with that company instead of yours', said I to -myself." Men of ardent and deep natures, whether absorbed in the realities -of experience, or in the ideals of art and imagination, are apt to be -affected in this way by the conventional social sparkle which is only -struck from and only illuminates the surface. Hear, on the other hand, -with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius for genius, Keats -writes after seeing the great tragedian last mentioned interpret the inner -and true passions of the soul:-- - - "The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean ... his - tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them - honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we - feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while - speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello, 'Put up your bright - swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had - commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he - speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of - 'blood! blood! blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the last degree; - the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, - making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild - dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can - distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In - Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' came - from him, as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns." - -It was in the Christmas weeks of 1817-18 that Keats undertook the office -of theatrical critic for the _Champion_ newspaper in place of Reynolds, -who was away at Exeter. Early in January he writes to his brothers of the -pleasure he has had in seeing their sister, who had been brought to London -for the Christmas holidays; and tells them how he has called on and been -asked to dine by Wordsworth, whom he had met on the 28th of December at a -supper given by Haydon. This is the famous Sunday supper, or 'immortal -dinner' as Haydon calls it, which is described at length in one of the -most characteristic passages of the painter's _Autobiography_. Besides -Wordsworth and Keats and the host, there were present Charles Lamb and -Monkhouse. "Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, -Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so -speeded the stream of conversation," says Haydon, "that I never passed a -more delightful time." Later in the evening came in Ritchie the African -traveller, just about to start on the journey to Fezzan on which he died, -besides a self-invited guest in the person of one Kingston, Comptroller of -Stamps, a foolish good-natured gentleman, recommended only by his -admiration for Wordsworth. Presently Lamb getting fuddled, lost patience -with the platitudes of Mr Kingston, and began making fun of him, with -pranks and personalities which to Haydon appeared hugely funny, but which -Keats in his letter to his brothers mentions with less relish, saying, -"Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston, proceeding so far as to take the -candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft -fellow he was[30]." Keats saw Wordsworth often in the next few weeks after -their introduction at Haydon's, but has left us no personal impressions of -the elder poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one day -preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest clothes, with his -aforesaid unlucky admirer Mr Comptroller Kingston. We know from other -sources that he was once persuaded to recite to Wordsworth the Hymn to Pan -from _Endymion_. "A pretty piece of Paganism," remarked Wordsworth, -according to his usual encouraging way with a brother poet; and Keats was -thought to have winced under the frigidity. Independently of their -personal relations, the letters of Keats show that Wordsworth's poetry -continued to be much in his thoughts throughout these months; what he has -to say of it varying according to the frame of mind in which he writes. In -the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days again insists, -that there are three things to rejoice at in the present age, "The -_Excursion_, Haydon's Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste." This -mention of the name of Hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence -which somewhat powerfully affected Keats at this time. On the liberal side -in politics and criticism there was no more effective or more uncertain -free lance than that eloquent and splenetic writer, with his rich, -singular, contradictory gifts, his intellect equally acute and fervid, his -temperament both enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and -incisive. The reader acquainted with Hazlitt's manner will easily -recognize its influence on Keats in the fragment of stage criticism above -quoted. Hazlitt was at this time delivering his course of lectures on the -English poets at the Surrey Institution, and Keats was among his regular -attendants. With Hazlitt personally, as with Lamb, his intercourse at -Haydon's and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and friendly, but not -intimate: and Haydon complains that it was only after the death of Keats -that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius. - -Of Haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we see by the words -above quoted that Keats continued to think as highly as ever. He had, as -Severn assures us, a keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting -and music. Cowden Clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to him at -school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind's eye -visions of pictures:--"when a schoolboy the abstract idea I had of an -heroic painting was what I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways, -large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence--somewhat like the -feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning on his -crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving -with the sea." In Haydon's pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends -and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt -to see, not so much the actual performance, as the idea he had -pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend's intentions and -enthusiasm. At this time Haydon, who had already made several drawings of -Keats's head in order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering -Jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, "to be engraved," -writes Keats, "in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying, -at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and -that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it." -Both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part -of the sublime Haydon; who failed, however, to carry out his promise. "My -neglect," said Haydon long afterwards, "really gave him a pang, as it now -does me." - -With Hunt also Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds -his intimacy grew daily closer. Both of these friendships had a -stimulating influence on his poetic powers. "The Wednesday before last -Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile," he tells his -brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. "I have been writing, at -intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read -them over to you." With the help of Keats's manuscripts or of the -transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the -actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was -written the humorous sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat; on the 21st, after -seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, -the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!'--and on the -22nd the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which -Keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his Spenser, in order -to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _Lear_. On -the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to Apollo beginning -'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' and in the same letter the sonnet -beginning 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' which he calls his -last. On the 3rd of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin Hood, -suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest; on the 4th, -the sonnet beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in -which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love-fancy, -and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written at Hunt's in -competition with that friend and with Shelley; on the 5th, another sonnet -postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's -to compose something in honour, or in emulation of Spenser; and on the -8th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest -against one of Reynolds. About the same time Keats agreed with Reynolds -that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and -publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with -_Isabella_ or _the Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month -of February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, -and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the -influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in -a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, -translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of a singular -and haunting melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find him in -correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon -afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing -to flit. His brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at -Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a -scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom's health having made a -momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and -determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and -stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather--the -soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing -themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, -throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more -than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the -scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of objurgations -against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible, -in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents -his father to have been a Devonshire man:-- - - "You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a - splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod - county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the - primroses are out,--but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep - colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them."... "I - fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, - all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat - off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the - honour of Britain, that Julius Caesar did not first land in this - county: A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct - object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would - dispossess him[31]." - -Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid -brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during -these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of -_Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had -begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_, the first of his longer poems -written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time -he was reading and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With -the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been -attracted by _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and then more -energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he -now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of -genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its -power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey -and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. It -was in all senses manifestly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power, -and in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries of existence -and of suffering, and the 'deeps of good and evil,' were beginning for the -first time to press habitually on his thoughts. In that beautiful and -interesting letter to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human -life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he -thus describes:-- - - "We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the - Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light - and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of - delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this - breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's - vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves - that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and - oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually - darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set - open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages. We see not the - balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are in that state, we - feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'" - -A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed -_Epistles_, Keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he -sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea's edge:-- - - "twas a quiet eve, - The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave - An untumultuous fringe of silver foam - Along the flat brown sand; I was at home - And should have been most happy,--but I saw - Too far into the sea, where every maw - The greater or the less feeds evermore:-- - But I saw too distinct into the core - Of an eternal fierce destruction, - And so from happiness I far was gone. - Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day, - I've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay - Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, - Still do I that most fierce destruction see,-- - The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,-- - The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, - Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods! - Moods of one's mind!"-- - -In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his "Why should -woman suffer?"--"Aye, why should she?" writes Keats: "'By heavens, I'd -coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas.' These things are, and -he who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal -this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of -thought." And again, "were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal -coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I -should not by rights speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary -spirit that would do so." - -Not the general tribulations of the race only, but particular private -anxieties, were pressing in these days on Keats's thoughts. The shadow of -illness, though it had hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly -not only over his brother but his best friends. He speaks of it in a tone -of courage and gaiety which his real apprehensions, we can feel, belie. -"Banish money"--he had written in Falstaff's vein, at starting for the -Isle of Wight a year ago--"Banish sofas--Banish wine--Banish music; but -right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish Health and -banish all the world." Writing now from Teignmouth to Reynolds, who was -down during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains laughingly, but -with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, how he can go nowhere but Sickness -is of the company, and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or -he must cut them. - -Nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was the pain of a family -break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his mind to emigrate to -America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get -possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his own -fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the desire to -be in a position as quickly as possible to help, or if need be support, -his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, -Miss Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be -married and sail early in the summer. Keats came up from Teignmouth in May -to see the last of his brother, and he and Tom settled again in their old -lodgings in Well Walk. He had a warm affection and regard for his new -sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted for George's sake. But at the -same time he felt life and its prospects overcast. He writes to Bailey, -after his outburst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone -now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing -his ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. And after -recounting his causes of depression, he recovers himself, and -concludes:--"Life must be undergone; and I certainly derive some -consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it -ceases." - -With reference to his poem then just appearing, and the year's work which -it represented, Keats was under no illusions whatever. From an early -period in its composition he had fully realised its imperfections, and had -written: "My ideas of it are very low, and I would write the subject -thoroughly again, but I am tired of it, and think the time would be better -spent in writing a new romance, which I have in my eye for next summer. -Rome was not built in a day, and all the good I expect from my employment -this summer is the fruit of experience which I hope to gather in my next -poem." The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most -natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so -in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his -strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend -might judge. He shows himself perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_ -he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than -producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry; and when the time comes -to write a preface to the poem, after a first attempt lacking reticence -and simplicity, and abandoned at the advice of Reynolds, he in the second -quietly and beautifully says of his own work all that can justly be said -in its dispraise. He warns the reader to expect "great inexperience, -immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a -deed accomplished," and adds most unboastfully:--"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." - -The apprehensions expressed in these words have not been fulfilled; and -_Endymion_, so far from having died away, lives to illustrate the maxim -conveyed in its own now proverbial opening line. Immature as the poem -truly is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as are the sweets -which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing of far too much beauty, -or at least of too many beauties, to perish. Every reader must take -pleasure in some of its single passages and episodes, while to the student -of the poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its weakness -as its strength. - - - - - -CHAPTER V. - - _Endymion._ - - -In the old Grecian world, the myth of Endymion and Selene was one deeply -rooted in various shapes in the popular traditions both of Elis in the -Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The -central feature of the tale, as originally sung by Sappho, was the nightly -descent of the goddess to kiss her lover where he lay spell-bound, by the -grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. -The poem of Sappho is lost, and the story is not told at length in any of -our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the -poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and of the late -prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias. Of such ancient -sources Keats of course knew only what he found in his classical -dictionaries. But references to the tale, as every one knows, form part of -the stock repertory of classical allusion in modern literature: and -several modern writers before Keats had attempted to handle the subject at -length. In his own special range of Elizabethan reading, he was probably -acquainted with Lyly's court comedy of _Endimion_, in prose, which had -been edited, as it happened, by his friend Dilke a few years before: but -in it he would have found nothing to his purpose. On the other hand I -think he certainly took hints from the _Man in the Moon_ of Michael -Drayton. In this piece Drayton takes hold of two post-classical notions -concerning the Endymion myth, both in the first instance derived from -Lucian,--one that which identifies its hero with the visible 'man in the -moon' of popular fancy,--the other that which rationalises his story, and -explains him away as a personification or mythical representative of early -astronomy. These two distinct notions Drayton weaves together into a short -tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into the mouth of a shepherd at a -feast of Pan. Like most of his writings, the _Man in the Moon_ has strong -gleams of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile and pedantic. -Critics, so far as I know, have overlooked Keats's debt to it: but even -granting that he may well have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the -notion of introducing his story with a festival in honour of Pan--do not, -at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain evidently the hint for -the wanderings on which Keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity -affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air[32]?-- - - "Endymion now forsakes - All the delights that shepherds do prefer, - And sets his mind so generally on her - That, all neglected, to the groves and springs - He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings - (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, - Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers - The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke. - Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back - Among the blue Nereides: and when - Weary of waters goddess-like again - She the high mountains actively assays, - And there amongst the light Oriades, - That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort: - Sometime amongst those that with them comport - The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; - And there she stays not, but incontinent - Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, - And with Endymion pleased that she saw, - Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye - Stripping the winds----" - -Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose -inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely -kindred to his own--Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ makes Chloe -tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus-- - - "How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, - First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes - She took eternal fire that never dies; - How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, - His temples bound with poppy, to the steep - Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, - Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, - To kiss her sweetest." - -The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have -seen already, in Keats's thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old -pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his -natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but -deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the -story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is -for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human -soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow -forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[33]. - -The manner in which Keats set about relating the Greek story, as he had -thus conceived it, was as far from being a Greek or 'classical' manner as -possible. He indeed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid -sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature: and he loved to -follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete -shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions -for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to -conjure up visions of the classic past, or images from classic fable, he -was able to do so often magically well. To this extent Keats may justly be -called, as he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The -rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in -all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to -select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential, -and paring away their material to the quick that the main masses might -stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously -clear--these instincts had neither been implanted in Keats by nature, nor -brought home to him by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his -gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' Gothic, English. -A general characteristic of his favourite Elizabethan poetry is its -prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it -takes the powers of a Shakspere to keep the vital play of character and -passion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the -quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he wrote -_Endymion_, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constituted an -essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. "I think poetry," he says, -"should surprise by a fine excess:" and with reference to his own poem -during its progress, "it will be a test, a trial 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." - -The 'one bare circumstance' of the story was in the result expanded -through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course -of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate, -amplifying every incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion -into a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central Endymion myth -whatever others pleased him best, as those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of -Cybele, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of -Neptune, and of Bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations, -and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and aerial gulfs and -over the floor of ocean. The scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not -merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental -bewilderment,--an Arabian Nights jugglery with space and time,--in the -vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. Such organic plan as -the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main -divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by -keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric -thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. The first -book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the -predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a -festival of his people held in honour of the god Pan, and is afterwards -induced by his sister Peona[34] to confide to her the secret of the -passion which consumes him. The account of the feast of Pan contains -passages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely -to be surpassed in poetry:-- - - "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 puls'd tenfold, - To feel this sun-rise and its glories old." - -What can be more fresh and stirring?--what happier in rhythmical -movement?--or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which -Keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work, -leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and -forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry -alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined -rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the -earth? Not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same -episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn -to Pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the Greek myth -to Greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are -foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. Keats having got -from Drayton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of -Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from -Chapman's Homer's hymn, from the sacrifice to Pan in Browne's -_Britannia's Pastorals_[35], and from the hymns in Ben Jonson's masque, -_Pan's Anniversary_: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and -refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an -imagination fed from the living sources of nature:-- - - "O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang - From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth - Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death - Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; - Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress - Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; - And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken - The dreary melody of bedded reeds-- - In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds - The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; - Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth - Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now, - By thy love's milky brow! - By all the trembling mazes that she ran, - Hear us, great Pan! - - * * * * * - - O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, - While ever and anon to his shorn peers - A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, - When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn - Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms, - To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: - Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, - That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, - And wither drearily on barren moors: - Dread opener of the mysterious doors - Leading to universal knowledge--see, - Great son of Dryope, - The many that are come to pay their vows - With leaves about their brows!" - -In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona he tells her the story -of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has -experienced or dreamed. In Keats's conception of his youthful heroes there -is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical -softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman -them quite: as indeed a helpless and enslaved submission of all the -faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of -his own nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it: but the -consequence is that the love-passages of _Endymion_, notwithstanding the -halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can -scarcely be read with pleasure. On the other hand, in matters of -subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the -signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance -wherein Peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:-- - - "Is this the cause? - This all? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas! - That one who through this middle earth should pass - Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave - His name upon the harp-string, should achieve - No higher bard than simple maidenhood, - Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood - Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray - He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_, - If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love; - What could it be but love? How a ring-dove - Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; - And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe - The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses. - And then the ballad of his sad life closes - With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!" - -In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led -by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless -region of adventure. In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions -of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in -mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings -Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. A Naiad, in the -disguise of a butterfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals -herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to -descend 'Into the sparry hollows of the world': which done, he gropes his -way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-Grecian magnificence, -where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and whither -Venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. Thence, urged -by the haunting passion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and -precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through all -this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich -first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and -inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry -admirably felt and expressed:-- - - "He sinks adown a solitary glen, - Where there was never sound of mortal men, - Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences - Melting to silence, when upon the breeze - Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet - To cheer itself to Delphi:"-- - -or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:-- - - "Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, - Came mother Cybele--alone--alone-- - In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown - About her majesty, and front death-pale, - With turrets crowned." - -After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the -bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable -descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his -celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the -streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled -flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to -his goddess in their behalf, and then-- - - "He turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept, - There was a cooler light; and so he kept - Towards it by a sandy path, and lo! - More suddenly than doth a moment go, - The visions of the earth were gone and fled-- - He saw the giant sea above his head." - -Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and -adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of -Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third -book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with -great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by -Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her -rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance -resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by -Endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful -fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's -submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,-- - - "He saw far in the green concave of the sea - An old man sitting calm and peacefully. - Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, - And his white hair was awful, and a mat - Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"-- - ---from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and -occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home his version of the myth with -strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. No picture can well -be more vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims: -and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected -enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. In the same book the -description of the sunk treasures cumbering the ocean-floor challenges -comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage in -Shakspere's _Richard III._ In the halls of Neptune Endymion again meets -Venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore. -Thence Nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in -spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in starlight on the -dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, he has allowed himself to be -diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of -others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last -nearer to fulfilment. - -It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really in his mind a -meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that -the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is -accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. And in his fourth -book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly -to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. Returning, in that -book, to upper air, Endymion before long half forgets his goddess for the -charms of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him -while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come -wandering in the train of Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian -maiden proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise. -But it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is -conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents, -descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, with his -infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave of -Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality -and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape, -make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially -intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in -pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal--such would seem -the argument--once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a -time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by -that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude -will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which -has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,--that it is -after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. What chiefly -or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric -poetry which Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian maiden -when she tells her story. His later and more famous lyrics, though they -are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do -not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of -imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of -the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the -best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial -romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps -partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful -associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild -wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, -yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a -'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening -measures are repeated at the close. It begins with a tender invocation to -sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of -a deserted maidenhood beside Indian streams; till suddenly, with another -change, comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on his march; next -follows the detailed picture of the god and of his rout, suggested in part -by the famous Titian at the National Gallery; and then, arranged as if for -music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, and their -choral answers: - - "'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your bowers desolate, - Your lutes, and gentler fate?' - 'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing, - A conquering! - Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide, - We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our wild minstrelsy!' - - 'Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye! - So many, and so many, and such glee? - Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left - Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'-- - - 'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; - For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, - And cold mushrooms; - For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth; - Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!-- - Come hither, lady fair, and joined be - To our mad minstrelsy!'" - -The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and -finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with -an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:-- - - "Come then, sorrow! - Sweetest sorrow! - Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast: - I thought to leave thee, - And deceive thee, - But now of all the world I love thee best. - There is not one, - No, no, not one - But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; - Thou art her mother - And her brother, - Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade." - -The high-water-mark of poetry in _Endymion_ is thus reached in the two -lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with -justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, -that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good -a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for -poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." In the main -body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a -critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable -truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, -mark such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry -breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read -farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly -tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by -Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as-- - - "AEaea's isle was wondering at the moon," - -standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed -narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme -and expression-- - - "I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe! - O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?" - -is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and -the heart:-- - - "Cold, O cold indeed - Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed - The sea-swell took her hair." - -One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has -shaken off--his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar -sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that tendency which he by nature shared -with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined -pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And -to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined -others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of -English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its -waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in -its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He -outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let Invention ramble and loiter -uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her -heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds -there: and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: -and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to -grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:-- - - "--a nymph of Dian's - Wearing a coronal of tender scions":-- - - "Does yonder thrush, - Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush - About the dewy forest, whisper tales?-- - Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails - Will slime the rose to-night." - -Chapman especially among Keats's masters had this trick of letting thought -follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman--to say nothing -of Chatterton--had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash -dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a -language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and -make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use -of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman's -spirit--'far-spooming Ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their -surly eyes brow-hidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'--coinages -sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as -well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms -as 'shent', 'sith', and 'seemlihed' from Spenser, 'eterne' from Spenser -and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly', 'to -monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as -active, as to 'travel' an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and _vice -versa_. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, -in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of -oddities and discords. - -In rhythm Keats adheres in _Endymion_ to the method he had adopted in -_Sleep and Poetry_, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the -metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, -and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had -carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later -critics have supposed the rhythm of _Endymion_ to have been influenced by -the _Pharonnida_ of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly -for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, -exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse -persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest -syllables--prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions--on which neither pause -nor emphasis is possible[36]. - -But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in -delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of -sentence structure. There is nothing in his treatment of the measure for -which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who -employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival -for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be -said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an -exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of -provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous. - -As the best criticism on Keats's _Endymion_ is in his own preface, so its -best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. "It -is as good," he says, "as I had power to make it by myself." Hunt had -warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley against those of -hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and -crude the classical training and now ripening taste of Shelley might -doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was -determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous -expression of his mind. "Had I been nervous," he goes on, "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." -How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of -his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he -says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next -labours. - - - - -CHAPTER VI. - - Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death of Tom - Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne--Excursion to - Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon and Money - Difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening Prospects--Summer at - Shanklin and Winchester--Wise Resolutions--Return from Winchester. - [June 1818-October, 1819.] - - -While Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with _Endymion_ -on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different -plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour -through Scotland with Charles Brown. "I have many reasons," he writes to -Reynolds, "for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from -spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and -Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I'll -have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, 'over the hills -we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in -turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." A -fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an -over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the -necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the -flight of poetry:-- - - "I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but - one thing to prevent me. 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." - -After he had come back to Hampstead in May, however, Keats allowed himself -to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the -recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year -before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed between him and -Brown that they should accompany George Keats and his bride as far as -Liverpool, and then start on foot from Lancaster. They left London -accordingly on Monday, June 22[37]. The coach stopped for dinner the first -day at Redbourn near St Albans, where Keats's friend of medical-student -days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake hands with the -travelling party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards wrote an -account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of Mrs -George Keats. "Rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome, -but looked like a being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily -love. She had the imaginative poetical cast. Somewhat singular and girlish -in her attire.... There was something original about her, and John seemed -to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her -with evident satisfaction[38]." With no other woman or girl friend was -Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this 'Nymph -of the downward smile and side-long glance' of his early sonnet--'Sister -George' as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the -series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards -in America, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth -preserving. - -The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to -Lancaster, and thence began their walk, Keats taking for his reading one -book only, the little three-volume edition of Cary's _Dante_. "I cannot," -writes Brown, "forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly, -and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain -scenery. It was just before our descent to the village of Bowness, at a -turn of the road, when the lake of Windermere at once came into view.... -All was enchantment to us both." Keats in his own letters says -comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, -not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque -tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and -fastidious Gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth -is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs -not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but -on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit -sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more -varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but -impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit. -Moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of Windermere, it -is evident that as Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery -somewhat foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beauties of -England, two ideals of landscape, classic and mediaeval, haunted and -allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled -south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the Scottish -border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, -and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to -neither. "I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem -anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." - -A change, besides, was coming over Keats's thoughts and feelings whereby -scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his -fellow-creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, -among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously -absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a -life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the -appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. "Scenery is -fine," he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, "but human -nature is finer." In the Lake country, after climbing Skiddaw one morning -early, and walking to Treby the same afternoon, where they watched with -amusement the exercises in a country dancing-school: "There was as fine a -row of boys and girls," says Keats, "as you ever saw; some beautiful -faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of -patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is -what I like better than scenery." The same note recurs frequently in -letters of a later date. - -From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside; from Ambleside to -the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on -Wordsworth at Rydal, and been disappointed to find him away -electioneering. From Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of -Derwentwater; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and Wigton to Carlisle, -where they arrived on the 1st of July. Thence by coach to Dumfries, -visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory -Keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dumfries they -started southwestwards for Galloway, a region little frequented even now, -and then hardly at all, by tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrightshire -coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and -rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Solway to the hazy -hills of Man, Brown bethought him that this was Guy Mannering's country, -and began to tell Keats about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who according to the -fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for Scott's poetry, and of the -Waverley novels had read the _Antiquary_ but not _Guy Mannering_, was much -struck; and presently, writes Brown,--"there was a little spot, close to -our pathway. 'There,' he said, 'in that very spot, without a shadow of -doubt, has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.' It was among pieces -of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of -honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and -fulness of blossom." As they went along, Keats composed on Scott's theme -the spirited ballad beginning 'Old Meg, she was a gipsy,' and stopping to -breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing -to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he -began at the same place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed -always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add scraps to -them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote -regularly and uniformly in the evenings. "He affronts my indolence and -luxury," says Keats, "by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; -secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care if he would -change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But -I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead -of afterwards." - -From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--skirting the wild moors about -the Water of Fleet, and passing where Cairnsmore looks down over wooded -slopes to the steaming estuary of the Cree,--as far as Newton Stewart: -thence across the Wigtonshire levels by Glenluce to Stranraer and -Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee packet for Ireland, with the -intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and -expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to -Belfast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. In letters -written during and immediately after this excursion, Keats has some -striking passages of human observation and reflection:-- - - "These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women, - old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants, - all careful; so they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and - gainers.... These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm; they have banished - puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:--poor, - unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a - luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its - delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have - leisure to go mad after things that are not!... I would sooner be a - wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would - sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's - penance before those execrable elders." - - "On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the Duchess of Dunghill. - It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you - ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a - wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved - from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, - with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, - skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of - her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two - ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a - history of her life and sensations!"--. - -From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking -along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr, -with the lonely mass of Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran, -looming ever above the Atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find -Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the -coast scenery. They went to Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the -home of Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to write a -sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did so, but was worried by -the prate of the man in charge--"a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew -Burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him"--"his gab -hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet." And -again, as they journeyed on toward Glasgow he composed with considerable -pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'There is a -charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' They were meant to express -the temper in which his pilgrimage through the Burns country had been -made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of -imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself. - -From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, and from Glasgow by -Dumbarton through the _Lady of the Lake_ country, which they found -vexatiously full of tourists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban. -At Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of _The -Stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the -next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in -a set of doggrel rhymes. The walk along the shores of Loch Awe impressed -him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set -description, for the benefit of his brother Tom. At the same point occur -for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. -At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its -effects upon his sleep and appetite: telling her how he tumbled into bed -"so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe -and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I get -so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to -me.... I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes." -Presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty -miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts of -the Highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and -frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and Brown, and he -grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the -friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for -Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and -Iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither -side of the island of Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the -farther side opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some -thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather. -By good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had -a favourable view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its associations -in the one 'illustrious island,' and of nature's architecture in the -other, Keats shows himself naturally much impressed. Fingal's cave in -especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the -race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer -since Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines -beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian.' Avoiding mere epithet-work and -description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for -comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, -bethinking himself of Milton's cry to Lycidas, - - "--where'er thy bones are hurl'd, - Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides"-- - -imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean, and -put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly -character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the -place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine -abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:-- - - "So for ever I will leave - Such a taint, and soon unweave - All the magic of the place![39] - - * * * * - - So saying, with a spirit's glance - He dived--." - -From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scotch tour, and -especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct -and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, and of the development -of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his -brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem, he speaks of -a 'slight sore throat,' and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at -Oban. Thence they pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the -ascent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th of August to -Inverness. Keats's throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the -ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, -tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at -Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue -his tour. Accordingly he took passage on the 8th or 9th of August from the -port of Cromarty for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey -alone,--"much lamenting," to quote Brown's own words, "the loss of his -beloved intelligence at my side." Keats in some degree picked up strength -during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards -described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat -trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of -time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, -and made his appearance among his friends the next day, "as brown and as -shabby as you can imagine," writes Mrs Dilke, "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." When he found himself -seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed -chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, -quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates -his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis[40]. - -Simultaneously, almost, with Keats's return from the North appeared -attacks on him in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_. The -_Blackwood_ article, being No. IV. of a series bearing the signature 'Z' -on the 'Cockney School of Poetry,' was printed in the August number of the -magazine. The previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter -similarly signed, had been directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of -insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness -of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were -most probably the work either of Lockhart or of Wilson, suggested and -perhaps revised by the publisher William Blackwood, at this time his own -sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt's opinions, or his real -weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh critics must needs heap on -him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. In the course of these -articles allusion had several times been made to 'Johnny Keats' as an -'amiable bardling' and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of -Cockaigne, Hunt. When now Keats's own turn came, his treatment was mild -in comparison with that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work -are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic -persons full of prejudice and wishing to hurt. 'Cockney' had been in -itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt; -neither was it altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the -facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the -measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of -it. The worst part of the Keats review was in its personalities,--"so back -to the shop, Mr John, stick to 'plasters, pills, ointment boxes,' -&c."--and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for -them had been obtained. Keats's friend Bailey had by this time taken his -degree, and after publishing a friendly notice of _Endymion_ in the -_Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a -curacy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at -the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and -Chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a -previous love-affair with one of the Reynolds sisters having fallen -through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, then in the -hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy -of Scott; and earning, on the staff of _Blackwood_ and otherwise, the -reputation and the nickname of 'Scorpion.' Bailey, anxious to save Keats -from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took -the opportunity of telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances -and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt -was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an -object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any -rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his -disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so -used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all -appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had -thus confidentially communicated. - -To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that whether or not -Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and -supplied the materials for it[41]. It seems in fact all but certain that -he actually wrote it[42]. If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart's part, -and to forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude that is his -due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of Scott. But -even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the -party violence of the time and place Scott himself was drawn into -encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh friends; and that -he was in some measure privy to the Cockney School outrages seems certain. -Such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time[43]; and when -Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the -subject of Keats and his detractors in conversation with Scott at Rome, he -observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which -he could only interpret in the same sense[44]. It is hard to say whether -the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul most free from jealousy -or harshness, thus associated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is -one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the -more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the -distracting cries and blind collisions of the world. - -The _Quarterly_ article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of -September (in the number dated April), and was in an equally contemptuous -strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first -canto, or to make head or tail of that. In this case again the question of -authorship must remain uncertain: but Gifford, as editor, and an editor -who never shrank from cutting a contributor's work to his own pattern, -must bear the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in his -manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable -of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the -pain he gives. Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with -which Keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work, -the attacks are both alike inexcusable. They had the effect of promptly -rousing the poet's friends in his defence. Reynolds published a warm -rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the _Alfred_; -an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_ -with the initials J. S.--those probably of John Scott, then editor of the -_London Magazine_, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart's in -a duel, arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which it was -thought that Lockhart himself ought to have come forward. Leigh Hunt -reprinted Reynolds's letter, with some introductory words, in the -_Examiner_, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. But -he could not have done more to any purpose. He was not himself an -enthusiastic admirer of _Endymion_, and had plainly said so to Keats and -to his friends. Reynolds's piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective -and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would -only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly -well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a -friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind. - -Neither was Keats's demeanour under the lash such as could make his -friends suppose him particularly hurt. Proud in the extreme, he had no -irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet -always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he -saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:--"I hate," he says, "a mawkish -popularity." Even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly -cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was -conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his -critics. Accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than -older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt had replied -indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn. -Hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. Keats at the first sting -declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what -good he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly recovering -himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one -merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When Mr Hessey sent for his -encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended, -he wrote:-- - - "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." - - And again:--"There have been two letters in my defence in the - 'Chronicle,' and one in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper, - and written by Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the - 'Chronicle.' This is a mere matter of the moment: 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.'" - -In point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent Keats about -this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a -further tribute in the shape of a L25 note. Keats was both pleased and -displeased: "if I had refused it," he says, "I should have behaved in a -very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a -little." About the same time he received, through his friend Richard -Woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or -assistant to Messrs Taylor and Hessey[45], a glowing letter of sympathy -and encouragement from Miss Porter, 'of Romance celebrity': by which he -shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands. - -Keats was really living, during the stress of these _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt -trouble. His Hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return -from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on -account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. He had left the -invalid behind in their lodgings at Well Walk, and found that he had grown -rapidly worse during his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for -the next few months Keats's chief occupation was the harrowing one of -watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written in the -third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and -occupations:--"I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses -upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had -intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and -plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, -and feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be -poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of -contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and -yet I must do so or suffer." And again about the same time to -Reynolds:--"I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has -haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverous -relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has -conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only -life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am -thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of -immortality." As the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever -more sorrowful and absorbing[46]. On the 29th of October Keats wrote to -his brother and sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a -beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst. -For the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and -in the first week of December the end came. "Early one morning," writes -Brown, "I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, -who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we -both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, -my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--'Have nothing -more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live -with me?' He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,--'I think it -would be better.' From that moment he was my inmate[47]." - -Brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part--the -smaller eastern part--of the block of two semi-detached houses near the -bottom of John Street, Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied -the other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place[48]. The -accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room -on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them. The -arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, -occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. As -soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in -some measure alleviated his grief, Keats became gradually once more -absorbed in poetry: his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had -already begun to work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed; -for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more -powerful than that of poetry itself. It was at this time that the flame -caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid 'lest it -should burn him up.' With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, -not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards -womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind's ideal of the -sex, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and -too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious at the same -time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself -partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of passion by his -sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. The set of -three sonnets in his first volume, beginning 'Woman, when I beheld thee -flippant, vain,' had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to -this state of mind. Its persistency is affirmed often in his letters. - - "I am certain," he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, "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.... Is it not - extraordinary?--when among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no - spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from - every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all - suspicion, and comfortable. 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.... I must absolutely get over this--but how?" - -In a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in America, he alleges this -general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or -rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he -will never marry:-- - - "The roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my - window-panes are my children; 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. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination - strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand - worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are - stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is - equivalent to a King's Bodyguard: "then Tragedy with scepter'd pall - comes sweeping by." According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles - shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; - or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, "I - wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage," I - melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content - to be alone. 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 that I rejoice in." - -But now Keats's hour was come. Since his return from Scotland, in the -midst of his watching by his brother's sick-bed, we have seen him -confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. This was a -certain Miss Charlotte Cox, a West-Indian cousin of Reynolds's, to whom he -did not think the Reynolds sisters were quite kind. A few days later he -writes again how he has been attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace. -Very soon, however, the attraction passed, and this 'Charmian' left him -fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. A Mrs Brawne, a widow -lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two -younger children, had taken Brown's house for the summer while he was away -in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the -Dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved -from Brown's house to one in Downshire Street close by: and it was at the -Dilkes' that Keats met Miss Fanny Brawne after his return. Her ways and -presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated -him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as -well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in -Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length -silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise -her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the -far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and -retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, -shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, -carriage and complexion,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her -character we have little means of judging. She was certainly -high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though -kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew -dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men -and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of -one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and -in regarding the attachment as unlucky. - -So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion -for a woman have been. Stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth -begun to fall on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional -misgivings of his darker moods. First the departure of his brother George -had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from -boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next -the exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and -unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in -his blood. Coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed -inexorably upon his brother Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit -through all his pains. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little -as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and -carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his -practical hopes from literature. Last were added the pangs of love--love -requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even -love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion wrought -fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and -torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every -strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty, -exposed them. Within a year the combined assault proved too much for his -strength, and he broke down. But in the meantime he showed a brave face to -the world, and while anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to -throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, -energy. During the first few weeks of winter following his brother's -death, he wrote indeed, as he tells Haydon, "only a little now and then: -but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting." Yet -such work as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of his -powers, and included parts both of _Hyperion_ and _The Eve of St Agnes_. - -Within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was -finished, having been written out during a visit which Keats and Brown -paid in Sussex in the latter part of January (1819). They stayed for a few -days with the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for nearly a -fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, at Bedhampton -close by. Keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but -his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to 'a couple of -dowager card-parties,' and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day, -at the consecration of a chapel for converted Jews. The latter ceremony -jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an -entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. -During his stay at Chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate -conceived, the poem on the _Eve of St Mark_, which he never finished, and -which remains so interesting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work. - -Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed his life at -Hampstead under Brown's roof. He saw much less society than the winter -before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally -to avoid the night air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt -the passion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest -in the other relations of life. The stages by which it grew on him we -cannot follow. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he -had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting. His -real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the -time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong -mixed attraction and aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the -14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in -America, "Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff;" -but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general -reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not -sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. The -secret violence of Keats's passion, and the restless physical jealousy -which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed _To -Fanny_, which belong apparently to this date. They are written very -unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and -there. The occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:-- - - "Who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast, - What stare outfaces now my silver moon? - Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least; - Let, let the amorous burn-- - But, pr'ythee, do not turn - The current of your heart from me so soon, - O! save, in charity, - The quickest pulse for me. - Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe - Voluptuous visions into the warm air, - Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath; - Be like an April day, - Smiling and cold and gay, - A temperate lily, temperate as fair; - Then, Heaven! there will be - A warmer June for me." - -If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his -feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother -or his friends. Except in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no -direct mention of Miss Brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere -excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because -he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers, -in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown -after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as -when the Dilkes left Hampstead in April, and went to live at Westminster, -the Brawnes again took their house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth -had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke himself, -but apparently not till many months later, writes, "It is quite a settled -thing between John Keats and Miss Brawne, God help them. It's a bad thing -for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that -it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or speak to her." -Other friends, including one so intimate and so affectionate as Severn, -never realised until Keats was on his death-bed that there had been an -engagement, or that his relations with Miss Brawne had been other than -those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours. - -Intense and jealous as Keats's newly awakened passion was, it seemed at -first to stimulate rather than distract him in the exercise of his now -ripened poetic gift. The spring of this year 1819 seems to repeat in a -richer key the history of the last; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits -of lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season advanced. Between -the beginning of February and the beginning of June he wrote many of his -best shorter poems, including apparently all except one of his six famous -odes. About the middle of February he speaks of having taken a stroll -among the marbles of the British Museum, and the ode _On Indolence_ and -the ode _On a Grecian Urn_, written two or three months later, show how -the charm of ancient sculpture was at this time working in his mind. The -fit of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former piece is -recorded in his correspondence under the date of March 19. The lines -beginning 'Bards of passion and of mirth,' are dated the 26th of the same -month. On the 15th of April he sends off to his brother, as the last poem -he has written, the ode _To Psyche_, only less perfect and felicitous than -that _On a Grecian Urn_. About a week later the nightingale would be -beginning to sing. Presently it appeared that one had built her nest in -Brown's garden, near his house. - - "Keats," writes Brown, "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; - and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the - grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. When he - came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his - hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, - I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic - feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well - legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many - scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his _Ode to a - Nightingale_.... Immediately afterwards I searched for more of his (in - reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again - assisted me.... From that day he gave me permission to copy any verses - he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so little - for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was - released from their influence, that he required a friend at hand to - preserve them." - -The above account perfectly agrees with what Keats had written towards -the end of the summer before:--"I feel assured I should write from the -mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's -labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them." -And yet for these odes Keats seems to have had a partiality: with that to -Psyche, he tells his brother, he has taken more pains than with anything -he had ever written before; and Haydon has told how thrillingly, 'in his -low tremulous under-tone,' he recited to him that to the nightingale as -they walked one day in the Kilburn meadows. - -During the winter and spring while his faculties were thus absorbed -between love and poetry, Keats had suffered his correspondence to flag, -except only with Haydon, with his young sister Fanny, and with his brother -and sister-in-law in America. About Christmas Haydon, whose work had been -interrupted by a weakness of the eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for -the time being exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to Keats of all -men. With his usual generosity Keats had promised, only asking him to try -the rich lovers of art first, that if the worst came to the worst he would -help him with all he had. Haydon in a few weeks returns to the -charge:--"My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised -assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and -manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst." Keats had intended for -Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share -in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over -to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were -raised, and after much correspondence, attendance in bankers' and -solicitors' offices, and other ordeals harassing to the poetic mind, he -had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When -by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with -his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies with perfect temper, -explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his -hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting -possession of his money. Moreover he finds that even if all he had were -laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live -on for two years.[49] Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent -sums to various friends amounting in all to near L200, of which he expects -the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats -contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds. Three months later a -law-suit threatened by the widow of Captain Jennings against Mr Abbey, in -connection with the administration of the trust, had the effect for a time -of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very -gently asks Haydon to make an effort to repay his loan; who not only made -none--"he did not," says Keats, "seem to care much about it, but let me go -without my money almost with nonchalance." This was too much even for -Keats's patience. He declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend -again: nevertheless he by-and-by let old affection resume its sway, and -entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly -as ever. - -To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are full of -playful brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of regrets that she is -kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey; and of plans -for coming over to see her at Walthamstow when the weather and his throat -allow. He thinks of various little presents to please her,--a selection of -Tassie's pretty, and then popular, paste imitations of ancient -gems,--flowers,--drawing materials,-- - - "anything but live stock. Though I will not now be very severe on it, - remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, - Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock Salmons and all the whole tribe of the - Bushes and the Brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the - water,--though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome - globe of gold-fish--then I would have it hold ten pails of water and - be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let - through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their - beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome - painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and Japonicas. I - should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd - sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading." - -For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant -anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant -Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices -been bound. In the middle of April news of them arrives, and he thereupon -sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has been writing up at -intervals during the last two months. Among all the letters of Keats, this -is perhaps the richest and most characteristic. It is full of the varied -matter of his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love: these are -only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more indistinctly in the -vaguely passionate tenor of two sonnets which he sends among other -specimens of his latest work in verse. One is that beginning 'Why did I -laugh to-night?'--the other that, beautiful and moving despite flaws of -execution, in which he describes a dream suggested by the Paolo and -Francesca passage in Dante. For the rest he passes disconnectedly as -usual--"it being an impossibility in grain," as Keats once wrote to -Reynolds, "for my ink to stain otherwise"--from the vein of fun and -freakishness to that of poetry and wisdom, with passages now of masterly -intuition, and now of wandering and uncertain, almost always beautiful, -speculative fancy, interspersed with expressions of the most generous -spirit of family affection, or the most searching and unaffected -disclosures of self-knowledge. Poetry and Beauty were the twin powers his -soul had ever worshipped; but his devotion to poetry seemed thus far to -promise him no reward either in fame or bread; while beauty had betrayed -her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a sustaining power, -since his love for the beautiful in general had turned into a craving -passion for the beauty of a particular girl. As his flesh began to faint -in the service of these two, his soul turned often with a sense of -comfort, at times even almost of ecstasy, towards the milder divinity of -Death, whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts:-- - - "Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, - But Death intenser--Death is Life's high meed." - -When he came down from these heights of feeling, and brought himself -soberly to face the facts of his existence, Keats felt himself compelled, -in those days while he was producing, 'out of the mere yearning and -fondness he had for the beautiful,' poem after poem that are among the -treasures of the English language, to consider whether as a practical -matter he could or ought to continue to apply himself to literature at -all. In spite of his magnanimous first reception of the _Blackwood_ and -_Quarterly_ gibes, we can see that as time went on he began more and more -to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened by them. -Reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material harm which the reviews were -capable of inflicting, when he wrote the year before:--"Certain it is, -that hundreds of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set down -this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writer, merely on the -assertions of some single heartless critic, who has just energy enough to -despise what is good." Such in fact was exactly the reputation which -_Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had succeeded in making for Keats, except -among a small private circle of admirers. Of praise and the thirst for -praise he continues to speak in as manly and sane a tone as ever; -especially in the two sonnets _On Fame_; and in the _Ode to Indolence_ -declares-- - - "For I would not be dieted with praise, - A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce." - -Again in the same ode, he speaks of his 'demon Poesy' as 'a maiden most -unmeek,' whom he loves the better the more blame is heaped on her. At the -same time he shows his sense of the practical position which the reviews -had made for him when he writes to his brother:--"These reviews are -getting more and more powerful, especially the 'Quarterly'.... I was in -hopes that as people saw, as they must do, all the trickery and iniquity -of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the -spectators at the Westminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or loses." -And as a consequence he adds presently, "I have been, at different times, -turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a -physician. I am afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I could -not take fees; and yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than -writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review -shambles." A little later he mentions to his sister Fanny an idea he has -of taking a voyage or two as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But Brown, -more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and -promise of his friend's genius, would not hear of this plan, and persuaded -him to abandon it and throw himself again upon literature. Keats being for -the moment unable to get at any of his money, Brown advanced him enough to -live on through the summer; and it was agreed that he should go and work -in the country, and that Brown should follow him. - -Towards the end of July Keats accordingly left Hampstead, and went first -to join his friend Rice in lodgings at Shanklin. Rice's health was at this -time worse than ever; and Keats himself was far from well; his chest weak, -his nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to Fanny -Brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains and joys of love. These -love-letters of Keats are written with little or none of the bright ease -and play of mind which make his correspondence with his friends and family -so attractive. Pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, but in the main -they are constrained and distressing, showing him a prey, despite his -efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity -and fretfulness of passion. An enraptured but an untrustful lover, -alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing through a -hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he found in the fever -of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his -love-sickness. As long as Rice and he were together at Shanklin, the two -ailing and anxious men, firm friends as they were, depressed and did each -other harm. It was better when Brown with his settled health and spirits -came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got -to work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, that of -writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What other struggling man of -letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated -them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose -Russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him in L500, was -supposed to possess the requisite stage experience, and to him were -assigned the plot and construction of the play, while Keats undertook to -compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from the history of the -Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at the -same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown sketched it out to -him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next, until the end -of the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into his own -hands. Besides the joint work by means of which he thus hoped, at least in -sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, Keats was -busily engaged by himself in writing a new Greek tale in rhymed heroics, -_Lamia_. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate -of Shanklin was against him: their lodgings were under the cliff, and from -the south-east, as he afterwards wrote, "came the damps of the sea, which -having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy -idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke." After a -stay of five or six weeks, the friends made up their minds to change their -quarters, and went in the second week of August to Winchester. The old -cathedral city, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its -clear-coursing streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the -nimble and pure air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited Keats, who -quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days which he spent here, -from the middle of August to the middle of October, were the last good -days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he -managed to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his -passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort. - -His work continued to be chiefly on _Lamia_, with the concluding part of -_Otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen; -in this last he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. Early -in September Brown left Winchester to go on a visit to Bedhampton. -Immediately afterwards a letter from America compelled Keats to go to town -and arrange with Mr Abbey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his -brother George. He dared not, to use his own words, 'venture into the -fire' by going to see his mistress at Hampstead, but stayed apparently -with Mr Taylor in Fleet Street, and was back on the fourth day at -Winchester, where he spent the following ten days or fortnight in -solitude. During this interval he took up _Hyperion_ again, but made up -his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style and method -too Miltonic and artificial. _Lamia_ he had finished, and his chief -present occupation was in revising the _Eve of St Agnes_, studying Italian -in the pages of Ariosto, and writing up one of his long and full -journal-letters to brother and sister George. The season was fine, and the -beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his spirit, prompted -also in these days the last, and one certainly of the happiest, of his -odes, that _To Autumn_. To the fragment of _St Mark's Eve_, begun or -planned, as we have seen, the January before, he now added lines inspired -at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his letters show to have -affected him deeply here at Winchester, and by the literary example of -Chatterton, for whom his old admiration had of late returned in full -force. - -The wholesome brightness of the early autumn continuing to sustain and -soothe him, Keats made in these days a vigorous effort to rally his moral -powers, to banish over-passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself -on a right footing with the world. The letter to America already -mentioned, and others written at the same time to Reynolds, Taylor, Dilke, -Brown, and Haydon, are full of evidences of this spirit. The ill success -of his brother in his American speculations shall serve, he is determined, -as a spur to his own exertions, and now that real troubles are upon them, -he will show that he can bear them better than those of imagination. The -imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him -up into an agent. He has been passing his time between reading, writing, -and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, and stick to the other -two. He does not consider he has any just cause of complaint against the -world; he has done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few people -predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that any thing really fine -will make its way. "What reviewers can put a hindrance to must be a -nothing--or mediocre which is worse." With reference to his own plans for -the future, he is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes of ultimate -success, whether from plays or poems, but to turn to the natural resource -of a man 'fit for nothing but literature' and needing to support himself -by his pen: the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. "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. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I will." -These words are from a letter written to Brown on the 22nd of September, -and further on in the same letter we find evidence of the honourable -spirit of independence and unselfishness towards his friends which went -together in Keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willingness -to accept their services at a pinch. He had been living since May on a -loan from Brown and an advance from Taylor, and was uneasy at putting the -former to a sacrifice. The subject, he says, is often in his mind,-- - - "and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your - happiness. This anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to - the plan I propose pursuing. I had got into a habit of mind of looking - towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it is a duty I - owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my - subsistence--make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall - applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct." - -Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken -in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose his company, and -doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected their -motives too much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled that -the two friends should part, Brown returning to his own house at -Hampstead, while Keats went to live by himself in London and look out for -employment on the press. - - - - -CHAPTER VII. - - _Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St - Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The Plays. - - -During the twenty months ending with his return from Winchester as last -narrated, Keats had been able, even while health and peace of mind and -heart deserted him, to produce in quick succession the series of poems -which give us the true measure of his powers. In the sketches and epistles -of his first volume we have seen him beginning, timidly and with no -clearness of aim, to make trial of his poetical resources. A year -afterwards he had leapt, to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and -boldly tried his strength on the composition of a long mythological -romance--half romance, half parable of that passion for universal beauty -of which he felt in his own bosom the restless and compulsive workings. In -the execution, he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in -him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and invention, and the caprice -of rhyme, run away with him, and by substituting for the worn-out verbal -currency of the last century a semi-Elizabethan coinage of his own, less -acceptable by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit greater -real poetic value. The experiment was rash, but when he next wrote, it -became manifest that it had not been made in vain. After _Endymion_ his -work threw off, not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and -ineffectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full 'effluence' (the -phrase is Landor's) 'of power and light[50].' - -His next poem of importance was _Isabella_, planned and begun, as we saw, -in February 1818, and finished in the course of the next two months at -Teignmouth. The subject is taken from the well-known chapter of Boccaccio -which tells of the love borne by a damsel of Messina for a youth in the -employ of her merchant-brothers, with its tragic close and pathetic -sequel[51]. Keats for some reason transfers the scene of the story from -Messina to Florence. Nothing can be less sentimental than Boccaccio's -temper, nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his style. -Keats invoking him asks pardon for his own work as what it truly is,--'An -echo of thee in the North-wind sung.' Not only does the English poet set -the southern story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of the -Arno, for instance, how its stream-- - - "Gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan - Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream - Keeps head against the freshets"-- - -he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, enriching it with -tones of sentiment and colours of romance, and brooding over every image -of beauty or passion as he calls it up. These things he does--but no -longer inordinately as heretofore. His powers of imagination and of -expression have alike gained strength and discipline; and through the -shining veils of his poetry his creations make themselves seen and felt in -living shape, action, and motive. False touches and misplaced beauties are -indeed not wanting. For example, in the phrase - - "his erewhile timid lips grew bold - And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme," - -we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not infrequent in -his earliest verses. And in the call of the wicked brothers to Lorenzo-- - - "To-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount - To spur three leagues towards the Apennine. - Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count - His dewy rosary on the eglantine,"-- - -the last two lines are a beauty indeed, and of the kind most -characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as Leigh Hunt long ago pointed -out) misplaced in the mouths that utter it. Moreover the language of -_Isabella_ is still occasionally slipshod, and there are turns and -passages where we feel, as we felt so often in _Endymion_, that the poetic -will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or suggestion of the -rhyme. But these are the minor blemishes of a poem otherwise conspicuous -for power and charm. - -For his Italian story Keats chose an Italian metre, the octave stanza -introduced in English by Wyatt and Sidney, and naturalised before long by -Daniel, Drayton, and Edward Fairfax. Since their day, the stanza had been -little used in serious poetry, though Frere and Byron had lately revived -it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the purpose for which the -epigrammatic snap and suddenness of the closing couplet in truth best fit -it. Keats, however, contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles -the measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale of pathos. -Over the purely musical and emotional resources of his art he shows a -singular command in stanzas like that beginning, 'O Melancholy, linger -here awhile,' repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude of -the main narrative. And there is a brilliant alertness of imagination in -such episodical passages as that where he pauses to realize the varieties -of human toil contributing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. But the -true test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the essential -points and central moments of action and passion, imaginative vitality and -truth with beauty and charm. This test _Isabella_ admirably bears. For -instance, in the account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her -lover's mouldering corpse:-- - - "Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright - With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof - From the poor girl by magic of their light." - -With what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the story of the -apparition invested by this touch, and all its charnel horror and grimness -mitigated! Or again in the stanzas describing Isabella's actions at her -lover's burial place:-- - - "She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though - One glance did fully all its secrets tell; - Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know - Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well; - Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, - Like to a native lily of the dell: - Then with her knife, all sudden, she began - To dig more fervently than misers can. - - Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon - Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies; - She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, - And put it in her bosom, where it dries - And freezes utterly unto the bone - Those dainties made to still an infant's cries: - Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care, - But to throw back at times her veiling hair." - -The lines are not all of equal workmanship: but the scene is realised with -unerring vision. The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with -too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third -and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the -same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of -the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the -impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden -solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as -she begins to dig 'more fervently than misers can' (what a commentary on -the relative strength of passions might be drawn from this simple -text):--then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not -ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it -is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, -while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us -as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and -continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic -truth as well as grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the -privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often -combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a -limpid and flowing ease of narrative. Poetry had always come to Keats, as -he considered it ought to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now -that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which -his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers -of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true -imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school -seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay, -those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two -kinds of writing comparable. - -After the completion of _Isabella_ followed the Scotch tour, of which the -only poetic fruits of value were the lines on Meg Merrilies and those on -Fingal's Cave. Returning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother -mortally ill, Keats plunged at once into the most arduous poetic labour he -had yet undertaken. This was the composition of _Hyperion_[52]. The -subject had been long in his mind, and both in the text and the preface of -_Endymion_ he indicated his intention to attempt it. At first he thought -of the poem to be written as a 'romance': but under the influence of -_Paradise Lost_, and no doubt also considering the height and vastness of -the subject, his plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books. -His purpose was to sing the Titanomachia, or warfare of the earlier -Titanic dynasty with the later Olympian dynasty of the Greek gods; and in -particular one episode of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god -Hyperion and the assumption of his kingdom by Apollo. Critics, even -intelligent critics, sometimes complain that Keats should have taken this -and other subjects of his art from what they call the 'dead' mythology of -ancient Greece. As if that mythology could ever die: as if the ancient -fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things believed, into -the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put -on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, -as faiths, perish one after another: but each in passing away bequeaths -for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained -of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, -embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to -explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the -thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and -control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; -and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern -mind which is in so far dead and not they. One of the great symptoms of -returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, toward the close of the -last century, was its awakening to the forgotten charm of past modes of -faith and life. When men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke of -Greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms which showed that they -had never felt its power; just as, when they spoke of nature, it was in -set phrases that showed that they had never looked at her. On matters of -daily social experience the gifts of observation and of reason were -brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts of the time were thoughts -of the street, the mart, and the assembly. The human genius was for the -time being like some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused -to see or think of anything beyond them. At length resuming its march, it -emerged on open ground, where it fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest -the beauties of the earth and sky, and whence at the same time it could -turn back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning with new -clearness and a new emotion, here under cloud and rainbow the forests and -spired cities of the Middle Age, there in serener light the hills and -havens and level fanes of Hellas. - -The great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on this new phase of its -pilgrimage was Goethe, who with deliberate effort and self-discipline -climbed to heights commanding an equal survey over the mediaeval and the -classic past. We had in England had an earlier, shyer, and far less -effectual pioneer in Gray. As time went on, poet after poet arose and sang -more freely, one the glories of nature, another the enchantments of the -Middle Age, another the Greek beauty and joy of life. Keats when his time -came showed himself, all young and untutored as he was, freshly and -powerfully inspired to sing of all three alike. He does not, as we have -said, write of Greek things in a Greek manner. Something indeed in -_Hyperion_--at least in the first two books--he has caught from _Paradise -Lost_ of the high restraint and calm which was common to the Greeks and -Milton. But to realise how far he is in workmanship from the Greek purity -and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images, we -have only to think of his palace of Hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling -pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. This is the most sustained and -celebrated passage of the poem. Or let us examine one of its most -characteristic images from nature:-- - - "As when, upon a tranced summer night, - Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, - Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, - Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--." - -Not to the simplicity of the Greek, but to the complexity of the modern, -sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and express, by such a concourse of -metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which -a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of -the oaks among the other trees--their aspect of human venerableness--their -verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural -stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with -mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky[53]. - -But though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he sees it truly. The -Greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated English way he -writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas. For the -story of the war of Titans and Olympians he had nothing to guide him -except scraps from the ancient writers, principally Hesiod, as retailed by -the compilers of classical dictionaries; and from the scholar's point of -view his version, we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary, -mixing up Latin conceptions and nomenclature with Greek, and introducing -much new matter of his own invention. But as to the essential meaning of -that warfare and its result--the dethronement of an older and ruder -worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of -arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,--as -to this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with -more beauty and force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the -Second Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of -early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human, -what masterly justice of instinct does he show,--to take one point -only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate -sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices. Thus -of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:-- - - "There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines - When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise - Among immortals when a God gives sign, - With hushing finger, how he means to load - His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, - With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: - Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines." - -Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:-- - - "So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea, - Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, - But cogitation in his watery shades, - Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, - In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue - Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands." - -And once more, of Clymene followed by Enceladus in debate:-- - - "So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook - That, lingering along a pebbled coast, - Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, - And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice - Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: - The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves - In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, - Came booming thus." - -This second book of _Hyperion_, relating the council of the dethroned -Titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, where the solemn opening -vision of Saturn fallen is followed by the resplendent one of Hyperion -threatened in his 'lucent empire'; nor the intensity of the unfinished -third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the -afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. -But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to -my mind, quite on a level with the other two. - -With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal -incorrectness, _Hyperion_, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the -grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the -easiest and most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able to apply -himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. Partly this was -due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of -dawning passion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may -trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception -of _Endymion_: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial -to his powers in the task itself. When after letting the poem lie by -through the greater part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September -made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds explaining his -reasons as follows. "There were too many Miltonic inversions in -it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's -humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be -kept up." In the same connection he declares that Chatterton is the purest -writer in the English language. "He has no French idiom or particles, like -Chaucer; it is genuine English idiom in English words." In writing about -the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as -to Milton and Chatterton. - -The influence, and something of the majesty, of _Paradise Lost_ are in -truth to be found in _Hyperion_: and the debate of the fallen Titans in -the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the -fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. -Passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of -Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austerity with Keats's luxuriance -of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:--in -the matter of rhythm, Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's. -Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and -far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and -ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since -Milton,--beside that of Shelley's _Alastor_,--perhaps a little below that -of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and -the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as -Milton himself: but while of Milton's diction the characteristic colour is -derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with -the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is -rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme -refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a passage -of this kind:-- - - "Eden stretch'd her line - From Auran eastward to the royal towers - Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings, - Or where the sons of Eden long before - Dwelt in Telassar." - -But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this:-- - - "throughout all the isle - There was no covert, no retired cave - Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, - Though scarcely heard in many a green recess." - -After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical -note of Milton's style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative -pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and -constructions generally. Already in _Isabella_ Keats is to be found -attempting both notes, thus:-- - - "With duller steel than the Persean sword - They cut away no formless monster's head--." - -Similar Miltonic echoes occur in _Hyperion_, as in the introduction -already quoted to the speech of Oceanus: or again thus:-- - - "Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope - In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, - Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet - And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies." - -But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton's -technical manner as he seems to have supposed. Yet he had adopted more of -it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain. - -In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was going back to one of his -first loves in literature. What he says of Chatterton's words and idioms -seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by -the Bristol boy out of Kersey's _Dictionary_[54]. But it is true that -through that jargon can be discerned, in the Rowley poems, not only an -ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition, -but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats -had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to -us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we find him in fact tempted aside -on an excursion into the regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how -much of _Hyperion_ had been written when he laid it aside in January to -take up the composition of _St Agnes' Eve_, that unsurpassed example--nay, -must we not rather call it unequalled?--of the pure charm of coloured and -romantic narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt the -elemental grandeur of _Hyperion_, so neither does it approach the human -pathos and passion of _Isabella_. Its personages appeal to us, not so much -humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery and atmosphere -amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the -weakness, of modern romance,--its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the -mediaeval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at -all,--its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both -writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral -truth: and without these no great literature can exist. - -Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love -of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story -wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young -Lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into association with the old popular -belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her -lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian -stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as -it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of -construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the -great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and -concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza, -which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us -first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and -next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd -taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, -where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly -bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with -the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about -the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in -handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers -vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and -sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he -touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, -movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought -before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our -sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:-- - - "Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, - He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails - To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." - -Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the -poet strikes life:-- - - "The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, - Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, - With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts." - -The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out -their beauties in detail, he calls-- - - "Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes - As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--" - -a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination -of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile -drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of -the same stanza-- - - "A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings," - ---the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is -at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of -her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that -moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted glass as Keats -in this celebrated passage represents it. Let us be grateful for the -error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly -splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow -is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. When -Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their -lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks -straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the -wearer,--'her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties -beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare -sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own -natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far -countries whence they have been gathered-- - - "From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." - -If the unique charm of the _Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the richness and -vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions -of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go. -What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse, -who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die -quietly of age when their parts are over[55]: especially the debate of old -Angela with Porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the -stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, I think, at two -moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,-- - - "No uttered syllable, or, woe betide: - But to her heart, her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side:"-- - -and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and -contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:-- - - "'Ah Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now - Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear - Made tunable with every sweetest vow; - And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear; - How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear'." - -Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the 'growing faint' of Porphyro, and -in his 'warm unnerved arm,' we have a touch of that swooning abandonment -to which Keats's heroes are too subject. But it is the slightest -possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet -individually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of that date are -constantly overcome in like manner. And we may well pardon Porphyro his -weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady's -side in defiance of her 'whole bloodthirsty race,' and will bear her -safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 'beyond the southern -moors' that he has prepared for her[56]. - -Nearly allied with the _Eve of St Agnes_ is the fragment in the four-foot -ballad metre, which Keats composed on the parallel popular belief -connected with the eve of St Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at -Chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Winchester -six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, seems farther to -suggest associations with Canterbury. Impressions of all these three -cathedral cities which Keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture -of which the fragment consists. I have said picture, but there are two: -one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and -Sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her -quaint fire-lit chamber. Each in its way is of an admirable vividness and -charm. The belief about St Mark's Eve was that a person stationed near a -church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church -the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the -ensuing year. Keats's fragment breaks off before the story is well -engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to -incidents illustrating this belief. Neither is it clear whether he -intended to place them in mediaeval or in relatively modern times. The -demure Protestant air which he gives the Sunday streets, the Oriental -furniture and curiosities of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate -the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his -archaeology--witness, for instance, the line which tells how 'the long -carpets rose along the gusty floor' in the _Eve of St Agnes_. The interest -of the _St Mark's_ fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the -promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and -charm of workmanship: and second, its relation to and influence on later -English poetry. Keats in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the -feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The indoor scene -of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and -the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is -perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply -impressed and interested),--of his pictures even more than of his poems: -while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and -cadences of Mr Morris in some tale of the _Earthly Paradise_:-- - - "The city streets were clean and fair - From wholesome drench of April rains; - And on the western window panes - The chilly sunset faintly told - Of unmatured green valleys cold, - Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, - Of rivers new with springtide sedge." - -Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _La -Belle Dame sans Merci_. The title is taken from that of a poem by Alain -Chartier,--the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. -of France,--of which an English translation used to be attributed to -Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This title -had caught Keats's fancy, and in the _Eve of St Agnes_ he makes Lorenzo -waken Madeline by playing beside her bed-- - - "an ancient ditty, long since mute, - In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci'." - -The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the -spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more -to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with -Provence[57]. Keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but -rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the mediaeval world of -enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when -either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a -bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his -own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery -expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world -symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of -whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a -weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild -yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound -and sense, make of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ the master-piece, not only -among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece -must be chosen) among them all. - -Before finally giving up _Hyperion_ Keats had conceived and written, -during his summer months at Shanklin and Winchester, another narrative -poem on a Greek subject: but one of those where Greek life and legend come -nearest to the mediaeval, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and -witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of passion. I speak, of -course, of _Lamia_, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and -victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him -by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the -scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats had found the germ of -the story, quoted from Philostratus, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. -In versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them, -however, not as in _Endymion_, but in a manner founded on that of Dryden, -with a free use of the Alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and -the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the measure -as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe -and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its -way as the victorious march of Dryden himself. Here is an example where -the poetry of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:-- - - "Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, goddess, see - Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! - For pity do not this sad heart belie-- - Even as thou vanishest so I shall die. - Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! - To thy far wishes will thy streams obey: - Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, - Alone they can drink up the morning rain: - Though a descended Pleiad, will not one - Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune - Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?" - -And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:-- - - "As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, - Throughout her palaces imperial, - And all her populous streets and temples lewd, - Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, - To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. - Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, - Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, - Companion'd or alone; while many a light - Flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals, - And threw their moving shadows on the walls, - Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade - Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade." - -No one can deny the truth of Keats's own criticism on _Lamia_ when he -says, "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 sensation." -There is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns -itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the -touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the -transformation itself. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat -disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode -of Hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the -merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and -beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This -thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine -melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give -_Lamia_ almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats's narrative -poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others -too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for -instance that of the palace reared by Lamia's magic; which will not bear -comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet's building. -And it has reflective passages, as that in the first book beginning, 'Let -the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and the first fifteen lines of -the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at -its best, Keats relapses into something too like Leigh Hunt's and his own -early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows at the -same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language. -The positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been -attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the _Eve of -St Agnes_ we had to 'brook' tears for to check or forbear them, in -_Hyperion_ 'portion'd' for 'proportion'd;' eyes that 'fever out;' a -chariot 'foam'd along.' Some of these verbal licences possess a force that -makes them pass; but not so in _Lamia_ the adjectives 'psalterian' and -'piazzian,' the verb 'to labyrinth,' and the participle 'daft,' as if from -an imaginary active verb meaning to daze. - -In the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is moreover a -weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much -importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him -uttering. But the doctrine he sets forth in _Lamia_ is one which from the -reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain -consistency:-- - - "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, as it erewhile made - The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade." - -Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in _The Rainbow_: but -one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which Keats would have done -well to stand, is preached by Wordsworth in his famous Preface. - -Passing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of Keats's work -during this period--it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly -occupied in the spring months of 1819, from the completion of _St Agnes' -Eve_ at Chichester in January until the commencement of _Lamia_ and _Otho -the Great_ at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats constitute a class -apart in English literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived -from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he -calls the 'roundelay' of the Indian maiden in _Endymion_ he had made his -most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching -Shelley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in -touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are -comparatively simple and regular in form. They are written in a strain -intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the -declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate -with the idea of an ode. Of the five composed in the spring of 1819, two, -those on _Psyche_ and the _Grecian Urn_, are inspired by the old Greek -world of imagination and art; two, those on _Melancholy_ and the -_Nightingale_, by moods of the poet's own mind; while the fifth, that on -_Indolence_, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations. - -In the _Psyche_, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching -those of Spenser's nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) Keats recurs -to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in -the opening poem of his first book, beginning-- - - "So felt he, who first told how Psyche went - On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment." - -Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by -cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like -touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by -the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are -disclosed--'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other -poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm -of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all -his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time -habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his 'sea-shouldering whales,' he -is now in his own manner the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden -in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'moss-lain Dryads' and -the 'soft-conched ear' of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on -us a little with a sense of oddity, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in -_Lamia_. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn -of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage -of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of -antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the -metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:-- - - "Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane - In some untrodden region of my mind, - Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, - Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind." - -Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself -swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold -of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his ear charmed by the -glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated -vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the -invocation and the imagery. - -Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the -_Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the -_Psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two -arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which -Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the -sestet, and in one instance--the ode to Melancholy--expanding it into a -septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had -set the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of -ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured -images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art -to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which -flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of -antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men -or gods are these, what maidens loth,' &c. The second and third stanzas -express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences -between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety -and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange -permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even -richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the -incomparable choice of pictures,-- - - "What little town by river or sea shore, - Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, - Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?" - -In the answering lines-- - - "And, little town, thy streets for evermore - Will silent be; and not a soul to tell - Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--" - -in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the -arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, -and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a -necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own -compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can -easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice -it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward -between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to -the future, to remain,-- - - "in midst of other woe - Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, - Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--" - -thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason -and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of -Keats's temper--an immutable law. - -It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied -Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland -House an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is -described in his fourth stanza[58]: and of course no subject is commoner -in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. But the two -subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of -ancient art: and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of -sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him -only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi's etchings. Lord -Holland's urn is duly figured in the _Vasi e Candelabri_ of that admirable -master. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond of what he -calls-- - - "the pleasant flow - Of words at opening a portfolio:" - -and in the scene of sacrifice in _Endymion_ (Book L, 136-163) we may -perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as -well as an anticipation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the -subject in the ode. - -The ode _On Indolence_ stands midway, not necessarily in date of -composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two Greek and the two -personal odes, as I have above distinguished them. In it Keats again calls -up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate -the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of Love, Ambition, -and Poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. This ode, less highly -wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record -of a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted -intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an -agreeable physical languor. Well had it been for him had such moods come -more frequently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons of men, -the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and -unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled to bursting. One of the -attributes he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is a - - "sciential brain - To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain." - -In the fragmentary ode _On Melancholy_ (which has no proper beginning, its -first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of Beaumont and of -Milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the -habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a -characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:-- - - "Aye, in the very Temple of Delight - Veil'd Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, - Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue - Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine: - His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, - And be among her cloudy trophies hung." - -The same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds -expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet's feeling for -nature and romance, in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Just as his Grecian urn -was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the -particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that -he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some -far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow -her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he -makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. Then -follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations -which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of -Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her -power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to -the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, -by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of -the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the thought -of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome -now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song--and here, by a -breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts -the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with -the permanence of the song-bird's life, meaning the life of the type. This -last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those -memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza -closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his -own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he -returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest -dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes rank beside the -_Grecian Urn_ in the other. Neither is strictly faultless, but such -revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch -that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to -faultlessness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. Both -are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. Let us -therefore place here, as an example of this class of Keats's work, the -ode _To Autumn_, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of -his quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, no such -far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but -in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. In the first stanza -the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in -words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at -all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the -middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have -an exquisite congruity and lightness. - - "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, - Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; - Conspiring with him how to load and bless - With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; - To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, - And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; - To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells - With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, - And still more, later flowers for the bees, - Until they think warm days will never cease, - For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. - - Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? - Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find - Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, - Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; - Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, - Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook - Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: - And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep - Steady thy laden head across a brook; - Or by a cider-press, with patient look, - Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. - - 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; - Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn - Among the river sallows, borne aloft - Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; - And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; - Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft - The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; - And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." - -To pass from our poet's work at this time in the several fields of -romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pass -from a region of happy and assured conquest to one of failure, though of -failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been -in store for him. At his age no man has ever been a master in the drama: -even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the -difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in -which Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot -contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to -his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted. -He brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we -have seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, and a mind -prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while -Brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. But these -things were not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not yet -developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of -the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in -conception. Keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing -with all the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the effect only -of puppets inexpertly agitated: Otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and -fatherly affection, Ludolph of febrile passion and vacillation, Erminia of -maidenly purity, Conrad and Auranthe of ambitious lust and treachery. At -least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. From -that point Keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence, -shows a great improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the violent -kind affected by the old English drama, in the disclosure of the body of -Auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly -imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his -frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Marlowe, not only by their -pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses -expressed in them. Of the second historical play, _King Stephen_, which -Keats began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to afford -matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he finished are not only marked -by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a -spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not -shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his -capacity had not this fragment been preserved. - -But in the mingling of his soul's and body's destinies it had been -determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be -suffered to ripen farther upon earth. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII. - - Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn occupations: The _Cap and Bells_: - Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing despondency--Visit of George Keats to - England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally in the Spring--Summer in - Kentish Town--Publication of the _Lamia_ volume--Relapse--Ordered - South--Voyage to Italy--Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October - 1819-Feb. 1821.] - - -We left Keats at Winchester, with _Otho_, _Lamia_, and the _Ode to Autumn_ -just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and -take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting -imagination magnify and passion exasperate them as heretofore. At his -request Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in -Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came on the 8th of October -to take up his quarters. But alas! his blood proved traitor to his will: -and the plan of life and literary work in London broke down at once on -trial. The gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at -Winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a -distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he -went to Hampstead--'into the fire'--and in a moment the flames had seized -him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his -mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was -utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he -found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send -her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, "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.... 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 absorb'd me." A three days' visit at her -mother's house, followed by another of a day or two at the Dilkes', ended -in his giving up all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently, -of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at Hampstead under -Brown's roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. He writes with -a true foreboding: "I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast -the die for Love or Death.--I have no patience with anything else." - -It was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to -Wentworth Place in October, 1819, begins the melancholy closing chapter of -Keats's history. Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the -flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last kept -smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the -first began from this time forth to sink. Not that he was idle during the -ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked -both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. For the present he -determined not to publish _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and the other poems written -since _Endymion_. He preferred to await the result of Brown's attempt to -get _Otho_ brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success -in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the -meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in -estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold -his friend's name. The great hope of the authors was that Kean would see -an opportunity for himself in the part of Ludolph. In this they were not -disappointed: the play was accepted: but Elliston, the manager, proposing -to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, Keats and Brown -objected to the delay, and about Christmas transferred the offer of their -MS. to Covent Garden, where Macready, under Harris's management, was at -this time beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while -returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped. - -In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which Keats bent his -hopes. "One of my ambitions," he had written to Bailey from Winchester, -"is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has -done in acting." And now, in a letter to Mr Taylor of Nov. 17, he says -that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he -does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he -may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he -conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to -diffuse the colouring of _St Agnes' Eve_ throughout a poem in which -character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." Two or -three such poems would be, he thinks, the best _gradus_ to the _Parnassum -altissimum_ of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment -engaged on a task of a different nature. "As the marvellous is the most -enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been -endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her manage -for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all." The piece to -which Keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the _Cap -and Bells_, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing -of the autumn days immediately following their return to Wentworth Place, -Brown says:-- - - "By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem - in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had not - composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It was to - be published under the feigned authorship of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' and - to bear the title of the _Cap and Bells_, or, which he preferred, the - _Jealousies_. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He wrote it with - the greatest facility; in one instance I remember having copied (for I - copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner[59]." - -Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the most judicious -adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the _Cap and -Bells_ to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly -flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to Keats's nature. As long -as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of -pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable[60], and he -was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. Moreover the spirit of -poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the -spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of -the metrical romances of the Italian Renaissance, and again, with -unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early cantos of _Don -Juan_. It was partly the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great -student of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent Italian -studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron's success, that now -induced Keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. Having already -employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the _ottava rima_ of -the Italians, in his serious poem of _Isabella_, he now, by what seems an -odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave Spenserian -stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. -Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his -choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to -gay with a light hand, and the movement of the _Cap and Bells_ has much of -his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not -a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and -Brown's invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a -fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being -meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all -that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the -emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his -affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the -Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to -weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the -fragment of _St Mark's Eve_ at the beginning of the year,--the tale of an -English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through -the reading of a magic book. With this and other purely fanciful elements -of the story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day. -It was in this year, 1819, that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and -his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject: -and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the -scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. The -references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the _Cap and Bells_ -are general rather than particular, although here and there individual -names and characters are glanced at: as when 'Esquire Biancopany' stands -manifestly, as Mr Forman has pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social -and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. As -Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for -this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the Byronic wit and devilry his -raillery seems but child's play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful -and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in -passages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination -becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and -colour,--but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time. - -Besides his morning task in Brown's company on the _Cap and Bells_, Keats -had other work on hand during this November and December. "In the -evenings," writes Brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate -apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of -_Hyperion_ into the form of a Vision." The result of this attempt, which -has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in Keats's -history. We have seen how, in the previous August, he had grown -discontented with the style and diction of _Hyperion_, as being too -artificial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he took the -poem up again[61], and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly, -it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading, -partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which -were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate the fall of the -Titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision -revealed and interpreted to him by a goddess of the fallen race. The -reader remembers how he had broken off his work on _Hyperion_ at the point -where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with the inspiration of -her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of -mythology he had lately bought[62], he now identifies this Greek -Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being -possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome -was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess -and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove -or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a -slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval -temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet -see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an -image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty, -he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from -her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn. -Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an -irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself -conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn's -overthrow. 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' &c.,--from this point -Keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his _Vision_ the text of the -original _Hyperion_; with alterations which are in almost all cases for -the worse. Neither does the new portion of his work well match the old. -Side by side with impressive passages, it contains others where both -rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more -on single lines and passages, and less on sustained effects. Keats has -indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the -opening of the _Vision_, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps -conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the -priestess when she removes her veils. But the especial interest of the -poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his -mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the -poet's character and lot. When Moneta bids him mount the steps to her -side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish -utterly where he stands. In fact he all but dies before he reaches the -stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the -ordeal:-- - - "None can usurp this height," returned that shade, - "But those to whom the miseries of the world - Are misery, and will not let them rest. - All else who find a haven in the world, - Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, - If by a chance into this fane they come, - Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half." - "Are there not thousands in the world," said I, - Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, - "Who love their fellows even to the death, - Who feel the giant agony of the world, - And more, like slaves to poor humanity, - Labour for mortal good? I sure should see - Other men here, but I am here alone." - "Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," - Rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; - They seek no wonder but the human face, - No music but a happy-noted voice: - They come not here, they have no thought to come; - And thou art here, for thou art less than they. - What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, - To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, - A fever of thyself: think of the earth: - What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? - What haven? Every creature hath its home, - Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, - Whether his labours be sublime or low-- - The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: - Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. - Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, - Such things as thou art are admitted oft - Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, - And suffer'd in these temples--"[63]. - -Tracing the process of Keats's thought through this somewhat obscure -imagery,--the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws -himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is -lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden): -awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with -Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly -above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow -men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to -approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only -on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. And -even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of -common men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the human mission -and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. Almost from the first -dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry -towards-- - - "a nobler life, - Where I may find the agonies, the strife - Of human hearts." - -What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet's lot even -at its best. - - "Only the dreamer venoms all his days, - Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve," - ---through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when this bitter cry -broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before, -when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of -the poetic life:-- - - "These are the living pleasures of the bard, - But richer far posterity's award. - What shall he murmur with his latest breath, - When his proud eye looks through the film of death?"-- - -His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the -spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh. -The wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his -sensations and emotions into pain--at once darkening the shadow of -impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding -instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied -cravings of his passion. In verses at this time addressed, though -doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones -like this:-- - - "Where shall I learn to get my peace again?"-- - - --"O for some sunny spell - To dissipate the shadows of this hell":-- - -or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:-- - - "Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, - Withhold no atom's atom or I die, - Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, - Forget, in the mist of idle misery, - Life's purposes,--the palate of the mind - Losing its gust, and my ambition blind." - -That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does -not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible in the present state of his -fortunes. "However selfishly I may feel," he had written to her some -months earlier, "I am sure I could never act selfishly." The Brawnes on -their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and -independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly -be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats's sufferings, -disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate -comrade Brown. Without understanding the cause, Brown was not slow to -perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances Keats had -given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen -him against troubles of imagination, and that he was not and would not -allow himself to be unhappy. - - "I quickly perceived," writes Brown, "that he was more so than I had - feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, - frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great - uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do - no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding - that word however.... All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge, - was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, - or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend - could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too - thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. - Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, - a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by - accident, and without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be - warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise - never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could - induce him to break his word when once given,--which was a difficulty. - Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional - proof of his rooted misery"[64]. - -Some of the same symptoms were observed by Haydon, and have been described -by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting -another's weakness with his own strength[65]. To his friends in general -Keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice -that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, Severn, at this time -competed for and carried off (December 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of -the Academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for -several years. The subject was Spenser's 'Cave of Despair.' We hear of -Keats flinging out in anger from among a company of elder artists where -the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an -appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture,--adding, however, -parenthetically from his troubled heart, "You had best put me into your -Cave of Despair." In December his letters to his sister make mention -several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made -to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, -that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in -connection with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, George -Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his -wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first -trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of -the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to -England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey, -of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers -from their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, during -which John made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. "He was -not the same being," wrote George, looking back on the time some years -afterwards; "although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, -he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the -reviving custom of venting his griefs." In a letter which the poet wrote -to his sister-in-law while her husband was in England, he attempts to keep -up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls -involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. Of -his work he says nothing, and it is clear from Brown's narrative that -both his morning and his evening task--the _Cap and Bells_ and the -_Vision_--had been dropped some time before this[66], and left in the -fragmentary state in which we possess them. - -George left for Liverpool on Friday Jan. 28. A few days later Keats was -seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set -up in his constitution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which -recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated. - - "One night," writes Brown--it was on the Thursday Feb. 3--"at eleven - o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce - intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible[67]; it - therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the - matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the - outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but - now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and - instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my - request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate - remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On - entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he - slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from my mouth.' - I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the - sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After - regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of - countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know the colour of - that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived in that - colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.' I ran - for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left - him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep." - -Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue -truly. He survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life -was but a life-in-death. How many are there among us to whom such -_lacrymae rerum_ come not home? Happy at least are they whose lives this -curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses -past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,--who know not -what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under Mediterranean -palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest -and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the -usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would -not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering -regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous -prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to -see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a -week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed, -and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, which his -good feelings wrung from him, that under the circumstances he ought to -release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he -became quieter and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he wrote -often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his -men friends: among them one to James Rice, which contains this often -quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:-- - - "I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed - a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering - under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify that - acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had - lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that - illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my - mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive - things in a truer light),--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 super-human fancy." - -The greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, Keats said at another -time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the -literary merits of the Bible he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the -Hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. What he wants to see again, -he writes now further from his sickbed, are 'the simple flowers of our -spring.' And in the course of April, after being nearly two months a -prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as -early as the twenty-fifth of March, we hear of him going into London, to -the private view of Haydon's 'Entry into Jerusalem,' where the painter -tells how he found him and Hazlitt in a corner, 'really rejoicing.' -Keats's friends, in whose minds his image had always been associated with -the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring -themselves to believe but that he would recover. Brown had arranged to -start early in May on a second walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor -actually advised Keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own -state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the smack as far as -Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in -Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the -sake of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer -Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks -during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking -advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive -on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been -strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even -that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin -(meaning begin again) soon on the _Cap and Bells_. But in fact the only -work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight -revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at -last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing -_Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, _Hyperion_, and the _Odes_. Of -the poems written during Keats's twenty months of inspiration from March -1818 to October 1819, none of importance are omitted except the _Eve of St -Mark_, the _Ode on Indolence_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The first -Keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: La -Belle Dame sans Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical _The -Indicator_, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on -May 20, 1820. _Hyperion_, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at -their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original -shape, the poet's friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they -thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came out in the first week -of July. An admirably kind and discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in -the _Indicator_ at the beginning of August[68]: and in the same month -Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_ for the first time broke silence in -Keats's favour. The impression made on the more intelligent order of -readers may be inferred from the remarks of Crabb Robinson in his -_Diaries_ for the following December[69]. "My book has had good success -among the literary people," wrote Keats a few weeks after its appearance, -"and I believe has a moderate sale." - -But had the success been even far greater than it was, Keats was in no -heart and no health for it to cheer him. Passion with lack of hope were -working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards -recovery. The relapse was not long delayed. Fresh haemorrhages occurring on -the 22nd and 23rd of June, he moved from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to -be nursed by the Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here everything -was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but -all in vain: he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards -avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a drive -in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a -flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing -to Fanny Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but -breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself -chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart -is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of -half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. "Hamlet's heart was full of such -misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a nunnery, go, go!'" -Keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, 'a -fever of himself:' and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but -his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his -betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words -that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory[70]. - -Such at this time was Keats's condition that the slightest shock unmanned -him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or -stranger. After he had been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened -on the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note -from Fanny Brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. This -circumstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to -stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to -his old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, would not suffer -this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and -tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some -mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has -told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with -white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic -flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I[71]." Ever since -his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that -a winter in England would be too much for him, and had been trying to -bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to Italy. The Shelleys had -heard through the Gisbornes of Keats's relapse, and Shelley now wrote in -terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come -and take up his residence with them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats -immediately after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain -tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Shelleys' friendship, but as -to the _Cenci_, which had just been sent him, and generally as to -Shelley's and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much -to the purpose to say. - -As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this time made up his -mind to try it, "as a soldier marches up to a battery." His hope was that -Brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend -in the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for Keats's -departure was fast approaching while Brown still remained in ignorance of -his purpose. In the meantime another companion offered himself in the -person of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the -Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with -a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn -accordingly took passage for Naples on board the ship 'Maria Crowther,' -which sailed from London on Sept. 18[72]. Several of the friends who loved -Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among them Mr -Taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase -for L100 of the copyright of _Endymion_. As soon as the ill news of his -health reached Brown in Scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way -south, and for that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in the -Thames on the same evening as the 'Maria Crowther' sailed: so that the two -friends lay on that night within hail of one another off Gravesend -unawares. - -The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn was struck by his -vigour of appetite and apparent cheerfulness. The fever of travel and -change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, -and in Keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to -those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to -raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time -afterwards. Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten -days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats -landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board -ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter -confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever -confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his -passion, he says 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 wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these -pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these -pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, -are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever." - -On the night when Keats wrote these words (Sept. 28) Brown was staying -with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly -missed seeing each other once more. The ship putting to sea again, still -with adverse winds, there came next to Keats that day of momentary calm -and lightening of the spirit of which Severn has left us the record, and -the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of -his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near -Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of -which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one -initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same -night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well; -placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a -_Lover's Complaint_, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of Shakespeare's -poems which had been given him by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and -under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and -feeling:-- - - "Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 cold 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 stedfast, still unchangeable, - Pillow'd 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." - -These were Keats's last verses. With the single exception of the sonnet -beginning 'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,' composed -probably immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only -love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no -death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty -and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. - -Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent -storm in the Bay of Biscay; and Severn waking at night, and finding the -water rushing through their cabin, called out to Keats "half fearing he -might be dead," and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first -line of Arne's long-popular song from _Artaxerxes_--'Water parted from the -sea.' As the storm abated Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _Don -Juan_, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and -presently flung the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed: -after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the -dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in -order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage -of over four weeks, the 'Maria Crowther' arrived in the Bay of Naples, and -was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says Keats, he -summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole -course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was -among his fellow-passengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of -cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly -preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his -own. He admits as much in writing from Naples harbour to Mrs Brawne: and -in the same letter says, "O what an account I could give you of the Bay of -Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a -spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly." The effort he -constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world -of colour and classic beauty about him, partly imposed on Severn; but in a -letter he wrote to Brown from Naples on Nov. 1, soon after their landing, -his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:-- - - "I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh God! God! God! - Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me - like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my - head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear - her.... Oh Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me - that the human heart is capable of so much misery." - -At Naples Keats and Severn stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and received -much kindness and hospitality from a brother of Miss Cotterill's who was -there to meet her. The political state and servile temper of the -people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms -imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous -summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the -theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance -that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He had -received there another letter from Shelley, who since he last wrote had -read the _Lamia_ volume, and was full of generous admiration for -_Hyperion_. Shelley now warmly renewed his invitation to Keats to come to -Pisa. But his and Severn's plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive -thither (apparently in the second week of November) Keats suffered -seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in -the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered -for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which -Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di -Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinita -dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were -left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and -at first they were ill served by the _trattoria_ from which they got their -meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the -dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says -Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first cares was to get a -piano, since nothing soothed Keats's pain so much as music. For a while -the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of -seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these -alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian -close by. The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the -air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn's -absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In -their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline -Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but -not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who -was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them -change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they -would ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working among the -ruins. - -It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at Rome began reading -a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to -himself:-- - - "Misera me! sollievo a me non resta - Altro che 'l pianto, _ed il pianto e delitto_." - -Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful. -His thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on -the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and -wrote encouragingly to his friends in England; and on Nov. 30 Keats -himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less despondent than before. But -suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. On Dec. 10 came a -relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Haemorrhage followed haemorrhage -on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes -the most piteous and distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his -friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to -have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn's -refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his -ardent imagination and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of pain in -Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but -above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would -bring upon his friend. "He explained to me the exact procedure of his -gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon -the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued -attendance on him." Severn gently persisting in refusal, Keats for a while -fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example -of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. In -religion Keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting -Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to -and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the -behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the -power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to -him from Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, strove to pass the -remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy. - -By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, -partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of -the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to -combat it. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then -were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous -kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr -Ewing. At one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in -danger of actual destitution, till a remittance from Mr Taylor arrived -just in time to save them. The devotion and resource of Severn were -infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium -or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and -his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with "beating -about in the tempest of his mind;" and once and again some fresh -remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, -would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the -first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, -one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his -companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite reading was -still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked -Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for -nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, -himself from thoughts of fame. "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing -over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he -gave the words for his epitaph:--"here lies one whose name was writ in -water." Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to -speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual -question to the doctor when he came in was, "Doctor, when will this -posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned to ask it neither -physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at -all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing -unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate to the -last, "his generous concern for me," says Severn, "in my isolated position -at Rome was one of his greatest cares." His response to kindness was -irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with -him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to -fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. "To remedy this -one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a -lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be -conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found -the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while -doubting suddenly cried out, 'Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy -lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'" And again "Poor Keats has -me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens -his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close -gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep." - -Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the -watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations -to write them down. Life held out for two months and a half after the -relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing -near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes -Severn, "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." Three days later his body was -carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his -story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his -sake and Shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English race -for ever. It was but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in -their last resting-place beside his friend[73]. - - - - -CHAPTER IX. - - Character and Genius. - - -The touching circumstances of Keats's illness and death at Rome aroused -naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous -mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy -was Shelley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics -had contributed to Keats's sufferings, and believing that they had killed -him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of -passionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that -double inspiration Shelley wrote,-- - - "And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres." - -As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, _Adonais_ is unsurpassed -in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and -the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is -perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley's art: while -its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most -lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the -elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his -character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the -same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than -that reached by Shelley, in the well-known stanza of _Don Juan_. In regard -to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. -When the _Edinburgh_ praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the -Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:--"No more Keats, I -entreat:--flay him alive;--if some of you don't, I must skin him myself." -Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he -turns against the latter, and cries:--"I would not be the person who wrote -that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world." In the -_Don Juan_ passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at -the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath. - -Taken together with the notion of 'Johnny Keats' to which _Blackwood_ and -the _Quarterly_ had previously given currency, the _Adonais_ and the _Don -Juan_ passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of -Keats's character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction -had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was 'as -like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,' did anything effectual to set his -memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the -end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been -quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography -George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but -against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the -hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had -unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication -between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats's -friends in England took George's part, disposed under the circumstances -to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to -superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his -want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his -occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at -one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse -collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them. -The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary -skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the -poet's friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects -not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats's -death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,--the -Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us -all,--and with help from nearly all Keats's surviving friends, and by the -grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet -in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every -student is familiar. - -Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can -with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, -inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with -pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for -pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 'exquisite sense of -the luxurious': and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which -he describes as his 'horrid morbidity of temperament.' The greater his -credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and -that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued -him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way -when he speaks of the 'violence of his temperament, continually smothered -up.' Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during -the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but -that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such -generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct -and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely -better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, -indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the -weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when -the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, -as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,--not indeed, so far as -we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of -the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of -trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of -self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, -he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences -preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his -fortunes justified. - -In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for -manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his -friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have -heard little in this history[74], wrote while the poet lay dying: "Keats -must get himself again, Severn, if but for me--I cannot afford to lose -him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats." The following -is from a letter of Brown written also during his illness:--"he is -present to me every where and at all times,--he now seems sitting here at -my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I -never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[75]." Elsewhere, -speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:--"while I waited on -him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance -of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as -absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like -this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me[76]:" and we know in fact how -the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's -death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord -Houghton's book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to -thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius I did not, -and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the _Man_[77]." The -points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high -good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for -many. "He had a soul of noble integrity," says Bailey: "and his common -sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, -in the best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of -sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very -intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, -requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it -nothing,--but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to -friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when -genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the -ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, -then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what -his companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest friend," cries -Reynolds, "the most loveable associate,--the deepest listener to the -griefs and distresses of all around him,--'That ever lived in this tide of -times[78].'" To the same effect Haydon:--"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 had a -kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who -wanted it." And again Bailey:-- - - "With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John - Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one - particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his - letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his - conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor - frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man - I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any - act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he - rose into sudden and animated indignation[79]." - -Lastly, "he had no fears of self," says George Keats, "through -interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and -without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, -defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and -purse." - -In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must assert his own -superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over -Keats's dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, -idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks of the poet's -"want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never -for two days did he know his own intentions," his criticism is deserving -of more attention. This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in -Keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He -acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." What he means is -no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in -regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in -regard to himself. "The Celtic instability," a reader may perhaps surmise -who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. Whether the quality -was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar -complexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression in character -of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, -namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as -was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the -order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own -personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised -clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility -to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical -consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. - - "As to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(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. - 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.... 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." - -"Even now," he says on another occasion, "I am perhaps not speaking from -myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live." Keats was often -impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. "I would call the head -and top of those who have a proper self," he says, "men of power": and it -is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, -that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of -thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent -of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all -intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself -the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of -what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:-- - - "For the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic - passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in - the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man - does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and - deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, - and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry - that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to - put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and - unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul." - -This is but one of many passages in which Keats proclaims the necessity, -for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His -critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise -of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the -foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware -that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, -of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its -elements existed:--"I have loved," as he says, "the principle of beauty in -all things." His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean, -including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the -soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long -enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their -manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit -of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the -faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to -divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the -Middle Age,--would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the -mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to -illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life? - -My belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the -height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief period between -its first effervescence and its exhaustion,--from the glowing humanity of -his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of -his own consciousness and his friends' experience, he was accustomed to -live in the lives of others,--from the gleams of true greatness of mind -which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and -pleasantry of his familiar letters,--from all our evidences, in a word, as -to what he was as well as from what he did,--I think it probable that by -power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shaksperean -spirit that has lived since Shakspere; the true Marcellus, as his first -biographer has called him, of the realm of English song; and that in his -premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something -like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living -successors, as Lord Tennyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have -formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the -banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really -adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? In a final -estimate of any writer's work, we must take into account not what he might -have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats, -the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with -fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we -can think, indeed, of the pathos of _Isabella_, but of that alone, as -equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the _Hymn to Pan_ -and the _Ode to a Nightingale_, with the glow of romance colour in _St -Agnes' Eve_, the weirdness of romance sentiment in _La Belle Dame Sans -Merci_, the conflict of elemental force with fate in _Hyperion_, the -revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the _Ode on a Grecian -Urn_ and the fragment of an _Ode to Maia_. - -It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who -have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence -been operative. First on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling and -informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and -also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. And -secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of -execution--a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never -cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he -speaks of 'loading every rift of a subject with ore.' We may define it as -the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of -phrase. A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that -tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline,-- - - "But to her heart her heart was voluble, - Paining with eloquence her balmy side." - -The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is -the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every -touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line -describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of -suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the -emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on -ourselves. In so far as Keats has taught other poets really to write like -this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,--but not so when -for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of -brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. The first -considerable writer among Keats's successors on whom his example took -effect was Hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. The -dominant poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly -influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed -the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal degrees. After or -together with Coleridge, Keats has also contributed most, among English -writers, to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group. -Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the -Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between -the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, -of our own day. - -Such, I think, is Keats's historic place in English literature. What his -place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned -from their own lips. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, -but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines -immortally. - - -THE END. - - - - -APPENDIX. - - -p. 2, note 1. As to the exact date of Keats's birth the evidence is -conflicting. He was christened at St Botolph's, Bishopsgate, Dec. 18, -1795, and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register (which I am -informed is in the handwriting of the rector, Dr Conybeare) is a note -stating that he was born Oct. 31. The date is given accordingly without -question by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. I. p. xlviii). But it seems -certain that Keats himself and his family believed his birthday to have -been Oct. 29. Writing on that day in 1818, Keats says, "this is my -birthday." Brown (in Houghton MSS.) gives the same day, but only as on -hearsay from a lady to whom Keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as -to the year. Lastly, in the proceedings in _Rawlings v. Jennings_, Oct. 29 -is again given as his birthday, in the affidavit of one Anne Birch, who -swears that she knew his father and mother intimately. The entry in the St -Botolph's register is probably the authority to be preferred.--Lower -Moorfields was the space now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the London -Institution, together with the east side of Finsbury Pavement.--The births -of the younger brothers are in my text given rightly for the first time, -from the parish registers of St Leonard's, Shoreditch; where they were all -three christened in a batch on Sept. 24, 1801. The family were at that -date living in Craven Street. - - -p. 2, note 2. Brown (Houghton MSS.) says simply that Thomas Keats was a -'native of Devon.' His daughter, Mrs Llanos, tells me she remembers -hearing as a child that he came from the Land's End. Persons of the name -are still living in Plymouth. - - -p. 5, note 2. The total amount of the funds paid into Court by the -executors under Mr Jennings's will (see Preface, p. viii) was L13160. -19_s._ 5_d._ - - -p. 11, note 1, and p. 70, note 1. Of the total last mentioned, there came -to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other legatees who -predeceased her) sums amounting to L9343. 2_s._ In the Chancery -proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by Mrs Jennings for the -benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but only its general purport; -whence it appears that the sum she made over to Messrs Sandell and Abbey -in trust for them amounted approximately to L8000, and included all the -reversions fallen or still to fall in as above mentioned. The balance it -is to be presumed she retained for her own support (she being then 74). - - -p. 17, note 1. The following letter written by Mr Abbey to Mr Taylor the -publisher, under April 18, 1821, soon after the news of Keats's death -reached England, speaks for itself. The letter is from Woodhouse MSS. B. - - "Sir, - - I beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the 30th ult. - respecting the late Mr Jno. Keats. - - I am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my - controul, and acted contrary to my advice, I cannot interfere with his - affairs. - - I am, Sir, - Yr. mo. Hble St., - RICHD. ABBEY." - - -p. 34, note 1. The difficulty of determining the exact date and place of -Keats's first introduction to Hunt arises as follows.--Cowden Clarke -states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in Leigh Hunt's -cottage at Hampstead. Hunt in his _Autobiography_ says it was 'in the -spring of the year 1816' that he went to live at Hampstead in the cottage -in question. Putting these two statements together, we get the result -stated as probable in the text. But on the other hand there is the -strongly Huntian character of Keats's _Epistle_ to G. F. Mathew, dated -November 1815, which would seem to indicate an earlier acquaintance (see -p. 31). Unluckily Leigh Hunt himself has darkened counsel on the point by -a paragraph inserted in the last edition of his _Autobiography_, as -follows:--(Pref. no. 7, p. 257) "It was not at Hampstead that I first saw -Keats. It was at York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote -part of the _Indicator_, and he resided with me while in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the -curious in such things, among whom I am one." The student must not be -misled by this remark of Hunt's, which is evidently only due to a slip of -memory. It is quite true that Keats lived with Hunt in Mortimer Street, -Kentish Town, during part of July and August 1820 (see page 197): and that -before moving to that address Hunt had lived for more than a year (from -the autumn of 1818 to the spring of 1820) at 8, New Road. But that Keats -was intimate with him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact -living not in London at all but at the Vale of Health, is abundantly -certain. - - -p. 37, note 1. Cowden Clarke tells how Keats once calling and finding him -fallen asleep over Chaucer, wrote on the blank space at the end of the -_Floure and the Leafe_ the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a -little copse.' Reynolds on reading it addressed to Keats the following -sonnet of his own, which is unpublished (Houghton MSS.), and has a certain -biographical interest. It is dated Feb. 27, 1817. - - "Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, - Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed; - They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed - The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves, - O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves - Songs that shall make the age be nature-led, - And win that coronal for thy young head - Which time's strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne'er bereaves. - Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way, - Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung; - Be thou companion of the summer day, - Roaming the fields and older woods among:-- - So shall thy muse be ever in her May, - And thy luxuriant spirit ever young." - - -p. 45, note 1. Woodhouse MSS. A. contains the text of the first draft in -question, with some preliminary words of Woodhouse as follows:-- - -"The lines at p. 36 of Keats's printed poems are altered from a copy of -verses written by K. at the request of his brother George, and by the -latter sent as a valentine to the lady. The following is a copy of the -lines as originally written:-- - - Hadst thou lived in days of old, - Oh what wonders had been told - Of thy lively dimpled face, - And thy footsteps full of grace: - Of thy hair's luxurious darkling, - Of thine eyes' expressive sparkling. - And thy voice's swelling rapture, - Taking hearts a ready capture. - Oh! if thou hadst breathed then, - Thou hadst made the Muses ten. - Could'st thou wish for lineage higher - Than twin sister of Thalia? - At least for ever, ever more - Will I call the Graces four." - -Here follow lines 41--68 of the poem as afterwards published: and in -conclusion:-- - - "Ah me! whither shall I flee? - Thou hast metamorphosed me. - Do not let me sigh and pine, - Prythee be my valentine. - 14 Feby. 1816." - - -p. 47, note 1. Mrs Procter's memory, however, betrayed her when she -informed Lord Houghton that the colour of Keats's eyes was blue. That they -were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence alike of C. C. Clarke, -of George Keats and his wife (as transmitted by their daughter Mrs Speed -to her son), and from the various portraits painted from life and -posthumously by Severn and Hilton. Mrs Procter calls his hair auburn: Mrs -Speed had heard from her father and mother that it was 'golden red,' which -may mean nearly the same thing: I have seen a lock in the possession of -Sir Charles Dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have -looked gold in the lights. Bailey in Houghton MSS. speaks of it as -extraordinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his -head was like laying it 'on the rich plumage of a bird.' An evidently -misleading description of Keats's general aspect is that of Coleridge when -he describes him as a 'loose, slack, not well-dressed youth.' The sage -must have been drawing from his inward eye: those intimate with Keats -being of one accord as to his appearance of trim strength and 'fine -compactness of person.' Coleridge's further mention of his hand as -shrunken and old-looking seems exact. - - -p. 78, note 1. The isolated expressions of Keats on this subject, which -alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him somewhat unjustly to -the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. Fairness seems to require -that the whole passage in which he deals with it should be given. The -passage occurs in a letter to Bailey written from Hampstead and dated -Oct. 8, 1817, of which only a fragment was printed by Lord Houghton, and -after him by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. III. p. 82, no. xvi.). - -"I went to Hunt's and Haydon's who live now neighbours.--Shelley was -there--I know nothing about anything in this part of the world--every Body -seems at Loggerheads. There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in -statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room criticizing -every head most unmercifully--There's Horace Smith tired of Hunt--'The Web -of our life is of mingled yarn.'... I am quite disgusted with literary -men, and will never know another except Wordsworth--no not even Byron. -Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known -each other many years--now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours. -Haydon says to me, Keats, don't show your lines to Hunt on any account, or -he will have done half for you--so it appears Hunt wishes it to be -thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him I was getting -on to the completion of 4000 lines--Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me -they would have been 7000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he -to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on the -subject from some Lady, which contains a caution to me, thro' him, on this -subject. Now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?" - - -p. 83, note 1. See Haydon, _Autobiography_, vol. I. pp. 384-5. The letter -containing Keats's account of the same entertainment was printed for the -first time by Speed, _Works_, vol. I. p. i. no. 1, where it is dated -merely 'Featherstone Buildings, Monday.' (At Featherstone Buildings lived -the family of Charles Wells.) In Houghton MSS. I find a transcript of the -same letter in the hand of Mr Coventry Patmore, with a note in Lord -Houghton's hand: "These letters I did not print. R. M. M." In the -transcript is added in a parenthesis after the weekday the date 5 April, -1818: but this is a mistake; the 5th of April in that year was not a -Monday: and the contents of Keats's letter itself, as well as a comparison -with Haydon's words in his _Autobiography_, prove beyond question that it -was written on Monday, the 5th of January. - - -p. 87, note 1. Similar expressions about the Devonshire weather occur in -nearly all Keats's letters written thence in the course of March and -April. The letter to Bailey containing the sentences quoted in my text is -wrongly printed both by Lord Houghton and Mr Forman under date Sept. -1818. I find the same date given between brackets at the head of the same -letter as transcribed in Woodhouse MSS. B., proving that an error was -early made either in docketing or copying it. The contents of the letter -leave no doubt as to its real date. The sentences quoted prove it to have -been written not in autumn but in spring. It contains Keats's reasons both -for going down to join his brother Tom at Teignmouth, and for failing to -visit Bailey at Oxford on the way: now in September Keats was not at -Teignmouth at all, and Bailey had left Oxford for good, and was living at -his curacy in Cumberland (see p. 122). Moreover there is an allusion by -Keats himself to this letter in another which he wrote the next day to -Reynolds, whereby its true date can be fixed with precision as Friday, -March 13. - - -p. 112, note 1. The following unpublished letter of Keats to Mr Taylor -(from Woodhouse MSS. B.) has a certain interest, both in itself and as -fixing the date of his departure for the North:-- - - "Sunday evening, - - "My dear Taylor, - - I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health till my - return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, au - revoir, God keep us all well! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother Tom - will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for - him, since I still keep those you lent me a year ago. If I am - overweening, you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall - write, do send him some you think will be most amusing--he will be - careful in returning them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am - ashamed to catalogue these messages. There is but one more, which - ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs - Reynolds one of my books bound. As I cannot write in it let the - opposite" [a leaf with the name and 'from the author,' notes - Woodhouse] "be pasted in 'prythee. Remember me to Percy St.--Tell - Hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged - on a history piece to his own content. And tell Dewint I shall become - a disputant on the landscape. Bow for me very genteely to Mrs D. or - she will not admit your diploma. Remember me to Hessey, saying I hope - he'll _Carey_ his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. Adieu! - - Your sincere friend, - JOHN O'GROTS. - - June 22, 1818. Hampstead" [The date and place are added by Woodhouse - in red ink, presumably from the post-mark]. - - -p. 120, note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton -Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between 'All the magic of the -place' and the next line, 'So saying, with a spirit's glance,' and has -proposed, by way of improvement, to read 'with a spirit's grace'. I find -the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued -thus in pencil after the word 'place'. - - "'Tis now free to stupid face, - To cutters, and to fashion boats, - To cravats and to petticoats:-- - The great sea shall war it down, - For its fame shall not be blown - At each farthing Quadrille dance. - So saying with a spirit's glance - He dived"--. - -Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he -well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his -correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any -indication of the hiatus so caused. - - -p. 128, note 1. Lord Houghton says, "On returning to the south, Keats -found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at -Teignmouth." It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was -made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of -Keats's March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, p. 225. - - -p. 138, note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his -knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been -mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the -capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at -his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the -provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband's -death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings -himself had left them by will; one of L1000 direct; the other, of a -capital to yield L50 a year, in reversion after their mother's death (see -p. 5). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and -brought L1550. 7_s._ 10_d._ worth of that security at the price at which -it then stood. L1666. 13_s_. 4_d._ worth of the same stock was farther -purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of L50 -a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances -Rawlings during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments -lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to -whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the -first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each, -with its accumulations. Two years afterwards Fanny Keats received in like -manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers -John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being -L3375. 5_s._ 7_d._, and to George L1147. 5_s._ 1_d._ It was a part of the -ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these -funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors -at the time when he most needed them. - - -p. 148, note 1. Landor's letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a -presentation copy of the _Life and Letters_, in 1848, begins -characteristically as follows:-- - - "Bath, Aug. 29. - - Dear Milnes, - - On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find - your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an - editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, - excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of - the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed - overcome so great a difficulty as Shelley in his _Cenci_, nor united - so many powers of the mind as Southey in _Kehama_--but there is an - effluence of power and light pervading all his work, and a freshness - such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.--" - - -p. 152, note 1. I think there is no doubt that _Hyperion_ was begun by -Keats beside his brother's sickbed in September or October 1818, and that -it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 'plunging into -abstract images,' and finding a 'feverous relief' in the 'abstractions' of -poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as -the translation of Ronsard's sonnet, _Nature ornant Cassandre_, which is -the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown -says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after -Tom's death in December--"It was then he wrote _Hyperion_"; but these -words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already -begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to -the poem by name, and says he has been 'going on a little' with it: and on -the 14th of February, 1819, says 'I have not gone on with _Hyperion_.' -During the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the _Odes_, and -whether he at the same time wrote any more of _Hyperion_ we cannot tell. -It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as -in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, -_Works_, vol. II. p. 143) that "it contains 2 books and 1/2--(about 900 -lines in all):" the actual length of the piece as published being 883 -lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before -revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after -nearly a year's interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him -in a letter from Winchester in August or September, "I have also been -writing parts of my _Hyperion_," this must not be taken as meaning that he -has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing -them,--like _Isabella_ and the _Eve of St Agnes_, which he mentions at the -same time,--since the date of his last letter. - - -p. 164, note 1. The version of _The Eve of St Agnes_ given in Woodhouse -MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the -original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all -probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see p. 133). The -readings of the MS. in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton -Forman (_Works_, vol. II. p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the -poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have, -from Woodhouse's transcript, the following table of the changes in those -stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:-- - -Stanza I.: line 1, for "chill" stood "cold": line 4, for "was" stood -"were": line 7, for "from" stood "in": line 9 (and Stanza II., line 1), -for "prayer" stood "prayers". Stanza III.: line 7, for "went" stood -"turn'd": line 8, for "Rough" stood "Black". After stanza III. stood the -following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed. - - 4. - - But there are ears may hear sweet melodies, - And there are eyes to brighten festivals, - And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies, - And many a lip that for the red wine calls-- - Follow, then follow to the illumined halls, - Follow me youth--and leave the eremite-- - Give him a tear--then trophied bannerals - And many a brilliant tasseling of light - Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night. - -Stanza V.; line 1, for "revelry" stood "revellers": lines 3-5, for-- - - "Numerous as shadows haunting fairily - The brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay - Of old romance. These let us wish away,"-- - -stood the following:-- - - "Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs, - The muse should never make the spirit gay; - Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away." - - -p. 166, note 1. At what precise date _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ was -written is uncertain. As of the _Ode to Melancholy_, Keats makes no -mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse MSS. A. it is -dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts before or while Keats was -on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in that year, is I think certain -both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence -among them of _Lamia_ and the _Ode to Autumn_. Hence it is to the first -half of 1819 that _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ must belong, like so much of -the poet's best work besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the -theme was already in his mind when he composed the _Eve of St Agnes_ in -January. Mr Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have -been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (_Works_, -vol. II. p. 357, note). - - -p. 186, note 1. The relation of _Hyperion, A Vision_, to the original -_Hyperion_ is a vital point in the history of Keats's mind and art, and -one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the error is -somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the _Vision_ is in -Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_, ed. 1848, Vol. I. p. 244. Having then -doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of Brown's MS. memoir quoted in -the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following -his account of _Hyperion_:--"He afterwards published it as a fragment, and -still later re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally -unfinished." When eight years later the same editor printed the piece for -the first time (in _Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society_, Vol. III. -1856-7) from the MS. given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown's -account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: "Is it the original sketch -out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the -commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? I have no external evidence -to decide this question:" and further,--"the problem of the priority of -the two poems--both fragments, and both so beautiful--may afford a wide -field for ingenious and critical conjecture." Ten years later again, when -he brought out the second edition of the _Life and Letters_, Lord Houghton -had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing -the piece in his Appendix as 'Another Version,' says in his text (p. 206) -"on reconsideration, I have no doubt that it was the first draft." -Accordingly it is given as 'an earlier version' in Mr W. M. Rossetti's -edition of 1872, as 'the first version' in Lord Houghton's own edition of -1876; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by -Messrs Buxton Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of -_Hyperion_ to the _Vision_ no doubt at first sight suggested the -conclusion to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In -the mean time at least two good critics, Mr W. B. Scott and Mr. R. -Garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the _Vision_ was not a -first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his -powers: an opinion in which Mr Garnett was confirmed by his recollection -of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse (see above, -Preface, p. v, and W. T. Arnold, _Works_ &c. p. xlix, note). Brown's -words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen -were right. They are confirmed from another side by Woodhouse MSS. A, -which contains the copy of a real early draft of _Hyperion_. In this copy -the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in -pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several -books of the poem as printed). - -BOOK I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines-- - - "Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief, - Sat moulting his weak plumage, never more - To be restored or soar against the sun; - While his three sons upon Olympus stood." - -In line 30, for "stay'd Ixion's wheel" stood "eased Ixion's toil". In line -48, for "tone" stood "tune". In line 76, for "gradual" stood "sudden". In -line 102, after the word "Saturn," stood the cancelled words-- - - "What dost think? - Am I that same? O Chaos!" - -In line 156, for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like mist." -In line 189, for "Savour of poisonous brass" stood "A poison-feel of -brass." In line 200 for "When earthquakes jar their battlements and -towers" stood "When an earthquake hath shook their city towers." After -line 205 stood the cancelled line "Most like a rose-bud to a fairy's -lute." In line 209, for "And like a rose" stood "Yes, like a rose." In -line 268, for "Suddenly" stood "And, sudden." - -BOOK II. In line 128, for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." In line 134 for -"starry Uranus" stood "starr'd Uranus" (some friend doubtless called -Keats's attention to the false quantity). - -BOOK III. After line 125 stood the cancelled lines:-- - - "Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain - Gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears - Gush luscious with no sob; or more severe." - -In line 126, for "most like" stood "more like." - -In these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the -student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that -where a corrected passage occurs again in the _Vision_, it in every case -corresponds to the printed _Hyperion_, and not to the draft of the poem -preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it certain that the -_Vision_ was not a first version of _Hyperion_, but a recast of the poem -as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after its first composition. -Taken together with the statement of Brown, which is perfectly explicit as -to time, place, and circumstances, and the corresponding statement of -Woodhouse as recollected by Mr Garnett, the proof is from all sides -absolute: and the 'first version' theory must disappear henceforward from -editions of and commentaries on our poet. - - -p. 193, note 2. A more explicit refutation of Haydon's account was given, -some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see Preface, no. 10), -not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from -general knowledge of the poet's character:-- - -"I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which -that ill-ordered being, Haydon, the artist, left behind him in his 'Diary' -respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, John Keats" ... -"Haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not -contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical -antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against -him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and -trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in -sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his -claret. In the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have -not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of -him Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as -could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic expenses never -would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, I never -perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence." - - -p. 198, note 1. In Medwin's _Life of Shelley_ (1847), pp. 89-92, are some -notices of Keats communicated to the writer by Fanny Brawne (then Mrs -Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his 'kind correspondent.' Medwin's -carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly -casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but I think an -attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. 91, which discusses Mr -Finch's account of Keats's death, leaves no doubt that it continues in -substance the quotation previously begun from Mrs Lindon. "That his -sensibility," so runs the text, "was most acute, is true, and his passions -were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is -implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn -on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only -by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his -friends. Violence such as the letter" [of Mr Finch] "describes, was quite -foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting -England, I saw him every day", [this would be true of Fanny Brawne from -Oct. 1819 to Sept. 1820, if we except the Kentish Town period in the -summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] "I -often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not -hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, -much less a violent one, to any human being." The above passage has been -overlooked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as -serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman -he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to Dilke so -often quoted. - - - - -INDEX. - - - Abbey, Mr Richard, 11, 17, 70, 77, 138, 144, 192. - - _Adonais_ (Shelley's), 209, 210. - - _Adventures of a younger Son_ (Trelawney's), 75. - - Alfieri, 205. - - _Alfred, The_, 124. - - _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Burton's), 167. - - _Antiquary_ (Scott's), 115. - - _Apollo, Ode to_, 21-22. - - _Autumn, Ode to_, 177. - - - Bailey, Benjamin, 75, 76, 77, 122, 213, 214. - - Beattie, 21. - - _Biographia Literaria_ (Coleridge's), 64. - - Boccaccio, 148. - - Bonaparte, Pauline, Princess Borghese, 204. - - Brawne, Miss Fanny, 131 seq., 180-181, 197, 198. - - _Britannia's Pastorals_ (Browne's), 31. - - Brown, Charles, 13, 73, 111 seq., 128, 143 seq., 181, 200, 210. - - Browne, 31. - - Browning, Robert, 218. - - Burnet, 10. - - Byron, 1, 19, 65, 210; - Sonnet to, 22. - - - Canterbury, 71. - - _Cap and Bells_, 183 seq. - - Castlereagh, 25. - - _Champion, The_, 82. - - Chatterton, 157, 158; - Sonnet to, 22. - - Chaucer, 28. - - Chichester, 133. - - Clarke, Cowden, 3, 8, 12, 22, 23, 72, 84. - - Clarke, Rev. John, 4. - - 'Cockaigne, King of,' 121. - - _Cockney School of Poetry_ (Articles in _Blackwood's Magazine_), 77, - 121 seq. - - Coleridge, 16, 25, 26, 33, 64. - - Cooper, Astley, 18. - - Cotterill, Miss, 202, 203. - - Cox, Miss Charlotte, 130. - - - _Dante_ (Cary's), 113. - - _Death_, Stanzas on, 21; - Keats' contemplation of, 140; - longing for, 200. - - De Quincey, 26. - - Devonshire, 87. - - _Dictionary_ (Lempriere's), 10. - - Dilke, 73, 210. - - Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 73, 128, 135. - - _Don Juan_ (Byron's), 184, 202, 210. - - Dryden, 29, 30, 53. - - - Edmonton, 5, 6, 11, 14, 20. - - Eldon, 25. - - Elton, Lieutenant, 204. - - Emancipation, Literary, 63-64. - - _Endymion_, 66, 68, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86, 91; - Keats' low opinion of the poem, 91; - its beauties and defects, 91, 106-109; - Drayton's and Fletcher's previous treatment of the subject, 94-95; - Keats' unclassical manner of treatment, 96; - its one bare circumstance, 87; - scenery of the poem, 97; - its quality of nature-interpretation, 98; - its love passages, 100; - comparison of description with a similar one in _Richard III._, 103; - its lyrics, 104-106; - appreciation of the lyrics a test of true relish for poetry, 106; - its rhythm and music, 109; - Keats' own preface the best criticism of the poem, 110. - - Enfield, 4, 12. - - _Epistles_, their tributes to the conjoined pleasures of literature and - friendship, 53; - ungrammatical slips in, 54; - characteristic specimens of, 54-55. - - _Epithalamium_ (Spenser's), 12. - - _Eve of St Agnes_, its simple theme, 160; - its ease and directness of construction, 161; - its unique charm, 163. - - _Eve of St Mark_, contains Keats' impressions of three Cathedral towns, - 164; - its pictures, 164; - the legend, 164; - its pictorial brilliance, 165; - its influence on later English poetry, 165. - - _Examiner, The_ (Leigh Hunt's), 25. - - - _Faerie Queene_ (Spenser's), 12, 13, 35. - - _Faithful Shepherdess_ (Fletcher's), 95. - - _Fanny, Lines to_, 134. - - _Feast of the Poets_ (Leigh Hunt's), 32. - - Fletcher, 95. - - _Foliage_ (Leigh Hunt's), 73. - - - Genius, births of, 1. - - _Gisborne, Letter to Maria_ (Shelley's), 30. - - Goethe, 154. - - _Grasshopper and Cricket_, 35. - - Gray, 113. - - Greece, Keats' love of, 58, 77, 154. - - _Guy Mannering_ (Scott's), 115. - - - Hammond, Mr, 11, 14. - - Hampstead, 72, 77. - - Haslam, William, 45, 212 (note). - - Haydon, 3, 40, 65, 68, 78, 137, 138, 191, 214. - - Hazlitt, William, 83, 84. - - _History of his own Time_ (Burnet's), 10. - - Holmes, Edward, 8. - - _Holy Living and Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor's), 206. - - _Homer, On first looking into Chapman's_ (Sonnet), 23-24. - - Hood, 219. - - _Hope_, address to, 21. - - Horne, R. H., 11. - - Houghton, Lord, 75, 211-213. - - Hunt, John, 25. - - Hunt, Leigh, 22, 24, 25, 32, 35, 39, 49, 51, 68, 72, 78, 196. - - _Hyperion_, 129, 133, 144; - its purpose, 152; - one of the grandest poems of our language, 157; - the influences of _Paradise Lost_ on it, 158; - its blank verse compared with Milton's, 158; - its elemental grandeur, 160; - remodelling of it, 185 seq.; - description of the changes, 186-187; - special interest of the poem, 187. - - - _Imitation of Spenser_ (Keats' first lines), 14, 20. - - _Indolence, Ode on_, 174-175. - - _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, 86; - source of its inspiration, 148; - minor blemishes, 149; - its Italian metre, 149; - its conspicuous power and charm, 149; - description of its beauties, 151. - - Isle of Wight, 67. - - - Jennings, Mrs, 5, 11. - - Jennings, Capt. M. J., 7. - - Joseph and his Brethren (Wells'), 45. - - - Kean, 81. - - Keats, John, various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224; - birth, 2; - education at Enfield, 4; - death of his father, 5; - school-life, 5-9; - his studious inclinations, 10; - death of his mother, 10; - leaves school at the age of fifteen, 11; - is apprenticed to a surgeon, 11; - finishes his school-translation of the _AEneid_, 12; - reads Spenser's _Epithalamium_ and _Faerie Queene_, 12; - his first attempts at composition, 13; - goes to London and walks the hospitals, 14; - his growing passion for poetry, 15; - appointed dresser at Guy's Hospital, 16; - his last operation, 16; - his early life in London, 18; - his early poems, 20 seq.; - his introduction to Leigh Hunt, 24; - Hunt's great influence over him, 26 seq.; - his acquaintance with Shelley, 38; - his other friends, 40-45; - personal characteristics, 47-48; - goes to live with his brothers in the Poultry, 48; - publication of his first volume of poems, 65; - retires to the Isle of Wight, 66; - lives at Carisbrooke, 67; - changes to Margate, 68; - money troubles, 70; - spends some time at Canterbury, 71; - receives first payment in advance for _Endymion_, 71; - lives with his two brothers at Hampstead, 71; - works steadily at _Endymion_, 71-72; - makes more friends, 73; - writes part of _Endymion_ at Oxford, 76; - his love for his sister Fanny, 77; - stays at Burford Bridge, 80; - goes to the 'immortal dinner,' 82; - he visits Devonshire, 87; - goes on a walking tour in Scotland with Charles Brown, 113; - crosses over to Ireland, 116; - returns to Scotland and visits Burns' country, 118; - sows there the seeds of consumption, 120; - returns to London, 120; - is attacked in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_, 121; - Lockhart's conduct towards him, 122; - death of his young brother Tom, 128; - goes to live with Charles Brown, 128; - falls in love, 130-131; - visits friends in Chichester, 133; - suffers with his throat, 133; - his correspondence with his brother George, 139; - goes to Shanklin, 143; - collaborates with Brown in writing _Otho_, 143; - goes to Winchester, 144; - returns again to London, 146; - more money troubles, 146; - determines to make a living by journalism, 146; - lives by himself, 146; - goes back to Mr Brown, 181; - _Otho_ is returned unopened after having been accepted, 182; - want of means prevents his marriage, 190; - his increasing illness, 191 seq.; - temporary improvement in his health, 194; - publishes another volume of poems, 196; - stays with Leigh Hunt's family, 197; - favourable notice in the _Edinburgh Review_, 197; - lives with the family of Miss Brawne, 198; - goes with Severn to spend the winter in Italy, 199; - the journey improves his health, 200; - writes his last lines, 201; - stays for a time at Naples, 203; - goes on to Rome, 203-204; - further improvement in his health, 205; - sudden and last relapse, 205; - he is tenderly nursed by his friend Severn, 206; - speaks of himself as already living a 'posthumous life,' 207; - grows worse and dies, 208; - various tributes to his memory, 214. - - His genius awakened by the _Faerie Queene_, 13; - influence of other poets on him, 21; - experiments in language, 21, 64, 147, 169; - employment of the 'Heroic' couplet, 27, 30; - element and spirit of his own poetry, 50; - experiments in metre, 52; - studied musical effect of his verse, 55; - his Grecian spirit, 58, 77, 95, 114, 154; - view of the aims and principles of poetry, 61; - imaginary dependence on Shakspere, 69; - thoughts on the mystery of Evil, 88; - puns, 72, 202; - his poems Greek in idea, English in manner, 96; - his poetry a true spontaneous expression of his mind, 110; - power of vivifying, 161; - verbal licenses, 169; - influence on subsequent poets, 218; - felicity of phrase, 219. - - Personal characteristics: - Celtic temperament, 3, 58, 70; - affectionate nature, 6, 7, 9, 10, 77; - morbid temperament, 6, 70, 211; - lovable disposition, 6, 8, 19, 212, 213; - temper, 7, 9, 233; - personal beauty, 8; - _penchant_ for fighting, 8, 9, 72; - studious nature, 9, 112; - humanity, 39, 89, 114-115; - sympathy and tenderness, 47, 213; - eyes, description of, 46, 207, 224; - love of nature, 47, 55-56; - voice, 47; - desire of fame, 60, 125, 141, 207; - natural sensibility to physical and spiritual spell of moonlight, 95; - highmindedness, 125-126; - love romances, 127, 130-134, 180-181, 197, 200, 203, 212; - pride and sensitiveness, 211; - unselfishness, 213, 214; - instability, 215. - - Various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224. - - Keats, Admiral Sir Richard, 7. - - Keats, Fanny (Mrs Llanos), 77. - - Keats, Mrs (Keats' mother), 5, 10. - - Keats, George, 90, 113, 192, 193, 210. - - Keats, Thomas (Keats' father), 2, 5. - - Keats, Tom, 6, 127. - - _King Stephen_, 179. - - 'Kirk-men,' 116-117. - - - _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, 165, 166, 218; - origin of the title, 165; - a story of the wasting power of love, 166; - description of its beauties, 166. - - Lamb, Charles, 26, 82, 83. - - _Lamia_, 143; - its source, 167; - versification, 167; - the picture of the serpent woman, 168; - Keats' opinion of the Poem, 168. - - Landor, 75. - - _Laon and Cythna_, 76. - - Letters, extracts, etc., from Keats', 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 81, - 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 114, 116-117, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130, - 134, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 157, 181, 182, 190, 194-195, 200, - 203, 226. - - 'Little Keats,' 19. - - Lockhart, 33, 122, 123. - - _London Magazine_, 71. - - - Mackereth, George Wilson, 18. - - Madeline, 162 seq. - - 'Maiden-Thought,' 88, 114. - - _Man about Town_ (Webb's), 38. - - _Man in the Moon_ (Drayton's), 93. - - Margate, 68. - - Mathew, George Felton, 19. - - Meg Merrilies, 115-116. - - _Melancholy, Ode on_, 175. - - Milton, 51, 52, 54, 88. - - Monckton, Milnes, 211. - - Moore, 65. - - _Morning Chronicle, The_, 124. - - _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ (Spenser's), 31. - - Mythology, Greek, 10, 58, 152, 153. - - - Naples, 203. - - _Narensky_ (Brown's), 74. - - Newmarch, 19. - - _Nightingale, Ode to a_, 136, 175, 218. - - _Nymphs_, 73. - - - Odes, 21, 137, 145, 170-171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 218. - - _Orion_, 11. - - _Otho_, 143, 144, 180, 181. - - Oxford, 75, 77. - - _Oxford Herald, The_, 122. - - - _Pan, Hymn to_, 83. - - _Pantheon_ (Tooke's), 10. - - _Paradise Lost_, 88, 152, 154, 158. - - Patriotism, 115. - - _Peter Corcoran_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Plays, 178, 179, 181, 182. - - Poems (Keats' first volume), faint echoes of other poets in them, 51; - their form, 52; - their experiments in metre, 52; - merely poetic preludes, 53; - their rambling tendency, 53; - immaturity, 60; - attractiveness, 61; - characteristic extracts, 63; - their moderate success, 65-66. - - Poetic Art, Theory and Practice, 61, 64. - - Poetry, joys of, 55; - principle and aims of, 61; - genius of, 110. - - _Polymetis_ (Spence's), 10. - - Pope, 19, 29, 30. - - 'Posthumous Life,' 207. - - Prince Regent, 25. - - Proctor, Mrs, 47. - - _Psyche, Ode to_, 136, 171, 172. - - _Psyche_ (Mrs Tighe's), 21. - - - Quarterly Review, 121, 124. - - - _Rainbow_ (Campbell's), 170. - - Rawlings, William, 5. - - Reynolds, John Hamilton, 36, 211, 214. - - Rice, James, 37, 142. - - _Rimini, Story of_, 27, 30, 31, 35. - - Ritchie, 82. - - Rome, 204. - - Rossetti, 220. - - - _Safie_ (Reynolds'), 36. - - Scott, Sir Walter, 1, 33, 65, 115, 123, 124. - - Scott, John, 124. - - Sculpture, ancient, 136. - - _Sea-Sonnet_, 67. - - Severn, Joseph, 45, 72, 135, 191, 199 seq. - - Shakspere, 67, 69. - - Shanklin, 67, 143. - - Shelley, 16, 32, 38, 56, 85, 110, 199, 203, 209. - - Shenstone, 21. - - _Sleep and Poetry_, 52, 60, 61, 109. - - Smith, Horace, 33, 81. - - Sonnets, 22, 23, 43, 48, 49, 57, 201. - - _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, 52. - - Spenser, 19, 20, 21, 31, 35, 54, 55. - - Stephens, Henry, 18-20. - - Surrey Institution, 84. - - - Taylor, Mr, 71, 81, 126, 144, 146, 206, 211. - - Teignmouth, 87. - - Tennyson, 218. - - Thomson, 21. - - - _Urn, Ode on a Grecian_, 136, 172-174. - - - _Vision, The_, 187, 193 (_see_ Hyperion). - - - Webb, Cornelius, 38. - - Wells, Charles, 45. - - Wilson, 33. - - Winchester, 143-145. - - Windermere, 113, 114. - - Wordsworth, 1, 44, 46, 56, 64, 82, 83, 158, 219. - - -CAMBRIDGE PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] See Appendix, p. 221. - -[2] _Ibid._ - -[3] John Jennings died March 8, 1805. - -[4] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See below, p. 138, and Appendix, p. 221. - -[5] Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808. - -[6] Houghton MSS. - -[7] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See Appendix, p. 221. - -[8] Mrs Alice Jennings was buried at St Stephen's, Coleman Street, -December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. Pratt, -M.A.) - -[9] I owe this anecdote to Mr Gosse, who had it direct from Horne. - -[10] Houghton MSS. - -[11] A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance -narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and in prose, not -verse, will be found in _The Philosophy of Mystery_, by W. C. Dendy -(London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr H. Stephens, in the -_Poetical Works_, ed. Forman (1 vol. 1884), p. 558. - -[12] See Appendix. - -[13] See C. L. Feltoe, _Memorials of J. F. South_ (London, 1884), p. 81. - -[14] Houghton MSS. See also Dr B. W. Richardson in the _Asclepiad_, vol. -i. p. 134. - -[15] Houghton MSS. - -[16] What, for instance, can be less Spenserian and at the same time less -Byronic than-- - - "For sure so fair a place was never seen - Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye"? - -[17] See Appendix, p. 222. - -[18] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[19] See particularly the _Invocation to Sleep_ in the little volume of -Webb's poems published by the Olliers in 1821. - -[20] See Appendix, p. 223. - -[21] See _Praeterita_, vol. ii. chap. 2. - -[22] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[23] Compare Chapman, _Hymn to Pan_:-- - - "the bright-hair'd god of pastoral, - Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe, - By lot, all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow, - All tops of hills, and _cliffy highnesses_, - All sylvan copses, and the fortresses - Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove, - And sometimes, by allurement of his love, - Will wade the _wat'ry softnesses_." - -[24] Compare Wordsworth:-- - - "Bees that soar for bloom, - High as the highest peak of Furness Fells, - Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells." - -Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence? - -[25] Mr W. T. Arnold in his _Introduction_ (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel -passage from Leigh Hunt's _Gentle Armour_ as an example of the degree to -which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt: forgetting that the _Gentle -Armour_ was not written till 1831, and that the debt in this instance is -therefore the other way. - -[26] See Appendix, p. 220. - -[27] The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph were -furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr Leslie Stephen, -from whom I have them. The point about the _Adventures of a Younger Son_ -is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken -from the Keats MSS. then in Brown's hands, especially _Otho_. - -[28] Houghton MSS. - -[29] See Appendix, p. 224. - -[30] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[31] See Appendix, p. 225. - -[32] In the extract I have modernized Drayton's spelling and endeavoured -to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending. - -[33] Mrs Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of an -allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats's narrative. - -[34] Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions Paeon as one of the fifty sons of -Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth): and in Spenser's _Faerie -Queene_ there is a Paeana--the daughter of the giant Corflambo in the -fourth book. Keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave -Endymion a sister and called her Peona. - -[35] Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by Mr W. T. -Arnold. - -[36] The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of -Chamberlayne:-- - - "Upon the throne, in such a glorious state - As earth's adored favorites, there sat - The image of a monarch, vested in - The spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been - A diadem's redemption; his large size, - Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize - The admired proportions of those mighty men - Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when - Found out, are carefully preserved to tell - Posterity how much these times are fell - From nature's youthful strength." - -[37] See Appendix, p. 226. - -[38] Houghton MSS. - -[39] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[40] Severn in Houghton MSS. - -[41] Houghton MSS. - -[42] Dilke (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton's _Life and -Letters_, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned as -much; and there are tricks of style, _e.g._ the use of the Spanish -_Sangrado_ for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand. - -[43] Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, and -Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott's faithful satellite, the actor -Terry. - -[44] Severn in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XI., p. 401. - -[45] See Preface, p. viii. - -[46] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[47] Houghton MSS. - -[48] The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been -thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the -summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the -then surviving brother of Keats's friend. - -[49] See Appendix, p. 227. - -[50] See Appendix, p. 228. - -[51] _Decamerone_, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment -of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously -with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his _Sicilian Story_ (1820). Of -the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write -concurrently with Keats (see above, p. 86), two were finished and -published by him after Keats's death in the volume called _A Garden of -Florence_ (1821). - -[52] As to the date when _Hyperion_ was written, see Appendix, p. 228: and -as to the error by which Keats's later recast of his work has been taken -for an earlier draft, _ibid._, p. 230. - -[53] If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by -predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so--though only on a -cameo scale--in the best idyls of Chenier in France, as _L'Aveugle_ or _Le -Jeune Malade_, or of Landor in England, as the _Hamadryad_ or _Enallos and -Cymodamia_; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at -Alexandria in the days of Theocritus. - -[54] We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the -best, that what he most liked in Chatterton's work was the minstrel's song -in _AElla_, that _fantasia_, so to speak, executed really with genius on -the theme of one of Ophelia's songs in _Hamlet_. - -[55] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the -beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of -rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the -beadsman in the lines, - - "But no--already had his death-bell rung; - The joys of all his life were said and sung;" - -that of Angela where she calls herself - - "A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, - Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll." - -[56] See Appendix, p. 229. - -[57] Chartier was born at Bayeux. His _Belle Dame sans Merci_ is a poem of -over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in -dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his -consequent despair and death.--For the date of composition of Keats's -poem, see Appendix, p. 230. - -[58] This has been pointed out by my colleague Mr A. S. Murray: see -Forman, _Works_, vol. iii. p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, _Poetical -Works_, &c., p. xxii, note. - -[59] Houghton MSS. - -[60] "He never spoke of any one," says Severn, (Houghton MSS.,) "but by -saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and -cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of -the person he was speaking of." - -[61] See Appendix, p. 230. - -[62] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. -Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his -death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey -(Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats's -mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus. - -[63] Mrs Owen was the first of Keats's critics to call attention to this -passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it -derives from the date of its composition. - -[64] Houghton MSS. - -[65] See below, p. 193, note 2. - -[66] "Interrupted," says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., "by a -circumstance which it is needless to mention." - -[67] This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest -daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of -Haydon. But see Appendix, p. 232. - -[68] A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the _Indicator_ a few -stanzas from the _Cap and Bells_, and about the same time dedicated to -Keats his translation of Tasso's _Amyntas_, speaking of the original as -"an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally -pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical." - -[69] See Crabb Robinson. _Diaries_, Vol. II. p. 197, etc. - -[70] See Appendix, p. 233. - -[71] Houghton MSS. In both the _Autobiography_ and the _Correspondence_ -the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy -additions. - -[72] I have the date of sailing from Lloyd's, through the kindness of the -secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time -following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials -published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in _Atlantic -Monthly_, Vol. XI. p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn -MSS. - -[73] Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and his -remains were in 1882 removed from their original burying-place to a grave -beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius -Cestius. - -[74] Haslam, in Severn MSS. - -[75] Severn MSS. - -[76] Houghton MSS. - -[77] _Ibid._ - -[78] Houghton MSS. - -[79] _Ibid._ - - - - -English Men of Letters. - -EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. - -_Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. Paper Covers, 1s.; Cloth, 1s. 6d. each._ - -_Pocket Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. 1s. net each._ - -_Library Edition. Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each._ - - - ADDISON. - By W. J. 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