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. 19s. 5d.

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. 2s. 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.

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:—

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. 7s. 10d. worth of that security at the price at which it then stood. £1666. 13s. 4d. 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. 5s. 7d., and to George £1147. 5s. 1d. 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:—

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 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 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.