LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE		PAGE
I.	Head of Keats	Frontispiece
	From a posthumous oil painting by Joseph Severn in the possession of the Marquis of Crewe, K.G.
II.	Portrait of James Henry Leigh Hunt	46
	From an engraving by Mayer after a drawing by J. Hayter.
III.	Portrait of Benjamin Robert Haydon	62
	From an engraving by Thomson after Haydon.
IV.	Life-Mask of Keats	144
	From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery.
V.	’Onward the Tiger and the Leopard Pants, With Asian Elephants’	230
	From an engraving after a sarcophagus relief at Woburn Abbey.
VI.	A Sacrifice to Apollo	264
	From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
VII.	The Enchanted Castle	266
	From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
VIII.	’And There I’d Sit and read all Day like a Picture of Somebody Reading’	338
	From an oil painting by Joseph Severn in the National Portrait Gallery
IX.	’Figures on a Greek Vase—A Man and Two Women’	342
	From an etching in Piranesi’s Vasi e Candelabri.
X.	Page from Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil	394
	From an autograph by Keats in the British Museum.
XI.	The Sosibios Vase: Profile and Frieze	416
	From an engraving in the MusÉe NapolÉon.
XII.	’What Pipes and Timbrels? what wild Ecstasy?’	418
	Bacchanalian friezes, (A) from the Townley Vase in the British Museum, (B) from the Borghese Vase in the Louvre.
XIII.	Page from a Letter of Haydon to Elizabeth Barrett, 1834	532

One of the silver medals awarded to Keats as a school prize in these days exists in confirmation of this account and was lately in the market. Cowden Clarke continues:—

In the midst of these ardent studies of Keats’s latter school days befell the death of his mother, who 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 at the age of thirty-five 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.’

From her, no doubt, came that predisposition to consumption which showed itself in her youngest son from adolescence and carried him off at nineteen, and with the help of ill luck, over-exertion, and distress of mind, wrecked also before twenty-five the robust-seeming frame and constitution of her eldest, the poet. Were the accounts of her character less ambiguous, or were the strands of human heredity less inveterately entangled than they are, it would be tempting, when we consider the deep duality of Keats’s nature, the trenchant contrast between the two selves that were in him, to trace to the mother the seeds of one of those selves, the feverishly over-sensitive and morbidly passionate one, and to his father the seeds of the other, the self that was all manly good sense and good feeling and undisturbed clear vision and judgment. In the sequel we shall see this fine virile self in Keats continually and consciously battling against the other, trying to hold it down, and succeeding almost always in keeping control over his ways and dealings with his fellow-men, though not over the inward frettings of his spirit.

In the July following her daughter’s death, 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.5 The guardians were Mr Rowland Sandell, merchant, who presently renounced the trust, and the aforesaid Mr Richard Abbey, tea-dealer. Mrs Jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years,6 but Mr Abbey seems at once to have taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John Keats was withdrawn from school at the end of the summer term, 1811, when he was some months short of sixteen, 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 to a Mr Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary of good repute at Edmonton, for the customary term of five years.7

The years between the sixteenth and twentieth of his age are the most critical of a young man’s life, and in these years, during which our other chief London-born poets, Spenser, Milton, Gray, were profiting by the discipline of Cambridge and the Muses, Keats had no better or more helpful regular training than that of an ordinary apprentice, apparently one of several, in a suburban surgery. But he had the one advantage, to him inestimable, of proximity to his old school, which meant free access to the school library and continued encouragement and advice in reading from his affectionate senior, the head master’s son. The fact that it was only two miles’ walk from Edmonton to Enfield helped much, says Cowden Clarke, to reconcile him to his new way of life, and his duties at the surgery were not onerous. As laid down in the ordinary indentures of apprenticeship in those times, they were indeed chiefly negative, the apprentice binding himself ‘not to haunt taverns or playhouses, not to play at dice or cards, nor absent himself from his said master’s service day or night unlawfully, but in all things as a faithful apprentice he shall behave himself towards the said master and all his during the said term.’

Keats himself, it is recorded, did not love talking of his apprentice days, and has left no single written reference to them except the much-quoted phrase in a letter of 1819, in which, speaking of the continual processes of change in the human tissues, he says, ‘this is not the same hand which seven years ago clenched itself at Hammond.’ It was natural that the same fiery temper which made him as a small boy square up against an usher on behalf of his brother,—an offence which the headmaster, according to his son Cowden Clarke, ‘felt he could not severely punish,’—it was natural that this same temper should on occasion flame out against his employer the surgeon. If Keats’s words are to be taken literally, this happened in the second year of his apprenticeship. Probably it was but the affair of a moment: there is no evidence of any habitual disagreement or final breach between them, and Keats was able to put in the necessary testimonial from Mr Hammond when he presented himself in due course for examination before the Court of Apothecaries. A fellow-apprentice in after years remembered him as ‘an idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry.’ This, seeing that he did not begin to write till he was near eighteen, must refer to the last two years of his apprenticeship and probably represents an unlettered view of his way of employing his leisure, rather (judging by his general character) than any slackness in the performance of actual duty. One of the very few glimpses we have of him from outside is from Robert Hengist Horne (‘Orion’ Horne), another alumnus of the Enfield school who lived to make his mark in literature. Horne remembered Mr Hammond driving on a professional visit to the school one winter day and leaving Keats to take care of the gig. While Keats sat in a brown study holding the reins, young Horne, remembering his school reputation as a boxer, in bravado threw a snowball at him and hit, but made off into safety before Keats could get at him to inflict punishment. The story suggests a picture to the eye but tells nothing to the mind.

Our only real witness for this time of Keats’s life is Cowden Clarke. He tells us how the lad’s newly awakened passion for the pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be stifled, and how at Edmonton he plunged back into his school occupations of reading and translating whenever he could spare the time. He finished at this time his prose version of the Aeneid, and on free afternoons and evenings, five or six times a month or oftener, was in the habit of walking over to Enfield,—by that field path where Lamb found the stiles so many and so hard to tackle,—to see his friend Cowden Clarke and bring away or return borrowed books. Young Clarke was an ardent liberal and disciple of Leigh Hunt both in political opinions and literary taste. In summer weather he and Keats 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 delight. From the nature of Keats’s imitative first flights in verse, it is clear that though he hated the whole ‘Augustan’ and post-Augustan tribe of social and moral essayists in verse, and Pope, their illustrious master, most of all, yet his mind and ear had become familiar, in the course of his school and after-school reading, with Thomson, Collins, Gray, and all the more romantically minded poets of the middle and later eighteenth century. But the essential service Clarke did him was in pressing upon his attention the poetry of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean age, from The Shepheard’s Calendar down to Comus and Lycidas,—‘our older and nobler poetry,’ as a few had always held it to be even through the Age of Reason and the reign of Pope and his followers, and as it was now loudly proclaimed to be by all the innovating critics, with Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt among the foremost.

On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden Clarke introduced him for the first time to Spenser, reading him the Epithalamion in the afternoon and at his own eager request lending him the Faerie Queene to take away the same evening. With Spenser’s later imitators, playful or serious, as Shenstone and Thomson, Beattie and the more recent Mrs Tighe, Keats, we know, was already familiar; indeed he owned later to a passing phase of boyish delight in Beattie’s Minstrel and Tighe’s languorously romantic Psyche. But now he found himself taken to the fountain head, and was enraptured. It has been said, and truly, that no one who has not had the good fortune to be attracted to the Faerie Queene in boyhood can ever quite wholeheartedly and to the full enjoy it. The maturer student, appreciate as he may its innumerable beauties and noble ethical temper, can hardly fail to be critically conscious also of its arbitrary forms of rime and language, and sated by its melodious redundance: he will perceive its faults now of scholastic pedantry and now of flagging inspiration, the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing humanity amidst all that luxuriance of symbolic and decorative invention, and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. It is otherwise with the greedy and indiscriminate imaginative appetite of boyhood. I speak as one of the fortunate who know by experience that for a boy there is no poetical revelation like the Faerie Queene, no pleasure equal to the pleasure of being rapt for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by those rivers 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 showed 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, Keats’s most intimate companion during the two last 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.’ Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest. We may fairly take Brown to be on this point the better informed of the two, and may assume that it was some time in the second year after he left school that the Spenser fever took hold on Keats, and with it the longing to be himself a poet. But it was not with Spenser alone, it was with other allegoric and narrative poets as well, his followers or contemporaries, that Keats was in these days gaining acquaintance. Not quite in his earliest, but still in his very early, attempts, we find clear traces of familiarity with the work both of William Browne of Tavistock and of Michael Drayton, and we can conceive how in that charming ingenuous retrospect of Drayton’s on his boyish vocation to poetry, addressed to his friend Henry Reynolds, Keats will have smiled to find an utterance of the same passion that had just awakened in his own not very much maturer self.

Let it be remembered moreover that the years of Keats’s school days and apprenticeship were also those of the richest and most stimulating outburst of the new poetry in England. To name only their chief products,—the Lyrical Ballads of Coleridge and Wordsworth had come while he was only a child: during his school days had appeared Wordsworth’s still richer and not less challenging volumes of 1807, and the succession of Scott’s romantic lays (but these last, in spite of their enormous public success, it was in circles influenced by Leigh Hunt not much the fashion to admire): during his apprentice years at Edmonton, the two first cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold and the still more overwhelmingly successful series of his Eastern tales: and finally Wordsworth’s Excursion, with which almost from the first Keats was profoundly impressed. But it was not, of course, only by reading poetry that he was learning to be a poet. Nature was quite as much his teacher as books; and the nature within easy reach of him, tame indeed and unimpressive in comparison with Wordsworth’s lakes and mountains, had quite enough of vital English beauty to afford fair seed-time to his soul. Across the levels of the Lea valley, not then disfigured as they are now by factories and reservoir works and the squalor of sprawling suburbs, rose the softly shagged undulations of Epping forest, a region which no amount of Cockney frequentation or prosaic vicinity can ever quite strip of its primitive romance. Westward over Hornsey to the Highgate and Hampstead heights, north-westward through Southgate towards the Barnets, and thence in a sweep by the remains of Enfield Chase, was a rich tract of typically English country, a country of winding elm-shadowed lanes, of bosky hedge and thicket and undulating pasture-land charmingly diversified with parks and pleasaunces. Nearly such I can myself remember it some sixty years ago, and even now, off the tram-frequented highways and between the devastating encroachments of bricks and mortar, forlorn patches of its ancient pastoral self are still to be found lurking.

It was in his rambles afield in these directions and in his habitual afternoon and evening strolls to Enfield and back, that a delighted sense of the myriad activities of nature’s life in wood and field and brook and croft and hedgerow began to possess Keats’s mind, and to blend with the beautiful images that already peopled it from his readings in Greek mythology, and to be enhanced into a strange supernatural thrill by the recurring magic of moonlight. It is only in adolescence that such delights can be drunk in, not with conscious study and observation but passively and half unaware through all the pores of being, and no youth ever drank them in more deeply than Keats. Not till later came for him, or comes for any man, the time when the images so absorbed, and the emotions and sympathies so awakened, define and develop themselves in consciousness and discover with effort and practice the secret of rightly expressing themselves in words.

After Keats, under the stimulus of Spenser, had taken his first plunge into verse, he went on writing occasional sonnets and other pieces: secretly and shyly at first like all other young poets: at least it was not until some two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed anything that he had written to his friend and confidant Cowden Clarke. This was a sonnet on the release of Leigh Hunt after serving a two years’ sentence of imprisonment for a political offence. Clarke relates how he was walking in to London from Enfield to call on and congratulate the ex-prisoner, whom he not only revered as a martyr in the cause of liberty but knew and admired personally, when Keats met him and turned back to accompany him part of the way. ‘At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he 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 remember the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with life.’ About a score of the pieces which Keats had written and kept secret during the preceding two years are preserved, and like the work of almost all beginners are quite imitative and conventional, failing to express anything original or personal to himself. They include the aforesaid Spenserian stanzas, which in fact echo the cadences of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence much more than those of Spenser himself; an ode to Hope, quite in the square-toed manner of eighteenth century didactic verse, and another to Apollo, in which style and expression owe everything to Gray; a set of octosyllabics recording, this time with some touch of freshness, a momentary impression of a woman’s beauty received one night at Vauxhall, and so intense that it continued to haunt his memory for years; two sets of verses addressed in a vein of polite parlour compliment to lady friends at the seaside; and several quite feeble sonnets in the Wordsworthian form, among them one on the peace of Paris in 1814, one on Chatterton and one on Byron.

Of Keats’s outward ways and doings during these days when he was growing to manhood we know nothing directly except from Cowden Clarke, and can only gather a little more by inference. It is clear that he enjoyed a certain amount of liberty and holiday, more, perhaps, than would have fallen to the lot of a more zealous apprentice, and that he spent part of his free time in London in the society of his brother George, at this time a clerk in Mr Abbey’s counting-house, and of friends to whom George made him known. Among these were the family of an officer of marines named Wylie, to whose charming daughter, Georgiana, George Keats a little later became engaged, and another family of prosperous tradespeople named Mathew. Here too there were daughters, Caroline and Ann, who made themselves pleasant to the Keats brothers, and to whom were addressed the pair of complimentary jingles already mentioned. One of the sisters, asked in later life for her recollections of the time, replied in a weariful strain of evangelical penitence for the frivolities of those days, and found nothing more to the purpose to say of Keats than this:—‘I cannot go further than say I always thought he had a very beautiful countenance and was very warm and enthusiastic in his character. He wrote a great deal of poetry at our house but I do not recollect whether I ever had any of it, I certainly have none now; Ann had many pieces of his.’ A cousin of this family, one George Felton Mathew, was a youth of sensibility and poetical leanings, and became for a time an intimate friend of Keats, and next to his brothers and Cowden Clarke the closest confidant of his studies and ambitions. Their intimacy began in the Edmonton days and lasted through the earlier months of his student life in London. Looking back upon their relations after some thirty years, Mr Felton Mathew, then a supernumerary official of 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, wrote as follows:—

Of Keats’s physical appearance and poetical preferences the same witness writes further:—

This last, it should be noted, seems in pretty direct contradiction with one of Cowden Clarke’s liveliest recollections as follows:—‘It was a treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage. Once when reading Cymbeline aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying she would have watched him—

Till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay follow’d him till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air; and then Have turn’d mine eye and wept.’

Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday, Keats left the service of Mr Hammond, his indentures having apparently been cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy’s and St Thomas’s. What befell him during the eighteen months that followed, and how his career as a student came to an end, will be told in the next two chapters.8

---

In connexion with this, take Hunt’s own account of the matter, as given about ten years after the event in his volume, Lord Byron and his Contemporaries:

Some inquirers, in interpreting these accounts, have judged that the personal introduction did not take place in the spring or early summer at all, but only after Keats’s return from his holiday at the end of September. I think it is quite clear, on the contrary, that Clarke had taken Keats up to Hampstead by the end of May or some time in June. Unmistakeable impressions of summer strolls there occur in his poetry of the next few months. The ‘happy fields’ where he had been rambling when he wrote the sonnet to Charles Wells on June the 29th were almost certainly the fields of Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt Hunt’s statement that the ‘little hill’ from which Keats drank the summer view and air, as told at the opening of his poem I stood tiptoe, was one of the swells of ground towards the Caen wood side of the Heath. At the same time it would seem that their intercourse in these first weeks did not extend beyond a few walks and talks, and that it was not until after Keats’s return from his summer holiday that the acquaintance ripened into the close and delighted intimacy which we find subsisting by the autumn.

For part of August and September he had been away at Margate, apparently alone. A couple of rimed epistles addressed during this holiday to his brother George and to Cowden Clarke breathe just such a heightened joy of life and happiness of anticipation as would be natural in one who had lately felt the first glow of new and inspiriting personal sympathies. To George, besides the epistle, he addressed a pleasant sonnet on the wonders he has seen, the sea, the sunsets, and the world of poetic glories and mysteries vaguely evoked by them in his mind. The epistle to George is dated August: that to Cowden Clarke followed in September. In it he explains, in a well-conditioned and affectionate spirit of youthful modesty, why he has hitherto been shy of addressing any of his own attempts in verse to a friend so familiar with the work of the masters; and takes occasion, in a heartfelt passage of autobiography, to declare all he has owed to that friend’s guidance and encouragement.

Thus have I thought; and days on days have flown Slowly, or rapidly—unwilling still For you to try my dull, unlearned quill. 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 from 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? You too upheld the veil from Clio’s beauty, And pointed out the patriot’s stern duty; The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell; The hand of Brutus, that so grandly fell Upon a tyrant’s head. Ah! had I never seen, Or known your kindness, what might I have been? What my enjoyments in my youthful years, Bereft of all that now my life endears? And can I e’er these benefits forget? And can I e’er repay the friendly debt? No doubly no;—yet should these rhymings please, I shall roll on the grass with two-fold ease: For I have long time been my fancy feeding With hopes that you would one day think the reading Of my rough verses not an hour misspent; Should it e’er be so, what a rich content!

Some of these lines are merely feeble and boyish, but some show a fast ripening, nay an almost fully ripened, critical feeling for the poetry of the past. The couplet about Spenser’s vowels could scarcely be happier, and the next on Milton anticipates, though without at all approaching in craftsmanship, the ‘Me rather all that bowery loneliness’ of Tennyson’s famous alcaic stanzas to the same effect.

Coming back from the seaside about the end of September to take up his quarters with his brothers in their lodging in the Poultry, Keats was soon to be indebted to Clarke for another and invaluable literary stimulus: I mean his first knowledge of Chapman’s translation of Homer. This experience, as every reader knows, was instantly celebrated by him in a sonnet, classical now almost to triteness, which is his first high achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our language in this form. The question of its exact date has been much discussed: needlessly, seeing that Keats himself signed and dated it in full, when it was printed in the Examiner for the first of December following, ‘Oct^r 1816, John Keats.’ The doubts expressed have been due partly to the overlooking of this fact and partly to a mistake in Cowden Clarke’s account of the matter written many years later. After quoting Keats’s invitation of October 1815 to come and find him at his lodging in the Borough, Clarke goes on:—

The whole of the above is a typical case of what I have called the telescoping action of memory. Recollections not of one, but of many, Homer readings are here compressed into a couple of paragraphs. They will have been readings carried on at intervals through the autumn and winter of 1816-17: an inspiring addition to the other intellectual gains and pleasures which fell to Keats’s lot during those months. There is no reason to doubt the exactness of Clarke’s account of the first night the friends spent together over Chapman and its result in the shape of the sonnet which lay on his table the next morning. His error is in remembering these circumstances as having happened when he and Keats first foregathered in London in the autumn of 1815, whereas Keats’s positive evidence above quoted shows that they did not really happen until a year later, after his return from his summer holiday in 1816.7 Before printing the Chapman sonnet, Leigh Hunt had the satisfaction of hearing his own opinion of it and of some other manuscript poems of Keats confirmed by good judges. I quote his words for the sake of the excellent concluding phrase. ‘Not long afterwards, having the pleasure of entertaining at dinner Mr Godwin, Mr Hazlitt, and Mr Basil Montague, I showed them the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to be as extraordinary as I thought them. One of them was that noble sonnet on first reading Chapman’s Homer, which terminates with so energetic a calmness, and which completely announced the new poet taking possession.’ But by this time Keats had become an established intimate in the Leigh Hunt household, and was constantly backwards and forwards between London and the Hampstead cottage.

This intimacy was really the opening of a new chapter both in his intellectual and social life. At first it was a source of unmixed encouragement and pleasure, but seeing that it carried with it in the sequel disadvantages and penalties which gravely affected Keats’s career, it is necessary that we should fix clearly in our mind Hunt’s previous history and the place held by him in the literary and political life of the time. He was Keats’s senior by eleven years: the son of an eloquent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher, sprung from a family long settled in Barbadoes, who having married a lady from Philadelphia had migrated to England and exercised his vocation in the northern suburbs of London. Brought up at Christ’s Hospital about a dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, Leigh Hunt gained at sixteen a measure of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile poems which gave evidence of great fluency and, for a boy, of wide and eager reading. 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 take part in the conduct of the Examiner newspaper, then just founded by his brother John Hunt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as manager and editor of that journal, helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of tense grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk audacity and an unflinching sincerity of conviction. So far they had escaped the usual penalty of such courage. Several prosecutions directed against them failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught tripping. To go as far as was safely possible in satire of the follies and vices of the Prince Regent was a tempting exercise to the reforming spirits of the time. Provoked by the grovelling excesses of some of the Prince’s flatterers, the Examiner at last broke bounds and denounced him as ‘a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.’ This attack followed within a few weeks of another almost as stinging contributed anonymously by Charles Lamb. Under the circumstances the result of a prosecution could not be doubtful: and the two Hunts were condemned to a fine of £500 each and two years imprisonment in separate jails. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fortitude, suffering severely in health but flagging little in spirits or industry. He decorated his apartment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol with a rose-trellis paper and a ceiling to imitate a summer sky, so that it looked, said Charles Lamb, like a room in a fairy tale, and spent money which he had not got in converting its backyard into a garden of shrubs and flowers.

Very early in life Hunt had been received into a family called Kent at the instance of an elder daughter who greatly admired him. Not long afterwards he engaged himself to her younger sister, then almost a child, and married her soon after the Examiner was started. She proved a prolific, thriftless woman and ill housekeeper, but through all the rubs and pinches of his after years he was ever an affectionate husband and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen, philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political persecution their sympathy and society. Charles Lamb and his sister were the most constant of all his visitors. Tom Moore, who both before and after the sentence on the brothers Hunt managed in his series of verse skits, The Twopenny Post Bag, to go on playing with impunity the game of Prince-Regent-baiting,—the light-hearted Tom Moore joined in deepest earnest the chorus of sympathy with the prisoners:—

Yet go—for thoughts as blessed as the air Of Spring or Summer flowers await you there: Thoughts such as He, who feasts his courtly crew In rich conservatories, never knew; Pure self-esteem—the smiles that light within— The Zeal, whose circling charities begin With the few lov’d ones Heaven has plac’d it near, And spread, till all Mankind are in its sphere; The Pride, that suffers without vaunt or plea, And the fresh Spirit, that can warble free, Through prison-bars, its hymn to Liberty!

Among ardent young men who brought their tributes was Cowden Clarke with a basket of fruit and flowers from his father’s garden; and this was followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. ‘Libertas, the loved Libertas,’ was the name found for Hunt by such fond young spirits and adopted by Keats.

During his captivity Hunt was allowed the full use of his library, and his chief reading was in the fifty volumes of the Parnaso Italiano. As a result he acquired and retained for life a really wide and familiar knowledge of Italian poetry. He continued to edit the Examiner from prison and occupied himself moreover with three small volumes in verse. One of these was The Descent of Liberty, A Mask, celebrating the downfall of Napoleon in 1814, and embodying gracefully enough the Liberal’s hope against hope that with that catastrophe there might return to Europe not only peace but freedom. (We have told already how Keats at Edmonton tried his boyish hand at a sonnet on the same occasion and to the same purpose.) Another of his prison tasks was the writing of his poem, The Story of Rimini; a third, the recasting and annotating of his Feast of the Poets, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse first printed two years before and modelled on the precedent of several rimed skits of the Caroline age such as Suckling’s Session of the Poets and the Duke of Buckinghamshire’s Election of a Poet Laureate. It represented Apollo 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. In revising this skit while he was in prison, Hunt modified some of his earlier verdicts, but in the main he let them stand. Moore and Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof; Coleridge and Wordsworth admonished (but Wordsworth in much more lenient terms than in the first edition) and dismissed. Hunt’s notes are of still living interest as setting forth, at that pregnant moment of our literary history, the considered judgments of a kindly and accomplished critic on his contemporaries. Seen at a distance of a hundred years they look short-sighted enough, as almost all contemporary judgments must, and are coloured as a matter of course with party feeling, though not so grossly as was the habit of the hour. Since Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth had been transformed, first by the Terror and then by the aggressions of Bonaparte, from ardent revolutionary idealists into vehement partisans of reaction both at home and abroad, the bitterness of the ‘Lost Leader’ feeling, common to all liberals, accounts for much of Hunt’s disparagement of them; while besides sharing the prejudice of his party in general against Scott as a known high Tory and friend to kings, he had ignorantly and peevishly conceived a special grudge against that great generous and chivalrous spirit on account of his lenient handling of Charles II in his Life of Dryden. Hunt in his new notes fully acknowledged the genius, while he condemned the defection and also what he thought the poetical perversities, of Wordsworth; but his treatment of Scott, as little more than a mere money-making manufacturer of pinchbeck northern lays in a sham antique ballad dialect, is idly flippant and patronizing. The point is of importance in Keats’s history, for hence, as we shall see in the sequel, came probably a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour with which the genial Hunt, and Keats as his friend and supposed follower, were by-and-by to be persecuted in Blackwood.

When Hunt’s ordeal was over in the first days of February 1815, he issued from it a butt for savage and vindictive obloquy to the reactionary half of the lettered world, but little less than a hero and martyr to the reforming half. He retained the private friendship of many of those who had sought him out from public sympathy. Tall, straight, slender, charmingly courteous and vivacious, with glossy black hair, bright jet-black eyes, full, relishing nether lip, and ‘nose of taste,’ Leigh Hunt was 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 and a beautiful caressing voice to say them in, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. To the misfortune of himself and his friends, he had no notion of even attempting to balance income and expenditure, and was perfectly light-hearted in the matter of money obligations, which he shrank neither from receiving nor conferring,—only circumstances made him almost invariably a receiver. But men of sterner fibre and better able to order their affairs have often been much more ready than he was to sacrifice conviction to advantage, and his friends found more to admire in his smiling steadfastness under obloquy and persecution than to blame in his chronic incapacity to pay his way. Hardly anyone had warmer well-wishers or requited them, so far as the depth of his nature went, with truer loyalty and kindness. His industry as a writer was incessant, hardly less than that of Southey himself. The titles he gave to the several journals he conducted, The Examiner, The Reflector, The Indicator, define accurately enough his true vocation as a guide to the pleasures of literature. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which De Quincey and even the illustrious Coleridge, with their more philosophic powers and method, were subject, the faults of roundaboutness and over-laboured profundity.

Pl. II

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT FROM AN ENGRAVING BY MAYER AFTER J. HAYTER

The weakness of Leigh Hunt’s style is of an opposite kind. ‘Matchless,’ according to Lamb’s well-known phrase, ‘as a fire-side companion,’ it was his misfortune to carry too much of a fire-side or parlour tone, and sometimes, it must be owned, a very second-rate parlour tone, into literature. He could not walk by the advice of Polonius, and in aiming at the familiar was apt, rarely in prose but sadly often in verse, to slip into an underbred strain of airy and genteel vulgarity, hard to reconcile with what we are told of his acceptable social qualities in real life.8 He was as enthusiastic a student of our sixteenth and seventeenth century literature as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the characteristic excellencies of what he always persists in calling the ‘French school,’ the school of polished artifice and convention which came in after Dryden and swore by the precepts of Boileau, he was not less bent on seeing it overthrown. In English poetry his predilection was for the older writers from Chaucer to Dryden, and above all others for Spenser: in Italian for Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and the later writers of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style. He insisted that such writers were much better models for English poets to follow than the French, and fought as hard as anyone for the return of English poetry from the urbane conventions of the eighteenth century to the paths of nature and of 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.’

We shall have to consider Hunt’s effort to revive the old freedom of the English heroic metre when we come to the study of Keats’s first volume, written much under Hunt’s influence. As to his success with his ‘ideas of what is natural in style,’ and his free and idiomatic—or as he elsewhere says ‘unaffected, contemporaneous’—cast of language to supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, let us take a sample of Rimini at its best and worst. Relating the gradual obsession of Paolo’s thoughts by the charm of his sister-in-law,—

And she became companion of his thought; Silence her gentleness before him brought, Society her sense, reading her books, Music her voice, every sweet thing her looks, Which sometimes seemed, when he sat fixed awhile, To steal beneath his eyes with upward smile; And did he stroll into some lonely place, Under the trees, upon the thick soft grass, How charming, would he think, to see her here! How heightened then, and perfect would appear The two divinest things this world has got, A lovely woman in a rural spot!

The first few lines are skilfully modulated, and in an ordinary domestic theme might be palatable enough; but what a couplet, good heavens! for the last. At the climax, Hunt’s version of Dante is an example of milk-and-water in conditions where milk-and-water is sheer poison:—

As thus they sat, and felt with leaps of heart Their colour change, they came upon the part Where fond Genevra, with her flame long nurst, Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:— That touch, at last, through every fibre slid; And Paulo turned, scarce knowing what he did, Only he felt he could no more dissemble, And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble.

The taste, we see, which guided Hunt so well in appreciating the work of others could betray him terribly in original composition. The passages of light narrative in Rimini are often vivacious and pleasant enough, those of nature description genuinely if not profoundly felt, and written with an eye on the object: but they are the only tolerable things in the poem. Hunt’s idea of a true poetical style was to avoid everything strained, stilted, and conventional, and to lighten the stress of his theme with familiar graces and pleasantries in the manner of his beloved Ariosto. But he did not realize that while any style, from that of the Book of Job to that of Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy, may become poetical if only there is strength and intensity of feeling behind it, nothing but the finest social instinct and tradition can impart the tact for such light conversational graces as he attempted, and that to treat a theme of high tragic passion in the tone and vocabulary of a suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott’s metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron’s of Greece and the Levant,—contemporaries found something fresh and homefelt in Leigh Hunt’s Rimini, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated, writes to Moore:—‘Leigh Hunt’s poem is a devilish good one—quaint here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed it to me.’ And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem from Sir Henry Englefield the dilettante, ‘a mighty man in the blue circles, and a very clever man anywhere,’ from Hookham Frere ‘and all the arch literati,’ and says how he had left his own sister and cousin ‘in fixed and delighted perusal of it.’ Byron’s admiration cooled greatly in the sequel, with or even before the cooling of his regard for the author. But it is an instructive comment on standards of taste and their instability that cultivated readers should at any time have endured to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca—Dante’s Paolo and Francesca—diluted through four cantos in a style like that of the above quotations. When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into Hunt’s faults of triviality and under-breeding: but Keats was only too apt to be betrayed into them.

Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the end of 1815, some time before the publication of Rimini, had settled at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under the storm of obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife. This is in Hunt’s reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer’s most congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to Tom Moore:—

And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while, 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-allied shades, With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees The hills up above him with roofs in the trees? Now too, while the season,—half summer, half spring,— Brown elms and green oaks—makes one loiter and sing; And the bee’s weighty murmur comes by us at noon, And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune, And little white clouds lie about in the sun, And the wind’s in the west, and hay-making begun?—

and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that inveterate lover of walking in the rain:—

We hadn’t much thunder and lightning, I own; But the rains might have led you to walk out of town; And what made us think your desertion still stranger, The roads were so bad, there was really no danger; At least where I live; for the nights were so groping, The rains made such wet, and the paths are so sloping, That few, unemboldened by youth or by drinking, Came down without lanthorns,—nor then without shrinking. And really, to see the bright spots come and go, As the path rose or fell, was a fanciful shew. Like fairies they seemed, pitching up from their nooks, And twinkling upon us their bright little looks.

Such were Leigh Hunt’s antecedents, and such his literary performances and reputation, when Keats at the age of twenty-one became his intimate. So far as opinions and public sympathies were concerned, those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been largely formed in boyhood by familiarity, under the lead of Cowden Clarke, with Leigh Hunt’s writings in the Examiner. Hunt was a confirmed Voltairian and sceptic as to revealed religion, and supplied its place with a private gospel of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his own invincibly 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 kind-hearted 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 recognized their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy the two men had up to a certain point not a little in common. Like Hunt, Keats at this time was given to ‘luxuriating’ too effusively and fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever he 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 enjoyment which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also truly felt with Keats the perennial charm and vitality 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. But behind such pleasant faculties in Hunt nothing deeper or more potent lay hidden. Whereas with Keats, as time went on, delighted sensation became more and more surely and instantaneously transmuted and spiritualized into imaginative emotion; his words and cadences came every day from deeper sources within him and more fully charged with the power of far-reaching and symbolic suggestion. Hence, as this profound and passionate young genius grew, he could not but be aware of what was shallow in the talent of his senior and cloying and distasteful in his ever-voluble geniality. But for many months the harmony of their relations was complete.

The ‘little cottage’ in the Vale of Health must have been fairly overcrowded, one would suppose, with Hunt’s fast-growing family of young children, but a bed was made up for Keats on a sofa, ‘in a parlour no bigger than an old mansion’s closet,’ says Hunt, which nevertheless served him for a library and had prints after Stothard hung on the walls and casts of the heads of poets and heroes crowning the bookshelves. Here the young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet beginning ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’ records a night of October or November 1816, when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to walk home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch and the youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he lived with his brothers the life affectionately described in that other pleasant sonnet written on Tom’s birthday, November 18, beginning ‘Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals.’ The well-known fifty lines at the end of Sleep and Poetry, a poem on which Keats put forth the best of his half-fledged strength this winter, give the fullest and most engaging account of the pleasure and inspiration he drew from Hunt’s hospitality:—

The chimes Of friendly voices had just given place To as sweet a silence, when I ‘gan retrace The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease. It was a poet’s house who keeps the keys Of pleasure’s temple. Round about were hung The glorious features of the bards who sung In other ages—cold and sacred busts Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts To clear Futurity his darling fame! Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim At swelling apples with a frisky leap And reaching fingers, ‘mid a luscious heap Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane Of liny marble, and thereto a train Of nymphs approaching fairly o’er the sward: One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward The dazzling sun-rise: two sisters sweet Bending their graceful figures till they meet Over the trippings of a little child: And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping. See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping Cherishingly Diana’s timorous limbs;— A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims At the bath’s edge, and keeps a gentle motion With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o’er Its rocky marge, and balances once more The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam Feel all about their undulating home... Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green, Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they! For over them was seen a free display Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone The face of Poesy: from off her throne She overlook’d things that I scarce could tell.

It is easy from the above and from some of Keats’s later work to guess at most of the prints which had caught his attention on Hunt’s walls and in his portfolios and worked on his imagination afterwards:—Poussin’s ‘Empire of Flora’ for certain: several, probably, of his various ‘Bacchanals,’ with the god and his leopard-drawn car, and groups of nymphs dancing with fauns or strewn upon the foreground to right or left: the same artist’s ‘Venus and Adonis’: Stothard’s ‘Bathers’ and ‘Vintage,’ his small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura and her friend; Raphael’s ‘Poetry’ from the Vatican; and so forth. These things are not without importance in the study of Keats, for he was quicker and more apt than any of our other poets to draw inspiration from works of art,—prints, pictures, or marbles,—that came under his notice, and it is not for nothing that he alludes in this same poem to

—the pleasant flow Of words on opening a portfolio.

A whole treatise might be written on matters which I shall have to mention briefly or not at all,—how such and such a descriptive phrase in Keats has been suggested by this or that figure in a picture; how pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what various originals, paintings or antiques or both, we can recognize as blending themselves into his evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation of the Grecian Urn.

On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said, did Keats the new service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an essay in the Examiner on ‘Young Poets,’ in which the names of Shelley and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject, Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of the same year, when the chosen theme was The Grasshopper and the Cricket:—‘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.’ The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself, be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another’s company and verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817) the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves ‘after the manner of the elder bards.’ Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy, Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came in—conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, ‘in his enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human being,’ and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted.9 Here are Hunt’s pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed:—

A crown of ivy! I submit my head To the young hand that gives it,—young, ’tis true, But with a right, for ’tis a poet’s too. How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread With their broad angles, like a nodding shed Over both eyes! and how complete and new, As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew My sense with freshness,—Fancy’s rustling bed! Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks, And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes,— And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent, Bacchus,—whose bride has of his hand fast hold. It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind, Thus to be topped with leaves;—to have a sense Of honour-shaded thought,—an influence As from great Nature’s fingers, and be twined With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind, As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence A head that bows to her benevolence, Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind. ’Tis what’s within us crowned. And kind and great Are all the conquering wishes it inspires,— Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods, Love of love’s self, and ardour for a state Of natural good befitting such desires, Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.

Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest:—

ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT

Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain Into a delphic labyrinth—I would fain Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt I owe to the kind poet who has set Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain. Two bending laurel sprigs—’tis nearly pain To be conscious of such a coronet. Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises Gorgeous as I would have it—only I see A trampling down of what the world most prizes, Turbans and crowns and blank regality; And then I run into most wild surmises Of all the many glories that may be.

TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED

What is there in the universal earth More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree? Haply a halo round the moon—a glee Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth; And haply you will say the dewy birth Of morning roses—ripplings tenderly Spread by the halcyon’s breast upon the sea— But these comparisons are nothing worth. Then there is nothing in the world so fair? The silvery tears of April? Youth of May? Or June that breathes out life for butterflies? No, none of these can from my favourite bear Away the palm—yet shall it ever pay Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.

Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats’s mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of the third book of Endymion,—

There are who lord it o’er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel—

and in its fifth a repetition of the ‘wild surmise’ phrase of the Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative formula of the opening lines of Sleep and Poetry, Keats’s chief venture in verse this winter.

Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is Hunt’s, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode to Apollo:—

God of the golden bow, And of the golden lyre, And of the golden hair, And of the golden fire, Charioteer Of the patient year, Where—where slept thine ire, When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath, Thy laurel, thy glory, The light of thy story, Or was I a worm—too low crawling, for death? O Delphic Apollo!

And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as a time when he had been content to play the part of ‘A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.’

---

1 Another account says Mitchell.

2 In The Asclepiad, April 1884.

3 Houghton MSS.

4 Le Grand: Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781. G. L. Way: Fabliaux or Tales, London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.

5 This note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir Charles Dilke to the public library at Hampstead.

6 In a review of Keats’s first book written the next year (Examiner, July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the ‘Solitude’ sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other anonymous correspondent: but this probably only means that he had not yet met Keats personally.

7 Putting day-break in early October at a little before six, there would have been fully time enough for Keats to walk to the Poultry, composing as he went, and to commit his draft to paper and send it to Clerkenwell by ten o’clock. The longer walk to and from the Borough, had the date been a year earlier, would have made the feat more difficult. Moreover the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we recognize it as performed not at the end of the poet’s twentieth year but at the end of his twenty first. But in view of Keats’s own explicit dating of the piece, the point seems to need no labouring: or else it might be pointed out that if Clarke had really introduced him to Chapman in October 1815 Chapman would assuredly not have been left out of the list of masters whom he quotes as having known through Clarke in his epistle of the following August quoted above (pp. 37, 38).

8 Both Byron and Barry Cornwall have expressed their sense of contrast between certain vulgarities of Hunt’s diction and his personal good breeding. Byron before their quarrel declared emphatically that he was ‘not a vulgar man’; and Barry Cornwall, admitting that he ‘indulged himself occasionally in pet words, some of which struck me as almost approaching to the vulgar,’ goes on to say that ‘he was essentially a gentleman in conduct, in demeanour, in manner, in his consideration for others,’ and to praise him for his ‘great fund of positive active kindness,’ his freedom from all irritable vanity, his pleasure and liberality in praising (Bryan Walter Procter, An Autobiographical Fragment, 1877, pp. 197-200).

9 This reconstruction of the scene is founded on a comparison of the sonnets themselves with Woodhouse’s note on Keats’s subsequent palinode, A Hymn to Apollo. Woodhouse says the friends were both crowned with laurel, but it seems more likely that he should have made this mistake than that a similar performance should have been twice repeated (Houghton MSS.).

CHAPTER III

WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY

So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, 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. For the last eight years he had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage—for such under the conditions of the time it was—in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of these marbles among all works of the sculptor’s art acknowledged, and their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron’s Curse of Minerva in shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies, had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.

Haydon’s victory over these antagonists is his chief title, and a title both sound and strong, 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 high-flaming energy and industry, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his indomitable self-assertion and of his ceaseless conflict with the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for pecuniary 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 and second great pictures, ‘Dentatus’ and ‘Macbeth,’ had been dubiously received; his third, the ‘Judgment of Solomon,’ with acclamation. This had been finished after his victory in the matter of the Elgin marbles. He was now busy on one larger and more ambitious than all, ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,’ in which it was his purpose to include among the crowd of lookers-on portraits of many famous men both historical and contemporary. While as usual sunk deep in debt, he 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 vision and originality, its gift of ‘heavenly alchemy’ for transmuting and new-creating the materials offered it by experience, its sovereign inability to see with any eyes or create to any pattern but its own, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional bold conception, a trick of colour or craftsmanship not too obviously 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 great art but of imitative pictorial posturing and empty pictorial bombast.

As a draughtsman especially, Haydon’s touch is surprisingly loose, empty, and inexpressive. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, as he did with passionate industry, covering reams, he fails almost wholly to render the qualities which he so ardently perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety of the original.1 Infinitely better is his account of them in words: for in truth Haydon’s chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know how vividly and tellingly he can relate an experience or touch off a character. In this gift of striking out a human portrait in words he stood second in his age, if second, to Hazlitt alone, and in our later literature there has been no one to beat him except Carlyle. But passion and pugnacity, vanity and the spirit of self-exaltation, at the same time as they intensify vision, are bound to discolour and distort it; and the reader must always bear in mind that Haydon’s pen portraits of his contemporaries are apt to be not less untrustworthy than they are unforgettable. Moreover in this, the literary, form of expression also, where he aims higher, leaving description and trying to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of spiritual hollowness disguised by temperamental fervour, as in his paintings.

But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his character, and not his essential commonness of gift and faculty, that impressed his associates as they impressed himself. Sturdy, loud-voiced, eloquent, high of colour, with a bald perpendicular forehead surmounting a set of squarely compressed, pugnacious features,—eyes, lips and jaw all prominent and aggressive together,—he was a dominating, and yet a welcome, presence in some of the choicest circles of his day. Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s firm ally, the painter-baronet Sir George Beaumont, Hazlitt, Horace Smith, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary Mitford, 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 loftily on faith and conduct while he was living without scruple on their bounty.

Pl. III

BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON FROM AN ENGRAVING BY THOMSON AFTER HAYDON

In October 1816, the first month of Keats’s intimacy with Hunt, Haydon also made a short stay at Hampstead. He and Hunt were already acquainted, and Hunt had published in the Examiner the very able, cogent and pungent letter with which Haydon a few months before had clenched the Elgin marble controversy and practically brought it to an end. Hunt had congratulated Haydon in a sonnet on the occasion, closing with a gentle hint that, fine as such a victory was, he was himself devoted to a mission finer still, as

One of the spirits chosen by heaven to turn The sunny side of things to human eyes.

Their intercourse was now warmly resumed, though never without latent risk of antagonism and discord. The following letter of Haydon to Wilkie, more just and temperate than usual, is good for filling in our picture both of Hunt and of Haydon himself, as well as for adding another to the number of bewildering contemporary estimates of Rimini.

A few days later, on October 31, we find Keats writing to Cowden Clarke of his pleasure at ‘the thought of seeing so soon this glorious Haydon and all his creations.’ The introduction was arranged to take place at Leigh Hunt’s cottage, where they met for dinner. Haydon, the sublime egoist, could be rapturously sympathetic and genuinely kind to those who took him at his own valuation, and there was much to attract the spirits of eager youth about him as a leader. Keats and he were mutually delighted at first sight: 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:—

Haydon was at no time of his life unused to compliments of this kind. About the same time as Keats another young member of Hunt’s circle, John Hamilton Reynolds, also wrote him a sonnet of eager sympathy and admiration; and the three addressed to him some years later by Wordsworth are well known. 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 the needless, and as it seems to me 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.

Some time after the turn of the year we find Keats presented with a copy of Goldsmith’s Greek History ‘from his ardent friend, B. R. Haydon.’ All the winter and early spring the two met frequently, sometimes at Haydon’s studio in Great Marlborough Street, sometimes in the rooms of the Keats brothers in the Poultry or in those of their common acquaintance, and discussed with passionate eagerness most things in heaven and earth, and especially poetry and painting. ‘I have enjoyed Shakespeare,’ declares Haydon, ‘with John Keats more than with any other human being.’ Both he and Keats’s other painter friend, Joseph Severn, have testified that Keats had a fine natural sense for the excellencies of painting and sculpture. Both loved to take him to the British Museum and expatiate to him on the glories of the antique; and it would seem that through Haydon he must have had access also to the collection of one at least of the great dilettanti noblemen of the day. After a first visit to the newly acquired Parthenon marbles with Haydon at the beginning of March 1817, Keats tried to embody his impressions in a couple of sonnets, which Hunt promptly printed in the Examiner. It is characteristic of his unfailing sincerity with his art and with himself that he allows himself to break into no stock raptures, but strives faithfully to get into words the confused sensations of spiritual infirmity and awe that have overpowered him:—

My spirit is too weak—mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep. And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky. Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep That I have not the cloudy winds to keep, Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye. Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main— A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

He sends this with a covering sonnet to Haydon asking pardon for its immaturity and justly praising the part played by Haydon in forcing the acceptance of the marbles upon the nation:—

Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak Definitely on these mighty things; Forgive me that I have not Eagle’s wings— That what I want I know not where to seek; And think that I would not be over meek In rolling out upfollow’d thunderings, Even to the steep of Heliconian springs, Were I of ample strength for such a freak— Think too, that all those numbers should be thine; Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture’s hem? For when men star’d at what was most divine With browless idiotism—o’erwise phlegm— Thou hadst beheld the Hesperian shine Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.

Haydon’s acknowledgment is of course enthusiastic, but betrays his unfortunate gift for fustian in the following precious expansion of Keats’s image of the sick eagle:—

In Haydon’s journal about the same date there is an entry which reads with ironical pathos in the light of after events:—‘Keats is a man after my own heart. He sympathises with me, and comprehends me. We saw through each other, and I hope are friends for ever. I only know that, if I sell my picture, Keats shall never want till another is done, that he may have leisure for his effusions: in short he shall never want all his life.’ To Keats himself, more hyperbolically still, and in terms still more suited to draw the pitying smile of the ironic gods, Haydon writes a little later:—

Familiar visitors at this time of Haydon in the Marlborough Street studio and of Hunt in the Hampstead cottage were two men of finer gift than either, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. With both of these seniors (Lamb was forty-one and Hazlitt thirty-eight) Keats now became acquainted without becoming intimate. Unluckily neither of them has left any but the slightest personal impression of the young poet, whose modesty probably kept him somewhat in the background when they were by. Haydon used to complain that it was only after Keats’s death that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius; but Lamb, as we shall see, with his unerring critical touch, paid to Keats’s best work while he was still living a tribute as splendid as it was just. Keats on his part, after the publication of Hazlitt’s lectures on the characters of Shakespeare in 1817, reckoned his ‘depth of taste’ one of the things most to rejoice at in his age, and was a diligent attendant at his next course on the English poets. But he never frequented, presumably for lack of invitation, those Wednesday and Thursday evening parties at the Lambs of which Talfourd and B. W. Procter have left us such vivid pictures; and when he met some of the same company at the Novello’s, the friends of his friend Cowden Clarke, he enjoyed it, as will appear later, less than one would have hoped. He has left no personal impression of Hazlitt, and of Lamb only the slightest and most casual. Fortunately we know them both so well from other sources that we can almost see and hear them: Hazlitt with his unkempt black hair and restless grey eyes, lean, slouching, splenetic, an Ishmaelite full of mistrust and suspicion, his habitual action of the hand within the waistcoat apt in his scowling moments to suggest a hidden dagger; but capable withal, in company where he felt secure, of throwing into his talk much the same fine mixture as distinguishes his writing of impetuous fullness and variety with incisive point and critical lucidity: Lamb noticeable in contrast by his neat, sombrely clad small figure on its spindle legs and his handsome romantic head; by his hurried, stammering utterance and too often, alas! his vinous flush and step almost as titubant as his tongue; but most of all by that airy genius of insight and caprice, of deep tenderness and freakish wisdom, quick to break from him in sudden, illuminating phrases at any moment and in any manner save the expected.

Yet another acquaintance brought about by Hunt in these days was that between Keats and Shelley, who was Keats’s senior by only three years and with whom Hunt himself was now first becoming intimate. When Hunt was sentenced for sedition four years earlier, Shelley, then barely twenty, had been eager to befriend him and had sent him an offer of money help; which for once, not being then in immediate need, Hunt had honourably declined. Since then they had held only slight communication; but when Hunt included Shelley on the strength of his poem Alastor, among the young poets praised in his Examiner essay (December 1, 1816), a glowing correspondence immediately followed, and a few days later Shelley came up from Bath to stay at the Hampstead cottage. The result of a week’s visit was an immediate intimacy and enthusiastic mutual regard, with a prompt determination on Shelley’s part to rescue Hunt from the slough of debt (something like £1400) into which during and since his imprisonment he had cheerfully muddled himself.

It was the eve of the most harrowing crisis in Shelley’s life, when his principle of love a law to itself entailed in action so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his own morality brought him into such harsh collision with the world’s. First came the news of the suicide of his deserted wife Harriet (December 14) and three months later the sentence of Lord Eldon which deprived him of the custody of his and Harriet’s children. On the day of the first tragic news he writes to Mary Godwin, whom he had left at Bath, ‘Leigh Hunt has been with me all day, and his delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of you, have sustained me against the weight of horror of this event.’ In the interval between the shock of Harriet’s death and that of the judgment sequestering his children Shelley was a frequent guest in the Vale of Health, sometimes alone and sometimes with Mary, now legally his wife. Neither in these first days nor later could Hunt persuade his old intimates Hazlitt and Lamb to take kindly to his new friend Shelley either as man or poet. Lamb, who seems only to have seen him once, said after his death, ‘his voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with’; of his poetry, that it was ‘thin sown with profit or delight’; and of his ‘theories and nostrums,’ that ‘they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend ‘em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in ‘em.’ Hazlitt, opening the most studied of his several attacks on Shelley’s poetry and doctrine, gives one of his vivid portraits, saying ‘he has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech.... He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced.... His bending, flexible form appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but flows from it like a river.’ Still less was a good understanding possible between Shelley and Haydon, who met him more than once in these early days at the Vale of Health. He tells how, on the evening of their first meeting, Shelley, looking hectically frail and girlish, opened the conversation at dinner with the words, ‘as to that detestable religion, the Christian,’—and how he, Haydon, a man at all times stoutly and vociferously orthodox, waited till the meal was over and then, ‘like a stag at bay and resolved to gore without mercy,’ struck his hardest on behalf of the established faith, while Hunt in his airily complacent way kept skirmishing in on Shelley’s side, until the contention grew hot and stormy. The heat and noise, Haydon owns, were chiefly on his side, and we might guess as much without his admission, for we have abundant evidence of the unfailing courtesy and sweetness of manner with which Shelley would in that high-pitched feminine voice of his advance the most staggering propositions and patiently encounter the arguments of his adversaries.

Such contentions, victorious as he always held himself to be in them, annoyed Haydon. The queer blend, in the atmosphere of the Hampstead cottage, of eager kindness and hospitality and a graceful, voluble enthusiasm for the ‘luxuries’ of poetry, art, and nature with slatternly housekeeping and a spirit of fervent or flippant anti-Christianity, became distasteful to him, and he afterwards dated from these days his gradual estrangement from Hunt and his circle. At the same time he began to try and draw away Keats from Hunt’s influence.

Keats, we are told, though much inclining in these days towards the Voltairian views of his host, would take little part in such debates as that above narrated, and once even supported another young member of the circle, Joseph Severn, in a defence of Christianity against Hunt and Shelley. To Shelley himself, his senior by three years, his relation was from the first and remained to the end one of friendly civility and little more. He did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him, says Hunt, 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, as we have seen, was eagerly open-hearted to new friendships, and it may well be that the reserve he maintained towards Shelley was assumed at first by way of defence against the possibility of social patronage on the other’s part. But he must soon have perceived that from Shelley, a gentleman of gentlemen, such an attitude was the last thing to be apprehended, and the cause of his standing off was much more likely his knowledge that nearly all Shelley’s literary friends were his pensioners,—from Godwin, the greediest, to Leigh Hunt, the lightest-hearted,—and a fear that he too might be supposed to expect a similar bounty. It would seem that in his spirit of independence he gave Shelley the impression of being much better off than he was,—or possibly instances of his only too ready generosity in lending from his modest means to his intimates when they were hard pressed may have come to Shelley’s knowledge: at all events a few months later we find Shelley casting about for persons able to help him in helping Hunt, and writing under a false impression, ‘Keats certainly can.’

These two young poets, equally and conjointly beloved by posterity, were in truth at many points the most opposite-natured of men. Pride and sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy between them. Keats, with the rich elements of earthly clay in his composition, his lively vein of every-day common-sense and humour, his keen, tolerant delight and interest in the aspects and activities of nature and human nature as he found them, may well have been as much repelled as attracted by Shelley, Shelley the ‘Elfin knight,’ the spirit all air and fire, with his passionate repudiation of the world’s ways and the world’s law, his passionate absorption in his vision of a happier scheme of things, a vision engendered in humanitarian dreams from his readings of Rousseau and Godwin and Plato,—or was it rather one brought with him from some ante-natal sojourn among the radiances and serenities of the sunset clouds? Leigh Hunt’s way of putting it is this:—‘Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of Hyperion, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands.’ Of the incidents and results of their intercourse at Hampstead we know little more than that Shelley, wisely enough in the light of his own headlong early experiments, tried to dissuade Keats from premature publication; and that Keats on his part declined, ‘in order that he might have his own unfettered scope,’ a cordial invitation from Shelley to come and stay with him at Great Marlow. Keats, though he must have known that he could learn much from Shelley’s trained scholarship and fine literary sense, was doubtless right in feeling that whatever power of poetry might be in him must work its own way to maturity in freedom and not in leading-strings. To these scanty facts Shelley’s cousin Medwin adds the statement that the two agreed to write in friendly rivalry the long poems each was severally meditating for his summer’s work, Shelley Laon and Cythna, afterwards called The Revolt of Islam, and Keats Endymion. This may very well have been the case, but Medwin was a man so lax of memory, tongue, and pen that his evidence, unconfirmed, counts for little. Of the influence possibly exercised on Keats by Shelley’s first important poem, Alastor, or by his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty printed in the Examiner during the January of their intercourse at Hunt’s, it will be time to speak later on.

A much closer intimacy sprang up between Keats and the other young poetic aspirant whom Hunt in his December essay in the Examiner had bracketed with him and Shelley. This was John Hamilton Reynolds, of whom we have as yet heard only the name. He was a handsome, witty, enthusiastic youth a year younger than Keats, having been born at Shrewsbury in September 1796. Part of his boyhood was spent in Devonshire near Sidmouth, a countryside to which he remained always deeply attached; but he was still quite young when his father came and settled in London as mathematical master and head writing master at Christ’s Hospital. The elder Reynolds and his wife were people of literary leanings and literary acquaintance, and seem to have been characters in their way: both Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were frequenters of their house in Little Britain, and Mrs Reynolds is reported as holding her own well among the talkers at Lamb’s evenings. Their son John was educated at St Paul’s school and showed talent and inclinations which drew him precociously into the literary movement of the time. At eighteen he wrote an Eastern tale in verse in the Byronic manner, Safie, of which Byron acknowledged the presentation copy in a kind and careful letter several pages long. Two years later, just about the time of his first introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt’s, the youngster had the honour of receiving a similar attention from Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem, The Naiad (November 1816). Neither of these two youthful volumes, nor yet a third, The Eden of Imagination, showed much more than a quick susceptibility to nature and romance, and a gift of falling in readily and gracefully now with one and now with another of the poetic fashions of the hour. Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt were alternately his models.

The same gift of adaptiveness which Reynolds showed in serious work made him when he chose a deft, sometimes even a masterly, parodist in the humourous vein, and his work done in this vein a few years later in collaboration with Thomas Hood holds its own well beside that of his associate. Partly owing to the persuasions of the lady to whom he was engaged, Reynolds early gave up the hope of a literary career and went into business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare 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 he continued to write occasionally for some years, and in the end failed somewhat tragically to prosper in the profession of law. During these early years he was not only one of the warmest friends Keats had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open his innermost mind with the certainty of being understood, and who once at least saved him from a serious mistake. A sonnet written by him within three months of their first meeting proves with what warmth of affection as well as with what generosity of admiration the one young aspirant from the first regarded the other. Keats one day, calling on Cowden Clarke and finding him asleep over Chaucer, passed the time by writing on the blank space at the end of The Floure and the Lefe, a poem with which he was already familiar, the sonnet beginning ‘This pleasant tale is like a little copse.’2 Reynolds’s comment after reading it is as follows:—

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 eyes, 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 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.

Reynolds had two sisters, Marianne and Jane, older than himself, and a third, Charlotte, several years younger. With the elder two Keats was soon on terms of almost brotherly intimacy and affection, seeing them often at the family home in Little Britain, exchanging lively letters with them in absence, and contributing to Jane’s album sets of verses some of which have only through this means been preserved. A little later the piano-playing of the youngest sister, Charlotte, was often a source of great pleasure to him.

Outside his own family Reynolds had an inseparable friend with whom Keats also became quickly intimate: this was 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.’ It was through Rice that there presently came to Reynolds that uncongenial business opening which in worldly wisdom he held himself bound to accept. Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant young versifying member, or satellite, of Hunt’s set when Keats first joined it was one Cornelius Webb, remembered now, if remembered at all, by the derisory quotation in Blackwood’s Magazine of his rimes on Byron and Keats, 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; and for some years afterwards served as press-reader in the printing-office of Messrs. Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the Quarterly proofs.

To turn to other close associates of Keats during the same period, known to him not through Hunt but through his brothers,—a word may suffice for Charles Wells, to whom we find him addressing in the summer of 1816 a sonnet of thanks for a gift of roses. Wells had been a schoolmate of Tom Keats and R.H. Horne, and is described as in those days a small, red-headed, snub-nosed, blue-eyed youth of irrepressible animal spirits. Now or somewhat later he formed an intimacy, never afterwards broken, with Hazlitt. Keats’s own regard for Wells was short-lived, being changed a year or so later into fierce indignation when Wells played off a heartless practical joke upon the consumptive Tom in the shape of a batch of pretended love-letters from an imaginary ‘Amena.’ It was after Keats’s death that Wells earned a place of his own in literature with the poetic drama Joseph and his Brethren, dead-born in its first anonymous form and re-animated after many years, but still during the life-time of its author, through the enthusiasm which its qualities of intellect and passion inspired in Rossetti and Swinburne.

Of far different importance were two other acquaintanceships, which Keats owed to his brother George and which in the same months were ripening into affection, one of them into an affection priceless in the sequel. The first was with a young solicitor called William Haslam (it is odd how high a proportion of Keats’s intimates were of this profession). Of him no personal picture has come down to us, but in the coming days we find him, of all the set, the most prompt and serviceable on occasions of practical need or urgency: ‘our oak friend’ he is called in one such crisis by Joseph Severn. It was as the friend of Haslam, and through Haslam of his brother George, that Keats first knew Joseph Severn, whose name is now inseparable from his own. He was two years Keats’s senior, the son of a music-master sprung from an old Gloucestershire stock and having a good connexion in the northern suburbs of London. The elder Severn seems to have been much of a domestic tyrant, and in all things headstrong and hot-headed, but blessed with an admirable wife whom he appreciated and who contrived to make the household run endurably if not comfortably. Joseph, the son, showing a precocious talent for drawing, was apprenticed to a stipple engraver, but the perpetual task of ‘stabbing copper’ irked him too sorely: his ambition was to be a painter, and against the angry opposition of his father he contrived to attend the Royal Academy schools, picking up meanwhile for himself what education in letters he could. He had a hereditary talent for music, an untrained love for books and poetry, and doubtless some touch already of that engaging social charm which Ruskin noted in him when they first met five and twenty years later in Rome. He was beginning to get a little practice as a miniature painter and to make private attempts in history-painting when he met the brilliant young poet-student of Guy’s, with whom he was shy and timid at first, as with a sort of superior being. But before long he became used to drinking in with delight all that Keats, in communicative hours, was moved to pour out from the play of his imagination or the stores—infinite as to the innocent Severn they appeared—of his reading in poetry and history. What especially, he recorded in after life, used to enrapture him was Keats’s talk on the meaning and beauty of the Greek polytheism as a ‘religion of joy.’ On his own part he was proud to act as cicerone to Keats in the British Museum or the British Institution (the National Gallery as yet was not), and deferentially to point out to him the glories of the antique or of Titian and Claude and Poussin.

Thus our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student, the orphan son of a Finsbury stable-keeper, found himself at twenty-one, before the end of his second winter in London, 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 most gifted spirits of his time. The power and charm of genius already shone from him, and impressed alike his older and his younger companions. Portraits of him verbal and other exist in abundance. A small, compact, well-turned figure, broad-chested for its height, which was barely an inch over five feet; a shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair and carried with an eager upward and forward thrust from the shoulders; the features powerful, finished, and mobile, with an expression at once bold and sensitive; the forehead sloping and not high, but broad and strong: the brows well arched above hazel-brown, liquid flashing eyes, ‘like the eyes of a wild gypsy maid in colour, set in the face of a young god,’ Severn calls them. To the same effect Haydon,—‘an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions’: and again 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 tremble.’ 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 once more Haydon,—‘Keats was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high calling, except Wordsworth.... 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.’ ‘Nothing seemed to escape him,’—I now quote paragraphs compiled by the late Mr William Sharp from many jotted reminiscences of Severn’s,—

Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the wind—just how it took certain tall flowers and plants—and the wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing tramps, the colour of one woman’s hair, the smile on one child’s face, the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the remotest hint as to the real self of the wearer. Withal, even when in a mood of joyous observance, with flow of happy spirits, he would suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.

Certain things affected him extremely, particularly when ‘a wave was billowing through a tree,’ as he described the uplifting surge of air among swaying masses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he heard the wind coming across woodlands. ‘The tide! the tide!’ he would cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of a wayside tree, and watch the passage of the wind upon the meadow grasses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his face glow till he ‘would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths,’ or like ‘a young eagle staring with proud joy before taking flight.’...

Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his frame, partly from his erect attitude and a characteristic backward poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen....

The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading, or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face....

The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of seeming gloomful reverie—the only thing, during those country-rambles, that would bring the poet ‘to himself again’ was the motion ‘of the inland sea’ he loved so well, particularly the violent passage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passage of the wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.

CHAPTER IV

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 and activities of nature, in the vividness of sensation, 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.

Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic or five-stressed couplet first naturalized by Chaucer, revived by the Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic, elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser,—truly rather of Spenser’s eighteenth century imitators; the Address to Hope of February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies of verses To some Ladies and On receiving a curious Shell from some Ladies, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain, to quote a phrase of Keats’s own,

—new stuff’d in youth with triumphs gay Of old romance,—

especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest an acquaintance with Oberon and Titania not only through the Midsummer Night’s Dream but through Wieland’s Oberon, a romance poem which Sotheby’s translation had made well known in England and in which the fairy king and queen are divided by a quarrel far deeper and more durable than in Shakespeare’s play.1

Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of passion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the class called ‘occasional’,—records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic, manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain here and there a passage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote,—but I will quote it nevertheless,—on Chapman’s Homer. That walk in the morning twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and concentration: concentration twofold, first flashing on our mind’s eye the human vision of the explorer and his companions with their looks and gestures, then symbolically evoking through that vision a whole world-wide range of the emotions of discovery.

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 rul’d 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 star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The ‘realms of gold’ lines in the Chapman sonnet, recording Keats’s range of reading in our older poetry, had been in a measure anticipated in this other, written six months earlier2:—

How many bards gild the lapses of time! A few of them have ever been the food Of my delighted fancy,—I could brood Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime: And often, when I sit me down to rhyme, These will in throngs before my mind intrude: But no confusion, no disturbance rude Do they occasion; ’tis a pleasing chime. So the unnumber’d sounds that evening store; The songs of birds—the whisp’ring of the leaves— The voice of waters—the great bell that heaves With solemn sound,—and thousand others more, That distance of recognizance bereaves, Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.

Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained use of ‘store’ for ‘fill’ and ‘recognizance’ for ‘recognition.’ But the main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats’s miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear,—a frank and illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work. Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,

From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty poets.3

Compare Shelley in the preface to Prometheus Unbound:—‘One great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study.’

Most of the remaining sonnets can best be taken in groups, each group centering round a single theme or embodying a single mood or vein of feeling. One is what may be called the sex-chivalry group, including the sequence of three printed separately from the rest and beginning, ‘Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain’; that beginning ‘Had I a man’s fair form’; that addressed to Georgiana Wylie, with its admirable opening, ‘Nymph of the downward smile, etc.,’ and its rather lame conclusion; to which, as more loosely connected with the group, and touched in some degree with Byronic suggestion, may be added ‘Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters.’ That excellent critic, the late F.T. Palgrave, had a singular admiration for the set of three which I have placed at the head of this group: to me its chief interest seems not poetical but personal, inasmuch as in it Keats already defines with self-knowledge the peculiar blend in his nature of ardent, idealizing boyish worship of woman and beauty with an acute critical sensitiveness to flaws of character defacing his ideal in actual women: a sensitiveness which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards put him ill at ease with his company and himself.

A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in association with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early sonnet composed on the day of Hunt’s release from prison (February 5, 1815), and shown shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816 which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman’s enjoyment of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:—‘To one who has been long in city pent’ (this opening comes with only the change of a word from Paradise Lost), ‘O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell,’ ‘As late I rambled in the happy fields.’ There is a memory of Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to Solitude:—

Let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.

Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead cottage and in their city lodgings:—‘Give me a golden pen,’ ‘Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,’ ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’: to which may be added the sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket written in Hunt’s house and in friendly competition with him.

A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well inspired in writing of the sea):—

The ocean with its vastness, its blue green, Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears, Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears Must think on what will be, and what has been.

Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this 1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble, though he has included others scarcely better. That headed ‘As from the darkening gloom a silver dove’ he may have counted too conventionally pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,4 seem not to have been written (as that on the Floure and the Lefe certainly was not) until the book was passing, or had passed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier date. But why leave out ‘After dark vapours’ and ‘Who loves to peer,’ and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie’s coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject. ‘Tassie’s gems’ were at this time immensely popular among lovers of Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true antiques among a multitude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova.5 The last three lines are an example, hardly to be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the eye.

Come hither all sweet maidens soberly, Down-looking aye, and with a chasten’d light Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white, And meekly let your fair hands joined be, As if so gentle that ye could not see, Untouch’d, a victim of your beauty bright, Sinking away to his young spirit’s night,— Sinking bewilder’d ‘mid the dreary sea: ’Tis young Leander toiling to his death; Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips For Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile. O horrid dream! see how his body dips Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile: He’s gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath!6

More than half the volume is taken up with epistles and meditative pieces (Drayton would have called them Elegies and Ben Jonson Epigrams) in the regular five-stressed or decasyllabic couplet. The earliest of these is the epistle to Felton Mathew from which I have already given a quotation. The form of the verse in this case is modelled pretty closely on Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals. Keats, as has been said, was already familiar with the work of this amiable Spenserian allegorist, so thin and tedious in the allegorical part of his work proper, in romantic invention so poorly inspired, so admirable, genuine, and vivacious on the other hand in his scenes and similitudes from real west-country life and in notes of patriotism both local and national. By the following motto chosen from Browne’s work Keats seems to put the group of Epistles in his volume under that poet’s particular patronage:—

Among the rest a shepheard (though but young Yet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill His few yeeres could, began to fit his quill.

But before coming to questions of the special influences which successively shaped Keats’s aims both as to style and versification in poems of this form, I shall ask the reader to pause with me awhile and get freshly and familiarly into his ear and mind, what to special students is well known but to others only vaguely, the story of the chief phases which this most characteristic of English measures had gone through until the time when Keats tried to handle it in a spirit more or less revolutionary. Some of the examples I shall quote by way of illustration are passages which we know to have been specially familiar to Keats and to which we shall have occasion to recur. Let us first consider Chaucer’s use, as illustrated in a part of the prayer of Emilia to Diana in the Knightes Tale:—

O chastË goddesse of the wodËs grene, To whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene, Quene of the regne of Pluto derk and lowe, Goddesse of maydens, that myn herte hast knowe Ful many a yeer, and woost what I desire, As keep me fro thy vengeance and thyn ire, That Attheon aboughtË cruelly. ChastË goddessË, wel wostow that I Desire to been a mayden al my lyf, Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf. I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye, A mayde, and love hunting and venerye, And for to walken in the wodËs wilde, And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe. Noght wol I knowË companye of man. Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can, For tho thre formËs that thou hast in thee. And Palamon, that hath swich love to me, And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore, This grace I preyË thee with-outË more, As sendË love and pees bitwixte hem two; And fro me turne awey hir hertËs so, That al hir hotË love, and hir desyr, And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr Be queynt, or turnËd in another place; And if so be thou wolt not do me grace, Or if my destinee be shapen so, That I shal nedËs have oon of hem two, As sende me him that most desireth me.

The rime-syllables with which Chaucer ends his lines are as a rule strong and followed by a pause, or at least by the grammatical possibility of a pause, though there are exceptions like the division of ‘I " desire.’ The general effect of the metre is that of a succession of separate couplets, though their separation is often slight and the sentence is allowed to run on with little break through several couplets divided from each other by no break of more than a comma. When a full stop comes and ends the sentence, it is hardly ever allowed to break a line by falling at any point except the end. On the other hand it is as often as not used to divide the couplet by falling at the end not of the second but of the first line, so that the ear has to wait a moment in expectancy until the second, beginning a new sentence, catches up the rime of the first like an echo. Other, slighter pauses fall quite variably where they will, and there is no regular breathing pause or caesura dividing the line after the second or third stress.

When the measure was revived by the Elizabethans two conflicting tendencies began to appear in its treatment. One was to end each line with a full and strong rime-syllable, noun or verb or emphatic adjective, and to let each couplet consist of a single sentence, or at any rate a single clause of a sentence, so as to be both grammatically and rhythmically almost independent of the next. Under this, which is called the closed or stopped couplet system, the rime-pattern and the sense or sentence-pattern, which together compose the formal elements in all rimed verse, are made strictly to coincide, and within the limits of a couplet no full break of the sense is allowed. Rhetorical and epigrammatical point and vigour are the special virtues of this system: its weaknesses are monotony of beat and lack of freedom and variety in sentence structure. The other and opposite tendency is to suffer the sentence or period to develop itself freely, almost as in prose, running over as it will from one couplet into another, and coming to a full pause at any point in the line; and at the same time to let any syllable whatever, down to the lightest of prepositions or auxiliaries, serve at need as a rime-syllable. Under this system the sense and consequent sentence-pattern winds in and out of the rime-pattern variously and deviously, the rime-echo striking upon the ear now with emphasis, now lightly and fugitively, and being sometimes held up to follow a full pause and sometimes hurried on with the merest suggestion or insinuation of a possible pause, or with none at all. The virtues of this system are variety and freedom of movement; its special dangers are invertebrateness and a tendency to straggle and wind itself free of all real observance of rime-effect or metrical law.

Most of the Elizabethans used both systems interchangeably, now a string of closed couplets, and now a flowing period carried through a succession of couplets overrunning into one another. Spenser in Mother Hubbard’s Tale and Marlowe in Hero and Leander were among the earliest and best revivers of the measure, and both inclined to the closed couplet system, Spenser the more strictly of the two, as the satiric and epigrammatic nature of his theme might naturally dictate. Let us take a well known passage from Marlowe:—

It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate. When two are stript, long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win; And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect: The reason no man knows; let it suffice, What we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed: Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said, ‘Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;’ And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him. He started up; she blushed as one ashamed; Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed. He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled: Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled. These lovers parlÈd by the touch of hands: True love is mute, and oft amazÈd stands. Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, The air with sparks of living fire was spangled; And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world upon Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid’s day).

The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which Chaucer affords precedent enough.

Drayton, a poet in whom Keats was well read, is commonly quoted as one who yielded habitually to the attraction of the closed couplet; and indeed he will often run on through page on page of twinned verses, or ‘gemells’ as he calls them, like these from the imaginary Epistle from Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey:—

Why, if thou wilt, I will myself deny, Nay, I’ll affirm and swear, I am not I: Or if in that thy shame thou dost perceive, Lo, for thy dear sake, I my name will leave. And yet, methinks, amaz’d thou shouldst not stand, Nor seem so much appallÈd at my hand; For my misfortunes have inur’d thine eye (Long before this) to sights of misery. No, no, read on, ’tis I, the very same, All thou canst read, is but to read my shame. Be not dismay’d, nor let my name affright; The worst it can, is but t’ offend thy sight; It cannot wound, nor do thee deadly harm, It is no dreadful spell, no magic charm.

But Drayton is also very capable of the full-flowing period and the loose over-run of couplet into couplet, as witness the following from one of his epistles:—

O God, though Virtue mightily do grieve For all this world, yet will I not believe But that she’s fair and lovely and that she So to the period of the world will be; Else had she been forsaken (sure) of all, For that so many sundry mischiefs fall Upon her daily, and so many take Up arms against her, as it well might make Her to forsake her nature, and behind To leave no step for future time behind, As she had never been, for he that now Can do her most disgrace, him they allow The time’s chief Champion—.

Turning to Keats’s next favourite among the old poets, William Browne of Tavistock, here is a passage from Britannia’s Pastorals which we know to have stuck in his memory, and which illustrates the prevailing tendency of the metre in Browne’s hands to run in a succession of closed, but not too tightly closed, couplets, and to abound in double or feminine rime-endings which make a variation in the beat:—

And as a lovely maiden, pure and chaste, With naked iv’ry neck, and gown unlaced, Within her chamber, when the day is fled, Makes poor her garments to enrich her bed: First, put she off her lily-silken gown, That shrieks for sorrow as she lays it down; And with her arms graceth a waistcoat fine, Embracing her as it would ne’er untwine. Her flaxen hair, ensnaring all beholders, She next permits to wave about her shoulders, And though she cast it back, the silken slips Still forward steal and hang upon her lips: Whereat she sweetly angry, with her laces Binds up the wanton locks in curious traces, Whilst (twisting with her joints) each hair long lingers, As loth to be enchain’d but with her fingers. Then on her head a dressing like a crown; Her breasts all bare, her kirtle slipping down, And all things off (which rightly ever be Call’d the foul-fair marks of our misery) Except her last, which enviously doth seize her, Lest any eye partake with it in pleasure, Prepares for sweetest rest, while sylvans greet her, And longingly the down bed swells to meet her.

Chapman, a poet naturally rugged of mind and speech and moreover hampered by having to translate, takes much greater liberties, constantly breaking up single lines with a full stop in the middle and riming on syllables too light or too grammatically dependent on the word next following to allow naturally any stress of after-pause, however slight; as thus in the sixth Odyssey:—

These, here arriv’d, the mules uncoach’d, and drave Up to the gulfy river’s shore, that gave Sweet grass to them. The maids from coach then took Their clothes, and steep’d them in the sable brook; Then put them into springs, and trod them clean With cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then, Who should have soonest and most cleanly done. When having throughly cleans’d, they spread them on The flood’s shore, all in order. And then, where The waves the pebbles wash’d, and ground was clear, They bath’d themselves, and all with glittering oil Smooth’d their white skins; refreshing then their toil With pleasant dinner, by the river’s side; Yet still watch’d when the sun their clothes had dried. Till which time, having dined, Nausicaa With other virgins did at stool-ball play, Their shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by.

The other classical translation of the time with which Keats was most familiar was that of the Metamorphoses of Ovid by the traveller and colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance,—

Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute With wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit Weighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire; There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire May mollify, milk, honey redolent With flowers of thyme, thy palate to content. The prodigal earth abounds with gentle food; Affording banquets without death or blood. Brute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy: And yet not all; in pastures horses joy: So flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath Endued with cruelty, and savage wrath (Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in Hot blood delight. How horrible a sin, That entrails bleeding entrails should entomb! That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become! While by one creature’s death another lives!

Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St Paul’s, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we shall have to return, is the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne, (1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation. For example:—

Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length The fair Pharonnida recovers strength, Though sighs each accent interrupted, to Return this answer:—‘Wilt, oh! wilt thou do Our infant love such injury—to leave It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive A comfortable smile to cherish it, When thou art gone? They’re but dull joys that sit Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would Our rigid fortune only be content With absence; but a greater punishment Conspires against us—Danger must attend Each step thou tread’st from hence; and shall I spend Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day Wherein your battles join, how will my fear With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast, My heart’s exposed to every danger that Assails thy valour, and is wounded at Each stroke that lights on thee—which absent I, Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.’

The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit—that is the separate couplet—as the completely dominant element in the measure, the ‘heroic’ measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist, in an address to King James I:—

In every language now in Europe spoke By nations which the Roman Empire broke, The relish of the Muse consists in rime: One verse must meet another like a chime. Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace In choice of words fit for the ending place, Which leave impression in the mind as well As closing sounds of some delightful bell.

Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college Vacation Exercise, familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion with the poems expressing Keats’s early aspirations, showed how the metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:—

Hail native Language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, ········ I have some naked thoughts that rove about And loudly knock to have their passage out; And wearie of their place do only stay Till thou hast deck’t them in thy best array; That so they may without suspect or fears Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly’s ears; Yet I had rather if I were to chuse, Thy service in some graver subject use, Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound: Such where the deep transported mind may soare Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns dore Look in, and see each blissful Deitie How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings To th’ touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings Immortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire: Then passing through the Spheres of watchful fire, And mistie Regions of wide air next under, And hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder, May tell at length how green-ey’d Neptune raves, In Heav’ns defiance mustering all his waves; Then sing of secret things that came to pass When Beldam Nature in her cradle was; And last of Kings and Queens and Hero’s old, Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast, While sad Ulisses soul and all the rest Are held with his melodious harmonie In willing chains and sweet captivitie.

But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich and rolling modulations: none more so than Andrew Marvell, as for instance in his noble poem on the death of Cromwell. The name especially associated in contemporary and subsequent criticism with the attainment of the admired quality of ‘smoothness’ (another name for clipped and even monotony of rime and rhythm) in this metre is Waller, the famous parliamentary and poetical turncoat who could adulate with equal unction first the Lord Protector and then the restored Charles. By this time, however, every rimer could play the tune, and thanks to the controlling and suggesting power of the metre itself, could turn out couplets with the true metallic and epigrammatic ring: few better than Katherine Philips (‘the matchless Orinda’), who was a stickler for the strictest form of the couplet and wished even to banish all double endings. Take this from her elegy on the death of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (1662):—

Although the most do with officious heat Only adore the living and the great, Yet this Queen’s merits Fame so far hath spread, That she rules still, though dispossest and dead. For losing one, two other Crowns remained; Over all hearts and her own griefs she reigned. Two Thrones so splendid as to none are less But to that third which she does now possess. Her heart and birth Fortune as well did know, That seeking her own fame in such a foe, She drest the spacious theatre for the fight: And the admiring World call’d to the sight: An army then of mighty sorrows brought, Who all against this single virtue fought; And sometimes stratagems, and sometimes blows, To her heroic soul they did oppose: But at her feet their vain attempts did fall, And she discovered and subdu’d them all.

Cowley in his long ‘heroic’ poem The Davideis admits the occasional Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line as a variation on the monotony of the rhythm. Dryden, with his incomparably sounder and stronger literary sense, saw the need for a richer variation yet, and obtained it by the free use both of triple rimes and of Alexandrines: often getting fine effects of sweeping sonority, although by means which the reader cannot but feel to be arbitrary, imported into the form because its monotony calls for relief rather than intrinsic and natural to it. Chaucer’s prayer, above quoted, of Emilia to Diana runs thus in Dryden’s ‘translation’:—

O Goddess, Haunter of the Woodland Green, To whom both Heav’n and Earth and Seas are seen; Queen of the nether Skies, where half the Year Thy Silver Beams descend, and light the gloomy Sphere; Goddess of Maids, and conscious of our Hearts, So keep me from the Vengeance of thy Darts, Which Niobe’s devoted Issue felt, When hissing through the Skies the feather’d Deaths were dealt: As I desire to live a Virgin-life, Nor know the Name of Mother or of Wife. Thy Votress from my tender Years I am, And love, like thee, the Woods and Sylvan Game. Like Death, thou know’st, I loath the Nuptial State, And Man, the Tyrant of our Sex, I hate, A lowly Servant, but a lofty Mate. Where Love is Duty on the Female Side, On theirs mere sensual Gust, and sought with surly Pride. Now by thy triple Shape, as thou art seen In Heav’n, Earth, Hell, and ev’ry where a Queen, Grant this my first Desire; let Discord, cease, And make betwixt the Rivals lasting Peace: Quench their hot Fire, or far from me remove The Flame, and turn it on some other Love. Or if my frowning Stars have so decreed, That one must be rejected, one succeed, Make him my Lord, within whose faithful Breast Is fix’d my Image, and who loves me best.

In serious work Dryden avoided double endings almost entirely, reserving them for playful and colloquial use in stage prologues, epilogues, and the like, thus:—

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. For, after death, we Sprights have just such Natures, We had, for all the World, when human Creatures.

In the following generation Pope discarded, with the rarest exceptions, all these variations upon the metre and wrought up successions of separate couplets, each containing a single sentence or clause of a sentence complete, and each line having its breathing-pause or caesura almost exactly in the same place, to a pitch of polished and glittering elegance, of striking, instantaneous effect both upon ear and mind, which completely dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries but three full generations of rimers and readers after them. Everyone knows the tune; it is the same whether applied to purposes of pastoral sentiment or rhetorical passion or playful fancy, of Homeric translation or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral and critical reflection or of savage personal lampoon and invective. Let the reader turn in memory from Ariel’s account of the duties of his subordinate elves and fays:—

Some in the fields of purest ether play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day: Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high, Or roll the planets through the boundless sky: Some, less refin’d, beneath the moon’s pale light Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night, Or suck 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. Others, on earth, o’er human race preside, Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide,—

let the reader turn in memory from this to the familiarly known lines in which Pope congratulates himself

That not in fancy’s maze he wandered long, But stoop’d to truth, and moraliz’d his song; That not for fame, but virtue’s better end, He stood the furious foe, the timid friend, The damning critic, half approving wit, The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit; Laughed at the loss of friends he never had, The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad; The distant threats of vengeance on his head, The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed; The tale revived, the lie so oft o’erthrown, The imputed trash, and dulness not his own,—

and again from this to his castigation of the unhappy Bayes:—

Swearing and supperless the hero sate, Blasphem’d his gods, the dice, and damn’d his fate; Then gnaw’d his pen, then dash’d it on the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung’d for his sense, but found no bottom there, Yet wrote and flounder’d on in mere despair. Round him much embryo, much abortion lay, Much future ode, and abdicated play; Nonsense precipitate, like running lead, That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head.

The author thus brilliantly and evenly accomplished in one metre and so many styles ruled as a sovereign long after his death, his works being published in nearly thirty editions before the end of the century; and the measure as thus fixed and polished by him became for a full hundred years the settled norm and standard for English ‘heroic’ verse, the length and structure of periods, sentences and clauses having to be rigidly clipped to fit it. In this respect no change of practice came till after the whole spirit of English poetry had been changed. Almost from Pope’s own day the leaven destined to produce what came afterwards to be called the romantic revolution was working, in the main unconsciously, in men’s minds. Of conscious rebels or pioneers, two of the chief were that admirable, ridiculous pair of clerical brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton, Joseph long headmaster of Winchester, Thomas professor of poetry at Oxford and later poet laureate. Joseph Warton made at twenty-four, within two years of Pope’s death, a formal protest against the reign of the polished and urbane moral essay in verse, and at all times stoutly maintained ‘Invention and Imagination’ to be the chief qualities of a poet; illustrating his views by what he called odes, to us sadly uninspired, of his own composition. His younger brother Thomas, with his passion for Gothic architecture, his masterly editing of Spenser, and his profound labours on the origin and history of our native English poetry, carried within him, for all his grotesque personality, many of the germs of the spirit that was to animate the coming age. As the century advanced, other signs and portents of what was to come were Chatterton’s audaciously brilliant blunder of the Rowley forgeries, with the interest which it excited, the profound impression created by the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson, and the enthusiastic reception of Percy’s Reliques. But current critical taste did not recognize the meaning of these signs, and tacitly treated the breach between our older and newer literatures as complete. Admitting the older as a worthy and interesting subject of study and welcoming the labour of scholars—even those of pretended scholars—in collecting and publishing its remains or what purported to be such, criticism none the less expected and demanded of contemporary production that it should conform as a matter of course to the standards established since language and style had been ‘polished’ and reduced to ‘correctness’ by Dryden and Pope. Thomas Warton, wishing to celebrate in verse the glories of the Gothic architecture of Oxford, finds himself constrained to do so strictly in the dominant style and measure. His brother, the protesting Joseph, actually has to enrol himself among Pope’s editors, and when for once he uses the heroic couplet and lets his fancy play upon the sight of a butterfly in Hackwood Park, must do so, he too, in this thoroughly Popeian wise:—

Fair child of Sun and Summer, we behold With eager eyes thy wings bedropp’d with gold; The purple spots that o’er thy mantle spread, The sapphire’s lively blue, the ruby’s red, Ten thousand various blended tints surprise, Beyond the rainbow’s hues or peacock’s eyes: Not Judah’s king in eastern pomp array’d, Whose charms allur’d from far the Sheban maid, High on his glitt’ring throne, like you could shine (Nature’s completest miniature divine): For thee the rose her balmy buds renews, And silver lillies fill their cups with dews; Flora for thee the laughing fields perfumes, For thee Pomona sheds her choicest blooms.

William Blake, in his Poetical Sketches of 1784, poured scorn on the still reigning fashion for ‘tinkling rhymes and elegances terse’, and himself struck wonderful lyric notes in the vein of our older poetry: but nobody read or marked Blake: he was not for his own age but for posterity. Even those of the eighteenth century poets who in the main avoided the heroic couplet, and took refuge, like Thomson, in the Spenserian stanza or Miltonic blank verse, or confined themselves to lyric or elegiac work like Gray,—even they continued to be hampered by a strict conventional and artificial code of poetic style and diction. The first full and effective note of emancipation, of poetical revolution and expansion, in England was that struck by Coleridge and Wordsworth with the publication and defence of their Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800). Both these young masters had written in the established mould in their quite earliest work, but afterwards disused it almost entirely (The Happy Warrior is of course a conspicuous exception); while their contemporary Walter Scott avoided it from the first.

The new poetry, whether cast in forms derived from or coloured by the old ballad literature of the country, or helping itself from the simplicities and directnesses of common every-day speech, or going back to Miltonic and pre-Miltonic tradition, fought its way to recognition now slowly, as in the case of Wordsworth, in whose style all these three elements play their part, now rapidly in the face of all opposition, as in the case of Scott with his dashing Border lays. But the heroic couplet on the Queen Anne model still held the field as the reigning and official form of verse; and among the most admired poets of Keats’s day, Rogers, Campbell, and Crabbe in the older generation, each in his own manner, still kept sounding the old instrument essentially to the old tune, with Byron in the younger following, in The Corsair and Lara, at a pace more rapid and helter-skelter but with a beat even more monotonous and hammering than any of theirs. We have seen how Leigh Hunt declared his intention to try a reform of the measure, and how he carried out his promise in Rimini. He did little more than revive Dryden’s expedients of the occasional triplet and Alexandrine, with a sprinkling of Elizabethan double-endings; failing withal completely to catch any touch either of the imaginative passion of the Elizabethans or of Dryden’s fine virile energy and worldly good-breeding.

Rimini was not yet published, nor had Keats yet met its author, when Keats wrote his Epistle to Felton Mathew in November 1815. If, as is the case, his strain of social ease and sprightliness jars on us a little in the same manner as Hunt’s, it is that there was really as he himself said on another occasion, something in common between them. At the same time it should be remembered that some of Keats’s most Huntian-seeming rimes and phrases contain really an echo of the older masters.7 That William Browne was his earliest model in the handling of the metre will, I think, be apparent to any reader who will put the passage from Britannia’s Pastorals above quoted (p. 98), with its easily flowing couplets varied at intervals by whole clusters or bunches of double endings, alongside of the following from Keats’s first Epistle:—

Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee Past each horizon of fine poesy; Fain would I echo back each pleasant note As o’er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float ‘Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted, Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted: But ’tis impossible; far different cares Beckon me sternly from soft ‘Lydian airs,’ And hold my faculties so long in thrall, That I am oft in doubt whether at all I shall again see Phoebus in the morning: Or flush’d Aurora in the roseate dawning! Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream; Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam; Or again witness what with thee I’ve seen, The dew by fairy feet swept from the green, After a night of some quaint jubilee Which every elf and fay had come to see: When bright processions took their airy march Beneath the curved moon’s triumphal arch. But might I now each passing moment give To the coy muse, with me she would not live In this dark city, nor would condescend ‘Mid contradictions her delights to lend. Should e’er the fine-ey’d maid to me be kind, Ah! surely it must be whene’er I find Some flowery spot, sequester’d, wild, romantic, That often must have seen a poet frantic; Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing, And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing; Where the dark-leav’d laburnum’s drooping clusters Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres, And intertwin’d the cassia’s arms unite, With its own drooping buds, but very white.

This is artless enough as writing, but obviously sincere, and interesting as showing how early and instinctively both Greek and mediÆval mythology had become to Keats symbols and incarnations, as living as in the days of their first creation, of the charm and power of nature. The piece ends with a queer Ovidian fancy about his friend, to the effect that he, Mathew, had once been a ‘flowret blooming wild’ beside the springs of poetry, and that Diana had plucked him and thrown him into the stream as an offering to her brother Apollo, who had turned him into a goldfinch, from which he was metamorphosed into a black-eyed swan fed by Naiads.

The next experiments in this measure, the fragment of Calidore with its Induction, date from a few months later, after the publication of Rimini, and express the longing of the young aspirant to follow the example of Hunt, the loved Libertas, and tell, he too, a tale of chivalry. But the longing is seconded by scarce a touch of inspiration. The Gothic and nature descriptions are quite cheap and external, the figures of knights and ladies quite conventional, the whole thing a matter of plumes and palfreys and lances, shallow graces of costume and sentiment, much more recalling Stothard’s sugared illustrations to Spenser than the spirit of Spenser himself, whose patronage Keats timorously invokes. He at the same time entreats Hunt to intercede with Spenser on his behalf: and in the result it seems as though Hunt had stepped bodily in between them. In the handling of the metre, indeed, there is nothing of Hunt’s diluted Drydenism: there is the same direct though timid following of Elizabethan precedents as before, varied by an occasional echo of Lycidas in the use of the short six-syllable line:—

Anon he leaps along the oaken floors Of halls and corridors.

But in the style and sentiment we trace Leigh Hunt, or those elements in Keats which were naturally akin to him, at every turn. We read, for instance, of trees that lean

So elegantly o’er the waters brim And show their blossoms trim:

and of

The lamps that from the high-roof’d hall were pendent And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.

A few months later, on his August and September holiday at Margate, Keats resumes the measure again, in two familiar epistles, one to his brother George, the other to Cowden Clarke. To his brother he expresses frankly, and in places felicitously, the moods and aspirations of a youth passionately and justly conscious of the working of the poetic impulse in him, but not less justly dissatisfied with the present fruits of such impulse, and wondering whether any worth gathering will ever come to ripeness. He tells us of hours when all in vain he gazes at the play of sheet lightning or pries among the stars ‘to strive to think divinely,’ and of other hours when the doors of the clouds break open and show him visions of the pawing of white horses, the flashing of festal wine cups in halls of gold, and supernatural colours of dimly seen flowers. In such moods, he asks concerning an imagined poet:—

Should he upon an evening ramble fare With forehead to the soothing breezes bare, Would he naught see but the dark silent blue With all its diamonds trembling through and through? Or the coy moon, when in the waviness Of whitest clouds she does her beauty dress, And staidly paces higher up, and higher, Like a sweet nun in holy-day attire? Ah, yes! much more would start into his sight— The revelries, and mysteries of night: And should I ever see them, I will tell you Such tales as needs must with amazement spell you.

But richer even than these privileges of the poet in his illuminated moments is the reward which he may look for from posterity. In a long passage, deeply pathetic considering the after-event, Keats imagines exultingly what must be a poet’s deathbed feelings when he foresees how his name and work will be cherished in after times by men and women of all sorts and conditions—warrior, statesman, and philosopher, village May-queen and nursing mother (the best and most of the verses are those which picture the May-queen taking his book from her bosom to read to a thrilled circle on the village green). He might be happier, he admits, could he stifle all these ambitions. Yet there are moments when he already tastes the true delights of poetry; and at any rate he can take pleasure in the thought that his brother will like what he writes; and so he is content to close with an attempt at a quiet description of the Thanet scenery and surroundings whence he writes.

In addressing Cowden Clarke Keats begins with an odd image, likening the way in which poetic inspiration eludes him to the slipping away of drops of water which a swan vainly tries to collect in the hollows of his plumage. He would have written sooner, he tells his correspondent, but had nothing worthy to submit to one so familiar with the whole range of poetry and recently, moreover, privileged to walk and talk with Leigh Hunt,—

One, who, of late, had ta’en sweet forest walks With him who elegantly chats, and talks— The wrong’d Libertas,—who has told you stories Of laurel chaplets, and Apollo’s glories; Of troops chivalrous prancing through a city, And tearful ladies made for love, and pity.

(The allusion in the last three lines is of course to The Feast of the Poets and Rimini. The passage seems to make it certain that whatever intercourse Keats himself may up to this time have had with Hunt was slight.) Even now, he goes on, he would not show Clarke his verses but that he takes courage from their old friendship and from his sense of owing to it all he knows of poetry. Recurring to the pleasantness of his present surroundings, he says that they have inspired him to attempt the verses he is now writing for his friend, which would have been better only that they have been too long parted. Then follow the lines quoted farther back (p. 37) in affectionate remembrance of old Enfield and Edmonton days.

In these early attempts Keats again ventures some way, but not yet far, in the direction of breaking the fetters of the regular couplet. He runs his sentences freely enough through a succession of lines, but nine times out of ten with some kind of pause as well as emphasis on the rime-word. He deals freely in double endings, and occasionally, but not often (oftenest in the epistle to George) breaks the run of a line with a full stop in or near the middle. He is in like manner timid and sparing as yet in the use, to which a little later he was to give rein so fully, of Elizabethan word-forms, or forms modelled for himself on Elizabethan usage.

Somewhat more free and adventurous alike in metre and in diction are the two poems, Sleep and Poetry and ‘I stood tip-toe,’ which Keats wrote after he came back to London in the autumn. These are the things which, together with two or three of the sonnets, give its real distinction and high promise to the volume. Both in substance and intention they are preludes merely, but preludes of genius, and, although marked by many immaturities, as interesting and attractive perhaps as anything which has ever been written by a poet of the same age about his art and his aspirations. In them the ardent novice communes intently with himself on his own hopes and ambitions. Possessed by the thrilling sense that everything in earth and air is full, as it were, of poetry in solution, he has as yet no clearness as to the forms and modes in which these suspended elements will crystallize for him. In Sleep and Poetry he tries to get into shape his conceptions of the end and aim of poetical endeavour, conjures up the difficulties of his task, counts over the new achievement and growing promise of the time in which he lives, and gives thanks for the encouragement by which he has been personally sustained. In ‘I stood tip-toe’ he runs over the stock of nature-images which are his own private and peculiar delight, traces in various phases and aspects of nature a symbolic affinity, or spiritual identity, with various forms and kinds of poetry; tells how such a strain of verse will call up such and such a range of nature images, and conversely how this or that group of outdoor delights will inspire this or that mood of poetic invention; and finally goes on to speculate on the moods which first inspired some of the Grecian tales he loves best, and above all the tale of Endymion and Cynthia, the beneficent wonders of whose bridal night he hopes himself one day to retell.

Sleep and Poetry is printed at the end of the volume, ‘I stood tip-toe’ at the beginning. It is hard to tell which of the two pieces was written first.8 Sleep and Poetry is the longer and more important, and has more the air of having been composed, so to speak, all of a piece. We know that ‘I stood tip-toe’ was not finished until the end of December 1816. Sleep and Poetry cannot well have been written later, seeing that the book was published in the first days of the following March, and must therefore have gone to press early in the new year. What seems likeliest is that Sleep and Poetry was written without break during the first freshness of Keats’s autumn intimacy at the Hampstead cottage; while ‘I stood tip-toe’ may have been begun in the summer and resumed at intervals until the year’s end. I shall take Sleep and Poetry first and let ‘I stood tip-toe’ come after, as being the direct and express prelude to the great experiment, Endymion, which was to follow.

The scheme of Sleep and Poetry is to some extent that of The Floure and the Lefe, the pseudo-Chaucerian poem which, as we have seen, had so strongly caught Keats’s fancy. Keats takes for his motto lines from that poem telling of a night wakeful but none the less cheerful, and avers that his own poem was the result of just such another night. An opening invocation sets the blessings of sleep above a number of other delightful things which it gives him joy to think of, and recounts the activities of Sleep personified,—‘Silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses,’ etc.,—in lines charming and essentially characteristic, for it is the way of his imagination to be continually discovering active and dynamic qualities in things and to let their passive and inert properties be. But far higher and more precious than the blessings of sleep are those of something else which he will not name:—

What is it? And to what shall I compare it? It has a glory, and nought else can share it: The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, Chasing away all worldliness and folly; Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth’s regions under; And sometimes like a gentle whispering Of all the secrets of some wond’rous thing That breathes about us in the vacant air; So that we look around with prying stare, Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning, And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning; To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended. That is to crown our name when life is ended. Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice, And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice! Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, And die away in ardent mutterings.

Every enlightened spirit will guess, he implies, that this thing is poetry, and to Poetry personified he addresses his next invocation, declaring that if he can endure the overwhelming favour of her acceptance he will be admitted to ‘the fair visions of all places’ and will learn to reveal in verse the hidden beauty and meanings of things, in an ascending scale from the playing of nymphs in woods and fountains to ‘the events of this wide world,’ which it will be given him to seize ‘like a strong giant.’

At this point a warning voice within him reminds him sadly of the shortness and fragility of life, to which an answering inward voice of gay courage and hope replies. Keats could only think in images, and almost invariably in images of life and action: those here conveying the warning and its reply are alike felicitous:—

Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree’s summit; a poor Indian’s sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan? Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown; The reading of an ever-changing tale; The light uplifting of a maiden’s veil; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing school-boy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his memory from schoolboy days—Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque sorores—certainly with visions from Poussin’s Bacchanals in his mind’s eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul. Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically. He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out the while ‘with glorious fear,’ then swooping downward to alight on a grassy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and mountains, then gazing and listening, ‘awfully intent,’ and writing something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes, ‘shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,’ sweeps on before his view, as if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind’s eye the multitude and variety of figures in this procession—

Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways Flit onward—

contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone before, of the events and tragedies of the world, ‘the agonies, the strife of human hearts,’—and close with the vision of

a lovely wreath of girls Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls,

as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves on the young aspirant’s mind in spite of his resolve to train himself for the grapple with sterner themes.

This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats’s mind as a symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of every-day realities seems like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry since the publication of Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads seventeen years earlier:—

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 eye-brow, 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 honors; nor had any other care Than to sing out and sooth 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,9 and the dew Of summer nights 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 thought 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, decrepid standard out Mark’d with most flimsy mottos, and in large The name of one Boileau!

The two great elder captains of poetic revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have expounded their cause, in prose, with full maturity of thought and language: Wordsworth in the austere contentions of his famous prefaces to his second edition (1800), Coleridge in the luminous retrospect of the Biographia Literaria (1816). In the interval a cloud of critics, including men of such gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, were in their several ways champions of the same cause. But none of these has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rimes of this young untrained recruit, John Keats. It is easy, indeed, to pick his verses 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?’ 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. And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude and to resent the contemptuous treatment of a very finished artist and craftsman by one as yet obviously raw and imperfect. 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 and ‘correctness’,—however clearly we may see the weak points of a passage like this, yet we cannot but feel that Keats touches truly the root of the matter: we cannot but admire the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of rhetoric, and the elastic life and variety of his verse.

So much for the indignant part of the passage. The congratulatory part repeats with different imagery the sense of the sonnet to Haydon beginning ‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,’ and declares that fine sounds are once more floating wild about the earth, wherefore the Muses are now glad and happy. But the congratulations, it next occurs to the young poet, need to be qualified. To some of the recent achievements of poetry he demurs, declaring that their themes of song are ‘ugly clubs’ and the poets who fling them Polyphemuses ‘disturbing the grand sea of song’ (Keats is here remembering the huge club which Ulysses and his companions, in the Homeric story, find in the cave of Polyphemus, and confusing it with the rocks which the blinded giant later tears up and hurls after them into the sea).10 The obvious supposition is that Keats is here referring to Byron’s Eastern tales, with their clamour and heat and violence of melodramatic action and passion. Leigh Hunt, indeed, who ought to have known, asserts in his review of the volume that they are aimed against ‘the morbidity which taints some of the productions of the poets of the Lake School.’ I suspect that Hunt is here attributing to Keats some of his own poetical aversions. What productions can he mean? Southey’s Curse of Kehama? Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner or Christabel? Wordsworth’s relatively few poems, or episodes, of tragic life—as the Mad Mother, Ruth, Margaret? For certainly the strained simplicities and trivialities of some of his country ballads, which were what Leigh Hunt and his friends most disliked in Wordsworth’s work, could never be called thunders.

But these jarring things, Keats goes on, shall not disturb him. He will believe in and seek to enter upon the kingdom of poetry where all shall be gentle and soothing like a lawn beneath a myrtle tree,

And they shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply sing the most heart-easing things.

Then a momentary terror of his own presumption seizes him; but he puts it away, defies despondency, and declares that for all his youth and lack of learning and wisdom, he has a vast idea before him, and a clear conception of the end and aim of poetry. Dare the utmost he will—and then once more the sense of the greatness of the task comes over him, and he falls back for support on thoughts of recent friendship and encouragement. A score of lines follow, recalling happy talks at Hunt’s over books and prints: the memory of these calls up by association a string of the delights (‘luxuries’ as in Huntian phrase he calls them) of nature: thence he recurs to the pleasures of sleep, or rather of a night when sleep failed him for thinking over the intercourse he had been enjoying and the place where he now rested—that is on the couch in Hunt’s library. Here follow the lines quoted above (p. 53) about the prints on the library walls: and the piece concludes:—

The very sense of where I was might well Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came Thought after thought to nourish up the flame Within my breast; so that the morning light Surprised me even from a sleepless night; And up I rose refresh’d, and glad, and gay, Resolving to begin that very day These lines; and howsoever they be done, I leave them as a father does his son.

The best reason for thinking that the poem ‘I stood tip-toe,’ though probably finished quite as late as Sleep and Poetry, was begun earlier, is that in it Keats again follows the practice which he had attempted in Calidore and its Induction but gave up in Sleep and Poetry, namely that of occasionally introducing a lyrical effect with a six-syllable line, in the manner used by Spenser in the Epithalamion and Milton in Lycidas,—

Open afresh your round of starry folds, Ye ardent marigolds!

No conclusion as to the date when the piece was begun can be drawn from the scene of summer freshness with which it opens, or from Leigh Hunt’s statement that this description was suggested by a summer’s day when he stood at a certain spot on Hampstead Heath. This may be quite true, but in the mind of a poet such scenes ripen by recollection, and Keats may at any after day have evoked it for his purpose, which was to bring his imagination to the right taking-off place—to plant it, so to speak, on the right spring-board—from which to start on its flight through a whole succession of other and kindred images of natural beauty. Some of the series of evocations that follow are already almost in the happiest vein of Keats’s lighter nature-poetry, especially the four lines about the sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, and the long passage recalling his boyish delights by the Edmonton brookside and telling (in lines which Tennyson has remembered in his idyll of Enid) how the minnows would scatter beneath the shadow of a lifted hand and come together again. When in the course of his recapitulation there comes to him the image of the moon appearing from behind a cloud, he breaks off to apostrophize that goddess of his imaginative idolatry, that source at once and symbol, for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic inspiration. But for the moment he does not pursue the theme: he pauses to trace the affinities between several kinds of nature-delight and corresponding moods of poetry,—

In the calm grandeur of a sober line, We see the waving of the mountain pine; And when a tale is beautifully staid, We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade,—

and so forth. And then, having in his mind’s eye, as I should guess, some of the mythological prints from Hunt’s portfolios, he asks what moods or phases of nature first inspired the poets of old with the fables of Cupid and Psyche and of Pan and Syrinx, of Narcissus and Echo, and most beautiful of all, that of Cynthia and Endymion,—and for the remaining fifty lines of the poem moonlight and the Endymion story take full possession. The lines imagining the occasion of the myth’s invention are lovely:—

He was a Poet, sure a lover too, Who stood on Latmus’ top, what time there blew Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below; And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow A hymn from Dian’s temple; while upswelling, The incense went to her own starry dwelling. But though her face was clear as infant’s eyes, Though she stood smiling o’er the sacrifice, The Poet wept at her so piteous fate, Wept that such beauty should be desolate: So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won, And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.

Then, treating the bridal night for the moment not as a myth but as a thing that actually happened, he recounts, in a strain of purely human tenderness which owes something to his hospital experience and which he was hardly afterwards to surpass, the sweet and beneficent influences diffused on that night about the world:—

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 soothed them into slumbers full and deep. Soon they awoke clear eyed, nor burnt with thirsting, Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: And springing up, they met the wondering 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. Young men and maidens at each other gaz’d With hands held back, and motionless, amaz’d To see the brightness in each other’s eyes.

Then, closing, he asks himself the momentous question, ‘Was there a poet born?’ which he intended that his next year’s work should answer.

In neither of these poems is the use of Elizabethan verbal forms, or the coinage of similar forms by analogy, carried nearly as far as we shall find it carried later on, especially in Endymion. The abstract nouns expressing qualities pleasant to the senses or the sensuous imagination, on the model of those in Chapman’s Hymn to Pan, increase in number, and we get the ‘quaint mossiness of aged roots,’ the ‘hurrying freshnesses’ of a stream running over gravel, the ‘pure deliciousness’ of the Endymion story, the ‘pillow silkiness’ of clouds, the ‘blue cragginess’ of other clouds, and the ‘widenesses’ of the ocean of poetry. Once, evidently with William Browne’s ‘roundly form’ in his mind, Keats invents, infelicitously enough, an adjective ‘boundly’ for ‘bounden.’ In the matter of metre, he is now fairly well at home in the free Elizabethan use of the couplet, letting his periods develop themselves unhampered, suffering his full pauses to fall at any point in the line where the sense calls for them, the rime echo to come full and emphatic or faint and light as may be, and the pause following the rime-word to be shorter or longer or almost non-existent on occasion. If his ear was for the moment attuned to the harmonies of any special master among the Elizabethans, it was by this time Fletcher rather than Browne: at least in Sleep and Poetry the double endings no longer come in clusters as they did in the earlier epistle, nor are the intervening couplets so nearly regular, while there is a marked preference for emphasizing an adjective by placing it at the end of a line and letting its noun follow at the beginning of the next,—‘the high " Imagination,’—‘the small " Breath of new buds unfolding.’ The reader will best see my point if he will compare the movement of the passages in Sleep and Poetry where these things occur with the Endymion passage he will find quoted later on from the Faithful Shepherdess (p. 168).

As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats’s first volume, enough has been said concerning that of Leigh Hunt. The influence of an incommensurably greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it. That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical admirer of Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier poems and of the Excursion, which had appeared when his passion for poetry was already at its height in the last year of his apprenticeship at Edmonton. There is a famous passage in the fourth book of The Excursion where Wordsworth treats of the spirit of Greek religion and imagines how some of its conceptions first took shape:—

In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched On the soft grass through half a summer’s day, With music lulled his indolent repose: And, in some fit of weariness, if he, When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched, Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment. The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed That timely light, to share his joyous sport: And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs, Across the lawn and through the darksome grove, Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes By echo multiplied from rock or cave, Swept in the storm of chase; as moon and stars Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven, When winds are blowing strong.

Keats, we know, was familiar with this passage, and a little later on we shall find him criticizing it in conversation with a friend. Leigh Hunt, in a review written at the time, hints that it was in his mind when he wrote the lines in ‘I stood tip-toe,’ asking in what mood or under what impulse a number of the Grecian fables were first invented and giving the answers to his own questions. We may take Hunt’s word for the fact, seeing that he was constantly in Keats’s company at the time. Other critics have gone farther and supposed it was from Wordsworth that Keats first learned truly to understand Greek mythology. I do not at all think so. He would never have pored so passionately over the stories in the classical dictionaries as a schoolboy, nor mused on them so intently in the field walks of his apprentice days by sunset and moonlight, had not some inborn instinct made the world of ancient fable and the world of natural beauty each equally living to his apprehension and each equally life-giving to the other. Wordsworth’s interpretations will no doubt have appealed to him profoundly, but not as something new, only as putting eloquently and justly what he had already felt and divined by native instinct.

Again, it has been acutely pointed out by Mr Robert Bridges how some of the ideas expressed by Keats in his own way in Sleep and Poetry run parallel with some of those expressed in a very different way by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey, a poem which we know from other evidence to have been certainly much in Keats’s mind a year and a half later. Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey defines three stages of his own emotional and imaginative development in relation to nature: first the stage of mere boisterous physical and animal pleasure: then that of intense and absorbing, but still unreflecting passion,—

An appetite, a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye,—

and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized passion doubly enriched by the ever-present haunting of ‘the still, sad music of humanity,’ and by the

sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth’s conception of these three stages more or less accurately paralleled in various passages of Keats’s Sleep and Poetry. One passage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human life under the string of joyous images beginning, ‘A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air’, seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of the poet’s soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth’s three stages in Keats’s repeated indication of the ascending scale of theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative passage beginning—

And can I ever bid these joys farewell? Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life—

may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth’s final stage: only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind’s eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of life.

Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the methods of the elder and the younger poet in these passages, defining Wordsworth’s as a subjective and Keats’s as an objective method. I should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke. Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his intense and intensely realized personal experience, expounds the spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as in Tintern Abbey and many passages of The Prelude and Excursion, with more revealing insight and a more exalted passion than any other poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his passion has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and droningly and flatly analyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand, had a mind constitutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so is by calling up, from the multitudes of concrete images with which his memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by their colour and significance, their quality of association and suggestion, to stand for and symbolize the abstractions working in his mind; and in this concrete and figurative fashion he will be found, by those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and purposefully enough. Again, Keats’s sense of personal identity was ever ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal self that he realizes and ponders over; what he does is with ever-participating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither strives for or attains, as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impassioned moments never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth’s is the genius of luminous exposition, so Keats’s, even among the immaturities of his first volume, is the genius of living evocation.

---

On the 14th of April Keats took the night mail for Southampton, whence he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. By the 17th, having looked at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging at Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons for his choice, mentioning at the same time that he is feeling rather nervous from want of sleep, and enclosing the admirable sonnet On the Sea which he has just composed—

It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, etc.—

It was the intense haunting of the lines in the scene on Dover Cliff in King Lear beginning ‘Do you not hear the sea,’ which moved him, he says, to this effort. He was reading and re-reading his Shakespeare with passion, and phrases from the plays come up continually in his letters, not only, as in the following extract, in the form of set quotations, but currently, as though they were part of his own mind and being. Having found in the lodging-house passage an engraved head of Shakespeare which pleased him and hung it up in his room (his landlady afterwards made him a present of it), he bethinks him of the approaching anniversary, April 23:—

‘I shall forthwith begin my Endymion,’ he adds, and looks forward to reading some of it out, when his correspondent comes to visit him, in a nook near the castle which he has already marked for the purpose.

But Haydon’s prescription of solitude turned out the worst Keats could well have followed in the then state of his mind, fermenting with a thousand restless thoughts and inchoate imaginations and with the feverish conflict between ambition and self-distrust. The result at any rate was that he passed the time, to use his own words, ‘in continual burning of thought, as an only resource,’ and what with that and lack of proper food felt himself after a week or ten days ‘not over capable in his upper stories’ and in need of change and companionship. He made straight for his last year’s lodging at Margate and got Tom to join him there. Thence in the second week of May he writes a long letter to Hunt and another to Haydon. To Hunt he criticizes some points in the last number of the Examiner, and especially, in his kind-hearted, well-conditioned way, deprecates a certain vicious allusion to grey hairs in an attack of Hazlitt upon Southey. Later on we shall have to tell of the critical savagery of Blackwood and the Quarterly, now long since branded and proverbial. But it should be borne in mind, as it by no means always is, that the Tories were far from having the savagery to themselves. When Hazlitt, for one, chose to strike on the liberal side, he could match Gifford or Lockhart or Wilson or Maginn with their own weapons. To realize the controversial atmosphere of the time, here is a passage, and not the fiercest, from the Hazlitt article in which Keats found too venomous a sting. Southey’s first love, rails Hazlitt, had been the Republic, his second was Legitimacy, ‘her more fortunate and wealthy rival’:—

It is fair to note that the mistress thus depicted as Southey’s is an allegorical being, while the Blackwood scurrilities were often directly personal.

After asking how Hunt’s own new poem, The Nymphs, is getting on, Keats tells how he has been writing some of Endymion every day the last fortnight, except travelling days, and how thoughts of the greatness of his ambition and the uncertainty of his powers have thrown him into a fit of gloom; hinting at such moods of bleak and blank despondency as we shall find now and again figuratively described in the text of Endymion itself.

The same evening Keats begins to answer a letter of encouragement and advice he had just had from Haydon. This is the letter of Haydon’s from which I have already quoted the passage about the efficacy of prayer as Haydon had experienced it. Perfectly sincere and genuinely moved, he can never for a minute continuously steer clear of rant and fustian and self-praise at another’s expense.

Keats in answer quotes the opening speech of the King in Love’s Labour’s Lost,—

Let Fame, that all pant after in their lives Live registered upon our brazen tombs, etc.,

saying that he could not bear to think he had not the right to couple his own name with Haydon’s in such a forecast, and acknowledging the occasional moods of depression which have put him into such a state of mind as to read over his own lines and hate them, though he has picked up heart again when he found some from Pope’s Homer which Tom read out to him seem ‘like Mice’ to his own. He takes encouragement also from the notion that has visited him lately of some good genius—can it be Shakespeare?—presiding over him. Continuing the next day, he is downhearted again at hearing from George of money difficulties actual and prospective. ‘You tell me never to despair—I wish it was as easy for me to deserve the saying—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.’ Then referring to Haydon’s warning in regard to Hunt, he goes half way in agreement and declares he would die rather than be deceived about his own achievements as Hunt is. ‘There is no greater sin after the seven deadly,’ he says, ‘than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great poet: the comfort is, such a crime must bring its own penalty, and if one is a self-deluder indeed accounts must one day be balanced.’

In the same week, moved no doubt by the difficulties George had mentioned about touching the funds due from their grandmother’s estate, Keats writes to Taylor and Hessey, in a lively and familiar strain showing the terms of confidence on which he already stood with them, asking them to advance him an instalment of the agreed price for Endymion. He mentions in this letter that he is tired of Margate (he had already to another correspondent called it a ‘treeless affair’) and means to move to Canterbury. At this point there occurs an unlucky gap in Keats’s correspondence. We know that he and Tom went to Canterbury from Margate as planned, but we do not know exactly when, nor how long he stayed there, nor what work he did (except that he was certainly going on with the first book of Endymion), nor what impressions he received. It was his first visit to a cathedral city, and few in the world, none in England, are more fitted to impress. Chichester and Winchester he came afterwards to know, Winchester well and with affection; but it was with thoughts of Canterbury in his mind that he planned, some two years later, first a serious and then a frivolous verse romance having an English cathedral town for scene (The Eve of St Mark, The Cap and Bells). The heroine of both was to have been a maiden of Canterbury called Bertha; not, of course, the historic Frankish princess Bertha, daughter of Haribert and wife of Ethelbert king of Kent, who converted her husband and prepared his people for Christianity before the landing of Saint Augustin, and who sleeps in the ancient church of Saint Martin outside the walls: not she, but some damsel of the city, named after her in later days, whom Keats had heard or read of or invented,—I would fain know which; but I have found no external evidence of his studies or doings during this spring stay at Canterbury, and his correspondence is, as I have said, a blank.

Some time in June he returned and the three brothers were together again: not now in City lodgings but in new quarters to which they had migrated in Well Walk, Hampstead. Their landlord was one Bentley the postman, with whom they seem to have got on well except that Keats occasionally complains of the ‘young carrots,’ his children, now for making a ‘horrid row,’ now for smelling of damp worsted stockings. The lack of letters continues through these first summer months at Hampstead. The only exception is a laughingly apologetic appeal to his new publishers for a further advance of money, dated June 10th and ending with the words,—‘I am sure you are confident of my responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me.’ For the rest, indirect evidence allows us to picture Keats in these months as working regularly at Endymion, having now reached the second book, and as living socially, not without a certain amount of convivial claret-drinking and racket, in the company of his brothers and of his friends and theirs. Leigh Hunt was still close by in the Vale of Health, and both in his circle and in Haydon’s London studio Keats was as welcome as ever. Reynolds and Rice were still his close intimates, and Reynolds’s sisters in Lamb’s Conduit Street almost like sisters of his own. He was scarcely less at home in the family of his sister-in-law that was to be, Georgiana Wylie. The faithful Severn and the faithful Haslam came up eagerly whenever they could to join the Hampstead party. An acquaintance he had already formed at Hunt’s with the Charles Dilkes and their friend Charles Brown, who lived as next-door neighbours at Wentworth Place, a double block of houses of their own building in a garden at the foot of the Heath, now ripened into friendship: that with Dilke rapidly, that with Brown, a Scotsman who by his own account held cannily aloof from Keats at first for fear of being thought to push, more slowly.

Charles Wentworth Dilke, by profession a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, by predilection a keen and painstaking literary critic and antiquary, had been stimulated by the charm of Lamb’s famous volume of Specimens to work at the old English dramatic poets, and had recently (being now twenty-seven) brought out a set of volumes in continuation of Dodsley’s Old Plays. In matters political and social he was something of a radical doctrinaire and ‘Godwin-perfectibility man’ (the label is Keats’s), loving decision and positiveness in all things and being therein the very opposite of Keats, who by rooted instinct as well as choice allowed his mind to cherish uncertainties and to be a thoroughfare for all thoughts (the phrase is again his own). There were many but always friendly discussions between Keats and Dilke, and their mutual regard never failed. Charles Brown, Dilke’s contemporary, schoolfellow, and close friend, was a man of Scottish descent born in Lambeth, who had in early youth joined a business set up by an elder brother in Petersburg. The business quickly failing, he had returned to London and after some years of struggle inherited a modest competence from another brother. A lively, cultivated, moderately successful amateur in literature, journalism, and drama, he was in person bald and spectacled, and portly beyond his years though active and robust; in habits much of a trencher-man (‘a huge eater’ according to the abstemious Trelawny) and something of a viveur within his means; exactly strict in money matters, but otherwise far from a precisian in life or conversation; an ardent friend and genial companion, though cherishing some fixed unreasonable aversions: in a word, a truly Scottish blend of glowing warm-heartedness and ‘thrawn’ prejudice, of frank joviality and cautious dealing.

It was in these same weeks of June or July 1817, soon after the beginning of the Oxford vacation, that Benjamin Bailey again came to town and sought after and learned to delight in Keats’s company. He meant to go back and read at Oxford for the latter part of the vacation, and invited Keats to spend some weeks with him there. Keats accepted, and the visit, lasting from soon after mid August until the end of September, proved a happiness alike to host and guest. At this point our dearth of documents ceases. Bailey’s memoranda, though not put on paper till thirty years later, are vivid and informing, and Keats’s own correspondence during the visit is fairly full. I will take Bailey’s recollections first, and give them in his own words, seeing that they paint the writer almost as well as his subject; omitting only passages that seem to drag or interrupt. First comes the impression Keats made on him at the time of their introduction in the spring, and then his account of the days they spent together in Oxford.

Bailey here tries to reconstruct and illustrate from memory Keats’s theory of vowel sounds, but his attempt falters and breaks down.

Keats’s own first account of himself from Oxford is in a letter of September 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then on holiday at Littlehampton: a piece of mere lively foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste which is not that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that series of letters to his young sister Fanny which acquaints us with perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was now just fourteen, and living under the close guardianship of the Abbeys, who had put her to a boarding school at Walthamstow. Keats shows a tender and considerate elder-brotherly anxiety to get into touch with her and know her feelings and likings:—

He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt’s opinion) how much better it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in schools, and winds up:—

Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much better fun than in the last, about Dilke’s shooting and about the rare havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke’s garden were he at Hampstead: partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to change from nonsense:—

To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:—

Then follows a diatribe against the literary and intellectual pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which he has felt an agreeable relief in some verses he has found on taking down from Bailey’s shelves the poems of Katherine Philips, ‘the matchless Orinda.’ The verses which pleased him, truly of her best, are those To M. A. at parting, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to laugh and chafe at in the poses of that high-flying coterie of mutual admirers, Silvander and Poliarchus, Lucasia and Rosania and PalÆmon, of which she was the centre? This is one of the very few instances to be found in Keats’s work or correspondence of interest in the poetry of the Caroline age.

Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind and critical power had been growing while he worked upon Endymion, and whom moreover the long effort of composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides to Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done:—‘You will be glad to hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines—which are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you 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.’

Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them, Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Shelleys at Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. ‘Everybody seems at loggerheads,’ Keats writes to Bailey. ‘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.’ Both Haydon and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has been talking flippantly and patronizingly of Endymion, saying that if it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly, ‘now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?... This is, to be sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.’

During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth book of Endymion, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh from the steadying and sympathetic companionship of Bailey, he keeps up their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in Cumberland and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to have finished Endymion in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a masterly criticism of Wordsworth’s poem The Gipsies and also of Hazlitt’s criticism of it in the Round Table. A fragment of another letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the first time, to some failure of Haydon’s to keep his word or take trouble about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same fragment records the appearance in Blackwood (the Endinburgh Magazine, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the Cockney School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it (verses of Cornelius Webb coupling the names of Hunt and Keats) to threaten a similar handling of Keats later on. ‘I don’t mind the thing much,’ says Keats, ‘but if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an Account if he be a human being, and appears in Squares and Theatres, where we might possibly meet—I don’t relish his abuse.’

Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and strength being steadier than in the spring, felt himself in the mood for a few weeks of solitude and went to spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote, was intended ‘to change the scene—change the air—and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting 500 lines.’ Keats dearly loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names denoting one. In his marginal notes to a copy of Paradise Lost he gave a friend we find the following:—

There, from his inmost self, speaks a poet of another poet, and as if to and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his every-day vein of speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds on November the 22nd, ‘I like this place very much. There is Hill and Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon—“you a’ seen the Moon”—came down and wrote some lines.’ ‘Whenever I am separated from you,’ he continues, ‘and not engaged in a continuous Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric—but I am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:’ the whole, that is, of Endymion. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in the spring. ‘I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets—they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally—in the intensity of working out conceits:’ and he goes on to quote passages and phrases both from them and from Venus and Adonis. Next, with a sudden change of mind about letting Reynolds see a sample of Endymion, ‘By the Whim-King! I’ll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connexion, and when I wrote it I wanted you to give your vote, pro or con.’—The stanza he gives is from the song of the Constellations in the fourth book, certainly one of the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not been there indeed, to give his vote contra.

On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work, from Endymion to the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Beginning with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of their own, Keats passes at the close to an illuminating self-confession which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent:—

Readers of Endymion will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of Endymion in general, is in the long central passage setting forth his speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of Paradise Lost, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how ‘One of shape divine’ took him by the hand and led him into the garden of Paradise:4 his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and opened his side and from his rib fashioned a creature:

Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair, That what seem’d fair in all the World, seem’d now Mean, or in her sum’d up, in her contain’d And in her looks, which from that time infus’d Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before, And into all things from her Air inspir’d The spirit of love and amorous delight. She disappear’d, and left me dark, I wak’d To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure: When out of hope, behold her, not far off, Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn’d With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow To make her amiable.5

It was no doubt this second of Adam’s dreams that was chiefly in Keats’s mind. His way of explaining his speculations to his friend is quite unstudied and inconsecutive; he is, as he says, ‘continually running away from the subject,’ or shall we say letting the stream of his ideas branch out into side channels from which he finds it difficult to come back? But yet their main current and purport will be found not difficult to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that when Keats in this and similar passages speaks of ‘Sensations’ as opposed to ‘Thoughts’ he does not limit the word to sensations of the body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever instantaneously transforming themselves from sensation into emotion: what he means are intuitions of the mind and spirit as immediate as these, as thrillingly convincing and indisputable, as independent of all consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking: almost the same things, indeed, as in a later passage of the same letter he calls ‘ethereal musings.’ And now let the poet speak for himself:—

O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth—whether it existed before or not,—for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream, he awoke and found it truth:—I am more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning—and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is ‘a Vision in the form of Youth,’ a shadow of reality to come—and this consideration has further convinced me,—for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine,—that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam’s dream will do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great things with small, have you never, by being surprised with an old Melody, in a delicious place by a delicious voice, felt over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer’s face—more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be hereafter—that delicious face you will see.

CHAPTER VI

ENDYMION.—I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM

Keats had long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the poem beginning ‘I stood tiptoe,’ finished at the end of 1816, he tried a kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a ‘poetical romance’ of Endymion on a great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the volume of Poems, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George soon after his departure:—

In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton’s protest uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a preface afterwards cancelled,—‘Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.’ But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a little over a thousand lines each.

Throughout Keats’s work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest passages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in the delights or sympathy with the doings of nature working together in him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind is the whole inspiration of Endymion. The poem is a joint outcome of his intense, his abnormal susceptibility to the spell of moonlight and of his pleasure in the ancient myth of the loves of the moon-goddess Cynthia and the shepherd-prince Endymion1 as made known to him through the earlier English poets.

The moon was to Keats a power very different from what she has always been to popular astrology and tradition. Traditionally and popularly she was the governess of floods, the presiding planet of those that ply their trade by sea, river, or canal, also of wanderers and vagabonds generally: the disturber and bewilderer withal of mortal brains and faculties, sending down upon men under her sway that affliction of lunacy whose very name was derived from her. For Keats it was her transmuting and glorifying power that counted, not her pallor but her splendour, the magic alchemy exercised by her light upon the things of earth, the heightened mystery, poetry, and withal unity of aspect which she sheds upon them. He can never keep her praises long out of his early poetry, and we have seen, in ‘I stood tiptoe,’ what a range of beneficent activities he attributes to her. Now, as he settles down to work on Endymion, we shall find her, by reason of that special glorifying and unifying magic of her light, become for him, at first perhaps instinctively and unaware, but more and more consciously as he goes on, a definite symbol of Beauty itself—what he calls in a letter ‘the principle of Beauty in all things,’ the principle which binds in a divine community all such otherwise unrelated matters as those we shall find him naming together as things of beauty in the exordium of his poem. Hence the tale of the loves of the Greek shepherd-prince and the moon-goddess turns under his hand into a parable of the adventures of the poetic soul striving after full communion with this spirit of essential Beauty.

As to the literary associations which drew Keats to the Endymion story, there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with the Endimion of John Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with

—that night-wandering, pale, and watery star, When yawning dragons draw her thirling car From Latmus’ mount up to the gloomy sky, Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty, She proudly sits.

So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call—

Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion, And would not be awaked,

uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the invocation near the end of Spenser’s Epithalamion, or the reference to ‘pale-changeful Cynthia’ and her Endymion in Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals;2 or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the masque in the Maid’s Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion passage, delightfully paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe, by Fletcher in the Faithful Shepherdess, that tedious, absurd, exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed Keats’s ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton before him.

Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been? Or whither go’st thou? Here be Woods as green As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet, As where smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any; Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells, Arbors o’rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells, Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing, Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love, How the pale Phoebe hunting in a Grove, First saw the Boy Endymion, from whose Eyes She took eternal fire that never dyes: 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 Brothers light, To kiss her sweetest.

In regard to Drayton’s handling of the story there is more to note. In early life he wrote a poem in heroic couplets called Endimion and Phoebe. This he never reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a later piece in the same metre called the Man in the Moone. The volume containing Drayton’s earlier Endimion and Phoebe became so rare that when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton’s poems in Smethwick’s edition of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The Man in the Moone is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference, the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the traditions of mediÆval theology as to the number and order of the celestial hierarchies. In Drayton’s earlier poem all this is highly serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it might seem, to rival Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: in his later, where the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian, recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her lover from their sphere.

The particular points in Keats’s Endymion where I seem to find suggestions from Drayton’s Man in the Moone are these. First the idea of introducing the story with the feast of Pan,—but as against this it may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following passage in Drayton (which is also interesting for its exceptionally breathless and trailing treatment of the verse):—

Endymion now forsakes All the delights that shepherds do prefer, And sets his mind so gen’rally 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 brack. Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back, Amongst 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; Sometimes 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, beholding from the sky The Earth in roundness of a perfect ball,—

the sequel is irrelevant, and the passage so loose in grammar and construction that it matters not where it is broken off.

Thirdly, we have the curious invention of the magic robe of Glaucus in Keats’s third book. In it, we are told, all the rulers and all the denizens of ocean are figured and indued with magic power to dwindle and dilate before the beholder’s eyes. Keats describes this mystic garment in a dozen lines3 which can scarcely be other than a summary and generalized recollection of a long passage of eighty in which Drayton describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and storm and shipwreck and sea-birds and of men fishing and fowling (crafts supposed to be subject to the planetary influence of the moon) in tidal or inland waters. And lastly, Keats in his second book has taken a manifest hint from Drayton where he makes Venus say archly how she has been guessing in vain which among the Olympian goddesses is Endymion’s lover.4

Not merely by delight in particular poets and familiarity with favourite passages, but by rooted instinct and by his entire self-training, Keats was beyond all his contemporaries,—and it is the cardinal fact to be borne in mind about him,—the lineal descendant and direct heir of the Elizabethans. The spirit of Elizabethan poetry was born again in him with its excesses and defects as well as its virtues. One general characteristic of this poetry is its prodigality and confusion of incidental, irrelevant, and superfluous beauties, its lack, however much it may revel in classical ideas and associations, of the classical instinct for clarity, simplicity, and selection. Another (I speak especially of narrative poetry) is its habitual wedding of allegory and romance, its love of turning into parable every theme, other than mere chronicle, which it touches. All the masters with whom Keats was at this time most familiar—Spenser of course first and foremost, William Browne and practically all the Spenserians,—were men apt to conceive alike of Grecian myth and mediÆval romance as necessarily holding moral and symbolic under-meanings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator, George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source, made himself familiar with the details of classic fable; and Sandys, in the fine Oxford folio edition of his book which we know Keats used, must needs conform to a fixed mediÆval and Renaissance tradition by ‘mythologizing’ his text, as he calls it, with a commentary full not only of illustrative parallel passages but of interpretations half rationalist, half ethical, which Ovid never dreamt of. Neither must it be forgotten that among Keats’s own contemporaries Shelley had in his first important poem, Alastor, set the example of embarking on an allegoric theme, and one shadowing forth, as we shall find that Endymion shadows forth though on different lines, the adventures and experiences of the poetic soul in man.

The bewildering redundance and intricacy of detail in Endymion are obvious, the presence of an underlying strain of allegoric or symbolic meaning harder to detect. Keats’s letters referring to his poem contain only the slightest and rarest hints of the presence of such ideas in it, and in the execution they are so little obtruded or even made clear that they were wholly missed by two generations of his earlier readers. It is only of late years that they have yielded themselves, and even now none too definitely, to the scrutiny of students reading and re-reading the poem by the light of incidental utterances in his earlier and later poetry and in his miscellaneous letters. But the ideas are certainly there: they account for and give interest to much that, taken as mere narrative, is confusing or unpalatable: and the best way of finding a clue through the mazes of the poem is by laying and keeping hold upon them wherever we can.

For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the fundamental idea of treating the passion of Endymion for Cynthia as a type of the passion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions, inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth is in its nature identical with the passion for that transcendental and essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventures which befall the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.

In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He draws out ‘the one bare circumstance,’ to use his own phrase, of the story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed, is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is something of Oriental bewilderment—an Arabian Night’s jugglery with space and time—in the vague suddenness with which its changes are effected.

Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and Professor de SÉlincourt have sought a key to the organic structure of the poem in the supposition that each of its four books is intended to relate the hero’s probationary adventures in one of the four elements, the first book being assigned to Earth, the second to Fire, the third to Water, the fourth to Air. I am convinced that this view is mistaken. The action of the first book passes on earth, no doubt, and that of the second beneath the earth. Now it is true that according to ancient belief there existed certain subterranean abodes or focuses of fire,—the stithy of Vulcan, the roots of Etna where the giants lay writhing, the river of bale rolling in flames around the city of the damned. But such things did not make the under-world, as the theory of these critics assumes, the recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.5 Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to the contrary. Moreover, if he had meant fire he would have given us fire, whereas in his under-world there is never a gleam of it, not a flicker of the flames of Phlegethon nor so much as a spark from the anvil of Vulcan; but instead, endless shadowy temple corridors, magical cascades spouting among prodigious precipices, and the gardens and bower of Adonis in their spring herbage and freshness. It is true, again, that the third book takes us and keeps us under sea. But the reason is the general one that Endymion, typifying the poetic soul of man in love with the principle of essential Beauty, has to leave habitual things behind him and

wander far In other regions, past the scanty bar To mortal steps,

in order to learn secrets of life, death, and destiny necessary to his enlightenment and discipline. Where else should he learn such secrets if not in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of ocean? ‘Our friend Keats,’ Endymion is made to say in one of the poet’s letters from Oxford, ‘has been hauling me through the earth and sea with unrelenting perseverance’: and in like manner in the poem itself the hero asks,

Why am I not as are the dead, Since to a woe like this I have been led Through the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea?

But never a word to suggest any thought of the element fire—an element from which Keats’s too often fevered spirit seems even to have shrunk, for except in telling of the blazing omens of Hyperion’s downfall it is scarce mentioned in his poetry at all. Lastly, it is again true that in the fourth book Endymion and his earthly love are carried by winged horses on an ethereal excursion among the stars (though only for two hundred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action passing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats’s mind from various sources in his reading,—from the passage of Drayton above quoted,—from the Arabian Nights,—it may be from like incidents in the mediÆval Alexander romances (in which the hero’s crowning exploits are always a flight to heaven with two griffins and a plunge under-sea in a glass case), or possibly even from the Endimion of Gombauld, a very wild and withal tiresome French seventeenth-century prose romance on Keats’s own theme.6

Book I. This book is entirely introductory, and carries us no farther than the exposition by the hero of the trouble in which he finds himself. For its exordium Keats uses a line, and probably a whole passage, which he had written many months before and kept by him. One day in 1816, while he was still walking the hospitals and sharing rooms in St Thomas’s Street with his fellow students Mackereth and Henry Stephens, Keats called out to Stephens from his window-seat to listen to a new line he had just written,—‘A thing of beauty is a constant joy,’—and asked him how he liked it. Stephens indicating that he was not quite satisfied, Keats thought again and came out with the amended line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’7 Using this for the first line of his new poem, Keats runs on from it into a passage, which may or may not have been written at the same time, declaring the virtues of those things of beauty—sun, moon, trees, rivulets, flowers, tales of beauty and heroism indiscriminately—which make for health and quietude amidst the gloom and distemper of the world. Then he tells of his own happiness in setting about his cherished task in the prime of spring, and his hopes of finishing it before winter. He takes us to a Pan-haunted forest on Mount Latmos, with many paths leading to an open glade. The hour is dawn, the scene in part manifestly modelled on a similar one in the Chaucerian poem, The Floure and Lefe, in which he took so much pleasure. First a group of little children come in from the forest paths and gather round the altar, then a bevy of damsels, then a company of shepherds; priests and people follow, and last of all the young shepherd-prince and hero Endymion, now wan and pining from a new, unexplained soul-sickness.

The festival opens with a speech of thanksgiving and exhortation from the priest, followed by a choral hymn in honour of the god: then come dances and games and story-telling. Meantime Endymion and the priest sit apart among the elder shepherds, who pass the time imagining what happy tasks and ministrations it will be theirs to ply in their ‘homes ethereal’ after death. In the midst of such conversation Endymion goes off into a distressful trance, during which there comes to him his sister Peona (this personage and her name are inventions of Keats, the name perhaps suggested by that of Paeana in the fourth book of the Faerie Queene, or by the Paeon mentioned in LempriÈre as a son of Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon the physician of the gods in the Iliad, whom she resembles in her quality of healer and comforter; or very probably by all three together). Peona wakes her brother from his trance, and takes him in a shallop to an arbour of her own on a little island in a lake. Here she lulls him to rest, the poet first pausing to utter a fine invocation to Sleep—his second, the first having been at the beginning of Sleep and Poetry. Endymion awakens refreshed, and promises to be of better cheer in future. She sings soothingly to the lute, and then questions him concerning his troubles:—

Brother,’tis vain to hide That thou dost know of things mysterious, Immortal, starry; such alone could thus Weigh down thy nature.

When she has guessed in vain, he determines to confide in her: tells her how he fell asleep on a bed of poppies and other flowers which he had found magically new-blown on a place where there had been none before; how he dreamed that he was gazing fixedly at the stars shining in the zenith with preternatural glory, until they began to swim and fade, and then, dropping his eyes to the horizon, he saw the moon in equal glory emerging from the clouds; how on her disappearance he again looked up and there came down to him a female apparition of incomparable beauty (in whom it does not yet occur to him to recognize the moon-goddess); how she took him by the hand, and they were lifted together through mystic altitudes

Where falling stars dart their artillery forth And eagles struggle with the buffeting north That balances the heavy meteor stone;

how thence they swooped downwards in eddies of the mountain wind, and finally how, clinging to and embracing his willing companion in a delirium of happiness, he alighted beside her on a flowery alp, and there fell into a dream-sleep within his sleep; from which awakening to reality, he found himself alone on the bed of poppies, with the breeze at intervals bringing him ‘Faint fare-thee-wells and sigh-shrilled adieus,’ and with disenchantment fallen upon everything about him:—

All the pleasant hues Of heaven and earth had faded: deepest shades Were deepest dungeons: heaths and sunny shades Were full of pestilent light; and taintless rills Seem’d sooty, and o’erspread with upturn’d gills Of dying fish; the vermeil rose had blown In frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrown Like spikÈd aloe.

Here we have the first of those mystic dream-flights of Endymion and his celestial visitant in company, prefiguring the union of the soul with the spirit of essential Beauty, which have to come true before the end but of which the immediate result is that all other delights lose their savour and turn to ashes. The spirit of man, so the interpretation would seem to run, having once caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and been allowed to embrace it, must pine after it evermore and in its absence can take no delight in nature or mankind. Another way would have been to make his hero find in every such momentary vision or revelation a fresh encouragement, a source of joy and inspiration until the next: but this was not Keats’s way. Peona listens with sisterly sympathy, but her powers of help, being purely human, cannot in this case avail. She can only try to rouse him by contrasting his present forlorn and languid state with his former virility and ambition:—

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!

His reply in his own defence is long and much of it beautiful: but we follow the chain of thought and argument with difficulty, so hidden is it in flowers of poetry and so little are its vital links made obvious. A letter of Keats, containing one of his very few explanatory comments on work of his own, shows that he attached great importance to the passage and felt that its sequence and significance might easily be missed. Sending a correction of the proof to Mr Taylor, the publisher, he says—‘The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that when I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a truth. My having written that argument will perhaps be of the greatest service to me of anything I ever did. It set before me the gradations of happiness, even like a kind of pleasure thermometer, and is my first step towards the chief attempt in the drama.’ The first ten lines offer little difficulty:—

Peona! ever have I long’d to slake My thirst for the world’s praises: nothing base, No merely slumberous phantasm, could unlace The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepar’d— Though now ’tis tatter’d; leaving my bark bar’d And sullenly drifting: yet my higher hope Is of too wide, too rainbow-large a scope, To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks. Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold The clear religion of heaven!

It seems clear that we have here shadowed forth the highest hope and craving of the poetic soul, the hope to be wedded in full communion or ‘fellowship divine’—or shall we say with Wordsworth in love and holy passion?—with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world. In the next lines we shall find, if we read them carefully enough, that Keats, having thus defined his ultimate hope, breaks off and sets out again from the foot of a new ascending scale of poetical pleasure and endeavour which he asks us to consider. It differs from the ascending scale of the earlier poems inasmuch as it begins, not with the toying of nymphs in shady places and the like, but with thoughts of olden minstrelsy and romantic tales and prophecies. The verse here is of Keats’s finest:—

—hist, when the airy stress Of music’s kiss impregnates the free winds, And with a sympathetic touch unbinds Æolian magic from their lucid wombs: Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs; Old ditties sigh above their father’s grave; Ghosts of melodious prophecyings rave Round every spot where trod Apollo’s foot; Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit, Where long ago a giant battle was; And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass In every place where infant Orpheus slept.

It is impressed upon us in the next lines that this is a relatively unexalted phase of imaginative feeling, and our thoughts are directed to other experiences of the poetic soul more enthralling and more ‘self-destroying’ (that is more effectual in purging it of egotism), namely the experiences of friendship and love, those of love above all:—

Aye, so delicious is the unsating food, That men, who might have tower’d in the van Of all the congregated world, to fan And winnow from the coming step of time All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime Left by men-slugs and human serpentry, Have been content to let occasion die, Whilst they did sleep in love’s elysium. And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb, Than speak against this ardent listlessness: For I have ever thought that it might bless The world with benefits unknowingly; As does the nightingale, upperched high, And cloister’d among cool and bunched leaves— She sings but to her love, nor e’er conceives How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.

If a man, next pleads Endymion, may thus reasonably give up even the noblest of worldly ambitions for the joys of a merely mortal love, how much more may he do so for those of an immortal. No, he re-assures Peona in reply to her questioning glance, he is not fancy-sick:—

no, no, I’m sure My restless spirit never could endure To brood so long upon one luxury, Unless it did, though fearfully, espy A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

We have now been carried back to the top of the scale, and these lines again express, although vaguely, the aspirations of the poetic soul at their highest pitch, rising through thoughts and experiences of mortal love to the hope of communion with immortal Beauty. But that longed-for, loftiest phase of the imaginative life, that hope beyond the shadow of a dream, too vast and too rainbow-bright to be quenched by any fear of earthly disaster, Endymion cannot attempt to define, least of all to the practically-minded Peona. He can only try to convince her of its reality by telling her of later momentary visitations with which the divinity of his dreams has favoured him—her face reflected at him from a spring—her voice murmuring to him from a cave—and how miserably in the intervals he has pined and hungered for her. But now, he ends by assuring his sister, he will be patient and pine no longer. Yet it is but a sickly half-assurance after all.

There is a paly flame of hope that plays Where’er I look: but yet, I’ll say ’tis naught, And here I bid it die. Have I not caught, Already, a more healthy countenance?

And with this, as she rows him back from her island, the anxious sister must rest content.

Book II. opens with a renewed declamation on the power and glory of love, and the relative unimportance of the wars and catastrophes of history. Juliet leaning from her balcony, the swoon of Imogen, Hero wrongfully accused by Claudio, Spenser’s Pastorella among the bandits, he declares,

Are things to brood on with more ardency Than the death-day of empires.

The passage has caused some critics to reproach Keats as a mere mawkish amorist indifferent to the great affairs and interests of the world. But must one not believe that all poor flawed and fragmentary human loves, real or fabled, happy or miserable, are far off symbols and shadowings of that Love which, unless the universe is quite other than we have trusted, ‘moves the sun and the other stars?’ Are they not related to it as to their source and spring? It is quite true that Keats was not yet able to tell of such loves except in terms which you may call mawkish if you will (he called them so himself a little later). But being a poet he knew well enough their worth and parentage. And when the future looks back on today, even on today, a death-day of empires in a sterner and vaster sense than any the world has known, will all the waste and hatred and horror, all the hope and heroism of the time, its tremendous issues and catastrophes, be really found to have eclipsed and superseded love as the thing fittest to fill the soul and inspire the songs of a poet?

The invocation ended, we set out with the hero on the adventures that await him. He gathers a wild-rose bud which on expanding releases a butterfly from its heart: the butterfly takes wing and he follows its flight with eagerness. At last they reach a fountain spouting near the mouth of a cave, and in touching the water the butterfly is suddenly transformed into a nymph of the fountain, who speaking to Endymion pities, encourages, and warns him in one breath. Endymion sits and soliloquizes beside the fountain, at first in wavering terms which express the ebb and flow of Keats’s own inner aspirations and misgivings about his poetic calling. Anon he invokes the virgin goddess Cynthia to quell the tyranny of love in him (not yet guessing that his dream visitant is really she). But no, insensibility would be the worst of all; the goddess must, he is assured, know of some form of love higher and purer than the Cupids are concerned with; he prays to her to be propitious; dreams again that he is sailing through the sky with her; and makes a wild appeal to her which is answered by a voice from within the cavern bidding him descend ‘into the sparry hollows of the world.’ He obeys, (this plunge into a spring or fountain and thence into the under-world is a regular incident in a whole group of folk tales, one or another of which was no doubt in Keats’s mind): and we follow him at first into a region

nor bright, nor sombre wholly, But mingled up; a gleaming melancholy; A dusky empire and its diadems; One faint eternal eventide of gems.

A vein of gold sparkling with jewels serves him for path, and leads him through twilight vaults and passages to a ridge that towers over many waterfalls: and the lustre of a pendant diamond guides him further till he reaches a temple of Diana. What imaginative youth but has known his passive day-dreams haunted by visions, mysteriously impressive and alluring, of natural and architectural marvels, huge sculptured caverns and glimmering palace-halls in endless vista? To such imaginings, fed by his readings and dreamings on

Memphis, and Nineveh, and Babylon,

Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. Now we find ourselves in a temple, described as complete and true to sacred custom, with an image of Diana; and in a trice either we have passed, or the temple itself has dissolved, into a structure which by its ‘abysmal depths of awe,’ its gloomy splendours and intricacies of aisle and vault and corridor, its dimly gorgeous and most un-Grecian magnificence, reminds us of nothing so much as of Vathek and the halls of Eblis or some of the magical subterranean palaces of the Arabian Nights. (Beckford’s Vathek and the Thousand and One Nights were both among Keats’s familiar reading.) Endymion is miserable there, and appeals to Diana to restore him to the pleasant light of earth. Thereupon the marble floor breaks up beneath and before his footsteps into a flowery sward. Endymion walks on to the sound of a soft music which only intensifies his yearnings: is led by a light through the alleys of a myrtle grove; and comes to an embowered chamber where Adonis lies asleep among little ministering Loves, with Cupid himself, lute in hand, for their chief.

Here follows a long and highly wrought episode of the winter sleep of Adonis and the descent of Venus to awaken him. The original idea for the scene comes from Ovid, in part direct, in part through Spenser (Faerie Queene, iii, 6) and Shakespeare. But the detail is entirely Keats’s own and on the whole is a happy example of his early luxuriant manner; especially the description of the entrance of Venus and the looks and presence of Cupid as bystander and interpreter. The symbolic meaning of the story is for him evidently much the same as it was to the ancients,—the awakening of nature to love and life after the sleep of winter, with all the ulterior and associated hopes implied by such a resurrection. The first embracements over, Endymion is about to intreat the favour of Venus for his quest when she anticipates him encouragingly, telling him that from her upper regions she has perceived his plight and has guessed (here is one of the echoes from Drayton to which I have referred above) that some goddess, she knows not which, has condescended to him. She bids her son be propitious to him, and she and Adonis depart. Endymion wanders on by miraculous grottoes and palaces, and then mounts by a diamond balustrade,

Leading afar past wild magnificence, Spiral through ruggedst loopholes, and thence Stretching across a void, then guiding o’er Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar, Streams subterranean teaze their granite beds; Then heighten’d just above the silvery heads Of a thousand fountains, so that he could dash The waters with his spear; but at the splash, Done heedlessly, those spouting columns rose Sudden a poplar’s height, and ‘gan to enclose His diamond path with fretwork, streaming round Alive, and dazzling cool, and with a sound, Haply, like dolphin tumults, when sweet shells Welcome the float of Thetis.

The fountains assume all manner of changing and interlacing imitative shapes which he watches with delight (this and much else on the underground journey seems to be the outcome of pure fancy and day-dreaming on the poet’s part, without symbolic purpose). Then passing on through a dim tremendous region of vaults and precipices he has a momentary vision of the earth-goddess Cybele with her team of lions issuing from an arch below him. At this point the diamond balustrade suddenly breaks off in mid-space and ends in nothing.8 Endymion calls to Jove for help and rescue, and is taken up on the wings of an eagle, (is this the eagle of Dante in the Purgatory and of Chaucer in The House of Fame?) who swoops down with him,—all this still happening, be it remembered, deep within the bowels of the earth,—to a place of sweet airs of flowers and mosses. He is deposited in a jasmine bower, wonders within himself who and what his unknown love may be, longs to force his way to her, but as that may not be, to sleep and dream of her. He sleeps on a mossy bed; she comes to him; and their endearments are related, unluckily in a very cloying and distasteful manner of amatory ejaculation. It was a flaw in Keats’s art and a blot on his genius—or perhaps only a consequence of the rawness and ferment of his youth?—that thinking nobly as he did of love, yet when he came to relate a love-passage, even one intended as this to be symbolical of ideal things, he could only realize it in terms like these.

The visitant, whose identity is still unrecognized, again disappears; he resumes his quest, and next finds himself in a huge vaulted grotto full of sea treasures and sea sounds and murmurs. Here he goes over in memory his past life and aspirations,

—the spur Of the old bards to mighty deeds: his plans To nurse the golden age ‘mong shepherd clans: That wondrous night: the great Pan-festival: His sister’s sorrow; and his wanderings all, Until into the earth’s deep maw he rush’d: Then all its buried magic, till it flush’d High with excessive love. ‘And now,’ thought he, ‘How long must I remain in jeopardy Of blank amazements that amaze no more? Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core All other depths are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root, And make my branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven: other light, Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight The Olympian eagle’s vision, is dark, Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark! My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells; Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells Of noises far away?—list!—’

The poet seems here to mean that in the seeker’s transient hour of union with his unknown divinity capacities for thought and emotion have been awakened in him richer and more spiritually illuminating than he has known before. The strange sounds which reach him are the rushing of the streams of the river-god Alpheus and the fountain-nymph Arethusa; Arethusa fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth which is told most fully by Ovid and which Shelley’s lyric has made familiar to all English readers); he entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the wrath of Diana. Endymion, who till now has had no thought of anything but his own plight, is touched by the pangs of these lovers and prays to his goddess to assuage them. We are left to infer that she assents: they plunge into a gulf and disappear: he turns to follow a path which leads him in the direction of a cooler light and a louder sound:

—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.

Throughout this second book Keats has been content to let the mystery and ‘buried magic’ of the under-world reveal itself in nothing of more original invention or of deeper apparent significance than the spring awakening of Adonis and the vision of the earth-goddess Cybele. His under-world is no Tartarus or Elysium, no place of souls: he attempts nothing like the calling-up of the ghosts of dead heroes by Ulysses in the Odyssey, still less like the mystic revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments in the sixth book of the Aeneid. Possibly the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and of her three characters as ‘Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell,’ to refer to the last, that of a goddess of the under-world and of the dead, and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to visit the poet’s soul with joy and illumination even among the ‘dismal elements’ of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the underground scenery and incidents it is hard to read any symbolical meaning or anything but the uncontrolled and aimless-seeming play of invention. But in what is now to follow we are conscious of a fuller meaning and a stricter plan. That from Diana, conscious of her own weakness, indulgence for the weakness of her nymph Arethusa should be won by the prayer of Endymion, now for the first time wrought to sympathy with the sorrows of others, is a clear stage in the development of the poet’s scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant still.

Book III. Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings, conquerors, and worldly ‘regalities’ in general, amplifying in his least fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet ‘On receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt’ written the previous March in the copy of his Poems which he gave to Reynolds (see above, p. 57). When Keats read this passage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with some forced expressions in it such as ‘baaing vanities,’ and also, he tells us, with what seemed to him an over-done defiance of the traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the verse passes into narrative with the question, ‘Are then regalities all gilded masks?’ The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe—cosmic powers, as we should now say—most of them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the poet, the moon is ‘the gentlier-mightiest.’ Having once more, in a strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls; how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey. Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in its turn something of an inspiration to Shelley. Endymion now in his own person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon’s praise, asking her pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous, more absorbing passion to come between him and his former youthful worship of her. At this moment the wanderer’s attention is suddenly diverted,—

For as he lifted up his eyes to swear How his own goddess was past all things fair, 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 were cold beneath his cold thin feet.

The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost entirely with his story. Keats’s reading of Ovid had made him familiar with this story:9 but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from the Arabian Nights.

Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him. But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own private quest, and meets the old man’s welcome first with suspicious terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps: whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with remorse.

Had he then wrong’d a heart where sorrow kept? ······· He had indeed, and he was ripe for tears. The penitent shower fell, as down he knelt Before that careworn sage.

They rise and proceed over the ocean floor together. Glaucus tells Endymion his history: how he led a quiet and kind existence as a fisherman long ago, familiar with and befriended by all sea-creatures, even the fiercest, until he was seized with the ambition to be free of Neptune’s kingdom and able to live and breathe beneath the sea; how this desire being granted he loved and pursued the sea-nymph Scylla, and she feared and fled him; how then he asked the aid of the enchantress Circe, who made him her thrall and lapped him in sensual delights while Scylla was forgotten. How the witch, the ‘arbitrary queen of sense,’ one day revealed her true character, and ‘specious heaven was changed to real hell.’ (Is Keats here remembering the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s great sonnet against lust—

This all the world well knows; but none know well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell?)

He came upon her torturing her crowd of spell-bound animals, once human beings, fled in terror at the sight, was overtaken, and with savage taunts driven back into his ocean-home. Here he found Scylla cold and dead, killed by Circe’s arts. (In the original myth as told by Ovid and others Glaucus refuses the temptations of Circe, who in revenge inflicts on Scylla a worse punishment than death, transforming her into a sea-monster engirdled with a pack of ravening dogs and stationed as a terror to mariners at the Straits over against Charybdis). Glaucus then tells how he conveyed the body of his dead love to a niche in a vacant under-sea temple, where she still remains. Then began the doom of paralysed and helpless senility which the enchantress had condemned him to endure for a thousand years and which still binds him fast,—a doom which inevitably reminds us of such stories as that of the Fisherman in the Arabian Nights, and of the spell laid by Suleiman upon the rebellious Djinn, whom he imprisoned for a thousand and eight hundred years in a bottle until the Fisherman released him.

Glaucus goes on to relate how once, in the course of his miserable spell-bound existence, he witnessed the drowning of a shipwrecked crew with agony at his own helplessness, and in trying vainly to rescue a sinking old man by the hand found himself left with a wand and scroll which the old man had held. Reading the scroll, he found in it comfortable words of hope and wisdom. (Note that it was through an attempted act of human succour that this wisdom came to him). If he would have patience, so ran the promise of the scroll, to probe all the depths of magic and the hidden secrets of nature—if moreover he would piously through the centuries make it his business to lay side by side in sanctuary all bodies of lovers drowned at sea—there would one day come to him a heaven-favoured youth to whom he would be able to teach the rites necessary for his deliverance. He recognizes the predestined youth in Endymion, who on learning the nature of the promise accepts joyfully his share in the prescribed duty, with the attendant risk of destruction to both if they fail. The young man and the old—or rather ‘the young soul in age’s mask’—go together to the submarine hall of burial where Scylla and the multitude of drowned lovers lie enshrined. As to the rites that follow and their effect, let us have them in the poet’s own words:—

‘Let us commence,’ Whisper’d the guide, stuttering with joy, ‘even now.’ He spake, and, trembling like an aspen-bough, Began to tear his scroll in pieces small, Uttering the while some mumblings funeral. He tore it into pieces small as snow That drifts unfeather’d when bleak northerns blow; And having done it, took his dark blue cloak And bound it round Endymion: then struck His wand against the empty air times nine.— ‘What more there is to do, young man, is thine: But first a little patience; first undo This tangled thread, and wind it to a clue. Ah, gentle! ’tis as weak as spider’s skein; And shouldst thou break it—What, is it done so clean A power overshadows thee! O, brave! The spite of hell is tumbling to its grave. Here is a shell; ’tis pearly blank to me, Nor mark’d with any sign or charactery— Canst thou read aught? O read for pity’s sake! Olympus! we are safe! Now, Carian, break This wand against yon lyre on the pedestal.’ ’Twas done: and straight with sudden swell and fall Sweet music breath’d her soul away, and sigh’d A lullaby to silence.—‘Youth! now strew These minced leaves on me, and passing through Those files of dead, scatter the same around, And thou wilt see the issue.’—‘Mid the sound Of flutes and viols, ravishing his heart, Endymion from Glaucus stood apart, And scatter’d in his face some fragments light. How lightning-swift the change! a youthful wight Smiling beneath a coral diadem Out-sparkling sudden like an upturn’d gem, Appear’d, and, stepping to a beauteous corse, Kneel’d down beside it, and with tenderest force Press’d its cold hand, and wept,—and Scylla sigh’d! Endymion, with quick hand, the charm apply’d— The nymph arose: he left them to their joy, And onward went upon his high employ, Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And as he passed, each lifted up his head, As doth a flower at Apollo’s touch. Death felt it to his inwards: ’twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. The Latmian persever’d along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air—while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, Sprang to each other madly; and the rest Felt a high certainty of being blest. They gaz’d upon Endymion. Enchantment Grew drunken, and would have its head and bent. Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers, Budded, and swell’d, and, full-blown, shed full showers Of light, soft, unseen leaves of sounds divine. The two deliverers tasted a pure wine Of happiness, from fairy-press ooz’d out. Speechless they ey’d each other, and about The fair assembly wander’d to and fro, Distracted with the richest overflow Of joy that ever pour’d from heaven.

The whole long Glaucus and Scylla episode filling the third book, and especially this its climax, has to many lovers and students of Keats proved a riddle hard of solution. And indeed at first reading the meaning of its strange incidents and imagery, beautiful as is much of the poetry in which they are told, looks obscure enough. Every definite clue to their interpretation seems to elude us as we lay hold of it, like the drowned man who sinks through the palsied grasp of Glaucus. But bearing in mind what we have recognized as the general scope and symbolic meaning of the poem, does not the main purport of the Glaucus book, on closer study, emerge clearly as something like this? The spirit touched with the divine beam of Cynthia—that is aspiring to and chosen for communion with essential Beauty—in other words the spirit of the Poet—must prepare itself for its high calling, first by purging away the selfishness of its private passion in sympathy with human loves and sorrows, and next by acquiring a full store alike of human experience and of philosophic thought and wisdom. Endymion, endowed by favour of the gods with the poetic gift and passion, has only begun to awaken to sympathy and acquire knowledge when he meets Glaucus, whose history has made him rich in all that Endymion yet lacks, including as it does the forfeiting of simple everyday life and usefulness for the exercise of a perilous superhuman gift; the desertion, under a spell of evil magic, of a pure for an impure love; the tremendous penalty which has to be paid for this plunge into sensual debasement; the painful acquisition of the gift of righteous magic, or knowledge of the secrets of nature and mysteries of life and death, by prolonged intensity of study, and the patient exercise of the duties of pious tenderness towards the bodies of the drowned. At the approach of Endymion the sage recognizes in him the predestined poet, and hastens to make over to him, as to one more divinely favoured than himself, all the dower of his dearly bought wisdom; in possession of which the poet is enabled to work miracles of joy and healing and to confer immortality on dead lovers.

As to the significance in detail of the rites by which the transfer of power is effected, we are again helped by remembering that Keats was mixing up with his classic myth ideas taken from the Thousand and One Nights. Let the student turn to the Glaucus and Circe episodes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and then refresh his memory of certain Arabian tales, particularly that of Bebr Salim, with its kings and queens of the sea living and moving under water as easily as on land, its repeated magical transformations and layings on and taking off of enchantments, and the adventures of the hero with queen Lab, the Oriental counterpart of Circe,—let the student refresh his memory from these sources, and the proceedings of this episode will no longer seem so strange. In the Arabian tales, and for that matter in western tales of magic also, the commonest method of annulling enchantments is by sprinkling with water over which words of power have been spoken. Under sea you cannot sprinkle with water, so Keats makes Endymion use for sprinkling the shredded fragments of the scroll taken by Glaucus from the drowned man. First Glaucus tears the scroll, uttering ‘some mumblings funeral’ as he does so (compare the ‘backward mutters of dissevering power’ in Milton’s Comus). Then follows a series of actions showing that the hour has come for him to surrender and make over his powers and virtues to the new comer. First he invests Endymion with his own magic robe. Then he waves his magic wand nine times in the air,—as a preliminary to the last exercise of its power? or as a sign that its power is exhausted? Nine is of course a magic number, and the immediate suggestion comes from the couplet in Sandys’s Ovid where Glaucus tells how the sea-gods admitted him to their fellowship,—

Whom now they hallow, and with charms nine times Repeated, purge me from my human crimes.

The disentangling of the skein and the perceiving and deciphering of runes on the shell10 which to Glaucus is a blank are evidently tests Endymion has to undergo before it is proved and confirmed that he is really the predestined poet, gifted to unravel and interpret mysteries beyond the ken of mere philosophy. The breaking of the philosopher’s wand against the lyre suspended from its pedestal, followed by an outburst of ravishing music, is a farther and not too obscure piece of symbolism shadowing forth the surrender and absorption of the powers of study and research into the higher powers of poetic intuition and inspiration. And then comes the general disenchantment and awakening of the drowned multitude to life and happiness.

The parable breaks off at this point, and the book closes with a submarine pageant imagined, it would seem, almost singly for the pageant’s sake; perhaps also partly in remembrance of Spenser’s festival of the sea-gods at the marriage of Thames and Medway in the fourth book of the Faerie Queene. The rejuvenated Glaucus bids the whole beautiful multitude follow him to pay their homage to Neptune: they obey: the first crowd of lovers restored to life meets a second crowd on the sand, and some in either crowd recognize and happily pair off with their lost ones in the other. All approach in procession the palace of Neptune—another marvel of vast and vague jewelled and translucent architectural splendours—and find the god presiding on an emerald throne between Venus and Cupid. Glaucus and Scylla receive the blessing of Neptune and Venus respectively, and Venus addresses Endymion in a speech of arch encouragement, where the poet’s style (as almost always in moments of his hero’s prosperous love) turns common and tasteless. Dance and revelry follow, and then a hymn to Neptune, Venus, and Cupid. This is interrupted by the entrance of Oceanus and a train of Nereids. The presence of all these immortals is too much for Endymion’s human senses: he swoons; a ring of Nereids lift and carry him tenderly away; he is aware of a message of hope and cheer from his goddess, written in starlight on the dark; and when he comes to himself, finds that he is restored to earth, lying on the grass beside a forest pool in his native Caria.

Book IV. In this book Endymion has to make his last discovery. He has to learn that all transient and secondary loves, which may seem to come between him and his great ideal pursuit and lure him away from it, are really, when the truth is known, but encouragements to that pursuit, visitations and condescensions to him of his celestial love in disguise. The narrative setting forth this discovery is pitched in a key which, following the triumphant close of the last book, seems curiously subdued and melancholy. An opening apostrophe by the poet to the Muse of his native land, long silent while Greece and Italy sang, but aroused in the fulness of time to happy utterance, begins joyously enough, but ends on no more confident note than this:—

Great Muse, thou know’st what prison Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets Our spirit’s wings: despondency besets Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn Seems to give forth its light in very scorn Of our dull, uninspir’d, snail-paced lives. Long have I said, how happy he who shrives To thee! But then I thought on poets gone, And could not pray:—nor could I now—so on I move to the end in lowliness of heart.—

Keats then tells how his hero, paying his vows to the gods, is interrupted by the plaint of a forsaken Indian damsel which reaches him through the forest undergrowth. (Such a damsel lying back on the grass with her arms among her hair had dwelt, I think, in the poet’s mind’s eye from pictures by or prints after Poussin ever since hospital and early Hunt days, and had been haunting him when he scribbled his attempted scrap of an Alexander romance in a fellow student’s notebook). Endymion listens and approaches: the poet foresees and deplores the coming struggle between his hero’s celestial love and this earthly beauty disconsolate at his feet. The damsel, speaking to herself, laments her loneliness, and tells how she could find it in her heart to love this shepherd youth, and how love is lord of all. Endymion falls to pitying and from pitying into loving her. Though without sense of treachery to his divine mistress, he is torn by the contention within him between this new earthly and his former heavenly flame. He goes on to declare the struggle is killing him, and entreats the damsel to sing him a song of India to ease his passing. Her song, telling of her desolation before and after she was swept from home in the train of Bacchus and his rout and again since she fell out of the march, is, in spite of one or two unfortunate blemishes, among the most moving and original achievements of English lyric poetry. Endymion is wholly overcome, and in a speech of somewhat mawkish surrender gives himself to the new earthly love, not blindly, but realizing fully what he forfeits. He bids the damsel—

Do gently murder half my soul, and I Shall feel the other half so utterly.

A cry of ‘Woe to Endymion!’ echoing through the forest has no sooner alarmed the lovers than there is a sudden apparition of Mercury descending. The gods intend for Endymion an unexpected issue from his perplexities. Their messenger touches the ground with his wand and vanishes: two raven-black winged horses rise through the ground where he has touched,—the horses, no doubt, of the imagination, the same or of the same breed as those ‘steeds with streamy manes’ that paw up against the light and trample along the ridges of the clouds in Sleep and Poetry. Endymion mounts the damsel on one and himself mounts the other: they are borne aloft together,

—unseen, alone, Among cool clouds and winds, but that the free, The buoyant life of song, can floating be Above their heads, and follow them untired.

The poet, seeming to realize that the most difficult part of his tale is now to tell, again invokes the native Muse, and relates how the lovers, couched on the wings of the raven steeds, enter on their flight a zone of mists enfolding the couch of Sleep, who has been drawn from his cave by the rumour of the coming nuptials of a goddess with a mortal. The narrative is here very obscure, but seems to run thus. Alike the magic steed and the lovers reclining on their wings yield to the influence of sleep, but still drift on their aerial course. As they drift, Endymion dreams that he has been admitted to Olympus. In his dream he drinks of Hebe’s cup, tries the bow of Apollo and the shield of Pallas; blows a bugle which summons the Seasons and the Hours to a dance; asks whose bugle it is and learns that it is Diana’s; the next moment she is there in presence; he springs to his now recognized goddess, and in the act he awakes, and it is a case of Adam’s dream having come true; he is aware of Diana and the other celestials present bending over him. On the horse-plume couch beside him lies the Indian maiden: the conflict between his two loves is distractingly renewed within him, though some instinct again tells him that he is not really untrue to either. He embraces the Indian damsel as she sleeps; the goddess disappears; the damsel awakes; he pleads with her, says that his other love is free from all malice or revenge and that in his soul he feels true to both.

What is this soul then? Whence Came it? It does not seem my own, and I Have no self-passion nor identity.

This charge, be it noted, is one which Keats in his private thoughts was constantly apt to bring against himself. Foreseeing disaster and the danger of losing both his loves and being left solitary, Endymion nevertheless rouses the steeds to a renewed ascent. He and the damsel are borne towards the milky way, in a mystery of loving converse: the crescent moon appears from a cloud, facing them: Endymion turns to the damsel at his side and finds her gone gaunt and cold and ghostly: a moment more and she is not there at all but vanished: her horse parts company from his, towers, and falls to earth. He is left alone on his further ascent, abandoned for the moment by both the objects of his passion, the celestial and the human. His spirit enters into a region, or phase, of involved and brooding misery and thence into one of contented apathy: he is scarcely even startled, though his steed is, by a flight of celestial beings blowing trumpets and proclaiming a coming festival of Diana. In a choral song they invite the signs and constellations to the festival: (the picture of the Borghese Zodiac in Spence’s Polymetis has evidently given Keats his suggestion here). Then suddenly Endymion hears no more and is aware that his courser has in a moment swept him down to earth again.

He finds himself on a green hillside with the Indian maiden beside him, and in a long impassioned protestation renounces his past dreams, condemns his presumptuous neglect of human and earthly joys, and declares his intention to live alone with her for ever and (not forgetting to propitiate the Olympians) to shower upon her all the treasures of the pastoral earth:—

O I have been Presumptuous against love, against the sky, Against all elements, against the tie Of mortals each to each, against the blooms Of flowers, rush of rivers, and the tombs Of heroes gone! Against his proper glory Has my own soul conspired: so my story Will I to children utter, and repent. There never liv’d a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starv’d and died. My sweetest Indian, here, Here will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast My life from too thin breathing: gone and past Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell! And air of visions, and the monstrous swell Of visionary seas! No, never more Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore Of tangled wonder, breathless and aghast.

Here Keats spins and puts into the mouth of Endymion wooing the Indian maiden a long, and in some at least of its verses exquisite, pastoral fantasia recalling, and no doubt partly founded on, the famous passage in Ovid, itself founded on one equally famous in Theocritus, where Polyphemus woos the nymph Galatea.11 Apparently, though it was through sympathy with the human sorrow of the Indian damsel that Endymion has first been caught, he proposes to enjoy her society now in detachment from all other human ties as well as from all transcendental dreams and ambitions.

But the damsel is aware of matters which prevent her from falling in with her lover’s desires. She puts him off, saying that she has always loved him and longed and languished to be his, but that this joy is forbidden her, or can only be compassed by the present death of both (that is, to the mortal in love with the spirit of poetry and poetic beauty no life of mere human and earthly contentment is possible); and so she proposes to renounce him. Despondingly they wander off together into the forest.

The poet pauses for an apostrophe to Endymion, confusedly expressed, but vital to his whole meaning. His suffering hero, he says, had the tale allowed, should have been enthroned in felicity before now (the word is ‘ensky’d,’ from Measure for Measure). In truth he has been so enthroned for many thousand years (that is to say, the poetic spirit in man has been wedded in full communion to the essential soul of Beauty in the world): the poet, Keats himself, has had some help from him already, and with his farther help hopes ere long to sing of his ‘lute-voiced brother’: that is Apollo, to whom Endymion is called brother as being espoused to his sister Diana. This is the first intimation of Keats’s intention to write on the story of Hyperion’s fall and the advent of Apollo. But the present tale, signifies Keats, has not yet got to that point, and must now be resumed.

Endymion rests beside the damsel in a part of the forest where every tree and stream and slope might have reminded him of his boyish sports, but his downcast eyes fail to recognize them. Peona appears; he dreads their meeting, but without cause; interpreting things by their obvious appearance she sweetly welcomes the stranger as the bride her brother has brought home after his mysterious absence, and bids them both to a festival the shepherds are to hold tonight in honour of Cynthia, in whose aspect the soothsayers have read good omens. Still Endymion does not brighten; Peona asks the stranger why, and craves her help with him; Endymion with a great effort, ‘twanging his soul like a spiritual bow’, says that after all he has gone through he must not partake in the common and selfish pleasures of men, lest he should forfeit higher pleasures and render himself incapable of the services for which he has disciplined himself; that henceforth he must live as a hermit, visited by none but his sister Peona. To her care he at the same time commends the Indian lady: who consents to go with her, and remembering the approaching festival of Diana says she will take part in it and consecrate herself to that sisterhood and to chastity.

For a while they all three feel like people in sleep struggling with oppressive dreams and making believe to think them every-day experiences. Endymion tries to ease the strain by bidding them farewell. They go off dizzily, he stares distressfully after them and at last cries to them to meet him for a last time the same evening in the grove behind Diana’s temple. They disappear; he is left in sluggish desolation till sunset, when he goes to keep his tryst at the temple, musing first with bitterness, then with a resigned prescience of coming death (the mood of the Nightingale Ode appearing here in Keats’s work for the first time): then bitterly again:—

I did wed Myself to things of light from infancy; And thus to be cast out, thus lorn to die Is sure enough to make a mortal man Grow impious. So he inwardly began On things for which no wording can be found; Deeper and deeper sulking, until drown’d Beyond the reach of music: for the choir Of Cynthia he heard not, though rough briar Nor muffling thicket interpos’d to dull The vesper hymn, far swollen, soft and full, Through the dark pillars of those sylvan aisles. He saw not the two maidens, nor their smiles, Wan as primroses gather’d at midnight By chilly finger’d spring. ‘Unhappy wight! Endymion!’ said Peona, ‘we are here! What wouldst thou ere we all are laid on bier?’ Then he embrac’d her, and his lady’s hand Press’d saying: ‘Sister, I would have command, If it were heaven’s will, on our sad fate.’ At which that dark-eyed stranger stood elate And said, in a new voice, but sweet as love, To Endymion’s amaze: ‘By Cupid’s dove, And so thou shalt! and by the lily truth Of my own breast thou shalt, beloved youth!’ And as she spake, into her face there came Light, as reflected from a silver flame: Her long black hair swell’d ampler, in display Full golden; in her eyes a brighter day Dawn’d blue and full of love. Aye, he beheld Phoebe, his passion!

And so the quest is ended, and the mystery solved. Vera incessu patuit dea: the forsaken Indian maiden had been but a disguised incarnation of Cynthia herself. Endymion’s earthly passion, born of human pity and desire, was one all the while, had he but known it, with his heavenly passion born of poetic aspiration and the soul’s thirst for Beauty. The two passions at their height and perfection are inseparable, and the crowned poet and the crowned lover are one. But these things are still a mystery to those who know not poetry, and when the happy lovers disappear the kind ministering sister Peona can only marvel:—

Peona went Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.

The poem ends on no such note of joy and triumph over the attained consummation as we might have expected and such as we found at the close of the third book, at the point where the faculty and vision of the poet had been happily enriched and completed by the gift of the learning and beneficence of the sage. The fourth book closes, as it began, in a minor key, leaving the reader, like Peona, in a mood rather musing than rejoicing. Is this because Keats had tired of his task before he came to the end, or because the low critical opinion of his own work which he had been gradually forming took the heart out of him, so that as he drew near the goal he involuntarily let his mind run on the hindrances and misgivings which beset the poetic aspirant on his way to victory more than on the victory itself? Or was it partly because of the numbing influence of early winter as recorded in the last chapter? We cannot tell.

But why take all this trouble, the reader may well have asked before now, to follow the argument and track the wanderings of Endymion book by book, when everyone knows that the poem is only admirable for its incidental beauties and is neither read nor well readable for its story? The answer is that the intricacy and obscurity of the narrative, taken merely as a narrative, are such as to tire the patience of many readers in their search for beautiful passages and to dull their enjoyment of them when found; but once the inner and symbolic meanings of the poem are recognized, even in gleams, their recognition gives it a quite new hold upon the attention. And in order to trace these meanings and disengage them with any clearness a fairly close examination and detailed argument are necessary. It is not with simple matters of personification, of the putting of initial capitals to abstract qualities, that we have to deal, nor yet with any obvious and deliberately thought-out allegory; still less is it with one purposely made riddling and obscure; it is with a vital, subtly involved and passionately tentative spiritual parable, the parable of the experiences of the poetic soul in man seeking communion with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world, invented and related, in the still uncertain dawn of his powers, by one of the finest natural-born and intuitively gifted poets who ever lived. This is a thing which stands almost alone in literature, and however imperfectly executed is worth any closeness and continuity of attention we can give it. Having now studied, to the best of our power, the sources and scheme of the poem, with its symbolism and inner meanings so far as they can with any confidence be traced, let us pass to the consideration of its technical and poetical qualities and its relation to the works of certain other poets and poems of Keats’s time.

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To rescue men’s minds from this mode of deadness was part of the work of the English poetical revival of 1800 and onwards, and Keats was the poet who has contributed most to the task. Wordsworth could understand and expound the spirit of Grecian myths, and on occasion, as in his cry for a sight of Proteus and a sound of old Triton’s horn, could for a moment hanker after its revival. Shelley could feel and write of Apollo and Pan and Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, with ardent delight and lyric emotion. But it was the gift of Keats to make live by imagination, whether in few words or many, every ancient fable that came up in his mind. The couple of lines telling of the song with which Peona tries to soothe her brother’s pining are a perfect example alike of appropriate verbal music and of imagination following out a classic myth, that of the birth and nurture of Pan, from a mere hint to its recesses and finding the human beauty and tenderness that lurk there:—

’Twas a lay More subtle cadencÈd, more forest wild Than Dryope’s lone lulling of her child:

Even in setting before us so trite a personification as the god of love, Keats manages to escape the traditional and the merely decorative, and to endow him with a new and subtle vitality—

awfully he stands; A sovereign quell is in his waving hands; No sight can bear the lightning of his bow; His quiver is mysterious, none can know What themselves think of it; from forth his eyes There darts strange light of varied hues and dyes: A scowl is sometimes on his brow, but who Look full upon it feel anon the blue Of his fair eyes run liquid through their souls.

Keats in one place defines his purpose in his poem, if only he can find strength to carry it out, as a

striving to uprear Love’s standard on the battlements of song.

His actual love scenes, as we have said, are the weakest, his ideal invocations to and celebrations of love among the strongest, things in the poem. One of these, already quoted, comes near the end of the first book: the second book opens with another: in the third book the incident of the moonlight spangling the surface of the sea and penetrating thence to the under-sea caverns where Endymion lies languishing is used to point an essential moral of the narrative:—

O love! how potent hast thou been to teach Strange journeyings! Wherever beauty dwells, In gulph or aerie, mountains or deep dells, In light, in gloom, in star or blazing sun, Thou pointest out the way, and straight ’tis won.

When the poet interrupts for a passing moment his tale of the might and mysteries of love, celestial or human, and turns to images of war, we find, him able to condense the whole tragedy of the sack of Troy into three potent lines,—

The woes of Troy, towers smothering o’er their blaze, Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, Struggling, and blood, and shrieks.

From a passage like the following any reasonably sympathetic reader of Keats’s day, running through the poem to find what manner and variety of promise it might contain, should have augured well of another kind of power, the dramatic and ironic, to be developed in due time. The speaker is the detected witch Circe uttering the doom of her revolted lover Glaucus:—

‘Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express, To cradle thee, my sweet, and lull thee: yes, I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch: My tenderest squeeze is but a giant’s clutch. So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabies Unheard of yet: and it shall still its cries Upon some breast more lily-feminine. Oh, no—it shall not pine, and pine, and pine More than one pretty, trifling thousand years. ... Mark me! Thou hast thews Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race: But such a love is mine, that here I chase Eternally away from thee all bloom Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb. Hence shalt thou quickly to the watery vast; And there, ere many days be overpast, Disabled age shall seize thee: and even then Thou shalt not go the way of aged men; But live and wither, cripple and still breathe Ten hundred years: which gone, I then bequeath Thy fragile bones to unknown burial. Adieu, sweet love, adieu!’

A vein very characteristic of Keats at this stage of his mind’s growth is that of figurative confession or self-revelation. Many passages in Endymion give poetical expression to the same alternating moods of ambition and humility, of exhilaration, depression, or apathy, which he confides to his friends in his letters. One of the most striking and original of these pieces of figurative psychology studied from his own moods is the description of the Cave of Quietude in Book IV:—

There lies a den, Beyond the seeming confines of the space Made for the soul to wander in and trace Its own existence, of remotest glooms. Dark regions are around it, where the tombs Of buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarce One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart: And in these regions many a venom’d dart At random flies; they are the proper home Of every ill: the man is yet to come Who hath not journeyed in this native hell. But few have ever felt how calm and well Sleep may be had in that deep den of all. There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall: Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate, Yet all is still within and desolate. ... Enter none Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won.

To the student of Endymion there are few things more interesting than to observe Keats’s technical and spiritual relations to his Elizabethan models in those places where he has one or another of them manifestly in remembrance. Here is the passage in Sandys’s Ovid which tells how Cybele, the Earth-Mother, punished the pair of lovers Hippomenes and Atalanta for the pollution of her sanctuary by turning them into lions and yoking them to her car:—

The Mother, crown’d With towers, had struck them to the Stygian sound, But that she thought that punishment too small. When yellow manes on their smooth shoulders fall; Their arms, to legs; their fingers turn to nails; Their breasts of wondrous strength: their tufted tails Whisk up the dust; their looks are full of dread; For speech they roar: the woods become their bed. These Lions, fear’d by others, Cybel checks With curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks.

This is a typical example of Ovid’s brilliantly clever, quite unromantic, unsurprised, and as it were unblinking way of detailing the marvels of an act of transformation. Keats’s recollection of it—and probably also of a certain engraving after a Roman altar-relief of Cybele and her yoked lions—inspires a vision of intense imaginative life expressed in verse of a noble solemnity and sonority:—

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 crown’d. Four maned lions hale The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws, Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away In another gloomy arch.

The four lions instead of two must be a whim of Keats’s imagination, and finds no authority either from Ovid or from ancient sculpture. Should any reader wish to pursue farther the comparison between Ovid in the Metamorphoses and Keats in Endymion, let him turn to the passage of Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish upon her if she will be his,—the same passage from which is derived the famous song in Handel’s Acis and Galatea: let him turn to this and compare it with the list of similar delights offered by Endymion to the Indian maiden when he is bent on forgoing his dreams of a celestial union for her sake, and he will see how they are dematerialized and refined yet at the same time made richer in colour and enchantment.

But let us for our purpose rather take, as illustrating the relations of Keats to his classic and Elizabethan sources, two of the incidental lyrics in his poem. There are four such lyrics in Endymion altogether. Two of them are of small account,—the hymn to Neptune and Venus at the end of the third book, and the song of the Constellations in the middle of the fourth. The other two, the hymn to Pan in Book I and the song of the Indian maiden in Book IV, are among Keats’s very finest achievements. The hymn to Pan is especially interesting in comparison with two of Keats’s Elizabethan sources, Chapman’s translation of the Homeric hymn and Ben Jonson’s original hymns in his masque of Pan’s Anniversary. Here is part of the Homeric hymn according to Chapman:—

Sing, Muse, this chief of Hermes’ love-got joys, Goat-footed, two-horn’d, amorous of noise, That through the fair greens, all adorn’d with trees, Together goes with Nymphs, whose nimble knees Can every dance foot, that affect to scale The most inaccessible tops of all Uprightest rocks, and ever use to call On Pan, the bright-haired 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. Sometimes (In quite oppos’d capriccios) he climbs The hardest rocks, and highest, every way Running their ridges. Often will convey Himself up to a watch-tow’r’s top, where sheep Have their observance. Oft through hills as steep His goats he runs upon, and never rests. Then turns he head, and flies on savage beasts, Mad of their slaughters... (When Hesp’rus calls to fold the flocks of men) From the green closets of his loftiest reeds He rushes forth, and joy with song he feeds. When, under shadow of their motions set, He plays a verse forth so profoundly sweet, As not the bird that in the flow’ry spring, Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring Of her sour sorrows, sweeten’d with her song, Runs her divisions varied so and strong.

And here are two of the most characteristic strophes from Ben Jonson’s hymns:—

Pan is our all, by him we breathe, we live, We move, we are; ’tis he our lambs doth rear, Our flocks doth bless, and from the store doth give The warm and finer fleeces that we wear. He keeps away all heats and colds, Drives all diseases from our folds: Makes every where the spring to dwell, The ewes to feed, their udders swell; But if he frown, the sheep (alas) The shepherds wither, and the grass. Strive, strive to please him then by still increasing thus The rites are due to him, who doth all right for us. ··········· Great Pan, the father of our peace and pleasure, Who giv’st us all this leisure, Hear what thy hallowed troop of herdsmen pray For this their holy-day, And how their vows to thee they in LycÆum pay. So may our ewes receive the mounting rams, And we bring thee the earliest of our lambs: So may the first of all our fells be thine, And both the breastning of our goats and kine. As thou our folds dost still secure, And keep’st our fountains sweet and pure, Driv’st hence the wolf, the tod, the brock, Or other vermin from the flock. That we preserv’d by thee, and thou observ’d by us, May both live safe in shade of thy lov’d Maenalus.

Comparing these strophes with the hymn in Endymion, we shall realize how the Elizabethan pastoral spirit, compounded as it was of native English love of country pleasures and Renaissance delight in classic poetry, emerged after near two centuries’ occultation to reappear in the poetry of Keats, but wonderfully strengthened in imaginative reach and grasp, richer and more romantic both in the delighted sense of nature’s blessings and activities and in the awed apprehension of a vast mystery behind them. The sense of such mystery is nowhere else expressed by Keats with such brooding inwardness and humbleness as where he invokes Pan no longer as a shepherd’s god but as a symbol of the World-All. Wordsworth, when Keats at the request of friends read the piece to him, could see, or would own to seeing, nothing in it but a ‘pretty piece of paganism,’ though indeed in the more profoundly felt and imagined lines, such as those with which the first and fifth strophes open, the inspiration can be traced in great part to the influence of Wordsworth himself:—

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 thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles Passion their voices cooingly ‘mong myrtles, What time thou wanderest at eventide Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side Of thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whom Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom Their ripen’d fruitage; yellow girted bees Their golden honeycombs; our village leas Their fairest blossom’d beans and poppied corn; The chuckling linnet its five young unborn, To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries Their summer coolness; pent up butterflies Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year All its completions—be quickly near, By every wind that nods the mountain pine, O forester divine! Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies For willing service; whether to surprise The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit; Or upward ragged precipices flit To save poor lambkins from the eagle’s maw; Or by mysterious enticement draw Bewildered shepherds to their path again; Or to tread breathless round the frothy main, And gather up all fancifullest shells For thee to tumble into Naiads’ cells, And being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping; Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping, The while they pelt each other on the crown With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown— By all the echoes that about thee ring, Hear us, O satyr king! 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 huntsmen: 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:3 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! Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity; A firmament reflected in a sea; An element filling the space between; An unknown—but no more: we humbly screen With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending, And giving out a shout most heaven rending, Conjure thee to receive our humble Paean, Upon thy Mount Lycean!

The song of the Indian maiden in the fourth book is in a very different key from this, more strikingly original in form and conception, and but for a weak opening and one or two flaws of taste would be a masterpiece. Keats’s later and more famous lyrics, though they have fewer faults, 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 northern 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 by invoking and questioning sorrow in a series of dreamy musical stanzas of which the imagery embodies, a little redundantly and confusedly, the idea expressed elsewhere by Keats with greater perfection, that it is Sorrow which confers upon beautiful things their richest beauty. From these the song passes to tell what has happened to the singer:—

To Sorrow, I bade good-morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind: I would deceive her And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind. Beneath my palm tree, by the river side, I sat a weeping: in the whole world wide There was no one to ask me why I wept,— And so I kept Brimming the water-lily cups with tears Cold as my fears. Beneath my palm trees, by the river side, I sat a weeping: what enamour’d bride, Cheated by shadowy wooer from the clouds, But hides and shrouds Beneath dark palm trees by a river side?

It is here that we seem to catch an echo, varied and new-modulated but in no sense weakened, from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan,—

A savage place, as holy as enchanted As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover.

Then, with another change of measure comes the deserted maiden’s tale of the irruption of Bacchus on his march from India; 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! 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!’ ‘Over wide streams and mountains great we went, And save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent, Onward the tiger and the leopard pants, With Asian elephants: Onward these myriads—with song and dance, With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians’ prance, Web-footed alligators, crocodiles, Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files, Plump infant laughers mimicking the coil Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers’ toil: With toying oars and silken sails they glide, Nor care for wind and tide.

Pl. V

On another day he recurs to the mood of half real half mock impatience against those who rub the bloom off things of beauty by over-commenting and over-interpreting them, a mood natural to a spirit dwelling so habitually and intuitively at the heart of beauty as his:—

Once, writing to Reynolds, he resumes his habit of a year and a half earlier, and casts his fancies and reflections into rime. Beginning playfully, he tells of an odd jumble of incongruous images that had crossed his brain, a kind of experience expressed by him elsewhere in various strains of verse, e.g. the finished poem Fancy and the careless lines beginning ‘Welcome Joy, and welcome Sorrow.’ He supposes that some people are not subject to such freaks of the mind’s eye, but have it consistently haunted by fine things such as he next proceeds to conjure up from memory,—

Some Titian colours touch’d into real life,— The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows, The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows; A white sail shows above the green-head cliff, Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff; The mariners join hymn with those on land.

There exists no such picture of a sacrifice by Titian, and what Keats was thinking of, I feel sure, was the noble ‘Sacrifice to Apollo’ by Claude from the Leigh Court collection, which he had seen at the British Institution in 1816 (hung, as it happened, next to Titian’s Europa from Cobham Hall), and which evidently worked deeply on his mind. To memory of it is probably due that magic vision of a little town emptied of its folk on a morning of sacrifice, which he evoked a year later in the ode on a Grecian Urn. It shows to the right an altar in front of a temple of Apollo, and about the altar a group including king and priest and a young man holding down a victim ox by the horns; people with baskets and offerings coming up from behind the temple; and to the left tall trees with a priest leading in another victim by the horns, and a woman with a jar bringing in libation; a little back, two herdsmen with their goats; a river spanned by a bridge and winding towards a sea-bay partly encircled by mountains which close the view, and on the edge of the bay the tower and roofs of a little town indistinctly seen. Recollection of this Claude leads Keats on quickly to that of another, the famous ‘Enchanted Castle,’ which he partly mixes up with it, and partly transforms by fantasy into something quite different from what it really is. He forgets the one human figure in the foreground, describes figures and features of the landscape which are not there, and remembering that the architecture combines ancient Roman with mediÆval castellated and later Palladian elements, invents for it far-fetched origins and associations which in a more careless fashion almost remind one of those invented by Pope for his Temple of Fame. (A year later, all this effervescence of the imagination about the picture had subsided, and the distilled and concentrated essence of its romance was expressed—so at least I conceive—in the famous ‘magic casement’ phrase at the end of the Nightingale ode).7

Pl. VI

A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE

From this play of fancy about two half-remembered pictures Keats turns suddenly to reflections, which he would like to banish but cannot, on the ‘eternal fierce destruction’ which is part of nature’s law:—

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!

The letters of this date should be read and re-read by all who want to get to the centre of Keats’s mind or to hold a key to the understanding of his deepest poetry. The richest of them all is that in which he sends the fragments of an ode to Maia written on May day with the (alas! unfulfilled) promise to finish it ‘in good time.’ The same letter contains the re-assertion of a purpose declared in a letter of a week before to Mr Taylor in the phrases, ‘I find I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world.... There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study and thought. I will pursue it.’ The mood of the verses interpreting the song of the thrush a few weeks earlier has passed, the reader will note, clean out of the poet’s mind. To Reynolds his words are:—

Let it never be forgotten that ‘sensations’ contrasted with ‘thoughts’ mean for Keats not pleasures and experiences of the senses as opposed to those of the mind, but direct intuitions of the imagination as opposed to deliberate processes of the understanding; and that by ‘philosophy’ he does not mean metaphysics but knowledge and the fruits of reading generally.

The same letter, again, contains an interesting meditation on the relative qualities of genius in Milton and Wordsworth as affected by the relative stages of history at which they lived, and on the further question whether Wordsworth was a greater or less poet than Milton by virtue of being more taken up with human passions and problems. This speculation leads on to one of Keats’s finest passages of life-wisdom:—

Pl. VII

THE ENCHANTED CASTLE FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE

Presently follows the famous chain of images by which Keats, searching and probing for himself along pathways of the spirit parallel to those followed by Wordsworth in the Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, renders account to himself of the stage of development to which his mind has now reached:—

Here is a typical case of the method of evocation as against the method of exposition. Wordsworth’s lines are written with a high, almost an inspired, power of describing and putting into direct words the successive moods of a spirit gradually ripening and deepening in the power of communion with nature, and through nature, with all life. But Keats, fully as he has pondered them, cannot be satisfied that they fit his own case until he has called up the history of his similar experiences in the form natural to him, the form, that is, of concrete similitudes or visions of the imagination—the Thoughtless Chamber, the Chamber of Maiden Thought with its gradual darkening and its many outlets standing open to be explored. It is significant that such visions should still be of architecture, of halls and chambers in an imagined mysterious building.

Apart from his growing sense of the darker sides of human existence and of the mysteries of good and evil, Keats was suffering at this time from 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 Georgiana Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be married and sail early in the summer. Some of Keats’s letters during the last weeks of his stay at Teignmouth are taken up with his plans for the time immediately following this change. He wavered for a while between two incompatible purposes. 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.’ (How ‘economize,’ one wonders?) ‘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.’ Here we find Keats in his turn caught by the romance of wild lands and of travel which had in various ways been so much of an inspiration to Byron and Shelley before him. A fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an overmastering 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.

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 is inclined, when not on the defensive against what he felt to be foolish criticism, to under-rate rather than to overrate his own work, and in his correspondence of the previous year we have found him 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, he in a first draft makes confession to the public of his ‘non-opinion of himself’ in terms both a little too intimate and too fidgeting and uneasy. Reynolds seeing the draft at once recognised that it would not do, and in criticizing it to Keats seems to have told him that it was too much in the manner of Leigh Hunt. In deference to his judgment Keats at once abandoned it, and a second attempt says briefly, with perfect dignity and taste, all that can justly be said in dispraise of his work. 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.’

Keats and Tom, the latter for the moment easier in health, were back at Hampstead in the last week of May, in time for the marriage of their brother George with Miss Georgiana Wylie. This was the young lady to whom Keats had rimed a valentine for his brother two years earlier (the lines beginning ‘Hadst thou liv’d in days of old’) and to whom he had also on his own account addressed the charming sonnet, ‘Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance.’ With no other woman or girl friend was he ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy. The wedding took place ‘a week ago,’ writes Keats on June 4, and about the same date, in order that he may not miss seeing as much of the young couple as possible before their departure, he declines a warm invitation from Bailey to visit him again at Oxford. Writing, as usual to this correspondent, with absolute openness, Keats shows that he is suffering from one of his moods of overmastering depression. First it takes the form of apathy. Bailey had written eagerly and judiciously in praise of Endymion in the Oxford Herald. Keats replies on June 1:—

Nine days later the mood has deepened to one of positive despondency, but it is the despondency of a great and generous spirit:—

Meanwhile his fluctuations of purpose between a plunge into a life of solitude and study and an excursion in Brown’s company to Scotland had been decided in favour of the Scottish tour. George and his bride having to set out for Liverpool on June 22, it was arranged that Keats and Brown should accompany them so far on their way to the north. The coach started from the Swan and two Necks in Lad Lane, and on the first day stopped for dinner at Redbourne 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 called strictly 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.’

---

From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns’s country, walking along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald and Maybole (the same walk that Stevenson took the reverse way in the winter of 1876) to Ayr. Brown grows especially lyrical, and Keats more enthusiastic than usual, over the beauty of the first day’s walk from Stranraer by Cairn Ryan and Glen App, with Ailsa Craig suddenly looming up through showers after they topped the pass:—

Less vivid than the above is the invocatory sonnet, apparently showing acquaintance with the geological theory of volcanic upheaval, which Keats was presently moved to address To Ailsa Rock. Coming down into Ballantrae in blustering weather, the friends met a country wedding party on horseback, and Keats tried a song about it in the Burns dialect, for Brown to palm off on Dilke as an original: ‘but it won’t do,’ he rightly decides. From Maybole he writes to Reynolds with pleased anticipation of the visit to be paid the next day to Burns’s cottage. ‘One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the cottage of Burns—we need not think of his misery—that is all gone—bad luck to it—I shall look upon it all with unmixed pleasure, as I do upon my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey.’ On the walk from Maybole to Ayr Keats has almost the only phrase which escapes him during the whole tour to indicate a sense of special inspiring power in mountain scenery for a poet:—‘The approach to it [Ayr] is extremely fine—quite outwent my expectations—richly meadowed, wooded, heathed, and rivuleted—with a Grand Sea view terminated by the black mountains of the Isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them so nearly I said to myself, “How is it they did not beckon Burns to some grand attempt at an Epic.”’ Nearing Kirk Alloway, Keats had been delighted to find the first home of Burns in a landscape so charming. ‘I endeavoured to drink in the Prospect, that I might spin it out to you, as the Silkworm makes silk from Mulberry leaves—I cannot recollect it.’ But his anticipations were deceived, the whole scene disenchanted, and thoughts of Burns’s misery forced on him in his own despite, by the presence and chatter of the man in charge of the poet’s birthplace:—

A little farther back Keats had written, ‘my head is sometimes in such a whirl in considering the million likings and antipathies of our Moments that I can get into no settled strain in my Letters.’ But their straggling, careless tissue is threaded with such strands of genius and fresh human wisdom that one often wonders whether they are not legacies of this rare young spirit equally precious with the poems themselves. Certainly their prose is better than most of the verse which he had strength or leisure to write during this Scottish tour. As the two friends tramped among the Highland mountains some days later Keats composed with considerable pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning ‘There is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain,’ intended to express the temper in which his pilgrimage through and beyond the Burns country had been made. They are written in the long iambic fourteeners of Chapman’s Iliad, a metre not touched by Keats elsewhere, and perhaps chosen to convey a sense of the sustained continuous trudge of his wayfaring. They are very interesting as an attempt to capture and fix in words certain singular, fluctuating intensities of the poet’s mood—the pressure of a great and tragic memory absorbing his whole consciousness and deadening all sense of outward things as he nears the place of pilgrimage—and afterwards his momentary panic lest the spell of mighty scenery and associations may be too overpowering and drag his soul adrift from its moorings of every-day habit and affection—from the ties of ‘the sweet and bitter world’—‘of Brother’s eyes, of Sister’s brow.’ In some of the lines expressing these obscure disturbances of the soul there is a deep smouldering fire, but hardly ever that touch of absolute felicity which is the note of Keats’s work when he is quite himself. The best, technically speaking, are those which tell of the pilgrim’s absorbed mood of expectant approach to his goal:—

Light heather-bells may tremble then but they are far away; Wood-lark may sing from sandy fern,—the Sun may hear his lay; Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear, But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear; Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks; Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks; Eagles may seem to sleep wing-wide upon the air; Ring-doves may fly convuls’d across to some high-cedar’d lair; But the forgotten eye is still fast lidded to the ground, As Palmer’s, that with weariness, mid-desert shrine hath found. At such a time the soul’s a child, in childhood is the brain; Forgotten is the worldly heart—alone, it beats in vain.—5

Keats makes it clear that he did not write these lines until some days after he had left Burns’s country and was well on into the heart of the Highlands, and we get what reads like the prose of some of them in a letter written to Tom on the last stage of his walk before reaching Oban. Meantime the friends had passed through Glasgow, of which they had nothing to say except that they were taken, not for the first time, for pedlars by reason of their knapsacks, and Brown in particular for a spectacle-seller by reason of his glasses, and that the whole population seemed to have turned out to stare at them. A drunken man in the street, accosting Keats with true Glaswegian lack of ceremony, vowed he had seen all kinds of foreigners but never the like o’ him: a remark perhaps not to be wondered at when we recall Mrs Dilke’s description of Keats’s appearance when he came home (see the end of this chapter) and Brown’s account of his own weird toggery as follows:—‘a thick stick in my hand, the knapsack on my back, “with spectacles on nose,” a white hat, a tartan coat and trousers and a Highland plaid thrown over my shoulders.’ From Glasgow they walked by Dumbarton through the Loch Lomond country, round the head of Loch Fyne to Inverary, thence down the side and round the south-west end of Loch Awe and so past the head of Loch Craignish to the coast. At his approach to the lower end of Loch Lomond Keats had thought the scene ‘precious good;’ but his sense of romance was disturbed by finding it so frequented. ‘Steamboats on Loch Lomond and Barouches on its sides take a little from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I.’ If the scene were to be peopled he would prefer that it were by another kind of denizen. ‘The Evening was beautiful nothing could surpass our fortune in the weather—yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with Trumpets and Banners just to die away before me into that blue place among the mountains’—and here follows a little sketch of the narrow upper end of the lake from near Tarbet, just to show where the blue place was. At Inverary Keats has a word about the woods which reminds one of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan—‘the woods seem old enough to remember two or three changes in the Crags above them’—and then goes on to tell how he has been 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 gad-flies, and vented his smart in a set of doggrel rhymes. Of all these matters he gossips gaily for the entertainment of the invalid Tom. Turning on the same day to write to Benjamin Bailey, the most serious-minded of his friends, he proceeds in a strain of considerate self-knowledge to confess and define some of the morbid elements in his own nature. That Bailey may be warned against taking any future complainings of his too seriously, ‘I carry all matters,’ he says, ‘to an extreme—so that when I have any little vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles.’ And then by way of accounting for his having failed of late to see much of the Reynolds sisters in Little Britain, he lays bare his reasons for thinking himself unfit for ordinary society and especially for the society of women:—

And then, as to his present doings and impressions:—

The word ‘identify’ in the above is noticeable, as seeming to imply that the fruit of his travel was not discovery, but only the recognition of scenes already fully preconceived in his imagination. Resuming his letter to Tom at a later stage, he tells of things that have impressed him: how in Glencroe6 they had been pleased with the noise of shepherds’ sheep and dogs in the misty heights close above them, but could see none of them for some time, till two came in sight ‘creeping among the crags like Emmets,’ yet their voices plainly audible: how solemn was the first sight of Loch Awe as they approached it ‘along a complete mountain road’ (that is by way of Glen Aray) ‘where if one listened there was not a sound but that of mountain streams’; how they tramped twenty miles by the loch side and how the next day they had reached the coast within view of Long Island (that is Luing; the spot was probably Kilmelfort). It is at this point we get the prose of some of the lines quoted above from the verses expressing the temper of his pilgrimage:—

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 appetite: ‘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.’ Some days later 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 hard accommodation and monotonous diet and rough journeys and frequent drenchings begin to tell upon both him and Brown:—

Our travellers seem to have felt the hardships of the Highlands more than either Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy when they visited the same scenes just fifteen years earlier, or Lockhart and his brother in their expedition, only three years before, to the loneliest wilds of Lochaber. But then the Wordsworth party only walked when they wished, and drove much of the way in their ramshackle jaunting-car; and the Lockharts, being fishermen, had their rods, and had besides brought portable soup with them and a horse to carry their kit. Lockhart’s account of his experience is in curious contrast with those of Keats and Brown:—

Arrived at Oban by way of the Melfort pass and Glen Euchar, 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 for their frugal scheme of travel, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the isle of Kerrera and thence on to the hither shore of Mull. Did Keats in crossing Kerrera hear of—he would scarcely have travelled out of his way to visit—the ruins of the castle of Goylen on its precipice above the sea, with its legend of the girl-child, unaccountably puny as was thought, who turned out to be really the fairy mistress of a gentleman of Ireland, and being detected as such threw herself headlong from the window into the waves? and was this scene with its story in his mind when he wrote of forlorn fairy lands where castle casements open on the foam of perilous seas?7 From the landing place in Mull they had to take a guide and traverse on foot the whole width of the island to the extreme point of the Ross of Mull opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some thirty-seven miles, over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather, broken by one night’s rest in a shepherd’s hut at a spot he calls Dun an Cullen,—perhaps for Derrynacullen. Having crossed the narrow channel to Iona and admired the antiquities of that illustrious island (the epithet is Johnson’s), they chartered a fresh boat for the trip to Staffa and thence up Loch na Keal, so landing on the return journey in the heart of Mull and shortening their walk back across the island by more than half. By the power of the past and its associations among the monastic ruins of Iona, and of nature’s architecture in building and scooping the basaltic columns of Fingal’s Cave, Keats shows himself naturally impressed. In this instance, and once or twice afterwards, he exerts himself to write a full and precise description for the benefit of his brother Tom. In doing so he uses a phrase which indicates a running of his thoughts upon his projected poem, Hyperion:—

More characteristically than this description, some verses he sends at the same time tell how Fingal’s cave and its profanation by the race of tourists affected him: I mean those beginning ‘Not Aladdin Magian,’ written in the seven-syllable metre which he handled almost as well as his sixteenth and seventeenth century masters, from Fletcher and Ben Jonson to the youthful Milton. Avoiding word-painting and description, like the born poet he is, he begins by calling up for comparison 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—

he 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 then dives suddenly from view. In the six lines which tell of the scene’s profanation the style sinks with the theme into flat triviality:—

So for ever will I leave Such a taint and soon unweave All the magic of the 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 glance He dived—.

Keats evidently, and no wonder, did not like those six lines from ‘Tis now free’ to ‘dance’: in transcripts by his friends they are dropped out or inserted only in pencil: but he apparently did not see his way to mend them, and Brown tells us he could never persuade him to finish or resume the poem. In the broken close as he left it there is after all an appropriate abruptness which may content us.

From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scottish tour, and especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct and settled symptoms of failure in Keats’s health, which by reason of his muscular vigour had to his friends hitherto seemed so robust, 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,’—Brown calls it a violent cold,—which compelled him to rest for a day or two at Oban. Thence they pushed on in broken weather by Ballachulish and the shore of Loch Linnhe to Fort William, and from thence groped and struggled up Ben Nevis, a toilsome climb at best, in a dissolving mist. Once again Keats makes an exceptional endeavour to realise the scene in words for his brother’s benefit, telling of the continual shifting and opening and closing and re-opening of the cloud veils about them; and to clench his effect adds, ‘There is not a more fickle thing than the top of a Mountain—what would a Lady give to change her headdress as often and with as little trouble?’ Seated, so Brown tells us, almost on the edge of a precipice of fifteen hundred feet drop, Keats composed a sonnet, above his worst but much below his best, turning the experience of the hour into a simple enough symbol of his own mental state in face of the great mysteries of things:—

Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist! I look into the chasms, and a shroud Vap’rous doth hide them,—just so much I wist Mankind do know of hell; I look o’erhead, And there is sullen mist,—even so much Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread Before the earth, beneath me,—even such, Even so vague is man’s sight of himself! Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,— Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf, I tread on them,—that all my eye doth meet Is mist and crag, not only on this height, But in the world of thought and mental might!

Hearing of a previous ascent by a Mrs Cameron, ‘the fattest woman in all Invernesshire,’ he had the energy to compose also for Tom’s amusement a comic dialogue in verse between the mountain and the lady, much more in Brown’s vein than in his own. By the 6th of August the travellers had reached Inverness, having tramped, as Brown calculates, six hundred and forty-two miles since leaving Lancaster.

Keats’s throat had for some time been getting worse: the ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, shaken and tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at Inverness thought his condition seriously threatening, and forbad him to continue his tour. Accordingly he gave up the purpose with which he had set out of footing it southward by a different route, seeing Edinburgh, and on his way home visiting Bailey at his curacy in Cumberland, and decided to take passage at once for London by the next packet from Cromarty. Dilke had in the meantime felt compelled to write and recall him on account of a sudden change for the worse in the condition of the invalid Tom, so that his tour with Brown would have been cut short in any case. On their way round the head of Beauly Firth to Cromarty the friends did not miss the opportunity of visiting the ruins of Beauly Abbey. The interior was then and for long afterwards used as a burial place and receptacle for miscellaneous rubbish. Their attention being drawn to a heap of skulls which they took, probably on the information of some local guide, for skulls of ancient monks of the Abbey, they jointly composed upon them a set of verses in Burns’s favourite measure (but without, this time, any attempt at his dialect). Unluckily Brown wrote the lion’s share of the piece and set the tone of the whole. To the sixteen stanzas Keats contributed, as he afterwards informed Woodhouse, only the first line-and-a-half of the first stanza, with three of the later stanzas entire. As the piece has never been published and is a new document in the history of the tour, it seems to call for insertion here: but in view of its length and lack of quality (for it has nowhere a touch of Keats’s true magic) I choose rather to relegate it to an appendix.

It was on the eighth or ninth of August that the smack for London put out from Cromarty with Keats on board, and Brown, having bidden him goodbye, was left to finish the tour alone—‘much lamenting,’ says he, ‘the loss of his beloved companionship 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.

---

More shrewdly still, Blackwood bethought himself of the one and only way of practically enlisting Scott, and that was by promising permanent work on the magazine for his friend, tenant, and dependent, William Laidlaw, whom he could never do enough to help. So it was arranged that Laidlaw should regularly contribute a chronicle on agricultural and antiquarian topics, and that Scott should touch it up and perhaps occasionally add a paragraph or short article of his own. In point of fact the peccant first number contains such an article, an entertaining enough little skit ‘On the alarming Increase of Depravity among Animals.’ After the number had appeared Scott wrote to Blackwood in tempered approval, but saying that he must withdraw his support if satire like that of the Chaldee Manuscript was to continue. He had been pleased and tickled with the prophetic picture of his own neutrality, but strongly disapproved the sting and malice of much of the rest.

One cannot but wish he had put his foot down in like manner about the ‘Cockney school’ and other excesses: but home—that is Edinburgh—affairs and personages interested him much more than those of London. Lockhart he did not yet personally know. They first met eight months later, in June 1818: the acquaintance ripened rapidly into firm devotion on Lockhart’s part—for this young satirist could love as staunchly as he could stab unmercifully—a devotion requited with an answering warmth of affection on the part of Scott. At an early stage of their relations Scott, recognizing with regret that his young friend was ‘as mischievous as a monkey,’ got an offer for him of official work which would have freed him of his ties to Blackwood. In like manner two years later Scott threw himself heart and soul into the contest on behalf of Wilson for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy, not merely as the Tory candidate, but in the hope—never fully realized—that the office would tame his combative extravagances as well as give scope for his serious talents. And when the battle was won and Lockhart, now Scott’s son-in-law, crowed over it in a set of verses which Scott thought too vindictive, he remonstrated in a strain of admirable grave and affectionate wisdom:—

It took a longer time and harder lessons to cure Lockhart of the scorpion habit and wean him from the seductions of the ‘Mother of Mischief,’ as Scott in another place calls Blackwood’s Magazine. Meantime he had in the case of Keats done as much harm as he could. He had not the excuse of entire ignorance. His intimate friend Christie (afterwards principal in the John Scott duel) was working at the bar in London and wrote to Lockhart in January 1818 that he had met Keats and been favourably impressed by him. In reply Lockhart writes: ‘What you say of Keates (sic) is pleasing, and if you like to write a little review of him, in admonition to leave his ways, etc., and in praise of his natural genius, I shall be greatly obliged to you.’ Later Benjamin Bailey had the opportunity of speaking with Lockhart in Keats’s behalf. Bailey had by this time taken orders, 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 he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, and anxious to save Keats from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took the opportunity of telling him in a friendly way Keats’s 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.1

‘That amiable but infatuated bardling, Mister John Keats,’ had received a certain amount of attention from ‘Z’ already, both in the quotation from Cornelius Webb prefixed to the Cockney school articles, and in allusion to Hunt’s pair of sonnets on the intercoronation scene which he had printed in his volume, Foliage, since the ‘Z’ series began. When now Keats’s own turn came, in the fourth article of the series, his treatment was almost mild in comparison with that of his supposed leader. ‘This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior, order—talents which, devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen.’ But, says the critic, he has unfortunately fallen a victim to the metromania of the hour; the wavering apprentice has been confirmed in his desire to quit the gallipots by his admiration for ‘the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of our time.’ ‘Mr Hunt is a small poet, but he is a clever man, Mr Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities which he has done everything in his power to spoil.’ And so on; and so on; not of course omitting to put a finger on real weaknesses, as lack of scholarship, the use of Cockney rimes like higher, Thalia; ear, Cytherea; thorn, fawn; deriding the Boileau passage in Sleep and Poetry, and perceiving nothing but laxity and nervelessness in the treatment of the metre. In the conceit of academic talent and training, the critic shows himself open-eyed to all the faults and stone-blind to all the beauty and genius and promise, and ends with a vulgarity of supercilious patronage beside which all the silly venial faults of taste in Leigh Hunt seem like good breeding itself.

There is a lesson in these things. I remember the late Mr Andrew Lang, one of the most variously gifted and richly equipped critical minds of our time, and under a surface vein of flippancy essentially kind-hearted,—I remember Mr Andrew Lang, in a candid mood of conversation, wondering whether in like circumstances he might not have himself committed a like offence, and with no Hyperion or St Agnes’ Eve or Odes yet written and only the 1817 volume and Endymion before him, have dismissed Keats fastidiously and scoffingly. Who knows?—and let us all take warning. But now-a-days the errors of criticism are perhaps rather of an opposite kind, and any rashness and rawness of undisciplined novelty is apt to find itself indulged and fostered rather than repressed. What should at any time have saved Endymion from harsh judgment, if the quality of the poetry could not save it, was the quality of the preface. How could either carelessness or rancour not recognize, not augur the best from, its fine spirit of manliness and modesty and self-knowledge?

The responsibility for the gallipots article, as for so many others in the Blackwood of the time, may have been in some sort collective. But that Lockhart had the chief share in it is certain. According to Dilke, he in later life owned as much. To those who know his hand, he stands confessed not only in the general gist and style but in particular phrases. One is the use of Sangrado for doctor, a use which both Scott and Lockhart had caught from Gil Blas.2 Others are the allusions to the MÉtromanie of Piron and the Endymion of Wieland, particularly the latter. Wieland’s Oberon, as we have seen, had made its mark in England through Sotheby’s translation, but no other member of the Blackwood group is the least likely to have had any acquaintance with his untranslated minor works except Lockhart, whose stay at Weimar had given him a familiar knowledge of contemporary German literature. In the Mad Banker of Amsterdam, a comic poem in the vein of Frere’s Whistlecraft and Byron’s Beppo, contributed by him at this time to Blackwood under one of his Protean pseudonyms, as ‘William Wastle Esq.,’ Lockhart sketches his own likeness as follows:—

Then touched I off friend Lockhart (Gibson John), So fond of jabbering about Tieck and Schlegel, Klopstock and Wieland, Kant and Mendelssohn, All High Dutch quacks, like Spurzheim or Feinagle— Him the Chaldee yclept the Scorpion.— The claws, but not the pinions, of the eagle, Are Jack’s, but though I do not mean to flatter, Undoubtedly he has strong powers of satire.

Bailey to the end of his life never forgave Lockhart for what he held to be a base breach of faith after their conversation above mentioned, and his indignation communicated itself to the Keats circle and afterwards, as we shall see, to Keats himself. Mr Andrew Lang, in his excellent Life of Lockhart, making such defence as is candidly possible for his hero’s share in the Blackwood scandals, urges justly enough that the only matter of fact divulged about Keats by ‘Z’ is that of his having been apprenticed to a surgeon (‘Z’ prefers to say an apothecary) and that thus much Lockhart could not well help knowing independently, either from his own friend Christie or from Bailey’s friend and future brother-in-law Gleig, then living at Edinburgh and about to become one of Blackwood’s chief supporters. When in farther defence of ‘Z’s’ attacks on Hunt Mr Lang quotes from Keats’s letters phrases in dispraise of Hunt almost as strong as those used by ‘Z’ himself, he forgets the world of difference there is between the confidential criticism, in a passing mood or whim of impatience, of a friend by a friend to a friend and the gross and re-iterated public defamation of a political and literary opponent.

Lockhart in after life pleaded the rawness of youth, and also that in the random and incoherent violences of the early years of Blackwood there had been less of real and settled malice than in the Quarterly Review as at that time conducted. The plea may be partly admitted, but to forgive him we need all the gratitude which is his due for his filial devotion to and immortal biography of Scott, as well as all the allowance to be made for a dangerous gift and bias of nature.

The Quarterly article on Endymion followed in the last week of September (in the number dated April,—such in those days was editorial punctuality). It is now known to have been the work of John Wilson Croker, a man of many sterling gifts and honourable loyalties, unjustly blackened in the eyes of posterity by Macaulay’s rancorous dislike and Disraeli’s masterly caricature, but in literature as in politics the narrowest and stiffest of conservative partisans. Like his editor Gifford, he was trained in strict allegiance to eighteenth century tradition and the school of Pope. His brief review of Endymion is 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. He professes to have been unable to read beyond the first canto, or to make head or tail of that, and what is worse, turns the frank avowals of Keats’s preface foolishly and unfairly against him. At the same time, like Lockhart, he does not fail to point out and exaggerate real weaknesses of Keats’s early manner, and the following, from the point of view of a critic who sees no salvation outside the closed couplet, is not unreasonable criticism:—

In another of the established reviews, The British Critic, a third censor came out with a notice even more contemptuous than those of Blackwood and the Quarterly. For a moment Keats’s pride winced, as any man’s might, under the personal insults of the critics, and dining in the company of Hazlitt and Woodhouse with Mr Hessey, the publisher, he seems to have declared in Woodhouse’s hearing that he would write no more. But he quickly recovered his balance, and in a letter to Dilke of a few days later, speaking of Hazlitt’s wrath against the Blackwood scribes, is silent as to their treatment of himself. Meantime some of his friends and more than one stranger were actively sympathetic and indignant on his behalf. A just and vigorous expostulation appeared in the Morning Chronicle under the initials J.S.,—those in all likelihood of John Scott, then editor of the London Magazine, not long afterwards killed by Lockhart’s friend Christie in a needless and blundering duel arising out of these very Blackwood brawls. Bailey, being in Edinburgh, had an interview with Blackwood and pleaded to be allowed to contribute a reply to his magazine; and this being refused, sought out Constable, who besides the Edinburgh Review conducted the monthly periodical which had been kind to Keats’s first volume,3 and proposed to publish in it an attack on Blackwood and the ‘Z’ articles: but Constable would not take the risk. Reynolds published in a west-country paper, the Alfred, a warm rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer, containing a judicious criticism in brief of Keats’s work, with remarks very much to the point on the contrast between his and the egotistical (meaning Wordsworth’s) attitude to nature. This Leigh Hunt reprinted with some introductory words in the Examiner, and later in 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, had plainly said so to Keats and to his friends, and would have got out of his depth if he had tried to appreciate the intensity and complexity of symbolic and spiritual meaning which made that poem so different from his own shallow, self-pleasing metrical versions of classic or Italian tales. Reynolds’s piece, which he re-printed, was quite effective and to the point as far as it went; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly well knew. Privately at the same time Reynolds, who had just been reading The Pot of Basil in manuscript, wrote to his friend with affectionate wisdom as follows:—

Woodhouse, in a correspondence with the unceasingly kind and loyal publishers Taylor and Hessey, shows himself as deeply moved as anyone, and Taylor in the course of the autumn sought to enlist on behalf of the victim the private sympathies of one of the most cultivated and influential Liberal thinkers and publicists of the time, Sir James Mackintosh. Sending him a copy of Endymion, Taylor writes:—‘Its faults are numberless, but there are redeeming features in my opinion, and the faults are those of real Genius. Whatever this work is, its Author is a true poet.’ After a few words as to Keats’s family and circumstances he adds, ‘These are odd particulars to give, when I am introducing the work and not the man to you,—but if you knew him, you would also feel that strange personal interest in all that concerns him.—Mr Gifford forgot his own early life when he tried to bear down this young man. Happily, it will not succeed. If he lives, Keats will be the brightest ornament of this Age.’ In concluding Taylor recommends particularly to his correspondent’s attention the hymn to Pan, the Glaucus episode, and above all the triumph of Bacchus.

Proud in the extreme, Keats had no irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such successes as he saw some of his contemporaries—Thomas Moore, for instance, with Lalla Rookh—enjoy. ‘I hate,’ he says, ‘a mawkish popularity.’ Wise recognition and encouragement would no doubt have helped and cheered him, but 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 more experienced men had taken the like. Hunt, as we have seen, had replied indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn, and he and Hazlitt were both at first red-hot to have the law of them. Keats after the first sting with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When early in October Mr Hessey sent for his encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended, he wrote:—

Two or three weeks later, in answer to a similar encouraging letter from Woodhouse, he explains, in sentences luminous with self-knowledge, what he calls his own chameleon character as a poet, and the variable and impressionable temperament such a character implies. ‘Where then,’ he adds, ‘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?... I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough to make you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I said that day.’ And again about the same time to his brother and sister-in-law:—

Since these firm expressions of indifference to critical attack have been before the world, it has been too confidently assumed that Shelley and Byron were totally misled and wide of the mark when they believed that Blackwood and the Quarterly had killed Keats or even much hurt him. But the truth is that not they, but their consequences, did in their degree help to kill him. It must not be supposed that such words of wisdom and composure, manifestly sincere as they are, represent the whole of Keats, or anything like the whole. They represent, indeed, the admirably sound and manly elements which were a part of him: they show us the veins of what Matthew Arnold calls flint and iron in his nature uppermost. But he was no Wordsworth, to remain all flint and iron in indifference to derision and in the scorn of scorn. He had not only in a tenfold degree the ordinary acuteness of a poet’s feelings: he had the variable and chameleon temperament of which he warns Woodhouse while in the very act of re-assuring him: he had along with the flint and iron a strong congenital tendency, against which he was always fighting but not always successfully, to fits of depression and self-torment. Moreover the reviews of those days, especially the Edinburgh and Quarterly, had a real power of barring the acceptance and checking the sale of an author’s work. What actually happened was that when a year or so later Keats began to realise the harm which the reviews had done and were doing to his material prospects, these consequences in his darker hours preyed on him severely and conspired with the forces of disease and passion to his undoing.

For the present and during the first stress of the Blackwood and Quarterly storms, he was really living under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt trouble. His friends the Dilkes, 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, whom he had left behind in their lodgings at Well Walk. In fact the case was desperate, and for the next three months Keats’s chief occupation was the harrowing one of watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written to Dilke in the third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and occupations:—

And again about the same time to Reynolds:—

What he calls the abstractions into which he had plunged for relief were the conceptions of the fallen Titans, ‘the characters of Saturn and Ops’ at the beginning of Hyperion. Those conceptions were just beginning to clothe themselves in his mind in the verses which every English reader knows, verses of a cadence as majestic and pathetic almost as any in the language, yet scarcely more charged with high emotion or more pregnant with the sense and pressure of destiny than some of the prose of his familiar letters written about the same time. His only other attempt in poetry during those weeks was a translation from a sonnet of Ronsard, whose works Taylor had lent him and from whom he got some hints for the names and characters of his Titans. As the autumn wore on the task of the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing, he was obliged to desist from poetry for the time. But his correspondence shows no flagging. Towards the middle of October he began, marking it as A, the first of the series of journal-letters to his brother and sister in America, which give us during the next fifteen months a picture of his outward and inward being fuller and richer than we possess from any other poet, and except in one single particular absolutely unreserved. Despatching the packet on his birthday, that is October 29 or 31, he explains why it is not longer (it is over 7,000 words): ‘Tom is rather more easy than he has been: but is still so nervous that I cannot speak to him of these Matters—indeed it is the care I have had to keep his mind aloof from feelings too acute that has made this letter so short a one—I did not like to write before him a letter he knew was to reach your hands—I cannot even now ask him for any Message—his heart speaks to you. Be as happy as you can.’ Keats had begun by warning George and his wife, in language of beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to prepare their minds for the worst, and assuring them of the comfort he took in the thoughts of them:—‘I have Fanny and I have you—three people whose Happiness to me is sacred—and it does annul that selfish sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort—the tears will come into your Eyes—let them—and embrace each other—thank heaven for what happiness you have, and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.’ Between the opening and the closing note of tenderness, the letter runs through a wide range of subject and feeling; gossip about the Dilkes and other acquaintances; an account of the humours of his sea-passage from Inverness to London; the unruffled allusion to the Tory reviews from which we have already quoted; two long and curious sex-haunted passages, one expressing his admiration of the same East Indian cousin of the Reynoldses, ‘not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian,’ whom we have found mentioned already in a letter to Reynolds, the other telling what promised to be an equivocal adventure, but turned out quite conventionally and politely, with a mysterious lady acquaintance met once before at Hastings; a rambling discussion on the state of home and foreign politics; a rhapsody, or as he would have called it rant, in a mounting strain of verse which rings like a boy’s voice singing in alt, prophesying that the child to be born to George and his wife shall be the first American poet; then more babble about friends and acquaintances; then, as if he knew that the invincible thing, the love-god whose spell he had always at once dreaded and longed for, were hovering and about to swoop, he tries to re-assure himself by calling up the reasons why marriage and the life domestic are not for him. The Charmian passage and the passage in which he seeks to stave off the approach of love are among the best known in his letters, but nevertheless the most necessary to quote:—

In the next passage, almost as the young priest Ion in the Greek play clings to his ministration in the temple of Apollo, so we find Keats cleaving exultingly to his high vocation and to the idea of a life dedicated to poetry alone. But a great spiritual flaw in his nature—or was it only a lack of fortunate experience?—betrays itself in his conception of the alternative from which he shrinks. The imagery under which he figures marriage joys gives no hint of their power to discipline and inspire and sustain, and is trivially sensuous and material.

Throughout November Keats was so fully absorbed in attendance on his dying brother as to be unfit for poetry or correspondence. On the night of December 1 the end came. ‘Early the next morning,’ writes Brown, ‘I was awakened in 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 little later he improvises a sample, not more than mildly satirical, from a comedy he professes to be planning on the ways and manners of Hunt and his satellites.

In the same letter a new personage makes her momentous entry on the scene. ‘Mrs Brawne who took Brown’s house for the summer still resides at Hampstead—she is a very nice woman—and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange—we have a little tiff now and then, and she behaves better, or I must have sheered off.’ This Mrs Brawne was a widow lady of West Indian connexions and some little fortune, with a daughter, Fanny, just grown up and two younger children. She had rented Brown’s house while he and Keats were away in Scotland, and had naturally become acquainted with the Dilkes living next door and sharing a common garden. After Brown’s return Mrs Brawne moved with her family to a house in Downshire Street close by. The acquaintance with the Dilkes was kept up, and it was through them, not long after he came back from Scotland, that Keats first met Fanny Brawne. His next words about her are these:—

An attraction which has begun by repulsion is ever the most dangerous of all. The heightened emotional strain of his weeks of tendance on his dying brother had laid Keats open to both influences at their fullest power; he was ripe, as several passages from his letters have made us feel, for the tremendous adventure of love; and the ‘new, strange, and threatening sorrow’ from which he had with relief declared himself escaped when the momentary lure of the East-Indian Charmian left him fancy-free, was about to fall on him in good earnest now. Before many weeks he was hopelessly enslaved, and passion teaching him a sensitive secretiveness and reserve, he says to brother and sister no word more of his enslaver except by way of the lightest passing allusion. From his first semi-sarcastic account of her above quoted, 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 possible to realise something of her aspect and presence.

A brisk and blooming young beauty of a little over eighteen (Keats’s ‘not seventeen’ is a mistake) with blonde hair and vivid palish colouring, a somewhat sharply cut aquiline cast of features, a slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a liveliness of manner bordering on the boisterous, and no doubt some taking air and effluence of youth and vitality and sex,—such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her character we have scant means of judging. Neither she nor her mother can have been worldly-minded, or they would never have encouraged the attentions of a youth like Keats, whose prospects were problematical or null. It is clear that, though certainly high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident, she was kind and in essentials constant to her lover, and patient and unresentful under his occasional wild outbursts of jealousy and suspicion. But it seems equally clear that she did not half realise what manner of man he was, nor how high and privileged was the charge committed to her. She had no objection to the prospect of a long engagement, and despite her lover’s remonstrances held herself free in the meantime to enjoy to the full the pleasures of her age and the admiration of other men.3 One day early in the new year Keats took the devoted Severn to call on his new friends. Severn was much pleased with the mother, who seems to have been in truth a cultivated kind and gentle person; but he did not take to the daughter or even much admire her looks, and though perceiving her attraction for Keats did not then or till long afterwards realise the fatal strength of its hold upon him. ‘That poor idle Thing of Womankind to whom he has so unaccountably attached himself’—so she is styled by Reynolds in a letter to Taylor a year and a half later. Brown, who knew her much better, and whose friendship with her sometimes showed itself in gallantries at which Keats writhed in secret, writes of her always in terms of kindness and respect, but never very explicitly. The very few of Keats’s friends who came to be in his confidence, including Dilke and his wife, seem to have been agreed, although they bore her no ill will, in regarding the attachment as a misfortune for him.

So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been. Blow on blow had in truth begun to fall on Keats, as though in fulfilment of the constitutional misgivings to which he was so often secretly a prey. First the departure of his brother George had deprived him of his closest friend, to whom alone he had from boyhood been accustomed to confide those obsessions of his darker hours and in confiding to find relief from them. Next the exertions of his Scottish tour had proved too much for his strength, and laid him open to the attacks of his hereditary enemy, consumption. Coming back, he had found his brother Tom almost at his last gasp in the clutch of that enemy, and in nursing him had both lived in spirit through all his pains and breathed for many weeks a close atmosphere of infection. 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. Now were to be 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 took him, as it often takes consumptives, in its fiercest form: Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.4

By what stages the coils closed on him we can only guess. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting: which took place, we know, some time during the period of watching by Tom’s sick-bed. After he went to live with Brown in December they must have met frequently. Probably it was this new attraction, as well as his chronic throat trouble and his concern over Haydon’s affairs, which made him postpone a promised visit to Dilke’s relations in Hampshire from Christmas until mid-January. He then carried out his promise, going to join Brown at Bedhampton, the home of Dilke’s brother-in-law Mr John Snook. He liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit, but was unwell and during a stay of a fortnight only once went outside the garden. This was to a gathering of country clergy reinforced by two bishops, at the consecration of a chapel built by a great Jew-convertor, a Mr Way. The ceremony got on his nerves and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. He spent also a few days with Dilke’s father in Chichester, and went out twice to dowager card parties. These social pleasures were naught to him, and his spirits, like his health, were low. But his genius was never more active. We have seen in the midst of what worries and interruptions he had worked before and during Christmas at Hyperion, the fragment which in our language stands next in epic quality to Paradise Lost. At Bedhampton in January, on some thin sheets of thin paper brought down for the purpose, he wrote the Eve of St Agnes, for its author merely ‘a little poem,’ for us a masterpiece aglow in every line with the vital quintessence of romance.

No word of Keats’s own or of his friends prepares us for this new achievement or informs when he began first to think of the subject. It must of course have been ripening in his mind some good while before he thus suddenly and swiftly cast it into shape. When he wrote three months earlier of having to seek relief beside the sick-bed of his brother by ‘plunging into abstract images,’ were they images of primeval Greek gods and Titans only, or were these contrasted figures and colours of mediÆval romance beginning to occupy his imagination at the same time? Had the subject perhaps come into his mind as long ago as the preceding March, when Hunt and Reynolds and he were having the talks about Boccaccio which resulted in Keats’s Isabella and Reynolds’s Garden of Florence and Ladye of Provence? We shall see that Boccaccio counts for something in Keats’s treatment of the St Agnes’ Eve story, so that the supposition is at least plausible. Or may it even have been of this story and not, as is commonly assumed, of Hyperion that he was thinking as far back as September 1817 when he wrote to Haydon from Oxford of the ‘new romance’ he had in his mind? Woodhouse does not throw much light on such questions when he tells us that ‘the subject was suggested by Mrs Jones.’ This name, uncongenial to the muse (excepting the muse of Wordsworth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats. Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition concerning St Mark’s day (April 25th), and so become the ‘only begetter’ of that remarkable fragment The Eve of St Mark, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is the authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of February after his return to Hampstead? In connexion with Keats few stones have been left unturned for further personal or critical research, but here is one.

Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January and it must have been very soon afterwards that he became the declared and accepted lover of Fanny Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tantalising sweets and bitters of that estate, though nothing was said to friends about the engagement. From the first he suffered severely from the sense of her freedom to enjoy pleasures and excitements for which neither his health nor his social habits and inclinations fitted him. The tale of the Eve of St Mark, begun and broken off just at this time, may possibly, as Rossetti thought, have been designed to turn on the remorse of a young girl for sufferings of a like kind inflicted on her lover and ending in his death. However that may be, we have two direct cries from his heart, one of pure love-yearning, the other of racking jealousy, which were written, if I read the evidences aright, almost immediately after the engagement and can be dated almost to a day. These are the first version, which has only lately become known, of the ‘Bright Star’ sonnet, and the ode To Fanny published posthumously by Lord Houghton. Both carry internal evidence of having been written before the winter was out: the sonnet in the words which invoke the star as watching the moving waters,

Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;

the ode in the lines,

I come, I see thee as thou standest there, Beckon me not into the wintry air.5

Now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in February, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the 24th and again the following morning. I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before dawn on the actual morning of the 25th.6 As slightly changed in form a year and a half later this sonnet has been long endeared to us all as one of the most beautiful in the language: I shall defer its discussion till we come to the date of this recast. The ode has flaws, for to make good or even bearable poetry out of that humiliating and grotesque passion of physical jealousy is a hard matter. It begins poorly, with a sense of discord, in the first stanza, between the choking violence of feeling expressed and the artificial form into which its expression is cast. But if we leave out this stanza, and also the fifth and sixth, which are a little common and unequal, we get an appeal as painful, indeed, as it is passionate, yet lacking neither in courtesy nor dignity, and conveyed in a strain of verse almost without fault:—

Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears, And hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,— To-night, if I may guess, thy beauty wears A smile of such delight, As brilliant and as bright, As when with ravished, aching, vassal eyes, Lost in soft amaze, I gaze, I gaze! 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. Ah! if you prize my subdu’d soul above The poor, the fading, brief pride of an hour; Let none profane my Holy See of Love, Or with a rude hand break The sacramental cake: Let none else touch the just new-budded flower: If not—may my eyes close, Love! on their last repose.

In both of these poems Keats soothes himself with thoughts of dying, and they are doubtless among the things he had in mind when two or three months later, in the ode To a Nightingale, he speaks of having invoked Death by soft names ‘in many a musÈd rhyme.’

Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of the time he calls ‘The dragon-world and all its hundred eyes,’ he was intensely jealous in guarding his secret from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might betray it. To his brother he merely says, ‘Miss Brawne and I have now and then a chat and a tiff,’ while to his young sister he writes on February 27th that he wishes he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so, packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him ‘a few common dancing steps,’—for what reason, to us too pathetically evident, he of course gives no hint.

On February 14th, about a fortnight after his return from Hampshire, and on the very day when according to Woodhouse he began The Eve of St Mark, Keats had put pen to a new journal-letter for America. A straw showing how the wind was blowing with him is his mention that the Reynolds sisters, whose company used to be among his chief pleasures, are staying at the Dilkes next door and that he finds them ‘very dull.’ So, we may guess, will they on their parts have found him. His only other correspondents in these weeks are Haydon and his young sister Fanny. Early in March Haydon returned to the charge about the loan. ‘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 for some time after the new year 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 without loss of 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 much less remains of his small inheritance than he had supposed, and even if all he had were laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on for two years. 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 which he could very ill spare.

To his young sister Keats’s letters during the same period are charming. He lets her perceive nothing of his anxieties, and is full of brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of interest in her preparation for her approaching confirmation; of regrets that she is kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey, with humorous admonitions to patience under that lady’s ‘unfeeling and ignorant gabble’; and of plans for coming over to see her when the weather and his throat allow or when he is in cash to pay the coach fare. On one day he is serious, begging her to lean on him in all things:—‘We have been very little together: but you have not the less been with me in thought. You have no one else in the world besides me who would sacrifice anything for you—I feel myself the only Protector you have. In all your little troubles think of me with the thought that there is at least one person in England who if he could would help you out of them—I live in hopes of being able to make you happy.’ Another day he is all playfulness, thinking of various little presents to please her, a selection of Tassie’s gems, flowers from the Tottenham nursery garden, drawing materials—and here follows the passage above quoted (p. 10) against keeping live birds or fishes:—

Pl. VIII

‘And there I’d sit like a picture of somebody reading’ From a posthumous portrait by Joseph Severn in the National Portrait Gallery Emery Walker ph &c.

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. Pending such news, he keeps writing up his journal for them, and for nearly four months it grew and grew. Still in February, he promises to send in the next packet his ‘Pot of Basil, St Agnes’ Eve, and if I should have finished it, a little thing called the Eve of St Mark. You see what fine Mother Radcliffe names I have—it is not my fault—I do not search for them. I have not gone on with Hyperion, for to tell the truth I have not been in great cue for writing lately—I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little!’

As it fell out, he never went on either with Hyperion or with the Eve of St Mark, the romance just so promisingly begun. For fully two months after breaking off the latter fragment (February 17th or 18th) he was quite out of cue for writing, and produced nothing except the ode To Fanny (if I am right as to its date) and a few personal sonnets. Many causes, we can feel, were working together to check for the time being the creative impulse within him: the mere disturbing influence of the spring season for one thing; discouragement at the public reception of his work for another, though this was a motive external and relatively secondary; the results of a deliberate mental stock-taking of his own powers and performances for a third; and more deep-seated and compulsive, though unexpressed, than any of these, the love-passion by which three-fourths of his soul and consciousness had come to be absorbed. Here, from a letter to Haydon of March 8, is an example of what I mean by his mental stock-taking. The resolution it expresses is of course more a matter of mood than of fixed purpose:—

Some five weeks later, about mid-April, we find that Haydon himself has been a contributing cause to Keats’s poetic inactivity by his behaviour in regard to the loan which Keats had hoped but so far been unable to make him. The failure he writes, has not been his fault:—

In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law, mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds ‘this same claret is the only palate-passion I have—I forgot game—I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodcock passim.’ Turning to his own affairs, he says,—

Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend Bailey’s fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little to Keats’s own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of The Subaltern and Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied and sustained invective, Hazlitt’s Letter to William Gifford Esqr., beside which Gifford’s own controversial virulences seem relatively blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the rest tomorrow,—

This is on the 13th of March. Six days later he gives another picture, this time of his state of body rather than of mind:—

Pl. IX

‘Figures on a Greek vase: a man and two women’ FROM AN ETCHING IN PIRANESI’S VASI E CANDELABRI

The criticism is foolish which sees in this passage the expression of a languid, self-indulgent nature, and especially foolish considering the footnote in which Keats observes that at the moment he has a black eye. The black eye was no doubt the mark of the fight in which he had lately well thrashed a young blackguard of a butcher whom he found tormenting a kitten. That the said fight took place just about this time is clear by the following evidences. Cowden Clarke, in his recollections communicated privately to Lord Houghton, writes, ‘The last time I saw Keats was during his residence with Mr Brown. I spent the day with him; and he read to me the poem he had last finished—The Eve of St Agnes. Shortly after this I removed many miles from London, and was spared the sorrow of beholding the progress of the disease that was to take him from us. When I last saw him he was in fine health and spirits; and he told me that he had, not long before our meeting, had an encounter with a fellow who was tormenting a kitten, or puppy, and who was big enough to have eaten him; that they fought for nearly an hour; and that his opponent was led home.’7 The reading of the Eve of St Agnes fixes the date of Clarke’s visit as after Keats’s return from Chichester at the end of January, and a remark of Keats, writing to his brother between February the 14th and 19th, that he has not seen Clarke ‘for God knows how long’, further fixes it as after mid-February; while the latest limit is set by the fact that by Easter Clarke had gone away to live with his family at Ramsgate, where they had settled after his father had given up the Enfield school. What the ‘effeminacy’ passage really expresses is of course no more than a passing mood of lassitude, gratefully welcomed as a relief from the strain of feelings habitually more acute than nature could well bear. Ambition he was schooling, or trying to school, himself to cherish in moderation, but it was not often or for long that the stings either of poetry or of love abated for him the least jot of their bitter-sweet intensity, or that anticipations of poverty or the fever of incipient disease relaxed their grip.

Though Keats’s letters to his brother and sister-in-law contain no confidence on the subject, some of the verses he encloses betray in abstract form the strain of passion under which he was living; notably the fine weird sonnet on a dream which came to him after reading the Paolo and Francesca passage in Dante, and the other sonnet beginning ‘Why did I laugh to-night?’ In copying this last, he adds careful and considerate words of re-assurance lest his brother should take alarm for his sake:

This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he himself refers in the Ode to the Nightingale written a few weeks later, and in its phrase ‘on this very midnight cease’ anticipates one of the great lines of the ode itself.

No letter of Keats—or of any one—is richer than this of February to May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of the freshest and most luminous of his discursive passages of meditation on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things: passages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpassed for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the unforeseen way in which circumstances, like clouds, gather and burst, reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with which men, like animals,—the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,—go about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,—

In the other passage he disposes of all Rousseau-Godwin theories of human perfectibility by a consideration of the physical frame and order of the world we live in, the flaws and violences which mar and jar it, and which its human offspring are likely to derive from and share with it until the end; and, provisionally accepting the doctrine of immortality, he broaches of his own a scheme of the spiritual discipline for the sake of which, as he suggests, the life of men on this so imperfect earth may have been designed.

In marked, not always entirely pleasant contrast with these passages of thought and beauty Keats sends his brother such things as a summary of a satiric fairy story of Brown’s and an impromptu comic tale of his own in verse, much in Brown’s manner, about a princess, a mule, and a dwarf: both of them apparently to his mind amusing, but to us rather silly and the former a little coarse: also some friendly satiric verses of his own on Brown in the Spenserian stanza. He tells how he has been turning over the love-letters palmed off by way of hoax upon his brother Tom by Charles Wells in the character of a pretended ‘Amena’, and vows fiercely to make Wells suffer for his heartlessness; gossips further of Dilke and his overstrained parental anxiety about his boy at school; asks a string of playful questions about his sister-in-law and her daily doings; and in another place gives us, in the mention of a casual walk and talk with Coleridge, the liveliest record we have of the astonishing variety of matters and mysteries over which that philosopher was capable, in a short hour’s conversation, of ranging without pause or taking breath:—

It is amusing to note how the time and distance covered by his own encyclopÆdic volubility shrank afterwards in Coleridge’s memory. In his Table Talk taken down thirteen years later his account of the meeting is recorded as follows (with the name of his companion left blank: I fill it in from Keats’s letter): ‘A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.’ The story of Coleridge’s observation after the handshake is no doubt exact: the ‘not well-dressed’ in his description of Keats may very well be so too: but the ‘loose’ and ‘slack’ applied to his appearance must have been drawn from the sage’s inward eye, as all accounts are agreed as to Keats’s well-knit compactness of person. One cannot but regret that Keats failed to follow up the introduction by going, as invited, to see Coleridge at Highgate: but in all cases save those of Hunt and Haydon, his contact with distinguished seniors seems thus to have stopped short at kindly and respectful acquaintance and not to have been pushed to intimacy.

Another, somewhat divergent, account of the meeting taken down, also from Coleridge’s lips, by Mr John Frere three years earlier has only lately been published. Its inaccuracy in details is evident, but there is much sense as well as kindness in Coleridge’s remarks on the reviews and their effect:—

In the Leigh Hunt circle it had always been the fashion to regard with contempt, mingled with regret, Wordsworth’s more childishly worded poems and ballads of humble life such as The Idiot Boy and Alice Fell. The announcement of his forthcoming piece, Peter Bell, now drew from John Hamilton Reynolds an anonymous skit in the shape of an adroit and rather stinging anticipatory parody, which Taylor and Hessey published in the course of this April despite a strong letter of protest addressed to them by Coleridge when he heard of their intention: a protest greatly to his credit considering his and Wordsworth’s recent estrangement. Keats copies for his brother the draft of a notice which at Reynolds’s request he has been writing of this skit for the Examiner, taking care to turn it compatibly with due reverence for the sublimer works of the master parodied. The thing is quite deftly and tactfully done, and seems to show that Keats might have made himself, could he have bent his mind to it, a skilled hand at newspaper criticism. ‘You will call it a little politic,’ he says to his brother—‘seeing I keep clear of all parties—I say something for and against both parties—and suit it to the tone of the Examiner—I mean to say I do not unsuit it—and I believe I think what I say—I am sure I do—I and my conscience are in luck to-day—which is an excellent thing.’

At intervals throughout these two months Keats asserts and re-asserts the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and sister-in-law:—‘I know not why poetry and I have been so distant lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely’: and again to the same on April 15, ‘I am still at a standstill in versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.’ To his young sister Fanny he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing upon him of late, ‘so that it will require a great shake to get rid of it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing—but I must turn over a new leaf.’ Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April 30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:—

Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees, But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy, And dotes the more upon a heart at ease; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content without her; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper’d close, Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her; A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born, Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar; Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn, Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are! Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals, itself reminiscent of a well known line in Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats’s mind?

True Fame is ever liken’d to our shade, He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made To overtake her; who so takes his wing, Regardless of her, she’ll be following: Her true proprieties she thus discovers, ‘Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.’10

Two days earlier Keats had copied out in his letter for America, side by side with the words for a commonplace operatic chorus of the Fairies of the Four Elements, and as though it were of no greater value, that masterpiece of romantic and tragic symbolism on the wasting power of Love, La Belle Dame sans Merci. This title had already been haunting Keats’s imagination when he wrote the Eve of St Agnes. He calls by it the air to which Porphyro touches his lute beside the sleeping Madeline. It is the title of a cold allegoric dialogue of the old French court poet Alan Chartier, which Keats knew in the translation traditionally ascribed to Chaucer. But except the title, Keats’s new poem has nothing in common with the French or the Chaucerian Belle Dame. The form, the poetic mould, he chooses is that of a ballad of the ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ class, in which a mortal passes for a time into the abode and under the power of a being from the elfin world. Into this mould Keats casts—with suchlike imagery he invests—all the famine and fever of his private passion, fusing and alchemising by his art a remembered echo from William Browne, ‘Let no bird sing,’ and another from Wordsworth, ‘Her eyes are wild,’ into twelve stanzas of a new ballad music vitally his own and as weirdly ominous and haunting as the music of words can be. The metrical secret lies in shortening the last line of each stanza from four feet11 to two, the two to take in reading the full time of four, whereby the movement is made one of awed and bodeful slowness—but let us shrink from the risk of laying an analytic finger upon the methods of a magic that calls to be felt, not dissected. Known as it is by heart to all lovers of poetry, I will print the piece again here, partly for the reason that in some of the most accessible and authoritative recent editions it is unfortunately given with changes which rob it of half its magic:—

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing! O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew; And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too— I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery’s child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild— I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan— I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery’s song— She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew; And sure in language strange she said, I love thee true— She took me to her elfin grot, And there she gazed and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild, wild eyes With kisses four. And there she lullÈd me asleep, And there I dreamed, ah woe betide, The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hill side. I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall.’ I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam With horrid warning gapÈd wide, And I awoke, and found me here On the cold hill side. And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.

Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has written, the Ode to Psyche. He wrote, as is well known, four other odes this spring, those On Indolence, On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale and To Melancholy. The Ode to Psyche has commonly been taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated assertion of complete poetic idleness,—‘the idle fever of two months without any fruit,’—lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as evidence that the Ode to Psyche represents the first wave of a new tide of inspiration—inspiration this time not narrative and creative but lyric and meditative—and that the rest of the odes followed and were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode On Indolence, although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is usually assumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling his mood at the hour of writing one of ‘summer indolence’ and defining the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction. But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it, and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his mind.

The ode On a Grecian Urn is obviously of kindred, and probably of contemporary, inspiration with that On Indolence, and if the one belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out, found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected scraps; and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to make copies of anything he might find.12 Haydon tells how Keats recited the new ode to him, ‘in his low, tremulous under-tone,’ as they walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on Haydon’s suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of Haydon’s in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for publication in his periodical, the Annals of the Fine Arts, during the following July. For the date of the Ode on Melancholy the clues are less definite. Burton’s Anatomy has clearly to do with inspiring it, but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of Love-Melancholy, Keats’s letters and some of his verses furnish evidence that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases, however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as approximately dating it.

Following these so fruitful labours (if I am right as to the dates) of May, came a month of strained indecision and anxiety during which Keats again could do no work. Questions of his own fortune and future were weighing heavily on his mind. For the time being he could not touch such small remainder of his grandmother’s legacy as was still unexpended. A lawsuit threatened by the widow of his uncle Captain Jennings against his guardian Mr Abbey, in connexion with the administration of the trust, had had the effect for the time being of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very gently asked Haydon to make an effort to repay his recent 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, and 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. Apart from Mrs Jennings’s bequest, there was a not inconsiderable sum which, as we know, had been left invested by Mr Jennings for the direct benefit of his Keats grandchildren; but this sum could not be divided until Fanny Keats came of age, and there seems to have been no thought of John’s anticipating his reversionary share. Indeed it is doubtful if the very existence of these and other funds lying by for them had not at this time been forgotten.13

In this predicament Keats began very seriously to entertain the idea, which we have seen broached by him several times already, of seeking the post of surgeon on an East Indiaman as at least a temporary means of livelihood. He mentions the idea not only to George and to his young sister, but he debates it with a new correspondent, one of the Miss Jeffrey’s of Teignmouth, whom he suddenly now addresses in terms of confidence which show how warm must have been their temporary friendship the year before:—

Your advice about the Indiaman is a very wise advice, because it just suits me, though you are a little in the wrong concerning its destroying the energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the finest thing in the world to strengthen them—to be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations of the differences of human character and to class them with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their lives and foster’d them after their deaths. They have in general been trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of Society. They have not been treated like the Raphaels of Italy. And where is the Englishman and Poet who has given a magnificent Entertainment at the christening of one of his Hero’s Horses as Boyardo did? He had a Castle in the Appenine. He was a noble Poet of Romance; not a miserable and mighty Poet of the human heart. The middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more happy than Hamlet’s who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common every day Life than any other of his Characters—Ben Johnson was a common Soldier and in the Low Countries in the face of two armies, fought a single combat with a French Trooper and slew him—For all this I will not go on board an Indiaman, nor for example’s sake run my head into dark alleys: I daresay my discipline is to come, and plenty of it too. I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb. I have put no more in Print or you should have had it. You will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence.

CHAPTER XII

JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, HAMPSTEAD: TROUBLE AND HEALTH FAILURE

By the last days of June Keats was settled with Rice in the village of Shanklin, in a lodging above the cliff and a little way back from the sea,1 and forthwith got to work upon a new poetical romance, Lamia, at which he seems to have made some beginning before he left Hampstead. He found the subject, that of the enchantress of Corinth who under her woman’s guise was really a serpent, in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a book in these days often in his hands, and for the form of his narrative chose rimed heroics, only this time leaning on Dryden as his model instead of the Elizabethans.

Rice’s health was at this time worse than ever, and Keats himself was far from well; his throat chronically sore, his nerves unstrung, his heart, in despite of distance, knowing little rest from agitation between the pains and joys of love. As long as Rice and he were alone together at Shanklin, the two ailing and anxious men, fast friends as they were, depressed and did each other harm. Things went better when Brown with his settled good health and good spirits came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got to work diligently at the joint task they had set themselves, that of writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What struggling man or woman 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 opera Narensky had made a hit in its day, and brought him in a sum variously stated at £300 or £500, was supposed to possess the requisite stage experience. To him were assigned the plot and construction of the play, for which he was to receive half profits in the event of success, 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. The collaboration of genius and mediocrity rarely succeeds, and it seems hard to conceive a more unpromising mode of it than this. Besides the work by means of which Keats thus hoped, at least in sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, he was busily engaged working by himself on Lamia. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate of Shanklin was against him: the quarter where they lodged lay screened by hills except from the south-east, whence, 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 some six weeks, Keats consequently made up his mind to move with Brown to the more bracing air of Winchester.

From these weeks at Shanklin date the earliest of the preserved series of Keats’s love-letters to Fanny Brawne. More than any man, more certainly than any other unripe youth fretting in the high fever of an unhopeful love, Keats has had to pay the penalty of genius in the loss of posthumous privacy for the most sacred and secret of his emotions. He thought his name would be forgotten, but posterity in an excess of remembrance has suffered no corner of his soul to escape the searchlight. Once preserved and printed, these love-letters of his cannot be ignored. Unselfish through and through, and naturally well-conditioned in all thoughts and feelings over which he had control, he strives hard in them to keep to a vein of considerate tenderness, and the earlier letters of the series contain charming passages. But often, more often indeed than not even from the first, they show him a prey, despite his best efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an uncontrollable intensity and fretfulness of passion. Now that experience of love had come to him, it belied instead of confirming the view he had expressed in Isabella that too much pity has been spent on the sorrows of lovers, and that

—for the general award of love The little sweet doth kill much bitterness.

In his own passion there was from the first, and increasingly as time went on, at least as much of bitterness as of sweet. 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 finds in the fever of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his love-sickness. This is written soon after his arrival at Shanklin:—

A fortnight later he manages to write a little more at ease of himself, his moods, and his doings:—

Yet another fortnight, and we find him uttering aloud the same yearning to attain the double goal of love and death together as he had often uttered to himself in secret since he came under the spell. On another day, letting his imagination comply with the longing for Alpine travel and seclusion which since Rousseau had been one of the romantic fashions of the time, he draws her a picture of an imagined future for herself and him which, judging at least by her choice of pleasures until now, would ill have stood the test of reality:—

The most sanely self-revealing and pleasant passages in the correspondence occur in a letter written in the second week after Keats and Brown had settled at Winchester:—

The old cathedral city of Winchester, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its hurrying limpid chalk-streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the tonic climate of its surrounding downs, ‘where the air,’ he writes, ‘is worth sixpence a pint,’ exactly suited Keats, and he quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days he spent here, from the middle of August to the second week of October, were the last good days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he managed, as the last extract shows, to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort, and to keep the thought of money troubles at bay by buoying himself up with the firm hope of a stage success. 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 the last act of Otho and the opening scenes (which are all he did) of King Stephen he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. On the 25th of August he writes to Reynolds, as usual more gravely and openly than to any other correspondent, of his present feelings in regard to life and literature.

A letter to his young sister of three days later is in quite another key, but one of wholesome and unforced high spirits:—

A week later (September 5) he discourses pleasantly to Taylor on the virtues and drawbacks of different kinds of country air and on the effects of field labour on the character; and by way of a specimen of his work sends a passage of thirty lines from Lamia. By this time Brown had gone off to visit friends at Bedhampton and elsewhere, and Keats was left alone at Winchester. Presently came a disturbing letter from George, established by this time at the then remote trading settlement of Louisville, Ohio, and in difficulties from a heavy loss incurred through a venture into which he had been led, dishonestly as he believed, by the naturalist Audubon. He asks in consequence that Abbey should be pressed to send him the share due to him from their brother Tom’s estate. This could only be done if their aunt Jennings could be persuaded to free Abbey’s hands by dropping her threatened Chancery suit. Hurrying to London to try and put this business through, Keats stayed there three days (Septr. 10-13), but dared not break his serenity by sight or touch of his enchantress. In a note to her he writes, ‘I love you too much to venture to Hampstead, I feel it is not paying a visit, but venturing into a fire.... I am a Coward, I cannot bear the pain of being happy, ’tis out of the question; I must admit no thought of it.’ He found few of his friends in town; dined with the Wylies, the family of his sister-in-law; and had much talk with Mr Abbey, who seemed inclined to dangle before him some prospect of employment in the hatter’s business which he combined with his tea-dealing, and read to him with approval a passage from Don Juan (‘Lord Byron’s last flash poem,’ says Keats) against literary ambition. He went to see his sister Fanny at Walthamstow, passed some time with Rice, and had a long six hours’ talk with Woodhouse: of this Keats’s own letters make no mention, but Woodhouse’s account of it, written a week later to Taylor, has been preserved and is curiously interesting.3

Keats, warm from the composition of Lamia, had had an impulse to publish it immediately, together with the Eve of St Agnes, but the publishers had thought the time inopportune. Woodhouse asked why not Isabella too? and Keats answered that he could not bear that poem now and thought it mawkish. Whereupon Woodhouse makes the judicious comment: ‘this certainly cannot be so, the feeling is very likely to come across an author on review of a former work of his own, particularly when the object of his present meditations is of a more sober and unimpassioned character. The feeling of mawkishness seems to me that which comes upon us when anything of great tenderness and simplicity is met with when we are not in a sufficiently tender and simple frame of mind to hear it: when we experience a sort of revulsion or resiliency (if there be such a word) from the sentiment or expression.’ Keats, full of Lamia, read it out to his friend, who comments: ‘I am much pleased with it. I can use no other terms for you know how badly he reads his own poetry.’ (Other witnesses on the contrary tell of the thrilling effect of Keats’s reading—a reading which was half chanting, ‘in a low, tremulous undertone’—of his own work.) ‘And you know,’ continues Woodhouse, ‘how slow I am to catch the effect of poetry read by the best reader for the first time.’ Nevertheless he is able to give his correspondent a quite accurate sketch of the plot, and adds, ‘you may suppose all these events have given K. scope for some beautiful poetry, which even in this cursory hearing of it, came every now and then upon me and made me “start, as tho’ a sea-nymph quired.”’

The talk turning to the Eve of St Agnes, Keats showed Woodhouse some changes he had just made in recopying it. One of these introduced a slight but disfiguring note of cynical realism or ‘pettish disgust’ into the concluding lines telling of the deaths of old Angela and the beadsman, and is the first sign we find of that inclination to mix a worldly would-be Don Juanish vein with romance which was soon to appear so disastrously in the Cap and Bells. The other change was to make it clear that the melting of Porphyro into Madeline’s dream, at the enchanted climax of the poem, implied love’s full fruition between them then and there. At this point Woodhouse’s prudery took alarm. He pleaded against the change vehemently, and Keats to tease him still more vehemently defended it, vowing that his own and his hero’s character for virility required the new reading, and that he did not write for misses. The correct and excellent Woodhouse, scandalized though he somewhat was by what he calls his friend’s ‘rhodomontade,’ declares that they had a delightful time together. He was leaving London the same afternoon for Weymouth, and Keats came to the coach-office to see him off. At parting they each promised to mend their ways in the matter of letter-writing, Keats holding out the hope, which was not fulfilled, of a rimed epistle to follow. Woodhouse tells how, being the only inside passenger in the coach, he ‘amused himself by diving into a deep reverie, and recalling all that had passed during the six hours we were tÊte À tÊte.’

Such touches of over-sensitive prudery set aside, the more light we get on this friend of Keats, Richard Woodhouse, the higher grows our esteem both for his character and judgment. In other extant letters to Taylor of this date, he comments with fine insight on Keats’s own confessions of secret pride and obstinacy, and on his vice (‘for a vice in a poor man it is’) of lending more than he could afford to friends in need. And what can be more sagacious than the following, from a letter of Woodhouse to a lady cousin of his own?—

By September 14 Keats was back at Winchester, where during the next three weeks he had a chance of testing his capacity for solitude. He seems to have looked at Hyperion again, but made up his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style too latinized and Miltonic. A very few weeks before, in August, he had written to two different correspondents that Paradise Lost was becoming every day a greater wonder to him. Now, in the third week of September he had come to regard it, ‘though so fine itself,’ as a ‘corruption of our language,’ a case of ‘a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations;’ and had convinced himself, paradoxically, that the purest English was Chatterton’s,—which is in truth no right English at all, but the attempt of a brilliant self-taught boy to forge himself a fifteenth-century style by gathering miscellaneous half-understood archaisms out of dictionaries and stringing them in fluent stanzas of Spenserian, or post-Spenserian, rhythm and syntax. But it was probably not of Chatterton’s vocabulary that Keats was thinking, but rather of the unartificial, straightforward flow of his verse in contrast with Milton’s. The apparent suddenness of Keats’s change of mind on this matter is characteristic, like his quite unjust return upon himself in regard to Isabella, of what Haydon calls his lack of decisions and fixity of aim:—‘One day he was full of an epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid impositions on the world. Never for two days did he know his own intentions.’ By these words, to be taken with the usual discount, Haydon means the same thing as Keats means himself when he speaks of his ‘unsteady and vagarish disposition’; let us rather say his sensitive and receptive openness of mind to contradictory impressions, even on questions of that art of which he had become so fine a master, and withal his habit of complete surrender to whatever was the dominant impression of the moment.

With reference to his other occupations of the hour,—Lamia he had finished, and for the present he did no more to King Stephen. Realizing the low repute into which critical derision had brought him as a member of the Cockney School, he proposed to withhold his next volume of poems in hope that the production of Otho the Great at Drury Lane in the autumn might, if successful, create a more favourable atmosphere for its reception; and was in consequence seriously dashed when he learnt that Kean was on the point of starting for America. One of his chief present pursuits was studying Italian in the pages of Ariosto. The wholesome brightness of an unusually fine season continuing to sustain and soothe him, he wrote the last, most unclouded and serenely accomplished of his meditative odes, that To Autumn. A sudden return of the epistolary mood came upon him, and between September 17th and 27th he poured himself out to his brother and sister-in-law in a new long journal-letter, full of confidences on every subject that dwelt in or flitted through his mind except the one master-subject of the passion he was striving to keep subdued by absence. ‘I am inclined,’ he says, ‘to write a good deal; for there can be nothing so remembrancing and enchaining as a good long letter, be it composed of what it may.’

Accordingly he ranges as usual over all manner of miscellaneous themes, discussing his own and his brother’s situation and future; telling of Haydon and his inconsiderate behaviour about the loan, and of Dilke’s political dogmatism and over-anxiety about his boy; giving accounts of the several members of the Hampstead circle, mixed up with playful messages to his sister-in-law, whom he represents as caring nothing for these tiresome people and interrupting her husband’s reading of the letter to insist on prattling about her baby. He adds anecdotes of his visit to her family in London, and À propos of babies tells of a thing he had heard Charles Lamb say. ‘A child in arms was passing by his chair toward its mother, in the nurse’s arms. Lamb took hold of the long clothes, saying: “Where, God bless me, where does it leave off?”’ With an unexpressed shaft of inward mockery at his own plight, he describes the ridiculous figure cut by a man in love, the victim in this case being his friend Haslam; relates jokes practical and other which had lately passed between Brown, Dilke, and himself, and after a very sensible excursion into history and current politics, to which he was never at all so indifferent as is commonly said, he dwells with a kindly, humorous enjoyment on the sedate maiden-ladylike ways and aspects of the cathedral town where he found the autumn quietude so comforting. This sets him thinking of his fragment of a poem written seven months earlier and breathing a similar spirit, the Eve of St Mark; so he transcribes it for their benefit, and also, in odd contrast, a long passage from Burton’s Anatomy which had tickled some queer corner of his brain by its cumulative effect of exuberant and grotesque disgustfulness, and which he declares he would love to hear delivered by an actor across the footlights.

During the same days at Winchester Keats also wrote intimately and purposefully to Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke. In all these letters we see the well conditioned, wise and admirable Keats, the sane and healthy partner in his so dual and divided nature, for the time being holding firmly, or at any rate hopeful and confident of being able to hold firmly, the upper hand. He resolves manfully to rally his moral powers, to banish over-passionate and fretful feelings and to put himself on a right footing with the world. Imaginary troubles, he declares, are what prey upon a man: real troubles spur him to exertion, and exert himself and fight against morbid imaginings he will. In reference to George’s money troubles, ‘Rest in the confidence,’ he says, ‘that I will not omit any exertion to benefit you by some means or other: if I cannot remit you hundreds, I will tens, and if not that, ones:’ a promise which we shall find George taking only too literally later on. Of his brothers and his own immediate prospect he writes with seriousness, nevertheless more encouragingly than the occasion well warranted. He will not let himself seem too much depressed even by the heavy check which his and Brown’s hopes about Otho the Great had just received from the news of Kean’s intended departure for America.

And again, in still better heart:—

To Dilke and Brown he writes at the same time of his own immediate plans, telling them that he is determined to give up trusting to mere hopes of ultimate success, whether from plays or poems, and 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. These are some of his words to Dilke:—

He had been living since May on an advance from Taylor and a loan from Brown to be repaid out of the eventual profits of their play, and was uneasy at putting Brown to a present sacrifice. He writes to him accordingly:—

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.... I had got into a habit of mind of looking towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it as 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.

CHAPTER XIII

WORK OF 1818, 1819.—I. THE ACHIEVEMENTS

The work of Keats’s two mature years (if any poet or man in his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years can be called mature) seems to divide itself naturally into two main groups or classes. One class consists of his finished achievements, things successfully carried through in accordance with his first intention; the other of his fragments and experiments, things begun and broken off either from external causes or because in the execution the poet changed his mind or his inspiration failed to sustain itself. I shall ask the reader to consider the two classes separately, the achievements first: not because there may not be even finer work in some of the fragments, but because a thing incomplete, a torso, however splendid in power and promise, cannot be judged on the same terms or with the same approach to finality as a thing of which the whole is before us. One finished thing only, the play of Otho the Great, I shall turn over to the second or experimental class, seeing that an experiment it essentially was, and one tried under conditions which made it impossible for Keats to be his true self.

The class of achievements will include, then, besides a score of sonnets and a few minor pieces of various form, the three completed tales in verse, Isabella or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St Agnes, and Lamia; with the six odes, To Psyche, On Indolence (not published in Keats’s lifetime), On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale, To Melancholy, and To Autumn. Beginning with the minor things,—the sonnets, being mostly occasional and autobiographical, have been sufficiently touched on in our narrative chapters, and so have several of the shorter lyrics, In drear-nighted December, Meg Merrilies, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. There remains chiefly the batch of pieces in the seven-syllable couplet metre printed in the Lamia volume between the odes To Psyche and To Autumn. Two of these, Lines on the Mermaid Tavern and Robin Hood, were written, as we have seen, at the beginning of 1818, in the months when Keats was living alone in Well Walk and resting after his labour on Endymion. Both are easy, spirited, and intensely English in feeling; both, for all their gay lightness of touch, are marked with that vivid imaginative life in single phrases which almost from the first, amidst all the rawnesses of his youth, stamps Keats for a poet of the great lineage. Already two years earlier, in the valentine ‘Hadst thou liv’d in days of old,’ he had shown a fair command of this metre, and now we can feel that he has an ear well trained in its cadences by familiarity with the finest early models, from Fletcher (in the Faithful Shepherdess) and Ben Jonson (in the masque of The Satyr, the songs To Celia, and the Charis lyrics) down to L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.

The other two pieces in the same form, Bards of Passion and of Mirth and Fancy, date from nearly a year later, when Keats had settled under Brown’s roof after Tom’s death, and were copied by him for his brother in a letter dated January 2nd 1819. In the Mermaid Tavern lines he had followed in fancy the poet-guests of that hostelry to the Elysian fields and asked them if they found there any finer entertainment than in their old haunt. In Bards of Passion and of Mirth, which he wrote on a blank page in Dilke’s copy of Beaumont and Fletcher, Keats singles out this particular pair of poet-partners to follow beyond the grave, and in a strain somewhat more serious tells of the double lives they lead,—their souls left here on earth in their writings, and themselves—

Seated on Elysian lawns Brows’d by none but Dian’s fawns ... Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, trancÈd thing, But divine, melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries.

In the affirmation with which the piece concludes,—

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on Earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-liv’d in regions new!—

in this affirmation it seems, as Mr Buxton Forman has pointed out, as though Keats were gaily countering the view of Wordsworth in the well-known stanzas where, declaring how the power of Burns survives ‘deep in the general heart of men,’ he goes on to ask what need has the poet for any other kind of Elysian after-life.1

Following an eighteenth-century practice, Keats calls this set of heptasyllabics an ode, a form which in strictness it no way resembles. A higher place is taken in his work by the longest poem he sends his brother in the same metre, Fancy. He calls it a rondeau, again rather at random; but he had already called the Bacchus lyric in Endymion a roundelay, and seems to have thought that the name might apply to any set of verses returning upon itself at the end with a repetition of its beginning. In the present case he both opens and closes his poem with the same idea as has been condensed by a later writer in the two-line refrain—

But every poet, born to stray, Still feeds upon the far-away.

The opening lines run,—

Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain pelteth; Then let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door, She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar. O sweet Fancy! let her loose; Summer’s joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming; Autumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too, Blushing through the mist and dew, Cloys with tasting: What do then?

The answer is that the thing to do is to sit by the chimney corner while Fancy goes ranging abroad to find and bring home a harvest of incompatible and contradictory delights; and after the evocation of a number of such the poem comes round at the end to a slightly altered repetition of its opening couplet,—

Let the winged Fancy roam Pleasure never is at home.

I like to think that Keats may have drawn his impulse to writing this poem from the fine passage in Fuller’s Holy State quoted by Lamb in his brief ‘Specimens’ of that author2:—

At any rate Keats’s poem, in its best and central part, is a delightful embroidery on the ideas here expressed. The notion, or vision, of a lawless place where all manner of things divorced in nature abide together and happily jostle, was one that often haunted him, as witness his verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the fragment he calls The Castle Builder, and again the piece beginning ‘Welcome joy and welcome sorrow,’ to which there has been posthumously given the title A Song of Opposites. The lines evoking such a vision in this poem, Fancy, are almost his happiest in his lighter vein, and are written in the true Elizabethan tradition: the predominant influence in the handling of the measure being, to my ear, that of Ben Jonson, who is wont to give it a certain weight and slowness of movement by the free use of long syllables in the unaccented places; even so Keats, in the passage quoted above, puts in such places words like ‘sweet,’ ‘rain,’ ‘still,’ ‘cage,’ ‘dart,’ ‘lipp’d.’

Passing from the minor to the major achievements of the time, the earliest, and to my mind the finest, of these is Isabella or the Pot of Basil. During the writing of Endymion, Keats had intended his next effort to be on the lofty classic and symbolic theme of the dethronement of Hyperion and the Titans and the accession of Apollo and the Olympians. But certain reading and talk in the Hunt circle having diverted him from this purpose for a while, and made him take up the idea of a volume of metrical tales from Boccaccio to be written jointly by himself and Reynolds, he chose the tale of the Pot of Basil (the fifth of the fourth day in the Decameron), made a sudden beginning at it before he left Hampstead at the end of February, (1819), and finished it at Teignmouth in the course of April. As an appropriate vehicle for an Italian story he took the Italian ottava rima or stanza of eight. Several of the earlier English poets had used this metre: Keats’s main model for it was doubtless Edward Fairfax, who, following other Elizabethan translators, had in his fine version from Tasso, Godfrey of Bulloigne, done much more than any of his predecessors towards suppling and perfecting its treatment in English. Since then it had been little employed in our serious poetry, but had lately been brilliantly revived for flippant and satiric uses, after later Italian models, by Hookham Frere and Byron. Keats goes over the heads of these direct to Fairfax, and in certain points at least, in variety of pause and cadence and subtle adaptation of verbal music to emotional effect, by a good deal outdoes even that excellent master.3 Of course it is of the essence of his treatment to avoid, in the closing couplet of the stanza, the special effect of witty snap and suddenness which fits it so well for the purpose of satire.

Every one knows the story: how a maiden of Messina (Keats chooses to transfer the scene to Florence), living in the house of her merchant brothers, in secret loves one of their clerks: how her brothers, discovering her secret, take out her lover to the forest and there slay and bury him: how his ghost appearing to her in a dream reveals his fate and burial place: how she hastens thither with her nurse, digs till she finds the corpse and having found it carries home the head and sets it in a pot of basil, or sweet marjoram, which she cherishes and waters with her tears until her brothers take it from her, whereupon she pines away and dies.

Boccaccio tells this story with that admirable combination of straightforward conciseness and finished grace which characterizes his mature prose. Keats in his poem romantically amplifies and embroiders it. In his way of doing so we can trace the influence of Chaucer, with whose Troilus and Criseyde, that miracle of detailed, long-drawn, yet ever human and rarely tedious narrative, he was by this time familiar. Keats, while avoiding Chaucer’s prolixity, diversifies his tale with invocations to Love and to the Muses, with apostrophes to the reader and ejaculatory comments on the events, entirely in Chaucer’s manner: only whereas Chaucer relegates the more part of such matter to the ‘proems’ of his several books, Keats, having plunged into the thick of the story in his first line, finds room for his apostrophes and invocations in the course of the narrative itself. Most critics have taken the view that this is evidence of weak or immature art. To my mind this is not so: the pauses thus introduced are never long enough to hold up the flow and interest of the narrative, while they afford welcome rests to the attention, pleasant changes from a too sustained narrative construction, with consequent beautiful and happy modulations in the movement of the verse.

One of these invocations—invocation and apology together—is to Boccaccio himself, disowning all idea of improving the tale and defining the poet’s attempt as made but to honour him,—

To stead thee as a verse in English tongue, An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.

The definition is exact. The revived spirit of English romantic poetry breathes in every line of the verse, and as in Endymion, so here, the southern setting is conceived as though it were English. ‘So the two brothers and their murder’d man’ (the force of the anticipatory epithet has been celebrated by every critic since Lamb)—

So the two brothers and their murder’d man Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream Gurgles through straiten’d banks, and still doth fan Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream Keep head against the freshets.

Another such criticized ‘digression’ tells of the toilers yoked in all quarters of the world to the service of these avaricious merchant brothers. In calling up their sufferings Keats for a moment strikes an unexpected verbal echo from the Annus Mirabilis of Dryden.4 Dryden, telling of the monopolies of the Dutch in the East India trade, had written,—

For them alone the Heav’ns had kindly heat, In eastern quarries ripening precious dew: For them the Idumean balm did sweat, And in hot Ceilon spicy forests grew.

Keats writes of Isabella’s brothers,—

For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark, For them his ears gush’d blood—

with more in the same strain, very vividly and humanly imagined, but somewhat unevenly written. On the other hand the last of the rests or interruptions in this poem is to my thinking one of its most original and admirable beauties: I mean the invocation beginning ‘O Melancholy, linger here awhile,’ repeated with lovely modulations in stanzas lv, lvi, and lxi; the poet deliberately pausing to heighten his effect as it were by an accompaniment of words chosen purely for their pathetic melody and more musical than music itself.

Keats’s way of imagining and telling the story is not less delicate than it is intense. Flaws and false notes there are: phrases, as in Endymion, too dulcet and cloying, like that which tells how the lover’s lips grew bold, ‘And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:’ a flat line where it is most out of place—‘And Isabella did not stamp or rave:’ a far-fetched rime, as where ‘love’ and ‘grove’ draw in after them the alien idea of Lorenzo not being embalmed in ‘Indian clove.’ But such flaws, abundant in Endymion, are in Isabella rare and need to be searched for. If we want an example of the staple tissue of the poem we shall rather find it in a stanza like this:—

Parting they seem’d to tread upon the air, Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart Only to meet again more close, and share The inward fragrance of each other’s heart. She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair Sang of delicious love and honey’d dart; He with light steps went up a western hill, And bade the sun farewell, and joy’d his fill.

The image of love-happiness in the last couplet is as jocund and uplifting as some radiant symbolic drawing by Blake, and poetry has few things more perfect or easier in their perfection.

In a far more difficult kind, where Keats has to deal with the features of the story that might easily make for the repulsive or the macabre, he triumphs not by shirking but by sheer force of passionate imagination. ‘The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.’ This dictum of Keats can scarcely be better illustrated than by his own handling of the Isabella story. Take the vision of the murdered man appearing to the girl at night:—

Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake; For there was striving, in its piteous tongue, To speak as when on earth it was awake, And Isabella on its music hung: Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake, As in a palsied Druid’s harp unstrung; And through it moan’d a ghostly under-song, Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among. 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.

How wonderfully, in these touches, do we feel love prevailing over horror and purging the apparition of all its charnel ghastliness. When we come to the discovery and digging up of the body, Boccaccio turns the difficulty which must inhere in any realistic treatment of the theme by simply saying that it was uncorrupted; as though some kind of miracle had kept it fresh. Keats on the other hand confronts the difficulty and overcomes it. First he acknowledges how the imagination in dwelling on the dead is prone to call up images of corruptibility:—

Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard, And let his spirit, like a demon-mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole; Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d, And filling it once more with human soul? Ah! this is holiday to what was felt When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.

Then he compulsively leads away the mind from such images to think only of the passionate absorption with which Isabella flings herself upon her task:—

She gaz’d 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 lilly 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.

Pl. X

PAGE FROM ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL FROM AN AUTOGRAPH BY KEATS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Is any scene in poetry written with more piercing, more 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 (with a fine implied commentary on the relative strength of passions) to dig ‘more fervently than misers can’:—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.5 Poetry had always come to Keats as naturally as leaves to a tree. So he considered it ought to come, 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 thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms mechanical: nay, those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two kinds of writing comparable.

The final consignment by Isabella of her treasure to its casket is told with the same genius for turning horror into beauty: note the third and fourth lines of the following, with the magically cooling and soothing effect of their open-vowelled sonority;—

Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby, And divine liquids come with odorous ooze Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,— She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet. And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun, And she forgot the blue above the trees, And she forgot the dells where waters run, And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze; She had no knowledge when the day was done, And the new morn she saw not: but in peace Hung over her sweet Basil evermore, And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.

In passages like these of Isabella Keats, for one reader at least, reaches his high-water mark in human feeling, and in felicity both imaginative and executive. The next of his three poetic tales, The Eve of St Agnes, does not strike so deep, though it is more nearly faultless and lives as the most complete and enchanting English pure romance-poem of its time. Little or none of the effect is due in this case to elements of magic weirdness or supernatural terror such as counted for so much in the general romantic poetry of the day, and had been of the very essence of achievements so diverse as The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Isabella itself. The tale hinges on the popular belief that on St Agnes’s Eve (January the 20th) a maiden might win sight of her future husband in a dream by going to bed supperless, silent and without looking behind her, and sleeping on her back with her hands on the pillow above her head. This belief is mentioned by two writers at least with whom Keats was very familiar: by Ben Jonson in his masque The Satyr and Robert Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy. An eighteenth century book of reference which he may well have known also, Brand’s Popular Antiquities, cites the superstition and adds from a current chapbook a fuller account of it, mentioning other and alternative rites. But one feature of the promised vision which in Keats’s mind was evidently essential, that the lover should regale his mistress after her fasting dream with exquisite viands and music, is not noted in any of these sources: Keats must either have invented it or drawn it from some other authority which criticism has not yet recognized.

It was an obvious and easy idea for Keats to weave into the St Agnes’ Eve motive the motive of a love-passion between the son and daughter of hostile houses, and to bring the youth to a festival in the halls of his enemies in a manner which reminds one both of Romeo and Juliet and of the young Lochinvar in Scott’s ballad. A remoter source has lately been pointed out as probable for the subsequent incidents of the lover’s concealment by the old nurse in a closet next the maiden’s chamber, his coming in to her while she sleeps, the melting of his real self into her dream of him, her momentary disenchantment and alarm on awakening, her re-assurance and surrender and their ensuing happy union and flight. All these circumstances, it has been shown, except the immediate flight of the lovers, are closely paralleled in Boccaccio’s early novel Il Filocolo, and look as though they must have been derived from it. The Filocolo is an excessively tedious and occasionally coarse amplification in prose, made by Boccaccio when his style was still unformed, of the old French metrical romance, long popular throughout Europe, of Floire et Blancheflor. The question is, how should Keats have come to be acquainted with it? At this time he knew very little Italian. He was accustomed to read his Decameron in a translation,6 and eight months later we find him with difficulty making out Ariosto at the rate of ten or a dozen stanzas a day. A French seventeenth-century version of the Filocolo indeed existed, but none in English. Can it be that Hunt had told Keats the story, or at least those parts of it which would serve him, in the course of talk about Boccaccio? One would not have expected even Hunt’s love of Italian reading to sustain him through the tedium of this early and little known novel by the master: moreover in criticizing The Eve of St Agnes he gives no hint that Keats was indebted to him for any of its incidents. But there the resemblances are, too close to be easily explained as coincidences. The part played by the old nurse Angela in Keats’s poem echoes pretty closely the part played by Glorizia in the Filocolo; the drama, dreaming and awake, played between Madeline and Porphyro, repeats, though in a far finer strain, that between Biancofiore and Florio; so that Keats’s narrative reads truly like a magically refined and enriched quintessence distilled from the corresponding chapter in Boccaccio’s tale.7

But the question of sources is one for the special student, and its discussion may easily tire the lay reader. Passing to the poem and its qualities, we have to note first that, fresh from treading, in his Hyperion attempt, in the path of Milton, Keats in The Eve of St Agnes went back, so far as his manner is derivative at all, to the example of his first master, Spenser. He shows as perfect a command of the Spenserian stanza, with its ‘sweet-slipping movement,’ as Spenser himself, and as subtle a sense as his of the leisurely meditative pace imposed upon the metre by the lingering Alexandrine at the close. Narrating at this pace and in this mood, he is able at any moment with the lightest of touches to launch the imagination to music on a voyage beyond the beyonds, and to charge every line, every word almost, with a richness and fullness of far-away suggestion that yet never clogs the easy harmonious flow of the verse. At the same time he does not, in this new poem, attempt anything like the depth of human passion and pathos which he had touched in Isabella, and his personages appeal to us in the manner strictly defined as ‘romantic,’ that is to say not so much humanly and in themselves as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere amidst which they move.

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. 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 disappear into the night, the poetry throbs in every line with the life of imagination and beauty. The monuments in the 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 supporting the banquet-hall roof 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.8

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.9 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 separate hues of painted glass as Keats in this celebrated passage represents it, but fuses them into a kind of neutral or indiscriminate opaline shimmer. 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. If any reader wishes to realise how the genius of Elizabethan romantic poetry re-awoke in Keats, and how much enriched and enhanced, after two hundred years, let him compare all this scene of Madeline’s unrobing with the passage from Brown’s Britannia’s Pastorals which was probably in his memory when he wrote it (see above, p. 98).

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 warmÈd 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.

Concerning this sumptuous passage of the spread feast of fruits, not unequally rivalling the famous one in Milton,10 Leigh Hunt has some interesting things to say in his Autobiography11:—

I remember Keats reading to me, with great relish and particularity, conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper and ending with the words,

And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.

Mr Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels were not to be varied. On the occasion above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:—

The singing masons building roofs of gold.

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.