Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats

CHAPTER II

Keats’s meeting with Hunt—Growth of their friendship—Haydon’s intervention—Keats’s residence with Hunt—His departure for Italy—Hunt’s Criticism of Keats’s poetry—His influence on the Poems of 1817.

It was about the year 1815 that Keats showed to his former school friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, the following sonnet, the first indication the latter had that Keats had written poetry:

“What though, for showing truth to flatter’d state,
Kind Hunt was shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit been as free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.
Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?
Think you he nought but prison walls did see,
Till, so unwilling thou unturn’dst the key?
Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate!
In Spenser’s halls he stray’d, and bowers fair,
Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew
With daring Milton through the fields of air:
To regions of his own his genius true
Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair
When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew?”

This admiration, expressed before Keats had met Hunt, was due to the influence of the Clarke family and to Keats’s acquaintance with The Examiner, which he saw regularly during his school days at Enfield and which he continued to borrow from Clarke during his medical apprenticeship. Clarke later showed to Leigh Hunt two or three of Keats’s poems. Of the reception of one of them (How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of Time) Clarke said:

“I could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions—written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem.”[91]

Hunt invited Keats to visit him. Of this first meeting between the two men, Clarke wrote:

“That was a red letter day in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and expression of Keats’s features would arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive.... The interview, which stretched into three ‘morning calls’, was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.”[92]

Hunt’s account of the meeting is as follows:

“I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination. We read and we walked together, and used to write verse of an evening upon a given subject. No imaginative pleasure was left untouched by us, or unenjoyed; from the recollections of the bards and patriots of old, to the luxury of a summer rain at our window, or the clicking of the coal in the winter-time. Not long afterwards, having the pleasure of entertaining at dinner Mr. Godwin, Mr. Hazlitt, and Mr. Basil Montagu, I showed the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to be as extraordinary as I thought them.”[93]

Leigh Hunt discovered Keats, by no means a small thing, for as he himself has said: “To admire and comment upon the genius that two or three hundred years have applauded, and to discover what will partake of applause two or three hundred years hence, are processes of a very different description.”[94] With the same power of prophetic discernment, writing in 1828, he realized to the full the greatness of Keats and predicted that growth of his fame in the future which has since taken place.[95] Keats’s account of his reception is given in the sonnet Keen fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there:

“For I am brimfull of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found;
Of fair hair’d Milton’s eloquent distress,
And all his love for gentle Lycid drown’d;
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
And faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned.”

The date of the introduction of Keats to Hunt has been placed variously from November, 1815, to the end of the year 1816. He says:

“It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats. It was in York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote part of the Indicator—and he resided with me while in Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the curious in such things, among whom I am one.”[96]

If this statement were correct, it would make the meeting about two or three years later than has generally been supposed, for Leigh Hunt did not move to York Buildings until 1818, and he did not begin work on the Indicator until October, 1819. Clarke states positively that the meeting took place at Hampstead. From this evidence Mr. Colvin has suggested the early spring of 1816 as the most probable date.[97] What seems better evidence than any that has yet been brought forward is a passage in The Examiner of June 1, 1817, in Hunt’s review of Keats’s Poems of 1817, where he says that the poet is a personal friend whom he announced to the public a short time ago (this allusion can only be to an article in The Examiner of December 1, 1816) and that the friendship dates from “no greater distance of time than the announcement above mentioned. We had published one of his sonnets in our paper,[98] without knowing more of him than of any other anonymous correspondent; but at the period in question a friend brought us one morning some copies in verse, which he said were from the pen of a youth.... We had not read more than a dozen lines when we recognized a young poet indeed.” This seems conclusive evidence that the meeting did not take place until the winter of 1816, for Hunt’s testimony written in 1817, when the circumstance was fresh in his mind is certainly more trustworthy than his impression of it at the time that he revised his Autobiography in 1859 at the age of seventy-five years.

The two men, before they came in contact, had much in common, and Hunt’s influence, while in some cases an inspiring force, more often fostered instincts already existing in Keats. Both possessed by nature a deep love of poetry, color and melody, and both “were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat voluptuously over the ‘deliciousness’ of the beautiful in art, books or nature.”[99] At the very beginning of their acquaintance, notwithstanding a disparity in age of eleven years, they were wonderfully drawn to each other. Spenser was their favorite poet. Both had a great love for Chaucer, for Oriental fable and for Chivalric romance, and an unusual knowledge of Greek myth. But even at the height of their intimacy, the friendship seems to have remained more intellectual than personal, a fact due no doubt to Keats’s reserve and Hunt’s “incuriousness.”[100] Except for this drawback Hunt considered the friendship ideal. He says: “Mr. Keats and I were old friends of the old stamp, between whom there was no such thing as obligation, except the pleasure of it. He enjoyed the privilege of greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged by him, and an equal, but not a greater delight, to oblige. It was a pleasure to his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not grude it.”[101]

Through Hunt, Keats was introduced to a circle of literary men whose companionship was an important factor in his development, notably Haydon, Godwin, Hazlitt, Shelley, Vincent Novello, Horace Smith, Cornelius Webbe, Basil Montagu, the Olliers, Barry Cornwall, and later Wordsworth.

For about a year following the meeting of the two, Hunt undoubtedly exerted the strongest influence of any living man over the young poet. Severn said that Keats’s introduction to Hunt wrought a great change in him and “intoxicated him with an excess of enthusiasm which kept by him four or five years.”[102] Mr. Forman says that “Charles Cowden Clarke, as his early mentor, Leigh Hunt and Haydon as his most powerful encouragers at the important epoch of adolescence, must be credited with much of the active influence that took Keats out of the path to a medical practitioner’s life, and set his feet in the devious paths of literature.”[103] Keats’s interest in his profession had decreased as his knowledge and love of poetry grew. With the publication of his Poems in 1817, and his retirement in April of that year from London to the Isle of Wight “to be alone and improve” himself and to continue Endymion, his decision was finally made in favor of a literary life. Hunt’s aid at this time took the practical form of publishing Keats’s poems in The Examiner and of drawing the attention of the public to them by comments and reviews. Whether he ever paid Keats for any of his contributions to his periodicals is not known.[104] Through the influence of Hunt the Ollier brothers were induced to undertake the publication of Keats’s first volume of poems. It is dedicated to Leigh Hunt in the sonnet Glory and loveliness have passed away. The sestet refers directly to him:

“But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time, when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.”[105]

Hunt replied in the sonnet To John Keats, quoted here in full because of its inacessibility:

“’Tis well you think me truly one of those,
Whose sense discerns the loveliness of things;
For surely as I feel the bird that sings
Behind the leaves, or dawn as it up grows,
Or the rich bee rejoicing as he goes,
Or the glad issue of emerging springs,
Or overhead the glide of a dove’s wings,
Or turf, or trees, or midst of all, repose.
And surely as I feel things lovelier still,
The human look, and the harmonious form
Containing woman, and the smile in ill,
And such a heart as Charles’s wise and warm,—
As surely as all this, I see ev’n now,
Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow.”[106]

In 1820, Hunt dedicated his translation of Tasso’s Aminta to Keats.

In spite of a eulogistic article by Hunt running in The Examiners of June 1, July 6 and 13, 1817, and other notices in some of the provincial papers, the Poems sold not very well at first, and later, not at all.[107] Praise from the editor of The Examiner, although offered with the kindest intentions in the world, was about the worst thing that could possibly have happened to Keats, for, politically and poetically, Leigh Hunt was most unpopular at this time;[108] and it was noised abroad that Keats too was a radical in politics and in religion, a disciple of the apostate in his attack on the established and accepted creed of poetry. As a matter of fact, Keats’s interest in politics decreased as his knowledge of poetry increased, although, “as a party-badge and sign of ultra-liberalism,” he, like Hunt, Byron and Shelley continued to wear the soft turn-down collars in contrast to the stiff collars and enormous cravats of the time.[109] In religion Keats vented his dislike of sect and creed on the Kirk of Scotland, as Hunt had on the Methodists. His “simply-sensuous Beauty-worship” Palgrave attributes to the “moral laxity” of Hunt.[110] Unless Palgrave, like Haydon, refers to Hunt’s unorthodoxy in matters of church and state, it is difficult to understand on what evidence he bases this statement; in the first place, a charge of moral laxity is not borne out by the recorded facts of Hunt’s life, but only by such untrustworthy tradition as still lingers in the public mind from the Cockney School articles of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly. Carlyle said that he was of “most exemplary private deportment.”[111] Byron, Shelley and Lamb testified to his virtuous life. In the second place, a close comparison of the works of the two now leads one to conclude that “simply-sensuous Beauty-worship” existed to a much higher degree in Keats than in Hunt, and that so strong an innate tendency would have developed without outward stimulus from any one. While both men sought the good and worshipped the beautiful, Keats, unlike Hunt, recognized somewhat “the burthen and the mystery” of human life.

Keats, during his stay in the Isle of Wight and a visit to Oxford with Bailey in the spring and summer of 1817, worked on Endymion, finishing it in the fall. The letters exchanged between him and Hunt during his absence were friendly, but a feeling of coolness began before his return. In a letter from Margate May 10, 1817, there is a curiously obscure reference to the Nymphs:

“How have you got on among them? How are the Nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance. Where are you now?—in Judea, Cappadocia, or the parts of Lybia about Cyrene? Stranger from ‘Heaven, Hues, and Prototypes’ I wager you have given several new turns to the old saying, ‘Now the maid was fair and pleasant to look on,’ as well as made a little variation in ‘Once upon a time.’ Perhaps, too, you have rather varied, ‘Here endeth the first lesson.’ Thus I hope you have made a horseshoe business of ‘unsuperfluous life,’ ‘faint bowers’ and fibrous roots.”[112]

A letter written by Haydon to Keats, dated May 11, 1817, warned Keats against Hunt, and, with others of its kind, was possibly the insidious beginning of the coolness which followed: “Beware, for God’s sake of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own neglect of character.”[113] A letter in reply from Keats, written the day after he wrote the passage about the Nymphs, accounts for its dissembling tone:

“I wrote to Hunt yesterday—scarcely know what I said in it. I could not talk about Poetry in the way I should have liked for I was not in humour with either his or mine. His self delusions are very lamentable—they have inticed him into a Situation which I should be less eager after than that of a galley Slave,—what you observe thereon is very true must be in time [sic].

Perhaps it is a self delusion to say so—but I think I could not be deceived in the manner that Hunt is—may I die to-morrow if I am to be. There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great Poet....”[114]

To judge from the testimony of his brother George it is not surprising that Keats succumbed to Haydon’s influence against Hunt: “his nervous, morbid temperament led him to misconstrue the motives of his best friends.”[115] In the last days of his life, his suspicion and bitterness were general. In a letter to Bailey, June, 1818, Keats says: “I have suspected everybody.”[116] January, 1820, he wrote Georgiana Keats, “Upon the whole I dislike mankind.”[117] Haydon may have sincerely believed Hunt’s influence to be injurious because of the latter’s unorthodoxy in matters of religion. He wrote that Keats “could not bring his mind to bear on one object, and was at the mercy of every petty theory that Leigh Hunt’s ingenuity would suggest.... He had a tendency to religion when I first knew him, but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind.... Leigh Hunt was the unhinger of his best dispositions. Latterly, Keats saw Leigh Hunt’s weaknesses. I distrusted his leader, but Keats would not cease to visit him, because he thought Hunt ill-used. This shows Keats’s goodness of heart.”[118] It is not to be regretted that Haydon lessened Keats’s estimate of Hunt’s literary infallibility, for his influence was most injurious in that direction; but it is to be regretted that he impugned a friendship in which Hunt was certainly sincere and by which Keats had benefited.

In September, just before Keats’s return, he seems somewhat mollified and writes to John Hamilton Reynolds of Leigh Hunt’s pleasant companionship; he has failings, “but then his make-ups are very good.”[119]

On his return to Hampstead in October, 1817, Keats found affairs among the circle in a very bad way.[120]

Everybody “seems at Loggerheads—There’s Hunt infatuated—there’s Haydon’s picture in statu quo—There’s Hunt walks up and down his painting room—criticising every head most unmercifully. There’s Horace Smith tired of Hunt. ‘The web of our life is of mingled yarn.’... I am quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth—no not even Byron. Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known each other many years.... Haydon says to me, Keats, don’t show your lines to Hunt on any Account or he will have done half for you—so it appears Hunt wishes it to be thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him that I was getting on to the completion of 4,000 lines—Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me they would have been 7,000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on this subject from some Lady—which contains a caution to me, thro’ him, on the subject—now is not all this a most paultry (sic) thing to think about?”[121]

Hunt had tried to persuade Keats not to write a long poem. Keats wrote of this: “Hunt’s dissuasion was of no avail[122]—I refused to visit Shelley that I might have my own unfettered scope; and after all, I shall have the reputation of Hunt’s ÉlÈve. His corrections and amputations will by the knowing ones be traced in the poem.”[123]

During 1818, Leigh Hunt in his critical work remained silent concerning Keats, probably because of his sincere disapproval of Endymion and secondly, because he realized that his praise would be injurious. The attacks on Hunt in Blackwood’s and the Quarterly had foreshadowed an attack of the same virulent kind on Keats. The realization came with the publication of Endymion. The article on “Johnny Keats,” fourth of the series on the Cockney School in Blackwood’s Magazine, appeared almost simultaneously with his return from Scotland, and the one in the Quarterly in September of the same year. These will be discussed in a later chapter. Suspicions of neglect on the part of Hunt murmured in Keats’s mind like a discordant undertone, although the friendship continued as warm as ever on Hunt’s part. Keats was passive, without, however, the old sense of dependence and trust. December 28, 1817, he writes to his brothers of the “drivelling egotism” of The Examiner article on the obsoletion of Christmas gambols and pastimes.[124] In a journal letter written to George Keats and his wife in Louisville during December and January, 1819, the old liking has become almost repugnance: “Hunt keeps on in his old way—I am completely tired of it all. He has lately published a Pocket Book called the literary Pocket-Book—full of the most sickening stuff you can imagine”;[125] yet Keats suffered himself to become a contributor to this same book with two sonnets, The Human Seasons and To Ailsa Rock. Again in the same letter:

“The night we went to Novello’s there was a complete set-to of Mozart and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow my own inclinations I should never meet any of that set again, not even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are with him, but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in matters of taste and morals. He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses,—he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually. Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts—and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing.”[126]

Continuing in the same strain:

“I will have no more Wordsworth or Hunt in particular. Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses?... I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur and Hunt’s merit, but I mean to say that we need not to be teazed with grandeur and merit, when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood.”[127]

And again:

“Hunt has damned Hampstead and masks and sonnets and Italian tales. Wordsworth has damned the lakes—Milman has damned the old drama—West has damned wholesale. Peacock has damned satire—Ollier has damned Music—Hazlitt has damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the Man?!”[128]

A parody on the conversation of Hunt’s set, in which he is the principal actor, carries with it a ridicule that is unkinder than the bitterness of dislike, and difficult to reconcile with the fact that Keats at the same time preserved the semblance of friendship.[129]

“Scene, a little Parlour—Enter Hunt—Gattie—Hazlitt—Mrs. Novello—Ollier. Gattie:—Ha! Hunt got into your new house? Ha! Mrs. Novello: seen Altam and his wife? Mrs. N.: Yes (with a grin) it’s Mr. Hunt’s isn’t it? Gattie: Hunt’s? no, ha! Mr. Ollier, I congratulate you upon the highest compliment I ever heard paid to the Book. Mr. Hazlitt, I hope you are well. Hazlitt:—Yes Sir, no Sir—Mr. Hunt (at the Music) ‘La Biondina’ etc. Hazlitt, did you ever hear this?—“La Biondina” &c. Hazlitt: O no Sir—I never—Ollier:—Do Hunt give it us over again—divine—Gattie:—divino—Hunt when does your Pocket-Book come out—Hunt:—‘What is this absorbs me quite?’ O we are spinning on a little, we shall floridize soon I hope. Such a thing was very much wanting—people think of nothing but money getting—now for me I am rather inclined to the liberal side of things. I am reckoned lax in my Christian principles, etc., etc., etc., etc.”[130]

Such a dual attitude in Keats can be explained only by a dual feeling in his mind, for it is impossible to believe him capable of deliberate deceit. He may have realized Hunt’s affectation and superficiality and “disgusting taste”; he was probably swayed by Haydon to distrust Hunt’s morals; the suspicions planted by Haydon concerning Endymion rankled; but at the same time Hunt’s charm of personality, and the assistance and encouragement given in the first days of their friendship, formed a bond difficult to break. Of Leigh Hunt’s attitude there can be no doubt, for through his long life of more than threescore years and ten, filled with many friendships of many kinds, he can in no instance be charged with insincerity. There is no conclusive proof on record to show him deserving of the insinuations which Keats believed in respect to Endymion, for Haydon is not trustworthy, and the opinion of a lady given through Haydon may be dismissed on the same grounds.[131] Reynolds’ testimony is not damaging in itself, and in the absence of facts to the contrary may have been wrongly construed by Keats. To the charges against himself, Leigh Hunt has replied in the following passage, “affecting and persuasive in its unrestrained pathos of remonstrance”:[132]

“an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the other day, with extreme pain, such as I am sure so kind and reflecting a man as Mr. Monckton Milnes would not have inflicted on me could he have foreseen it, that Keats at one period of his intercourse suspected Shelley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most noble natures. For Shelley, let Adonais answer. For myself, let every word answer which I uttered about him, living and dead, and such as I now proceed to repeat. I might as well have been told that I wished to see the flowers or the stars undervalued, or my own heart that loved him.”[133]

Hunt’s feeling towards Keats is nowhere better expressed than in his Autobiography: “I could not love him as deeply as I did Shelley. That was impossible. But my affection was only second to the one which I entertained for that heart of hearts.”[134]

Keats’s atonement is contained in the last letter that he ever wrote: “If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness, and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven.”[135]

Haydon’s influence over Keats was at its height in 1817 and 1818.[136] His gifts and his enthusiasm, his “fresh magnificence”[137] carried Keats by storm. It was not until about July 1818 that a reaction against Haydon in favor of Hunt set in, brought about by money transactions between Keats and Haydon, and the indifference of the latter in repaying a debt when he knew Keats’s necessity.[138] Keats probably never ceased to feel that Hunt’s influence as a poet had been injurious, as indeed it was, but the relative stability of his two friends adjusted itself after this experience with Haydon. Affairs seem to have been smoothed over with Hunt, and were not disturbed again until a short time before Keats’s departure for Italy, when his morbid suspicions, which even led him to accuse his friend Brown of flirting with Fanny Brawne,[139] seem to have been renewed.

In 1820, Brown, with whom Keats had been living since his brother Tom’s death, went on a second tour to Scotland. Keats, unable to accompany him, took a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town, to be near Hunt, who was living in Mortimer Street. Brown says: “It was his choice, during my absence to lodge at Kentish Town, that he might be near his friend, Leigh Hunt, in whose companionship he was ever happy.”[140] In a letter to Fanny Brawne, Keats said Hunt “amuses me very kindly.”[141] It is not likely, judging from this overture, that there had ever been an actual cessation of intercourse, notwithstanding what Keats wrote in his letters; and the act points to a revival of the old feeling on his part. About the twenty-second or twenty-third of June, 1820, Keats left his rooms and moved to Leigh Hunt’s home to be nursed.[142] He remained about seven weeks with the family, when there occurred an unfortunate incident which resulted in his abrupt departure August 12, 1820. A letter of Fanny Brawne’s was delivered to him two days late with the seal broken. The contretemps was due to the misconduct of a servant, but it was interpreted by Keats as treachery on the part of the family. At the moment he would accept no explanations or apologies. He writes of this incident to Fanny Brawne:

“My friends have behaved well to me in every instance but one, and there they have become tattlers, and inquisitors into my conduct: spying upon a secret I would rather die than share it with anybody’s confidence. For this I cannot wish them well, I care not to see any of them again. If I am the Theme, I will not be the Friend of idle Gossips. Good gods what a shame it is our Loves should be put into the microscope of a Coterie. Their laughs should not affect you (I may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people to hate me well enough, for reasons I know of, who have pretended a great friendship for me) when in competition with one, who if he should never see you again would make you the Saint of his memory. These Laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your Beauty, who would have God-bless’d me from you for ever: who were plying me with disencouragements with respect to you eternally. People are revengeful—do not mind them—do nothing but love me.”[143]

In his next letter to her he says:

“I shall never be able to endure any more the society of any of those who used to meet at Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my Palate.”[144]

The lack of self-control and the distrust seen in these extracts show that Keats was laboring under hallucinations produced by an ill mind and body; the letters from which they have been taken are unnatural, almost terrible, in their passion and rebellion against fate.Keats moved to the residence of the Brawnes. While he was here the trouble seems to have been smoothed over, for in a letter to Hunt he says: “You will be glad to hear I am going to delay a little at Mrs. Brawne’s. I hope to see you whenever you get time, for I feel really attached to you for your many sympathies with me, and patience at all my lunes.... Your affectionate friend, John Keats.”[145] To Brown he says: “Hunt has behaved very kindly to me”; and again: “The seal-breaking business is over-blown. I think no more of it.”[146] Hunt’s reply is couched in most affectionate terms:

“Giovani [sic] Mio,

“I shall see you this afternoon, and most probably every day. You judge rightly when you think I shall be glad at your putting up awhile where you are, instead of that solitary place. There are humanities in the house; and if wisdom loves to live with children round her knees (the tax-gatherer apart), sick wisdom, I think, should love to live with arms about it’s waist. I need not say how you gratify me by the impulse that led you to write a particular sentence in your letter, for you must have seen by this time how much I am attached to yourself.

“I am indicating at as dull a rate as a battered finger-post in wet weather. Not that I am ill: for I am very well altogether. Your affectionate Friend, Leigh Hunt.”[147]

This was probably the last letter written by him to Keats. In September Keats went to Rome with Severn to escape the hardships of the winter climate, after having declined an invitation from Shelley to visit him at Pisa. In the same month, Hunt published an affectionate farewell to him in The Indicator. An announcement of his death appeared in The Examiner of March 25, 1821. The story of the personal relations of the two men could not be better closed than with the words of Hunt written March 8, 1821, to Severn in Rome when he believed Keats still alive:

“If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it already, and can put it into better language than any man. I hear that he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, tell him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour) think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear to hear this, tell him—tell that great poet and noblehearted man—that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him; and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think all who are of one accord in mind and heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted.”[148]

The literary relations of Keats and Hunt will be considered under two heads; first, the criticism of Keats’s writings by Hunt; and second, his direct influence upon them.

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer in The Examiner of December 1st, 1816, was embodied in an article entitled “Young Poets.” It was the first notice of Keats to appear in print and is in part as follows:

“The last of these young aspirants whom we have met with, and who promise to help the new school to revive Nature and

‘To put a spirit of youth in everything,’—

is we believe, the youngest of them all, and just of age. His name is John Keats. He has not yet published anything except in a newspaper, but a set of his manuscripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature.”

In Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, the last line of the same sonnet—

“Silent upon a peak in Darien”—

is called “a basis of gigantic tranquillity.”[149]

Leigh Hunt’s review of the Poems of 1817[150] was kind and discriminating. He writes characteristically of the first poem, I stood tiptoe, that it “consists of a piece of luxury in a rural spot”; of the epistles and sonnets, that they “contain strong evidences of warm and social feelings.” This comment is quite characteristic of Hunt. He was as fond of finding “warm and social feelings” in the poetry of others as of putting them into his own. In his anxiety he sometimes found them when they did not exist. He continues: “The best poem is certainly the last and the longest, entitled Sleep and Poetry. It originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures [Hunt’s library], and is a striking specimen of the restlessness of the young poetical appetite, obtaining its food by the very desire of it, and glancing for fit subjects of creation ‘from earth to heaven.’ Nor do we like it the less for an impatient, and as it may be thought by some irreverend [sic] assault upon the late French school of criticism[151] and monotony.” But Hunt did not allow his affection for Keats or his approval of Keats’s poetical doctrine to blunt his critical acumen. In summarizing he says: “The very faults of Mr. Keats arise from a passion for beauties, and a young impatience to vindicate them; and as we have mentioned these, we shall refer to them at once. They may be comprised in two;—first, a tendency to notice everything too indiscriminately, and without an eye to natural proportion and effect; and second, a sense of the proper variety of versification without a due consideration of its principles.” In conclusion, the beauties “outnumber the faults a hundred fold” and “they are of a nature decidedly opposed to what is false and inharmonious. Their characteristics indeed are a fine ear, a fancy and imagination at will, and an intense feeling of external beauty in its most natural and least inexpressible simplicity.”

Hunt was disappointed with Endymion and did not hesitate to say so. Keats writes to his brothers:

“Leigh Hunt I showed my 1st book to—he allows it not much merit as a whole; says it is unnatural and made ten objections to it in the mere skimming over. He says the conversation is unnatural and too high-flown for Brother and Sister—says it should be simple, forgetting do ye mind that they are both overshadowed by a supernatural Power, and of force could not speak like Francesca in the Rimini. He must first prove that Caliban’s poetry is unnatural. This with me completely overturns his objections. The fact is he and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously (sic); and from several hints I have had they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made.—But who’s afraid? Aye! Tom! Demme if I am.”[152]

Leigh Hunt expressed himself thus in 1828: “Endymion, it must be allowed was not a little calculated to perplex the critics. It was a wilderness of sweets, but it was truly a wilderness; a domain of young, luxuriant, uncompromising poetry.”[153]

La Belle Dame sans Merci, which appeared first in The Indicator,[154] was accompanied with an introduction by Hunt, who says that it was suggested by Alain Chartier’s poem of the same title and “that the union of the imagination and the real is very striking throughout, particularly in the dream. The wild gentleness of the rest of the thoughts and of the music are alike old, and they are alike young.” The Indicator of August 2 and 9, 1820, contained a review of the volume of 1820. The part dealing with philosophy in poetry is of more than passing interest:

“We wish that for the purpose of his story he had not appeared to give in to the commonplace of supposing that Apollonius’s sophistry must always prevail, and that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, etc.; that is to say, that the knowledge of natural science and physics, by showing us the nature of things, does away the imaginations that once adorned them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so excellent a poet as Mr. Keats ought not to have made. The world will always have fine poetry, so long as it has events, passions, affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy. There will be a poetry of the heart, as long as there are tears and smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the first causes of things remain a mystery. A man who is no poet, may think he is none, as soon as he finds out the first causes of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:—he was none before.”[155]

Much the same line of discussion is reported of the conversation at Haydon’s “immortal dinner,” December 28, 1817, when Keats and Lamb denounced Sir Isaac Newton and his demolition of the things of the imagination, Keats saying he “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.”[156] The pictorial features of the Eve of St. Agnes were particularly admired by Hunt, as one might be led to expect from the decorative detail of his own narrative poetry. The portrait of “Agnes” (sic for Madeline) is said to be “remarkable for its union of extreme richness and good taste” and “affords a striking specimen of the sudden and strong maturity of the author’s genius. When he wrote Endymion he could not have resisted doing too much. To the description before me, it would be a great injury either to add or to diminish. It falls at once gorgeously and delicately upon us, like the colours of the painted glass.” Of the description of the casement window, Hunt asks “Could all the pomp and graces of aristocracy with Titian’s and Raphael’s aid to boot, go beyond the rich religion of this picture, with its ‘twilight saints’ and its ‘scutcheons blushing with the blood of queens’?” Elsewhere he says that “Persian Kings would have filled a poet’s mouth with gold” for such poetry. Hunt calls Hyperion[157] “a fragment, a gigantic one, like a ruin in the desert, or the bones of the mastodon. It is truly of a piece with its subject, which is the downfall of the elder gods.” Later, in Imagination and Fancy, Hunt declared that Keats’s greatest poetry is to be found in Hyperion. His opinion of the whole is thus summed up:

“Mr. Keats’s versification sometimes reminds us of Milton in his blank verse, and sometimes of Chapman both in his blank verse and in his rhyme; but his faculties, essentially speaking, though partaking of the unearthly aspirations and abstract yearnings of both these poets, are altogether his own. They are ambitious, but less directly so. They are more social, and in the finer sense of the word, sensual, than either. They are more coloured by the modern philosophy of sympathy and natural justice. Endymion, with all its extraordinary powers, partook of the faults of youth, though the best ones; but the reader of Hyperion and these other stories would never guess that they were written at twenty.[158] The author’s versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and possessing in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can combine them. Mr. Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets.”[159]

The more important division of the literary relations of the two men is the direct influence of Hunt’s work upon that of Keats.

On Keats’s prose style Hunt’s influence was very slight and can be quickly dismissed. At one time Keats, affected perhaps by Hunt’s example, thought of becoming a theatrical critic. He did actually contribute four articles to The Champion. Keats’s favorite of Hunt’s essays, A Now, contains several passages composed by Keats. Mr. Forman considers that “the greater part of the paper is so much in the taste and humor of Keats” that he is justified in including it in his edition of Keats. He has also called attention to a passage in Keats’s letter to Haydon of April 10, 1818, which bears a striking likeness to Hunt’s occasional essay style: “The Hedges by this time are beginning to leaf—Cats are becoming more vociferous—Young Ladies who wear Watches are always looking at them. Women about forty-five think the Season very backward.”

The Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influences in spirit, diction and versification. There are epistles and sonnets in the manner of Hunt. I stood tiptoe upon a little hill opens the volume with a motto from the Story of Rimini. The Specimen of an Induction and Calidore so nearly approach Hunt’s work in manner, that they might easily be mistaken for it. Sleep and Poetry attacks French models as Hunt had previously done. The colloquial style of certain passages is significant of Hunt’s influence upon the poems. A few examples are:

“To peer about upon variety.”[160]
“Or by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves
Guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves.”[161]
“The ripples seem right glad to reach those cresses.”[162]
“... you just now are stooping
To pick up the keepsake intended for me.”[163]
“Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers.”[164]
“The evening weather was so bright, and clear,
That men of health were of unusual cheer.”[165]
“Linger awhile upon some bending planks
That lean against a streamlet’s rushy banks,
And watch intently Nature’s gentle doings:
They will be found softer than the ring-dove’s cooings.”[166]
“The lamps that from the high roof’d wall were pendant
And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.”[167]
“Or on the wavy grass outstretch’d supinely,
Pry ’mong the stars, to strive to think divinely.”[168]

The following are infelicitous passages reflecting Leigh Hunt’s bad taste, especially in the description of physical appearance, or of situations involving emotion:

“... what amorous and fondling nips
They gave each other’s cheeks.”[169]
“... some lady sweet
Who cannot feel for cold her tender feet.”[170]
“Rein in the swelling of his ample might.”[171]
“Nor will a bee buzz round two swelling peaches.”[172]
“... What a kiss,
What gentle squeeze he gave each lady’s hand!
How tremblingly their delicate ankles spann’d!
Into how sweet a trance his soul was gone,
While whisperings of affection
Made him delay to let their tender feet
Come to the earth; with an incline so sweet
From their low palfreys o’er his neck they bent:
And whether there were tears of languishment,
Or that the evening dew had pearl’d their tresses,
He felt a moisture on his cheek and blesses
With lips that tremble, and with glistening eye,
All the soft luxury
That nestled in his arms.”[173]
“... Add too, the sweetness
Of thy honey’d voice; the neatness
Of thine ankle, lightly turned:
With those beauties, scarce discern’d
Kept with such sweet privacy,
That they seldom meet the eye
Of the little loves that fly
Round about with eager pry.”[174]

Descriptive passages in the Huntian style are not infrequent: the opening lines from the Imitation of Spenser[175] are much nearer to Hunt than to Spenser.

“Now morning from her orient chamber came,
And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill,
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,
Silv’ring the untainted gushes of its rill;
Which, pure from mossy beds, did down distil
And after parting beds of simple flowers,
By many streams a little lake did fill,
Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,
And in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.”[176]

These lines of Calidore show a like resemblance:

“He bares his forehead to the cool blue sky,
And smiles at the far clearness all around,
Until his heart is well nigh over wound,
And turns for calmness to the pleasant green
Of easy slopes, and shadowy trees that lean
So elegantly o’er the waters’ brim
And show their blossoms trim.”[177]

A third is:

“Across the lawny fields, and pebbly water.”

Single phrases showing the influence of Hunt[178] are: “airy feel,” “patting the flowing hair,” “A Man of elegance,” “sweet-lipped ladies,” “grateful the incense,” “modest pride,” “a sun-beamy tale of a wreath,” “soft humanity,” “leafy luxury,” “pillowy silkiness,” “swelling apples,” “the very pleasant rout,” “forms of elegance.”

The following passages apparently bear as close a resemblance to each other as it is possible to find by the comparison of individual passages from the works of the two men:

“The sidelong view of swelling leafiness
Which the glad setting sun in gold doth dress”[179]

compare with:

“And every hill, in passing one by one
Gleamed out with twinkles of the golden sun:
For leafy was the road, with tall array.”[180]

The Epistles are strikingly like Hunt’s epistles in spirit, diction and metre. Mr. Colvin has pointed out that the one addressed To George Felton Mathew was written in November, 1815, before Keats had met Hunt and before the publication of the latter’s epistles;[181] but Keats may have known them at the time in manuscript through Clarke. The resemblances may also have been due, in part, as in other points of comparison, to an innate similarity of thought and feeling.

That Hunt’s habit of sonneteering and his preference for the Petrarcan form influenced Keats, is attested by the similarity of the latter’s sonnets to Hunt’s in form, subjects, and[Pg 56 & 57] allusions, and by the direct references[182] to Hunt. On the Grasshopper and the Cricket[183] and To the Nile[184] were written in contest with Hunt. To Spenser is a refusal to comply with Hunt’s request that he should write a sonnet on Spenser.[185] The title of On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, The Story of Rimini[186] speaks for itself.[187]

To put it briefly, the Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influence in more ways than any equal number of the young poet’s later verses. It is seen in Keats’s subject matter[188] and allusions; in his adoption of a colloquial style and diction; in his absorption of Hunt’s spirit in the treatment of nature and in his attitude toward women; and in his imitation and exaggerated use of the free heroic couplet in Sleep and Poetry, I stood tiptoe, Specimen of an Induction and other poems.

Of the poem Lines on seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair, written in January, 1818, Keats wrote in a letter to Bailey: “I was at Hunt’s the other day, and he surprised me with a real authenticated lock of Milton’s hair. I know you would like what I wrote thereon, so here it is—as they say of a Sheep in a Nursery Book.... This I did at Hunt’s, at his request—perhaps I should have done something better alone and at home.”[189] Leigh Hunt’s three sonnets on the same subject, published in Foliage, have been already spoken of in the preceding chapter.

Endymion shows a decided decrease in the ascendancy of Hunt’s mind over Keats, for the sway of his intellectual supremacy had been shaken before suspicions arose in Keats’s mind as to the disinterestedness of his motives. What influence lingers is seen in the general theory of versification and in the diction, with some trace in matters of taste. A marvellous luxury of imagery, glimpses into the heights and depths of nature, an absorbing love of Greek fable, a deeper infusion of the ideal have superseded what Mr. Colvin has called the “sentimental chirp” of Hunt.[190] Specific passages in Endymion reminiscent of Hunt are rare, but Book III, ll. 23-30 recalls the general descriptive style in the Descent of Liberty and summarizes in a few lines pages of Hunt’s diffuse, spectacular imagery. Once or twice Keats seems to have fallen into the colloquial manner in dialogue:

“But a poor Naiad, I guess not. Farewell!
I have a ditty for my hollow cell.”[191]

Again:

“I own
This may sound strangely: but when, dearest girl,
Thou seest it for my happiness, no pearl
Will trespass down those cheeks. Companion fair!
Wilt be content to dwell with her, to share
This sister’s love with me? Like one resign’d
And bent by circumstance, and thereby blind
In self-commitment, thus that meek unknown:
‘Aye, but a buzzing by my ears has flown,
Of jubilee to Dian:—truth I heard?
Well then, I see there is no little bird.’”[192]

Occasionally there are passages in the bad taste of Hunt, as this example:

“Enchantress! tell me by this soft embrace,
By the most soft completion of thy face,
Those lips, O slippery blisses, twinkling eyes,
And by these tenderest, milky sovereignties—
These tenderest, and by the nectar wine,
The passion—”[193]

Likewise:

“O that I
Were rippling round her dainty fairness now,
Circling about her waist, and striving how
To entice her to a dive! then stealing in
Between her luscious lips and eyelids thin.”[194]

In July, 1820, appeared the volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems. The lingering influence of Hunt is seen in a fondness for the short poetic tale, in the direct and simple narrative style, and in the return in Lamia to the use of the heroic couplet; but that, along with the other poems of the volume, is free from the Huntian eccentricities of manner and diction found in Keats’s earlier works. He had come into his own. In treatment, Lamia is almost faultless in technique and in matters of taste; although Mr. Colvin has pointed out as an exception the first fifteen lines of the second book, which he says have Leigh Hunt’s “affected ease and fireside triviality.”[195] One of the few occurrences of Hunt’s manner is seen in the Eve of St. Agnes.

“Paining with eloquence her balmy side.”[196]

The famous passage in the Eve of St. Agnes describing all manner of luscious edibles is very suggestive of one in Hunt’s Bacchus and Ariadne which enumerates articles of the same kind.[197] It is in this latter poem and in the Story of Rimini that Hunt’s power of description most nearly approximates to that of Keats. In 1831, in the Gentle Armour, Hunt is the imitator of Keats, as Mr. Colvin has already pointed out.[198]

The peculiarities of Keats’s diction are, in the main, two-fold, and may each be traced to a direct influence: first, archaisms in the manner of Spenser[199] and Chatterton; second, colloquialisms and deliberate departures from established usage in the employment and formation of words, in imitation of Leigh Hunt. Keats’s theory so far as he had one, is set forth in a passage in one of his letters: “I shall never become attached to a foreign idiom, so as to put it into my writings. The Paradise Lost, though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language. It should be kept as it is, unique, a curiosity, a beautiful and grand curosity, the most remarkable production of the world; a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations. The purest English, I think—or what ought to be the purest—is Chatterton’s.”[200]

Keats’s Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influence in diction more strongly than any of his later works. In the majority of instances, this influence is reflected in the principles of usage rather than in the actual usages, although words and phrases used by Hunt are occasionally found in the writings of Keats. The tendency to a colloquial vocabulary is seen in such words and combinations as jaunty, right glad, balmy pain, leafy luxury,[201] delicious,[202] tasteful, gentle doings, gentle livers, soft floatings, frisky leaps, lawny mantle, patting, busy spirits. Among these words, leafy, balmy, lawny, patting, nest, tiptoe, and variations of “taste” were special favorites with Hunt. A few expressions only of this kind, as “nest,” “honey feel,” “infant’s gums,” are found in Endymion, and almost none at all in the later poems.

Keats used peculiar words with so much greater felicity and in so much greater profusion than Hunt, exceeding in richness and individuality of vocabulary most of the poets of his own time, that one is forced to believe that Spenser’s influence rather than Hunt’s was dominant here. Breaches of taste are confined almost entirely to the Poems of 1817.

Ordinary words used peculiarly include “nips” (they gave each other’s cheeks), “core” (for heart) and “luxury”[203] (with a wrong connotation), nouns and adjectives employed as verbs, and verbs as nouns and adjectives. These devices likewise cannot be credited to Hunt without reservation, since both Spenser and Milton used them; but there is little doubt that in this instance Hunt was an inciting and sustaining influence. Keats resorted to such artifices frequently and continued to do so to the end. Instances of nouns and adjectives employed as verbs are: pennanc’d, luting, passion’d, neighbour’d, syllabling, companion’d, labrynth, anguish’d, poesied, vineyard’d, woof’d, loaned, medicin’d, zon’d, mesh, pleasure, legion’d, companion, green’d, gordian’d, character’d, finn’d, forest’d, tusk’d, monitor. Verbs employed as nouns and adjectives are: shine, which occurs five times, feel, seeing, hush, pry and amaze.More examples of coined compounds, nouns and adjectives, are to be found in Keats than in Hunt; in his better work as well as in his early productions. A few are: cirque-couchant, milder-mooned, tress-lifting, flitter-winged, silk-pillowed, death-neighing, break-covert, palsy-twitching, high-sorrowful, sea-foamy, amber-fretted, sweet-lipped, lush-leaved.

The last principle is the coining, or choice of, adjectives in y and ing; of adverbs in ly, when, in many instances, adjectives and adverbs already existed formed on the same stem. The frequent use of words with these weak endings gives a very diffuse effect at times in Keats’s early poems. The following are examples: fenny, fledgy, rushy, lawny, liny, nervy, pipy, paly, palmy, towery, sluicy, surgy, scummy, mealy, sparry, heathy, rooty, slumbery, bowery, bloomy, boundly, palmy, surgy, spermy, ripply, spangly, spherey, orby, oozy, skeyey, clayey, and plashy.[204] Adjectives in ing are: cheering, hushing, breeding, combing, dumpling, sphering, tenting, toying, baaing, far-spooming, peering (hand), searing (hand), shelving, serpenting. Adverbs are: scantly, elegantly, refreshingly, freshening (lave), hoveringly, greyly, cooingly, silverly, refreshfully, whitely, drowningly, wingedly, sighingly, windingly, bearingly.

These statements are not very conclusive proof of the frequent occurrences of the same words in the poems of the two men. They are questionable even in regard to the principles of usage themselves, since poets of the same period or young poets may possess the same tendencies. Yet in the light of their relations already discussed the similarity of a number of principles seems convincing proof that Hunt influenced Keats considerably in the principles of diction in his first volume and occasionally in the selection of individual words; and that Keats never entirely freed himself from some of Hunt’s peculiarities. Shelley, in writing of Hyperion to Mrs. Hunt, spoke of the “bad sort of style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy that they are imitating Hunt and Wordsworth.”[205] Medwin reported Shelley as saying “We are certainly indebted to the Lakists for a more simple and natural phraseology; but the school that has sprung out of it, have spawned a set of words neither Chaucerian nor Spencerian (sic), words such as ‘gib,’ and ‘flush,’ ‘whiffling,’ ‘perking up,’ ‘swirling,’ ‘lightsome and brightsome’ and hundreds of others.”[206]

Keats, following the lead of Hunt, used the free heroic couplet in several of the 1817 poems with a license even greater than Hunt’s. In Endymion he indulged in further vagaries of rhythm and metre that Hunt never dreamed of and in fact greatly disapproved of. Hunt said that “Endymion had no versification.”[207] In its want of couplet and line units, this is not very far from the truth. Writing of it again in 1828, he says: “The great fault of Endymion next to its unpruned luxuriance, (or before it, rather, for it was not a fault on the right side,) was the wilfulness of its rhymes. The author had a just contempt for the monotonous termination of everyday couplets; he broke up his lines in order to distribute the rhyme properly; but going only upon the ground of his contempt, and not having settled with himself any principles of versification, the very exuberance of his ideas led him to make use of the first rhymes that offered; so that, by a new meeting of effects, the extreme was artificial, and much more obtrusive than the one under the old system. Dryden modestly thought, that a rhyme had often helped him to a thought. Mr. Keats in the tyranny of his wealth, forced his rhymes to help him, whether they would or not; and they obeyed him, in the most singular manner, with equal promptitude and ungainliness.”[208] Endymion has been thought by some critics, to have been written under the metrical influence of Chamberlayne’s Pharronida. In the number of run-on lines and couplets—a scheme nearer blank verse than the couplet—there is certainly a striking correspondence. Mr. Forman thinks that Keats knew the poem. Mr. Colvin and Mr. De Selincourt can see no real likeness. There is no proof as yet discovered that Keats ever heard of it.

In Lamia, after the extreme reaction in Endymion, Keats approached nearer to the classic form of the couplet used by Dryden, but still with greater freedom in structure than appears in either Dryden or Hunt. From the evidence of Brown it is probable that Keats imitated Dryden directly and not through the medium of Hunt’s work, but it is very likely that Hunt directed him there in the first instance for a model. Mr. Palgrave says of the metre of Lamia that Keats “admirably found and sustained the balance between a blank verse treatment of the ‘Heroic’ and the epigrammatic form carried to such perfection by Pope.”[209] Leigh Hunt said that “the lines seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty like sea nymphs luxuriating through the water.”[210]

In conclusion, Keats’s early and late employment of the couplet was marked always by greater freedom in the use of run-on couplets and lines, and in the handling of the cÆsura than Dryden’s or Hunt’s; he was at first slower than Hunt to employ the triplet and the Alexandrine, but he later adopted them in a larger measure; and he introduced the run-on paragraph and the hemistich independently of Hunt.

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