the bibliotaph and other people by leon h. vincent boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company the riverside press, cambridge copyright, , by leon h. vincent all rights reserved to my father the rev. b. t. vincent, d.d. this little volume is dedicated with love and admiration four of these papers--the first bibliotaph, and the notes on keats, gautier, and stevenson's _st. ives_--are reprinted from the _atlantic monthly_ by the kind permission of the editor. i am also indebted to the literary editor of the _springfield republican_ and to the editors of _poet-lore_, respectively, for allowing me to reprint the paper on _thomas hardy_ and the lecture on _an elizabethan novelist_. contents the bibliotaph: a portrait not wholly imaginary the bibliotaph: his friends, scrap-books, and 'bins' last words on the bibliotaph thomas hardy a reading in the letters of john keats an elizabethan novelist the autobiography of a fair-minded man concerning a red waistcoat stevenson: the vagabond and the philosopher stevenson's st. ives the bibliotaph and other people the bibliotaph: a portrait not wholly imaginary a popular and fairly orthodox opinion concerning book-collectors is that their vices are many, their virtues of a negative sort, and their ways altogether past finding out. yet the most hostile critic is bound to admit that the fraternity of bibliophiles is eminently picturesque. if their doings are inscrutable, they are also romantic; if their vices are numerous, the heinousness of those vices is mitigated by the fact that it is possible to sin humorously. regard him how you will, the sayings and doings of the collector give life and color to the pages of those books which treat of books. he is amusing when he is purely an imaginary creature. for example, there was one thomas blinton. every one who has ever read the volume called _books and bookmen_ knows about thomas blinton. he was a man who wickedly adorned his volumes with morocco bindings, while his wife 'sighed in vain for some old _point d'alençon lace_.' he was a man who was capable of bidding fifteen pounds for a foppens edition of the essays of montaigne, though fifteen pounds happened to be 'exactly the amount which he owed his plumber and gas-fitter, a worthy man with a large family.' from this fictitious thomas blinton all the way back to richard heber, who was very real, and who piled up books as other men heap together vulgar riches, book-collectors have been a picturesque folk. the name of heber suggests the thought that all men who buy books are not bibliophiles. he alone is worthy the title who acquires his volumes with something like passion. one may buy books like a gentleman, and that is very well. one may buy books like a gentleman and a scholar, which counts for something more. but to be truly of the elect one must resemble richard heber, and buy books like a gentleman, a scholar, and a madman. you may find an account of heber in an old file of _the gentleman's magazine_. he began in his youth by making a library of the classics. then he became interested in rare english books, and collected them _con amore_ for thirty years. he was very rich, and he had never given hostages to fortune; it was therefore possible for him to indulge his fine passion without stint. he bought only the best books, and he bought them by thousands and by tens of thousands. he would have held as foolishness that saying from the greek which exhorts one to do nothing too much. according to heber's theory, it is impossible to have too many good books. usually one library is supposed to be enough for one man. heber was satisfied only with eight libraries, and then he was hardly satisfied. he had a library in his house at hodnet. 'his residence in pimlico, where he died, was filled, like magliabecchi's at florence, with books from the top to the bottom; every chair, every table, every passage containing piles of erudition.' he had a house in york street which was crowded with books. he had a library in oxford, one at paris, one at antwerp, one at brussels, and one at ghent. the most accurate estimate of his collections places the number at , volumes. heber is believed to have spent half a million dollars for books. after his death the collections were dispersed. the catalogue was published in twelve parts, and the sales lasted over three years. heber had a witty way of explaining why he possessed so many copies of the same book. when taxed with the sin of buying duplicates he replied in this manner: 'why, you see, sir, no man can comfortably do without _three_ copies of a book. one he must have for his show copy, and he will probably keep it at his country house; another he will require for his own use and reference; and unless he is inclined to part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends.' in the pursuit of a coveted volume heber was indefatigable. he was not of those sybaritic buyers who sit in their offices while agents and dealers do the work. 'on hearing of a curious book he has been known to put himself into the mail-coach, and travel three, four, or five hundred miles to obtain it, fearful to trust his commission to a letter.' he knew the solid comfort to be had in reading a book catalogue. dealers were in the habit of sending him the advance sheets of their lists. he ordered books from his death-bed, and for anything we know to the contrary died with a catalogue in his fingers. a life devoted to such a passion is a stumbling-block to the practical man, and to the philistine foolishness. yet you may hear men praised because up to the day of death they were diligent in business,--business which added to life nothing more significant than that useful thing called money. thoreau used to say that if a man spent half his time in the woods for the love of the woods he was in danger of being looked upon as a loafer; but if he spent all his time as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he was regarded as an upright and industrious citizen. heber had a genius for friendship as well as for gathering together choice books. sir walter scott addressed verses to him. professor porson wrote emendations for him in his favorite copy of _athenæus_. to him was inscribed dr. ferrier's poetical epistle on bibliomania. his virtues were celebrated by dibdin and by burton. in brief, the sketch of heber in the_ gentleman's magazine_ for january, , contains a list of forty-six names,--all men of distinction by birth, learning, or genius, and all men who were proud to call richard heber friend. he was a mighty hunter of books. he was genial, scholarly, generous. out-of-door men will be pleased to know that he was active physically. he was a tremendous walker, and enjoyed tiring out his bailiff by an all-day tramp. of many good things said of him this is one of the best: 'the learned and curious, whether rich or poor, have always free access to his library.' thus was it possible for scott very truthfully to say to heber, 'thy volumes open as thy heart.' no life of this prince of book-hunters has been written, i believe. some one with access to the material, and a sympathy with the love of books as books, should write a memoir of heber the magnificent. it ought not to be a large volume, but it might well be about the size of henry stevens's _recollections of james_ _lenox_. and if it were equally readable it were a readable book indeed. dibdin thought that heber's tastes were so catholic as to make it difficult to classify him among hunters of books. the implication is that most men can be classified. they have their specialties. what pleases one collector much pleases another but little or not at all. collectors differ radically in the attitude they take with respect to their volumes. one man buys books to read, another buys them to gloat over, a third that he may fortify them behind glass doors and keep the key in his pocket. therefore have learned words been devised to make apparent the varieties of motive and taste. these words begin with _biblio_; you may have a _biblio_ almost anything. two interesting types of maniac are known respectively as the bibliotaph and the biblioclast. a biblioclast is one who indulges himself in the questionable pleasure of mutilating books in order more sumptuously to fit out a particular volume. the disease is english in origin, though some of the worst cases have been observed in america. clergymen and presidents of colleges have been known to be seized with it. the victim becomes more or less irresponsible, and presently runs mad. such an one was john bagford, of diabolical memory, who mutilated not less than ten thousand volumes to form his vast collection of title-pages. john bagford died an unrepentant sinner, lamenting with one of his later breaths that he could not live long enough to get hold of a genuine caxton and rip the initial page out of that. the bibliotaph buries books; not literally, but sometimes with as much effect as if he had put his books underground. there are several varieties of him. the dog-in-the-manger bibliotaph is the worst; he uses his books but little himself, and allows others to use them not at all. on the other hand, a man may be a bibliotaph simply from inability to get at his books. he may be homeless, a bachelor, a denizen of boarding-houses, a wanderer upon the face of the earth. he may keep his books in storage or accumulate them in the country, against the day when he shall have a town house with proper library. the most genial lover of books who has walked city streets for many a day was a bibliotaph. he accumulated books for years in the huge garret of a farmhouse standing upon the outskirts of a westchester county village. a good relative 'mothered' the books for him in his absence. when the collection outgrew the garret it was moved into a big village store. it was the wonder of the place. the country folk flattened their noses against the panes and tried to peer into the gloom beyond the half-drawn shades. the neighboring stores were in comparison miracles of business activity. on one side was a harness-shop; on the other a nondescript establishment at which one might buy anything, from sunbonnets and corsets to canned salmon and fresh eggs. between these centres of village life stood the silent tomb for books. the stranger within the gates had this curiosity pointed out to him along with the new high school and the soldiers' monument. by shading one's eyes to keep away the glare of the light, it was possible to make out tall carved oaken cases with glass doors, which lined the walls. they gave distinction to the place. it was not difficult to understand the point of view of the dressmaker from across the way who stepped over to satisfy her curiosity concerning the stranger, and his concerning the books, and who said in a friendly manner as she peered through a rent in the adjoining shade, 'it's almost like a cathedral, ain't it?' to an inquiry about the owner of the books she replied that he was brought up in that county; that there were people around there who said that he had been an exhorter years ago; her impression was that now he was a 'political revivalist,' if i knew what that was. the phrase seemed hopeless, but light was thrown upon it when, later, i learned that this man of many buried books gave addresses upon the responsibilities of citizenship, upon the higher politics, and upon themes of like character. they said that he was humorous. the farmers liked to hear him speak. but it was rumored that he went to colleges, too. the dressmaker thought that the buying of so many books was 'wicked.' 'he goes from new york to beersheba, and from chicago to dan, buying books. never reads 'em because he hardly ever comes here.' it became possible to identify the bibliotaph of the country store with a certain mature youth who some time since 'gave his friends the slip, chose land-travel or seafaring,' and has not returned to build the town house with proper library. they who observed him closely thought that he resembled heber in certain ways. perhaps this fact alone would justify an attempt at a verbal portrait. but the additional circumstance that, in days when people with the slightest excuse therefor have themselves regularly photographed, this old-fashioned youth refused to allow his 'likeness' to be taken,--this circumstance must do what it can to extenuate minuteness of detail in the picture, as well as over-attention to points of which a photograph would have taken no account. you are to conceive of a man between thirty-eight and forty years of age, big-bodied, rapidly acquiring that rotund shape which is thought becoming to bishops, about six feet high though stooping a little, prodigiously active, walking with incredible rapidity, having large limbs, large feet, large though well-shaped and very white hands; in short, a huge fellow physically, as big of heart as of body, and, in the affectionate thought of those who knew him best, as big of intellect as of heart. his head might be described as leonine. it was a massive head, covered with a tremendous mane of brown hair. this was never worn long, but it was so thick and of such fine texture that it constituted a real beauty. he had no conceit of it, being innocent of that peculiar german type of vanity which runs to hair, yet he could not prevent people from commenting on his extraordinary hirsute adornment. their occasional remarks excited his mirth. if they spoke of it again, he would protest. once, among a small party of his closest friends, the conversation turned upon the subject of hair, and then upon the beauty of _his_ hair; whereupon he cried out, 'i am embarrassed by this unnecessary display of interest in my samsonian assertiveness.' he loved to tease certain of his acquaintances who, though younger than himself, were rapidly losing their natural head-covering. he prodded them with ingeniously worded reflections upon their unhappy condition. he would take as a motto erasmus's unkind salutation, 'bene sit tibi cum tuo calvitio,' and multiply amusing variations upon it. he delighted in sending them prescriptions and advertisements clipped from newspapers and medical journals. he quoted at them the remark of a pale, bald, blond young literary aspirant, who, seeing him, the bibliotaph, passing by, exclaimed audibly and almost passionately, 'oh, i perfectly adore _hair_!' of his clothes it might be said that he did not wear them, but rather dwelt at large in them. they were made by high-priced tailors and were fashionably cut, but he lived in them so violently--that is, traveled so much, walked so much, sat so long and so hard, gestured so earnestly, and carried in his many pockets such an extraordinary collection of notebooks, indelible pencils, card-cases, stamp-boxes, penknives, gold toothpicks, thermometers, and what not--that within twenty-four hours after he had donned new clothes all the artistic merits of the garments were obliterated; they were, from every point of view, hopelessly degenerate. he was a scrupulously clean man, but there was a kind of civilized wildness in his appearance which astonished people; and in perverse moments he liked to terrify those who knew him but little by affirming that he was a near relative of christopher smart, and then explaining in mirth-provoking phrases that one of the arguments used for proving smart's insanity was that he did not love clean linen. his appetite was large, as became a large and active person. he was a very valiant trencher-man; and yet he could not have been said to love eating for eating's sake. he ate when he was hungry, and found no difficulty in being hungry three times a day. he should have been an englishman, for he enjoyed a late supper. in the proper season this consisted of a bountiful serving of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, with a glass of lemonade. as a variant upon the beverage he took milk. he was the only man i have known, whether book-hunter or layman, who could sleep peacefully upon a supper of cucumbers and milk. there is probably no occult relation between first editions and onions. the bibliotaph was mightily pleased with both: the one, he said, appealed to him æsthetically, the other dietetically. he remarked of some particularly large spanish onions that there was 'a globular wholesomeness about them which was very gratifying;' and after eating one he observed expansively that he felt 'as if he had swallowed the earth and the fullness thereof.' his easy, good-humored exaggerations and his odd comments upon the viands made him a pleasant table companion: as when he described a parker house sultana roll by saying that 'it looked like the sanguinary output of the whole crimean war.' high-priced restaurants did not please him as well as humbler and less obtrusive places. but it was all one,--delmonico's, the bellevue, a stool in the twelfth street market, or a german café on van buren street. the humors of certain eating-houses gave him infinite delight. he went frequently to the diner's own home, the proprietor of which, being both cook and christian, had hit upon the novel plan of giving scriptural advice and practical suggestions by placards on the walls. the bibliotaph enjoyed this juxtaposition of signs: the first read, 'the very god of peace sanctify you wholly;' the second, 'look out for your hat and coat.' the bibliotaph had no home, and was reputed to live in his post-office box. he contributed to the support of at least three clubs, but was very little seen at any one of them. he enjoyed the large cities, and was contented in whichever one he happened to find himself. he was emphatically a city man, but what city was of less import. he knew them all, and was happy in each. he had his favorite hotel, his favorite bath, his work, bushels of newspapers and periodicals, friends who rejoiced in his coming as children in the near advent of christmas, and finally book-shops in which to browse at his pleasure. it was interesting to hear him talk about city life. one of his quaint mannerisms consisted in modifying a well-known quotation to suit his conversational needs. 'why, sir,' he would remark, 'fleet street has a very animated appearance, but i think the full tide of human existence is at the corner of madison and state.' his knowledge of cities was both extensive and peculiar. i have heard him name in order all the hotels on broadway, beginning at the lower end and coming up as far as hotels exist, branching off upon the parallel and cross streets where there were noted caravansaries, and connecting every name with an event of importance, or with the life and fortunes of some noted man who had been guest at that particular inn. this was knowledge more becoming in a guide, perhaps, but it will illustrate the encyclopædic fullness of his miscellaneous information. as was natural and becoming in a man born within forty miles of the metropolis, he liked best the large cities of the east, and was least content in small western cities. but this was the outcome of no illiberal prejudice, and there was a quizzical smile upon his lips and a teasing look in his eyes when he bantered a westerner. 'a man,' he would sometimes say, 'may come by the mystery of childbirth into omaha or kansas city and be content, but he can't come by boston, new york, or philadelphia.' then, a moment later, paraphrasing his remark, he would add, 'to go to omaha or kansas city by way of new york and philadelphia is like being translated heavenward with such violence that one _passes through_--into a less comfortable region!' strange to say, the conversation of this most omnivorous of book-collectors was less of books than of men. true, he was deeply versed in bibliographical details and dangerously accurate in his talk about them, but, after all, the personality back of the book was the supremely interesting thing. he abounded in anecdote, and could describe graphically the men he had met, the orators he had heard, the occasions of importance where he had been an interested spectator. his conversation was delightfully fresh and racy because of the vividness of the original impressions, the unusual force of the ideas which were the copies of these impressions, and the fine artistic sense which enabled him to determine at once what points should be omitted, and what words should be used most fittingly to express the ideas retained. he had no pride in his conversational power. he was always modest, but never diffident. i have seen him sit, a respectful listener, absolutely silent, while some ordinary chatterer held the company's attention for an hour. many good talkers are unhappy unless they have the privilege of exercising their gifts. not so he. sometimes he had almost to be compelled to begin. on such occasions one of his intimates was wont to quote from boswell: 'leave him to me, sir; i'll make him rear.' the superficial parts of his talk were more easily retained. in mere banter, good-humored give-and-take, that froth and bubble of conversational intercourse, he was delightful. his hostess, the wife of a well-known comedian, apologized to him for having to move him out of the large guest-chamber into another one, smaller and higher up,--this because of an unexpected accession of visitors. he replied that it did not incommode him; and as for being up another flight of stairs, 'it was a comfort to him to know that when he was in a state of somnolent helplessness he was as near heaven as it was possible to get in an actor's house.' the same lady was taking him roundly to task on some minor point in which he had quite justly offended her; whereupon he turned to her husband and said, 'jane worships but little at the shrine of politeness because so much of her time is mortgaged to the shrine of truth.' when asked to suggest an appropriate and brief cablegram to be sent to a gentleman who on the following day would become sixty years of age, and who had taken full measure of life's joys, he responded, 'send him this: "_you don't look it, but you've lived like it._"' his skill in witty retort often expressed itself by accepting a verbal attack as justified, and elaborating it in a way to throw into shadow the assault of the critic. at a small and familiar supper of bookish men, when there was general dissatisfaction over an expensive but ill-made salad, he alone ate with apparent relish. the host, who was of like mind with his guests, said, 'the bibliotaph doesn't care for the quality of his food, if it has filling power.' to which he at once responded, 'you merely imply that i am like a robin: i eat cherries when i may, and worms when i must.' his inscriptions in books given to his friends were often singularly happy. he presented a copy of _lowell's letters_ to a gentleman and his wife. the first volume was inscribed to the husband as follows:-- 'to mr. ---- ----, who is to the owner of the second volume of these letters what this volume is to that: so delightful as to make one glad that there's another equally as good, if not better.' in volume two was the inscription to the wife, worded in this manner:-- 'to mrs. ---- ----, without whom the owner of the first volume of these letters would be as that first volume without this one: interesting, but incomplete.' perhaps this will illustrate his quickness to seize upon ever so minute an occasion for the exercise of his humor. a young woman whom he admired, being brought up among brothers, had received the nickname, half affectionately and half patronizingly bestowed, of 'the kid.' among her holiday gifts for a certain year was a book from the bibliotaph, a copy of _old-fashioned roses_, with this dedication: 'to a kid, had abraham possessed which, isaac had been the burnt-offering.' it is as a buyer and burier of books that the subject of this paper showed himself in most interesting light. he said that the time to make a library was when one was young. he held the foolish notion that a man does not purchase books after he is fifty; i shall expect to see him ransacking the shops after he is seventy, if he shall survive his eccentricities of diet that long. he was an omnivorous buyer, picking up everything he could lay his hands upon. yet he had a clearly defined motive for the acquisition of every volume. however absurd the purchase might seem to the bystander, he, at any rate, could have given six cogent reasons why he must have that particular book. he bought according to the condition of his purse at a given time. if he had plenty of money, it would be expensive publications, like those issued by the grolier club. if he was financially depressed, he would hunt in the out-of-door shelves of well-known philadelphia bookshops. it was marvelous to see what things, new and old, he was able to extract from a ten-cent alcove. part of the secret lay in this idea: to be a good book-hunter one must not be too dainty; one must not be afraid of soiling one's hands. he who observes the clouds shall not reap, and he who thinks of his cuffs is likely to lose many a bookish treasure. our bibliotaph generally parted company with his cuffs when he began hunting for books. how many times have i seen those cuffs with the patent fasteners sticking up in the air, as if reaching out helplessly for their owner; the owner in the mean time standing high upon a ladder which creaked under his weight, humming to himself as he industriously examined every volume within reach. this ability to live without cuffs made him prone to reject altogether that orthodox bit of finish to a toilet. i have known him to spend an entire day in new york between club, shops, and restaurant, with one cuff on, and the other cuff--its owner knew not where. he differed from heber in that he was not 'a classical scholar of the old school,' but there were many points in which he resembled the famous english collector. heber would have acknowledged him as a son if only for his energy, his unquenchable enthusiasm, and the exactness of his knowledge concerning the books which he pretended to know at all. for not alone is it necessary that a collector should know precisely what book he wants; it is even more important that he should be able to know a book _as_ the book he wants when he sees it. it is a lamentable thing to have fired in the dark, and then discover that you have shot a wandering mule, and not the noble game you were in pursuit of. one cannot take his reference library with him to the shops. the tests, the criteria, must be carried in the head. the last and most inappropriate moment for getting up bibliographical lore is that moment when the pressing question is, to buy or not to buy. master slender, in the play, learned the difficulties which beset a man whose knowledge is in a book, and whose book is at home upon a shelf. it is possible to sympathize with him when he exclaims, 'i had rather than forty shillings i had my book of songs and sonnets here!' in making love there are other resources; all wooers are not as ill equipped as slender was. but in hunting rare books the time will be sure to come when a man may well cry, 'i had rather than forty dollars i had my list of first editions with me!' the bibliotaph carried much accurate information in his head, but he never traveled without a thesaurus in his valise. it was a small volume containing printed lists of the first editions of rare books. the volume was interleaved; the leaves were crowded with manuscript notes. an appendix contained a hundred and more autograph letters from living authors, correcting, supplementing, or approving the printed bibliographies. even these authors' own lists were accurately corrected. they needed it in not a few instances. for it is a wise author who knows his own first edition. men may write remarkable books, and understand but little the virtues of their books from the collector's point of view. men are seldom clever in more ways than one. z. jackson was a practical printer, and his knowledge as a printer enabled him to correct sundry errors in the first folio of shakespeare. but z. jackson, as the rev. george dawson observes, 'ventured beyond the composing-case, and, having corrected blunders made by the printers, corrected excellencies made by the poet.' it was amusing to discover, by means of these autograph letters, how seldom a good author was an equally good bibliographer. and this is as it should be. the author's business is, not to take account of first editions, but to make books of such virtue that bibliomaniacs shall be eager to possess the first editions thereof. it is proverbial that a poet is able to show a farmer things new to him about his own farm. turn a bibliographer loose upon a poet's works, and he will amaze the poet with an account of _his_ own doings. the poet will straightway discover that while he supposed himself to be making 'mere literature' he was in reality contributing to an elaborate and exact science. the bibliotaph was not a blind enthusiast on the subject of first editions. he was one of the few men who understood the exceeding great virtues of second editions. he declared that a man who was so fortunate as to secure a second edition of henry crabb robinson's _diary_ was in better case than he who had bothered himself to obtain a first. when it fell in with his mood to argue against that which he himself most affected, he would quote the childish bit of doggerel beginning 'the first the worst, the second the same,' and then grow eloquent over the dainty templeman hazlitts which are chiefly third editions. he thought it absurd to worry over a first issue of carlyle's _french revolution_ if it were possible to buy at moderate price a copy of the third edition, which is a well-nigh perfect book, 'good to the touch and grateful to the eye.' but this lover of books grew fierce in his special mania if you hinted that it was also foolish to spend a large sum on an _editio princeps_ of _paradise lost_ or of _robinson crusoe_. there are certain authors concerning the desirability of whose first editions it must not be disputed. the singular readiness with which bookish treasures fell into his way astonished less fortunate buyers. rare stevensons dropped into his hand like ripe fruit from a tree. the most inaccessible of pamphlets fawned upon him, begging to be purchased, just as the succulent little roast pigs in _the new paul and virginia_ run about with knives and forks in their sides pleading to be eaten. the bibliotaph said he did not despair of buying poe's _tamerlane_ for twenty-five cents one of these days; and that a rarity he was sure to get sooner or later was a copy of that english newspaper which announced shelley's death under the caption _now he knows whether there is a hell or not_. he unconsciously followed heber in that he disliked large-paper copies. heber would none of them because they took up too much room; their ample borders encroached upon the rights of other books. heber objected to this as prosper mérimée objected to the gigantic english hoopskirts of ,--there was space on regent street for but one woman at a time. original as the bibliotaph was in appearance, manners, habits, he was less striking in what he did than in what he said. it is a pity that no record of his talk exists. it is not surprising that there is no such record, for his habits of wandering precluded the possibility of his making a permanent impression. by the time people had fully awakened to the significance of his presence among them he was gone. so there grew up a legend concerning him, but no true biography. he was like a comet, very shaggy and very brilliant, but he stayed so brief a time in a place that it was impossible for one man to give either the days or the thought to the reproduction of his more serious and considered words. a greater difficulty was involved in the fact that the bibliotaph had many socii, but no fidus achates. moreover, achates, in this instance, would have needed the reportorial powers of a james boswell that he might properly interpret genius to the public. this particular genius illustrated the misfortune of having too great facility in establishing those relations which lie midway between acquaintance and friendship. to put the matter in the form of a paradox, he had so many _friends_ that he had no _friend_. perhaps this is unjust, but friendship has a touch of jealousy and exclusiveness in it. he was too large-natured to say to one of his admirers, 'thou shalt have no other gods save myself;' but there were those among the admirers who were quite prepared to say to him, 'we prefer that thou shalt have no other worshipers in addition to us.' people wondered that he seemed to have no care for a conventional home life. he was taxed with want of sympathy with what makes even a humble home a centre of light and happiness. he denied it, and said to his accusers, 'can you not understand that after a stay in _your_ home i go away with much the feeling that must possess a lusty young calf when his well-equipped mother tells him that henceforth he must find means of sustenance elsewhere?' he professed to have been once in love, but no one believed it. he used to say that his most remarkable experience as a bachelor was in noting the uniformity with which eligible young women passed him by on the other side of the way. and when a married friend offered condolence, with that sleek complacency of manner noteworthy in men who are conscious of being mated for life better than they deserve, the bibliotaph said, with an admiring glance at the wife, 'your sympathy is supererogatory, sir, for i fully expect to become your residuary legatee.' it is most pleasing to think of this unique man 'buffeting his books' in one of those temporary libraries which formed about him whenever he stopped four or five weeks in a place. the shops were rifled of not a few of their choicest possessions, and the spoils carried off to his room. it was a joy to see him display his treasures, a delight to hear him talk of them. he would disarm criticism with respect to the more eccentric purchases by saying, 'you wouldn't approve of this, but _i_ thought it was curious,'--and then a torrent of facts, criticisms, quotations, all bearing upon the particular volume which you were supposed not to like; and so on, hour after hour. there was no limit save that imposed by the receptive capacity of the guest. it reminded one of the word spoken concerning a 'hard sitter at books' of the last century, that he was a literary giant 'born to grapple with whole libraries.' but the fine flavor of those hours spent in hearing him discourse upon books and men is not to be recovered. it is evanescent, spectral, now. this talk was like the improvisation of a musician who is profoundly learned, but has in him a vein of poetry too. the talk and the music strongly appeal to robust minds, and at the same time do not repel the sentimentalist. it is not to be supposed that the bibliotaph pleased every one with whom he came in contact. there were people whom his intellectual potency affected in a disagreeable way. they accused him of applying great mental force to inconsidered trifles. they said it was a misfortune that so much talent was going to waste. but there is no task so easy as criticising an able man's employment of his gifts. the bibliotaph: his friends, scrap-books, and 'bins' to arrive at a high degree of pleasure in collecting a library, one must travel. the bibliotaph regularly traveled in search of his volumes. his theory was that the collector must go to the book, not wait for the book to come to him. no reputable sportsman, he said, would wish the game brought alive to his back-yard for him to kill. half the pleasure was in tracking the quarry to its hiding-place. he himself ordered but seldom from catalogues, and went regularly to and fro among the dealers in books, seeking the volume which his heart desired. he enjoyed those shops where the book-seller kept open house, where the stock was large and surprises were common, where the proprietor was prodigiously well-informed on some points and correspondingly ill-informed on others. he bought freely, never disputed a price, and laid down his cash with the air of a man who believes that unspent money is the root of all evil. these travels brought about three results: the making of friends, the compilation of scrap-books, and the establishment of 'bins.' before speaking of any one of these points, a word on the satisfactions of bibliographical touring. in every town of considerable size, and in many towns of inconsiderable size, are bookshops. it is a poor shop which does not contain at least one good book. this book bides its time, and usually outstays its welcome. but its fate is about its neck. somewhere there is a collector to whom that book is precious. they are made for one another, the collector and the book; and it is astonishing how infrequently they miss of realizing their mutual happiness. the book-seller is a marriage-broker for unwedded books. his business is to find them homes, and take a fee for so doing. sugarman the shadchan was not more zealous than is your vendor of rare books. now, it is a curious fact that the most desirable of bookish treasures are often found where one would be least likely to seek them. montana is a great state, nevertheless one does not think of going to montana for early editions of shakespeare. let the book-hunter inwardly digest the following plain tale of a clergyman and a book of plays. there is a certain collector who is sometimes called 'the bishop.' he is not a bishop, but he may be so designated; coming events have been known to cast conspicuous shadows in the likeness of mitre and crosier. the bishop heard of a man in montana who had an old book of plays with an autograph of william shakespeare pasted in it. being a wise ecclesiastic, he did not exclaim 'tush' and 'fie,' but proceeded at once to go book-hunting in montana. he went by proxy, if not in person; the journey is long. in due time the owner of the volume was found and the book was placed in the bishop's hands for inspection. he tore off the wrappers, and lo! it was a fourth folio of shakespeare excellently well preserved, and with what appeared to be the great dramatist's signature written on a slip of paper and pasted inside the front cover. the problem of the genuineness of that autograph does not concern us. the great fact is that a shakespeare folio turned up in montana. now when he hears some one express desire for a copy of greene's _groatsworth of wit_, or any other rare book of elizabeth's time, the bishop's thoughts fly toward the setting sun. then he smiles a notable kind of smile, and says, 'if i could get away i'd run out to montana and try to pick up a copy for you.' there is a certain gentleman who loves the literature of queen anne's reign. he lives with whigs and tories, vibrates between coffee-house and tea-table. he annoys his daughter by sometimes calling her 'belinda,' and astonishes his wife with his mock-heroic apostrophes to her hood and patches. he reads his _spectator_ at breakfast while other people batten upon newspapers only three hours old. he smiles over the love-letters of richard steele, and reverences the name and the writings of joseph addison. indeed, his devotion to addison is so radical that he has actually been guilty of reading _the campaign_ and the _dialogue on medals_. this gentleman hunted books one day and was not successful. it seemed to him that on this particular afternoon the world was stuffed with allison's histories of europe, and jeffrey's contributions to the _edinburgh review_. his heart was filled with bitterness and his nostrils with dust. books which looked inviting turned out to be twenty-second editions. of fifty things upon his list not one came to light. but it was predestined that he should not go sorrowing to his home. he pulled out from a bottom shelf two musty octavo volumes bound in dark brown leather, and each securely tied with a string; for the covers had been broken from the backs. the titles were invisible, the contents a mystery. the gentleman held the unpromising objects in his hand and meditated upon them. they might be a treatise on conic sections, or a latin grammar, and again they might be a book. he untied the string and opened one of the volumes. was it a breath of summer air from isis that swept out of those pages, which were as white as snow in spite of the lapse of nearly two centuries? he read the title, musarum anglicanarum analecta. the date was . he turned to the table of contents, and his heart gave a contented throb. there was the name he wished to see, j. addison, magd. coll: the name occurred eight times. the dejected collector had found a clean and uncut copy of those two volumes of contemporary latin verse compiled by joseph addison, when he was a young man at oxford, and printed at the sheldonian theatre. addison contributed eight poems to the second volume. the bookseller was willing to take seventy-five cents for the set, and told the gentleman as he did up the package that he was a comfort to the trade. that night the gentleman read _the battle of the pigmies and the cranes_, while his wife read the evening edition of the _lurid paragraph_. now he says to his friends, 'hunt books in the most unpromising places, but make a thorough search. you may not discover a koh-i-noor, but you will be pretty sure to run upon some desirable little thing which gives you pleasure and costs but a trifle.' one effect of this adventure upon himself is that he cannot pass a volume which is tied with a string. he spends his days and saturday nights in tying and untying books with broken covers. even the evidence of a clearly-lettered title upon the back fails to satisfy him. he is restless until he has made a thorough search in the body of the volume. the bibliotaph's own best strokes of fortune were made in out-of-the-way places. but some god was on his side. for at his approach the bibliographical desert blossomed like the rose. he used to hunt books in texas at one period in his life; and out of texas would he come, bringing, so it is said, first editions of george borrow and jane austen. it was maddening to be with him at such times, especially if one had a gift for envy. yet why should one envy him his money, or his unerring hand and eye? he paid for the book, but it was yours to read and to caress so long as you would. if he took it from you it was only that he might pass it on to some other friend. but if that volume once started in the direction of the great tomb of books in westchester county, no power on earth could avail to restore it to the light of day. it is pleasant to meditate upon past journeys with the bibliotaph. he was an incomparable traveling companion, buoyant, philosophic, incapable of fatigue, and never ill. yet it is a tradition current, that he, the mighty, who called himself a friend to physicians, because he never robbed them of their time either in or out of office-hours, once succumbed to that irritating little malady known as car-sickness. he succumbed, but he met his fate bravely and with the colors of his wit flying. the circumstances are these:-- there is a certain railway thoroughfare which justly prides itself upon the beauty of its scenery. this road passes through a hill-country, and what it gains in the picturesque it loses in that rectilinear directness most grateful to the traveler with a sensitive stomach. the bibliotaph often patronized this thoroughfare, and one day it made him sick. as the train swept around a sharp curve, he announced his earliest symptom by saying: 'the conspicuous advantages of this road are that one gets views of the scenery and reviews of his meals.' a few minutes later he suggested that the road would do well to change its name, and hereafter be known as 'the emetic g. and o.' they who were with him proffered sympathy, but he refused to be pitied. he thought he had a remedy. he discovered that by taking as nearly as possible a reclining posture, he got temporary relief. he kept settling more and more till at last he was nearly on his back. then he said: 'if it be true that the lower down we get the more comfortable we are, the basements of hell will have their compensations.' he was too ill to say much after this, but his last word, before the final and complete extinction of his manhood, was, 'the influence of this road is such that employees have been known involuntarily to throw up their jobs.' the bibliotaph invariably excited comment and attention when he was upon his travels. i do not think he altogether liked it. perhaps he neither liked it nor disliked it. he accepted the fact that he was not as other men quite as he would have accepted any indisputable fact. he used occasionally to express annoyance because of the discrepancy between his reputation and appearance; in other words, because he seemed a man of greater fame than he was. he suffered the petty discomforts of being a personage, and enjoyed none of the advantages. he declared that he was quite willing to be much more distinguished or much less conspicuous. what he objected to was the laodicean character of his reputation as set over against the pronounced and even startling character of his looks and manner. he used also to note with amusement how indelible a mark certain early ambitions and tentative studies had made upon him. people invariably took him for a clergyman. they decided this at once and conducted themselves accordingly. he made no protest, but observed that their convictions as to how they should behave in his presence had corollaries in the shape of very definite convictions as to how he should carry himself before them. he thought that such people might be described as moral trainers. they do not profess virtue themselves, but they take a real pleasure in keeping you up to your profession. the bibliotaph had no explanation to give why he was so immediately and invariably accounted as one in orders. he was quite sure that the clerical look was innate, and by no means dependent upon the wearing of a high vest or a joseph parker style of whisker; for once as he sat in the hot room of a turkish bath and in the adamitic simplicity of attire suitable to the temperature and the place, a gentleman who occupied the chair nearest introduced conversation by saying, 'i beg your pardon, sir, but are you not a clergyman?' 'this incident,' said the bibliotaph, 'gave me a vivid sense of the possibility of determining a man's profession by a cursory examination of his cuticle.' lowell's conviction about n. p. willis was well-founded: namely, that if it had been proper to do so, willis could have worn his own plain bare skin in a way to suggest that it was a representative broadway tailor's best work. i imagine that few boys escape an outburst of that savage instinct for personal adornment which expresses itself in the form of rude tattooing upon the arms. the bibliotaph had had his attack in early days, and the result was a series of decorations of a highly patriotic character, and not at all in keeping with south kensington standards. i said to him once, apropos of the pictures on his arms: 'you are a great surprise to your friends in this particular.' 'yes,' he replied, 'few of them are aware that the volume of this life is extra-illustrated.' but that which he of necessity tolerated in himself he would not tolerate in his books. they were not allowed to become pictorially amplified. he saw no objection to inserting a rare portrait in a good book. it did not necessarily injure the book, and it was one way of preserving the portrait. yet the thing was questionable, and it was likely to prove the first step in a downward path. as to cramming a volume with a heterogeneous mass of pictures and letters gathered from all imaginable sources, he held the practice in abhorrence, and the bibliographical results as fit only for the libraries of the illiterate rich. he admitted the possibility of doing such a thing well or ill; but at its best it was an ill thing skillfully done. the bibliotaph upon his travels was a noteworthy figure if only because of the immense parcel of books with which he burdened himself. that part of the journeying public which loves to see some new thing puzzled itself mightily over the gentleman of full habit, who in addition to his not inconsiderable encumbrance of flesh and luggage, chose to carry about a shawl-strap loaded to utmost capacity with a composite mass of books, magazines, and newspapers. it was enormously heavy, and the way in which its component parts adhered was but a degree short of the miraculous. he appeared hardly conscious of its weight, for he would pick the thing up and literally _trip_ with it on a toe certainly not light, but undeniably fantastic. he carried the books about with him partly because he had just purchased them and wished to study their salient points, and partly because he was taking them to a 'bin.' there is no mystery about these 'bins.' they were merely places of temporary rest for the books before the grand moving to the main library. but if not mysterious they were certainly astonishing, because of their number and size. with respect to number, one in every large city was the rule. with respect to size, few people buy in a lifetime as many books as were sometimes heaped together in one of these places of deposit. he would begin by leaving a small bundle of books with some favorite dealer, then another, and then another. as the collection enlarged, the accommodations would be increased; for it was a satisfaction to do the bibliotaph this favor, he purchased so liberally and tipped the juvenile clerks in so royal a manner. nor was he always in haste to move out after he had once moved in. one bookseller, speaking of the splendid proportions which the 'bin' was assuming, declared that he sometimes found it difficult to adjust himself mentally to the situation; he couldn't tell when he came to his place of business in the morning whether he was in his own shop or the bibliotaph's library. the corner of the shop where the great collector's accumulations were piled up was a centre of mirth and conversation if he himself chanced to be in town. men dropped in for a minute and stayed an hour. in some way time appeared to broaden and leisure to grow more ample. life had an unusual richness, and warmth, and color, when the bibliotaph was by. there was an olympian largeness and serenity about him. he seemed almost pagan in the breadth of his hold upon existence. and when he departed he left behind him what can only be described as great unfilled mental spaces. i recall that a placard was hung up in his particular corner with the inscription, 'english spoken here.' this amused him. later there was attached to it another strip upon which was crayoned, 'sir, we had much good talk,' with the date of the talk. still later a victim added the words, 'yes, sir, on that day the bibliotaph tossed and gored a number of people admirably.' it was difficult for the bibliotaph not to emit intellectual sparks of one kind or another. his habit of dealing with every fact as if it deserved his entire mental force, was a secret of his originality. everything was worth while. if the fact was a serious fact, all the strength of his mind would be applied to its exposition or defense. if it was a fact of less importance, humor would appear as a means to the conversational end. and he would grow more humorous as the topics grew less significant. when finally he rioted in mere word-play, banter, quizzing, it was a sign that he regarded the matter as worthy no higher species of notice. i like this theory of his wit so well that i am minded not to expose it to an over-rigid test. the following small fragments of his talk are illustrative of such measure of truth as the theory may contain. among the bibliotaph's companions was one towards whose mind he affected the benevolent and encouraging attitude of a father to a budding child. he was asked by this friend to describe a certain quaint and highly successful entertainer. this was the response: 'the gentleman of whom you speak has the habit of coming before his audience as an idiot and retiring as a genius. you and i, sir, couldn't do that; we should sustain the first character consistently throughout the entire performance.' it was his humor to insist that all the virtues and gifts of a distinguished collector were due for their expansion and development to association with himself and the writer of these memories. he would say in the presence of the distinguished collector: 'henry will probably one day forget us, but on the day of judgment, in any just estimate of the causes of his success, the lord won't.' i have forgotten what the victim's retort was; it is safe to assume that it was adequate. this same collector had the pleasing habit of honoring the men he loved, among whom the bibliotaph was chief, with brightly written letters which filled ten and fifteen half-sheets. but the average number of words to a line was two, while a five-syllable word had trouble in accommodating itself to a line and a half, and the sheets were written only upon one side. the bibliotaph's comment was: 'henry has a small brain output, but unlimited influence at a paper-mill.' of all the merry sayings in which the bibliotaph indulged himself at the expense of his closest friend this was the most comforting. a gentleman present was complaining that henry took liberties in correcting his pronunciation. 'i have no doubt of the occasional need of such correction, but it isn't often required, and not half so often as he seems to think. i, on the other hand, observe frequent minor slips in his use of language, but i do not feel at liberty to correct him.' the bibliotaph began to apply salve to the bruised feelings of the gentleman present as follows: 'the animus of henry's criticism is unquestionably envy. he probably feels how few flies there are in your ointment. while you are astonished that in his case there should be so little ointment for so many flies.' the bibliotaph never used slang, and the united recollections of his associates can adduce but two or three instances in which he sunk verbally so low as even to _hint_ slang. he said that there was one town which in his capacity of public speaker he should like to visit. it was a remote village in virginia where there was a girls' seminary, the catalogue of which set forth among advantages of location this: that the town was one to which the traveling lecturer and the circus never came. the bibliotaph said, 'i should go there. for i am the one when i am on the platform, and by the unanimous testimony of all my friends i am the other when i am off.' the second instance not only illustrates his ingenuity in trifles, but also shows how he could occasionally answer a friend according to his folly. he had been describing a visit which he had made in the hero-worshiping days of boyhood to chappaqua; how friendly and good-natured the great farmer-editor was; how he called the bibliotaph 'bub,' and invited him to stay to dinner; how he stayed and talked politics with his host; how they went out to the barn afterwards to look at the stock; what greeley said to him and what he said to greeley,--it was a perfect bit of word-sketching, spontaneous, realistic, homely, unpretentious, irresistibly comic because of the quaintness of the dialogue as reported, and because of the mental image which we formed of this large-headed, round-bellied, precocious youth, who at the age of sixteen was able for three consecutive hours to keep the conversational shuttlecock in the air with no less a person than horace greeley. amid the laughter and comment which followed the narration one mirthful genius who chose for the day to occupy the seat of the scorner, called out to the bibliotaph:-- 'how old did you say you were at that time, "bub"?' 'sixteen.' 'and did you wear whiskers?' the query was insulting. but the bibliotaph measured the flippancy of the remark with his eye and instantly fitted an answer to the mental needs of the questioner. 'even if i had,' he said, 'it would have availed me nothing, for in those days there was no wind.' the bibliotaph was most at home in the book-shop, on the street, or at his hotel. he went to public libraries only in an emergency, for he was impatient of that needful discipline which compelled him to ask for each volume he wished to see. he had, however, two friends in whose libraries one might occasionally meet him in the days when he hunted books upon this wide continent. one was the gentleman to whom certain letters on literature have been openly addressed, and who has made a library by a process which involves wise selection and infinite self-restraint. this priceless little collection contains no volume which is imperfect, no volume which mars the fine sense of repose begotten in one at the sight of lovely books becomingly clothed, and no volume which is not worthy the name of literature. and there is matter for reflection in the thought that it is not the library of a rich man. money cannot buy the wisdom which has made this collection what it is, and without self-denial it is hardly possible to give the touch of real elegance to a private library. when dollars are not counted the assemblage of books becomes promiscuous. how may we better describe this library than by the phrase infinite riches in a little book-case! there was yet another friend, the country squire, who revels in wealth, buys large-paper copies, reads little but deeply, and raises chickens. his library (the room itself, i mean) is a gentleman's library, with much cornice, much plate-glass, and much carving; whereof a wit said, 'the squire has such a beautiful library, and no place to put his books.' these books are of a sort to rejoice the heart, but their tenure of occupancy is uncertain. hardly one of them but is liable to eviction without a moment's notice. they have a look in their attitude which indicates consciousness of being pilgrims and strangers. they seem to say, 'we can tarry, we can tarry but a night.' some have tarried two nights, others a week, others a year, a few even longer. but aside from a dozen or so of volumes, not one of the remaining three thousand dares to affirm that it holds a permanent place in its owner's heart of hearts. it is indeed a noble procession of books which has passed in and out of those doors. a day will come in which the owner realizes that he has as good as the market can furnish, and then banishments will cease. one sighs not for the volumes which deserved exile, but for those which were sent away because their master ceased to love them. there was no friend with whom the bibliotaph lived on easier terms than with the country squire. they were counterparts. they supplemented one another. the bibliotaph, though he was born and bred on a farm, had fled for his salvation to the city. the squire, a man of city birth and city education, had fled for his soul's health to the country; he had rendered existence almost perfect by setting up an urban home in rural surroundings. it was well said of that house that it was finely reticent in its proffers of hospitality, and regally magnificent in its kindness to those whom it delighted to honor. it was in the country squire's library that the bibliotaph first met that actor with whom he became even more intimate than with the squire himself. the closeness of their relation suggested the days of the old miracle plays when the theatre and the church were as hand in glove. the bibliotaph signified his appreciation of his new friend by giving him a copy of a sixteenth-century book 'containing a pleasant invective against poets, pipers, players, jesters, and such like caterpillars of a commonwealth.' the player in turn compiled for his friend of clerical appearance a scrap-book, intended to show how evil associations corrupt good actors. this actor professed that which for want of a better term might be called parlor agnosticism. the bibliotaph was sturdily inclined towards orthodoxy, and there was from time to time collision between the two. it is my impression that the actor sometimes retired with four of his five wits halting. but he was brilliant even when he mentally staggered. neither antagonist convinced the other, and after a while they grew wearied of traveling over one another's minds. it fell out on a day that the actor made a fine speech before a large gathering, and mindful of stage effect he introduced a telling allusion to an all-wise and omnipotent providence. for this he was, to use his own phrase, 'soundly spanked' by all his friends; that is, he was mocked at, jeered, ridiculed. to what end, they said, was one an agnostic if he weakly yielded his position to the exigencies of an after-dinner speech. the bibliotaph alone took pains to analyze his late antagonist's position. he wrote to the actor congratulating him upon his success. 'i wondered a little at this, remembering how inconsiderable has been your practice; and i infer that it has been inconsiderable, for i am aware how seldom an actor can be persuaded to make a speech. i, too, was at first shocked when i heard that you had made a respectful allusion to deity; but i presently took comfort, _remembering that your gods, like your grease-paints, are purely professional_.' he was always capital in these teasing moods. to be sure, he buffeted one about tremendously, but his claws were sheathed, and there was a contagiousness in his frolicsome humor. moreover one learned to look upon one's self in the light of a public benefactor. to submit to be knocked about by the bibliotaph was in a modest way to contribute to the gayety of nations. if one was not absolutely happy one's self, there was a chastened comfort in beholding the happiness of the on-lookers. a small author wrote a small book, so small that it could be read in less time than it takes to cover an umbrella, that is, 'while you wait.' the bibliotaph had brobdingnagian joy of this book. he sat and read it to himself in the author's presence, and particularly diminutive that book appeared as its light cloth cover was outlined against the bibliotaph's ample black waistcoat. from time to time he would vent 'a series of small private laughs,' especially if he was on the point of announcing some fresh illustration of the fallibility of inexperienced writers. finally the uncomfortable author said, 'don't sit there and pick out the mistakes.' to which the bibliotaph triumphantly replied, 'what other motive is there for reading it at all?' he purchased every copy of this book which he could find, and when asked by the author why he did so, replied, 'in order to withdraw it from circulation.' a moment afterwards he added reflectively, 'but how may i hope to withdraw a book from that which it has never had?' he was apt to be severe in his judgment of books, as when he said of a very popular but very feeble literary performance that it was an argument for the existence of god. 'such intensity of stupidity was not realized without infinite assistance.' he could be equally emphatic in his comments upon men. among his acquaintance was a church dignitary who blew alternately hot and cold upon him. when advised of some new illustration of the divine's uncertainty of attitude, the bibliotaph merely said, 'he's more of a chameleon than he is a clergyman.' that bostonian would be deficient in wit who failed to enjoy this remark. speaking of the characteristics of american cities, the bibliotaph said, 'it never occurs to the hub that anything of importance can possibly happen at the periphery.' he greatly admired the genial and philanthropic editor of a well-known philadelphia newspaper. shortly after mr. childs's death some one wrote to the bibliotaph that in a quiet kentucky town he had noticed a sign over a shop-door which read, 'g. w. childs, dealer in tobacco and cigars.' there was something graceful in the bibliotaph's reply. he expressed surprise at mr. childs's new occupation, but declared that for his own part he was 'glad to know that the location of heaven had at last been definitely ascertained.' the bibliotaph habitually indulged himself in the practice of hero-worship. this propensity led him to make those glorified scrap-books which were so striking a feature in his collection. they were no commonplace affairs, the ugly result of a union of cheap leather, newspaper-clippings and paste, but sumptuous books resplendent in morocco and gilt tooling, the creations of an artist who was eminent among binders. these scrap-books were chiefly devoted to living men,--men who were famous, or who were believed to be on the high road to fame. there was a book for each man. in this way did the bibliotaph burn incense before his dii majores et minores. these books were enriched with everything that could illustrate the gifts and virtues of the men in whose honor they were made. they contained rare manuscripts, rare pictures, autograph comments and notes, a bewildering variety of records,--memorabilia which were above price. poets wrote humorous verse, and artists who justly held their time as too precious to permit of their working for love decorated the pages of the bibliotaph's scrap-books. one does not abuse the word 'unique' when he applies it to these striking volumes. the bibliotaph did not always follow contemporary judgment in his selection of men to be so canonized. he now and then honored a man whose sense of the relation of achievement to fame would not allow him to admit to himself that he deserved the distinction, and whose sense of humor could not but be strongly excited at the thought of deification by so unusual a process. it might be pleasant to consider that the bibliotaph cared so much for one's letters as to wish not to destroy them, but it was awful to think of those letters as bound and annotated. this was to get a taste of posthumous fame before posthumous fame was due. the bibliotaph added a new terror to life, for he compelled one to live up to one's scrap-book. he reversed the old pagan formula, which was to the effect that 'so-and-so died and was made a god.' according to the bibliotaph's prophetic method, a man was made a god first and allowed to die at his leisure afterward. not every one of that little company which his wisdom and love have marked for great reputation will be able to achieve it. they are unanimously grateful that he cared enough for them to wish to drag their humble gifts into the broad light of publicity. but their gratitude is tempered by the thought that perhaps he was only elaborately humorous at their expense. the bibliotaph's intellectual processes were so vigorous and his pleasure in mental activity for its own sake was so intense that he was quite capable of deciding after a topic of discussion had been introduced which side he would take. and this with a splendid disdain of the merits of the cause which he espoused. i remember that he once set out to maintain the thesis that a certain gentleman, as notable for his virtues as he was conspicuous for lack of beauty, was essentially a handsome man. the person who initiated the discussion by observing that 'mr. blank was unquestionably a plain man' expected from the bibliotaph (if he expected any remark whatever) nothing beyond a platonic 'that i do most firmly believe.' he was not a little astonished when the great book-collector began an elaborate and exhaustive defense of the gentleman whose claims to beauty had been questioned. at first it was dialogue, and the opponent had his share of talk; but when in an unlucky moment he hinted that such energy could only be the result of consciousness on the bibliotaph's part that he was in a measure pleading his own cause, the dialogue changed to monologue. for the bibliotaph girded up his loins and proceeded to smite his opponent hip and thigh. all in good humor, to be sure, and laughter reigned, but it was tremendous and it was logically convincing. it was clearly not safe to have a reputation for good looks while the bibliotaph was in this temper. all the gentlemen were in terror lest something about their countenances might be construed as beauty, and men with good complexions longed for newspapers behind which to hide their disgrace. as for the disputant who had stirred up the monster, his situation was as unenviable as it was comic to the bystanders. he had never before dropped a stone into the great geyser. he was therefore unprepared for the result. one likened him to an unprotected traveler in a heavy rain-storm. for the bibliotaph's unpremeditated speech was a very cloud-burst of eloquence. the unhappy gentleman looked despairingly in every direction as if beseeching us for the loan of a word-proof umbrella. there was none to be had. we who had known a like experience were not sorry to stand under cover and watch a fellow mortal undergo this verbal drenching. the situation recalled one described by lockhart when a guest differed on a point of scholarship with the great coleridge. coleridge began to 'exert himself.' he burst into a steady stream of talk which broadened and deepened as the moments fled. when finally it ceased the bewildered auditor pulled himself together and exclaimed, 'zounds, i was never so _be-thumped_ with words in my life!' people who had opportunity of observing the bibliotaph were tempted to speculate on what he might have become if he had not chosen to be just what he was. his versatility led them to declare for this, that, and the other profession, largely in accordance with their own personal preferences. lawyers were sure that he should have been an advocate; ministers that he would have done well to yield to the 'call' he had in his youth; teachers were positive that he would have made an inspiring teacher. no one, so far as i know, ever told him that in becoming a book-collector he had deprived the world of a great musician; for he was like charles lamb in that he was sentimentally inclined to harmony but organically incapable of a tune. yet he was so broad-minded that it was not possible for him to hold even a neutral attitude in the presence of anything in which other people delighted. i have known him to sit through a long and heavy organ recital, not in a resigned manner but actively attentive, clearly determined that if the minutest portion of his soul was sensitive to the fugues of j. s. bach he would allow that portion to bask in the sunshine of an unwonted experience. so that from one point of view he was the incarnation of tolerance as he certainly was the incarnation of good-humor and generosity. he envied no man his gifts from nature or fortune. he was not only glad to let live, but painstakingly energetic in making the living of people a pleasure to them, and he received with amused placidity adverse comments upon himself. words which have been used to describe a famous man of this century i will venture to apply in part to the bibliotaph. 'he was a kind of gigantic and olympian school-boy, ... loving-hearted, bountiful, wholesome and sterling to the heart's core.' last words on the bibliotaph the bibliotaph's major passion was for collecting books; but he had a minor passion, the bare mention of which caused people to lift their eyebrows suspiciously. he was a shameless, a persistent, and a successful hunter of autographs. his desire was for the signatures of living men of letters, though an occasional dead author would be allowed a place in the collection, provided he had not been dead too long. as a rule, however, the bibliotaph coveted the 'hand of write' of the man who was now more or less conspicuously in the public eye. this autograph must be written in a representative work of the author in question. the bibliotaph would not have crossed the street to secure a line from ben jonson's pen, but he mourned because the autograph of the rev. c. l. dodgson was not forthcoming, nor likely to be. his conception of happiness was this: to own a copy of the first edition of _alice in wonderland_, upon the fly-leaf of which lewis carroll had written his name, together with the statement that he had done so at the bibliotaph's request, and because that eminent collector could not be made happy in any other way. the bibliotaph liked the autograph of the modern man of letters because it _was_ modern, and because there was a reasonable hope of its being genuine. he loved genuineness. everything about himself was exactly what it pretended to be. from his soul to his clothing he was honest. and his love for the genuine was only surpassed in degree by his contempt for the spurious. i remember that some one gave him a bit of silverware, a toilet article, perhaps, which he next day threw out of a car window, because he had discovered that it was not sterling. he scouted the suggestion that possibly the giver may not have known. such ignorance was inexcusable, he said. 'the likelier interpretation was that the gift was symbolical of the giver.' the act seemed brutal, and the comment thereon even more so. but to realize the atmosphere, the setting of the incident, one must imagine the bibliotaph's round and comfortable figure, his humorous look, and the air of genial placidity with which he would do and say a thing like this. it was as impossible to be angry with him in behalf of the unfortunate giver of cheap silver as to take offense at a tree or mountain. and it was useless to argue the matter--nay it was folly, for he would immediately become polysyllabic and talk one down. it was this desire for genuine things which made him entirely suspicious of autographs which had been bought and sold. he had no faith in them, and he would weaken your faith, supposing you were a collector of such things. offer him an autograph of our first president and he would reply, 'i don't believe that it's genuine; and if it were i shouldn't care for it; i never had the honor of general washington's acquaintance.' the inference was that one could have a personal relation with a living great man, and the chances were largely in favor of getting an autograph that was not an object of suspicion. few collectors in this line have been as happy as the bibliotaph. the problem was easily mastered with respect to the majority of authors. as a rule an author is not unwilling to give such additional pleasure to a reader of his book as may consist in writing his name in the reader's copy. it is conceivable that the author may be bored by too many requests of this nature, but he might be bored to an even greater degree if no one cared enough for him to ask for his autograph. some writers resisted a little, and it was beautiful to see the bibliotaph bring them to terms. he was a highwayman of the tom faggus type, just so adroit, and courteous, and daring. he was perhaps at his best in cases where he had actually to hold up his victim; one may imagine the scene,--the author resisting, the bibliotaph determined and having the masterful air of an expert who had handled just such cases before. a humble satellite who disapproved of these proceedings read aloud to the bibliotaph that scorching little essay entitled _involuntary bailees_, written by perhaps the wittiest living english essayist. an involuntary bailee--as the essayist explains--is a person to whom people (generally unknown to him) send things which he does not wish to receive, but which _they_ are anxious to have returned. if a man insists upon lending you a book, you become an involuntary bailee. you don't wish to read the book, but you have it in your possession. it has come to you by post, let us suppose, 'and to pack it up and send it back again requires a piece of string, energy, brown paper, and stamps enough to defray the postage.' and it is a question whether a casual acquaintance 'has any right thus to make demands on a man's energy, money, time, brown paper, string, and other capital and commodities.' there are other ways of making a man an involuntary bailee. you may ask him to pass judgment on your poetry, or to use his influence to get your tragedy produced, or to do any one of a half hundred things which he doesn't want to do and which you have no business to ask him to do. the essayist makes no mention of the particular form of sin which the bibliotaph practiced, but he would probably admit that malediction was the only proper treatment for the idler who bothers respectable authors by asking them to write their names in his copies of their books. for to what greater extent could one trespass upon an author's patience, energy, brown paper, string, and commodities generally? it was amusing to watch the bibliotaph as he listened to this arraignment of his favorite pursuit. the writer of the essay admits that there may be extenuating circumstances. if the autograph collector comes bearing gifts one may smile upon his suit. if for example he accompanies his request for an autograph with 'several brace of grouse, or a salmon of noble proportions, or rare old books bound by derome, or a service of worcester china with the square mark,' he may hope for success. the essayist opines that such gifts 'will not be returned by a celebrity who respects himself.' 'they bless him who gives and him who takes much more than tons of manuscript poetry, and thousands of entreaties for an autograph.' a superficial examination of the bibliotaph's collection revealed the fact that he had either used necromancy or given many gifts. the reader may imagine some such conversation between the great collector and one of his dazzled visitors:-- 'pray, how did you come by this?' 'his lordship has always been very kind in such matters.' 'and where did you get this?' 'i am greatly indebted to the prime minister for his complaisance.' 'but this poet is said to abhor americans.' 'you see that his antipathy has not prevented his writing a stanza in my copy of his most notable volume.' 'and this?' 'i have at divers times contributed the sum of five dollars to divers fresh air funds.' the bibliotaph could not be convinced that his sin of autograph collecting was not venial. when authors denied his requests, on the ground that they were intrusions, he was inclined to believe that selfishness lay at the basis of their motives. some men are quite willing to accept great fame, but they resent being obliged to pay the penalties. they wish to sit in the fierce light which beats on an intellectual throne, but they are indignant when the passers-by stop to stare at them. they imagine that they can successfully combine the glory of honorable publicity with the perfect retirement enjoyed only by aspiring mediocrity. the bibliotaph believed that he was a missionary to these people. he awakened in them a sense of their obligations toward their admirers. the principle involved is akin to that enunciated by a certain american philosopher, who held that it is an act of generosity to borrow of a man once in a while; it gives that man a lively interest in the possible success or possible failure of your undertaking. he levied autographic toll on young writers. for mature men of letters with established reputations he would do extraordinary and difficult services. a famous englishman, not a novelist by profession, albeit he wrote one of the most successful novels of his day, earnestly desired to own if possible a complete set of all the american pirated editions of his book. the bibliotaph set himself to this task, and collected energetically for two years. the undertaking was considerable, for many of the pirated editions were in pamphlet, and dating from twenty years back. it was almost impossible to get the earliest in a spotless condition. quantities of trash had to be overhauled, and weeks might elapse before a perfect copy of a given edition would come to light. books are dirty, but pamphlets are dirtier. the bibliotaph declared that had he rendered an itemized bill for services in this matter, the largest item would have been for turkish baths. here was a case in which the collector paid well for the privilege of having a signed copy of a well-loved author's novel. he begrudged no portion of his time or expenditure. if it pleased the great englishman to have upon his shelves, in compact array and in spotless condition, these proofs of what he _didn't_ earn by the publication of his books in america, well and good. the bibliotaph was delighted that so modest a service on his part could give so apparently great a pleasure. the englishman must have had the collecting instinct, and he must have been philosophical, since he could contemplate with equanimity these illegitimate volumes. the conclusion of the story is this: the work of collecting the reprints was finished. the last installment reached the famous englishman during an illness which subsequently proved fatal. they were spread upon the coverlid of the bed, and the invalid took a great and humorous satisfaction in looking them over. said the bibliotaph, recounting the incident in his succinct way, 'they reached him on his death-bed,--and made him willing to go.' the bibliotaph was true to the traditions of the book-collecting brotherhood, in that he read but little. his knowledge of the world was fresh from life, not 'strained through books,' as johnson said of a certain irish painter whom he knew at birmingham. but the bibliotaph was a mighty devourer of book-catalogues. he got a more complete satisfaction, i used to think, in reading a catalogue than in reading any other kind of literature. to see him unwrapping the packages which his english mail had brought was to see a happy man. for in addition to books by post, there would be bundles of sale-catalogues. then might you behold his eyes sparkle as he spread out the tempting lists; the humorous lines about the corners of his mouth deepened, and he would take on what a little girl who watched him called his 'pussy-cat look.' then with an indelible pencil in his huge and pudgy left fist (for the bibliotaph was a benjaminite), he would go through the pages, checking off the items of interest, rolling with delight in his chair as he exclaimed from time to time, 'good books! such good books!' say to him that you yourself liked to read a catalogue, and his response was pretty sure to be, 'pleasant, isn't it?' this was expressive of a high state of happiness, and was an allusion. for the bibliotaph was once with a newly-married man, and they two met another man, who, as the conversation proceeded, disclosed the fact that he also had but recently been wed. whereupon the first bridegroom, marveling that there could be another in the world so exalted as himself, exclaimed with sympathetic delight, 'and _you_, too, are married.' 'yes,' said the second, 'pleasant, isn't it?' with much the same air that he would have said, 'nice afternoon.' this was one of the incidents which made the bibliotaph skeptical about marriage. but he adopted the phrase as a useful one with which to express the state of highest mental and spiritual exaltation. people wondered at the extent of his knowledge of books. it was very great, but it was not incredible. if a man cannot touch pitch without being defiled, still less can he handle books without acquiring bibliographical information. i am not sure that the bibliotaph ever heard of that professor of history who used to urge his pupils to handle books, even when they could not get time to read them. 'go to the library, take down the volumes, turn over the leaves, read the title-pages and the tables of contents; information will stick to you'--this was the professor's advice. information acquired in this way may not be profound, but so far as it goes it is definite and useful. for the collector it is indispensable. in this way the bibliotaph had amassed his seemingly phenomenal knowledge of books. he had handled thousands and tens of thousands of volumes, and he never relinquished his hold upon a book until he had 'placed' it,--until he knew just what its rank was in the hierarchy of desirability. between a diligent reading of catalogues and an equally diligent rummaging among the collections of third and fourth rate old book-shops, the bibliotaph had his reward. he undoubtedly bought a deal of trash, but he also lighted upon nuggets. for example, in leask's life of boswell is an account of that curious little romance entitled _dorando_. this so-called _spanish tale_, printed for j. wilkie at the bible in st. paul's church-yard, was the work of james boswell. it was published anonymously in , and he who would might then have bought it for 'one shilling.' it was to be 'sold also by j. dodsley in pall mall, t. davies in russell-street, covent garden, and by the book-sellers of scotland.' this t. davies was the very man who introduced boswell to johnson. he was an actor as well as a bookseller. _dorando_ was a story with a key. under the names of don stocaccio, don tipponi, and don rodomontado real people were described, and the facts of the 'famous douglas cause' were presented to the public. the little volume was suppressed in so far as that was possible. it is rare, so rare that boswell's latest biographer speaks of it as the 'forlorn hope of the book-hunter,' though he doubts not that copies of it are lurking in some private collection. one copy at least is lurking in the bibliotaph's library. he bought it, not for a song to be sure, but very reasonably. the bibliotaph declares that this book is good for but one thing,--to shake in the faces of boswell collectors who haven't it. the bibliotaph had many literary heroes. conspicuous among them were professor richard porson and benjamin jowett, the late master of balliol. the bibliotaph collected everything that related to these two men, all the books with which they had had anything to do, every newspaper clipping and magazine article which threw light upon their manners, habits, modes of thought. he especially loved to tell anecdotes of porson. he knew many. he had an interleaved copy of j. selby watson's life of porson into which were copied a multitude of facts not to be found in that amusing biography. the bibliotaph used to say that he would rather have known porson than any other man of his time. he used to quote this as one of the best illustrations of porson's wit, and one of the finest examples of the retort satiric to be found in any language. one of porson's works was assailed by wakefield and by hermann, scholars to be sure, but scholars whose scholarship porson held in contempt. being told of their attack porson only said that 'whatever he wrote in the future should be written in such a way that those fellows wouldn't be able to reach it with their fore-paws if they stood on their hind-legs to get at it!' the bibliotaph gave such an air of contemporaneity to his stories of the great greek professor that it seemed at times as if they were the relations of one who had actually known porson. so vividly did he portray the marvels of that compound of thirst and scholarship that no one had the heart to laugh when, after one of his narrations, a gentleman asked the bibliotaph if he himself had studied under porson. 'not _under_ him but _with_ him,' said the bibliotaph. 'he was my coeval. porson, richard bentley, joseph scaliger, and i were all students together.' speaking of jowett the bibliotaph once said that it was wonderful to note how culture failed to counteract in an englishman that disposition to heave stones at an american. jowett, with his remarkable breadth of mind and temper, was quite capable of observing, with respect to a certain book, that it was american, 'yet in perfect taste.' 'this,' said the bibliotaph, 'is as if one were to say, "the guests were americans, but no one expectorated on the carpet."' the bibliotaph thought that there was not so much reason for this attitude. the sins of englishmen and americans were identical, he believed, but the forms of their expression were different. 'our sin is a voluble boastfulness; theirs is an irritating, unrestrainable, all-but-constantly manifested, satisfied self-consciousness. the same results are reached by different avenues. we praise ourselves; they belittle others.' then he added with a smile: 'thus even in these latter days are the scriptures exemplified; the same spirit with varying manifestations.' he was once commenting upon jowett's classification of humorists. jowett divided humorists 'into three categories or classes; those who are not worth reading at all; those who are worth reading once, but once only; and those who are worth reading again and again and for ever.' this remark was made to swinburne, who quotes it in his all too brief _recollections of professor jowett_. swinburne says that the starting-point of their discussion was the _biglow papers_, which 'famous and admirable work of american humour' jowett placed in the second class. swinburne himself thought that the _biglow papers_ was too good for the second class and not quite good enough for the third. 'i would suggest that a fourth might be provided, to include such examples as are worth, let us say, two or three readings in a life-time.' the bibliotaph made a variety of comments on this, but i remember only the following; it is a reason for not including the _biglow papers_ in jowett's third and crowning class. 'humor to be popular permanently must be general rather than local, and have to do with a phase of character rather than a fact of history; that is, it must deal in a great way with what is always interesting to all men. humor that does not meet this requirement is not likely, when its novelty has worn off, to be read even occasionally save by those who enjoy it as an intellectual performance or who are making a critical study of its author.' the observation, if not profound, is at least sensible, and it illustrates very well the bibliotaph's love of alliteration and antithesis. but it is easier to remember and to report his caustic and humorous remarks. the country squire had a card-catalogue of the books in his library, and he delighted to make therein entries of his past and his new purchases. but it was not always possible to find upon the shelves books that were mentioned in the catalogue. the bibliotaph took advantage of a few instances of this sort to prod his moneyed friend. he would ask the squire if he had such-and-such a book. the squire would say that he had, and appeal to his catalogue in proof of it. then would follow a search for the volume. if, as sometimes happened, no book corresponding to the entry could be found, the bibliotaph would be satirical and remark:-- 'i'll tell you what you ought to name your catalogue.' 'what?' 'great expectations!' another time he said, 'this is not a list of your books, this is a list of the things that you intend to buy;' or he would suggest that the squire would do well to christen his catalogue _vaulting ambition_. perhaps the variation might take this form. after a fruitless search for some book, which upon the testimony of the catalogue was certainly in the collection, the bibliotaph would observe, 'this catalogue might not inappropriately be spoken of as the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.' another time the bibliotaph said to the squire, calling to mind the well-known dictum as to the indispensableness of certain books, 'between what one sees on your shelves and what one reads in your card-catalogue one would have reason to believe that you were a gentleman.' once the bibliotaph said to me in the presence of the squire: 'i think that our individual relation to books might be expressed in this way. you read books but you don't buy them. i buy books but i don't read them. the squire neither reads them nor buys them,--only card-catalogues them!' to all this the squire had a reply which was worldly, emphatic, and adequate, but the object of this study is not to exhibit the virtues of the squire's speech, witty though it was. one of the bibliotaph's friends began without sufficient provocation to write verse. the bibliotaph thought that if the matter were taken promptly in hand the man could be saved. accordingly, when next he gave this friend a book he wrote upon a fly-leaf: 'to a poet who is nothing if not original--and who is not original!' and the injured rhymester exclaimed when he read the inscription: 'you deface every book you give me.' he could pay a compliment, as when he was dining with a married pair who were thought to be not yet disenchanted albeit in the tenth year of their married life. the lady was speaking to the bibliotaph, but in the eagerness of conversation addressed him by her husband's first name. whereupon he turned to the husband and said: 'your wife implies that i am a repository of grace and a bundle of virtues, and calls me by your name.' he once sent this same lady, apropos of the return of the shirt-waist season, a dozen neckties. in the box was his card with these words penciled upon it: 'a contribution to the man-made dress of a god-made woman.' the squire had great skill in imitating the cries of various domestic fowl, as well as dogs, cats, and children. once, in a moment of social relaxation, he was giving an exhibition of his power to the vast amusement of his guests. when he had finished, the bibliotaph said: 'the theory of henry ward beecher that every man has something of the animal in him is superabundantly exemplified in _your_ case. you, sir, have got the whole ark.' there was a quaint humor in his most commonplace remarks. of all the fruits of the earth he loved most a watermelon. and when a fellow-traveler remarked, 'that watermelon which we had at dinner was bad,' the bibliotaph instantly replied: 'there is no such thing as a _bad_ watermelon. there are watermelons, and _better_ watermelons.' i expressed astonishment on learning that he stood six feet in his shoes. he replied: 'people are so preoccupied in the consideration of my thickness that they don't have time to observe my height.' again, when he was walking through a private park which contained numerous monstrosities in the shape of painted metal deer on pedestals, pursued (also on pedestals) by hunters and dogs, the bibliotaph pointed to one of the dogs and said, 'cave cast-iron canem!' he once accompanied a party of friends and acquaintances to the summit of mt. tom. the ascent is made in these days by a very remarkable inclined plane. after looking at the extensive and exquisite view, the bibliotaph fell to examining his return coupon, which read, 'good for one trip down.' then he said: 'let us hope that in a post-terrestrial experience our tickets will not read in this way.' he was once ascending in the unusually commodious and luxurious elevator of a new ten-story hotel and remarked to his companion: 'if we can't be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, we can at least start in that direction under not dissimilar conditions.' he also said that the advantage of stopping at this particular hotel was that you were able to get as far as possible from the city in which it was located. he studied the dictionary with great diligence and was unusually accurate in his pronunciation. he took an amused satisfaction in pronouncing exactly certain words which in common talk had shifted phonetically from their moorings. this led a gentleman who was intimate with the bibliotaph to say to him, 'why, if i were to pronounce that word among my kinsfolk as you do they'd think i was crazy.' 'what you mean,' said the bibliotaph, 'is, that they would look upon it in the light of supererogatory supplementary evidence.' he himself indulged overmuch in alliteration, but it was with humorous intent; and critics forgave it in him when they would have reprehended it in another. he had no notion that it was fine. taken, however, in connection with his emphatic manner and sonorous voice he produced a decided and original effect. meeting the squire's wife after a considerable interval, i asked whether her husband had been behaving well. she replied 'as usual.' whereupon the bibliotaph said, 'you mean that his conduct in these days is characterized by a plethora of intention and a paucity of performance.' he objected to enlarging the boundaries of words until they stood for too many things. let a word be kept so far as was reasonable to its earlier and authorized meaning. speaking of the word 'symposium,' which has been stretched to mean a collection of short articles on a given subject, the bibliotaph said that he could fancy a honey-bee which had been feasting on pumice until it was unable to make the line characteristic of its kind, explaining to its queen that it had been to a symposium; but that he doubted if we ought to allow any other meaning. the bibliotaph got much amusement from what he insisted were the ill-concealed anxieties of his friend the actor on the subject of a future state. 'he has acquired,' said the bibliotaph, 'both a pathetic and a prophetic interest in that place which begins as heaven does, but stops off monosyllabically.' the two men were one day discussing the question of the permanency of fame, how ephemeral for example was that reputation which depended upon the living presence of the artist to make good its claim; how an actor, an orator, a singer, was bound to enjoy his glory while it lasted, since at the instant of his death all tangible evidence of greatness disappeared; he could not be proven great to one who had never seen and heard him. having reached this point in his philosophizing the bibliotaph's player-friend became sentimental and quoted a great comedian to the effect that 'a dead actor was a mighty useless thing.' 'certainly,' said the bibliotaph, 'having exhausted the life that now is, and having no hope of the life that is to come.' sometimes it pleased the bibliotaph to maintain that his friend of the footlights would be in the future state a mere homeless wanderer, having neither positive satisfaction nor positive discomfort. for the actor was wont to insist that even if there were an orthodox heaven its moral opposite were the desirable locality; all the clever and interesting fellows would be down below. 'except yourself,' said the bibliotaph. 'you, sir, will be eliminated by your own reasoning. you will be denied heaven because you are not good, and hell because you are not great.' on the whole it pleased the bibliotaph to maintain that his friend's course was downward, and that the sooner he reconciled himself to his undoubted fate the better. 'why speculate upon it?' he said paternally to the actor, 'your prospective comparisons will one day yield to reminiscent contrasts.' the actor was convinced that the bibliotaph's own past life needed looking into, and he declared that when he got a chance he was going to examine the great records. to which the bibliotaph promptly responded: 'the books of the recording angel will undoubtedly be open to your inspection if you can get an hour off to come up. the probability is that you will be overworked.' the bibliotaph never lost an opportunity for teasing. he arrived late one evening at the house of a friend where he was always heartily welcome, and before answering the chorus of greetings, proceeded to kiss the lady of the mansion, a queenly and handsome woman. being asked why he--who was a large man and very shy with respect to women, as large men always are--should have done this thing, he answered that the kiss had been sent by a common friend and that he had delivered it at once, 'for if there was anything he prided himself upon it was a courageous discharge of an unpleasant duty.' once when he had been narrating this incident he was asked what reply the lady had made to so uncourteous a speech. 'i don't remember,' said the bibliotaph, 'it was long ago; but my opinion is that she would have been justified in denominating me by a monosyllable beginning with the initial letter of the alphabet and followed by successive sibilants.' one of the bibliotaph's fellow book-hunters owned a chair said to have been given by sir edwin landseer to sir walter scott. the chair was interesting to behold, but the bibliotaph after attempting to sit in it immediately got up and declared that it was not a genuine relic: 'sir edwin had reason to be grateful to rather than indignant at sir walter scott.' he said of a highly critical person that if that man were to become a minister he would probably announce as the subject of his first sermon: 'the conditions that god must meet in order to be acceptable to me.' he said of a poor orator who had copyrighted one of his most indifferent speeches, that the man 'positively suffered from an excess of caution.' he remarked once that the great trouble with a certain lady was 'she labored under the delusion that she enjoyed occasional seasons of sanity.' the _nil admirari_ attitude was one which he never affected, and he had a contempt for men who denied to the great in literature and art that praise which was their due. this led him to say apropos of an obscure critic who had assailed one of the poetical masters: 'when the lord makes a man a fool he injures him; but when he so constitutes him that the man is never happy unless he is making that fact public, he insults him.' he enjoyed speculating on the subject of marriage, especially in the presence of those friends who unlike himself knew something about it empirically. he delighted to tell his lady acquaintances that their husbands would undoubtedly marry a second time if they had the chance. it was inevitable. a man whose experience has been fortunate is bound to marry again, because he is like the man who broke the bank at monte carlo. a man who has been unhappily married marries again because like an unfortunate gamester he has reached the time when his luck has got to change. the bibliotaph then added with a smile: 'i have the idea that many men who marry a second time do in effect what is often done by unsuccessful gamblers at monte carlo; they go out and commit suicide.' the bibliotaph played but few games. there was one, however, in which he was skillful. i blush to speak of it in these days of much muscular activity. what have golfers, and tennis-players, and makers of century runs to do with croquet? yet there was a time when croquet was spoken of as 'the coming game;' and had not clintock's friend jennings written an epic poem upon it in twelve books, which poem he offered to lend to a certain brilliant young lady? but gwendolen despised boys and cared even less for their poetry than for themselves. at the house of the country squire the bibliotaph was able to gratify his passion for croquet, and verily he was a master. he made a grotesque figure upon the court, with his big frame which must stoop mightily to take account of balls and short-handled mallets, with his agile manner, his uncovered head shaggy with its barbaric profusion of hair (whereby some one was led to nickname him bibliotaph indetonsus), with the scanty black alpaca coat in which he invariably played--a coat so short in the sleeves and so brief in the skirt that the figure cut by the wearer might almost have passed for that of mynheer ten broek of many-trowsered memory. but it was vastly more amusing to watch him than to play with him. he had a devil 'most undoubted.' only with the help of black art and by mortgaging one's soul would it have been possible to accomplish some of the things which he accomplished. for the materials of croquet are so imperfect at best that chance is an influential element. i've seen tennis-players in the intervals of _their_ game watch the bibliotaph with that superior smile suggestive of contempt for the puerility of his favorite sport. they might even condescend to take a mallet for a while to amuse _him_; but presently discomfited they would retire to a game less capricious than croquet and one in which there was reasonable hope that a given cause would produce its wonted effect. the bibliotaph played strictly for the purpose of winning, and took savage joy in his conquests. in playing with him one had to do two men's work; one must play, and then one must summon such philosophy as one might to suffer continuous defeat, and such wit as one possessed to beat back a steady onslaught of daring and witty criticisms. 'i play like a fool,' said a despairing opponent after fruitless effort to win a just share of the games. 'we all have our moments of unconsciousness,' purred the bibliotaph blandly in response. this same despairing opponent, who was an expert in everything he played, said that there was but one solace after croquet with the bibliotaph; he would go home and read hazlitt's essay on the indian jugglers. * * * * * here ends the account of the bibliotaph. from these inadequate notes it is possible to get some little idea of his habits and conversation. the library is said to be still growing. packages of books come mysteriously from the corners of the earth and make their way to that remote and almost inaccessible village where the great collector hides his treasures. no one has ever penetrated that region, and no one, so far as i am aware, has ever seen the treasures. the books lie entombed, as it were, awaiting such day of resurrection as their owner shall appoint them. the day is likely to be long delayed. of the collector's whereabouts now no one of his friends dares to speak positively; for at the time when knowledge of him was most exact the bibliotaph was like a newly-discovered comet,--his course was problematical. thomas hardy i 'the reason why so few good books are written is that so few people that can write know anything.' so said a man who, during a busy career, found time to add several fine volumes to the scanty number of good books. and in a vivacious paragraph which follows this initial sentence he humorously anathematizes the literary life. he shows convincingly that 'secluded habits do not tend to eloquence.' he says that the 'indifferent apathy' so common among studious persons is by no means favorable to liveliness of narration. he proves that men who will not live cannot write; that people who shut themselves up in libraries have dry brains. he avows his confidence in the 'original way of writing books,' the way of the first author, who must have looked at things for himself, 'since there were no books for him to copy from;' and he challenges the reader to prove that this original way is not the best way. 'where,' he asks, 'are the amusing books from voracious students and habitual writers?' this startling arraignment of authors has been made by other men than walter bagehot. hazlitt in his essay on the 'ignorance of the learned' teaches much the same doctrine. its general truth is indisputable, though bagehot himself makes exception in favor of sir walter scott. but the two famous critics are united in their conviction that learned people are generally dull, and that books which are the work of habitual writers are not amusing. there are as a matter of course more exceptions than one. thomas hardy is a distinguished exception. thomas hardy is an 'habitual writer,' but he is always amusing. the following paragraphs are intended to emphasize certain causes of this quality in his work, the quality by virtue of which he chains the attention and proves himself the most readable novelist now living. that he does attract and hold is clear to any one who has tried no more than a half-dozen pages from one of his best stories. he has the fatal habit of being interesting,--fatal because it robs you who read him of time which you might else have devoted to 'improving' literature, such as history, political economy, or light science. he destroys your peace of mind by compelling your sympathies in behalf of people who never existed. he undermines your will power and makes you his slave. you declare that you will read but one more chapter and you weakly consent to make it two chapters. as a special indulgence you spoil a working day in order to learn about the _return of the native_, perhaps agreeing with a supposititious 'better self' that you will waste no more time on novels for the next six months. but you are of ascetic fibre indeed if you do not follow up the book with a reading of _the woodlanders_ and _the mayor of casterbridge_. there is a reason for this. if the practiced writer often fails to make a good book because he knows nothing, mr. hardy must succeed in large part because he knows so much. the more one reads him the more is one impressed with the extent of his knowledge. he has an intimate acquaintance with an immense number of interesting things. he knows men and women--if not all sorts and all conditions, at least a great many varieties of the human animal. moreover, his men are men and his women are women. he does not use them as figures to accentuate a landscape, or as ventriloquist's puppets to draw away attention from the fact that he himself is doing all the talking. his people have individuality, power of speech, power of motion. he does not tell you that such a one is clever or witty; the character which he has created does that for himself by doing clever things and making witty remarks. in an excellent story by a celebrated modern master there is a young lady who is declared to be clever and brilliant. out of forty or fifty observations which she makes, the most extraordinary concerns her father; she says, 'isn't dear papa delightful?' at another time she inquires whether another gentleman is not also delightful. hardy's resources are not so meagre as this. when his people talk we listen,--we do not endure. he knows other things besides men and women. he knows the soil, the trees, the sky, the sunsets, the infinite variations of the landscape under cloud and sunshine. he knows horses, sheep, cows, dogs, cats. he understands the interpretation of sounds,--a detail which few novelists comprehend or treat with accuracy; the pages of his books ring with the noises of house, street, and country. moreover there is nothing conventional in his transcript of facts. there is no evidence that he has been in the least degree influenced by other men's minds. he takes the raw stuff of which novels are made and moulds it as he will. he has an absolutely fresh eye, as painters sometimes say. he looks on life as if he were the first literary man, 'and none had ever lived before him.' paraphrasing ruskin, one may say of hardy that in place of studying the old masters he has studied what the old masters studied. but his point of view is his own. his pages are not reminiscent of other pages. he never makes you think of something you have read, but invariably of something you have seen or would like to see. he is an original writer, which means that he takes his material at first hand and eschews documents. there is considerable evidence that he has read books, but there is no reason for supposing that books have damaged him. dr. farmer proved that shakespeare had no 'learning.' one might perhaps demonstrate that thomas hardy is equally fortunate. in that case he and shakespeare may felicitate one another. though when we remember that in our day it is hardly possible to avoid a tincture of scholarship, we may be doing the fairer thing by these two men if we say that the one had small greek and the other has adroitly concealed the measure of greek, whether great or small, which is in his possession. to put the matter in another form, though hardy may have drunk in large quantity 'the spirit breathed from dead men to their kind,' he has not allowed his potations to intoxicate him. this paragraph is not likely to be misinterpreted unless by some honest soul who has yet to learn that 'literature is not sworn testimony.' therefore it may be well to add that mr. hardy undoubtedly owns a collection of books, and has upon his shelves dictionaries and encyclopedias, together with a decent representation of those works which people call 'standard.' but it is of importance to remember this: that while he may be a well-read man, as the phrase goes, he is not and never has been of that class which emerson describes with pale sarcasm as 'meek young men in libraries.' it is clear that hardy has not 'weakened his eyesight over books,' and it is equally clear that he has 'sharpened his eyesight on men and women.' let us consider a few of his virtues. ii in the first place he tells a good story. no extravagant praise is due him for this; it is his business, his trade. he ought to do it, and therefore he does it. the 'first morality' of a novelist is to be able to tell a story, as the first morality of a painter is to be able to handle his brush skillfully and make it do his brain's intending. after all, telling stories in an admirable fashion is rather a familiar accomplishment nowadays. many men, many women are able to make stories of considerable ingenuity as to plot, and of thrilling interest in the unrolling of a scheme of events. numberless writers are shrewd and clever in constructing their 'fable,' but they are unable to do much beyond this. walter besant writes good stories; robert buchanan writes good stories; grant allen and david christie murray are acceptable to many readers. but unless i mistake greatly and do these men an injustice i should be sorry to do them, their ability ceases just at this point. they tell good stories and do nothing else. they write books and do not make literature. they are authors by their own will and not by grace of god. it may be said of them as augustine birrell said of professor freeman and the bishop of chester, that they are horny-handed sons of toil and worthy of their wage. but one would like to say a little more. granting that this is praise, it is so faint as to be almost inaudible. if hardy only wrote good stories he would be merely doing his duty, and therefore accounted an unprofitable servant. but he does much besides. he fulfills one great function of the literary artist, which is to mediate between nature and the reading public. such a man is an eye specialist. through his amiable offices people who have hitherto been blind are put into condition to see. near-sighted persons have spectacles fitted to them--which they generally refuse to wear, not caring for literature which clears the mental vision. hardy opens the eyes of the reader to the charm, the beauty, the mystery to be found in common life and in every-day objects. so alert and forceful an intelligence rarely applies its energy to fiction. the result is that he makes an almost hopelessly high standard. the exceptional man who comes after him may be a rival, but the majority of writing gentlemen can do little more than enviously admire. he seems to have established for himself such a rule as this, that he will write no page which shall not be interesting. he pours out the treasures of his observation in every chapter. he sees everything, feels everything, sympathizes with everything. to be sure he has an unusually rich field for work. in _the mayor of casterbridge_ is an account of the discovery of the remains of an old roman soldier. one would expect hardy to make something graphic of the episode. and so he does. you can almost see the warrior as he lies there 'in an oval scoop in the chalk, like a chicken in its shell; his knees drawn up to his chest; his spear against his arm; an urn at his knees, a jar at his throat, a bottle at his mouth; and mystified conjecture pouring down upon him from the eyes of casterbridge street-boys and men.' the real virtue in this bit of description lies in the few words expressive of the mental attitude of the onlookers. and it is a nice distinction which hardy makes when he says that 'imaginative inhabitants who would have felt an unpleasantness at the discovery of a comparatively modern skeleton in their gardens were quite unmoved by these hoary shapes. they had lived so long ago, their hopes and motives were so widely removed from ours, that between them and the living there seemed to stretch a gulf too wide for even a spirit to pass.' he takes note of that language which, though not articulate, is in common use among yeomen, dairymen, farmers, and the townsfolk of his little world. it is a language superimposed upon the ordinary language. 'to express satisfaction the casterbridge market-man added to his utterance a broadening of the cheeks, a crevicing of the eyes, a throwing back of the shoulders.' 'if he wondered ... you knew it from perceiving the inside of his crimson mouth and the target-like circling of his eyes.' the language of deliberation expressed itself in the form of 'sundry attacks on the moss of adjoining walls with the end of his stick' or a 'change of his hat from the horizontal to the less so.' the novel called _the woodlanders_ is filled with notable illustrations of an interest in minute things. the facts are introduced unobtrusively and no great emphasis is laid upon them. but they cling to the memory. giles winterbourne, a chief character in this story, 'had a marvelous power in making trees grow. although he would seem to shovel in the earth quite carelessly there was a sort of sympathy between himself and the fir, oak, or beech that he was operating on; so that the roots took hold of the soil in a few days.' when any of the journeymen planted, one quarter of the trees died away. there is a graphic little scene where winterbourne plants and marty south holds the trees for him. 'winterbourne's fingers were endowed with a gentle conjurer's touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress under which the delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their proper direction for growth.' marty declared that the trees began to 'sigh' as soon as they were put upright, 'though when they are lying down they don't sigh at all.' winterbourne had never noticed it. 'she erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her finger; the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled--probably long after the two planters had been felled themselves.' later on in the story there is a description of this same giles winterbourne returning with his horses and his cider apparatus from a neighboring village. 'he looked and smelt like autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat color, his eyes blue as corn flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.' hardy throws off little sketches of this sort with an air of unconsciousness which is fascinating.... it may be a sunset, or it may be only a flake of snow falling upon a young girl's hair, or the light from lanterns penetrating the shutters and flickering over the ceiling of a room in the early winter morning,--no matter what the circumstance or happening is, it is caught in the act, photographed in permanent colors, made indelible and beautiful. hardy's art is tyrannical. it compels one to be interested in that which delights him. it imposes its own standards. there is a rude strength about the man which readers endure because they are not unwilling to be slaves to genius. you may dislike sheep, and care but little for the poetical aspect of cows, if indeed you are not inclined to question the existence of poetry in cows; but if you read _far from the madding crowd_ you can never again pass a flock of sheep without being conscious of a multitude of new thoughts, new images, new matters for comparison. all that dormant section of your soul which for years was in a comatose condition on the subject of sheep is suddenly and broadly awake. read _tess_ and at once cows and a dairy have a new meaning to you. they are a conspicuous part of the setting of that stage upon which poor tess durbeyfield's life drama was played. but hardy does not flaunt his knowledge in his reader's face. these things are distinctly means to an end, not ends in themselves. he has no theory to advance about keeping bees or making cider. he has taken no little journeys in the world. on the contrary, where he has traveled at all, he has traveled extensively. he is like a tourist who has been so many times abroad that his allusions are naturally and unaffectedly made. but the man just back from a first trip on the continent has astonishment stamped upon his face, and he speaks of paris and of the alps as if he had discovered both. zola is one of those practitioners who, big with recently acquired knowledge, appear to labor under the idea that the chief end of a novel is to convey miscellaneous information. this is probably a mistake. novels are not handbooks on floriculture, banking, railways, or the management of department stores. one may make a parade of minute details and endlessly wearisome learning and gain a certain credit thereby; but what if the details and the learning are chiefly of value in a dictionary of sciences and commerce? wisdom of this sort is to be sparingly used in a work of art. in these matters i cannot but feel that hardy has a reticence so commendable that praise of it is superfluous and impertinent. after all, men and women are better than sheep and cows, and had he been more explicit, he would have tempted one to inquire whether he proposed making a story or a volume which might bear the title _the wessex farmer's own hand-book_, and containing wise advice as to pigs, poultry, and the useful art of making two heads of cabbage grow where only one had grown before. iii among the most engaging qualities of this writer is humor. hardy is a humorous man himself and entirely appreciative of the humor that is in others. according to a distinguished philosopher, wit and humor produce love. hardy must then be in daily receipt of large measures of this 'improving passion' from his innumerable readers on both sides of the atlantic. his humor manifests itself in a variety of ways; by the use of witty epithet; by ingenious description of a thing which is not strikingly laughable in itself, but which becomes so from the closeness of his rendering; by a leisurely and ample account of a character with humorous traits,--traits which are brought artistically into prominence as an actor heightens the complexion in stage make-up; and finally by his lively reproductions of the talk of village and country people,--a class of society whose everyday speech has only to be heard to be enjoyed. i do not pretend that the sources of hardy's humor are exhausted in this analysis, but the majority of illustrations can be assigned to some one of these divisions. he is usually thought to be at his best in descriptions of farmers, village mechanics, laborers, dairymen, men who kill pigs, tend sheep, furze-cutters, masons, hostlers, loafers who do nothing in particular, and while thus occupied rail on lady fortune in good set terms. certainly he paints these people with affectionate fidelity. their virile, racy talk delights him. his reproductions of that talk are often intensely realistic. nearly every book has its chorus of human grotesques whose mere names are a source of mirth. william worm, grandfer cantle, 'corp'el' tullidge, christopher coney, john upjohn, robert creedle, martin cannister, haymoss fry, robert lickpan, and sammy blore,--men so denominated should stand for comic things, and these men do. william worm, for example, was deaf. his deafness took an unusual form; he heard fish frying in his head, and he was not reticent upon the subject of his infirmity. he usually described himself by the epithet 'wambling,' and protested that he would never pay the lord for his making,--a degree of self-knowledge which many have arrived at but few have the courage to confess. he was once observed in the act of making himself 'passing civil and friendly by overspreading his face with a large smile that seemed to have no connection with the humor he was in.' sympathy because of his deafness elicited this response: 'ay, i assure you that frying o' fish is going on for nights and days. and, you know, sometimes 'tisn't only fish, but rashers o' bacon and inions. ay, i can hear the fat pop and fizz as nateral as life.' he was questioned as to what means of cure he had tried. 'oh, ay bless ye, i've tried everything. ay, providence is a merciful man, and i have hoped he'd have found it out by this time, living so many years in a parson's family, too, as i have; but 'a don't seem to relieve me. ay, i be a poor wambling man, and life's a mint o' trouble.' one knows not which to admire the more, the appetizing realism in william worm's account of his infirmity, or the primitive state of his theological views which allowed him to look for special divine favor by virtue of the ecclesiastical conspicuousness of his late residence. hardy must have heard, with comfort in the thought of its literary possibilities, the following dialogue on the cleverness of women. it occurs in the last chapter of _the woodlanders_. a man who is always spoken of as the 'hollow-turner,' a phrase obviously descriptive of his line of business, which related to wooden bowls, spigots, cheese-vats, and funnels, talks with john upjohn. 'what women do know nowadays!' he says. 'you can't deceive 'em as you could in my time.' 'what they knowed then was not small,' said john upjohn. 'always a good deal more than the men! why, when i went courting my wife that is now, the skillfulness that she would show in keeping me on her pretty side as she walked was beyond all belief. perhaps you've noticed that she's got a pretty side to her face as well as a plain one?' 'i can't say i've noticed it particular much,' said the hollow-turner blandly. 'well,' continued upjohn, not disconcerted, 'she has. all women under the sun be prettier one side than t'other. and, as i was saying, the pains she would take to make me walk on the pretty side were unending. i warrent that whether we were going with the sun or against the sun, uphill or downhill, in wind or in lewth, that wart of hers was always toward the hedge, and that dimple toward me. there was i too simple to see her wheelings and turnings; and she so artful though two years younger, that she could lead me with a cotton thread like a blind ham; ... no, i don't think the women have got cleverer, for they was never otherwise.' iv these men have sap and juice in their talk. when they think they think clearly. when they speak they express themselves with an energy and directness which mortify the thin speech of conventional persons. here is farfrae, the young scotchman, in the tap-room of the three mariners inn of casterbridge, singing of his ain contree with a pathos quite unknown in that part of the world. the worthies who frequent the place are deeply moved. 'danged if our country down here is worth singing about like that,' says billy wills, the glazier,--while the literal christopher coney inquires, 'what did ye come away from yer own country for, young maister, if ye be so wownded about it?' then it occurs to him that it wasn't worth farfrae's while to leave the fair face and the home of which he had been singing to come among such as they. 'we be bruckle folk here--the best o' us hardly honest sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and god-a'mighty sending his little taties so terrible small to fill 'em with. we don't think about flowers and fair faces, not we--except in the shape of cauliflowers and pigs' chaps.' i should like to see the man who sat to artist hardy for the portrait of corporal tullidge in _the trumpet-major_. this worthy, who was deaf and talked in an uncompromisingly loud voice, had been struck in the head by a piece of shell at valenciennes in ' . his left arm had been smashed. time and nature had done what they could, and under their beneficent influences the arm had become a sort of anatomical rattle-box. people interested in corp'el tullidge were allowed to see his head and hear his arm. the corp'el gave these private views at any time, and was quite willing to show off, though the exhibition was apt to bore him a little. his fellows displayed him much as one would a 'freak' in a dime museum. 'you have got a silver plate let into yer head, haven't ye, corp'el?' said anthony cripplestraw. 'i have heard that the way they mortised yer skull was a beautiful piece of workmanship. perhaps the young woman would like to see the place.' the young woman was anne garland, the sweet heroine of the story; and anne didn't want to see the silver plate, the thought of which made her almost faint. nor could she be tempted by being told that one couldn't see such a 'wownd' every day. then cripplestraw, earnest to please her, suggested that tullidge rattle his arm, which tullidge did, to anne's great distress. 'oh, it don't hurt him, bless ye. do it, corp'el?' said cripplestraw. 'not a bit,' said the corporal, still working his arm with great energy. there was, however, a perfunctoriness in his manner 'as if the glory of exhibition had lost somewhat of its novelty, though he was still willing to oblige.' anne resisted all entreaties to convince herself by feeling of the corporal's arm that the bones were 'as loose as a bag of ninepins,' and displayed an anxiety to escape. whereupon the corporal, 'with a sense that his time was getting wasted,' inquired: 'do she want to see or hear any more, or don't she?' this is but a single detail in the account of a party which miller loveday gave to soldier guests in honor of his son john,--a description the sustained vivacity of which can only be appreciated through a reading of those brilliant early chapters of the story. half the mirth that is in these men comes from the frankness with which they confess their actual thoughts. ask a man of average morals and average attainments why he doesn't go to church. you won't know any better after he has given you his answer. ask nat chapman, of the novel entitled _two on a tower_, and you will not be troubled with ambiguities. he doesn't like to go because mr. torkingham's sermons make him think of soul-saving and other bewildering and uncomfortable topics. so when the son of torkingham's predecessor asks nat how it goes with him, that tiller of the soil answers promptly: 'pa'son tarkenham do tease a feller's conscience that much, that church is no holler-day at all to the limbs, as it was in yer reverent father's time!' the unswerving honesty with which they assign utilitarian motives for a particular line of conduct is delightful. three men discuss a wedding, which took place not at the home of the bride but in a neighboring parish, and was therefore very private. the first doesn't blame the new married pair, because 'a wedding at home means five and six handed reels by the hour, and they do a man's legs no good when he's over forty.' a second corroborates the remark and says: 'true. once at the woman's house you can hardly say nay to being one in a jig, knowing all the time that you be expected to make yourself worth your victuals.' the third puts the whole matter beyond the need of further discussion by adding: 'for my part, i like a good hearty funeral as well as anything. you've as splendid victuals and drink as at other parties, and even better. and it don't wear your legs to stumps in talking over a poor fellow's ways as it do to stand up in hornpipes.' beings who talk like this know their minds,--a rather unwonted circumstance among the sons of men,--and knowing them, they do the next most natural thing in the world, which is to speak the minds they have. there is yet another phase of hardy's humor to be noted: that humor, sometimes defiant, sometimes philosophic, which concerns death and its accompaniments. it cannot be thought morbid. hardy is too fond of nature ever to degenerate into mere morbidity. he has lived much in the open air, which always corrects a tendency to 'vapors.' he takes little pleasure in the gruesome, a statement in support of which one may cite all his works up to , the date of the appearance of _tess_. this paper includes no comment in detail upon the later books; but so far as _tess_ is concerned it would be critical folly to speak of it as morbid. it is sad, it is terrible, as _lear_ is terrible, or as any one of the great tragedies, written by men we call 'masters,' is terrible. _jude_ is psychologically gruesome, no doubt; but not absolutely indefensible. even if it were as black a book as some critics have painted it, the general truth of the statement as to the healthfulness of hardy's work would not be impaired. this work judged as a whole is sound and invigorating. he cannot be accused of over-fondness for charnel-houses or ghosts. he does not discourse of graves and vaults in order to arouse that terror which the thought of death inspires. it is not for the purpose of making the reader uncomfortable. if the grave interests him, it is because of the reflections awakened. 'man, proud man,' needs that jog to his memory which the pomp of interments and aspect of tombstones give. hardy has keen perception of that humor which glows in the presence of death and on the edge of the grave. the living have such a tremendous advantage over the dead, that they can neither help feeling it nor avoid a display of the feeling. when the lion is buried the dogs crack jokes at the funeral. they do it in a subdued manner, no doubt, and with a sense of proprieties, but nevertheless they do it. their immense superiority is never so apparent as at just this moment. this humor, which one notes in hardy, is akin to the humor of the grave-diggers in _hamlet_, but not so grim. i have heard a country undertaker describe the details of the least attractive branch of his uncomfortable business with a pride and self-satisfaction that would have been farcical had not the subject been so depressing. this would have been matter for hardy's pen. there are few scenes in his books more telling than that which shows the operations in the family vault of the luxellians, when john smith, martin cannister, and old simeon prepare the place for lady luxellian's coffin. it seems hardly wise to pronounce this episode as good as the grave-diggers' scene in _hamlet_; that would shock some one and gain for the writer the reputation of being enthusiastic rather than critical. but i profess that i enjoy the talk of old simeon and martin cannister quite as much as the talk of the first and second grave-diggers. simeon, the shriveled mason, was 'a marvelously old man, whose skin seemed so much too large for his body that it would not stay in position.' he talked of the various great dead whose coffins filled the family vault. here was the stately and irascible lord george:-- 'ah, poor lord george,' said the mason, looking contemplatively at the huge coffin; 'he and i were as bitter enemies once as any could be when one is a lord and t'other only a mortal man. poor fellow! he'd clap his hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familiar and neighborly as if he'd been a common chap. ay, 'a cussed me up hill and 'a cussed me down; and then 'a would rave out again and the goold clamps of his fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of brass, while i, being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. such a strappen fine gentleman as he was too! yes, i rather liken en sometimes. but once now and then, when i looked at his towering height, i'd think in my inside, "what a weight you'll be, my lord, for our arms to lower under the inside of endelstow church some day!"' 'and was he?' inquired a young laborer. 'he was. he was five hundred weight if 'a were a pound. what with his lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t'other'--here the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that caused a rattle among the bones inside--'he half broke my back when i took his feet to lower en down the steps there. "ah," saith i to john there--didn't i, john?--"that ever one man's glory should be such a weight upon another man!" but there, i liked my lord george sometimes.' it may be observed that as hardy grows older his humor becomes more subtle or quite dies away, as if serious matters pressed upon his mind, and there was no time for being jocular. some day, perhaps, if he should rise to the dignity of an english classic, this will be spoken of as his third period, and critics will be wise in the elucidation thereof. but just at present this third period is characterized by the terms 'pessimistic' and 'unhealthy.' that he is a pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. they preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is grass. some people escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy or much religion or much work. many who have not taken up permanent residence beneath the roof of schopenhauer or von hartmann are occasional guests. then there is that great mass of pessimism which is the result, not of thought, but of mere discomfort, physical and super-physical. one may have attacks of pessimism from a variety of small causes. a bad stomach will produce it. financial difficulties will produce it. the light-minded get it from changes in the weather. that note of melancholy which we detect in many of hardy's novels is as it should be. for no man can apprehend life aright and still look upon it as a carnival. he may attain serenity in respect to it, but he can never be jaunty and flippant. he can never slap life upon the back and call it by familiar names. he may hold that the world is indisputably growing better, but he will need to admit that the world is having a hard time in so doing. hardy would be sure of a reputation for pessimism in some quarters if only because of his attitude, or what people think is his attitude, toward marriage. he has devoted many pages and not a little thought to the problems of the relations between men and women. he is considerably interested in questions of 'matrimonial divergence.' he recognizes that most obvious of all obvious truths, that marriage is not always a success; nay, more than this, that it is often a makeshift, an apology, a pretense. but he professes to undertake nothing beyond a statement of the facts. it rests with the public to lay his statement beside their experience and observation, and thus take measure of the fidelity of his art. he notes the variety of motives by which people are actuated in the choice of husbands and wives. in the novel called _the woodlanders_, grace melbury, the daughter of a rich though humbly-born yeoman, has unusual opportunities for a girl of her class, and is educated to a point of physical and intellectual daintiness which make her seem superior to her home environment. her father has hoped that she will marry her rustic lover, giles winterbourne, who, by the way, is a man in every fibre of his being. grace is quite unspoiled by her life at a fashionable boarding school, but after her return her father feels (and hardy makes the reader feel) that in marrying giles she will sacrifice herself. she marries dr. fitzspiers, a brilliant young physician, recently come into the neighborhood, and in so doing she chooses for the worse. the character of dr. fitzspiers is summarized in a statement he once made (presumably to a male friend) that 'on one occasion he had noticed himself to be possessed by five distinct infatuations at the same time.' his flagrant infidelities bring about a temporary separation; grace is not able to comprehend 'such double and treble-barreled hearts.' when finally they are reunited the life-problem of each still awaits an adequate solution. for the motive which brings the girl back to her husband is only a more complex phase of the same motive which chiefly prompted her to marry him. hardy says that fitzspiers as a lover acted upon grace 'like a dram.' his presence 'threw her into an atmosphere which biased her doings until the influence was over.' afterward she felt 'something of the nature of regret for the mood she had experienced.' but this same story contains two other characters who are unmatched in fiction as the incarnation of pure love and self-forgetfulness. giles winterbourne, whose devotion to grace is without wish for happiness which shall not imply a greater happiness for her, dies that no breath of suspicion may fall upon her. he in turn is loved by marty south with a completeness which destroys all thought of self. she enjoys no measure of reward while winterbourne lives. he never knows of marty's love. but in that last fine paragraph of this remarkable book, when the poor girl places the flowers upon his grave she utters a little lament which for beauty, pathos, and realistic simplicity is without parallel in modern fiction. hardy was never more of an artist than when writing the last chapter of _the woodlanders_. after all, a book in which unselfish love is described in terms at once just and noble cannot be dangerously pessimistic, even if it also takes cognizance of such hopeless cases as a man with a chronic tendency to fluctuations of the heart. the matter may be put briefly thus: in hardy's novels one sees the artistic result of an effort to paint life as it is, with much of its joy and a deal of its sorrow, with its good people and its selfish people, its positive characters and its laodiceans, its men and women who dominate circumstances, and its unhappy ones who are submerged. these books are the record of what a clear-eyed, sane, vigorous, sympathetic, humorous man knows about life; a man too conscious of things as they are to wish grossly to exaggerate or to disguise them; and at the same time so entirely aware how much poetry as well as irony god has mingled in the order of the world as to be incapable of concealing that fact either. he is of such ample intellectual frame that he makes the petty contentions of literary schools appear foolish. i find a measure of hardy's mind in passages which set forth his conception of the preciousness of life, no matter what the form in which life expresses itself. he is peculiarly tender toward brute creation. in that paragraph which describes tess discovering the wounded pheasants in the wood, hardy suggests the thought, quite new to many people, that chivalry is not confined to the relations of man to man or of man to woman. there are still weaker fellow-creatures in nature's teeming family. what if we are unmannerly or unchivalrous toward them? he abounds in all manner of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. it is to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being dispersedly set forth in a 'wit and wisdom of thomas hardy.' such books are a depressing species of literature and seem chiefly designed to be given away at holiday time to acquaintances who are too important to be put off with christmas cards, and not important enough to be supplied with gifts of a calculable value. one must praise the immense spirit and vivacity of scenes where something in the nature of a struggle, a moral duel, goes on. in such passages every power at the writer's command is needed; unerring directness of thought, and words which clothe this thought as an athlete's garments fit the body. everything must count, and the movement of the narrative must be sustained to the utmost. the chess-playing scene between elfride and knight in _a pair of blue eyes_ is an illustration. sergeant troy displaying his skill in handling the sword--weaving his spell about bathsheba in true snake fashion, is another example. still more brilliant is the gambling scene in _the return of the native_, where wildeve and diggory venn, out on the heath in the night, throw dice by the light of a lantern for thomasin's money. venn, the reddleman, in the mephistophelian garb of his profession, is the incarnation of a good spirit, and wins the guineas from the clutch of the spendthrift husband. the scene is immensely dramatic, with its accompaniments of blackness and silence, wildeve's haggard face, the circle of ponies, known as heath-croppers, which are attracted by the light, the death's-head moth which extinguishes the candle, and the finish of the game by the light of glow-worms. it is a glorious bit of writing in true bravura style. his books have a quality which i shall venture to call 'spaciousness,' in the hope that the word conveys the meaning i try to express. it is obvious that there is a difference between books which are large and books which are merely long. the one epithet refers to atmosphere, the other to number of pages. hardy writes large books. there is room in them for the reader to expand his mind. they are distinctly out-of-door books, 'not smacking of the cloister or the library.' in reading them one has a feeling that the vault of heaven is very high, and that the earth stretches away to interminable distances upon all sides. this quality of largeness is not dependent upon number of pages; nor is length absolute as applied to books. a book may contain one hundred pages and still be ninety-nine pages too long, for the reason that its truth, its lesson, its literary virtue, are not greater than might be expressed in a single page. spaciousness is in even less degree dependent upon miles. the narrowness, geographically speaking, of hardy's range of expression is notable. there is much contrast between him and stevenson in this respect. the scotchman has embodied in his fine books the experiences of life in a dozen different quarters of the globe. hardy, with more robust health, has traveled from portland to bath, and from 'wintoncester' to 'exonbury,'--journeys hardly more serious than from the blue bed to the brown. and it is better thus. no reader of _the return of the native_ would have been content that eustacia vye should persuade her husband back to paris. rather than the boulevards one prefers egdon heath, as hardy paints it, 'the great inviolate place,' the 'untamable ishmaelitish thing' which its arch-enemy, civilization, could not subdue. he is without question one of the best writers of our time, whether for comedy or for tragedy; and for extravaganza, too, as witness his lively farce called _the hand of ethelberta_. he can write dialogue or description. he is so excellent in either that either, as you read it, appears to make for your highest pleasure. if his characters talk, you would gladly have them talk to the end of the book. if he, the author, speaks, you would not wish to interrupt. more than most skillful writers, he preserves that just balance between narrative and colloquy. his best novels prior to the appearance of _tess_, are _the woodlanders_, _far from the madding crowd_, _the return of the native_, and _the mayor of casterbridge_. these four are the bulwarks of his reputation, while a separate and great fame might be based alone on that powerful tragedy called by its author _tess of the d'urbervilles_. criticism which glorifies any one book of a given author at the expense of all his other books is profitless, if not dangerous. moreover, it is dangerous to have a favorite author as well as a favorite book of that favorite author. a man's choice of books, like his choice of friends, is usually inexplicable to everybody but himself. however, the chief object in recommending books is to make converts to the gospel of literature according to the writer of these books. for which legitimate purpose i would recommend to the reader who has hitherto denied himself the pleasure of an acquaintance with thomas hardy, the two volumes known as _the woodlanders_ and _the return of the native_. the first of these is the more genial because it presents a more genial side of nature. but the other is a noble piece of literary workmanship, a powerful book, ingeniously framed, with every detail strongly realized; a book which is dramatic, humorous, sincere in its pathos, rich in its word-coloring, eloquent in its descriptive passages; a book which embodies so much of life and poetry that one has a feeling of mental exaltation as he reads. surely it is not wise in the critical jeremiahs so despairingly to lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of the literature of the time. the literature of the time is very well, as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work of thomas hardy and george meredith. with such men among the most influential in modern letters, and with barrie and stevenson among the idols of the reading world, it would seem that the office of public jeremiah should be continued rather from courtesy than from an overwhelming sense of the needs of the hour. a reading in the letters of john keats one would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of keats does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. it is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock. most readers of keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his poetry, have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in his letters. hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of virile intellectual health. not that they think of him as morbid,--his poetry surely could not make this impression,--but rather that the popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the keats of shelley's preface to the _adonais_, the keats whose story is written large in the world's book of pity and of death. when the readers are confronted with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes. nay, more, it embarrasses them. to find themselves guilty of having pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. in plain terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow) alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his patrons could boast. small wonder that now and then you find a reader, with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to his first dip into the letters. the legendary keats dies hard; or perhaps we would better say that when he seems to be dying he is simply, in the good old fashion of legends, taking out a new lease of life. for it is as true now as when the sentence was first penned, that 'a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.' among the many readers of good books, there will always be some whose notions of the poetical proprieties suffer greatly by the facts of keats's history. it is so much pleasanter to them to think that the poet's sensitive spirit was wounded to death by bitter words than to know that he was carried off by pulmonary disease. but when they are tired of reading _endymion_, _isabella_, and _the eve of st. agnes_ in the light of this incorrect conception, let them try a new reading in the light of the letters, and the masculinity of this very robust young maker of poetry will prove refreshing. the letters are in every respect good reading. rather than deplore their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. at every turn there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. we are carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. not a little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch glimpses of notable figures. often, the feeling is that we have been called in haste to a window to look at some celebrity passing by, and have arrived just in time to see him turn the corner. what a touch of reality, for example, does one get in reading that 'wordsworth went rather huff'd out of town'! one is not in the habit of thinking of wordsworth as capable of being 'huffed,' but the writer of the letters feared that he was. all of keats's petty anxieties and small doings, as well as his aspirations and his greatest dreams, are set down here in black on white. it is a complete and charming revelation of the man. one learns how he 'went to hazlitt's lecture on poetry, and got there just as they were coming out;' how he was insulted at the theatre, and wouldn't tell his brothers; how it vexed him because the irish servant said that his picture of shakespeare looked exactly like her father, only 'her father had more color than the engraving;' how he filled in the time while waiting for the stage to start by counting the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook's window, 'and had just begun on the jellies;' how indignant he was at being spoken of as 'quite the little poet;' how he sat in a hatter's shop in the poultry while mr. abbey read him some extracts from lord byron's 'last flash poem,' _don juan_; how some beef was carved exactly to suit his appetite, as if he 'had been measured for it;' how he dined with horace smith and his brothers and some other young gentlemen of fashion, and thought them all hopelessly affected; in a word, almost anything you want to know about john keats can be found in these letters. they are of more value than all the 'recollections' of all his friends put together. in their breezy good-nature and cheerfulness they are a fine antidote to the impression one gets of him in haydon's account, 'lying in a white bed with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable at his weakness and wounded at the way he had been used. he seemed to be going out of life with a contempt for this world, and no hopes of the other. i told him to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would destroy himself.' this is taking keats at his worst. it is well enough to know that he seemed to haydon as haydon has described him, but few men appear to advantage when they are desperately ill. turn to the letters written during his tour in scotland, when he walked twenty miles a day, climbed ben nevis, so fatigued himself that, as he told fanny keats, 'when i am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me around the town, like a hoop, without waking me. then i get so hungry a ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like larks to me.... i take a whole string of pork sausages down as easily as a pen'orth of lady's fingers.' and then he bewails the fact that when he arrives in the highlands he will have to be contented 'with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of milk, and a cloaths basket of eggs morning, noon, and night.' here is the active keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut sickness.' indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a temptation to dwell upon these things. how we love a man's weaknesses--if we share them! i do not know that keats would have given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that was quite universally sung to this actor's virtues, acquiesced by saying amiably, 'mr. blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can't spell;' yet there are comforting evidences that keats was no servile follower of the 'monster conventionality' even in his spelling, while in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. he sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he would spell romeo with a small _r_, irishman with a small _i_, and god with a small _g_. it is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a touch of book-madness. there was in him the making of a first-class bibliophile. he speaks with rapture of his black-letter chaucer, which he proposes to have bound 'in gothique,' so as to unmodernize as much as possible its outward appearance. but to keats books were literature or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely 'curious.' one reads with sympathetic amusement of keats's genuine and natural horror of paying the same bill twice, 'there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).' the necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at leigh hunt's instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and in part destroyed, keats refused to burn any, 'for fear of demolishing receipts.' but the reader will chance upon few more humorous passages than that in which the poet tells his brother george how he cures himself of the blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention: 'whenever i find myself growing vaporish i rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if i were going out--then all clean and comfortable, i sit down to write. this i find the greatest relief.' the virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it remained for keats to show what a change of linen and a general _adonizing_ could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. this is better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it prompts one to think anew that the english poets, taking them as a whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men. it is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet's literary life that the letters are of highest significance. they gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see authorship in the act. the processes by which genius brings things to pass are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less content with mere externals. if we may not hope to see the actual process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet's manuscript. by knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a little nearer the secret of his power. we must bear in mind that keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he died before he quite got out of boyhood. to be sure, most boys of twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. but one must have successfully passed twenty-six without doing anything in particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. and to have wrought so well in so short a time, keats must have had from the first a clear and noble conception of the nature of his work, as he must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it. perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting to see how the letters bear witness to their truth. in the first place, keats was anything but a loafer at literature. he seems never to have dawdled. a fine healthiness is apparent in all allusions to his processes of work. 'i read and write about eight hours a day,' he remarks in a letter to haydon. bailey, keats's oxford friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after breakfast, and stay there until two or three o'clock in the afternoon. he was then writing _endymion_. his stint was about 'fifty lines a day, ... and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as much ease, as he wrote his letters.... sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. but he never forced himself.' bailey quotes, in connection with this, keats's own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at all than not to come 'as naturally as the leaves of a tree.' whether this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved tom nash's sneer at those writers who can only produce by 'sleeping betwixt every sentence.' keats had in no small degree the 'fine extemporal vein' with 'invention quicker than his eye.' we uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the case of one with whom poetry was a passion. keats had an infinite hunger and thirst for good poetry. his poetical life, both in the receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. poetry was meat and drink to him. he could even urge his friend reynolds to talk about it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one's lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would be spoken. 'whenever you write, say a word or two on some passage in shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,'--a sentence which shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. shakespeare was forever 'coming new' to _him_, and he was 'haunted' by particular passages. he loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. 'i find i cannot exist without poetry,--without eternal poetry; half the day will not do,--the whole of it; i began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan.' he tells leigh hunt, in a letter written from margate, that he thought so much about poetry, and 'so long together,' that he could not get to sleep at night. whether this meant in working out ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life were imbedded in poetical soil. he loved a debauch in the verse of masters of his art. he could intoxicate himself with shakespeare's sonnets. he rioted in 'all their fine things said unconsciously.' we are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for these men, by just so much he was of them. undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment. keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses. he knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than mere ambition could. he understood the limits of ambition as a force in literature. keats's ambition trembled in the presence of keats's conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. 'i have asked myself so often why i should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is.' yet he had honest confidence. one cannot help liking him for the fine audacity with which he pronounces his own work good,--better even than that of a certain other great name in english literature; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies entirely without the range of self-choosing. there is a point of view from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own poetry, and when _endymion_ was spoken of as 'slipshod' keats could reply, 'that it is so is no fault of mine.... the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man.... that which is creative must create itself. in _endymion_ i leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if i had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. i was never afraid of failure; for i would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.' well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. men who aspire to be poets are gamblers. in all the lotteries of the literary life none is so uncertain as this. a million chances that you don't win the prize to one chance that you do. it is a curious thing that ever so thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is making literature or merely writing verse. he conforms to all the canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he shuns excesses of diction, and he courts originality; his verse seems to himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of his time, but twenty years later it is old-fashioned. keats, with all his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another. above all would he avoid self-delusion in these things. 'there is no greater sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one's self into an idea of being a great poet.' keats, if one may judge from a letter written to john taylor in february, , had little expectation that his _endymion_ was going to be met with universal plaudits. he doubtless looked for fair treatment. he probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as 'johnny,' or of getting recommendations to return to his 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.' in fact, he looked upon the issue as entirely problematical. he seemed willing to take it for granted that in _endymion_ he had but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings. 'if _endymion_ serves me for a pioneer, perhaps i ought to be content, for thank god i can read and perhaps understand shakespeare to his depths; and i have, i am sure, many friends who if i fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than pride,--to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to bitterness that i am not appreciated.' and for evidence of any especial bitterness because of the lashing he received one will search the letters in vain. keats was manly and good-humored, most of his morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. the trouncing he had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one administered to tennyson by professor wilson. critics, good and bad, can do much harm. they may terrorize a timid spirit. but a greater terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of john keats. he stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. he could say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain without comparison beyond what _blackwood_ or the _quarterly_ could possibly inflict. if he had had any terrible heart-burning over their malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother, george keats. but he is almost imperturbable. he talks of the episode freely, says that he has been urged to publish his _pot of basil_ as a reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, 'i think i shall be among the english poets after my death!' such egoism of genius is magnificent; the more so as it appears in keats because it runs parallel with deep humility in the presence of the masters of his art. naturally, the masters who were in their graves were the ones he reverenced the most and read without stint. but it was by no means essential that a poet be a dead poet before keats did him homage. it is impossible to think that keats's attitude towards wordsworth was other than finely appreciative, in spite of the fact that he applauded reynolds's _peter bell_, and inquired almost petulantly why one should be teased with wordsworth's 'matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand.' but it is also impossible that his sense of humor should not have been aroused by much that he found in wordsworth. it was wordsworth he meant when he said, 'every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,'--a sentence, by the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed at in the works of his great contemporary. it will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical words which keats scattered through his letters. emphasizing the use of simple means in his art, he says, 'i think that poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.' 'we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.... poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.' or as ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, 'entirely first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute over it.' keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. with the exception of byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical contemporaries. with respect to society he frequently practiced total abstinence; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. he was fond of the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of going to the houses of his friends. but he would run no risks; he was shy and he was proud. he dreaded contact with the ultra-fashionables. naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he cheerfully neglected his opportunities. i doubt if he ever bewailed his humble origin; nevertheless, the constitution of english society would hardly admit of his forgetting it. he had that pardonable pride which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing mental attitude. most of his friendships were with men, and this is to his credit. the man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding friendship with one of his own sex; and to go a step farther, that man is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. we may not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take this point of view. the friendships of men are a vastly more interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men and women. this is in the nature of the case. it is the usual victory of the normal over the abnormal. as a rule, it is impossible for a friendship to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question be husband and wife. then it is as rare as it is beautiful. and with men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant circumstances prompt to heroic display of friendship, for it is often so much easier to die than to live. but you may see young men pledging their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest of what is noblest in the art of living. such love will not urge to a theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. words seem to profane it. i do not say that keats stood in such an ideal relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the letters. he gave of himself to them all, and he received much from each. no man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered by the way in which keats approached him. he was charming in his attitude toward haydon; and when haydon proposed sending keats's sonnet to wordsworth, the young poet wrote, 'the idea of your sending it to wordsworth put me out of breath--you know with what reverence i would send my well wishes to him.' but interesting as a chapter on keats's friendships with men would be, we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale when laid beside that fiery love passage of his life, his acquaintance with fanny brawne. the thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume of buxton forman's edition of _keats's works_ tell the story of this affair of a poet's heart. these are the letters which mr. william watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall ever induce him to look. but mr. watson reflects upon people who have been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of 'listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.' this is not a just illustration. the man who takes upon himself the responsibility of being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read,--such an editor will need to satisfy mr. watson that in so doing he was not listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. for the general public, the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open. perhaps our duty is not to look. i, for one, wish that great men would not leave their love letters around. nay, i wish you a better wish than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar who gave us in its present form the correspondence of carlyle and emerson, the early and later letters of carlyle, and the letters of lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius whose teachings the world holds dear. he would need for this an indefinite lease upon life; but since i am wishing, let me wish largely. there is need of such wishing. many editors have been called, and only two or three chosen. but why one who reads the letters of keats to fanny brawne should have any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so desperately in love as to be wretched because of it i do not see. even a cynic will grant that keats was not disgraced, since it is very clear that he did not yield readily to what dr. holmes calls the great passion. he had a complacent boyish superiority of attitude with respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. 'nothing,' he says, 'strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. a man in love i do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world. even when i know a poor fool to be really in pain about it i could burst out laughing in his face. his pathetic visage becomes irresistible.' then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters described in the _spectator_, and says that it would please him more 'to scrape together a party of lovers.' if this letter be genuine and the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after he had succumbed to the attractions of fanny brawne. perhaps he was trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarrassment. in a much earlier letter than this he hopes he shall never marry, but nevertheless has a good deal to say about a young lady with fine eyes and fine manners and a 'rich eastern look.' he discovers that he can talk to her without being uncomfortable or ill at ease. 'i am too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble.... she kept me awake one night as a tune of mozart's might do.... i don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do i fret to leave her behind me.' but he was not a little touched, and found it easy to fill two pages on the subject of this dark beauty. she was a friend of the reynolds family. she crosses the stage of the keats drama in a very impressive manner, and then disappears. the most extraordinary passage to be met with in relation to the poet's attitude towards women is in a letter written to benjamin bailey in july, . as a partial hint towards its full meaning i would take two phrases in _daniel deronda_. george eliot says of gwendolen harleth that there was 'a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her,' which expression is quoted here only to emphasize the girl's feeling towards men as described a little later, when rex gascoigne attempted to tell her his love. gwendolen repulsed him with a sort of fury that was surprising to herself. the author's interpretative comment is, '_the life of passion had begun negatively in her._' so one might say of keats that the life of passion began negatively in him. he was conscious of a hostility of temper towards women. 'i am certain i have not a right feeling toward women--at this moment i am striving to be just to them, but i cannot.' he certainly started with a preposterously high ideal, for he says that when a schoolboy he thought a fair woman a pure goddess. and now he is disappointed at finding women only the equals of men. this disappointment helps to give rise to that antagonism which is almost inexplicable save as george eliot's phrase throws light upon it. he thinks that he insults women by these perverse feelings of unprovoked hostility. 'is it not extraordinary,' he exclaims, 'when among men i have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; i feel free to speak or to be silent; ... i am free from all suspicion, and comfortable. when i am among women, i have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; i cannot speak or be silent; i am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; i am in a hurry to be gone.' he wonders how this trouble is to be cured. he speaks of it as a prejudice produced from 'a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel.' and then, with a good-humored, characteristic touch, he drops the subject, saying, 'after all, i do think better of women than to suppose they care whether mister john keats, five feet high, likes them or not.' three or four months after writing these words he must have begun his friendly relations with the brawne family. this would be in october or november, . keats's description of fanny is hardly flattering, and not even vivid. what is one to make of the colorless expression 'a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort'? but she was fair to him, and any beauty beyond that would have been superfluous. we look at the silhouette and sigh in vain for trace of the loveliness which ensnared keats. but if our daguerreotypes of forty years ago can so entirely fail of giving one line of that which in its day passed for dazzling beauty, let us not be unreasonable in our demands upon the artistic capabilities of a silhouette. not infrequently is it true that the style of dress seems to disfigure. but we have learned, in course of experience, that pretty women manage to be pretty, however much fashion, with their cordial help, disguises them. it is easy to see from the letters that keats was a difficult lover. hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of heart, made him whimsical. nothing less than a woman of genius could possibly have managed him. he was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably so. fanny brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he misinterpreted her vivacity. she liked what is commonly called 'the world,' and so did he when he was well; but looking through the discolored glass of ill health, all nature was out of harmony. for these reasons it happens that the letters at times come very near to being documents in love-madness. many a line in them gives sharp pain, as a record of heart-suffering must always do. you may read richard steele's love letters for pleasure, and have it. the love letters of keats scorch and sting; and the worst of it is that you cannot avoid reflecting upon the transitory character of such a passion. withering young love like this does not last. it may burn itself out, or, what is quite as likely, it may become sober and rational. but in its earlier maddened state it cannot possibly last; a man would die under it. men as a rule do not so die, for the race of the azra is nearly extinct. these brawne letters, however, are not without their bright side; and it is wonderful to see how keats's elastic nature would rebound the instant that the pressure of the disease relaxed. he is at times almost gay. the singing of a thrush prompts him to talk in his natural epistolary voice: 'there's the thrush again--i can't afford it--he'll run me up a pretty bill for music--besides he ought to know i deal at clementi's.' and in the letter which he wrote to mrs. brawne from naples is a touch of the old bantering keats when he says that 'it's misery to have an intellect in splints.' he was never strong enough to write again to fanny, or even to read her letters. i should like to close this reading with a few sentences from a letter written to reynolds in february, . keats says: 'i had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner--let him on a certain day read a certain page of full poesy or distilled prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, ... and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it, until it becomes stale--but when will it do so? never! when man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting post towards all the "two-and-thirty palaces." how happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent indolence!... nor will this sparing touch of noble books be any irreverence to their writers--for perhaps the honors paid by man to man are trifles in comparison to the benefit done by great works to the spirit and pulse of good by their mere passive existence.' may we not say that the final test of great literature is that it be able to be read in the manner here indicated? as keats read, so did he write. his own work was 'accomplished in repose too great for haste, too high for rivalry.' an elizabethan novelist the fathers in english literature were not a little given to writing books which they called 'anatomies.' thomas nash, for example, wrote an _anatomy of absurdities_, and stubbes an _anatomy of abuses_. greene, the novelist, entitled one of his romances _arbasto, the anatomy of fortune_. the most famous book which bears a title of this kind is the _anatomy of melancholy_, by robert burton. it is notable, first, for its inordinate length; second, for its readableness, considering the length and the depth of it; third, for its prodigal and barbaric display of learning; and last, because it is said to have had the effect of making the most indolent man of letters of the eighteenth century get up betimes in the morning. why dr. johnson needed to get up in order to read the _anatomy of melancholy_ will always be an enigma to some. perhaps he did not get up. perhaps he merely sat up and reached for the book, which would have been placed conveniently near the bed. for the virtue of the act resided in the circumstance of his being awake and reading a good book two hours ahead of his wonted time for beginning his day. if he colored his remark so as to make us think he got up and dressed before reading, he may be forgiven. it was innocently spoken. just as a man who lives in one room will somehow involuntarily fall into the habit of speaking of that one room in the plural, so the doctor added a touch which would render him heroic in the eyes of those who knew him. i should like a pictorial book-plate representing dr. johnson, in gown and nightcap, sitting up in bed reading the _anatomy of melancholy_, with hodge, the cat, curled up contentedly at his feet. it would be interesting to know whether johnson ever read, in bed or out, a book called _euphues, the anatomy of wit_. it was published in the spring of by gabriel cawood, 'dwelling in paules churchyard,' and was followed one year later by a second part, _euphues and his england_. these books were the work of john lyly, a young oxford master of arts. according to the easy orthography of that time (if the word orthography may be applied to a practice by virtue of which every man spelled as seemed right in his own eyes), lyly's name is found in at least six forms: lilye, lylie, lilly, lyllie, lyly, and lylly. remembering the willingness of _i_ and _y_ to bear one another's burdens, we may still exclaim, with dr. ingleby, 'great is the mystery of archaic spelling!' great indeed when a man sometimes had more suits of letters to his name than suits of clothes to his back. that the name of this young author was pronounced as was the name of the flower, lily, seems the obvious inference from henry upchear's verses, which contain punning allusions to lyly and robert greene:-- 'of all the flowers a lillie once i lov'd whose laboring beautie brancht itself abroad,' etc. original editions of the _anatomy of wit_ and its fellow are very rare. probably there is not a copy of either book in the united states. this statement is ventured in good faith, and may have the effect of bringing to light a hitherto neglected copy.[ ] strange it is that princely collectors of yore appear not to have cared for _euphues_. surely one would not venture to affirm that john, duke of roxburghe, might not have had it if he had wanted it. the book is not to be found in his sale catalogue; he had lyly's plays in quarto, seven of them each marked 'rare,' and he had two copies of a well-known book called _euphues golden legacie_, written by thomas nash. the perkins sale catalogue shows neither of lyly's novels. list after list of the spoils of mighty book-hunters has only a blank where the _anatomy of wit_ ought to be. from this we may argue great scarcity, or great indifference, or both. in the compact little reprint made by professor arber one may read this moral tale, which was fashionable when shakespeare was a youth of sixteen. for convenience it will be advisable to speak of it as a single work in two parts, for such it practically is. [ ] the writer of this paper once sent to that fine scholar and gracious gentleman, professor edward arber, to inquire whether in his opinion one might hope to buy at a modest price a copy of either the first or the second part of _euphues_. professor arber's reply was amusingly emphatic: 'you might as well try to purchase one of mahomet's old slippers.' but in july of there were four copies of this old novel on sale at one new york bookstore. one of the copies was of great beauty, consisting of the two parts of the story bound up together in a really sumptuous fashion. the price was not large as prices of such books go, but on the other hand ''a was not small.' to pronounce upon this romance is not easy. we read a dozen or two of pages, and say, 'this is very fantastical humours.' we read further, and are tempted to follow sir hugh to the extent of declaring, 'this is lunatics.' one may venture the not profound remark that it takes all sorts of books to make a literature. _euphues_ is one of the books that would prompt to that very remark. for he who first said that it takes all sorts of people to make a world was markedly impressed with the differences between those people and himself. he had in mind eccentric folk, types which deviate from the normal and the sane. so _euphues_ is a very malvolio among books, cross-gartered and wreathed as to its countenance with set smiles. the curious in literary history will always enjoy such a production. the verdict of that part of the reading world which keeps a book alive by calling for fresh copies of it after the old copies are worn out is against _euphues_. it had a vivacious existence between and , and then went into a literary retirement lasting two hundred and thirty-six years. when it again came before the public it was introduced as 'a great bibliographical rarity.' its fatal old-fashionedness hangs like a millstone about its neck. in the poems of chaucer and the dramas of shakespeare are a thousand touches which make the reader feel that chaucer and shakespeare are his contemporaries, that they have written in his own time, and published but yesterday. read _euphues_, and you will say to yourself, 'that book must have been written three hundred years ago, and it looks its age.' yet it has its virtues. one may not say of it, as johnson said of the _rehearsal_, that it 'has not wit enough to keep it sweet.' neither may he, upon second thought, conclude that 'it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.' it has, indeed, a bottom of good sense; and so had malvolio. it is filled from end to beginning with wit, or with what passed for wit among many readers of that day. often the wit is of a tawdry and spectacular sort,--mere verbal wit, the use of a given word not because it is the best word, the most fitting word, but because the author wants a word beginning with the letter g, or the letter m, or the letter f, as the case may be. on the second page of greene's _arbasto_ is this sentence: 'he did not so much as vouchsafe to give an _eare_ to my _parle_, or an _eye_ to my _person_.' greene learned this trick from lyly, who was a master of the art. the sentence represents one of the common forms in _euphues_, such as this: 'to the stomach _quatted_ with _dainties_ all _delicates_ seem _queasie_.' sometimes the balance is preserved by three words on a side. for example, the companions whom euphues found in naples practiced arts 'whereby they might either _soake_ his _purse_ to reape _commodotie_, or _sooth_ his _person_ to winne _credite_.' other illustrations are these: i can neither '_remember_ our _miseries_ without _griefe_, nor _redresse_ our _mishaps_ without _grones_.' 'if the _wasting_ of our _money_ might not _dehort_ us, yet the _wounding_ of our _mindes_ should _deterre_ us.' this next sentence, with its combination of k sounds, clatters like a pair of castanets: 'though curio bee as hot as a toast, yet euphues is as cold as a clocke, though hee bee a cocke of the game, yet euphues is content to bee craven and crye creake.' excess of alliteration is the most obvious feature of lyly's style. that style has been carefully analyzed by those who are learned in such things. the study is interesting, with its talk of alliteration and transverse alliteration, antithesis, climax, and assonance. in truth, one does not know which to admire the more, the ingenuity of the man who constructed the book, or the ingenuity of the scholars who have explained how he did it. between lyly on the one hand, and the grammarians on the other, the reader is almost tempted to ask if this be literature or mathematics. whether lyly got his style from pettie or guevara is an important question, but he made it emphatically his own, and it will never be called by any other name than euphuism. the making of a book on this plan is largely the result of astonishing mental gymnastics. it commands respect in no small degree, because lyly was able to keep it up so long. to walk from new york to albany, as did the venerable weston not so very long since, is a great test of human endurance. but walking is the employment of one's legs and body in god's appointed way of getting over the ground. suppose a man were to undertake to hop on one leg from new york to albany, the utility or the æsthetic value of the performance would be less obvious. the most successful artist in hopping could hardly expect applause from the right-minded. he would excite attention because he was able to hop so far, and not because he was the exponent of a praiseworthy method of locomotion. lyly gained eminence by doing to a greater extent than any man a thing that was not worth doing at all. one is more astonished at lyly's power of endurance as author than at his own power of endurance as reader. for the volume is actually readable even at this day. did lyly not grow wearied of perpetually riding these alliterative trick-ponies? apparently not. the book is 'executed' with a vivacity, a dash, a 'go,' that will captivate any reader who is willing to meet the author halfway. _euphues_ became the rage, and its literary style the fashion. how or why must be left to him to explain who can tell why sleeves grow small and then grow big, why skirts are at one time only two and a half yards around and at another time five and a half or eight yards around. an elizabethan gentleman might be too poor to dress well, but he would squander his last penny in getting his ruff starched. lyly's style bristles with extravagances of the starched ruff sort, which only serve to call attention to the intellectual deficiencies in the matter of doublet and hose. of plot or story there is but little. the hero, euphues, who gives the title to the romance, is a young, clever, and rich athenian. he visits naples, where his money and wit attract many to his side. by his careless, pleasure-seeking mode of life he wakens the fatherly interest of a wise old gentleman, eubulus, who calls upon him to warn him of his danger. the conversation between the two is the first and not the least amusing illustration of the courtly verbal fencing with which the book is filled. the advice of the old man only provokes euphues into making the sophistical plea that his style of living is right because nature prompts him to it; and he leaves eubulus 'in a great quandary' and in tears. nevertheless, the old gentleman has the righteous energy which prompts him to say to the departing euphues, already out of hearing, 'seeing thou wilt not buy counsel at the first hand good cheap, thou shalt buy repentance at the second hand, at such unreasonable rate, that thou wilt curse thy hard pennyworth, and ban thy hard heart.' euphues takes to himself a new sworn brother, one philautus, who carries him to visit his lady-love, lucilla. lucilla is rude at first, but becomes enamored of euphues's conversational power, and finally of himself. in fact, she unceremoniously throws over her former lover, and tells her father that she will either marry euphues or else lead apes in hell. this causes a break in the friendship between euphues and philautus, and there is an exchange of formidably worded letters, in which philautus reminds euphues that all greeks are liars, and euphues quotes euripides to the effect that all is lawful in love. lucilla, who is fickle, suddenly dismisses her new cavalier for yet a third, while euphues and philautus, in the light of their common misfortune, fall upon each other's necks and are reconciled. both profess themselves to have been fools, while euphues, as the greater and more recent fool, composes a pamphlet against love. this he calls a 'cooling-card.' it is addressed primarily to philautus, but contains general advice for 'all fond lovers.' euphues's own cure was radical, for he says, 'now do i give a farewell to the world, meaning rather to macerate myself with melancholy, than pine in folly, rather choosing to die in my study amidst my books than to court it in italy in the company of ladies.' he returns to athens, applies himself to the study of philosophy, becomes public reader in the university, and, as crowning evidence that he has finished sowing his wild oats, produces three volumes of lectures. realizing how much of his own youth has been wasted, he writes a pamphlet on the education of the young, a dialogue with an atheist, and these, with a bundle of letters, make up the first part of the _anatomy of wit_. from one of the letters we learn that lucilla was as frail as she was beautiful, and that she died in evil report. the story, including the diatribe against love, is about as long as _the vicar of wakefield_. it begins as a romance and ends as a sermon. the continuation of the novel, _euphues and his england_, is a little over a third longer than part one. the two friends carry out their project of visiting england. after a wearisome voyage they reach dover, view the cliffs and the castle, and then proceed to canterbury. between canterbury and london they stop for a while with a 'comely olde gentleman,' fidus, who keeps bees and tells good stories. he also gives sound advice as to the way in which strangers should conduct themselves. a lively bit of writing is the account which fidus gives of his commonwealth of bees. it is not according to lubbock, but is none the less amusing. in london the two travelers become favorites at the court. philautus falls in love, to the great annoyance of euphues, who argues mightily with him against such folly. the two gentlemen expend vast resources of stationery and language upon the subject. they quarrel violently, and euphues becomes so irritated that he must needs go and rent new lodgings, 'which by good friends he quickly got, and there fell to his _pater noster_, where awhile,' says lyly innocently, 'i will not trouble him in his prayers.' they are reconciled later, and philautus obtains permission to love; but he has discovered in the mean time that the lady will not have him. the account of his passion, how it 'boiled and bubbled,' of his visit to the soothsayer to purchase love charms, his stately declamations to camilla and her elaborate replies to him, of his love letter concealed in a pomegranate, and her answer stitched into a copy of petrarch,--is all very lively reading, much more so than that dreary love-making between pyrocles and philoclea, or between any other pair of the many exceedingly tiresome folk in sidney's _arcadia_. grant that it is deliciously absurd. it is not to be supposed that a clever eighteen-year-old girl, replying to a declaration of love, will talk in the language of a trained nurse, and say: 'green sores are to be dressed roughly lest they fester, tettars are to be drawn in the beginning lest they spread, ringworms to be anointed when they first appear lest they compass the whole body, and the assaults of love to be beaten back at the first siege lest they undermine at the second.' was ever suitor in this fashion rejected! it makes one think of some of the passages in the _history of john buncle_, where the hero pours out a torrent of passionate phrases, and the 'glorious' miss noel, in reply, begs that they may take up some rational topic of conversation; for example, what is _his_ view of that opinion which ascribes 'primævity and sacred prerogatives' to the hebrew language. but philautus does not break his heart over camilla's rejection. he is consoled with the love of another fair maiden, marries her, and settles in england. euphues goes back to athens, and presently retires to the country, where he follows the calling of one whose profession is melancholy. like most hermits of culture, he leaves his address with his banker. we assume this, for he was very rich; it is not difficult to be a hermit on a large income. the book closes with a section called 'euphues glasse for europe,' a thirty-page panegyric on england and the queen. they say that this novel was very popular, and certain causes of its popularity are not difficult to come at. a large measure of the success that _euphues_ had is due to the commonplaceness of its observations. it abounds in proverbs and copy-book wisdom. in this respect it is as homely as an almanac. john lyly had a great store of 'miscellany thoughts,' and he cheerfully parted with them. his book succeeded as tupper's _proverbial philosophy_ and watts' _on the mind_ succeeded. people believed that they were getting ideas, and people like what they suppose to be ideas if no great effort is required in the getting of them. it is astonishing how often the world needs to be advised of the brevity of time. yet every person who can wade in the shallows of his own mind and not wet his shoe-tops finds a sweet melancholy and a stimulating freshness in the thought that time is short. john lyly said, 'there is nothing more swifter than time, nothing more sweeter,'--and countless elizabethan gentlemen and ladies underscored that sentence, or transferred it to their commonplace books,--if they had such painful aids to culture,--and were comforted and edified by the discovery that brilliant john lyly had made. this glib command of the matter-of-course, with a ready use of the proverb and the 'old said saw,' is a marked characteristic of the work. it emphasizes the youth of its author. we learn what could not have been new even in , that 'in misery it is a great comfort to have a companion;' that 'a new broom sweepeth clean;' that 'delays breed dangers;' that 'nothing is so perilous as procrastination;' that 'a burnt child dreadeth the fire;' that it is well not to make comparisons 'lest comparisons should seem odious;' that 'it is too late to shut the stable door when the steed is stolen;' that 'many things fall between the cup and the lip;' and that 'marriages are made in heaven, though consummated on earth.' with these old friends come others, not altogether familiar of countenance, and quaintly archaic in their dress: 'it must be a wily mouse that shall breed in the cat's ear;' 'it is a mad hare that will be caught with a tabor, and a foolish bird that stayeth the laying salt on her tail, and a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon.' lyly would sometimes translate a proverb; he does not tell us that fine words butter no parsnips, but says, 'fair words fat few,'--which is delightfully alliterative, but hardly to be accounted an improvement. expressions that are surprisingly modern turn up now and then. one american street urchin taunts another by telling him that he doesn't know enough to come in when it rains. the saying is at least three hundred years old, for lyly says, in a dyspeptic moment, 'so much wit is sufficient for a woman as when she is in the rain can warn her to come out of it.' another cause of the popularity of _euphues_ is its sermonizing. the world loves to hear good advice. the world is not nervously anxious to follow the advice, but it understands the edification that comes by preaching. with many persons, to have heard a sermon is almost equivalent to having practiced the virtues taught in the sermon. churches are generally accepted as evidences of civilization. a man who is exploiting the interests of a new western town will invariably tell you that it has so many churches. also, an opera-house. the english world above all other worlds loves to hear good advice. england is the natural home of the sermon. jusserand notes, almost with wonder, that in the annual statistics of the london publishers the highest numbers indicate the output of sermons and theological works. then come novels. john lyly was ingenious; he combined good advice and storytelling. not skillfully, hiding the sermon amid lively talk and adventure, but blazoning the fact that he was going to moralize as long as he would. he shows no timidity, even declares upon one of his title-pages that in this volume 'there is small offense by lightness given to the wise, and less occasion of looseness proffered to the wanton.' such courage in this day would be apt seriously to injure the sale of a novel. did not ruskin declare that miss edgeworth had made virtue so obnoxious that since her time one hardly dared express the slightest bias in favor of the ten commandments? lyly knew the public for which he acted as literary caterer. they liked sermons, and sermons they should have. nearly every character in the book preaches, and euphues is the most gifted of them all. even that old gentleman of naples who came first to euphues because his heart bled to see so noble a youth given to loose living has the tables turned upon him, for euphues preaches to the preacher upon the sovereign duty of resignation to the will of god. a noteworthy characteristic is the frequency of lyly's classical allusions. if the only definition of pedantry be 'vain and ostentatious display of learning,' i question if we may dismiss lyly's wealth of classical lore with the word 'pedantry.' he was fresh from his university life. if he studied at all when he was at oxford, he must have studied latin and greek, for after these literatures little else was studied. young men and their staid tutors were compelled to know ancient history and mythology. like heine, they may have taken a 'real delight in the mob of gods and goddesses who ran so jolly naked about the world.' in the first three pages of the _anatomy of wit_ there are twenty classical names, ten of them coupled each with an allusion. nobody begins a speech without a reference of this nature within calling distance. euphues and philautus fill their talk with evidences of a classical training. the ladies are provided with apt remarks drawn from the experiences of helen, of cornelia, of venus, of diana, and vesta. even the master of the ship which conveyed euphues from naples to england declaims about ulysses and julius cæsar. this naturally destroys all dramatic effect. everybody speaks euphuism, though classical allusion alone is not essentially euphuistic. john lyly would be the last man to merit any portion of that fine praise bestowed by hazlitt upon shakespeare when he said that shakespeare's genius 'consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose.' lyly's genius was the opposite of this; it consisted in the faculty of transforming everybody into a reduplication of himself. there is no change in style when the narrative parts end and the dialogue begins. all the persons of the drama utter one strange tongue. they are no better than the characters in a punch and judy show, where one concealed manipulator furnishes voice for each of the figures. but in lyly's novel there is not even an attempt at the most rudimentary ventriloquism. what makes the book still less a reflection of life is that the speakers indulge in interminably long harangues. no man (unless he were a coleridge) would be tolerated who talked in society at such inordinate length. when the characters can't talk to one another they retire to their chambers and declaim to themselves. they polish their language with the same care, open the classical dictionary, and have at themselves in good set terms. philautus, inflamed with love of camilla, goes to his room and pronounces a ten-minute discourse on the pangs of love, having only himself for auditor. they are amazingly patient under the verbal inflictions of one another. euphues, angry with philautus for having allowed himself to fall in love, takes him to task in a single speech containing four thousand words. if lyly had set out with the end in view of constructing a story by putting into it alone 'what is not life,' his product would have been what we find it now. one could easily believe the whole affair to have been intended for a tremendous joke were it not that the tone is so serious. we are accustomed to think of youth as light-hearted: but look at a serious child,--there is nothing more serious in the world. lyly was twenty-six years when he first published. much of the seriousness in his romance is the burden of twenty-six years' experience of life, a burden greater perhaps than he ever afterward carried. being, as we take it, an unmarried man, lyly gives directions for managing a wife. he believes in the wholesome doctrine that a man should select his own wife. 'made marriages by friends' are dangerous. 'i had as lief another should take measure by his back of my apparel as appoint what wife i shall have by his mind.' he prefers in a wife 'beauty before riches, and virtue before blood.' he holds to the radical english doctrine of wifely submission; there is no swerving from the position that the man is the woman's 'earthly master,'[ ] but in taming a wife no violence is to be employed. wives are to be subdued with kindness. 'if their husbands with great threatenings, with jars, with brawls, seek to make them tractable, or bend their knees, the more stiff they make them in the joints, the oftener they go about by force to rule them, the more froward they find them; but using mild words, gentle persuasions, familiar counsel, entreaty, submission, they shall not only make them to bow their knees, but to hold up their hands, not only cause them to honor them, but to stand in awe of them.' by such methods will that supremest good of an english home be brought about, namely, that the wife shall stand in awe of her husband. [ ] lady burton's dedication of her husband's biography,--'to my earthly master,' etc. the young author admits that some wives have the domineering instinct, and that way danger lies. a man must look out for himself. if he is not to make a slave of his wife, he is also not to be too submissive; 'that will cause her to disdain thee.' moreover, he must have an eye to the expenditure. she may keep the keys, but he will control the pocket-book. the model wife in ecclesiastes had greater privileges; she could not only consider a piece of ground, but she could buy it if she liked it. not so this well-trained wife of lyly's novel. 'let all the keys hang at her girdle, but the purse at thine, so shalt thou know what thou dost spend, and how she can spare.' but in setting forth his theory for being happy though married, lyly, methinks, preaches a dangerous doctrine in this respect: he hints at the possibility of a man's wanting, in vulgar parlance, to go on a spree, expresses no question as to the propriety of his so doing, but says that if a man does let himself loose in this fashion his wife must not know it. 'imitate the kings of persia, who when they were given to riot kept no company with their wives, but when they used good order had their queens even at the table.' in short, the wife was to duplicate the moods of her husband. 'thou must be a glass to thy wife, for in thy face must she see her own; for if when thou laughest she weep, when thou mournest she giggle, the one is a manifest sign she delighteth in others, the other a token she despiseth thee.' john lyly was a wise youth. he struck the keynote of the mode in which most incompatible marriages are played when he said that it was a bad sign if one's wife giggled when one was disposed to be melancholy. an interesting study is the author's attitude toward foreign travel. it would appear to have been the fashion of the time to indulge in much invective against foreign travel, but nevertheless--to travel. many men believed with young valentine that 'home keeping youth have ever homely wits,' while others were rather of ascham's mind when he said, 'i was once in italy, but i thank god my stay there was only nine days.' lyly came of a nation of travelers. then as now it was true that there was no accessible spot of the globe upon which the englishman had not set his foot. nomadic england went abroad; sedentary england stayed at home to rail at him for so doing. aside from that prejudice which declared that all foreigners were fools, there was a well-founded objection to the sort of traveling usually described as seeing the world. young men went upon the continent to see questionable forms of pleasure, perhaps to practice them. whether justly or not, common report named italy as the higher school of pleasurable vices, and naples as the city where one's doctorate was to be obtained. gluttony and licentiousness are the sins of naples. eubulus tells euphues that in that city are those who 'sleep with meat in their mouths, with sin in their hearts, and with shame in their houses.' there is no limit to the inconveniences of traveling. 'thou must have the back of an ass to bear all, and the snout of a swine to say nothing.... travelers must sleep with their eyes open lest they be slain in their beds, and wake with their eyes shut lest they be suspected by their looks.' journeys by the fireside are better. 'if thou covet to travel strange countries, search the maps, there shalt thou see much with great pleasure and small pains, if to be conversant in all courts, read histories, where thou shalt understand both what the men have been and what their manners are, and methinketh there must be much delight where there is no danger.' perhaps lyly intended to condemn traveling with character unformed. a boy returned with more vices than he went forth with pence, and was able to sin both by experience and authority. lest he should be thought to speak with uncertain voice upon this matter lyly gives euphues a story to tell in which the chief character describes the effect of traveling upon himself. 'there was no crime so barbarous, no murder so bloody, no oath so blasphemous, no vice so execrable, but that i could readily recite where i learned it, and by rote repeat the peculiar crime of every particular country, city, town, village, house, or chamber.' here, indeed, is no lack of plain speech. in the section called 'euphues and his ephoebus' twenty-nine pages are devoted to the question of the education of youth. it is largely taken from plutarch. some of the points are these: that a mother shall herself nurse her child, that the child shall be early framed to manners, 'for as the steele is imprinted in the soft waxe, so learning is engraven in ye minde of an young impe.' he is not to hear 'fonde fables or filthy tales.' he is to learn to pronounce distinctly and to be kept from 'barbarous talk,' that is, no dialect and no slang. he is to become expert in martial affairs, in shooting and darting, and he must hunt and hawk for his 'honest recreation.' if he will not study, he is not to be 'scourged with stripes, but threatened with words, not _dulled with blows_, like servants, the which, the more they are beaten the better they bear it, and the less they care for it.' in taking this position lyly is said to be only following ascham. ascham was not the first in his own time to preach such doctrine. forty years before the publication of _the schoolmaster_, sir thomas elyot, in his book called _the governour_, raised his voice against the barbarity of teachers 'by whom the wits of children be dulled,'--almost the very words of john lyly. _euphues_, besides being a treatise on love and education, is a sort of tudor tract upon animated nature. it should be a source of joy unspeakable to the general reader if only for what it teaches him in the way of natural history. how much of what is most gravely stated here did john lyly actually believe? it is easy to grant so orthodox a statement of physical fact as that 'the sunne doth harden the durte, and melte the waxe;' but ere the sentence be finished, the author calls upon us to believe that 'perfumes doth refresh the dove and kill the betill.' the same reckless extravagance of remark is to be noted whenever bird, beast, or reptile is mentioned. the crocodile of shakespeare's time must have been a very contortionist among beasts, for, says lyly, 'when one approacheth neere unto him, [he] gathereth up himselfe into the roundnesse of a ball, but running from him, stretcheth himselfe into the length of a tree.' perhaps the fame of this creature's powers grew in the transmission of the narrative from the banks of the nile to the banks of the thames. the ostrich was human in its vanity according to lyly; men and women sometimes pull out their white hairs, but 'the estritch, that taketh the greatest pride in her feathers, picketh some of the worst out and burneth them.' nay, more than that, being in 'great haste she pricketh none but hirselfe which causeth hir to runne when she would rest.' we shall presently expect to hear that ostriches wear boots by the straps of which they lift themselves over ten-foot woven-wire fences. but lyly used the conventional natural history that was at hand, and troubled himself in no respect to inquire about its truth or falsity. there is yet another cause of the popularity of this book in its own time, which has been too little emphasized. it is that trumpet blast of patriotism with which the volume ends. we feel, as we read the thirty pages devoted to the praise of england and the queen, that this is right, fitting, artistic, and we hope that it is tolerably sincere. flattery came easily to men in those days, and there was small hope of advancement for one who did not master the art. but there is a glow of earnestness in these paragraphs rather convincing to the skeptic. nor would the book be complete without this eulogy. we have had everything else; a story for who wanted a story, theories upon the education of children, a body of mythological divinity, a discussion of methods of public speaking, advice for men who are about to marry, a theological sparring match, in which a man of straw is set up to be knocked down, and _is_ knocked down, a thousand illustrations of wit and curious reading, and now, as a thing that all men could understand, the author tells englishmen of their own good fortune in being englishmen, and is finely outspoken in praise of what he calls 'the blessed island.' this is an old-fashioned vein, to be sure,--the _ad captandum_ trick of a popular orator bent upon making a success. it is not looked upon in all places with approval. 'our unrivaled prosperity' was a phrase which greatly irritated matthew arnold. here in america, are we not taught by a highly fastidious journal that we may be patriotic if we choose, but we must be careful how we let people know it? we mustn't make a fuss about it. we mustn't be blatant. the star-spangled banner on the public schools is at best a cheap and vulgar expression of patriotism. but somehow even this sort of patriotism goes with the people, and perhaps these instincts of the common folk are not entirely to be despised. many a reader of _euphues_, who cared but little for its elaborated style, who was not moved by its orthodoxy, who didn't read books simply because they were fashionable, must have felt his pulse stirred by lyly's chant of england's greatness. for euphues is john lyly, and john lyly's creed was substantially that of the well-known hero of a now forgotten comic opera, 'i am an englishman.' in the thin disguise of the chief character of his story the author describes the happy island, its brave gentlemen and rich merchants, its fair ladies and its noble queen. the glories of london, which he calls the storehouse and mart of all europe, and the excellence of english universities, 'out of which do daily proceed men of great wisdom,' are alike celebrated. england's material wealth in mines and quarries is amply set forth, also the fine qualities of the breed of cattle, and the virtues of english spaniels, hounds, and mastiffs; for these constitute a sort of good that all could appreciate. he is satirical at the expense of his countrymen's dress,--'there is nothing in england more constant than the inconstancie of attire,'--but praises their silence and gravity at their meals. they have wise ministers in the court, and devout guardians of the true religion and of the church. 'o thrice happy england, where such councilors are, where such people live, where such virtue springeth.' in the paragraphs relating to the queen, lyly grows positively eloquent. he praises her matchless beauty, her mercy, patience, and moderation, and emphasizes the fact of her virginity to a degree that would have satisfied the imperial votaress herself if but once she had considered her admirer's words: 'o fortunate england that hath such a queen; ungratefull, if thou pray not for her; wicked, if thou do not love her; miserable, if thou lose her.' he calls down heaven's blessings upon her that she may be 'triumphant in victories like the palm tree, fruitful in her age like the vine, in all ages prosperous, to all men gracious, in all places glorious: so that there be no end of her praise, until the end of all flesh.' with passages such as these, this interesting book draws to a conclusion. a most singular and original book, worthy to be read, unless, indeed, the reading of these out-of-the-way volumes were found to encroach upon time belonging by right of eminent intellectual domain to chaucer and to shakespeare, to spenser and to milton. that _euphues_ is in no exact sense a novel admits of little question. it is also a brilliant illustration of how not to write english. nevertheless it is very amusing, and its disappearance would be a misfortune, since it would eclipse the innocent gayety of many a man who loves to bask in that golden sunshine which streams from the pages of old english books. the autobiography of a fair-minded man it is by no means necessary that one be a man of letters in order to write a good book. some very admirable books have been written by men who gave no especial thought to literature as an art. they wrote because they were so fortunate as to find themselves in possession of ideas, and not because they had determined to become authors. literature as such implies sophistication, and people who devote themselves to literature do so from a variety of motives. but these writers of whom i now speak have a less complex thought back of their work. they do not, for example, propose pleasure to the reader as an object in writing. their aim is single. they recount an experience, or plead a cause. literature with them is always a means to an end. they are like pedestrians who never look upon walking as other than a rational process for reaching a given place. it does not occur to them that walking makes for health and pleasure, and that it is also an exercise for displaying a graceful carriage, the set of the shoulders, the poise of the head. to be sure one runs the risk of being deceived in this matter. the actress who plays the part of an unaffected young girl, for aught that the spectator knows to the contrary may be a pronounced woman of the world. not every author who says to the public 'excuse my untaught manner' is on this account to be regarded as a literary ingénu. his simplicity awakens distrust. the fact that he professes to be a layman is a reason for suspecting him. he is probably an adept, a master of the wiles by which readers are snared. but aside from the cases in which deception is practiced, or at least attempted, there is in the world a respectable body of literature which is not the work of literary men. its chief characteristic is sincerity. the writers of these books are so busy in telling the truth that they have no time to think of literature. among the more readable of these pieces is that unpretentious volume in which dr. joseph priestley relates the story of his life. for in classing this book with the writings of authors who are not men of letters one surely does not go wide of the mark. there is a sense in which it is entirely proper to say that priestley was not a literary man. he produced twenty-five volumes of 'works,' but they were for use rather than for art. he wrote on science, on grammar, on theology, on law. he published controversial tracts: 'did so-and-so believe so-and-so or something quite different?' and then a discussion of the 'grounds' of this belief. he made 'rejoinders,' 'defenses,' 'animadversions,' and printed the details of his _experiments on different kinds of air_. this is distinctly uninviting. let me propose an off-hand test by which to determine whether or no a given book is literature. _can you imagine charles lamb in the act of reading that book?_ if you can; it's literature; if you can't, it isn't. i find it difficult to conceive of charles lamb as mentally immersed in the _letter to an anti-pædobaptist_ or the _doctrine of phlogiston established_, but it is natural to think of him turning the pages of priestley's memoir, reading each page with honest satisfaction and pronouncing the volume to be worthy the title of a book. it is a plain unvarnished tale and entirely innocent of those arts by the practice of which authors please their public. there is no eloquence, no rhetoric, no fine writing of any sort. the two or three really dramatic events in priestley's career are not handled with a view to producing dramatic effect. there are places where the author might easily have become impassioned. but he did not become impassioned. not a few paragraphs contain unwritten poems. the simple-hearted priestley was unconscious of this, or if conscious, then too modest to make capital of it. he had never aspired to the reputation of a clever writer, but rather of a useful one. his aim was quite as simple when he wrote the memoir as when he wrote his various philosophical reports. he never deviated into brilliancy. he set down plain statements about events which had happened to him, and people whom he had known. nevertheless the narrative is charming, and the reasons of its charm are in part these:-- in the first place the book belongs to that department of literature known as autobiography. autobiography has peculiar virtues. the poorest of it is not without some flavor of life, and at its best it is transcendent. a notable value lies in its power to stimulate. this power is very marked in priestley's case, where the self-delineated portrait is of a man who met and overcame enormous difficulties. he knew poverty and calumny, both brutal things. he had a thorn in the flesh,--for so he himself characterized that impediment in his speech which he tried more or less unsuccessfully all his life to cure. he found his scientific usefulness impaired by religious and political antagonisms. he tasted the bitterness of mob violence; his house was sacked, his philosophical instruments destroyed, his manuscripts and books scattered along the highway. but as he looked back upon these things he was not moved to impatience. there is a high serenity in his narrative as becomes a man who has learned to distinguish between the ephemeral and the permanent elements of life. yet it is not impossible that autobiography of this sort has an effect the reverse of stimulating upon some people. it is pleasanter to read of heroes than to be a hero oneself. the story of conquest is inspiring, but the actual process is apt to be tedious. one's nerves are tuned to a fine energy in reading of priestley's efforts to accomplish a given task. 'i spent the latter part of every week with mr. thomas, a baptist minister, ... who had no liberal education. him i instructed in hebrew, and by that means made myself a considerable proficient in that language. at the same time i learned chaldee and syriac and just began to read arabic' this seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process. think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. one must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. the man was never afraid of work. take as an illustration his experience in keeping school. he had pronounced objections to this business, and he registered his protest. but suppose the alternative is to teach school or to starve. a man will then teach school. i don't know that this was quite the situation in which priestley found himself, though he needed money. he may have hesitated to enter a profession which in his time required a more extensive muscular equipment than he was able to furnish. the old english schoolmasters were 'bruisers.' they had thick skins, hard heads, and solid fists. the symbols of their office were a greek grammar and a flexible rod. they were skillful either with the book or the birch. it has taken many years to convince the world that the short road to the moods and tenses does not necessarily lie through the valley of the shadow of flogging. perhaps priestley objected to school-mastering because it was laborious. it was indeed laborious as he practiced it. one marvels at his endurance. his school consisted of about thirty boys, and he had a separate room for about half-a-dozen young ladies. 'thus i was employed from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, without any interval except one hour for dinner; and i never gave a holiday on any consideration, the red letter days excepted. immediately after this employment in my own school-rooms i went to teach in the family of mr. tomkinson, an eminent attorney, ... and here i continued until seven in the evening.' twelve consecutive hours of teaching, less one hour for dinner! it was hardly necessary for priestley to add that he had 'but little leisure for reading.' he laid up no money from teaching, but like a true man of genius spent it upon books, a small air-pump, an electrical machine. by training his advanced pupils to manipulate these he 'extended the reputation' of his school. this was playing at science. several years were yet to elapse before he should acquire fame as an original investigator. this autobiography is valuable because it illustrates the events of a remarkable time. he who cares about the history of theological opinion, the history of chemical science, the history of liberty, will read these pages with keen interest. priestley was active in each of these fields. men famous for their connection with the great movements of the period were among his friends and acquaintance. he knew franklin and richard price. john canton, who was the first man in england to verify franklin's experiments, was a friend of priestley. so too were smeaton the engineer, james watt, boulton, josiah wedgewood, and erasmus darwin. he knew kippis, lardner, parr, and had met porson and dr. johnson. his closest friend for many years was theophilus lindsey. one might also mention the great lavoisier, magellan the jesuit philosopher, and a dozen other scientific, ecclesiastical, and political celebrities. the memoir, however, is almost as remarkable for what it does not tell concerning these people as for what it does. priestley was not anecdotal. and he is only a little less reticent about himself than he is about others. he does indeed describe his early struggles as a dissenting minister, but the reader would like a little more expansiveness in the account of his friendships and his chemical discoveries. these discoveries were made during the time that he was minister at the mill-hill chapel, leeds. here he began the serious study of chemistry. and that without training in the science as it was then understood. at warrington he had heard a series of chemical lectures by dr. turner of liverpool, a gentleman whom americans ought to regard with amused interest, for he was the man who congratulated his fellows in a liverpool debating society that while they had just lost the _terra firma_ of thirteen colonies in america, they had gained, under the generalship of dr. herschel, a _terra incognita_ of much greater extent _in nubibus_. priestley not only began his experiments without any great store of knowledge, but also without apparatus save what he devised for himself of the cheapest materials. in he published his first important scientific tract, 'a small pamphlet on the method of impregnating water with fixed air.' for this he received the copley medal from the royal society. on the first of august, , he discovered oxygen. nobody in leeds troubled particularly to inquire what this dissenting minister was about with his vials and tubes, his mice and his plants. priestley says that the only person who took 'much interest' was mr. hey, a surgeon. mr. hey was a 'zealous methodist' and wrote answers to priestley's theological papers. arminian and socinian were at peace if science was the theme. when priestley departed from leeds, hey begged of him the 'earthen trough' in which all his experiments had been made. this earthen trough was nothing more nor less than a washtub of the sort in common local use. so independent is genius of the elaborate appliances with which talent must produce results. the discoveries brought fame, especially upon the continent, and led lord shelburne to invite priestley to become his 'literary companion.' dr. price was the intermediary in effecting this arrangement. priestley's nominal post was that of 'librarian,' and he now and then officiated as experimentalist extraordinary before lord shelburne's guests. the compensation was not illiberal, and the relation seems to have been as free from degrading elements as such relations can be. priestley was not a sycophant even in the day when men of genius thought it no great sin to give flattery in exchange for dinners. it was never his habit to burn incense before the great simply because the great liked the smell of incense and were accustomed to it. on the other hand, shelburne appears to have treated the philosopher with kindness and delicacy, and the situation was not without difficulties for his lordship. among obvious advantages which priestley derived from this residence were freedom from financial worry, time for writing and experimenting, a tour on the continent, and the privilege of spending the winter season of each year in london. it was during these london visits that he renewed his acquaintance with dr. franklin. they were members of a club of 'philosophical gentlemen' which met at stated times at the london coffee house, ludgate hill. there were few days upon which the father of pneumatic chemistry and the father of electrical science did not meet. when their talk was not of dephlogisticated air and like matters it was pretty certain to be political. the war between england and america was imminent. franklin dreaded it. he often said to priestley that 'if the difference should come to an open rupture, it would be a war of _ten years_, and he should not live to see the end of it.' he had no doubt as to the issue. 'the english may take all our great towns, but that will not give them possession of the country,' he used to say. franklin's last day in england was given to priestley. the two friends spent much of the time in reading american newspapers, especially accounts of the reception which the boston port bill met with in america, and as franklin read the addresses to the inhabitants of boston, from the places in the neighborhood, 'the tears trickled down his cheeks.' he wrote to priestley from philadelphia just a month after the battle of lexington, briefly describing that lively episode, and mentioning his pleasant six weeks voyage with weather 'so moderate that a london wherry might have accompanied us all the way.' at the close of his letter he says: 'in coming over i made a valuable philosophical discovery, which i shall communicate to you when i can get a little time. at present i am extremely hurried.' in october of that year, , franklin wrote to priestley about the state of affairs in america. his letter contains one passage which can hardly be hackneyed from over-quotation. franklin wants priestley to tell 'our dear good friend,' dr. price, that america is 'determined and unanimous.' 'britain at the expense of three millions has killed yankees this campaign, which is , l. a head; and at bunker's hill, she gained a mile of ground, all of which she lost again, by our taking post on ploughed hill. during the same time , children have been born in america.' from these data dr. price is to calculate 'the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer the whole of our territory.' then the letter closes with greetings 'to the club of honest whigs at the london coffee house.' seven years later franklin's heart was still faithful to the club. he writes to priestley from france: 'i love you as much as ever, and i love all the honest souls that meet at the london coffee house.... i labor for peace with more earnestness that i may again be happy in your sweet society.' franklin thought that war was folly. in a letter to dr. price, he speaks of the great improvements in natural philosophy, and then says: 'there is one improvement in moral philosophy which i wish to see: the discovery of a plan that would induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first cutting one another's throats.' priestley lamented that a man of franklin's character and influence 'should have been an unbeliever in christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers.' franklin acknowledged that he had not given much attention to the evidences of christianity, and asked priestley to recommend some 'treatises' on the subject 'but not of great length.' priestley suggested certain chapters of hartley's _observations on man_, and also what he himself had written on the subject in his _institutes of natural and revealed religion_. franklin had promised to read whatever books his friend might advise and give his 'sentiments on them.' 'but the american war breaking out soon after, i do not believe,' says priestley, 'that he ever found himself sufficiently at leisure for the discussion.' priestley valued his own scientific reputation not a little for the weight it gave, among skeptics, to his arguments in support of his religious belief. he found that all the philosophers in paris were unbelievers. they looked at him with mild astonishment when they learned that he was not of the same mind. they may even have thought him a phenomenon which required scientific investigation. 'as i chose on all occasions to appear as a christian, i was told by some of them that i was the only person they had ever met with, of whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed to believe christianity.' priestley began to question them as to what they supposed christianity was, and with the usual result,--they were not posted on the subject. in priestley went to birmingham. in the summer of occurred that remarkable riot, perhaps the most dramatic event in the philosopher's not unpicturesque career. this storm had long been gathering, and when it broke, the principal victim of its anger was, i verily believe, more astonished than frightened. the dissenters were making unusual efforts to have some of their civil disabilities removed. feeling against them was especially bitter. in birmingham this hostility was intensified by the public discourses of mr. madan, 'the most respectable clergyman of the town,' says priestley. he published 'a very inflammatory sermon ... inveighing against the dissenters in general, and myself in particular.' priestley made a defense under the title of _familiar letters to the inhabitants of birmingham_. this produced a 'reply' from madan, and 'other letters' from his opponent. being a conspicuous representative of that body which was most 'obnoxious to the court' it is not surprising that priestley should have been singled out for unwelcome honors. the feeling of intolerance was unusually strong. it was said--i don't know how truly--that at a confirmation in birmingham tracts were distributed against socinianism in general and priestley in particular. very reputable men thought they did god service in inflaming the minds of the rabble against this liberal-minded gentleman. priestley's account of the riot in the memoir is singularly temperate. it might even be called tame. he was quite incapable of posing, or of playing martyr to an audience of which a goodly part was sympathetic and ready to believe his sufferings as great as he chose to make them appear. one could forgive a slight outburst of indignation had the doctor chosen so to relieve himself. 'on occasion of the celebration of the anniversary of the french revolution, on july , , by several of my friends, but with which i had little to do, a mob, encouraged by some persons in power, first burned the meeting-house in which i preached, then another meeting-house in the town, and then my dwelling-house, demolishing my library, apparatus, and as far as they could everything belonging to me.... being in some personal danger on this occasion i went to london.' a much livelier account from priestley's own hand and written the next day after the riot is found in a letter to theophilus lindsay. 'the company were hardly gone from the inn before a drunken mob rushed into the house and broke all the windows. they then set fire to our meeting-house and it is burned to the ground. after that they gutted, and some say burned the old meeting. in the mean time some friends came to tell me that i and my house were threatened, and another brought a chaise to convey me and my wife away. i had not presence of mind to take even my mss.; and after we were gone the mob came and demolished everything, household goods, library, and apparatus.' the letter differs from the memoir in saying that 'happily no fire could be got.' priestley afterwards heard that 'much pains was taken, but without effect, to get fire from my large electrical machine which stood in the library.' it is rather a curious fact that priestley was not at the inn where the anniversary was celebrating. while the company there were chanting the praises of liberty he was at home playing backgammon with his wife, a remarkably innocent and untreasonable occupation. mr. arthur young visited the scene of the riot a few days later and had thoughts upon it. 'seeing, as i passed, a house in ruins, on inquiry i found that it was dr. priestley's. i alighted from my horse, and walked over the ruins of that laboratory which i had left home with the expectation of reaping instruction in; of that laboratory, the labours of which have not only illuminated mankind but enlarged the sphere of science itself; which has carried its master's fame to the remotest corner of the civilized world; and will now with equal celerity convey the infamy of its destruction to the disgrace of the age and the scandal of the british name.' it is not necessary to supplement arthur young's burst of indignation with private bursts of our own. we can afford to be as philosophic over the matter as priestley was. that feeling was hot against him even in london is manifest from the fact that the day after his arrival a hand-bill was distributed beginning with the words: 'dr. priestley is a damned rascal, an enemy both to the religious and political constitution of this country, a fellow of a treasonable mind, consequently a bad christian.' the 'bad christian' thought it showed 'no small degree of courage' in mr. william vaughan to receive him into his house. 'but it showed more in dr. price's congregation at hackney to invite me to succeed him.' the invitation was not unanimous, as priestley with his characteristic passion for exactness is at pains to tell the reader. some of the members withdrew, 'which was not undesirable.' people generally looked askance at him. if he was upon one side of the street the respectable part of the world made it convenient to pass by on the other side. he even found his relations with his philosophical acquaintance 'much restricted.' 'most of the members of the royal society shunned him,' he says. this seems amusing and unfortunate. apparently one's qualifications as a scientist were of little avail if one happened to hold heterodox views on the trinity, or were of opinion that more liberty than englishmen then had would be good for them. priestley resigned his fellowship in the royal society. one does not need even mildly to anathematize the instigators of that historic riot. they were unquestionably zealous for what they believed to be the truth. moreover, as william hutton observed at the time, 'it's the right of every englishman to walk in darkness if he chooses.' the method employed defeated its own end. persecution is an unsafe investment and at best pays a low rate of interest. no dignified person can afford to indulge in it. there's the danger of being held up to the laughter of posterity. it has happened so many times that the unpopular cause has become popular. this ought to teach zealots to be cautious. what would madan have thought if he could have been told that within thirty years one of his own coadjutors in this affair would have publicly expressed regret for the share he had in it? madan has his reward, three quarters of a column in the _dictionary of national biography_. but to-day priestley's statue stands in a public square of birmingham opposite the council house. thus do matters get themselves readjusted in this very interesting world. rutt's life of priestley (that remarkable illustration of how to make a very poor book out of the best materials) contains a selection of the addresses and letters of condolence which were forthcoming at this time. some of them are stilted and dull, but they are actual 'documents,' and the words in them are alive with the passion of that day. they make the transaction very real and close at hand. priestley was comparatively at ease in his new home. yet he could not entirely escape punishment. there were 'a few personal insults from the lowest of the rabble.' anxiety was felt lest he might again receive the attentions of a mob. he humorously remarked: 'on the th of july, , it was taken for granted by many of my neighbors that my house was to come down just as at birmingham the year before.' the house did not come down, but its occupant grew ill at ease, and within another two years he had found a new home in the new nation across the sea. it is hardly exact to say that he was 'driven' from england, as some accounts of his life have it. mere personal unpopularity would not have sufficed for this. but at sixty-one a man hasn't as much fight in him as at forty-five. he is not averse to quiet. priestley's three sons were going to america because their father thought that they could not be 'placed' to advantage in a country so 'bigoted' as their native land was then. 'my own situation, if not hazardous, was become unpleasant, so that i thought my removal would be of more service to the cause of truth than my longer stay in england.' the sons went first and laid the foundations of the home in northumberland, pennsylvania. the word 'susquehanna' had a magic sound to englishmen. on march , , priestley delivered his farewell discourse. april he passed with his friends the lindsays in essex street, and a day later went to gravesend. for the details of the journey one must go to his correspondence. his last letters were written from deal and falmouth, april and . the vessel was six weeks in making the passage. the weather was bad and the travelers experienced everything 'but shipwreck and famine.' there was no lack of entertainment, for the ocean was fantastic and spectacular. not alone were there the usual exhibitions of flying-fish, whales, porpoises, and sharks, but also 'mountains of ice larger than the captain had ever seen before,'--for thus early had transatlantic captains learned the art of pronouncing upon the exceptional character of a particular voyage for the benefit of the traveler who is making that voyage. they saw water-spouts, 'four at one time.' the billows were 'mountain-high, and at night appeared to be all on fire.' they had infinite leisure, and scarcely knew how to use it. mrs. priestley wrote 'thirty-two large pages of paper.' the doctor read 'the whole of the greek testament and the hebrew bible as far as the first book of samuel.' he also read through hartley's second volume, and 'for amusement several books of voyages and ovid's metamorphoses.' 'if i had [had] a virgil i should have read him through, too. i read a great deal of buchanan's poems, and some of petrarch's _de remediis_, and erasmus's dialogues; also peter pindar's poems, ... which pleased me much more than i expected. he is paine in verse.' on june the ship reached sandy hook. three days later dr. and mrs. priestley 'landed at the battery in as private a manner as possible, and went immediately to mrs. loring's lodging-house close by.' the next morning the principal inhabitants of new york came to pay their respects and congratulations; among others governor clinton, dr. prevoost, bishop of new york; mr. osgood, late envoy to great britain; the heads of the college; most of the principal merchants, and many others; for an account of which amenities one must read henry wansey's _excursion to the united states in the summer of _, published by salisbury in , a most amusing and delectable volume. priestley missed seeing vice-president john adams by one day. adams had sailed for boston on the third. but he left word that boston was 'better calculated' for priestley than any other part of america, and that 'he would find himself very well received if he should be inclined to settle there.' mrs. priestley in a letter home says: 'dr. p. is wonderfully pleased with everything, and indeed i think he has great reason from the attentions paid him.' the good people became almost frivolous with their dinner-parties, receptions, calls, and so forth. then there were the usual addresses from the various organizations,--one from the tammany society, who described themselves as 'a numerous body of freemen, who associate to cultivate among them the love of liberty, and the enjoyment of the happy republican government under which they live.' there was an address from the 'democratic society,' one from the 'associated teachers in the city of new york,' one from the 'republican natives of great britain and ireland,' one from the 'medical society.' the pleasure was not unmixed. dr. priestley the theologian had a less cordial reception than dr. priestley the philosopher and martyr. the orthodox were considerably disturbed by his coming. 'nobody asks me to preach, and i hear there is much jealousy and dread of me.' in philadelphia at a baptist meeting the minister bade his people beware, for 'a priestley had entered the land.' but the heretic was very patient and earnest to do what he might for the cause of 'rational' christianity. the widespread infidelity distressed him. he mentioned it as a thing to be wondered at that in america the lawyers were almost universally unbelievers. he lost no time in getting to work. on august , when he had been settled in northumberland only a month, he wrote to a friend that he had just got paine's _age of reason_, and thought to answer it. by september he had done so. 'i have transcribed for the press my answer to mr. paine, whose work is the weakest and most absurd as well as most arrogant of anything i have yet seen.' priestley was fully conscious of the humor of his situation. he was trying to save the public, including lawyers, from the mentally debilitating effects of reading paine's _age of reason_, while at the same time all the orthodox divines were warning their flocks of the danger consequent upon having anything to do with _him_. honors and rumors of honors came to him. he was talked of for the presidency of colleges yet to be founded, and was invited to professorships in colleges that actually were. he went occasionally to philadelphia, a frightful journey from northumberland in those days. through his influence a unitarian society was established. he gave public discourses, and there was considerable curiosity to see and hear so famous a man. 'i have the use of mr. winchester's pulpit every morning ... and yesterday preached my first sermon.' he was told that 'a great proportion of the members of congress were present,' and we know that 'mr. vice-president adams was a regular attendant.' in company with his friend mr. russell, priestley went to take tea with president washington. they stayed two hours 'as in any private family,' and at leavetaking were invited 'to come at any time without ceremony.' about a year later priestley saw again washington, who had finished his second term of office. 'i went to take leave of the late president. he seemed not to be in very good spirits. he invited me to mt. vernon, and said he thought he should hardly go from home twenty miles as long as he lived.' priestley was not to have the full measure of the rest which he coveted. he had left england to escape persecution, and persecution followed him. cobbett, who had assailed him in a scurrilous pamphlet at the time of his emigration, continued his attacks. priestley was objectionable because he was a friend of france. moreover he had opinions about things, some of which he freely expressed,--a habit he had contracted so early in life as to render it hopeless that he should ever break himself of it. cobbett's virulence was so great as to excite the astonishment of mr. adams, who said to priestley, 'i wonder why the man abuses you;' when a hint from adams, priestley thought, would have prevented it all. but it was not easy to control william cobbett. adams may have thought that cobbett was a being created for the express purpose of being let alone. there are such beings. every one knows, or can guess, to what sort of animal churton collins compared dean swift, when the dean was in certain moods. william cobbett, too, had his moods. yet it is impossible to read priestley's letters between and without indignation against those who preyed upon his peace of mind. he writes to lindsay: 'it is nothing but a firm faith in a good providence that is my support at present: but it is an effectual one.' his 'never failing resource' was the 'daily study of the scriptures.' in moments of depression he loved to read the introduction to hartley's second volume, those noble passages beginning: 'whatever be our doubts, fears, or anxieties, whether selfish or social, whether for time or eternity, our only hope and refuge must be in the infinite power, knowledge and goodness of god.' priestley was indeed a remarkable man. his services to science were very great. he laid the foundations of notable structures which, however, other men were to rear. he might have been a greater man had he been less versatile. and yet his versatility was one source of his greatness. he clung to old-fashioned notions, defending the doctrine of 'philogiston' after it had been abandoned by nearly every other chemist of repute. for this he has been ridiculed. but he was not ridiculous, he was singularly open-minded. he knew that his reputation as a philosopher was under a cloud. 'though all the world is at present against me, i see no reason to despair of the old system; and yet, _if i should see reason to change my opinion, i think i should rather feel a pride in making the most public acknowledgment of it_.' these are words which professor huxley might well have quoted in his beautiful address on priestley delivered at birmingham, for they are the perfect expression and symbol of the fair-minded man. he was as modest as he was fair-minded. when it was proposed that he should accompany captain cook's expedition to the south seas, and the arrangements were really completed, he was objected to because of his political and religious opinions. dr. reinhold foster was appointed in his stead. he was a person 'far better qualified,' said priestley. again when he was invited to take the chair of chemistry at philadelphia he refused. this for several reasons, the chief of which was that he did not believe himself fitted for it. one would naturally suppose that the inventor of soda-water and the discoverer of oxygen would have been able to give lectures to young men on chemistry. but priestley believed that he 'could not have acquitted himself in it to proper advantage.' 'though i have made discoveries in some branches of chemistry, i never gave much attention to the common routine of it, and know but little of the common processes.' priestley still awaits a biographer. the two thick volumes compiled by rutt more than sixty-three years ago have not been reprinted, nor are they likely to be. but a life so precious in its lessons should be recorded in just terms. it would be an inspiring book, and its title might well be 'the story of a man of character.' not the least of its virtues would consist in ample recognition of joseph priestley's unwavering confidence that all things were ordered for the best; and then of his piety, which prompted him to say, as he looked back upon his life: 'i am thankful to that good providence which always took more care of me than ever i took of myself.' concerning a red waistcoat hero-worship is appropriate only to youth. with age one becomes cynical, or indifferent, or perhaps too busy. either the sense of the marvelous is dulled, or one's boys are just entering college and life is agreeably practical. marriage and family cares are good if only for the reason that they keep a man from getting bored. but they also stifle his yearnings after the ideal. they make hero-worship appear foolish. how can a man go mooning about when he has just had a good cup of coffee and a snatch of what purports to be the news, while an attractive and well-dressed woman sits opposite him at breakfast-table, and by her mere presence, to say nothing of her wit, compels him to be respectable and to carry a level head? the father of a family and husband of a federated club woman has no business with hero-worship. let him leave such folly to beardless youth. but if a man has never outgrown the boy that was in him, or has never married, then may he do this thing. he will be happy himself, and others will be happy as they consider him. indeed, there is something altogether charming about the personality of him who proves faithful to his early loves in literature and art; who continues a graceful hero-worship through all the caprices of literary fortune; and who, even though his idol may have been dethroned, sets up a private shrine at which he pays his devotions, unmindful of the crowd which hurries by on its way to do homage to strange gods. some men are born to be hero-worshipers. théophile gautier is an example. if one did not love gautier for his wit and his good-nature, one would certainly love him because he dared to be sentimental. he displayed an almost comic excess of emotion at his first meeting with victor hugo. gautier smiles as he tells the story; but he tells it exactly, not being afraid of ridicule. he went to call upon hugo with his friends gérard de nerval and pétrus borel. twice he mounted the staircase leading to the poet's door. his feet dragged as if they had been shod with lead instead of leather. his heart throbbed; cold sweat moistened his brow. as he was on the point of ringing the bell, an idiotic terror seized him, and he fled down the stairs, four steps at a time, gérard and pétrus after him, shouting with laughter. but the third attempt was successful. gautier saw victor hugo--and lived. the author of _odes et ballades_ was just twenty-eight years old. youth worshiped youth in those great days. gautier said little during that visit, but he stared at the poet with all his might. he explained afterwards that one may look at gods, kings, pretty women, and great poets rather more scrutinizingly than at other persons, and this too without annoying them. 'we gazed at hugo with admiring intensity, but he did not appear to be inconvenienced.' what brings gautier especially to mind is the appearance within a few weeks of an amusing little volume entitled _le romantisme et l'éditeur renduel_. its chief value consists, no doubt, in what the author, m. adolphe jullien, has to say about renduel. that noted publisher must have been a man of unusual gifts and unusual fortune. he was a fortunate man because he had the luck to publish some of the best works of victor hugo, sainte-beuve, théophile gautier, alfred de musset, gérard de nerval, charles nodier, and paul lacroix; and he was a gifted man because he was able successfully to manage his troop of geniuses, neither quarreling with them himself nor allowing them to quarrel overmuch with one another. renduel's portrait faces the title-page of the volume, and there are two portraits of him besides. there are fac-similes of agreements between the great publisher and his geniuses. there is a famous caricature of victor hugo with a brow truly monumental. there is a caricature of alfred de musset with a figure like a regency dandy,--a figure which could have been acquired only by much patience and unremitted tight-lacing; also one of balzac, which shows that that great novelist's waist-line had long since disappeared, and that he had long since ceased to care. what was a figure to him in comparison with the flesh-pots of paris! one of the best of these pictorial satires is roubaud's sketch of gautier. it has a teasing quality, it is diabolically fascinating. it shows how great an art caricature is in the hands of a master. but the highest virtue of a good new book is that it usually sends the reader back to a good old book. one can hardly spend much time upon renduel; he will remember that gautier has described that period when hero-worship was in the air, when the sap of a new life circulated everywhere, and when he himself was one of many loyal and enthusiastic youths who bowed the head at mention of victor hugo's name. the reader will remember, too, that gautier was conspicuous in that band of romanticists who helped to make _hernani_ a success the night of its first presentation. gautier believed that to be the great event of his life. he loved to talk about it, dream about it, write of it. there was a world of good fellowship among the young artists, sculptors, and poets of that day. they took real pleasure in shouting hosanna to victor hugo and to one another. even zola, the unsentimental, speaks of _ma tristesse_ as he reviews that delightful past. he cannot remember it, to be sure, but he has read about it. he thinks ill of the present as he compares the present with 'those dead years.' writers then belonged to a sort of heroic brotherhood. they went out like soldiers to conquer their literary liberties. they were kings of the paris streets. 'but we,' says zola in a pensive strain, 'we live like wolves each in his hole.' i do not know how true a description this is of modern french literary society, but it is not difficult to make one's self think that those other days were the days of magnificent friendships between young men of genius. it certainly was a more brilliant time than ours. it was flamboyant, to use one of gautier's favorite words. youth was responsible for much of the enthusiasm which obtained among the champions of artistic liberty. these young men who did honor to the name of hugo were actually young. they rejoiced in their youth. they flaunted it, so to speak, in the faces of those who were without it. gautier says that young men of that day differed in one respect from young men of this day; modern young men are generally in the neighborhood of fifty years of age. gautier has described his friends and comrades most felicitously. all were boys, and all were clever. they were poor and they were happy. they swore by scott and shakespeare, and they planned great futures for themselves. take for an example jules vabre, who owed his reputation to a certain essay on the inconvenience of conveniences. you will search the libraries in vain for this treatise. the author did not finish it. he did not even commence it,--only talked about it. jules vabre had a passion for shakespeare, and wanted to translate him. he thought of shakespeare by day and dreamed of shakespeare by night. he stopped people in the street to ask them if they had read shakespeare. he had a curious theory concerning language. jules vabre would not have said, as a man thinks so is he, but, as a man drinks so is he. according to gautier's statement, vabre maintained the paradox that the latin languages needed to be 'watered' (_arroser_) with wine, and the anglo-saxon languages with beer. vabre found that he made extraordinary progress in english upon stout and extra stout. he went over to england to get the very atmosphere of shakespeare. there he continued for some time regularly 'watering' his language with english ale, and nourishing his body with english beef. he would not look at a french newspaper, nor would he even read a letter from home. finally he came back to paris, anglicized to his very galoshes. gautier says that when they met, vabre gave him a 'shake hand' almost energetic enough to pull the arm from the shoulder. he spoke with so strong an english accent that it was difficult to understand him; vabre had almost forgotten his mother tongue. gautier congratulated the exile upon his return, and said, 'my dear jules vabre, in order to translate shakespeare it is now only necessary for you to learn french.' gautier laid the foundations of his great fame by wearing a red waistcoat the first night of _hernani_. all the young men were fantastic in those days, and the spirit of carnival was in the whole romantic movement. gautier was more courageously fantastic than other young men. his costume was effective, and the public never forgot him. he says with humorous resignation: 'if you pronounce the name of théophile gautier before a philistine who has never read a line of our works, the philistine knows us, and remarks with a satisfied air, "oh yes, the young man with the red waistcoat and the long hair." ... our poems are forgotten, but our red waistcoat is remembered.' gautier cheerfully grants that when everything about him has faded into oblivion this gleam of light will remain, to distinguish him from literary contemporaries whose waistcoats were of soberer hue. the chapter in his _histoire du romantisme_ in which gautier tells how he went to the tailor to arrange for the most spectacular feature of his costume is lively and amusing. he spread out the magnificent piece of cherry-colored satin, and then unfolded his design for a 'pour-point,' like a 'milan cuirass.' says gautier, using always his quaint editorial _we_, 'it has been said that we know a great many words, but we don't know words enough to express the astonishment of our tailor when we lay before him our plan for a waistcoat.' the man of shears had doubts as to his customer's sanity. 'monsieur,' he exclaimed, 'this is not the fashion!' 'it will be the fashion when we have worn the waistcoat once,' was gautier's reply. and he declares that he delivered the answer with a self-possession worthy of a brummel or 'any other celebrity of dandyism.' it is no part of this paper to describe the innocently absurd and good-naturedly extravagant things which gautier and his companions did, not alone the first night of _hernani_, but at all times and in all places. they unquestionably saw to it that victor hugo had fair play the evening of february , . the occasion was an historic one, and they with their merovingian hair, their beards, their waistcoats, and their enthusiasm helped to make it an unusually lively and picturesque occasion. i have quoted a very few of the good things which one may read in gautier's _histoire du romantisme_. the narrative is one of much sweetness and humor. it ought to be translated for the benefit of readers who know gautier chiefly by _mademoiselle de maupin_ and that for reasons among which love of literature is perhaps the least influential. it is pleasant to find that renduel confirms the popular view of gautier's character. m. jullien says that renduel never spoke of gautier but in praise. 'quel bon garçon!' he used to say. 'quel brave coeur!' m. jullien has naturally no large number of new facts to give concerning gautier. but there are eight or nine letters from gautier to renduel which will be read with pleasure, especially the one in which the poet says to the publisher, 'heaven preserve you from historical novels, and your eldest child from the smallpox.' gautier must have been both generous and modest. no mere egoist could have been so faithful in his hero-worship or so unpretentious in his allusions to himself. one has only to read the most superficial accounts of french literature to learn how universally it is granted that gautier had skillful command of that language to which he was born. yet he himself was by no means sure that he deserved a master's degree. he quotes one of goethe's sayings,--a saying in which the great german poet declares that after the practice of many arts there was but one art in which he could be said to excel, namely, the art of writing in german; in that he was almost a master. then gautier exclaims, 'would that _we_, after so many years of labor, had become almost a master of the art of writing in french! but such ambitions are not for us!' yet they were for him; and it is a satisfaction to note how invariably he is accounted, by the artists in literature, an eminent man among many eminent men in whose touch language was plastic. stevenson: the vagabond and the philosopher a certain critic said of stevenson that he was 'incurably literary;' the phrase is a good one, being both humorous and true. there is comfort in the thought that such efforts as may have been made to keep him in the path of virtuous respectability failed. rather than _do_ anything stevenson preferred to loaf and to write books. and he early learned that considerable loafing is necessary if one expects to become a writer. there is a sense in which it is true that only lazy people are fit for literature. nothing is so fruitful as a fine gift for idleness. the most prolific writers have been people who seemed to have nothing to do. every one has read that description of george sand in her latter years, 'an old lady who came out into the garden at mid-day in a broad-brimmed hat and sat down on a bench or wandered slowly about. so she remained for hours looking about her, musing, contemplating. she was gathering impressions, absorbing the universe, steeping herself in nature; and at night she would give all this forth as a sort of emanation.' one shudders to think what the result might have been if instead of absorbing the universe george sand had done something practical during those hours. but the scotchman was not like george sand in any particular that i know of save in his perfect willingness to bask in the sunshine and steep himself in nature. his books did not 'emanate.' the one way in which he certainly did not produce literature was by improvisation. george sand never revised her work; it might almost be said that robert louis stevenson never did anything else. of his method we know this much. he himself has said that when he went for a walk he usually carried two books in his pocket, one a book to read, the other a note-book in which to put down the ideas that came to him. this remark has undoubtedly been seized upon and treasured in the memory as embodying a secret of his success. trusting young souls have begun to walk about with note-books: only to learn that the note-book was a detail, not an essential, in the process. he who writes while he walks cannot write very much, but he may, if he chooses, write very well. he may turn over the rubbish of his vocabulary until he finds some exquisite and perfect word with which to bring out his meaning. this word need not be unusual; and if it is 'exquisite' then exquisite only in the sense of being fitted with rare exactness to the idea. stevenson wrote so well in part because he wrote so deliberately. he knew the vulgarity of haste, especially in the making of literature. he knew that finish counted for much, perhaps for half. has he not been reported as saying that it wasn't worth a man's while to attempt to be a writer unless he was quite willing to spend a day if the need were, on the turn of a single sentence? in general this means the sacrifice of earthly reward; it means that a man must work for love and let the ravens feed him. that scriptural source has been distinctly unfruitful in these latter days, and few authors are willing to take a prophet's chances. but stevenson was one of the few. he laid the foundations of his reputation with two little volumes of travel. _an inland voyage_ appeared in ; _travels with a donkey in the cevennes_, in . these books are not dry chronicles of drier facts. they bear much the same relation to conventional accounts of travel that flowers growing in a garden bear to dried plants in a herbarium. they are the most friendly and urbane things in modern english literature. they have been likened to sterne's _sentimental journey_. the criticism would be better if one were able to imagine stevenson writing the adventure of the _fille de chambre_, or could conceive of lawrence sterne writing the account of the meeting with the plymouth brother. 'and if ever at length, out of our separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common-house, i have a hope to which i cling dearly, that my mountain plymouth brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.' that was written twenty years ago and the brother was an old man then. and now stevenson is gone. how impossible it is not to wonder whether they have yet met in that 'one common-house.' 'he feared to intrude, but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.' the _inland voyage_ contains passages hardly to be matched for beauty. let him who would be convinced read the description of the forest mormal, that forest whose breath was perfumed with nothing less delicate than sweet brier. 'i wish our way had always lain among woods,' says stevenson. 'trees are the most civil society.' stevenson's traveling companion was a young english baronet. the two adventurers paddled in canoes through the pleasant rivers and canals of belgium and north france. they had plenty of rain and a variety of small misadventures; but they also had sunshine, fresh air, and experiences among the people of the country such as they could have got in no other way. they excited not a little wonder, and the common opinion was that they were doing the journey for a wager; there seemed to be no other reason why two respectable gentlemen, not poor, should work so hard and get so wet. this was conceived in a more adventurous vein than appears at first sight. in an unsubdued country one contends with beasts and men who are openly hostile. but when one is a stranger in the midst of civilization and meets civilization at its back door, he is astonished to find how little removed civilization is from downright savagery. stevenson and his companion learned as they could not have learned otherwise how great deference the world pays to clothes. whether your heart is all right turns out a matter of minor importance; but--_are your clothes all right_? if so, smiles, and good beds at respectable inns; if not, a lodging in a cow-shed or beneath any poor roof which suffices to keep off the rain. the voyagers had constantly to meet the accusation of being peddlers. they denied it and were suspected afresh while the denial was on their lips. the public mind was singularly alert and critical on the subject of peddlers. at la fere, 'of cursed memory,' they had a rebuff which nearly spoiled their tempers. they arrived in a rain. it was the finest kind of a night to be indoors 'and hear the rain upon the windows.' they were told of a famous inn. when they reached the carriage entry 'the rattle of many dishes fell upon their ears.' they sighted a great field of snowy table-cloth, the kitchen glowed like a forge. they made their triumphal entry, 'a pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp india-rubber bag upon his arm.' stevenson declares that he never had a sound view of that kitchen. it seemed to him a culinary paradise 'crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen, who all turned round from their sauce-pans and looked at us with surprise.' but the landlady--a flushed, angry woman full of affairs--there was no mistaking her. they asked for beds and were told to find beds in the suburbs: 'we are too busy for the like of you!' they said they would dine then, and were for putting down their luggage. the landlady made a run at them and stamped her foot: 'out with you--out of the door,' she screeched. i once heard a young englishman who had been drawn into some altercation at a continental hotel explain a discreet movement on his own part by saying: 'now a french cook running amuck with a carving knife in his hand would have bean a nahsty thing to meet, you know.' there were no knives in this case, only a woman's tongue. stevenson says that he doesn't know how it happened, 'but next moment we were out in the rain, and i was cursing before the carriage entry like a disappointed mendicant.' 'it's all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. six hours of police surveillance (such as i have had) or one brutal rejection from an inn door change your views upon the subject, like a course of lectures. as long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil. i will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then i will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.' stevenson declares that he could have set the temple of diana on fire that night if it had been handy. 'there was no crime complete enough to express my disapproval of human institutions.' as for the baronet, he was horrified to learn that he had been taken for a peddler again; and he registered a vow before heaven never to be uncivil to a peddler. but before making that vow he particularized a complaint for every joint in the landlady's body. to read _an inland voyage_ is to be impressed anew with the thought that some men are born with a taste for vagabondage. they are instinctively for being on the move. like the author of that book they travel 'not to go any where but to go.' if they behold a stage-coach or a railway train in motion they heartily wish themselves aboard. they are homesick when they stop at home, and are only at home when they are on the move. talk to them of foreign lands and they are seized with unspeakable heart-ache and longing. stevenson met an omnibus driver in a belgian village who looked at him with thirsty eyes because he was able to travel. how that omnibus driver 'longed to be somewhere else and see the round world before he died.' 'here i am,' said he. 'i drive to the station. well. and then i drive back again to the hotel. and so on every day and all the week round. my god, is that life?' stevenson opined that this man had in him the making of a traveler of the right sort; he might have gone to africa or to the indies after drake. 'but it is an evil age for the gipsily inclined among men. he who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.' in his _travels with a donkey_ the author had no companionship but such as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companionship was almost human at times. he learned to love the quaint little beast which shared his food and his trials. 'my lady-friend' he calls her. modestine was her name; 'she was patient, elegant in form, the color of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.' she gave him trouble, and at times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. modestine carried the luggage. she may not have known that r. l. stevenson wrote books, but she knew as by instinct that r. l. stevenson had never driven a donkey. she wrought her will with him, that is, she took her own gait. 'what that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run.' he must belabor her incessantly. it was an ignoble toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her sex. 'the sound of my own blows sickened me. once when i looked at her she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my cruelty.' from time to time modestine's load would topple off. the villagers were delighted with this exhibition and laughed appreciatively. 'judge if i was hot!' says stevenson. 'i remembered having laughed myself when i had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jack-ass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. that was in my old light days before this trouble came upon me.' he had a sleeping-bag, waterproof without, blue sheep's wool within, and in this portable house he passed his nights afield. not always by choice, as witness his chapter entitled 'a camp in the dark.' there are two or three pages in that chapter which come pretty near to perfection,--if there be such a thing as perfection in literature. i don't know who could wish for anything better than the paragraphs in which stevenson describes falling asleep in the tempest, and awaking next morning to see the 'world flooded with a blue light, the mother of dawn.' he had been in search of an adventure all his life, 'a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers,' and he thinks that he realized a fraction of his daydreams when that morning found him, an inland castaway, 'as strange to his surroundings as the first man upon the earth.' passages like these indicate stevenson's quality. he was no carpet-knight; he had the true adventurer's blood in his veins. he and drake and the belgian omnibus-driver should have gone to the indies together. better still, the omnibus driver should have gone with drake, and stevenson should have gone with amyas leigh. they say that stevenson traveled in search of health. without doubt; but think how he _would_ have traveled if he had had good health. and one has strange mental experiences alone with the stars. that came of sleeping in the fields 'where god keeps an open house.' 'i thought i had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists.' much as he gloried in his solitude he 'became aware of a strange lack;' for he was human. and he gave it as his opinion that 'to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.' it may be so. such a woman would need to be of heroic physical mould, and there is danger that she would turn out of masculine mould as well. isopel berners was of such sort. isopel could handle her clenched fists like a prizefighter. she was magnificent in the forest, and never so perfectly in place as when she backed up george borrow in his fight with the flaming tinman. having been in the habit of taking her own part, she was able to give pertinent advice at a critical moment. 'it's of no use flipping at the flaming tinman with your left hand,' she said, 'why don't you use your right?' isopel called borrow's right arm 'long melford.' and when the flaming tinman got his knock-down blow from borrow's right, isopel exclaimed, 'hurrah for long melford; there is nothing like long melford for shortness all the world over!' but what an embarrassing personage miss berners would have been transferred from the dingle to the drawing-room; nay, how impossible it is to think of that athletic young goddess as _miss_ berners! the distinctions and titles of conventional society refuse to cling even to her name. i wonder how stevenson would have liked isopel berners. and now his philosophy. yet somehow 'philosophy' seems a big word for so unpretentious a theory of life as his. stevenson didn't philosophize much; he was content to live and to enjoy. he was deliberate, and in general he would not suffer himself to be driven. he resembled an admirable lady of my acquaintance who, when urged to get something done by a given time, usually replied that 'time was made for slaves.' stevenson had the same feeling. he says: 'hurry is the resource of the faithless. when a man can trust his own heart and those of his friends to-morrow is as good as to-day. and if he die in the mean while, why, then, there he dies, and the question is solved.' you think this a poor philosophy? but there must be all kinds of philosophy; the people in the world are not run into one mould like so much candle-grease. and because of this, his doctrine of inaction and postponement, stern men and practical women have frowned upon stevenson. in their opinion instead of being up and doing he consecrated too many hours to the idleness of literature. they feel towards him as hawthorne fancied his ancestor the great witch judge would have felt towards _him_. hawthorne imagines that ghostly and terrible ancestor looking down upon him and exclaiming with infinite scorn, 'a writer of storybooks. what kind of employment is that for an immortal soul?' to many people nothing is more hateful than this willingness to hold aloof and let things drift. that any human being should acquiesce with the present order of the world appears monstrous to these earnest souls. an indian critic once called stevenson 'a faddling hedonist.' stevenson quotes the phrase with obvious amusement and without attempting to gainsay its accuracy. but if he allowed the world to take its course he expected the same privilege. he wished neither to interfere nor to be interfered with. and he was a most cheerful nonconformist withal. he says: 'to know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.' independence and optimism are vital parts of his unformulated creed. he hated cynicism and sourness. he believed in praise of one's own good estate. he thought it was an inspiriting thing to hear a man boast, 'so long as he boasts of what he really has.' if people but knew this they would boast 'more freely and with a better grace.' stevenson was humorously alive to the old-fashioned quality of his doctrine of happiness and content. he says in the preface to an _inland voyage_ that although the book 'runs to considerably over a hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of god's universe, nor so much as a single hint that i could have made a better one myself--i really do not know where my head can have been.' but while this omission will, he fears, render his book 'philosophically unimportant' he hopes that 'the eccentricity may please in frivolous circles.' stevenson could be militant. his letter on father damien shows that. but there was nothing of the professional reformer about him. he had no hobby, and he was the artist first and then the philanthropist. this is right; it was the law of his being. other men are better equipped to do the work of humanity's city missionaries than was he. let their more rugged health and less sensitive nerves bear the burden; his poet's mission was not the less important. the remaining point i have to note, among a number which might be noted, is his firm grasp of this idea: that whether he is his brother's keeper or not he is at all events his brother's brother. it is 'philosophy' of a very good sort to have mastered this conception and to have made the life square with the theory. this doctrine is fashionable just now, and thick books have been written on the subject, filled with wise terms and arguments. i don't know whether stevenson bothered his head with these matters from a scientific point of view or not, but there are many illustrations of his interest. was it this that made him so gentle in his unaffected manly way? he certainly understood how difficult it is for the well-to-do member of society to get any idea not wholly distorted of the feelings and motives of the lower classes. he believed that certain virtues resided more conspicuously among the poor than among the rich. he declared that the poor were more charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. 'a workman or a peddler cannot shutter himself off from his less comfortable neighbors. if he treats himself to a luxury he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. and what should more directly lead to charitable thoughts?' but with the advent of prosperity a man becomes incapable of understanding how the less fortunate live. stevenson likens that happy individual to a man going up in a balloon. 'he presently passes through a zone of clouds and after that merely earthly things are hidden from his gaze. he sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in admirable order and positively as good as new. he finds himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the sky-larks. he does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so unassuming in his open landau! if all the world dined at one table this philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.' in the three years since stevenson's death many additions have been made to the body of literature by him and about him. there are letters, finished and unfinished novels, and recollections by the heaping handful. critics are considerably exercised over the question whether any, or all, or only two or three of his books are to last. the matter has, i believe, been definitely decided so that posterity, whatever other responsibilities it has, will at least not have that one; and anything that we can do to relieve the future of its burdens is altruism worthy the name. stevenson was one of the best tempered men that ever lived. he never prated about goodness, but was unaffectedly good and sunny-hearted as long as he lived. of how many men can it be said, as it _can_ be said of him, that he was sick all his days and never uttered a whimper? what rare health of mind was this which went with such poor health of body! i've known men to complain more over toothache than stevenson thought it worth while to do with death staring him in the face. he did not, like will o' the mill, live until the snow began to thicken on his head. he never knew that which we call middle age. he worked harder than a man in his condition should have done. at times he felt the need to write for money; and this was hostile to his theory of literature. he wrote to his friend colvin: 'i sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the nature of an income that would come in--mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the immortal mind of man. what i want is an income that really comes in of itself while all you have to do is just to blossom and exist and sit on chairs.' i wish he might have had it; i can think of no other man whose indolence would have been so profitable to the world. stevenson's st. ives with the publication of _st. ives_ the catalogue of stevenson's important writings has closed. in truth it closed several years ago,--in , to be exact,--when _catriona_ was published. nothing which has appeared since that date can modify to any great extent the best critical estimate of his novels. neither _weir of hermiston_ nor _st. ives_ affects the matter. you may throw them into the scales with his other works, and then you may take them out; beyond a mere trembling the balance is not disturbed. but suppose you were to take out _kidnapped_, or _treasure island_, or _the master of ballantrae_, the loss would be felt at once and seriously. and unless he has left behind him, hidden away among his loose papers, some rare and perfect sketch, some letter to posterity which shall be to his reputation what neil paraday's lost novel in _the death of the lion_ might have been to his, _st. ives_ may be regarded as the epilogue. stevenson's death and the publication of this last effort of his fine genius may tend to draw away a measure of public interest from that type of novel which he, his imitators, and his rivals have so abundantly produced. this may be the close of a 'period' such as we read about in histories of literature. if the truth be told, has not our generation had enough of duels, hair-breadth escapes, post-chaises, and highwaymen, mysterious strangers muffled in great-coats, and pistols which always miss fire when they shouldn't? to say positively that we _have_ done with all this might appear extravagant in the light of the popularity of certain modern heroic novels. but it might not be too radical a view if one were to maintain that these books are the expression of something temporary and accidental, that they sustain a chronological relation to modern literature rather than an essential one. matthew arnold spoke of heine as a sardonic smile on the face of the zeitgeist. let us say that these modern stories in the heroic vein are a mere heightening of color on the cheeks of that interesting young lady, the genius of the modern novel--a heightening of color _on_ the cheeks, for the color comes from without and not from within. it is a matter of no moment. artificial red does no harm for once, and looks well under gaslight. these novels of adventure which we buy so cheerfully, read with such pleasure, and make such a good-natured fuss over, are for the greater part an expression of something altogether foreign to the deeper spirit of modern fiction. surely the true modern novel is the one which reflects the life of to-day. and life to-day is easy, familiar, rich in material comforts, and on the whole without painfully striking contrasts and thrilling episodes. people have enough to eat, reasonable liberty, and a degree of patience with one another which suggests indifference. a man may shout aloud in the market-place the most revolutionary opinions, and hardly be taken to task for it; and then on the other hand we have got our rulers pretty well under control. this paragraph, however, is not the peroration of a eulogy upon 'our unrivaled happiness.' it attempts merely to lay stress on such facts as these, that it is not now possible to hang a clergyman of the church of england for forgery, as was done in ; that a man may not be deprived of the custody of his own children because he holds heterodox religious opinions, as happened in . there is widespread toleration; and civilization in the sense in which ruskin uses the word has much increased. now it is possible for a jew to become prime minister, and for a roman catholic to become england's poet laureate. if, then, life is familiar, comfortable, unrestrained, and easy, as it certainly seems to be, how are we to account for the rise of this semihistoric, heroic literature? it is almost grotesque, the contrast between the books themselves and the manner in which they are produced. one may picture the incongruous elements of the situation,--a young society man going up to his suite in a handsome modern apartment house, and dictating romance to a type-writer. in the evening he dines at his club, and the day after the happy launching of his novel he is interviewed by the representative of a newspaper syndicate, to whom he explains his literary method, while the interviewer makes a note of his dress and a comment on the decoration of his mantelpiece. surely romance written in this way--and we have not grossly exaggerated the way--bears no relation to modern literature other than a chronological one. _the prisoner of zenda_ and _a gentleman of france_, to mention two happy and pleasing examples of this type of novel, are not modern in the sense that they express any deep feeling or any vital characteristic of to-day. they are not instinct with the spirit of the times. one might say that these stories represent the novel in its theatrical mood. it is the novel masquerading. just as a respectable bookkeeper likes to go into private theatricals, wear a wig with curls, a slouch hat with ostrich feathers, a sword and ruffles, and play a part to tear a cat in, so does the novel like to do the same. the day after the performance the whole artificial equipment drops away and disappears. the bookkeeper becomes a bookkeeper once more and a natural man. the hour before the footlights has done him no harm. true, he forgot his lines at one place, but what is a prompter for if not to act in such an emergency? now that it is over the affair may be pronounced a success,--particularly in the light of the gratifying statement that a clear profit has been realized towards paying for the new organ. this is a not unfair comparison of the part played by these books in modern fiction. the public likes them, buys them, reads them; and there is no reason why the public should not. in proportion to the demand for color, action, posturing, and excessive gesticulation, these books have a financial success; in proportion to the conscientiousness of the artist who creates them they have a literary vitality. but they bear to the actual modern novel a relation not unlike that which _the castle of otranto_ bears to _tom jones_,--making allowance of course for the chronological discrepancy. from one point the heroic novel is a protest against the commonplace and stupid elements of modern life. according to mr. frederic harrison there is no romance left in us. life is stale and flat; yet even mr. harrison would hardly go to the length of declaring that it is also commercially unprofitable. the artificial apartment-house romance is one expression of the revolt against the duller elements in our civilization; and as has often been pointed out, the novel of psychological horrors is another expression. there are a few men, however, whose work is not accounted for by saying that they love theatrical pomp and glitter for its own sake, or that they write fiction as a protest against the times in which they live. stevenson was of this number. he was an adventurer by inheritance and by practice. he came of a race of adventurers, adventurers who built lighthouses and fought with that bold outlaw, the sea. he himself honestly loved, and in a measure lived, a wild life. there is no truer touch of nature than in the scene where st. ives tells the boy rowley that he is a hunted fugitive with a price set upon his head, and then enjoys the tragic astonishment depicted in the lad's face. rowley 'had a high sense of romance and a secret cultus for all soldiers and criminals. his traveling library consisted of a chap-book life of wallace, and some sixpenny parts of the old bailey sessions papers; ... and the choice depicts his character to a hair. you can imagine how his new prospects brightened on a boy of this disposition. to be the servant and companion of a fugitive, a soldier, and a murderer rolled in one--to live by stratagems, disguises, and false names, in an atmosphere of midnight and mystery so thick that you could cut it with a knife--was really, i believe, more dear to him than his meals, though he was a great trencher-man and something of a glutton besides. for myself, as the peg by which all this romantic business hung, i was simply idolized from that moment; and he would rather have sacrificed his hand than surrendered the privilege of serving me.' one can believe that stevenson was a boy with tastes and ambitions like rowley. but for that matter rowley stands for universal boy-nature. criticism of _st. ives_ becomes both easy and difficult by reason of the fact that we know so much about the book from the author's point of view. he wrote it in trying circumstances, and never completed it; the last six chapters are from the pen of a practiced story-teller, who follows the author's known scheme of events. stevenson was almost too severe in his comment upon his book. he says of _st. ives_:-- 'it is a mere tissue of adventures; the central figure not very well or very sharply drawn; no philosophy, no destiny, to it; some of the happenings very good in themselves, i believe, but none of them _bildende_, none of them constructive, except in so far perhaps as they make up a kind of sham picture of the time, all in italics, and all out of drawing. here and there, i think, it is well written; and here and there it's not.... if it has a merit to it, i should say it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style, which seems to me to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it sounds all through. 'tis my most prosaic book.' one must remember that this is epistolary self-criticism, and that it is hardly to be looked upon in the nature of an 'advance notice.' still more confidential and epistolary is the humorous and reckless affirmation that _st. ives_ is 'a rudderless hulk.' 'it's a pagoda,' says stevenson in a letter dated september, , 'and you can just feel--or i can feel--that it might have been a pleasant story if it had only been blessed at baptism.' he had to rewrite portions of it in consequence of having received what dr. johnson would have called 'a large accession of new ideas.' the ideas were historical. the first five chapters describe the experiences of french prisoners of war in edinburgh castle. st. ives was the only 'gentleman' among them, the only man with ancestors and a right to the 'particle.' he suffered less from ill treatment than from the sense of being made ridiculous. the prisoners were dressed in uniform,--'jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of a sulphur or mustard yellow, and a shirt of blue-and-white striped cotton.' st. ives thought that 'some malignant genius had found his masterpiece of irony in that dress.' so much is made of this point that one reads with unusual interest the letter in which stevenson bewails his 'miserable luck' with _st. ives_; for he was halfway through it when a book, which he had ordered six months before, arrived, upsetting all his previous notions of how the prisoners were cared for. now he must change the thing from top to bottom. 'how could i have dreamed the french prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week?' all his points had been made on the idea that they were 'unshaved and clothed anyhow.' he welcomes the new matter, however, in spite of the labor it entails. and it is easy to see how he has enriched the earlier chapters by accentuating st. ives's disgust and mortification over his hideous dress and stubby chin. the book has a light-hearted note, as a romance of the road should have. the events take place in ; they might have occurred fifty or seventy-five years earlier. for the book lacks that convincing something which fastens a story immovably within certain chronological limits. it is the effect which thomas hardy has so wonderfully produced in that little tale describing napoleon's night-time visit to the coast of england; the effect which stevenson himself was equally happy in making when he wrote the piece called _a lodging for a night_. _st. ives_ has plenty of good romantic stuff in it, though on the whole it is romance of the conventional sort. it is too well bred, let us say too observant of the forms and customs which one has learned to expect in a novel of the road. there is an escape from the castle in the sixth chapter, a flight in the darkness towards the cottage of the lady-love in the seventh chapter, an appeal to the generosity of the lady-love's aunt, a dragon with gold-rimmed eyeglasses, in the ninth chapter. and so on. we would not imply that all this is lacking in distinction, but it seems to want that high distinction which stevenson could give to his work. ought one to look for it in a book confessedly unsatisfactory to its author, and a book which was left incomplete? there is a pretty account of the first meeting between st. ives and flora. one naturally compares it with the scene in which david balfour describes his sensations and emotions when the spell of catriona's beauty came upon him. says david:-- 'there is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man's mind and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the thing he wanted.' this is quite perfect, and in admirable keeping with the genuine simplicity of david's character:-- 'she had wonderful bright eyes like stars; ... and whatever was the cause, i stood there staring like a fool.' this is more concise than st. ives's description of flora; but st. ives was a man of the world who had read books, and knew how to compare the young scotch beauty to diana:-- 'as i saw her standing, her lips parted, a divine trouble in her eyes, i could have clapped my hands in applause, and was ready to acclaim her a genuine daughter of the winds.' the account of the meeting with walter scott and his daughter on the moors does not have the touch of reality in it that one would like. here was an opportunity, however, of the author's own making. there are flashes of humor, as when st. ives found himself locked in the poultry-house 'alone with half a dozen sitting hens. in the twilight of the place all fixed their eyes on me severely, and seemed to upbraid me with some crying impropriety.' there are sentences in which, after stevenson's own manner, real insight is combined with felicitous expression. st. ives is commenting upon the fact that he has done a thing which most men learned in the wisdom of this world would have pronounced absurd; he has 'made a confidant of a boy in his teens and positively smelling of the nursery.' but he has no cause to repent it. 'there is none so apt as a boy to be the adviser of any man in difficulties like mine. to the beginnings of virile common sense he adds the last lights of the child's imagination.' men have been known to thank god when certain authors died,--not because they bore the slightest personal ill-will, but because they knew that as long as the authors lived nothing could prevent them from writing. in thinking of stevenson, however, one cannot tell whether he experiences the more a feeling of personal or of literary loss, whether he laments chiefly the man or the author. it is not possible to separate the various cords of love, admiration, and gratitude which bind us to this man. he had a multitude of friends. he appealed to a wider audience than he knew. he himself said that he was read by journalists, by his fellow novelists, and by boys. envious admiration might prompt a less successful writer to exclaim, 'well, isn't that enough?' no, for to be truly blest one must have women among one's readers. and there are elect ladies not a few who know stevenson's novels; yet it is a question whether he has reached the great mass of female novel-readers. certainly he is not well known in that circle of fashionable maidens and young matrons which justly prides itself upon an acquaintance with van bibber. and we can hardly think he is a familiar name to that vast and not fashionable constituency which battens upon the romances of marie corelli under the impression that it is perusing literature, while he offers no comfort whatever to that type of reader who prefers that a novel shall be filled with hard thinking, with social riddles, theological problems, and 'sexual theorems.' stevenson was happy with his journalists and boys. among all modern british men of letters he was in many ways the most highly blest; and his career was entirely picturesque and interesting. other men have been more talked about, but the one thing which he did not lack was discriminating praise from those who sit in high critical places. he was prosperous, too, though not grossly prosperous. it is no new fact that the sales of his books were small in proportion to the magnitude of his contemporary fame. people praised him tremendously, but paid their dollars for entertainment of another quality than that supplied by his fine gifts. _an inland voyage_ has never been as popular as _three men in a boat_, nor _treasure island_ and _kidnapped_ as _king solomon's mines_; while _the black arrow_, which mr. lang does not like, and professor saintsbury insists is 'a wonderfully good story,' has not met a wide public favor at all. _travels with a donkey_, which came out in , had only reached its sixth english edition in . perhaps that is good for a book so entirely virtuous in a literary way, but it was not a success to keep a man awake nights. we have been told that it is wrong to admire _jekyll and hyde_, that the story is 'coarse,' an 'outrage upon the grand allegories of the same motive,' and several other things; nay, it is even hinted that this popular tale is evidence of a morbid strain in the author's nature. rather than dispute the point it is a temptation to urge upon the critic that he is not radical enough, for in stevenson's opinion all literature might be only a 'morbid secretion.' the critics, however, agree in allowing us to admire without stint those smaller works in which his characteristic gifts displayed themselves at the best. _thrawn janet_ is one of these, and the story of tod lapraik, told by andie dale in _catriona_, is another. stevenson himself declared that if he had never written anything except these two stories he would still have been a writer. we hope that there would be votes cast for _will o' the mill_, which is a lovely bit of literary workmanship. and there are a dozen besides these. he was an artist of undoubted gifts, but he was an artist in small literary forms. his longest good novels are after all little books. when he attempted a large canvas he seemed not perfectly in command of his materials, though he could use those materials as they could have been used by no other artist. there is nothing in his books akin to that broad and massive treatment which may be felt in a novel like _rhoda fleming_ or in a tragedy like _tess of the d'urbervilles_. andrew lang was right when he said of stevenson: he is a 'little master,' but of the little masters the most perfect and delightful. the riverside press cambridge, massachusetts, u. s. a. electrotyped and printed by h. o. houghton and co. days with the great poets keats [illustration] [_painting by w. j. neatby._ la belle dame sans merci. 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.] a day with keats by may byron hodder & stoughton ltd., publishers london _uniform with this volume_ days with the poets browning burns keats longfellow shakespeare tennyson days with the composers beethoven chopin gounod mendelssohn tschaikovsky wagner _made and printed in great britain for hodder & stoughton, limited, by c. tinling & co., ltd., liverpool, london and prescot._ a day with keats about eight o'clock one morning in early summer, a young man may be seen sauntering to and fro in the garden of wentworth place, hampstead. wentworth place consists of two houses only; in the first, john keats is established along with his friend charles armitage brown. the second is inhabited by a mrs. brawne and her family. they are wooden houses, with festooning draperies of foliage: and the clean countrified air of hampstead comes with sweet freshness through the gardens, and fills the young man with ecstatic delight. he gazes around him, with his weak dark eyes, upon the sky, the flowers, the various minutiæ of nature which mean so much to him: and although he has severely tried a never robust physique by sitting up half the night in study, a new exhilaration now throbs through his veins. for, in his own words, he loves the principle of beauty in all things: and he repeats to himself, as he loiters up and down in the sunshine, the lines into which he has crystallized, for all time, sensations similar to those of the present:-- a thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth, spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth of noble natures, of the gloomy days, of all the unhealthy and o'er-darken'd ways made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirits. such the sun, the moon, trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep; and such are daffodils with the green world they live in; and clear rills that for themselves a cooling covert make 'gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake, rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: and such too is the grandeur of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead; all lovely tales that we have heard or read: an endless fountain of immortal drink, pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. nor do we merely feel these essences for one short hour; no, even as the trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, the passion poesy, glories infinite, haunt us till they become a cheering light unto our souls, and bound to us so fast, that, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast, they alway must be with us, or we die. _endymion._ yet john keats is in some respects out of keeping with the magnificent phraseology of which he is the mouthpiece. "little keats," as his fellow medical students termed him, is a small, undersized man, not over five feet high--the shoulders too broad, the legs too spare--"death in his hand," as coleridge said, the slack moist hand of the incipient consumptive. the only "thing of beauty" about him is his face. "it is a face," to quote his friend leigh hunt, "in which energy and sensibility" (i.e., sensitiveness) "are remarkably mixed up--an eager power, wrecked and made impatient by ill-health. every feature at once strongly cut and delicately alive." there is that femininity in the cast of his features, which coleridge classed as an attribute of true genius. his beautiful brown hair falls loosely over those eyes, large, dark, glowing, which appeal to all observers by their mystical illumination of rapture--eyes which seem as though they had been dwelling on some glorious sight--which have, as haydon said, "an inward look perfectly divine, like a delphian priestess who saw visions." and he _is_ seeing visions all the while. some chance sight or sound has wrapt him away from the young greenness of the may morning, and plunged him deep into the opulent colour of september. his prophetic eye sees all the apple-buds as golden orbs of fruit, and the swallows, that now build beneath the eaves, making ready for their departure. and these future splendours shape themselves into lines as richly coloured. [illustration] [_painting by w. j. neatby._ autumn. where are the songs of spring? ay, where are they? think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- while barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn among the river sallows, borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ...] * * * * * season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; conspiring with him how to load and bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; to bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel; to set budding more, and still more, later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days will never cease, for summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells. who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor, thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook spares the next swath and all its twined flowers; and sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep steady thy laden head across a brook; or by a cider-press, with patient look, thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. where are the songs of spring? ay, where are they? think not of them, thou hast thy music too, while barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows, borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; and full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft the red-breast whistles from a garden-croft. and gathering swallows twitter in the skies. _autumn._ the voice of charles brown at the open window, hailing him cheerily, breaks the spell; keats goes in, and they sit down together to a simple breakfast-table, and brown "quizzes" keats, as the current phrase goes, on his inveterate abstractedness. the young man, with his sweet and merry laugh, defends himself by producing the result of his last-night's meditations, in praise of the selfsame wandering fancy. ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home: at a touch sweet pleasure melteth, like to bubbles when rain pelteth; then let wingèd 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? sit thee by the ingle, when the sear faggot blazes bright, spirit of a winter's night; when the soundless earth is muffled, and the caked snow is shuffled from the ploughboy's heavy shoon.... fancy, high-commission'd:--send her! she has vassals to attend her: she will bring, in spite of frost, beauties that the earth hath lost; she will bring thee, all together, all delights of summer weather; all the buds and bells of may, from dewy sward or thorny spray; all the heapèd autumn's wealth, with a still, mysterious stealth: she will mix these pleasures up, like three fit wines in a cup, and thou shalt quaff it.... _fancy._ breakfast over, the business of the day begins: and that, with keats, is poetry, and all that can foster poetic stimulus. he takes no real heed of anything else. a devoted son and brother, one ready to sacrifice himself and his slender resources to the uttermost farthing for his mother, brothers, sister and friends--yet he has no vital interest in other folks' affairs, nor in current events, nor in ordinary social topics. other people's poetry does not appeal to him, except that of shakespeare, and of homer--whom he does not know in the original, but who, through the poor medium of translation, has filled his soul with grecian fantasies. much have i travell'd in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen; round many western islands have i been which bards in fealty to apollo hold. oft of one wide expanse had i been told that deep-brow'd homer ruled as his demesne: yet did i never breathe its pure serene till i heard chapman speak out loud and bold: then felt i like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the pacific--and all his men look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- silent upon a peak in darien. _sonnet._ this is what he wrote after sitting up one night till daybreak with his friend cowden clarke, shouting with delight over the vistas newly revealed to him. and from that time on, he has luxuriated in dreams of classic beauty, warmed to new life by the sorcery of romance. immortal shapes arise upon him from the "infinite azure of the past:" and he sees how deep in the shady sadness of a vale far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, sat gray-hair'd saturn, quiet as a stone, still as the silence round about his lair; forest on forest hung about his head like cloud on cloud. no stir of air was there, not so much life as on a summer's day robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, but where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. a stream went voiceless by, still deadened more by reason of his fallen divinity spreading a shade: the naiad 'mid her reeds press'd her cold finger closer to her lips. _hyperion._ he is studying french, latin, and especially italian--all with a view of furthering his poetic ability: though no great reader, he has soaked himself in the atmosphere of old italian tales, and the very spirit of mediæval florence breathes from the story, borrowed from boccaccio, "an echo in the north-wind sung," which narrates how the hapless isabelle bid away the head of her murdered lover. [illustration] [_painting by w. j. neatby._ isabella. and she forgot the stars, the moon, the 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 moon she saw not: but in peace hung over her sweet basil evermore, and moisten'd it with tears unto the core.] * * * * * 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 covered 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 moon she saw not: but in peace hung over her sweet basil evermore, and moisten'd it with tears unto the core. _isabella._ keats has brought himself with difficulty, however, to the perusal of modern poets. his boyish enthusiasm for leigh hunt's work has long since evaporated: and after reading shelley's _revolt of islam_, all he has found to say is, "poor shelley, i think he has his quota of good qualities!" but, for the rest, he is not attracted to any kind of knowledge which cannot be "made applicable and subservient to the purposes of poetry,"--his own poetry. for his one desire is to win an immortal name--and he has begun life "full of hopes, fiery, impetuous, and ungovernable, expecting the world to fall at once beneath his pen. poor fellow!" (haydon's diary). but "men of genius," keats himself has said, "are as great as certain ethereal chemicals, operating in a mass of created matter: but they have not any determined character." that indefiniteness of literary aim--that want of willpower, without which genius is a curse, which have hampered the young man all along--are now still further emphasised by the restlessness of a passionate lover. john keats cannot stay indoors this fine may morning, "fitting himself for verses fit to live," when the girl who is to him the incarnation of all poetry is visible in the next-door garden. he throws down his pen and hurries out to join her. contemporary portraits of fanny brawne have not succeeded in representing her as beautiful: and at first sight keats has complained, that, although she "manages to make her hair look well," she "wants sentiment in every feature." propinquity, however, has achieved the usual result; and now the young poet believes his inamorata to be the very apotheosis of loveliness: he is never weary of adoring her sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone, bright eyes, accomplished shape! if the truth be told, fanny brawne is a fairly good-looking young woman, blue-eyed and long-nosed, her hair arranged with curls and ribbons over her brow: she has a curious but striking resemblance to the draped figure in titian's "sacred and profane love": and for the rest, she is by no means poetic or sentimental, but a voluminous reader, whose strong point is an extraordinary knowledge of the history of costume. she accepts the homage of keats, much as she accepts the fact of their tacit betrothal, and the fact that her mother disapproves of it--without taking it too seriously in any sense. and now, though not particularly keen on open-air enjoyment, she accepts his daily suggestion of a walk with her; and they go out into the beautiful meadows which were part of hampstead a hundred years ago. keats is in his glory in the fields. always, the humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, have "seemed to make his nature tremble: then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, his mouth quivered." peculiarly sensitive, as he is, to external influences, his chief delight is to "think of green fields ... i muse with the greatest affection on every flower i have known from my infancy." the man who is so soon to "feel the daisies growing over him," takes one of his intensest pleasures in watching the growth of flowers; and now, as an exquisite music, "notes that pierce and pierce," descends through the young green oak-leaves, the poet seizes this golden moment of the may world and transmutes it into song. my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock i had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past, and lethe-wards had sunk: 'tis not with envy of thy happy lot, but being too happy in thine happiness,-- that thou, light-wingèd dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot of beechen green, and shadows numberless, singest of summer in full-throated ease. o, for a draught of vintage, that hath been cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, tasting of flora and the country-green, dance, and provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! o for a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stainèd mouth; that i might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim: fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget what thou among the leaves hast never known, the weariness, the fever, and the fret here, where men sit and hear each other groan; where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs; where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.... thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! no hungry generations tread thee down; the voice i hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown: perhaps the self-same song that found a path through the sad heart of ruth, when sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn; that same that oft-times hath charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. forlorn! the very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my sole self! adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf. adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows, over the still stream, up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep in the next valley-glades: was it a vision, or a waking dream? fled is that music:--do i wake or sleep? _ode to a nightingale._ [illustration] [_painting by w. j. neatby._ the nightingale. thou, light-wingèd dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot of beechen green, and shadows numberless, singest of summer in full-throated ease.] the poet is recalled from these rapturous flights to the fugitive sweetness of the present: he is wandering in may meadows, young and impetuous, on fire with hopes, and his heart's beloved beside him. it is almost too good to be true. "i have never known any unalloyed happiness for many days together," he tells fanny; "the death or sickness of someone has always spoilt my home. i almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer days--three such days with you i could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain." he talks to her earnestly of his dreams, his aspirations, his ambitions: and then the sordid facts of every-day life begin to cast a blighting shadow over his effulgent hopes. what has he, indeed, to offer, worth her taking? a young man of twenty-three, ex-dresser at a hospital, who has abandoned his surgical career without adopting any other: with slender resources, and no occupation beyond that of producing verses which are held up to absolute derision by the great reviews. "i would willingly have recourse to other means," he tells her again, as he has told his friend dilke, "i cannot: i am fit for nothing else but literature." he talks of taking up journalism--but in his heart he feels unfit for any regular profession, by reason both of physical weakness and a certain lack of system in mental work. the future becomes blackly, blankly overcast; the _res augusta domi_ descend like a curtain between the sublimity of keats and the calm commonsense of fanny. they turn homewards in silence, the poet revolving melancholy musings. but when the melancholy fit shall fall sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, that fosters the droop-headed flowers all, and hides the green hill in an april shroud; then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, or on the wealth of globèd peonies; or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, emprison her soft hand, and let rave, and feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. she dwells with beauty--beauty that must die; and joy, whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh, turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips. ay, in the very temple of delight veil'd melancholy has her sovran shrine, though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst joy's grape against his palate fine; his soul shall taste the sadness of her might, and be among her cloudy trophies hung. _ode to melancholy._ fanny brawne enters her mother's house, and john keats goes into his room and sits down, brooding, brooding. "o," he says, "that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers! then i might hope--but despair is forced upon me as a habit." and he is only too well aware, that although he is naturally "the very soul of courage and manliness," this habit of despair is growing upon him, and eating his energy away. a wintry chill settles down upon the may-time, and his misery finds vent in lovely lines-- in a drear-nighted december, too happy, happy tree, thy branches ne'er remember their green felicity: the north cannot undo them, with a sleety whistle through them; nor frozen thawings glue them from budding at the prime. in a drear-nighted december, too happy, happy brook, thy bubblings ne'er remember apollo's summer look; but with a sweet forgetting, they stay their crystal fretting, never, never petting about the frozen time. ah! would 'twere so with many a gentle girl and boy! but were there ever any writh'd not at passed joy? to know the change and feel it, when there is none to heal it, nor numbed sense to steal it, was never said in rhyme. [illustration] [_painting by w. j. neatby._ endymion. as she spake, into her face there came light, as reflected from a silver flame, ... in her eyes a brighter day dawn'd blue and full of love.] yet keats is young, and youth means buoyancy. with an effort--increasingly difficult--he is able to shake off this sombre fit for awhile; and he makes use of the simplest means to that end. "whenever i feel vapourish," he has said, "i rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt; brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if i were going out: then, all clean and comfortable, i sit down to write." these very prosaic methods adopted, he abandons himself to the full flood of inspiration, and lets his mind suffuse itself in antique glory. as endymion, he receives the divine commands of the passionately bright moon-lady, as she stoops at last to bless him. and as she spake, into her face there came light, as reflected from a silver flame: her long black hair swelled ample, in display full golden: in her eyes a brighter day dawn'd blue and full of love. _endymion._ or, as lycius, he succumbs to the serpentine grace of lamia; or as porphyro, hidden in the silence, watches madeline at prayer. a casement high and triple-arch'd there was, all garlanded with carven imageries of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot grass, and diamonded with panes of quaint device, innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings; and in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, and twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, a shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings. full on this casement shone the wintry moon, and threw warm gules on madeline's fair breast, as down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, and on her silver cross soft amethyst, and on her hair a glory, like a saint: she seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest, save wings, for heaven: porphyro grew faint: she knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. _eve of st. agnes._ but the inspiration does not well up to-day: its flow is frustrated, in view of the mountainous difficulties which hedge him in. ill-health, stinted means, hopeless love, and continual lack of success--these are calculated to give the bravest pause. and presently keats, snatching a few hurried mouthfuls of lunch, is off to the studio of his friend, the painter haydon--the one man among all his acquaintance who is capable of really understanding him. he sits down morbid and silent in the painting room: for a while nothing will evoke a word from him, good or bad. but his keen interest in matters of art, and the entry of various friends one by one--wentworth dilke, hamilton reynolds, bailey and leigh hunt--soon arouse him to animated conversation. keats is shy and ill at ease in women's society: but a "delightful combination of earnestness and pleasantry distinguishes his intercourse with men." he says fine things finely, jokes with ready humour, and at the mention of any oppression or wrong rises "into grave manliness at once, seeming like a tall man." no wonder that his society is much sought after, and himself greatly beloved by these congenial spirits; no wonder that here, at least, he meets with that appreciation of which elsewhere his genius has been starved. in this young fellow of twenty-three, who unites winning, affectionate ways, and habitual gentleness of manner, with the loftiest and most nobly-worded ideals, few would discover that imaginary "johnny keats, the apothecary's assistant," upon whom the _blackwood_ reviewer had lavished such vials of vituperation. he is here openly acknowledged as one of the "bards of passion and of mirth," and his poems are each accepted, as not a senseless, tranced thing, but divine melodies of truth, philosophic numbers smooth, tales and golden histories of heaven and its mysteries.... "no one else in english poetry, save shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of keats, his perfection of loveliness." (matthew arnold). but only these few friends of his are able to recognise that perfection. outside their charmed circle, lies an obstinately unappreciative world. the afternoon wears on, and the friends disperse. keats, returning to wentworth place flushed with hectic exhilaration, finds a veritable douche of cold water awaiting him, in the shape of a letter from his publishers. they refer to his unlucky first volume of poems, brought out in . "by far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us," they say, "have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back, rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has time after time been showered upon it. in fact, it was only on sunday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman who told us that he considered it 'no better than a take-in.'" for a few minutes the pendulum swings back to despair. a man whose whole business in life is the creation of the best work, who "never wrote a line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought," who believes that after his death he will be among the english poets, and that if he only has time now, he will make himself remembered--that such a one should be merely the butt and laughing-stock of his readers! it is an unendurable position. not that keats attaches undue importance to popular applause. "praise or blame," he says, "has but a momentary effect upon the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.... in _endymion_ i leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if i had stayed upon the green shore and took tea and comfortable advice. i was never afraid of failure: for i would sooner fail than not be among the greatest." but what will fanny think of such a letter? he falls to miserable meditation over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the constant erection of new obstacles in the course of his luckless love. and of fanny's love he always has had a smouldering doubt: yet he remains her vassal, from the first, as he has told her--irrevocably her slave. he conceives himself an outcast on the wintry hillside, exiled from all his heart's desires. ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, alone and palely loitering? the sedge is wither'd from the lake, and no birds sing. ah what can ail thee, wretched wight, 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 set her on my pacing steed, and nothing else saw all day long; and sideways would she lean, and sing a faery's song. i made a garland for her head, and bracelets too, and fragrant zone; she look'd at me and she did love, and made sweet moan. 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 gaz'd and sighed deep, and there i shut her wild sad eyes-- so kiss'd to sleep. and there we slumber'd on the moss, and there i dream'd, ah woe betide, the latest dream i ever dream'd 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 gaped wide, and i awoke, and found me here on the cold hill side. and this is why i sojourn here alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is wither'd from the lake, and no birds sing. _la belle dame sans merci._ and now he hears the voice of his belle dame ringing light across the garden; while he sits here, a prey to every distress, she is gaily gossiping with her next-door neighbour brown. at once the unhappy keats is tormented by a thousand jealous fears. fanny is transferring her affection to brown: of that he is quite certain. he rushes out: his black looks banish the much-amused brown, and very nearly produce an immediate rupture between fanny and himself. but after a few bitter words, he permits himself to be reassured--or is it cajoled?--and tells her, "i must confess that i love you the more, in that i believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else." the poor boy, from a worldly point of view, has "nothing else" to offer. the lovers' quarrel is over for the nonce. visitors begin to drop in for the evening; there is music and singing in brown's little drawing room. keats is very fond of music, and can himself, though possessing hardly any voice, "produce a pleasing musical effect." he will sit and listen for hours to a sympathetic performer: but his ear, like all his faculties, is abnormally sensitive: and a wrong note will drive him into a frenzy. as the room grows fuller, he becomes restive. "the poetical character," he has observed, "is not itself--it has no character. when i am in a room with people, the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me so that i am in a little time annihilated." in the light chit-chat of small talk and badinage he has no part: it bewilders and annoys him. those about him--especially the women--seem to show up in their worst colours. fanny herself appears, as he has described her at their first meeting, an absolute _minx_. and presently he contrives to slip stealthily away, and seats himself in some quiet chamber, alone with the darkness and the may-scents of leaf and blossom. "i hope i shall never marry," he groans once more; "the roaring wind is my wife, and the stars through the window-panes are my children: the mighty abstract idea of beauty i have in all things, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. i do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. no sooner am i alone, than shapes of epic greatness are stationed round me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's bodyguard." the young man now lights his candles, and takes up a familiar and favourite occupation;--the writing of a long letter to his brother george in america. this epistle is, as one might expect, almost entirely concerned with the art of poetry--what else has keats to write about?--whether from the side of technique, or inspiration. he dwells on the adroit management of open and close vowels--he shows how "the poetry of earth is never dead;" he discusses the need of constant application to work, and how "the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man." and meanwhile, as fitful strains of song reach him from the distance, and his roving gaze rivets itself upon a wedgwood copy of a grecian vase--one of brown's chief treasures--the fleeting wafts of sound, and the lovely symmetry of shape, and the golden chain of figures, blend themselves into one harmonious whole of word-music. thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, thou foster-child of silence and slow time, sylvan historian, who canst thus express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: what leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape of deities or mortals, or of both, in tempe or the dales of arcady? what men or gods are these? what maidens loath? what mad pursuit? what struggle to escape? what pipes and timbrels? what wild ecstasy? heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; she cannot fade, though hast not thou thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; and, happy melodist, unwearied, for ever piping songs for ever new; more happy love! more happy, happy love! for ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, for ever panting, and for ever young; all breathing human passion far above, that leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy'd, a burning forehead, and a parching tongue. who are these coming to the sacrifice? to what green altar, o mysterious priest, lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garlands drest? what little town by river or sea-shore, or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? and, little town, thy streets for evermore will silent be; and not a soul to tell why thou art desolate, can e'er return. o attic shape! fair attitude! with brede of marble men and maidens overwrought, with forest branches and trodden weed; thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought as doth eternity: cold pastoral! when old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "beauty is truth, truth beauty"--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. _ode to a grecian urn._ the "shapes of epic greatness" throng closer and mightier around him. the storm and stress of the day's thoughts have utterly drained his small reserve of strength. outworn by the vehemence of his own conflicting emotions, john keats lays his aching eyes and dark brown head upon his arm as it rests along the table, and sinks into a dreamless slumber of exhaustion; while, a "happy melodist, unwearied, for ever singing songs for ever new," the nightingale chants on outside. proofreading team among my books second series by james russell lowell to r.w. emerson. a love and honor which more than thirty years have deepened, though priceless to him they enrich, are of little import to one capable of inspiring them. yet i cannot deny myself the pleasure of so far intruding on your reserve as at least to make public acknowledgment of the debt i can never repay. contents. dante spenser wordsworth milton keats dante.[ ] on the banks of a little river so shrunken by the suns of summer that it seems fast passing into a tradition, but swollen by the autumnal rains with an italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge shudders under the impatient heap of waters behind it, stands a city which, in its period of bloom not so large as boston, may well rank next to athens in the history which teaches _come l' uom s' eterna_. originally only a convenient spot in the valley where the fairs of the neighboring etruscan city of fiesole were held, it gradually grew from a huddle of booths to a town, and then to a city, which absorbed its ancestral neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters, the science, and the commerce[ ] of modern europe. for her cimabue wrought, who infused byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature and feeling; for her the pisani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure with it, the secret of greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the marvellous boy ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of figure and drapery were never beyond the reach of genius;[ ] for her brunelleschi curved the dome which michel angelo hung in air on st. peter's; for her giotto reared the bell-tower graceful as an horatian ode in marble; and the great triumvirate of italian poetry, good sense, and culture called her mother. there is no modern city about which cluster so many elevating associations, none in which the past is so contemporary with us in unchanged buildings and undisturbed monuments. the house of dante is still shown; children still receive baptism at the font (_il mio bel san giovanni_) where he was christened before the acorn dropped that was to grow into a keel for columbus; and an inscribed stone marks the spot where he used to sit and watch the slow blocks swing up to complete the master-thought of arnolfo. in the convent of st. mark hard by lived and labored beato angelico, the saint of christian art, and fra bartolommeo, who taught raphael dignity. from the same walls savonarola went forth to his triumphs, short-lived almost as the crackle of his martyrdom. the plain little chamber of michel angelo seems still to expect his return; his last sketches lie upon the table, his staff leans in the corner, and his slippers wait before the empty chair. on one of the vine-clad hills, just without the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs that milton climbed to visit galileo. to an american there is something supremely impressive in this cumulative influence of the past full of inspiration and rebuke, something saddening in this repeated proof that moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins behind it. time, who with us obliterates the labor and often the names of yesterday, seems here to have spared almost the prints of the _care piante_ that shunned the sordid paths of worldly honor. around the courtyard of the great museum of florence stand statues of her illustrious dead, her poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors, and statesmen; and as the traveller feels the ennobling lift of such society, and reads the names or recognizes the features familiar to him as his own threshold, he is startled to find fame as commonplace here as notoriety everywhere else, and that this fifth-rate city should have the privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men her sons, whose claim to pre-eminence the whole world would concede. among them is one figure before which every scholar, every man who has been touched by the tragedy of life, lingers with reverential pity. the haggard cheeks, the lips clamped together in unfaltering resolve, the scars of lifelong battle, and the brow whose sharp outline seems the monument of final victory,-- this, at least, is a face that needs no name beneath it. this is he who among literary fames finds only two that for growth and immutability can parallel his own. the suffrages of highest authority would now place him second in that company where he with proud humility took the sixth place.[ ] dante (durante, by contraction dante) degli alighieri was born at florence in , probably during the month of may.[ ] this is the date given by boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he makes a blunder in saying, _sedendo urbano quarto nella cattedra di san pietro_, for urban died in october, . some, misled by an error in a few of the early manuscript copies of the _divina commedia_, would have him born five years earlier, in . according to arrivabene,[ ] sansovino was the first to confirm boccaccio's statement by the authority of the poet himself, basing his argument on the first verse of the _inferno_,-- "nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita"; the average age of man having been declared by the psalmist to be seventy years, and the period of the poet's supposed vision being unequivocally fixed at .[ ] leonardo aretino and manetti add their testimony to that of boccaccio, and is now universally assumed as the true date. voltaire,[ ] nevertheless, places the poet's birth in , and jauntily forgives bayle (who, he says, _écrivait à rotterdam_ currente calamo _pour son libraire_) for having been right, declaring that he esteems him neither more nor less for having made a mistake of five years. oddly enough, voltaire adopts this alleged blunder of five years on the next page in saying that dante died at the age of , though he still more oddly omits the undisputed date of his death ( ), which would have shown bayle to be right. the poet's descent is said to have been derived from a younger son of the great roman family of the frangipani, classed by the popular rhyme with the orsini and colonna:-- "colonna, orsini, e frangipani, prendono oggi e pagano domani." that his ancestors had been long established in florence is an inference from some expressions of the poet, and from their dwelling having been situated in the more ancient part of the city. the most important fact of the poet's genealogy is, that he was of mixed race, the alighieri being of teutonic origin. dante was born, as he himself tells us,[ ] when the sun was in the constellation gemini, and it has been absurdly inferred, from a passage in the _inferno_,[ ] that his horoscope was drawn and a great destiny predicted for him by his teacher, brunetto latini. the _ottimo comento_ tells us that the twins are the house of mercury, who induces in men the faculty of writing, science, and of acquiring knowledge. this is worth mentioning as characteristic of the age and of dante himself, with whom the influence of the stars took the place of the old notion of destiny.[ ] it is supposed, from a passage in boccaccio's life of dante, that alighiero the father was still living when the poet was nine years old. if so, he must have died soon after, for leonardo aretino, who wrote with original documents before him, tells us that dante lost his father while yet a child. this circumstance may have been not without influence in muscularizing his nature to that character of self-reliance which shows itself so constantly and sharply during his after-life. his tutor was brunetto latini, a very superior man (for that age), says aretino parenthetically. like alexander gill, he is now remembered only as the schoolmaster of a great poet, and that he did his duty well may be inferred from dante's speaking of him gratefully as one who by times "taught him how man eternizes himself." this, and what villani says of his refining the tuscan idiom (for so we understand his _farli scorti in bene parlare_),[ ] are to be noted as of probable influence on the career of his pupil. of the order of dante's studies nothing can be certainly affirmed. his biographers send him to bologna, padua, paris, naples, and even oxford. all are doubtful, paris and oxford most of all, and the dates utterly undeterminable. yet all are possible, nay, perhaps probable. bologna and padua we should be inclined to place before his exile; paris and oxford, if at all, after it. if no argument in favor of paris is to be drawn from his _pape satan_[ ] and the corresponding _paix, paix, sathan,_ in the autobiography of cellini, nor from the very definite allusion to doctor siger,[ ] we may yet infer from some passages in the _commedia_ that his wanderings had extended even farther;[ ] for it would not be hard to show that his comparisons and illustrations from outward things are almost invariably drawn from actual eyesight. as to the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt that he went through the _trivium_ (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the _quadrivium_ (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary university course. to these he afterward added painting (or at least drawing,--_designavo un angelo sopra certe tavolette_),[ ] theology, and medicine. he is said to have been the pupil of cimabue, and was certainly the friend of giotto, the designs for some of whose frescos at assisi and elsewhere have been wrongly attributed to him, though we may safely believe in his helpful comment and suggestion. to prove his love of music, the episode of casella were enough, even without boccaccio's testimony. the range of dante's study and acquirement would be encyclopedic in any age, but at that time it was literally possible to master the _omne scibile_, and he seems to have accomplished it. how lofty his theory of science was, is plain from this passage in the _convito_: "he is not to be called a true lover of wisdom (_filosofo_) who loves it for the sake of gain, as do lawyers, physicians, and almost all churchmen (_li religiosi_), who study, not in order to know, but to acquire riches or advancement, and who would not persevere in study should you give them what they desire to gain by it.... and it may be said that (as true friendship between men consists in each wholly loving the other) the true philosopher loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to herself, and allows no one of his thoughts to wander to other things."[ ] the _convito_ gives us a glance into dante's library. we find aristotle (whom he calls the philosopher, the master) cited seventy-six times; cicero, eighteen; albertus magnus, seven; boethius, six; plato (at second-hand), four; aquinas, avicenna, ptolemy, the digest, lucan, and ovid, three each; virgil, juvenal, statius, seneca, and horace, twice each; and algazzali, alfrogan, augustine, livy, orosius, and homer (at second-hand), once. of greek he seems to have understood little; of hebrew and arabic, a few words. but it was not only in the closet and from books that dante received his education. he acquired, perhaps, the better part of it in the streets of florence, and later, in those homeless wanderings which led him (as he says) wherever the italian tongue was spoken. his were the only open eyes of that century, and, as nothing escaped them, so there is nothing that was not photographed upon his sensitive brain, to be afterward fixed forever in the _commedia_. what florence was during his youth and manhood, with its guelphs and ghibellines, its nobles and trades, its bianchi and neri, its kaleidoscopic revolutions, "all parties loving liberty and doing their best to destroy her," as voltaire says, it would be beyond our province to tell even if we could. foreshortened as events are when we look back on them across so many ages, only the upheavals of party conflict catching the eye, while the spaces of peace between sink out of the view of history, a whole century seems like a mere wild chaos. yet during a couple of such centuries the cathedrals of florence, pisa, and siena got built; cimabue, giotto, arnolfo, the pisani, brunelleschi, and ghiberti gave the impulse to modern art, or brought it in some of its branches to its culminating point; modern literature took its rise; commerce became a science, and the middle class came into being. it was a time of fierce passions and sudden tragedies, of picturesque transitions and contrasts. it found dante, shaped him by every experience that life is capable of,--rank, ease, love, study, affairs, statecraft, hope, exile, hunger, dependence, despair,--until he became endowed with a sense of the nothingness of this world's goods possible only to the rich, and a knowledge of man possible only to the poor. the few well-ascertained facts of dante's life may be briefly stated. in occurred what we may call his spiritual birth, the awakening in him of the imaginative faculty, and of that profounder and more intense consciousness which springs from the recognition of beauty through the antithesis of sex. it was in that year that he first saw beatrice portinari. in he was present at the battle of campaldino, fighting on the side of the guelphs, who there utterly routed the ghibellines, and where, he says characteristically enough, "i was present, not a boy in arms, and where i felt much fear, but in the end the greatest pleasure, from the various changes of the fight."[ ] in the same year he assisted at the siege and capture of caprona.[ ] in died beatrice, married to simone dei bardi, precisely when is uncertain, but before , as appears by a mention of her in her father's will, bearing date january of that year. dante's own marriage is assigned to various years, ranging from to ; but the earlier date seems the more probable, as he was the father of seven children (the youngest, a daughter, named beatrice) in . his wife was gemma dei donati, and through her dante, whose family, though noble, was of the lesser nobility, became nearly connected with corso donati, the head of a powerful clan of the _grandi_, or greater nobles. in occurred what is called the revolution of gian della bella, in which the priors of the trades took the power into their own hands, and made nobility a disqualification for office. a noble was defined to be any one who counted a knight among his ancestors, and thus the descendant of cacciaguida was excluded. della bella was exiled in , but the nobles did not regain their power. on the contrary, the citizens, having all their own way, proceeded to quarrel among themselves, and subdivided into the _popolani grossi_ and _popolani minuti_, or greater and lesser trades,--a distinction of gentility somewhat like that between wholesale and retail tradesmen. the _grandi_ continuing turbulent, many of the lesser nobility, among them dante, drew over to the side of the citizens, and between and there is found inscribed in the book of the physicians and apothecaries, _dante d' aldighiero, degli aldighieri, poeta fiorentino_[ ] professor de vericour[ ] thinks it necessary to apologize for this lapse on the part of the poet, and gravely bids us take courage, nor think that dante was ever an apothecary. in we find him elected one of the priors of the city. in order to a perfect misunderstanding of everything connected with the florentine politics of this period, one has only to study the various histories. the result is a spectrum on the mind's eye, which looks definite and brilliant, but really hinders all accurate vision, as if from too steady inspection of a catharine-wheel in full whirl. a few words, however, are necessary, if only to make the confusion palpable. the rival german families of welfs and weiblingens had given their names, softened into guelfi and ghibellini,--from which gabriel harvey[ ] ingeniously, but mistakenly, derives elves and goblins,--to two parties in northern italy, representing respectively the adherents of the pope and of the emperor, but serving very well as rallying-points in all manner of intercalary and subsidiary quarrels. the nobles, especially the greater ones,--perhaps from instinct, perhaps in part from hereditary tradition, as being more or less teutonic by descent,--were commonly ghibellines, or imperialists; the bourgeoisie were very commonly guelphs, or supporters of the pope, partly from natural antipathy to the nobles, and partly, perhaps, because they believed themselves to be espousing the more purely italian side. sometimes, however, the party relation of nobles and burghers to each other was reversed, but the names of guelph and ghibelline always substantially represented the same things. the family of dante had been guelphic, and we have seen him already as a young man serving two campaigns against the other party. but no immediate question as between pope and emperor seems then to have been pending; and while there is no evidence that he was ever a mere partisan, the reverse would be the inference from his habits and character. just before his assumption of the priorate, however, a new complication had arisen. a family feud, beginning at the neighboring city of pistoja, between the cancellieri neri and cancellieri bianchi,[ ] had extended to florence, where the guelphs took the part of the neri and the ghibellines of the bianchi.[ ] the city was instantly in a ferment of street brawls, as actors in one of which some of the medici are incidentally named,--the first appearance of that family in history. both parties appealed at different times to the pope, who sent two ambassadors, first a bishop and then a cardinal. both pacificators soon flung out again in a rage, after adding the new element of excommunication to the causes of confusion. it was in the midst of these things that dante became one of the six priors (june, ),--an office which the florentines had made bimestrial in its tenure, in order apparently to secure at least six constitutional chances of revolution in the year. he advised that the leaders of both parties should be banished to the frontiers, which was forthwith done; the ostracism including his relative corso donati among the neri, and his most intimate friend the poet guido cavalcanti among the bianchi. they were all permitted to return before long (but after dante's term of office was over), and came accordingly, bringing at least the scriptural allowance of "seven other" motives of mischief with them. affairs getting worse ( ), the neri, with the connivance of the pope (boniface viii.), entered into an arrangement with charles of valois, who was preparing an expedition to italy. dante was meanwhile sent on an embassy to rome (september, , according to arrivabene,[ ] but probably earlier) by the bianchi, who still retained all the offices at florence. it is the tradition that he said in setting forth: "if i go, who remains? and if i stay, who goes?" whether true or not, the story implies what was certainly true, that the council and influence of dante were of great weight with the more moderate of both parties. on october , , charles took possession of florence in the interest of the neri. dante being still at rome (january , ), sentence of exile was pronounced against him and others, with a heavy fine to be paid within two months; if not paid, the entire confiscation of goods, and, whether paid or no, exile; the charge against him being pecuniary malversation in office. the fine not paid (as it could not be without admitting the justice of the charges, which dante scorned even to deny), in less than two months (march , ) a second sentence was registered, by which he with others was condemned to be burned alive if taken within the boundaries of the republic.[ ] from this time the life of dante becomes semi-mythical, and for nearly every date we are reduced to the "as they say" of herodotus. he became now necessarily identified with his fellow-exiles (fragments of all parties united by common wrongs in a practical, if not theoretic, ghibellinism), and shared in their attempts to reinstate themselves by force of arms. he was one of their council of twelve, but withdrew from it on account of the unwisdom of their measures. whether he was present at their futile assault on florence (july , ) is doubtful, but probably he was not. from the _ottimo comento_, written at least in part[ ] by a contemporary as early as , we learn that dante soon separated himself from his companions in misfortune with mutual discontents and recriminations.[ ] during the nineteen years of dante's exile, it would be hard to say where he was not. in certain districts of northern italy there is scarce a village that has not its tradition of him, its _sedia, rocca, spelonca,_ or _torre di dante_; and what between the patriotic complaisance of some biographers overwilling to gratify as many provincial vanities as possible, and the pettishness of others anxious only to snub them, the confusion becomes hopeless.[ ] after his banishment we find some definite trace of him first at arezzo with uguccione della faggiuola; then at siena; then at verona with the scaligeri. he himself says: "through almost all parts where this language [italian] is spoken, a wanderer, wellnigh a beggar, i have gone, showing against my will the wound of fortune. truly i have been a vessel without sail or rudder, driven to diverse ports, estuaries, and shores by that hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty; and i have shown myself to the eyes of many who perhaps, through some fame of me, had imagined me in quite other guise, in whose view not only was my person debased, but every work of mine, whether done or yet to do, became of less account."[ ] by the election of the emperor henry vii. (of luxemburg, november, ), and the news of his proposed expedition into italy, the hopes of dante were raised to the highest pitch. henry entered italy, october, , and received the iron crown of lombardy at milan, on the day of epiphany, . his movements being slow, and his policy undecided, dante addressed him that famous letter, urging him to crush first the "hydra and myrrha" florence, as the root of all the evils of italy (april , ). to this year we must probably assign the new decree by which the seigniory of florence recalled a portion of the exiles, excepting dante, however, among others, by name.[ ] the undertaking of henry, after an ill-directed dawdling of two years, at last ended in his death at buonconvento (august , ; carlyle says wrongly september); poisoned, it was said, in the sacramental bread, by a dominican friar, bribed thereto by florence.[ ] the story is doubtful, the more as dante nowhere alludes to it, as he certainly would have done had he heard of it. according to balbo, dante spent the time from august, , to november, , in pisa and lucca, and then took refuge at verona, with can grande della scala (whom voltaire calls, drolly enough, _le grand can de vérone_, as if he had been a tartar), where he remained till . foscolo with equal positiveness sends him, immediately after the death of henry, to guido da polenta[ ] at ravenna, and makes him join can grande only after the latter became captain of the ghibelline league in december, . in the government of florence set forth a new decree allowing the exiles to return on conditions of fine and penance. dante rejected the offer (by accepting which his guilt would have been admitted), in a letter still hot, after these five centuries, with indignant scorn. "is this then the glorious return of dante alighieri to his country after nearly three lustres of suffering and exile? did an innocence, patent to all, merit this?--this, the perpetual sweat and toil of study? far from a man, the housemate of philosophy, be so rash and earthen hearted a humility as to allow himself to be offered up bound like a school-boy or a criminal! far from a man, the preacher of justice, to pay those who have done him wrong as for a favor! this is not the way of retaining to my country; but if another can be found that shall not derogate from the fame and honor of dante, that i will enter on with no lagging steps. for if by none such florence may be entered, by me then never! can i not everywhere behold the mirrors of the sun and stars? speculate on sweetest truths under any sky without first giving myself up inglorious, nay, ignominious, to the populace and city of florence? nor shall i want for bread." dionisi puts the date of this letter in .[ ] he is certainly wrong, for the decree is dated december , . foscolo places it in , troya early in , and both may be right, as the year began march . whatever the date of dante's visit to voltaire's great khan[ ] of verona, or the length of his stay with him, may have been, it is certain that he was in ravenna in , and that, on his return thither from an embassy to venice (concerning which a curious letter, forged probably by doni, is extant), he died on september , ( th, according to others). he was buried at ravenna under a monument built by his friend, guido novello.[ ] dante is said to have dictated the following inscription for it on his death-bed:-- jvra monarchiae svperos phlegethonta lacvsqve lvstrando cecini volvervnt fata qvovsqve sed qvia pars cessit melioribvs hospita castris avctoremqve svvm petiit felicior astris hic clavdor dantes patriis extorris ab oris qvem genvit parvi florentia mater amoris. of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a translation:-- the rights of monarchy, the heavens, the stream of fire, the pit, in vision seen, i sang as far as to the fates seemed fit; but since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars, and, happier now, hath gone to seek its maker 'mid the stars, here am i dante shut, exiled from the ancestral shore, whom florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore.[ ] if these be not the words of dante, what is internal evidence worth? the indomitably self-reliant man, loyal first of all to his most unpopular convictions (his very host, guido, being a guelph), puts his ghibellinism (_jura monarchiae_) in the front. the man whose whole life, like that of selected souls always, had been a war fare, calls heaven another camp,--a better one, thank god! the wanderer of so many years speaks of his soul as a guest,--glad to be gone, doubtless. the exile, whose sharpest reproaches of florence are always those of an outraged lover, finds it bitter that even his unconscious bones should lie in alien soil. giovanni villani, the earliest authority, and a contemporary, thus sketches him: "this man was a great scholar in almost every science, though a layman; was a most excellent poet, philosopher, and rhetorician; perfect, as well in composing and versifying as in haranguing; a most noble speaker.... this dante, on account of his learning, was a little haughty, and shy, and disdainful, and like a philosopher almost ungracious, knew not well how to deal with unlettered folk." benvenuto da imola tells us that he was very abstracted, as we may well believe of a man who carried the _commedia_ in his brain. boccaccio paints him in this wise: "our poet was of middle height; his face was long, his nose aquiline, his jaw large, and the lower lip protruding somewhat beyond the upper; a little stooping in the shoulders; his eyes rather large than small; dark of complexion; his hair and beard thick, crisp, and black; and his countenance always sad and thoughtful. his garments were always dignified; the style such as suited ripeness of years; his gait was grave and gentlemanlike; and his bearing, whether public or private, wonderfully composed and polished. in meat and drink he was most temperate, nor was ever any more zealous in study or whatever other pursuit. seldom spake he, save when spoken to, though a most eloquent person. in his youth he delighted especially in music and singing, and was intimate with almost all the singers and musicians of his day. he was much inclined to solitude, and familiar with few, and most assiduous in study as far as he could find time for it. dante was also of marvellous capacity and the most tenacious memory." various anecdotes of him are related by boccaccio, sacchetti, and others, none of them verisimilar, and some of them at least fifteen centuries old when revamped. most of them are neither _veri_ nor _ben trovati_. one clear glimpse we get of him from the _ottimo comento_, the author of which says:[ ] "i, the writer, heard dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and oft (_molte e spesse volte_) he had made words say for him what they were not wont to express for other poets." that is the only sincere glimpse we get of the living, breathing, word-compelling dante. looked at outwardly, the life of dante seems to have been an utter and disastrous failure. what its inward satisfactions must have been, we, with the _paradiso_ open before us, can form some faint conception. to him, longing with an intensity which only the word _dantesque_ will express to realize an ideal upon earth, and continually baffled and misunderstood, the far greater part of his mature life must have been labor and sorrow. we can see how essential all that sad experience was to him, can understand why all the fairy stories hide the luck in the ugly black casket; but to him, then and there, how seemed it? thou shalt relinquish everything of thee, beloved most dearly; this that arrow is shot from the bow of exile first of all; and thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath the bread of others, and how hard a path to climb and to descend the stranger's stairs![ ] _come sa di sale!_ who never wet his bread with tears, says goethe, knows ye not, ye heavenly powers! our nineteenth century made an idol of the noble lord who broke his heart in verse once every six months, but the fourteenth was lucky enough to produce and not to make an idol of that rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of genius who could hold heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die till he had done his task. at the end of the _vita nuova_, his first work, dante wrote down that remarkable aspiration that god would take him to himself after he had written of beatrice such things as were never yet written of woman. it was literally fulfilled when the _commedia_ was finished twenty-five years later. scarce was dante at rest in his grave when italy felt instinctively that this was her great man. boccaccio tells us that in [ ] cardinal poggetto (du poiet) caused dante's treatise _de monarchiâ_, to be publicly burned at bologna, and proposed further to dig up and burn the bones of the poet at ravenna, as having been a heretic; but so much opposition was roused that he thought better of it. yet this was during the pontificate of the frenchman, john xxii., the reproof of whose simony dante puts in the mouth of st. peter, who declares his seat vacant,[ ] whose damnation the poet himself seems to prophesy,[ ] and against whose election he had endeavored to persuade the cardinals, in a vehement letter. in the republic of florence voted the sum of ten golden florins to be paid by the hands of messer giovanni boccaccio to dante's daughter beatrice, a nun in the convent of santa chiara at ravenna. in florence voted a monument, and begged in vain for the metaphorical ashes of the man of whom she had threatened to make literal cinders if she could catch him alive. in [ ] she begged again, but ravenna, a dead city, was tenacious of the dead poet. in michel angelo would have built the monument, but leo x. refused to allow the sacred dust to be removed. finally, in , five hundred and eight years after the death of dante, florence got a cenotaph fairly built in santa croce (by ricci), ugly beyond even the usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on it, dante in the middle, with italy on one side and poesy on the other. the tomb at ravenna, built originally in , by cardinal bembo, was restored by cardinal corsi in , and finally rebuilt in its present form by cardinal gonzaga, in , all three of whom commemorated themselves in latin inscriptions. it is a little shrine covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb of a mohammedan saint, and is now the chief magnet which draws foreigners and their gold to ravenna. the _valet de place_ says that dante is not buried under it, but beneath the pavement of the street in front of it, where also, he says, he saw my lord byron kneel and weep. like everything in ravenna, it is dirty and neglected. in (august ) florence instituted a chair of the _divina commedia_, and boccaccio was named first professor. he accordingly began his lectures on sunday, october , following, but his comment was broken off abruptly at the th verse of the th canto of the _inferno_ by the illness which ended in his death, december , . among his successors were filippo villani and filelfo. bologna was the first to follow the example of florence, benvenuto da imola having begun his lectures, according to tiraboschi, so early as . chairs were established also at pisa, venice, piacenza, and milan before the close of the century. the lectures were delivered in the churches and on feast-days, which shows their popular character. balbo reckons (but this is guess-work) that the ms. copies of the _divina commedia_ made during the fourteenth century, and now existing in the libraries of europe, are more numerous than those of all other works, ancient and modern, made during the same period. between the invention of printing and the year more than twenty editions were published in italy, the earliest in . during the sixteenth century there were forty editions; during the seventeenth,--a period, for italy, of sceptical dilettanteism,--only three; during the eighteenth, thirty-four; and already, during the first half of the nineteenth, at least eighty. the first translation was into spanish, in .[ ] m. st. rené taillandier says that the _commedia_ was condemned by the inquisition in spain; but this seems too general a statement, for, according to foscolo,[ ] it was the commentary of landino and vellutello, and a few verses in the _inferno_ and _paradiso_, which were condemned. the first french translation was that of grangier, , but the study of dante struck no root there till the present century. rivarol, who translated the _inferno_ in , was the first frenchman who divined the wonderful force and vitality of the _commedia_.[ ] the expressions of voltaire represent very well the average opinion of cultivated persons in respect of dante in the middle of the eighteenth century. he says: "the italians call him divine; but it is a hidden divinity; few people understand his oracles. he has commentators, which, perhaps, is another reason for his not being understood. his reputation will go on increasing, because scarce anybody reads him."[ ] to father bettinelli he writes: "i estimate highly the courage with which you have dared to say that dante was a madman and his work a monster." but he adds, what shows that dante had his admirers even in that flippant century: "there are found among us, and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupidly extravagant and barbarous."[ ] elsewhere he says that the _commedia_ was "an odd poem, but gleaming with natural beauties, a work in which the author rose in parts above the bad taste of his age and his subject, and full of passages written as purely as if they had been of the time of ariosto and tasso."[ ] it is curious to see this antipathetic fascination which dante exercised over a nature so opposite to his own. at the beginning of this century châteaubriand speaks of dante with vague commendation, evidently from a very superficial acquaintance, and that only with the _inferno_, probably from rivarol's version.[ ] since then there have been four or five french versions in prose or verse, including one by lamennais. but the austerity of dante will not condescend to the conventional elegance which makes the charm of french, and the most virile of poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most feminine of languages. yet in the works of fauriel, ozanam, ampère, and villemain, france has given a greater impulse to the study of dante than any other country except germany. into germany the _commedia_ penetrated later. how utterly dante was unknown there in the sixteenth century is plain from a passage in the "vanity of the arts and sciences" of cornelius agrippa, where he is spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories: "there have been many of these historical pandars, of which some of obscure fame, as aeneas sylvius, dantes, and petrarch, boccace, pontanus," etc.[ ] the first german translation was that of kannegiesser ( ). versions by streckfuss, kopisch, and prince john (late king) of saxony followed. goethe seems never to have given that attention to dante which his ever-alert intelligence might have been expected to bestow on so imposing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. unless the conclusion of the second part of "faust" be an inspiration of the _paradiso_, we remember no adequate word from him on this theme. his remarks on one of the german translations are brief, dry, and without that breadth which comes only of thorough knowledge and sympathy. but german scholarship and constructive criticism, through witte, kopisch, wegele, ruth, and others, have been of pre-eminent service in deepening the understanding and facilitating the study of the poet. in england the first recognition of dante is by chaucer in the "hugelin of pisa" of the "monkes tale,"[ ] and an imitation of the opening verses of the third canto of the _inferno_ ("assembly of foules"). in giovanni da serravalle, bishop of fermo, completed a latin prose translation of the _commedia_, a copy of which, as he made it at the request of two english bishops whom he met at the council of constance, was doubtless sent to england. later we find dante now and then mentioned, but evidently from hearsay only,[ ] till the time of spenser, who, like milton fifty years later, shows that he had read his works closely. thenceforward for more than a century dante became a mere name, used without meaning by literary sciolists. lord chesterfield echoes voltaire, and dr. drake in his "literary hours"[ ] could speak of darwin's "botanic garden" as showing the "wild and terrible sublimity of dante"! the first complete english translation was by boyd,--of the _inferno_ in , of the whole poem in . there have been eight other complete translations, beginning with cary's in , six since , beside several of the _inferno_ singly. of these that of longfellow is the best. it is only within the last twenty years, however, that the study of dante, in any true sense, became at all general. even coleridge seems to have been familiar only with the _inferno_. in america professor ticknor was the first to devote a special course of illustrative lectures to dante; he was followed by longfellow, whose lectures, illustrated by admirable translations, are remembered with grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn the full significance of the great christian poet. a translation of the _inferno_ into quatrains by t.w. parsons ranks with the best for spirit, faithfulness, and elegance. in denmark and russia translations of the _inferno_ have been published, beside separate volumes of comment and illustration. we have thus sketched the steady growth of dante's fame and influence to a universality unparalleled except in the case of shakespeare, perhaps more remarkable if we consider the abstruse and mystical nature of his poetry. it is to be noted as characteristic that the veneration of dantophilists for their master is that of disciples for their saint. perhaps no other man could have called forth such an expression as that of ruskin, that "the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is dante." the first remark to be made upon the writings of dante is that they are all (with the possible exception of the treatise _de vulgari eloquio_) autobiographic, and that all of them, including that, are parts of a mutually related system, of which the central point is the individuality and experience of the poet. in the _vita nuova_ he recounts the story of his love for beatrice portinari, showing how his grief for her loss turned his thoughts first inward upon his own consciousness, and, failing all help there, gradually upward through philosophy to religion, and so from a world of shadows to one of eternal substances. it traces with exquisite unconsciousness the gradual but certain steps by which memory and imagination transubstantiated the woman of flesh and blood into a holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of sorrow and hope that faith which is the instinctive refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of god which higher natures learn to find in the trial which passeth all understanding, and that perfect womanhood, the dream of youth and the memory of maturity, which beckons toward the forever unattainable. as a contribution to the physiology of genius, no other book is to be compared with the _vita nuova_. it is more important to the understanding of dante as a poet than any other of his works. it shows him (and that in the midst of affairs demanding practical ability and presence of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative abstraction, equalling that of a soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation. it enables us in some sort to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art. we comprehend the _commedia_ better when we know that dante could be an active, clear-headed politician and a mystic at the same time. various dates have been assigned to the composition of the _vita nuova_. the earliest limit is fixed by the death of beatrice in (though some of the poems are of even earlier date), and the book is commonly assumed to have been finished by ; foscolo says . but professor karl witte, a high authority, extends the term as far as .[ ] the title of the book also, _vita nuova_, has been diversely interpreted. mr. garrow, who published an english version of it at florence in , entitles it the "early life of dante." balbo understands it in the same way.[ ] but we are strongly of the opinion that "new life" is the interpretation sustained by the entire significance of the book itself. his next work in order of date is the treatise _de monarchiâ_. it has been generally taken for granted that dante was a guelph in politics up to the time of his banishment, and that out of resentment he then became a violent ghibelline. not to speak of the consideration that there is no author whose life and works present so remarkable a unity and logical sequence as those of dante, professor witte has drawn attention to a fact which alone is enough to demonstrate that the _de monarchiâ_ was written before . that and the _vita nuova_ are the only works of dante in which no allusion whatever is made to his exile. that bitter thought was continually present to him. in the _convito_ it betrays itself often, and with touching unexpectedness. even in the treatise _de vulgari eloquio_, he takes as one of his examples of style: "i have most pity for those, whosoever they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their country only in dreams." we have seen that the one decisive act of dante's priorate was to expel from florence the chiefs of both parties as the sowers of strife, and he tells us (_paradiso_, xvii.) that he had formed a party by himself. the king of saxony has well defined his political theory as being "an ideal ghibellinism"[ ] and he has been accused of want of patriotism only by those short-sighted persons who cannot see beyond their own parish. dante's want of faith in freedom was of the same kind with milton's refusing (as tacitus had done before) to confound license with liberty. the argument of the _de monarchiâ_ is briefly this: as the object of the individual man is the highest development of his faculties, so is it also with men united in societies. but the individual can only attain the highest development when all his powers are in absolute subjection to the intellect, and society only when it subjects its individual caprices to an intelligent head. this is the order of nature, as in families, and men have followed it in the organization of villages, towns, cities. again, since god made man in his own image, men and societies most nearly resemble him in proportion as they approach unity. but as in all societies questions must arise, so there is need of a monarch for supreme arbiter. and only a universal monarch can be impartial enough for this, since kings of limited territories would always be liable to the temptation of private ends. with the internal policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and kingdoms, the monarch would have nothing to do, only interfering when there was danger of an infraction of the general peace. this is the doctrine of the first book, enforced sometimes eloquently, always logically, and with great fertility of illustration. it is an enlargement of some of the _obiter dicta_ of the _convito_. the earnestness with which peace is insisted on as a necessary postulate of civic well-being shows what the experience had been out of which dante had constructed his theory. it is to be looked on as a purely scholastic demonstration of a speculative thesis, in which the manifold exceptions and modifications essential in practical application are necessarily left aside. dante almost forestalls the famous proposition of calvin, "that it is possible to conceive a people without a prince, but not a prince without a people," when he says, _non enim gens propter regem, sed e converso rex propter gentem_.[ ] and in his letter to the princes and peoples of italy on the coming of henry vii., he bids them "obey their prince, but so as freemen preserving their own constitutional forms." he says also expressly: _animadvertendum sane, quod cum dicitur humanum genus potest regi per unum supremum principem, non sic intelligendum est ut ab illo uno prodire possint municipia et leges municipales. habent namque nationes, regna, et civitates inter se proprietates quas legibus differentibus regulari oportet_. schlosser the historian compares dante's system with that of the united states.[ ] it in some respects resembled more the constitution of the netherlands under the supreme stadtholder, but parallels between ideal and actual institutions are always unsatisfactory.[ ] the second book is very curious. in it dante endeavors to demonstrate the divine right of the roman empire to universal sovereignty. one of his arguments is, that christ consented to be born under the reign of augustus; another, that he assented to the imperial jurisdiction in allowing himself to be crucified under a decree of one of its courts. the atonement could not have been accomplished unless christ suffered under sentence of a court having jurisdiction, for otherwise his condemnation would have been an injustice and not a penalty. moreover, since all mankind was typified in the person of christ, the court must have been one having jurisdiction over all mankind; and since he was delivered to pilate, an officer of tiberius, it must follow that the jurisdiction of tiberius was universal. he draws an argument also from the wager of battle to prove that the roman empire was divinely permitted, at least, if not instituted. for since it is admitted that god gives the victory, and since the romans always won it, therefore it was god's will that the romans should attain universal empire. in the third book he endeavors to prove that the emperor holds by divine right, and not by permission of the pope. he assigns supremacy to the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor in temporals. this was a delicate subject, and though the king of saxony (a catholic) says that dante did not overstep the limits of orthodoxy, it was on account of this part of the book that it was condemned as heretical.[ ] next follows the treatise _de vulgari eloquio_. though we have doubts whether we possess this book as dante wrote it, inclining rather to think that it is a copy in some parts textually exact, in others an abstract, there can be no question either of its great glossological value or that it conveys the opinions of dante. we put it next in order, though written later than the _convito_, only because, like the _de monarchiâ_, it is written in latin. it is a proof of the national instinct of dante, and of his confidence in his genius, that he should have chosen to write all his greatest works in what was deemed by scholars a _patois_, but which he more than any other man made a classic language. had he intended the _de monarchiâ_ for a political pamphlet, he would certainly not have composed it in the dialect of the few. the _de vulgari eloquio_ was to have been in four books. whether it was ever finished or not it is impossible to say; but only two books have come down to us. it treats of poetizing in the vulgar tongue, and of the different dialects of italy. from the particularity with which it treats of the dialect of bologna, it has been supposed to have been written in that city, or at least to furnish an argument in favor of dante's having at some time studied there. in lib. ii. cap. ii., is a remarkable passage in which, defining the various subjects of song and what had been treated in the vulgar tongue by different poets, he says that his own theme had been righteousness. the _convito_ is also imperfect. it was to have consisted of fourteen treatises, but, as we have it, contains only four. in the first he justifies the use of the vulgar idiom in preference to the latin. in the other three he comments on three of his own _canzoni_. it will be impossible to give an adequate analysis of this work in the limits allowed us.[ ] it is an epitome of the learning of that age, philosophical, theological, and scientific. as affording illustration of the _commedia_, and of dante's style of thought, it is invaluable. it is reckoned by his countrymen the first piece of italian prose, and there are parts of it which still stand unmatched for eloquence and pathos. the italians (even such a man as cantù among the rest) find in it and a few passages of the _commedia_ the proof that dante, as a natural philosopher was wholly in advance of his age,--that he had, among other things, anticipated newton in the theory of gravitation. but this is as idle as the claim that shakespeare had discovered the circulation of the blood before harvey,[ ] and one might as well attempt to dethrone newton because chaucer speaks of the love which draws the apple to the earth. the truth is, that it was only as a poet that dante was great and original (glory enough, surely, to have not more than two competitors), and in matters of science, as did all his contemporaries, sought the guiding hand of aristotle like a child. dante is assumed by many to have been a platonist, but this is not true, in the strict sense of the word. like all men of great imagination, he was an idealist, and so far a platonist, as shakespeare might be proved to have been by his sonnets. but dante's direct acquaintance with plato may be reckoned at zero, and we consider it as having strongly influenced his artistic development for the better, that transcendentalist as he was by nature, so much so as to be in danger of lapsing into an oriental mysticism, his habits of thought should have been made precise and his genius disciplined by a mind so severely logical as that of aristotle. this does not conflict with what we believe to be equally true, that the platonizing commentaries on his poem, like that of landino, are the most satisfactory. beside the prose already mentioned, we have a small collection of dante's letters, the recovery of the larger number of which we owe to professor witte. they are all interesting, some of them especially so, as illustrating the prophetic character with which dante invested himself. the longest is one addressed to can grande della scalla, explaining the intention of the _commedia_ and the method to be employed in its interpretation. the authenticity of this letter has been doubted, but is now generally admitted. we shall barely allude to the minor poems, full of grace and depth of mystic sentiment, and which would have given dante a high place in the history of italian literature, even had he written nothing else. they are so abstract, however, that without the extrinsic interest of having been written by the author of the _commedia_, they would probably find few readers. all that is certainly known in regard to the _commedia_ is that it was composed during the nineteen years which intervened between dante's banishment and death. attempts have been made to fix precisely the dates of the different parts, but without success, and the differences of opinion are bewildering. foscolo has constructed an ingenious and forcible argument to show that no part of the poem was published before the author's death. the question depends somewhat on the meaning we attach to the word "published." in an age of manuscript the wide dispersion of a poem so long even as a single one of the three divisions of the _commedia_ would be accomplished very slowly. but it is difficult to account for the great fame which dante enjoyed during the latter years of his life, unless we suppose that parts, at least, of his greatest work had been read or heard by a large number of persons. this need not, however, imply publication; and witte, whose opinion is entitled to great consideration, supposes even the _inferno_ not to have been finished before or . in a matter where certainty would be impossible, it is of little consequence to reproduce conjectural dates. in the letter to can grande, before alluded to, dante himself has stated the theme of his song. he says that "the literal subject of the whole work is the state of the soul after death simply considered. but if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of justice." he tells us that the work is to be interpreted in a literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical sense, a mode then commonly employed with the scriptures,[ ] and of which he gives the following example: "to make which mode of treatment more clear, it may be applied in the following verses: _in exitu israel de aegypto, domus jacob de populo barbaro, facta est judaea sanctificatio ejus, israel potestas ejus_.[ ] for if we look only at the literal sense, it signifies the going out of the children of israel from egypt in the time of moses; if at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption through christ; if at the moral, it signifies the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace; and if at the anagogical, it signifies the passage of the blessed soul from the bondage of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory." a latin couplet, cited by one of the old commentators, puts the matter compactly together for us:-- "_litera_ gesta refert; quid credas _allegoria_; _moralis_ quid agas; quid speres _anagogia_." dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy because it has a fortunate ending, and gives its title thus: "here begins the comedy of dante alighieri, a florentine by birth, but not in morals."[ ] the poem consists of three parts, hell, purgatory, and paradise. each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the saviour's life; for though the hell contains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. in the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the trinity, and in the three divisions, of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. symbolic meanings reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the architecture of the middle ages. an analysis of the poem would be out of place here, but we must say a few words of dante's position as respects modern literature. if we except wolfram von eschenbach, he is the first christian poet, the first (indeed, we might say the only) one whose whole system of thought is colored in every finest fibre by a purely christian theology. lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption, these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem: or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in virgil (symbol also of that imperialism whose origin he sang); moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, typified in beatrice; reconciliation with god, and actual blinding vision of him,--"the pure in heart shall see god." here are general truths which any christian may accept and find comfort in. but the poem comes nearer to us than this. it is the real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow, and that the ladder of that faith by which man climbs to the actual fruition of things not seen _ex quovis ligno non fit_, but only of the cross manfully borne. the poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman indeed, as marvell's drop of dew mirrored the whole firmament, so we find in the _commedia_ the image of the middle ages, and the sentimental gyniolatry of chivalry, which was at best but skin-deep, is lifted in beatrice to an ideal and universal plane. it is the same with catholicism, with imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy, and nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with such, cosmopolitan truth to human nature and to his own individuality, as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. we protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade dante to a mere partisan, which sees in him a luther before his time, and would clap the _bonnet rouge_ upon his heavenly muse. like all great artistic minds, dante was essentially conservative, and, arriving precisely in that period of transition when church and empire were entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he strove to preserve both by presenting the theory of both in a pristine and ideal perfection. the whole nature of dante was one of intense belief. there is proof upon proof that he believed himself invested with a divine mission like the hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was imbued, it was back to the old worship and the god of the fathers that he called his people, and not isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor, that sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in the composition of a sceptic. in dante's time, learning had something of a sacred character, the line was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of supernatural powers, it was with the next generation, with the elegant petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly boccaccio, that the purely literary life, and that dilettanteism, which is the twin sister of scepticism, began. as a merely literary figure, the position of dante is remarkable. not only as respects thought, but as respects aesthetics also, his great poem stands as a monument on the boundary line between the ancient and modern. he not only marks, but is in himself, the transition. _arma virumque cano_, that is the motto of classic song; the things of this world and great men. dante says, _subjectum est homo_, not _vir_; my theme is man, not a man. the scene of the old epic and drama was in this world, and its catastrophe here; dante lays his scene in the human soul, and his fifth act in the other world. he makes himself the protagonist of his own drama. in the _commedia_ for the first time christianity wholly revolutionizes art, and becomes its seminal principle. but aesthetically also, as well as morally, dante stands between the old and the new, and reconciles them. the theme of his poem is purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic; but its treatment is objective (almost to realism, here and there), and it is limited by a form of classic severity. in the same way he sums up in himself the two schools of modern poetry which had preceded him, and, while essentially lyrical in his subject, is epic in the handling of it. so also he combines the deeper and more abstract religious sentiment of the teutonic races with the scientific precision and absolute systematism of the romanic. in one respect dante stands alone. while we can in some sort account for such representative men as voltaire and goethe (nay, even shakespeare) by the intellectual and moral fermentation of the age in which they lived, dante seems morally isolated and to have drawn his inspiration almost wholly from his own internal reserves. of his mastery in style we need say little here. of his mere language, nothing could be better than the expression of rivarol "his verse holds itself erect by the mere force of the substantive and verb, without the help of a single epithet." we will only add a word on what seems to us an extraordinary misapprehension of coleridge, who disparages dante by comparing his lucifer with milton's satan. he seems to have forgotten that the precise measurements of dante were not prosaic, but absolutely demanded by the nature of his poem. he is describing an actual journey, and his exactness makes a part of the verisimilitude. we read the "paradise lost" as a poem, the _commedia_ as a record of fact; and no one can read dante without believing his story, for it is plain that he believed it himself. it is false aesthetics to confound the grandiose with the imaginative. milton's angels are not to be compared with dante's, at once real and supernatural; and the deity of milton is a calvinistic zeus, while nothing in all poetry approaches the imaginative grandeur of dante's vision of god at the conclusion of the _paradiso_. in all literary history there is no such figure as dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential; and there is no moral more touching than that the contemporary recognition of such a nature, so endowed and so faithful to its endowment, should be summed up in the sentence of florence: _igne comburatur sic quod moriatur_.[ ] the range of dante's influence is not less remarkable than its intensity. minds, the antipodes of each other in temper and endowment, alike feel the force of his attraction, the pervasive comfort of his light and warmth. boccaccio and lamennais are touched with the same reverential enthusiasm. the imaginative ruskin is rapt by him, as we have seen, perhaps beyond the limit where critical appreciation merges in enthusiasm; and the matter-of-fact schlosser tells us that "he, who was wont to contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light, has made use of dante, landino, and vellutello in his solitude to bring a heavenly light into his inward life." almost all other poets have their seasons, but dante penetrates to the moral core of those who once fairly come within his sphere, and possesses them wholly. his readers turn students, his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes a religion. the homeless exile finds a home in thousands of grateful hearts. _e venne da esilio in questa pace!_ every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may be, and has been, made to the _divina commedia_, especially by critics who have but a superficial acquaintance with it, or rather with the _inferno_, which is as far as most english critics go. coleridge himself, who had a way of divining what was in books, may be justly suspected of not going further, though with carey to help him. mr. carlyle, who has said admirable things of dante the man, was very imperfectly read in dante the author, or he would never have put sordello in hell and the meeting with beatrice in paradise. in france it was not much better (though rivarol has said the best thing hitherto of dante's parsimony of epithet)[ ] before ozanam, who, if with decided ultramontane leanings, has written excellently well of our poet, and after careful study. voltaire, though not without relentings toward a poet who had put popes heels upward in hell, regards him on the whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. it was no better in italy, if we may trust foscolo, who affirms that "neither pelli nor others deservedly more celebrated than he ever read attentively the poem of dante, perhaps never ran through it from the first verse to the last."[ ] accordingly we have heard that the _commedia_ was a sermon, a political pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed ghibelline, nay, worse, of a turncoat guelph. it is narrow, it is bigoted, it is savage, it is theological, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is scholastic, it is obscure, it is pedantic, its italian is not that of _la crusca_, its ideas are not those of an enlightened eighteenth century, it is everything, in short, that a poem should not be; and yet, singularly enough, the circle of its charm has widened in proportion as men have receded from the theories of church and state which are supposed to be its foundation, and as the modes of thought of its author have become more alien to those of his readers. in spite of all objections, some of which are well founded, the _commedia_ remains one of the three or four universal books that have ever been written. we may admit, with proper limitations, the modern distinction between the artist and the moralist. with the one form is all in all, with the other tendency. the aim of the one is to delight, of the other to convince. the one is master of his purpose, the other mastered by it. the whole range of perception and thought is valuable to the one as it will minister to imagination, to the other only as it is available for argument. with the moralist use is beauty, good only as it serves an ulterior purpose; with the artist beauty is use, good in and for itself. in the fine arts the vehicle makes part of the thought, coalesces with it. the living conception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or modulated sound, and henceforth the two are inseparable. the results of the moralist pass into the intellectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters little by what mode of conveyance. but where, as in dante, the religious sentiment and the imagination are both organic, something interfused with the whole being of the man, so that they work in kindly sympathy, the moral will insensibly suffuse itself with beauty as a cloud with light. then that fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the assonance between facts seemingly remote and unrelated, between the outward and inward worlds, though convinced that the things of this life are shadows, will be persuaded also that they are not fantastic merely, but imply a substance somewhere, and will love to set forth the beauty of the visible image because it suggests the ineffably higher charm of the unseen original. dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and strengthening of that native instinct of the soul which leads it to strive backward toward its divine source, may sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for the light of truth and the splendor of god to shine through. in him as in calderon the perpetual presence of imagination not only glorifies the philosophy of life and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols of material beauty. though dante's conception of the highest end of man was that he should climb through every phase of human experience to that transcendental and super-sensual region where the true, the good, and the beautiful blend in the white light of god, yet the prism of his imagination forever resolved the ray into color again, and he loved to show it also where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it became beautiful once more to the eye of sense. speculation, he tells us, is the use, without any mixture, of our noblest part (the reason). and this part cannot in this life have its perfect use, which is to behold god (who is the highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch as the intellect considers and beholds him in his effects.[ ] underlying dante the metaphysician, statesman, and theologian, was always dante the poet,[ ] irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through in a picturesque phrase, or touching things unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and subdues like distance in the landscape. the stern outline of his system wavers and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. beyond the horizon of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of the empyrean, the city of our god, the rome whereof christ is a roman,[ ] the citadel of refuge, even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow and self denial, transhumanized[ ] to the divine abstraction of pure contemplation. "and it is called empyrean," he says in his letter to can grande, "which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a spiritual one, which is blessed love or charity." but this splendor he bodies forth, if sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most often in types of winning grace. dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of mind. a platonist by nature, an aristotelian by training, his feet keep closely to the narrow path of dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are fixed on the stars and his brain is busy with things not demonstrable, save by that grace of god which passeth all understanding, nor capable of being told unless by far off hints and adumbrations. though he himself has directly explained the scope, the method, and the larger meaning of his greatest work,[ ] though he has indirectly pointed out the way to its interpretation in the _convito_, and though everything he wrote is but an explanatory comment on his own character and opinions, unmistakably clear and precise, yet both man and poem continue not only to be misunderstood popularly, but also by such as should know better.[ ] that those who confined their studies to the _commedia_ should have interpreted it variously is not wonderful, for out of the first or literal meaning others open, one out of another, each of wider circuit and purer abstraction, like dante's own heavens, giving and receiving light.[ ] indeed, dante himself is partly to blame for this. "the form or mode of treatment," he says, "is poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive, and withal definitive, divisive, probative, improbative, and positive of examples." here are conundrums enough, to be sure! to italians at home, for whom the great arenas of political and religious speculation were closed, the temptation to find a subtler meaning than the real one was irresistible. italians in exile, on the other hand, made dante the stalking-horse from behind which they could take a long shot at church and state, or at obscurer foes.[ ] infinitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of intense sympathy which drawst hese latter toward their great forerunner, _exul immeritus_ like themselves.[ ] but they have too often wrung a meaning from dante which is injurious to the man and out of keeping with the ideas of his age. the aim in expounding a great poem should be, not to discover an endless variety of meanings often contradictory, but whatever it has of great and perennial significance; for such it must have, or it would long ago have ceased to be living and operative, would long ago have taken refuge in the chartreuse of great libraries, dumb thenceforth to all mankind. we do not mean to say that this minute exegesis is useless or unpraiseworthy, but only that it should be subsidiary to the larger way. it serves to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful in dante, namely, the omnipresence of his memory throughout the work, so that its intimate coherence does not exist in spite of the reconditeness and complexity of allusion, but is woven out of them. the poem has many senses, he tells us, and there can be no doubt of it; but it has also, and this alone will account for its fascination, a living soul behind them all and informing all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of doctrine simple, human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his own phrase, the bread of angels. nor is this unity characteristic only of the _divina commedia_. all the works of dante, with the possible exception of the _de vulgari eloquio_ (which is unfinished), are component parts of a whole duty of man mutually completing and interpreting one another. they are also, as truly as wordsworth's "prelude," a history of the growth of a poet's mind. like the english poet he valued himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt after fortune had made him outwardly cheap. _sempre il magnanimo si magnifica in suo cuore; e così lo pusillanimo per contrario sempre si tiene meno che non è._[ ] as in the prose of milton, whose striking likeness to dante in certain prominent features of character has been remarked by foscolo, there are in dante's minor works continual allusions to himself of great value as material for his biographer. those who read attentively will discover that the tenderness he shows toward francesca and her lover did not spring from any friendship for her family, but was a constant quality of his nature, and that what is called his revengeful ferocity is truly the implacable resentment of a lofty mind and a lover of good against evil, whether showing itself in private or public life; perhaps hating the former manifestation of it the most because he believed it to be the root of the latter,--a faith which those who have watched the course of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be inclined to share. his gentleness is all the more striking by contrast, like that silken compensation which blooms out of the thorny stem of the cactus. his moroseness,[ ] his party spirit, and his personal vindictiveness are all predicated upon the _inferno_, and upon a misapprehension or careless reading even of that. dante's zeal was not of that sentimental kind, quickly kindled and as soon quenched, that hovers on the surface of shallow minds, "even as the flame of unctuous is wont to move upon the outer surface only";[ ] it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the whole character of the man through and through, like the minarets of his own city of dis.[ ] he was, as seems distinctive in some degree of the latinized races, an unflinching _à priori_ logician, not unwilling to "syllogize invidious verities,"[ ] wherever they might lead him, like sigier, whom he has put in paradise, though more than suspected of heterodoxy. but at the same time, as we shall see, he had something of the practical good sense of that teutonic stock whence he drew a part of his blood, which prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield without breaking to the inevitable, but incalculable pressure of human nature and the stiffer logic of events. his theory of church and state was not merely a fantastic one, but intended for the use and benefit of men as they were; and he allowed accordingly for aberrations, to which even the law of gravitation is forced to give place; how much more, then, any scheme whose very starting-point is the freedom of the will! we are thankful for a commentator at last who passes dry-shod over the _turbide onde_ of inappreciative criticism, and, quietly waving aside the thick atmosphere which has gathered about the character of dante both as man and poet, opens for us his city of doom with the divining-rod of reverential study. miss rossetti comes commended to our interest, not only as one of a family which seems to hold genius by the tenure of gavelkind, but as having a special claim by inheritance to a love and understanding of dante. she writes english with a purity that has in it something of feminine softness with no lack of vigor or precision. her lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace through the metaphysical and other intricacies of her subject. she brings to her work the refined enthusiasm of a cultivated woman and the penetration of sympathy. she has chosen the better way (in which germany took the lead) of interpreting dante out of himself, the pure spring from which, and from which alone, he drew his inspiration, and not from muddy fra alberico or abbate giovacchino, from stupid visions of saint paul or voyages of saint brandan. she has written by far the best comment that has appeared in english, and we should say the best that has been done in england, were it not for her father's _comento analitico_, for excepting which her filial piety will thank us. students of dante in the original will be grateful to her for many suggestive hints, and those who read him in english will find in her volume a travelling map in which the principal points and their connections are clearly set down. in what we shall say of dante we shall endeavor only to supplement her interpretation with such side-lights as may have been furnished us by twenty years of assiduous study. dante's thought is multiform, and, like certain street signs, once common, presents a different image according to the point of view. let us consider briefly what was the plan of the _divina commedia_ and dante's aim in writing it, which, if not to justify, was at least to illustrate, for warning and example, the ways of god to man. the higher intention of the poem was to set forth the results of sin, or unwisdom, and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life, and consequently in the life to come, which is but the continuation and fulfilment of this. the scene accordingly is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly denizens now as hereafter. the poem is a diary of the human soul in its journey upwards from error through repentance to atonement with god. to make it apprehensible by those whom it was meant to teach, nay, from its very nature as a poem, and not a treatise of abstract morality, it must set forth everything by means of sensible types and images. "to speak thus is adapted to your mind, since only from the sensible it learns what makes it worthy of intellect thereafter, on this account the scripture condescends unto your faculties, and feet and hands to god attributes, and means something else."[ ] whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of its branches need not be told that dante's age was one that demanded very palpable and even revolting types. as in the old legend, a drop of scalding sweat from the damned soul must shrivel the very skin of those for whom he wrote, to make them wince if not to turn them away from evil doing. to consider his hell a place of physical torture is to take circe's herd for real swine. its mouth yawns not only under florence, but before the feet of every man everywhere who goeth about to do evil. his hell is a condition of the soul, and he could not find images loathsome enough to express the moral deformity which is wrought by sin on its victims, or his own abhorrence of it. its inmates meet you in the street every day. "hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place, for where we are is hell, and where hell is there we must ever be."[ ] it is our own sensual eye that gives evil the appearance of good, and out of a crooked hag makes a bewitching siren. the reason enlightened by the grace of god sees it as it truly is, full of stench and corruption.[ ] it is this office of reason which dante undertakes to perform, by divine commission, in the _inferno_. there can be no doubt that he looked upon himself as invested with the prophetic function, and the hebrew forerunners, in whose society his soul sought consolation and sustainment, certainly set him no example of observing the conventions of good society in dealing with the enemies of god. indeed, his notions of good society were not altogether those of this world in any generation. he would have defined it as meaning "the peers" of philosophy, "souls free from wretched and vile delights and from vulgar habits, endowed with genius and memory."[ ] dante himself had precisely this endowment, and in a very surprising degree. his genius enabled him to see and to show what he saw to others; his memory neither forgot nor forgave. very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of atavism or those of society, personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. dante indeed saw clearly enough that the divine justice did at length overtake society in the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. "it is thou," he says sternly, "who hast done this thing, and thou, not society, shalt be damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. this is not my judgment, but that of universal nature[ ] from before the beginning of the world."[ ] accordingly the highest reason, typified in his guide virgil, rebukes him for bringing compassion to the judgments of god,[ ] and again embraces him and calls the mother that bore him blessed, when he bids filippo argenti begone among the other dogs.[ ] this latter case shocks our modern feelings the more rudely for the simple pathos with which dante makes argenti answer when asked who he was, "thou seest i am one that weeps." it is also the one that makes most strongly for the theory of dante's personal vindictiveness,[ ] and it may count for what it is worth. we are not greatly concerned to defend him on that score, for he believed in the righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. he did not think the tweeds and fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and thoroughly trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. he believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever and whoever hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to god's law, and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity. it has been commonly assumed that dante was a man soured by undeserved misfortune, that he took up a wholly new outfit of political opinions with his fallen fortunes, and that his theory of life and of man's relations to it was altogether reshaped for him by the bitter musings of his exile. this would be singular, to say the least, in a man who tells us that he "felt himself indeed four-square against the strokes of chance," and whose convictions were so intimate that they were not merely intellectual conclusions, but parts of his moral being. fortunately we are called on to believe nothing of the kind. dante himself has supplied us with hints and dates which enable us to watch the germination and trace the growth of his double theory of government, applicable to man as he is a citizen of this world, and as he hopes to become hereafter a freeman of the celestial city. it would be of little consequence to show in which of two equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six hundred years ago, but it is worth something to know that a man of ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all. dante's opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour. swiftly the politic goes: is it dark? he borrows a lantern; slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the stars. it will be well, then, to clear up the chronology of dante's thought. when his ancestor cacciaguida prophesies to him the life which is to be his after ,[ ] he says, speaking of his exile:-- "and that which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders will be the bad and foolish company with which into this valley thou shalt fall; * * * * * "of their bestiality their own proceedings shall furnish proof; _so 'twill be well for thee a party to have made thee by thyself_." here both context and grammatical construction (infallible guides in a writer so scrupulous and exact) imply irresistibly that dante had become a party by himself before his exile. the measure adopted by the priors of florence while he was one of them (with his assent and probably by his counsel), of sending to the frontier the leading men of both factions, confirms this implication. among the persons thus removed from the opportunity of doing mischief was his dearest friend guido cavalcanti, to whom he had not long before addressed the _vita nuova_.[ ] dante evidently looked back with satisfaction on his conduct at this time, and thought it both honest and patriotic, as it certainly was disinterested. "we whose country is the world, as the ocean to the fish," he tells us, "though we drank of the arno in infancy, and love florence so much that, _because we loved her, we suffer exile unjustly,_ support the shoulders of our judgment rather upon reason than the senses."[ ] and again, speaking of old ago, he says: "and the noble soul at this age blesses also the times past, and well may bless them, because, revolving them in memory, she recalls her righteous conduct, without which she could not enter the port to which she draws nigh, with so much riches and so great gain." this language is not that of a man who regrets some former action as mistaken, still less of one who repented it for any disastrous consequences to himself. so, in justifying a man for speaking of himself, he alleges two examples,--that of boethius, who did so to "clear himself of the perpetual infamy of his exile"; and that of augustine, "for, by the process of his life, which was from bad to good, from good to better, and from better to best, he gave us example and teaching."[ ] after middle life, at least, dante had that wisdom "whose use brings with it marvellous beauties, that is, contentment with every condition of time, and contempt of those things which others make their masters."[ ] if dante, moreover, wrote his treatise _de monarchiâ_ before , and we think witte's inference,[ ] from its style and from the fact that he nowhere alludes to his banishment in it, conclusive on this point, then he was already a ghibelline in the same larger and unpartisan sense which ever after distinguished him from his italian contemporaries. "let, let the ghibellines ply their handicraft beneath some other standard; for this ever ill follows he who it and justice parts," he makes justinian say, speaking of the roman eagle.[ ] his ghibellinism, though undoubtedly the result of what he had seen of italian misgovernment, embraced in its theoretical application the civilized world. his political system was one which his reason adopted, not for any temporary expediency, but because it conduced to justice, peace, and civilization,--the three conditions on which alone freedom was possible in any sense which made it worth having. dante was intensely italian, nay, intensely florentine, but on all great questions he was, by the logical structure of his mind and its philosophic impartiality, incapable of intellectual provincialism.[ ] if the circle of his affections, as with persistent natures commonly, was narrow, his thought swept a broad horizon from that tower of absolute self which he had reared for its speculation. even upon the principles of poetry, mechanical and other,[ ] he had reflected more profoundly than most of those who criticise his work, and it was not by chance that he discovered the secret of that magical word too few, which not only distinguishes his verse from all other, but so strikingly from his own prose. he never took the bit of art[ ] between his teeth where only poetry, and not doctrine, was concerned. if dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was practical a guide for the conduct of life, it was, on the other, a much more transcendent thing, whose body was wisdom her soul love, and her efficient cause truth. it is a practice of wisdom from the mere love of it, for so we must interpret his _amoroso uso di sapienzia_, when we remember how he has said before[ ] that "the love of wisdom for its delight or profit is not true love of wisdom." and this love must embrace knowledge in all its branches, for dante is content with nothing less than a pancratic training, and has a scorn of _dilettanti_, specialists, and quacks. "wherefore none ought to be called a true philosopher who for any delight loves any part of knowledge, as there are many who delight in composing _canzoni_, and delight to be studious in them, and who delight to be studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and abandon the other sciences which are all members of wisdom."[ ] "many love better to be held masters than to be so." with him wisdom is the generalization from many several knowledges of small account by themselves; it results therefore from breadth of culture, and would be impossible without it. philosophy is a noble lady (_donna gentil_),[ ] partaking of the divine essence by a kind of eternal marriage, while with other intelligences she is united in a less measure "as a mistress of whom no lover takes complete joy."[ ] the eyes of this lady are her demonstrations, and her smile is her persuasion. "the eyes of wisdom are her demonstrations by which truth is beheld most certainly; and her smile is her persuasions in which the interior light of wisdom is shown under a certain veil, and in these two is felt that highest pleasure of beatitude which is the greatest good in paradise."[ ] "it is to be known that the beholding this lady was so largely ordained for us, not merely to look upon the face which she shows us, but that we may desire to attain the things which she keeps concealed. and as through her much thereof is seen by reason, so by her we believe that every miracle may have its reason in a higher intellect, and consequently may be. whence our good faith has its origin, whence comes the hope of those unseen things which we desire, and through that the operation of charity, by the which three virtues we rise to philosophize in that celestial athens where the stoics, peripatetics, and epicureans through the art of eternal truth accordingly concur in one will."[ ] as to the double scope of dante's philosophy we will cite a passage from the _convito_, all the more to our purpose as it will illustrate his own method of allegorizing. "verily the use of our mind is double, that is, practical and speculative, the one and the other most delightful, although that of contemplation be the more so. that of the practical is for us to act virtuously, that is, honorably, with prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. [these are the four stars seen by dante, _purgatorio_, i. - .] that of the speculative is not to act for ourselves, but to consider the works of god and nature.... verily of these uses one is more full of beatitude than the other, as it is the speculative, which without any admixture is the use of our noblest part.... and this part in this life cannot have its use perfectly, which is to see god, except inasmuch as the intellect considers him and beholds him through his effects. and that we should seek this beatitude as the highest, and not the other, the gospel of mark teaches us if we will look well. mark says that mary magdalene, mary the mother of james, and mary salome went to find the saviour at the tomb and found him not, but found a youth clad in white who said to them, 'ye seek the saviour, and i say unto you that he is not here; and yet fear ye not, but go and say unto his disciples and peter that he will go before them into galilee, and there ye shall see him even as he told you.' by these three women may be understood the three sects of the active life, that is, the epicureans, the stoics, and the peripatetics, who go to the tomb, that is, to the present life, which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and seek the saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him not, but they find a youth in white raiment, who, according to the testimony of matthew and the rest, was an angel of god. this angel is that nobleness of ours which comes from god, as hath been said, which speaks in our reason and says to each of these sects, that is, to whoever goes seeking beatitude in this life, that it is not here, but go and say to the disciples and to peter, that is, to those who go seeking it and those who are gone astray (like peter who had denied), that it will go before them into galilee, that is, into speculation. galilee is as much as to say whiteness. whiteness is a body full of corporeal light more than any other, and so contemplation is fuller of spiritual light than anything else here below. and he says, 'it will go before,' and does not say, 'it will be with you,' to give us to understand that god always goes before our contemplation, nor can we ever overtake here him who is our supreme beatitude. and it is said, 'there ye shall see him as he told you,' that is, here ye shall have of his sweetness, that is, felicity, as is promised you here, that is, as it is ordained that ye can have. and thus it appears that we find our beatitude, this felicity of which we are speaking, first imperfect in the active life, that is, in the operations of the moral virtues, and afterwards wellnigh perfect in the operation of the intellectual ones, the which two operations are speedy and most direct ways to lead to the supreme beatitude, the which cannot be had here, as appears by what has been said."[ ] at first sight there may seem to be some want of agreement in what dante says here of the soul's incapacity of the vision of god in this life with the triumphant conclusion of his own poem. but here as elsewhere dante must be completed and explained by himself. "we must know that everything most greatly desires its own perfection, and in that its every desire is appeased, and by that everything is desired. [that is, the one is drawn toward, the other draws.] and this is that desire which makes every delight maimed, for no delight is so great in this life that it can take away from the soul this thirst so that desire remain not in the thought."[ ] "and since it is most natural to wish to be in god, the human soul naturally wills it with all longing. and since its being depends on god and is preserved thereby it naturally desires and wills to be united with god in order to fortify its being. and since in the goodnesses of human nature is shown some reason for those of the divine, it follows that the human soul unites itself in a spiritual way with those so much the more strongly and quickly as they appear more perfect, and this appearance happens according as the knowledge of the soul is clear or impeded. and this union is what we call love, whereby may be known what is within the soul, seeing those it outwardly loves.... and the human soul which is ennobled with the ultimate potency, that is, reason, participates in the divine nature after the manner of an eternal intelligence, because the soul is so ennobled and denuded of matter in that sovran potency that the divine light shines in it as in an angel."[ ] this union with god may therefore take place before the warfare of life is over, but is only possible for souls _perfettamente naturati_, perfectly endowed by nature.[ ] this depends on the virtue of the generating soul and the concordant influence of the planets. "and if it happen that through the purity of the recipient soul, the intellectual virtue be well abstracted and absolved from every corporeal shadow, the divine bounty is multiplied in it as a thing sufficient to receive the same."[ ] "and there are some who believe that if all the aforesaid virtues [powers] should unite for the production of a soul in their best disposition, so much of the deity would descend into it that it would be almost another incarnate god."[ ] did dante believe himself to be one of these? he certainly gives us reason to think so. he was born under fortunate stars, as he twice tells us,[ ] and he puts the middle of his own life at the thirty-fifth year, which is the period he assigns for it in the diviner sort of men.[ ] the stages of dante's intellectual and moral growth may, we think, be reckoned with some approach to exactness from data supplied by himself. in the poems of the _vita nuova_, beatrice, until her death, was to him simply a poetical ideal, a type of abstract beauty, chosen according to the fashion of the day after the manner of the provençal poets, but in a less carnal sense than theirs. "and by the fourth nature of animals, that is, the sensitive, man has another love whereby he loves according to sensible appearance, even as a beast.... and by the fifth and final nature, that is, the truly human, or, to speak better, angelic, that is, rational, man has a love for truth and virtue.... wherefore, since this nature is called _mind_, i said that love discoursed in my mind to make it understood that this love was that which is born in the noblest of natures, that is, [the love] of truth and virtue, and to _shut out every false opinion by which it might be suspected that my love was for the delight of sense._"[ ] this is a very weighty affirmation, made, as it is, so deliberately by a man of dante's veracity, who would and did speak truth at every hazard. let us dismiss at once and forever all the idle tales of dante's amours, of la montanina, gentucca, pietra, lisetta, and the rest, to that outer darkness of impure thoughts _là onde la stoltezza dipartille._[ ] we think miss rossetti a little hasty in allowing that in the years which immediately followed beatrice's death dante gave himself up "more or less to sensual gratification and earthly aim." the earthly aim we in a certain sense admit; the sensual gratification we reject as utterly inconsistent, not only with dante's principles, but with his character and indefatigable industry. miss rossetti illustrates her position by a subtle remark on "the lulling spell of an intellectual and sensitive delight in good running parallel with a voluntary and actual indulgence in evil." the dead beatrice beckoned him toward the life of contemplation, and it was precisely during this period that he attempted to find happiness in the life of action. "verily it is to be known, that we may in this life have two felicities, following two ways, good and best, which lead us thither. the one is the active, the other the contemplative life, the which (though by the active we may attain, as has been said, unto good felicity) leads us to the best felicity and blessedness."[ ] "the life of my heart, that is, of my inward self, was wont to be a sweet thought which went many times to the feet of god, that is to say, in thought i contemplated the kingdom of the blessed. and i tell the final cause why i mounted thither in thought when i say, 'where it [the sweet thought] beheld a lady in glory,' that i might make it understood that i was and am certain, by _her gracious revelation, that she was in heaven,_ [not on earth, as i had vainly imagined,] whither i went in thought, so often as was possible to me, as it were rapt."[ ] this passage exactly answers to another in _purgatorio_, xxx. - :-- "not only by the work of those great wheels that destine every seed unto some end, according as the stars are in conjunction, _but by the largess of celestial graces,_ * * * * * "such had this man become in his new life potentially, that every righteous habit would have made admirable proof in him; * * * * * "some time i did sustain him with my look (_volto_); revealing unto him my youthful eyes, i led him with me turned in the right way. as soon as ever of my second age i was upon the threshold and changed life, himself from me he took and gave to others. when from the flesh to spirit i ascended, and beauty and virtue were in me increased, i was to him less dear and less delightful, and into ways untrue he turned his steps, pursuing the false images of good that never any promises fulfil[ ] nor prayer for inspiration me availed,[ ] _by means of which in dreams and otherwise i called him back_, so little did he heed them. so low he fell, that all appliances for his salvation were already short save showing him the people of perdition." now dante himself, we think, gives us the clew, by following which we may reconcile the contradiction, what miss rossetti calls "the astounding discrepancy," between the lady of the _vita nuova_ who made him unfaithful to beatrice, and the same lady in the _convito_, who in attributes is identical with beatrice herself. we must remember that the prose part of the _convito_, which is a comment on the _canzoni_, was written after the _canzoni_ themselves. how long after we cannot say with certainty, but it was plainly composed at intervals, a part of it probably after dante had entered upon old age (which began, as he tells us, with the forty-fifth year), consequently after . dante had then written a considerable part of the _divina commedia_, in which beatrice was to go through her final and most ethereal transformation in his mind and memory. we say in his memory, for such idealizations have a very subtle retrospective action, and the new condition of feeling or thought is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into harmony whatever is inconsistent with it in the past. the inward life unwillingly admits any break in its continuity, and nothing is more common than to hear a man, in venting an opinion taken up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity, "i have always thought so and so." whatever belief occupies the whole mind soon produces the impression on us of having long had possession of it, and one mode of consciousness blends so insensibly with another that it is impossible to mark by an exact line where one begins and the other ends. dante in his exposition of the _canzoni_ must have been subject to this subtlest and most deceitful of influences. he would try to reconcile so far as he conscientiously could his present with his past. this he could do by means of the allegorical interpretation. "for it would be a great shame to him," he says in the _vita nuova_, "who should poetize something under the vesture of some figure or rhetorical color, and afterwards, when asked, could not strip his words of that vesture in such wise that they should have a true meaning." now in the literal exposition of the _canzone_ beginning, "voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete,"[ ] he tells us that the _grandezza_ of the _donna gentil_ was "temporal greatness" (one certainly of the felicities attainable by way of the _vita attiva_), and immediately after gives us a hint by which we may comprehend why a proud[ ] man might covet it. "how much wisdom and how great a persistence in virtue (_abito virtuoso_) are hidden for want of this lustre!"[ ] when dante reaches the terrestrial paradise[ ] which is the highest felicity of this world, and therefore the consummation of the active life, he is welcomed by a lady who is its symbol, "who went along singing and culling floweret after floweret." and warming herself in the rays of love, or "actual speculation," that is, "where love makes its peace felt."[ ] that she was the symbol of this is evident from the previous dream of dante,[ ] in which he sees leah, the universally accepted type of it, "walking in a meadow, gathering flowers; and singing she was saying, 'know whosoever may my name demand that i am leah, who go moving round my beauteous hands to make myself a garland,'" that is to say, of good works. she, having "washed him thoroughly from sin,"[ ] "all dripping brought into the dance of the four beautiful,"[ ] who are the intellectual virtues prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, the four stars, guides of the practical life, which he had seen when he came out of the hell where he had beheld the results of sin, and arrived at the foot of the mount of purification. that these were the special virtues of practical goodness dante had already told us in a passage before quoted from the _convito_.[ ] that this was dante's meaning is confirmed by what beatrice says to him,[ ] "short while shalt thou be here a forester (_silvano_) and thou shalt be with me forevermore a citizen of that rome where christ is roman"; for by a "forest" he always means the world of life and action.[ ] at the time when dante was writing the _canzoni_ on which the _convito_ was a comment, he believed science to be the "ultimate perfection itself, and not the way to it,"[ ] but before the _convito_ was composed he had become aware of a higher and purer light, an inward light, in that beatrice, already clarified wellnigh to a mere image of the mind, "who lives in heaven with the angels, and on earth with my soul."[ ] so spiritually does dante always present beatrice to us, even where most corporeal, as in the _vita nuova_, that many, like biscione and rossetti, have doubted her real existence. but surely we must consent to believe that she who speaks of "the fair limbs wherein i was enclosed, which scattered are in earth," was once a creature of flesh and blood,-- "a creature not too bright and good for human nature's daily food." when she died, dante's grief, like that of constance, filled her room up with something fairer than the reality had ever been. there is no idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy as much as of real feeling. she early began to undergo that change into something rich and strange in the sea[ ] of his mind which so completely supernaturalized her at last. it is not impossible, we think, to follow the process of transformation. during the period of the _convito canzoni_, when he had so given himself to study that to his weakened eyes "the stars were shadowed with a white blur,"[ ] this star of his imagination was eclipsed for a time with the rest. as his love had never been of the senses (which is bestial),[ ] so his sorrow was all the more ready to be irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her to be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in him the nobler impulses of his nature,-- ("such had this man become in his new life potentially,") and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of the highest good. with that turn for double meaning and abstraction which was so strong in him, her very name helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed (_beat_), and thence the step was a short one to personify in her that theosophy which enables man to see god and to be mystically united with him even in the flesh. already, in the _vita nuova_,[ ] she appears to him as afterwards in the terrestrial paradise, clad in that color of flame which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate god in himself, simply, and not in his relation to the son or the holy spirit.[ ] when misfortune came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity failed, and science was helpless to console, as it had never been able wholly to satisfy, she already rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth, reproaching him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. it is, perhaps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her death with such minute precision on the th june, , most probably his own twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the boundary of adolescence.[ ] that there should seem to be a discrepancy between the lady of the _vita nuova_ and her of the _convito_, dante himself was already aware when writing the former and commenting it. explaining the sonnet beginning _gentil pensier_, he says, "in this sonnet i make two parts of myself according as my thoughts were divided in two. the one part i call _heart_, that is, the appetite, the other _soul_, that is, reason.... it is true that in the preceding sonnet i take side with the heart against the eyes [which were weeping for the lost beatrice], and that appears contrary to what i say in the present one; and therefore i say that in that sonnet also i mean by my _heart_ the appetite, because my desire to remember me of my most gentle lady was still greater than to behold this one, albeit i had already some appetite for her, but slight as should seem: whence it appears that the one saying is not contrary to the other."[ ] when, therefore, dante speaks of the love of this lady as the "adversary of _reason_," he uses the word in its highest sense, not as understanding (_intellectus_), but as synonymous with _soul_. already, when the latter part of the _vita nuova_, nay, perhaps the whole of the explanatory portion of it, was written the plan of the _commedia_ was complete, a poem the higher aim of which was to keep the soul alive both in this world and for the next. as dante tells us, the contradiction in his mind was, though he did not become aware of it till afterwards, more apparent than real. he sought consolation in study, and, failing to find it in learning (_scienza_), he was led to seek it in wisdom (_sapienza_), which is the love of god and the knowledge of him.[ ] he had sought happiness through the understanding; he was to find it through intuition. the lady philosophy (according as she is moral or intellectual) includes both. her gradual transfiguration is exemplified in passages already quoted. the active life leads indirectly by a knowledge of its failures and sins (_inferno_), or directly by a righteous employment of it (_purgatorio_), to the same end. the use of the sciences is to induce in us the ultimate perfection, that of speculating upon truth; the use of the highest of them, theology, the contemplation of god.[ ] to this they all lead up. in one of those curious chapters of the _convito_,[ ] where he points out the analogy between the sciences and the heavens, dante tells us that he compares moral philosophy with the crystalline heaven or _primum mobile_, because it communicates life and gives motion to all the others below it. but what gives motion to the crystalline heaven (moral philosophy) itself? "the most fervent appetite which it has in each of its parts to be conjoined with each part of that most divine quiet heaven" (theology).[ ] theology, the divine science, corresponds with the empyrean, "because of its peace, the which, through the most excellent certainty of its subject, which is god, suffers no strife of opinions or sophistic arguments."[ ] no one of the heavens is at rest but this, and in none of the inferior sciences can we find repose, though he likens physics to the heaven of the fixed stars, in whose name is a suggestion of the certitude to be arrived at in things demonstrable. dante had this comparison in mind, it may be inferred, when he said, "well i perceive that never sated is our intellect unless the truth illume it beyond which nothing true[ ] expands itself. it rests therein as wild beast in his lair; when it attains it, and it can attain it; if not, then each desire would frustrate be. therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot, doubt at the foot of truth, and this is nature which to the top from height to height impels us."[ ] the contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves itself into an essential, easily apprehensible, if mystical, unity. dante at first gave himself to the study of the sciences (after he had lost the simple, unquestioning faith of youth) as the means of arriving at certainty. from the root of every truth to which he attained sprang this sucker (_rampollo_) of doubt, drawing out of it the very sap of its life. in this way was philosophy truly an adversary of his soul, and the reason of his remorse for fruitless studies which drew him away from the one that alone was and could be fruitful is obvious enough. but by and by out of the very doubt came the sweetness[ ] of a higher and truer insight. he became aware that there were "things in heaven and earth undreamt of in your philosophy," as another doubter said, who had just finished _his_ studies, but could not find his way out of the scepticism they engendered as dante did. "insane is he who hopeth that our reason can traverse the illimitable way which the one substance in three persons follows! mortals, remain contented at the _quia_; for, if ye had been able to see all, no need there were [had been] for mary to bring forth. and ye have seen desiring without fruit, those whose desire would have been quieted which evermore is given them for a grief. i speak of aristotle and of plato and many others."[ ] whether at the time when the poems of the _vita nuova_ were written the lady who withdrew him for a while from beatrice was (which we doubt) a person of flesh and blood or not, she was no longer so when the prose narrative was composed. any one familiar with dante's double meanings will hardly question that by putting her at a window, which is a place to look out of, he intended to imply that she personified speculation, a word which he uses with a wide range of meaning, sometimes as _looking for_, sometimes as seeing (like shakespeare's "there is no speculation in those eyes"), sometimes as _intuition_, or the beholding all things in god, who is the cause of all. this is so obvious, and the image in this sense so familiar, that we are surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked. it is plain that, even when the _vita nuova_ was written, the lady was already philosophy, but philosophy applied to a lower range of thought, not yet ascended from flesh to spirit. the lady who seduced him was the science which looks for truth in second causes, or even in effects, instead of seeking it, where alone it can be found, in the first cause; she was the philosophy which looks for happiness in the visible world (of shadows), and not in the spiritual (and therefore substantial) world. the guerdon of his search was doubt. but dante, as we have seen, made his very doubts help him upward toward certainty; each became a round in the ladder by which he climbed to clearer and clearer vision till the end.[ ] philosophy had made him forget beatrice; it was philosophy who was to bring him back to her again, washed clean in that very stream of forgetfulness that had made an impassable barrier between them.[ ] dante had known how to find in her the gift of achilles's lance, "which used to be the cause first of a sad and then a gracious boon."[ ] there is another possible, and even probable, theory which would reconcile the beatrice of the _purgatorio_ with her of the _vita nuova_. suppose that even in the latter she signified theology, or at least some influence that turned his thoughts to god? pietro di dante, commenting the _pargoletta_ passage in the _purgatorio_, says expressly that the poet had at one time given himself to the study of theology and deserted it for poesy and other mundane sciences. this must refer to a period beginning before . again there is an early tradition that dante in his youth had been a novice in a franciscan convent, but never took the vows. buti affirms this expressly in his comment on _inferno_, xvi. - . it is perhaps slightly confirmed by what dante says in the _convito_,[ ] that "one cannot only turn to religion by making himself like in habit and life to st. benedict, st. augustine, st. francis, and st. dominic, but likewise one may turn to good and true religion in a state of matrimony, for god wills no religion in us but of the heart." if he had ever thought of taking monastic vows, his marriage would have cut short any such intention. if he ever wished to wed the real beatrice portinari, and was disappointed, might not this be the time when his thoughts took that direction? if so, the impulse came indirectly, at least, from her. we have admitted that beatrice portinari was a real creature, "col sangue suo e con le sue giunture"; but _how_ real she was, and whether as real to the poet's memory as to his imagination, may fairly be questioned. she shifts, as the controlling emotion or the poetic fitness of the moment dictates, from a woman loved and lost to a gracious exhalation of all that is fairest in womanhood or most divine in the soul of man and ere the eye has defined the new image it has become the old one again, or another mingled of both. "nor one nor other seemed now what it was, e'en as proceedeth on before the flame upward along the paper a brown color, which is not black as yet, and the white dies."[ ] as the mystic griffin in the eyes of beatrice (her demonstrations), so she in his own, "now with the one, now with the other nature; think, reader, if within myself i marvelled when i beheld the thing itself stand still and in its image it transformed itself."[ ] at the very moment when she had undergone her most sublimated allegorical evaporation, his instinct as poet, which never failed him, realized her into woman again in those scenes of almost unapproached pathos which make the climax of his _purgatorio_. the verses tremble with feeling and shine with tears.[ ] beatrice recalls her own beauty with a pride as natural as that of fair annie in the old ballad, and compares herself as advantageously with the "brown, brown bride" who had supplanted her. if this be a ghost, we do not need be told that she is a woman still.[ ] we must remember, however, that beatrice had to be real that she might be interesting, to be beautiful that her goodness might be persuasive, nay, to be beautiful at any rate, because beauty has also something in it of divine. dante has told, in a passage already quoted, that he would rather his readers should find his doctrine sweet than his verses, but he had his relentings from this stoicism. "'canzone, i believe those will be rare who of thine inner sense can master all, such toil it costs thy native tongue to learn; wherefore, if ever it perchance befall that thou in presence of such men shouldst fare as seem not skilled thy meaning to discern, i pray thee then thy grief to comfort turn, saying to them, o thou my new delight, 'take heed at least how fair i am to sight.'"[ ] we believe all dante's other ladies to have been as purely imaginary as the dulcinea of don quixote, useful only as _motives_, but a real beatrice is as essential to the human sympathies of the _divina commedia_ as her glorified idea to its allegorical teaching, and this dante understood perfectly well.[ ] take _her_ out of the poem, and the heart of it goes with her; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of its soul. she is the menstruum in which letter and spirit dissolve and mingle into unity. those who doubt her existence must find dante's graceful sonnet[ ] to guido cavalcante as provoking as sancho's story of his having seen dulcinea winnowing wheat was to his master, "so alien is it from all that which eminent persons, who are constituted and preserved for other exercises and entertainments, do and ought to do."[ ] but we should always remember in reading dante that with him the allegorical interpretation is the true one (_verace sposizione_), and that he represents himself (and that at a time when he was known to the world only by his minor poems) as having made righteousness (_rettitudine_, in other words, moral philosophy) the subject of his verse.[ ] love with him seems first to have meant the love of truth and the search after it (_speculazione_), and afterwards the contemplation of it in its infinite source (_speculazione_ in its higher and mystical sense). this is the divine love "which where it shines darkens and wellnigh extinguishes all other loves."[ ] wisdom is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to contemplate god the true mirror (_verace spegio, speculum_), wherein all things are seen as they truly are. nay, she herself "is the brightness of the eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty of god."[ ] there are two beautiful passages in the _convito_, which we shall quote, both because they have, as we believe a close application to dante's own experience, and because they are good specimens of his style as a writer of prose. in the manly simplicity which comes of an earnest purpose, and in the eloquence of deep conviction, this is as far beyond that of any of his contemporaries as his verse, nay, more, has hardly been matched by any italian from that day to this. illustrating the position that "the highest desire of everything and the first given us by nature is to return to its first cause," he says: "and since god is the beginning of our souls and the maker of them like unto himself, according as was written, 'let us make man in our image and likeness,' this soul most greatly desires to return to him. and as a pilgrim who goes by a way he has never travelled, who believes every house he sees afar off to be his inn, and not finding it to be so directs his belief to another, and so from house to house till he come to the inn, so our soul forthwith on entering upon the new and never-travelled road of this life directs its eyes to the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes whatever thing it sees that seems to have in it any good to be that. and because its first knowledge is imperfect by reason of not being experienced nor indoctrinated, small goods seem to it great. wherefore we see children desire most greatly an apple, and then proceeding further on desire a bird, and then further yet desire fine raiment, and then a horse, and then a woman, and then, riches not great, and then greater and greater. and this befalls because in none of these things it finds that which it goes seeking, and thinks to find it further on. by which it may be seen that one desirable stands before another in the eyes of our soul in a fashion as it were pyramidal, for the smallest at first covers the whole of them, and is as it were the apex of the highest desirable, which is god, as it were the base of all; so that the further we go from the apex toward the base the desirables appear greater; and this is the reason why human desires become wider one after the other. verily this way is lost through error as the roads of earth are; for as from one city to another there is of necessity one best and straightest way, and one that always leads farther from it, that is, the one which goes elsewhere, and many others, some less roundabout and some less direct, so in human life are divers roads whereof one is the truest and another the most deceitful, and certain ones less deceitful, and certain less true. and as we see that that which goes most directly to the city fulfils desire and gives repose after weariness, and that which goes the other way never fulfils it and never can give repose, so it falls out in our life. the good traveller arrives at the goal and repose, the erroneous never arrives thither, but with much weariness of mind, always with greedy eyes looks before him."[ ] if we may apply dante's own method of exposition to this passage, we find him telling us that he first sought felicity in knowledge, "that apple sweet which through so many branches the care of mortals goeth in pursuit of,"[ ] then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we follow,[ ] then in being esteemed of men ("to be clothed in purple, ... to sit next to darius, ... and be called darius his cousin "), then in power,[ ] then in the riches of the holy spirit in larger and larger measure.[ ] he, too, had found that there was but one straight road, whether to the terrestrial paradise or the celestial city, and may come to question by and by whether they be not parallel one with the other, or even parts of the same road, by which only repose is to be reached at last. then, when in old age "the noble soul returns to god as to that port whence she set forth on the sea of this life, ... just as to him who comes from a long journey, before he enters into the gate of his city, the citizens thereof go forth to meet him, so the citizens of the eternal life go to meet _her_, and do so because of her good deeds and contemplations, who, having already betaken herself to god, seems to see those whom she believes to be nigh unto god."[ ] this also was to be the experience of dante, for who can doubt that the _paradiso_ was something very unlike a poetical exercise to him who appeals to the visions even of sleep as proof of the soul's immortality? when did his soul catch a glimpse of that certainty in which "the mind that museth upon many things" can find assured rest? we have already said that we believe dante's political opinions to have taken their final shape and the _de monarchiâ_ to have been written before .[ ] that the revision of the _vita nuova_ was completed in that year seems probable from the last sonnet but one, which is addressed to pilgrims on their way to the santa veronica at rome.[ ] in this sonnet he still laments beatrice as dead; he would make the pilgrims share his grief. it is the very folly of despairing sorrow, that calls on the first comer, stranger though he be, for a sympathy which none can fully give, and he least of all. but in the next sonnet, the last in the book, there is a surprising change of tone. the transfiguration of beatrice has begun, and we see completing itself that natural gradation of grief which will erelong bring the mourner to call on the departed saint to console him for her own loss. the sonnet is remarkable in more senses than one, first for its psychological truth, and then still more for the light it throws on dante's inward history as poet and thinker. hitherto he had celebrated beauty and goodness in the creature; henceforth he was to celebrate them in the creator whose praise they were.[ ] we give an extempore translation of this sonnet, in which the meaning is preserved so far as is possible where the grace is left out. we remember with some compunction as we do it, that dante has said, "know every one that nothing harmonized by a musical band can be transmuted from its own speech to another without breaking all its sweetness and harmony,"[ ] and cervantes was of the same mind:[ ] "beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre passeth the sigh[ ] that leaves my heart below; a new intelligence doth love bestow on it with tears that ever draws it higher; when it wins thither where is its desire, a lady it beholds who honor so and light receives, that, through her splendid glow, the pilgrim spirit[ ] sees her as in fire; it sees her such, that, telling me again i understand it not, it speaks so low unto the mourning heart that bids it tell; its speech is of that noble one i know, for 'beatrice' i often hear full plain, so that, dear ladies, i conceive it well." no one can read this in its connection with what goes before and what follows without feeling that a new conception of beatrice had dawned upon the mind of dante, dim as yet, or purposely made to seem so, and yet the authentic forerunner of the fulness of her rising as the light of his day and the guide of his feet, the divine wisdom whose glory pales all meaner stars. the conception of a poem in which dante's creed in politics and morals should be picturesquely and attractively embodied, and of the high place which beatrice should take in it, had begun vaguely to shape itself in his thought. as he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined itself clearly. "soon after this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision[ ] wherein i saw things which made me propose not to say more of that blessed one until i could treat of her more worthily. and to arrive at that i study all i can, as she verily knows. so that, if it be the pleasure of him through whom all things live, that my life hold out yet a few years, i hope to say that of her which was never yet said of any (woman). and then may it please him who is the lord of courtesy that my soul may go to see the glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed beatrice who gloriously beholds the face of him _qui est per omnia saecula benedictus_." it was the method of presentation that became clear to dante at this time,--the plan of the great poem for whose completion the experience of earth and the inspiration of heaven were to combine, and which was to make him lean for many years.[ ] the doctrinal scope of it was already determined. man, he tells us, is the only creature who partakes at once of the corruptible and incorruptible nature; "and since every nature is ordained to some ultimate end, it follows that the end of man is double. and as among all beings he alone partakes of the corruptible and incorruptible, so alone among all beings he is ordained to a double end, whereof the one is his end as corruptible, the other as incorruptible. that unspeakable providence therefore foreordered two ends to be pursued by man, to wit, beatitude in this life, which consists in the operation of our own virtue, and is figured by the terrestrial paradise, and the beatitude of life eternal, which consists in a fruition of the divine countenance, whereto our own virtue cannot ascend unless aided by divine light, which is understood by the celestial paradise." the one we attain by practice of the moral and intellectual virtues as they are taught by philosophers, the other by spiritual teachings transcending human reason, and the practice of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. for one, reason suffices ("which was wholly made known to us by philosophers"), for the other we need the light of supernatural truth revealed by the holy spirit and "needful for us." men led astray by cupidity turn their backs on both, and in their bestiality need bit and rein to keep them in the way. "wherefore to man was a double guidance needful according to the double end," the supreme pontiff in spiritual, the emperor in temporal things.[ ] but how to put this theory of his into a poetic form which might charm while it was teaching? he would typify reason in virgil (who would serve also as a symbol of political wisdom as having celebrated the founding of the empire), and the grace of god in that beatrice whom he had already supernaturalized into something which passeth all understanding. in choosing virgil he was sure of that interest and sympathy which his instinct led him to seek in the predisposition of his readers, for the popular imagination of the middle ages had busied itself particularly with the mantuan poet. the church had given, him a quasi-orthodoxy by interpreting his _jam redit et virgo_ as a prophecy of the birth of christ. at naples he had become a kind of patron saint, and his bones were exhibited as relics. dante himself may have heard at mantua the hymn sung on the anniversary of st. paul, in which the apostle to the gentiles is represented as weeping at the tomb of the greatest of poets. above all, virgil had described the descent of aeneas to the under-world. dante's choice of a guide was therefore, in a certain degree, made for him. but the mere reason[ ] of man without the illumination of divine grace cannot be trusted, and accordingly the intervention of beatrice was needed,--of beatrice, as miss rossetti admirably well expresses it "already transfigured, potent not only now to charm and soothe, potent to rule; to the intellect a light, to the affections a compass and a balance, a sceptre over the will." the wood obscure in which dante finds himself is the world.[ ] the three beasts who dispute his way are the sins that most easily beset us, pride, the lusts of the flesh, and greed. we are surprised that miss rossetti should so localize and confine dante's meaning as to explain them by florence, france, and rome. had he written in so narrow a sense as this, it would indeed be hard to account for the persistent power of his poem. but it was no political pamphlet that dante was writing. _subjectum est homo_, and it only takes the form of a diary by dante alighieri because of the intense realism of his imagination, a realism as striking in the _paradiso_ as the _inferno_, though it takes a different shape. everything, the most supersensual, presented itself to his mind, not as abstract idea, but as visible type. as men could once embody a quality of good in a saint and _see_ it, as they even now in moments of heightened fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their country and speak of england, france, or america, as if they were real beings, so did dante habitually.[ ] he saw all his thoughts as distinctly as the hypochondriac sees his black dog, and, as in that, their form and color were but the outward form of an inward and spiritual condition. whatever subsidiary interpretations the poem is capable of, its great and primary value is as the autobiography of a human soul, of yours and mine, it may be, as well as dante's. in that lie its profound meaning and its permanent force. that an exile, a proud man forced to be dependent, should have found some consolation in brooding over the justice of god, weighed in such different scales from those of man, in contrasting the outward prosperity of the sinner with the awful spiritual ruin within, is not wonderful, nay, we can conceive of his sometimes finding the wrath of god sweeter than his mercy. but it is wonderful that out of the very wreck of his own life he should have built this three-arched bridge, still firm against the wash and wear of ages, stretching from the pit to the empyrean, by which men may pass from a doubt of god's providence to a certainty of his long-suffering and loving-kindness. "the infinite goodness hath such ample arms that it receives whatever turns to it."[ ] a tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of them.[ ] it cannot be too often repeated that dante's other world is not in its first conception a place of _departed_ spirits. it is the spiritual world, whereof we become denizens by birth and citizens by adoption. it is true that for artistic purposes he makes it conform so far as possible with vulgar preconceptions, but he himself has told us again and again what his real meaning was. virgil tells dante,-- "thou shalt behold the people dolorous who have foregone the good of intellect."[ ] the "good of the intellect," dante tells us after aristotle, is truth.[ ] he says that virgil has led him "through the deep night of the _truly dead_."[ ] who are they? dante had in mind the saying of the apostle, "to be carnally minded is death." he says: "in man to live is to use reason. then if living is the being of man, to depart from that use is to depart from being, and so to be dead. and doth not he depart from the use of reason who doth not reason out the object of his life?" "i say that so vile a person is dead, seeming to be alive. for we must know _that the wicked man may be called truly dead_." "he is dead who follows not the teacher. and of such a one some might say, how is he dead and yet goes about? i answer that the man is dead and the beast remains."[ ] accordingly he has put living persons in the _inferno_, like frate alberigo and branca d' oria, of whom he says with bitter sarcasm that he still "eats and drinks and puts on clothes," as if that were his highest ideal of the true ends of life.[ ] there is a passage in the first canto of the _inferno_[ ] which has been variously interpreted:-- "the ancient spirits disconsolate who cry out each one for the _second death_." miss rossetti cites it as an example of what she felicitously calls "an ambiguity, not hazy, but prismatic, and therefore not really perplexing." she gives us accordingly our choice of two interpretations, "'each cries out on account of the second death which he is suffering,' and 'each cries out for death to come a second time and ease him of his sufferings.'"[ ] buti says: "here one doubts what the author meant by the second death, and as for me i think he meant the last damnation, which shall be at the day of judgment, because they would wish through envy that it had already come, that they might have more companions, since the first death is the first damnation, when the soul parted from the body is condemned to the pains of hell for its sins. the second is when, resuscitated at the judgment day, they shall be finally condemned, soul and body together.... it may otherwise be understood as annihilation." imola says, "each would wish to die again, if he could, to put an end to his pain. do not hold with some who think that dante calls the second death the day of judgment," and then quotes a passage from st. augustine which favors that view. pietro di dante gives us four interpretations among which to choose, the first being that, "allegorically, depraved and vicious men are in a certain sense dead in reputation, and this is the first death; the second is that of the body." this we believe to be the true meaning. dante himself, in a letter to the "most rascally (_scelestissimis_) dwellers in florence," gives us the key: "but you, transgressors of the laws of god and man, whom the direful maw of cupidity hath enticed not unwilling to every crime, does not the terror of the _second death_ torment you?" their first death was in their sins, the second is what they may expect from the just vengeance of the emperor henry vii. the world dante leads us through is that of his own thought, and it need not surprise us therefore if we meet in it purely imaginary beings like tristrem[ ] and renoard of the club.[ ] his personality is so strongly marked that it is nothing more than natural that his poem should be interpreted as if only he and his opinions, prejudices, or passions were concerned. he would not have been the great poet he was if he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he could never have won the cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how to generalize his special experience into something mediatorial for all of us. pietro di dante in his comment on the thirty-first canto of the _purgatorio_ says that "unless you understand him and his figures allegorically, you will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our author made his pilgrimage as the representative of the rest (_in, persona ceterorum_).[ ] to give his vision reality, he has adapted it to the vulgar mythology, but to understand it as the author meant, it must be taken in the larger sense. to confine it to florence or to italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. it was not from the campanile of the badia that dante got his views of life and man. the relation of dante to literature is monumental, and marks the era at which the modern begins. he is not only the first great poet, but the first great prose writer who used a language not yet subdued to literature, who used it moreover for scientific and metaphysical discussion, thus giving an incalculable impulse to the culture of his countrymen by making the laity free of what had hitherto been the exclusive guild of clerks.[ ] whatever poetry had preceded him, whether in the romance or teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for its simplicity without forethought, or, as in the _nibelungen_, for a kind of savage grandeur that rouses the sympathy of whatever of the natural man is dormant in us. but it shows no trace of the creative faculty either in unity of purpose or style, the proper characteristics of literature. if it have the charm of wanting artifice, it has not the higher charm of art. we are in the realm of chaos and chance, nebular, with phosphorescent gleams here and there, star stuff, but uncondensed in stars. the _nibelungen_ is not without far-reaching hints and forebodings of something finer than we find in it, but they are a glamour from the vague darkness which encircles it, like the whisper of the sea upon an unknown shore at night, powerful only over the more vulgar side of the imagination, and leaving no thought, scarce even any image (at least of beauty) behind them. such poems are the amours, not the lasting friendships and possessions of the mind. they thrill and cannot satisfy. but dante is not merely the founder of modern literature. he would have been that if he had never written anything more than his _canzoni_, which for elegance, variety of rhythm, and fervor of sentiment were something altogether new. they are of a higher mood than any other poems of the same style in their own language, or indeed in any other. in beauty of phrase and subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of the greek tragic choruses. we are constantly moved in them by a nobleness of tone, whose absence in many admired lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by conceits. so perfect is dante's mastery of his material, that in compositions, as he himself has shown, so artificial,[ ] the form seems rather organic than mechanical, which cannot be said of the best of the provençal poets who led the way in this kind. dante's sonnets also have a grace and tenderness which have been seldom matched. his lyrical excellence would have got him into the collections, and he would have made here and there an enthusiast as donne does in english, but his great claim to remembrance is not merely italian. it is that he was the first christian poet, in any proper sense of the word, the first who so subdued dogma to the uses of plastic imagination as to make something that is still poetry of the highest order after it has suffered the disenchantment inevitable in the most perfect translation. verses of the kind usually called _sacred_ (reminding one of the adjective's double meaning) had been written before his time in the vulgar tongue,--such verses as remain inviolably sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked at with distant reverence by the pious, and with far other feelings by the profane reader. there were cycles of poems in which the physical conflict between christianity and paganism[ ] furnished the subject, but in which the theological views of the authors, whether doctrinal or historical, could hardly be reconciled with any system of religion ancient or modern. there were church legends of saints and martyrs versified, fit certainly to make any other form of martyrdom seem amiable to those who heard them, and to suggest palliative thoughts about diocletian. finally, there were the romances of arthur and his knights, which later, by means of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and edifying; every one who listened to them paying the minstrel his money, and having his choice whether he would take them as song or sermon. in the heroes of some of these certain christian virtues were typified, and around a few of them, as the holy grail, a perfume yet lingers of cloistered piety and withdrawal. wolfram von eschenbach, indeed, has divided his _parzival_ into three books, of simplicity, doubt, and healing, which has led gervinus to trace a not altogether fanciful analogy between that poem and the _divina commedia_. the doughty old poet, who says of himself,-- "of song i have some slight control, but deem her of a feeble soul that doth not love my naked sword above my sweetest lyric word," tells us that his subject is the choice between good and evil; "whose soul takes untruth for its bride and sets himself on evil's side, chooses the black, and sure it is his path leads down to the abyss; but he who doth his nature feed with steadfastness and loyal deed lies open to the heavenly light and takes his portion with the white." but wolfram's poem has no system, and shows good feeling rather than settled conviction. above all it is wandering (as he himself confesses), and altogether wants any controlling purpose. but to whatever extent christianity had insinuated itself into and colored european literature, it was mainly as mythology. the christian idea had never yet incorporated itself. it was to make its avatar in dante. to understand fully what he accomplished we must form some conception of what is meant by the christian idea. to bring it into fuller relief, let us contrast it with the greek idea as it appears in poetry; for we are not dealing with a question of theology so much as with one of aesthetics. greek art at its highest point is doubtless the most perfect that we know. but its circle of motives was essentially limited; and the greek drama in its passion, its pathos, and its humor is primarily greek, and secondarily human. its tragedy chooses its actors from certain heroic families, and finds its springs of pity and terror in physical suffering and worldly misfortune. its best examples, like the _antigone_, illustrate a single duty, or, like the _hippolytus_, a single passion, on which, as on a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in its details, revolves as pieces of sculpture are sometimes made to do, displaying its different sides in one invariable light. the general impression left on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer one than any drawn from single examples) is that the duty is one which is owed to custom, that the passion leads to a breach of some convention settled by common consent,[ ] and accordingly it is an outraged society whose figure looms in the background, rather than an offended god. at most it was one god of many, and meanwhile another might be friendly. in the greek epic, the gods are partisans, they hold caucuses, they lobby and log-roll for their candidates. the tacit admission of a revealed code of morals wrought a great change. the complexity and range of passion is vastly increased when the offence is at once both crime and sin, a wrong done against order and against conscience at the same time. the relation of the greek tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly antagonistic, struggle against an implacable destiny, sublime struggle, and of heroes, but sure of defeat at last. and that defeat is final. grand figures are those it exhibits to us, in some respects unequalled, and in their severe simplicity they compare with modern poetry as sculpture with painting. considered merely as works of art, these products of the greek imagination satisfy our highest conception of form. they suggest inevitably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, and independence, of something rounded and finished in itself. the secret of those old shapers died with them; their wand is broken, their book sunk deeper than ever plummet sounded. the type of their work is the greek temple, which leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection of design, in harmony and subordination of parts, and in entireness of impression. but in this aesthetic completeness it ends. it rests solidly and complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there with it. now the christian idea has to do with the human soul, which christianity may be almost said to have invented. while all paganism represents a few pre-eminent families, the founders of dynasties or ancestors of races, as of kin with the gods, christianity makes every pedigree end in deity, makes monarch and slave the children of one god. its heroes struggle not against, but upward and onward _toward_, the higher powers who are always on their side. its highest conception of beauty is not aesthetic, but moral. with it prosperity and adversity have exchanged meanings. it finds enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where pagan and even hebrew literature saw the highest blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow, poverty, humbleness of station, where the former world recognized only implacable foes. while it utterly abolished all boundary lines of race or country and made mankind unitary, its hero is always the individual man whoever and wherever he may be. above all, an entirely new conception of the infinite and of man's relation to it came in with christianity. that, and not the finite, is always the background, consciously or not. it changed the scene of the last act of every drama to the next world. endless aspiration of all the faculties became thus the ideal of christian life, and to express it more or less perfectly the ideal of essentially christian art. it was this which the middle ages instinctively typified in the gothic cathedral,--no accidental growth, but the visible symbol of an inward faith,--which soars forever upward, and yearns toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly turned to stone. it is not without significance that goethe, who, like dante, also absorbed and represented the tendency and spirit of his age, should, during his youth and while europe was alive with the moral and intellectual longing which preluded the french revolution, have loved the gothic architecture. it is no less significant that in the period of reaction toward more positive thought which followed, he should have preferred the greek. his greatest poem, conceived during the former era, is gothic. dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary tradition, began to write the _divina commedia_ in latin, and had elaborated several cantos of it in that dead and intractable material. but that poetic instinct, which is never the instinct of an individual, but of his age, could not so be satisfied, and leaving the classic structure he had begun to stand as a monument of failure, he completed his work in italian. instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was foreign and artificial, he let the poem make itself out of him. the epic which he wished to write in the universal language of scholars, and which might have had its ten lines in the history of literature, would sing itself in provincial tuscan, and turns out to be written in the universal dialect of mankind. thus all great poets have been in a certain sense provincial,--homer, dante, shakespeare, goethe, burns, scott in the "heart of midlothian" and "bride of lammermoor,"--because the office of the poet is always vicarious, because nothing that has not been living experience can become living expression, because the collective thought, the faith, the desire of a nation or a race, is the cumulative result of many ages, is something organic, and is wiser and stronger than any single person, and will make a great statesman or a great poet out of any man who can entirely surrender himself to it. as the gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the christian idea, so is it also of dante's poem. and as that in its artistic unity is but the completed thought of a single architect, which yet could never have been realized except out of the faith and by the contributions of an entire people, whose beliefs and superstitions, whose imagination and fancy, find expression in its statues and its carvings, its calm saints and martyrs now at rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied niches, and its wanton grotesques thrusting themselves forth from every pinnacle and gargoyle, so in dante's poem, while it is as personal and peculiar as if it were his private journal and autobiography, we can yet read the diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth century and of the italian people. complete and harmonious in design as his work is, it is yet no pagan temple enshrining a type of the human made divine by triumph of corporeal beauty; it is not a private chapel housing a single saint and dedicate to one chosen bloom of christian piety or devotion; it is truly a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs the emblem of suffering, of the divine made human to teach the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence of the spiritual, not overhanging and threatening, but informing and sustaining the material. in this cathedral of dante's there are side-chapels as is fit, with altars to all christian virtues and perfections; but the great impression of its leading thought is that of aspiration, for ever and ever. in the three divisions of the poem we may trace something more than a fancied analogy with a christian basilica. there is first the ethnic forecourt, then the purgatorial middle-space, and last the holy of holies dedicated to the eternal presence of the mediatorial god. but what gives dante's poem a peculiar claim to the title of the first christian poem is not merely its doctrinal truth or its christian mythology, but the fact that the scene of it is laid, not in this world, but in the soul of man; that it is the allegory of a human life, and therefore universal in its significance and its application. the genius of dante has given to it such a self-subsistent reality, that one almost gets to feel as if the chief value of contemporary italian history had been to furnish it with explanatory foot-notes, and the age in which it was written assumes towards it the place of a satellite. for italy, dante is the thirteenth century. most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean. but dante had made up his mind as to the true purpose and meaning of our existence in this world, shortly after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. he had already conceived the system about which as a connecting thread the whole experience of his life, the whole result of his studies, was to cluster in imperishable crystals. the cornerstone of his system was the freedom of the will (in other words, the right of private judgment with the condition of accountability), which beatrice calls the "noble virtue."[ ] as to every man is offered his choice between good and evil, and as, even upon the root of a nature originally evil a habit of virtue may be engrafted,[ ] no man is excused. "all hope abandon ye who enter in," for they have thrown away reason which is the good of the intellect, "and it seems to me no less a marvel to bring back to reason him in whom it is wholly spent than to bring back to life him who has been four days in the tomb."[ ] as a guide of the will in civil affairs the emperor; in spiritual, the pope.[ ] dante is not one of those reformers who would assume the office of god to "make all things new." he knew the power of tradition and habit, and wished to utilize it for his purpose. he found the empire and the papacy already existing, but both needing reformation that they might serve the ends of their original institution. bad leadership was to blame, men fit to gird on the sword had been turned into priests, and good preachers spoiled to make bad kings.[ ] the spiritual had usurped to itself the prerogatives of the temporal power. "rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was two suns to have which one road and the other, of god and of the world, made manifest. one has the other quenched, and to the crosier the sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it, * * * * * "because, being joined one feareth not the other."[ ] both powers held their authority directly from god, "not so, however, that the roman prince is not in some things subject to the roman pontiff, since that human felicity [to be attained only by peace, justice, and good government, possible only under a single ruler] is in some sort ordained to the end of immortal felicity. let caesar use that reverence toward peter which a first-born son ought to use toward a father; that, shone upon by the light of paternal grace, he may more powerfully illumine the orb of earth over which he is set by him alone who is the ruler of all things spiritual and temporal."[ ] as to the fatal gift of constantine, dante demonstrates that an emperor could not alienate what he held only in trust; but if he made the gift, the pope should hold it as a feudatory of the empire, for the benefit, however, of christ's poor.[ ] dante is always careful to distinguish between the papacy and the pope. he prophesies for boniface viii. a place in hell,[ ] but acknowledges him as the vicar of christ, goes so far even as to denounce the outrage of guillaume de nogaret at anagni as done to the saviour himself.[ ] but in the spiritual world dante acknowledges no such supremacy, and, when he would have fallen on his knees before adrian v., is rebuked by him in a quotation from the apocalypse:-- "err not, fellow-servant am i with thee and with the others to one power."[ ] so impartial was this man whose great work is so often represented as a kind of bag in which he secreted the gall of personal prejudice, so truly catholic is he, that both parties find their arsenal in him. the romanist proves his soundness in doctrine, the anti-romanist claims him as the first protestant, the mazzinist and the imperialist can alike quote him for their purpose. dante's ardent conviction would not let him see that both church and empire were on the wane. if an ugly suspicion of this would force itself upon him, perhaps he only clung to both the more tenaciously; but he was no blind theorist. he would reform the church through the church, and is less anxious for italian independence than for italian good government under an emperor from germany rather than from utopia. the papacy was a necessary part of dante's system, as a supplement to the empire, which we strongly incline to believe was always foremost in his mind. in a passage already quoted, he says that "the soil where rome sits is worthy beyond what men preach and admit," that is, as the birthplace of the empire. both in the _convito_ and the _de monarchia_ he affirms that the course of roman history was providentially guided from the first. rome was founded in the same year that brought into the world david, ancestor of the redeemer after the flesh. st. augustine said that "god showed in the most opulent and illustrious empire of the romans how much the civil virtues might avail even without true religion, that it might be understood how, this added, men became citizens of another city whose king is truth, whose law charity, and whose measure eternity." dante goes further than this. he makes the romans as well as the jews a chosen people, the one as founders of civil society, the other as depositaries of the true faith.[ ] one side of dante's mind was so practical and positive, and his pride in the romans so intense,[ ] that he sometimes seems to regard their mission as the higher of the two. without peace which only good government could give, mankind could not arrive at the highest virtue, whether of the active or contemplative life. "and since what is true of the part is true of the whole, and it happens in the particular man that by sitting quietly he is perfected in prudence and wisdom, it is clear that the human race in the quiet or tranquillity of peace is most freely and easily disposed for its proper work which is almost divine, as it is written, 'thou hast made him a little lower than the angels'[ ] whence it is manifest that universal peace is the best of those things which are ordained for our beatitude. hence it is that not riches, not pleasures, not honors, not length of life, not health, not strength, not comeliness, was sung to the shepherds from on high, but peace."[ ] it was dante's experience of the confusion of italy, where "one doth gnaw the other of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in,"[ ] that suggested the thought of a universal umpire, for that, after all, was to be the chief function of his emperor. he was too wise to insist on a uniformity of political institutions _a priori_,[ ] for he seems to have divined that the surest stay of order, as of practical wisdom, is habit, which is a growth, and cannot be made offhand. he believed with aristotle that vigorous minds were intended by nature to rule,[ ] and that certain races, like certain men, are born to leadership.[ ] he calls democracies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms (_tyrannides_) "oblique policies which drive the human race to slavery, as is patent in all of them to one who reasons."[ ] he has nothing but pity for mankind when it has become a many-headed beast, "despising the higher intellect irrefragable in reason, the lower which hath the face of experience."[ ] he had no faith in a turbulent equality asserting the divine right of _i'm as good as you_. he thought it fatal to all discipline: "the confounding of persons hath ever been the beginning of sickness in the state."[ ] it is the same thought which shakespeare puts in the mouth of ulysses:-- "degree being vizarded, the unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask, when degree is shaked, which is the ladder to all high designs, the enterprise is sick."[ ] yet no one can read dante without feeling that he had a high sense of the worth of freedom, whether in thought or government. he represents, indeed, the very object of his journey through the triple realm of shades as a search after liberty.[ ] but it must not be that scramble after undefined and indefinable rights which ends always in despotism, equally degrading whether crowned with a red cap or an imperial diadem. his theory of liberty has for its corner-stone the freedom of the will, and the will is free only when the judgment wholly controls the appetite.[ ] on such a base even a democracy may rest secure, and on such alone. rome was always the central point of dante's speculation. a shadow of her old sovereignty was still left her in the primacy of the church, to which unity of faith was essential. he accordingly has no sympathy with heretics of whatever kind. he puts the ex-troubadour bishop of marseilles, chief instigator of the horrors of provence, in paradise.[ ] the church is infallible in spiritual matters, but this is an affair of outward discipline merely, and means the church as a form of polity. unity was dante's leading doctrine, and therefore he puts mahomet among the schismatics, not because he divided the church, but the faith.[ ] dante's church was of this world, but he surely believed in another and spiritual one. it has been questioned whether he was orthodox or not. there can be no doubt of it so far as outward assent and conformity are concerned, which he would practice himself and enforce upon others as the first postulate of order, the prerequisite for all happiness in this life. in regard to the visible church he was a reformer, but no revolutionist; it is sheer ignorance to speak of him as if there were anything new or exceptional in his denunciation of the corruptions of the clergy. they were the commonplaces of the age, nor were they confined to laymen.[ ] to the absolute authority of the church dante admitted some exceptions. he denies that the supreme pontiff has the unlimited power of binding and loosing claimed for him. "otherwise he might absolve me impenitent, which god himself could not do."[ ] "by malison of theirs is not so lost eternal love that it cannot return."[ ] nor does the sacredness of the office extend to him who chances to hold it. philip the fair himself could hardly treat boniface viii. worse than he. with wonderful audacity, he declares the papal throne vacant by the mouth of saint peter himself.[ ] even if his theory of a dual government were not in question, dante must have been very cautious in meddling with the church. it was not an age that stood much upon ceremony. he himself tells us he had seen men burned alive, and the author of the _ottimo comento_ says: "i the writer saw followers of his [fra dolcino] burned at padua to the number of twenty-two together."[ ] clearly, in such a time as this, one must not make "the veil of the mysterious terse" _too_ thin.[ ] in the affairs of this life dante was, as we have said, supremely practical, and he makes prudence the chief of the cardinal virtues.[ ] he has made up his mind to take things as they come, and to do at rome as the romans do. "ah, savage company! but in the church with saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons!"[ ] in the world of thought it was otherwise, and here dante's doctrine, if not precisely esoteric, was certainly not that of his day, and must be gathered from hints rather than direct statements. the general notion of god was still (perhaps is largely even now) of a provincial, one might almost say a denominational, deity. the popular poets always represent macon, apolm, tervagant, and the rest as quasi-deities unable to resist the superior strength of the christian god. the paynim answers the arguments of his would-be converters with the taunt that he would never worship a divinity who could not save himself from being done ignominiously to death. dante evidently was not satisfied with the narrow conception which limits the interest of the deity to the affairs of jews and christians that saying of saint paul, "whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him declare i unto you," had perhaps influenced him, but his belief in the divine mission of the roman people probably was conclusive. "the roman empire had the help of miracles in perfecting itself," he says, and then enumerates some of them. the first is that "under numa pompilius, the second king of the romans, when he was sacrificing according to the rite of the gentiles, a shield fell from heaven into the city chosen of god."[ ] in the _convito_ we find "virgil speaking in the person of god," and aeacus "wisely having recourse to god," the god being jupiter.[ ] ephialtes is punished in hell for rebellion against "the supreme jove,"[ ] and, that there may be no misunderstanding, dante elsewhere invokes the "jove supreme, who upon earth for us wast crucified."[ ] it is noticeable also that dante, with evident design, constantly alternates examples drawn from christian and pagan tradition or mythology.[ ] he had conceived a unity in the human race, all of whose branches had worshipped the same god under divers names and aspects, had arrived at the same truth by different roads. we cannot understand a passage in the twenty-sixth _paradiso_, where dante inquires of adam concerning the names of god, except as a hint that the chosen people had done in this thing even as the gentiles did.[ ] it is true that he puts all pagans in limbo, "where without hope they live in longing," and that he makes baptism essential to salvation.[ ] but it is noticeable that his limbo is the elysium of virgil, and that he particularizes adam, noah, moses, abraham, david, and others as prisoners there with the rest till the descent of christ into hell.[ ] but were they altogether without hope? and did baptism mean an immersion of the body or a purification of the soul? the state of the heathen after death had evidently been to dante one of those doubts that spring up at the foot of every truth. in the _de monarchia_ he says: "there are some judgments of god to which, though human reason cannot attain by its own strength, yet is it lifted to them by the help of faith and of those things which are said to us in holy writ,--as to this, that no one, however perfect in the moral and intellectual virtues both as a habit [of the mind] and in practice, can be saved without faith, it being granted that he shall never have heard anything concerning christ; for the unaided reason of man cannot look upon this as just; nevertheless, with the help of faith, it can."[ ] but faith, it should seem, was long in lifting dante to this height; for in the nineteenth canto of the _paradiso_, which must have been written many years after the passage just cited, the doubt recurs again, and we are told that it was "a cavern," concerning which he had "made frequent questioning." the answer is given here:-- "truly to him who with me subtilizes, _if so the scripture were not over you_, for doubting there were marvellous occasion." but what scripture? dante seems cautious, tells us that the eternal judgments are above our comprehension, postpones the answer, and when it comes, puts an orthodox prophylactic before it:-- "unto this kingdom never ascended one who had not faith in christ before or since he to the tree was nailed but look thou, _many crying are, 'christ, christ!' who at the judgment shall be far less near to him than some shall be who knew not christ_." there is, then, some hope for the man born on the bank of indus who has never heard of christ? dante is still cautious, but answers the question indirectly in the next canto by putting the trojan ripheus among the blessed:-- "who would believe, down in the errant world, that e'er the trojan ripheus in this round could be the fifth one of these holy lights? now knoweth he enough of what the world has not the power to see of grace divine, although _his_ sight may not discern the bottom." then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the church legend of trajan brought back to life by the prayers of gregory the great that he might be converted, and after an interval of fifty lines tells us how ripheus was saved:-- "the other one, through grace that from so deep a fountain wells that never hath the eye of any creature reached its primal wave, set all his love below on righteousness; wherefore from grace to grace did god unclose his eye to our redemption yet to be, whence he believed therein, and suffered not from that day forth the stench of paganism, and he reproved therefor the folk perverse. those maidens three, whom at the right hand wheel[ ] thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism more than a thousand years before baptizing." if the reader recall a passage already quoted from the _convito_,[ ] he will perhaps think with us that the gate of dante's _limbo_ is left ajar even for the ancient philosophers to slip out. the divine judgments are still inscrutable, and the ways of god past finding out, but faith would seem to have led dante at last to a more merciful solution of his doubt than he had reached when he wrote the _de monarchia_. it is always humanizing to see how the most rigid creed is made to bend before the kindlier instincts of the heart. the stern dante thinks none beyond hope save those who are dead in sin, and have made evil their good. but we are by no means sure that he is not right in insisting rather on the implacable severity of the law than on the possible relenting of the judge. exact justice is commonly more merciful in the long run than pity, for it tends to foster in men those stronger qualities which make them good citizens, an object second only with the roman-minded dante to that of making them spiritually regenerate, nay, perhaps even more important as a necessary preliminary to it. the inscription over the gate of hell tells us that the terms on which we receive the trust of life were fixed by the divine power (which can what it wills), and are therefore unchangeable; by the highest wisdom, and therefore for our truest good; by the primal love, and therefore the kindest. these are the three attributes of that justice which moved the maker of them. dante is no harsher than experience, which always exacts the uttermost farthing; no more inexorable than conscience, which never forgives nor forgets. no teaching is truer or more continually needful than that the stains of the soul are ineffaceable, and that though their growth may be arrested, their nature is to spread insidiously till they have brought all to their own color. evil is a far more cunning and persevering propagandist than good, for it has no inward strength, and is driven to seek countenance and sympathy. it must have company, for it cannot bear to be alone in the dark, while "virtue can see to do what virtue would by her own radiant light." there is one other point which we will dwell on for a moment as bearing on the question of dante's orthodoxy. his nature was one in which, as in swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was continually streamed over by the northern lights of mysticism, through which the familiar stars shine with a softened and more spiritual lustre. nothing is more interesting than the way in which the two qualities of his mind alternate, and indeed play into each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes giving an almost geometrical precision to his most mystical visions. in his letter to can grande he says: "it behooves not those to whom it is given to know what is best in us to follow the footprints of the herd; much rather are they bound to oppose its wanderings. for the vigorous in intellect and reason, endowed with a certain divine liberty, are constrained by no customs. nor is it wonderful, since they are not governed by the laws, but much more govern the laws themselves." it is not impossible that dante, whose love of knowledge was all-embracing, may have got some hint of the doctrine of the oriental sufis. with them the first and lowest of the steps that lead upward to perfection is the law, a strict observance of which is all that is expected of the ordinary man whose mind is not open to the conception of a higher virtue and holiness. but the sufi puts himself under the guidance of some holy man [virgil in the _inferno_], whose teaching he receives implicitly, and so arrives at the second step, which is the path [_purgatorio_] by which he reaches a point where he is freed from all outward ceremonials and observances, and has risen from an outward to a spiritual worship. the third step is knowledge [_paradiso_], endowed by which with supernatural insight, he becomes like the angels about the throne, and has but one farther step to take before he reaches the goal and becomes one with god. the analogies of this system with dante's are obvious and striking. they become still more so when virgil takes leave of him at the entrance of the terres trial paradise with the words:-- "expect no more a word or sign from me; free and upright and sound is thy free-will, and error were it not to do its bidding; thee o'er thyself i therefore crown and mitre,"[ ] that is, "i make thee king and bishop over thyself; the inward light is to be thy law in things both temporal and spiritual." the originality of dante consists in his not allowing any divorce between the intellect and the soul in its highest sense, in his making reason and intuition work together to the same end of spiritual perfection. the unsatisfactoriness of science leads faust to seek repose in worldly pleasure; it led dante to find it in faith, of whose efficacy the short-coming of all logical substitutes for it was the most convincing argument. that we cannot know, is to him a proof that there is some higher plane on which we can believe and see. dante had discovered the incalculable worth of a single idea as compared with the largest heap of facts ever gathered. to a man more interested in the soul of things than in the body of them, the little finger of plato is thicker than the loins of aristotle. we cannot but think that there is something like a fallacy in mr. buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals. no doubt the laws of morals existed from the beginning, but so also did those of science, and it is by the application, not the mere recognition, of both that the race is benefited. no one questions how much science has done for our physical comfort and convenience, and with the mass of men these perhaps must of necessity precede the quickening of their moral instincts; but such material gains are illusory, unless they go hand in hand with a corresponding ethical advance. the man who gives his life for a principle has done more for his kind than he who discovers a new metal or names a new gas, for the great motors of the race are moral, not intellectual, and their force lies ready to the use of the poorest and weakest of us all. we accept a truth of science so soon as it is demonstrated, are perfectly willing to take it on authority, can appropriate whatever use there may be in it without the least understanding of its processes, as men send messages by the electric telegraph, but every truth of morals must be redemonstrated in the experience of the individual man before he is capable of utilizing it as a constituent of character or a guide in action. a man does not receive the statements that "two and two make four," and that "the pure in heart shall see god," on the same terms. the one can be proved to him with four grains of corn; he can never arrive at a belief in the other till he realize it in the intimate persuasion of his whole being. this is typified in the mystery of the incarnation. the divine reason must forever manifest itself anew in the lives of men, and that as individuals. this atonement with god, this identification of the man with the truth,[ ] so that right action shall not result from the lower reason of utility, but from the higher of a will so purified of self as to sympathize by instinct with the eternal laws,[ ] is not something that can be done once for all, that can become historic and traditional, a dead flower pressed between the leaves of the family bible, but must be renewed in every generation, and in the soul of every man, that it may be valid. certain sects show their recognition of this in what are called revivals, a gross and carnal attempt to apply truth, as it were, mechanically, and to accomplish by the etherization of excitement and the magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the solitary exaltations of the soul. this is the high moral of dante's poem. we have likened it to a christian basilica; and as in that so there is here also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and holiness the artist's mind could conceive for the adornment of the holy place. we may linger to enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central thought that runs like the nave from entrance to choir, it leads us to an image of the divine made human, to teach us how the human might also make itself divine. dante beholds at last an image of that power, love, and wisdom, one in essence, but trine in manifestation, to answer the needs of our triple nature and satisfy the senses, the heart, and the mind. "within the deep and luminous subsistence of the high light appeared to me three circles of threefold color and of one dimension, and by the second seemed the first reflected as iris is by iris, and the third seemed fire that equally by both is breathed. * * * * * "within itself, of its own very color, seemed to me painted with our effigy, wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein." he had reached the high altar where the miracle of transubstantiation is wrought, itself also a type of the great conversion that may be accomplished in our own nature (the lower thing assuming the qualities of the higher), not by any process of reason, but by the very fire of the divine love. "then there smote my mind a flash of lightning wherein came its wish."[ ] perhaps it seems little to say that dante was the first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself, but, rightly looked at, it implies a wonderful self-reliance and originality in his genius. his is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. "l'acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse."[ ] he discovered that not only the story of some heroic person, but that of any man might be epical; that the way to heaven was not outside the world, but through it. living at a time when the end of the world was still looked for as imminent,[ ] he believed that the second coming of the lord was to take place on no more conspicuous stage than the soul of man; that his kingdom would be established in the surrendered will. a poem, the precious distillation of such a character and such a life as his through all those sorrowing but undespondent years, must have a meaning in it which few men have meaning enough in themselves wholly to penetrate. that its allegorical form belongs to a past fashion, with which the modern mind has little sympathy, we should no more think of denying than of whitewashing a fresco of giotto. but we may take it as we may nature, which is also full of double meanings, either as picture or as parable, either for the simple delight of its beauty or as a shadow of the spiritual world. we may take it as we may history, either for its picturesqueness or its moral, either for the variety of its figures, or as a witness to that perpetual presence of god in his creation of which dante was so profoundly sensible. he had seen and suffered much, but it is only to the man who is himself of value that experience is valuable. he had not looked on man and nature as most of us do, with less interest than into the columns of our daily newspaper. he saw in them the latest authentic news of the god who made them, for he carried everywhere that vision washed clear with tears which detects the meaning under the mask, and, beneath the casual and transitory, the eternal keeping its sleepless watch. the secret of dante's power is not far to seek. whoever can express _himself_ with the full force of unconscious sincerity will be found to have uttered something ideal and universal. dante intended a didactic poem, but the most picturesque of poets could not escape his genius, and his sermon sings and glows and charms in a manner that surprises more at the fiftieth reading than the first, such variety of freshness is in imagination. there are no doubt in the _divina commedia_ (regarded merely as poetry) sandy spaces enough both of physics and metaphysics, but with every deduction dante remains the first of descriptive as well as moral poets. his verse is as various as the feeling it conveys; now it has the terseness and edge of steel, and now palpitates with iridescent softness like the breast of a dove. in vividness he is without a rival. he drags back by its tangled locks the unwilling head of some petty traitor of an italian provincial town, lets the fire glare on the sullen face for a moment, and it sears itself into the memory forever. he shows us an angel glowing with that love of god which makes him a star even amid the glory of heaven, and the holy shape keeps lifelong watch in our fantasy constant as a sentinel. he has the skill of conveying impressions indirectly. in the gloom of hell his bodily presence is revealed by his stirring something, on the mount of expiation by casting a shadow. would he have us feel the brightness of an angel? he makes him whiten afar through the smoke like a dawn,[ ] or, walking straight toward the setting sun, he finds his eyes suddenly unable to withstand a greater splendor against which his hand is unavailing to shield him. even its reflected light, then, is brighter than the direct ray of the sun.[ ] and how mack more keenly do we feel the parched lips of master adam for those rivulets of the casentino which run down into the arno, "making their channels cool and soft"! his comparisons are as fresh, as simple, and as directly from nature as those of homer.[ ] sometimes they show a more subtle observation, as where he compares the stooping of antaeus over him to the leaning tower of garisenda, to which the clouds, flying in an opposite direction to its inclination, give away their motion.[ ] his suggestions of individuality, too, from attitude or speech, as in farinata, sordello, or pia,[ ] give in a hint what is worth acres of so-called character-painting. in straightforward pathos, the single and sufficient thrust of phrase, he has no competitor. he is too sternly touched to be effusive and tearful: "io non piangeva, si dentro impietrai."[ ] his is always the true coin of speech, "si lucida e si tonda che nel suo conio nulla ci s'inforsa," and never the highly ornamented promise to pay, token of insolvency. no doubt it is primarily by his poetic qualities that a poet must be judged, for it is by these, if by anything, that he is to maintain his place in literature. and he must be judged by them absolutely, with reference, that is, to the highest standard, and not relatively to the fashions and opportunities of the age in which he lived. yet these considerations must fairly enter into our decision of another side of the question, and one that has much to do with the true quality of the man, with his character as distinguished from his talent, and therefore with how much he will influence men as well as delight them. we may reckon up pretty exactly a man's advantages and defects as an artist; these he has in common with others, and they are to be measured by a recognized standard; but there is something in his _genius_ that is incalculable. it would be hard to define the causes of the difference of impression made upon us respectively by two such men as aeschylus and euripides, but we feel profoundly that the latter, though in some respects a better dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight. aeschylus stirs something in us far deeper than the sources of mere pleasurable excitement. the man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and most sacred in us, though we cannot always explain it, is none the less real and lasting. some men always seem to remain outside their work; others make their individuality felt in every part of it; their very life vibrates in every verse, and we do not wonder that it has "made them lean for many years." the virtue that has gone out of them abides in what they do. the book such a man makes is indeed, as milton called it, "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit." theirs is a true immortality, for it is their soul, and not their talent, that survives in their work. dante's concise forthrightness of phrase, which to that of most other poets is as a stab[ ] to a blow with a cudgel, the vigor of his thought, the beauty of his images, the refinement of his conception of spiritual things, are marvellous if we compare him with his age and its best achievement. but it is for his power of inspiring and sustaining, it is because they find in him a spur to noble aims, a secure refuge in that defeat which the present always seems, that they prize dante who know and love him best. he is not merely a great poet, but an influence, part of the soul's resources in time of trouble. from him she learns that, "married to the truth, she is a mistress, but otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty."[ ] all great poets have their message to deliver us, from something higher than they. we venture on no unworthy comparison between him who reveals to us the beauty of this world's love and the grandeur of this world's passion and him who shows that love of god is the fruit whereof all other loves are but the beautiful and fleeting blossom, that the passions are yet sublimer objects of contemplation, when, subdued by the will, they become patience in suffering and perseverance in the upward path. but we cannot help thinking that if shakespeare be the most comprehensive intellect, so dante is the highest spiritual nature that has expressed itself in rhythmical form. had he merely made us feel how petty the ambitions, sorrows, and vexations of earth appear when looked down on from the heights of our own character and the seclusion of our own genius, or from the region where we commune with god, he had done much: "i with my sight returned through one and all the sevenfold spheres, and i beheld this globe such that i smiled at its ignoble semblance."[ ] but he has done far more; he has shown us the way by which that country far beyond the stars may be reached, may become the habitual dwelling-place and fortress of our nature, instead of being the object of its vague aspiration in moments of indolence. at the round table of king arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the holy grail. it was called the perilous seat because of the dangers he must encounter who would win it. in the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious, who should make us partakers of that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with christ. he who should do this would indeed achieve the perilous seat, for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity,--and dante has done it. as he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when virgil rejoined the company of great singers, "all honor to the loftiest of poets!" footnotes: [ ] the shadow of dante, being an essay towards studying himself, his world, and his pilgrimage. by maria francesca rossetti. "se dio te lasci, lettor prender frutto di tua lezione." boston: roberts brothers. . vo. pp. . [ ] the florentines should seem to have invented or re-invented banks, book-keeping by double entry, and bills of exchange. the last, by endowing value with the gift of fern seed and enabling it to walk invisible, turned the flank of the baronial tariff-system and made the roads safe for the great liberalizer commerce. this made money omnipresent, and prepared the way for its present omnipotence. fortunately it cannot usurp the third attribute of deity,--omniscience. but whatever the consequences, this florentine invention was at first nothing but admirable, securing to brain its legitimate influence over brawn. the latter has begun its revolt, but whether it will succeed better in its attempt to restore mediaeval methods, than the barons in maintaining them remains to be seen. [ ] ghiberti's designs have been criticised by a too systematic aestheticism, as confounding the limits of sculpture and painting. but is not the _riliero_ precisely the bridge by which the one art passes over into the territory of the other? [ ] inferno, iv. . [ ] the nouvelle biographie générale gives may as his birthday. this is a mere assumption, for boccaccio only says generally may. the indication which dante himself gives that he was born when the sun was in gemini would give a range from about the middle of may to about the middle of june, so that the th is certainly too early. [ ] secolo di dante, udine edition of , vol. iii. part i. p. . [ ] arrivabene, however, is wrong. boccaccio makes precisely the same reckoning in the first note of his commentary (bocc. comento, etc., firenze, , vol. i. pp. , ). [ ] dict. phil., art. _dante_. [ ] paradise, xxii. [ ] canto xv. [ ] purgatorio, xvi. [ ] though he himself preferred french, and wrote his _trésor_ in that language for two reasons, _"l'una perchè noi siamo in francia, e l'altra perchè, la parlatura francesca e più dilettevolee più comune che tutti li altri linguaggi_." (_proemio, sul fine_.) [ ] inferno, canto vii. [ ] paradiso, canto x. [ ] see especially inferno, ix. et seq.; xii. ; xv. et seq.; xxxii. - . [ ] vit. nuov. p. , ed. pesaro, . [ ] tratt. iii. cap. xi. [ ] letter of dante, now lost, cited by aretino. [ ] inferno, xxi. . [ ] balbo, vita di dante, firenze, , p. . [ ] life and times of dante, london, , p. . [ ] notes to spenser's "shepherd's calendar." [ ] see the story at length in balbo, vita di dante, cap. x. [ ] thus foscolo. perhaps it would be more accurate to say that at first the blacks were the extreme guelphs, and the whites those moderate guelphs inclined to make terms with the ghibellines. the matter is obscure, and balbo contradicts himself about it. [ ] secolo di dante, p. . he would seem to have been in rome during the jubilee of . see inferno, xviii. - . [ ] that dante was not of the _grandi_, or great nobles (what we call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out, is plain from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list and with no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen _domini_. bayle, however, is equally wrong in supposing his family to have been obscure. [ ] see witte, "quando e da chi sia composto l' ottimo comento," etc. (leipsic, ) [ ] ott. com. parad. xvii. [ ] the loose way in which many italian scholars write history is as amazing as it is perplexing. for example: count balbo's "life of dante" was published originally at turin, in . in a note (lib. i. cap. x.) he expresses a doubt whether the date of dante's banishment should not be , and inclines to think it should be. meanwhile, it seems never to have occurred to him to employ some one to look at the original decree, still existing in the archives. stranger still, le monnier, reprinting the work at florence in , within a stone's throw of the document itself, and with full permission from balbo to make corrections, leaves the matter just where it was. [ ] convito, tratt. i. cap. iii. [ ] macchiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly cited in the preface to the udine edition of the "codex bartolinianus" as placing it in . macchiavelli does no such thing, but expressly implies an earlier date, perhaps . (see macch. op. ed. baretti, london, , vol. i. p. .) [ ] see carlyle's "frederic," vol. i. p. . [ ] a mistake, for guido did not become lord of ravenna till several years later. but boccaccio also assigns as the date of dante's withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may have been one of the other polentani to whom guido (surnamed novello, or the younger; his grandfather having borne the same name) succeeded. [ ] under this date ( ) a th _condemnatio_ against dante is mentioned _facta in anno de mense octobris per d. rainerium, d. zachario de urbeveteri, olim et tunc vicarium regium civitatis florentia_, etc. it is found recited in the decree under which in jacopo di dante redeemed a portion of his father's property, to wit: _una possessione cum vinea et cum domibus super ea, combustis et non combustis, posita in populo s. miniatis de pagnlao_. in the _domibus combustis_ we see the blackened traces of dante's kinsman by marriage, corso donati, who plundered and burnt the houses of the exiled bianchi, during the occupation of the city by charles of valois. (see "de romanis," notes on tiraboschi's life of dante, in the florence ed. of , vol. v. p. .) [ ] voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by mons. e. aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the middle ages, tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each other, and adds: _il n'y a donc pas trop à s'etonner des noms bizarres de mastino et de cane donnés à ces della scala_. (dante, hérétique, révolutionnaire, et socialiste, paris, , pp. - .) [ ] if no monument at all was built by guido, as is asserted by balbo (vita, i. lib. ii. cap. xvii.), whom de vericour copies without question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation of the original epitaph replaced by cardinal bembo when he built the new tomb, in . bembo's own inscription implies an already existing monument, and, if in disparaging terms, yet epitaphial latin verses are not to be taken too literally, considering the exigencies of that branch of literary ingenuity. the doggerel latin has been thought by some unworthy of dante, as shakespeare's doggerel english epitaph has been thought unworthy of him. in both cases the rudeness of the verses seems to us a proof of authenticity. an enlightened posterity with unlimited superlatives at command, and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap, would have aimed at something more befitting the occasion. it is certain, at least in dante's case, that cardinal bembo would never have inserted in the very first words an allusion to the de monarchiâ, a book long before condemned as heretical. [ ] we have translated _lacusque_ by "the pit," as being the nearest english correlative. dante probably meant by it the several circles of his hell, narrowing, one beneath the other, to the centre. as a curious specimen of english we subjoin professor de vericour's translation: "i have sang the rights of monarchy; i have sang, in exploring them, the abode of god, the phlegethon and the impure lakes, as long as destinies have permitted. but as the part of myself, which was only passing, returns to better fields, and happier, returned to his maker, i, dante, exiled from the regions of fatherland, i am laid here, i, to whom florence gave birth, a mother who experienced but a feeble love." (the life and times of dante, london, , p. .) [ ] inferno, x. . [ ] paradiso, xvii. [ ] he says after the return of louis of bavaria to germany, which took place in that year. the de monarchiâ was afterward condemned by the council of trent. [ ] paradiso, xxvii. [ ] inferno, xi. [ ] see the letter in gaye, carteggio inedito d' artisti, vol. i. p. . [ ] st. rené taillandier, in revue des deux mondes, december , . [ ] dante, vol. iv. p. . [ ] ste. beuve, causeries du lundi, tome xi. p. . [ ] dict. phil., art. _dante_. [ ] corresp. gén., oeuvres, tome lvii. pp. , . [ ] essai sur les moeurs, oeuvres, tome xvii. pp. , . [ ] génie du christianisme, cap. iv. [ ] ed. lond. , p. . [ ] it is worth notice, as a proof of chaucer's critical judgment, that he calls dante "the great poet of itaille," while in the "clerke's tale" he speaks of petrarch as a "worthy clerk," as "the laureat poete" (alluding to the somewhat sentimental ceremony at rome), and says that his "rhetorike sweete enlumined all itaille of poetry." [ ] it is possible that sackville may have read the inferno, and it is certain that sir john harrington had. see the preface to his translation of the orlando furioso. [ ] second edition, . [ ] dante alighieri's lyrische gedichte, leipzig, , theil ii. pp. - . [ ] vita, p. . [ ] comment on paradiso, vi. [ ] jean de meung had already said,-- "ge n'en met hors rois ne prélas * * * * * "qu'il sunt tui serf au menu pueple." roman de la rose (ed. méon), v. ii. pp. , . [ ] dante, studien, etc., , p. . [ ] compare also spinoza, tractat. polit., cap. vi. [ ] it is instructive to compare dante's political treatise with those of aristotle and spinoza. we thus see more clearly the limitations of the age in which he lived, and this may help us to a broader view of him as poet. [ ] a very good one may be found in the sixth volume of the molini edition of dante, pp. - . [ ] see field's "theory of colors." [ ] as by dante himself in the convito. [ ] psalm cxiv. , . [ ] he commonly prefaced his letters with some such phrase as _exul immeritus_. [ ] in order to fix more precisely in the mind the place of dante in relation to the history of thought, literature, and events, we subjoin a few dates: dante born, ; end of crusades, death of st. louis, ; aquinas died, ; bonaventura died, ; giotto born, ; albertus magnus died, ; sicilian vespers, ; death of ugolino and francesca da rimini, ; death of beatrice, ; roger bacon died, ; death of cimabue, ; dante's banishment, ; petrarch born, ; fra dolcino burned, ; pope clement v. at avignon, ; templars suppressed, ; boccaccio born, ; dante died, ; wycliffe born, ; chaucer born, . [ ] rivavol characterized only a single quality of dante's style, who knew how to spend as well as spare. even the inferno, on which he based his remark, might have put him on his guard. dante understood very well the use of ornament in its fitting place. _est enim exornatio alicujus convenientis additio_, he tells us in his de vulgari eloquio (lib. ii. c. ii.). his simile of the doves (inferno, v. et seq.), perhaps the most exquisite in all poetry, quite oversteps rivarol's narrow limit of "substantive and verb." [ ] discorso sul testo, ec., § xviii. [ ] convito, b. iv. c. xxii. [ ] it is remarkable that when dante, in , as a preliminary condition to active politics, enrolled himself in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, he is qualified only with the title _poeta_. the arms of the alighieri (curiously suitable to him who _sovra gli altri come aquila vola_) were a wing of gold in a field of azure. his vivid sense of beauty even hovers sometimes like a _corposant_ over the somewhat stiff lines of his latin prose. for example, in his letter to the kings and princes of italy on the coming of henry vii: "a new day brightens, revealing the dawn which already scatters the shades of long calamity; already the breezes of morning gather; _the lips of heaven are reddening!"_ [ ] purgatorio, xxxii. . [ ] paradiso, i. . [ ] in a letter to can grande (xi. of the epistolae). [ ] witte, wegele, and ruth in german, and ozanam in french, have rendered ignorance of dante inexcusable among men of culture. [ ] inferno, vii. . "nay, his style," says miss rossetti, "is more than concise: it is elliptical, it is recondite. a first thought often lies coiled up and hidden under a second; the words which state the conclusion involve the premises and develop the subject." (p. .) [ ] a complete vocabulary of italian billingsgate might be selected from biagioli. or see the concluding pages of nannucci's excellent tract "intorno alle voci usate da dante," corfu, . even foscolo could not always refrain. dante should have taught them to shun such vulgarities. see inferno, xxx. - . [ ] "my italy, my sweetest italy, for having loved thee too much i have lost thee, and, perhaps, ... ah, may god avert the omen! but more proud than sorrowful, for an evil endured for thee alone, i continue to consecrate my vigils to thee alone.... an exile full of anguish, perchance, availed to sublime the more in thy alighieri that lofty soul which was a beautiful gift of thy smiling sky; and an exile equally wearisome and undeserved now avails, perhaps, to sharpen my small genius so that it may penetrate into what he left written for thy instruction and for his glory." (rossetti, disamina, ec., p. .) bossetti is himself a proof that a noble mind need not be narrowed by misfortune. his "comment" (unhappily incomplete) is one of the most valuable and suggestive. [ ] the great-minded man ever magnifies himself in his heart, and in like manner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he is. (convito, tr. i. c. .) [ ] dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor has any one ever painted her in colors more soft and splendid than he in the convito. she is "sweeter than the lids of juno's eyes," and he dwells on the delights of her love with a rapture which kindles and purifies. so far from making her an inquisitor, he says expressly that she "should be gladsome and not sullen in all her works." (convito, tr. i. c. .) "not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose"! [ ] inferno, xix. , . [ ] inferno, viii. - . [ ] paradise, x. . [ ] paradiso, iv. - (longfellow's version). [ ] marlowe's "faustus." "which way i fly is hell, myself am hell." (paradise lost, iv. .) in the same way, _ogni dove in cielo o paradiso_. (paradiso, iii. , .) [ ] purgatorio, xix. - . [ ] convito, tr. ii. c. . [ ] _la natura universale, cioè iddio._ (convito, tr. iii. c. .) [ ] inferno, iii. , . [ ] inferno, xx. . mr. w.m. rossetti strangely enough renders this verse "who hath a passion for god's judgeship" _compassion porta_, is the reading of the best texts, and witte adopts it. buti's comment is "_cioè porta pena e dolore di colui che giustamente è condannato da dio che e sempre giusto_." there is an analogous passage in "the revelation of the apostle paul," printed in the "proceedings of the american oriental society" (vol. viii. pp. , ): "and the angel answered and said, 'wherefore dost thou weep? why! art thou more merciful than god?' and i said, 'god forbid, o my lord; for god is good and long-suffering unto the sons of men, and he leaves every one of them to his own will, and he walks as he pleases'" this is precisely dante's view. [ ] inferno, viii . [ ] "i following her (moral philosophy) in the work as well as the passion, so far as i could, abominated and disparaged the errors of men, not to the infamy and shame of the erring, but of the errors." (convito, tr iv. c. .) "wherefore in my judgment as he who defames a worthy man ought to be avoided by people and not listened to, so a vile man descended of worthy ancestors ought to be hunted out by all." (convito, tr. iv. c. .) [ ] paradise, xvii. - . [ ] it is worth mentioning that the sufferers in his inferno are in like manner pretty exactly divided between the two parties. this is answer enough to the charge of partiality. he even puts persons there for whom he felt affection (as brunetto latini) and respect (as farinata degli uberti and frederick ii.). till the french looked up their mss., it was taken for granted that the _beccajo di parigi_ (purgatorio, xx. ) was a drop of dante's gall. "ce fu huez capez e' on apelle bouchier." hugues capet, p. . [ ] de vulgari eloquio, lib. i, cap. vi. cf. inferno, xv. - . [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . ib. tr. i. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] opp. min., ed. fraticelli, vol. ii. pp. and . witte is inclined to put it even earlier than , and we believe he is right. [ ] paradiso, vi. - . [ ] some florentines have amusingly enough doubted the genuineness of the de vulgari eloquio, because dante therein denies the pre-eminence of the tuscan dialect. [ ] see particularly the second book of the de vulgari eloquio. [ ] purgatorio, xxxiii. . "that thing one calls beautiful whose parts answer to each other, because pleasure results from their harmony." (convito, tr. i. c. .) carlyle says that "he knew too, partly, that his work was great, the greatest a man could do." he knew it fully. telling us how giotto's fame as a painter had eclipsed that of cimabue, he takes an example from poetry also, and selecting two italian poets,--one the most famous of his predecessors, the other of his contemporaries,--calmly sets himself above them both (purgatorio, xi. - ), and gives the reason for his supremacy (purgatorio, xxiv. - ). it is to be remembered that _amore_ in the latter passage does not mean love in the ordinary sense, but in that transcendental one set forth in the convito,--that state of the soul which opens it for the descent of god's spirit, to make it over into his own image. "therefore it is manifest that in this love the divine virtue descends into men in the guise of an angel, ... and it is to be noted that the descending of the virtue of one thing into another is nothing else than reducing it to its own likeness." (convito, tr. iii. c. .) [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . ib. tr. i. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. - . [ ] inferno, ii. . the _donna gentil_ is lucia, the prevenient grace, the _light_ of god which shows the right path and guides the feet in it. with dante god is always the sun, "which leadeth others right by every road." (inferno, i. .) "the spiritual and unintelligible sun, which is god." (convito, tr. iii. c. ) his light "enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world," but his dwelling is in the heavens. he who wilfully deprives himself of this light is spiritually dead in sin. so when in mars he beholds the glorified spirits of the martyrs he exclaims, "o elios, who so arrayest them!" (paradiso, xiv. .) blanc (vocabolario, _sub voce_) rejects this interpretation. but dante, entering the abode of the blessed, invokes the "good apollo," and shortly after calls him _divina virtù._ we shall have more to say of this hereafter. [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . recalling how the eyes of beatrice lift her servant through the heavenly spheres, and that smile of hers so often dwelt on with rapture, we see how dante was in the habit of commenting and illustrating his own works. we must remember always that with him the allegorical exposition is the true one (convito, tr. iv. c. ), the allegory being a truth which is hidden under a beautiful falsehood (convito, tr. ii. c. ), and that dante thought his poems without this exposition "under some shade of obscurity, so that to many their beauty was more grateful than their goodness" (convito, tr. i. c. ), "because the goodness is in the meaning, and the beauty in the ornament of the words" (convito, tr. ii. c. ). [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . by _potenzia_ and _potenza_ dante means the faculty of receiving influences or impressions. (paradiso, xiii. ; xxix. .) reason is the "sovran potency" because it makes us capable of god. [ ] "o thou _well-born_, unto whom grace concedes to see the thrones of the eternal triumph, or ever yet the warfare be abandoned." paradiso, v. - . [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] inferno, x. , ; paradiso, xxii. - . [ ] convito, tr. i. c. (cf. inferno, i. iv). [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. ; paradiso, xviii. - . [ ] see an excellent discussion and elucidation of this matter by witte, who so highly deserves the gratitude of all students of dante, in dante alighieri's lyrische gedichte, theil ii. pp. - . it was kindly old boccaccio, who, without thinking any harm, first set this nonsense agoing. his "life of dante" is mainly a rhetorical exercise. after making dante's marriage an excuse for revamping all the old slanders against matrimony, he adds gravely, "certainly i do not affirm these things to have happened to dante, for i do not know it, though it be true that (whether things like these or others were the cause of it), once parted from her, he would never come where she was nor suffer her to come where he was, for all that she was the mother of several children by him." that he did not come to her is not wonderful, for he would have been burned alive if he had. dante could not send for her because he was a homeless wanderer. she remained in florence with her children because she had powerful relations and perhaps property there. it is plain, also, that what boccaccio says of dante's _lussuria_ had no better foundation. it gave him a chance to turn a period. he gives no particulars, and his general statement is simply incredible. lionardo bruni and vellutello long ago pointed out the trifling and fictitious character of this "life." those familiar with dante's allegorical diction will not lay much stress on the literal meaning of _pargoletta_ in purgatono, xxxi. . gentucca, of course, was a real person, one of those who had shown hospitality to the exile. dante remembers them all somewhere, for gratitude (which is quite as rare as genius) was one of the virtues of his unforgetting nature boccaccio's "comment" is later and far more valuable than the "life." [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. ; purgatorio, xxvii. - . [ ] convito, tr. ii. c. . [ ] that is, _wholly_ fulfil, _rendono intera_. [ ] we should prefer here, "nor inspirations _won by prayer_ availed," as better expressing _nè l'impetrare spirazion_. mr. longfellow's translation is so admirable for its exactness as well as its beauty that it may be thankful for the minutest criticism, such only being possible. [ ] which he cites in the paradiso, viii. . [ ] dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which (as appears by the examples he gives of it) included ambition, in purgatorio, xiii. , . [ ] convito, tr. ii. c. . [ ] purgatorio, xxviii. [ ] purgatorio, xxviii. - ; convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] purgatorio, xxvii. - . [ ] psalm li. . "and therefore i say that her [philosophy's] beauty, that is, morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the which appetite removes us from the natural as well as other vices." (convito, tr. iii. c. .) [ ] purgatorio, xxxi. , . [ ] tr. iv. c. . [ ] purgatorio, - . [ ] such is the _selva oscura_ (inferno, i. ), such, the _selva erronea di questa vita_ (convito, tr. iv. c. ). [ ] convito, tr. i. c. . [ ] convito, tr. ii. c. . [ ] _mar di tutto il senno_, he calls virgil (inferno, viii. ). those familiar with his own works will think the phrase singularly applicable to himself. [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . [ ] vita nuova, xi. [ ] vita nuova, tr. ii. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . the date of dante's birth is uncertain, but the period he assigns for it (paradiso, xxii. - ) extends from the middle of may to the middle of june. if we understand buti's astrological comment, the day should fall in june rather than may. [ ] vita nuova, xxxix. compare for a different view, "the new life of dante, an essay with translations," by c. e. norton, pp. . et seq. [ ] there is a passage in the convito (tr. iii. c. ) in which dante seems clearly to make the distinction asserted above, "and therefore the desire of man is limited in this life to that _knowledge_ (_scienzia_) which may here be had, and passes not save by error that point which is beyond our natural understanding. and so is limited and measured in the angelic nature the amount of that _wisdom_ which the nature of each is capable of receiving." man is, according to dante, superior to the angels in this, that he is capable both of reason and contemplation, while they are confined to the latter. that beatrice's reproaches refer to no human _pargoletta_, the context shows, where dante asks, "but wherefore so beyond my power of sight soars your desirable discourse that aye the more i strive, so much the more i lose it? that thou mayst recognize, she said, the school which thou hast followed, and mayst see how far its doctrine follows after my discourse, and mayst behold your path from the divine distant as far as separated is from earth the heaven that highest hastens on." purgatorio, xxxiii. - . the _pargoletta_ in its ordinary sense was necessary to the literal and human meaning, but it is shockingly discordant with that non-natural interpretation which, according to dante's repeated statement, lays open the true and divine meaning. [ ] "so then they that are in the flesh cannot please god. but ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the spirit of god dwell in you." romans viii. , . [ ] convito, tr. ii. c. , . [ ] convito, tr. ii. c. . compare paradiso, i. , . [ ] "vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called." tim. vi. . [ ] that is, no partial truth. [ ] paradise, iv. - . [ ] "out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness."--judges xiv. . [ ] purgatorio, iii. - . the allusions in this passage are all to sayings of saint paul, of whom dante was plainly a loving reader. "remain contented at the _quia_," that is, be satisfied with knowing _that_ things are, without inquiring too nicely _how_ or _why_. "being justified by faith we have peace with god" (rom. v. ). _infinita via_: "o the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of god! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" (rom. xi. ) _aristotle and plato_: "for the wrath of god is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness.... for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead, so _that they are without excuse_. because that when they knew god, they glorified him not as god, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened" (rom. i. - ). he refers to the greeks. the epistle to the romans, by the way, would naturally be dante's favorite. as saint paul made the law, so he would make science, "our schoolmaster to bring us unto christ, that we might be justified by faith" (gal. iii. ). he puts aristotle and plato in his inferno, because they did not "adore god duly" (inferno, iv. ), that is, they "held the truth in unrighteousness." yet he calls aristotle "the master and guide of human reason" (convito, tr. iv. c. ), and plato "a most excellent man" (convito, tr. ii. c ). plato and aristotle, like all dante's figures, are types. we must disengage our thought from the individual, and fix on the genus. [ ] it is to be remembered that dante has typified the same thing when he describes how reason (virgil) first carries him down by clinging to the fell of satan, and then in the same way upwards again _a riveder le stelle_. satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed at the point "to which things heavy draw from every side"; as god is light and warmth, so is he "cold obstruction"; the very effort which he makes to rise by the motion of his wings begets the chilly blast that freezes him more immovably in his place of doom. the danger of all science save the highest (theology) was that it led to materialism there appears to have been a great deal of it in florence in the time of dante. its followers called themselves epicureans, and burn in living tombs (inferno, x.). dante held them in special horror. "of all bestialities that is the most foolish and vile and hurtful which believes there is no other life after this." "and i so believe, so affirm, and so am certain that we pass to another better life after this" (convito, tr. ii. c. ). it is a fine divination of carlyle from the _non han speranza di morte_ that "one day it had risen sternly benign in the scathed heart of dante that he, wretched, never resting, worn as he was, would [should] full surely _die_." [ ] purgatorio, xxxi. . [ ] inferno, xxxi. , . [ ] tr. iv. c. . [ ] inferno, xxv. - . [ ] purgatorio, xxxi. - . [ ] spenser, who had, like dante, a platonizing side, and who was probably the first english poet since chaucer that had read the commedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these passages in the "faerie queene" (b. vi. c. ). he has turned it into a compliment, and a very beautiful one, to a living mistress. it is instructive to compare the effect of his purely sensuous verses with that of dante's, which have such a wonderful reach behind them. they are singularly pleasing, but they do not stay by us as those of his model had done by him. spenser was, as milton called him, a "sage and serious poet"; he would be the last to take offence if we draw from him a moral not without its use now that priapus is trying to persuade us that pose and drapery will make him as good as urania. better far the naked nastiness; the more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. poor old god of gardens! innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply disgusting as an ideal of art. in the last century, they set him up in beatrice recalls her germany and in france as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light of which came too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long endurable. [ ] this touch of nature recalls another. the italians claim humor for dante. we have never been able to find it, unless it be in that passage (inferno, xv. ) where brunetto latini lingers under the burning shower to recommend his tesoro to his former pupil. there is a comical touch of nature in an author's solicitude for his little work, not, as in fielding's case, after _its_, but his own damnation. we are not sure, but we fancy we catch the momentary flicker of a smile across those serious eyes of dante's. there is something like humor in the opening verses of the xvi. paradiso, where dante tells us how even in heaven he could not help glorying in being gently born,--he who had devoted a canzone and a book of the convito to proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue. but there is, after all, something touchingly natural in the feeling. dante, unjustly robbed of his property, and with it of the independence so dear to him, seeing "needy nothings trimmed in jollity, and captive good attending captain ill," would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could neither buy nor replace. there is a curious passage in the convito which shows how bitterly he resented his undeserved poverty. he tells us that buried treasure commonly revealed itself to the bad rather than the good. "verily i saw the place on the flanks of a mountain in tuscany called falterona, where the basest peasant of the whole countryside digging found there more than a bushel of pieces of the finest silver, which perhaps had awaited him more than a thousand years." (tr. iv. c. .) one can see the grimness of his face as he looked and thought, "how salt a savor hath the bread of others!" [ ] l'envoi of canzone xiv. of the canzoniere, i. of the convito. dante cites the first verse of this canzone, paradiso, viii. . [ ] how dante himself could allegorize even historical personages may be seen in a curious passage of the convito (tr. iv. c. ), where, commenting on a passage of lucan, he treats martia and cato as mere figures of speech. [ ] ii. of the canzoniere. see fraticelli's preface. [ ] don quixote, p. ii. c. viii. [ ] de vulgari eloquio, l. ii. c. . he says the same of giraud de borneil, many of whose poems are moral and even devotional. see, particularly, "al honor dieu torn en mon chan" (raynouard, lex rom i. ), "ben es dregz pos en aital port" (ib. ), "jois sia comensamens" (ib. ), and "be veg e conosc e say" (ib. ). another of his poems ("ar ai grant joy," raynouard, choix, iii. ) may _possibly_ be a mystical profession of love for the blessed virgin, for whom, as dante tells us, beatrice had a special devotion. [ ] convito, tr. iii. c. . in the same chapter is perhaps an explanation of the two rather difficult verses which follow that in which the _verace speglio_ is spoken of (paradise, xxvi. , ). "che fa di sè pareglie l' altre cose e nulla face lui di sè pareglio." buti's comment is, "that is, makes of itself a receptacle to other things, that is, to all things that exist, which are all seen in it." dante says (_ubi supra_), "the descending of the virtue of one thing into another is a reducing that other into a likeness of itself.... whence we see that the sun sending his ray down hitherward reduces things to a likeness with his light in so far as they are able by their disposition to receive light from his power. so i say that god reduces this love to a likeness with himself as much as it is possible for it to be like him." in provençal _pareilh_ means _like_, and dante may have formed his word from it. but the four earliest printed texts read:-- "che fa di sè pareglio all' altre cose." accordingly we are inclined to think that the next verse should be corrected thus:-- "e nulla face a lui di sè pareglio." we would form _pareglio_ from _parere_ (a something in which things _appear_), as _miraglio_ from _mirare_ (a something in which they are _seen_). god contains all things in himself, but nothing can wholly contain him. the blessed behold all things in him as if reflected, but not one of the things so reflected is capable of his image in its completeness. this interpretation is confirmed by paradiso, xix. - . "e quinci appar _ch' ogni minor natura É corto recettacolo a quel bene che non ha fine_, e sè con sè misura." [ ] "wisdom of solomon," vii. , quoted by dante (convito, tr. iii. c. ) there are other passages in the "wisdom of solomon" besides that just cited which we may well believe dante to have had in his mind when writing the canzone beginning,-- "amor che nella mente mi ragiona," and the commentary upon it, and some to which his experience of life must have given an intenser meaning. the writer of that book also personifies wisdom as the mistress of his soul: "i loved her and sought her out from my youth, i desired to make her my spouse, and i was a lover of her beauty." he says of wisdom that she was "present when thou (god) madest the world," and dante in the same way identifies her with the divine logos, citing as authority the "beginning of the gospel of john." he tells us, "i perceived that i could not otherwise obtain her except god gave her me," and dante came at last to the same conclusion. again, "for the very true beginning of her is the desire of discipline; and the care of discipline is love. and love is the keeping of her laws; and the giving heed unto her laws is the assurance of incorruption." but who can doubt that he read with a bitter exultation, and applied to himself passages like these which follow? "when the righteous _fled from his brothers wrath, she guided him in right paths showed him the kingdom of god, and gave him knowledge of holy things_. she defended him from his enemies and kept him safe from those that lay in wait, ... that he might know that godliness is stronger than all.... she forsook him not, but delivered him from sin; _she went down with him into the pit_, and left him not in bonds till she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom, ... and gave him perpetual glory." it was, perhaps, from this book that dante got the hint of making his punishments and penances typical of the sins that earned them. "wherefore, whereas men lived dissolutely and unrighteously, thou hast tormented them with their own abominations." dante was intimate with the scriptures. they do even a scholar no harm. m. victor le clerc, in his "histoire littéraire de la france au quatorzième siècle" (tom. ii. p. ), thinks it "not impossible" that a passage in the lamentations of jeremiah, paraphrased by dante, may have been suggested to him by rutebeuf or tristan, rather than by the prophet himself! dante would hardly have found himself so much at home in the company of _jongleurs_ as in that of prophets. yet he was familiar with french and provençal poetry. beside the evidence of the _vulgari eloquio_, there are frequent and broad traces in the commedia of the _roman de la rose_, slighter ones of the _chevalier de la charette, guillaume d'orange,_ and a direct imitation of bernard de ventadour. [ ] convito, tr. i. c. . [ ] purgatorio, xxii. , . [ ] that dante loved fame we need not be told. he several times confesses it, especially in the de vulgari eloquio, i. . "how glorious she [the vulgar tongue] makes her intimates [_familiares_, those of her household], we ourselves have known, who in the sweetness of this glory put our exile behind our backs." [ ] dante several times uses the sitting a horse as an image of rule. see especially purgatorio, vi. , and convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] "o the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of god!" dante quotes this in speaking of the influence of the stars, which, interpreting it presently "by the theological way," he compares to that of the holy spirit "and thy counsel who hath known, except thou give wisdom and send thy holy spirit from above?" (wisdom of solomon, ix. .) the last words of the convito are, "her [philosophy] whose proper dwelling is in the depths of the divine mind". the ordinary reading is _ragione_ (reason), but it seems to us an obvious blunder for _magione_ (mansion, dwelling). [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] he refers to a change in his own opinions (lib ii. § ), where he says, "when i knew the nations to have murmured against the preeminence of the roman people, and saw the people imagining vain things _as i myself was wont_." he was a guelph by inheritance, he became a ghibelline by conviction. [ ] it should seem from dante's words ("at the time when much people went to see the blessed image," and "ye seem to come from a far off people") that this was some extraordinary occasion, and what so likely as the jubilee of ? (compare paradiso, xxxi. - .) dante's comparisons are so constantly drawn from actual eye-sight, that his allusion (inferno, xiii. - ) to a device of boniface viii. for passing the crowds quietly across the bridge of saint angelo, renders it not unlikely that he was in rome at that time, and perhaps conceived his poem there as giovanni villani his chronicle. that rome would deeply stir his mind and heart is beyond question "and certes i am of a firm opinion that the stones that stand in her walls are worthy of reverence, and the soil where she sits worthy beyond what is preached and admitted of men." (convito, tr. iv. c. .) [ ] _beatrice, loda di dio vera_, inferno, ii. . "surely vain are all men by nature who are ignorant of god, and could not out of the good things that are seen know him that is, neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the work-master.... for, being conversant in his works, they search diligently and believe their sight, because the things are beautiful that are seen. howbeit, neither are they to be pardoned." (wisdom of solomon, xiii. , , .) _non adorar debitamente, dio_. "for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that they are without excuse." it was these "invisible things" whereof dante was beginning to get a glimpse. [ ] convito, tr. i. c. . [ ] "and here we would have forgiven mr. captain if he had not betrayed him (_traido, traduttore traditore_) to spain and made him a castilian, for he took away much of his native worth, and so will all those do who shall undertake to turn a poem into another tongue; for with all the care they take and ability they show, they will never reach the height of its original conception," says the curate, speaking of a translation of ariosto. (don quixote, p. i. c. .) [ ] in his own comment dante says, "i tell whither goes my thought, calling it by the name of one of its effects." [ ] _spirito_ means in italian both breath (_spirto ed acqua fessi_, purgatorio, xxx. ) and spirit. [ ] by _visione_ dante means something seen waking by the inner eye. he believed also that dreams were sometimes divinely inspired, and argues from such the immortality of the soul. (convito, tr. ii. c. .) [ ] paradiso, xxv. - . [ ] de monarchia, lib. iii. § _ult_. see the whole passage in miss rossetti, p . it is noticeable that dante says that the pope is to _lead_ (by example), the emperor to _direct_ (by the enforcing of justice) the duty, we are to observe, was a double but not a divided one. to exemplify this unity was indeed one object of the commedia. [ ] "what reason seeth here myself [virgil] can tell thee; beyond that await for beatrice, since 'tis a work of faith." _purgatorio_, xviii. - . beatrice here evidently impersonates theology. it would be interesting to know what was the precise date of dante's theological studies. the earlier commentators all make him go to paris, the great fountain of such learning, after his banishment. boccaccio indeed says that he did not return to italy till . wegele (dante's "leben und werke," p. ) puts the date of his journey between and . ozanam, with a pathos comically touching to the academic soul, laments that poverty compelled him to leave the university without the degree he had so justly earned. he consoles himself with the thought that "there remained to him an incontestable erudition and the love of serious studies." (dante et la philosophic catholique, p. .) it _is_ sad that we cannot write _dantes alighierius, s. t. d._! dante seems to imply that he began to devote himself to philosophy and theology shortly after beatrice's death. (convito, tr. ii. c. .) he compares himself to one who, "seeking silver, should, without meaning it, find gold, which an occult cause presents to him, not perhaps without the divine command." here again apparently is an allusion to his having found wisdom while he sought learning. he had thought to find god in the beauty of his works, he learned to seek all things in god. [ ] in a more general view, matter, the domain of the senses, no doubt with a recollection of aristotle's [greek: hylae]. [ ] as we have seen, even a sigh becomes _he_. this makes one of the difficulties of translating his minor poems. the modern mind is incapable of this subtlety. [ ] purgatorio, iii. , . [ ] purgatorio, iii. , . [ ] purgatorio, v. . [ ] inferno, iii. , (_hanno perduto_ = thrown away). [ ] convito, tr. ii. c. . [ ] purgatorio, xxiii. , . [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] inferno, xxxiii. , et seq. [ ] inferno, i. , . [ ] mr. longfellow's _for_, like the italian _per_, gives us the same privilege of election. we "freeze for cold," we "hunger for food." [ ] inferno, v. . [ ] paradiso, xviii. . renoard is one of the heroes (a rudely humorous one) in "la bataille d'alischans," an episode of the measureless "guillaume d'orange." it was from the graves of those supposed to have been killed in this battle that dante draws a comparison, inferno, ix. boccaccio's comment on this passage might have been read to advantage by the french editors of "alischans." [ ] we cite this comment under its received name, though it is uncertain if pietro was the author of it. indeed, we strongly doubt it. it is at least one of the earliest, for it appears, by the comment on paradiso, xxvi., that the greater part of it was written before . it is remarkable for the strictness with which it holds to the spiritual interpretation of the poem, and deserves much more to be called ottimo, than the comment which goes by that name. its publication is due to the zeal and liberality of the late lord vernon, to whom students of dante are also indebted for the parallel-text reprint of the four earliest editions of the commedia. [ ] see wegele, _ubi supra_, p. , et seq. the best analysis of dante's opinions we have ever met with is emil ruth's "studien über dante alighieri," tübingen, . unhappily it wants an index, and accordingly loses a great part of its usefulness for those not already familiar with the subject. nor are its references sufficiently exact. we always respect dr. ruth's opinions, if we do not wholly accept them, for they are all the results of original and assiduous study. [ ] see the second book of the de vulgari eloquio. the only other italian poet who reminds us of dante in sustained dignity is guido guinicelli. dante esteemed him highly, calls him maximus in the de vulgari eloquio, and "the father of me and of my betters," in the xxvi. purgatorio. see some excellent specimens of him in mr. d. g. rossetti's remarkable volume of translations from the early italian poets. mr. rossetti would do a real and lasting service to literature by employing his singular gift in putting dante's minor poems into english. [ ] the old french poems confound all unbelievers together as pagans and worshippers of idols. [ ] dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but the difference is that with him society is something divinely ordained. he follows aristotle pretty closely, but on his own theory crime and sin are identical. [ ] purgatorio, xviii. . he defines it in the de monarchia (lib. i. § ). among other things he calls it "the first beginning of our liberty." paradiso, v. , , he calls it "the greatest gift that in his largess god creating made." "dico quod judicium medium est apprehensionis et appetitus." (de monarchia, _ubi supra_.) "right and wrong, between whose endless jar justice resides." _troilus and cressida._ [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . "qui descenderit ad inferos, non ascendet." job vii. . [ ] but it may he inferred that he put the interests of mankind above both. "for citizens," he says, "exist not for the sake of consuls, nor the people for the sake of the king, but, on the contrary, consuls for the sake of citizens, and the king for the sake of the people." [ ] paradiso, viii. , . [ ] purgatorio, xvi. - . [ ] de monarchia, § _ult_. [ ] de monarchia lib iii § . "poterat tamen imperator in patrocinium eccelesiae patrimonium et alia deputare immoto semper superiori dominio cujus unitas divisio non patitur. poterat et vicarius dei recipere, non tanquam possessor, sed tanquam fructuum pro eccelesia proque christi pauperibus dispensator." he tells us that st. dominic did not ask for the tithes which belong to the poor of god. (paradiso, xii. , .) "let them return whence they came," he says (de monarchia, lib ii. § ); "they came well, let them return ill, for they were well given and ill held." [ ] inferno, xix. ; paradiso, xxx. - . [ ] purgatorio, xx. - . [ ] purgatorio, xx. - . [ ] purgatorio, xix. , . [ ] this results from the whole course of his argument in the second book of de monarchia, and in the vi. paradiso he calls the roman eagle "the bird of god" and "the scutcheon of god." we must remember that with dante god is always the "emperor of heaven," the barons of whose court are the apostles. (paradiso, xxiv. ; ib., xxv. .) [ ] dante seems to imply (though his name be german) that he was of roman descent he makes the original inhabitants of florence (inferno, xv. , ) of roman seed, and cacciaguida, when asked by him about his ancestry, makes no more definite answer than that their dwelling was in the most ancient part of the city (paradiso, xvi. .) [ ] man was created, according to dante (convito, tr. ii. c. ), to supply the place of the fallen angels, and is in a sense superior to the angels, inasmuch as he has reason, which they do not need. [ ] de monarchia, lib i. § . [ ] purgatorio, vi. , . [ ] de monarchia, lib. i. § . [ ] de monarchia, lib. i. § . [ ] de monarchia, lib ii. § . [ ] purgatorio, xvi. , . [ ] "troilus and cressida," act i. s. . the whole speech is very remarkable both in thought and phrase. [ ] purgatorio, i. . [ ] de monarchia, lib. i. § . [ ] de monarchia, lib. i. § . [ ] de monarchia, lib. i. § . [ ] paradiso, ix. [ ] inferno, xxxviii; purgatorio, xxxii. [ ] see the poems of walter mapes (who was archdeacon of oxford); the "bible guiot," and the "bible au seignor de berze," barbezan and méon, ii. [ ] de monarchia, lib. iii. § . [ ] purgatorio, iii. , . [ ] paradiso, xxvii. . [ ] purgatorio, xxvii. ; ottimo, inferno, xxviii. . [ ] inferno, ix. ; purgatorio, viii. . [ ] purgatorio, xxix. , . [ ] inferno, xxii. , . [ ] de monarchia, lib. ii. § . [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. ; ib., c. ; aeneid, i. , ; ovid's met., vii. [ ] inferno, xxxi. . [ ] purgatorio, vi. , . pulci, not understanding, has parodied this. ("morgante," canto ii. st. .) [ ] see, for example, purgatorio, xx. - . [ ] we believe that dante, though he did not understand greek, knew something of hebrew. he would have been likely to study it as the sacred language, and opportunities of profiting by the help of learned jews could not have been wanting to him in his wanderings. in the above-cited passage some of the best texts read _i s' appellava_, and others _un s' appellava_. god was called i (the _je_ in jehovah) or _one_, and afterwards _el_,--the strong,--an epithet given to many gods. whichever reading we adopt, the meaning and the inference from it are the same. [ ] inferno, iv. [ ] dante's "limbo," of course, is the older "limbus patrum." [ ] de monarchia, lib. ii. § . [ ] faith, hope, and charity. (purgatorio, xxix. .) mr. longfellow has translated the last verse literally. the meaning is, "more than a thousand years ere baptism was." [ ] in which the _celestial athens_ is mentioned. [ ] purgatorio, xxvii. - . [ ] "i conceived myself to be now," says milton, "not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof i was persuaded." [ ] "but now was turning my desire and will, even as a wheel that equally is moved, the love that moves the sun and other stars." paradiso, xxxiii., closing verses of the divina commedia. [ ] dante seems to allude directly to this article of the catholic faith when he says, on entering the celestial paradise, "to signify transhumanizing by words could not be done," and questions whether he was there in the renewed spirit only or in the flesh also:-- "if i was merely _what of me thou newly createdst_, love who governest the heavens, thou knowest who didst lift me with thy light." paradiso, i. - . [ ] paradiso, ii. . lucretius makes the same boast:-- "avia pieridum peragro loca nullius ante trita solo." [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] purgatorio, xvi. . here is milton's "far off his coming shone." [ ] purgatorio, xv. , et seq. [ ] see, for example, inferno, xvii. - ; ib. xxiv. - ; purgatorio, ii. - ; ib., iii. - ; ib., xxvii. - ; paradiso, xix. - ; ib. xxi. - ; ib. xxiii. - . [ ] inferno, xxxi. - . "and those thin clouds above, in fakes and bars, that give away their motion to the stars." coleridge, "dejection, an ode." see also the comparison of the dimness of the faces seen around him in paradise to "a pearl on a white forehead." (paradiso, iii. .) [ ] inferno, x. - ; purgatorio, vi. - ; ib., x. . [ ] for example, cavalcanti's _come dicesti egli ebbe_? (inferno, x. , .) anselmuccio's _tu guardi si, padre, che hai_? (inferno, xxxiii. .) [ ] to the "bestiality" of certain arguments dante says, "one would wish to reply, not with words, but with a knife." (convito, tr. iv. c. .) [ ] convito, tr. iv. c. . [ ] paradiso, xxii. - ; ib., xxvii. . spenser. chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years ere england had secreted choice material enough for the making of another great poet. the nature of men living together in societies, as of the individual man, seems to have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line of shore between them is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only with such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches and holds the sunshine. from the two centuries between and the indefatigable ritson in his _bibliographia poetica_ has made us a catalogue of some six hundred english poets, or, more properly, verse-makers. ninety-nine in a hundred of them are mere names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some of them mere initials. nor can it be said of them that their works have perished because they were written in an obsolete dialect; for it is the poem that keeps the language alive, and not the language that buoys up the poem. the revival of letters, as it is called, was at first the revival of _ancient_ letters, which, while it made men pedants, could do very little toward making them poets, much less toward making them original writers. there was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity, invention, and careless faith in the present which make many of the productions of the norman trouvères delightful reading even now. the whole of europe during the fifteenth century produced no book which has continued readable, or has become in any sense of the word a classic. i do not mean that that century has left us no illustrious names, that it was not enriched with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic succession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still unextinguished torch of intelligence, the _lampada vitae_, to those who came after them. but a classic is properly a book which maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of growing old. it is not his latin which makes horace cosmopolitan, nor can béranger's french prevent his becoming so. no hedge of language however thorny, no dragon-coil of centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of the hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them. if poems die, it is because there was never true life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty the imagination. take aristotle's ethics, the scholastic philosophy, the theology of aquinas, the ptolemaic system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the middle ages, mix in at will grecian, roman, and christian mythology, and tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of such an incongruous mixture. can these dry bones live? yes, dante can create such a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth century since his death. accordingly i am apt to believe that the complaints one sometimes hears of the neglect of our older literature are the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. one does not need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut. on the whole, the scottish poetry of the fifteenth century has more meat in it than the english, but this is to say very little. where it is meant to be serious and lofty it falls into the same vices of unreality and allegory which were the fashion of the day, and which there are some patriots so fearfully and wonderfully made as to relish. stripped of the archaisms (that turn every _y_ to a meaningless _z_, spell which _quhilk_, shake _schaik_, bugle _bowgill_, powder _puldir_, and will not let us simply whistle till we have puckered our mouths to _quhissill_) in which the scottish antiquaries love to keep it disguised,--as if it were nearer to poetry the further it got from all human recognition and sympathy,--stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it from the contemporary verse-mongering south of the tweed. their compositions are generally as stiff and artificial as a trellis, in striking contrast with the popular ballad-poetry of scotland (some of which possibly falls within this period, though most of it is later), which clambers, lawlessly if you will, but at least freely and simply, twining the bare stem of old tradition with graceful sentiment and lively natural sympathies. i find a few sweet and flowing verses in dunbar's "merle and nightingale,"--indeed one whole stanza that has always seemed exquisite to me. it is this:-- "ne'er sweeter noise was heard by living man than made this merry, gentle nightingale. her sound went with the river as it ran out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale; o merle, quoth she, o fool, leave off thy tale, for in thy song good teaching there is none, for both are lost,--the time and the travail of every love but upon god alone." but except this lucky poem, i find little else in the serious verses of dunbar that does not seem to me tedious and pedantic. i dare say a few more lines might be found scattered here and there, but i hold it a sheer waste of time to hunt after these thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy haystacks of verse. if that be genius, the less we have of it the better. his "dance of the seven deadly sins," over which the excellent lord hailes went into raptures, is wanting in everything but coarseness; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under the lash. it would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. what he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be billingsgate if it could, and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. mr. sibbald, in his "chronicle of scottish poetry," has admiringly preserved more than enough of it, and seems to find a sort of national savor therein, such as delights his countrymen in a _haggis_, or the german in his _sauer-kraut_. the uninitiated foreigner puts his handkerchief to his nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as soon as he civilly can. barbour's "brus," if not precisely a poem, has passages whose simple tenderness raises them to that level. that on freedom is familiar.[ ] but its highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of manly courage in it, the easy and familiar way in which barbour always takes chivalrous conduct as a matter of course, as if heroism were the least you could ask of any man. i modernize a few verses to show what i mean. when the king of england turns to fly from the battle of bannockburn (and barbour with his usual generosity tells us he has heard that sir aymer de valence led him away by the bridle-rein against his will), sir giles d'argente "saw the king thus and his menie shape them to flee so speedily, he came right to the king in hy [hastily] and said, 'sir, since that is so that ye thus gate your gate will go, have ye good-day, for back will i: yet never fled i certainly, and i choose here to bide and die than to live shamefully and fly.'" the "brus" is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle ever written. it is national in a high and generous way, but i confess i have little faith in that quality in literature which is commonly called nationality,--a kind of praise seldom given where there is anything better to be said. literature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets beyond sight of the parish steeple, is not what i understand by literature. to tell you when you cannot fully taste a book that it is because it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. to say it of a poem is even worse, for it is to say that what should be true of the whole compass of human nature is true only to some north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. i can understand the nationality of firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former glories of his country, he tells us that "the nightingale still sings old persian"; i can understand the nationality of burns when he turns his plough aside to spare the rough burr thistle, and hopes he may write a song or two for dear auld scotia's sake. that sort of nationality belongs to a country of which we are all citizens,--that country of the heart which has no boundaries laid down on the map. all great poetry must smack of the soil, for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and substance from it, but it must do so with the aspiring instinct of the pine that climbs forever toward diviner air, and not in the grovelling fashion of the potato. any verse that makes you and me foreigners is not only not great poetry, but no poetry at all. dunbar's works were disinterred and edited some thirty years ago by mr. laing, and whoso is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content. i am inclined for other pasture, having long ago satisfied myself by a good deal of dogged reading that every generation is sure of its own share of bores without borrowing from the past. a little later came gawain douglas, whose translation of the aeneid is linguistically valuable, and whose introductions to the seventh and twelfth books--the one describing winter and the other may--have been safely praised, they are so hard to read. there is certainly some poetic feeling in them, and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke of oxen, who lays over one furrow of verse, and then turns about to lay the next as cleverly alongside it as he can. but it is a wrong done to good taste to hold up this _item_ kind of description any longer as deserving any other credit than that of a good memory. it is a mere bill of parcels, a _post-mortem_ inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not called for, but would be out of place. why, a recipe in the cookery-book is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like true word-painting. the poet with a real eye in his head does not give us everything, but only the _best_ of everything. he selects, he combines, or else gives what is characteristic only; while the false style of which i have been speaking seems to be as glad to get a pack of impertinences on its shoulders as christian in the pilgrim's progress was to be rid of his. one strong verse that can hold itself upright (as the french critic rivarol said of dante) with the bare help of the substantive and verb, is worth acres of this dead cord-wood piled stick on stick, a boundless continuity of dryness. i would rather have written that half-stanza of longfellow's, in the "wreck of the hesperus," of the "billow that swept her crew like icicles from her deck," than all gawain douglas's tedious enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together. a real landscape is never tiresome; it never presents itself to us as a disjointed succession of isolated particulars; we take it in with one sweep of the eye,--its light, its shadow, its melting gradations of distance: we do not say it is this, it is that, and the other; and we may be sure that if a description in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous mistake somewhere. all the pictorial adjectives in the dictionary will not bring it a hair's-breadth nearer to truth and nature. the fact is that what we see is in the mind to a greater degree than we are commonly aware. as coleridge says,-- "o lady, we receive but what we give, and in our life alone doth nature live!" i have made the unfortunate dunbar the text for a diatribe on the subject of descriptive poetry, because i find that this old ghost is not laid yet, but comes back like a vampire to suck the life out of a true enjoyment of poetry,--and the medicine by which vampires were cured was to unbury them, drive a stake through them, and get them under ground again with all despatch. the first duty of the muse is to be delightful, and it is an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by a kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the critics of something to which our judgment will not consent, and from which our taste revolts. a collection of poets is commonly made up, nine parts in ten, of this perfunctory verse-making, and i never look at one without regretting that we have lost that excellent latin phrase, _corpus poetarum_. in fancy i always read it on the backs of the volumes,--a _body_ of poets, indeed, with scarce one soul to a hundred of them. one genuine english poet illustrated the early years of the sixteenth century,--john skelton. he had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality. gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate in him with an almost brutal coarseness. he was truly rabelaisian before rabelais. but there is a freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular attraction. a breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and casting back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear western winds. but skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. a long and dreary winter follows. surrey, who brought back with him from italy the blank-verse not long before introduced by trissino, is to some extent another exception. he had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. we have gascoyne, surrey, wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, systematic as a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in love. every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a lath, and their poems are nothing more than bundles of such tied trimly together. they are said to have refined our language. let us devoutly hope they did, for it would be pleasant to be grateful to them for something. but i fear it was not so, for only genius can do that; and sternhold and hopkins are inspired men in comparison with them. for sternhold was at least the author of two noble stanzas:-- "the lord descended from above and bowed the heavens high, and underneath his feet he cast the darkness of the sky; on cherubs and on cherubims full royally he rode, and on the wings of all the winds came flying all abroad." but gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put the worst school of italian love poetry into an awkward english dress. the italian proverb says, "inglese italianizzato, diavolo incarnato," that an englishman italianized is the very devil incarnate, and one feels the truth of it here. the very titles of their poems set one yawning, and their wit is the cause of the dulness that is in other men. "the lover, deceived by his love, repenteth him of the true love he bare her." as thus:-- "where i sought heaven there found i hap; from danger unto death, much like the mouse that treads the trap in hope to find her food, and bites the bread that stops her breath,-- so in like case i stood." "the lover, accusing his love for her unfaithfulness, proposeth to live in liberty." he says:-- "but i am like the beaten fowl that from the net escaped, and thou art like the ravening owl that all the night hath waked." and yet at the very time these men were writing there were simple ballad-writers who could have set them an example of simplicity, force, and grandeur. compare the futile efforts of these poetasters to kindle themselves by a painted flame, and to be pathetic over the lay figure of a mistress, with the wild vigor and almost fierce sincerity of the "twa corbies":-- "as i was walking all alone i heard twa corbies making a moan. the one unto the other did say, where shall we gang dine to-day? in beyond that old turf dyke i wot there lies a new slain knight; and naebody kens that he lies there but his hawk and his hound and his lady fair. his hound is to the hunting gone, his hawk to fetch the wild fowl home, his lady has ta'en another mate, so we may make our dinner sweet. o'er his white bones as they lie bare the wind shall blow forevermair." there was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends, could they have understood it. but they were as much afraid of an attack of nature as of the plague. such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction into which spenser was born, and which he did more than any one else to redeem from the leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic conceit. sir philip sidney, born the year after him, with a keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier emancipated than his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps even more directly influential in educating the taste and refining the vocabulary of, his contemporaries and immediate successors. the better of his pastoral poems in the "arcadia" are, in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above all, more pathetic than those of spenser, who sometimes strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that would better suit the trumpet. sidney had the good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted such themes.[ ] he recognized the distinction between simplicity and vulgarity, which wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems to have divined the fact that there is but one kind of english that is always appropriate and never obsolete, namely, the very best.[ ] with the single exception of thomas campion, his experiments in adapting classical metres to english verse are more successful than those of his contemporaries. some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and it can hardly be doubted that coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of strephon and klaius the pleasing movement of his own _catullian hendecasyllabics_. spenser, perhaps out of deference to sidney, also tried his hand at english hexameters, the introduction of which was claimed by his friend gabriel harvey, who thereby assured to himself an immortality of grateful remembrance. but the result was a series of jolts and jars, proving that the language had run off the track. he seems to have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a gleam of mischief in what he writes to harvey: "i like your late english hexameter so exceedingly well that i also enure my pen sometime in that kind, which i find indeed, as i have often heard you defend in word, neither so hard nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itself to our mother-tongue. for the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, is in the accent, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favoredly, coming short of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the number, as in _carpenter_; the middle syllable being used short in speech, when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one leg after her; and _heaven_ being used short as one syllable, when it is in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds up one leg."[ ] it is almost inconceivable that spenser's hexameters should have been written by the man who was so soon to teach his native language how to soar and sing, and to give a fuller sail to english verse. one of the most striking facts in our literary history is the pre-eminence at once so frankly and unanimously conceded to spenser by his contemporaries. at first, it is true, he had not many rivals. before the "faery queen" two long poems were printed and popular,--the "mirror for magistrates" and warner's "albion's england,"--and not long after it came the "polyolbion" of drayton and the "civil wars" of daniel. this was the period of the saurians in english poetry, interminable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like far-stretching _vertebrae_, that at first sight would seem to have rendered earth unfit for the habitation of man. they most of them sleep well now, as once they made their readers sleep, and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep morasses of chambers and anderson. we wonder at the length of face and general atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the men of that generation, but it is no marvel when even their relaxations were such downright hard work. fathers when their day on earth was up must have folded down the leaf and left the task to be finished by their sons,--a dreary inheritance. yet both drayton and daniel are fine poets, though both of them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their genius on the shoal of a bad subject. neither of them could make poetry coalesce with gazetteering or chronicle-making. it was like trying to put a declaration of love into the forms of a declaration in trover. the "polyolbion" is nothing less than a versified gazetteer of england and wales,--fortunately scotland was not yet annexed, or the poem would have been even longer, and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. mountains, rivers, and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes, or to give us geographical lectures. there are two fine verses in the seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he says,-- "their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand, as for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand"; and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that comes near being fine; but the far greater part is mere joiner-work. consider the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a post, and then think whether we can afford to honor such a draft upon our time as is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines! even the laborious selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book. yet drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of fancy, as his "nymphidia" proves. his poem "to the cambro-britons on their harp" is full of vigor; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to a charge. daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. he did indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the praise his contemporaries concur in giving him of being "well-languaged."[ ] writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need of a glossary, and i have noted scarce a dozen words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete. this certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally remarkable judgment. there is an equable dignity in his thought and sentiment such as we rarely meet. his best poems always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we are standing. i think his "musophilus" the best poem of its kind in the language. the reflections are natural, the expression condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. but he also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the characters were incapable of that remoteness from ordinary associations which is essential to the ideal. not that we can escape into the ideal by _merely_ emigrating into the past or the unfamiliar. as in the german legend the little black kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat himself on the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the magician be not there to exorcise him. no man can jump off his own shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that daniel had only the thinking and languaging parts of a poet's outfit, without the higher creative gift which alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life and with an interest which transcends the parish limits of his generation. in the prologue to his "masque at court" he has unconsciously defined his own poetry:-- "wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport, but tender passions, motions soft and grave, the still spectator must expect to have." and indeed his verse does not snatch you away from ordinary associations and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry, but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. his best-known poem, blunderingly misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the countess of cumberland. it is an amplification of horace's _integer vitae_, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original. it is very fine english, but it is the english of diplomacy somehow, and is never downright this or that, but always has the honor to be so or so, with sentiments of the highest consideration. yet the praise of _well-languaged_, since it implies that good writing then as now demanded choice and forethought, is not without interest for those who would classify the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors well. his diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, has a suppleness and spring that give proof of training and endurance. his "defence of rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than verse), has a passionate eloquence that reminds one of burke, and is more light-armed and modern than the prose of milton fifty years later. for us occidentals he has a kindly prophetic word:-- "and who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores the gain of our best glory may be sent to enrich unknowing nations with our stores? what worlds in the yet unformed occident may come refined with accents that are ours?" during the period when spenser was getting his artistic training a great change was going on in our mother-tongue, and the language of literature was disengaging itself more and more from that of ordinary talk. the poets of italy, spain, and france began to rain influence and to modify and refine not only style but vocabulary. men were discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still pointed forward. there was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in america. this demand was nobly answered in the next generation. but no man contributed so much to the transformation of style and language as spenser; for not only did he deliberately endeavor at reform, but by the charm of his diction, the novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method of treatment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the new manner popular and fruitful. we can trace in spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true bent of his genius,--that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality. before his time the boundary between poetry and prose had not been clearly defined. his great merit lies not only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first revealed to his countrymen. he at first sought for that remoteness, which is implied in an escape from the realism of daily life, in the pastoral,--a kind of writing which, oddly enough, from its original intention as a protest in favor of naturalness, and of human as opposed to heroic sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of abstractions. but he was soon convinced of his error, and was not long in choosing between an unreality which pretended to be real and those everlasting realities of the mind which seem unreal only because they lie beyond the horizon of the every-day world and become visible only when the mirage of fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal atmosphere. as in the old fairy-tales, the task which the age imposes on its poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue; and when every device has failed, in comes the witch imagination, and with a touch the miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always are after they are wrought. spenser, like chaucer a londoner, was born in .[ ] nothing is known of his parents, except that the name of his mother was elizabeth; but he was of gentle birth, as he more than once informs us, with the natural satisfaction of a poor man of genius at a time when the business talent of the middle class was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment. in he was entered as a sizar at pembroke hall, cambridge, and in due course took his bachelor's degree in , and his master's in . he is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it appears to me, to have met with some disgust or disappointment during his residence at the university.[ ] between and spenser seems to have been with some of his kinsfolk "in the north" it was during this interval that he conceived his fruitless passion for the rosalinde, whose jilting him for another shepherd, whom he calls menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily bemoaned in his pastorals[ ] before the publication of his "shepherd's calendar" in , he had made the acquaintance of sir philip sidney, and was domiciled with him for a time at penshurst, whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain. in october, , he is in the household of the earl of leicester. in july, he accompanied lord grey de wilton to ireland as secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of his life, with occasional flying visits to england to publish poems or in search of preferment. his residence in that country has been compared to that of ovid in pontus. and, no doubt, there were certain outward points of likeness. the irishry by whom he was surrounded were to the full as savage, as hostile, and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the scythians[ ] who made tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier english settlers had degenerated as much as the mix-hellenes who disgusted the latin poet. spenser himself looked on his life in ireland as a banishment. in his "colm clout's come home again" he tells us that sir walter raleigh, who visited him in , and heard what was then finished of the "faery queen,"-- "'gan to cast great liking to my lore and great disliking to my luckless lot, that banisht had myself, like wight forlore, into that waste, where i was quite forgot the which to leave thenceforth he counselled me, unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful, and wend with him his cynthia to see, whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful." but spenser was already living at kilcolman castle (which, with , acres of land from the forfeited estates of the earl of desmond, was confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid scenery at once placid and noble, whose varied charm he felt profoundly. he could not complain, with ovid,-- "non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem," for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him the stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar. above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. surely this sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of the "faery queen" and to giving his "soul a loose" than "the smoke, the wealth, and noise of rome, and all the busy pageantry that wise men scorn and fools adore." yet he longed for london, if not with the homesickness of bussy-rabutin in exile from the parisian sun, yet enough to make him joyfully accompany raleigh thither in the early winter of , carrying with him the first three books of the great poem begun ten years before. horace's _nonum prematur in annum_ had been more than complied with, and the success was answerable to the well-seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness of the work. but spenser did not stay long in london to enjoy his fame. seen close at hand, with its jealousies, intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the court had lost the enchantment lent by the distance of kilcolman. a nature so prone to ideal contemplation as spenser's would be profoundly shocked by seeing too closely the ignoble springs of contemporaneous policy, and learning by what paltry personal motives the noble opportunities of the world are at any given moment endangered. it is a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by ignoble men. "vide questo globo tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante." in his "colin clout," written just after his return to ireland, he speaks of the court in a tone of contemptuous bitterness, in which, as it seems to me, there is more of the sorrow of disillusion than of the gall of personal disappointment. he speaks, so he tells us,-- "to warn young shepherds' wandering wit which, through report of that life's painted bliss, abandon quiet home to seek for it and leave their lambs to loss misled amiss; for, sooth to say, it is no sort of life for shepherd fit to live in that same place, where each one seeks with malice and with strife to thrust down other into foul disgrace himself to raise; and he doth soonest rise that best can handle his deceitful wit in subtle shifts.... to which him needs a guileful hollow heart masked with fair dissembling courtesy, a filëd tongue furnisht with terms of art, no art of school, but courtiers' schoolery. for arts of school have there small countenance, counted but toys to busy idle brains, and there professors find small maintenance, but to be instruments of others' gains, nor is there place for any gentle wit unless to please it can itself apply. * * * * * "even such is all their vaunted vanity, naught else but smoke that passeth soon away. * * * * * "so they themselves for praise of fools do sell, and all their wealth for painting on a wall. * * * * * "whiles single truth and simple honesty do wander up and down despised of all."[ ] and again in his "mother hubberd's tale," in the most pithy and masculine verses he ever wrote:-- "most miserable man, whom wicked fate hath brought to court to sue for _had-i-wist_ that few have found and many one hath mist! full httle knowest thou that hast not tried what hell it is in suing long to bide; to lose good days that might be better spent, to waste long nights in pensive discontent, to speed to day, to be put back to-morrow, to feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow, to have thy prince's grace yet want her peers', to have thy asking yet wait many years, to fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, to eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, to fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, to spend, to give, to want, to be undone. * * * * * "whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate in safe assurance, without strife or hate, finds all things needful for contentment meek, and will to court for shadows vain to seek, * * * * * "that curse god send unto mine enemy!"[ ] when spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat and serene companionship of his great poem, with what profound and pathetic exultation must he have recalled the verses of dante!-- "chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio, e chi regnar per forza e per sofismi, e chi rubare, e chi civil negozio, chi nei diletti della carne involto s' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio, quando da tutte queste cose sciolto, con beatrice m' era suso in cielo cotanto gloriosamente accolto."[ ] what spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning and literature is the more remarkable because he himself was by no means an unsuccessful suitor. queen elizabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he received the grant of lands already mentioned. it is said, indeed, that lord burleigh in some way hindered the advancement of the poet, who more than once directly alludes to him either in reproach or remonstrance. in "the ruins of time," after speaking of the death of walsingham, "since whose decease learning lies unregarded, and men of armes do wander unrewarded," he gives the following reason for their neglect.-- "for he that now wields all things at his will, scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill. o grief of griefs! o gall of all good hearts, to see that virtue should despisëd be of him that first was raised for virtuous parts, and now, broad spreading like an aged tree, lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be: o let the man of whom the muse is scorned nor live nor dead be of the muse adorned!" and in the introduction to the fourth book of the "faery queen," he says again:-- "the rugged forehead that with grave foresight wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state, my looser rhymes, i wot, doth sharply wite for praising love, as i have done of late,-- * * * * * "by which frail youth is oft to folly led through false allurement of that pleasing bait, that better were in virtues discipled than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed. "such ones ill judge of love that cannot love nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame; forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove, ne natural affection faultless blame for fault of few that have abused the same: for it of honor and all virtue is the root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame that crown true lovers with immortal bliss, the meed of them that love and do not live amiss." if lord burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as the "faery queen," he is very much more to be pitied than spenser. the sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in which he proposed to himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part of moral philosophy"[ ] could be so misinterpreted. but spenser speaks in the same strain and without any other than a general application in his "tears of the muses," and his friend sidney undertakes the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. but undervalued by whom? by the only persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now call society and who were then called the court. the inference i would draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost nothing.[ ] then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere, there must have been a sympathetic public. literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations ([greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[ ] england had long been growing more truly insular in language and political ideas when the reformation came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of europe. hitherto there had been englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud or not as the case might be, but there was no england as a separate entity from the sovereign who embodied it for the time being.[ ] but now an english people began to be dimly aware of itself. their having got a religion to themselves must have intensified them much as the having a god of their own did the jews. the exhilaration of relief after the long tension of anxiety, when the spanish armada was overwhelmed like the hosts of pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a provincial deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring into flower all that there was of imaginative or sentimental in the english nature, already just in the first flush of its spring. ("the yongë sonne had in _the bull_ half of his course yronne.") and just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of greece, rome, and italy. if keats could say, when he first opened chapman's homer,-- "then felt i like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise," if keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed with the results of this culture,--results that permeated all thought, all literature, and all talk,--fancy what must have been the awakening shock and impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation of this new world of thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of a great organ, which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders of tragedy, and its passionate _vox humana!_ it might almost seem as if shakespeare had typified all this in miranda, when she cries out at first sight of the king and his courtiers, "o, wonder! how many goodly creatures are there here! how beauteous mankind is! o, brave new world that hath such people in't!" the civil wars of the roses had been a barren period in english literature, because they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in which no great principles were involved which could shake all minds with controversy and heat them to intense conviction. a conflict of opposing ambitions wears out the moral no less than the material forces of a people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convictions may realize resources of character which before were only potential, may transform a merely gregarious multitude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible of the dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a common ideal. some such transformation had been wrought or was going on in england. for the first time a distinct image of her was disengaging itself from the tangled blur of tradition and association in the minds of her children, and it was now only that her great poet could speak exultingly to an audience that would understand him with a passionate sympathy, of "this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in a silver sea, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this england, this land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, england, bound in with the triumphant sea!" such a period can hardly recur again, but something like it, something pointing back to similar producing causes, is observable in the revival of english imaginative literature at the close of the last and in the early years of the present century. again, after long fermentation, there was a war of principles, again the national consciousness was heightened and stung by a danger to the national existence, and again there was a crop of great poets and heroic men. spenser once more visited england, bringing with him three more books of the "faery queen," in . he is supposed to have remained there during the two following years.[ ] in he had been married to the lady celebrated in his somewhat artificial _amoretti_. by her he had four children. he was now at the height of his felicity; by universal acclaim the first poet of his age, and the one obstacle to his material advancement (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by the death of lord burleigh, august, . in the next month he was recommended in a letter from queen elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county of cork. but alas for polycrates! in october the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for sparing the house of pindarus. they sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped.[ ] he sought shelter in london and died there on the th january, , at a tavern in king street, westminster. he was buried in the neighboring abbey next to chaucer, at the cost of the earl of essex, poets bearing his pall and casting verses into his grave. he died poor, but not in want. on the whole, his life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets must have commonly been. if they feel more passionately the pang of the moment, so also the compensations are incalculable, and not the least of them this very capacity of passionate emotion. the real good fortune is to be measured, not by more or less of outward prosperity, but by the opportunity given for the development and free play of the genius. it should be remembered that the power of expression which exaggerates their griefs is also no inconsiderable consolation for them. we should measure what spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the unavailing tears be shed for rosalind. a careful analysis of these leaves no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe that the passion itself was not much more real than the pastoral accessories of pipe and crook. i very much doubt whether spenser ever felt more than one profound passion in his life, and that luckily was for his "faery queen." he was fortunate in the friendship of the best men and women of his time, in the seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. all that we know of him is amiable and of good report. he was faithful to the friendships of his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his life. above all, the ideal with him was not a thing apart and unattainable, but the sweetener and ennobler of the street and the fireside. there are two ways of measuring a poet, either by an absolute aesthetic standard, or relatively to his position in the literary history of his country and the conditions of his generation. both should be borne in mind as coefficients in a perfectly fair judgment. if his positive merit is to be settled irrevocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism will find its advantage not only in considering what he was, but what, under the given circumstances, it was possible for him to be. the fact that the great poem of spenser was inspired by the orlando of ariosto, and written in avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost always needs to have his fancy set agoing by the hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to overlook his manifest claim to originality. it is not what a poet takes, but what he makes out of what he has taken, that shows what native force is in him. above all, did his mind dwell complacently in those forms and fashions which in their very birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively drawn to those qualities which are permanent in language and whatever is wrought in it? there is much in spenser that is contemporary and evanescent; but the substance of him is durable, and his work was the deliberate result of intelligent purpose and ample culture. the publication of his "shepherd's calendar" in (though the poem itself be of little interest) is one of the epochs in our literature. spenser had at least the originality to see clearly and to feel keenly that it was essential to bring poetry back again to some kind of understanding with nature. his immediate predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. it is true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so from italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of _keeping it up_ as long as they could. to my mind the old comedy of "gammer gurton's needle" is worth the whole of them. it may be coarse, earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at least a man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs. the form of spenser's "shepherd's calendar," it is true, is artificial, absurdly so if you look at it merely from the outside,--not, perhaps, the wisest way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a volume of the "congressional globe,"--but the spirit of it is fresh and original we have at last got over the superstition that shepherds and shepherdesses are any wiser or simpler than other people. we know that wisdom can be on only by wide commerce with men and books, and that simplicity, whether of manners or style, is the crowning result of the highest culture. but the pastorals of spenser were very different things, different both in the moving spirit and the resultant form from the later ones of browne or the "piscatory eclogues" of phinehas fletcher. and why? browne and fletcher wrote because spenser had written, but spenser wrote from a strong inward impulse--an instinct it might be called--to escape at all risks into the fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into which rhymer after rhymer had been pumping carbonic-acid gas with the full force of his lungs, and in which all sincerity was on the edge of suffocation. his longing for something truer and better was as honest as that which led tacitus so long before to idealize the germans, and rousseau so long after to make an angel of the savage. spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole chasm between himself and chaucer, as dante between himself and virgil. he called chaucer master, as milton was afterwards to call _him_. and, even while he chose the most artificial of all forms, his aim--that of getting back to nature and life--was conscious, i have no doubt, to himself, and must be obvious to whoever reads with anything but the ends of his fingers. it is true that sannazzaro had brought the pastoral into fashion again, and that two of spenser's are little more than translations from marot; but for manner he instinctively turned back to chaucer, the first and then only great english poet. he has given common instead of classic names to his personages, for characters they can hardly be called. above all, he has gone to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and freshen his poetical vocabulary.[ ] i look upon the "shepherd's calendar" as being no less a conscious and deliberate attempt at reform than thomson's "seasons" were in the topics, and wordsworth's "lyrical ballads" in the language of poetry. but the great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their matter as their manner. they show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto displayed by no english poet since chaucer. surrey had brought back from italy a certain inkling of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. but here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety, elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of men. if not passion, there was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the somewhat stately movement of spenser's mind would allow him to come. sidney had tried many experiments in versification, which are curious and interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the _sliding_ rhymes of sannazzaro in english. but there is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice hand. spenser shows himself already a master, at least in verse, and we can trace the studies of milton, a yet greater master, in the "shepherd's calendar" as well as in the "faery queen." we have seen that spenser, under the misleading influence of sidney[ ] and harvey, tried his hand at english hexameters. but his great glory is that he taught his own language to sing and move to measures harmonious and noble. chaucer had done much to vocalize it, as i have tried to show elsewhere,[ ] but spenser was to prove "that no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired for verse, and that sweet music to the ear struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this." the "shepherd's calendar" contains perhaps the most picturesquely imaginative verse which spenser has written. it is in the eclogue for february, where he tells us of the "faded oak whose body is sere, whose branches broke, whose naked arms stretch unto the fire." it is one of those verses that joseph warton would have liked in secret, that dr. johnson would have proved to be untranslatable into reasonable prose, and which the imagination welcomes at once without caring whether it be exactly conformable to _barbara_ or _celarent_. another pretty verse in the same eclogue, "but gently took that ungently came," pleased coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own. but in general it is not so much the sentiments and images that are new as the modulation of the verses in which they float. the cold obstruction of two centuries' thaws, and the stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. the service which spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is incalculable. his fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "ferrex and porrex" to the damascus pliancy of fletcher and shakespeare. it was he that "taught the dumb on high to sing, and heavy ignorance aloft to fly that added feathers to the learned's wing, and gave to grace a double majesty." i do not mean that in the "shepherd's calendar" he had already achieved that transmutation of language and metre by which he was afterwards to endow english verse with the most varied and majestic of stanzas, in which the droning old alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a feeling of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder, like m. jourdain, that he had been talking prose all his life,--but already he gave clear indications of the tendency and premonitions of the power which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfection. a harmony and alacrity of language like this were unexampled in english verse:-- "ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook do bathe your breast, forsake your watery bowers and hither look at my request.... and eke you virgins that on parnass dwell, whence floweth helicon, the learned well, help me to blaze her worthy praise, which in her sex doth all excel." here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal and slow, as befits an invocation; and now mark how the same feet shall be made to quicken their pace at the bidding of the tune:-- "bring here the pink and purple columbine, with gilliflowers; bring coronations and sops in wine, worne of paramours; strow me the ground with daffadowndillies, and cowslips and kingcúps and loved lilies; the pretty paunce and the chevisance shall match with the fair flowërdelice."[ ] the argument prefixed by e.k. to the tenth eclogue has a special interest for us as showing how high a conception spenser had of poetry and the poet's office. by cuddy he evidently means himself, though choosing out of modesty another name instead of the familiar colin. "in cuddy is set forth the perfect pattern of a poet, which finding no maintenance of his state and studies, complaineth of the contempt of poetry and the causes thereof, specially having been in all ages, and even amongst the most barbarous, always of singular account and honor, _and being indeed so worthy and commendable an art, or rather no art, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labor and learning, but adorned with both, and poured into the wit by a certain enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration_, as the author hereof elsewhere at large discourseth in his book called the english poet, which book being lately come into my hands, i mind also by god's grace, upon further advisement, to publish." e. k., whoever he was, never carried out his intention, and the book is no doubt lost; a loss to be borne with less equanimity than that of cicero's treatise _de gloria_, once possessed by petrarch. the passage i have italicized is most likely an extract, and reminds one of the long-breathed periods of milton. drummond of hawthornden tells us, "he [ben jonson] hath by heart some verses of spenser's 'calendar,' about wine, between coline and percye" (cuddie and piers).[ ] these verses are in this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having the approval of dear old ben, the best critic of the day, and because they are a good sample of spenser's earlier verse:-- "thou kenst not, percie, how the rhyme should rage; o, if my temples were distained with wine, and girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine, how i could rear the muse on stately stage and teach her tread aloft in buskin fine with quaint bellona in her equipage!" in this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious style which was to distinguish him, and which, like his own fame, "with golden wings aloft doth fly above the reach of ruinous decay, and with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky, admired of base-born men from far away."[ ] he was letting his wings grow, as milton said, and foreboding the "faery queen":-- "lift thyself up out of the lowly dust * * * * * "to 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts and helms unbruised waxen daily brown: there may thy muse display her fluttering wing, and stretch herself at large from east to west." verses like these, especially the last (which dryden would have liked), were such as english ears had not yet heard, and curiously prophetic of the maturer man. the language and verse of spenser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help being poetical. it was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm that forthwith won for spenser his never-disputed rank as the chief english poet of that age, and gave him a popularity which, during his life and in the following generation, was, in its select quality, without a competitor. it may be thought that i lay too much stress on this single attribute of diction. but apart from its importance in his case as showing their way to the poets who were just then learning the accidence of their art and leaving them a material to work in already mellowed to their hands, it should be remembered that it is subtle perfection of phrase and that happy coalescence of music and meaning, where each reinforces the other, that define a man as poet and make all ears converts and partisans. spenser was an epicure in language. he loved "seld-seen costly" words perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of seeming association. he had not the concentrated power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the little room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather for dilatation than compression.[ ] but he was, with the exception of milton and possibly gray, the most learned of our poets. his familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy and intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the grand manner and high bred ways of the society he frequented. but even to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity of phrase that was habitual with the generation that preceded him. in the fifth book of the "faery queen," where he is describing the passion of britomart at the supposed infidelity of arthegall, he descends to a teniers-like realism,[ ]--he whose verses generally remind us of the dancing hours of guido, where we catch but a glimpse of the real earth and that far away beneath. but his habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and refined luxury. he shows his mature hand in the "muiopotmos," the most airily fanciful of his poems, a marvel for delicate conception and treatment, whose breezy verse seems to float between a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable sunshine. no other english poet has found the variety and compass which enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch. it can hardly be doubted that in clarion the butterfly he has symbolized himself, and surely never was the poetic temperament so picturesquely exemplified:-- "over the fields, in his frank lustiness, and all the champain o'er, he soared light, and all the country wide he did possess, feeding upon their pleasures bounteously, that none gainsaid and none did him envy. "the woods, the rivers, and the meadows green, with his air-cutting wings he measured wide, nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen, nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried; but none of these, however sweet they been, mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide; his choiceful sense with every change doth flit; no common things may please a wavering wit. "to the gay gardens his unstaid desire him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights; there lavish nature, in her best attire, pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights, and art, with her contending doth aspire, to excel the natural with made delights; and all that fair or pleasant may be found, in riotous excess doth there abound. "there he arriving, round about doth flie, from bed to bed, from one to the other border, and takes survey with curious busy eye, of every flower and herb there set in order, now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly, yet none of them he rudely doth disorder, ne with his feet their silken leaves displace, but pastures on the pleasures of each place. "and evermore with most variety and change of sweetness (for all change is sweet) he casts his glutton sense to satisfy, now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet, or of the dew which yet on them doth lie, now in the same bathing his tender feet; and then he percheth on some branch thereby to weather him and his moist wings to dry. "and then again he turneth to his play, to spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise; the wholesome sage, the lavender still gray, rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes, the roses reigning in the pride of may, sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme, sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime, "cool violets, and orpine growing still, embathed balm, and cheerful galingale, fresh costmary and breathful camomill, dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale, vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill, sound savory, and basil hearty-hale, fat coleworts and comforting perseline, cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine.[ ] "and whatso else of virtue good or ill, grew in this garden, fetched from far away, of every one he takes and tastes at will, and on their pleasures greedily doth prey; then, when he hath both played and fed his fill, in the warm sun he doth himself embay, and there him rests in riotous suffisance of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance. "what more felicity can fall to creature than to enjoy delight with liberty, and to be lord of all the works of nature? to reign in the air from earth to highest sky, to feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, to take whatever thing doth please the eye? who rests not pleased with such happiness, well worthy he to taste of wretchedness." the "muiopotmos" pleases us all the more that it vibrates in us a string of classical association by adding an episode to ovid's story of arachne. "talking the other day with a friend (the late mr. keats) about dante, he observed that whenever so great a poet told us anything in addition or continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as classical authority. for instance, said he, when he tells us of that characteristic death of ulysses, ... we ought to receive the information as authentic, and be glad that we have more news of ulysses than we looked for."[ ] we can hardly doubt that ovid would have been glad to admit this exquisitely fantastic illumination into his margin. no german analyzer of aesthetics has given us so convincing a definition of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. "to reign in the air" was certainly spenser's function. and yet the commentators, who seem never willing to let their poet be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not been so, they would have lost their only hold upon life, try to make out from his "mother hubberd's tale" that he might have been a very sensible matter of-fact man if he would. for my own part, i am quite willing to confess that i like him none the worse for being _un_practical, and that my reading has convinced me that being too poetical is the rarest fault of poets. practical men are not so scarce, one would think, and i am not sure that the tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted and left it nothing but ship-timber. such men as spenser are not sent into the world to be part of its motive power. the blind old engine would not know the difference though we got up its steam with attar of roses, nor make one revolution more to the minute for it. what practical man ever left such an heirloom to his countrymen as the "faery queen"? undoubtedly spenser wished to be useful and in the highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and milton calls him "our sage and serious poet, whom i dare be known to think a better teacher than scotus or aquinas." and good dr. henry more was of the same mind. i fear he makes his vices so beautiful now and then that we should not be very much afraid of them if we chanced to meet them; for he could not escape from his genius, which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract contemplation of the beautiful, left him as poet open to every impression of sensuous delight. when he wrote the "shepherd's calendar" he was certainly a puritan, and probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or thought of personal interests. there is a verse, it is true, in the second of the two detached cantos of "mutability," "like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace," which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and from which it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. it is very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. but with the more generous side of puritanism i think he sympathized to the last. his rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in "mother hubberd's tale," published in .[ ] there is an iconoclastic relish in his account of sir guyon's demolishing the bower of bliss that makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered abbeys as perhaps shakespeare did when he speaks of the winter woods as "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang";-- "but all those pleasant bowers and palace brave guyon broke down with rigor pitiless, ne ought their goodly workmanship might save them from the tempest of his wrathfulness, but that their bliss he turned to balefulness; their groves he felled, their gardens did deface, their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress, their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase, and of the fairest late now made the foulest place." but whatever may have been spenser's religious opinions (which do not nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was toward a platonic mysticism, a supramundane sphere where it could shape universal forms out of the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to put up with their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay. he who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to the real world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether:-- "lifting himself out of the lowly dust on golden plumes up to the purest sky." nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as in his hymns to love and beauty, especially the latter. there is an exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. i shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately coherent and transcendentally logical poems that "moveth altogether if it move at all," the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals. whatever there is of sentiment and passion is for the most part purely disembodied and without sex, like that of angels,--a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion, whether to our gain or not may be questioned. perhaps one may venture to hint that the animal instincts are those that stand in least need of stimulation. spenser's notions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not to disqualify him for achieving the quest of the holy grail, and accordingly it is not uninstructive to remember that he had drunk, among others, at french sources not yet deboshed with _absinthe_.[ ] yet, with a purity like that of thrice-bolted snow, he had none of its coldness. he is, of all our poets, the most truly sensuous, using the word as milton probably meant it when he said that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate." a poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and illumines his senses; when they, on the other hand, muddy the mind, he becomes sensual. every one of spenser's senses was as exquisitely alive to the impressions of material, as every organ of his soul was to those of spiritual beauty. accordingly, if he painted the weeds of sensuality at all, he could not help making them "of glorious feature." it was this, it may be suspected, rather than his "praising love," that made lord burleigh shake his "rugged forehead." spenser's gamut, indeed, is a wide one, ranging from a purely corporeal delight in "precious odors fetched from far away" upward to such refinement as "upon her eyelids many graces sate under the shadow of her even brows," where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. he is court-painter in ordinary to each of the senses in turn, and idealizes these frail favorites of his majesty king lusty juventus, till they half believe themselves the innocent shepherdesses into which he travesties them.[ ] in his great poem he had two objects in view: first the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that of recommending himself to the permanent approval of his own and following ages as a poet, and especially as a moral poet. to meet the first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in contemporary england, and brings in all the leading personages of the day under the thin disguise of his knights and their squires and lady-loves. he says this expressly in the prologue to the second book:-- "of faery land yet if he more inquire, by certain signs, here set in sundry place, he may it find; ... and thou, o fairest princess under sky, in this fair mirror mayst behold thy face and thine own realms in land of faery." many of his personages we can still identify, and all of them were once as easily recognizable as those of mademoiselle de scudéry. this, no doubt, added greatly to the immediate piquancy of the allusions. the interest they would excite may be inferred from the fact that king james, in , wished to have the author prosecuted and punished for his indecent handling of his mother, mary queen of scots, under the name of duessa.[ ] to suit the wider application of his plan's other and more important half, spenser made all his characters double their parts, and appear in his allegory as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities. when the cardinal and theological virtues tell dante, "noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle," the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp, to swallow without solution the problem of being in two places at the same time. but there is something fairly ludicrous in such a duality as that of prince arthur and the earl of leicester, arthegall and lord grey, and belphoebe and elizabeth. "in this same interlude it doth befall that i, one snout by name, present a wall." the reality seems to heighten the improbability, already hard enough to manage. but spenser had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as wordsworth,[ ] or he could never have carried his poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he did. it is evident that to him the land of faery was an unreal world of picture and illusion, "the world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil," in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with its shortcomings and failures. "the ways through which my weary steps i guide in this delightful land of faery are so exceeding spacious and wide, and sprinkled with such sweet variety of all that pleasant is to ear and eye, that i, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight, my tedious travail do forget thereby, and, when i 'gin to feel decay of might, it strength to me supplies, and cheers my dullëd spright." spenser seems here to confess a little weariness; but the alacrity of his mind is so great that, even where his invention fails a little, we do not share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the musical felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. in this last quality ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as bologna to venice in the comparison. that, when the personal allusions have lost their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book should continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be. as a narrative it has, i think, every fault of which that kind of writing is capable. the characters are vague, and, even were they not, they drop out of the story so often and remain out of it so long, that we have forgotten who they are when we meet them again; the episodes hinder the advance of the action instead of relieving it with variety of incident or novelty of situation; the plot, if plot it may be called, "that shape has none distinguishable in member, joint, or limb," recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the metrical romance; while the fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously sincere, is between shadow and shadow, where we know that neither can harm the other, though are tempted to wish he might. hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do not meddle with it. but how if it bore us, which after all is the fatal question? the truth is that it is too often forced upon us against our will, as people were formerly driven to church till they began to look on a day of rest as a penal institution, and to transfer to the scriptures that suspicion of defective inspiration which was awakened in them by the preaching. the true type of the allegory is the odyssey, which we read without suspicion as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he meant to give us. but this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to prevent our lapsing into the old arabian nights simplicity of interest again. the moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of giotto, and are reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet. the vast superiority of bunyan over spenser lies in the fact that we help make his allegory out of our own experience. instead of striving to embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his own in all their pathetic simplicity. he is the ulysses of his own prose-epic. this is the secret of his power and his charm, that, while the representation of what may happen to all men comes home to none of us in particular, the story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us. the very homeliness of bunyan's names and the everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical beings as we might be with adam or socrates in a dream. indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at setting out that the story was of a dream. the long nights of bedford jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind become _things_, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them. but spenser's are too often mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered on the muses' musterroll by the specious trick of personification. there is likewise, in bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted which win our confidence. his giant despair,[ ] for example, is by no means the ossianic figure into which artists who mistake the vague for the sublime have misconceived it. he is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with his malicious wife; and he comes forth to us from those regions of early faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by the imagination. these figures of bunyan's are already familiar inmates of the mind, and, if there be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness of his verisimilitude. spenser's giants are those of the later romances, except that grand figure with the balances in the second canto of book v., the most original of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure eidolon of the mind. as bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, to unmistakable prose. take his description of the house of alma,[ ] for instance:-- "the master cook was cald concoctiön, a careful man, and full of comely guise; the kitchen-clerk, that hight digestion, did order all the achates in seemly wise." and so on through all the organs of the body. the author of ecclesiastes understood these matters better in that last pathetic chapter of his, blunderingly translated as it apparently is. this, i admit, is the worst failure of spenser in this kind; though, even here, when he gets on to the organs of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and style come to the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such visionary damsels as ambition and shamefastness. nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of prosopopoeia which half beguiles us as of children who _play_ that everything is something else, and are quite satisfied with the transformation. the problem for spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate trifling,[ ] and how he, master edmund spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend _his_ poetry to master john bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his soul. _omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_ was not only an irrefragable axiom because a latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. he would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show master bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. allegory, as then practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial purpose. such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he proceeded to put forth; but he so bordered it with bright-colored fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the grimani missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its adornment. worse than all, does not his brush linger more lovingly along the rosy contours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of the wise virgins? "the general end of the book," he tells us in his dedication to sir walter raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." but a little further on he evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had interpreted his promise of cuts: "to some i know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large,[ ] as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices." lord burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but how could poor clarion help it? has he not said, "and whatso else, _of virtue good or ill,_ grew in that garden, fetcht from far away, of every one he takes and tastes at will, and on their pleasures greedily doth prey"? one sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure sense of the beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might interpret it to our duller perceptions so exquisite was his sensibility,[ ] that with him sensation and intellection seem identical, and we "can almost say his body thought." this subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. he is full of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet associate it with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call sensibility by the physical name of heart. charles lamb made the most pithy criticism of spenser when he called him the poets' poet. we may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming, but because it was the only wear. the true use of him is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them. he makes one think always of venice; for not only is his style venetian,[ ] but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. and again, as at venice you swim in a gondola from gian bellini to titian, and from titian to tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from picture to picture. "if all the pens that ever poet held had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts, and every sweetness that inspired their hearts their minds and muses on admired themes, if all the heavenly quintessence they still from their immortal flowers of poesy, if these had made one poem's period, and all combined in beauty's worthiness; yet should there hover in their restless heads one thought, one grace, one wonder at the best, which into words no virtue can digest."[ ] spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this unattainable something as any other poet. he is so purely poet that with him the meaning does not so often modulate the music of the verse as the music makes great part of the meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant paths. no poet is so splendidly superfluous as he; none knows so well that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a beggarly parsimony. he spends himself in a careless abundance only to be justified by incomes of immortal youth. "pensier canuto nè molto nè poco si può quivi albergare in alcun cuore; non entra quivi disagio nè inopia, ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la copia."[ ] this delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of spenser appear in the very structure of his verse. he found the _ottava rima_ too monotonously iterative; so, by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the let from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow. there is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on the shores of the adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. in all this there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. by the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become languorous. he knew how to make it rapid and passionate at need, as in such verses as, "but he, my lion, and my noble lord, how does he find in cruel heart to hate her that him loved and ever most adored as the god of my life? why hath he me abhorred?"[ ] or this, "come hither, come hither, o, come hastily!"[ ] joseph warton objects to spenser's stanza, that its "constraint led him into many absurdities." of these he instances three, of which i shall notice only one, since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for words and rhymes) will hardly seem valid to any one who knows the poet. it is that it "obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however unimportant with trifling and tedious circumlocutions, namely, faery queen, ii. ii. :-- "'now hath fair phoebe with her silver face thrice seen the shadows of this nether world, sith last i left that honorable place, in which her royal presence is enrolled.' "that is, it is three months since i left her palace."[ ] but dr. warton should have remembered (what he too often forgets in his own verses) that, in spite of dr. johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and that verse only loses its advantage over the latter by invading its province.[ ] verse itself is an absurdity except as an expression of some higher movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift other minds to the same ideal level. it is the cothurnus which gives language an heroic stature. i have said that one leading characteristic of spenser's style was its spaciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than compresses. but his way of measuring time was perfectly natural in an age when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as now. he is the last of the poets, who went (without affectation) by the great clock of the firmament. dante, the miser of words, who goes by the same timepiece, is full of these roundabout ways of telling us the hour. it had nothing to do with spenser's stanza, and i for one should be sorry to lose these stately revolutions of the _superne ruote_. time itself becomes more noble when so measured; we never knew before of how precious a commodity we had the wasting. who would prefer the plain time of day to this? "now when aldebaran was mounted high above the starry cassiopeia's chair"; or this? "by this the northern wagoner had set his seven-fold team behind the steadfast star that was in ocean's waves yet never wet, but firm is fixt and sendeth light from far to all that in the wide deep wandering are"; or this? "at last the golden oriental gate of greatest heaven gan to open fair, and phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair and hurls his glistening beams through dewy air." the generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more or less as of no account, is in keeping with that sense of endless leisures which it is one chief merit of the poem to suggest. but spenser's dilatation extends to thoughts as well as to phrases and images. he does not love the concise. yet his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of natural growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest stick of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. here is one of his, suggested by homer:[ ] "upon the top of all his lofty crest a bunch of hairs discolored diversly, with sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest, did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity; like to an almond-tree mounted high on top of green selinus all alone with blossoms brave bedeckëd daintily, whose tender locks do tremble every one at every little breath that under heaven is blown." and this is the way he reproduces five pregnant verses of dante:-- "seggendo in piume in fama non si vien, nè sotto coltre, senza la qual chi sua vita consuma, cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia qual fumo in aere ed in acqua la schiuma."[ ] "whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she, does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss, does waste his days in dark obscurity and in oblivion ever buried is; where ease abounds it's eath to do amiss: but who his limbs with labors and his mind behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss. abroad in arms, at home in studious kind, who seeks with painful toil shall honor soonest find. "in woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell, and will be found with peril and with pain, ne can the man that moulds in idle cell unto her happy mansiön attain; before her gate high god did sweat ordain, and wakeful watches ever to abide; but easy is the way and passage plain to pleasure's palace; it may soon be spied, and day and night her doors to all stand open wide."[ ] spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-room. his thoughts are never pithily expressed, but with a stately and sonorous proclamation, as if under the open sky, that seems to me very noble. for example,-- "the noble heart that harbors virtuous thought and is with child of glorious-great intent can never rest until it forth have brought the eternal brood of glory excellent."[ ] one's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. and here is a passage which milton had read and remembered:-- "and is there care in heaven? and is there love in heavenly spirits to these creatures base, that may compassion of their evils move? there is: else much more wretched were the case of men than beasts: but o, the exceeding grace of highest god, that loves his creatures so, and all his works with mercy doth embrace, that blessed angels he sends to and fro, to serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe! "how oft do they their silver bowers leave, to come to succor us that succor want! how oft do they with golden pinions cleave the fleeting skies like flying pursuivant, against foul fiends to aid us militant! they for us fight, they watch and duly ward, and their bright squadrons round about us plant; and all for love and nothing for reward; o, why should heavenly god to men have such regard?"[ ] his natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. he loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily. so entirely are beauty and delight in it the native element of spenser, that, whenever in the "faery queen" you come suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream. he is the most fluent of our poets. sensation passing through emotion into revery is a prime quality of his manner. and to read him puts one in the condition of revery, a state of mind in which our thoughts and feelings float motionless, as one sees fish do in a gentle stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to keep themselves from going down with the current, while their bodies yield indolently to all its soothing curves. he chooses his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning. to characterize his style in a single word, i should call it _costly_. none but the daintiest and nicest phrases will serve him, and he allures us from one to the other with such cunning baits of alliteration, and such sweet lapses of verse, that never any word seems more eminent than the rest, nor detains the feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to the end before you have time to stop and muse over the wealth that has been lavished on you. but he has characterized and exemplified his own style better than any description could do:-- "for round about the walls yclothed were with goodly arras of great majesty, woven with gold and silk so close and near that the rich metal lurked privily as faining to be hid from envious eye; yet here and there and everywhere, unwares it showed itself and shone unwillingly like to a discolored snake whose hidden snares through the green grass his long bright-burnished back declares."[ ] and of the lulling quality of his verse take this as a sample:-- "and, more to lull him in his slumber soft, a trickling stream from high rock tumbling down and ever drizzling rain upon the loft, mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soun of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon. no other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries, as still are wont to annoy the walled town, might there be heard: but careless quiet lies wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies."[ ] in the world into which spenser carries us there is neither time nor space, or rather it is outside of and independent of them both, and so is purely ideal, or, more truly, imaginary; yet it is full of form, color, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if not real, yet apprehensible by the senses. there are no men and women in it, yet it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that have the likeness of men and women, and hint at some kind of foregone reality. now this place, somewhere between mind and matter, between soul and sense, between the actual and the possible, is precisely the region which spenser assigns (if i have rightly divined him) to the poetic susceptibility of impression,-- "to reign in the air from the earth to highest sky." underneath every one of the senses lies the soul and spirit of it, dormant till they are magnetized by some powerful emotion. then whatever is imperishable in us recognizes for an instant and claims kindred with something outside and distinct from it, yet in some inconceivable way a part of it, that flashes back on it an ideal beauty which impoverishes all other companionship. this exaltation with which love sometimes subtilizes the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the joy of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in it, would appear to have been the normal condition of spenser. while the senses of most men live in the cellar, his "were laid in a large upper chamber which opened toward the sunrising." "his birth was of the womb of morning dew, and his conception of the joyous prime." the very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more than one of them?) have a way, i admit, of getting within our inmost consciousness and in a manner betraying us to ourselves. there is in spenser a remoteness very different from this, but it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable, perhaps quite as wholesome in certain moods when we are glad to get away from ourselves and those importunate trifles which we gravely call the realities of life. in the warm mediterranean of his mind everything "suffers a sea change into something rich and strange." he lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an ideal distance where no mortal, i had almost said human, fleck is visible. instead of the ordinary bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an epithalamion fit for a conscious goddess, and the "savage soil"[ ] of ireland becomes a turf of arcady under her feet, where the merchants' daughters of the town are no more at home than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan mythology whom they meet there. he seems to have had a common-sense side to him, and could look at things (if we may judge by his tract on irish affairs) in a practical and even hard way; but the moment he turned toward poetry he fulfilled the condition which his teacher plato imposes on poets, and had not a particle of prosaic understanding left. his fancy, habitually moving about in worlds not realized, unrealizes everything at a touch. the critics blame him because in his prothalamion the subjects of it enter on the thames as swans and leave it at temple gardens as noble damsels; but to those who are grown familiar with his imaginary world such a transformation seems as natural as in the old legend of the knight of the swan. "come now ye damsels, daughters of delight, help quickly her to dight: but first come ye, fair hours, which were begot in jove's sweet paradise of day and night, ... and ye three handmaids of the cyprian queen, the which do still adorn her beauty's pride, help to adorn my beautifulest bride. * * * * * "crown ye god bacchus with a coronal, and hymen also crown with wreaths of vine, and let the graces dance unto the rest,-- for they can do it best. the whiles the maidens do their carols sing, to which the woods shall answer and their echo ring." the whole epithalamion is very noble, with an organ-like roll and majesty of numbers, while it is instinct with the same joyousness which must have been the familiar mood of spenser. it is no superficial and tiresome merriment, but a profound delight in the beauty of the universe and in that delicately surfaced nature of his which was its mirror and counterpart. sadness was alien to him, and at funerals he was, to be sure, a decorous mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a temperament; but his condolences are graduated to the unimpassioned scale of social requirement. even for sir philip sidney his sighs are regulated by the official standard. it was in an unreal world that his affections found their true object and vent, and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he had never known that he puts into the mouth of a husband whom he has evaporated into a shepherd, the two most naturally pathetic verses he ever penned:-- "i hate the day because it lendeth light to see all things, but not my love to see."[ ] in the epithalamion there is an epithet which has been much admired for its felicitous tenderness:-- "behold, whiles she before the altar stands, hearing the holy priest that to her speakes and blesseth her with his two _happy_ hands." but the purely impersonal passion of the artist had already guided him to this lucky phrase. it is addressed by holiness--a dame surely as far abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can readily conceive of--to una, who, like the visionary helen of dr. faustus, has every charm of womanhood, except that of being alive as juliet and beatrice are. "o happy earth, whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread!"[ ] can we conceive of una, the fall of whose foot would be as soft as that of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen,--can we conceive of her treading anything so sordid? no; it is only on some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks securely, herself a dream. and it is only when spenser has escaped thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied his wife till she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagination as the other ideal images with which he converses, that his feeling becomes as nearly passionate--as nearly human, i was on the point of saying--as with him is possible. i am so far from blaming this idealizing property of his mind, that i find it admirable in him. it is his quality, not his defect. without some touch of it life would be unendurable prose. if i have called the world to which he transports us a world of unreality, i have wronged him. it is only a world of unrealism. it is from pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and inch-long politics that he emancipates us, and makes us free of that to-morrow, always coming and never come, where ideas shall reign supreme.[ ] but i am keeping my readers from the sweetest idealization that love ever wrought:-- "unto this place whenas the elfin knight approached, him seemëd that the merry sound of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height, and many feet fast thumping the hollow ground, that through the woods their echo did rebound; he nigher drew to wit what it mote be. there he a troop of ladies dancing found full merrily and making gladful glee; and in the midst a shepherd piping he did see. "he durst not enter into the open green for dread of them unwares to be descried, for breaking of their dance, if he were seen; but in the covert of the wood did bide beholding all, yet of them unespied; there he did see that pleased so much his sight that even he himself his eyes envied, a hundred naked maidens lily-white, all ranged in a ring and dancing in delight. "all they without were ranged in a ring, and danced round; but in the midst of them three other ladies did both dance and sing, the while the rest them round about did hem, and like a garland did in compass stem. and in the midst of these same three was placed another damsel, as a precious gem amidst a ring most richly well enchased, that with her goodly presence all the rest much graced. "look how the crown which ariadne wove upon her ivory forehead that same day, that theseus her unto his bridal bore, (when the bold centaurs made that bloody fray, with the fierce lapithes, that did them dismay) being now placëd in the firmament, through the bright heaven doth her beams display, and is unto the stars an ornament, which round about her move in order excellent; "such was the beauty of this goodly band, whose sundry parts were here too long to tell, but she that in the midst of them did stand, seemed all the rest in beauty to excel, crowned with a rosy garland that right well did her beseem. and, ever as the crew about her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell, and fragrant odors they upon her threw; but most of all those three did her with gifts endue. "those were the graces, daughters of delight, handmaids of venus, which are wont to haunt upon this hill and dance there, day and night; those three to men all gifts of grace do grant and all that venus in herself doth vaunt is borrowed of them; but that fair one that in the midst was placed paravant, was she to whom that shepherd piped alone, that made him pipe so merrily, as never none. "she was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass which pipëd there unto that merry rout; that jolly shepherd that there pipëd was poor colin clout; (who knows not colin clout?) he piped apace while they him danced about; pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace, unto thy love that made thee low to lout; thy love is present there with thee in place, thy love is there advanced to be another grace."[ ] is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles with simple delight as this? it is a sky of italian april full of sunshine and the hidden ecstasy of larks. and we like it all the more that it reminds us of that passage in his friend sidney's _arcadia_, where the shepherd-boy pipes "as if he would never be old." if we compare it with the mystical scene in dante,[ ] of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost like a bit of real life; but taken by itself it floats as unconcerned in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset cloud. the sound of that pastoral pipe seems to come from as far away as thessaly when apollo was keeping sheep there. sorrow, the great idealizer, had had the portrait of beatrice on her easel for years, and every touch of her pencil transfigured the woman more and more into the glorified saint. but elizabeth nagle was a solid thing of flesh and blood, who would sit down at meat with the poet on the very day when he had thus beatified her. as dante was drawn upward from heaven to heaven by the eyes of beatrice, so was spenser lifted away from the actual by those of that ideal beauty whereof his mind had conceived the lineaments in its solitary musings over plato, but of whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses had already premonished him. the intrusion of the real world upon this supersensual mood of his wrought an instant disenchantment:-- "much wondered calidore at this strange sight whose like before his eye had never seen, and, standing long astonished in sprite and rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween, whether it were the train of beauty's queen, or nymphs, or fairies, or enchanted show with which his eyes might have deluded been, therefore resolving what it was to know, out of the woods he rose and toward them did go. "but soon as he appearëd to their view they vanished all away out of his sight and clean were gone, which way he never knew, all save the shepherd, who, for fell despite of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite." ben jonson said that "he had consumed a whole night looking to his great toe, about which he had seen tartars and turks, romans and carthaginians, fight in his imagination"; and coleridge has told us how his "eyes made pictures when they were shut" this is not uncommon, but i fancy that spenser was more habitually possessed by his imagination than is usual even with poets. his visions must have accompanied him "in glory and in joy" along the common thoroughfares of life and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more real than the men and women he met there. his "most fine spirit of sense" would have tended to keep him in this exalted mood. i must give an example of the sensuousness of which i have spoken :-- "and in the midst of all a fountain stood of richest substance that on earth might be, so pure and shiny that the crystal flood through every channel running one might see; most goodly it with curious imagery was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys, of which some seemed with lively jollity to fly about, playing their wanton toys, whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys. "and over all, of purest gold was spread a trail of ivy in his native hue; for the rich metal was so colorëd that he who did not well avised it view would surely deem it to be ivy true; low his lascivious arms adown did creep that themselves dipping in the silver dew their fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep, which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep. "infinite streams continually did well out of this fountain, sweet and fair to see, the which into an ample laver fell, and shortly grew to so great quantity that like a little lake it seemed to be whose depth exceeded not three cubits' height, that through the waves one might the bottom see all paved beneath with jasper shining bright, that seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright. "and all the margent round about was set with shady laurel-trees, thence to defend the sunny beams which on the billows bet, and those which therein bathed mote offend. as guyou happened by the same to wend two naked damsels he therein espied, which therein bathing seemed to contend and wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide their dainty parts from view of any which them eyed. "sometimes the one would lift the other quite above the waters, and then down again her plunge, as overmasterëd by might, where both awhile would coverëd remain, and each the other from to rise restrain; the whiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil, so through the crystal waves appeared plain: then suddenly both would themselves unhele, and the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal. "as that fair star, the messenger of morn, his dewy face out of the sea doth rear; or as the cyprian goddess, newly born of the ocean's fruitful froth, did first appear; such seemed they, and so their yellow hear crystalline humor dropped down apace. whom such when guyon saw, he drew him near, and somewhat gan relent his earnest pace; his stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace. "the wanton maidens him espying, stood gazing awhile at his unwonted guise; then the one herself low duckéd in the flood, abashed that her a stranger did avise; but the other rather higher did arise, and her two lily paps aloft displayed, and all that might his melting heart entice to her delights, she unto him bewrayed; the rest, hid underneath, him more desirous made. "with that the other likewise up arose, and her fair locks, which formerly were bound up in one knot, she low adown did loose, which flowing long and thick her clothed around, and the ivory in golden mantle gowned: so that fair spectacle from him was reft, yet that which reft it no less fair was found; so hid in locks and waves from lookers' theft, naught but her lovely face she for his looking left. "withal she laughëd, and she blushed withal, that blushing to her laughter gave more grace, and laughter to her blushing, as did fall. * * * * * "eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound, of all that mote delight a dainty ear, such as at once might not on living ground, save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere: right hard it was for wight which did it hear to read what manner music that mote be; for all that pleasing is to living ear was there consorted in one harmony; birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree. "the joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade, their notes unto the voice attempered sweet; the angelical soft trembling voices made to the instruments divine respondence mete; the silver-sounding instruments did meet with the base murmur of the water's fall; the water's fall with difference discreet, now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call; the gentle warbling wind low answerëd to all." spenser, in one of his letters to harvey, had said, "why, a god's name, may not we, as else the greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?" this is in the tone of bellay, as is also a great deal of what is said in the epistle prefixed to the "shepherd's calendar." he would have been wiser had he followed more closely bellay's advice about the introduction of novel words: "fear not, then, to innovate somewhat, particularly in a long poem, with modesty, however, with analogy, and judgment of ear; and trouble not thyself as to who may think it good or bad, hoping that posterity will approve it,--she who gives faith to doubtful, light to obscure, novelty to antique, usage to unaccustomed, and sweetness to harsh and rude things." spenser's innovations were by no means always happy, as not always according with the genius of the language, and they have therefore not prevailed. he forms english words out of french or italian ones, sometimes, i think, on a misapprehension of their true meaning; nay, he sometimes makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion of romance on a teutonic root. his theory, caught from bellay, of rescuing good archaisms from unwarranted oblivion, was excellent; not so his practice of being archaic for the mere sake of escaping from the common and familiar. a permissible archaism is a word or phrase that has been supplanted by something less apt, but has not become unintelligible; and spenser's often needed a glossary, even in his own day.[ ] but he never endangers his finest passages by any experiments of this kind. there his language is living, if ever any, and of one substance with the splendor of his fancy. like all masters of speech, he is fond of toying with and teasing it a little; and it may readily be granted that he sometimes "hunted the letter," as it was called, out of all cry. but even where his alliteration is tempted to an excess, its prolonged echoes caress the ear like the fading and gathering reverberations of an alpine horn, and one can find in his heart to forgive even such a debauch of initial assonances as "eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, more swift than swallow shears the liquid sky." generally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, reminding us of the arrangement of voices in an ancient catch, where one voice takes up the phrase another has dropped, and thus seems to give the web of harmony a firmer and more continuous texture. other poets have held their mirrors up to nature, mirrors that differ very widely in the truth and beauty of the images they reflect; but spenser's is a magic glass in which we see few shadows cast back from actual life, but visionary shapes conjured up by the wizard's art from some confusedly remembered past or some impossible future; it is like one of those still pools of mediaeval legend which covers some sunken city of the antique world; a reservoir in which all our dreams seem to have been gathered. as we float upon it, we see that it pictures faithfully enough the summer-clouds that drift over it, the trees that grow about its margin, but in the midst of these shadowy echoes of actuality we catch faint tones of bells that seem blown to us from beyond the horizon of time, and looking down into the clear depths, catch glimpses of towers and far-shining knights and peerless dames that waver and are gone. is it a world that ever was, or shall be, or can be, or but a delusion? spenser's world, real to him, is real enough for us to take a holiday in, and we may well be content with it when the earth we dwell on is so often too real to allow of such vacations. it is the same kind of world that petrarca's laura has walked in for five centuries with all ears listening for the music of her footfall. the land of spenser is the land of dream, but it is also the land of rest. to read him is like dreaming awake, without even the trouble of doing it yourself, but letting it be done for you by the finest dreamer that ever lived, who knows how to color his dreams like life and make them move before you in music. they seem singing to you as the sirens to guyon, and we linger like him:-- "o, thou fair son of gentle faery that art in mighty arms most magnified above all knights that ever battle tried, o, turn thy rudder hitherward awhile, here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride, this is the port of rest from troublous toil, the world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.[ ] "with that the rolling sea, resounding swift in his big bass, them fitly answered, and on the rock the waves, breaking aloft, a solemn mean unto them measured, the whiles sweet zephyrus loud whisteled his treble, a strange kind of harmony which guyon's senses softly tickeled that he the boatman bade row easily and let him hear some part of their rare melody." despite spenser's instinctive tendency to idealize, and his habit of distilling out of the actual an ethereal essence in which very little of the possible seems left, yet his mind, as is generally true of great poets, was founded on a solid basis of good-sense. i do not know where to look for a more cogent and at the same time picturesque confutation of socialism than in the second canto of the fifth book. if i apprehend rightly his words and images, there is not only subtile but profound thinking here. the french revolution is prefigured in the well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and rousseau's fallacies exposed two centuries in advance. spenser was a conscious englishman to his inmost fibre, and did not lack the sound judgment in politics which belongs to his race. he was the more english for living in ireland, and there is something that moves us deeply in the exile's passionate cry:-- "dear country! o how dearly dear ought thy remembrance and perpetual band be to thy foster-child that from thy hand did common breath and nouriture receive! how brutish is it not to understand how much to her we owe that all us gave, that gave unto us all whatever good we have!" his race shows itself also where he tells us that "chiefly skill to ride seems a science proper to gentle blood," which reminds one of lord herbert of cherbury's saying that the finest sight god looked down on was a fine man on a fine horse. wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, tells us that the "faery queen" "faded before" sylvester's translation of du bartas. but wordsworth held a brief for himself in this case, and is no exception to the proverb about men who are their own attorneys. his statement is wholly unfounded. both poems, no doubt, so far as popularity is concerned, yielded to the graver interests of the civil war. but there is an appreciation much weightier than any that is implied in mere popularity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured by the kind as well as the amount of influence it exerts. spenser has _coached_ more poets and more eminent ones than any other writer of english verse. i need say nothing of milton, nor of professed disciples like browne, the two fletchers, and more. oowley tells us that he became "irrecoverably a poet" by reading the "faery queen" when a boy. dryden, whose case is particularly in point because he confesses having been seduced by du bartas, tells us that spenser had been his master in english. he regrets, indeed, comically enough, that spenser could not have read the rules of bossu, but adds that "no man was ever born with a greater genius or more knowledge to support it." pope says, "there is something in spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. i read the _faery queen_ when i was about twelve with a vast deal of delight; and i think it gave me as much when i read it over about a year or two ago." thomson wrote the most delightful of his poems in the measure of spenser; collins, gray, and akenside show traces of him; and in our own day his influence reappears in wordsworth, byron, shelley, and keats. landor is, i believe, the only poet who ever found him tedious. spenser's mere manner has not had so many imitators as milton's, but no other of our poets has given an impulse, and in the right direction also, to so many and so diverse minds; above all, no other has given to so many young souls a consciousness of their wings and a delight in the use of them. he is a standing protest against the tyranny of commonplace, and sows the seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the dull uses to which it may be put. three of spenser's own verses best characterize the feeling his poetry gives us:-- "among wide waves set like a little nest," "wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies," "the world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil." we are wont to apologize for the grossness of our favorite authors sometimes by saying that their age was to blame and not they; and the excuse is a good one, for often it is the frank word that shocks us while we tolerate the thing. spenser needs no such extenuations. no man can read the "faery queen" and be anything but the better for it. through that rude age, when maids of honor drank beer for breakfast and hamlet could say a gross thing to ophelia, he passes serenely abstracted and high, the don quixote of poets. whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the "faery queen." there is the land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter. footnotes: [ ] though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the word in that generalized meaning which is common now, but which could not without an impossible anachronism have been present to his mind. he meant merely freedom from prison. [ ] in his "defence of poesy" he condemns the archaisms and provincialisms of the "shepherd's calendar." [ ] "there is, as you must have heard wordsworth point out, a language of pure, intelligible english, which was spoken in chaucer's time, and is spoken in ours; equally understood then and now; and of which the bible is the written and permanent standard, as it has undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it." (southey's life and correspondence, iii. , .) [ ] nash, who has far better claims than swift to be called the english rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies harvey's hexameters in prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt stamford and beechneld, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." it was a happy thought to satirize (in this inverted way) prose written in the form of verse. [ ] edmund bolton in his _hypercritica_ says, "the works of sam daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and copious english, and words as warrantable as any man's, and _fitter perhaps for prose than measure_." i have italicized his second thought, which chimes curiously with the feeling daniel leaves in the mind. (see haslewood's ancient crit. essays, vol. ii.) wordsworth, an excellent judge, much admired daniel's poem to the countess of cumberland. [ ] mr. hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on the strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet. but it is not established that this sonnet was written in , and even if it were, a sonnet is not upon oath, and the poet would prefer the round number forty, which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty-nine or forty-one, which might have been truer to the measure of his days. [ ] this has been inferred from a passage in one of gabriel harvey's letters to him. but it would seem more natural, from the many allusions in harvey's pamphlets against nash, that it was his own wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption would take it for granted that spenser sympathized with him in all his grudges. harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining influence of classical studies. amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction remind us of landor. these lucid intervals in his overweening vanity explain and justify the friendship of spenser. yet the reiteration of emphasis with which he insists on all the world's knowing that nash had called him an ass, probably gave shakespeare the hint for one of the most comic touches in the character of dogberry. [ ] the late major c. g. halpine, in a very interesting essay, makes it extremely probable that rosalinde is the anagram of rose daniel, sister of the poet and married to john florio he leaves little doubt, also, that the name of spenser's wife (hitherto unknown) was elizabeth nagle. (see "atlantic monthly," vol ii november, .) mr. halpine informed me that he found the substance of his essay among the papers of his father, the late rev. n. j. halpine, of dublin. the latter published in the series of the shakespeare society a sprightly little tract entitled "oberon," which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for its ingenuity and research. [ ] in his prose tract on ireland, spenser, perhaps with some memory of ovid in his mind, derives the irish mainly from the scythians. [ ] compare shakespeare's lxvi. sonnet. [ ] this poem, published in , was, spenser tells us in his dedication, "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth." but he had evidently retouched it. the verses quoted show a firmer hand than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that they were added after his visit to england. dr. johnson epigrammatized spenser's indictment into "there mark what ills the scholar's life assail, toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail," but i think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point. [ ] paradiso, xi. - spenser was familiar with the "divina commedia," though i do not remember that his commentators have pointed out his chief obligations to it. [ ] his own words as reported by lodowick bryskett. (todd's spenser, i. lx.) the whole passage is very interesting as giving us the only glimpse we get of the living spenser in actual contact with his fellow-men. it shows him to us, as we could wish to see him, surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful. bryskett tells us that he was "perfect in the greek tongue," and "also very well read in philosophy both moral and natural." he encouraged bryskett in the study of greek, and offered to help him in it. comparing the last verse of the above citation of the "faery queen" with other passages in spenser, i cannot help thinking that he wrote, "do not love amiss." [ ] "and know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know, that 'tis not in the power of kings to raise a spirit for verse that is not born thereto; nor are they born in every prince's days" _daniel's dedic trag. of "philotas."_ [ ] louis xiv. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to have created french literature. he may more truly be said to have petrified it so far as his influence went. the french _renaissance_ in the preceding century was produced by causes similar in essentials to those which brought about that in england not long after. the _grand siècle_ grew by natural processes of development out of that which had preceded it, and which, to the impartial foreigner at least, has more flavor, and more french flavor too, than the gallo-roman usurper that pushed it from its stool. the best modern french poetry has been forced to temper its verses in the colder natural springs of the ante-classic period. [ ] in the elizabethan drama the words "england" and "france" we constantly used to signify the kings of those countries. [ ] i say supposed, for the names of his two sons, sylvanus and peregrine, indicate that they were born in ireland, and that spenser continued to regard it as a wilderness and his abode there as exile. the two other children are added on the authority of a pedigree drawn up by sir w. betham and cited in mr. hales's life of spenser prefixed to the globe edition. [ ] ben jonson told drummond that one child perished in the flames. but he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course, from hearsay. spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public. giles fletcher in his "purple island" (a poem which reminds us of the "faery queen" by the supreme tediousness of its allegory, but in nothing else) set the example in the best verse he ever wrote:-- "poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died." gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as authentic history. spenser could never have been poor, except by comparison. the whole story of his later days has a strong savor of legend. he must have had ample warning of tyrone's rebellion, and would probably have sent away his wife and children to cork, if he did not go thither himself. i am inclined to think that he did, carrying his papers with him, and among them the two cantos of mutability, first published in . these, it is most likely, were the only ones he ever completed, for, with all his abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. when we remember that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first three books, and that five more elapsed before the next three were ready, we shall waste no vain regrets on the six concluding books supposed to have been lost by the carelessness of an imaginary servant on their way from ireland. [ ] sir philip sidney did not approve of this. "that same framing of his style to an old rustic language i dare not allow, since neither theocritus in greek, virgil in latin, nor sannazzaro in italian did affect it." ("defence of poesy.") ben jonson, on the other hand, said that guarini "kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could." ("conversations with drummond.") i think sidney was right, for the poets' arcadia is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly. but whoever looks into the glossary appended to the "calendar" by e.k., will be satisfied that spenser's object was to find unhackneyed and poetical words rather than such as should seem more on a level with the speakers. see also the "epistle dedicatory." i cannot help thinking that e.k. was spenser himself, with occasional interjections of harvey. who else could have written such english as many passages in this epistle? [ ] it was at penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has come down to us, and bad enough it is. i have said that some of sidney's are pleasing. [ ] see "my study windows," _seqq_. [ ] of course _dillies_ and _lilies_ must be read with a slight accentuation of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to chime with _delice_. in the first line i have put _here_ instead of _hether_, which (like other words where _th_ comes between two vowels) was then very often a monosyllable, in order to throw the accent back more strongly on _bring_, where it belongs. spenser's innovation lies in making his verses by ear instead of on the finger-tips, and in valuing the stave more than any of the single verses that compose it. this is the secret of his easy superiority to all others in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name. milton (who got more of his schooling in these matters from spenser than anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and applied it with more various mastery. i have little doubt that the tune of the last stanza cited above was clinging in shakespeare's ear when he wrote those exquisite verses in "midsummer night's dream" ("i know a bank"), where our grave pentameter is in like manner surprised into a lyrical movement. see also the pretty song in the eclogue for august. ben jonson, too, evidently caught some cadences from spenser for his lyrics. i need hardly say that in those eclogues (may, for example) where spenser thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call the _riding-rhyme_ of chaucer, he fails most lamentably. he had evidently learned to scan his master's verses better when he wrote his "mother hubberd's tale." [ ] drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes cuddy to be colin. in milton's "lycidas" there are reminiscences of this eclogue as well as of that for may. the latter are the more evident, but i think that spenser's "cuddie, the praise is better than the price," suggested milton's "but not the praise, phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears." shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. compare "but, ah, mecaenas is yclad in clay, and great augustus long ago is dead, and all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead," with "king pandion, he is dead; all thy friends are lapt in lead." it is odd that shakespeare, in his "lapt in lead," is more spenserian than spenser himself, from whom he caught this "hunting of the letter." [ ] "ruins of time." it is perhaps not considering too nicely to remark how often this image of _wings_ recurred to spenser's mind. a certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings of his style. [ ] perhaps his most striking single epithet is the "sea-shouldering whales," b. ii , xxiii. his ear seems to delight in prolongations for example, he makes such words as _glorious_, _gratious_, _joyeous_, _havior_, _chapelet_ dactyles, and that, not at the end of verses, where it would not have been unusual, but in the first half of them. milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it were) in the uniformity of his verse by a practice exactly the opposite of this. he also shuns a _hiatus_ which does not seem to have been generally dipleasing to spenser's ear, though perhaps in the compound epithet _bees-alluring_ he intentionally avoids it by the plural form. [ ] "like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep is broken with some fearful dream's affright, with froward will doth set himself to weep ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might, but kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight, now scratching her and her loose locks misusing, now seeking darkness and now seeking light, then craving suck, and then the suck refusing." he would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example of homer's comparing ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the illiad. so also in the "epithalamion" it grates our nerves to hear, "pour not by cups, but by the bellyful, pour out to all that wull." such examples serve to show how strong a dose of spenser's _aurum potabile_ the language needed. [ ] i could not bring myself to root out this odorous herb-garden, though it make my extract too long. it is a pretty reminiscence of his master chaucer, but is also very characteristic of spenser himself. he could not help planting a flower or two among his serviceable plants, and after all this abundance he is not satisfied, but begins the next stanza with "and whatso _else_." [ ] leigh hunt's indicator, xvii. [ ] ben jonson told drummond "that in that paper sir w. raleigh had of the allegories of his faery queen, by the blatant beast the puritans were understood." but this is certainly wrong. there were very different shades of puritanism, according to individual temperament. that of winthrop and higginson had a mellowness of which endicott and standish were incapable the gradual change of milton's opinions was similar to that which i suppose in spenser. the passage in mother hubberd may have been aimed at the protestant clergy of ireland (for he says much the same thing in his "view of the state of ireland"), but it is general in its terms. [ ] two of his eclogues, as i have said, are from marot, and his earliest known verses are translations from bellay, a poet who was charming whenever he had the courage to play truant from a bad school. we must not suppose that an analysis of the literature of the _demi-monde_ will give us all the elements of the french character. it has been both grave and profound; nay, it has even contrived to be wise and lively at the same time, a combination so incomprehensible by the teutonic races that they have labelled it levity. it puts them out as nature did fuseli. [ ] taste must be partially excepted. it is remarkable how little eating and drinking there is in the "faery queen." the only time he fairly sets a table is in the house of malbecco, where it is necessary to the conduct of the story. yet taste is not wholly forgotten:-- "in her left hand a cup of gold she held, and with her right the riper fruit did reach, whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld, into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach of her fine fingers without foul impeach, that so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet." b. ii c. xii. . taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment! [ ] had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his friend raleigh's saying, that "whosoever in writing modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth." the passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in the "faery queen." spenser was copying ariosto; but the italian poet, with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generalities. spenser goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. he did this, no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, mary's rival; and this gives us a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary manner. it becomes only the more marvellous that the fine flower of his genius could have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and sweetness which are its own peculiar properties. [ ] there is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of "mother hubberd's tale," where the fox, persuading the ape that they should disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the more successfully, says,-- "be you the soldier, for you likest are for manly semblance _and small skill in war."_ [ ] bunyan probably took the hint of the giants suicidal offer of "knife, halter, or poison," from spenser's "swords, ropes, poison," in faery queen, b. i. c. ix. . [ ] book ii. c. . [ ] see sidney's "defence," and puttenham's "art of english poesy," book i. c. . [ ] we can fancy how he would have done this by jeremy taylor, who was a kind of spenser in a cassock. [ ] of this he himself gives a striking hint, when speaking in his own person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the passionate cry, "ah, dearest god, me grant i dead be not defouled." _faery queen_, b. i. c. x. . [ ] was not this picture painted by paul veronese, for example? "arachne figured how jove did abuse europa like a bull, and on his back her through the sea did bear: ... she seemed still back unto the land to look, and her playfellows' aid to call, and fear the dashing of the waves, that up she took her dainty feet, and garments gathered near.... before the bull she pictured winged love, with his young brother sport, ... and many nymphs about them flocking round, and many tritons which their horns did sound." _muiopotmos_, - . spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the "commonwealth and government of venice" ( ) with this beautiful verse, "fair venice, flower of the last world's delight." perhaps we should read "lost"? [ ] marlowe's "tamburlaine," part i. act v. . [ ] grayheaded thought, nor much nor little, may take up its lodging here in any heart; unease nor lack can enter at this door; but here dwells full-horned plenty evermore. _orl. fur._, e. vi. . [ ] b. i. c. iii. . leigh hunt, one of the most sympathetic of critics, has remarked the passionate change from the third to the first person in the last two verses. [ ] b. ii. c. viii. . [ ] observations on faery queen, vol. i pp. , . mr. hughes also objects to spenser's measure, that it is "closed always by a fullstop, in the same place, by which every stanza is made as it were a distinct paragraph." (todd's spenser, ii. xli.) but he could hardly have read the poem attentively, for there are numerous instances to the contrary. spenser was a consummate master of versification, and not only did marlowe and shakespeare learn of him, but i have little doubt that, but for the "faery queen," we should never have had the varied majesty of milton's blank verse. [ ] as where dr. warton himself says:-- "how nearly had my spirit past, till stopt by metcalf's skilful hand, to death's dark regions wide and waste and the black river's mournful strand, or to," etc., to the end of the next stanza. that is, i had died but for dr. metcalf 's boluses. [ ] iliad, xvii. _seqq_. referred to in upton's note on faery queen, b. i. c. vii. . into what a breezy couplet trailing off with an alexandrine has homer's [greek: pnoiai pantoion anemon] expanded! chaplin unfortunately has slurred this passage in his version, and pope _tittivated_ it more than usual in his. i have no other translation at hand. marlowe was so taken by this passage in spenser that he put it bodily into his _tamburlaine_. [ ] inferno, xxiv. - . "for sitting upon down, or under quilt, one cometh not to fame, withouten which whoso his life consumeth such vestige leaveth of himself on earth as smoke in air or in the water foam." _longfellow._ it shows how little dante was read during the last century that none of the commentators on spenser notice his most important obligations to the great tuscan. [ ] faery queen, b. ii. c. iii. , . [ ] ibid., b. i. c. v. . [ ] ibid., b. ii. c. viii. , . [ ] b. iii. c. xi. . [ ] b. i. c. i. . [ ] this phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the earl of ormond and in that to lord grey de wilton in the series prefixed to the "faery queen". these sonnets are of a much stronger build than the "amoretti", and some of them (especially that to sir john norris) recall the firm tread of milton's, though differing in structure. [ ] daphnaida, , . [ ] faery queen, b. i. c. x. . [ ] strictly taken, perhaps his world is not _much_ more imaginary than that of other epic poets, homer (in the iliad) included. he who is familiar with mediaeval epics will be extremely cautious in drawing inferences as to contemporary manners from homer. he evidently _archaizes_ like the rest. [ ] faery queen, b. vi. c. x. - . [ ] purgatorio, xxix., xxx. [ ] i find a goodly number of yankeeisms in him, such as _idee_ (not as a rhyme); but the oddest is his twice spelling _dew deow_, which is just as one would spell it who wished to phonetize its sound in rural new england. [ ] this song recalls that in dante's purgatorio (xix. -- ), in which the italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements. browne's beautiful verses ("turn, hither turn your winged pines") were suggested by these of spenser. it might almost seem as if spenser had here, in his usual way, expanded the sweet old verses:-- "merry sungen the monks binnen ely when knut king rew thereby; 'roweth knightes near the loud, that i may hear these monkes song.'" wordsworth. a generation has now passed away since wordsworth was laid with the family in the churchyard at grasmere.[ ] perhaps it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as a poet. to do this is especially hard for those who are old enough to remember the last shot which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics which began when he published his manifesto as pretender, and which came to a pause rather than end when they flung up their caps with the rest at his final coronation. something of the intensity of the _odium theologicum_ (if indeed the _aestheticum_ be not in these days the more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. the wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are liable. the verses of the master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant of zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded criticism. like the hymns of the huguenots and covenanters, they were songs of battle no less than of worship, and the combined ardors of conviction and conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their own. as we read them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of them, and whatever of dr. wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock of disenchantment. it is something like the difference between the _marseillaise_ sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or by brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of thérèse. it was natural in the early days of wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly on those profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in some sort the measure of a man's right to judge of poetry at all. but now we must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less essential elements in forming a sound judgment as to whether the seer and artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in by himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the few great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction and safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while insensibly helping them toward balance of character and serenity of judgment by stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice adjustment of means to ends. in none of our poets has the constant propulsion of an unbending will, and the concentration of exclusive, if i must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies done so much to make the original endowment of nature effective, and in none accordingly does the biography throw so much light on the works, nor enter so largely into their composition as an element whether of power or of weakness. wordsworth never saw, and i think never wished to see, beyond the limits of his own consciousness and experience. he early conceived himself to be, and through life was confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he was, a "dedicated spirit,"[ ] a state of mind likely to further an intense but at the same time one-sided development of the intellectual powers. the solitude in which the greater part of his mature life was passed, while it doubtless ministered to the passionate intensity of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any standard of proportion outside himself by which to test the comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone without lessening individuality. wordsworth never quite saw the distinction between the eccentric and the original. for what we call originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything odd, but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. the poet's office is to be a voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the throng of men and lifting their common aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. we cannot, if we would, read the poetry of wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. the world-old question of matter and form of whether nectar _is_ of precisely the same flavor when served to us from a grecian chalice or from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. the teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to any shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of sense. wordsworth never lets us long forget the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben dà lui_. * * * * * william wordsworth was born at cockermouth in cumberland on the th of april, , the second of five children. his father was john wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of sir james lowther, afterwards first earl of lonsdale. his mother was anne cookson, the daughter of a mercer in penrith. his paternal ancestors had been settled immemorially at penistone in yorkshire, whence his grandfather had emigrated to westmoreland. his mother, a woman, of piety and wisdom, died in march, , being then in her thirty-second year. his father, who never entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death, survived her but five years, dying in december, , when william was not quite fourteen years old. the poet's early childhood was passed partly at cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grandfather at penrith. his first teacher appears to have been mrs. anne birkett, a kind of shenstone's schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not endeavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from natural logicians into impertinent sophists. among his schoolmates here was mary hutchinson, who afterwards became his wife. in he was sent to a school founded by edwin sandys, archbishop of york, in the year , at hawkshead in lancashire. hawkshead is a small market-town in the vale of esthwaite, about a third of a mile northwest of the lake. here wordsworth passed nine years, among a people of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. his earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native district, and the associations with which his mind was stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. the boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus enjoying a freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing but beneficial in a place where the temptations were only to sports that hardened the body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit and habits of observation in the mind. wordsworth's ordinary amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing, skating, and long walks around the lake and among the hills, with an occasional scamper on horseback.[ ] his life as a school-boy was favorable also to his poetic development, in being identified with that of the people among whom he lived. among men of simple habits, and where there are small diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are displayed with less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal human basis of character where the muse finds firm foothold, and to which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying drift of conventionalism. the dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more picturesque time. a common level of interests and social standing fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human sympathies. solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its own resources, and individuality of character. where everybody knew everybody, and everybody's father had known everybody's father, the interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distant report when death knocked at any door in the hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropt its white flowers at every threshold. there was not a grave in the churchyard but had its story, not a crag or glen or aged tree untouched with some ideal hue of legend it was here that wordsworth learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and sincerity to his poems. travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the deep trace of that early training which enables him to speak directly to the primitive instincts of man. he was apprenticed early to the difficult art of being himself. at school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master, and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any peculiar merit. but he seems to have made up his mind as early as in his fourteenth year to become a poet.[ ] "it is recorded," says his biographer vaguely, "that the poet's father set him very early to learn portions of the best english poets by heart, so that at an early age he could repeat large portions of shakespeare, milton, and spenser."[ ] the great event of wordsworth's school days was the death of his father, who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of claims upon the first earl of lonsdale, the payment of which, though their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. in october, , he left school for st. john's college, cambridge. he was already, we are told, a fair latin scholar, and had made some progress in mathematics. the earliest books we hear of his reading were don quixote, gil blas, gulliver's travels, and the tale of a tub; but at school he had also become familiar with the works of some english poets, particularly goldsmith and gray, of whose poems he had learned many by heart. what is more to the purpose, he had become, without knowing it, a lover of nature in all her moods, and the same mental necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also studious of the movements of his own mind, and the mutual interaction and dependence of the external and internal universe. doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in confirming a character naturally impatient of control, and his mind, left to itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. it has become a truism, that remarkable persons have remarkable mothers; but perhaps this is chiefly true of such as have made themselves distinguished by their industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of faculties in themselves of only an average quality. it is rather to be noted how little is known of the parentage of men of the first magnitude, how often they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early an apparently adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to encounter and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences. of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is characteristic. he himself tells us that he was "stiff, moody, and of violent temper." his mother said of him that he was the only one of her children about whom she felt any anxiety,--for she was sure that he would be remarkable for good or evil. once, in resentment at some fancied injury, he resolved to kill himself but his heart failed him. i suspect that few boys of passionate temperament have escaped these momentary suggestions of despairing helplessness. "on another occasion," he says, "while i was at my grandfather's house at penrith, along with my eldest brother richard we were whipping tops together in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down on particular occasions. the walls were hung round with family pictures, and i said to my brother, 'dare you strike your whip through that old lady's petticoat?' he replied, 'no, i won't.' 'then,' said i, 'here goes,' and i struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which, no doubt, though i have forgotten it, i was properly punished. but, possibly from some want of judgment in punishments inflicted, i had become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it than otherwise." this last anecdote is as happily typical as a bit of greek mythology which always prefigured the lives of heroes in the stories of their childhood. just so do we find him afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punishment of the reviewers. of his college life the chief record is to be found in "the prelude." he did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life. he speaks of reading chaucer, spenser, and milton while at cambridge,[ ] but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest published poems. the greater part of his vacations was spent in his native lake-country, where his only sister, dorothy, was the companion of his rambles. she was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and tendency of the poet's mind. it was she who called forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. she was his first public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early solitude of original minds with messages from the future. through the greater part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to him. wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon the continent ( ). in january, , he took his degree of b.a., and left cambridge. during the summer of this year he visited wales, and, after declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was not of age for ordination, went over to france in november, and remained during the winter at orleans. here he became intimate with the republican general beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he ardently sympathized. in the spring of he was at blois, and returned thence to orleans, which he finally quitted in october for paris. he remained here as long as he could with safety, and at the close of the year went back to england, thus, perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after overtook his friends the brissotins. as hitherto the life of wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period of his stay in france. born and reared in a country where the homely and familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime forms of nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative faculty can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds and waters, but he had known man only as an actor in fireside histories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage. in france he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart; he was a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall of the eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action; and he saw man such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm of a national emotion. he sympathized with the hopes of france and of mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young man and a poet; and if his faith in the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and his reverence for the human as something quite apart from the popular and above it. wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. but it was inevitable that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in religion. he reads the poems of wordsworth without understanding, who does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal liberty possible and assures its permanence. he was to make men better by opening to them the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing them that these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. his politics were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events. the change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was complete soon after his return from france, and was perhaps due in part to the influence of burke. "while he [burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth, against all systems built on abstract rights, keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims of institutes and laws hallowed by time; declares the vital power of social ties endeared by custom; and with high disdain, exploding upstart theory, insists upon the allegiance to which men are born. .... could a youth, and one in ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved under the weight of classic eloquence, sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?"[ ] he had seen the french for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. he became a tory through intellectual conviction, retaining, i suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. haydon tells us that in sir george beaumont said to him and wilkie, "wordsworth may perhaps walk in; if he do i caution you both against his terrific democratic notions"; and it must have been many years later that wordsworth himself told crabb eobinson, "i have no respect whatever for whigs, but i have a great deal of the chartist in me." in , during his tour in scotland, he travelled on sundays as on the other days of the week.[ ] he afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer. "wordsworth defended earnestly the church establishment. he even said he would shed his blood for it. nor was he disconcerted by a laugh raised against him on account of his having confessed that he knew not when he had been in a church in his own country. 'all our ministers are so vile,' said he. the mischief of allowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the multitude he thought more than outweighed all the evils of an establishment."[ ] in december, , wordsworth had returned to england, and in the following year published "descriptive sketches" and the "evening walk." he did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that, although he had gained no honors at the university, he _could_ do something. they met with no great success, and he afterward corrected them so much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile productions, without communicating to them any of the merits of maturity. in commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these poems,-- "and, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,"-- he says: "this is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but i recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... the moment was important in my poetical history; for i date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as i was acquainted with them, and i made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency." it is plain that wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. the more distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in retrospection. how far could wordsworth at fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his dying day could not endure to read goethe and knew nothing of calderon? it seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable in him is that of goldsmith, and later of cowper, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its having already begun that his first volume of "descriptive sketches" ( ) was put forth by johnson, who was cowper's publisher. by and by the powerful impress of burns is seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression. but whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the eighteenth century. "the first verses from which he remembered to have received great pleasure were miss carter's 'poem on spring,' a poem in the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed much in,--for example, 'ruth.'" this is noteworthy, for wordsworth's lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always narrow. his sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. we cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm us in our elizabethan drama and whose last warble died with herrick; but shelley, tennyson, and browning have shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable, even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall. we feel this lack in wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such verses as "like an army defeated the snow hath retreated and now doth fare ill on the top of the bare hill," with goethe's exquisite _ueber allen gipfeln ist ruh_, in which the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf. "the evening walk" and "descriptive sketches" show plainly the prevailing influence of goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the mechanism of the verse. they lack altogether the temperance of tone and judgment in selection which have made the "traveller" and the "deserted village," perhaps, the most truly classical poems in the language. they bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of the maturer wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. of this realism, from which wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may suffice as a specimen. after describing the fate of a chamois-hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved wife and son:-- "haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze, passing his father's bones in future days, start at the reliques of that very thigh on which so oft he prattled when a boy." in these poems there is plenty of that "poetic diction" against which wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later. "to wet the peak's impracticable sides he opens of his feet the sanguine tides, weak and more weak the issuing current eyes lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies." both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which byron made fashionable not long after. nor are there wanting touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from wordsworth.[ ] "farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade rest near their little plots of oaten glade, those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire to throw the 'sultry ray' of young desire; those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow; those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed, and rising by the moon of passion swayed." the political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he changes "despot courts" into "tyranny." one of the alterations is interesting. in the "evening walk" he had originally written "and bids her soldier come her wars to share asleep on minden's charnel hill afar." an _erratum_ at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:-- "asleep on bunker's charnel hill afar."[ ] wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful bird. he had himself done so in the "evening walk," and corrects his epithets to suit his later judgment, putting "gladsome" for "boding," and replacing "the tremulous sob of the complaining owl" by "the sportive outcry of the mocking owl." indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading anachronism. but there is one truly wordsworthian passage which already gives us a glimpse of that passion with which he was the first to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with turner. "'tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour all day the floods a deepening murmur pour: the sky is veiled and every cheerful sight; dark is the region as with coming night; but what a sudden burst of overpowering light! triumphant on the bosom of the storm, glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form; eastward, in long prospective glittering shine the wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, at once to pillars turned that flame with gold; behind his sail the peasant tries to shun the west that burns like one dilated sun, where in a mighty crucible expire the mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire." wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the worse, by substituting "glorious" (which was already implied in "glances" and "fire-clad") for "wheeling." in later life he would have found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline over a lake. on the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of poesy. during the same year ( ) he wrote, but did not publish, a political tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had without a revolution. he probably continued to be all his life in favor of that ideal republic "which never was on laud or sea," but fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his own nobler calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which he found freedom enough in england as it was.[ ] dr. wordsworth admits that his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as . i suspect that they remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. he had himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great landholder, and he was born and bred in a part of england where there is a greater social equality than elsewhere. the look and manner of the cumberland people especially are such as recall very vividly to a new-englander the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from new england to new ireland had begun. but meanwhile, want, which makes no distinctions of monarchist or republican, was pressing upon him. the debt due to his father's estate had not been paid, and wordsworth was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first duty of a friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his neighbor. he at first proposed establishing a periodical journal to be called "the philanthropist," but luckily went no further with it, for the receipts from an organ of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. there being no appearance of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists, he tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. here also it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too great to be merged in the editorial we, and had too well defined a private opinion on all subjects to be able to express that average of public opinion which constitutes able editorials. but so it is that to the prophet in the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the wing with food from heaven; and while wordsworth's relatives were getting impatient at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare attorney that was lost in him,[ ] the prescient muse guided the hand of raisley calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a legacy of £ . by the death of calvert, in , this timely help came to wordsworth at the turning point of his life and made it honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play bills, or leaders that led only to oblivion. in the autumn of wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at racedown lodge, near crewkerne, in dorsetshire. here nearly two years were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and wordsworth to some extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is consistent with a healthy productiveness. here coleridge, who had contrived to see something more in the "descriptive sketches" than the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. the sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like coleridge's supplied him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers it was now that the tragedy of "the borderers" was for the most part written, and that plan of the "lyrical ballads" suggested which gave wordsworth a clew to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entangled. it was agreed between the two young friends, that wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune uncommon to such conspiracies, nature had already consented to the arrangement. in july, , the two wordsworths removed to allfoxden in somersetshire, that they might be near coleridge, who in the mean while had married and settled himself at nether-stowey. in november "the borderers" was finished, and wordsworth went up to london with his sister to offer it for the stage. the good genius of the poet again interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and wordsworth went back to allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so common to young authors. the play has fine passages, but is as unreal as jane eyre. it shares with many of wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. applied to the drama, such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables them for being characters. wordsworth seems to have felt this when he published "the borderers" in , and says in a note that it was "at first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage." but he was mistaken. the contemporaneous letters of coleridge to cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it accepted by some theatrical manager. he now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the "lyrical ballads" for the press, and it was published toward the close of . the book, which contained also "the ancient mariner" of coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part contemptuous. when mr. cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his copyrights to mr. longman, that of the "lyrical ballads" was reckoned at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. a few persons were not wanting however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.[ ] lord byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would have thought the sunrise tedious. if we may believe his biographer, wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself in-famous, for the publication of the "lyrical ballads" undoubtedly raised him to the distinction of being the least popular poet in england. parnassus has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. wordsworth had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the man of talent insufferable. it mattered not to him though all the reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind him. he went quietly over to germany to write more lyrical ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time when there were only two men in the world (himself and coleridge) who were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by side, in the great pin-paper of society. in germany wordsworth dined in company with klopstock, and after dinner they had a conversation, of which wordsworth took notes. the respectable old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the chimney-corner, darby and joan like, with his respectable muse, seems to have been rather bewildered by the apparition of a living genius. the record is of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into wordsworth's mind. among other things he said, "that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs,"--memorable words, the more memorable that a literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them. it would be instructive to know what were wordsworth's studies during his winter in goslar. de quincey's statement is mere conjecture. it may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the german language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. the spinosism with which he has been not unjustly charged was certainly not due to any german influence, for it appears unmistakably in the "lines composed at tintern abbey" in july, . it is more likely to have been derived from his talks with coleridge in .[ ] when emerson visited him in , he spoke with loathing of "wilhelm meister," a part of which he had read in carlyle's translation apparently. there was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read smollett. on the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of goethe. his poem of the "thorn," though vastly more imaginative, may have been suggested by bürger's _pfarrer's tochter von taubenhain_. the little grave _drei spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement, certainly recalls a famous couplet in the english poem. after spending the winter at goslar, wordsworth and his sister returned to england in the spring of , and settled at grasmere in westmoreland. in , the first edition of the "lyrical ballads" being exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, mr. longman paying £ for the copyright of two editions. the book passed to a second edition in , and to a third in .[ ] wordsworth sent a copy of it, with a manly letter, to mr. fox, particularly recommending to his attention the poems "michael" and "the brothers," as displaying the strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of those domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under the influence of manufactories and poor houses. mr. fox wrote a civil acknowledgment, saying that his favorites among the poems were "harry gill," "we are seven," "the mad mother," and "the idiot," but that he was prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple subjects. any political significance in the poems he was apparently unable to see. to this second edition wordsworth prefixed an argumentative preface, in which he nailed to the door of the cathedral of english song the critical theses which he was to maintain against all comers in his poetry and his life. it was a new thing for an author to undertake to show the goodness of his verses by the logic and learning of his prose; but wordsworth carried to the reform of poetry all that fervor and faith which had lost their political object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater number of his readers. fifty years have since demonstrated that the true judgment of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false judgment, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a well-founded faith in himself. to this _defensio_ wordsworth afterward added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for philosophic statement and decorous english. their only ill effect has been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to set a sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were unsalable. the strength of an argument for self reliance drawn from the example of a great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who uses it; such arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion. an advertisement prefixed to the "lyrical ballads," as originally published in one volume, warned the reader that "they were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes_ of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." in his preface to the second edition, in two volumes, wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a little (perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of coleridge), and now says of the former volume that "it was published as an experiment which, i hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may _rationally endeavor_ to impart."[ ] here is evidence of a retreat towards a safer position, though wordsworth seems to have remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately to the passages of bald prose into which his original theory had betrayed him. in his opinions had undergone a still further change, and an assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that appeal to the understanding which is implied by the words "rationally endeavor to impart." in the preface of that year he says, "the observations prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was published many years ago under the title of 'lyrical ballads' have so little of special application to the greater part of the present enlarged and diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an introduction to it." it is a pity that he could not have become an earlier convert to coleridge's pithy definition, that "prose was words in their best order and poetry the _best_ words in the best order." but idealization was something that wordsworth was obliged to learn painfully. it did not come to him naturally as to spenser and shelley and to coleridge in his higher moods. moreover, it was in the too frequent choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a manifest jar between theme and treatment that wordsworth's great mistake lay. for example, in "the blind highland boy" he had originally the following stanzas:-- "strong is the current, but be mild, ye waves, and spare the helpless child! if ye in anger fret or chafe, a bee-hive would be ship as safe as that in which he sails. "but say, what was it? thought of fear! well may ye tremble when ye hear! --a household tub like one of those which women use to wash their clothes, this carried the blind boy." in endeavoring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the last stanza, wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest. any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality. but wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between fact, which suffocates the muse, and truth, which is the very breath of her nostrils. study and self-culture did much for him, but they never quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. he yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of "i've measured it from side to side, 't is three feet long and two feet wide." but i doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and sometimes so distasteful.[ ] "simon lee," after his latest revision, still contains verses like these:-- "and he is lean and he is sick; his body, dwindled and awry, rests upon ankles swollen and thick; his legs are thin and dry; * * * * * "few months of life he has in store, as he to you will tell, for still, the more he works, the more do his weak ankles swell,"-- which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the same fault for which wordsworth condemned dr. johnson's famous parody on the ballad-style,--that their "_matter_ is contemptible." the sonorousness of conviction with which wordsworth sometimes gives utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in unguarded moments. we are reminded of a passage in the "excursion":-- "list! i heard from yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat, sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_." in the friendship of wordsworth with lamb began, and was thenceforward never interrupted. he continued to live at grasmere, conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as ulysses. meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards him. in he made a short visit to france, in company with miss wordsworth, and soon after his return to england was married to mary hutchinson, on the th of october of the same year. of the good fortune of this marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else. on the th of june, , his first child, john, was born, and on the th of august of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot journey into scotland coleridge was their companion during a part of this excursion, of which miss wordsworth kept a full diary. in scotland he made the acquaintance of scott, who recited to him a part of the "lay of the last minstrel," then in manuscript. the travellers returned to grasmere on the th of september. it was during this year that wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent sir george beaumont began. sir george was an amateur painter of considerable merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to wordsworth in making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency of which was toward too great exclusiveness. sir george beaumont, dying in , did not forego his regard for the poet, but contrived to hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of £ , to defray the charges of a yearly journey. in march, , the poet's brother, john, lost his life by the shipwreck of the abergavenny east-indiaman, of which he was captain. he was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible to save him. wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it. the need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion may account for the great productiveness of this and the following year. he now completed "the prelude," wrote "the wagoner," and increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes, which were published in . this collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable odes to duty and on immortality, did not reach a second edition till . the reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they scoffed, particularly byron, among whose verses a bit of wordsworth showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on the back of some buccaneering plunderer of an abbey.[ ] there was a general combination to put him down, but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his favor, consisting of william wordsworth. he not only continued in good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such occasions, kept up the spirits of his friends.[ ] wordsworth passed the winter of - in a house of sir george beaumont's, at coleorton in leicestershire, the cottage at grasmere having become too small for his increased family. on his return to the vale of grasmere he rented the house at allan bank, where he lived three years. during this period he appears to have written very little poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a primary reason the smokiness of the allan bank chimneys. this will hardly account for the failure of the summer crop, especially as wordsworth composed chiefly in the open air. it did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon the convention of cintra, which was published too late to attract much attention, though lamb says that its effect upon him was like that which one of milton's tracts might have had upon a contemporary.[ ] it was at allan bank that coleridge dictated "the friend," and wordsworth contributed to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of mathetes[ ] (professor wilson), and the other on epitaphs, republished in the notes to "the excursion." here also he wrote his "description of the scenery of the lakes." perhaps a truer explanation of the comparative silence of wordsworth's muse during these years is to be found in the intense interest which he took in current events, whose variety, picturesqueness, and historical significance were enough to absorb all the energies of his imagination. in the spring of wordsworth removed to the parsonage at grasmere. here he remained two years, and here he had his second intimate experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, catharine and thomas, one of whom died th june, and the other st december, .[ ] early in he bought rydal mount, and, having removed thither, changed his abode no more during the rest of his life. in march of this year he was appointed distributor of stamps for the county of westmoreland, an office whose receipts rendered him independent, and whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample leisure for nobler duties. de quincey speaks of this appointment as an instance of the remarkable good luck which waited upon wordsworth through his whole life. in our view it is only another illustration of that scripture which describes the righteous as never forsaken. good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty. wordsworth owed his nomination to the friendly exertions of the earl of lonsdale, who desired to atone as far as might be for the injustice of the first earl, and who respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the originality of the poet.[ ] the collectorship at whitehaven (a more lucrative office) was afterwards offered to wordsworth, and declined. he had enough for independence, and wished nothing more. still later, on the death of the stamp-distributor for cumberland, a part of that district was annexed to westmoreland, and wordsworth's income was raised to something more than £ , a year. in he made his second tour in scotland, visiting yarrow in company with the ettrick shepherd. during this year "the excursion" was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied the demand for six years. another edition of the same number of copies was published in , and not exhausted till . in "the white doe of rylstone" appeared, and in "a letter to a friend of burns," in which wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be observed by the biographers of literary men. it contains many valuable suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to which he was constitutionally indifferent.[ ] nearly the same date may be ascribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the aeneid, a specimen of which was printed in the cambridge "philological museum" ( ). in "peter bell," written twenty years before, was published, and, perhaps in consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his previous volumes. "the wagoner," printed in the same year, was less successful. his next publication was the volume of sonnets on the river duddon, with some miscellaneous poems, . a tour on the continent in furnished the subjects for another collection, published in . this was followed in the same year by the volume of "ecclesiastical sketches." his subsequent publications were "yarrow revisited," , and the tragedy of "the borderers," . during all these years his fame was increasing slowly but steadily, and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the troops of friends which his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them deserved. public honors followed private appreciation. in the university of dublin conferred upon him the degree of d.c.l. in oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the university was enthusiastic. in he resigned his office of stamp-distributor, and sir robert peel had the honor of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of £ . in he was appointed laureate, with the express understanding that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be self-imposed. his only official production was an ode for the installation of prince albert as chancellor of the university of cambridge. his life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should seem, that he might receive that honor which he had truly conquered for himself by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of half a century, unparalleled for the scorn with which its labors were received, and the victorious acknowledgment which at last crowned them. surviving nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had, a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own posthumous renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its durability. he died on the d of april, , the anniversary of the death of shakespeare. we have thus briefly sketched the life of wordsworth,--a life uneventful even for a man of letters, a life like that of an oak, of quiet self development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. the life and growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are to be looked for, even more than is the case with most poets, in his works, for he deliberately recorded them there. of his personal characteristics little is related. he was somewhat above the middle height, but, according to de quincey, of indifferent figure, the shoulders being narrow and drooping. his finest feature was the eye, which was gray and full of spiritual light. leigh hunt says: "i never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural. they were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. one might imagine ezekiel or isaiah to have had such eyes." southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and haydon that he had none of form. the best likeness of him, in de quincey's judgment, is the portrait of milton prefixed to richardson's notes on paradise lost. he was active in his habits, composing in the open air, and generally dictating his poems. his daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations it is remarkable how little that was personal entered into his judgment of contemporaries. the true rank of wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of judgment uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the doors. coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost inevitable that wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgment was a rebel against the existing order, should become a partisan. unfortunately, he became not only the partisan of a system, but of william wordsworth as its representative. right in general principle, he thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. justly convinced that greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts too much to a system, mistook his own resentments for the promptings of his natural genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of his own temperament or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself artificial. if a poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his being merely peculiar. wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew older, from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[ ] but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the growth of his fame. he had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. he forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of something like mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented repose of implicit faith. to the child a watch seems to be a living creature; but wordsworth would not let his readers be children, and did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether creations which really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of genius, and were alive with nature's life of life, were not contrivances of wheels and springs. a naturalness which we are told to expect has lost the crowning grace of nature. the men who walked in cornelius agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but to a tree that has grown as god willed we come without a theory and with no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the imagination recreates for us its past summers and winters, the birds that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that have drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter. the imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by laying out paths with a peremptory _do not step off the gravel!_ at the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be caught. but if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and permanent effect of his poems. he was theoretically determined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet, and to this end he must produce an epic. leaving aside the question whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the history of a single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and section. it is rather something which is more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its simple _open sesame!_ while they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of philosophy. in point of fact, the one element of greatness which "the excursion" possesses indisputably is heaviness. it is only the episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. wordsworth had his epic mould to fill, and, like benvenuto cellini in casting his perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest it should run short. separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and without example in the language. wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he made for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of leisure and the employment of minds without definite object. it may be doubted, indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing but his own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the imagination.[ ] he says of himself, speaking of his youth:-- "in fine, i was a better judge of thoughts than words, misled in estimating words, not only by common inexperience of youth, but by the trade in classic niceties, the dangerous craft of culling term and phrase from languages that want the living voice to carry meaning to the natural heart; to tell us what is passion, what is truth, what reason, what simplicity and sense."[ ] though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its weight. no reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he did not earlier give himself to "the trade of classic niceties." it was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of landor the severe dignity and reserved force which alone among later poets recall the tune of milton, and to which wordsworth never attained. indeed, wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always essentially that of cowper. they were alike also in their love of outward nature and of simple things. the main difference between them is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between the life-long familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain. it cannot be denied that in wordsworth the very highest powers of the poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. it is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagination are imbedded.[ ] he wrote too much to write always well; for it is not a great xerxes-army of words, but a compact greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. he set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. throughout "the prelude" and "the excursion" he seems striving to bind the wizard imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere. there is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome. yet with what splendors as of mountain-sunsets are we rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the undying barytone of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other poet! take from wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will show how truly great he was. he had no humor, no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only essays. if we consider carefully where he was most successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own mind, and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn took from his mood or temperament. his finest passages are always monologues. he had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue relative importance given to trivial matters. he was the historian of wordsworthshire. this power of particularization (for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment. it was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. that sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his fecundity (if i may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. it suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it was there that lamb (an admirable judge of what was permanent in literature) liked him best. its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. he excels in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. in "the excursion" we are driven to the subterfuge of a french verdict of extenuating circumstances. his mind had not that reach and elemental movement of milton's, which, like the tradewind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse. it was an organ that milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim delicacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. if wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. and it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of admetus,--that which pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe,--the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity. wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while it no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory concerning the language of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule called forth by it, seems to have been indicative of a certain dulness of perception in other directions.[ ] we cannot help feeling that the material of his nature was essentially prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the power of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspiration failed or was factitious, remained obstinately leaden. the normal condition of many poets would seem to approach that temperature to which wordsworth's mind could be raised only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. and in proportion to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the very high quality of his best verses. they seem rather the productions of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. is it his thought? it has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. is it his feeling? it is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. he seems to have caught and fixed forever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. but this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and wordsworth, in endeavoring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet of passages. indeed, one cannot help having the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of these passages, rather than that these are the natural jets and elations of a mind energized by the rapidity of its own motion. in other words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.[ ] during the most happily productive period of his life, wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical portion of his art. his wife and sister seem from the first to have been his scribes. in later years, he had learned and often insisted on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. but he certainly had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was always a little numb on the side of form and proportion. perhaps his best poem in these respects is the "laodamia," and it is not uninstructive to learn from his own lips that "it cost him more trouble than almost anything of equal length he had ever written." his longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond of union than their more or less immediate relation to his own personality. of character other than his own he had but a faint conception, and all the personages of "the excursion" that are not wordsworth are the merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of individual character. the best parts of these longer poems are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the _callida junctura_. the stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque placido aequore sylvas_); we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration. the fact that what is precious in wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some greater poets than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be borne in mind in taking the measure of his power. i know not whether to call it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows those parts of his work which we should distinguish as wordsworthian with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we feel in the presence of nature herself. he seems to have been half conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers with an enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have been profoundly comic[ ] but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that william wordsworth, esquire, of rydal mount, was one person, and the william wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite another. we recognize two voices in him, as stephano did in caliban. there are jeremiah and his scribe baruch. if the prophet cease from dictating, the amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an old woman, and the next day did _not_, and so came home and dictated some verses on this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. these marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings. presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the voice of a higher and invisible power. wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong to the grand simplicities of the bible. they seem not more his own than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable mind. this gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to the period of his prime, ere time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[ ] he did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. one of the most delightful fancies of the genevese humorist, toepffer, is the poet albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. many of wordsworth's later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self. they would never, as sir john harrington says of poetry, "keep a child from play and an old man from the chimney-corner."[ ] chief justice marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by saying, "brother jones, there are _some_ things which a supreme court of the united states sitting in equity may be presumed to know." wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat underrated. he is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not when to stop. if he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. there are three stanzas of such near the close of the first part of "peter bell," where peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of comicality:-- "is it a fiend that to a stake of fire his desperate self is tethering? or stubborn spirit doomed to yell, in solitary ward or cell, ten thousand miles from all his brethren?" the same want of humor which made him insensible to incongruity may perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion which so often strikes us in his poetry. for example, a little farther on in "peter bell" we find:-- "_now_--like a tempest-shattered bark that overwhelmed and prostrate lies, and in a moment to the verge is lifted of a foaming surge-- full suddenly the ass doth rise!" and one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[ ] the movement of wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood to meditative for narrative poetry. he values his own thoughts and reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests of his story. moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. "the wagoner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with "tam o'shanter" infinitely to its own disadvantage. "peter bell," full though it be of profound touches and subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. even lamb was forced to confess that he did not like it. "the white doe," the most wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. what charms in wordsworth and will charm forever is the "happy tone of meditation slipping in between the beauty coming and the beauty gone," a few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner, indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. they rather narcotize than fortify. wordsworth must subject our mood to his own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of character. his system of a nature-cure, first professed by dr. jean jaques and continued by cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. the solitary of "the excursion," who has not been cured of his scepticism by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see, equally proof against the lectures of pedler and parson. wordsworth apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his way clear to finishing the poem. but the treatment, whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. i am not sure, indeed, that the nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less vigorous than wordsworth's what milton would call a fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. the ancients and our own elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of another. if they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the mighty mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence. but when, as i have said, our impartiality has made all those qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may not plead his privilege, what is left to wordsworth is enough to justify his fame. even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a revelation. if it be the most delightful function of the poet to set our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. in the great poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. wordsworth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or two of his contemporaries, notably than coleridge or shelley; but he was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that stimulates thought and challenges meditation. groping in the dark passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. compared with goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular, almost provincial. he reminds us of those saints of dante who gather brightness by revolving on their own axis. but through this very limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. if we read wordsworth through, as i have just done, we find ourselves changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. if we read our favorite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly great. and even as regards "the excursion" we should remember how few long poems will bear consecutive reading. for my part i know of but one,--the odyssey. none of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and clearness. of no other poet except shakespeare have so many phrases become household words as of wordsworth. if pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. he has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. and he hath his reward. it needs not to bid "renowned chaucer lie a thought more nigh to rare beaumond, and learned beaumond lie a little nearer spenser"; for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great english poets. footnotes: [ ] "i pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at grasmere," writes james dixon (an old servant of wordsworth) to crabb robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine pathos, thirteen years after his master's death. wordsworth was always considerate and kind with his servants, robinson tells us. [ ] in the prelude he attributes this consecreation to a sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some village festival where he had danced all night-- "my heart was full; i made no vows, but vows were then made for me; bond unknown to me was given that i should be, else sinning greatly, a dedicated spirit."--b. iv. [ ] prelude, book ii. [ ] "i to the muses have been bound, these fourteen years, by strong indentures." _idiot boy_ ( ). [ ] i think this more than doubtful, for i find no traces of the influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. goldsmith was evidently his model in the descriptive sketches and the evening walk. i speak of them as originally printed. [ ] prelude, book iii. he studied italian also at cambridge, his teacher, whose name was isola, had formerly taught the poet gray. it may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic study of english poetry was due to the copy of andersen's british poets, left with him by his sailor brother john on setting out for his last voyage in . [ ] prelude, book vii. written before , and referring to a still earlier date. "wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat under his arm, to the marchioness of stafford's rout." (southey to miss barker, may, .) [ ] this was probably one reason for the long suppression of miss wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for publication as early as . [ ] crabb robinson, i. , am. ed. [ ] wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to prudery. the late mr. clough told me that he heard him at dr. arnold's table denounce the first line in keats's ode to a grecian urn as indecent, and haydon records that when he saw the group of cupid and psyche he exclaimed, "the dev-ils!" [ ] the whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. the original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately charles lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend professor c. e. norton. [ ] wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends coleridge and southey. the latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with wordsworth began. but coleridge seems to have clung to them longer. there is a passage in one of his letters to cottle (without date, but apparently written in the spring of ) which would imply that wordsworth had been accused of some kind of social heresy. "wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_ that he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the allfoxden estate to let him the house after their first agreement is expired." perhaps, after all, it was wordsworth's insulation of character and habitual want of sympathy with anything but the moods of his own mind that rendered him incapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. he appears to have regarded even his sister dora (whom he certainly loved as much as it was possible for him to love anything but his own poems) as a kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a mountain might look down on one of its ancillary spurs. [ ] speaking to one of his neighbors in he said, "that, after he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what his future employment should be. he did not feel himself good enough for the church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his impulses would have made life a torture. he also shrank from the law, although southey often told him that he was well fitted for the higher parts of the profession. he had studied military history with great interest, and the strategy of war, and he always fancied that he had talents for command, and he at one time thought of a military life, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if he were ordered to the west indies, his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave that up." (memoirs, ii. .) it is curious to fancy wordsworth a soldier. certain points of likeness between him and wellington have often struck me. they resemble each other in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in a kind of precise uprightness which made their personal character somewhat uninteresting. but what was decorum in wellington was piety in woidsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make wellington a great commander. [ ] cottle says, "the sale was so slow and the severity of most of the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be certain." but the notices in the monthly and critical reviews (then the most influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, especially to wordsworth's share in the volume. the monthly says, "so much genius and originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to see another from the same hand." the critical, after saying that "in the whole range of english, poetry we scarcely recollect anything superior to a passage in lines written near tintern abbey," sums up thus: "yet every piece discovers genius; and ill as the author has frequently employed his talents, they certainly rank him with the best of living poets." such treatment cannot surely be called discouraging. [ ] a very improbable story of coleridge's in the biographia literaria represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion of treasonable dealings with the french enemy by their constant references to a certain "spy nosey." the story at least seems to show how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in accordance with the usage of the last generation in new england. [ ] wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) a hearing in america sooner than in england. james humphreys, a philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient _list of subscribers_ to reprint the first edition of the lyrical ballads. the second english edition, however, having been published before he had wholly completed his reprinting, was substantially followed in the first american, which was published in . [ ] some of the weightiest passages in this preface, as it is now printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of . [ ] "on my alluding to the line, "'three feet long and two feet wide,' "and confessing that i dared not read them aloud in company, he said, 'they ought to be liked.'" (crabb robinson, th may, .) his ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity to judge of poetry at all. [ ] byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these volumes not, on the whole, unfair. crabb robinson is reported as saying that wordsworth was indignant at the edinburgh review's attack on hours of idleness. "the young man will do something if he goes on," he said. [ ] the rev. dr. wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his uncle with two volumes of memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only matched by the rev. mark noble's "history of the protectorate house of cromwell." it is a misfortune that his materials were not put into the hands of professor reed, whose notes to the american edition are among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the clearest. the book contains, however, some valuable letters of wordsworth, and those relating to this part of his life should be read by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the principles which governed him in the composition of his poems. in a letter to lady beaumont (may , ) he says, "trouble not yourself upon their present reception, of what moment is that compared with what i trust is their destiny!--to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which i trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.... to conclude, my ears are stone dead to this idle buzz [of hostile criticism] and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings and; after what i have said, i am sure yours will be the same i doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found; and that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." here is an odd reversal of the ordinary relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of admirers; it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith from his own inexhaustible cistern. [ ] "wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend de quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation." (southey to scott, th july, .) the tract is, as southey hints, heavy. [ ] the first essay in the third volume of the second edition. [ ] wordsworth's children were,-- john, born th june, ; still living; a clergyman. dorothy, born th august, ; died th july, . thomas, born th june, ; died st december, . catharine, born th september, ; died th june, . william, born th may, ; succeeded his father as stamp-distributor. [ ] good luck (in the sense of _chance_) seems properly to be the occurrence of opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows how to use it. in such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. moore's bermudan appointment is an instance of it wordsworth had a sound common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fil his office as well as dr. franklin could have done. a fitter man could not have been found in westmoreland. [ ] "i am not one who much or oft delight in personal talk." [ ] how far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. the advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his thanksgiving ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of pope:-- "while the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast." and in "the italian itinerant" and "the swiss goatherd" we find a thermometer or barometer called "the well-wrought scale whose sentient tube instructs to time a purpose to a fickle clime." still worse in the "eclipse of the sun," :-- "high on her speculative tower stood science, waiting for the hour when sol was destined to endure that darkening." so in "the excursion," "the cold march wind raised in her tender throat viewless obstructions." [ ] according to landor, he pronounced all scott's poetry to be "not worth five shillings." [ ] prelude, book vi. [ ] this was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. miss martineau said to crabb robinson in , speaking of wordsworth's conversation: "sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with which he dwells on trifles; at other times he flows on in the utmost grandeur, leaving a strong impression of inspiration." robinson tells us that he read "resolution" and "independence" to a lady who was affected by it even to tears, and then said, "i have not heard anything for years that so much delighted me; but, _after all, it is not poetry_." [ ] nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of helen of kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. its shuddering compression is masterly. compare "curst be the heart that thought the thought, and curst the hand that fired the shot, when in my arms burd helen dropt, that died to succor me! o, think ye not my heart was sair when my love dropt down and spake na mair?" compare this with,-- "proud gordon cannot bear the thoughts that through his brain are travelling, and, starting up, to bruce's heart he launched a deadly javelin: fair ellen saw it when it came, and, _stepping forth to meet the same_, did with her body cover the youth, her chosen lover. * * * * * "and bruce (_as soon, as he had slain the gordon_) sailed away to spain, and fought with rage incessant against the moorish crescent." these are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a stanza when he should engross." it will be noticed that wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. had he written,-- "and gordon never gave a hint, but, having somewhat picked his flint, let fly the fatal bullet that killed that lovely pullet," it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. he shows the same insensibility in a note upon the ancient mariner in the second edition of the lyrical ballads: "the poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated." here is an indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed. one would think that the strange charm of coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect. [ ] "a hundred times when, roving high and low, i have been harassed with the toil of verse, much pains and little progress, and at once some lovely image in the song rose up, full formed, like venus rising from the sea." _prelude_, book iv. [ ] mr. emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and mr. ellis yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, "these quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed me; it seemed almost as if he were _awed by the greatness of his own power, the gifts with which he had been endowed_." (the italics are mine.) [ ] his best poetry was written when he was under the immediate influence of coleridge. coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of "those who have been so well pleased that i should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream." (letters, conversations, and recollections of s.t.c., vol. i. pp. - .) "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 that milton never would have written. keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers." (leigh hunt's autobiography.) wordsworth writes to crabb robinson in , "my ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to disease." one cannot help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by coleridge. [ ] in the preface to his translation of the orlando furioso. [ ] in "resolution" and "independence". milton.[ ] if the biographies of literary men are to assume the bulk which mr. masson is giving to that of milton, their authors should send a phial of _elixir vitae_ with the first volume, that a purchaser might have some valid assurance of surviving to see the last. mr. masson has already occupied thirteen hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting milton to his thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven years stretches between the dates of the first and second instalments of his published labors. as milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one, with the "ode on the nativity," and as by far the more important part of it lies between the year at which we are arrived and his death at the age of sixty-six, we might seem to have the terms given us by which to make a rough reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land. but when we recollect the baffling character of the winds and currents we have already encountered, and the eddies that may at any time slip us back to the reformation in scotland or the settlement of new england; when we consider, moreover, that milton's life overlapped the _grand siècle_ of french literature, with its irresistible temptations to digression and homily for a man of mr masson's temperament, we may be pardoned if a sigh of doubt and discouragement escape us. we envy the secular leisures of methusaleh, and are thankful that _his_ biography at least (if written in the same longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. what a subject would that have been for a person of mr. masson's spacious predilections! even if he himself can count on patriarchal prorogations of existence, let him hang a print of the countess of desmond in his study to remind him of the ambushes which fate lays for the toughest of us. for myself, i have not dared to climb a cherry-tree since i began to read his work. even with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, i feel by no means sure of living to see mary powell back in her husband's house; for it is just at this crisis that mr. masson, with the diabolical art of a practised serial writer, leaves us while he goes into an exhaustive account of the westminster assembly and the political and religious notions of the massachusetts puritans. one could not help thinking, after having got milton fairly through college, that he was never more mistaken in his life than when he wrote, "how _soon_ hath time, that subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!" or is it mr. masson who has scotched time's wheels? it is plain from the preface to the second volume that mr. masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that milton ought somehow to be more than a mere incident of his own biography. he tells us that, "whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside, no one can study the life of milton as it ought to be studied without being obliged to study extensively and intimately the contemporary history of england, and even incidentally of scotland and ireland too.... thus on the very compulsion, or at least the suasion, of the biography, a history grew on my hands. it was not in human nature to confine the historical inquiries, once they were in progress, within the precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the biography, even had it been possible to determine these limits beforehand; and so the history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me, was pursued often for its own sake, and became, though always with a sense of organic relation to the biography, continuous in itself." if a "hasty person" be one who thinks eleven years rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begin his next sentence, i take to myself the sting of mr. masson's covert sarcasm. i confess with shame a pusillanimity that is apt to flag if a "to be continued" do not redeem its promise before the lapse of a quinquennium. i could scarce await the "autocrat" himself so long. the heroic age of literature is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove too heavy [greek: oion nun brotoi] for the descendants of men to whom the folio was a pastime. but what does mr. masson mean by "continuous"? to me it seems rather as if his somewhat rambling history of the seventeenth century were interrupted now and then by an unexpected apparition of milton, who, like paul pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what _he_ has been doing in the mean while. the reader, immersed in scottish politics or the schemes of archbishop laud, is a little puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on being reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protagonist of the drama. _pars minima est ipsa puella sui_. if goethe was right in saying that every man was a citizen of his age as well as of his country, there can be no doubt that in order to understand the motives and conduct of the man we must first make ourselves intimate with the time in which he lived. we have therefore no fault to find with the thoroughness of mr. masson's "historical inquiries." the more thorough the better, so far as they were essential to the satisfactory performance of his task. but it is only such contemporary events, opinions, or persons as were really operative on the character of the man we are studying that are of consequence, and we are to familiarize ourselves with them, not so much for the sake of explaining them as of understanding him. the biographer, especially of a literary man, need only mark the main currents of tendency, without being officious to trace out to its marshy source every runlet that has cast in its tiny pitcherful with the rest. much less should he attempt an analysis of the stream and to classify every component by itself, as if each were ever effectual singly and not in combination. human motives cannot be thus chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive at any true knowledge of character by such minute subdivision of its ingredients. nothing is so essential to a biographer as an eye that can distinguish at a glance between real events that are the levers of thought and action, and what donne calls "unconcerning things, matters of fact,"--between substantial personages, whose contact or even neighborhood is influential, and the supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and afterwards the interstices of a biographical dictionary. "time hath a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion." let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred and merciful deposit, and not renew for us the bores of a former generation as if we had not enough of our own. but if he cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly complain when he insists on taking us along with him in the processes of his investigation, instead of giving us the sifted results in their bearing on the life and character of his subject, whether for help or hindrance. we are blinded with the dust of old papers ransacked by mr. masson to find out that they have no relation whatever to his hero. he had been wise if he had kept constantly in view what milton himself says of those who gathered up personal traditions concerning the apostles: "with less fervency was studied what saint paul or saint john had written than was listened to one that could say, 'here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited; and o, happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle.'.... thus while all their thoughts were poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after such men as had sat at table with the apostles, ... by this means they lost their time and truanted on the fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as was seen shortly in their writings." mr. masson has so _poured out his mind upon circumstances_, that his work reminds us of allston's picture of elijah in the wilderness, where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape where the very ravens could scarce have found him out, except by divine commission. the figure of milton becomes but a speck on the enormous canvas crowded with the scenery through which he may by any possibility be conjectured to have passed. i will cite a single example of the desperate straits to which mr. masson is reduced in order to hitch milton on to his own biography. he devotes the first chapter of his second book to the meeting of the long parliament. "already," he tells us, "in the earlier part of the day, the commons had gone through the ceremony of hearing the writ for the parliament read, and the names of the members that had been returned called over by thomas wyllys, esq., the clerk of the crown in chancery. his deputy, _agar, milton's brother-in-law, may have been in attendance on such an occasion_. during the preceding month or two, _at all events_, agar and his subordinates in the crown office had been unusually busy with the issue of the writs and with the other work connected with the opening of parliament." (vol. ii. p. .) mr. masson's resolute "at all events" is very amusing. meanwhile "the hungry sheep look up and are not fed." augustine thierry has a great deal to answer for, if to him we owe the modern fashion of writing history picturesquely. at least his method leads to most unhappy results when essayed by men to whom nature has denied a sense of what the picturesque really is. the historical picturesque does not consist, in truth of costume and similar accessaries, but in the grouping, attitude, and expression of the figures, caught when they are unconscious that the artist is sketching them. the moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man of genius, the life has gone out of them. in the hands of an inferior artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be squeezed out of color-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jackboots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere property-room of a deserted theatre, as if the light had been scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights. it is the power of catching the actors in great events at unawares that makes the glimpses given us by contemporaries so vivid and precious. and st. simon, one of the great masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art when he tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death of monseigneur, he saw "_du premier coup d'oeil vivement porté_, tout ce qui leur échappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit." it is the gift of producing this reality that almost makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping through a keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which we had no right,--it is this only that can justify the pictorial method of narration. mr. carlyle has this power of contemporizing himself with bygone times, he cheats us to "play with our fancies and believe we see"; but we find the _tableaux vivants_ of the apprentices who "deal in his command without his power," and who compel us to work very hard indeed with our fancies, rather wearisome. the effort of weaker arms to shoot with his mighty bow has filled the air of recent literature with more than enough fruitless twanging. mr. masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerably awkward when he strives to make up for the want of st. simon's _premier coup d'oeil_ by impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. for example, does hall profess to have traced milton from the university to a "suburb sink" of london? mr. masson fancies he hears milton saying to himself, "a suburb sink! has hall or his son taken the trouble to walk all the way down to aldersgate here, to peep up the entry where i live, and so have an exact notion of my whereabouts? there has been plague in the neighborhood certainly; and i hope jane yates had my doorstep tidy for the visit." does milton, answering hall's innuendo that he was courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that he would rather "choose a virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred"? mr. masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this wise: "what have we here? surely nothing less, if we choose so to construe it, than a marriage advertisement! ho, all ye virgins of england (widows need not apply), here is an opportunity such as seldom occurs: a bachelor, unattached; age, thirty-three years and three or four months; height [milton, by the way, would have said _highth_] middle or a little less; personal appearance unusually handsome, with fair complexion and light auburn hair; circumstances independent; tastes intellectual and decidedly musical; principles root-and-branch! was there already any young maiden in whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in her way, it would have raised a conscious flutter? if so, did she live near oxford?" if there _is_ anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being facetious. he tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot of a hippopotamus. i am no advocate of what is called the dignity of history, when it means, as it too often does, that dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity. too well do i recall the sorrows of my youth, when i was shipped in search of knowledge on the long johnsonian swell of the last century, favorable to anything but the calm digestion of historic truth. i had even then an uneasy suspicion, which has ripened into certainty, that thoughts were never draped in long skirts like babies, if they were strong enough to go alone. but surely there should be such a thing as good taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the historian himself, that should not allow him to play any tricks with the dignity of his subject. a halo of sacredness has hitherto invested the figure of milton, and our image of him has dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from the vulgarities of life. no diaries, no private letters, remain to give the idle curiosity of after-times the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion of his reserve. that a man whose familiar epistles were written in the language of cicero, whose sense of personal dignity was so great that, when called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he always does it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose self-respect even in youth was so profound that it resembles the reverence paid by other men to a far-off and idealized character,--that he should be treated in this offhand familiar fashion by his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration, a violation of good manners no less than of the laws of biographic art. milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity. better the surly injustice of johnson than such presumptuous friendship as this. let the seventeenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the insupportable foot of the interviewer! but mr. masson, in his desire to be (shall i say) idiomatic, can do something worse than what has been hitherto quoted. he can be even vulgar. discussing the motives of milton's first marriage, he says, "did he come seeking his £ , and did mrs. powell _heave a daughter at him?_" we have heard of a woman throwing herself at a man's head, and the image is a somewhat violent one; but what is this to mr. masson's improvement on it? it has been sometimes affirmed that the fitness of an image may be tested by trying whether a picture could be made of it or not. mr. masson has certainly offered a new and striking subject to the historical school of british art. a little further on, speaking of mary powell, he says, "we have no portrait of her, nor any account of her appearance; but on the usual rule of the elective affinities of opposites, milton being fair, _we will vote her_ to have been dark-haired." i need say nothing of the good taste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the fact that mr. masson himself had left us in doubt whether the match was one of convenience or inclination. i know not how it may be with other readers, but for myself i feel inclined to resent this hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty "_we_ will vote." in some cases, mr. masson's indecorums in respect of style may possibly be accounted for as attempts at humor by one who has an imperfect notion of its ingredients. in such experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive element of the compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious. whether i have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque and vivid, i shall leave the reader to judge by an example or two. in the manuscript copy of milton's sonnet in which he claims for his own house the immunity which the memory of pindar and euripides secured for other walls, the title had originally been, "_on his door when the city expected an assault_." milton has drawn a line through this and substituted "_when the assault was intended to the city_." mr. masson fancies "a mood of jest or semi-jest in the whole affair"; but we think rather that milton's quiet assumption of equality with two such famous poets was as seriously characteristic as dante's ranking himself _sesto tra cotanto senno_. mr. masson takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of prince rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and finding some of his "anti-episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently. 'oho!' the cavalier captain might then have said, 'pindar and euripides are all very well, by g----! i've been at college myself; and when i meet a gentleman and scholar, i hope i know how to treat him; but neither pindar nor euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the church of england, by g----! it won't do, mr. milton!'" this, it may be supposed, is mr. masson's way of being funny and dramatic at the same time. good taste is shocked with this barbarous dissonance. could not the muse defend her son? again, when charles i., at edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of , fills the vacant english sees, we are told, "it was more than an insult; it was a sarcasm! it was as if the king, while giving alexander henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that reverend presbyter's back!" now one can conceive charles ii. winking when he took the solemn league and covenant, but never his father under any circumstances. he may have been, and i believe he was, a bad king, but surely we may take marvell's word for it, that "he nothing common did or mean," upon any of the "memorable scenes" of his life. the image is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a grand historical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least a decorous actor. but mr. masson can do worse than this. speaking of a mrs. katherine chidley, who wrote in defence of the independents against thomas edwards, he says, "people wondered who this she-brownist, katherine chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest in her when they found that she was an oldish woman, and a member of some hole-and-corner congregation in london. indeed, _she put her nails into mr. edwards with some effect_." why did he not say at once, after the good old fashion, that she "set her ten commandments in his face"? in another place he speaks of "satan standing with his _staff_ around him." mr. masson's style, a little robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse when forced to condescend to every-day matters. he can no more dismount and walk than the man in armor on a lord mayor's day. "it [aldersgate street] stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by long lane and the barbican, it parts with the name of aldersgate street, and, under the new names of goswell street and goswell road, _completes its tendency towards the suburbs_ and fields about islington." what a noble work might not the directory be if composed on this scale! the imagination even of an alderman might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile of continuous thoroughfare. mr. masson is very great in these passages of civic grandeur; but he is more surprising, on the whole, where he has an image to deal with. speaking of milton's "two-handed engine" in lycidas, he says: "may not milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming english parliament with its two houses? whatever he meant, his prophecy had come true. as he sat among his books in aldersgate street, the two-handed engine at the door of the english church was on the swing. once, twice, thrice, it had swept its arcs to gather energy; now it was on the backmost poise, and the blow was to descend." one cannot help wishing that mr. masson would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast in revelation, or on the time and half a time of daniel. there is something so consoling to a prophet in being told that, no matter what he meant, his prophecy had come true, and that he might mean "whatever else" he pleased, so long as he _may_ have meant what we choose to think he did, reasoning backward from the assumed fulfilment! but perhaps there may be detected in mr. masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a latitude. how if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a broom (or besom, to be more dignified), "sweeping--vehemently sweeping, no pause admitted, no design avowed," like that wielded by the awful shape which dion the syracusan saw? i make the suggestion modestly, though somewhat encouraged by mr. masson's system of exegesis, which reminds one of the casuists' doctrine of probables, in virtue of which a man may be _probabiliter obligatus_ and _probabiliter deobligatus_ at the same time. but perhaps the most remarkable instance of mr. masson's figures of speech is where we are told that the king might have established a _bona fide_ government "by giving public ascendency to the popular or parliamentary element in his council, and _inducing the old leaven in it either to accept the new policy, or to withdraw and become inactive."_ there is something consoling in the thought that yeast should be accessible to moral suasion. it is really too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral sense as should "induce it to accept the new policy." of mr. masson's unhappy infection with the _vivid_ style an instance or two shall be given in justification of what has been alleged against him in that particular. he says of london that "he was committed to the tower, where for more than two months he lay, with as near a prospect as ever prisoner had of a _chop_ with the executioner's axe on a scaffold on tower hill." i may be over-fastidious, but the word "chop" offends my ears with its coarseness, or if that be too strong, has certainly the unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. old auchinleck's saying of cromwell, that "he gart kings ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good example of really vivid phrase, suggesting the axe and the block, and giving one of those dreadful hints to the imagination which are more powerful than any amount of detail, and whose skilful use is the only magic employed by the masters of truly picturesque writing. the sentence just quoted will serve also as an example of that tendency to _surplusage_, which adds to the bulk of mr. masson's sentences at the cost of their effectiveness. if he had said simply "chop on tower hill" (if chop there must be), it had been quite enough, for we all know that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are implied in it. once more, and i have done with the least agreeable part of my business. mr. masson, after telling over again the story of strafford with needless length of detail, ends thus: "on wednesday, the th of may, that proud _curly_ head, the casket of that brain of power, rolled on the scaffold of tower hill." why _curly_? surely it is here a ludicrous impertinence. this careful thrusting forward of outward and unmeaning particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a picture which genius only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness in modern descriptive writing. it reminds one of the mrs. jarley expedient of dressing the waxen effigies of murderers in the very clothes they wore when they did the deed, or with the real halter round their necks wherewith they expiated it. it is probably very effective with the torpid sensibilities of the class who look upon wax figures as works of art. true imaginative power works with other material. lady macbeth striving to wash away from her hands the damned spot that is all the more there to the mind of the spectator because it is not there at all, is a type of the methods it employs and the intensity of their action. having discharged my duty in regard to mr. masson's faults of manner, which i should not have dwelt on so long had they not greatly marred a real enjoyment in the reading, and were they not the ear-mark of a school which has become unhappily numerous, i turn to a consideration of his work as a whole. i think he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was guilty of a misnomer in his title. his book is not so much a life of milton as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader may sift the main facts of the poet's biography. his passion for minute detail is only to be equalled by his diffuseness on points mainly if not altogether irrelevant. he gives us a survey of british literature, occupying one hundred and twenty-eight pages of his first volume, written in the main with good judgment, and giving the average critical opinion upon nearly every writer, great and small, who was in any sense a contemporary of milton. i have no doubt all this would be serviceable and interesting to mr. masson's classes in edinburgh university, and they may well be congratulated on having so competent a teacher; but what it has to do with milton, unless in the case of such authors as may be shown to have influenced his style or turn of thought, one does not clearly see. most readers of a life of milton may be presumed to have some knowledge of the general literary history of the time, or at any rate to have the means of acquiring it, and milton's manner (his style was his own) was very little affected by any of the english poets, with the single exception, in his earlier poems, of george wither. mr. masson also has something to say about everybody, from wentworth to the obscurest brownist fanatic who was so much as heard of in england during milton's lifetime. if this theory of a biographer's duty should hold, our grandchildren may expect to see "a life of thackeray, or who was who in england, france, and germany during the first half of the nineteenth century." these digressions of mr. masson's from what should have been his main topic (he always seems somehow to be "completing his tendency towards the suburbs" of his subject), give him an uneasy feeling that he must get milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it were only to remind the reader that he has a certain connection with the book. he is eager even to discuss a mere hypothesis, though an untenable one, if it will only increase the number of pages devoted specially to milton, and thus lessen the apparent disproportion between the historical and the biographical matter. milton tells us that his morning wont had been "to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have his full fraught; then with useful and generous labors preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion and our country's liberty when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations rather than see the rum of our protestantism and the enforcement of a slavish life." mr. masson snatches at the hint: "this is interesting," he says; "milton, it seems, has for some time been practising drill! the city artillery ground was near.... did milton among others make a habit of going there of mornings? of this more hereafter." when mr. masson returns to the subject he speaks of milton's "all but positive statement ... that in the spring of , or a few months before the breaking out of the civil war, he was in the habit of spending a part of each day in _military exercise somewhere not far from his house in aldersgate street_." what he puts by way of query on page has become downright certainty seventy-nine pages further on. the passage from milton's tract makes no "statement" of the kind it pleases mr. masson to assume. it is merely a miltonian way of saying that he took regular exercise, because he believed that moral no less than physical courage demanded a sound body. and what proof does mr. masson bring to confirm his theory? nothing more nor less than two or three passages in "paradise lost," of which i shall quote only so much as is essential to his argument:-- "and now advanced in view they stand, a horrid front of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise of warriors old with _ordered_ spear and shield, awaiting what command their mighty chief had to impose."[ ] mr. masson assures us that "there are touches in this description (as, for example, the _ordering_ of arms at the moment of halt, and without word of command) too exact and technical to have occurred to a mere civilian. again, at the same review.... "'he now prepared to speak; whereat their doubled ranks they bend from wing to wing, and half enclose him round with all his peers; _attention_ held them mute.'[ ] "to the present day this is the very process, or one of the processes, when a commander wishes to address his men. they wheel inward and stand at 'attention.'" but his main argument is the phrase "_ported_ spears," in book fourth, on which he has an interesting and valuable comment. he argues the matter through a dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that milton _must_ have had some practical experience of military drill. i confess a very grave doubt whether "attention" and "ordered" in the passages cited have any other than their ordinary meaning, and milton could never have looked on at the pike-exercise without learning what "ported" meant. but, be this as it may, i will venture to assert that there was not a boy in new england, forty years ago, who did not know more of the manual than is implied in milton's use of these terms. mr. masson's object in proving milton to have been a proficient in these martial exercises is to increase our wonder at his not entering the army. "if there was any man in england of whom one might surely have expected that he would be in arms among the parliamentarians," he says, "that man was milton." milton may have had many an impulse to turn soldier, as all men must in such times, but i do not believe that he ever seriously intended it. nor is it any matter of reproach that he did not. it is plain, from his works, that he believed himself very early set apart and consecrated for tasks of a very different kind, for services demanding as much self-sacrifice and of more enduring result. i have no manner of doubt that he, like dante, believed himself divinely inspired with what he had to utter, and, if so, why not also divinely guided in what he should do or leave undone? milton wielded in the cause he loved a weapon far more effective than a sword. it is a necessary result of mr. masson's method, that a great deal of space is devoted to what might have befallen his hero and what he might have seen. this leaves a broad margin indeed for the insertion of purely hypothetical incidents. nay, so desperately addicted is he to what he deems the vivid style of writing, that he even goes out of his way to imagine what might have happened to anybody living at the same time with milton. having told us fairly enough how shakespeare, on his last visit to london, perhaps saw milton "a fair child of six playing at his father's door," he must needs conjure up an imaginary supper at the mermaid. "ah! what an evening ... was that; and how ben and shakespeare _be-tongued_ each other, while the others listened and wondered; and how, when the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard their departing footsteps, and the stars shone down on the old roofs." certainly, if we may believe the old song, the stars "had nothing else to do," though their chance of shining in the middle of a london november may perhaps be reckoned very doubtful. an author should consider how largely the art of writing consists in knowing what to leave in the inkstand. mr. masson's volumes contain a great deal of very valuable matter, whatever one may think of its bearing upon the life of milton. the chapters devoted to scottish affairs are particularly interesting to a student of the great rebellion, its causes and concomitants. his analyses of the two armies, of the parliament, and the westminster assembly, are sensible additions to our knowledge. a too painful thoroughness, indeed, is the criticism we should make on his work as a biography. even as a history, the reader might complain that it confuses by the multiplicity of its details, while it wearies by want of continuity. mr. masson lacks the skill of an accomplished story-teller. a fact is to him a fact, never mind how unessential, and he misses the breadth of truth in his devotion to accuracy. the very order of his title-page, "the life of milton, narrated in connection with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time," shows, it should seem, a misconception of the true nature of his subject. milton's chief importance, it might be fairly said his only importance, is a literary one. his place is fixed as the most classical of our poets. neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, did milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion. in both these lines of his activity circumstances forced upon him the position of a controversialist whose aims and results are by the necessity of the case desultory and ephemeral. hooker before him and hobbes after him had a far firmer grasp of fundamental principles than he. his studies in these matters were perfunctory and occasional, and his opinions were heated to the temper of the times and shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum, sometimes to his own convenience at the moment, instead of being the slow result of a deliberate judgment enlightened by intellectual and above all historical sympathy with his subject. his interest was rather in the occasion than the matter of the controversy. no aphorisms of political science are to be gleaned from his writings as from those of burke. his intense personality could never so far dissociate itself from the question at issue as to see it in its larger scope and more universal relations. he was essentially a _doctrinaire_, ready to sacrifice everything to what at the moment seemed the abstract truth, and with no regard to historical antecedents and consequences, provided those of scholastic logic were carefully observed. he has no respect for usage or tradition except when they count in his favor, and sees no virtue in that power of the past over the minds and conduct of men which alone insures the continuity of national growth and is the great safeguard of order and progress. the life of a nation was of less importance to him than that it should be conformed to certain principles of belief and conduct. burke could distill political wisdom out of history because he had a profound consciousness of the soul that underlies and outlives events, and of the national character that gives them meaning and coherence. accordingly his words are still living and operative, while milton's pamphlets are strictly occasional and no longer interesting except as they illustrate him. in the latin ones especially there is an odd mixture of the pedagogue and the public orator. his training, so far as it was thorough, so far, indeed, as it may be called optional, was purely poetical and artistic. a true attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey. milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match for some of his antagonists in theological and ecclesiastical learning. but he brought into the contest a white heat of personal conviction that counted for much. his self-consciousness, always active, identified him with the cause he undertook. "i conceived myself to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof i was persuaded and whereof i had declared myself openly to be the partaker."[ ] accordingly it does not so much seem that he is the advocate of puritanism, freedom of conscience, or the people of england, as that all these are _he_, and that he is speaking for himself. he was not nice in the choice of his missiles, and too often borrows a dirty lump from the dunghill of luther; but now and then the gnarled sticks of controversy turn to golden arrows of phoebus in his trembling hands, singing as they fly and carrying their messages of doom in music. then, truly, in his prose as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the early gods, and there is that in him which tramples all learning under his victorious feet. from the first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated and set apart. he had that sublime persuasion of a divine mission which sometimes lifts his speech from personal to cosmopolitan significance; his genius unmistakably asserts itself from time to time, calling down fire from heaven to kindle the sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the worship of mankind. plainly enough here was a man who had received something other than episcopal ordination. mysterious and awful powers had laid their unimaginable hands on that fair head and devoted it to a nobler service. yet it must be confessed that, with the single exception of the "areopagitica," milton's tracts are wearisome reading, and going through them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of silver, as if the conscious element were giving out all the moonlight it had garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent. which, being interpreted, means that his prose is of value because it is milton's, because it sometimes exhibits in an inferior degree the qualities of his verse, and not for its power of thought, of reasoning, or of statement. it is valuable, where it is best, for its inspiring quality, like the fervencies of a hebrew prophet. the english translation of the bible had to a very great degree judaized, not the english mind, but the puritan temper. those fierce enthusiasts could more easily find elbow-room for their consciences in an ideal israel than in a practical england. it was convenient to see amalek or philistia in the men who met them in the field, and one unintelligible horn or other of the beast in their theological opponents. the spiritual provincialism of the jewish race found something congenial in the english mind. their national egotism quintessentialized in the prophets was especially sympathetic with the personal egotism of milton. it was only as an inspired and irresponsible person that he could live on decent terms with his own self-confident individuality. there is an intolerant egotism which identifies itself with omnipotence,[ ] and whose sublimity is its apology; there is an intolerable egotism which subordinates the sun to the watch in its own fob. milton's was of the former kind, and accordingly the finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in his verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking that they are often unconsciously so. those fallen angels in utter ruin and combustion hurled, are also cavaliers fighting against the good old cause; philistia is the restoration, and what samson did, that milton would have done if he could. the "areopagitica" might seem an exception, but that also is a plea rather than an argument, and his interest in the question is not one of abstract principle, but of personal relation to himself. he was far more rhetorician than thinker. the sonorous amplitude of his style was better fitted to persuade the feelings than to convince the reason. the only passages from his prose that may be said to have survived are emotional, not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of their figurative beauty, not their weight of thought. milton's power lay in dilation. touched by him, the simplest image, the most obvious thought, "dilated stood like teneriffe or atlas.... .... nor wanted in his grasp what _seemed_ both spear and shield." but the thin stiletto of macchiavelli is a more effective weapon than these fantastic arms of his. he had not the secret of compression that properly belongs to the political thinker, on whom, as hazlitt said of himself, "nothing but abstract ideas makes any impression." almost every aphoristic phrase that he has made current is borrowed from some one of the classics, like his famous "license they mean when they cry liberty," from tacitus. this is no reproach to him so far as his true function, that of poet, is concerned. it is his peculiar glory that literature was with him so much an art, an end and not a means. of his political work he has himself told us, "i should not choose this manner of writing, wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself (led by the genial power of nature to another task), i have the use, as i may account, but of my left hand." mr. masson has given an excellent analysis of these writings, selecting with great judgment the salient passages, which have an air of blank-verse thinly disguised as prose, like some of the corrupted passages of shakespeare. we are particularly thankful to him for his extracts from the pamphlets written against milton, especially for such as contain criticisms on his style. it is not a little interesting to see the most stately of poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low words. we seem to get a glimpse of the schooling of his "choiceful sense" to that nicety which could not be content till it had made his native tongue "search all her coffers round." one cannot help thinking also that his practice in prose, especially in the long involutions of latin periods, helped him to give that variety of pause and that majestic harmony to his blank-verse which have made it so unapproachably his own. landor, who, like milton, seems to have thought in latin, has caught somewhat more than others of the dignity of his gait, but without his length of stride. wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it, but with how long an interval! bryant has not seldom attained to its serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. keats has caught something of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its nervous severity of phrase. cowper's muse (that moved with such graceful ease in slippers) becomes stiff when (in his translation of homer) she buckles on her feet the cothurnus of milton. thomson grows tumid wherever he assays the grandiosity of his model. it is instructive to get any glimpse of the slow processes by which milton arrived at that classicism which sets him apart from, if not above, all our other poets. in gathering up the impressions made upon us by mr. masson's work as a whole, we are inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake than for ours. the several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable, his research has been conscientious, and he has given us better means of understanding milton's time than we possessed before. but how is it about milton himself? here was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of portrait-painting. there is hardly a more stately figure in literary history than milton's, no life in some of its aspects more tragical, except dante's. in both these great poets, more than in any others, the character of the men makes part of the singular impressiveness of what they wrote and of its vitality with after times. in them the man somehow overtops the author. the works of both are full of autobiographical confidences. like dante, milton was forced to become a party by himself. he stands out in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man. very much alive he certainly was in his day. has mr. masson made him alive to us again? i fear not. at the same time, while we cannot praise either the style or the method of mr. masson's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful for it. it is not so much a book for the ordinary reader of biography as for the student, and will be more likely to find its place on the library-shelf than the centre-table. it does not in any sense belong to light literature, but demands all the muscle of the trained and vigorous reader. "truly, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is milton's life it is naught." mr. masson's intimacy with the facts and dates of milton's career renders him peculiarly fit in some respects to undertake an edition of the poetical works. his edition, accordingly, has distinguished merits. the introductions to the several poems are excellent and leave scarcely anything to be desired. the general introduction, on the other hand, contains a great deal that might well have been omitted, and not a little that is positively erroneous. mr. masson's discussions of milton's english seem often to be those of a scotsman to whom english is in some sort a foreign tongue. it is almost wholly inconclusive, because confined to the miltonic verse, while the basis of any altogether satisfactory study should surely be the miltonic prose; nay, should include all the poetry and prose of his own age and of that immediately preceding it. the uses to which mr. masson has put the concordance to milton's poems tempt one sometimes to class him with those whom the poet himself taxed with being "the mousehunts and ferrets of an index." for example, what profits a discussion of milton's [greek: hapax legomena], a matter in which accident is far more influential than choice?[ ] what sensible addition is made to our stock of knowledge by learning that "the word _woman_ does not occur in any form in milton's poetry before 'paradise lost,'" and that it is "exactly so with the word _female_"? is it any way remarkable that such words as _adam, god, heaven, hell, paradise, sin, satan_, and _serpent_ should occur "very frequently" in "paradise lost"? would it not rather have been surprising that they should not? such trifles at best come under the head of what old warner would have called cumber-minds. it is time to protest against this minute style of editing and commenting great poets. gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the brobdignagian maids of honor "a mole here and there as broad as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest hippocrene after the critic's solar microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical, syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every drop of it. when a poet has been so much edited as milton, the temptation of whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen becomes great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not been seen before. mr. masson is quite right in choosing to modernize the spelling of milton, for surely the reading of our classics should be made as little difficult as possible, and he is right also in making an exception of such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons. his exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the original editions seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself appears to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the thousand milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. yet mr. masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he tells us that the short _a_ sound is the same in _man_ and _darby_, the short _o_ sound in _god_ and _does_, and what he calls the long _o_ sound in _broad_ and _wrath_. speaking of the apostrophe, mr. masson tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark: _hero's_ for _heroes_, _myrtle's_ for _myrtles_, _gorgons_ and _hydra's_, etc." now, in books printed about the time of milton's the apostrophe was put in almost at random, and in all the cases cited is a misprint, except in the first, where it serves to indicate that the pronunciation was not heróës as it had formerly been.[ ] in the "possessive singular of nouns already ending in _s_" mr. masson tells us, "milton's general practice is not to double the _s_; thus, _nereus wrinkled look, glaucus spell_. the necessities of metre would naturally constrain to such forms. in a possessive followed by the word _sake_ or the word _side_, dislike to [of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the inflection. in addition to '_for righteousness' sake_' such phrases as '_for thy name sake_' and '_for mercy sake_,' are allowed to pass; _bedside_ is normal and _riverside_ nearly so." the necessities of metre need not be taken into account with a poet like milton, who never was fairly in his element till he got off the soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his verse under him like a steed that knows his rider. but does the dislike of the double sibilant account for the dropping of the _s_ in these cases? is it not far rather the presence of the _s_ already in the sound satisfying an ear accustomed to the english slovenliness in the pronunciation of double consonants? it was this which led to such forms as _conscience sake_ and _on justice side_, and which beguiled ben jonson and dryden into thinking, the one that _noise_ and the other that _corps_ was a plural,[ ] what does mr. masson say to _hillside, bankside, seaside, cheapside, spindleside, spearside, gospelside_ (of a church), _nightside, countryside, wayside, brookside_, and i know not how many more? is the first half of these words a possessive? or is it not rather a noun impressed into the service as an adjective? how do such words differ from _hilltop, townend, candlelight, rushlight, cityman_, and the like, where no double _s_ can be made the scapegoat? certainly milton would not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote "and airy tongues that syllable men's names on sands and shores and desert wildernesses," "so in his seed all nations shall be blest," "and seat of salmanasser whose success," verses that hiss like medusa's head in wrath, and who was, i think, fonder of the sound than any other of our poets. indeed, in compounds of the kind we always make a distinction wholly independent of the doubled _s_. nobody would boggle at _mountainside_; no one would dream of saying _on the fatherside_ or _motherside_. mr. masson speaks of "the miltonic forms _vanquisht, markt, lookt_, etc." surely he does not mean to imply that these are peculiar to milton? chapman used them before milton was born, and pressed them farther, as in _nak't_ and _saf't_ for _naked_ and _saved_. he often prefers the contracted form in his prose also, showing that the full form of the past participle in _ed_ was passing out of fashion, though available in verse.[ ] indeed, i venture to affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling or accent to be found in milton which is without example in his predecessors or contemporaries. even _highth_, which is thought peculiarly miltonic, is common (in hakluyt, for example), and still often heard in new england. mr. masson gives an odd reason for milton's preference of it "as indicating more correctly the formation of the word by the addition of the suffix _th_ to the adjective _high_." is an adjective, then, at the base of _growth_, _earth_, _birth_, _truth_, and other words of this kind? horne tooke made a better guess than this. if mr. masson be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the spelling _bearth_ (paradise lost, ix. ), which he interprets as "collective produce," though in the only other instance where it occurs it is neither more nor less than _birth_, it should seem that milton had hit upon horne tooke's etymology. but it is really solemn trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the original editions, after having admitted, as mr. masson has honestly done, that in all likelihood milton had nothing to do with it. and yet he cannot refrain. on the word _voutsafe_ he hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of milton's ear. mr. masson thinks that milton "must have had a reason for it,"[ ] and finds that reason in "his dislike to [of] the sound _ch_, or to [of] that sound combined with _s_.... his fine ear taught him not only to seek for musical effects and cadences at large, but also to be fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions of consonants, except when there might be a musical reason for harshness or difficulty. in the management of the letter _s_, the frequency of which in english is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, i believe, most careful and skilful. more rarely, i think, than in shakespeare will one word ending in _s_ be found followed immediately in milton by another word beginning with the same letter; or, if he does occasionally pen such a phrase as _moab's sons_, it will be difficult to find in him, i believe, such a harsher example as _earth's substance_, of which many writers would think nothing. [with the index to back him mr. masson could safely say this.] the same delicacy of ear is even more apparent in his management of the _sh_ sound. he has it often, of course; but it may be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. he writes _basan_ for _bashan_, _sittim_ for _shittim_, _silo_ for _shiloh_, _asdod_ for _ashdod_. still more, however, does he seem to have been wary of the compound sound _ch_ as in _church_. of his sensitiveness to this sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet entitled 'an apology against a pamphlet, called a modest completion, etc.,' where, having occasion to quote these lines from one of the satires[ ] of his opponent, bishop hall, "'teach each hollow grove to sound his love, wearying echo with one changeless word,' "he adds, ironically, 'and so he well might, and all his auditory besides, with his _teach each!_'" generalizations are always risky, but when extemporized from a single hint they are maliciously so. surely it needed no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by hall's echo of _teach each_. did milton reject the _h_ from _bashan_ and the rest because he disliked the sound of _sh_, or because he had found it already rejected by the vulgate and by some of the earlier translators of the bible into english? oddly enough, milton uses words beginning with _sh_ seven hundred and fifty four times in his poetry, not to speak of others in which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in _tion_. hall, had he lived long enough, might have retorted on milton his own "manli_est_, resolut_est_, br_east_, as the magnetick hard_est_ iron draws," or his "what moves thy inquisition? know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall, and my promotion thy destruction?" with the playful controversial wit of the day he would have hinted that too much _est-est_ is as fatal to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that danger was often incurred by those who too eagerly _shun_ned it. nay, he might even have found an echo almost tallying with his own in "to begirt the almighty throne beseeching or besieging," a pun worthy of milton's worst prose. or he might have twitted him with "a _seq_uent king who _seeks_." as for the _sh_ sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote, "gna_sh_ing for angui_sh_ and despite and _sh_ame," or again, "then bursting forth afre_sh_ with con_sc_ious terrors vex me round that rest or intermi_ssion_ none i find. before mine eyes in oppos_ition_ sits grim death, my son." and if milton disliked the _ch_ sound, he gave his ears unnecessary pain by verses such as these,-- "straight cou_ch_es close; then, rising, _ch_anges oft his cou_ch_ant wat_ch_, as one who _ch_ose his ground"; still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless chief."[ ] the truth is, that milton was a harmonist rather than a melodist. there are, no doubt, some exquisite melodies (like the "sabrina fair ") among his earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which produced or trained the authors of our best english glees, as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. the strain heard in the "nativity ode," in the "solemn music," and in "lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical construction, than anything that had thrilled the english ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing breath. it was in the larger movements of metre that milton was great and original. i have spoken elsewhere of spenser's fondness for dilatation as respects thoughts and images. in milton it extends to the language also, and often to the single words of which a period is composed. he loved phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like teneriffe or atlas. in those poems and passages that stamp him great, the verses do not dance interweaving to soft lydian airs, but march rather with resounding tread and clang of martial music. it is true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a master. he even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals between and unobviously in his blank-verse:-- "there rest, if any rest can harbour _there_; and, reassembling our afflicted powers, consult how we may henceforth most offend our enemy, our own loss how re_pair_, how overcome this dire calamity, what reinforcement we may gain from hope, if not, what resolution from des_pair_."[ ] there is one almost perfect quatrain,-- "before thy fellows, ambitious to win from me some plume, that thy success may show destruction to the rest. this pause between (unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know"; and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an assonance,-- "if once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft in worst extremes and on the perilous edge of battle when it raged, in all assaults." there can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first passage cited were intentional, and perhaps they were so in the others; but milton's ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming couplets, and others in which the assonance almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blankverse:-- "from the asian kings (and parthian among these), from india and the golden chersonese"; "that soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired what hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired"; "and will alike be punished, whether thou reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow"; "of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy, save what is in destroying, other joy"; "shall all be paradise, far happier place than this of eden, and far happier days"; "this my long sufferance and my day of grace they who neglect and scorn shall never taste"; "so far remote with diminution seen, first in his east the glorious lamp was seen."[ ] these examples (and others might be adduced) serve to show that milton's ear was too busy about the larger interests of his measures to be always careful of the lesser. he was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, beyond any other english poet, of putting great masses through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. in reading "paradise lost" one has a feeling of vastness. you float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene change, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. his imagination seldom condenses, like shakespeare's, in the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves better to diffuse itself. witness his descriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the blue streams of air, controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser expression. he was fonder of the vague, perhaps i should rather say the indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any other of our poets. he loved epithets (like _old_ and _far_) that suggest great reaches, whether of space or time. this bias shows itself already in his earlier poems, as where he hears "the _far off_ curfew sound over some _widewatered_ shore," or where he fancies the shores[ ] and sounding seas washing lycidas far away; but it reaches its climax in the "paradise lost." he produces his effects by dilating our imaginations with an impalpable hint rather than by concentrating them upon too precise particulars. thus in a famous comparison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. he generalizes always instead of specifying,--the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. tasso begins finely with "chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne ii rauco suon della tartarea tromba; treman le spaziose atre caverne, e l'aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba," but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons with thunder and intestinal convulsions of the earth; in other words, he is unwary enough to give us a standard of measurement, and the moment you furnish imagination with a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statistical poor-relation commonplace. milton, with this passage in his memory, is too wise to hamper himself with any statement for which he can be brought to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming indefiniteness; "he called so loud that all the hollow deep of hell resounded," thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his usual method of prolonged evolution. no caverns, however spacious, will serve his turn, because they have limits. he could practise this self-denial when his artistic sense found it needful, whether for variety of verse or for the greater intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness. his more elaborate passages have the multitudinous roll of thunder, dying away to gather a sullen force again from its own reverberations, but he knew that the attention is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short without echo and leave us listening. there are no such vistas and avenues of verse as his. in reading the "paradise lost" one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives. milton's respect for himself and for his own mind and its movements rises wellnigh to veneration. he prepares the way for his thought and spreads on the ground before the sacred feet of his verse tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and romance. there is no such unfailing dignity as his. observe at what a reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak of himself, as at the beginning of the third book and the seventh. his sustained strength is especially felt in his beginnings. he seems always to start full-sail; the wind and tide always serve; there is never any fluttering of the canvas in this he offers a striking contrast with wordsworth, who has to go through with a great deal of _yo-heave-ohing_ before he gets under way. and though, in the didactic parts of "paradise lost," the wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell that will not let us forget it, and ever and anon some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer peers heaped with stormy memories. and the poem never becomes incoherent; we feel all through it, as in the symphonies of beethoven, a great controlling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly. mr. masson's discussions of milton's english are, it seems to me, for the most part unsatisfactory he occupies some ten pages, for example, with a history of the genitival form _its_, which adds nothing to our previous knowledge on the subject and which has no relation to milton except for its bearing on the authorship of some verses attributed to him against the most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. mr. masson is altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough "recollectiveness of latin constructions" in milton, and scents them sometimes in what would seem to the uninstructed reader very idiomatic english. more than once, at least, he has fancied them by misunderstanding the passage in which they seem to occur. thus, in "paradise lost," xi. , , "therefore so abject is their punishment, disfiguring not god's likeness but their own," has no analogy with _eorum deformantium_, for the context shows that it is the _punishment_ which disfigures. indeed, mr. masson so often finds constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words needing annotation that are common to all poetry, nay, sometimes to all english, that his notes seem not seldom to have been written by a foreigner. on this passage in "comus,"-- "i do not think my sister so to seek or so unprincipled in virtue's book and the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever as that the single want of light and noise * * * * * "(not being in danger, as i trust she is not) could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts," mr. masson tells us, that "in very strict construction, _not being_ would cling to _want_ as its substantive; but the phrase passes for the latin ablative absolute." so on the words _forestalling night_, "i. e. anticipating. forestall is literally to anticipate the market by purchasing goods before they are brought to the stall." in the verse "thou hast immanacled while heaven sees good," he explains that "_while_ here has the sense of _so long as_." but mr. masson's notes on the language are his weakest. he is careful to tell us, for example, "that there are instances of the use of _shine_ as a substantive in spenser, ben jonson, and other poets." it is but another way of spelling _sheen_, and if mr. masson never heard a shoeblack in the street say, "shall i give you a shine, sir?" his experience has been singular.[ ] his notes in general are very good (though too long). those on the astronomy of milton are particularly valuable. i think he is sometimes a little too scornful of parallel passages,[ ] for if there is one thing more striking than another in this poet, it is that his great and original imagination was almost wholly nourished by books, perhaps i should rather say set in motion by them. it is wonderful how, from the most withered and juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his grand images rise like an exhalation; how from the most battered old lamp caught in that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to build his palaces. whatever he touches swells and towers. that wonderful passage in comus of the airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured out of a dry sentence in purchas's abstract of marco polo. such examples help us to understand the poet. when i find that sir thomas browne had said before milton, that adam "was _the wisest of all men since_," i am glad to find this link between the most profound and the most stately imagination of that age. such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the historical development of our poetry, of its apostolical succession, so to speak. every one has noticed milton's fondness of sonorous proper names, which have not only an acquired imaginative value by association, and so serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a merely musical significance. this he probably caught from marlowe, traces of whom are frequent in him. there is certainly something of what afterwards came to be called miltonic in more than one passage of "tamburlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems struggling from the block, as in michel angelo's dawn. mr. masson's remarks on the versification of milton are, in the main, judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree with him. he seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to what he calls _variations_, he talks of the "substitution of the trochee, the pyrrhic, or the spondee, for the regular iambus, or of the anapaest, the dactyl, the tribrach, etc., for the same." this is always misleading. the shift of the accent in what mr. masson calls "dissyllabic variations" is common to all pentameter verse, and, in the other case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either were not so in milton's day,[ ] or were so or not at choice of the poet, according to their place in the verse. there is not an elision of milton's without precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned to write blank-verse. milton was a greater metrist than any of them, except marlowe and shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur) oftener than they to give a faint undulation or retardation to his verse, only because his epic form demanded it more for variety's sake. how milton would have _read_ them, is another question. he certainly often marked them by an apostrophe in his manuscripts. he doubtless composed according to quantity, so far as that is possible in english, and as cowper somewhat extravagantly says, "gives almost as many proofs of it in his 'paradise lost' as there are lines in the poem."[ ] but when mr. masson tells us that "self-fed and self-consumed: if this fail," and "dwells in all heaven charity so rare," are "only nine syllables," and that in "created hugest that swim the ocean-stream," "either the third foot must be read as an _anapaest_ or the word _hugest_ must be pronounced as one syllable, _hug'st_," i think milton would have invoked the soul of sir john cheek. of course milton read it "created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream," just as he wrote (if we may trust mr. masson's facsimile) "thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills," a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely as in the italian poets.[ ] "gest that swim" would be rather a knotty _anapaest_, an insupportable foot indeed! and why is even _hug'st_ worse than shakespeare's "_young'st_ follower of thy drum"? in the same way he says of "for we have also our evening and our morn," that "the metre of this line is irregular," and of the rapidly fine "came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried," that it is "a line of unusual metre." why more unusual than "as being the contrary to his high will"? what would mr. masson say to these three verses from dekkar?-- "and _knowing_ so much, i muse thou art so poor"; "i fan away the dust _flying_ in mine eyes"; "_flowing_ o'er with court news only of you and them." all such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels) were normally of one syllable, permissibly of two.[ ] if mr. masson had studied the poets who preceded milton as he has studied _him_, he would never have said that the verse "not this rock only; his omnipresence fills," was "peculiar as having a distinct syllable of overmeasure." he retains milton's spelling of _hunderd_ without perceiving the metrical reason for it, that _d, t, p, b,_ &c., followed by _l_ or _r_, might be either of two or of three syllables. in marlowe we find it both ways in two consecutive verses:-- "a hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse, two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms."[ ] mr. masson is especially puzzled by verses ending in one or more unaccented syllables, and even argues in his introduction that some of them might be reckoned alexandrines. he cites some lines of spenser as confirming his theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes the conditions of the case by throwing the accent (appreciably even now, but more emphatically in spenser's day) on the last syllable. "a spirit and judgment equal or superior," he calls "a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of twelve or even thirteen syllables." surely milton's ear would never have tolerated a dissyllabic "spirit" in such a position. the word was then more commonly of one syllable, though it might be two, and was accordingly spelt _spreet_ (still surviving in _sprite_), _sprit_, and even _spirt_, as milton himself spells it in one of mr. masson's facsimiles.[ ] shakespeare, in the verse "hath put a spirit of youth in everything," uses the word admirably well in a position where it _cannot_ have a metrical value of more than one syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to the verse in keeping with the sense. our old metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality which modern verse has lost in proportion as our language has stiffened into uniformity under the benumbing fingers of pedants. this discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it seems. a great deal of nonsense has been written about imperfect measures in shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic effect produced by filling up the gaps of missing syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice in reading. in rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible, but in passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. i do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly left us a single imperfect verse. seeing in what a haphazard way and in how mutilated a form their plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute such _faults_ (as a geologist would call them) to anything rather than to the deliberate design of the poets. marlowe and shakespeare, the two best metrists among them, have given us a standard by which to measure what licenses they took in versification,--the one in his translations, the other in his poems. the unmanageable verses in milton are very few, and all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the chances of supervision and increased those of error. there are only two, indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. these are, "burnt after them to the bottomless pit," and "with them from bliss to the bottomless deep." this certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out or had been stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. mr. masson notices only the first of these lines, and says that to make it regular by accenting the word _bottomless_ on the second syllable would be "too horrible." certainly not, if milton so accented it, any more than _blasphémous_ and twenty more which sound oddly to us now. however that may be, milton could not have intended to close not only a period, but a paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in the only other passage where the word occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable: "with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition, there to dwell." as _bottom_ is a word which, like _bosom_ and _besom_, may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, i am persuaded that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to the same event) gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that milton wrote, or meant to write,-- "burnt after them down to the bottomless pit," which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that milton liked best.[ ] much of what mr. masson says in his introduction of the way in which the verses of milton should be read is judicious enough, though some of the examples he gives, of the "comicality" which would ensue from compressing every verse into an exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a surprising ignorance of the laws which guided our poets just before and during milton's time in the structure of their verses. thus he seems to think that a strict scansion would require us in the verses "so he with difficulty and labor hard," and "carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold," to pronounce _diffikty_ and _purp'_. though mr. masson talks of "slurs and elisions," his ear would seem somewhat insensible to their exact nature or office. his _diffikty_ supposes a hiatus where none is intended, and his making _purple_ of one syllable wrecks the whole verse, the real slur in the latter case being on _azure or_.[ ] when he asks whether milton required "these pronunciations in his verse," no positive answer can be given, but i very much doubt whether he would have thought that some of the lines mr. masson cites "remain perfectly good blank verse even with the most leisurely natural enunciation of the spare syllable," and i am sure he would have stared if told that "the number of accents" in a pentameter verse was "variable." it may be doubted whether elisions and compressions which would be thought in bad taste or even vulgar now were more abhorrent to the ears of milton's generation than to a cultivated italian would be the hearing dante read as prose. after all, what mr. masson says may be reduced to the infallible axiom that poetry should be read as poetry. mr. masson seems to be right in his main principles, but the examples he quotes make one doubt whether he knows what a verse is. for example, he thinks it would be a "horror," if in the verse "that invincible samson far renowned" we should lay the stress on the first syllable of _invincible_. it is hard to see why this should be worse than _cónventicle_ or _rémonstrance_ or _súccessor_ or _incómpatible_, (the three latter used by the correct daniel) or why mr. masson should clap an accent on _surfàce_ merely because it comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to _ínvincible_. if one read the verse just cited with those that go with it, he will find that the accent _must_ come on the first syllable of _invincible_ or else the whole passage becomes chaos.[ ] should we refuse to say _obleeged_ with pope because the fashion has changed? from its apparently greater freedom in skilful hands, blank-verse gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter couplet, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in the one that would not be good in the other when handled by a master like dryden. milton, like other great poets, wrote some bad verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so than to conjure up some unimaginable reason why the reader should accept them as the better for their badness. such a bad verse is "rocks, caves, lakes, _fens_, bogs, _dens_ and shapes of death," which might be cited to illustrate pope's "and ten low words oft creep in one dull line." milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality for low words. he rather loved them tall, as the prussian king loved men to be six feet high in their stockings, and fit to go into the grenadiers. he loved them as much for their music as for their meaning,--perhaps more. his style, therefore, when it has to deal with commoner things, is apt to grow a little cumbrous and unwieldy. a persian poet says that when the owl would boast he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole. shakespeare would have understood this. milton would have made him talk like an eagle. his influence is not to be left out of account as partially contributing to that decline toward poetic diction which was already beginning ere he died. if it would not be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may be called in the highest sense the most scientific of our poets. if to spenser younger poets have gone to be sung-to, they have sat at the feet of milton to be taught. our language has no finer poem than "samson agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of austere dignity or in the skill with which the poet's personal experience is generalized into a classic tragedy. gentle as milton's earlier portraits would seem to show him, he had in him by nature, or bred into him by fate, something of the haughty and defiant self-assertion of dante and michel angelo. in no other english author is the man so large a part of his works. milton's haughty conception of himself enters into all he says and does. always the necessity of this one man became that of the whole human race for the moment. there were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when _he_ wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great deal. did mary powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode of a roundhead schoolmaster _incompatible_ and leave it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. if _he_ is blind, it is with excess of light, it is a divine partiality, an over-shadowing with angels' wings. phineus and teiresias are admitted among the prophets because they, too, had lost their sight, and the blindness of homer is of more account than his iliad. after writing in rhyme till he was past fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it at once becomes "the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre." if the structure of _his_ mind be undramatic, why, then, the english drama is naught, learned jonson, sweetest shakespeare, and the rest notwithstanding, and he will compose a tragedy on a greek model with the blinded samson for its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme. plainly he belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are in no way responsible for their to-morrows. and this makes him perennially interesting even to those who hate his politics, despise his socinianism, and find his greatest poem a bore. a new edition of his poems is always welcome, for, as he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each new student, and mr. masson, in his three handsome volumes, has given us, with much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much more that is a solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge. it results from the almost scornful withdrawal of milton into the fortress of his absolute personality that no great poet is so uniformly self-conscious as he. we should say of shakespeare that he had the power of transforming himself into everything; of milton, that he had that of transforming everything into himself. dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and he, the cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at the breath of beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine. but milton never let himself go for a moment. as other poets are possessed by their theme, so is he _self_-possessed, his great theme being john milton, and his great duty that of interpreter between him and the world. i say it with all respect, for he was well worthy translation, and it is out of hebrew that the version is made. pope says he makes god the father reason "like a school divine." the criticism is witty, but inaccurate. he makes deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and had the poem been written a few years later, the almighty would have become more heterodox. since dante, no one had stood on these visiting terms with heaven. now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, i suspect, which goes far toward making the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's-breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous. puritanism showed both the strength and weakness of its prophetic nurture; enough of the latter to be scoffed out of england by the very men it had conquered in the field, enough of the former to intrench itself in three or four immortal memories. it has left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great monuments are the prose of bunyan and the verse of milton. it is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events; to have been a partaker in them and to have seen noble purposes by their own self-confidence become the very means of ignoble ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion of regret deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its sorrow. the grand loneliness of milton in his latter years, while it makes him the most impressive figure in our literary history, is reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime independence of human sympathy like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us. but it is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the habitual companions of whose mind were the past and future. i always seem to see him leaning in his blindness a hand on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will guard the song which the other had inspired. footnotes: [ ] the life of john milton: narrated in connection with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time. by david masterson, m.d., ll.d. professor of rhetoric and english literature in the university of edinburgh. vols. i., ii. - . london and new york: macmillan & co. . vo. pp. xii, . the poetical works of john milton, edited, with introduction, notes and an essay on milton's english by david masson, m.a., ll.d. professor of rhetoric and english literature in the university of edinburgh. vols. vo. macmillan & co. . [ ] book i. - . [ ] ibid., - . [ ] apology for smectymnuus. [ ] "for him i was not sent, nor yet to free that people, victor once, now vile and base, deservedly made vassal."--p.r. iv. - . [ ] if things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty inferences might not be drawn from mr. masson's invariably printing [greek: _apax legomena_!] [ ] "that you may tell heroës, when you come to banquet with your wife." _chapman's odyssey_, viii. , . in the facsimile of the sonnet to fairfax i find "thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings," which shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe. [ ] mr. masson might have cited a good example of this from drummond, whom (as a scotsman) he is fond of quoting for an authority in english,-- "sleep, silence' child, sweet father of soft rest." the survival of _horse_ for _horses_ is another example. so by a reverse process _pult_ and _shay_ have been vulgarly deduced from the supposed plurals _pulse_ and _chaise_. [ ] chapman's spelling is presumably his own. at least he looked after his printed texts. i have two copies of his "byron's conspiracy," both dated , but one evidently printed later than the other, for it shows corrections. the more solemn ending in _ed_ was probably kept alive by the reading of the bible in churches. though now dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right hearing of the more metrical passages in the old testament, which are finer and more scientiflc than anything in the language, unless it be some parts of "samson agonistes." i remember an old gentleman who always used the contracted form of the participle in conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable in reading. sir thomas browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. at any rate he has the spelling _empuzzeled_ in prose. [ ] he thinks the same of the variation _strook_ and _struck_, though they were probably pronounced alike. in marlowe's "faustus" two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words "cursed be he that struck." in a note on the passage mr. dyce tells us that the old editions (there were three) have _stroke_ and _strooke_ in the first instance, and all agree on _strucke_ in the second. no inference can be drawn from such casualties. [ ] the lines are _not_ "from one of the satires," and milton made them worse by misquoting and bringing _love_ jinglingly near to _grove_. hall's verse (in his satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious. he long before milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very terms of the preface to paradise lost. [ ] mr. masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that milton may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a _t_ out of _slep'st_, "for ease of sound." yet the poet could bear _boast'st_ and--one stares and gasps at it--_doat'dst_. there is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the _ch_ sound predominates, not without a touch of _sh_, in a single couplet:-- "can any mortal mixture of earth's mould breathe su_ch_ divine enchanting ravi_sh_ment?" so "blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss," and perhaps "i see his tents pitched about sechem" might be added. [ ] i think coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of _enemy_ and _calamity_ in this passage. mr. masson leaves out the comma after _if not_, the pause of which is needful, i think, to the sense, and certainly to keep _not_ a little farther apart from _what_, ("teach each"!) [ ] "first in his east," is not soothing to the ear. [ ] there seems to be something wrong in this word _shores_. did milton write _shoals_? [ ] but his etymological notes are worse. for example, "_recreant_, renouncing the faith, from the old french _recroire_, which again is from the mediaeval latin _recredere_, to 'believe back,' or apostatize." this is pure fancy. the word had no such meaning in either language. he derives _serenate_ from _sera_, and says that _parle_ means treaty, negotiation, though it is the same word as _parley_, had the same meanings, and was commonly pronounced like it, as in marlowe's "what, shall we _parlé_ with this christïan?" it certainly never meant _treaty_, though it may have meant _negotiation_. when it did it implied the meeting face to face of the principals. on the verses "and some flowers and some bays for thy hearse to strew the ways," he has a note to tell us that _hearse_ is not to be taken "in our sense of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or framework over a tomb," though the obvious meaning is "to strew the ways for thy hearse." how could one do that for a tomb or the framework over it? [ ] a passage from dante (inferno, xi. - ), with its reference to aristotle, would have given him the meaning of "nature taught art," which seems to puzzle him. a study of dante and of his earlier commentators would also have been of great service in the astronomical notes. [ ] almost every combination of two vowels might in those days be a diphthong or not, at will. milton's practice of elision was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely conforms. [ ] letter to rev. w. bagot, th january, . [ ] so dante:-- "ma sapienza e amore e virtute." so donne:-- "simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives." [ ] mr. masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the versification to which milton's youthful ear had been trained, but seems to have learned something from abbott's "shakespearian grammar" in the interval between writing his notes and his introduction. walker's "shakespeare's versification" would have been a great help to him in default of original knowledge. [ ] milton has a verse in comus where the _e_ is elided from the word _sister_ by its preceding a vowel:-- "heaven keep my sister! again, again, and near!" this would have been impossible before a consonant. [ ] so _spirito_ and _spirto_ in italian, _esperis_ and _espirs_ in old french. [ ] milton, however, would not have balked at _th' bottomless_ any more than drayton at _th' rejected_ or donne at _th' sea_. mr. masson does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects _i' th' midst_ to _i' the midst_, and takes pains to mention it in a note. he might better have restored the _n_ in _i'_, where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronunciation, as _o'_ for _of_ and _on_. [ ] exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to two syllables. [ ] milton himself has _ínvísible_, for we cannot suppose him guilty of a verse like "shoots invisible virtue even to the deep," while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions that he loved. keats. there are few poets whose works contain slighter hints of their personal history than those of keats; yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the conditions upon which they lived, are more clearly traceable in what they have written. to write the life of a man was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of circumstances, of those things which stood about the life and were more or less related to it, but were not the life itself. but biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. a man's life, so far as its outward events are concerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser material; but the gait and gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. it is those essential facts which underlie the life and make the individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the surface that gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature hidden below. every man has his block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend very much upon the shape of that,--upon the knots and twists which existed in it from the beginning. we were designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. it is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough. keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined character, for that results commonly from the resistance made by temperament to the many influences by which the world, as it may happen then to be, endeavors to mould every one in its own image. what his temperament was we can see clearly, and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the discipline of art. * * * * * john keats, the second of four children, like chaucer and spenser, was a londoner, but, unlike them, he was certainly not of gentle blood. lord houghton, who seems to have had a kindly wish to create him gentleman by brevet, says that he was "born in the upper ranks of the middle class." this shows a commendable tenderness for the nerves of english society, and reminds one of northcote's story of the violin-player who, wishing to compliment his pupil, george iii., divided all fiddlers into three classes,--those who could not play at all, those who played very badly, and those who played very well,--assuring his majesty that he had made such commendable progress as to have already reached the second rank. we shall not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the father of keats (as lord houghton had told us in an earlier biography) "was employed in the establishment of mr. jennings, the proprietor of large livery-stables on the pavement in moorfields, nearly opposite the entrance into finsbury circus." so that, after all, it was not so bad; for, first, mr. jennings was a _proprietor_; second, he was the proprietor of an _establishment_; third, he was the proprietor of a _large_ establishment; and fourth, this large establishment was _nearly_ opposite finsbury circus,--a name which vaguely dilates the imagination with all sorts of potential grandeurs. it is true leigh hunt asserts that keats "was a little too sensitive on the score of his origin,"[ ] but we can find no trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or in such of his letters as have been printed. we suspect the fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride the vulgar blackwood and quarterly standard, which measured genius by genealogies. it is enough that his poetical pedigree is of the best, tracing through spenser to chaucer, and that pegasus does not stand at livery even in the largest establishments in moorfields. as well as we can make out, then, the father of keats was a groom in the service of mr. jennings, and married the daughter of his master. thus, on the mother's side, at least, we find a grandfather, on the father's there is no hint of such an ancestor, and we must charitably take him for granted. it is of more importance that the elder keats was a man of sense and energy, and that his wife was a "lively and intelligent woman, who hastened the birth of the poet by her passionate love of amusement," bringing him into the world, a seven-months' child, on the th october, , instead of the th of december, as would have been conventionally proper. lord houghton describes her as "tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat saturnine demeanour." this last circumstance does not agree very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us by adding that "she succeeded, _however_, in inspiring her children with the profoundest affection." this was particularly true of john, who once, when between four and five years old, mounted guard at her chamber door with an old sword, when she was ill and the doctor had ordered her not to be disturbed.[ ] in , keats being in his ninth year, his father was killed by a fall from his horse. his mother seems to have been ambitious for her children, and there was some talk of sending john to harrow. fortunately this plan was thought too expensive, and he was sent instead to the school of mr. clarke at enfield with his brothers. a maternal uncle, who had distinguished himself by his courage under duncan at camperdown, was the hero of his nephews, and they went to school resolved to maintain the family reputation for courage. john was always fighting, and was chiefly noted among his school-fellows as a strange compound of pluck and sensibility. he attacked an usher who had boxed his brother's ears; and when his mother died, in , was moodily inconsolable, hiding himself for several days in a nook under the master's desk, and refusing all comfort from teacher or friend. he was popular at school, as boys of spirit always are, and impressed his companions with a sense of his power. they thought he would one day be a famous soldier. this may have been owing to the stories he told them of the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly famoused by the boy homer, and whom they probably took for an admiral at the least, as it would have been well for keats's literary prosperity if he had been. at any rate, they thought john would be a great man, which is the main thing, for the public opinion of the playground is truer and more discerning than that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was, we will tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be repressed by necessity or fear of the police reports. lord houghton has failed to discover anything else especially worthy of record in the school-life of keats. he translated the twelve books of the aeneid, read robinson crusoe and the incas of peru, and looked into shakespeare. he left school in , with little latin and no greek, but he had studied spence's polymetis, tooke's pantheon, and lempriere's dictionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good company perhaps for him as artists and aspirates. it is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respectable writers if their pages could suddenly have become alive tinder their pens with all that the young poet saw in them.[ ] on leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at edmonton. his master was a mr. hammond, "of some eminence" in his profession, as lord houghton takes care to assure us. the place was of more importance than the master, for its neighborhood to enfield enabled him to keep up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, mr. clarke, and to borrow books of them. in , when he was in his seventeenth year, mr. charles cowden clarke lent him the "faerie queene." nothing that is told of orpheus or amphion is more wonderful than this miracle of spenser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a great poet. keats learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his indentures ran to apollo instead of mr. hammond. thus could the muse defend her son. it is the old story,--the lost heir discovered by his aptitude for what is gentle and knightly. haydon tells us "that he used sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should never be a poet, and if he was not he would destroy himself." this was perhaps a half-conscious reminiscence of chatterton, with whose genius and fate he had an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of the shortness of his own career.[ ] before long we find him studying chaucer, then shakespeare, and afterward milton. but chapman's translations had a more abiding influence on his style both for good and evil. that he read wisely, his comments on the "paradise lost" are enough to prove. he now also commenced poet himself, but does not appear to have neglected the study of his profession. he was a youth of energy and purpose, and though he no doubt penned many a stanza when he should have been anatomizing, and walked the hospitals accompanied by the early gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable examination in . in the spring of this year, also, he prepared to take his first degree as poet, and accordingly published a small volume containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. it attracted little attention, and the rest of this year seems to have been occupied with a journey on foot in scotland, and the composition of "endymion," which was published in . milton's "tetrachordon" was not better abused; but milton's assailants were unorganized, and were obliged each to print and pay for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural laws of demand and supply to furnish him with readers. keats was arraigned by the constituted authorities of literary justice. they might be, nay, they were jeffrieses and scroggses, but the sentence was published, and the penalty inflicted before all england. the difference between his fortune and milton's was that between being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and being set in the pillory. in the first case, the annoyance brushes off mostly with the mud; in the last, there is no solace but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. this solace, to a certain extent, keats had; for his ambition was noble, and he hoped not to make a great reputation, but to be a great poet. haydon says that wordsworth and keats were the only men he had ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty purpose. it is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they suspect to be good verses, than what they know to be bad morals. is it because they feel themselves incapable of the one and not of the other? probably a certain amount of honest loyalty to old idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken into account, and quite as much of the cruelty of criticism is due to want of thought as to deliberate injustice. however it be, the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men who scrupulously practised the ten commandments as if there were never a _not_ in any of them, felt every sentiment of their better nature outraged by the "lyrical ballads." it is idle to attempt to show that keats did not suffer keenly from the vulgarities of blackwood and the quarterly. he suffered in proportion as his ideal was high, and he was conscious of falling below it. in england, especially, it is not pleasant to be ridiculous, even if you are a lord; but to be ridiculous and an apothecary at the same time is almost as bad as it was formerly to be excommunicated. _a priori_, there was something absurd in poetry written by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables of mr. jennings, even though they were an establishment, and a large establishment, and nearly opposite finsbury circus. mr. gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the quarterly, and mr. terry, the actor,[ ] thought so even more distinctly in blackwood, bidding the young apothecary "back to his gallipots!" it is not pleasant to be talked down upon by your inferiors who happen to have the advantage of position, nor to be drenched with ditchwater, though you know it to be thrown by a scullion in a garret. keats, as his was a temperament in which sensibility was excessive, could not but be galled by this treatment. he was galled the more that he was also a man of strong sense, and capable of understanding clearly how hard it is to make men acknowledge solid value in a person whom they have once heartily laughed at. reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. to his friend taylor he writes, "there is but one way for me. the road lies through study, application, and thought." thrilling with the electric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in vision, like dante, that small procession of the elder poets to which only elect centuries can add another laurelled head. might he, too, deserve from posterity the love and reverence which he paid to those antique glories? it was no unworthy ambition, but everything was against him,--birth, health, even friends, since it was partly on their account that he was sneered at. his very name stood in his way, for fame loves best such, syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue, like spenserian, shakespearian. in spite of juliet, there is a great deal in names, and when the fairies come with their gifts to the cradle of the selected child, let one, wiser than the rest, choose a name for him from which well-sounding derivatives can be made, and, best of all, with a termination in _on_. men judge the current coin of opinion by the ring, and are readier to take without question whatever is platonic, baconian, newtonian, johnsonian, washingtonian, jeffersonian, napoleonic, and all the rest. you cannot make a good adjective out of keats,--the more pity,--and to say a thing is _keatsy_ is to contemn it. fortune likes fine names. haydon tells us that keats was very much depressed by the fortunes of his book. this was natural enough, but he took it all in a manly way, and determined to revenge himself by writing better poetry. he knew that activity, and not despondency, is the true counterpoise to misfortune. haydon is sure of the change in his spirits, because he would come to the painting-room and sit silent for hours. but we rather think that the conversation, where mr. haydon was, resembled that in a young author's first play, where the other interlocutors are only brought in as convenient points for the hero to hitch the interminable web of his monologue upon. besides, keats had been continuing his education this year, by a course of elgin marbles and pictures by the great italians, and might very naturally have found little to say about mr. haydon's extensive works, that he would have cared to hear. lord houghton, on the other hand, in his eagerness to prove that keats was not killed by the article in the quarterly, is carried too far toward the opposite extreme, and more than hints that he was not even hurt by it. this would have been true of wordsworth, who, by a constant companionship with mountains, had acquired something of their manners, but was simply impossible to a man of keats's temperament. on the whole, perhaps, we need not respect keats the less for having been gifted with sensibility, and may even say what we believe to be true, that his health was injured by the failure of his book. a man cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount of his imagination. it is perfectly true that what we call the world, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere brocken spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves; but as long as we do not know it, it is a very passable giant. we are not without experience of natures so purely intellectual that their bodies had no more concern in their mental doings and sufferings than a house has with the good or ill fortune of its occupant. but poets are not built on this plan, and especially poets like keats, in whom the moral seems to have so perfectly interfused the physical man, that you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his hands, so truly did his body, like that of donne's mistress boulstred, think and remember and forebode. the healthiest poet of whom our civilization has been capable says that when he beholds "desert a beggar born, and strength by limping sway disabled, and art made tongue-tied by authority," alluding, plainly enough, to the giffords of his day, "and simple truth miscalled simplicity," as it was long afterward in wordsworth's case, "and captive good attending captain ill," that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others, life seems to have been dearest, as it was also the fullest of enjoyment, "tired of all these," had nothing for it but to cry for "restful death." keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill fortune courageously. he certainly did not overestimate "endymion," and perhaps a sense of humor which was not wanting in him may have served as a buffer against the too importunate shock of disappointment. "he made ritchie promise," says haydon, "he would carry his 'endymion' to the great desert of sahara and fling it in the midst." on the th october, , he writes to his publisher, mr. hessey, "i cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. as for the rest, i begin to get acquainted with my own strength and weakness. praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works. my own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what blackwood or the quarterly could inflict; and also, when i feel i am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. j.s. is perfectly right in regard to 'the slipshod endymion.' that it is so is no fault of mine. no! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as i had power to make it by myself. had i been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble. i will write independently. i have written independently _without judgment_. i may write independently and _with judgment_, hereafter. the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. that which is creative must create itself. in 'endymion' i leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if i had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. i was never afraid of failure; for i would sooner fail than not be among the greatest." this was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally the side which a large-minded person would display to a friend. this is what he thought, but whether it was what he _felt_, i think doubtful. i look upon it rather as one of the phenomena of that multanimous nature of the poet, which makes him for the moment that of which he has an intellectual perception. elsewhere he says something which seems to hint at the true state of the case. "i must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man: _they make our prime objects a refuge as well as a passion_." one cannot help contrasting keats with wordsworth,--the one altogether poet; the other essentially a wordsworth, with the poetic faculty added,--the one shifting from form to form, and from style to style, and pouring his hot throbbing life into every mould; the other remaining always the individual, producing works, and not so much living in his poems as memorially recording his life in them. when wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on his writings, he speaks serenely and generously of wordsworth the poet, as if he were an unbiassed third person, who takes up the argument merely in the interest of literature. he towers into a bald egotism which is quite above and beyond selfishness. poesy was his employment; it was keats's very existence, and he felt the rough treatment of his verses as if it had been the wounding of a limb. to wordsworth, composing was a healthy exercise, his slow pulse and imperturbable self trust gave him assurance of a life so long that he could wait, and when we read his poems we should never suspect the existence in him of any sense but that of observation, as if wordsworth the poet were a half-mad land-surveyor, accompanied by mr. wordsworth the distributor of stamps, as a kind of keeper. but every one of keats's poems was a sacrifice of vitality, a virtue went away from him into every one of them; even yet, as we turn the leaves, they seem to warm and thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not wonder he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly. in the mean time his younger brother languished and died, his elder seems to have been in some way unfortunate and had gone to america, and keats himself showed symptoms of the hereditary disease which caused his death at last. it is in october, , that we find the first allusion to a passion which was, erelong, to consume him it is plain enough beforehand, that those were not moral or mental graces that should attract a man like keats. his intellect was satisfied and absorbed by his art, his books, and his friends he could have companionship and appreciation from men; what he craved of woman was only repose. that luxurious nature, which would have tossed uneasily on a crumpled rose leaf, must have something softer to rest upon than intellect, something less ethereal than culture. it was his body that needed to have its equilibrium restored, the waste of his nervous energy that must be repaired by deep draughts of the overflowing life and drowsy tropical force of an abundant and healthily poised womanhood. writing to his sister-in-law, he says of this nameless person: "she is not a cleopatra, but is, at least, a charmian; she has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. when she comes into a room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. she is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her. from habit, she thinks that _nothing particular_. i always find myself at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which i cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. i am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. i forget myself entirely, because i live in her. you will by this time think i am in love with her, so, before i go any farther, i will tell you that i am not. she kept me awake one night, as a tune of mozart's might do. i speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which i can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very _yes_ and _no_ of whose life is to me a banquet.... i like her and her like, because one has no _sensation_; what we both are is taken for granted.... she walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn toward her with magnetic power.... i believe, though, she has faults, the same as a cleopatra or a charmian might have had. yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. in the former, bonaparte, lord byron, and this charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, john howard, bishop hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. as a man of the world, i love the rich talk of a charmian; as an eternal being, i love the thought of you. i should like her to ruin me, and i should like you to save me." it is pleasant always to see love hiding his head with such pains, while his whole body is so clearly visible, as in this extract. this lady, it seems, is not a cleopatra, only a charmian; but presently we find that she is imperial. he does not love her, but he would just like to be ruined by her, nothing more. this glimpse of her, with her leopardess beauty, crossing the room and drawing men after her magnetically, is all we have. she seems to have been still living in , and as lord houghton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred. "she is an east-indian," keats says, "and ought to be her grandfather's heir." her name we do not know. it appears from dilke's "papers of a critic" that they were betrothed: "it is quite a settled thing between john keats and miss ----. god help them. it is a bad thing for them. the mother says she cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go off. he don't like any one to look at her or to speak to her." alas, the tropical warmth became a consuming fire! "his passion cruel grown took on a hue fierce and sanguineous." between this time and the spring of he seems to have worked assiduously. of course, worldly success was of more importance than ever. he began "hyperion," but had given it up in september, , because, as he said, "there were too many miltonic inversions in it." he wrote "lamia" after an attentive study of dryden's versification. this period also produced the "eve of st. agnes," "isabella," and the odes to the "nightingale" and to the "grecian urn." he studied italian, read ariosto, and wrote part of a humorous poem, "the cap and bells." he tried his hand at tragedy, and lord houghton has published among his "remains," "otho the great," and all that was ever written of "king stephen." we think he did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon to show how ill his _biographee_ could do anything. in the winter of he was chilled in riding on the top of a stage-coach, and came home in a state of feverish excitement. he was persuaded to go to bed, and in getting between the cold sheets, coughed slightly. "that is blood in my mouth," he said; "bring me the candle; let me see this blood." it was of a brilliant red, and his medical knowledge enabled him to interpret the augury. those narcotic odors that seem to breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of the voyager who is drifting toward the shore of the mysterious other world, appeared to envelop him, and, looking up with sudden calmness, he said, "i know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood; i cannot be deceived in that color. that drop is my death-warrant; i must die." there was a slight rally during the summer of that year, but toward autumn he grew worse again, and it was decided that he should go to italy. he was accompanied thither by his friend, mr. severn, an artist. after embarking, he wrote to his friend, mr. brown. we give a part of this letter, which is so deeply tragic that the sentences we take almost seem to break away from the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches of dante's lamentable wood. "i wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. there is one i must mention and have done with it. even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. the very thing which i want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. i cannot help it. who can help it? were i in health it would make me ill, and how can i bear it in my state? i dare say you will be able to guess on what subject i am harping,--you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house i wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then i wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains, which are better than nothing. land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer forever. when the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, i may say the bitterness of death is passed. i often wish for you, that you might flatter me with the best. i think, without my mentioning it, for my sake, you would be a, friend to miss ---- when i am dead. you think she has many faults, but for my sake think she has not one. if there is anything you can do for her by word or deed i know you will do it. i am in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to miss ---- and my sister is amazing,--the one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. i seldom think of my brother and sister in america; the thought of leaving miss ---- is beyond everything horrible,--the sense of darkness coming over me,--i eternally see her figure eternally vanishing, some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at wentworth place ring in my ears. is there another life? shall i awake and find all this a dream? there must be; we cannot be created for this sort of suffering." to the same friend he writes again from naples, st november, :-- "the persuasion that i shall see her no more will kill me. my dear brown, i should have had her when i was in health, and i should have remained well. i can bear to die,--i cannot bear to leave her. o god! god! god! everything i have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. the silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my head. my imagination is horribly vivid about her,--i see her, i hear her. there is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. this was the case when i was in england, i cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that i was a prisoner at hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on hampstead all day. then there was a good hope of seeing her again,--now!--o that i could be buried near where she lives! i am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter from her,--to see her handwriting would break my heart. even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than i can bear. my dear brown, what am i to do? where can i look for consolation or ease? if i had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me. indeed, through the whole of my illness, both at your house and at kentish town, this fever has never ceased wearing me out." the two friends went almost immediately from naples to rome, where keats was treated with great kindness by the distinguished physician, dr. (afterward sir james) clark.[ ] but there was no hope from the first. his disease was beyond remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. the very fact that life might be happy deepened his despair. he might not have sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was struggling looked only the blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-torch that promised safety and love and rest. it is good to know that one of keats's last pleasures was in hearing severn read aloud from a volume of jeremy taylor. on first coming to rome, he had bought a copy of alfieri, but, finding on the second page these lines, "misera me! sollievo a me non resta altro che il pianto, ed il pianto é delitto," he laid down the book and opened it no more. on the th february, , severn speaks of a change that had taken place in him toward greater quietness and peace. he talked much, and fell at last into a sweet sleep, in which he seemed to have happy dreams. perhaps he heard the soft footfall of the angel of death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be his valentine. that night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed upon his gravestone,-- "here lies one whose name was writ in water." on the d he died, without pain and as if falling asleep. his last words were, "i am dying; i shall die easy; don't be frightened, be firm and thank god it has come!" he was buried in the protestant burial-ground at rome, in that part of it which is now disused and secluded from the rest. a short time before his death he told severn that he thought his intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of flowers; and once, after lying peacefully awhile, he said, "i feel the flowers growing over me." his grave is marked by a little headstone on which are carved somewhat rudely his name and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself. no tree or shrub has been planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to their buried lover, crowd his small mound with a galaxy of their innocent stars, more prosperous than those under which he lived.[ ] in person, keats was below the middle height, with a head small in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders. his hair was brown and fine, falling in natural ringlets about a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. every feature was delicately cut; the chin was bold; and about the mouth something of a pugnacious expression. his eyes were mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. at the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled.[ ] haydon says that his eyes had an inward delphian look that was perfectly divine. the faults of keats's poetry are obvious enough, but it should be remembered that he died at twenty-five, and that he offends by superabundance and not poverty. that he was overlanguaged at first there can be no doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of diction. it is only by the rich that the costly plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is attainable. whether keats was original or not, i do not think it useful to discuss until it has been settled what originality is. lord houghton tells us that this merit (whatever it is) has been denied to keats, because his poems take the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the time he wrote them. but men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several generations. in the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. it is true that keats has the accent of the men from whom he learned to speak, but this is to make originality a mere question of externals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary might bring an action of trover against every author who used his words. it is the man behind the words that gives them value, and if shakespeare help himself to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his intellect that makes the other weighty with meaning. enough that we recognize in keats that indefinable newness and unexpectedness which we call genius. the sunset is original every evening, though for thousands of years it has built out of the same light and vapor its visionary cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night shall utterly abase and destroy. three men, almost contemporaneous with each other,--wordsworth, keats, and byron,--were the great means of bringing back english poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. of these, wordsworth was the only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the existing formalism injured his earlier poems by tingeing them with something of iconoclastic extravagance. he was the deepest thinker, keats the most essentially a poet, and byron the most keenly intellectual of the three. keats had the broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on more sides, and he was able to understand wordsworth and judge byron, equally conscious, through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the one and the many littlenesses of the other, while wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic character, and byron had only an uneasy and jealous instinct of contemporary merit. the poems of wordsworth, as he was the most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those of keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste and feeling; and those of byron, who was impressible chiefly through the understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he lived. wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; keats, their forms; and byron, interesting to men of imagination less for his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires not yet regulated by experience nor supplied with motives by the duties of life. keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these later days. it is not merely that he has studied the elizabethans and caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. his imagination was his bliss and bane. was he cheerful, he "hops about the gravel with the sparrows"; was he morbid, he "would reject a petrarcal coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers." so impressible was he as to say that he "had no nature," meaning character. but he knew what the faculty was worth, and says finely, "the imagination may be compared to adam's dream: he awoke and found it truth." he had an unerring instinct for the poetic uses of things, and for him they had no other use. we are apt to talk of the classic _renaissance_ as of a phenomenon long past, nor ever to be renewed, and to think the greeks and romans alone had the mighty magic to work such a miracle. to me one of the most interesting aspects of keats is that in him we have an example of the _renaissance_ going on almost under our own eyes, and that the intellectual ferment was in him kindled by a purely english leaven. he had properly no scholarship, any more than shakespeare had, but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his purpose. his delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore. of the self-denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in one so young) the second draft of hyperion as compared with the first is a conclusive proof. and far indeed is his "lamia" from the lavish indiscrimination of "endymion." in his odes he showed a sense of form and proportion which we seek vainly in almost any other english poet, and some of his sonnets (taking all qualities into consideration) are the most perfect in our language. no doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it _was_ maturity nevertheless. happy the young poet who has the saving fault of exuberance, if he have also the shaping faculty that sooner or later will amend it! as every young person goes through all the world-old experiences, fancying them something peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with every new generation, whose youth always finds its representatives in its poets. keats rediscovered the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary. wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found in vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it, except when it is upborne by the thought. keats had an instinct for fine words, which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic expression than any modern english poet. and by poetic expression i do not mean merely a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which heightens or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and gives entireness to the effect. there is a great deal more than is commonly supposed in this choice of words. men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or reapplies an old epithet. the thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. this power of language is veiled in the old legends which make the invisible powers the servants of some word. as soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. we reward the discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him member of all the societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the small academy of the immortals. the poems of keats mark an epoch in english poetry; for, however often we may find traces of it in others, in them found its most unconscious expression that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. the lowest point was indicated when there was such an utter confounding of the common and the uncommon sense that dr. johnson wrote verse and burke prose. the most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as if one should say that the test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-candles could be made of it. we find keats at first going to the other extreme, and endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of tallow; but we see also incontestable proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic gift in the constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later poems. and it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like that of the eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. in him a vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure with the divine faculty; thought emancipated itself from expression without becoming its tyrant; and music and meaning floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on the smooth element of his verse. without losing its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which underlies the senses and is the spirit of them. footnotes: [ ] hunt's autobiography (am. ed.), vol. ii. p. . [ ] haydon tells the story differently, but i think lord houghton's version the best. [ ] there is always some one willing to make himself a sort of accessary after the fact in any success; always an old woman or two, ready to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the childhood of persons who have become distinguished. accordingly, a certain "mrs. grafty, of craven street, finsbury," assures mr. george keats, when he tells her that john is determined to be a poet, "that this was very odd, because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." the early histories of heroes, like those of nations, are always more or less mythical, and i give the story for what it is worth. doubtless there is a gleam of intelligence in it, for the old lady pronounces it odd that any one should _determine_ to be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint that the matter was determined earlier and by a higher disposing power. there are few children who do not soon discover the charm of rhyme, and perhaps fewer who can resist making fun of the mrs. graftys, of craven street, finsbury, when they have the chance. see haydon's autobiography, vol i. p. . [ ] "i never saw the poet keats but once, but he then read some lines from (i think) the 'bristowe tragedy' with an enthusiasm of admiration such as could be felt only by a poet, and which true poetry only could have excited."--j. h. c., in notes & queries, th s. x. . [ ] haydon (autobiography, vol. i. p. ) says that he "strongly suspects" terry to have written the articles in blackwood. [ ] the lodging of keats was on the piazza di spagna, in the first house on the right hand in going up the scalinata. mr. severn's studio is said to have been in the cancello over the garden gate of the villa negroni, pleasantly familiar to all americans as the roman home of their countryman crawford. [ ] written in . o irony of time! ten years after the poet's death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend mr. dilke, that "the kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obscurity to which circumstances had condemned him"! (papers of a critic, i. .) o time the atoner! in i found the grave planted with shrubs and flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent american sculptor. [ ] leigh hunt's autobiography, ii. . life of john keats. by william michael rossetti. london walter scott warwick lane, paternoster row (_all rights reserved._) * * * * * contents. chapter i. page keats's grandfather jennings; his father and mother; keats born in london, october , ; his brothers and sister; goes to the school of john clarke at enfield, and is tutored by charles cowden clarke; death of his parents; is apprenticed to a surgeon, hammond; leaves hammond, and studies surgery; reads spenser, and takes to poetry; his literary acquaintances--leigh hunt, haydon, j. hamilton reynolds, dilke, &c.; keats's first volume, "poems," chapter ii. keats begins "endymion," may ; his health suffers in oxford; finishes "endymion" in november; his friend, charles armitage brown; his brother george marries and emigrates to america; keats and brown make a walking tour in scotland and ireland; returns to hampstead, owing to a sore throat; death of his brother tom; his description of miss cox ("charmian"), and of miss brawne, with whom he falls in love; a difference with haydon; visits winchester; george keats returns for a short while from america, but goes away again without doing anything to relieve john keats from straits in money matters. chapter iii. keats's consumptive illness begins, february ; he rallies, but has a relapse in june; he stays with leigh hunt, and leaves him suddenly; publication of his last volume, "lamia" &c.; returns to hampstead before starting for italy; his love-letters to miss brawne--extracts; haydon's last sight of him; he sails for italy with joseph severn; letter to brown; naples and rome; extracts from severn's letters; keats dies in rome, february , . chapter iv. keats rhymes in infancy; his first writings, the "imitation of spenser," and some sonnets; not precocious as a poet; his sonnet on chapman's homer; contents of his first volume, "poems," ; hunt's first sight of his poems in ms.; "sleep and poetry," extract regarding poetry of the pope school, &c.; the publishers, messrs. ollier, give up the volume as a failure. chapter v. "endymion"; keats's classical predilections; extract (from "i stood tiptoe" &c.) about diana and endymion; details as to the composition of "endymion," ; preface to the poem; the critique in _the quarterly review_; attack in _blackwood's magazine_; question whether keats broke down under hostile criticism; evidence on this subject in his own letters, and by shelley, lord houghton, haydon, byron, hunt, george keats, cowden clarke, severn; conclusion. chapter vi. poems included in the "lamia" volume, ; "isabella"; "the eve of st. agnes"; "hyperion"; "lamia"; five odes; other poems--sonnet on "the nile"; "the eve of st. mark," "otho the great," "la belle dame sans merci," "the cap and bells," final sonnet, &c.; prose writings. chapter vii. keats's grave in rome; projects of brown and others for writing his life; his brother george, and his sister, mrs. llanos; miss brawne; discussion as to hunt's friendship to keats; other friends--bailey, haydon, shelley. chapter viii. keats's appearance; portraits; difficulties in estimating his character; his poetic ambition, and feeling on subjects of historical or public interest; his intensity of thought; moral tone; question as to his strength of character--haydon's opinion; demeanour among friends; studious resolves; suspicious tendency; his feeling toward women--poem quoted; love of flowers and music; politics; irritation against leigh hunt; his letters; antagonism to science; remarks on contemporary writers; axioms on poetry; self-analysis as to his perceptions as a poet; feelings as to painting; sense of humour, punning, &c.; indifference in religious matters; his sentiments as to the immortality of the soul; fondness for wine and game; summary. chapter ix. influence of spenser discussed; flimsiness of keats's first volume; early sonnets; "endymion"; shelley's criticisms of this poem; detailed argument of the poem; estimate of "endymion" as to invention and execution; estimate of "isabella"; of "the eve of st. agnes"; of "the eve of st. mark"; of "hyperion"; of "otho the great"; of "lamia"; "la belle dame sans merci" quoted and estimated; keats's five great odes--extracts; "beauty is truth, truth beauty"; imagination in verbal form distinctive of keats; discussion of the term "faultless" applied to keats; details of execution in the "ode to a nightingale"; other odes, sonnets, and lyrics; treatment of women in keats's last volume; his references to "swooning"; his sensuousness and its correlative sentiment; superiority of shelley to keats; final remarks as to the quality of keats's poetry. index note. in all important respects i leave this brief "life of keats" to speak for itself. there is only one point which i feel it needful to dwell upon. in the summer of i was invited to undertake a life of keats for the present series, and i assented. some while afterwards it was publicly announced that a life of keats, which had been begun by mr. sidney colvin long before for a different series, would be published at an early date. i read up my materials, began in march the writing of my book, finished it on june rd, and handed it over to the editor. on june th mr. colvin's volume was published. i at once read it, and formed a high opinion of its merits, and i found in it some new details which could not properly be ignored by any succeeding biographer of the poet. i therefore got my ms. back, and inserted here and there such items of fresh information as were really needful for the true presentment of my subject-matter. in justice both to mr. colvin and to myself i drew upon his pages for only a minimum, not a maximum, of the facts which they embody; and in all matters of opinion and criticism i left my ms. exactly as it stood. the reader will thus understand that the present "life of keats" is, in planning, structure, execution, and estimate, entirely independent of mr. colvin's; but that i have ultimately had the advantage of consulting mr. colvin's book as one of my various sources of information--the latest and within its own lines the completest of all. life of keats. chapter i. a truism must do duty as my first sentence. there are long lives, and there are eventful lives: there are also short lives, and uneventful ones. keats's life was both short and uneventful. to the differing classes of lives different modes of treatment may properly be applied by the biographer. in the case of a writer whose life was both long and eventful, i might feel disposed to carry the whole narrative forward _pari passu_, and to exhibit in one panorama the outward and the inward career, the incidents and the product, the doings and environment, and the writings, acting and re-acting upon one another. in the instance of keats this does not appear to me to be the most fitting method. it may be more appropriate to apportion his life into two sections: and to treat firstly of his general course from the cradle to the grave, and secondly of his performances in literature. the two things will necessarily overlap to some extent, but i shall keep them apart so far as may be convenient. when we have seen what he did and what he wrote, we shall be prepared to enter upon some analysis of his character and personality. this will form my third section; and in a fourth i shall endeavour to estimate the quality and value of his writings, in particular and in general. thus i address myself in the first instance to a narrative of the outer facts of his life. * * * * * john keats came of undistinguished parentage. no biographer carries his pedigree further than his maternal grandfather, or alleges that there was any trace, however faint or remote, of ancestral eminence. the maternal grandfather was a mr. jennings, who kept a large livery-stable, called the swan and hoop, in the pavement, moorfields, london, opposite the entrance to finsbury circus. the principal stableman or assistant in the business was named thomas keats, of devonshire or cornish parentage. he was a well-conducted, sensible, good-looking little man, and won the favour of jennings's daughter, named frances or fanny: they married, and this rather considerable rise in his fortunes left keats unassuming and manly as before. he appears to have been a natural gentleman. jennings was a prosperous tradesman, and might have died rich (his death took place in ) but for easy-going good-nature tending to the gullible. mrs. keats seems to have been in character less uniform and single-minded than her husband. she is described as passionately fond of amusement, prodigal, dotingly attached to her children, more especially john, much beloved by them in return, sensible, and at the same time saturnine in demeanour: a personable tall woman with a large oval face. her pleasure-seeking tendency probably led her into some imprudences, for her first baby, john, was a seven months' child. john keats was born at the moorfields place of business on the st of october . this date of birth is established by the register of baptisms at st. botolph's, bishopsgate: the date usually assigned, the th of october, appears to be inaccurate, though keats himself, and others of the family, believed in it. there were three other children of the marriage--or four if we reckon a a son who died in infancy: george, thomas, and lastly fanny, born in march . an anecdote is told of john when in the fifth year of his age, purporting to show forth the depth of his childish affection for his mother. it is said that she then lay seriously ill; and john stood sentinel at her chamber-door, holding an old sword which he had picked up about the premises, and he remained there for hours to prevent her being disturbed. one may fear, however, that this anecdote has taken an ideal colouring through the lens of a partial biographer. the painter benjamin robert haydon--who, as we shall see in the sequel, was extremely well acquainted with john keats, and who heard the story from his brother thomas--records it thus: "he was, when an infant, a most violent and ungovernable child. at five years of age or thereabouts he once got hold of a naked sword, and, shutting the door, swore nobody should go out. his mother wanted to do so; but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody, through the window, saw her position, and came to her rescue." it can scarcely be supposed that there were two different occasions when the quinquennial john keats superintended his mother and her belongings with a naked sword--once in ardent and self-oblivious affection, and once in petulant and froward excitement. the parents would have liked to send john to harrow school: but, this being finally deemed too expensive, he was placed in the rev. john clarke's school at enfield, then in high repute, and his brothers followed him thither. the enfield schoolhouse was a fine red-brick building of the early eighteenth century, said to have been erected by a retired west india merchant; the materials "moulded into designs decorating the front with garlands of flowers and pomegranates, together with heads of cherubim over two niches in the centre of the building." this central part of the façade was eventually purchased for the south kensington museum, and figures there as a screen in the structural division. the schoolroom was forty feet long; the playground was a spacious courtyard between the schoolroom and the house itself; a garden, a hundred yards in length, stretched beyond the playground, succeeded by a sweep of greensward, with a "lake" or well-sized pond: there was also a two-acre field with a couple of cows. in this commodious seat of sound learning, well cared for and well instructed so far as his school course extended, john keats remained for some years. he came under the particular observation of the headmaster's son, mr. charles cowden clarke, not very many years his senior. he was born in , fostered keats's interest in literature, became himself an industrious writer of some standing, and died in . keats at school did not show any exceptional talent, but he was, according to mr. cowden clarke's phrase, "a very orderly scholar," and got easily through his tasks. in the last eighteen months of his schooling he took a new lease of assiduity: he read a vast deal, and would keep to his book even during meals. for two or three successive half-years he obtained the first prize for voluntary work; and was to be found early and late attending to some translation from the latin or the french, to which he would, when allowed his own way, sacrifice his recreation-time. he was particularly fond of lemprière's "classical dictionary," tooke's "pantheon," and spence's "polymetis": a line of reading presageful of his own afterwork in the region of greek mythology. of the grecian language, however, he learned nothing: in latin he proceeded as far as the Æneid, and of his own accord translated much of that epic in writing. two of his favourite books were "robinson crusoe" and marmontel's "incas of peru." he must also have made some acquaintance with shakespeare, as he told a younger schoolfellow that he thought no one durst read "macbeth" alone in the house at two in the morning. not indeed that these bookish leanings formed the whole of his personality as a schoolboy. he was noticeable for beauty of face and expression, active and energetic, intensely pugnacious, and even quarrelsome. he was very apt to get into a fight with boys much bigger than himself. nor was his younger brother george exempted: john would fight fiercely with george, and this (if we may trust george's testimony) was always owing to john's own unmanageable temper. the two brothers were none the less greatly attached, both at school and afterwards. the youngest brother, thomas (always called tom in family records), is reported to have been as pugilistic as john; whereas george, when allowed his own way, was pacific, albeit resolute. the ideal of all the three boys was a maternal uncle, a naval officer of very stalwart presence, who had been in admiral duncan's ship in the famous action off camperdown; where he had distinguished himself not only by signal gallantry, but by not getting shot, though his tall form was a continual mark for hostile guns. while still a schoolboy at enfield, john keats lost both his parents. the father died on the th of april , in returning from a visit to the school: a detail which serves to show us (for i do not find it otherwise affirmed) that john could at the utmost have been only in the ninth year of his age, possibly even younger, when his schooling began. on leaving enfield, the father dined at southgate, and, going late homewards, his horse fell in the city road, and the rider's skull was fractured. he was found about one o'clock in the morning speechless, and expired towards eight, aged thirty-six. the mother suffered from rheumatism, and later on from consumption; of which she died in february . "john," so writes haydon, "sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine or even cook her food but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease." she had been an easily consoled widow, for, within a year from the decease of her first husband, she married another, william rawlings, who had probably succeeded to the management of the business. she soon, however, separated from rawlings, and lived with her mother at edmonton. after her death keats hid himself for some days in a nook under his master's desk, passionately inconsolable. the four children, who inherited from their grandparents (chiefly from their grandmother) a moderate fortune of nearly £ , altogether, in which the daughter had the largest share, were then left under the guardianship of mr. abbey, a city merchant residing at walthamstow. at the age of fifteen, or at some date before the close of , john quitted his school. a little stave of doggrel which keats wrote to his sister, probably in july , gives a glimpse of what he was like at the time when he and his brothers were living with their grandmother. "there was a naughty boy, and a naughty boy was he: he kept little fishes in washing-tubs three, in spite of the might of the maid, nor afraid of his granny good. he often would hurly-burly get up early and go by hook or crook to the brook, and bring home miller's-thumb, tittlebat, not over fat, minnows small as the stall of a glove, not above the size of a nice little baby's little fingers." he was fond of "goldfinches, tomtits, minnows, mice, ticklebacks, dace, cock-salmons, and all the whole tribe of the bushes and the brooks." a career in life was promptly marked out for the youth. while still aged fifteen, he was apprenticed, with a premium of £ , to mr. hammond, a surgeon of some repute at edmonton. mr. cowden clarke says that this arrangement evidently gave keats satisfaction: apparently he refers rather to the convenient vicinity of edmonton to enfield than to the surgical profession itself. the indenture was to have lasted five years; but, for some reason which is not wholly apparent, keats left hammond before the close of his apprenticeship.[ ] if haydon was rightly informed (presumably by keats himself), the reason was that the youth resented surgery as the antagonist of a possible poetic vocation, and "at last his master, weary of his disgust, gave him up his time." he then took to walking st. thomas's hospital; and, after a short stay at no. dean street, borough, and next in st. thomas's street, he resided along with his two brothers--who were at the time clerks in mr. abbey's office--in the poultry, cheapside, over the passage which led to the queen's arms tavern. two of his surgical companions were mr. henry stephens, who afterwards introduced creosote into medical practice, and mr. george wilson mackereth. keats attended the usual lectures, and made careful annotations in a book still preserved. mr. stephens relates that keats was fond of scribbling rhyme of a sort among professional notes, especially those of a fellow-student, and he sometimes showed graver verses to his associates. finally, in july , he passed the examination at apothecaries' hall with considerable credit--more than his familiars had counted upon; and in march he was appointed a dresser at guy's under mr. lucas. cowden clarke once inquired how far keats liked his studies at the hospital. the youth replied that he did not relish anatomy: "the other day, for instance, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray, and i was off with them to oberon and fairyland." readers of keats's poetry will have no difficulty in believing that, ever since his first introduction into a professional life, surgery and literature had claimed a divided allegiance from him. when at edmonton with mr. hammond, he kept up his connection with the clarke family, especially with charles cowden clarke. he was perpetually borrowing books; and at last, about the beginning of he asked for spenser's "faery queen," rather to the surprise of the family, who had no idea that that particular book could be at all in his line. the effect, however, was very noticeable. keats walked to enfield at least once a week, for the purpose of talking over spenser with cowden clarke. "he ramped through the scenes of the romance," said clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." a fine touch of description or of imagery, or energetic epithets such as "the sea-shouldering whale," would light up his face with ecstasy. his leisure had already been given to reading and translation, including the completion of his rendering of the Æneid. a literary craving was now at fever-heat, and he took to writing verses as well as reading them. soon surgery and letters were to conflict no longer--the latter obtaining, contrary to the liking of mr. abbey, the absolute and permanent mastery. keats indeed always denied that he abandoned surgery for the express purpose of taking to poetry: he alleged that his motive had been the dread of doing some mischief in his surgical operations. his last operation consisted in opening a temporal artery; he was entirely successful in it, but the success appeared to himself like a miracle, the recurrence of which was not to be reckoned on. while surgery was waning with keats, and finally dying out--an upshot for which the exact date is not assigned, nor perhaps assignable--he was making, at first through his intimacy with cowden clarke, some good literary acquaintances. the brothers john and leigh hunt were the centre of the circle to which keats was thus admitted. john was the publisher, and leigh the editor, of _the examiner_. they had both been lately fined, and imprisoned for two years, for a libel on the prince regent, george iv.; it was perhaps legally a libel, and was certainly a castigation laid on with no indulgent hand. leigh hunt (born in , and therefore keats's senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the stricter sense of the term), a charming companion, a too-constant cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. he understood good literature both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as model or as mentor. leigh hunt first saw keats in the spring of , not at his residence in hampstead as has generally been supposed, but at no. york buildings, new road.[ ] the earliest meeting of keats with haydon was in november , at hunt's house; haydon born in , the zealous and impatient champion of high art, wide-minded and combative, too much absorbed in his love for art to be without a considerable measure of self-seeking for art's apostle, himself. he painted into his large picture of christ's entry into jerusalem the head of keats, along with those of wordsworth and others. another acquaintance was mr. charles ollier, the publisher, who wrote verse and prose of his own. the ollier firm in the early spring of became the publishers of keats's first volume of poems, of which more anon. still earlier than the hunts, haydon, and ollier, keats had known john hamilton reynolds, his junior by a year, a poetical writer of some mark, now too nearly forgotten, author of "the garden of florence," "the fancy," and the prose tale, "miserrimus"; he was the son of the writing-master at christ hospital, and keats became intimate with the whole family, though not invariably well pleased with them all. one of the sisters married thomas hood. through reynolds keats made acquaintance with mr. benjamin bailey, born towards , then a student at oxford reading for the church, afterwards archdeacon of colombo in ceylon. charles wentworth dilke, born in , the critic, and eventually editor of _the athenæum_, was another intimate; and in course of time keats knew charles wells, seven years younger than himself, the author of the dramatic poem "joseph and his brethren," and of the prose "stories after nature." other friends will receive mention as we progress. i have for the present said enough to indicate what was the particular niche in the mansion of english literary life in which keats found himself housed at the opening of his career. chapter ii. we have now reached the year and the month of may, when keats was in the twenty-second year of his age. he then wrote that he had "forgotten all surgery," and was beginning at margate his romantic epic of "endymion," reading and writing about eight hours a day. keats had previously been at carisbrooke in the isle of wight, but had run away from there, finding that the locality, while it charmed, also depressed him. he had left london for the island, apparently with the view of having greater leisure for study and composition. his brother tom was with him at carisbrooke and at margate. he was already provided with a firm of publishers, messrs. taylor and hessey, willing to undertake the risk of "endymion," and they advanced him a sum sufficient for continuing at work on it with comfort. in september he went with mr. benjamin bailey to oxford: they made an excursion to stratford-on-avon, and keats was back at hampstead by the end of the month. it would appear that in oxford keats, in the heat of youthful blood, committed an indiscretion of which we do not know the details, nor need we give them if we knew them; for on the th of october he wrote to bailey in these terms: "the little mercury i have taken has corrected the poison and improved my health,[ ] though i feel, from my employment, that i shall never again be secure in robustness." the residence of keats and his brother tom in hampstead, a first-floor lodging, was in well walk, no. , next to the wells tavern, which was then called the green man. the reader who has a head for localities should bear this point well in mind, should carefully discriminate the house in well walk from another house, wentworth place, afterwards tenanted by keats and others at hampstead, and, every time that the question occurs to his thought, should pass a mental vote of thanks to mr. buxton forman for the great pains which he took to settle the point, and the lucid and pleasant account which he has given of it. keats was at leatherhead in november; finished the first draft of "endymion" at burford bridge, near dorking, on the th of that month, and returned to hampstead for the winter. two anecdotes which have often been repeated belong apparently to about this date. one of them purports that keats gave a sound drubbing in hampstead to a butcher, or a butcher's boy, who was ill-treating a small boy, or else a cat. hunt simply says that the butcher "had been insolent,"--by implication, to keats himself. the "butcher's boy" has obtained traditional currency; but, according to george keats, the offender was "a scoundrel in livery," the locality "a blind alley at hampstead." clarke says that the stand-up fight lasted nearly an hour. keats was an undersized man, in fact he was not far removed from the dwarfish, being barely more than five feet high, and this small feat of stubborn gallantry deserves to be appraised and praised accordingly. the other anecdote is that coleridge met keats along with leigh hunt in a lane near highgate, "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth," and after shaking hands with keats, he said aside to hunt, "there is death in that hand." nothing is extant to show that at so early a date as this, or even for some considerable while after, any of keats's immediate friends shared the ominous prevision of coleridge. in march keats joined his brothers at teignmouth in devonshire, and in april "endymion" was published. in june he set off on a pedestrian tour of some extent with a friend whose name will frequently recur from this point forwards, charles armitage brown. one is generally inclined to get some idea of what a man was like; if one knows what he was _un_like much the same purpose is served. in april keats wrote some bantering verses about brown, which are understood to go mainly by contraries we therefore infer brown to have presented a physical and moral aspect the reverse of the following-- "he is to meet a melancholy carle, thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair, as hath the seeded thistle when a parle it holds with zephyr ere it sendeth fair its light balloons into the summer air. thereto his beard had not begun to bloom; no brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer; no care had touched his cheek with mortal doom, but new he was and bright as scarf from persian loom. "ne carèd he for wine or half-and-half, ne carèd he for fish or flesh or fowl, and sauces held he worthless as the chaff; he 'sdained the swine-head at the wassail bowl. ne with lewd ribalds sat he cheek by jowl, ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair; but after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul panted, and all his food was woodland air, though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare. "the slang of cities in no wise he knew; 'tipping the wink' to him was heathen greek. he sipped no olden tom or ruin blue, or nantz or cherry-brandy, drank full meek by many a damsel brave and rouge of cheek. nor did he know each aged watchman's beat; nor in obscurèd purlieus would he seek for curlèd jewesses with ankles neat, who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet." mr. brown, son of a london stockbroker from scotland, was a man several years older than keats, born in . he was a russia merchant retired from business, of much culture and instinctive sympathy with genius, and he enjoyed assisting the efforts of young men of promise. he had produced the libretto of an opera, "narensky," and he eventually published a book on the sonnets of shakespeare. from the date we have now reached, the summer of , which was more than a year following their first introduction, brown may be regarded as the most intimate of all keats's friends, dilke coming next to him. the pedestrian tour with brown was the sequel of a family leave-taking at liverpool. george keats, finding in himself no vocation for trade, with its smug compliances and sleek assiduities (and john agreed with him in these views), had determined to emigrate to america, and rough it in a new settlement for a living, perhaps for fortune; and, as a preliminary step, he had married miss georgiana augusta wylie, a girl of sixteen, daughter of a deceased naval officer. the sonnet "nymph of the downward smile" &c. was addressed to her. john keats and brown, therefore, accompanied george and his bride to liverpool, and saw them off. they then started as pedestrians into the lake country, the land of burns, belfast, and the western highlands. before starting on the trip keats had often been in such a state of health as to make it prudent that he should not hazard exposure to night air; but in his excursion he seems to have acted like a man of sound and rather hardy physique, walking from day to day about twenty miles, and sometimes more, and his various records of the trip have nothing of a morbid or invaliding tone. this was not, however, to last long; the isle of mull proved too much for him. on the rd of july, writing to his brother tom, he describes the expedition thus: "the road through the island, or rather track, is the most dreary you can think of; between dreary mountains, over bog and rock and river, with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in hand.... we had a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the island of mull, and then we crossed to iona." in another letter he says: "walked up to my knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to see icolmkill and staffa." from this time forward the mention of the sore throat occurs again and again; sometimes it is subsiding, or as good as gone; at other times it has returned, and causes more or less inconvenience. brown wrote of it as "a violent cold and ulcerated throat." the latest reference to it comes in december , only two months preceding the final and alarming break-down in the young poet's health. in scotland, at any rate, amid the exposure and exertion of the walking tour, the sore throat was not to be staved off; so, having got as far as inverness, keats, under medical advice, reluctantly cut his journey short, parted from brown, and went on board the smack from cromarty. a nine days' passage brought him to london bridge, and on the th of august he presented himself to the rather dismayed eyes of mrs. dilke. "john keats," she wrote, "arrived here last night, as brown and as shabby as you can imagine: scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. i cannot tell what he looked like." more ought to be said here of the details of keats's scottish and irish trip; but such details, not being of essential importance as incidents in his life, could only be given satisfactorily in the form of copious extracts from his letters, and for these--readable and picturesque as they are--i have not adequate space. he preferred, on the whole, the scotch people to the little which he saw of the irish. just as keats was leaving scotland, because of his own ailments, he had been summoned away thence on account of the more visibly grave malady of his brother tom, who was in an advanced stage of consumption; but it appears that the letter did not reach his hands at the time. the next three months were passed by keats along with tom at their hampstead lodgings. anxiety and affection--warm affection, deep anxiety--were of no avail. tom died at the beginning of december, aged just twenty, and was buried on the th of that month. the words in "king lear," "poor tom," remain underlined by the surviving brother. john keats was now solitary in the world. tom was dead, george and his bride in america, fanny, his girlish sister, a permanent inmate of the household of mr. and mrs. abbey at walthamstow. in december he quitted his lodgings at hampstead, and set up house along with mr. brown in what was then called wentworth place, hampstead, now lawn bank; brown being rightly the tenant, and keats a paying resident with brown. wentworth place consisted of only two houses. one of them was thus inhabited by brown and keats, the other by the dilkes. in the first of these houses, when brown and keats were away, and afterwards in the second, there was also a well-to-do family of the name of brawne,--a mother, with a son and two daughters. lawn bank is the penultimate house on the right of john street, next to wentworth house: dr. sharpey passed some of his later years in it. this is, beyond all others, the dwelling which remains permanently linked with the memory of keats. while tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, keats made the acquaintance of two young ladies. he has left us a description of both of them. his portraiture of the first, miss jane cox, is written in a tone which might seem the preliminary to a _grande passion_; but this did not prove so; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his memory. his portraiture of the second, miss fanny brawne, does not suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a definite antipathy; this also was delusive, for he was from the first smitten with miss brawne, and soon profoundly in love with her--i might say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair, was the main ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages. i shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of exceptional importance for our biography--one as acquainting us with keats's general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two years of his life. on october , , he wrote as follows to his brother george and his wife in america:-- "the misses reynolds are very kind to me.... on my return, the first day i called [this was probably towards the th of september], they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, miss cox, who, having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by mrs. reynolds to take asylum in her house. she is an east indian, and ought to be her grandfather's heir.... from what i hear she is not without faults of a real kind; but she has others which are more apt to make women of inferior claims hate her. she is not a cleopatra, but is at least a charmian; she has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. when she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. she is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her; from habit she thinks that nothing particular. i always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which i cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. i am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble; i forget myself entirely, because i live in her. you will by this time think i am in love with her; so, before i go any further, i will tell you i am not. she kept me awake one night, as a tune of mozart's might do. i speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which i can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose lips[ ] is to me a banquet. i don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do i fret to leave her behind me. i like her, and her like, because one has no _sensations_; what we both are is taken for granted. you will suppose i have by this time had much talk with her. no such thing; there are the misses reynolds on the look out. they think i don't admire her because i don't stare at her; they call her a flirt to me--what a want of knowledge! she walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn to her with a magnetic power; this they call flirting! they do not know things; they do not know what a woman is. i believe, though, she has faults, the same as charmian and cleopatra might have had. yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things:--the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. in the former, bonaparte, lord byron, and this charmian, hold the first place in our mind; in the latter, john howard, bishop hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. as a man of the world, i love the rich talk of a charmian; as an eternal being, i love the thought of you. i should like her to ruin me, and i should like you to save me." so much for miss cox, the charmian whom keats was not in love with. this is not absolutely the sole mention of her in his letters, but it is the only one of importance. we now turn to miss brawne, the young lady with whom he had fallen very much in love at a date even preceding that to which the present description must belong. the description comes from a letter to george and georgiana keats, written probably towards the middle of december . it is true that the name brawne does not appear in the printed version of the letter, but the "very positive conviction" expressed by mr. forman that that name really does stand in the ms., a conviction "shared by members of her family," may safely be adopted by all my readers. i therefore insert the name where a blank had heretofore appeared in print. "perhaps, as you are fond of giving me sketches of characters, you may like a little picnic of scandal, even across the atlantic. shall i give you miss brawne? she is about my height, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort. she wants sentiment in every feature. she manages to make her hair look well; her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful; her mouth is bad, and good; her profile is better than her full face, which indeed is not 'full,' but pale and thin, without showing any bone; her shape is very graceful, and so are her movements; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet tolerable. she is not seventeen [keats, if he really wrote 'not seventeen,' was wrong here; 'not nineteen' would have been correct, as she was born on august , .] but she is ignorant, monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions; calling people such names that i was forced lately to make use of the term 'minx.' this is, i think, from no innate vice, but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. i am, however, tired of such style, and shall decline any more of it. she had a friend to visit her lately. you have known plenty such. she plays the music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her fingers. she is a downright miss, without one set-off. we hated her ["we" would apparently be keats, brown, and the dilkes], and smoked her, and baited her, and i think drove her away. miss brawne thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only woman in the world she would change persons with. what a stupe! she is as superior as a rose to a dandelion." at the time when keats wrote these words he had known miss brawne for a couple of months, more or less, having first seen her in october or november at the house of the dilkes. it might seem that he was about this time in a state of feeling propense to love. _some_ woman was required to fill the void in his heart. the woman might have been miss cox, whom he met in september. as the event turned out, it was not she, but it _was_ miss brawne, whom he met in october or november. fanny brawne was the elder daughter of a gentleman of independent means, who died while she was still a child; he left another daughter and a son with their mother; and the whole family, as already mentioned, lived at times in the same house which the dilkes occupied in wentworth-place, hampstead, and at other times in the adjoining house, while not tenanted by brown and keats. miss brawne (i quote here from mr. forman) "had much natural pride and buoyancy, and was quite capable of affecting higher spirits and less concern than she really felt. but, as to the genuineness of her attachment to keats, some of those who knew her personally have no doubt whatever."[ ] if so--or indeed whether so or not--it is a pity that she was wont, after keats's death, to speak of him (as has been averred) as "that foolish young poet who was in love with me." that keats was a poet and a young poet is abundantly true; but that he was a foolish one had even before his death, and especially very soon after it, been found out to be a gross delusion by a large number of people, and might just as well have been found out by his betrothed bride in addition. i know of only one portrait of miss brawne; it is a silhouette by edouart, engraved in two of mr. forman's publications. a silhouette is one of the least indicative forms of portraiture for enabling one to judge whether the sitter was handsome or not. this likeness shows a very profuse mass of hair, a tall, rather sloping, forehead, a long and prominent aquiline nose, a mouth and chin of the _petite_ kind, a very well-developed throat, and a figure somewhat small in proportion to the head. the face is not of the sort which i should suppose to have ever been beautiful in an artist's eyes, or in a poet's either; and indeed keats's description of miss brawne, which i have just cited, is qualified, chilly, and critical, with regard to beauty. nevertheless, his love-letters to miss brawne, most of which have been preserved and published, speak of her beauty very emphatically. "the very first week i knew you i wrote myself your vassal;" "i cannot conceive any beginning of such love as i have for you, but beauty;" "all i can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty." it seems probable that keats was the declared lover of miss brawne in april at the latest--more probably in february; and when his first published letter to her was written, july , he and she must certainly have been already engaged, or all but engaged, to marry. this was contrary to mrs. brawne's liking. they appear to have contemplated--anything but willingly on the poet's part--a tolerably long engagement; for he was a young man of twenty-three, with stinted means, no regular profession, and no occupation save that of producing verse derided in the high places of criticism. he spoke indeed of re-studying in edinburgh for the medical profession: this was a vague notion, with which no practical beginning was made. an early marriage, followed by a year or so of pleasuring and of intellectual advancement in some such place as rome or zurich, was what keats really longed for. we must now go back a little--to december . haydon was then still engaged upon his picture of christ's entry into jerusalem, and found his progress impeded by want of funds, and by a bad attack, from which he frequently suffered, of weakness of eyesight. on the nd of the month, keats, with conspicuous generosity--and although he had already lent nearly £ to various friends--tendered him any money-aid which might be in his power; asking merely that his friend would claim the fulfilment of his promise only in the last resort. on january , , haydon definitely accepted his offer; and keats wrote back, hoping to comply, and refusing to take any interest. his own money affairs were, however, at this time almost at a deadlock, controlled by lawyers and by his ex-guardian mr. abbey; and the amount which he had expected to command as coming to him after his brother tom's death was not available. he had to explain as much in april to haydon, who wrote with some urgency. eventually he did make a small loan to the painter--£ ; but very shortly afterwards (june th) was compelled to ask for a reimbursement--"do borrow or beg somehow what you can for me." there was a chancery-suit of old standing, begun soon after the death of mr. jennings in , and it continued to obstruct keats in his money affairs. the precise facts of these were also but ill-known to the poet, who had potentially at his disposal certain funds which remained _perdu_ and unused until two years after his death. on september , , he wrote to his brother george in america that haydon had been unable to make the repayment; and he added, "he did not seem to care much about it, and let me go without my money with almost nonchalance, when he ought to have sold his drawings to supply me. i shall perhaps still be acquainted with him, but, for friendship, that is at an end." and in fact the hitherto very ardent cordiality between the poet and the painter does seem to have been materially damped after this date; keats being somewhat reserved towards haydon, and haydon finding more to censure than to extol in the conduct of keats. we can feel with both of them; and, while we pronounce keats blameless and even praiseworthy throughout, may infer haydon to have been not greatly blameable. towards the end of june keats went to shanklin; his first companion there being an invalid but witty and cheerful friend, james rice, a solicitor, and his second, brown, who co-operated at this time with the poet in producing the drama "otho the great." next, the two friends went to winchester, "chiefly," wrote keats to his sister fanny, "for the purpose of being near a tolerable library, which after all is not to be found in this place. however, we like it very much; it is the pleasantest town i ever was in, and has the most recommendations of any." one of his letters from here (september ) speaks of his being now almost as well acquainted with italian as with french, and he adds, "i shall set myself to get complete in latin, and there my learning must stop. i do not think of venturing upon greek." it is stated that he learned italian with uncommon quickness. early in the winter which closed george keats came over for a short while from america, his main object being to receive his share of the money accruing from the decease of his brother tom, to the cost of whose illness he had largely contributed. he had been in cincinnati, and had engaged in business, but as yet without any success. in some lines which john keats addressed to miss brawne in october there is an energetic and no doubt consciously overloaded denunciation of "that most hateful land, dungeoner of my friends, that monstrous region," &c., &c. john, it appears, concealed from george, during his english visit, the fact that he himself was then much embarrassed in money-matters, and almost wholly dependent upon his friends for a subsistence meanwhile; and george left england again without doing anything for his brother's relief or convenience. he took with him £ , some substantial part of which appears to have been the property of john, absolutely or contingently; and he undertook to remit shortly to his brother £ , to be raised by the sale of a boat which he owned in america; but months passed, and the £ never came, no purchaser for the boat being procurable. out of the £ , which tom keats had left, george received £ , john hardly more than £ , george thus repaying himself some money which had been previously advanced for john's professional education. for all this he has been very severely censured, mr. brown being among his sternest and most persistent assailants. it must seemingly have been to george keats, and yet not to him exclusively, that colonel finch referred in the letter which reached shelley's eyes, saying that john had been "infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe;" and shelley re-enforced this accusation in his preface to "adonais"--"hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care." from these painful charges george keats eventually vindicated himself with warmth of feeling, and with so much solidity of demonstration as availed to convince mr. dilke, and also mr. abbey. who were the other offenders glanced at by colonel finch, as also in one of severn's letters, i have no distinct idea. chapter iii. from this point forwards nothing but misery remains to be recorded of john keats. the narrative becomes depressing to write and depressing to read. the sensation is like that of being confined in a dark vault at noonday. one knows, indeed, that the sun of the poet's genius is blazing outside, and that, on emerging from the vault, we shall be restored to light and warmth; but the atmosphere within is not the less dark and laden, nor the shades the less murky. in tedious wretchedness, racked and dogged with the pang of body and soul, exasperated and protesting, raging now, and now ground down into patience and acceptance, keats gropes through the valley of the shadow of death. before detailing the facts, we must glance for a minute at the position. keats had a passionate ambition and a passionate love--the ambition to be a poet, the love of fanny brawne. at the beginning of , he was conscious of his authentic vocation as a poet, and conscious also that this vocation, though recognized in a small and to some extent an influential circle, was publicly denied and ridiculed; his portion was the hiss of the viper and the gander, the hooting of the impostor and the owl. his forthcoming volume was certain to share the same fate; he knew its claims would be perversely resisted and cruelly repudiated. if he could make no serious impression as a poet, not only was his leading ambition thwarted, but he would also be impeded in getting any other and more paying literary work to do--regular profession or employment he had none. he was at best a poor man, and, for the while, almost bereft of any command of funds. so long as this state of things, or anything like it, continued, he would be unable to marry the woman of his heart. while sickness kept him a prisoner, he was torn by ideas of her volatility and fickleness. disease was sapping his vitals, pain wrung him, death beckoned him with finger more and more imperative. poetic fame became the vision of tantalus, and love the clasp of ixion. such was the life, or such the incipient death, of keats, in the last twelvemonth of his brief existence. for half a year prior to february he had been unrestful and cheerless. "either that gloom overspread me," so he wrote to james rice, "or i was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if i turned to versify, that exacerbated the poison of either sensation." he began taking laudanum at times, but was induced by brown, towards the end of , to promise to give up this insidious practice. then came the crash: it was at hampstead, on the night of the rd of february. "one night, about eleven o'clock," i quote the words of lord houghton, which have become classical, "keats returned home[ ] in a state of strange physical excitement; it might have appeared, to those who did not know him, one of fierce intoxication. he told his friend [brown] he had been outside the stage-coach, had received a severe chill, was a little fevered; but added: 'i don't feel it now.' he was easily persuaded to go to bed; and, as he leapt into the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and said: 'that is blood from my mouth. bring me the candle: let me see this blood.' he gazed steadfastly some moments at the ruddy stain, and then, looking in his friend's face with an expression of sudden calmness never to be forgotten, said: 'i know the colour of that blood--it is arterial blood. i cannot be deceived in that colour. that drop is my death-warrant; i must die.'" a surgeon arrived shortly, bled keats, and pronounced the rupture to be unimportant, but the patient was not satisfied. he wrote to miss brawne some few days afterwards, "so violent a rush of blood came to my lungs that i felt nearly suffocated." by the th of the month, however, he was already better, and he then said in a letter to his sister: "from imprudently leaving off my great-coat in the thaw, i caught cold, which flew to my lungs." later on he suffered from palpitation of the heart; but was so far recovered by the th of march as to be able to go to town to the exhibition of haydon's picture, christ's entry into jerusalem, and early in april he could take a walk of five miles. in march he had written that he was then picking up flesh, and, if he could avoid inflammation for six weeks, might yet do well; in april his doctor assured him that his only malady was nervous irritability and general weakness, caused by anxiety and by the excitement of poetry. at an untoward time for his health, about the first week in may, keats was obliged to quit his residence in hampstead; as brown was then leaving for scotland, and, according to his wont, let the house. keats accordingly went to live in wesleyan place, kentish town. a letter which he wrote just before his departure speaks of his uncertain outlook; he might be off to south america, or, more likely, embarking as surgeon on a vessel trading to the east indies. this latter idea had been in his mind for about a year past, off and on. what he could have contemplated doing in south america is by no means apparent. on the th of may keats parted at gravesend from brown, and they never met again. the hand with which he grasped brown's, and which he had of old "clenched against hammond's," was now, according to his own words, "that of a man of fifty." things had thus gone on pretty well with keats's health, since he first began to rally from the blood-spitting attack of the rd of february; but this was not to continue. on the nd of june he again broke a blood-vessel, and vomited blood morning and evening. leigh hunt thought it high time to intervene, and removed the patient to his house, no. mortimer terrace, kentish town. by the th of july--just about the time when keats's last volume was published, the one containing "lamia," "hyperion," and all his best works--the physician had told him that he must not remain in england, but go to italy. on the th, mrs. gisborne, the friend of godwin and of shelley, saw him at hunt's house, looking emaciated, and "under sentence of death from dr. lamb." three days afterwards he wrote to haydon "i am afraid i shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone." the stay at leigh hunt's house came to an end in a way which speaks volumes for the shattered nerves, and consequent morbid susceptibility, of keats. on the th of august a note for him written by miss brawne, which "contained not a word of the least consequence," arrived at the house. keats was then resting in his own room, and mrs. hunt, who was occupied, desired a female servant to give it to him. the servant quitted the household on the following day; and, in leaving, she handed the letter to thornton hunt, then a mere child, asking him to reconsign it to his mother. when thornton did this on the th, the letter was open; opened (one assumes) either by the servant through idle curiosity, or by thornton through simple childishness. "poor keats was affected by this inconceivable circumstance beyond what can be imagined. he wept for several hours, and resolved, notwithstanding hunt's entreaties, to leave the house. he went to hampstead that same evening." in hampstead he had at least the solace of being received into the dwelling occupied by the brawne family, being the same dwelling (next door to that of brown and keats) which had been recently tenanted by the dilkes; yet the excitement of feeling, consequent on the continual presence of miss brawne, was perhaps harmful to him. here he remained until the time for journeying to italy arrived. he was still, it seems, left in some uncertainty as to the precise nature and gravity of his disease, for on the th of august he wrote to his sister: "'tis not yet consumption, i believe; but it would be, were i to remain in this climate all the winter." anyhow, his expectations of recovery, or of marked benefit from the italian sojourn, were but faint. something may here be said of the love-letters of keats to fanny brawne. they begin (as already stated) on the st of july , and end at some date between his leaving hampstead, early in may , and quitting hunt's house in august. we may assume the th july , or thereabouts, as the date of the last letter. i cannot say that the character of keats gains to my eyes from the perusal of this correspondence. love-letters are not expected to be models of self-regulation and "the philosophic mind"; they would be bad love-letters, or letters of a bad specimen of a lover, if they were so. still, one wants a man to show himself, _quâ_ lover, at his highest in letters of this stamp; one wants to find in them his noblest self, his steadiest as his most ardent aspirations, in one direction. keats seems to me, throughout his love-letters, unbalanced, wayward, and profuse; he exhibits great fervour of temperament, and abundant caressingness, without the inner depth of tenderness and regard. he lives in his mistress, for himself. as the letters pass further and further into the harsh black shadows of disease, he abandons all self-restraint, and lashes out right and left; he wills that his friends should have been disloyal to him, as the motive for his being disloyal to them. to make allowance for all this is possible, and even necessary; but to treat it as not needing that any allowance should be made would seem to me futile. in the earlier letters of the series we have to note a few points of biographic interest. he says that he believes miss brawne liked him for himself, not for his writings, and he loves her the more for it; that, on first falling in love with her, he had written to declare himself, but he burned the letter, fancying that she had shown some dislike to him; that he had all his life been indifferent to money matters, but must be chary of the resources of his friends; that he was afraid of her "being a little inclined to the cressid"--one of the various passages which show that he chafed at her girlish liking for general society and diversions. on the th of october he had had "a thousand kisses" from her, and was resolved not to dispense with the thousand and first. early in june he speaks of her having "been in the habit of flirting with brown," who "did not know he was doing me to death by inches."--it may be well to give three of the letters as specimens:-- (i.) " college street. "[postmark] _ october ._ "my dearest girl,--this moment i have set myself to copy some verses out fair. i cannot proceed with any degree of content. i must write you a line or two, and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. upon my soul i can think of nothing else. the time is past when i had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my life. my love has made me selfish. i cannot exist without you; i am forgetful of everything but seeing you again; my life seems to stop there--i see no further. you have absorbed me; i have a sensation at the present moment as though i was dissolving. i should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you; i should be afraid to separate myself far from you. my sweet fanny, will your heart never change? my love, will it? i have no limit now to my love. "your note came in just here. i cannot be 'happier' away from you; 'tis richer than an argosy of pearls. do not threat me, even in jest. i have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion--i have shuddered at it. i shudder no more; i could be martyred for _my_ religion. love is my religion--i could die for that; i could die for you. my creed is love, and you are its only tenet. you have ravished me away by a power i cannot resist; and yet i could resist till i saw you; and even since i have seen you i have endeavoured often 'to reason against the reasons of my love.' i can do that no more, the pain would be too great. my love is selfish; i cannot breathe without you." (ii.) [date uncertain--say towards june , .] "my dearest fanny,--my head is puzzled this morning, and i scarce know what i shall say, though i am full of a hundred things. 'tis certain i would rather be writing to you this morning, notwithstanding the alloy of grief in such an occupation, than enjoy any other pleasure, with health to boot, unconnected with you. upon my soul i have loved you to the extreme. i wish you could know the tenderness with which i continually brood over your different aspects of countenance, action, and dress. i see you come down in the morning; i see you meet me at the window; i see everything over again eternally that i ever have seen. if i get on the pleasant clue, i live in a sort of happy misery; if on the unpleasant, 'tis miserable misery. "you complain of my ill-treating you in word, thought, and deed.[ ] i am sorry--at times i feel bitterly sorry that i ever made you unhappy. my excuse is that those words have been wrung from me by the sharpness of my feelings. at all events, and in any case, i have been wrong: could i believe that i did it without any cause, i should be the most sincere of penitents. i could give way to my repentant feelings now, i could recant all my suspicions, i could mingle with you heart and soul, though absent, were it not for some parts of your letters. do you suppose it possible i could ever leave you? you know what i think of myself, and what of you: you know that i should feel how much it was my loss, and how little yours. "'my friends laugh at you.' i know some of them: when i know them all, i shall never think of them again as friends, or even acquaintance. my friends have behaved well to me in every instance but one; and there they have become tattlers, and inquisitors into my conduct--spying upon a secret i would rather die than share it with anybody's confidence. for this i cannot wish them well; i care not to see any of them again. if i am the theme, i will not be the friend of idle gossips. good gods, what a shame it is our loves should be so put into the microscope of a coterie! their laughs should not affect you--(i may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for i suspect a few people to hate me well enough, _for reasons i know of_, who have pretended a great friendship for me)--when in competition with one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory. these laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty, who would have god-blessed me from you for ever, who were plying me with discouragements with respect to you eternally! people are revengeful: do not mind them. do nothing but love me: if i knew that for certain, life and health will in such event be a heaven, and death itself will be less painful. i long to believe in immortality: i shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell. if i am destined to be happy with you here, how short is the longest life! i wish to believe in immortality--i wish to live with you for ever. do not let my name ever pass between you and those laughers: if i have no other merit than the great love for you, that were sufficient to keep me sacred and unmentioned in such society. if i have been cruel and unjust, i swear my love has ever been greater than my cruelty--which lasts but a minute, whereas my love, come what will, shall last for ever. if concession to me has hurt your pride, god knows i have had little pride in my heart when thinking of you. your name never passes my lips--do not let mine pass yours. those people do not like me. "after reading my letter, you even then wish to see me. i am strong enough to walk over: but i dare not--i shall feel so much pain in parting with you again. my dearest love, i am afraid to see you: i am strong, but not strong enough to see you. will my arm be ever round you again, and, if so, shall i be obliged to leave you again? "my sweet love, i am happy whilst i believe your first letter. let me be but certain that you are mine heart and soul, and i could die more happily than i could otherwise live. if you think me cruel, if you think i have slighted you, do muse it over again, and see into my heart. my love to you is 'true as truth's simplicity, and simpler than the infancy of truth'--as i think i once said before. how could i slight you? how threaten to leave you? not in the spirit of a threat to you--no, but in the spirit of wretchedness in myself. my fairest, my delicious, my angel fanny, do not believe me such a vulgar fellow. i will be as patient in illness and as believing in love as i am able." (iii.) (this is the last letter of the series. its date is uncertain; but may, as already intimated, be towards july , . it follows next after our no. .) "my dearest girl,--i wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. every hour i am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth. i feel it almost impossible to go to italy. the fact is, i cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute's content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. but i will not go on at this rate. a person in health, as you are, can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through. "what island do your friends propose retiring to? i should be happy to go with you there alone, but in company i should object to it: the backbitings and jealousies of new colonists, who have nothing else to amuse themselves, is unbearable. mr. dilke came to see me yesterday, and gave me a very great deal more pain than pleasure. i shall never be able any more to endure the society of any of those who used to meet at elm cottage[ ] and wentworth place. the last two years taste like brass upon my palate. if i cannot live with you, i will live alone. "i do not think my health will improve much while i am separated from you. for all this, i am averse to seeing you: i cannot bear flashes of light, and return into my glooms again. i am not so unhappy now as i should be if i had seen you yesterday. to be happy with you seems such an impossibility: it requires a luckier star than mine--it will never be. "i enclose a passage from one of your letters which i want you to alter a little: i want (if you will have it so) the matter expressed less coldly to me. "if my health would bear it, i could write a poem which i have in my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a situation as mine. i would show some one in love, as i am, with a person living in such liberty as you do.[ ] shakespeare always sums up matters in the most sovereign manner. hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is, when he said to ophelia, 'go to a nunnery, go, go!' indeed, i should like to give up the matter at once--i should like to die. i am sickened at the brute world you are smiling with. i hate men, and women more. i see nothing but thorns for the future: wherever i may be next winter, in italy or nowhere, brown will be living near you, with his indecencies. i see no prospect of any rest. suppose me in rome. well, i should there see you, as in a magic glass, going to and from town at all hours--i wish i could infuse a little confidence of human nature into my heart: i cannot muster any. the world is too brutal for me. i am glad there is such a thing as the grave--i am sure i shall never have any rest till i get there. at any rate, i will indulge myself by never seeing any more dilke or brown or any of their friends. i wish i was either in your arms full of faith, or that a thunderbolt would strike me.--god bless you. "j. k." it is seldom one reads a letter (not to speak of a love-letter) more steeped than this in wretchedness and acrimony; wretchedness for which the cause was but too real and manifest; acrimony for which no ground has been shown or is to be surmised. what mr. dilke had done, or could be supposed to have done, to merit the invalid's ire, is unapparent. mr. brown may be inferred, from the verses of keats already quoted, to have had the general character and bearing of a _bon vivant_ or "jolly dog"; sufficiently versed in the good things of this world, whether fish, flesh, or womankind; jocose, or on occasion slangy. but keats himself, in the nearly contemporary letter in which he arraigned miss brawne for "flirting with brown," had said: "i know his love and friendship for me--at this moment i should be without pence were it not for his assistance;" and we refuse to think that any contingency could be likely to arise in which his "indecencies" would put miss brawne to the blush. be it enough for us to know that keats, in the drear prospect of expatriation and death, wrote in this strain, and to wish it were otherwise. the time had now arrived when keats was to go to italy. it was on the th of september that he embarked on the _maria crowther_ from london. haydon gives us a painful glimpse of the poet shortly before his departure: "the last time i saw him was at hampstead, lying on his back in a white bed, helpless, irritable, and hectic. he had a book, and, enraged at his own feebleness, seemed as if he were going out of the world, with a contempt of this, and no hopes of a better. he muttered as i stood by him that, if he did not recover, he would 'cut his throat.' i tried to calm him, but to no purpose. i left him, in great depression of spirit to see him in such a state." another attached friend, of whom i have not yet made mention, accompanied him; and in the annals of watchful and self-oblivious friendship there are few records more touching than the one which links with the name of john keats that of joseph severn. severn, two years older than keats, had known him as far back as , being introduced by mr. william haslam. keats was then studying at guy's hospital, but none the less gave severn "the complete idea of a poet." the acquaintance does not seem to have proceeded far at that date; but, through the intervention of mr. edward holmes (author of a "life of mozart," and "a ramble among the musicians of germany") was renewed whilst the poet was composing "endymion"; and severn may probably have co-operated in some minor degree with haydon in training keats to a perception of the great things in plastic art. in severn, a student-painter at the royal academy, had won the gold medal by his picture of the cave of despair, from spenser, entitling him to the expenses of a three years' stay in italy, for advancement in his art. he had an elegant gift in music, as well as in painting; and it is a satisfaction to learn that at this period he had "great animal spirits," for without these what he went through during the ensuing five months would have been but too likely to break him down. i must make room here for another letter from keats, one addressed to his good friend brown, deeply pathetic, and serving to assuage whatever may have been like "brass upon our palate" in the last-quoted letter to fanny brawne. "_saturday, september ._ "_maria crowther_, off yarmouth, isle of wight. "my dear brown,--the time has not yet come for a _pleasant_ letter from me. i have delayed writing to you from time to time, because i felt how impossible it was to enliven you with one heartening hope of my recovery. this morning in bed the matter struck me in a different manner. i thought i would write 'while i was in some liking,' or i might become too ill to write at all, and then, if the desire to have written should become strong, it would be a great affliction to me. i have many more letters to write, and i bless my stars that i have begun, for time seems to press--this may be my best opportunity. "we are in a calm, and i am easy enough this morning. if my spirits seem too low you may in some degree impute it to our having been at sea a fortnight without making any way. i was very disappointed at not meeting you at bedhampton, and am very provoked at the thought of you being at chichester to-day.[ ] i should have delighted in setting off for london for the sensation merely--for what should i do there? i could not leave my lungs or stomach or other worse things behind me. "i wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. there is one i must mention, and have done with it. even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. the very thing which i want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. i cannot help it--who can help it? were i in health, it would make me ill, and how can i bear it in my state? i daresay you will be able to guess on what subject i am harping: you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. i wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains; and then i wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains, which are better than nothing. land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators; but death is the great divorcer for ever. when the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, i may say the bitterness of death is past. i often wish for you, that you might flatter me with the best. "i think, without my mentioning it, for my sake you would be a friend to miss brawne when i am dead. you think she has many faults: but for my sake think she has not one. if there is anything you can do for her by word or deed, i know you will do it. i am in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over me than stocks and stones; and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to miss brawne and my sister is amazing. the one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. i seldom think of my brother and sister in america. the thought of leaving miss brawne is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--i eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at wentworth place ring in my ears. is there another life? shall i awake and find all this a dream? there must be--we cannot be created for this sort of suffering. the receiving this letter is to be one of yours. "i will say nothing about our friendship, or rather yours to me, more than that, as you deserve to escape, you will never be so unhappy as i am. i should think of--you[ ] in my last moments. i shall endeavour to write to miss brawne if possible to-day.[ ] a sudden stop to my life in the middle of one of these letters would be no bad thing, for it keeps one in a sort of fever awhile. "though fatigued with a letter longer than any i have written for a long while, it would be better to go on for ever than awake to a sense of contrary winds. we expect to put into portland roads to-night. the captain, the crew, and the passengers are all ill-tempered and weary. i shall write to dilke. i feel as if i was closing my last letter to you." the ship at last proceeded on her voyage, and in the bay of biscay encountered a severe squall. keats soon afterwards read the storm-scene in byron's "don juan": he threw the book away in indignation, denouncing the author's perversity of mind which could "make solemn things gay, and gay things solemn." late in october he reached the harbour of naples, and had to perform a tedious quarantine of ten days. after landing on the st,[ ] he received a second letter from shelley, then at pisa, urging him to come to that city. the first letter on this subject, dated in july, had invited keats to the hospitality of shelley's own house; but in november this project had been given up, as "we are not rich enough for that sort of thing"--although shelley still intended (so he wrote to leigh hunt) "to be the physician both of his body and his soul,--to keep the one warm, and to teach the other greek and spanish." keats, however, had brought with him a letter of introduction to dr. (afterwards sir james) clark, in rome,--or indeed he may have met him before leaving england--and he decided to proceed to rome rather than pisa. dr. clark engaged for him a lodging opposite his own: it was in the first house on the right as you ascend the steps of the trinità del monte. the precise date when keats reached rome, his last place of torture and of rest, does not appear to be recorded: it was towards the middle of november. he was at first able to walk out a little, and occasionally to ride. dr. clark attended his sick bed with the most exemplary assiduity and kindness. he pronounced (so keats wrote to brown in a letter of november th, which is perhaps the last he ever penned) that the lungs were not much amiss, but the stomach in a very bad condition: perhaps this was a kindly equivocation, for by this time--as was ascertained after his death--keats can have had scarcely any lungs at all. the patient was under no illusion as to his prospects, and he more than once asked the physician "when will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?" the only words in which the last days of keats can be adequately recorded are those of severn: our best choice would be between extract and silence. there were oscillations from time to time, from bad to less bad, but generally the tendency of the disease was steadily downwards. the poet's feelings regarding fanny brawne were so acute and harrowing that he never mentioned her to his friend. i give a few particulars from severn's contemporary letters--the person addressed being not always known. "_december ._ his suffering is so great, so continued, and his fortitude so completely gone, that any further change must make him delirious. "_december ._ not a moment can i be from him. i sit by his bed and read all day, and at night i humour him in all his wanderings.... he rushed out of bed and said 'this day shall be my last,' and but for me most certainly it would. the blood broke forth in similar quantity the next morning, and he was bled again. i was afterwards so fortunate as to talk him into a little calmness, and he soon became quite patient. now the blood has come up in coughing five times. not a single thing will he digest, yet he keeps on craving for food. every day he raves he will die from hunger, and i've been obliged to give him more than was allowed.... dr. clark will not say much.... all that can be done he does most kindly; while his lady, like himself in refined feeling, prepares all that poor keats takes, for--in this wilderness of a place for an invalid--there was no alternative. [to mrs. brawne.] "_january ._ he has now given up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish, for recovery. his mind is in a state of peace, from the final leave he has taken of this world, and all its future hopes.... i light the fire, make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook; make his bed, and even sweep the room.... oh i would my unfortunate friend had never left your wentworth place for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless italy! he has many many times talked over 'the few happy days at your house, the only time when his mind was at ease'.... poor keats cannot see any letters--at least he will not; they affect him so much, and increase his danger. the two last i repented giving: he made me put them into his box, unread. "_january ._ torlonia the banker has refused us any more money. the bill is returned unaccepted, and to-morrow i must pay my last crown for this cursed lodging-place: and what is more, if he dies, all the beds and furniture will be burnt, and the walls scraped, and they will come on me for a hundred pounds or more.... you see my hopes of being kept by the royal academy will be cut off unless i send a picture in the spring. i have written to sir t. lawrence. "_february ._ at times i have hoped he would recover; but the doctor shook his head, and keats would not hear that he was better; the thought of recovery is beyond everything dreadful to him. [to mrs. brawne.] "_february ._ his mind is growing to great quietness and peace. i find this change has its rise from the increasing weakness of his body; but it seems like a delightful sleep to me, i have been beating about in the tempest of his mind so long. to-night he has talked very much to me, but so easily that he at last fell into a pleasant sleep. he seems to have comfortable dreams without nightmare. this will bring on some change: it cannot be worse--it may be better. among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal--that on his grave shall be this, 'here lies one whose name was writ in water.'... such a letter has come! i gave it to keats, supposing it to be one of yours; but it proved sadly otherwise. the glance of that letter tore him to pieces. the effects were on him for many days. he did not read it--he could not; but requested me to place it in his coffin, together with a purse and letter (unopened) of his sister's: since which time he has requested me not to place _that_ letter in his coffin, but only his sister's purse and letter, with some hair. then he found many causes of his illness in the exciting and thwarting of his passions; but i persuaded him to feel otherwise on this delicate point.... i have got an english nurse to come two hours every other day.... he has taken half a pint of fresh milk: the milk here is beautiful to all the senses--it is delicious. for three weeks he has lived on it, sometimes taking a pint and a half in a day. "_february ._ this morning, by the pale daylight, the change in him frightened me: he has sunk in the last three days to a most ghastly look.... he opens his eyes in great doubt and horror; but, when they fall upon me, they close gently, open quietly, and close again, till he sinks to sleep. "_february ._ he is gone. he died with the most perfect ease--he seemed to go to sleep. on the rd, about four, the approaches of death came on. 'severn--i--lift me up. i am dying--i shall die easy. don't be frightened: be firm, and thank god it has come.' i lifted him up in my arms. the phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet that i still thought he slept. i cannot say more now. i am broken down by four nights' watching, no sleep since, and my poor keats gone. three days since the body was opened: the lungs were completely gone. the doctors could not imagine how he had lived these two months. i followed his dear body to the grave on monday [february th], with many english.... the letters i placed in the coffin with my own hand." no words of mine shall be added here to tarnish upon the mirror of memory this image of a sacred death and a sacred friendship. chapter iv. we have now reached the close of a melancholy history--that of the extinction, in a space of less than twenty-six years, of a bright life foredoomed by inherited disease. we turn to another subject--the intellectual development and the writings of keats, what they were, and how they were treated. here again there are some sombre tints. a minute anecdote, apparently quite authentic, shows that a certain propensity to the jingle of rhyme was innate in keats: haydon is our informant. "an old lady (mrs. grafty, of craven street, finsbury) told his brother george--when, in reply to her question what john was doing, he told her he had determined to become a poet--that this was very odd; because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." this, however, is the only rhyming-anecdote that we hear of keats's childhood or mere boyhood: there is nothing to show that at school he made the faintest attempt at verse-spinning. the earliest known experiment of his is the "imitation of spenser"--four spenserian stanzas, beginning-- "now morning from her orient chamber came," and very poor stanzas they are. this imitation was written while he was living at edmonton, in his nineteenth year, and thus there was nothing singularly precocious in keats, either in the age at which he began versifying, or in the skill with which he first addressed himself to the task. i might say more of other verses, juvenile in the amplest sense of the term, but such remarks would belong more properly to a later section of this volume. i will therefore only observe here that the earliest poems of his in which i can discern anything even distantly approaching to poetic merit or to his own characteristic style (and these distantly indeed) are the lines "to ----" "hadst thou lived in days of old," and "calidore, a fragment," "young calidore is paddling o'er the lake." the dates of these two compositions are not stated, but they were probably later than the opening of , and if so keats would have been nearly or quite twenty when he wrote them--and this is far remote from precocity. let us say then, once for all, that, whatever may be the praise and homage due to keats for ranking as one of the immortals when he died aged twenty-five, no sort of encomium can be awarded to him on the ground that, when he first began, he began early and well. all his rawest attempts, be it added to his credit, appear to have been kept to himself; for cowden clarke, who was certainly his chief literary confidant in those tentative days, says that until keats produced to him his sonnet "written on the day that mr. leigh hunt left prison" the youth's attempts at verse-writing were to him unknown. the rd of february was the day of hunt's liberation, so that the endeavour had by this time been going on in silence for something like a year or more. it was not till --or let us say when he was just of age--that keats produced a truly excellent thing. this is the sonnet "on first looking into chapman's homer." a copy of chapman's translation had been lent to cowden clarke; he and keats sat up till daylight reading it, the young poet shouting with delight, and by ten o'clock on the following morning keats sent the sonnet to clarke. it was therefore a sudden immediate inspiration, a little rill of lava flowing out of a poetic volcano, solidified at once. this is not only the first excellent thing written by keats--it is the _only_ excellent thing contained in his first volume of verse. this volume came out (as already mentioned) in the early spring of . the sonnet dedicating the book to leigh hunt, written off at a moment's notice "when the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer," was evidently composed in winter-time. the title of the volume is "poems by john keats." the motto on its title-page is from spenser-- "what more felicity can fall to creature than to enjoy delight with liberty?" --a motto embodying with considerable completeness the feeling which is predominant in the volume, and generally in keats's poetic works. we always feel "delight" to be his true element, whatever may be the undertone of pathos opposed to it by poetic development and treatment, and by adverse fate. "liberty" also--a free flight of the faculties, a rejection of conventional trammels, whether in life or in verse--was highly characteristic of him; and perhaps the youthful friend of hunt intended the word "liberty" to be understood by his readers as having a certain political flavour as well. in addition to some writings just specified, the volume contained "i stood tiptoe upon a little hill"; the three epistles "to george felton mathew" (who was a gentleman of literary habits, afterwards employed in administering the poor law), "to my brother george," and "to charles cowden clarke"; sixteen sonnets; and "sleep and poetry." the question of the poetic deservings of these compositions belongs more properly to our final chapter. i shall here give only a few details bearing upon the circumstances of their production. the poem "i stood tiptoe" &c. was written beside a gate near caen wood, highgate. it must have been begun in a summer, no doubt that of , and was still uncompleted in the middle of december of that year. "the epistle to mathew," dated november , testifies to the early admiration of keats for thomas chatterton; though the dedication of "endymion," "inscribed to the memory of thomas chatterton," was but poorly forestalled by such lines as the following-- "where we may soft humanity put on, and sit and rhyme, and think on chatterton, and that warm-hearted shakspeare sent to meet him four laurelled spirits heavenward to entreat him." moreover, the first of his youthful sonnets is addressed to chatterton. the "epistle to george," august , opens with a reference to "many a dreary hour" which john keats has passed, fearing he would never be able to write good poetry, however much he might gaze on sky, honey-bees, and the beauty of woman. the "epistle to clarke," september , pays ample tribute to the guidance which he had afforded to keats into the realms of poetry, and contains a couplet which has of late been very often quoted-- "who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly up to its climax, and then dying proudly?" the sonnet-- "o solitude, if i must with thee dwell," is the first thing that keats ever published. it had previously appeared in _the examiner_ for may , , and is clearly one of the best of these early sonnets. the sonnet which begins with the unmetrical line-- "how many bards gild the lapses of time" was included in the very first batch of verses by keats which cowden clarke showed to leigh hunt. hunt expressed "unhesitating and prompt admiration" of some other one among the compositions; and horace smith, who was present, reading out the sonnet now before us, praised as "a well-condensed expression" the contorted and inefficient line-- "that distance of recognizance bereaves," _i.e._ [sounds] which distance bereaves of recognizance, or, in plain english, which are too distant to be recognized. two other sonnets are addressed to haydon in a tone of glowing laudation. "sleep and poetry" is (if we except the sonnet upon chapman's homer) by far the most important poem in the volume. it was written partly in leigh hunt's cottage at hampstead, in the library-room, where a sofa-bed had on one occasion been made up for keats's convenience, and the latter lines in the poem refer to objects of art which were kept in the room. apart from the impressive line which all readers remember, saying of poetry-- "'tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm," there are several passages interesting as showing keats's enthusiasm for the art in which he was now a beginner, soon to be an adept-- "oh for ten years that i may overwhelm myself in poesy!" also "the great end of poesy, that it should be a friend to soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man;" and again "they shall be accounted poet-kings who simply tell the most heart-easing things"-- both of these being definitions in which we might imagine leigh hunt to have borne his part, or at least notified his concurrence. the following well-known diatribe is also important, and should be kept in mind when we come to speak of the reception accorded to keats by established critics, more or less of the old school. he has been dilating on the splendours of british poetry of the great era, say spenser to milton, and then proceeds-- "could all this be forgotten? yes, a schism nurtured by foppery and barbarism made great apollo blush for this his land. men were thought wise who could not understand his glories: with a puling infant's force they swayed about upon a rocking-horse, and thought it pegasus. ah dismal-souled! the winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled its gathering waves--ye felt it not; the blue bared its eternal bosom, and the dew of summer-night collected still to make the morning precious. beauty was awake-- why were ye not awake? but ye were dead to things ye knew not of--were closely wed to musty laws lined out with wretched rule and compass vile; so that ye taught a school of dolts to smoothe, inlay, and chip, and fit, till--like the certain wands of jacob's wit-- their verses tallied. easy was the task; a thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask of poesy. ill-fated impious race, that blasphemed the bright lyrist to his face, and did not know it! no, they went about holding a poor decrepit standard out marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large the name of one boileau." zeal is generally pardonable. keats's was manifestly honest zeal, and flaming forth in the right direction. yet it would have been well for him to remember and indicate that amid his "school of dolts," bearing the flag of boileau, there had been some very strong and capable men, notably dryden and pope, who could do several things besides inlaying and clipping; nor could it be said that the beauty of the world had been wholly blinked by so pre-eminently descriptive a poet as thomson; and, if we were to read boileau--which few of us do now-a-days, and i daresay keats was not one of the few--we should probably find that his "mottoes" were much less concerned with inlaying and clipping than with solid meaning and studious congruity--qualities not totally contemptible, but (be it acknowledged) very largely contemned by keats in that first slender performance of his adolescence named "poems, ." it has been said that this volume hardly went beyond the circle of keats's personal friends; nor do i think this statement can be far wrong, although one inquirer avers that the book was "constantly alluded to in the prominent periodicals." the dictum of keats himself stands thus: "it was read by some dozen of my friends, who liked it; and some dozen whom i was unacquainted with, who did not." shelley cannot have been among the friends who liked the volume, for he had recommended keats not to give it to the press. at any rate the publishers, messrs. ollier, would after a very short while sell it no more. their letter to george keats--who seems to have been acting for john during the absence of the latter in the isle of wight or at margate--is too amusing to be omitted:-- "we regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. we are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connexion with it, which we must have done, as we think the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped. by far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has time after time been showered upon it. in fact, it was only on sunday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman who told us he considered it 'no better than a take-in.' these are unpleasant imputations for any one in business to labour under; but we should have borne them and concealed their existence from you had not the style of your note shown us that such delicacy would be quite thrown away. we shall take means without delay for ascertaining the number of copies on hand, and you shall be informed accordingly. " welbeck street, th april ." i do not find that the after-fate of the "poems" is recorded: probably they were handed over to messrs. taylor and hessey, who undertook the publication of "endymion." chapter v. to "endymion" we now have to turn. the early verses of keats (as well as the later ones) contain numerous allusions to grecian mythology--muses, apollo, pan, narcissus, endymion and diana, &c. for the most part these early allusions are nothing more than tawdry conventionalisms; so indeed are some of the later ones, as for instance in the drama of "king stephen," written in , the schoolboy classicism of " nd captain"-- "royal maud from the thronged towers of lincoln hath looked down, like pallas from the walls of ilion;" and we cannot discover that any more credit is due to keats for dribbling out his tritenesses about apollo and the muses than to any akenside, mason, or hayley, of them all. at times, however, there is a genuine tone of _enjoyment_ in these utterances sufficient to persuade us that the subject had really taken possession of his mind, and that he could feel grecian mythology, not merely as a convenient vehicle for rhetorical personifications, but as an ever-vital embodiment of ideas of beauty in forms of beauty. in the early and partly boyish poem, "i stood tip-toe upon a little hill," a good deal of space is devoted to showing that classical myths are an outcome of eager sensitiveness to the lovely things of nature: the tales of psyche, pan and sirynx, narcissus, are cited in confirmation--and finally diana and endymion, in the following lines:-- "where had he been from whose warm head outflew that sweetest of all songs, that ever new, that aye-refreshing pure deliciousness coming ever to bless the wanderer by moonlight? to him bringing shapes from the invisible world, unearthly singing from out the middle air, from flowery nests, and from the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the speculation of the stars. ah surely he had burst our mortal bars: into some wondrous region he had gone to search for thee, divine endymion. he was a poet, sure a lover too, who stood on latmus' top what time there blew soft breezes from the myrtle-vale below, and brought--in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow-- a hymn from dian's temple, while upswelling the incense went to her own starry dwelling. but, though her face was clear as infants' eyes, though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice, the poet wept at her so piteous fate-- wept that such beauty should be desolate; so in fine wrath some golden sounds he won, and gave meek cynthia her endymion. queen of the wide air, thou most lovely queen of all the brightness that mine eyes have seen, as thou exceedest all things in thy shine, so every tale does this sweet tale of thine. oh for three words of honey that i might tell but one wonder of thy bridal night! where distant ships do seem to show their keels phoebus awhile delayed his mighty wheels, and turned to smile upon thy bashful eyes ere he his unseen pomp would solemnize. * * * * * cynthia, i cannot tell the greater blisses that followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses: was there a poet born?" readers often go at a skating-pace over passages of this kind, without very clearly realizing to themselves the gist of the whole matter. i will therefore put the thing into the most prosaic form, and say that what keats substantially intimates here is as follows:--the inventor of the myth of artemis and endymion must have been a poet and lover, who, standing on the hill of latmos, and hearing thence a sweet hymn wafted from the low-lying temple of artemis, while the pure maiden-like moon was shining resplendently, felt a pang of pity for this loveless moon or artemis, and invented for her a lover in the person of endymion; and ever since then the myth has lent additional beauty to the effects, beautiful as in themselves they are, of moonlight. without tying down keats too rigidly to this view of the genesis of the myth, i may nevertheless point out that he wholly ignores as participants both the spirit of religious devoutness, and the device of allegorizing natural phænomena: the inventor is simply a poet and lover, who thinks it a world of pities that such a sweet maiden as artemis should not have a lover sooner or later. invention prompted by warmth of feeling is thus the sole motive-power recognized. the final phrase "was there a poet born?" may without violence be understood as implying, "ought not the loves of artemis and endymion to beget their poet, and why should not i be that poet?" at all events, keats determined that he _would_ be that poet; and, contemplating the original invention of the myth from the point of view which we have just analysed, he not unnaturally treated it from a like point of view. the tale of diana and endymion was not to be a monument of classic antiquity re-stated in the timid, formal spirit of a school-exercise, but an invention of a poet and lover, who, acting under the spell of natural beauty, re-informs his theme with poetic fancy, amorous ardour, and nature's profusion of object and of imagery. and in this keats thought--and surely he rightly thought--that he would be getting closer to the spirit of a grecian myth than by any cut-and-dry process of tame repetition or pulseless decorum. he wanted the dell of wild flowers, and not the _hortus siccus_. "endymion" was actually begun in the spring of , much about the same time when the volume "poems" was published. the first draft was completed (as we have said) on the th of november , and by the end of the winter which opened the year no more probably remained to be done to it. the ms. was subjected to much revision and excision, so that it cannot be alleged that keats worked in a reckless temper, or without such self-criticism as he could at that date bring to bear. it would even appear, moreover, from the terms of a letter which he addressed to mr. taylor, on april , , that he allowed that gentleman to make some volunteer corrections of his own. haydon had spurred him on to the ambitious attempt, which hunt on the contrary deprecated. shelley--so the story goes--agreed with keats that each of them should write an epic within a space of six months. shelley produced "the revolt of islam," keats the "endymion." shelley proved to be the more rapid writer of the two; for his poem of lines was finished by the early autumn of , while keats's, numbering , lines, went on through the winter which opened . a good deal of it had been done during keats's sojourn with mr. bailey, in magdalen hall, oxford. afterwards, on th october , he wrote to bailey--"i refused to visit shelley, that i might have my own unfettered scope;" an expression which one might be inclined to understand as showing that shelley, having now completed "the revolt of islam," had invited keats to visit him at marlow, and there to proceed with "endymion,"--not without the advantage it may well be supposed, of shelley's sympathizing but none the less stringent counsel. bailey's account of the facts may be given here. "he wrote and i read--sometimes at the same table, sometimes at separate desks--from breakfast till two or three o'clock. he sat down to his task, which was about fifty lines a day, with his paper before him, and wrote with as much regularity and apparently with as much ease as he wrote his letters. indeed, he quite acted up to the principle he lays down, 'that, if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree, it had better not come at all.' sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. but he never forced himself. when he had finished his writing for the day, he usually read it over to me, and then read or wrote letters till we went out for a walk." the first book of the poem was delivered into the hands of the publisher, mr. taylor, in the middle of january. haydon undertook to make a finished chalk-sketch of the author's head, to be prefixed to the volume; he drew outlines accordingly, but the volume, an octavo, appeared in april without any portrait. we all know the now proverbial first line in "endymion," "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever." this seems to have been an inspiration of long anterior date; for mr. stephens, the surgical fellow-student and fellow-lodger of keats, says that in one twilight when they were together the youthful poet produced the line-- "a thing of beauty is a constant joy;" which, failing wholly to satisfy its author's ear, was immediately afterwards improved into its present form. even before handing over any part of his ms. to the printer, keats, at the "immortal dinner" which came off in haydon's painting-room, on the th of december , and at which wordsworth, lamb, and others, were present, had bespoken a strange and heroic fate for one copy of his book; for he made mr. ritchie, who was about to set forth on an african exploration, promise that he would carry the volume "to the great desert of sahara, and fling it in the midst." "invention" was the quality which keats most sought for in his "endymion," as shown in his letter to mr. bailey, already cited. he said--"it ['endymion'] will be a test of my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my invention--which is a rare thing indeed--by which i must make lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry.... a long poem is a test of invention, which i take to be the polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.... this same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a poetical excellence." the term "invention" might be used in various senses. keats seems to have meant the power of producing a great number of minor incidents, illustrative images, and other particulars, all tending to reinforce and fill out the main conception and subject-matter. keats wrote a preface to "endymion" on march , , which was objected to by hamilton reynolds, and by his friends generally. it was certainly off-hand and unconciliating, and some readers would have regarded it as defiant. its general purport was that the poem was faulty, but the author would not keep it back for revision, which would make the performance a tedium to himself, "i have written to please myself, and in hopes to please others, and for a love of fame." there was a good deal more, jaunty and provocative enough. keats was not well inclined to suppress this preface. he replied on april th to reynolds in a letter from which some weighty words must be quoted:-- "i have not the slightest feeling of humility towards the public, or to anything in existence but the eternal being, the principle of beauty, and the memory of great men.... a preface is written to the public--a thing i cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which i cannot address without feelings of hostility.... i would be subdued before my friends, and thank them for subduing me; but among multitudes of men i have no feel of stooping--i hate the idea of humility to them. i never wrote one single line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought.... i hate a mawkish popularity. i cannot be subdued before them. my glory would be to daunt and dazzle the thousand jabberers about pictures and books." keats, however, yielded to his censors, and wrote a rather shorter preface, by far a better one. it bears the date of april th, being the very next day after he had written to reynolds in so unsubmissive a tone. this second preface says substantially much the same thing as the first, but without any aggressive or "devil-may-care" addenda. it is too important to be omitted here:-- "knowing within myself the manner in which this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that i make it public. what manner i mean will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished. the two first books, and indeed the two last, i feel sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press; nor should they, if i thought a year's castigation would do them any good. it will not: the foundations are too sandy. it is just that this youngster should die away--a sad thought for me, if i had not some hope that, while it is dwindling, i may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live. "this may be speaking too presumptuously, and may deserve a punishment. but no feeling man will be forward to inflict it; he will leave me alone with the conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object. this is not written with the least atom of purpose to forestall criticisms of course, but from the desire i have to conciliate men who are competent to look, and who do look, with a zealous eye to the honour of english literature. "the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy. but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted. thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men i speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages. "i hope i have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of greece, and dulled its brightness; for i wish to try once more before i bid it farewell." no one can deny that this is a modest preface; it is in fact too modest, and concedes to the adversary the utmost which could possibly be at issue, viz., whether the poem was worth publishing or not. the only scintilla of self-assertion in it is the hope expressed-"_some_ hope"--that the writer might eventually produce "verses fit to live;" and less than that no man who puts a poem before the public could be expected to postulate. keats must therefore be expressly acquitted of having done anything to excite animosity or retaliation on the part of his critics; the sole thing which could be attacked was the poem itself--too frankly pronounced indefensible--or else something in the author which did not appear within the covers of his volume. the preface is indeed manly as well as modest; there is not a servile or obsequious word in it; yet i cannot help thinking that keats, when later on he found "endymion" denounced as drivel, must at times have wished that he had been a little less deferential to reynolds's objections, and had not so explicitly admitted that not one of the four books of the poem was qualified to "pass the press." an adverse reviewer was sure to take advantage of that admission, and did so. it would be interesting to compare with the preface which keats printed for "endymion" the one which shelley printed for "the revolt of islam." shelley, like keats, was modest; he left his readers to settle any question as to his poetic claims (although "alastor," previously published, might pretty well have vouched for these); but he resolutely explained that reviewers would find in him no subject for bullying. i can only make room for a few sentences:-- "the experience and the feelings to which i refer do not in themselves constitute men poets, but only prepare them to be the auditors of those who are. how far i shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, i know not, and which, with an acquiescent and contented spirit, i expect to be taught by the effect which i shall produce upon those whom i now address.... it is the misfortune of this age that its writers, too thoughtless of immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or blame. they write with the fear of reviews before their eyes. this system of criticism sprang up in that torpid interval when poetry was not. poetry, and the art which professes to regulate and limit its powers, cannot subsist together.... i have sought, therefore, to write (as i believe that homer, shakespeare, and milton wrote) in utter disregard of anonymous censure." the publisher of "endymion" (mr. taylor is probably meant) was nervous as to the reception which potent critics would accord to the volume. he went to william gifford, the editor of the _quarterly review_, to bespeak indulgence, but found a cerberus who rejected every sop. in the number of the _quarterly_ for april --not actually published, it would seem, until september--appeared a critique branded into ignominious permanence by the name and fame of keats. gifford himself is regarded as its author. as an account of keats's career would for various reasons be incomplete in the absence of this critique, i reproduce it here. it has the merit of brevity, and lends itself hardly at all to curtailment, but i miss one or two details, relating chiefly to leigh hunt. "reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticize. on the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. not that we have been wanting in our duty; far from it; indeed, we have made efforts, almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it: but, with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this poetic romance consists. we should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into. "it is not that mr. keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)--it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius. he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called 'cockney poetry,' which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. "of this school mr. leigh hunt, as we observed in a former number, aspires to be the hierophant.... this author is a copyist of mr. hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd, than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. but mr. keats had advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples. his nonsense, therefore, is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by mr. leigh hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry. "mr. keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances. 'knowing within myself,' he says, 'the manner [&c., down to 'a deed accomplished']. we humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be 'quite so clear;' we really do not know what he means. but the next passage is more intelligible. 'the two first books, and indeed the two last, i feel sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press.' thus 'the two first books' are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and 'the two last' are, it seems, in the same condition; and, as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear, and we believe a very just, estimate of the entire work. "mr. keats, however, deprecates criticism on this 'immature and feverish work' in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the 'fierce hell' of criticism[ ] which terrify his imagination if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which at least ought to be warned of the wrong; and if finally he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline. "of the story we have been able to make out but little. it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of diana and endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty, and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification. and here again we are perplexed and puzzled. at first it appeared to us that mr. keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at _bouts rimés_; but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play that the rhymes, when filled up, shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. he seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes. there is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. he wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn. "we shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem. 'such the sun, the moon, trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep; and such are daffodils, with the green world they live in; and clear rills that for themselves a cooling covert make 'gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms; and such too is the grandeur of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead,' &c. here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_, produces the simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that 'the _dooms_ of the mighty dead' would never have intruded themselves but for the 'fair musk-rose _blooms_.' "again-- 'for 'twas the morn. apollo's upward fire made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre of brightness so unsullied that therein a melancholy spirit well might win oblivion, and melt out his essence fine into the winds. rain-scented eglantine gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; the lark was lost in him; cold springs had run to warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; man's voice was on the mountains: and the mass of nature's lives and wonders pulsed tenfold to feel this sunrise and its glories old.' here apollo's _fire_ produces a _pyre_--a silvery pyre--of clouds, _wherein_ a spirit might _win_ oblivion, and melt his essence _fine_; and scented _eglantine_ gives sweets to the _sun_, and cold springs had _run_ into the _grass_; and then the pulse of the _mass_ pulsed _tenfold_ to feel the glories _old_ of the new-born day, &c. "one example more-- 'be still the unimaginable lodge for solitary thinkings, such as dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven, then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven that, spreading in this dull and clodded earth, gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth.' _lodge_, _dodge_--_heaven_, _leaven_--_earth_, _birth_--such, in six words, is the sum and substance of six lines. "we come now to the author's taste in versification. he cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. let us see. the following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our english heroic metre: 'dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, the passion poesy, glories infinite. 'so plenteously all weed-hidden roots. 'of some strange history, potent to send. 'before the deep intoxication. 'her scarf into a fluttering pavilion. 'the stubborn canvas for my voyage prepared. 'endymion, the cave is secreter than the isle of delos. echo hence shall stir no sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys and trembles through my labyrinthine hair.' "by this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. we now present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of mr. leigh hunt, he adorns our language. "we are told that turtles _passion_ their voices; that an arbour was _nested_, and a lady's locks _gordianed_ up; and, to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalized, mr. keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and human _serpentry_, the _honey-feel_ of bliss, wives prepare _needments_, and so forth. "then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads. thus the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night up-took; the wind up-blows, and the hours are down-sunken. but, if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. thus a lady whispers _pantingly_ and close, makes _hushing_ signs, and steers her skiff into a _ripply_ cove, a shower falls _refreshfully_, and a vulture has a _spreaded_ tail. "but enough of mr. leigh hunt and his simple neophyte. if any one should be bold enough to purchase this 'poetic romance,' and so much more patient than ourselves as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success. we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to mr. keats and to our readers." such is the too famous article in _the quarterly review_. if its contents are to be assessed with perfect calmness, i should have to say that it is not mistaken in alleging that the poem of "endymion" is rambling and indistinct; that keats allowed himself to drift too readily according to the bidding of his rhymes (leigh hunt has acknowledged as much, in independent remarks of his own); that many words are coined, and badly coined; and that the versification is not free from blemishes--although several of the lines quoted by _the quarterly_ as unmetrical, are, when read with the right emphasis, blameless, or even sonorous. but the article is none the less a despicable and odious performance; partly as being a sneering depreciation of a work showing rich poetic endowment, and partly as being, not a deliberate and candid (however severe) estimate of keats as a poet, but really an utterance of malice prepense, and hardly disguised, against hunt as a hostile politician who wrote poetry, and against any one who consorted with him. the inverting of the due balance between the merits and the defects of "endymion," would have been at best an act of stupidity; at second best, after the author's preface had been laid to heart, an act of brutalism; and at worst, when the venom of abuse was poured into the poetic cup of keats as an expedient for drugging the political cup of hunt, an act of partisan turpitude. no more words need be wasted upon a proceeding of which the abiding and unevadeable literary record is graven in the brass of shelley's "adonais." the attack in _the quarterly review_ was accompanied by attacks in _blackwood's magazine_. if _the quarterly_ was carping and ill-natured, _blackwood_ was basely insulting. a series of articles "on the cockney school of poetry" began in the scotch magazine in october , being directed mainly, and with calumnious virulence, against leigh hunt. no. of the series came out in august , and formed a vituperation of keats. i will not draw upon its stores of underbred jocularity, so as to show that the best raillery which _blackwood_ could get up consisted of terming him johnny keats, and referring to his having been assistant to an "apothecary." the author of these papers signed himself z, being no doubt too noble and courageous to traduce people without muffling himself in anonymity; nor did he consent to uncloak, though vigorously pressed by hunt to do so. it is affirmed that z was lockhart, the son-in-law of sir walter scott, and afterwards editor of _the quarterly review_; and an unpleasant adjunct to this statement--we would gladly disbelieve it--is that scott himself lent active aid in concocting the articles. a different account is that z was at first john wilson (christopher north), revised by william blackwood, but that the article on keats was due to lockhart. few literary questions of the last three-quarters of a century have been regarded from more absolutely different points of view than the problem--how did keats receive the attacks made upon his poem and himself? from an early date in the controversy three points seem to have been very generally agreed upon: ( ) that "endymion" is (as shelley judiciously phrased it), "a poem considerably defective;" ( ) that the attacks upon it were, in essence, partly true, but so biassed--so keen of scent after defects, and so dull of vision for beauties--as to be practically unfair and perverse in a marked degree; and ( ) that the unfairness and perversity _quoad_ keats were wilful devices of literary and especially of political spite _quoad_ a knot of writers among whom leigh hunt was the central figure. the question remains--in what spirit did keats meet his critics? was he greatly distressed, or defiant and retaliatory, or substantially indifferent? among the documents of keats's life i find few records strictly contemporary with the events themselves, serving to settle this point. when the abuse of z against hunt began, keats was indignant and combative. he said in a letter which may belong to october -- "there has been a flaming attack upon hunt in the edinburgh magazine.... there has been but one number published--that on hunt, to which they have prefixed a motto by one cornelius webb, 'poetaster,' who unfortunately was one of our party occasionally at hampstead, and took it into his head to write the following (something about)-- 'we'll talk on wordsworth, byron, a theme we never tire on,' and so forth till he came to hunt and keats. in the motto they have put 'hunt and keats' in large letters. i have no doubt that the second number was intended for me, but have hopes of its non-appearance.... i don't mind the thing much; but, if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with hunt, i must infallibly call him to an account, if he be a human being, and appears in squares and theatres where we might 'possibly meet.' i don't relish his abuse." it is worth observing also that, in a paper "on kean as richard duke of york" which keats published on december , , he wrote: "the english people do not care one fig about shakespeare, only as he flatters their pride and their prejudices;... it is our firm opinion." if he thought that english indifference to shakespeare was of this degree of density, he must surely have been prepared for a considerable amount of apathy in relation to any poem by john keats. on october , , just after the spiteful notices of himself in _blackwood_ and _the quarterly_ had appeared, and had been replied to in _the morning chronicle_ by two correspondents signing j. s. and r. b., keats wrote as follows to his publisher mr. hessey; and to treat the affair in a more self-possessed, measured, and dignified spirit, would not have been possible:-- "you are very good in sending me the letters from _the chronicle_, and i am very bad in not acknowledging such a kindness sooner; pray forgive me. it has so chanced that i have had that paper every day. i have seen to-day's. i cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. as for the rest, i begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. my own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what _blackwood_ or _the quarterly_ could possibly inflict; and also, when i feel i am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. j. s. is perfectly right in regard to the 'slipshod "endymion."'[ ] that it is so is no fault of mine. no; though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as i had power to make it by myself. had i been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written, for it is not in my nature to fumble. i will write independently. i have written independently, _without judgment_: i may write independently, and _with judgment_, hereafter. the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. that which is creative must create itself. in 'endymion' i leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if i had stayed upon the green shore and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. i was never afraid of failure, for i would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. but i am nigh getting into a rant; so, with remembrances to taylor and woodhouse, &c., i am yours very sincerely, "john keats." this letter, equally moderate and wide-reaching, proves conclusively that keats, at the time when he wrote it, treated depreciatory criticism in exactly the right spirit; acknowledging that it was not without a certain _raison d'être_, but affirming that he could for himself see much further and much deeper in the same direction, and in others as well. on october , , he wrote to his brother george:-- "reynolds... persuades me to publish my 'pot of basil' as an answer to the attack made on me in _blackwood's magazine_ and _the quarterly review_.... i think i shall be among the english poets after my death. even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to crush me in _the quarterly_ has only brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among book-men, 'i wonder _the quarterly_ should cut its own throat.' it does me not the least harm in society to make me appear little and ridiculous. i know when a man is superior to me, and give him all due respect; he will be the last to laugh at me; and as for the rest, i feel that i make an impression upon them which ensures me personal respect while i am in sight, whatever they may say when my back is turned.... the only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one short passing day is any doubt about my powers for poetry. i seldom have any; and i look with hope to the nighing time when i shall have none." towards december he wrote in a similarly contented strain to george keats and his wife: "you will be glad to hear that gifford's attack upon me has done me service; it has got my book among several _sets_." the same letter mentions a sonnet, and a bank-note for £ received from an unknown admirer. however, the next letter to the same correspondents, february , , clearly attests some annoyance. "my poem has not at all succeeded.... the reviewers have enervated men's minds, and made them indolent; few think for themselves. these reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially _the quarterly_. they are like a superstition which, the more it prostrates the crowd and the longer it continues, the more it becomes powerful, just in proportion to their increasing weakness. i was in hopes that, as people saw (as they must do now) all the trickery and iniquity of these plagues, they would scout them. but no; they are like the spectators at the westminster cockpit; they like the battle, and do not care who wins or who loses.... i have been at different times turning it in my head whether i should go to edinburgh and study for a physician.... it is not worse than writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown in the review shambles." we find in keats's letters nothing further about the criticisms; but, when he replied in august to shelley's first invitation to italy, he referred to "endymion" itself: "i am glad you take any pleasure in my poor poem, which i would willingly take the trouble to unwrite if possible, did i care so much as i have done about reputation." we must also take into account the publishers' advertisement (not keats's own) to the "lamia" volume, saying of "hyperion"--"the poem was intended to have been of equal length with 'endymion,' but the reception given to that work discouraged the author from proceeding." it can scarcely be supposed that the publishers printed this without keats's express sanction; yet he never assigned elsewhere any similar reason for discontinuing "hyperion," nor was "hyperion" open to exception on any such grounds as had been urged against "endymion." the earliest written reference which i can trace to any serious despondency of keats consequent upon the attacks of reviewers (if we except a less strongly worded statement by leigh hunt, to be quoted further on) is in a letter which shelley wrote, but did not eventually send, to the editor of the _quarterly review_. it was written after shelley had seen the "lamia" volume, and can hardly, i suppose, date earlier than october , two full years after the publication of the _quarterly_ (and also the _blackwood_) tirades against "endymion." shelley adverts, with great reserve of tone, to the _quarterly_ critique, and then proceeds-- "poor keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which i am persuaded was not written with any intention of producing the effect (to which it has at least greatly contributed) of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. the first effects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. the agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun." the informants of shelley with regard to keats's acute feelings and distress were (it is stated) the gisbornes, and possibly leigh hunt may have confirmed them in some measure; but the gisbornes knew nothing directly of what had been taking place in england in or about the autumn of , and that which hunt published regarding keats is far from corroborating so extreme a view of the facts. later on shelley received from mr. gisborne a letter written by colonel finch, the date of which would perhaps be in may (three months after the death of keats). this letter appears to have been one of his principal incentives for the indignation expressed in the preface to "adonais," but not in the poem itself, which had been completed before shelley saw the letter; and it is remarkable that colonel finch's expressions, when one scrutinizes them, do not really say anything about mental anguish caused to keats by any review, but only by ill-treatment of a different kind--seemingly that of his brother george and others, as previously detailed. the following is the only relevant passage: "he left his native shores by sea in a merchant vessel for naples, where he arrived, having received no benefit during the passage, and brooding over the most melancholy and mortifying reflections, and nursing a deeply-rooted disgust to life and to the world, owing to having been infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe." shelley however put into print in the preface to "adonais" the same view of the blighting of keats's life by the _quarterly_ critique (he seems to have known nothing of the _blackwood_ scurrility), which had appeared in his undespatched letter to the editor of the _quarterly_-- "the savage criticism on his 'endymion' which appeared in _the quarterly review_ produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind. the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs. a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.... miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of god. nor shall it be your excuse that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers but used none." thus far we have found no strong evidence (only assertions) that keats took greatly to heart the attacks upon him, whether in the _quarterly_ or in _blackwood_. shelley seems to be the principal authority, and shelley, unless founding upon some adequate information, is next to no authority at all. he had left england in march , five months before the earlier--printed in august--of these spiteful articles. were there nothing further, we should be more than well pleased to rally to the opinion of lord houghton, who came to the conclusion that the idea of keats's extreme sensitiveness to criticism was a positive delusion--that he paid little heed to it, and pursued his own course much as if no reviewer had tried to be provoking. but there is, in fact, a direct witness of high importance--haydon. haydon knew keats very intimately, and saw a great deal of him; he admired and loved him, and had a vigorous, discerning insight into character and habit of mind, such as makes his observations about all sorts of men substantial testimony and first-rate reading. he took forcible views of many things, and sometimes exaggerated views: but, when he attributed to keats a particular mood of feeling, i should find it very difficult to think that he was either unfairly biassed or widely mistaken. in his reminiscences proper to the year - occurs the following passage:-- "the assaults on hunt in _blackwood_ at this time, under the signature of z, were incessant. who z was nobody knew, but i myself strongly suspect him to have been terry the actor. leigh hunt had exasperated terry by neglecting to notice his theatrical efforts. terry was a friend of sir walter's, shared keenly his political hatreds, and was also most intimate with the blackwood party, which had begun a course of attacks on all who showed the least liberalism of thinking, or who were praised by or known to _the examiner_. hunt had addressed a sonnet to me. this was enough: we were taken to be of the same clique of rebels, rascals, and reformers, who were supposed to support that production of so much power and talent. on keats the effect was melancholy. he became morbid and silent; would call and sit whilst i was painting, for hours, without speaking a word." this counts for something--not very much. but another passage forming an entry in haydon's diary, written on march , , perhaps as soon as he had heard of keats's death, carries the matter much further-- "he began life full of hopes, fiery, impetuous, and ungovernable, expecting the world to fall at once beneath his powers. poor fellow! his genius had no sooner begun to bud than hatred and malice spat their poison on its leaves, and, sensitive and young, it shrivelled beneath their effusions. unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength of mind enough to buckle himself together like a porcupine and present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief, which, after a temporary elevation of spirits, plunged him into deeper despondency than ever. for six weeks he was scarcely sober, and (to show what a man does to gratify his appetites when once they get the better of him) once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with cayenne pepper in order to appreciate the 'delicious coldness[ ] of claret in all its glory'--his own expression." immediately afterwards, april , , haydon wrote a letter to miss mitford, repeating, with some verbal variations, what is said above, and adding several other particulars concerning keats. the opening phrase runs thus: "keats was a victim to personal abuse, and want of nerve to bear it. ought he to have sunk in that way because a few quizzers told him that he was an apothecary's apprentice?" and further on--"i remonstrated on his absurd dissipation, but to no purpose." the reader will observe that this dissipation, six weeks of insobriety, is alleged to have occurred after keats "began to despond." the precise time when he began to despond is not defined, but we may suppose it to have been in the late autumn of . if so, it was much about the same period when he first made miss brawne's acquaintance. it is true that mr. cowden clarke, when he published certain "recollections" in _the gentleman's magazine_ in , strongly contested these statements of haydon's; he disbelieved the cayenne pepper and the dissipation, and had "never perceived in keats even a tendency to imprudent indulgence." the "recollections" were afterwards reproduced as a volume, and in the volume the confutation of haydon disappeared; whether because clarke had eventually changed his opinion, or for what other reason, i am unable to say. anyhow, haydon's evidence remains; it relates to a period of keats's life when haydon no doubt saw him much oftener than clarke did, and we must observe that he refers to "keats's own expression" as to the claret ensuing after the cayenne pepper, and affirms that he himself remonstrated in vain against the "dissipation," which means apparently excess in drinking alone. to advert to what lord byron wrote about keats as having been killed by _the quarterly review_ is hardly worth while. his first reference to the subject is in a letter to mr. murray (publisher of _the quarterly_) dated april , . in this he expressly names shelley as his informant, and with shelley as an authority for the allegation i have already dealt. there are two writings of leigh hunt in which the question of keats and his critics is touched upon. the first is the review, august , of the "lamia" volume. in speaking of the "ode to a nightingale" he says-- "the poem will be the more striking to the reader when he understands, what we take a friend's liberty in telling him, that the author's powerful mind has for some time past been inhabiting a sickened and shaken body; and that in the meanwhile it has had to contend with feelings that make a fine nature ache for its species, even when it would disdain to do so for itself--we mean critical malignity, that unhappy envy which would wreak its own tortures upon others, especially upon those that really feel for it already." hunt's posthumous memoir of keats was first published in . he refers to the attack in _blackwood_ upon himself and upon keats, and says: "i little suspected, as i did afterwards, that the hunters had struck him; that a delicate organization, which already anticipated a premature death, made him feel his ambition thwarted by these fellows; and that the very impatience of being impatient was resented by him and preyed on his mind." hunt also says regarding byron--"i told him he was mistaken in attributing keats's death to the critics, though they had perhaps hastened and certainly embittered it." another item of evidence may be cited. it is from a letter written by george keats to mr. dilke in april , and refers to the insolences of _blackwood's magazine_. george, it will be remembered, was already out of england before the articles appeared in _blackwood_ and in _the quarterly_, and he only saw a little of john keats at the close of the ensuing year, . "_blackwood's magazine_ has fallen into my hands. i could have walked miles to have dirked him _à l'américaine_ for his cruelly associating john in the cockney school, and other blackguardisms. such paltry ridicule will have wounded deeper than the severest criticisms, particularly as he regarded what is called the cockneyism of the coterie with so much disgust. he either knew john well, and touched him in the tenderest place purposely; or knew nothing of him, and supposed he went all lengths with the set in their festering opinions and cockney affectations." and from a later letter dated in april : "after all, _blackwood_ and _the quarterly_, associated with our family disease, consumption, were ministers of death sufficiently venomous, cruel, and deadly, to have consigned one of less sensibility to a premature grave.... john was the very soul of courage and manliness, and as much like the holy ghost as 'johnny keats.'" the evidence of latest date on this subject (there is none such in severn's correspondence[ ]) is that of cowden clarke. in his "recollections," already mentioned, he refers to the attacks upon keats, having his eye, it would seem, rather upon those in _blackwood_ than in _the quarterly_, and he remarks: "to say that these disgusting misrepresentations did not affect the consciousness and self-respect of keats would be to under-rate the sensitiveness of his nature. he did feel and resent the insult, but far more the _injustice_ of the treatment he had received. they no doubt had injured him in the most wanton manner; but, if they or my lord byron ever for one moment supposed that he was crushed or even cowed in spirit by the treatment he had received, never were they more deluded." i have now given all the evidence at first or second hand which seems to be producible on that much-vexed question--was keats (to adopt byron's phrase) "snuffed out by an article"? the upshot appears to me to be as follows. in his inmost mind keats was from first to last raised very far above that level where the petty gales of review-criticism blow, puffing out the canvas of feeble reputations, and fraying that of strong ones. nevertheless he was sensitive to derisive criticism, and more especially to personal ridicule, and even (as haydon records) gave way to his feelings of irritation with reckless and culpable self-abandonment. this passed off partially, and would have passed off entirely--it has left in his letters no trace worth mentioning, and in his poetry no trace at all, other than that of executive power braced up to do constantly better and yet better; but then, about a year and a half after the reviews, supervened his fatal illness (which cannot be reasonably supposed to have had its root in any critiques), and all the heartache of his unsatisfied love. this last formed the real agony of his waning life: it must have been reinforced to some extent by resentment against a mode of reviewing which would contribute to the thwarting of his poetic ambition, and make him go down into the grave with a "name writ in water;" but the reviews themselves counted for very little in the last wrestlings of his spirit with death and nothingness. by general constitution of mind few men were less adapted than keats for being "snuffed out by an article," or more certain to snuff one out and leave all its ill-savour to its scribe. chapter vi. the first important poem to which keats sets his hand after finishing "endymion" was "isabella, or the pot of basil." this was completed by april , , the same month in which "endymion" was published. hamilton reynolds had suggested the project of producing a volume of tales in verse, founded upon stories in boccaccio's "decameron"; some of the tales would have been executed by reynolds himself, who did in fact produce on this plan the two poems named collectively "the garden of florence." as it turned out, however, keats's tale appeared in a volume of his own, , and reynolds's two came out independently in the succeeding year. "the eve of st. agnes" was written in the winter beginning the year . then came "hyperion," of which two versions remain, both fragmentary. the first version (begun perhaps as early as october or september ), the only one which keats himself published, is in all respects by far the better. he was much under the spell of milton while he wrote it; and finally he gave it up in september , declaring that "there were too many miltonic inversions in it." he went so far as to say in a letter written in the same month that "the 'paradise lost,' though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language--a northern dialect accommodating itself to greek and latin inversions and intonations." "hyperion" was included in keats's third volume at the request of the publishers, contrary to the author's own preference. one may readily infer that it was to "hyperion" that he referred when, in the preface to "endymion," he spoke of returning to grecian mythology for another subject: the full length of the poem was to have been ten books. "lamia" was the last poem of considerable length which keats brought to completion and published. it seems to have been begun towards the summer of , and was written with great care, after a heedful study of dryden's methods of composition. on september , , keats wrote: "i am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way, give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensations." the subject was taken from burton's "anatomy of melancholy," in which there is a reference to the "life of apollonius" by philostratus as the original source of the legend. the volume--entitled "lamia, isabella, the eve of st. agnes, and other poems"--came out towards the beginning of july , when the malady of keats had reached an advanced and alarming stage. at the beginning of september keats wrote to brown--"the sale of my book is very slow, though it has been very highly rated." i am not aware that there is any other record to show how far the publication may ultimately have approached towards becoming a commercial success; nor indeed would it be altogether easy to define the date at which keats became a recognized and uncontested poet of high rank, and his works a solid property. his early death, at the beginning of , must have formed a turning-point--not to speak of the favourable notice of "endymion," and subordinately of the "lamia" volume, which appeared in _the edinburgh review_, jeffrey being the critic, in august . perhaps jeffrey's praise may have facilitated an arrangement which keats made in september --the sale of the copyright of "endymion" to messrs. taylor and hessey for £ ; no second edition of the poem appeared, however, while he was alive. i should presume that, within five or six years after keats's decease, ridicule and rancour were already much in the minority; and that, by some such date as to , they had finally "hidden their diminished heads," living only, with too persistent a life, in the retributive memory of men. some of the shorter poems in the "lamia" volume must receive brief mention here. the "ode to psyche" was written in february , and was termed by keats the first poem with which he had taken pains--"i have for the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry." "to autumn," the "ode on melancholy," and the "ode on a grecian urn," succeeded. the "ode to a nightingale" was composed at hampstead in the spring of _after breakfast_, forming two or three hours' work: thus we see that the nocturnal imagery of the ode was a general or a particular reminiscence, not actual to the very moment of composition. this poem and the "ode on a grecian urn" were recited by keats to haydon in a chaunting tone in kilburn meadows, and were published in the serial entitled "annals of the fine arts." the urn thus immortalized may probably be one preserved in the garden of holland house. with the "lamia" volume we have come to the close of what keats published during his lifetime. something remains to be said of other writings of his--almost all of them earlier in date than the publication of that volume--which remained imprinted or uncollected at the time of his death. in february keats, leigh hunt, and shelley, undertook to write a sonnet each upon the river nile. in order of merit, the three sonnets are the reverse of what one might have been willing to forecast. i at least am clearly of opinion that hunt's sonnet is the best (though with a weak ending), keats's the second, and shelley's a decidedly bad third. the leading thought in each sonnet is characteristic of its author. keats adheres to the simple natural facts of the case, while hunt and shelley turn the nile into a moral or intellectual symbol. keats says essentially that to associate the nile with ideas of antique desolation is but a delusion of ignorance, for this river is really rich and fresh like others. hunt makes the egyptian stream an emblem of history tending towards the progress of the individual and the race; while shelley reads into the nile a lesson of the good and the evil inhering in knowledge. "the eve of st. mark"--a fragment which very few of keats's completed poems can rival in point of artist-like feeling and writing--belongs to the years - . i find nothing in print to account for his leaving it unfinished. in may keats had an idea of inventing a new structure of sonnet-rhyme; and he sent to his brother and sister-in-law a sonnet composed accordingly, beginning-- "if by dull rhymes our english must be chained." he wrote: "i have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet-stanza than we have. the legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes. the other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. i do not pretend to have succeeded." keats's experiment reads agreeably. it comprises five rhymes altogether; the first rhyme being repeated thrice at arbitrary intervals; and the last rhyme twice in lines twelve and fourteen. the tragedy of "otho the great" was written by keats (as already referred to) in july and august , in co-operation with armitage brown. the diction of the play is, it would appear, keats's entirely; whereas the invention and development of plot in the first four acts is wholly due to brown. the two friends sat together; brown described each successive scene, and keats turned it into verse, without troubling his head as to the subject-matter for the scene next ensuing. when it came to the fifth act, however, keats inquired what would be the conclusion of the play; and, not being satisfied with brown's project which he deemed too humorous and too melodramatic, he both invented and wrote a fifth act for himself. he felt sure that "otho the great" was "a tolerable tragedy," and set his heart upon getting it acted--kean was well inclined to take the principal character, prince ludolph; and it became his greatest ambition to write fine plays. "otho" was in fact accepted for drury lane theatre, on the offer of brown, who left keats's authorship in the background; but, as both the writers were impatient of delay, brown, in february , took away the ms., and covent garden theatre was thought of instead--without any practical result. as soon as "otho" was finished, brown suggested king stephen as the subject of another drama; and keats, without any further collaboration from his friend, composed the few scenes of it which remain. "one of my ambitions" (writes keats to bailey in august ), "is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as kean has done in acting." the ballad "la belle dame sans merci," than which keats did nothing more thrilling or more perfect, may perhaps have been written in the earlier half of ; it was published in , in hunt's _indicator_ for may th, under the signature "caviare"; the same signature which was adopted for the sonnet, "a dream, after reading dante's episode of paolo and francesca." keats may probably have meant to imply, in some bitterness of spirit, that his poems were "caviare to the general." the title of this ballad was suggested to keats by seeing it at the head of a translation from alain chartier in a copy of chaucer. as to the "dream" sonnet he wrote in april :-- "the th canto of dante pleases me more, and more; it is that one in which he meets with paulo and francesca. i had passed many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them i dreamt of being in that region of hell. the dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments i ever had in my life. i floated about the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and in the midst of all this cold and darkness i was warm. ever-flowery tree-tops sprang up, and we rested on them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind blew us away again. i tried a sonnet on it; there are fourteen lines in it, but nothing of what i felt. oh that i could dream it every night!" the last long work which keats undertook, and he wrote it with extreme facility, was "the cap and bells; or the jealousies, a fairy tale," in the spenserian stanza. what remains is probably far less than keats intended the tale to amount to, but it is enough to enable us to pronounce upon its merits. the poem was begun soon after keats's first attack of blood-spitting in february . it seems singular that under such depressing conditions he should have written in so frivolous and jaunty a spirit, and provoking that his last long work (the last, that is, if we except the recast of "hyperion") should be about the most valueless which he produced, at any date after commencing upon "endymion." this poem has been said to be written in the spirit of ariosto; a statement which, in justice to the brilliant italian, cannot be admitted. it may well be, however, as lord houghton suggests, that the general notion was suggested by brown, who had translated the first five cantos (not indeed of ariosto, but) of the "orlando innamorato" of bojardo. "the cap and bells" appears to be destitute of distinct plan, though some sort of satirical allusion to the marital and extra-marital exploits of george iv. is traceable in it; meagre and purposeless in invention; a poor farrago of pumped-up and straggling jocosity. perhaps a hearty laugh has never been got out of it; although there are points here and there at which a faint snigger may be permissible, and the concluding portion improves somewhat. keats seems to have intended to publish it under a pseudonym, lucy vaughan lloyd; and hunt gave, in _the indicator_ of august , , some taste of its quality, possibly meaning to print more of it anon. the last verses which keats ever wrote formed the sonnet here ensuing. he composed this late in september , after landing on the dorsetshire coast, probably near lulworth, and returning to the ship which bore him to his doom in italy; and he wrote it down on a blank page in shakespeare's poems, facing "a lover's complaint." "bright star, would i were steadfast as thou art; not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, and watching with eternal lids apart, like nature's patient sleepless eremite, the moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's human shores, or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors:-- no, yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, to feel for ever its soft fall and swell, awake for ever in a sweet unrest; still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, and so live ever--or else swoon to death." of poetic projects which remained unfulfilled when keats died we hear--leaving out of count the works which he had begun and left uncompleted--of only one. during his voyage to naples he often spoke of wishing to write the story of sabrina, as indicated in milton's "comus," connecting it with some points in english history and character. in prose--apart from his letters, which are noticeably various in mood, matter, and manner, and contain many admirable things--keats wrote extremely little. in a weekly paper with which reynolds was connected, _the champion_, december , he published two articles on "kean as a shakespearean actor:" they are not remarkable. with the above-named articles are now associated some "notes on shakespeare," not written with a view to publication; these appear to me somewhat strained and bloated. there are also some "notes on milton's 'paradise lost.'" on september , , keats addressed to mr. dilke a letter, which however does not appear to have been actually sent off. as it shows a definite intention of writing in prose for regular publication and for an income, a few sentences are worth quoting. "it concerns a resolution i have taken to endeavour to acquire something by temporary writing in periodical works. you must agree with me how unwise it is to keep feeding upon hopes which, depending so much on the state of temper and imagination, appear gloomy or bright, near or afar off, just as it happens.... you may say i want tact; that is easily acquired.... i should, a year or two ago, have spoken my mind on every subject with the utmost simplicity. i hope i have learned a little better, and am confident i shall be able to cheat as well as any literary jew of the market, and shine up an article on anything without much knowledge of the subject--aye, like an orange. i would willingly have recourse to other means. i cannot; i am fit for nothing but literature.... notwithstanding my 'aristocratic' temper, i cannot help being very much pleased with the present public proceedings. i hope sincerely i shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the question before i die." on the following day keats wrote to brown on the same subject-- "i will write on the liberal side of the question for whoever will pay me. i have not known yet what it is to be diligent. i purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper.... i shall apply to hazlitt, who knows the market as well as any one, for something to bring me in a few pounds as soon as possible. i shall not suffer my pride to hinder me. the whisper may go round--i shall not hear it. if i can get an article in _the edinburgh_, i will. one must not be delicate." in pursuance of this plan, keats did, for a few days in october, take a lodging in westminster. he then reverted to hampstead, and finally the scheme came to nothing, principally perhaps because his fatal illness began, and everything had to be given up which was not directly controlled by considerations of health. chapter vii. having now gone through the narrative of keats's life and death, and also the narrative of his literary work, we have before us the more delicate and exacting task of forming some judgment of both,--to estimate his character, and appraise his writings. but first i pause a brief while for the purpose of relating a little that took place after his decease, and mentioning a few particulars regarding his surviving relatives and friends. keats was buried in the protestant cemetery at rome amid the overgrown ruins of the honorian walls, surmounted by the pyramid-tomb of caius cestius, a tribune of the people whose monument has long survived his fame: this used to be traditionally called the tomb of remus. there were but few graves on the spot when keats was laid there. in recent years the portion of the cemetery where he reposes has been cut off by a fortification. a little altar-tomb was set up for him, sculptured with a greek lyre, and inscribed with his name and his own epitaph, "here lies one whose name was writ in water." severn attended affectionately to all this, and the whole was completed about two years after the poet's death. in general sir vincent eyre and some other englishmen and americans repaired the stone, and placed on an adjacent wall a medallion portrait of keats, presented by its sculptor, mr. warrington wood. severn, who died in august , having been british consul in rome for many years, now lies in close proximity to his friend. shelley's remains are interred hard by, but in the new cemetery,--not the old one, which received the bones of keats. as early as severn was able to attest that his connection with the poet had been of benefit to his own professional career. the friend and death-bed companion of keats had by that time become a personage, apart from the merit, be it greater or less, of his performances as a painter. severn's letters addressed to armitage brown show that it was expected that brown should write a life of keats. the non-appearance of any such work was made a matter of remonstrance in ; and at one time george keats, though conscious of not being quite the right man for the purpose, thought of supplying the deficiency. severn also had had a similar idea. brown was in italy in , and there he met mr. richard monckton milnes, afterwards lord houghton. he returned to england some three years later, and was about to produce the desired life when a new project entered his mind, and he emigrated to new zealand. he then handed over to mr. milnes all his collections of keats's writings, and the biographical notices which he had compiled, and these furnished a substantive basis for mr. milnes's work published in --a work written with abundant sympathy, invaluable at its own date and ever since to all lovers of the poet's writings. brown died towards . george keats voluntarily paid all the debts left by his brother. these have not been precisely detailed: but it appears that messrs. taylor and hessey had made an advance of £ , and there must have been something not inconsiderable due to brown, and probably also to dilke, who assured george that john keats had known nothing of direct want of either money or friends. george, who has been described as "the most manly and self-possessed of men," settled at louisville, kentucky, where he became a prominent citizen, and left a family creditably established. he died in , and his widow remarried with a mr. jeffrey. in one of his letters addressed to his sister, april , there is a pleasant little critique of "don quixote." it gives one so prepossessing an idea of its writer that i am tempted to extract it:-- "your face is decidedly not spanish, but english all over. if i fancied you to resemble don quixote, i should fancy a handsome, intelligent, melancholy countenance, with something wild but benevolent about the eyes, a lofty forehead but not very broad, with finely-arched eyebrows, denoting candour and generosity. he is an immense favourite of mine; and i cannot help feeling angry with the great cervantes for bringing him into situations where he is the laughing-stock of minds so inferior to his own. it is evident he was a great favourite of the author, and it is evident _he_ was united with the chivalric spirits he so wittily ridicules. he is made to speak as much sound sense, elevated morality, and true piety, as any divine who ever wrote. if i were to meet such a man, i should almost hate myself for laughing at his eccentricities." the opening reference here to a spanish face must relate to the fact that miss fanny keats, who in girlhood had been the recipient of many affectionate and attentive letters from her brother john, was engaged to, and eventually married, a spanish gentleman, senhor llanos, author of "don esteban," "sandoval the freemason," and other books illustrating the modern history of his country. he was a liberal, and in the time of the spanish republic represented his government at the court of rome. mrs. llanos is still living at a very advanced age. a few years ago a pension on the civil list was conferred upon her, in national recognition of what is due to the sister of john keats. there is a pathetic reference to her appearance at the close of the very last letter which he wrote: "my sister, who walks about my imagination like a ghost, she is so like tom." miss brawne married a mr. lindon some years after the death of keats. i do not know how many years, but it must have been later than june . she died in . the sincerity or otherwise of leigh hunt as a personal, and more especially a literary, friend of keats, has been a good deal canvassed of late. it has been said that he showed little staunchness in championing the cause of keats at the time--towards the close of --when detraction was most rampant, and when support from a man occupying the position of editor of _the examiner_ would have been most serviceable. but one must not hurry to assume that hunt was seriously in the wrong, whether we regard the question as one of individual friendship or of literary policy. the attacks upon keats were in great measure flank-attacks upon hunt himself. keats was abused on the ground that he wrote bad poetry through imitating hunt's bad poetry--that he out-heroded herod, or out-hunted hunt. obviously it was a delicate task which would have lain before the elder poet: for any direct defence of keats must have been conducted on the thesis either that the faults were not there (when indeed they _were_ there to a large extent); or else that the faults were in fact beauties, an allegation which would only have riveted the charge that they were leigh-huntish mannerisms; or finally that they were not due to hunt's influence or example, but were proper to keats in person, and this would have been more in the nature of censure than of vindication. a defence on general grounds, upholding the poems without any discussion of the particular faults alleged, would also, as coming from hunt, have been a difficult thing to manage: it would rather have inflamed than abated the rancour of the enemy. besides, we must remember that keats's first volume, though very warmly accepted and praised by hunt, was really but beginner's work, imperfect in the last degree; while the second volume, "endymion," was viewed by hunt as a hazardous and immature attempt notwithstanding its many beauties, and incapable of being upheld beyond a certain limit. there was not at that date any third volume to be put forward in proof of faculty, or in arrest of judgment. mr. forman, than whom no man looks with more patience into the evidence on a question such as this of hunt's friendship, or is more likely to pronounce a sound judgment upon it, wholly scouts the accusation; and i am quite content to range myself on the same side as mr. forman. of keats's friends in general it may be said that the one whom he respected very highly in point of character was bailey: the one who had a degree of genius fully worthy, whatever its limitations and defects, of communing with his own, was haydon. shelley can hardly be reckoned among his friends, though very willing and even earnest to be such, both in life and after death. keats held visibly aloof from shelley, more perhaps on the ground of his being a man of some family and position than from any other motive. shortly after the publication of "the revolt of islam," keats's rather naïve expression was, "poor shelley, i think he has his quota of good qualities." neither did he show any warm or frank admiration of shelley's poetry. on receiving a copy of "the cenci," he urged its author to "curb his magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of his subject with ore." we should not ascribe this to any mean-spirited jealousy, but to that sense, which grew to a great degree of intensity in keats, that the art of composition and execution is of paramount importance in poetry, and must supersede all considerations of abstract or proselytizing intention. chapter viii. i must next proceed to offer some account of keats's person, character, and turn of mind. as i have already said, keats was a very small man, barely more than five feet in height. he was called "little keats" by his surgical fellow-students. archdeacon bailey has left a good description of him in brief:-- "there was in the character of his countenance the femineity which coleridge thought to be the mental constitution of true genius. his hair was beautiful, and, if you placed your hand upon his head, the curls fell round it like a rich plumage. i do not particularly remember the thickness of the upper lip so generally described; but the mouth was too wide, and out of harmony with the rest of his face, which had a peculiar sweetness of expression, with a character of mature thought, and an almost painful sense of suffering." leigh hunt should also be heard:-- "his lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but neat and well-turned. his shoulders were very broad for his size. he had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up--an eager power checked and made impatient by ill-health. every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. if there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. his face was rather long than otherwise. the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing--large, dark, and sensitive. at the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. in this there was ill-health as well as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral courage. his hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. the head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity which he had in common with byron and shelley, whose hats i could not get on. keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man of fifty." cowden clarke confirms hunt in stating that keats's hair was brown, and he assigns the same colour, or dark hazel, to his eyes: confuting the "auburn" and "blue" of which mrs. procter had spoken. it is rather remarkable that, while hunt speaks of the projection of the _upper_ lip--a detail which is fully verified in a charcoal drawing by severn--lord houghton observes upon "the undue prominence of the _lower_ lip," which point i cannot trace clearly in any one of the portraits. keats himself, in one of his love-letters (august ), says, "i do not think myself a fright." according to clarke, john keats was the only one of the family who resembled the father in person and feature, while the other three resembled the mother. george keats does not wholly coincide in this, for he says, "my mother resembled john very much in the face;" at the same time he would not have been qualified to deny a likeness to the father, of whom he remembered nothing except that he had dark hair. the lady who saw keats's hair and eyes of the wrong colour saw at any rate his face to some effect, having left it recorded thus: "his countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight." in a like spirit, haydon speaks of keats as having "an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a delphian priestess who saw visions." his voice was deep and grave. let us now turn to the portraits, which are as numerous and as good as could fairly be expected under the circumstances. the earliest in date, and certainly one of the best from an art point of view, is a sketch in profile done by haydon preparatory to introducing keats's head into the picture of christ's entry into jerusalem. the sketch dates in november , just after keats had come of age. the picture is in philadelphia, and i cannot speak of the head as it appears there. in the sketch we see abundant wavy hair; a forehead and nose sloping forward to the nasal tip in a nearly uniform curve; a dark, set, speaking eye; a mouth tolerably well moulded, the upper lip being fully long enough, and noticeably overhanging the lower lip, upon which the chin--large, full, and rounded--closely impinges. the whole face partakes of the raphaelesque cast of physiognomy. at some time, which may have been the autumn of , some one, most probably haydon, took a mask of the face of keats. in respect of actual form, this is necessarily the final test of what the poet was like--but masks are often only partially true to the _impression_ of a face. this mask confirms haydon's sketch markedly; allowing only for the points that haydon has rather emphasized the length of the nose, and attenuated (so far as one can judge from a profile) its thickness, and has given very much more of the overhanging of the upper lip--but this last would, by the very conditions of mask-taking, be there reduced to a minimum. on the whole we may say that, after considering reciprocally haydon's sketch and the mask, we know very adequately what keats's face was--he had ample reason for acquitting himself of being "a fright." we come still closer to a firm conclusion upon taking into account, along with these two records, two of the portraits left to us by severn. one is a miniature, which was exhibited at the royal academy in , and which we may surmise to have been painted in that year, or late in : the well-known likeness which represents keats in three-quarters face, looking earnestly forwards, and resting his chin upon his left hand. here the eyes are larger than in haydon's sketch, and the upper lip shorter, while the forehead seems straighter; but, as to those matters of lip and forehead, a profile tells the plainer tale. the whole aspect of the face is not greatly unlike byron's. there is also the earlier charcoal drawing by severn, the best of all for enabling us to judge of the beautiful rippling long hair; it is a profile, and extremely like haydon's profile, except for the greater straightness of the forehead, and the decided smallness of the chin, points on which the mask shows conclusively that haydon was in the right. most touching of all as a reminiscence is the indian-ink drawing which severn made of his dying friend on " jan^y. , o'clock morn^g.," as he lay asleep, with the death-damp on his dark hair. it exhibits the attenuation of disease, but without absolute painfulness, and produces, fully as much as any of the other portraits, the impression of a fine and distinguished mould of face. severn left yet other likenesses of keats--posthumous, and of inferior interest. there is moreover a chalk drawing by the painter hilton, who used to meet keats at the house of the publisher mr. taylor. it has an artificial air, and conveys a notion of the general character of the face different from the other records, but may assist us towards estimating what keats was like about, or very soon before, the commencement of his fatal illness. lastly, though the list of extant portraits is not even thus exhausted, i mention the medallion by girometti, which is to all appearance a posthumous performance. its lines correspond pretty well with the profile sketch by haydon, while in character it assimilates more to hilton's drawing. to me it seems of very little importance as a document, but hamilton reynolds thought it the best likeness of all. mrs. llanos was in favour of the mask; mr. cowden clarke, of the crayon drawing by severn--which, indeed, conveys a bright impression of eager, youthful impulsiveness. the character of keats appears to me not a very easy one to expound. to begin with, it stands to reason that a man who died at the age of twenty-five can only have half evolved and evinced himself; there must have been a great deal which time and trial, had these been granted, would have developed, but which untimely fate left to conjecture. we are thus compelled to judge of an apprentice in the severe school of life as if he had gone through its full course; many things about him may, in their real nature, have been fleeting and tentative, which to us pass for final and established. this difficulty has to be allowed for, but cannot be got over; the only keats with whom we have to deal is the keats who had not completed his twenty-sixth year. for him, as for other youths, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had budded apace; the fruit remained for ever unmatured. another gravely deflecting force in our estimation of the character of keats consists in the fact that what we really care for in him is his poetry. we admire his poetry, and condole his inequitable treatment, and his hard and premature fate, and are disposed to see his life in the light of his verse and his sufferings. hence arises a facile and perhaps vapid enthusiasm, with an inclination to praise through thick and thin, or to ignore such points as may not be susceptible of praise. the sympathetic biographer is a very pleasant fellow; but the truthful biographer also has something to say for himself in the long run. i aspire to the part of the truthful biographer, duly sympathetic. we have already seen that keats in early childhood was vehement and ungovernable. his sensibility displayed itself in the strongest contrasts, and he would be convulsed with laughter or with tears, rapidly interchanged. at school his skill in bodily exercises, and his marked generosity of spirit, made him very popular--his comrades surmising that he would turn out superior in some active career, such as soldiering. to be rated as a good boy was not his ambition; but, as previously stated, he settled down into a very attentive scholar. later on, his friend bailey liked "the simplicity of his character," and his winning affectionate manner. "simplicity" means, i suppose, frankness or straightforwardness; for i cannot see that keats's character was at any time particularly simple--i should rather say that it was complex and many-sided. the one great craving of keats, before the love for miss brawne engrossed him, was the desire to become an excellent poet; to do great things in poesy, and leave a name among the immortals. at times he was conscious of some presumption in this craving; but mostly it seems to have held such plenary possession of him that the question of presumption or otherwise hardly arose. whether he felt very strongly upon any matters of intellectual or general concern other than poetic ones may admit of some doubt. in book ii. of "endymion" he openly proclaims that poetic love-making is the one thing needful to the susceptible mind; the athenian admiral and his auspicious owl, the indian expeditions of alexander, ulysses and the cyclops, the death-day of empires, are as nothing to juliet's passion, hero's tears, imogen's swoon, and pastorella in the bandits' den. he does indeed, in one of his letters (april ), aver "i would jump down Ætna for any great public good"; but it may perhaps be permissible to think that he would at all events have postponed the empedoclean feat until he had written and ensured the publishing of some poem upon which he could be content to stake his claim to permanent poetic renown. his tension of thought was great. in a letter which he addressed in may to leigh hunt there is a little passage which may be worth quoting here, along with mr. dilke's comment upon it: "i went to the isle of wight. thought so much about poetry so long together that i could not get to sleep at night; and moreover, i know not how it was, i could not get wholesome food. by this means, in a week or so, i became not over-capable in my upper stories, and set off pell-mell for margate, at least a hundred and fifty miles, because forsooth i fancied that i should like my old lodging here, and could continue to do without trees. another thing, i was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource." this passage mr. dilke considered "an exact picture of the man's mind and character," adding: "he could at any time have 'thought himself out,' mind and body. thought was intense with him, and seemed at times to assume a reality that influenced his conduct, and, i have no doubt, helped to wear him out." whether keats should be regarded as a young man tolerably regular in his mode of life, or manifestly tending to the irregular, is a question not entirely clear. we have seen something of a sexual misadventure in oxford, and of six weeks of hard drinking, attested by haydon; and it should be added that two or three of keats's minor poems have a certain unmistakable twang of erotic laxity. lord houghton thought that in the winter of - the poet had indulged somewhat "in that dissipation which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent temperaments;" but he held that it all amounted to no more than "a little too much rollicking" (keats's own phrase), and he would not allow that either drinking or gaming had proceeded to any serious extent, "for, in his letters to his brothers, he speaks of having drunk too much as a rare piece of joviality, and of having won £ at cards as a great hit." medical students, it may be added, are not, as a rule, conspicuous for mortifying the flesh; keats, however, according to mr. stephens, did not indulge in any vice during his term of studentship. he was eminently open, as his writings evidence, to impressions of enjoyment; and one may not unnaturally suppose that the joys of sense numbered him, no less than the average of young men, among their votaries--not indeed among their slaves. he had not, i think, any taste for those "manly recreations" which consist chiefly in making the lower animals uncomfortable, or in putting a quietus to their comforts and discomforts along with their lives. i only observe one occasion on which he went out with a gun. he then (towards the close of ) accompanied mr. dilke in shooting on hampstead heath, and his trophy was a solitary tomtit. as to strength or stability of character, it is rather amusing to find keats picking a hole in haydon, while haydon could probe a joint in the armour of keats. in november haydon had been playing rather fast and loose (so at least it seemed to keats and to his friend bailey) with a pictorial aspirant named cripps, and keats wrote to bailey in the following terms: "to a man of your nature such a letter as haydon's must have been extremely cutting.... as soon as i had known haydon three days, i had got enough of his character not to have been surprised at such a letter as he has hurt you with. nor, when i knew it, was it a principle with me to drop his acquaintance, although with you it would have been an imperious feeling.... i must say one thing that has pressed upon me lately, and increased my humility and capability of submission, and that is this truth: _men of genius_ are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on a mass of neutral intellect; but they _have not any individuality, any determined character_." the following also, from a letter of january to the same correspondent, relates partly to haydon: "the sure way, bailey, is first to know a man's faults, and then be passive. if after that he insensibly draws you towards him, then you have no power to break the link." haydon's verdict upon keats is no doubt extremely important. i give here the whole entry in his diary, th of march , omitting only two passages which have been already extracted in their more essential context:-- "keats, too, is gone! he died at rome, the rd february, aged twenty-five. a genius more purely poetical never existed. in fireside conversation he was weak and inconsistent, but he was in his glory in the fields. the humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed, his mouth quivered. he was the most unselfish of human creatures; unadapted to this world, he cared not for himself, and put himself to any inconvenience for the sake of his friends. he was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank [this corresponds with hunt's remark, that keats looked upon a man of birth as his natural enemy], but he had a kind, gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any man who wanted it. his classical knowledge was inconsiderable, but he could feel the beauties of the classical writers. he had an exquisite sense of humour, and too refined a notion of female purity to bear the little sweet arts of love with patience. _he had no decision of character_, and, having no object upon which to direct his great powers, was at the mercy of every pretty theory hunt's ingenuity might start. one day he was full of an epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid impositions on the world. never for two days did he know his own intentions.... the death of his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me that he began to droop from that hour. i was much attracted to keats, and he had a fellow-feeling for me. i was angry because he would not bend his great powers to some definite object, and always told him so. latterly he grew irritated because i would shake my head at his irregularities, and tell him that he would destroy himself.... poor dear keats! had nature given you firmness as well as fineness of nerve, you would have been glorious in your maturity as great in your promise. may your kind and gentle spirit be now mingling with those of shakespeare and milton, before whose minds you have so often bowed! may you be considered worthy of admission to share their musings in heaven, as you were fit to comprehend their imaginations on earth! dear keats, hail and adieu for some six or seven years, and i shall meet you. i have enjoyed shakespeare more with keats than with any other human creature." in writing to miss mitford, haydon added: "his ruin was owing to _his want of decision of character, and power of will_, without which genius is a curse." it will be seen that haydon's character of keats is in some respects very highly laudatory: he speaks of the poet's unselfishness and generosity in terms which may possibly run into excess, but cannot assuredly have fallen short. what he remarks as to "irregularities" seems to show that these had (at least in haydon's opinion) taken somewhat firm root with keats, and had not merely come and gone with a spurt, as a relief from feelings of depression or mortification; nor can we altogether forget the statement that, on the night of february , , which closed with the first attack of blood-spitting, keats "returned home in a state of strange physical excitement--it might have appeared to those who did not know him one of fierce intoxication." physical excitement which looks like fierce intoxication, without being really anything of the sort, can be but a comparatively rare phænomenon; nor do i suppose that an impending attack of blood-spitting would account for such an appearance. brown, however, was still more positive than lord houghton in excluding the idea of intoxication on that occasion; he even says, "such a state in him, i knew, was impossible"--an assertion which we have to balance against the general averments of haydon. keats's irritation at the remonstrances which haydon addressed to him upon irregularities, real or assumed, is mentioned by the painter without any seeming knowledge of the fact that keats had (as shown by his letter of september , , already cited, to his brother george) cooled down very greatly in his cordiality to his monitor; and he may perhaps have received the remonstrances in a spirit of stubbornness, or of apparent irritation, more because he was out of humour with haydon than because he could not confute the allegations, had he been so minded. as to the charge of want of decision of character, want of power of will, we must try to understand what is the exact sense in which haydon applies these terms. he appears from the context to refer more to indefiniteness of literary aim, combined with sensitiveness to critical detraction and ridicule, than to anything really affecting the basis of a man's character in his general walk of life and commerce with the world. a few words on both these aspects of the question will not be wasted. we need not, however, recur to the allegation of over-sensitiveness to criticism, or of being "snuffed out by an article," which has already been sufficiently debated. indefiniteness of literary aim must be assessed in relation to a man's faculties, and in especial to his age and experience. a beginner is naturally indefinite in aim, in the sense that he tries his hand at various things, and only after making several experiments does he learn which things he can manage well, and which less than well. keats, in his first two volumes, was but a beginner, and a youthful beginner. if they show indefiniteness of aim--though indeed they hardly _do_ show that in any marked degree--one cannot regard the fact as derogatory to the author. with his third volume, he was getting some assurance of the direction in which his power lay. it is certainly true that, after producing one epic (if such it can be called), "endymion," and after commencing another, "hyperion," he laid the second aside, for whatever reason; partly, it would seem, because the harsh reception of "endymion" discouraged him, and partly because he considered the turn of diction too obviously miltonic; and no doubt, as his mood varied, he must have expressed to haydon very divergent opinions as to the expediency of writing epics. but, apart from this special matter, the third volume shows no uncertainty or infirmity of purpose. it contains three narrative poems--"isabella," "the eve of st. agnes," and "lamia"--some odes, and a few minor lyrics. the very fact that he continued writing poetry so persistently, maugre _blackwood's magazine_ and _the quarterly review_, speaks to some decision of character and power of will in literary matters; and the immense advance in executive force tells the same tale aboundingly. therefore, while laying great stress upon haydon's view so far as it concerns certain shifting currents of thought and of talk, i cannot find that keats is fairly open to the charge of want of decision or of will in the literary relation. then as to the larger question of his character generally, keats appears to me to have been eminently wilful, and somewhat wayward to boot. he had the temperament of a man of genius, liable to sudden and sharp impressions, and apt to go considerable lengths at the beck of an impulse, or even of a caprice. wilfulness along with waywardness is certainly not quite the same thing as "power of will," but it testifies to a will which can exert itself steadily if it likes. the very short duration of keats's life, and the painful conjuncture of circumstances which made his last year a despairing struggle between a passionate love and an inexorable disease, preclude our forming a very distinct opinion of what his power of will might naturally have become. if i may venture a surmise, i would say that he had within him the stuff of ample determination and high-heartedness in any matters upon which he was in earnest, mingled however with deficient self-control, and with a perilous facility for seeing the seamy side of life. lord houghton gives an attractive picture of keats at what was probably his happiest time, the winter of - , when "endymion" was preparing for the press. i cannot condense it to any purpose, and certainly cannot improve it, so i reproduce the passage as it stands: "keats passed the winter of - at hampstead, gaily enough among his friends. his society was much sought after, from the delightful combination of earnestness and pleasantry which distinguished his intercourse with all men. there was no effort about him to say fine things, but he _did_ say them most effectively, and they gained considerably by his happy transition of manner. he joked well or ill as it happened, and with a laugh which still echoes sweetly in many ears; but at the mention of oppression or wrong, or at any calumny against those he loved, he rose into grave manliness at once, and seemed like a tall man. his habitual gentleness made his occasional looks of indignation almost terrible. on one occasion, when a gross falsehood respecting the young artist, severn, was repeated and dwelt upon, he left the room, declaring 'he should be ashamed to sit with men who could utter and believe such things.'" severn himself avers that keats never spoke of any one unless by way of saying something in his favour. cowden clarke's anecdote tells in the same direction, that once, when some local tyranny was being discussed, keats amused the party by shouting: "why is there not a human dust-hole into which to tumble such fellows?" his own carlylean phrase seems to have tickled keats as well as others, for he repeated it in a field walk with haydon: "haydon, what a pity it is there is not a human dust-hole!" to this may be added a few words from a letter addressed from teignmouth by keats to mr. taylor in april :-- "i know nothing, i have read nothing: and i mean to follow solomon's directions, 'get learning, get understanding.' i find earlier days are gone by; i find that i can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. i find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. some do it with their society, some with their wit, some with their benevolence, some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great nature. there is but one way for me: the road lies through application, study, and thought. i will pursue it; and for that end purpose retiring for some years. i have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for philosophy. were i calculated for the former, i should be glad; but, as i am not, i shall turn all my soul to the latter." this "exquisite sense of the luxurious" must have prompted an interjection of keats in a rather earlier letter to bailey (november ): "oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!" one does not usually associate the suspicious character with the unselfish and generous character. even apart from haydon's, there is ample evidence to show that keats was generous, and, in a sense, unselfish; although a man of creative or productive genius, intent upon his own work, and subordinating everything else to it, is seldom unselfish in the fullest ordinary sense of the term. but he was certainly suspicious. of this temper we have already seen some painful ebullitions in his letters to fanny brawne. these might be ascribed mainly to the acute feelings of a lover, the morbid impressions of an invalid. but, in truth, keats always was and had been suspicious. in a letter to his brothers, dated in january , he refers, in a tone of some soreness, to objections which hunt had raised against points of treatment in the first book of "endymion," adding: "the fact is, he and shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously; and, from several hints i have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip i may have made." still earlier, writing to haydon, he had confessed to "a horrid morbidity of temperament." in a letter of june to bailey he says: "you have all your life (i think so) believed everybody: i have suspected everybody." by january he has got into a condition of decided _ennui_, not far removed from misanthropy, and the company of acquaintances, and even of friends, is a tedium to him. this was a month before the beginning of his fatal illness. it is true, he was then in love. he writes to mrs. george keats:-- "i dislike mankind in general.... the worst of men are those whose self-interests are their passions; the next, those whose passions are their self-interest. upon the whole, i dislike mankind. whatever people on the other side of the question may advance, they cannot deny that we are always surprised at hearing of a good action, and never of a bad one.... if you were in england, i dare say you would be able to pick out more amusement from society than i am able to do. to me it is as dull as louisville is to you. [then follow several remarks on hunt, haydon, the misses reynolds, and dilke.] 'tis best to remain aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull processes of their everyday lives. when once a person has smoked the vapidness of the routine of society, he must have either some self-interest or the love of some sort of distinction to keep him in good humour with it. all i can say is that, standing at charing cross, and looking east, west, north, and south, i see nothing but dulness." "i carry all things to an extreme," he had written to bailey in july , "so that when i have any little vexation it grows in five minutes into a theme fit for sophocles. then and in that temper if i write to any friend, i have so little self-possession that i give him matter for grieving, at the very time perhaps when i am laughing at a pun." a phrase which keats used in a letter of the th of october , addressed to mrs. brawne, may also be, in the main, a true item of self-portraiture: "if ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping, i am he." too much weight, however, should not be given to this, as the poet's disease had then brought him far onward towards his grave. severn does not seem to have regarded such a tendency as innate in keats, for he wrote, at a far later date, "no mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling." keats's sentiment towards women appears to have been that of a shy youth who was at the same time a critical man. miss brawne enslaved him, but did not inspire him with that tender and boundless confidence which the accepted and engaged lover of a virtuous girl naturally feels. with one woman, miss cox, he seems to have been thoroughly at his ease; and one can gather from his expressions that this unusual result depended upon a fair counterbalance of claims. while she was self-centred in her beauty and attractiveness, he was self-centred in his intellect and aspirations. there is an early poem of his--the reverse of a good one--which seems worth quoting here. i presume he may have been in his twenty-first year or so when he wrote it:-- "woman, when i behold thee flippant, vain, inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies; without that modest softening that enhances the downcast eye, repentant of the pain that its mild light creates to heal again; e'en then elate my spirit leaps and prances, e'en then my soul with exultation dances, for that to love so long i've dormant lain. but, when i see thee meek and kind and tender, heavens! how desperately do i adore thy winning graces! to be thy defender i hotly burn--to be a calidore, a very red-cross knight, a stout leander-- might i be loved by thee like these of yore. light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair, soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast, are things on which the dazzled senses rest till the fond fixèd eyes forget they stare. from such fine pictures, heavens! i cannot dare to turn my admiration, though unpossessed they be of what is worthy--though not dressed in lovely modesty and virtues rare. yet these i leave as thoughtless as a lark; these lures i straight forget--e'en ere i dine or thrice my palate moisten. but, when i mark such charms with mild intelligences shine, my ear is open like a greedy shark to catch the tunings of a voice divine. ah who can e'er forget so fair a being? who can forget her half-retiring sweets? god! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats for man's protection. surely the all-seeing, who joys to see us with his gifts agreeing, will never give him pinions who entreats such innocence to ruin--who vilely cheats a dove-like bosom. in truth there is no freeing one's thoughts from such a beauty. when i hear a lay that once i saw her hand awake, her form seems floating palpable and near. had i e'er seen her from an arbour take a dewy flower, oft would that hand appear, and o'er my eyes the trembling moisture shake." from the opening lines of this poem i gather that keats, when he wrote it, had never been in love; but that he had a feeling towards pure, sweet-minded, lovely women, which made him, in idea, their champion and votary. later on, in june , he wrote to bailey that his love for his brothers had "always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon him." and in july of the same year, also to bailey:-- "i am certain that our fair friends [_i.e._ the misses reynolds] are glad i should come for the mere sake of my coming; but i am certain i bring with me a vexation they are better without.... i am certain i have not a right feeling towards women: at this moment i am striving to be just to them, but i cannot. is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? when i was a schoolboy i thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. i have no right to expect more than their reality. i thought them ethereal--above men; i find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. one who is tender of being insulted does not like to _think_ an insult against another. i do not like to think insults in a lady's company; i commit a crime with her which absence would not have known.... when i am among women i have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; i cannot speak or be silent; i am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; i am in a hurry to be gone. you must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood.... after all, i do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether mister john keats, five feet high, likes them or not." in his letter about miss cox as "charmian," written perhaps just before he knew miss brawne, keats said: "i hope i shall never marry.... the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things i have stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. an amiable wife and sweet children i contemplate as part of that beauty, but i must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart.... these things, combined with the opinion i have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom i would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which i rejoice in." we have seen, in one of keats's letters to miss brawne, that he shrank from the thought of having their mutual love made known to any of their friends. but he went further than this. as well after as before he had fallen in love with miss brawne, and had become engaged to her, he could express a contrary state of feeling. thus, in addressing mr. taylor, on august , , he says: "i equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman; they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence." and to his brother george, september , : "nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. a man in love, i do think, cuts the sorriest figure in the world. even when i know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, i could burst out laughing in his face; his pathetic visage becomes irresistible." the letters to george, in fact, give no hint of any love for miss brawne, still less of an engagement. from all these details it would appear that keats was by no means an ardent devotee of the feminine type of character. he thought there was but little congruity between the ideal and the real of womanhood. he parted company, in this regard, with shakespeare and shelley, and adhered rather to milton. so it was before he was in love; and to be in love was not the occasion of any essential alteration of view. he ascribed to fanny brawne the same volatile appetite for amusement, the same propensity for flirtation, the same comparative shallowness of heart-affection, which he imputed to her sex in general. he loved her passionately: he believed in her not passionately, nor even intensely. that he was hard hit by the blind and winged archer was a patent fact; but he still knew the archer to be blind. in a room, says keats's surgical fellow-student, mr. stephens, he was always at the window peering out into space, and it was customary to call the window-seat "keats's place." in his last illness he told severn that the intensest of his pleasures had been to watch the growth of flowers; and, after lying quiet one day, he whispered, "i feel the daisies [or "the flowers"] growing over me." in an early stage of his fatal illness, february , , he had written pathetically to james rice: "how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! like poor falstaff, though i do not 'babble,' i think of green fields; i muse with the greatest affection on every flower i have known from my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if i had just created them with a superhuman fancy. it is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. i have seen foreign flowers in hot-houses, of the most beautiful nature, but i do not care a straw for them. the simple flowers of our spring are what i want to see again." music was another of his great enjoyments. he would sit for hours while miss charlotte reynolds played to him on the pianoforte; and a wrong note in an orchestra has been known to rouse his pugnacity, and make him wish to "go down and smash all the fiddles." haydn's symphonies were among his prime favourites, and purcell's songs from shakespeare. "give me," he wrote from winchester to his sister, in august , "books, fruit, french wine, and fine weather, and a little music out of doors, played by somebody i do not know, and i can pass a summer very quietly." he would also listen long to severn's playing, following the air with a low kind of recitative; and could himself "produce a pleasing musical effect, though possessing hardly any voice." closely though he was mixed up with leigh hunt and his circle, keats had, in fact, not much sympathy with their ideas on literary topics, nor with hunt's own poetry, still less with their views on political matters of the time, in which he took but very faint interest. cowden clarke thought that the poet's "whole civil creed was comprised in the master-principle of universal liberty, viz., equal and stern justice to all, from the duke to the dustman." he was, however, a liberal by temperament, and, i suppose, by conviction as well. one of the really puerile and nonsensical passages in "endymion" is that which opens book iii. he told his friend richard woodhouse (a barrister, connected with the firm of taylor and hessey) that it expressed his opinion of the tory ministry then in office:-- "there are who lord it o'er their fellow-men with most prevailing tinsel; who unpen their baaing vanities to browse away the comfortable green and juicy hay from human pastures; or, oh torturing fact! who through an idiot blink will see unpacked fire-branded foxes to scar up and singe our gold and ripe-eared hopes. with not one tinge of sanctuary splendour, not a sight able to face an owl's, they still are dight by the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests, and crowns and turbans. with unladen breasts, save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount to their spirit's perch, their being's high account, their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones, amid the fierce intoxicating tones of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums, and sudden cannon." a rather more sensible embodiment of his political feelings is a stanza which he wrote, perhaps in , at the close of canto , book ii. of "the faery queen." in this stanza the revolutionary giant, who had been suppressed by artegall and talus, is represented as being pieced together again by typographus, the printing-press, and so trained up as to become more than a match for his former victors. there is also, in a letter to george keats dated in september , a rather long and detailed passage on politics covering a wide period in english and european history, on the oscillations of governmental and popular power &c., and on the writer's sympathy with the enlightenment and progress of the people. it closes with an admiring description of sandt, the assassin of kotzebue, as pourtrayed in a profile likeness. as to hunt, some expressions in a letter from george keats to dilke are decidedly strong:--"i should be extremely sorry that poor john's name should go down to posterity associated with the littlenesses of leigh hunt--an association of which he was so impatient in his lifetime. he speaks of him patronizingly; that he would have defended him against the reviewers if he had known his nervous irritation at their abuse of him, and says that on that point only he was reserved to him. the fact was, he more dreaded hunt's defence than their abuse. you know all this as well as i do." apart from his own special capability for poetry, keats had a mind both active and capacious. the depth, pregnancy, and incisiveness, of many of the remarks in his letters, glancing along a considerable range of subject-matter, are highly noticeable. if some one were to take the pains of extracting and classifying them, he would do a good service to readers. it does not appear, however, that keats took much interest in any kind of knowledge which could not be made applicable or subservient to the purposes of poetry. many will remember the anecdote, proper to haydon's "immortal dinner" (december ), of keats's joining with charles lamb in denouncing sir isaac newton for having destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours; the whole company had to drink "newton's health, and confusion to mathematics." this was a freak, yet not so mere a freak but that the poet--in one of his most elaborated and heedful compositions, "lamia"--could revert to the same idea-- "do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? there was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture--she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine, unweave a rainbow." in a letter to his brother, december , keats observes:-- "the excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth. examine 'king lear,' and you will find this exemplified throughout.... it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which shakespeare possessed so enormously. i mean _negative capability_; that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. this, pursued through volumes, would perhaps take us no further than this: that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." keats did not very often in his letters remark upon the work of his poetic contemporaries. we have just read a reference to coleridge. in another letter addressed to haydon, january , he shows that his admiration of wordsworth's "excursion" was great, coupling that poem with haydon's pictures, and with "hazlitt's depth of taste," as "three things to rejoice at in this age." soon afterwards, february , while "endymion" was passing through the press, he wrote to mr. taylor:-- "in poetry i have a few axioms, and you will see how far i am from their centre. st, i think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. nd, its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. the rise, the progress, the setting, of imagery, should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. but it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it. and this leads me to another axiom--that, if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all." keats held that the melody of verse is founded on the adroit management of open and close vowels. he thought that vowels can be as skilfully combined and interchanged as differing notes of music, and that monotony should only be allowed when it subserves some special purpose. the following, from a letter to mr. woodhouse, october (soon after the abusive reviews had appeared in _blackwood's magazine_ and _the quarterly_), is a remarkable piece of self-analysis. as we read it, we should bear in mind what haydon said of keats's want of decision of character. i am not indeed clear that keats has here pourtrayed himself with marked accuracy. it may appear that he ascribes to himself too much of absorption into the object or the personage which he contemplates; whereas it might, with fully as much truth, be advanced that he was wont to assimilate the personage or the object to himself. i greatly doubt whether in keats's poems we see the object or the personage the clearer because his faculty transpires through them: rather, we see the object or the personage through the haze of keats. his range was not extremely extensive (whatever it might possibly have become, with a longer lease of life), nor was his personality by any means occulted. but in any event his statement here is of great importance as showing what he thought of the poetic phase of mind and working. "as to the poetical character itself (i mean that sort of which, if i am anything, i am a member--that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing _per se_, and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self. it is everything, and nothing--it has no character. it enjoys light, and shade. it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated--it has as much delight in conceiving an iago as an imogen. what shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. it does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. a poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. the sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute: the poet has none, no identity. he is certainly the most unpoetical of all god's creatures. if then he has no self, and if i am a poet, where is the wonder that i should say i would write no more? might i not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of saturn and ops? it is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word i ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. how can it when i have _no_ nature? when i am in a room with people, if i ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that i am in a very little time annihilated. not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children." elsewhere keats says, november : "nothing startles me beyond the moment. the setting sun will always set me to rights; or if a sparrow come before my window, i take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel." for painting keats had a good deal of taste, largely fostered, no doubt, by his intimacy with haydon. this came to him gradually. towards the beginning of he was, according to his own account, quite unable to appreciate raphael's cartoons, but afterwards gained an insight into them through contrasting them with some maudlin saints by guido. it is interesting to find him entering warmly into the beauties of the earlier italian art, as indicated in a book of prints from some church in milan (so he says, but perhaps it should rather be pisa or florence). "i do not think i ever had a greater treat out of shakespeare; full of romance and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything i ever saw, not excepting raphael's, but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there was left so much room for imagination." here is a small trait of character, recorded by keats in a letter to george, from winchester, september . "i feel i can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. whenever i find myself growing vapourish, i rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if i were going out; then, all clean and comfortable, i sit down to write. this i find the greatest relief." haydon, as we have seen, said that keats had an exquisite sense of humour. there are few things more difficult to analyse than the sense of humour; few points as to which different people will vary more in opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense. certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings of keats--often a quick perception of the ridiculous or the risible, sometimes a telling jest or _jeu d'esprit_. i confess, however, that to myself most of keats's fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness of taste and manner, and tending towards the vulgar; a jangling jingle of word and notion. punning plays a large part in it, as it did in leigh hunt's familiar converse. some specimens of keats's funning or punning seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, january , which armitage brown addressed to mr. and mrs. dilke, with interpolations by keats. no doubt both the friends were resolutely bent upon being silly on that occasion; but to be silly is not fully tantamount to being "a fellow of infinite jest," or having an exquisite sense of humour. there is some very exasperating writing also in a letter to reynolds (may ), about "making wordsworth and colman play at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half-holiday at fly-the-garter," &c., &c. a feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one element of jocoseness; if so, keats may have been genuinely jocose when (as he wrote in his very last letter to brown) he "at his worst, even in quarantine [in naples harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of his life." he had a good power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. he did indisputably, towards september , play off one practical joke--brown was the victim--with eminent success; pretending that a certain mr. nathan benjamin, who was then renting brown's house at hampstead, had written a letter complaining of illness--gravel, caused by some lime-tainted water on the premises. but the success depended upon a very singular coincidence, viz., that by mere chance keats had happened to give the tenant's name correctly. the angry reply of brown to the angry supposititious letter of benjamin, and the astonishment of benjamin upon receiving brown's retort, are fertile of laughter. keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject, or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. he was certainly not a christian. his early friend, mr. felton mathew, speaks of him as "of the sceptical and republican school." on christmas eve, , soon after he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet-- "the church-bells toll a melancholy round, calling the people to some other prayers, some other gloominess, more dreadful cares, more hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound. surely the mind of man is closely bound in some black spell: seeing that each one tears himself from fireside joys and lydian airs, and converse high of those with glory crowned. still, still they toll: and i should feel a damp, a chill as from a tomb, did i not know that they are dying like an outburnt lamp,-- that 'tis their sighing, wailing, ere they go into oblivion,--that fresh flowers will grow, and many glories of immortal stamp." his sonnet on ben nevis, , is also an utterance of scepticism--speaking of heaven and hell as misty surmises, and of "the world of thought and mental might" as a realm of nebulosity. a letter to leigh hunt, may , contains a phrase arraigning the god of christians. to the clerical student bailey, september , he spoke out: "you know my ideas about religion. i do not think myself more in the right than other people, that nothing in this world is proveable." the latter clause appears to be carelessly elliptical in expression, the real meaning being "i think [not "i do _not_ think"] that nothing in this world is proveable." to fanny brawne, towards may , he appealed "by the blood of that christ you believe in." haydon tells a noticeable anecdote--the only one, i think, which exhibits keats as an admirer of that anti-imaginative order of intellect of which voltaire was a prototype-- "he had a tending to religion when first i knew him [autumn of ], but leigh hunt soon forced it from his mind. never shall i forget keats once rising from his chair, and approaching my last picture, entry into jerusalem. he went before the portrait of voltaire, placed his hand on his heart, and, bowing low, 'in reverence done, as to the power that dwelt within, whose presence had infused into the plant sciential sap derived from nectar, drink of gods,' (as milton says of eve after she had eaten the apple), 'that's the being to whom _i_ bend,' said he; alluding to the bending of the other figures in the picture, and contrasting voltaire with our saviour, and his own adoration with that of the crowd." notwithstanding the general vagueness or indifference of his mind in religious matters, keats seems to have been at most times a believer in the immortality of the soul. following that phrase of his already quoted (from a letter to bailey, november ) "oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!" he proceeds: "it is 'a vision in the form of youth,' a shadow of reality to come. and this consideration has further convinced me--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we call happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. and yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger, as you do, after truth. adam's dream will do here: and seems to be a conviction that imagination, and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life, and its spiritual repetition." this allusion to "adam's dream" refers back to a fine phrase which had occurred shortly before in the same letter--"imagination may be compared to adam's dream; he awoke, and found it truth." in a letter written to george keats and his wife, shortly after the death of tom, comes a very positive assertion--"i have a firm belief in immortality, and so had tom." this firm belief, however, must certainly have faltered later on; for, as we have already seen, one of keats's letters to miss brawne, written in , contains the phrase "i long to believe in immortality." the reader may also refer to the letter to armitage brown, september , extracted in a previous page. of superstitious feeling i observe only one instance in keats. after tom's death, a white rabbit appeared in the garden of mr. dilke, and was shot by him: keats would have it that this rabbit was the spirit of tom, and he persisted in the fancy with not a little earnestness. of keats's fondness for wine--his appreciation of it as a flavour grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment--there are numerous traces throughout his writings. we all remember the famous lines in his "ode to a nightingale"-- "oh for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,... oh for a beaker full of the warm south!" &c.-- lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts of the nightingale. there is also in "lamia" a conspicuous passage celebrating "the happy vintage--merry wine, sweet wine." on claret--as to which we have heard the evidence of haydon--there is a long tirade in a letter addressed to george keats and his wife in february . i give it in a condensed form:-- "i never drink above three glasses of wine, and never any spirits and water.... how i like claret! when i can get claret, i must drink it. 'tis the only palate affair that i am at all sensual in.... it fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness--then goes down cool and feverless: then you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver.... other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a silenus: this makes him a hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an ariadne.... i said this same claret is the only palate-passion i have: i forgot game. i must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock _passim_." at a rather later date, october , keats had "left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature." but i presume this form of abstinence did not last long. i have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. he entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a man--unselfish, kindly, and generous. but, though kindly, he was irritable; though unselfish and generous, wilful and suspicious. an affront was what he would not bear; and, when he found himself affronted in a form--that of press ridicule and detraction--which could not be resented in person, nor readily retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love which had become the single intense interest of his life. the single intense interest, along with poetry--both of them hurrying without fruition to the grave. keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse self-conflict. the circumstances of his brief career--his poetic ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal malady--all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. with the personal character of keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. but his latest years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adolescence. from "endymion" to "lamia" and the "eve of st. mark," we have, in poetry, advanced greatly towards the radiant meridian: in life, from to , we have receded to a baffling dusk. chapter ix. we have seen what john keats did in the shifting scene of the world, and in the high arena of poesy; we have seen what were the qualities of character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. his work as a poet is to us the thing of primary importance: and it remains for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in detail. the critic who _is_ a critic--and not a _quarterly_ or a _blackwood_ reviewer or lampooner--is well aware of the disproportion between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as that of keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make upon the estimating faculty. but this consideration cannot be allowed to operate beyond a certain point: the estimate has to be given--and given candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. i shall therefore proceed to express my real opinion of keats's poems, whether an admiring opinion or otherwise; and shall write without reiterating--what i may nevertheless feel--a sense of the presumption involved in such a process. i shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the chronological order of the poems. as we have seen, keats began versifying chiefly under a spenserean influence; and it has been suggested that this influence remained puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic career. i do not see much force in the suggestion: unless in this limited sense--that spenser, like other elizabethan and jacobean poets his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or jarring, obvious or far-fetched, simple or grandiose, according to the mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbitrary picturesqueness than of ordered suavity. and keats no doubt often did the same: but not in the choicest productions of his later time, nor perhaps so much under incitement from spenser as in pursuance of that revolt from a factitious and constrained model of work in which wordsworth in one direction, coleridge in another, and leigh hunt in a third, had already come forward with practice and precept. making allowance for a few early attempts directly referable to spenser, i find, even in keats's first volume, little in which that influence is paramount. he seems to have written because his perceptions were quick, his sympathies vivid in certain directions, and his energies wound up to poetic endeavour. the mannerisms of thought, method, and diction, are much more those of hunt than of spenser; and it is extremely probable that the soreness against hunt which keats evidenced at a later period was due to his perceiving that that kindly friend and genial literary ally had misled him into some poetic trivialities and absurdities, not less than to anything in himself which could be taken hold of for complaint. keats's first volume would present nothing worthy of permanent memory, were it not for his after achievements, and for the single sonnet upon chapman's homer. several of the compositions are veritable rubbish: probably keats knew at the time that they were not good, and knew soon afterwards that they were deplorably bad. such are the address "to some ladies" who had sent the author a shell; that "on receiving a curious shell and a copy of verses [moore's "golden chain"] from the same ladies;" the "ode to apollo" (in which homer, virgil, milton, shakespeare, spenser, and tasso, are commemorated); the "hymn to apollo;" the lines "to hope" (in which there is a patriotic aspiration, mingled with scorn for the gauds of a court). "calidore" has a certain boyish ardour, clearly indicated if not well expressed. the verses "i stood tiptoe upon a little hill" are very far from good, and are stuffed with affectations, but do nevertheless show a considerable spice of the real keats. some lines have already been quoted from this effusion, about "flowery nests," and "the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the speculation of the stars." it is only by an effort that we can attach any meaning to either of these childish della-cruscanisms: the "pillowy silkiness" may perhaps be clouds intermingled with stars, and the "flowery nests" may, by a great wrenching of english, be meant for "flowery nooks"--nests or nooks of flowers. "sleep and poetry" contains various fine lines, telling and suggestive images, and luscious descriptive snatches, and is interesting as showing the bent of the writer's mind, and a sense of his mission begun. serious metrical flaws are perceptible in it here and there, and throughout this first volume of verse--and indeed in "endymion" as well. one metrical weakness of which he never got rid is the accenting of the preterite or participial form "ed" (in such words as "resolved," &c.), where its sound ekes out with feeble stress the prosody of a line. two songs which have genuine lyric grace--dated in , but not included in the volume of "poems"--are those which begin "think not of it, sweet one, so," and "unfelt, unheard, unseen." the volume contains sixteen sonnets, besides the grand one on "chapman's homer." the best are those which begin "keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there," and "happy is england," and the "grasshopper and cricket," which was written in competition with hunt. it seems to me that keats's production has more of poetry, hunt's of finish. the sonnet "on leaving some friends at an early hour" is characteristic enough. this is as much detail as need be given here to the "poems" of . the sonnet on chapman's homer revealed a hand which might easily prove to be a master's. all else was prentice-work, with some melody, some richness and freshness, some independence, much enthusiasm; also many solecisms and perversities of diction, imagery, and method: and not a few pieces were included which only self-conceit, or torpor of the critical faculty, or the mis-persuasion of friends, could have allowed to pass muster. but keats chose to publish--to exhibit his poetic identity at this stage and in this guise; and of course we can see, in the light of his after-work, that the experiment was rather a rash forestalling than a positive mistake. there are a few other sonnets which keats wrote in , or, in general terms, between the publishing dates of the "poems" volume and of "endymion." those "on a picture of leander," and "on the sea," and the one which begins "after dark vapours have oppressed our plains," rank among the best of his juvenile productions. a general observation, applicable to all the early work, whether printed at the time or unprinted, is that the ideas are constantly _expressed_ in an imperfect way. there are perceptions, thoughts, and emotions; but the vehicle of words is, as a rule, huddled and approximate. "endymion" now claims our attention. i believe that no better criticism of "endymion" has ever been written than that which shelley supplied in a letter dated in september . certainly no criticism which is equally short is also equally good. i therefore extract it here, and shall have little to say about the poem which is not potentially condensed into shelley's brief utterance. "i have read keats's poem," he wrote: "much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry; indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. i think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it i should have been led to admire keats as a poet more than i ought, of which there is now no danger." in july shelley wrote to keats himself on the subject, furnishing almost the only addendum which could have been needed to the preceding remarks: "i have lately read your 'endymion' again, and even with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion." as shelley shared with gifford the conviction that it is difficult to read "endymion" from book , line , to book , line , and as human nature has not changed essentially since the time of that pre-eminent poet and that rather less eminent critic, i daresay that there are at this day several keats-enthusiasts who know _in foro conscientiæ_, though they may not avow in public, that they have left "endymion" unread, or only partially read. others have perused it, but have found in it so much "indistinct profusion" that they also remain after a while with rather a vague impression of the course of the story; although they agree with gifford, and even exceed him in the assurance, that "it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of diana and endymion." as the poem is an extremely important one in relation to the life-work of keats, i think it may not be out of place if i here give a succinct account of what the narrative really amounts to. this may be all the more desirable as keats has not followed the convenient if prosaic practice of several other epic poets by prefixing to the several books of his long poem an "argument" of their respective contents. _book ._ on a lawn within a forest upon a slope of mount latmos was held one morning a festival to pan. the young huntsman-chieftain endymion attended, but his demeanour betrayed a secret preoccupation and trouble. after the rites were over, his sister peona addressed him, and gradually won him to open his heart to her. he told her that at a certain spot by the river, one of his favourite haunts, he had lately seen a sudden efflorescence of dittany and poppies (the flowers sacred to diana). he fell asleep there, and had a dream or vision of entering the gates of heaven, seeing the moon in transcendent splendour, and then being accosted by a woman or goddess lovely beyond words, who pressed his hand. he seemed to faint, and to be upborne into the upper regions of the sky, where he gave the beauty a rapturous kiss, and then they both paused upon a mountain-side. next he dreamed that he fell asleep. this was the prelude to his actual waking out of the vision. ever since he had retained a mysterious sense that the dream had not been all a dream. this was confirmed by various incidents of obscure suggestion, and especially by his hearing in a cavern the words (we have read them already, beslavered by the "human serpentry" of criticism, but they remain delicious words none the less)-- "endymion, the cave is secreter than the isle of delos. echo hence shall stir no sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys and trembles through my labyrinthine hair." as nothing further, however, had happened, endymion promised peona that he would henceforth cease to live a life of feverish expectation, and would resume the calm tenor of his days. _book ._--endymion's promise had not been strictly fulfilled; he was still restless and craving. one day he plucked a rosebud: it suddenly blossomed, and a butterfly emerged from it, with strangely-charactered wings. he pursued the butterfly, which led him to a fountain by a cavern, and then disappeared. a naiad thereupon addressed him, saying that he must wander far before he could be reunited to his mystic fair one. he then appealed to the moon-goddess for some aid, was rapt into a dizzy vision as if he were sailing through heaven in her car, and heard a voice from the cavern bidding him descend into the entrails of the earth. he eagerly obeyed, and passed through a region of twilight dimness starred with gems, until he reached a natural temple enshrining a statue of diana. an awful sense of solitude weighed upon him, and he implored the goddess to restore him to his earthly home. a profusion of flowers budded forth before his feet, followed by music as he resumed his journey. at last he came to a verdant space, peopled with slumbering cupids. here in a beautiful chamber he found adonis lying tranced on a couch, attended by other cupids.[ ] one of them gave him wine and fruit, and explained to him the winter-sleep and summer-life of adonis; and at this moment adonis woke up from his trance, and venus came to solace him with love. venus spoke soothingly also to endymion, telling him that she knew of his love for some one of the immortals, but who this was she had failed to fathom. she promised that one day he should be blessed, and with adonis she then rose heavenward in her car. the earth closed, and endymion gladly pursued his way through caves, jewels, and water-springs. cybele passed on her lion-drawn chariot. the diamond path ended in middle air; endymion invoked jupiter, an eagle swooped and bore him down through darkness into a mossy jasmine-bower. with a sense of ecstasy, chequered by an unsatisfied longing for his unknown love, endymion prepared himself to sleep: "and, just into the air stretching his indolent arms, he took, o bliss! a naked waist. 'fair cupid, whence is this?' a well-known voice sighed, 'sweetest, here am i!'" the lovers indulged their passion in kisses and caresses; he urgent to know who she might be, and she confessing herself a goddess hitherto awful in loveless chastity, but not naming herself, though perhaps her avowals were sufficiently indicative,[ ] and she promised to exalt him ere long to olympus. the rapturous interview ended with the sleep of endymion, and awaking he found himself alone. he strayed out, and reached an enormous grotto. two springs of water gushed forth--the springs of arethusa and alpheus, whose loves found voice in words. endymion, sending up a prayer for their union, stepped forward and found himself beneath the sea. _book ._ soothed by a moonbeam which greeted him through the waters, endymion pursued his course. upon a rock within the sea he encountered an old, old man, with wand and book. the ancient man started up as from a trance, declaring that he should now be young again and happy. this was glaucus, who imparted to endymion the story of his ill-omened love for scylla (it is told at considerable length, but need not be detailed here), the witchcraft of circe which had doomed him to a ghastly marine life of a thousand years, and how, after a shipwreck, he came into possession of a book of magic, which revealed to him that at some far-off day a youth should make his appearance and break the accursed spell. in endymion, glaucus recognized the predicted youth. glaucus then led endymion to an edifice in which he had preserved the corpse of scylla, and thousands of other corpses, being those of lovers who had been shipwrecked during his many cycles of sea-dwelling doom. glaucus tore his scroll into fragments, bound his cloak round endymion, and waved his wand nine times. he then instructed endymion to unwind a tangled thread, read the markings on a shell, break the wand against a lyre, and strew the fragments of the scroll upon glaucus himself, and upon the dead bodies. as the final act was performed, glaucus resumed his youth, and scylla and the drowned lovers returned to life. the whole joyous company then rushed off, and paid their devotions to neptune in his palace. cupid and venus were also present here; and the goddess of love spoke words of comfort to endymion, assuring him that his long expectancy would soon find its full reward. she had by this time probed the secret of diana, but she refrained from naming that deity to endymion. she invited him and his bride to pass a portion of their honeymoon in cythera,[ ] with adonis and cupid. a stupendous festival in neptune's palace succeeded. endymion finally sank down in a trance; nereids conveyed him up to a forest by a lake; and as he floated earthwards he heard in dream words promising that his goddess would soon waft him up into heaven. he awoke in the sylvan scene. _book ._ the first sound that endymion heard was a female voice; the wail of a damsel who had followed bacchus from the banks of the ganges, and who longed to be at home again, if only to die there. unseen himself, he saw a beautiful girl, who lay bemoaning her loveless lot. he at once felt that, if he adored his unknown goddess, he loved also his indian bacchante. he sprang forward and declared his passion.[ ] she, after chaunting her long journeyings in the train of bacchus, explained that, being sick-hearted and weary, she had strayed away in the forest, and was now but the votary of sorrow. endymion continued to woo her with sweet words and hot: he heard a dismal voice, "woe to endymion!" echoing through the forest. mercury descended and touched the ground with his wand, and two winged horses sprang out of the earth. endymion seated his bacchante upon one horse and mounted the other; they flew upward, eagle-high. in the air they passed sleep, who had heard a report that a mortal was to wed a daughter of jove, and who desired to hearken to the marriage ditties before he returned to his cave. the influence of sleep made the winged horses drowse, and also endymion and the bacchante. endymion then dreamed of being in heaven, the mate of gods and goddesses, diana among them. in dream he sprang towards diana, and so awoke; but awake he still saw the same vision. diana was there in heaven; his bacchante was beside him lying on the horse's pinions. he kissed the bacchante, and almost in the same breath protested to diana his unshaken constancy. the bacchante then awoke. endymion, dazed in mind with his divided allegiance, urged her to be gone, and the winged horses resumed their flight. they advanced towards the galaxy, the moon peeped out of the sky, the bacchante faded away in the moonbeams. her steed dropped down to the earth; while the one which bore endymion continued mounting upwards, and he again fell into a sort of trance. he heard not the celestial messengers bespeaking guests to diana's wedding. the winged horse then carried endymion down to a hill-top. here once more he found his beautiful indian, and for her sake forswore all præterhuman passion. she, however, declared to him that a divine terror forbade her to be his. his sister peona now re-appeared. she rallied him and the bacchante on their love and melancholy, both equally obvious, and bade him attend at night a festival to diana, whom the soothsayers had pronounced to be in a mood peculiarly propitious. endymion announced his resolution to abandon the world, and live an eremitic life: peona and the fair indian should both be his sisters. the indian vowed lifelong chastity, devoted to diana. both the women then retired. the day passed over endymion motionless and mute. at eventide he walked towards the temple: he heeded not the hymning to diana. peona, companioned by the indian damsel, accosted him. he replied, "sister, i would have command, if it were heaven's will, on our sad fate." the indian replied that this he should assuredly have; as she spoke she changed semblance, and stood revealed as diana herself. she laid upon her own fears and upon fate the blame of past delays, and told endymion that it had also been fitting that he should be spiritualized out of mortality by some unlooked-for change. as endymion kneeled and kissed her hands, they both vanished away. the last words of the poem are-- "peona went home through the gloomy wood in wonderment:" words which may perhaps be modelled upon the grave and subdued conclusion of "paradise lost." this is a bald outline of the thread of story which meanders through that often-skimmed, seldom-read, not easily readable poem--in snatches alluring, in entirety disheartening--the "endymion" of keats. it will be perceived that the poet keeps throughout tolerably close to his main and professed subject matter--the loves of diana and endymion, although the episode of glaucus, which is brought within the compass of the amorous quest, is certainly a very long and extraneous one. as we have seen, keats, when well advanced with this poem, spoke of it as a test of his inventive faculty: and truly it is such, but i am not sure that his inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. the best part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous, sane, and adequate conception of the imaginable relation between a loving goddess and her human lover; her emotion towards him, and his emotion towards her; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human mode of existence in the divine conclave; along with a chain of incidents--partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet's own--which should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take possession of the reader's mind, for their own sake at the moment, and for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result. of all this we find little in keats's poem. diana figures as a very willing woman, passing out of the stage of maidenly coyness. endymion talks indeed at times of the exaltation of a passion transcending the bounds of mortality, but his conduct and demeanour go little beyond those of an adventurous lover of the knight-errant sort who, having taken the first leap in the dark, follows where fortune leads him--and assuredly she leads him a very curious dance, where one cannot make out how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist. moreover, the last book of the poem spoils all that has preceded, so far as continuity of feeling is concerned; for here we learn that no sooner does endymion see a pretty indian bacchante than he falls madly in love with her, and casts to the winds every shred and thought of diana, already his bride or quasi-bride; she goes out like a cloud-veiled glimpse of moonlight. true, the bacchante is in fact diana herself; but of this endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately--or rather with fatuous precipitancy--gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. this may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess--it is certainly not so to that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood--shall we say superior to it? in another and minor sense there is no lack of invention in this poetic romance. so far as i know, there is nothing in grecian mythology furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of endymion's descending into the bowels of the earth, passing thence beneath the sea, meeting glaucus, and restoring to life the myriads of drowned lovers, encountering the indian bacchante, and taking with her an aërial voyage upon winged coursers. these incidents--except indeed that of the bacchante--are passing strange, and could not be worked out in a long narrative poem without a lavish command of fanciful and surprising touches. the tale of the aërial voyage seems abortive; its natural _raison d'être_ and needful sequel would appear to be that diana, having thus launched endymion along with herself into the heavenly regions, should bear him straight onward to the high court of the gods; but, instead of that, the horses and their riders return to earth, the air has been traversed to no purpose and with no ostensible result, and endymion is allowed again to forswear diana for the bacchante before the consummation is reached. presumably morpheus (sleep) is responsible for this mishap. his untoward presence in the sky sent the bacchante, as well as endymion, to sleep for awhile: when they awoke, diana had to leave the form of the bacchante, and, in her character of phoebe, regulate the nascent moon; though a goddess, she could not be in two places at once, and so the winged horses descended _re infectâ_. this is an ingenious point of incident enough; but it is just one of those points which indicate that the poet's mind moved in a region of scintillating details rather than of large and majestic contours. such is in fact the quality of "endymion" throughout. everything is done for the sake of variegation and embroidery of the original fabric; or we might compare it to a richly-shot silk which, at every rustling movement, catches the eye with a change of colour. constant as they are, the changes soon become fatiguing, and in effect monotonous; one colour, varied with its natural light and shade, would be more restful to the sight, and would even, in the long run, leave a sense of greater, because more congruous and harmonized, variety. luscious and luxuriant in intention--for i cannot suppose that keats aimed at being exalted or ideal--the poem becomes mawkish in result: he said so himself, and we need not hesitate to repeat it. affectations, conceits, and puerilities, abound, both in thought and in diction: however willing to be pleased, the reader is often disconcerted and provoked. the number of clever things said cleverly, of rich things richly, and of fine things finely, is however abundant and superabundant; and no one who peruses "endymion" with a true sense for poetic endowment and handling can fail to see that it is peculiarly the work of a poet. the versification, though far from faultless, is free, surging, and melodious--one of the devices which the author most constantly employs with a view to avoiding jogtrot uniformity being that of beginning a new sentence with the second line of a couplet. on every page the poet has enjoyed himself, and on most of them the reader can joy as well. the lyrical interludes, especially the hymn to pan, and the chaunt of the bacchante (which comprises a sort of verse-transcript of titian's "bacchus and ariadne"), are singularly wealthy in that fancy which hovers between description and emotion. the hymn to pan was pronounced by wordsworth, _vivâ voce_, to be "a pretty piece of paganism"--a comment which annoyed keats not a little. shelley (in his undispatched letter to the editor of the _quarterly review_) pointed out, as particularly worthy of attention, the passages--"and then the forest told it in a dream" (book ii.); "the rosy veils mantling the east" (book iii.); and "upon a weeded rock this old man sat" (book iii.) the last--relating to glaucus and his pictured cloak--is certainly remarkable; the other two, i should say, not more remarkable than scores of others--as indeed shelley himself implied. to sum up, "endymion" is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by excess. to deny these blemishes would be childish--they are there, and must be not only admitted, but resented. the faults, like the beauties, of the poem, are positive--not negative or neutral. the work was in fact (as keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. at the age of twenty-one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material; he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, conscious that, if some things came right, others would come wrong. we are the richer for his rather overweening experiment; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. if "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever," a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its minor degree. the next long poem of keats--"isabella, or the pot of basil"--is a vast advance on "endymion" in sureness of hand and moderation of work: it is in all respects the better poem, and justifies what keats said (in his letter of october , , quoted in our chapter v.) of the experience which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in "endymion." of course it was a less arduous attempt; the subject being one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. except in altering the locality from messina to florence (a change which seems objectless), keats has adhered faithfully enough to the sweet and sad story of boccaccio; he has however amplified it much in detail, for the italian tale is a short one. "isabella" has always been a favourite with the readers of keats, and deservedly so; it is tender, touching, and picturesque. yet i should not place it in the very first rank of the poet's works--the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less masculine than is needed. the writer seems too conscious that he has set himself to narrating something pathetic; he tells the story _ab extra_, and enlarges on "the pity of it," instead of leaving the pity to speak to the heart out of the very circumstances themselves. the brothers may have been "ledger-men" and "money-bags" (boccaccio does not insist upon any such phase of character), and they certainly became criminals, though the italian author treats their murder of lorenzo as if it were a sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour; but, when keats "again asks aloud" why these commercial brothers were proud, he seems to intrude upon us overmuch the personality of the narrator of a tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. this is only one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem--that it is all told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic--indignant now, and now compassionate. leigh hunt has pointed out the absurdity of putting into the mouth of one of the brother "money-bags," just as they are about to execute their plot for murdering lorenzo, the lines (though he praises the pretty conceit in itself)-- "come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count his dewy rosary on the eglantine." the author's invocation to melancholy, music, echo, spirits in grief, and melpomene, to condole the approaching death of isabella, seems to me a _fadeur_ hardly more appropriate than the money-bag's epigram upon the "dewy rosary." but the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses for the admiration with which he regards "the pot of basil." he thinks it both beautiful and pathetic--and so do i. "isabella" is written in the octave stanza; "the eve of st. agnes" in the spenserean. this difference of metre corresponds very closely to the difference of character between the two poems. "isabella" is a narrative poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as chiefly to subserve purposes of sentiment; "the eve of st. agnes," though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which sentiment again permeates and over-rules. i rate it far above "isabella"--and indeed above all those poems of keats, not purely lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except only the ballad "la belle dame sans merci," and the uncompleted "eve of st. mark." "hyperion" stands aloof in lonely majesty; but i think that, in the long run, even "hyperion" represents the genius of keats less adequately, and past question less characteristically, than "the eve of st. agnes." the story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be almost nugatory. there is nothing in it but this--that keats took hold of the superstition proper to st. agnes' eve, the power of a maiden to see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it that a lover, who was clandestinely present in this conjuncture of circumstances, eloped with his mistress. this extreme tenuity of constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness of "endymion," and the futility of "the cap and bells," might be held to indicate that keats had very little head for framing a story--and indeed i infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained undeveloped up to the day of his death. one of the few subsidiary incidents introduced into "the eve of st. agnes" is that the lover porphyro, on emerging from his hiding-place while his lady is asleep, produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of appetizing eatables. why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet been able to divine; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as to reinforce our persuasion that keats's capacity for framing a story out of successive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was decidedly feeble. the power of "the eve of st. agnes" lies in a wholly different direction. it lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and emotion into sound; in making pictures out of words, or turning words into pictures; of giving a visionary beauty to the closest items of description; of holding all the materials of the poem in a long-drawn suspense of music and reverie. "the eve of st. agnes" is _par excellence_ the poem of "glamour." it means next to nothing; but means that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less than a sensuous restorative. perhaps no reader has ever risen from "the eve of st. agnes" dissatisfied. after a while he can question the grounds of his satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting; but he has only to peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him. "the eve of st. mark" was begun at much the same date as "the eve of st. agnes," rather the earlier of the two. its relation to other poems by the author is singular. in "endymion" he had been a prodigal of treasures--some of them genuine, others spurious; in "the eve of st. agnes" he was at least opulent, a magnate superior to sumptuary laws; but in "the eve of st. mark" he subsides into a delightful simplicity--a simplicity full, certainly, of "favour and prettiness," but chary of ornament. it comes perfectly natural to him, and promises the most charming results. the non-completion of "the eve of st. mark" is the greatest grievance of which the admirers of keats have to complain. i should suppose that, in the first instance, he advisedly postponed the eve of one saint, mark, to the eve of the other, agnes; and that he did not afterwards find a convenient opportunity for resuming the uncompleted poem. the superstition connected with st. mark's vigil is not wholly unlike that pertaining to st. agnes's. in the former instance (i quote from dante rossetti), "it is believed that, if a person placed himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year go into the church. if they remained there, it signified their death; if they came out again, it portended their recovery; and, the longer or shorter the time they remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness." the same writer, forecasting the probable course of the story,[ ] surmised that "the heroine, remorseful after trifling with a sick and now absent lover, might make her way to the minster porch to learn his fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return." if this was really to have been the sequel, we can perceive that the unassuming simplicity of the poem at its commencement would, ere its close, have deepened into a different sort of simplicity--emotional, and even tragic. as it stands, the simplicity of "the eve of st. mark" is full-blooded as well as quaint--there is nothing starved or threadbare about it. diverse though it is from coleridge's "christabel," we seem to feel in it something of the like possessing or haunting quality, modified by keats's own distinctive genius. in this respect, and in perfectness of touch, we link it with "la belle dame sans merci." "hyperion" has next to be considered. this was the only poem by keats which shelley admired in an extreme degree. he wrote at different dates: "the fragment called 'hyperion' promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age.... it is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of keats which i confess i had not before.... if the 'hyperion' be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.... the great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry." byron, who had been particularly virulent against keats during his lifetime, wrote after his death a much more memorable phrase: "his fragment of 'hyperion' seems actually inspired by the titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus." mr. swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and with carefully weighed words: "the triumph of 'hyperion' is as nearly complete as the failure of 'endymion.' yet keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not (as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible significance." mr. swinburne is a critic with whom one may well be content to go astray, if astray it is. i will therefore say that i entirely agree with him in this estimate of "hyperion," and of the sound discretion which keats exercised in giving it up. to deal with the gods of olympus is no easy task--it had decidedly overtaxed keats in "endymion," though he limited himself to the two goddesses diana and venus, and casually the gods neptune and mercury; but to deal with the elder gods--saturn, ops, hyperion--and with the titans, on the scale of a long epic narration, is a task which may well be pronounced unachievable. the olympian gods would also have had to be introduced: apollo already appears in the poem, not too promisingly. the elder gods are necessarily mere figure-heads of bulk, might, majesty, and antiquity; to get any character out of them after these "property" attributes have been exhausted to the mind's eye, to "set them going" in act, and doing something apportionable into cantos, and readable by human energies, was not a problem which could be solved by a poet of the nineteenth century. past question, keats started grandly, and has left us a monument of cyclopean architecture in verse almost impeccable--a stonehenge of reverberance; he has made us feel that his elder gods were profoundly primæval, powers so august and abstract-natured as to have become already obsolete in the days of zeus and hades: his titans, too, were so vast and muscular that no feat would have been difficult to them except that of interesting us. this sufficed for the first book of the poem; in the second book, the enterprise is already revealing itself as an impossible one, for the council at which oceanus and others speak is reminiscent of the pandæmonic council in milton, and clearly very inferior to that. it could not well help resembling the scene in "paradise lost," nor yet help being inferior; besides, even were it equal or preferable, milton had done the thing first. the "large utterance of the early gods," large though it be, tends to monotony. in book iii., we go off to mnemosyne and apollo; but of this section little remains, and we close the poem with a conviction that keats, if he had succeeded in writing "a _fragment_ as sublime as Æschylus," was both prudent and fortunate in leaving it a fragment. to say that "hyperion" is after all a semi-artificial utterance of the grand would be harsh, and ungrateful for so noble an effort of noble faculty; but to say that, by being prolonged, its grandeur must infallibly have partaken more and more of an artificial infusion, appears to me criticism entirely sound and safe. mr. woodhouse has informed us: "the poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of hyperion, the former god of the sun, by apollo; and incidentally of those of oceanus by neptune, of saturn by jupiter, &c., and of the war of the giants for saturn's re-establishment; with other events of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of greece and rome. in fact, the incidents would have been pure creations of the poet's brain." here again keats would have been partly forestalled by milton: the combat of the giants with the olympian gods must have borne a very appreciable resemblance to the combat of satan and his legions with the hosts of heaven. how far keats's "invention" would have sufficed to filling in this vast canvas may be questioned. the precedent of "endymion," in which he had attempted something of the same kind, was not wholly encouraging. the method and tone would of course have been very different; in what remains of "hyperion," the general current of diction is as severe as in "endymion" it had been florid. the other commencement of "hyperion" (alluded to in my sixth chapter) was a later version, done in november and december ; it presents a great deal of poetic or scenic machinery in which the author's personality was copiously introduced. this recast contains impressive things; but the prominence given to the author as spectator or participant of what he pictures forth was fulsome and fatal. mr. swinburne is in error (along with most other writers) in supposing this to be the earlier version of the two. the tragedy of "otho the great," written on a peculiar system of collaboration to which i have already referred, succeeded "hyperion." it is a tragedy on the elizabethan model, and we find in scene i. a curious instance of elizabethan contempt of chronology--a reference to "hungarian petards." the main factors in the plot are a fierce and fervent love-passion of the man, and an unscrupulous ambition of the woman, reddened with crime. webster may perhaps have been taken by keats as his chief prototype. to call "otho the great" an excellent drama would not be possible; but it can be read without tedium, and contains vigorous passages, and lines and images moulded with a fine poetic ardour. the action would be sufficient for stage-representation at a time when an audience come prepared to like a play if it is good in verse and strong in romantic emotion; under such conditions, while it could not be a great success, it need not nevertheless fall manifestly flat. under any other conditions, such as those which prevail nowadays, this tragedy would necessarily run no chance at all. in a copy of keats which belonged to dante gabriel rossetti i find the following note of his, which may bear extracting: "this repulsive yet powerful play is of course in draft only. it is much less to be supposed that it would have been left so imperfect than to be surmised, from its imperfection, how very gradual the maturing of keats's best work probably may have been. it gives after all, perhaps, the strongest proof of _robustness_ that keats has left; and as a tragedy is scarcely more deficient than 'endymion' as a poem. both, viewed as wholes, are quite below keats's three masterpieces;[ ] yet 'otho,' as well as 'endymion,' gives proof of his finest powers." another note from the same hand remarks: "the character and conduct of albert [the lover of auranthe murdered to clear the way for her ambition] are the finest point in the play." of the later drama, "king stephen," so little was written that i need not dwell upon it here. "lamia" was begun about the same time as "otho the great," but finished afterwards. the influence of dryden, under which it was composed, has told strongly upon its versification, as marked especially in the very free use of alexandrines--generally the third line of a triplet, sometimes even the second line of a couplet. you might search "endymion" in vain for alexandrines; and i will admit that their frequency appears to me to give an artificial tone to "lamia." the view which keats has elected to take of his subject is worth considering. the heroine is a serpent-woman, or a double-natured being who can change from serpent into woman and _vice versâ_. in the female form she beguiles a young student of philosophy, lycius, lives with him in a splendid palace, and finally celebrates their marriage-feast. the philosopher apollonius attends among the guests, perceives her to be "human serpentry," and, gazing on her with ruthless fixity, he compels her and all her apparatus of enchantment to vanish. this is the act for which (in lines partly quoted in these pages) keats arraigns philosophy, and its power of stripping things bare of their illusions. no doubt a poet has a right to treat a legend of this sort from such point of view as he likes; it is for him, and not for his reader, to take the bull by the horns. but it does look rather like taking the bull by the weaker horn to contend that the philosopher who saves a youthful disciple from the wiles of a serpent is condemnably prosaic--a grovelling spirit that denudes life of its poetry. conveniently for keats's theory, lycius is made to die forthwith after the vanishing of his lamia. if we invent a different finale to the poem, and say that lycius fell down on his knees, and thanked apollonius for saving him from such pestilent delusions and perilous blandishments, and ever afterwards looked out for the cloven tongue (if not the cloven hoof) when a pretty woman made advances to him, we may perhaps come quite as near to a right construction of so strange a series of events, and to the true moral of the story. but keats's championship was for the enjoying aspects of life; he may be held to have exercised it here rather perversely. "lamia" is one of his completest and most finished pieces of writing--perhaps in this respect superior to all his other long poems, if we except "hyperion"; it closes the roll of them with an affluence, even an excess, of sumptuous adornment. "lamia" leaves on the mental palate a rich flavour, if not an absolutely healthy one. passing from the long compositions, we find the cream of keats's poetry in the ballad of "la belle dame sans merci," and in the five odes--"to psyche," "to autumn," "on melancholy," "to a nightingale," and "on a grecian urn." "la belle dame sans merci" may possibly have been written later than any of the odes, but this point is uncertain. i give it here as marking the highest point of romantic imagination to which keats attained in dealing with human or quasi-human personages, and also his highest level of simplicity along with completeness of art. "ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,[ ] alone and palely loitering? the sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. "ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, so haggard and so woe-begone? the squirrel's granary is full, and the harvest's done. "i see a lily on thy brow, with anguish moist and fever-dew; and on thy cheeks a fading rose fast withereth too." "i met a lady in the meads, full beautiful, a faery's child; her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild. "i made a garland for her head, and bracelets too, and fragrant zone: she looked at me as she did love, and made sweet moan. "i set her on my pacing steed, and nothing else saw all day long; for sideways would she lean and sing a faery's song. "she found me roots of relish sweet, and honey wild, and manna-dew; and sure in language strange she said-- 'i love thee true.' "she took me to her elfin grot, and there she gazed and sighèd deep, and there i shut her wild sad eyes-- so kissed to sleep. "and there we slumbered on the moss, and there i dreamed--ah woe betide!-- the latest dream i ever dreamed on the cold hill-side. "i saw pale kings and princes too, pale warriors--death-pale were they all; they cried--'la belle dame sans merci hath thee in thrall.' "i saw their starved lips in the gloam with horrid warning 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." this is a poem of _impression_. the impression is immediate, final, and permanent; and words would be more than wasted upon pointing out to the reader that such and such are the details which have conduced to impress him. in the five odes there is naturally some diversity in the degrees of excellence. i have given their titles above in the probable (not certain) order of their composition. considered intellectually, we might form a kind of symphony out of them, and arrange it thus-- , "grecian urn"; , "psyche"; , "autumn"; , "melancholy"; , "nightingale"; and, if keats had left us nothing else, we should have in this symphony an almost complete picture of his poetic mind, only omitting, or representing deficiently, that more instinctive sort of enjoyment which partakes of gaiety. viewing all these wondrous odes together, the predominant quality which we trace in them is an extreme susceptibility to delight, close-linked with afterthought--pleasure with pang--or that poignant sense of ultimates, a sense delicious and harrowing, which clasps the joy in sadness, and feasts upon the very sadness in joy. the emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty: beauty intensely perceived, intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx, imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the mortal throes of the human soul. as no poet had more capacity for enjoyment than keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. few also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irretrievable; but this conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than of sensation, and the spirit of keats was almost an alien in the region of morals. as he himself wrote (march )-- "oh never will the prize, high reason, and the love of good and ill, be my award!" i think it will be well to cull out of these five odes--taken in the symphonic order above noted--the phrases which constitute the strongest chords of emotion and of music. ( ) "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone. "human passion far above that leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, a burning forehead, and a parching tongue. "beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. ( ) "too late for antique vows, too too late for the fond believing lyre, when holy were the haunted forest boughs, holy the air, the water, and the fire. "yes, i will be thy priest, and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind, where branchèd thoughts new-grown with pleasant pain, instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind. ( ) "where are the songs of spring--ay, where are they? think not of them: thou hast thy music too, while barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue. ( ) "but, when the melancholy fit shall fall sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, that fosters the droop-headed flowers all, and hides the green hill in an april shroud, then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave. "she dwells with beauty--beauty that must die; and joy, whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh, turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips ay, in the very temple of delight veiled melancholy has her sovran shrine. ( ) "that i might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim: fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget what thou among the leaves hast never known, the weariness, the fever, and the fret, here where men sit and hear each other groan; where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs; where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies; where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs; where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow. "darkling i listen: and for many a time i have been half in love with easeful death,-- called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme to take into the air my quiet breath. now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain, while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy. "the same that oft-times hath charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. forlorn! the very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my sole self. "was it a vision or a waking dream? fled is that music--do i wake or sleep?" to one or two of these phrases a few words of comment may be given. that axiom which concludes the "ode on a grecian urn"-- "beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," is perhaps the most important contribution to thought which the poetry of keats contains: it pairs with and transcends "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever." i am not prepared to say whether keats was the first writer to formulate any axiom to this effect,--i should rather presume not; but at any rate it comes with peculiar appropriateness in the writings of a poet who might have varied the dictum of iago, and said of himself "for i am nothing if not beautiful." in the ode, the axiom is put forward as the message of the sculptured grecian urn "to man," and is thus propounded as being of universal application. it amounts to saying--"any beauty which is not truthful (if any such there be), and any truth which is not beautiful (if any such there be), are of no practical importance to mankind in their mundane condition: but in fact there are none such, for, to the human mind, beauty and truth are one and the same thing." to debate this question on abstract grounds is not in my province: all that i have to do is to point out that keats's perception and thought crystallized into this axiom as the sum and substance of wisdom for man, and that he has bequeathed it to us to ponder in itself, and to lay to heart as the secret of his writings. those other lines, from the "ode on melancholy," where he says of melancholy-- "she dwells with beauty--beauty that must die; and joy, whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu"-- appear to me unsurpassable in the whole range of his poetry--as intense in imagery as supreme in diction and in music. they pair with the other celebrated verses from the "ode to a nightingale"-- "now more then ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain;" and-- "charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." the phrase "_rich_ to die" is of the very essence of keats's emotion; and the passage about "magic casements" shows a reach of expression which might almost be called the pillars of hercules of human language. far greater things have been said by the greatest minds: but nothing more perfect in form has been said--nothing wider in scale and closer in utterance--by any mind of whatsoever pitch of greatness. and here we come to one of the most intrinsic properties of keats's poetry. he is a master of _imagination in verbal form_: he gifts us with things so finely and magically said as to convey an imaginative impression. the imagination may sometimes be in the substance of the thought, as well as in its wording--as it is in the passage just quoted: sometimes it resides essentially in the wording, out of which thought expands in the reader, who is made "to feel for ever its soft fall and swell, awake for ever in a sweet unrest." from wealth of perception, at first confused or docked in the expression, he rose into a height of verbal embodiment which has seldom been equalled and seldomer exceeded. his conception of poetry as an ideal, his sense of poetry as an art, spurred him on to artistic achievement; and in the later stages of his work the character of the artist is that which marks him most strongly. as one of his own letters says, he "looks upon fine phrases like a lover." according to mr. swinburne, "the faultless force and profound subtlety of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals." we may safely accept this verdict of poet upon poet as a true one: yet i should be inclined to demur to such strong adjectives as "faultless" and "absolute." beautiful as several of them are, i might hesitate to say that even one poem by keats exhibits this his special characteristic in a faultless degree, or expresses absolutely throughout a natural beauty of absolute quality. to the last, he appears to me to have been somewhat wanting in those faculties of selection and of discipline which we sum up, by a rough-and-ready process, in the word "taste." he had done a great deal in this direction, and would probably, with a few years more of life, have done all that was needed; but we have to take him as he stands, with those few years denied. unless perhaps in "la belle dame sans merci," keats has not, i think, come nearer to perfection than in the "ode to a nightingale." it is with some trepidation that i recur to this ode, for the invidious purpose of testing its claim to be adjudged "faultless," for in so doing i shall certainly lose the sympathy of some readers, and strain the patience of many. the question, however, seems to be a very fair one to raise, and the specimen a strong one to try it by, and so i persevere. the first point of weakness--excess which becomes weak in result--is a surfeit of mythological allusions: lethe, dryad (the nightingale is turned into a "light-wingèd dryad of the trees"--which is as much as to say, a light-wingèd _oak_-nymph of the _trees_), flora, hippocrene, bacchus, the queen-moon (the queen-moon appears at first sight to be the classical phoebe, who is here "clustered around by all her starry fays," spirits proper to a northern mythology; but possibly keats thought more of a faery-queen than of phoebe). then comes the passage (already cited in these pages) about the poet's wish for a draught of wine, to help him towards spiritual commune with the nightingale. some exquisite phrases in this passage have endeared it to all readers of keats; yet i cannot but regard it as very foreign to the main subject-matter. surely nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music, whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation. taken in detail, to call wine "the true, the blushful hippocrene"--the veritable fount of poetic inspiration--seems both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim" is (though picturesque) trivial, in the same way as much of keats's earlier work. far worse is the succeeding image, "not charioted by bacchus and his pards"--_i.e._, not under the inspiration of wine: the poet will fly to the nightingale, but not in a leopard-drawn chariot. further on, as if we had not already had enough of wine and its associations, the coming musk-rose is described as "full of dewy wine"--an expression of very dubious appositeness: and the like may be said of "become a sod," in the sense of "become a corpse--earth to earth." the renowned address-- "thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! no hungry generations tread thee down," seems almost outside the region of criticism. still, it is a palpable fact that this address, according to its place in the context, is a logical solecism. while "youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies," while the poet would "become a sod" to the requiem sung by the nightingale, the nightingale itself is pronounced immortal. but this antithesis cannot stand the test of a moment's reflection. man, as a race, is as deathless, as superior to the tramp of hungry generations, as is the nightingale as a race: while the nightingale as an individual bird has a life not less fleeting, still more fleeting, than a man as an individual. we have now arrived at the last stanza of the ode. here the term "deceiving elf," applied to "the fancy," sounds rather petty, and in the nature of a make-rhyme: but this may possibly be a prejudice. having thus--in the interest of my reader as a critical appraiser of poetry--burned my fingers a little at the clear and perennial flame of the "ode to a nightingale," i shall quit that superb composition, and the whole quintett of odes, and shall proceed to other phases of my subject. the "ode to indolence," and the fragment of an "ode to maia," need not detain us; the former, however, is important as indicating a mood of mind--too vaguely open to the influences of the moment for either love, ambition, or poesy--to which we may well suppose that keats was sufficiently prone. the few poems which remain to be mentioned were all printed posthumously. there are four addresses to fanny brawne, dating perhaps from early till late in ; two of them are irregular lyrics, and two sonnets. the best of the four is the sonnet, "the day is gone, and all its sweets are gone," which counts indeed among the better sonnets of keats. taken collectively, all four supply valuable evidence as to the poet's love affair, confirmatory of what appears in his letters; they exhibit him quelled by the thought of his mistress and her charms, and jealous of her mixing in or enjoying the company of others. keats wrote some half-hundred of sonnets altogether, some of them among his very earliest and most trifling performances, others up to his latest period, including the last of all his compositions. notwithstanding his marked growth in love of form, and his ultimate surprising power of expression--both being qualities peculiarly germane to this form of verse--his sonnets appear to me to be seldom masterly. a certain freakishness of disposition, and liability to be led astray by some point of detail into side-issues, mar the symmetry and concentration of his work. perhaps the sonnet on "chapman's homer," early though it was, remains the best which he produced; it is at any rate pre-eminent in singleness of thought, illustrated by a definite and grand image. it has a true opening and a true climax, and a clear link of inventive association between the thing mentally signified in chief, and the modes of its concrete presentment. in points of this kind keats is seldom equally happy in his other sonnets; sometimes not happy at all, but distinctly at fault. there is a second homeric sonnet, "standing aloof in giant ignorance" ( ), which contains one line which has been very highly praised, "there is a budding morrow in midnight:" but, regarded as a whole, it is a weakling in comparison with the chapman sonnet. the sonnets, "to sleep" ("o soft embalmer of the still midnight"), "why did i laugh to-night?" and "on a dream" ("as hermes once took to his feathers light")--all of them dated in --are remarkable; the third would indeed almost be excellent were it not for the inadmissible laxity of an alexandrine last line. this is the sonnet of which we have already spoken, the dream of paolo and francesca. the "why did i laugh to-night?" is a strange personal utterance, in which the poet (not yet attacked by his mortal illness) exalts death above verse, fame, and beauty, in the same mood of mind as in the lovely passage of the "ode to a nightingale"; but the sonnet, considered as an example of its own form of art, is too exclamatory and uncombined. there are several minor poems by keats of which--though some of them are extremely dear to his devotees--i have made no mention. such are "teignmouth," "where be you going, you devon maid?" "meg merrilies," "walking in scotland," "staffa," "lines on the mermaid tavern," "robin hood," "to fancy," "to the poets," "in a drear-nighted december," "hush, hush, tread softly," four "faery songs." most of these pieces seem to me over-rated. as a rule they have lyrical impulse, along with the brightness or the tenderness which the subject bespeaks; but they are slight in significance and in structure, pleasurable but not memorable work. one enjoys them once and again, and then their office is over; they have not in them that stuff which can be laid to heart, nor that spherical unity and replenishment which can make of a mere snatch of verse an inscription for the adamantine portal of time. the feeling with which keats regarded women in real life has been already spoken of. as to the tone of his poems respecting them we have his own evidence. a letter of his to armitage brown, dated towards the first days of september , says, in reference to the "lamia" volume: "one of the causes, i understand from different quarters, of the unpopularity of this new book, is the offence the ladies take at me. on thinking that matter over, i am certain that i have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman i would care to please; but still there is a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats; they never see themselves dominant." the long poems in the volume in question were "isabella," "the eve of st. agnes," "hyperion," and "lamia." in "hyperion" women are of course not dominant; but, as regards the other three poems, they are surely dominant enough in one sense. in "isabella" the heroine is the sole figure of prime importance--so also in "lamia"; and in the "eve of st. agnes" she counts for much more than porphyro, though the number of stanzas about her may be fewer. nevertheless it might be that the women in the three poems, though "dominant," are "classed with roses and sweetmeats." i do not see, however, that this can fairly be said of madeline in the "eve of st. agnes"; she is made a very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope. again, isabella, amenable as she may be to the censure of the severely virtuous, plays a part which takes her very considerably out of affinity to roses and sweetmeats. to lamia the objection applies clearly enough; but then she is not exactly a woman, and keats resents so fiercely the far from indefensible line of conduct which apollonius adopts in relation to her that it seems hard if the ladies owed the poet a grudge. on the whole i incline to think that they must have been misreported; but the statement in keats's letter remains not the less significant as a symptom of his real underlying feeling about women. it has often been pointed out that keats's lovers have a habit of "swooning," and the fact has sometimes been remarked upon as evidencing a certain want of virility in himself. i cannot affect to be, so far, of a different opinion. the incident and the phrase do manifestly tend to the namby-pamby. this may have been more a matter of affected or self-willed diction on his part--and diction of that kind appears constantly in his earlier poems, and not seldom in his later ones--than of actual character chargeable against himself; yet i would not entirely disregard it in the latter relation either. keats was a very young man, with a limited experience of life. he had to picture to himself how his lovers would be likely to behave under given conditions; and, if he thought they would be likely to swoon, the probability is that he also, under parallel conditions, would have been likely to swoon--or at least supposed he would be likely. because he thrashed a butcher-boy, or was indignant at backbiting and meanness, we are not to credit him with an unmingled fund of that toughness which distinguishes the english middle class. the english middle-class man is not habitually addicted to writing an "endymion," an "eve of st. agnes," or an "ode on melancholy." sensuousness has been frequently defined as the paramount bias of keats's poetic genius. this is, in large measure, unassailably true. he was a man of perception rather than of contemplation or speculation. perception has to do with perceptible things; perceptible things must be objects of sense, and the mind which dwells on objects of sense must _ipso facto_ be a mind of the sensuous order. but the mind which is mainly sensuous by direct action may also work by reflex action, and pass from sensuousness into sentiment. it cannot fairly be denied that keats's mind continually did this; it had direct action potently, and reflex action amply. he saw so far and so keenly into the sensuous as to be penetrated with the sentiment which, to a healthy and large nature, is its inseparable outcome. we might say that, if the sensuous was his atmosphere, the breathing apparatus with which he respired it was sentiment. in his best work--for instance, in all the great odes--the two things are so intimately combined that the reader can only savour the sensuous nucleus through the sentiment, its medium or vehicle. one of the most compendious and elegant phrases in which the genius of keats has been defined is that of leigh hunt: "he never beheld an oak tree without seeing the dryad." in immediate meaning hunt glances here at the mythical sympathy or personifying imagination of the poet; but, if we accept the phrase as applying to the sensuous object-painting, along with its ideal aroma or suggestion in his finest work, we shall still find it full of right significance. we need not dwell upon other less mature performances in which the two things are less closely interfused. certainly some of his work is merely, and some even crudely, sensuous: but this is work in which the poet was trying his materials and his powers, and rising towards mastery of his real faculty and ultimate function. while discriminating between what was excellent in keats, and what was not excellent, or was merely tentative in the direction of final excellence, we must not confuse endowments, or the homage which is due to endowments, of a radically different order. many readers, and there have been among them several men highly qualified to pronounce, have set keats beside his great contemporary shelley, and indeed above him. i cannot do this. to me it seems that the primary gift of shelley, the spirit in which he exercised it, the objects upon which he exercised it, the detail and the sum of his achievement, the actual produce in appraisable work done, the influence and energy of the work in the future, were all superior to those of keats, and even superior beyond any reasonable terms of comparison. if shelley's poems had defects--which they indisputably had--keats's poems also had defects. after all that can be said in their praise--and this should be said in the most generous or rather grateful and thankful spirit--it seems to me true that not many of keats's poems are highly admirable; that most of them, amid all their beauty, have an adolescent and frequently a morbid tone, marking want of manful thew and sinew and of mental balance; that he is not seldom obscure, chiefly through indifference to the thought itself and its necessary means of development; that he is emotional without substance, and beautiful without control; and that personalism of a wilful and fitful kind pervades the mass of his handiwork. we have already seen, however, that there is a certain not inconsiderable proportion of his poems to which these exceptions do not apply, or apply only with greatly diminished force; and, as a last expression of our large and abiding debt to him and to his well-loved memory, we recur to his own words, and say that he has given us many a "thing of beauty," which will remain "a joy for ever." by his early death he was doomed to be the poet of youthfulness; by being the poet of youthfulness he was privileged to become and to remain enduringly the poet of rapt expectation and passionate delight. the end. index. a. abbey, guardian of keats, , , , , , "adonais," by shelley, , , , Æschylus, "agnes, the eve of st.," , ; critical estimate of the poem, - ; , "alastor," by shelley, "annals of the fine arts," ariosto, _asclepiad, the_, _athenæum, the_, "autumn, ode to," by keats, , , b. bailey, archdeacon benjamin, , , , , ; his description of keats, ; , , , , , , "belle dame (la) sans merci," by keats, , , , ; quoted, , &c.; benjamin, nathan, bion, idyll on "adonis," by, blackwood, william, _blackwood's magazine_, ; articles in by z, on the cockney school of poetry, ; , , , , , , , , , boccaccio's "decameron," , , boileau, bojardo's "orlando innamorato," brawne, fanny, engaged to keats, , ; keats's description of her, ; , , , , , , , ; keats's love-letters to her, - , &c.; , , , , ; her marriage to mr. lindon, ; , , , , , , ; poems to, brawne, mrs., , , , , , brown, charles armitage, friend of keats, ; keats's verses on, ; , , , , , , , , , , , ; letter from keats to, - , , , , , , , ; his death, ; , , , , burton's "anatomy of melancholy," byron, lord, , , , , , , byron's "don juan," c. caius cestius, "calidore," by keats, , "cap and bells, the," by keats, , "caviare" (pseudonym of keats), "cenci, the," by shelley, _champion, the_, "chapman's homer," sonnet by keats, , , , , chartier, alain, chatterton, , chaucer, christ's entry into jerusalem, picture by haydon, , , , , "christmas eve," sonnet by keats, quoted, clark, mrs., clark, sir james, , clarke, charles cowden, preceptor and friend of keats, , , , , , , ; his "recollections," ; , , , , , clarke, epistle to, by keats, , clarke, rev. john, keats's schoolmaster, coleridge, , , coleridge's "christabel," colman, colvin's, mr., "life of keats," , , "comus," by milton, cox, miss jane ["charmian"], , , , , , cripps, d. dante, , dilke, charles wentworth, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , dilke, mrs., "dream, a," sonnet by keats, , dryden, , , duncan, admiral, e. _edinburgh review_, , edouart, "endymion," by keats, , , , , , ; details as to the composition of, ; preface to, , ; criticism upon in _the quarterly review_, ; keats's feeling as to this and other criticisms, - ; , , , , , , , , , , ; shelley's opinion of, ; summary of the poem, - ; critical estimate of it, - ; , , , , _examiner, the_, , , eyre, sir vincent, f. "fancy, the," by reynolds, finch, colonel, , "florence, the garden of," by reynolds, , forman, mr. h. buxton, , , , , , , g. _gentleman's magazine, the_, george iv., , gifford, william, , , girometti, gisborne, mrs., , grafty, mrs., "grasshopper and cricket, the," sonnets by keats and hunt, "grecian urn, ode on a," by keats, , , , - guido, h. hammond, surgeon, , haslam, william, haydn, haydon, benjamin robert, the painter, friend of john keats, , , , , , , ; his last interview with keats, , , , , , , ; his view as to keats's feeling regarding critical attacks, , &c.; , , , , , , , ; his view of keats's character, - , , , , , , , , , , , hazlitt, , hilton, holmes, edward, homer, hood, mrs. (miss reynolds), hood, thomas, hooker, bishop, houghton, lord, , , , , , , , , , howard, john, hunt, john, hunt, leigh, , , , , , - , , , , , - , , , ; his view as to keats's sensitiveness to criticism, ; , , , , , ; his description of keats, ; , , , , , , , , , , , , hunt, leigh, dedicatory sonnet to, by keats, hunt, leigh, leaving prison, sonnet by keats, hunt, mrs., hunt, thornton, "hyperion," by keats, , , , , , , ; critical estimate of the poem, - ; recast of, ; , , i. "i stood tiptoe upon a little hill," poem by keats, ; extract from, ; _indicator, the_, , "indolence, ode to," by keats, "isabella, or the pot of basil," by keats, , , ; critical estimate of the poem, - ; "islam, the revolt of," by shelley, , , j. j. s., , jeffrey, lord, jeffrey, mr., jennings, grandfather of keats, , jennings, captain, jennings, mrs., "joseph and his brethren," by wells, k. kean as richard duke of york, critique by keats, , kean, edmund, keats, fanny, sister of the poet, , , , , , , , , , , keats, frances, mother of the poet, ; her death, ; , keats, george, brother of the poet, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; his view as to john keats's sensitiveness to criticism, ; , , , , , , , , , , , , , , keats, george, epistle to, by john keats, , keats, john, his parentage, ; his birth in london, october , , ; anecdote of his childhood, ; goes to the school of mr. clarke at enfield, ; his studies, pugnacity, &c., ; death of his parents, ; apprenticed to a surgeon, hammond, ; leaves hammond, and walks the hospitals, , ; reads spenser's "faery queen," and drops surgical study, ; makes acquaintance with leigh hunt, haydon, and others, , , ; his first volume, poems, , ; writes "endymion," ; his health suffers in oxford, ; anecdotes (coleridge, &c.), ; makes a pedestrian tour in scotland &c. with charles armitage brown, - ; takes leave of his brother george and his wife, ; his brother tom dies, ; lodges with brown at hampstead, ; meets miss cox ("charmian") and miss brawne, and falls in love with the latter, - ; their engagement, ; his friendship towards haydon cools, , ; at shanklin and winchester, , ; sees his brother george again, and is left by him in pecuniary straits, , ; the painful circumstances of his closing months, owing to illness, his love affair, and the depreciation of his poems, , ; beginning of his consumptive illness, , ; removes to kentish town, , ; returns to mrs. brawne's house at hampstead, ; his love-letters, - ; travels to italy with joseph severn, - ; severn's account of his last days in rome, , ; his death there, february , , , ; his early turn for mere rhyming, ; his early writings, and first volume, , ; diatribe against boileau, and poets of that school, ; the publishers relinquish sale of the volume, ; "endymion," and passage from an early poem forecasting this attempt, - ; details as to composition of "endymion," - ; prefaces to the poem, - ; adverse critique in _the quarterly review_, - ; question debated whether this and other attacks affected keats deeply, - ; statements by shelley, ; and by haydon, ; other evidence, ; conclusion as to this point, ; keats writes "isabella," "the eve of st. agnes," and "hyperion," ; "lamia," ; and publishes the volume containing these poems, , ; other poems in the volume, ; posthumous poems of keats, "the eve of st. mark," "otho the great," "the cap and bells," &c., - ; his letters and other prose writings, - ; keats's burial-place, - ; projects for writing his life, accomplished finally by lord houghton, ; his relations with hunt, shelley, and others, - ; keats's small stature and personal appearance, - ; the portraits of him, - ; difficulty of clearly estimating his character, ; his poetic ambition and intensity of thought, , ; his moral tone, ; his character ("no decision" &c.,) estimated by haydon, - ; lord houghton's account of his manner in society, ; his suspiciousness, ; and dislike of mankind, ; his feeling towards women, - ; and towards miss brawne, , ; his habits, opinions, likings, &c., - ; humour and jocularity, - ; negative turn in religious matters, - ; wine and diet, , ; conclusion as to his character, , ; his early tone in poetry, ; critical estimate of his first volume, poems, , - ; of "endymion," , ; narrative of this poem, - ; defects and beauties of "endymion," - ; critical estimate of "isabella," ; "eve of st. agnes," ; "eve of st. mark," ; "hyperion," ; "otho the great," ; "lamia," ; "belle dame sans merci" (quoted), ; the five chief odes, ; analysis of the "ode to a nightingale," ; various posthumous lyrics, sonnets, &c., ; keats's feeling towards women, as developed in his poems, ; "swooning," ; sensuousness and sentiment, ; comparison between keats and shelley, and final remarks, keats, mrs. george, , , , keats, thomas, father of the poet, ; his death, ; keats, thomas, brother of the poet, , , , , , , ; his death, ; , , , , , , "king stephen," by keats, , , kotzebue, l. lamb, charles, , lamb, dr., "lamia," by keats, , , , ; critical estimate of the poem, , &c.; "lamia, and other poems," by keats ( ), , , , , , , lawrence, sir thomas, lemprière's "classical dictionary," lindon, mrs. (_see_ brawne, fanny) llanos, lockhart, lucas, lucy vaughan lloyd (pseudonym of keats), lyrics (various) by keats, m. mackereth, george wilson, "maia, ode to," by keats, "mark, eve of st.," by keats, , , ; critical estimate of the poem, - ; marmontel's "incas of peru," mathew, george felton, epistle to, by keats, ; medwin's "life of shelley," "melancholy, ode on," by keats, , , - milton, , , , , , , "miserrimus," by reynolds, mitford, miss, , moore, thomas, _morning chronicle, the_, murray, john, n. napoleon i., "narensky," opera by c. a. brown, newton, sir isaac, "nightingale, ode to a," by keats, , , , , - ; analysed, - ; "nile," sonnets on the, by keats, &c.; o. ollier, charles, , "otho the great," by keats, , , ; critical estimate of, p. "paradise lost," , , "paradise lost," notes on, by keats, philostratus's "life of apollonius," "poems" ( ), by keats, , ; letter regarding this volume, by the publishers, ; , - pope, procter, mrs., , purcell, "psyche, ode to," by keats, , , - q. _quarterly review, the_, ; its critique of "endymion" extracted, - ; , , , , , , , , , "quixote, don," r. r. b., raphael, rawlings, william, reynolds, john hamilton, , , , , , , reynolds, misses, , , , , reynolds, mrs., rice, james, , , richardson, dr., ritchie, robinson crusoe, robinson, h. crabb, rossetti, dante g., , , , s. sandt, scott, sir walter, , severn, joseph, ; leaves england with keats for italy, ; ; his narrative of keats's last days, , &c.; , , , ; his portraits of keats, - ; , , , shakespeare (macbeth), ; (hamlet), ; , , , ; (king lear), ; , shakespeare, notes on, by keats, shakespeare's sonnets, book on, by c. a. brown, sharpey, dr., shelley, percy bysshe, , , , , , , , ; his references to "endymion," and _the quarterly review_, - ; , , , , , , , , , , ; comparison between shelley and keats, "sleep and poetry," by keats, , ; extract from, ; smith, horace, snook, sonnet by keats ("bright star," &c.), sonnets (various) by keats, , , , &c. spence's "polymetis," spenser, edmund, , , spenser's cave of despair, picture by severn, spenser's "faery queen," , "spenser, imitation of," by keats, stephens, henry, , , , "stories after nature," by wells, swinburne, mr. (on "hyperion"), ; , t. tasso, taylor and hessey, , , , , , , , , , , , , , terry, thomson, james, titian's "bacchus and ariadne," tooke's "pantheon," torlonia, v. virgil, virgil's Æneid, , voltaire, w. webb, cornelius, webster, wells, charles, wilson, john, "woman, when i behold thee" &c., poem by keats, quoted, wood, warrington, woodhouse, richard, , , , wordsworth, , ; ("the excursion,") ; , , , z. z (probably lockhart), , , . bibliography. by john p. anderson (british museum). i. works. ii. poetical works. iii. single works. iv. letters, etc. v. miscellaneous. vi. appendix-- biography, criticism, etc. magazine articles. vii. chronological list of works. i. works. the poetical works and other writings of john keats, now first brought together, including poems and numerous letters not before published. edited, with notes and appendices, by h. b. forman. vols. london, , vo. the letters of john keats. edited by j. g. speed. (the poems of j. keats, with the annotations of lord houghton, and a memoir by j. g. speed.) vols. new york, , vo. a number of letters now included in this work were first published in the new york _world_ of june - , , and afterwards reprinted in the _academy_, vol. xii., , pp. - , - . ii. poetical works. the poetical works of coleridge, shelley, and keats. in one volume. paris, , vo. john keats (including memoir), i.-vii. and - . standard library. the poetical works of j. k. london, , vo. the first _collected_ edition of keats's works. the poetical works of j. k. london, , vo. with an engraved frontispiece from the portrait in chalk by hilton. this book, although dated , was not issued until the following year. the frontispiece is dated correctly. the poetical works of j. k. london, , vo. the poetical works of j. k. a new edition. london, , vo. the poetical works of j. k. with memoir by r. m. milnes [lord houghton]. illustrated by a portrait and designs by george scharf, jun. london, , vo. a small number of copies were struck off upon large paper. the poetical works of j. k. with a life [signed j. r. l.--_i.e._, james russell lowell]. boston [u.s.], , vo. the poetical works of j. k. with a memoir by richard monckton milnes [lord houghton]. a new edition. london, , vo. upon the reverse of the half-title to the "memoir" is a wood-cut profile of keats. the poetical works of j. k. edited, with a critical memoir, by w. m. rossetti. illustrated by t. seccombe. london [ ], vo. the poetical works of j. k. edited, with an introductory memoir and illustrations, by william b. scott. london [ ], vo. the poetical works of j. k. with a memoir by james russell lowell. portrait and illustrations. new york, , vo. the memoir was afterwards reprinted in "among my books," second series, , pp. - . the poetical works of j. k., reprinted from the early editions, with memoir, explanatory notes, etc. (_chandos classics._) london [ ], vo. the poetical works of j. k. chronologically arranged and edited, with a memoir, by lord houghton. (_aldine edition._) london, , vo. the poetical works of coleridge and keats, with a memoir of each. (_riverside edition._) vols. in . new york, , vo. the poetical works of j. k. london [ ], vo. the poetical works of j. k. edited, with an introductory memoir, by w. b. scott. (_excelsior series._) london [ ], vo. the poetical works of j. k. edited, with a critical memoir, by w. m. rossetti. [portrait, fac-simile, and six illustrations by thomas seccombe.] (_moxon's popular poets._) london [ ], vo. the same as the edition of . the memoir was reprinted in "lives of famous poets." the poetical works of j. k., reprinted from the original editions, with notes, by f. t. palgrave. (_golden treasury series._) london, , vo. the poetical works of j. k. edited by w. t. arnold. london, , vo. there was a large paper edition, consisting of fifty copies, numbered and signed. the poetical works of john keats. edited by h. b. forman. london, , vo. the poetical works of j. k. with an introductory sketch by john hogben. (_canterbury poets._) london, , vo. iii. single works. poems, by john keats. london, , mo. the museum copy contains a ms. note by f. locker. endymion; a poetic romance. by j. k. london, , vo. endymion. illustrated by f. joubert. from paintings by e. j. poynter. london, , fol. the eve of st. agnes. by j. k. with illustrations by e. h. wehnert. london, , vo. the eve of st. agnes. illustrated by e. h. wehnert. london [ ], vo. the eve of st. agnes. illustrated by nineteen etchings by charles o. murray. london, , fol. the eve of st. agnes, and other poems. illustrated. boston [u.s.], , mo. miscellanies of the philobiblon society. london, - , vo. vol. iii. contains "another version of keats's _hyperion, a vision_," edited, with an introduction, by r. m. milnes (lord houghton). keatsii hyperionis. libri i-ii. latine reddidit carolus merivale. cambridge, , vo. keats's hyperion. book i. with notes [life and introduction]. london [ ], vo. keats's hyperion. book i. with introduction, elucidatory notes, and an appendix of exercises. london [ ], vo. lamia, isabella, the eve of st. agnes, and other poems. by j. k. london, , mo. lamia. with illustrative designs by w. h. low. philadelphia, , fol. ode to a nightingale. by j. k. edited, with an introduction, by thomas j. wise. london, , vo. printed for private distribution, and issued in parchment wrappers. four copies on vellum and twenty-five on paper only printed. iv. letters, etc. life, letters, and literary remains of j. k. edited by r. m. milnes. vols. london, , mo. life and letters of john keats. a new and completely revised edition. edited by lord houghton. london, , vo. letters of j. k. to fanny brawne, written in the years and , and now given from the original manuscripts, with introduction and notes, by harry buxton forman. london, , vo. in addition to the ordinary issue, the following special copies were "printed for private distribution"--in vo on whatman's hand-made paper copies, on vellum copies; in post vo there were copies with title-page set up in different style, and copies of coloured bank-note paper, one blue and the other yellow. v. miscellaneous. contributions to magazines. _annals of the fine arts. a quarterly magazine, edited by james elmes_-- "ode to the nightingale," vol. iv., , pp. - . the first appearance of this poem, which was afterwards included in the "lamia" volume, , pp. - . "ode on a grecian urn." appeared first in the "annals of the fine arts" vol. iv., , pp. , , afterwards included in the lamia volume. _the athenæum_-- first appearance of the sonnet "on hearing the bag-pipe and seeing 'the stranger' played at inverary," june , , p. . _the champion_-- "on edmund kean as a shakesperian actor, and on kean in 'richard, duke of york.'" appeared on the st and th dec. . _the dial_-- "notes on milton's paradise lost." in vol. iii., , pp, - ; reprinted by lord houghton. _the examiner_-- the "sonnet to solitude," keats's first published poem, according to charles cowden clarke, appeared on the th of may , signed j. k., p. . the first appearance of the sonnet "to kosciusko," feb. , , p. . the first appearance of the sonnet, "after dark vapors have oppress'd our plains," etc., feb. , , p. . two sonnets "to haydon, with a sonnet written on seeing the elgin marbles," and "on seeing the elgin marbles" appear for the first time, march , , p. . in they were reprinted in the _annals of the fine arts_, no. . the first appearance of the sonnet, "written on a blank space at the end of chaucer's tale of 'the floure and the lefe,'" march , , p. . sonnet "on the grasshopper and cricket" appeared on the st sept. , p. . _the gem, a literary annual, edited by thomas hood_-- the sonnet "on a picture of leander" appeared for the first time in , p. . _hood's comic annual_-- "sonnet to a cat," , p. . _hood's magazine_-- in vol. ii., , p. , the sonnet "life's sea hath been five times at its slow ebb" appears for the first time; included by lord houghton in the literary remains. in vol. ii., , p. , the poem "old meg," written during a tour in scotland, appears for the first time. _the indicator. edited by leigh hunt_-- in vol. i., , p. . there are thirty-four lines, headed _vox et præterea nihil_, supposed by mr. forman to be a cancelled passage of endymion, and reprinted by him in his edition of keats, , vol. i, p. . in vol. i. , pp. - , the poem "la belle dame sans merci" first appeared, and signed "caviare." first appearance of the sonnet, "a dream after reading dante's episode of 'paolo and francesca,'" signed "caviare," vol. i. , p. . _leigh hunt's literary pocket book_-- first appearance of the sonnets, "to ailsa rock" and "the human season" in . vi. appendix. biography, criticism, etc. armstrong, edmund j.--essays and sketches of edmund j. armstrong. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . atlantic monthly.--boston, , vo. "the poet keats." seven stanzas, vol. ii., pp. - . belfast, earl of.--poets and poetry of the xixth century. a course of lectures. london, , vo. moore, keats, scott, pp. - . best bits.--best bits. london, , vo. "the last moments of keats," vol. ii., p. . biographical magazine.--lives of the illustrious (the biographical magazine). london, , vo. john keats, vol. iii., pp. - . caine, t. hall. recollections of dante gabriel rossetti. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . caine, t. hall.--cobwebs of criticism, etc. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . carr, j. comyns.--essays on art. london, , vo. the artistic spirit in modern english poetry, pp. - . clarke, charles cowden.--the riches of chaucer, in which his impurities have been expunged, etc. vols. london, , mo. john keats, vol. i., pp. , . ---- recollections of writers. london, , vo. john keats, pp. - . colvin, sidney.--keats (_english men of letters_). london, , vo. cotterill, h. b.--an introduction to the study of poetry. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . courthope, william j.--the liberal movement in english literature. london, , vo. poetry, music, and painting. coleridge and keats, pp. - . cunningham, allan.--biographical and critical history of the british literature of the last fifty years. [reprinted from the "athenæum."] paris, , mo. keats, pp. - . dennis, john.--heroes of literature. english poets. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . de quincey, thomas.--essays on the poets, and other english writers. boston, , vo. john keats, pp. - . ---- de quincey's works. vols. edinburgh, - , mo. john keats, vol. v, pp. - . devey, j.--a comparative estimate of modern english poetry. london, , vo. alexandrine poets. keats, pp. - . dilke, charles wentworth.--the papers of a critic. selected from the writings of the late charles w. dilke. vols. london, , vo. john keats, vol. i., pp. - . encyclopædia britannica.--encyclopædia britannica. eighth edition. edinburgh, , to. john keats, vol. xiii., pp. - . ---- ninth edition. edinburgh, , to. john keats, by algernon c. swinburne, vol. xiv., pp. - . english writers.--essays on english writers. by the author of "the gentle life." london, , vo. shelley, keats, etc., pp. - . gilfillan, george.--a gallery of literary portraits. edinburgh, , vo. john keats, pp. - . gossip.--the gossip. london, , vo. three stanzas, signed g. v. d., may , , p. , "on reading lamia and other poems, by john keats." griswold, rufus w.--the poets and poetry of england in the nineteenth century. new york, , vo. john keats, with portrait, pp. - . haydon, benjamin robert,--life of b. r. haydon. edited and compiled by tom taylor. vols. london, , vo. numerous references to keats. ---- correspondence and table-talk. with a memoir by his son, f. w. haydon. vols. london, , vo. contains ten letters and two extracts from letters to haydon, and ten letters from haydon to keats, vol. ii., pp. - . hinde, f.--essays and poems. liverpool, , vo. the life and works of the poet keats: a paper read before the liverpool philomathic society, april , , pp. - . hoffmann, frederick a.--poetry, its origin, nature, and history, etc. london, , vo. keats, vol. i., pp. - . howitt, william.--homes and haunts of the most eminent british poets. third edition. london, , vo. john keats, pp. - . ---- the northern heights of london, etc. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . hunt, leigh.--imagination and fancy; or, selections from the english poets. london, , mo. keats, born , died , pp. - . ---- foliage, or poems original and translated. london, , vo. contains four sonnets; "to john keats," "on receiving a crown of ivy from the same," "on the same," "to the grasshopper and the cricket." ---- lord byron and some of his contemporaries; with recollections of the author's life, and of his visit to italy. london, , to. john keats, pp. - . ---- the autobiography of leigh hunt; with reminiscences of friends and contemporaries. in three volumes. london, , vo. the references to john keats, vol. ii., pp. - , etc. are substantially reproduced from the preceding work. hutton, laurence.--literary landmarks of london. london, [ ], vo. john keats, pp. - . jeffrey, francis.--contributions to the edinburgh review. london, , vo. john keats. review of endymion and lamia, pp. - . lester, john w.--criticisms. third edition, london, , vo. john keats, pp. - . lowell, james russell.--among my books. second series. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . ---- the poetical works of j. r. l. new revised edition. boston [u.s.], , vo. sonnet "to the spirit of keats," p. . maginn, william.--miscellanies: prose and verse. edited by r. w. montagu. vols. london, ; vo. remarks on shelley's adonais, vol. ii., pp. - . mario, jessie white.--sepoleri inglesi in roma. (estratto dalla _nuova antologia_, maggio, .) roma, , vo. on keats and shelley. mason, edward t.--personal traits of british authors. new york, , vo. john keats, pp. - . masson, david.--wordsworth, shelley, keats, and other essays. london, , vo. "the life and poetry of keats," pp. - . medwin, thomas.--journal of the conversations of lord byron: noted during a residence with his lordship at pisa, in the years and . by t. medwin. london, , to. john keats, pp. , - , , etc. milnes, richard monckton, _lord houghton_.--life, letters, and literary remains of john keats. in two volumes. london, , vo. ---- life and letters of john keats. a new and completely revised edition. edited by lord houghton, london, , vo. mitford, mary russell.--recollections of a literary life, etc. vols. london, , vo. shelley and keats, vol. ii., pp. - . moir, d. m.--sketches of the poetical literature of the past half-century. london, , vo. john keats, pp. - . noel, hon. roden.--essays on poetry and poets. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . notes and queries.--general index to notes and queries. series. london, - , to. numerous references to john keats. olio.--the olio. london [ ]. vo. "recollections of books and their authors," no. , "john keats, the poet," vol. i., pp. - . oliphant, mrs.--the literary history of england, etc. vols. london, , vo. john keats, vol. iii., pp. - . owen, frances mary.--john keats. a study. london, , vo. reviewed in the _academy_, july , p. . payn, james.--stories from boccaccio, and other poems. london, , vo. sonnet to john keats, p. . phillips, samuel.--essays from "the times." being a selection from the literary papers which have appeared in that journal. london, , vo. "the life of john keats," pp. - . this article originally appeared in "the times" on sept. , . ---- new edition. vols. london, , vo. john keats, vol. i., pp. - . richardson, david lester.--literary chit-chat, etc. calcutta, , vo. shelley, keats, and coleridge, pp. - . rossetti, dante gabriel.--ballads and sonnets. london, , vo. sonnets "to five english poets." no. iv., john keats, p. . rossetti, william michael.--lives of famous poets. london [ ], vo. john keats, pp. - . sarrazin, gabriel.--poètes modernes de l'angleterre. paris, , vo. john keats, pp. - . scott, william bell.--poems, ballads, studies from nature, sonnets, etc. illustrated by seventeen etchings by the author and l. alma tadema. london, , vo. an etching by the author of keats' grave, p. ; sonnet "on the inscription, keats' tombstone," p. . an ode "to the memory of john keats," pp. - . scribner's monthly magazine.--scribner's monthly magazine. new york, , , vo. the no. for june contains fourteen lines "to the immortal memory of keats," and the may no. for , p. , "keats" (ten verses) by robert burns wilson. shelley, percy bysshe.--adonais. an elegy on the death of john keats, author of endymion, hyperion, etc. pisa, , to. ---- adonais. an elegy on the death of john keats, etc. cambridge, , vo. ---- adonais. edited, with notes, by h. buxton forman. london, , vo. shelley, lady.--shelley memorials; from authentic sources. edited by lady shelley. london, , vo. john keats, pp. , - , , , , . stedman, edmund clarence.--victorian poets. london, , vo. john keats, pp. , , , , , etc. swinburne, algernon charles.--miscellanies. london, , vo. keats, pp. - . originally appeared in the encyclopædia britannica. tuckerman, henry t.--characteristics of literature, illustrated by the genius of distinguished men. philadelphia, , vo. final memorials of lamb and keats, pp. - . ---- thoughts on the poets. london [ ], mo. keats, pp. - . verdicts.--verdicts. [verse.] london, , vo. john keats, occupies lines, pp. - . ward, thomas h.--the english poets, etc. vols. london, , vo. john keats, by matthew arnold, vol. iv., pp. - . willis, n. p.--pencillings by the way. a new edition. london, , vo. "keats's poems," pp. - . wiseman, cardinal.--on the perception of natural beauty by the ancients and the moderns, etc. london, , vo. keats, pp. , ; reviewed by leigh hunt in _fraser's magazine_ for december, . magazine articles. keats, john --examiner, june , , p. , july , , pp. , , july , , pp. , . --blackwood's edinburgh magazine, vol. , , pp. - . --blackwood's edinburgh magazine, vol. , , p. ; vol. , , p. . --indicator, by leigh hunt, vol. , , pp. - . --quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - . --southern literary messenger, by h. t. tuckerman, vol. , , pp. - . --tait's edinburgh magazine, by t. de quincey, vol. , n.s., , pp. - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. , pp. - . --democratic review, vol. , n.s., , pp. - . --united states magazine, vol. , n.s., , pp. - ; vol. , n.s., , pp. - . --hogg's weekly instructor, with portrait, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. , pp. - . --chambers's edinburgh journal, vol. , n.s., , pp. - . --sharpe's london magazine, vol. , , pp. - . --knickerbocker, vol. , , pp. - . --temple bar, vol. , , pp. - . --edinburgh review, july , pp. - . --harper's new monthly magazine, vol. . , pp. - and vol. , , by e. f. madden, pp. - , illustrated. --scribner's monthly, by r. h. stoddard, vol. , , pp. - . --american bibliopolist, vol. , p. , etc., and vol. , p. , etc. --_la revue politique et littéraire_, by léo quesnel, , pp. - . --argonaut, by reginald w. corlass, vol. , , pp. - . --canadian monthly, by edgar fawcett, vol. , , pp. - . --_century_, by edmund c. stedman, illustrated, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _and his critics._ dial, vol. , , pp. , . ---- _and joseph severn._ dublin university magazine, by e. s. r., vol. , , pp. - . ---- _and lamb._ southern literary messenger, by h. t. tuckerman, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _and shelley._ to-day, june , pp. - , etc. ---- _and the quarterly review._ morning chronicle, oct. and , (two letters). examiner, oct., , pp. , . ---- _an esculapian poet._ asclepiad, with portrait on steel, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _art of._ our corner, by j. robertson, vol. , , pp. - , - . ---- _cardinal wiseman on._ fraser's magazine, by leigh hunt, vol. , , pp. , . ---- _daintiest of poets._ victoria magazine, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _death of._ london magazine, vol. , , pp. , . ---- _verses on death of._ london magazine, vol. , , p. . ---- _did he really care for music._ manchester quarterly, by john mortimer, vol , , pp. - . ---- _endymion._ quarterly review, by gifford, vol. , , pp. - .--london magazine, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _forman's edition of._ macmillan's magazine, vol. , , pp. - .--times, aug. , . ---- _fragment from._ gentleman's magazine, by grant allen, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _genius of._ christian remembrancer, vol. , n.s., , pp. - . ---- _holman hunt's "isabel."_ fortnightly review, by b. cracroft, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _hyperion._ american whig review, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _hyperionis, libri i-ii._ saturday review, april , , pp. , . ---- _in cloudland._ a poem of thirty-one verses. st. james's magazine, by r. w. buchanan, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _lamia, isabella, the eve of st. agnes, and other poems._ london magazine, vol. , , pp. - .--indicator, by leigh hunt, vol. , , pp. - .--monthly review, vol. , n.s., , pp. - .--eclectic review, vol. n.s., , - . ---- _leigh hunt's farewell words to._ indicator, september , . ---- _letters to fanny brawne._ athenæum, july , p. , july , pp. , , and july , , pp. , .--harper's new monthly magazine, vol. , , p. .--eclectic magazine, vol. , n.s., , pp. - (from the academy).--appleton's journal, by r. h. stoddard, vol. , n.s., , pp. - . ---- _life and poems of._ macmillan's magazine, by d. masson, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _marginalia made by dante g. rossetti in a copy of keats' poems._ manchester quarterly, by george milner, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _milnes' life of._ american review, by c. a. bristed, vol. , , pp. - .--littell's living age, vol. , , pp. - .--united states magazine, vol. , n.s., , pp. - .--athenæum, aug. , , pp. - .--revue des deux mondes, by philarète chasles, tom. , série , , pp. - .--eclectic review, vol. , n.s., , pp. - .--dublin review, vol. , , pp. - .--british quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - .--prospective review, vol. , , pp. - .--democratic review, vol. , n.s., , pp. - .--westminster review, vol. , , pp. - .--sharpe's london magazine, vol. , , pp. - .--north british review, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. , pp. - .--new monthly magazine, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, eclectic magazine, vol. , pp. - .--dublin university magazine, vol. , , pp. - .--democratic review, vol. , n.s., , pp. - . ---- _my copy of._ tinsley's magazine, by richard dowling, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _new editions of._ dial, by w. m. payne, vol. , , pp. , . ---- _le paganisme poétique en angleterre._ revue des deux mondes, by louis Étienne, tom. , période , pp. - .--eclectic review, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _poems of._ examiner, by leigh hunt, june , july and , .--edinburgh review, by f. jeffrey, vol. , , pp. - .--tait's edinburgh magazine, vol. , n.s., , pp. , .--dublin university magazine, vol. , , pp. - .--edinburgh review, vol. , , pp. - .--massachusetts quarterly review, vol. , , pp. - .--dublin university magazine, vol. , , pp. - .--north american review, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _poetry, music, and painting: coleridge and keats._ national review, by w. j. courthope, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _recollections of._ gentleman's magazine, by charles cowden clarke, vol. , n.s., , pp. - ; same article, littell's living age, vol. , pp. - ; every saturday, vol. , p. , etc., , etc.--atlantic monthly, by c. c. clarke, vol. , , pp. - . ---- _school house of, at enfield._ st. james's magazine holiday annual, , by charles cowden clarke. ---- _thoughts on._ new dominion monthly (portrait), by robert s. weir, , pp. - . ---- _unpublished notes on milton._ athenæum, oct. , , pp. , . ---- _unpublished notes on shakespeare._ athenæum, nov. , , p. . ---- _vicissitudes of his fame._ atlantic monthly, by j. severn, vol. , , pp. - ; same article, sharpe's london magazine, vol. , n.s., , pp. - . vii.--chronological list of works. poems endymion lamia, etc. life, letters, and literary remains letters to fanny brawne letters * * * * * footnotes: [footnote : a small point here may deserve a note. a letter from john keats to his brother george, under date of september st, , contains the following words: "our bodies, every seven years, are completely fresh-materialed: seven years ago it was not this hand that clenched itself against hammond." another version of the same letter (the true wording of which is matter of some dispute) substitutes: "mine is not the same hand i clenched at hammond's." mr. buxton forman, who gives the former phrase as the genuine one, thinks that "this phrase points to a serious rupture as the cause of his quitting his apprenticeship to hammond." my own inclination is to surmise that the accurate reading may be--"it was not this hand that clenched itself against hammond's"; indicating, not any quarrel, but the friendly habitual clasp of hand against hand. "seven years ago" would reach back to september : whereas keats did not part from hammond until .] [footnote : this is hunt's own express statement. it has been disputed, but i am not prepared to reject it.] [footnote : biographers have been reticent on this subject. keats's statement however speaks for itself, and a high medical authority, dr. richardson, writing in _the asclepiad_ for april , and reviewing the whole subject of the poet's constitutional and other ailments, says that keats in oxford "runs loose, and pays a forfeit for his indiscretion which ever afterwards physically and morally embarrasses him." he pronounces that keats's early death was "expedited, perhaps excited, by his own imprudence," but was substantially due to hereditary disease. his mother, as we have already seen, had died of the malady which killed the poet, consumption. it is not clear to me what keats meant by saying that "from his _employment_" his health would be insecure. one might suppose that he was thinking of the long and haphazard working hours of a young surgeon or medical man; in which case, this seems to be the latest instance in which he spoke of himself as still belonging to that profession.] [footnote : hitherto printed "life"; it seems to me clear that "lips" is the right word.] [footnote : in medwin's "life of shelley," vol. ii. pp. to , are some interesting remarks upon keats's character and demeanour, written in a warm and sympathetic tone. some of them were certainly penned by miss brawne (mrs. lindon), and possibly all of them. mr. colvin (p. of his book) has called special attention to these remarks: i forbear from quoting them. a leading point is to vindicate keats from the imputation of "violence of temper."] [footnote : this passage is taken from lord houghton's "life, &c., of keats," first published in , and by "home" he certainly means wentworth place, hampstead. yet in his aldine edition of keats, his lordship says that the poet "was at that time, very much against mr. brown's desire and advice, living alone in london." this latter statement may possibly be correct--i question it. the passage, as written by lord houghton, is condensed from the narrative of brown. the latter is given verbatim in mr. colvin's "keats," and is, of course, the more important and interesting of the two. i abstain from quoting it, solely out of regard to mr. colvin's rights of priority.] [footnote : apparently miss brawne had remonstrated against the imputation of "flirting with brown," and much else to like effect in a recent letter from keats.] [footnote : i observe this name occurring once elsewhere in relation to keats, but am not clear whose house it represents.] [footnote : it has been suggested (by dante gabriel rossetti, as printed in mr. forman's edition of keats) that the poem here referred to is "the eve of st. mark." keats had begun it fully a year and a half before the date of this letter, but, not having continued it, he might have spoken of "having it in his head."] [footnote : this may require a word of explanation. keats, detained at portsmouth by stress of weather, had landed for a day, and seen his friend mr. snook, at bedhampton. brown was then in chichester, only ten miles off, but of this keats had not at the time been aware.] [footnote : the -- before "you" appears in the letter, as printed in mr. forman's edition of keats. it might seem that keats hesitated a moment whether to write "you" or "miss brawne."] [footnote : no such letter is known. it has been stated that keats, after leaving home, could never summon up resolution enough to write to miss brawne: possibly this statement ought to be limited to the time after he had reached italy.] [footnote : lord houghton says that keats in naples "could not bear to go to the opera, on account of the sentinels who stood constantly on the stage:" he spoke of "the continual visible tyranny of this government," and said "i will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism." sentinels on the stage have, i believe, been common in various parts of the continent, as a mere matter of government parade, or of routine for preserving public order. the other points (for which no authority is cited by lord houghton) must, i think, be over-stated. in november the short-lived constitution of the kingdom of naples was in full operation, and neither tyranny nor despotism was in the ascendant--rather a certain degree of popular license.] [footnote : the reader of keats's preface will note that this is a misrepresentation. keats did not speak of any fierce hell of criticism, nor did he ask to remain uncriticized in order that he might write more. what he said was that a feeling critic would not fall foul of him for hoping to write good poetry in the long run, and would be aware that keats's own sense of failure in "endymion" was as fierce a hell as he could be chastised by.] [footnote : this phrase stands printed with inverted commas, as a quotation. it is not, however, a quotation from the letter of j. s.] [footnote : "coolness" (which seems to be the right word) in the letter to miss mitford.] [footnote : severn's view of the matter some years afterwards has however received record in the diary of henry crabb robinson. under the date may , , we read--"he [severn] denies that keats's death was hastened by the article in the _quarterly_."] [footnote : the passage which begins-- "hard by stood serene cupids watching silently" has some affinity with a passage in shelley's "adonais." the latter passage is, however, more directly based upon one in the idyll of bion on adonis.] [footnote : i do not clearly understand from the poem whether endymion does or does not know, until the story nears its conclusion, that the goddess who favours him is diana. he appears at any rate to _guess_ as much, either during this present interview or shortly afterwards.] [footnote : keats has been laughed at for ignorance in printing "visit my cytherea"; but it appears on good evidence that what he really wrote was "visit thou my cythera." a false quantity in this same canto, "nèpt[)u]nus," cannot be explained away.] [footnote : declared it in some very odd lines; for instance-- "do gently murder half my soul, and i shall feel the other half so utterly!"] [footnote : see p. as to miss brawne.] [footnote : i presume the "three masterpieces" are "the eve of st. agnes," "hyperion," and "lamia"; this leaves out of count the short "belle dame sans merci," and the unfinished "eve of st. mark," but certainly not because dante rossetti rated those lower than the three others.] [footnote : there are some various readings in this poem (as here, "wretched wight"); i adopt the phrases which i prefer.] * * * * * transcriber's note: every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, and inconsistent hyphenation. obvious typographical errors in punctuation have been fixed. corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below: page : typo fixed in feburary[february] keats, leigh hunt, and shelley, undertook to write a sonnet each upon the river nile. page : typo fixed which could not be made applicable or subservient to the purposes of poetry. many will remember the ancedote[ancedote], proper to haydon's "immortal dinner" page : typo fixed seems almost outside the region of criticism. still, it is a palpaple[palpable] fact that this address, according to its place in in footnote , [)u] indicates a u-breve. transcriber's notes: ( ) characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript. ( ) macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters were not inserted. ( ) the following typographical errors have been corrected: page : "the shield and helmet of diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of neptune's passage to the achive ships, in the thirteenth book:" 'achive' amended to 'argive'. page : "and his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.--but in those exquisite stanzas," 'references' amended from 'reference'. page : "many of them, considered in any other character than that of authors, are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very worthy people in their own way." 'considered' amended from 'considerd'. page : "... or no regard to truth. it is, in truth, at least is full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great deal in it to admire and to give delight ..." 'of' amended from 'af'. page : "... we are like a quartett of fighting cocks this morning." 'quartett' amended from 'quratett'. [illustration: pl. i] john keats his life and poetry his friends critics and after-fame by sidney colvin macmillan and co., limited st. martin's street, london copyright glasgow: printed at the university press by robert maclehose and co. ltd. s. c. to f. c. preface to the name and work of keats our best critics and scholars have in recent years paid ever closer attention and warmer homage. but their studies have for the most part been specialized and scattered, and there does not yet exist any one book giving a full and connected account of his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and with help of all the available material. ever since it was my part, some thirty years ago, to contribute the volume on keats to the series of short studies edited by lord morley, (the _english men of letters_ series), i have hoped one day to return to the subject and do my best to supply this want. once released from official duties, i began to prepare for the task, and through the last soul-shaking years, being over age for any effectual war-service, have found solace and occupation in carrying it through. the following pages, timed to appear in the hundredth year after the publication of keats's first volume, are the result. i have sought in them to combine two aims not always easy to be reconciled, those of holding the interest of the general reader and at the same time of satisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing, the special student. i have tried to set forth consecutively and fully the history of a life outwardly remarkable for nothing but its tragic brevity, but inwardly as crowded with imaginative and emotional experience as any on record, and moreover, owing to the open-heartedness of the man and to the preservation and unreserved publication of his letters, lying bare almost more than any other to our knowledge. further, considering for how much friendship counted in keats's life, i have tried to call up the group of his friends about him in their human lineaments and relations, so far as these can be recovered, more fully than has been attempted before. i believe also that i have been able to trace more closely than has yet been done some of the chief sources, both in literature and in works of art, of his inspiration. i have endeavoured at the same time to make felt the critical and poetical atmosphere, with its various and strongly conflicting currents, amid which he lived, and to show how his genius, almost ignored in its own day beyond the circle of his private friends, was a focus in which many vital streams of poetic tendency from the past centred and from which many radiated into the future. to illustrate this last point it has been necessary, by way of epilogue, to sketch, however briefly, the story of his posthumous fame, his after life in the minds and hearts of english writers and readers until to-day. by english i mean all those whose mother language is english. to follow the extension of keats's fame to the continent is outside my aim. he has not yet, by means of translation and comment in foreign languages, become in any full sense a world-poet. but during the last thirty years the process has begun, and there would be a good deal to say, did my scheme admit it, of work upon keats done abroad, especially in france, where our literature has during the last generation been studied with such admirable intelligence and care. in an attempt of this scope, i have necessarily had to repeat matters of common knowledge and to say again things that others have said well and sufficiently already. but working from materials hitherto in part untouched, and taking notice of such new lights as have appeared while my task was in progress, i have drawn from them some conclusions, both biographical and critical, which i believe to be my own and which i hope may stand. i have not shrunk from quoting in full poems and portions of poems which everybody knows, in cases where i wanted the reader to have their text not merely in memory but actually before him, for re-studying with a fresh comment or in some new connexion. i have also quoted very largely from the poet's letters, even now not nearly as much read as things so full of genius should be, both in order that some of his story may be told in his own words and for the sake of that part of his mind--a great and most interesting part--which is expressed in them but has not found its way into his poems. it must be added that when i found things in my former small book which i did not see my way to better and which seemed to fit into the expanded scale of this one, i have not hesitated sometimes to incorporate them--to the amount perhaps of forty or fifty pages in all. i wish i could hope that my work will be found such as to justify the amount and variety of friendly help i have had in its preparation. thanks for such help are due in more quarters than i can well call to mind. first and foremost, to lord crewe for letting me have free and constant access to his unrivalled collection of original documents connected with the subject, both those inherited from his father (referred to in the notes as 'houghton mss.') and those acquired in recent years by himself (referred to as 'crewe mss.'). speaking generally, it may be assumed that new matter for which no authority is quoted is taken from these sources. to miss henrietta woodhouse of weston lea, albury, i am indebted for valuable documentary and other information concerning her uncle richard woodhouse. next in importance among collections of keats documents to that of lord crewe is that of mr j. p. morgan in new york, the chief contents of which have by his leave been transcribed for me with the kindliest diligence by his librarian miss greene. for other illustrative documents existing in america, i believe of value, i should like to be able to thank their owners, mr day and mr louis holman of boston: but these gentlemen made a condition of their help the issue of a limited edition _de luxe_ of the book specially illustrated from their material, a condition the publishers judged it impossible to carry out, at any rate in war-time. foremost among my scholarly helpers at home has been my friend professor w. p. ker. for information and suggestions in answer to enquiries of one kind or another i am indebted to professor israel gollancz and mr henry bradley; to professor ernest weekley, the best living authority on surnames; to mr a. h. bullen; to mr falconer madan and mr j. w. mackail; to mr thomas j. wise; to mr h. c. shelley; to mr j. d. milner, director of the national portrait gallery; and to my former colleague mr a. h. smith, keeper of greek and roman antiquities at the british museum. mr george whale supplied me with full copies of and comments on the entries concerning keats in the books of guy's hospital. dr hambley rowe of bradford put at my disposal the results, unfortunately not yet conclusive, of the researches made by him as a zealous cornishman on keats's possible cornish descent. i must not omit thanks to mr emery walker for his skill and pains in preparing the illustrations for my book. with reference to these, i may note that the head from the portrait painted by severn in and now in lord crewe's possession was chosen for colour reproduction as frontispiece because it is the fullest in colouring and, though done from memory so long after the poet's death, to my mind the most satisfying and convincing in general air of any of the extant portraits. of the miniature done by severn from life in , copied and recopied by himself, charles brown and others, and made familiar by numberless reproductions in black and white, the original, now deposited by the dilke trustees in the national portrait gallery, has the character of a monochrome touched with sharp notes or suggestions of colour in the hair, lips, hands, book, etc. i have preferred not to repeat either this or the equally well known--nay, hackneyed--and very distressing death-bed drawing made by severn at rome. the profile from haydon's life-mask of the poet is taken, not, like most versions of the same mask, from the plaster, but from an electrotype made many years ago when the cast was fresh and showing the structure and modellings of the head more subtly, in my judgment, than the original cast itself in its present state. both cast and electrotype are in the national portrait gallery. so is the oil-painting of keats seated reading, begun by severn soon after the poet's death and finished apparently two years later, which i have reproduced, well known though it is, partly for its appositeness to a phrase in one of his letters to his sister. besides the portraits of keats, i have added from characteristic sources those of the two men who most influenced him at the outset of his career, leigh hunt and haydon. a new feature in my book is provided by the reproductions of certain works of art, both pictures and antiques, which can be proved or surmised to have struck and stimulated his imagination. the reproductions of autographs, one of his own and one of haydon's, speak for themselves. contents chapter i page - : birth and parentage: schooldays and apprenticeship chapter ii october -march : hospital studies: poetical ambitions: leigh hunt chapter iii winter - : haydon: other new friendships: the die cast for poetry chapter iv the 'poems' of chapter v april-december : work on _endymion_ chapter vi _endymion._--i. the story: its sources, plan, and symbolism chapter vii _endymion._--ii. the poetry: its qualities and affinities chapter viii december -june : hampstead and teignmouth: emigration of george keats chapter ix june-august : the scottish tour chapter x september-december : blackwood and the quarterly: death of tom keats chapter xi december -june : keats and brown house-mates: fanny brawne: work and idleness chapter xii june -january : shanklin, winchester, hampstead: trouble and health failure chapter xiii work of , .--i. the achievements chapter xiv work of , .--ii. the fragments and experiments chapter xv february-august : hampstead and kentish town: publication of _lamia_ volume chapter xvi august -february : voyage to italy: last days and death at rome chapter xvii epilogue appendix index 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 from an engraving by mayer after a drawing by j. hayter. iii. portrait of benjamin robert haydon from an engraving by thomson after haydon. iv. life-mask of keats from an electrotype in the national portrait gallery. v. 'onward the tiger and the leopard pants, with asian elephants' from an engraving after a sarcophagus relief at woburn abbey. vi. a sacrifice to apollo from an engraving by vivares and woollett after claude. vii. the enchanted castle 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' from an oil painting by joseph severn in the national portrait gallery ix. 'figures on a greek vase--a man and two women' from an etching in piranesi's _vasi e candelabri_. x. page from _isabella; or, the pot of basil_ from an autograph by keats in the british museum. xi. the sosibios vase: profile and frieze from an engraving in the _musée napoléon_. xii. 'what pipes and timbrels? what wild ecstasy?' 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, chapter i - : birth and parentage: schooldays and apprenticeship obscure family history--the finsbury livery stable--the surname keats--origin probably cornish--character of parents--traits of childhood--the enfield school--the edmonton home--the pymmes brook--testimonies of schoolmates--edward holmes--charles cowden clarke--new passion for reading--left an orphan--apprenticed to a surgeon--relations with his master--readings in the poets--the _faerie queene_--the spenser fever--other poetic influences--influences of nature--early attempts in verse--early sympathizers--george felton mathew--move to london. for all the study and research, that have lately been spent on the life and work of keats, there is one point as to which we remain as much in the dark as ever, and that is his family history. he was born at an hour when the gradually re-awakened genius of poetry in our race, i mean of impassioned and imaginative poetry, was ready to offer new forms of spiritual sustenance, and a range of emotions both widened and deepened, to a generation as yet only half prepared to receive them. if we consider the other chief poets who bore their part in that great revival, we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood or some strong inspiring quality in the scenery and traditions of their home, or both together. granting that the scenic and legendary romance of the scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in walter scott a man predestined for the task alike by origin, association, and opportunity. had the indwelling spirit of the cumbrian lakes and mountains, and their power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we look for its spokesman but in one of wordsworth's birth and training? what, then, it may be asked, of byron and shelley, the two great contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the counter-revolution, in the younger generation,--the one worldly, mocking, half theatrically rebellious and satanic, the other unworldly even to unearthliness, a loving alien among men, more than half truly angelic? these we are perhaps rightly used to count as offspring of their age, with its forces and ferments, its violent actions and reactions, rather than of their ancestry or upbringing. and yet, if we will, we may fancy byron inspired in literature by demons of the same froward brood that had urged others of his lineage on lives of adventure or of crime, and may conceive that shelley drew some of his instincts for headlong, peremptory self-guidance, though in directions most opposite to the traditional, from the stubborn and wayward stock of colonial and county aristocracy whence he sprang. keats, more purely and exclusively a poet than any of these, and responding more intuitively than any to the spell alike of ancient greece, of mediæval romance, and of the english woods and fields, was born in a dull and middling walk of london city life, and 'if by traduction came his mind',--to quote dryden with a difference,--it was through channels hidden from our search. from his case less even than from shakespeare's can we draw any argument as to the influence of heredity or environment on the birth and growth of genius. his origin, in spite of much diligent inquiry, has not been traced beyond one generation on the father's side and two on the mother's. his father, thomas keats, was a west-country lad who came young to london, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable kept by a mr john jennings in finsbury. seven or eight years later, about the beginning of , he married his employer's daughter, frances jennings, then in her twentieth year. mr jennings, who had carried on a large business in north-eastern london and the neighbouring suburbs, and was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the country, at ponder's end near edmonton, leaving the management of the business in the hands of his son-in-law. at first the young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the swan and hoop, finsbury pavement, facing the then open space of lower moorfields. here their eldest child, the poet john keats, was born prematurely on either the th or st of october, . a second son, named george, followed on february , ; a third, tom, on november , ; a fourth, edward, who died in infancy, on april , ; and on the rd of june, , a daughter, frances mary. in the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a house in craven street, city road, half a mile farther north. the keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. but it was a pride that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears. some of their friends believed their father to have been a devonshire man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing as a child that he came from cornwall, near the land's end. there is no positive evidence enabling us to decide the question. the derivation of english surnames is apt to be complicated and obscure, and 'keats' is no exception to the rule. it is a name widely distributed in various counties of england, though not very frequent in any. it may in some cases be a possessive form derived from the female christian name kate, on the analogy of jeans from jane, or maggs from margaret: but the source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is the middle-english adjective 'kete', a word of scandinavian origin meaning bold, gallant. in the form 'keyte' the name prevails principally in warwickshire: in the variants keat (or keate) and keats (or keates[ ]) it occurs in many of the midland, home, and southern, especially the south-western, counties. mr thomas hardy tells me of a keats family sprung from a horsedealer of broadmayne, dorsetshire, members of which lived within his own memory as farmers and publicans in and near dorchester, one or two of them bearing, as he thought, a striking likeness to the portrait of the poet. one keats family of good standing was established by the mid-eighteenth century in devon, in the person of a well-known headmaster of blundell's school, tiverton, afterwards rector of bideford. his son was one of nelson's bravest and most famous captains, sir richard godwin keats of the 'superb', and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the pseudonym 'zack', gave promise of a literary career which has been unhappily cut short. but with this bideford stock the keats brothers can have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would assuredly have made the prowess of their namesake of the 'superb' their pride and boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous person, their mother's brother midgley john jennings, a tall lieutenant of marines who served with some credit on duncan's flagship at camperdown and by reason of his stature was said to have been a special mark for the enemy's musketry. in the form keat or keate the name is common enough both in devon, particularly near tiverton, and in cornwall, especially in the parishes of st teath and lanteglos,--that is round about camelford,--and also as far eastward as callington and westward as st columb major: the last named parish having been the seat of a family of the name entitled to bear arms and said to have come originally from berkshire. but neither the records of the dorsetshire family, nor search in the parish registers of devon and cornwall, have as yet yielded the name of any thomas keat or keats as born in , the birth-year of our poet's father according to our information. a 'thomas keast', however, is registered as having been born in that year in the parish of st agnes, between new quay and redruth. now keast is a purely cornish name, limited to those parts, and it is quite possible that, borne by a cornishman coming to london, it would get changed into the far commoner keats (a somewhat similar phonetic change is that of crisp into cripps). so the identification of this thomas keast of st agnes as the father of our keats is not to be excluded. the jennings connexion is of itself a circumstance which may be held to add to the likelihood of a cornish origin for the poet, jennings being a name frequent in the falmouth district and occurring as far westward as lelant. children are registered as born in and after of the marriage of a john jennings to a catherine keate at penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous london stable-keeper jonn jennings was himself of cornish origin, and that between him and the lad thomas keats, whom he took so young first as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous family connexion or acquaintance. these, however, are matters purely conjectural, and all we really know about the poet's parents are the dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people somewhat out of the ordinary. thomas keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: 'of so remarkably fine a commonsense and native respectability,' writes cowden clarke, in whose father's school the poet and his brother were brought up, 'that i perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys.' and again:--'i have a clear recollection of his lively and energetic countenance, particularly when seated on his gig and preparing to drive his wife home after visiting his sons at school. in feature, stature, and manner john resembled his father.' of frances keats, the poet's mother, we learn more vaguely that she was 'tall, of good figure, with large oval face, and sensible deportment': and again that she was a lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some imprudence. her second son, george, wrote in after life of her and of her family as follows:--'my grandfather mr jennings was very well off, as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would have been affluent. i have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of his excellencies, and mr abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother.' as to the grandmother and her estimable qualities all accounts are agreed, but of the mother the witness quoted himself tells a very different tale. this mr richard abbey was a wholesale tea-dealer in saint pancras lane and a trusted friend of mr and mrs jennings. in a memorandum written long after their death he declares that both as girl and woman their daughter, the poet's mother, was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways and was no credit to her family.[ ] whatever truth there may be in these charges, it is certain that she lived to the end under her mother's roof and was in no way cut off from her children. the eldest boy john in particular she is said to have held in passionate affection, by him passionately returned. once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in. haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different turn:--'he was when an infant a most violent and ungovernable child. at five years of age or thereabouts, he once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should go out. his mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the window saw her position and came to the rescue.' another trait of the poet's childhood, mentioned also by haydon, on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to the last word people said and then laughing. the parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send them to harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school kept by a mr john clarke at enfield. the brothers of mrs keats, including the boys' admired uncle, the lieutenant of marines, had been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. the school-house had been originally built for a rich west india merchant, in the finest style of early georgian classic architecture, and stood in a spacious garden at the lower end of the town. when years afterwards the site was used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but later it was taken down, and the central part of the façade, with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the south kensington (now victoria and albert) museum, and is still preserved there as a choice example of the style. it is evident that mr clarke was a kind and excellent schoolmaster, much above the standards of his time, and that lads with any bent for literature or scholarship had their full chance under him. still more was this the case when his son charles cowden clarke, a genial youth with an ardent and trained love of books and music, grew old enough to help him as usher in the school-work. the brothers john and george keats were mere children when they were put under mr clarke's care, john not much over and george a good deal under eight years old, both still dressed, we are told, in the childish frilled suits which give such a grace to groups of young boys in the drawings of stothard and his contemporaries. not long after keats had been put to school he lost his father, whose horse fell and threw him in the city road as he rode home late one night after dining at southgate, perhaps on his way home from the enfield school. his skull was fractured: he was picked up unconscious about one o'clock and died at eight in the morning. this was on the th of april, . within twelve months his widow had taken a second husband--one william rawlings, described as 'of moorgate in the city of london, stable-keeper,' presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management of her father's business. (it may be noted incidentally that rawlings, like jennings, is a name common in cornwall, especially in and about the parish of madron). this marriage must have turned out unhappily, for it was soon followed by a separation, under what circumstances or through whose fault we are not told. in the correspondence of the keats brothers after they were grown up no mention is ever made of their stepfather, of whom the family seem soon to have lost all knowledge. mrs rawlings went with her children to live at edmonton, in the house of her mother, mrs jennings, who was just about this time left a widow. the family was well enough provided for, mr jennings (who died march , ) having left a fortune of over £ , , of which, in addition to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding £ a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding £ a year to his daughter frances rawlings, with reversion to her keats children after her death; and £ to be separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on the coming of age of the youngest. between the home, then, in church street, edmonton, and the neighbouring enfield school, where the two elder brothers were in due time joined by the youngest, the next five years of keats's boyhood ( - ) were passed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. he did not live to attain the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in his grandmother's house at edmonton. they are conveyed in some rimes which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside and keeping small fishes in tubs,-- there was a naughty boy tittlebat and a naughty boy was he not over fat, he kept little fishes minnow small in washing tubs three as the stal in spite of a glove of the might not above of the maid, the size nor afraid of a nice of his granny-good little baby's he often would little finger-- hurly burly o he made get up early 'twas his trade and go of fish a pretty kettle by hook or crook a kettle-- to the brook a kettle-- and bring home of fish a pretty kettle miller's thumb, a kettle! in a later letter to his sister he makes much the same confession in a different key, when he bids her ask him for any kind of present she fancies, only not for live stock to be kept in captivity, 'though i will not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond i used to be of goldfinches, tomtits, minnows, mice, ticklebacks, dace, cock salmons and all the whole tribe of the bushes and the brooks.' despite the changes which have overbuilt and squalidly or sprucely suburbanized all those parts of middlesex, the pymmes brook still holds its course across half the county, is still bridged by the main street of edmonton, and runs countrywise, clear and open, for some distance along a side street on its way to join the lea. other memories of it, and of his childish playings and musings beside it, find expression in keats's poetry where he makes the shepherd-prince endymion tell his sister peona how one of his love-sick vagaries has been to sit on a stone and bubble up the water through a reed,-- so reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips, with leaves stuck in them; and the neptune be of their petty ocean. if we learn little of keats's early days from his own lips, we have sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school companions; which was that of a fiery, generous little fellow, handsome and passionate, vehement both in tears and laughter, and as placable and loveable as he was pugnacious. but beneath this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. these he was accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, to whom he was attached by the very closest of fraternal ties. george, the second brother, had all john's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive disposition and a cooler blood. from a boy he was the bigger and stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery senior. tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. here are some of george keats's recollections, written after the death of his elder brother, and referring partly to their school days and partly to john's character after he was grown up: i loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and i can safely say and my schoolfellows will bear witness that john's temper was the cause of all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are. from the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and fought alternately, until we separated in , i in a great measure relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. he avoided teazing any one with his miseries but tom and myself, and often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him relief. let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to their confirmation in the words of two of keats's school friends; and first in those of his junior edward holmes, afterwards a musical critic of note and author of a well-known _life of mozart_:-- keats was in childhood not attached to books. his _penchant_ was for fighting. he would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his brother among the rest. it was meat and drink to him. jennings their sailor relation was always in the thoughts of the brothers, and they determined to keep up the family reputation for courage; george in a passive manner; john and tom more fiercely. the favourites of john were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour. i recollect at this moment his delight at the extraordinary gesticulations and pranks of a boy named wade who was celebrated for this.... he was a boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty might easily fancy would become great--but rather in some military capacity than in literature. you will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly and unexpectedly. some books of his i remember reading were _robinson crusoe_ and something about montezuma and the incas of peru. he must have read shakespeare as he thought that 'no one would care to read _macbeth_ alone in a house at two o'clock in the morning.' this seems to me a boyish trait of the poet. his sensibility was as remarkable as his indifference to be thought well of by the master as a 'good boy' and to his tasks in general.... he was in every way the creature of passion.... the point to be chiefly insisted on is that he was _not literary--his love of books and poetry manifested itself chiefly about a year before he left school_. in all active exercises he excelled. the generosity and daring of his character with the extreme beauty and animation of his face made i remember an impression on me--and being some years his junior i was obliged to woo his friendship--in which i succeeded, but not till i had fought several battles. this violence and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of disposition--in passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter--always in extremes--will help to paint keats in his boyhood. associated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more popular.[ ] entirely to the same effect is the account of keats given by a school friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first became aware of his own vocation for poetry. this was the aforementioned charles cowden clarke, the son of the head master, who towards the close of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature and of his generation in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of keats:-- he was a favourite with all. not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--i ever saw. one of the transports of that marvellous actor, edmund kean--whom, by the way, he idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure. upon one occasion when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had boxed his brother tom's ears, john rushed up, put himself into the received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. his passion at times was almost ungovernable; and his brother george, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when john was 'in one of his moods,' and was endeavouring to beat him. it was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. he was not merely the favourite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that i never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.[ ] the same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his earlier school days keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. but during his last few terms, that is in his fifteenth and sixteenth years, he suddenly became a passionate student and a very glutton of books. let us turn again to cowden clarke's words:-- my father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of voluntary work; and such was keats's indefatigable energy for the last two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that, upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable distance. he was at work before the first school-hour began, and that was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, he would be in the school--almost the only one--at his latin or french translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the consequences of so close and persevering an application, that he never would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes driven out for the purpose by one of the masters.... 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 latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading. thus, his _whole_ time was engrossed. he had a tolerably retentive memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. he must in those last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted principally of abridgements of all the voyages and travels of any note; mavor's collection, also his _universal history_; robertson's histories of scotland, america, and charles the fifth; all miss edgeworth's productions, together with many other books equally well calculated for youth. the books, however, that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were tooke's _pantheon_, lemprière's _classical dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and spence's _polymetis_. this was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the greek mythology; here was he 'suckled in that creed outworn;' for his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the _Æneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a considerable portion.... he must have gone through all the better publications in the school library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and, in my 'mind's eye,' i now see him at supper (we had our meals in the schoolroom), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the folio volume of burnet's _history of his own time_ between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. this work, and leigh hunt's _examiner_--which my father took in, and i used to lend to keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty. 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 . 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.[ ] 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,[ ] 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, , 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.[ ] 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 , 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 , 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 , 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 , 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:-- keats and i though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in many respects as different as two individuals could be. he enjoyed good health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was fond of company--could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life--and had great confidence in himself. i, on the other hand was languid and melancholy--fond of repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree. but i always delighted in administering to the happiness of others: and being one of a large family, it pleased me much to see him and his brother george enjoy themselves so much at our little domestic concerts and dances.... he was of the sceptical and republican school. an advocate for the innovations which were making progress in his time. a faultfinder with everything established. i, on the contrary, hated controversy and dispute--dreaded discord and disorder--loved the institutions of my country.... but i respected keats' opinions, because they were sincere--refrained from subjects on which we differed, and only asked him to concede with me the imperfection of human knowledge, and the fallibility of human judgment: while he, on his part, would often express regret on finding that he had given pain or annoyance by opposing with ridicule or asperity the opinions of others. of keats's physical appearance and poetical preferences the same witness writes further:-- a painter or a sculptor might have taken him for a study after the greek masters, and have given him 'a station like the herald mercury, new lighted on some heaven-kissing hill.' his eye admired more the external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the muse. he delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. he used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but i never observed the tears in his eyes nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme sensibility. these indeed were not the parts of poetry which he took pleasure in pointing out. 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 , 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.[ ] footnotes: [ ] between the forms with and without the final 's' there is no hard and fast line to be drawn, one getting changed into the other either regularly, by the normal addition of the possessive or patronymic suffix, or casually, through our mere english habit of phonetic carelessness and slipshod pronunciation. i learn from a correspondent belonging to the very numerous st teath stock, and signing and known only as keat, that other members of his family call themselves keats. and my friend mr f. b. keate, working-man poet and politician of bristol, whose forbears came from tiverton and earlier probably from st teath, assures me that he is addressed keates in speech and writing as often as not. there are several families in bristol, most of them coming from wilts or (as the famous flogging headmaster of eton came) from somerset, whose names are spelt and spoken keat or keats and keate or keates indifferently. [ ] this document, a memorandum written for the information of keats's friend and publisher, john taylor, was sold in london in . i saw and took rough note of it before the sale, meaning to follow it up afterwards: but circumstances kept me otherwise fully occupied, and later i found that the buyer, a well known and friendly bookseller, had unfortunately mislaid it: neither has he since been able to recover it from among the chronic congestion of his shelves. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] charles cowden clarke,_ recollection of writers_, . [ ] _rawlings v. jennings._ [ ] she was buried at st stephen's, colman street, decr. , , aged . [ ] mistakes have crept into the received statements (my own included) as to the dates when keats's apprenticeship began and ended. the witnesses on whom we have chiefly to depend wrote from thirty to fifty years after the events they were trying to recall, and some of them, cowden clarke especially, had avowedly no memory for dates. the accepted date of keats's leaving school and going as apprentice to mr hammond at edmonton has hitherto been the autumn of , the end of his fifteenth year. it should have been the late summer of , well on in his sixteenth, as is proved by the discovery of a copy of bonnycastle's _astronomy_ given him as a prize at the end of the midsummer term that year (see _bulletin of the keats-shelley memorial_, rome, , p. ). on the other hand we have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in the shape of an ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed with a fine writing-master's flourish, 'john keats, emer: ;' _emer_, added in a fainter ink, is of course for _emeritus_, a boy who has left school. this book is in the dilke collection of keats relics at hampstead, and the inscription has been supposed to be keats's own, which it manifestly is not. another school-book of keats's, of five years' earlier date, has lately been presented to the same collection: this is the french-english grammar of duverger,--inscribed in much the same calligraphy with his name and the date . he must have studied it to some purpose, if we may judge by the good reading knowledge of french which he clearly possessed when he was grown up. [ ] surmise, partly founded on the vague recollections of former fellow-students, has hitherto dated this step a year earlier, in the autumn of . but the publication of the documents relating to keats from the books of the hospital show that this is an error. he was not entered as a student at guy's till october , . if he had moved to london, as has been supposed, a year earlier, he would have had nothing to do there, nor is it the least likely that his guardian would have permitted such removal. that he came straight from mr hammond's to guy's, without any intermediate period of study elsewhere, is certain both from a note to that effect against the entry of his name in the hospital books, and from the explicit statement of his fellow-student and sometime housemate, mr henry stephens. it results that the period of his life as hospital student in a succession of london lodgings must be cut down from the supposed two years and a half, october -april , to one year and a half, oct. -april . there is no difficulty about this, and i think that both as to his leaving school and his going to london the facts and dates set forth in the present chapter may be taken as well established. chapter ii october -march : hospital studies: poetical ambitions: leigh hunt hospital days: summary--aptitudes and ambitions--teachers--testimony of henry stephens--pride and other characteristics--evidences of a wandering mind--services of cowden clarke--introduction to leigh hunt--summer walks at hampstead--holiday epistles from margate--return to london--first reading of chapman's homer--date of the chapman sonnet--intimacy with leigh hunt--the _examiner_: hunt's imprisonment--his visitors in captivity--his occupations--_the feast of the poets_--hunt's personality and charm--his ideas of poetical reform--_the story of rimini_--its popularity--dante and namby-pamby--hunt's life at hampstead--hunt and keats compared--keats at hunt's cottage--prints in the library--the intercoronation scene--sonnets of hunt to keats--sonnets of keats to hunt--keats's penitence. the external and technical facts of keats's life as a medical student are these. his name, as we have said, was entered at guy's as a six months' student (surgeon's pupil) on october , , a month before his twentieth birthday. four weeks later he was appointed dresser to one of the hospital surgeons, mr lucas. at the close of his first six months' term, march , , he entered for a further term of twelve months. on july , , he presented himself for examination before the court of apothecaries and obtained their licence to practise. he continued to attend lectures and live the regular life of a student; but early in the spring of , being now of age and on the eve of publishing his first volume of verse, he determined to abandon the pursuit of medicine for that of poetry, declared his intention to his guardian, and ceased attending the hospitals without seeking or receiving the usual certificate of proficiency. for the first two or three months of this period, from the beginning of october till about the new year of , keats lodged alone at dean street, borough, and then for half a year or more with several other students over the shop of a tallow chandler named markham[ ] in st thomas's street. thence, in the summer or early autumn of , leaving the near neighbourhood of the hospitals, he went to join his brothers in rooms in the poultry, over a passage leading to the queen's head tavern. finally, early in , they all three moved for a short time to cheapside. for filling up this skeleton record, we have some traditions of the hospital concerning keats's teachers, some recollections of fellow students,--of one, mr henry stephens, in particular,--together with further reminiscences by cowden clarke and impressions recorded in after years by one and another of a circle of acquaintances which fast expanded. moreover keats begins during this period to tell something of his own story, in the form of a few poems of a personal tenor and a very few letters written to and preserved by his friends. as to his hospital work, it is clear that though his heart was not in it and his thoughts were prone to wander, and though he held and declared that poetry was the only thing worth living for, yet when he chose he could bend his mind and will to the tasks before him. the operations which as dresser he performed or assisted in are said to have proved him no fumbler. when he went up for examination before the court of apothecaries he passed with ease and credit, somewhat to the surprise of his fellow students, who put his success down to his knowledge of latin rather than of medicine. later, after he had abandoned the profession, he was always ready to speak or act with a certain authority in cases of illness or emergency, and though hating the notion of practice evidently did not feel himself unqualified for it so far as knowledge went. he could not find in the scientific part of the study a satisfying occupation for his thoughts; and though a few years later, when he had realized that there is no kind of knowledge but may help to nourish a poet's mind, he felt unwilling to lose hold of what he had learned as apprentice and student, he was never caught by that special passion of philosophical curiosity which laid hold for a season on coleridge and shelley successively, and drew them powerfully towards the study of the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame. the practical responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him, and he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill. once when cowden clarke asked him about his prospects and feelings in regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of his unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that 'the other day, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and i was off with them to oberon and fairy-land.' 'my last operation,' he once told another friend, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. i did it with the utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and i never took up the lancet again.' the surgeon to whom he was specially assigned as pupil, mr lucas, seems to have had few qualifications as a teacher. we have the following lively character of him from a man afterwards highly honoured in the profession, john flint south, who walked the hospitals at the same time as keats:--'a tall ungainly awkward man, with stooping shoulders and a shuffling walk, as deaf as a post, not overburdened with brains, but very good natured and easy, and liked by everyone. his surgical acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly performed, and accompanied with much bungling, if not worse.' but the teacher from whom keats will really, as all witnesses agree, have learnt the best of what he knew was the great dissector and anatomist, astley cooper, then almost in the zenith of his power as a lecturer and of his popular fame and practice. he is described as one of the handsomest and most ingratiating of men, as well as one of the most indefatigable and energetic, with an admirable gift of exposition made racy by a strong east anglian accent; and it is on record that he took an interest in young keats, and recommended him to the special care of his own dresser and namesake, george cooper. it was in consequence of this recommendation that keats left his solitary lodging in dean street and went to live as housemate in st thomas's street with three other students, the aforesaid george cooper, one george wilson mackereth, and henry stephens, the last-named afterwards a surgeon in good repute as well as a dabbler in dramatic literature. it is from stephens that we get much the fullest picture of keats in these student days. i give the pith of his reminiscences, partly as quoted from his conversation by an intimate friend in the same profession, sir benjamin ward richardson,[ ] partly as written down by himself for lord houghton's information in .[ ] whether it was in the latter part of the year or the early part of the year that my acquaintance with john keats commenced i cannot say. we were both students at the united hospitals of st thomas's and guy's, and we had apartments in a house in st thomas's street, kept by a decent respectable woman of the name of mitchell i think. [after naming his other fellow students, the witness goes on]--john keats being alone, and to avoid the expense of having a sitting room to himself, asked to join us, which we readily acceded to. we were therefore constant companions, and the following is what i recollect of his previous history from conversation with him. of his parentage i know nothing, for upon that subject i never remember his speaking, i think he was an orphan. he had been apprenticed to a mr hammond surgeon of southgate from whence he came on the completion of his time to the hospitals. his passion, if i may so call it, for poetry was soon manifested. he attended lectures and went through the usual routine but he had no desire to excel in that pursuit.... he was called by his fellow students 'little keats,' being at his full growth no more than five feet high.... in a room, he was always at the window, peering into space, so that the window-seat was spoken of by his comrades as keats's place.... in the lecture room he seemed to sit apart and to be absorbed in something else, as if the subject suggested thoughts to him which were not practically connected with it. he was often in the subject and out of it, in a dreamy way. he never attached much consequence to his own studies in medicine, and indeed looked upon the medical career as the career by which to live in a workaday world, without being certain that he could keep up the strain of it. he nevertheless had a consciousness of his own powers, and even of his own greatness, though it might never be recognised.... poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations: the only thing worthy the attention of superior minds: so he thought: all other pursuits were mean and tame. he had no idea of fame or greatness but as it was connected with the pursuits of poetry, or the attainment of poetical excellence. the greatest men in the world were the poets and to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition. it may readily be imagined that this feeling was accompanied with a good deal of pride and conceit, and that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals. this pride exposed him, as may be readily imagined, to occasional ridicule, and some mortification. having a taste and liking for poetry myself, though at that time but little cultivated, he regarded me as something a little superior to the rest, and would gratify himself frequently by showing me some lines of his writing, or some new idea which he had struck out. we had frequent conversation on the merits of particular poets, but our tastes did not agree. he was a great admirer of spenser, his _faerie queene_ was a great favourite with him. byron was also in favour, pope he maintained was no poet, only a versifier. he was fond of imagery, the most trifling similes appeared to please him. sometimes i ventured to show him some lines which i had written, but i always had the mortification of hearing them condemned, indeed he seemed to think it presumption in me to attempt to tread along the same pathway as himself at however humble a distance. he had two brothers, who visited him frequently, and they worshipped him. they seemed to think their brother john was to be exalted, and to exalt the family name. i remember a student from st bartholomew's hospital who came often to see him, as they had formerly been intimate, but though old friends they did not cordially agree. newmarsh or newmarch (i forget which was his name) was a classical scholar, as was keats, and therefore they scanned freely the respective merits of the poets of greece and rome. whenever keats showed newmarch any of his poetry it was sure to be ridiculed and severely handled. newmarch was a light-hearted and merry fellow, but i thought he was rather too fond of mortifying keats, but more particularly his brothers, as their praise of their brother john amounted almost to idolatry, and newmarch and they frequently quarrelled. whilst attending lectures he would sit and instead of copying out the lecture, would often scribble some doggrel rhymes among the notes of lecture, particularly if he got hold of another student's syllabus. in my syllabus of chemical lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper cover. this cover has been long torn off, except one small piece on which is the following fragment of doggrel rhyme:-- give me women, wine and snuff until i cry out, 'hold! enough' you may do so, sans objection until the day of resurrection. this is all that remains, and is the only piece of his writing which is now in my possession. he was gentlemanly in his manners and when he condescended to talk upon other subjects he was agreeable and intelligent. he was quick and apt at learning, when he chose to give his attention to any subject. he was a steady quiet and well behaved person, never inclined to pursuits of a low or vicious character. the last words need to be read in the light of the convivial snatch of verse quoted just above. keats in these days was no rake, indeed, but neither was he a puritan: his passions were strong in proportion to the general intensity of his being: and his ardent absorption in poetry and study did not save him from the risks and slips incident to appetite and hot blood. another fellow student relates:--'even in the lecture room of st thomas's i have seen keats in a deep poetic dream; his mind was on parnassus with the muses. and here is a quaint fragment which he one evening scribbled in our presence, while the precepts of sir astley cooper fell unheeded on his ear.' the fragment tells how alexander the great saw and loved a lady of surpassing beauty on his march through india, and reads like the beginning of an attempt to tell the story of the old french _lai d'aristote_ in the style and spelling of an early-printed english prose romance,--possibly the _morte d'arthure_. into his would-be archaic prose, luxuriantly describing the lady's beauty, keats works in tags taken direct from spenser and shakespeare and milton, all three. he no doubt knew this favourite mediæval tale--that of the indian damsel whose charms enslaved first alexander in the midst of his conquests and then his tutor aristotle--either in the eighteenth-century prose version of le grand or the recent english verse translation by g. l. way, who turns the tale in couplets of this style:-- at the first glance all dreams of conquest fade and his first thought is of his indian maid. i cannot but think the indian maiden of this story must have been still lingering in keats's imagination when he devised the episode of that other indian maiden in the fourth book of _endymion_.[ ] besides these records, we have an actual tangible relic to show how keats's attention in the lecture room was now fixed and now wandered, in the shape of a notebook in which some other student has begun to put down anatomy notes and keats has followed. beginning from both ends, he has made notes of an anatomical and also of a surgical course, which are not those of a lax or inaccurate student, but full and close as far as they go; only squeezed into the margins of one or two pages there are signs of flagging attention in the shape of sketches, rather prettily touched, of a pansy and other flowers.[ ] after the first weeks of autumn gloom spent in solitary lodgings in the dingiest part of london, keats expresses, in a rimed epistle to felton mathew, the fear lest his present studies and surroundings should stifle the poetic faculty in him altogether. about the same time he takes pains to get into touch again with cowden clarke, who had by this time left enfield and was living with a brother-in-law in clerkenwell. in a letter unluckily not dated, but certainly belonging to these first autumn weeks in london, keats writes to clarke:--'although the borough is a beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet no , dean street, is not difficult to find; and if you would run the gauntlet over london bridge, take the first turning to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door, which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as st paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. at all events, let me hear from you soon: i say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your fingers.' clarke seems to have complied promptly with this petition, and before many months their renewed intercourse had momentous consequences. keats's fear that the springs of poetry would dry up in him was not fulfilled, and he kept trying his prentice hand in various modes of verse. some of the sonnets recorded to have belonged to the year , as _woman, when i behold thee, happy is england_, may have been written in london at the close of that year: a number of others, showing a gradually strengthening touch, belong, we know, to the spring and early summer of the next. for his brother george to send to his _fiancée_, miss georgiana wylie, on valentine's day, feb. , , he wrote the pleasant set of heptasyllabics beginning 'hadst thou lived in days of old.' in the same month was published leigh hunt's poem _the story of rimini_, and by this, working together with his rooted enthusiasm for spenser, keats was immediately inspired to begin an attempt at a chivalrous romance of his own, _calidore_; which went no farther than an induction and some hundred and fifty opening lines. cowden clarke had kept up his acquaintance with leigh hunt, and was in the habit of going up to visit him at the cottage where he was now living at hampstead, in the vale of health. some time in the late spring of clarke made known to hunt first some of keats's efforts in poetry and then keats himself. both clarke and hunt have told the story, both writing at a considerable, and clarke at a very long, interval after the event. in their main substance the two accounts agree, but both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt to do, circumstances really separated by an interval of months. one firm fact we have to start with,--that hunt printed in his paper, the _examiner_, for may th, , keats's sonnet, _o solitude, if i with thee must dwell_. this was keats's first appearance in print, and a decisive circumstance in his life. clarke, it appears, had taken up the 'solitude' sonnet and a few other manuscript verses of keats to submit to leigh hunt for his opinion,[ ] and had every reason to be gratified at the result. here is his story of what happened. i took with me two or three of the poems i had received from keats. 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. horace smith happened to be there on the occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appreciation of their merits.... after making numerous and eager inquiries about him personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the vale of health. 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. as we approached the heath, there was the rising and accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. the interview, which stretched into three 'morning calls,' was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about caen wood and its neighbourhood; for keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed. 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_: to mr clarke i was indebted for my acquaintance with him. 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 walked together, and used to write verses of an evening on a given subject. no imaginative pleasure was left unnoticed by us, or unenjoyed, from the recollections of the bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer's rain at our window or the clicking of the coal in winter-time. 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 th 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 , 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 to come and find him at his lodging in the borough, clarke goes on:-- this letter having no date but the week's day, and no postmark, preceded our first symposium; and a memorable night it was in my life's career. a beautiful copy of the folio edition of chapman's translation of _homer_ had been lent me. it was the property of mr. alsager, the gentleman who for years had contributed no small share of celebrity to the great reputation of the _times_ newspaper by the masterly manner in which he conducted the money-market department of that journal.... well then, we were put in possession of the _homer_ of chapman, and to work we went, turning to some of the 'famousest' passages, as we had scrappily known them in pope's version. there was, for instance, that perfect scene of the conversation on troy wall of the old senators with helen, who is pointing out to them the several greek captains; with the senator antenor's vivid portrait of an orator in ulysses, beginning at the th line of the third book:-- but when the prudent ithacus did to his counsels rise, he stood a little still, and fix'd upon the earth his eyes, his sceptre moving neither way, but held it formally, like one that vainly doth affect. of wrathful quality, and frantic (rashly judging), you would have said he was; but when out of his ample breast he gave his great voice pass, and words that flew about our ears like drifts of winter's snow, none thenceforth might contend with him, though naught admired for show. the shield and helmet of diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of neptune's passage to the achive ships, in the thirteenth book:-- the woods and all the great hills near trembled beneath the weight of his immortal-moving feet. three steps he only took, before he far-off Ægas reach'd, but with the fourth, it shook with his dread entry. one scene i could not fail to introduce to him--the shipwreck of ulysses, in the fifth book of the _odysseis_, and i had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:-- then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both his strong hands hanging down, and all with froth his cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath spent to all use, and down he sank to death. _the sea had soak'd his heart through_; all his veins his toils had rack'd t'a labouring woman's pains. dead-weary was he. on an after-occasion i showed him the couplet, in pope's translation, upon the same passage:-- from mouth and nose the briny torrent ran, and _lost in lassitude lay all the man_. (!!!) chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when i came down to breakfast the next morning, i found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, _on first looking into chapman's homer_. we had parted, as i have already said, at day-spring, yet he contrived that i should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles by ten o'clock. 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 - : 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 , 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 .[ ] 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 ) 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 , 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 £ 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 , 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 , 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. [illustration: 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.[ ] 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, . '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 , 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 , 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 , 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 st, , 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 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 ( ) 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.[ ] 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.' footnotes: [ ] another account says mitchell. [ ] in _the asclepiad_, april . [ ] houghton mss. [ ] le grand: _fabliaux ou contes, _. g. l. way: _fabliaux or tales_, london, ; nd ed. . see appendix i. [ ] this note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late sir charles dilke to the public library at hampstead. [ ] in a review of keats's first book written the next year (_examiner_, july , ) 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. [ ] 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 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. , ). [ ] 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_, , pp. - ). [ ] 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 - : haydon: other new friendships: the die cast for poetry haydon and the elgin marbles--haydon as painter and writer--vanity, pugnacity, and piety--haydon on leigh hunt--keats and haydon meet--an enthusiastic friendship--keats and the elgin marbles--sonnets and protestations--hazlitt and lamb--friendship of hunt and shelley--lamb and hazlitt on shelley--haydon and shelley: a battle royal--keats and shelley--a cool relation--john hamilton reynolds--his devotion to keats--the reynolds sisters--james rice--charles wells--william haslam--joseph severn--keats judged by his circle--described by severn--his range of sympathies--his poetic ambition--the die is cast--first volume goes to press. 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.[ ] 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. [illustration: pl. iii benjamin robert haydon from an engraving by thomson after haydon] in october , 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_. october, . i have been at hampstead this fortnight for my eyes, and shall return with my body much stronger for application. the greater part of my time has been spent in leigh hunt's society, who is certainly one of the most delightful companions. full of poetry and art, and amiable humour, we argue always with full hearts on everything but religion and buonaparte, and we have resolved never to talk of these, particularly as i have been recently examining voltaire's opinions concerning christianity, and turmoiling my head to ascertain fully my right to put him into my picture! though leigh hunt is not deep in knowledge, moral, metaphysical, or classical, yet he is intense in feeling, and has an intellect for ever on the alert. he is like one of those instruments on three legs, which, throw it how you will, always pitches on two, and has a spike sticking for ever up and ever ready for you. he 'sets' at a subject with a scent like a pointer. he is a remarkable man, and created a sensation by his independence, his courage, his disinterestedness in public matters, and by the truth, acuteness, and taste of his dramatic criticisms he raised the rank of newspapers, and gave by his example a literary feeling to the weekly ones more especially. as a poet, i think him full of the genuine feeling. his third canto in _rimini_ is equal to anything in any language of that sweet sort. perhaps in his wishing to avoid the monotony of the pope school, he may have shot into the other extreme, and his invention of obscure words to express obscure feelings borders sometimes on affectation. but these are trifles compared with the beauty of the poem, the intense painting of the scenery, and the deep burning in of the passion which trembles in every line. thus far as a critic, an editor, and a poet. as a man, i know none with such an affectionate heart, if never opposed in his opinions. he has defects of course: one of his great defects is getting inferior people about him to listen, too fond of shining at any expense in society, and a love of approbation from the darling sex bordering on weakness; though to women he is delightfully pleasant, yet they seem more to dandle him as a delicate plant. i don't know if they do not put a confidence in him which to me would be mortifying. he is a man of sensibility tinged with morbidity, and of such sensitive organisation of body that the plant is not more alive to touch than he. i remember once, walking in a field, we came to a muddy place concealed by grass. the moment hunt touched it, he shrank back, saying, 'it's muddy!' as if he meaned that it was full of adders.... he is a composition, as we all are, of defects and delightful qualities, indolently averse to worldly exertion, because it harasses the musings of his fancy, existing only by the common duties of life, yet ignorant of them, and often suffering from their neglect. a few days later, on october , 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 th of november, , the young poet wrote to haydon as follows, joining his name with those of wordsworth and leigh hunt:-- last evening wrought me up, and i cannot forbear sending you the following:-- great spirits now on earth are sojourning: he of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, who on helvellyn's summit, wide awake, catches his freshness from archangel's wing: he of the rose, the violet, the spring, the social smile, the chain for freedom's sake, and lo! whose steadfastness would never take a meaner sound than raphael's whispering. and other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the world another heart, and other pulses. hear ye not the hum of mighty workings in some distant mart? listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb. 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 , 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:-- many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two noble sonnets. i know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects of their seeking.... 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:-- consider this letter a sacred secret.--often have i sat by my fire after a day's effort, as the dusk approached and a gauzy veil seemed dimming all things--and mused on what i had done, and with a burning glow on what i would do till filled with fury i have seen the faces of the mighty dead crowd into my room, and i have sunk down and prayed the great spirit that i might be worthy to accompany these immortal beings in their immortal glories, and then i have seen each smile as it passes over me, and each shake his hand in awful encouragement. my dear keats, the friends who surrounded me were sensible to what talent i had,--but no one reflected my enthusiasm with that burning ripeness of soul, my heart yearned for sympathy,--believe me from my soul, in you i have found one,--you add fire, when i am exhausted, and excite fury afresh--i offer my heart and intellect and experience--at first i feared your ardor might lead you to disregard the accumulated wisdom of ages in moral points--but the feelings put forth lately have delighted my soul. god bless you! let our hearts be buried on each other. 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 , 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 , ), 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 £ ) 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 ) 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 . 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 ). 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 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to the muses in a copy of shakespeare which he gave to keats, and in 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.'[ ] 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 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. in regard to keats's social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and unaffected. his voice was rich and low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. 'in my knowledge of my fellow beings,' says cowden clarke, 'i never knew one who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness, and the irresistible sway of anger, as keats. his indignation would have made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his features--"the form of his visage was changed."' in lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are described as great and never used unkindly. he loved the exhibition of any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and nature. 'though a quarrel in the streets,' he says, 'is a thing to be hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.' his yearning love for the old polytheism and instinctive affinity with the greek spirit did not at all blunt his relish of actualities. to complete our picture and illustrate the wide and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things, let us take cowden clarke's account of the way he could enjoy and re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our refinement no longer tolerates:-- his perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. he once described to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. the performance not having begun, keats was near to, and watched, a young aspirant, who had brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of all the magnates present. now and then, in his zeal to manifest and impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the prescribed bounds into the ring, to the lashing resentment of its comptroller, mr william soames, who, after some hints of a practical nature to 'keep back' began laying about him with indiscriminate and unmitigable vivacity, the peripatetic signifying to his pupil. 'my eyes! bill soames giv' me sich a licker!' evidently grateful, and considering himself complimented upon being included in the general dispensation. keats's entertainment with and appreciation of this minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. but his concurrent personification of the baiting, with his position,--his legs and arms bent and shortened till he looked like bruin on his hind legs, dabbing his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged--his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a remarkable and as memorable a display. thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and half awe-stricken, passion for the poetic life. poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. it was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement, expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as england has not known since. fortunes, even, had been made or were being made in poetry; by scott, by byron, by moore, whose _irish melodies_ were an income to him and who was known to have just received a cheque of £ in advance for _lalla rookh_. in such an atmosphere keats, having enough of his inheritance left after payment of his school and hospital expenses to live on for at least a year or two, soon found himself induced to try his luck and his powers with the rest. the backing of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. his brothers, including the business member of the family, the sensible and practical george, were as eager that john should become a famous poet as he was himself. so encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his power. the consequence was a quarrel, which mr abbey afterwards related, in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which i have already referred as containing his character of the poet's mother. the die was cast. in the marlborough street studio, in the hampstead cottage, in the city lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their friends, it was determined that john keats (or according to his convivial _alias_ 'junkets') should put forth a volume of his poems. leigh hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be sympathetic, the brothers charles and james ollier, who had already published for shelley and who readily undertook the issue. the volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _to leigh hunt esqr_, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:-- glory and loveliness have pass'd away; for if we wander out in early morn, no wreathed incense do we see upborne into the east to meet the smiling day: no crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, in woven baskets bringing ears of corn, roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn the shrine of flora in her early may. but there are left delights as high as these, and i shall ever bless my destiny, that in a time when under pleasant trees pan is no longer sought, i feel a free, a leafy luxury, seeing i could please, with these poor offerings, a man like thee. with this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of all his circle, in the first days of march . footnotes: [ ] these drawings are preserved in the department of prints and drawings at the british museum. [ ] cowden clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was keats's first acquaintance with chaucer. he is certainly mistaken. it was on feb. , , that keats called and found him asleep as related in the text. within a week was published the volume of _poems_, with the principal piece, _sleep and poetry_, partly modelled on the _floure and the lefe_ itself and headed with a quotation from it. it is needless to add that later criticism does not admit _the floure and lefe_ into the canon of chaucer's works. chapter iv the 'poems' of spirit and chief contents of the volume--sonnets and rimed heroics--the chapman sonnet--the 'how many bards' sonnet--the sex-chivalry group--the leigh hunt group--the haydon pair--the leander sonnet--epistles--history of the 'heroic' couplet--the closed and free systems--marlowe--drayton--william browne--chapman and sandys--decay of the free system--william chamberlayne--milton and marvell--waller--katherine philips--dryden--pope and his ascendency--reaction: the brothers warton--symptoms of emancipation--coleridge, wordsworth and scott--leigh hunt and couplet reform--keats to mathew: influence of browne--_calidore_: influence of hunt--epistle to george keats--epistle to cowden clarke--_sleep and poetry_ and _i stood tiptoe_--analysis of _sleep and poetry_--double invocation--vision of the charioteer--battle-cry of the new poetry--its strength and weakness--challenge and congratulation--encouragements acknowledged--analysis of _i stood tiptoe_--intended induction to _endymion_--relation to elizabethans--relation to contemporaries--wordsworth and greek mythology--_tintern abbey_ and the three stages--contrasts of method--evocation _versus_ exposition. 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 , 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 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.[ ] 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 earlier[ ]:-- 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.[ ] 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 , ), 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 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 volume. among those excluded, he may well have thought the early attempts on the peace of , 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,[ ] 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 , , 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_.[ ] 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![ ] 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, ( ) 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 ( ):-- 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 , 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_ ( , ). 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 . 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.[ ] 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. ), 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. ) 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.[ ] _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 . _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,[ ] 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 ( ), coleridge in the luminous retrospect of the _biographia literaria_ ( ). 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).[ ] 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. ) 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. ). 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. footnotes: [ ] the lines i mean are-- this canopy mark: 'tis the work of a fay; beneath its rich shade did king oberon languish, when lovely titania was far, far away, and cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish. shakespeare's hint for his oberon and titania was taken, as is well known, from the french prose romance _huon of bordeaux_ translated by lord berners. the plot of wieland's celebrated poem is founded entirely on the same romance. with its high-spiced blend of the marvellous and the voluptuous, the cynically gay and the heavily moral and pathetic, it had a considerable vogue in sotheby's translation (published ) and played a part in the english romantic movement of the time. there are several passages in keats, notably in _the cap and bells_, where i seem to catch a strain reminiscent of this _oberon_, and one instance where a definite phrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory and been turned to gold, thus:-- oft in this speechless language, glance on glance, when mute the tongue, how voluble the heart! _oberon_, c. vi, st. . no utter'd syllable, or woe betide! but to her heart her heart was voluble. _the eve of st agnes_, st. . [ ] march according to woodhouse. [ ] _the prelude_, book v. [ ] see above, p. . [ ] particularly sonnet xii:-- voi che portate la sembianza umile, cogli occhi bassi mostrando dolore. it would have been easy to suppose that keats had learnt something of the _vita nuova_ through leigh hunt: but they were not yet acquainted when he wrote the leander sonnet, so that the resemblance is most likely accidental. [ ] in the earlier editions this sonnet is headed _on a picture of leander_. a note of woodhouse (houghton mss., transcripts iii) puts the matter right and gives the date. which particular leander gem of tassie's keats had before him it is impossible to tell. the general catalogue of tassie's reproductions gives a list of over sixty representing leander swimming either alone or with hero looking down at him from her tower. most of them were not from true antiques but from later imitations. [ ] here, for instance, are verses of keats that have often been charged with cockneyism and huntism:-- and revelled in a chat that ceased not when at nightfall among our books we got. the silence when some rimes are coming out, and when they're come, the very pleasant rout. well, but had not drayton written in his _epistle to henry reynolds_?-- my dearly lovèd friend how oft have we in winter evenings (meaning to be free) to some well-chosen place used to retire, and there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire, have past the hour contentedly with chat, now talked of this and then discoursed of that, spoke our own verses 'twixt ourselves, if not other men's lines, which we by chance had got. and milton in the _vacation exercise_?-- i have some lively thoughts that rove about, and loudly knock to have their passage out. [ ] it is to be remembered that in his famous volume of keats prints first the poem he had last written, _lamia_. [ ] so wordsworth in his famous sonnet:-- this sea that bares its bosom to the moon. [ ] in lord houghton's and nearly all editions of keats, including, i am sorry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite without cause, into the trite 'ugly cubs.' chapter v april-december : work on _endymion_ 'poems' fall flat--reviews by hunt and others--change of publishers--new friends: bailey and woodhouse--begins _endymion_ at carisbrooke--moves to margate--hazlitt and southey--hunt and haydon--ambition and self-doubt--stays at canterbury--joins brothers at hampstead--dilke and brown--visits bailey at oxford--work on _endymion_--bailey's testimony--talk on wordsworth--letters from oxford--to his sister fanny--to jane and j.h. reynolds--return to hampstead--friends at loggerheads--stays at burford bridge--correspondence--confessions--speculations--imagination and truth--composes various lyrics--'o love me truly'--'in drear-nighted december'--dryden and swinburne--_endymion_ finished--an autumnal close--return to hampstead. keats's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of cowden clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle. everyone of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a sensation in the literary world.' the magniloquent haydon words these expectations after his manner:--'i have read your _sleep and poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that _will_ follow.' sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. i have already quoted (p. ) one which reynolds, familiar with the contents of the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome it and at the same time to congratulate keats on his sonnet written in clarke's copy of the _floure and the lefe_. leigh hunt, always delighted to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the sonnet in which keats had dedicated the volume to him. richard woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to apollo, welcomed keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return to lighten the poetic darkness of the land:-- have these thy glories perish'd? or in scorn of thankless man hath thy race ceased to quire? o no! thou hear'st! for lo! the beamèd morn chases our night of song: and, from the lyre waking long dormant sounds, keats, thy last born, to the glad realm proclaims the coming of his sire. sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one has been found in the handwriting of charles ollier, and almost certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for keats's work. the brothers ollier, it will be remembered, were shelley's publishers, and for a while also leigh hunt's and lamb's, and charles was the poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer of some accomplishment in prose and verse. but in point of fact, outside the immediate leigh hunt circle, the volume made extremely little impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from its occupations or made tremble. 'alas!' continues cowden clarke, 'the book might have emerged in timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame and appreciation. the whole community as if by compact, seemed determined to know nothing about it.' clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. leigh hunt kept his own review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the just idea that praise from him might prejudice keats rather than serve him. at length it appeared, in three numbers of the _examiner_ for june and july, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the struggle. in the second and third notices hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap of such sights as youthful poets dream on summer eves by haunted stream.' two at least of the established critical reviews noticed the book at length, constable's _scots and edinburgh magazine_, and the _eclectic review_, the chief organ of lettered nonconformity, owned and edited by the busy dissenting poet and bookseller josiah conder. both criticisms are of the preaching and admonishing kind then almost universally in fashion. the scottish reviewer recognizes in the new poet a not wholly unsuccessful disciple of spenser, but warns him against 'the appalling doom which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly refinement,' and with reference to his association with the person and ideas of hazlitt and hunt declares that 'if mr keats does not forthwith cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears he might succeed.' the preachment of the _eclectic_ is still more pompous and superior. there are mild words of praise for some of the sonnets, but none for that on chapman's homer. _sleep and poetry_, declares the critic, would seem to show of the writer that 'he is indeed far gone, beyond the reach of the efficacy of either praise or censure, in affectation and absurdity. seriously, however, we regret that a young man of vivid imagination and fine talents should have fallen into so bad hands as to have been flattered into the resolution to publish verses, of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape from the remembrance.' notices such as this could not help a new writer to fame or his book to sale. but before they appeared keats and his brothers, or they for him, had begun to fret at the failure of the volume and to impute it, as authors and their friends will, to some mishandling by the publishers. george in john's absence wrote to the olliers taking them to task pretty roundly, and received the often-quoted reply drafted, let us hope, not by the sonneteer but by james ollier, his business brother, and alleging of the work that-- by far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take it back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it. in fact, it was only on saturday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who told us he considered it 'no better than a take in.' meanwhile keats had found other publishers ready to take up his next work, and destined to become his staunch and generous friends. these were messrs taylor and hessey of fleet street. john taylor, the chief partner, was a man of high character and considerable attainments, who had come up from nottinghamshire to open a business in london ten years earlier. he was already noted as an authority on junius and was to be a little later the editor as well as publisher of the _london magazine_, and the good friend and frequent entertainer (in the back parlour of the publishing house in fleet street) of his most distinguished contributors. how and through whom keats was introduced to his firm is not quite clear: probably through benjamin bailey, a new acquaintance whom we know to have been a friend of taylor's. bailey was an oxford man five years older than keats. he had been an undergraduate of trinity and was now staying up at magdalen hall to read for orders. he was an ardent student of poetry and general literature as well as of theology, a devout worshipper of milton, and scarcely less of wordsworth, with whom he had some personal acquaintance. of his appetite for books keats wrote when they had come to know each other well: 'i should not like to be pages in your way; when in a tolerably hungry mood you have no mercy. your teeth are the rock tarpeian down which you capsize epic poems like mad. i would not for forty shillings be coleridge's lays [i.e. _lay sermons_] in your way.' bailey was intimate with john hamilton reynolds and his family, and at this time a suitor for the hand of his sister marianne. in the course of the winter - reynolds had written to him enthusiastically of keats's poetical promise and personal charm. when at the beginning of march keats's volume came out, bailey was much struck, and on a visit to london called to make the new poet's acquaintance. though it was not until a few months later that this acquaintance ripened into close friendship, it may well have been bailey who recommended keats and taylor to each other. relations of business or friendship with taylor necessarily involved relations with richard woodhouse, a lettered and accomplished young solicitor of twenty-nine who was an intimate friend of taylor's and at this time apparently the regular reader and adviser to the firm. woodhouse was sprung from an old landed stock in herefordshire, some of whose members were now in the wine-trade (his father, it seems, was owner or part owner of the white hart at bath). he had been educated at eton but not at the university: his extant correspondence, as well as notes and version-books in his hand, show him to have been a good linguist in spanish and italian and a man of remarkably fine literary taste and judgment. he afterwards held a high position as a solicitor and was one of the founders of the law life insurance society. these three new friendships, with benjamin bailey, john taylor, and richard woodhouse, formed during the six weeks between the publication of his book (march ) and the mid-april following, turned out to be among the most valuable of keats's life, and were the best immediate results the issue of his first volume brought him. during this interval he and his brothers were lodging at cheapside, having left their old quarters in the poultry. some time in march it was decided, partly on haydon's urging, that john should for the sake of quiet and self-improvement go and spend some time by himself in the country, and try to get to work upon his great meditated _endymion_ poem. he writes as much to reynolds, concluding with an adaptation from falstaff expressive of anxiety for the health of some of those dear to him--probably his brother tom and james rice:-- my brothers are anxious that i should go by myself into the country--they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that i should be alone to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me continually for a great good which i hope will follow. so i shall soon be out of town. you must soon bring all your present troubles to a close, and so must i, but we must, like the fox, prepare for a fresh swarm of flies. banish money--banish sofas--banish wine--banish music; but right jack health, honest jack health, true jack health--banish health and banish all the world. on the th of april keats took the night mail for southampton, whence he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. by the th, 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 :-- i'll tell you what--on the d was shakespeare born. now if i should receive a letter from you, and another from my brothers on that day 'twould be a parlous good thing. whenever you write say a word or two on some passage in shakespeare that may have come rather new to you, which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same play forty times--for instance, the following from the tempest never struck me so forcibly as at present, urchins _shall, for the vast of night that they may work_, all exercise on thee-- how can i help bringing to your mind the line-- in the dark backward and abysm of time. i find i cannot exist without poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--i began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan i had become all in a tremble from not having written anything of late--the sonnet over-leaf did me good. i slept the better last night for it--this morning, however, i am nearly as bad again. just now i opened spenser, and the first lines i saw were these-- the noble heart that harbours virtuous thought, and is with child of glorious great intent, can never rest until it forth have brought th' eternal brood of glory excellent. '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':-- he is becoming uxorious in his second matrimonial connection; and though his false duessa has turned out a very witch, a murderess, a sorceress, perjured, and a harlot, drunk with insolence, mad with power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her ends--bringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train--infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her slaves--driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever she comes, mr southey sticks to her in spite of everything, and for very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in her ears, calls her little fondling names, religion, morality, and social order, takes for his motto, be to her faults a little blind, be to her virtues very kind-- sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because she keeps him, and he is down in her will. faugh! 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. i have asked myself so often why i should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is,... that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment that the other day i nearly consented with myself to drop into a phaeton ... i see nothing but continual uphill journeying. now is there anything more unpleasant than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last? but i intend to whistle all those cogitations into the sea, where i hope they will breed storms enough to block up all exit from russia. does shelley go on telling strange stories of the deaths of kings?[ ] tell him there are strange stories of the deaths of poets. some have died before they were conceived. 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. never despair, he goes on, while the path is open to you. by habitual exercise you will have habitual intercourse and constant companionship; and at every want turn to the great star of your hopes with a delightful confidence that will never be disappointed. i love you like my own brother: 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. i wish you would come up to town for a day or two that i may put your head in my picture. i have rubbed in wordsworth's, and advanced the whole. god bless you, my dear keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read shakespeare, and trust in providence, and you will do, you must. 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 th 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 , 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. i was delighted with the naturalness and simplicity of his character, and was at once drawn to him by his winning and indeed affectionate manner towards those with whom he was himself pleased. nor was his personal appearance the least charm of a first acquaintance with the young poet. he bore, along with the strong impress of genius, much beauty of feature and countenance. his hair was beautiful--a fine brown, rather than auburn, i think, and if you placed your hand upon his head, the silken curls felt like the rich plumage of a bird. the eye was full and fine, and softened into tenderness, or beamed with a fiery brightness, according to the current of his thoughts and conversation. indeed the form of his head was like that of a fine greek statue:--and he realized to my mind the youthful apollo, more than any head of a living man whom i have known. at the commencement of the long vacation i was again in london, on my way to another part of the country: and it was my intention to return to oxford early in the vacation for the purpose of reading. i saw much of keats. and i invited him to return with me to oxford, and spend as much time as he could afford with me in the silence and solitude of that beautiful place during the absence of the numerous members and students of the university. he accepted my offer, and we returned together. i think in august . it was during this visit, and in my room, that he wrote the third book of _endymion_.... his mode of composition is best described by recounting our habits of study for one day during the month he visited me at oxford. he wrote, and i read, sometimes at the same table, and sometimes at separate desks or tables, from breakfast to the time of our going out for exercise,--generally two or three o'clock. he sat down to his task,--which was about lines a day,--with his paper before him, and wrote with as much regularity, and apparently as much ease, as he wrote his letters.... sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often: and he would make it up another day. but he never forced himself. when he had finished his writing for the day, he usually read it over to me: and he read or wrote letters until we went for a walk. this was our habit day by day. the rough manuscript was written off daily, and with few erasures. i remember very distinctly, though at this distance of time, his reading of a few passages; and i almost think i hear his voice, and see his countenance. most vivid is my recollection of the following passage of the finest affecting story of the old man, glaucus, which he read to me immediately after its composition:-- the old man raised his hoary head and saw the wildered stranger--seeming not to see, the features were so lifeless. suddenly he woke as from a trance; his snow white brows went arching up, _and like two magic ploughs furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large, which kept as fixedly as rocky marge, till round his withered lips had gone a smile._ the lines i have italicised, are those which then forcibly struck me as peculiarly fine, and to my memory have 'kept as fixedly as rocky marge.' i remember his upward look when he read of the 'magic ploughs,' which in his hands have turned up so much of the rich soil of fairyland. when we had finished our studies for the day we took our walk, and sometimes boated on the isis.... once we took a longer excursion of a day or two, to stratford upon avon, to visit the birthplace of shakespeare. we went of course to the house visited by so many thousands of all nations of europe, and inscribed our names in addition to the 'numbers numberless' of those which literally blackened the walls. we also visited the church, and were pestered with a commonplace showman of the place.... he was struck, i remember, with the simple statue there, which, though rudely executed, we agreed was most probably the best likeness of the many extant, but none very authentic, of shakespeare. his enjoyment was of that genuine, quiet kind which was a part of his gentle nature; deeply feeling what he truly enjoyed, but saying little. on our return to oxford we renewed our quiet mode of life, until he finished the third book of _endymion_, and the time came that we must part; and i never parted with one whom i had known so short a time, with so much real regret and personal affection, as i did with john keats, when he left oxford for london at the end of september or the beginning of october . [illustration: pl. iv _life-mask of keats from an electrotype in the national portrait gallery_] living as we did for a month or six weeks together (for i do not remember exactly how long) i knew him at that period of his life, perhaps as well as any one of his friends. there was no reserve of any kind between us.... his brother george says of him that to his brothers his temper was uncertain; and he himself confirms this judgment of him in a beautiful passage of a letter to myself. but with his friends, a sweeter tempered man i never knew. gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit. quite the contrary. 'he was gentle but not fearful,' in the chivalric and moral sense of the term 'gentle.' he was pleased with every thing that occurred in the ordinary mode of life, and a cloud never passed over his face, except of indignation at the wrongs of others. his conversation was very engaging. he had a sweet toned voice, 'an excellent thing' in _man_ as well as 'in woman....' in his letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. it appeared not in his conversation. on the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor, frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man i ever knew, especially for the faults of his friends. but if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation. he had a truly poetic feeling for women; and he often spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection. he had a soul of noble integrity: and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. indeed his character was in the best sense manly. our conversation rarely or never flagged, during our walks, or boatings, or in the evening. and i have retained a few of his opinions on literature and criticism which i will detail. the following passage from wordsworth's ode on immortality was deeply felt by keats, who however at this time seemed to me to value this great poet rather in particular passages than in the full-length portrait, as it were, of the great imaginative and philosophic christian poet, which he really is, and which keats obviously, not long afterwards, felt him to be. not for these i raise the song of thanks and praise; but for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, fallings from us, vanishings; blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, _high instincts, before which our mortal nature_ did tremble like a guilty thing surprized. the last lines he thought were quite awful in their application to a guilty finite creature, like man, in the appalling nature of the feeling which they suggested to a thoughtful mind. again, we often talked of that noble passage in the lines on _tintern abbey_:-- that blessed mood, in which _the burthen of the mystery_, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened. and his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.--but in those exquisite stanzas, she dwelt among the untrodden ways, beside the springs of dove, ending,-- she lived unknown and few could know when lucy ceased to be; but she is in her grave, and oh, _the difference to me_. the simplicity of the last line he declared to be the most perfect pathos. among the qualities of high poetic promise in keats was, even at this time, his correct taste. i remember to have been struck with this by his remarks on that well known and often quoted passage of the _excursion_ upon the greek mythology--where it is said that 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_. keats said this description of apollo should have ended at the 'golden lute,' and have left it to the imagination to complete the picture, _how_ he 'filled the illumined groves.' i think every man of taste will feel the justice of the remark. every one now knows what was then known to his friends that keats was an ardent admirer of chatterton. the melody of the verses of the marvellous boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of _endymion_. methinks i now hear him recite, or _chant_, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the roundelay sung by the minstrels of ella:-- _come with acorn cup and thorn_ drain my hertys blood away; life and all its good i scorn; dance by night or feast by day. the first line to his ear possessed the great charm. indeed his sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; and in none more than in numerous passages of his _endymion_. another object of his enthusiastic admiration was the homeric character of achilles--especially when he is described as 'shouting in the trenches.' one of his favourite topics of discourse was the principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions, particularly in the management of open and close vowels. i think i have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to mr wordsworth. but i do not remember his laying it down in writing. be this as it may, keats's theory was worked out by himself. it was, that the vowels should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear the melody,--and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing notes of music to prevent monotony....[ ] 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 th 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:-- let us now begin a regular question and answer--a little pro and con; letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favourite little wants and enjoyments, that i may meet them in a way befitting a brother. we have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that i know not whether you prefer the _history of king pepin_ to bunyan's _pilgrim's progress_--or _cinderella_ and her glass slipper to moor's _almanack_. however in a few letters i hope i shall be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your pleasure. you must tell me about all you read if it be only six pages in a week and this transmitted to me every now and then will procure full sheets of writing from me pretty frequently.--this i feel as a necessity for we ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that i may not only, as you grow up love you as my only sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend. when i saw you last i told you of my intention of going to oxford and 'tis now a week since i disembark'd from his whipship's coach the defiance in this place. i am living in magdalen hall on a visit to a young man with whom i have not been long acquainted, but whom i like very much--we lead very industrious lives--he in general studies and i in proceeding at a pretty good rate with a poem which i hope you will see early in the next year.--perhaps you might like to know what i am writing about. i will tell you. many years ago there was a young handsome shepherd who fed his flocks on a mountain's side called latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a person and lived solitary among the trees and plains little thinking that such a beautiful creature as the moon was growing mad in love with him.--however so it was; and when he was asleep on the grass she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of that high mountain latmus while he was a dreaming--but i dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful tales which have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful greece. if you have not let me know and i will tell you more at large of others quite as delightful. this oxford i have no doubt is the finest city in the world--it is full of old gothic buildings--spires--towers--quadrangles--cloisters--groves etc and is surrounded with more clear streams than ever i saw together. i take a walk by the side of one of them every evening and, thank god, we have not had a drop of rain these days. 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:-- now fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--you need not do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it be a diary of your life. you will preserve all my letters and i will secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and god knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come. 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:-- now let us turn to the sea-shore. believe me, my dear jane, it is a great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year, winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. in truth, the great elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the air is our robe of state--the earth is our throne and the sea a mighty minstrel playing before it--able, like david's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life. i have found in the ocean's music,--varying (tho' self-same) more than the passion of timotheus, an enjoyment not to be put into words; and, 'though inland far i be,' i now hear the voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your sensations. to reynolds keats writes on september the st:-- for these last five or six days, we have had regularly a boat on the isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eye-lashes. we sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened 'reynolds's cove,' in which we have read wordsworth, and talked as may be; i think i see you and hunt meeting in the pit.--what a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. what evenings we might pass with him, could we have him from mrs h. failings i am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a level. 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 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 th, 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 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:-- 'or have ye chosen this place after the toil of battle to repose your wearied virtue, for the ease you find to slumber here, as in the vales of heaven?' there is cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. the english word is of the happiest chance. milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great poet. it is a sort of delphic abstraction--a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a mist. the next mention of vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of poetry:-- 'others, more mild, retreated in a silent valley, sing with notes angelical to many a harp their own heroic deeds and hapless fall by doom of battle.' how much of the charm is in the valley! 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 nd, '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 , 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:-- you perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away--i scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--i look not for it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the moment. the setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, i take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. the first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this--'well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his spirit'--and i beg now, my dear bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for i assure you i sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or affection during a whole week--and so long this sometimes continues, i begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times--thinking them a few barren tragedy tears. 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:[ ] 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.[ ] 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. there is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for regret. keats speaks of 'the little song i sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters.' such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which keats in his letter tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so much less a master. of 'my last,' that is of his preceding letter to bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none of keats's preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this one. his words have a further interest as proving that now in these days of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages he had not done. external testimony and reasonable inference enable us to identify some of these experiments. two or three lightish love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by passing adventures of his own, are among the number. that beginning 'think not of it, sweet one, so,' dates definitely from november , before he left hampstead. to nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily finished stanzas 'unfelt, unheard, unseen,' which one at least of keats's subtlest critics[ ] considers (i cannot agree with her) the first of his technically faultless achievements. so also, i am convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning-- you say you love, but with a voice chaster than a nun's who singeth the soft vespers to herself when the chime-bell ringeth-- o love me truly! you say you love; but with a smile cold as sunrise in september, as you were st cupid's nun, and kept his week of ember. o love me truly!-- and so forth. here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an echo from one of the old elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous song-writer) lingering like a chime in keats's memory. listen to the first three stanzas of _a proper wooing song_, written to the tune of the _merchant's daughter_ and printed in clement robinson's _handful of pleasant delites_, :-- maide will ye loue me yea or no? tell me the trothe and let me go. it can be no lesse than a sinful deed, trust me truly, to linger a louer that lookes to speede, in due time duly. you maides that thinke yourselves as fine, as venus and all the muses nine: the father himselfe when he first made man, trust me truly, made you for his helpe when the world began, in due time duly. then sith god's will was even so why should you disdaine your louer tho? but rather with a willing heart, loue him truly; for in so doing you do your part let reason rule ye. the metrical form of keats's verses is not, indeed, the same as that of the elizabethan song, but i think he must certainly have had the cadence of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind's ear.[ ] a definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to keats at this time by an older model is the famous little 'drear-nighted december' song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery, the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of past happiness. this was composed, as woodhouse on the express testimony of jane reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same december, , when keats was finishing _endymion_ at burford bridge. any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the mole, will realize how deeply the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into keats's verse. well as the piece is known, i shall quote it entire, not in the form in which it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends woodhouse and brown[ ]:-- in drear-nighted december, too happy, happy tree, thy branches ne'er remember their green felicity: the north cannot undo them, with a sleety whistle through them; nor frozen thawings glue them from budding at the prime. in drear-nighted december, too happy, happy brook, thy bubblings ne'er remember apollo's summer look; but with a sweet forgetting, they stay their crystal fretting, never, never petting about the frozen time. ah! would 'twere so with many a gentle girl and boy! but were there ever any writh'd not at passed joy? the feel of _not_ to feel it, when there is none to heal it, nor numbed sense to steel it, was never said in rhyme.[ ] keats's model in this instance is a song from dryden's _spanish fryar_, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from bailey's shelves, as he took the poems of orinda? here is a verse to show the tune as set by dryden:-- farewell ungrateful traitor, farewell my perjured swain, let never injured creature believe a man again. the pleasure of possessing surpasses all expressing, but 'tis too short a blessing, and love too long a pain. do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,--do readers recall what mr swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the _garden of proserpine_? but in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months' task upon _endymion_. in finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at carisbrooke:-- many and many a verse i hope to write, before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, i must be near the middle of my story. o may no wintry season, bare and hoary, see it half finish'd: but let autumn bold, with universal tinge of sober gold, be all about me when i make an end. the gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which keats makes endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted december' lyric:-- the carian no word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan, into the vallies green together went. far wandering, they were perforce content to sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree; nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves. and again:-- at this he press'd his hands against his face, and then did rest his head upon a mossy hillock green, and so remain'd as he a corpse had been all the long day; save when he scantly lifted his eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted with the slow move of time,--sluggish and weary until the poplar tops, in journey dreary, had reach'd the river's brim. then up he rose, and slowly as that very river flows, walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament: 'why such a golden eve? the breeze is sent careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall before the serene father of them all bows down his summer head below the west. now am i of breath, speech, and speed possest, but at the setting i must bid adieu to her for the last time. night will strew on the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves, and with them shall i die; nor much it grieves to die, when summer dies on the cold sward.' that point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. the sun sets early in this valley in the winter. i know not if there is any group of trees still standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow to the river's edge. opposite the last line in the manuscript of _endymion_ keats wrote the date november , whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. he did not immediately leave burford bridge, but stayed on through the first week or ten days of december, setting to work at once, it would appear, on the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the 'drear-nighted december' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at hampstead. the scheme of a winter flight to lisbon for the suffering tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that george should take him to spend some months at teignmouth. they were to be there by christmas, and keats timed his return so as to be with them for a week or two at hampstead before they started. _endymion_ was not published until the following april, but inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain, experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of keats's mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it. footnotes: [ ] 'sad stories' in the original text of _richard ii_. the allusion is to the well-known incident of shelley alarming an old lady in a stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. whether keats had been in his company at the time we do not know. [ ] 'our friend' of course is leigh hunt. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] _paradise lost_, viii, - . [ ] _ibid._ viii, - . [ ] the late precociously gifted and prematurely lost mary suddard, in _essays and studies_ (cambridge, ). [ ] if it is objected that _the handful of pleasant delites_ is an excessively rare book, which keats is not likely to have known, the answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier in _heliconia_, the great three-volume collection edited by thomas park; and moreover that park, one of the most zealous and learned of researchers in the field of old english literature, had long been living in church row, hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to dilke and his circle. [ ] crewe mss. [ ] this poem was first printed posthumously in : both in _the gem_, a periodical of the _keepsake_ type then edited by thomas hood, and in galignani's collective edition of the poems of coleridge, shelley, and keats published the same year in paris. in these and all versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas i and ii are altered and read 'in a drear-nighted december,' and the fifth line is made to run, 'to know the change and feel it.' the first line thus gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress, giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly does not hurt the metre. the new fifth line is to modern ears more elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive form 'feel' for feeling. but 'feel,' which after all had been good enough for horace walpole and fanny burney, was to keats and the leigh hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day usage both in verse and prose. and does not the correction somewhat blunt the point of keats's meaning? to be emphatically aware of no longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a 'change' seems neither so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. it may be doubted whether the alterations are due to keats at all and not to someone (conceivably, in the case of _the gem_, thomas hood) editing him after his death. i should add, however, that i have found what must perhaps be regarded as evidence that keats did try various versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript made in by a brother of his friend woodhouse. in this version the poem is headed _pain of memory_, an apt title, and while the first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs quite differently, as follows:-- but in the soul's december the fancy backward strays, and darkly doth remember the hue of golden days, in woe the thought appalling of bliss gone past recalling brings o'er the heart a falling not to be told in rhyme. this can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by keats himself. the 'fallings from us, vanishings' of wordsworth's _ode on intimations of immortality_, may be responsible for the 'falling' in the seventh line, and though 'the thought appalling' is a common-place phrase little in keats's manner, it is worth noting that the word occurs in bailey's report of his spoken comment on this very passage of wordsworth (see above, p. ). chapter vi _endymion._--i. the story: its sources, plan, and symbolism invention and imagination--what the moon meant to keats--elizabethan precedents--fletcher and drayton--drayton's two versions--debt of keats to drayton--strain of allegory--the soul's quest for beauty--phantasmagoric adventures--the four elements theory--its error--book i. the exordium--the forest scene--confession to peona--her expostulation--endymion's defence--the ascending scale--the highest hope--book ii. the praise of love--underworld marvels--the awakening of adonis--embraces in the jasmine bower--the quest renewed--new sympathies awakened--book iii. exordium--encounter with glaucus--glaucus relates his doom--the predestined deliverer--the deliverance--meaning of the parable--its machinery explained--the happy sequel--book iv. address to the muse--the indian damsel--an ethereal flight--olympian visions--descent and renunciation--distressful farewells--the mystery solved--a chastened victory--above analysis justified. 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 , 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 , 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:-- as to what you say about my being a poet, i can return no answer but by saying that the high idea i have of poetical fame makes me think i see it towering too high above me. at any rate, i have no right to talk until _endymion_ is finished, it will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed--by which i must make lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry--and when i consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame--it makes me say--god forbid that i should be without such a task! i have heard hunt say, and i may be asked--why endeavour after a long poem? to which i should answer, do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading.... besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which i take to be the polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails--and imagination the rudder.--did our great poets ever write short pieces? i mean in the shape of tales. this same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a poetical excellence--but enough of this, i put on no laurels till i shall have finished _endymion_, and i hope apollo is not angered at my having made a mockery at hunt's-- 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 endymion[ ] 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_;[ ] 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 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 (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 lines[ ] 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.[ ] 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.[ ] 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.[ ] 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 , 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.'[ ] 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, ) 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.[ ] 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. ). 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:[ ] 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 shell[ ] 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.[ ] 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. footnotes: [ ] in the old grecian world, the endymion myth, or rather an endymion myth, for like other myths it had divers forms, was rooted deeply in the popular traditions both of elis in the peloponnese, and of the ionian cities about the latmian gulf in caria. the central feature of the carian legend was the nightly descent of the moon-goddess seléné to kiss her lover, the shepherd prince endymion, where he lay spell-bound, by the grace of zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on mount latmos. this legend was early crystallized in a lyric poem of sappho now lost, and thereafter became part of the common heritage of greek and roman popular mythology. the separate moon-goddess, seléné for the greeks and luna for the romans, got merged in course of time in the multiform divinities of the greek artemis and the roman diana respectively; so that in modern literatures derived from the latin it is always of diana (or what is the same thing, of cynthia or phoebe) that the tale is told. it is not given at length in any of our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the poets, as theocritus, apollonius rhodius, and ovid, and in cicero and some of the late greek prose-writers, as lucian, apollodorus, and pausanias. from these it passed at the renaissance into the current european stock of classical imagery and reference. [ ] in another place, browne makes endymion shut out from the favour of cynthia stand figuratively for raleigh in disgrace with elizabeth: just as in lyly's comedy the myth had been turned into an allegory of contemporary court intrigue, with elizabeth for cynthia, leicester for endymion, tellus for mary queen of scots, eumenides for sidney, and so forth. [ ] _endymion_, iii. - . [ ] _endymion_, ii. - and - . [ ] _metam._ i. - , englished thus by sandys:-- forthwith upsprung the quick and weightless fire, whose flames unto the highest arch aspire: the next, in levity and peace, is air: gross elements to thicker earth repair self-clogg'd with weight: the waters flowing round possess the last, and solid tellus bound. [ ] keats was more widely read in out-of-the-way french literature than could have been expected from his opportunities, and there are passages in _endymion_ which run closely parallel to gombauld's romance, notably the first apparition of cynthia, with the description of her hair (_end._ i, - ), and the account of the sudden distaste which afterwards seizes him for former pleasures and companions. but these may be mere coincidences, and the whole series of the hero's subsequent adventures according to gombauld, his dream-flight to the caspian under the spell of the thessalian enchantress ismene, and all the weird things that befall him there, are entirely unlike anything that happens in keats's poem. [ ] the authority for this story is the late sir b. w. richardson, professing to quote verbatim as follows from mr stephens' own statement to him in conversation. 'one evening in the twilight, the two students sitting together, stephens at his medical studies, keats at his dreaming, keats breaks out to stephens that he has composed a new line:-- a thing of beauty is a constant joy. "what think you of that, stephens?" "it has the true ring, but is wanting in some way," replies the latter, as he dips once more into his medical studies. an interval of silence, and again the poet:-- a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. "what think you of that, stephens?" "that it will live for ever."' the conversation as thus related at second hand reads certainly as though it had been more or less dressed up for effect, but we cannot suppose the circumstance to have been wholly invented. a careful reading of the first twenty-four lines of _endymion_ will show that they have close affinities with much both in _sleep and poetry_ and '_i stood tip-toe_' in thought as well as style, and especially in their manner of bringing together, by reason of the common property of beauty, things otherwise so unlike as the cloak of weeds which rivulets are conceived as making to keep themselves cool in summertime (compare '_i stood tip-toe_' ii. - ) musk-roses in a woodland brake (compare _sleep and poetry_ i. ), the life of great spirits after death, and beautiful stories in general. my own inference is that keats, having written these two dozen lines some time in , used them the next spring as a suitable exordium for _endymion_, and added the following lines, - , as a (somewhat clumsy) transition to the actual beginning of the poem 'therefore with full happiness,' etc., as written at carisbrooke. [ ] there is a certain, though slight enough, resemblance between some of these underground incidents and those which happen in a romance of travel, which keats may very well have read, the _voyage d'anténor_, then popular both in france and in an english translation. anténor is permitted by the egyptian priests to pass through the triple ordeal by fire, water, and air contrived by them in the vast subterranean vaults under the temple of osiris. the points of most resemblance are the suspended guiding light seen from within the entrance, the rushing of the water streams, and the ascent by a path between balustrades. the _voyage d'anténor_ was itself founded on an earlier and much rarer french romance, _sethos_, and both were freely and avowedly imitated by thomas moore in his prose tale, the _epicurean_ ( ). mr robert bridges has noticed a point in common between _endymion_ and the _epicurean_ in the sudden breaking off or crumbling away of the balustrade under the wayfarer's feet. this does not occur in _sethos_ or _anténor_, and was probably borrowed by moore from keats. [ ] how familiar, both with the text and the translator's commentary, is proved by his adopting as his own, almost literally, a phrase which sandys brings in by way of illustrative comment from the _imagines_ (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of philostratus. philostratus, coming to a picture of glaucus, tells how the painter had given him 'thick and arched eyebrows which touched one another.' keats writes,-- his snow-white brows _went arching up_, and like two magic ploughs furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large. it was the look and expression of keats in reciting this same phrase, the reader will remember, which so struck bailey that he found himself vividly recalling it thirty years later (see above, p. ). [ ] mr mackail sees in this shell and its secret characters a reminiscence of the mystic shell, which is also a book, carried in the right hand of the sheikh who is also don quixote in the dream narrated by wordsworth in the third book of _the prelude_. i owe so very much of the interpretation above attempted to mr mackail that i am bound to record his opinion: but as i shall show later (p. ), it is scarcely possible that any passages from _the prelude_ should have come to keats's knowledge until after _endymion_ was finished. [ ] ovid, _metam._ xiii, - ; theocr. _idyll_. xi, _sqq._ chapter vii _endymion._--ii. the poetry: its qualities and affinities revival of elizabethan usages--avoidance of closed couplets--true metrical instincts--an example--rime too much his master--lax use of words--flaws of taste and training--faults and beauties inseparable--homage to the moon--a parallel from drayton--examples of nature-poetry--nature and the greek spirit--greek mythology revitalized--its previous deadness--poetry of love and war--dramatic promise--comparison with models--sandys's _ovid--hymn to pan_: chapman--ben jonson--the hymn in _endymion_--'a pretty piece of paganism'--song of the indian maiden--the triumph of bacchus--a composite: its sources--english scenery and detail--influence of wordsworth--influence of shelley--_endymion_ and _alastor_--correspondences and contrasts--_hymn to intellectual beauty_--shelley on _endymion_--keats and clarence's dream--shelley a borrower--shelley and the rimed couplet. throughout the four books of _endymion_ we find keats still working, more even than in his epistles and meditations of the year before, under the spell of elizabethan and early jacobean poetry. spenser and the spenserians, foremost among them william browne; drayton in his pastorals and elegies; shakespeare, especially in his early poems and comedies; fletcher and ben jonson in pastoral and lyrical work like _the faithful shepherdess_ or _the sad shepherd_; chapman's version of homer, especially the _odyssey_ and the _hymns_, and sandys's of the _metamorphoses_ of ovid; these are the masters and the models of whom we feel his mind and ear to be full. in their day the english language had been to a large extent unfixed, and in their instinctive efforts to enrich and expand and supple it, poets had enjoyed a wide range of freedom both in maintaining old and in experimenting with new usages. many of the liberties they used were renounced by the differently minded age which followed them, and the period from the restoration, roughly speaking, to the middle years of george iii had in matters of literary form and style been one of steadily tightening restriction and convention. then ensued the period of expansion, in which wordsworth and coleridge and scott had been the most conspicuous leaders, each after his manner, in reconquering the freedom of poetry. other innovators had followed suit, including leigh hunt in that slippered, sentimental, italianate fashion of his own. and now came young keats, not following closely along the paths opened by any of these, though closer to leigh hunt than to the others, but making a deliberate return to certain definite and long abandoned usages of the english poets during the illustrious half century from - . he chose the heroic couplet, and in handling it reversed the settled practice of more than a century. he was even more sedulous than any of his elizabethan or jacobean masters to achieve variety of pause and movement by avoiding the regular beat of the closed couplet; while in framing his style he did not scruple to revive all or nearly all those licences of theirs which the intervening age had disallowed. there was a special rashness in his attempt considering the slightness of his own critical equipment, and considering also the strength of the long riveted fetters which he undertook to break and the charges of affectation and impertinence which such a revival of obsolete metrical and verbal usages--the marks of what pope had denounced as 'our rustic vein and splay-foot verse'--was bound to bring against him. first of his revolutionary treatment of the metre. he no longer uses double or feminine endings, as in his epistles of the year before, with a profusion like that of _britannia's pastorals_. they occur, but in moderation, hardly more than a score of them in any one of the four books. at the beginning he tries often, but afterwards gives up, an occasional trick of the elizabethan and earlier poets in riming on the unstressed second syllables of words such as 'dancing' (rimed with 'string'), 'elbow' (with 'slow'), 'velvet' (with 'set'), 'purplish' (with 'fish'). on the other hand he regularly resolves the 'tion' or 'shion' termination into its full two syllables, the last carrying the rime, as--'with speed of five-tailed exhalations:' 'before the deep intoxication;' 'vanish'd in elemental passion;' and the like. he admits closed couplets, but very grudgingly, as a general rule in the proportion of not more than one to eight or ten of the unclosed. he seldom allows himself even so much of a continuous run of them as this:-- moreover, through the dancing poppies stole a breeze most softly lulling to my soul; and shaping visions all about my sight of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light; the which became more strange, and strange, and dim, and then were gulph'd in a tumultuous swim: or this:-- so in that crystal place, in silent rows, poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes.-- the stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac'd such thousands of shut eyes in order plac'd; such ranges of white feet, and patient lips all ruddy,--for here death no blossom nips. he mark'd their brows and foreheads; saw their hair put sleekly on one side with nicest care. the essential principle of his versification is to let sentences, prolonged and articulated as freely and naturally as in prose, wind their way in and out among the rimes, the full pause often splitting a couplet by falling at the end of the first line, and oftener still (in the proportion of two or three times to one) breaking up a single line in the middle or at any point of its course. sense and sound flow habitually over from one couplet to the next without logical or grammatical pause, but to keep the sense of metre present to the ear keats commonly takes care that the second line of a couplet shall end with a fully stressed rime-word such as not only allows, but actually invites, at least a momentary breathing-pause to follow it. it is only in the rarest cases that he compels the breath to hurry on with no chance of stress or after-rest from a light preposition at the end of a line to its object at the beginning of the next ('on | his left,' 'upon | a dreary morning'), or from an auxiliary to its verb ('as might be | remembered') or from a comparative particle to the thing compared ('sleeker than | night-swollen mushrooms'); a practice in which chapman, ben jonson, fletcher, and their contemporaries indulged, as we have seen, freely, and which afterwards developed into a fatal disease of the metre. keats's musical and metrical instincts were too fine, and his ear too early trained in the 'sweet-slipping' movement of spenser, to let him fall often into this fault. to the other besetting fault of some of these masters, that of a harsh and jolting ruggedness, he was still less prone. although he chooses to forgo that special effect of combined vigour and smoothness proper to the closed couplet, he always knows how to make a rich and varied music with his vowel sounds; while the same fine natural instinct for sentence-structure as distinguishes the prose of his letters makes itself felt in his verse, so that wherever he has need to place a full stop he can make his sentence descend upon it smoothly and skimmingly, like a seabird on the sea.[ ] the long passage quoted from book iii in the last chapter illustrates the narrative verse of _endymion_ in nearly all its moods and variations. here is a characteristic example of its spoken or dramatic verse. endymion supplicates his goddess from underground:-- o haunter chaste of river sides, and woods, and heathy waste, where with thy silver bow and arrows keen art thou now forested? o woodland queen, what smoothest air thy smoother forehead woos? where dost thou listen to the wide halloos of thy disparted nymphs? through what dark tree glimmers thy crescent? wheresoe'er it be, 'tis in the breath of heaven: thou dost taste freedom as none can taste it, nor dost waste thy loveliness in dismal elements; but, finding in our green earth sweet contents, there livest blissfully. ah, if to thee it feels elysian, how rich to me, an exil'd mortal, sounds its pleasant name! within my breast there lives a choking flame-- o let me cool't the zephyr-boughs among! a homeward fever parches up my tongue-- o let me slake it at the running springs! upon my ear a noisy nothing rings-- o let me once more hear the linnet's note! before mine eyes thick films and shadows float-- o let me 'noint them with the heaven's light! dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white? o think how sweet to me the freshening sluice! dost thou now please thy thirst with berry-juice? o think how this dry palate would rejoice! if in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice, o think how i should love a bed of flowers!-- the first fifteen lines of the above are broken and varied much in keats's usual way: in the following fourteen it is to be noted how he throws the speaker's alternate complaints of his predicament and prayers for release from it not into twinned but into split or parted couplets, making each prayer rime not with the complaint which calls it forth but with the new complaint which is to follow it: a bold and to my ear a happy sacrifice of obvious rhetorical effect to his predilection for the suspended or delayed rime-echo. rime is to some poets a stiff and grudging but to others an officious servant, over-active in offering suggestions to the mind; and no poet is rightly a master until he has learnt how to sift those suggestions, rejecting many and accepting only the fittest. keats in _endymion_ has not reached nor come near reaching this mastery: in the flush and eagerness of composition he is content to catch at almost any and every suggestion of the rime, no matter how far-fetched and irrelevant. he had a great fore-runner in this fault in chapman, who constantly, especially in the _iliad_, wrenches into his text for the rime's sake ideas that have no kind of business there. take the passage justly criticized by bailey at the beginning of the third book:-- there are who lord it o'er their fellow-men with most prevailing tinsel: who unpen their baaing vanities, to browse away the comfortable green and juicy hay from human pastures; or, o torturing fact! who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. with not one tinge of sanctuary splendour, not a sight able to face an owl's, they still are dight by the blear-ey'd nations in empurpled vests, and crowns, and turbans. here it is obviously the need of a rime to 'men' that has suggested the word 'unpen' and the clumsy imagery of the 'baaing sheep' which follows, while the inappropriate and almost meaningless 'tinge of sanctuary splendour' lower down has been imported for the sake of the foxes with fire-brands tied to their tails which 'singe' the metaphorical corn-sheaves (they come from the story of samson in the book of judges). milder cases abound, as this of circe tormenting her victims:-- appealing groans from their poor breasts went sueing to her ear in vain; _remorseless as an infant's bier_ she whisk'd against their eyes the sooty oil. does yonder thrush, schooling its half-fledg'd little ones to brush about the dewy forest, whisper tales. speak not of grief, young stranger, or _cold snails will slime the rose to-night_. he rose: he grasp'd his stole, with convuls'd clenches waving it abroad, and in a voice of solemn joy, _that aw'd echo into oblivion_, he said:-- yet hourly had he striven to hide the cankering venom, that had _riven_ his fainting recollections. the wanderer holding his forehead to keep off the _burr_ of smothering fancies. endymion! the cave is secreter than the isle of delos. echo hence shall _stir_ no sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise of thy combing hand, the while it travelling _cloys_ and trembles through my labyrinthine hair. in some of these cases the trouble is, not that the rime drags in a train of far-fetched or intrusive ideas, but only that words are used for the rime's sake in inexact and inappropriate senses. such laxity in the employment of words is one of the great weaknesses of keats's style in _endymion_, and is no doubt partly connected with his general disposition to treat language as though it were as free and fluid in his own day as it had been two hundred years earlier. the same disposition makes him reckless in turning verbs into nouns (a 'complain,' an 'exclaim,' a 'shine,' a 'pierce,' a 'quell') and nouns into verbs (to 'throe,' to 'passion,' to 'monitor,' to 'fragment up'); in using at his convenience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as active; and in not only reviving archaic participial forms ('dight,' 'fight,' 'raft,' etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the class coleridge denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd,' 'gordian'd,' 'mountain'd,' 'phantasy'd'), as well as to adjectives borrowed from elizabethan use or new-minted more or less in accordance with it ('pipy,' 'paly,' 'ripply,' 'sluicy,' 'slumbery,' 'towery,' 'bowery,' 'orby,' 'nervy,' 'surgy,' 'sparry,' 'spangly).' it was these and such like technical liberties with language which scandalized conservative critics, and caused even de quincey, becoming tardily acquainted with keats's work, to dislike and utterly under-rate it. he himself came before long to condemn the style of 'the slipshod endymion.' nevertheless the consequence of his experiments in reviving or imitating the usages of the great renaissance age of english poetry is only in part to be regretted. his rashness led him into almost as many felicities as faults, and the examples of the happier liberties in _endymion_ has done much towards enriching the vocabulary and diction of english poetry in the nineteenth century. other faults that more gravely mar the poem are not technical but spiritual: intimate failures of taste and feeling due partly to mere rawness and inexperience, partly to excessive intensity and susceptibility of temperament, partly to second-rateness of social training and association. a habit of cloying over-luxuriance in description, the giving way to a sort of swooning abandonment of the senses in contact with the 'deliciousness' of things, is the most besetting of such faults. allied with it is keats's treatment of love as an actuality, which in this poem is in unfortunate and distasteful contrast with his high conception of love in the abstract as the inspiring and ennobling power of the world and all things in it. add the propensity to make glaucus address scylla as 'timid thing!' and endymion beg for 'one gentle squeeze' from his indian maiden, with many a like turn in the simpering, familiar mood which keats at this time had caught from or naturally shared with leigh hunt. it should, however, be noted as a mark of progress in self-criticism that, comparing the drafts of the poem with the printed text, we find that in revising it for press he had turned out more and worse passages in this vein than he left in. from flaws or disfigurements of one or other of these kinds the poem is never free for more than a page or two, and rarely for so much, at a time. but granting all weaknesses and immaturities whether of form or spirit, what a power of poetry is in _endymion_: what evidence, unmistakeable, one would have said, to the blindest, of genius. did any poet in his twenty-second year ever write with so prodigal an activity of invention, however undisciplined and unbraced, or with an imagination so penetrating to divine and so swift to evoke beauty? were so many faults and failures ever interspersed with felicities of married sound and sense so frequent and absolute, and only to be matched in the work of the ripest masters? lost as the reader may often feel himself among the phantasmagoric intricacies of the tale, cloyed by its amatory insipidities, bewildered by the redundancies of an invention stimulated into over-activity by any and every chance feather-touch of association or rime-suggestion, he can afford to be patient in the certainty of coming, from one page to another, upon touches of true and fresh inspiration in almost every strain and mode of poetry. often the inspired poet and the raw cockney rimester come inseparably coupled in the limit of half a dozen lines, as thus in the narrative of glaucus:-- upon a dead thing's face my hand i laid; i look'd--'twas scylla! cursed, cursed circe! o vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy? could not thy harshest vengeance be content, but thou must nip this tender innocent because i loved her?--_cold, o cold indeed were her fair limbs, and like a common weed the sea-swell took her hair._ or thus from the love-making of cynthia:-- now i swear at once that i am wise, that pallas is a dunce-- perhaps her love like mine is but unknown-- o i do think that i have been alone in chastity: yes, pallas has been sighing, _while every eve saw me my hair uptying, with fingers cool as aspen leaves_. in like manner the unfortunate opening of book iii above cited leads on, as mr de sélincourt has justly observed, to a passage in praise of the moon which is among the very finest and best sustained examples of keats's power in nature-poetry. for quotation i will take not this but a second invocation to the moon which follows a little later, for the reason that in it the raptures and longings which the poet puts into the mouth of his hero are really in a large measure his own:-- what is there in thee, moon! that thou shouldst move my heart so potently? when yet a child i oft have dry'd my tears when thou hast smil'd. thou seem'dst my sister: hand in hand we went from eve to morn across the firmament. no apples would i gather from the tree, till thou hadst cool'd their cheeks deliciously: no tumbling water ever spake romance, but when my eyes with thine thereon could dance: no woods were green enough, no bower divine, until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine: in sowing time ne'er would i dibble take, or drop a seed, till thou wast wide awake; and, in the summer tide of blossoming, no one but thee hath heard me blythly sing and mesh my dewy flowers all the night. no melody was like a passing spright if it went not to solemnize thy reign. yes, in my boyhood every joy and pain by thee were fashioned in the self-same end; and as i grew in years, still didst thou blend with all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen; thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen-- the poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun; thou wast the river--thou wast glory won; thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed-- my goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:-- thou wast the charm of women, lovely moon! o what a wild and harmonized tune my spirit struck from all the beautiful! in the last two lines of the above keats gives us the essential master key to his own poetic nature and being. the eight preceding, from 'as i grew in years' offer in their rhetorical form a curious parallel with a passage of similar purport in drayton's _endimion and phoebe_:-- be kind (quoth he) sweet nymph unto thy lover, my soul's sole essence and my senses' mover, life of my life, pure image of my heart, impression of conceit, invention, art. my vital spirit receives his spirit from thee, thou art that all which ruleth all in me, thou art the sap and life whereby i live, which powerful vigour doth receive and give. thou nourishest the flame wherein i burn, the north whereto my heart's true touch doth turn. was keats, then, after all familiar with the rare volume in which alone drayton's early poem had been printed, or does the similar turn of the two passages spring from some innate affinity between the two poets,--or perhaps merely from the natural suggestion of the theme? in nature-poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his identity in delighted sympathy with her doings, keats already shows himself a master scarcely excelled. take the lines near the beginning which tell of the 'silent workings of the dawn' on the morning of pan's festival:-- rain-scented eglantine gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; the lark was lost in him; cold springs had run to warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold, to feel this sun-rise and its glories old. the freshness and music and felicity of the first two lines are nothing less than shakespearean: in the rest note with how true an instinct the poet evokes the operant magic and living activities of the dawn, single instances first and then in a sudden outburst the sum and volume of them all: how he avoids word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen, delights which the poet instinctively attributes to nature as though she were as sentient as himself. it is like keats here so to place and lead up to the word 'old' as to make it pregnant with all the meanings which it bore to him: that is with all the wonder and romance of ancient greece, and at the same time with a sense of awe, like that expressed in the opening chorus of goethe's _faust_, at nature's eternal miracle of the sun still rising 'glorious as on creation's day.' it is interesting to note how above all other nature-images keats, whose blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature's coolness and refreshment. here are two or three out of a score of instances. endymion tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at him from the well:-- i started up, when lo! refreshfully, there came upon my face in plenteous showers dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers, wrapping all objects from my smothered sight, bathing my spirit in a new delight. coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself-- 'tis the grot of proserpine, when hell, obscure and hot, doth her resign; and where her tender hands she dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands: a little later, and now he is sitting by a shady spring, and elbow-deep with feverous fingering, stems the upbursting cold. for many passages where the magic of nature is mingled instinctively and inseparably with the magic of greek mythology, the prayer of endymion to cynthia above quoted (p. ) may serve as a sample: and all readers of poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural scene melts into one, more beautiful still, of a scene of ancient life and worship which comes floated upon the poet's inner vision by an imagined strain of music from across the sea:-- it seem'd he flew, the way so easy was; and like a new-born spirit did he pass through the green evening quiet in the sun, o'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams the summer time away. one track unseams a wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue of ocean fades upon him; then, anew, he sinks adown a solitary glen, where there was never sound of mortal men, saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences melting to silence, when upon the breeze some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet, to cheer itself to delphi.[ ] often in thus conjuring up visions of the classic past, keats effects true master strokes of imaginative concentration. do we not feel half the romance of the _odyssey_, with the spell that is in the sound of the vowelled place-names of grecian story, and the breathing mystery of moonlight falling on magic islands of the sea, distilled into the one line-- aeaea's isle was wondering at the moon? and again in the pair of lines-- like old deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood or blind orion hungry for the morn, do not the two figures evoked rise before us full-charged each with the vital significance of his story? mr de sélincourt is no doubt right in suggesting that in the orion line keats's vision has been stimulated by the print from that picture of poussin's which hazlitt has described in so rich a strain of eulogy. one of the great symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of europe, as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, was its re-awakening to the significance and beauty of the greek mythology. for a hundred years and more the value of that mythology for the human spirit had been forgotten. there never had been a time when the names of the ancient, especially the roman, gods and goddesses were used so often in poetry, but simply in cold obedience to tradition and convention; merely as part of the accepted mode of speech of persons classically educated, and with no more living significance than belonged to the trick of personifying abstract forces and ideas by putting capital initials to their names. so far as concerned any real effect upon men's minds, it was tacitly understood and accepted that the greek mythology was 'dead.' as if it could ever die; as if the 'fair humanities of old religion,' in passing out of the transitory state of things believed into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. faiths, as faiths, perish one after another; but each in passing away bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. the polytheism of ancient greece, embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest gifted human race to explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern mind which is in so far dead and not they. some words of johnson's written forty years before keats's time may help us to realize the full depth of the deadness from which in this respect it had to be awakened:-- he (waller) borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from the old mythology, for which it is in vain to plead the example of ancient poets: the deities, which they introduced so frequently, were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine. but of these images time has tarnished the splendour. a fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight illustration. to rescue men's minds from this mode of deadness was part of the work of the english poetical revival of 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:[ ] 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. [illustration: pl. v 'onward the tiger and the leopard pants with asian elephants' from a sarcophagus relief at woburn abbey] it is usually said that this description of bacchus and his rout was suggested by titian's famous picture of bacchus and ariadne (after catullus) which is now in the national gallery, and which severn took keats to see when it was exhibited at the british institution in . but this will account for a part at most of keats's vision. tiger and leopard panting along with asian elephants on the march are not present in that picture, nor anything like them. keats might have found suggestions for them in the text both of godwin's little handbook just quoted and in spence's _polymetis_: but it would have been much more like him to work from something seen with his eyes: and these animals, with indian prisoners mounted on the elephants, are invariable features of the triumphal processions of bacchus through india as represented on a certain well-known type of ancient sarcophagus. from direct sight of such sarcophagus reliefs or prints after such keats, i feel sure, must have taken them,[ ] while the children mounted on crocodiles may have been drawn from the plinth of the famous ancient recumbent statue of the nile, and the pigmy rowers, in all likelihood, from certain reliefs which keats will have noticed in the townley collection at the british museum: so that the whole brilliant picture is a composite (as we shall see later was the case with the grecian urn) which had shaped itself from various sources in keats's imagination and become more real than any reality to his mind's eye. but i am holding up the reader, with this digression as to sources, from the fine rush of verse with which the lyric sweeps on to tell how the singer dropped out of the train of bacchus to wander alone into the carian forest, and finally, returning to the opening motive, ends as it began with an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:-- come then, sorrow! sweetest sorrow! like an own babe i nurse thee on my breast: i thought to leave thee, and deceive thee, but now of all the world i love thee best. there is not one, no, no, not one but thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; thou art her mother and her brother, her playmate, and her wooer in the shade. an intensely vital imaginative feeling, such as can afford to dispense with scholarship, for the spirit of greek and greco-asiatic myths and cults inspires these lyrics respectively; and strangely enough the result seems in neither case a whit impaired by the fact that the nature-images keats invokes in them are almost purely english. bean-fields in blossom and poppies among the corn, hemlock growing in moist places by the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dew upon them, cowslips and strawberries and the song of linnets, oak, hazel and flowering broom, holly trees smothered from view under the summer leafage of chestnuts, these are the things of nature that he has loved and lived with from a child, and his imagination cannot help importing the same delights not only into the forest haunts of pan but into the regions ranged over by bacchus with his train of yoked tiger and panther, of elephant, crocodile and zebra. contemporary influences as well as elizabethan and jacobean are naturally discernible in the poem. the strongest and most permeating is that of wordsworth, not so much to be traced in actual echoes of his words, though these of course occur, as in adoptions of his general spirit. we have recognized a special instance in that deep and brooding sense of mystery, of 'something far more deeply interfused,' of the working of an unknown spiritual force behind appearances, which finds expression in the hymn to pan. endymion's prayer to cynthia from underground in the second book will be found to run definitely and closely parallel with wordsworth's description of the huntress diana in his account of the origin of greek myths (see above, pp. - ). when keats likens the many-tinted mists enshrouding the litter of sleep to the fog on the top of skiddaw from which the travellers may with an eye-guess towards some pleasant vale descry a favourite hamlet faint and far, we know that his imagination is answering to a stimulus supplied by wordsworth. but it is for the undercurrent of ethical symbolism in _endymion_ that keats will have owed the most to that master. both shelley and he had been profoundly impressed by the reading of _the excursion_, published when shelley was in his twenty-second year and keats in his nineteenth, and each in his own way had taken deeply to heart wordsworth's inculcation, both in that poem and many others, of the doctrine that a poet must learn to go out of himself and to live and feel as a man among fellow men,--that it is a kind of spiritual suicide for him to attempt to live apart from human sympathies, housed in a dream, at distance from the kind! a large part of _endymion_, as we have seen, is devoted to the symbolical setting forth of this conviction. for the rest, that essential contrast between the mental processes and poetic methods of the elder and the younger man which we have noted in discussing keats's first volume continues to strike us in the second. in interpreting the relations of man to the natural world, wordsworth's poetry is intensely personal and 'subjective,' keats's intensely impersonal and 'objective.' wordsworth expounds, keats evokes: the mind of wordsworth works by strenuous after-meditation on his experiences of life and nature and their effect upon his own soul and consciousness: the mind of keats works by instantaneous imaginative participation, instinctive and self-oblivious, in nature's doings and beings, especially those which make for human refreshment and delight. the second contemporary influence to be considered is that of shelley. shelley's _alastor_, it will be remembered, published early in , had been praised by hunt in _the examiner_ for december of that year, and in the following january hunt printed in the same paper shelley's _hymn to intellectual beauty_. in the course of that same december and january keats had seen a good deal of shelley at hunt's and taken part with him in many talks on poetry. it is certain that keats read and was impressed by _alastor_: doubtless he also read the _hymn_. how much did either or both influence him in the composition of _endymion_? mr andrew bradley thinks he sees evidence that _alastor_ influenced him strongly. that poem is a parable, as _endymion_ is, of the adventures of a poet's soul; and it enforces, as much of _endymion_ does, the doctrine that a poet cannot without ruin to himself live in isolation from human sympathies. but there the resemblance between the two conceptions really ends. in _alastor_ the poet, having lived in solitary communion 'with all that is most beautiful and august in nature and in human thought and the world's past' (the words are shelley's own prose summary of the imagined experiences which the first part of the poem relates in splendid verse), is suddenly awakened, by a love-vision which comes to him in a dream, to the passionate desire of finding and mating with a kindred soul, the living counterpart of his dream, who shall share with him the delight of such communion. the desire, ever unsatisfied, turns all his former joys to ashes, and drives him forth by unheard-of ways through monstrous wildernesses until he pines and dies, or in the strained shelleyan phrase, 'blasted by his disappointment, he descends into an untimely grave.' the essence of the theme is the quest of the poetic soul for perfect spiritual sympathy and its failure to discover what it seeks. shelley does not make it fully clear whether the ideal of his poet's dream is a purely abstract entity, an incarnation of the collective response which he hopes, but fails, to find from his fellow creatures at large; or whether, or how far, he is transcendentally expressing his own personal longing for an ideally sympathetic soul-companion in the shape of woman. both strains no doubt enter into his conception; so far as the private strain comes in, many passages of his life furnish a mournfully ironic comment on his dream. but in any case his conception is fundamentally different from that of keats in _endymion_. the essence of keats's task is to set forth the craving of the poet for full communion with the essential spirit of beauty in the world, and the discipline by which he is led, through the exercise of the active human sympathies and the toilsome acquisition of knowledge, to the prosperous and beatific achievement of his quest. it is rather the preface to _alastor_ than the poem itself which we can trace as having really worked in the mind of keats. in it the evil fate of those who shut themselves out from human sympathies is very eloquently set forth, in a passage which is only partly relevant to the design of the poem, inasmuch as its warning is addressed not only to the poet in particular but to human beings in general. the passage may have had some influence on keats when he framed the scheme of _endymion_: what is certain is that we shall find its thoughts and even its words recurring forcibly to his mind in an hour of despondency some thirty months later: let us therefore postpone its consideration until then. for the rest, it is not difficult to show correspondence between some of the descriptive passages of _alastor_ and _endymion_, especially those telling of the natural and architectural marvels amid which the heroes wander. endymion's wanderings we are fresh from tracing. alastor before him had wandered-- where the secret caves rugged and dark, winding amid the springs of fire and poison, inaccessible to avarice or pride, their starry domes of diamond and of gold expand above numerous and immeasurable halls, frequent with crystal columns, and clear shrines of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite. but these are the kind of visions which may rise spontaneously in common in the minds of almost any pair of youthful dreamers. shelley's poetic style is of course as much sounder and less experimental than that of keats at this time as his range and certainty of penetrating and vivifying imagination are, to my apprehension at least, less: he had a trained and scholarly feeling both for the resources of the language and for its purity, and keats might have learnt much from him as to what he should avoid. but as we have seen, keats was firmly on his guard against letting any outside influence affect his own development, and would not visit shelley at marlow during the composition of _endymion_, in order 'that he might have his own unfettered scope' and that the spirit of poetry might work out its own salvation in him. as to the _hymn to intellectual beauty_, written though it was by shelley under the fresh impression of the glory of the alps and also in the first flush of his acquaintance with and enthusiasm for plato, i think keats would have felt its strain of aspiration and invocation too painful, too near despair, to make much appeal to him, and that shelley's spirit of beauty, that dost consecrate with thine own hues all thou dost shine upon, would have seemed to him something abstract, remote, and uncomforting. his own imagination insisted on the existence of something in the ultimate nature of the universe to account for what he calls the 'wild and harmonised tune' which he found his spirit striking from all the scattered and broken beauties of the world. vague and floating his conception of that something might be, but it was extraordinarily intense, partaking of the concentrated essence of a thousand thrilling joys of perception and imagination. he had read no plato, though he was of course familiar enough with spenser's mellifluous dilution of platonic and neo-platonic doctrine in his four _hymns_. in _endymion_, as in the speculative passages of the letters we have quoted, his mind has to go adventuring for itself among those ancient, for him almost uncharted, mysteries of love and beauty. he does not as yet conceive himself capable of anything more than steppings, to repeat his own sober phrase, of the imagination towards truth. he does not light, he does not expect to light, upon revelations of truth abstract or formal, and seems to waver between the adam's dream idea of finding in some transcendental world all the several modes of earthly happiness 'repeated in a finer tone' but yet retaining their severalness, and an idea, nearer to the platonic, of a single principle of absolute or abstract beauty, the object of a purged and perfected spiritual contemplation, from which all the varieties of beauty experienced on earth derive their quality and oneness. but in his search he strikes now and again, for the attentive reader, notes of far reaching symbolic significance that carry the mind to the verge of the great mysteries of things: he takes us with him on exploratory sweeps and fetches of figurative thought in regions almost beyond the reach of words, where we gain with him glimmering adumbrations of the super-sensual through distilled and spiritualized remembrance of the joys of sense-perception at their most intense. so much for keats's possible debt to shelley in regard to _endymion_. there is an interesting small debt to be recorded on the other side, which critics, i think, have hitherto failed to notice. shelley, notwithstanding his interest in keats, did not read _endymion_ till a year or more after its publication. he had in the meantime gone to live in italy, and having had the volume sent out to him at leghorn, writes: 'much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. yet it is full of the highest and finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. i think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, i should have been led to admire keats as a poet more than i ought, of which there is now no danger.' nothing can be more just; and in the same spirit eight months later, in may , he writes, 'keats, i hope, is going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through the clouds, which, though dyed in the finest colours of the air, obscured his rising.' about the same time, having heard of keats's hæmorrhage and sufferings and of their supposed cause in the hostility of the tory critics, shelley drafted, but did not send, his famous indignant letter to the editor of the _quarterly review_. in this draft he shows himself a careful student of _endymion_ by pointing out particular passages for approval. one of these passages is that near the beginning of the third book describing the wreckage seen by the hero as he traversed the ocean floor before meeting glaucus. everybody knows, in shakespeare's _richard iii_, clarence's dream of being drowned and of what he saw below the sea:-- what dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! what ugly sights of death within mine eyes! methought i saw a thousand fearful wrecks; ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon; wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, all scatter'd in the bottom of the sea. keats, no doubt remembering, and in a sense challenging, this passage, wrote,-- far had he roam'd, with nothing save the hollow vast, that foam'd, above, around, and at his feet; save things more dead than morpheus' imaginings: old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe; rudders that for a hundred years had lost the sway of human hand; gold vase emboss'd with long-forgotten story, and wherein no reveller had ever dipp'd a chin but those of saturn's vintage; mouldering scrolls, writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude in ponderous stone, developing the mood of ancient nox;--then skeletons of man, of beast, behemoth, and leviathan, and elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw of nameless monster. jeffrey in his review of the _lamia_ volume has a fine phrase about this passage. it 'comes of no ignoble lineage,' he says, 'nor shames its high descent.' how careful shelley's study of the passage had been, and how completely he had assimilated it, is proved by his, doubtless quite unconscious, reproduction and amplification of it in the fourth act of _prometheus unbound_, which he added as an afterthought to the rest of the poem in december . the wreckage described is not that of the sea, but that which the light flashing from the forehead of the infant earth-spirit reveals at the earth's centre. the beams flash on and make appear the melancholy ruins of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships; planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears, and gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels of scythèd chariots, and the emblazonry of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems of dead destruction, ruin within ruin! the wrecks beside of many a city vast, whose population which the earth grew over was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons, their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes huddled in gray annihilation, split, jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these, the anatomies of unknown wingèd things, and fishes which were isles of living scale, and serpents, bony chains, twisted around the iron crags, or within heaps of dust to which the tortuous strength of their last pangs had crushed the iron crags; and over these the jaggèd alligator, and the might of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once were monarch beasts. the derivation of this imagery from the passage of keats seems evident alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without name. another possible debt of shelley to _endymion_ has also been suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing passage of _epipsychidion_, proposes to share with his spirit's mate in their imagined island home in the Ægean. if shelley indeed owes anything to _endymion_ here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original even more than keats did ovid. possibly, it may also be suggested, it may have been shelley's reading of _endymion_ that led him at this time to take two of the myths handled in it by keats as subjects for his own two lyrics, _arethusa_ and the _hymn to pan_ (both of ); but he may just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within keats's compass. it would be tempting to attribute to a desire of emulating and improving on keats shelley's beautifully accomplished use of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in the _epistle to maria gisborne_ ( ) and _epipsychidion_ ( ), but that he had already made a first experiment in the same kind with _julian and maddalo_, written before his copy of _endymion_ had reached him, so that we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not intermediately through keats but direct from leigh hunt. footnotes: [ ] why will my friend professor saintsbury, in range of reading and industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that in the metre of _endymion_ keats owed something to the _pharonnida_ of william chamberlayne? there is absolutely no metrical usage in keats's poem for which his familiar elizabethan and jacobean masters do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. i do not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages of _pharonnida_. but that is only an opinion, and the matter can be decided by a simple computation on the fingers. the fact is that there are no five pages of _pharonnida_ which do not contain more of those unfortunate rimings on 'in' and 'by' and 'to' and 'on' and 'of' followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on 'to' followed by its infinitive,--on 'it' and 'than' and 'be' and 'which,' and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,--than can be found in any whole book of _endymion_. it is also a fact that the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other pause is in _pharonnida_ about ten to one, and in _endymion_ not more than two and a half to one. that the sentence-structure of _pharonnida_ is as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that of _endymion_ is graceful and well-articulated i hesitate to insist, because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my other points, of sheer arithmetic. [ ] the flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word 'unseam.' the only authority for the word is shakespeare, who uses it in _macbeth_, in a sufficiently different sense and context-- 'till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps.' the vision in keats's mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley. [ ] 'all the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were heard in solitary places, were attributed to pan, the god of rural scenery' (baldwin's _pantheon_, ed. , p. ). keats possessed a copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology, by william godwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym edward baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly due to it which are to be found in his poetry. [ ] two classes of sarcophaguses are concerned, those figuring the triumph of bacchus and hercules with their indian captives, and those which show the march of silenus and his rout of fauns and maenads. now it so happens that an excellent original of each class, and with them also a fine endymion sarcophagus, had been bought by the duke of bedford from the villa aldobrandini in and were set up in his grand new gallery at woburn five years later. where they were housed in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was haydon could easily have obtained access to them, (the duke's agent in the purchase having been also secretary to lord elgin) and i cannot resist the conviction, purely conjectural as it is, that keats must have seen them in haydon's company some time in the winter of / , and drawn inspiration from them both in this and some other passages of _endymion_. the triumph relief is the richest extant of its class, especially in its multitude of sporting children: see plate opposite. chapter viii december -june : hampstead and teignmouth: emigration of george keats hampstead again: stage criticism--hazlitt's lectures--life at well walk--meeting with wordsworth--the 'immortal dinner'--lamb forgets himself--more of wordsworth--a happy evening--wordsworth on bacchus--disillusion and impatience--winter letters--maxims and reflections--quarrels among friends--haydon, hunt and shelley--a prolific february--rants and sonnets--a haunting memory--six weeks at teignmouth--soft weather and soft men--_isabella_ or _the pot of basil_--rich correspondence--epistle to reynolds--thirst for knowledge--need of experience--the two chambers of thought--summer plans--preface to _endymion_--a family break-up--to scotland with brown. from finishing _endymion_ at burford bridge keats returned some time before mid-december to his hampstead lodging. the exact date is uncertain; but it was in time to see kean play _richard iii_ at drury lane on the th--the actor's first performance after a break of some weeks due to illness. j. h. reynolds had gone to exeter for a christmas holiday, and keats, acting as his substitute, wrote four dramatic criticisms for the _champion_: the first, printed on december , on kean in general and his re-appearance as richard iii in particular; a second on a hash of the three parts of shakespeare's _henry vi_ produced under the title _richard duke of york_, with kean in the name-part and probably kean also as compiler; a third on a tragedy of small account by one dillon, called _retribution_, or the _chieftain's daughter_, in which the young macready played the part of the villain; and a fourth on a pantomime of _don giovanni_. no one, least of all one living in keats's circle, could well attempt stage criticism at this time without trying to write like hazlitt. keats acquits himself on the whole rather youthfully and crudely. in one point he is cruder than one would have expected, and that is where, after re-reading the three parts of _henry vi_ for his purpose, he retracts what he had begun to say about them and declares that they are 'perfect works,' apparently without any suspicion that shakespeare's part in them is at most that of a beginner of genius touching up the hackwork of others with a fine passage here and there. it is only in the notice of kean as richard iii that the genius in keats really kindles. here his imagination teaches him phrases beyond the reach of hazlitt, to express (there is nothing more difficult) the specific quality and very thrill of the actor's voice and utterance. the whole passage is of special interest, both what is groping in it and what is masterly, and alike for itself and for such points as its familiar use of tags from the then recent _christabel_ and _siege of corinth_:-- a melodious passage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and spiritual. the spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty; the mysterious signs of our immortal free-masonry! 'a thing to dream of, not to tell'! the sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of kean and to one learned in shakespearian hieroglyphics--learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which kean adds a sensual grandeur; his tongue must seem to have robbed the hybla bees and left them honeyless! there is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while speaking of the instant. when he says in _othello_, 'put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. from eternal risk, he speaks as though his body were unassailable. again, his exclamation of 'blood, blood, blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the deepest degree; the very words appear stained and gory. his nature hangs over them, making a prophetic repast. the voice is loosed on them, like the wild dog on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' in richard, 'be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle norfolk!' comes from him as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns.... surely this intense power of anatomizing the passions of every syllable, of taking to himself the airings of verse, is the means by which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with a still deeper charm, he does his spiriting gently. other actors are continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about anything else. he feels his being as deeply as wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists. from all his comrades he stands alone, reminding us of him, whom dante has so finely described in his hell: and sole apart retir'd the soldan fierce.[ ] although so many times he has lost the battle of bosworth field, we can easily conceive him really expectant of victory, and a different termination of the piece. keats was by this time left alone in well walk, having seen his brothers off for teignmouth, whither george carried the invalid tom for change of climate. his regular occupation for the next two months was revising and copying out _endymion_ for press. regular also was his attendance at hazlitt's evening lectures on the english poets at the surrey institution. of the lectures on shakespeare which coleridge was in the same weeks delivering in fetter lane keats makes no mention, and it is clear that he made no effort to go and hear them, though the distance of the lecture-hall from his hampstead lodging was so much less. the reader who would fain conjure up for himself the contrasted personalities and styles in public discourse of these two master critics, the shy and saturnine, yet vigorously straight-hitting and trenchantly effective hazlitt, and the ramblingly mellifluous, sometimes beautifully inspired and sometimes painfully drug-beclouded coleridge, can draw but a faint and tantalized satisfaction from the diaries of henry crabb robinson, that assiduous friend and satellite of men of genius, who punctually records his attendance at both courses, but lacked the touch that should have made his record live. keats's letters to his brothers in these winter months, with a few more to bailey and reynolds, give us lively glimpses of his social doings, and others, interesting in the extreme, of the inward growth and workings of his mind. he tells of a certain amount of common-place conviviality: an absurd dance and rackety supper at one redhall's; noisy saturday 'concerts' at his own rooms, which means that two or three intimates came to early afternoon dinner and spent the rest of the day drinking claret and keeping up a concerted racket, each in imitation of some musical instrument (keats himself of the bassoon); but of this pastime he soon got tired and rather ashamed. his social relations began to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought consistent with proper industry. we find him dining with shelley's friend, the genial and admirable stockbroker and man of letters horace smith, in company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:--'they only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment. these men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a decanter. they talked of kean and his low company. "would i were with that company instead of yours," said i to myself.' sunday evenings were for a while set apart for dining with haydon, and here, on the last sunday of the year, keats met wordsworth for the first time. wordsworth was on one of his rare visits to london, and had been staying since the beginning of december with his brother christopher at lambeth rectory. according to crabb robinson, he seems to have been in these weeks in one of his stiffest and most domineering moods of egotism, much ruffled by the moderate strictures of coleridge in _biographia literaria_ on certain qualities in his work and not at all appeased by the splendid praise which so much out-balanced them. one evening in conversation he went so far as to treat that great helpless genius, his old bosom-friend and inspirer, with a rudeness of contradiction which even the devoted robinson found it hard to forgive.[ ] near about the same time, hearing that the next waverley novel was to be about rob roy, he took down his ballad so named, read it aloud, and said 'i do not know what more mr scott can have to say on the subject.'[ ] keats promptly had full experience of wordsworth's egotism, but also saw more genial aspects of his character. quite coolly and briefly he mentions those circumstances of their first meeting which haydon, in a famous passage of his autobiography, thrusts before us in the insistent colour and illumination of a magic-lantern picture. 'i think,' writes keats, 'ritchie is going to fezan in africa; thence to proceed if possible like mungo park. then there was wordsworth, lamb, monkhouse, landseer, and your humble servant. lamb got tipsy and blew up kingston--proceeding so far as to take the candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft fellow he was.' it should be explained that ritchie was a young explorer whom tom had met the summer before on his run to paris, and kingston a thick-witted, thick-skinned, intrusive but kindly gentleman of lion-hunting proclivities, who as comptroller of stamps had had some correspondence with wordsworth and on the strength of this invited himself to join haydon's party in the poet's honour. now for haydon:-- on december th the immortal dinner came off in my painting-room, with jerusalem towering up behind us as a background. wordsworth was in fine cue, and we had a glorious set-to,--on homer, shakespeare, milton and virgil. lamb got exceedingly merry and exquisitely witty; and his fun in the midst of wordsworth's solemn intonations of oratory was like the sarcasm and wit of the fool in the intervals of lear's passion. he made a speech and voted me absent, and made them drink my health. 'now,' said lamb, 'you old lake poet, you rascally poet, why do you call voltaire dull?' we all defended wordsworth, and affirmed there was a state of mind when voltaire would be dull. 'well,' said lamb, 'here's to voltaire--the messiah of the french nation, and a very proper one too.' he then, in a strain of humour beyond description, abused me for putting newton's head into my picture,--'a fellow,' said he, 'who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle. and then he and keats agreed he had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. it was impossible to resist him, and we all drank 'newton's health, and confusion to mathematics.' it was delightful to see the good-humour of wordsworth in giving in to all our frolics without affectation and laughing as heartily as the best of us. by this time other friends joined, amongst them poor ritchie who was going to penetrate by fezzan to timbuctoo. i introduced him to all as 'a gentleman going to africa.' lamb seemed to take no notice; but all of a sudden he roared out, 'which is the gentleman we are going to lose?' we then drank the victim's health, in which ritchie joined. in the morning of this delightful day, a gentleman, a perfect stranger, had called on me. he said he knew my friends, had an enthusiasm for wordsworth and begged i would procure him the happiness of an introduction. he told me he was a comptroller of stamps, and often had correspondence with the poet. i thought it a liberty; but still, as he seemed a gentleman, i told him he might come. when we retired to tea we found the comptroller. in introducing him to wordsworth i forgot to say who he was. after a little time the comptroller looked down, looked up and said to wordsworth, 'don't you think, sir, milton was a great genius?' keats looked at me, wordsworth looked at the comptroller. lamb who was dozing by the fire turned round and said, 'pray, sir, did you say milton was a great genius?' 'no, sir; i asked mr wordsworth if he were not.' 'oh,' said lamb, 'then you are a silly fellow.' 'charles! my dear charles!' said wordsworth; but lamb, perfectly innocent of the confusion he had created, was off again by the fire. after an awful pause the comptroller said, 'don't you think newton a great genius?' i could not stand it any longer; keats put his head into my books. ritchie squeezed in a laugh. wordsworth seemed asking himself, 'who is this?' lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, 'sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?' he then turned his back on the poor man, and at every question of the comptroller he chaunted-- diddle diddle dumpling, my son john went to bed with his breeches on. the man in office, finding wordsworth did not know who he was, said in a spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation of assured victory, 'i have had the honour of some correspondence with you, mr wordsworth.' 'with me, sir?' said wordsworth, 'not that i remember.' 'don't you, sir? i am a comptroller of stamps.' there was a dead silence;--the comptroller evidently thinking that was enough. while we were waiting for wordsworth's reply, lamb sung out hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle. 'my dear charles!' said wordsworth,-- diddle diddle dumpling, my son john, chaunted lamb, and then rising, exclaimed, 'do let me have another look at that gentleman's organs.' keats and i hurried lamb into the painting-room, shut the door and gave way to inextinguishable laughter. monkhouse followed and tried to get lamb away. we went back but the comptroller was irreconcilable. we soothed and smiled and asked him to supper. he stayed though his dignity was sorely affected. however, being a good-natured man, we parted all in good humour, and no ill effects followed. all the while, until monkhouse succeeded, we could hear lamb struggling in the painting-room and calling at intervals, 'who is that fellow? allow me to see his organs once more.' it was indeed an immortal evening. wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted milton and virgil, keats's eager inspired look, lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation, that in my life i never passed a more delightful time. all our fun was within bounds. not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to. it was a night worthy of the elizabethan age, and my solemn jerusalem flashing up by the flame of the fire, with christ hanging over us like a vision, all made up a picture which will long glow upon-- that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. keats made ritchie promise he would carry his _endymion_ to the great desert of sahara and fling it in the midst. to complete our impression of wordsworth at this time of his winter visit to london in his forty-eighth year, let us turn for a moment to leigh hunt's recollections of his looks and ways about the same time. certainly i never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. they were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the end of two caverns. one might imagine ezekiel or isaiah to have had such eyes.... he had a dignified manner, with a deep roughish but not unpleasing voice, and an exalted mode of speaking. he had a habit of keeping his left hand in the bosom of his waistcoat; and in this attitude, except when he turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the shelves, he was dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic judgments. hazlitt, in words written a few years later, gives a nearly similar portrait:-- he is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and quixotic. he reminds one of some of holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour.... he has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a rugged harmony in the tones of his voice. his manner of reading his own poetry is particularly imposing, and in his favourite passages his eye beams with preternatural lustre, and the meaning labours slowly up from his swelling breast. although the great man could praise or care for no contemporary poetry save his own, and had none of the sympathetic or encouraging criticism to bestow on keats which to that ardent young spirit would have meant so much, he nevertheless showed him no little personal kindness, receiving him when he called and inviting him several times to dine or sup. on his first visit keats was kept waiting till the poet bustled in, full dressed in stiff stock and knee breeches, in haste to keep a dinner appointment with one of his official chiefs. this experience proved no check to their acquaintance: neither did wordsworth's chilling comment when keats was induced to read to him the hymn to pan from _endymion_. 'a very pretty piece of paganism,' he remarked and that was all. severn was present at the gathering in haydon's studio where this reading took place. the evening's talk, he relates, ran much on the virtues of a vegetable diet, which was for the moment, through the vehement advocacy of shelley, so much in vogue in leigh hunt's circle that even the ruddy and robust haydon gave himself out for a proselyte like the rest, until friends one day caught him coming privily smacking his lips out of a chop-house. wordsworth was in a jocular mood, and asked his herbivorous friends whether they did not welcome such a succulent morsel of animal food as a chance caterpillar in their cabbage. was it on the same occasion that the sage and seer condescended to a pun, telling haydon that if he ever took the name of another artist, as some of the old masters used to do, it should be teniers, seeing that he had been ten years working on his great picture, still unfinished, of christ's entry into jerusalem, in which wordsworth and other leading personages of the time were to figure among the crowd of lookers on? a fortnight after their first meeting keats re-affirms to his brother the view he had formerly expressed to haydon that 'if there were three things superior in the modern world they were _the excursion_, haydon's pictures, and hazlitt's depth of taste.' about the same time, that is in the course of january, he writes of having 'seen wordsworth frequently': and again 'i have seen a good deal of wordsworth.' a later allusion implies that he has seen him 'with his beautiful wife and his enchanting sister.' at one meeting keats must have heard talk or reading that delighted him, for severn tells how while he was toiling late one night over his miniature painting, keats burst into his lodging fresh from wordsworth's company and in a state of eager elation over his experience. it is hard to refrain from conjecture as to what had happened. what one would like to think is that wordsworth had been reading keats some of those great passages in the _prelude_ without which the master cannot truly be more than half known and which remained unpublished until the year of his death. or may we possibly trace a clue to the evening's enjoyment in this further note of hazlitt's on a phase of wordsworth's conversation?-- it is fine to hear him talk of the way in which certain subjects should have been treated by eminent poets, according to his notions of the art. thus he finds fault with dryden's description of bacchus in the _alexander's feast_, as if he were a mere good-looking youth, or boon companion flushed with a purple grace, he shows his honest face-- instead of representing the god returning from the conquest of india, crowned with vine-leaves, and drawn by panthers, and followed by troops of satyrs, of wild men and animals that he had tamed. you would think, in hearing him speak on this subject, that you saw titian's picture of the meeting of bacchus and ariadne--so classic were his conceptions, so glowing his style.[ ] it is tempting to seek some kind of connexion between keats in his great bacchic ode in _endymion_ and wordsworth in this vein of talk. had we not known that _endymion_ was finished before the elder and the younger poet met, we might have been inclined to attribute to wordsworth's eloquence some part of keats's inspiration. and even as it is such possibility remains open, for it must be remembered that keats carefully re-copied the several cantos of his poem during the spring, the fourth canto not until march, at teignmouth, and it is conceivable, though unlikely, that the triumph of bacchus might have been an addition made in re-copying. it was most likely a result of the interest taken by wordsworth in keats that the young poet received at this time a friendly call, of which he makes passing mention, from crabb robinson. but the more keats saw of wordsworth himself, the more critically, as his letters show, he came gradually to look upon him. he disliked the idea of a man so revered dining with the foolish kingston, and refused to dine and meet him there. he regrets, after wordsworth has gone, that he has 'left a bad impression wherever he has visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry;' adding, 'yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher.' the fullest expression of this critical attitude occurs in a letter written to reynolds at the beginning of february. keats is for the moment out of conceit with the poets of his own time; particularly with wordsworth, whom he had always devoutly reverenced from a distance, and with hunt, next to cowden clarke his earliest encourager and sympathiser, whom to his disappointment he had lately found more ready to carp than praise when he read him the early books of _endymion_. it seems hunt would have liked the talk of endymion and peona to come nearer his own key of simpering triviality in _rimini_. 'he says,' writes keats '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 perforce could not talk like francesca in the _rimini_. he must first prove that caliban's poetry is unnatural. this with me completely overturns his objections.' in revising _endymion_ for press keats proved his wise adherence to his own point of view by cutting out some of the passages most infected with the taint of hunt's familiar tea-party manner. the words in which he expresses his impatience of the several dogmatisms of wordsworth and hunt are vital in relation to his own conception of poetry and of its right aim and working:-- it may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that wordsworth etc., should have their due from us. but, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist? every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. many a man can travel to the very bourne of heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing. sancho will invent a journey heavenward as well as anybody. we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. how beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, 'admire me, i am a violet! dote upon me, i am a primrose!' modern poets differ from the elizabethans in this: each of the moderns like an elector of hanover governs his petty state, and knows how many straws are swept daily from the causeways in all his dominions, and has a continual itching that all the housewives should have their coppers well scoured. the ancients were emperors of vast provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them. i will cut all this--i will have no more of wordsworth or hunt in particular.... i don't mean to deny wordsworth's grandeur and hunt's merit, but i mean to say we need not be teazed with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. these winter letters of keats are full of similar first fruits of young reflection, thoughts forming or half-forming themselves in absolute sincerity as he writes, intuitions of his first-endeavouring mind on the search for vital truths of art and nature and humanity. imperfect, half-wrought phrases often come from him which prove, when you have lived with them, to be more sufficient as well as more suggestive than if they had been chiselled into precision by longer study and a more confident mind. for instance: 'the excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth': a sentence worth whole treatises and fit, sketchy as it is, to serve as text to all that can justly be discoursed concerning problems of art in its relation to nature,--of realism, romance, and the rest. or this:-- brown and dilke walked with me and back to the christmas pantomime. i had not a dispute, but a disquisition, with dilke upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which shakespeare possessed so enormously--i mean _negative capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. this pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. or this:-- in poetry i have a few axioms, and you will see how far i am from their centre. st. i think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. nd. its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. but it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it. and this leads me to another axiom--that if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. however it may be with me, i cannot help looking into new countries with 'o for a muse of fire to ascend!' if _endymion_ serves me as a pioneer, perhaps i ought to be content--i have great reason to be content, for thank god i can read, and perhaps understand shakespeare to his depths; and i have i am sure many friends, who, if i fail will attribute any change in my life and temper to humbleness rather than pride--to a cowering under the wings of great poets, rather than to a bitterness that i am not appreciated. cogitations of this cast, not less fresh than deep, and often throwing a clear retrospective light on the moods and aims which governed him in writing _endymion_, are interspersed at the beginning of the year with regrets at dissensions rife among his friends. the strain between haydon and hunt had increased since the autumn, and now, over a sordid matter of money borrowed by mrs hunt--by all accounts the most unabashed of petty spongers--and not repaid, grew into an active quarrel. another still fiercer quarrel broke out between haydon and reynolds, who with all his fine qualities seems to have been quick and touchy, and whom we find later in open breach with his admirable brother-in-law thomas hood. keats was not involved. with his distinguished good sense and good heart in matters of friendship, he knew how to keep in close and affectionate touch with what was loveable or likeable in each of the disputants severally. his comments are the best key to the best part of himself, and show him as the true great spirit, by character not less than by gift, among the group. things have happened lately of great perplexity--you must have heard of them--reynolds and haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting for ever--the same thing has happened between haydon and hunt. it is unfortunate--men should bear with each other: there lives not the man who may not be cut up, aye lashed to pieces on his weakest side. the best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with circumstance. the sure way, bailey, is first to know a man's and then be passive--if after that he insensibly draws you towards him then you have no power to break the link. before i felt interested in either reynolds or haydon, i was well read in their faults; yet, knowing them, i have been cementing gradually with both. i have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite--and to both must i of necessity cling, supported always by the hope that, when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully in their esteem, i may be able to bring them together. the time must come, because they have both hearts and they will recollect the best parts of each other, when this gust is overblown. of haydon himself and of his powers as a painter keats continued to think as highly as ever, seeing in his pictures, as the friends and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt to see, not so much the actual performance as the idea he had pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend's enthusiastic ambition and eloquence. severn repeatedly insists on keats's remarkably keen natural instinct for and understanding of the arts both of music and painting. cowden clarke's piano-playing had been one of the chief pleasures of his school-days: as to the capacity he felt in himself for judging the works of painting, here is his own scrupulously modest and sincere estimate expressed to haydon a little later: believe me haydon your picture is part of myself--i have ever been too sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in art (judging from poetry) ever to think i understood the emphasis of painting. the innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty. i know not your many havens of intenseness--nor ever can know them: but for this i hope nought you achieve is lost upon me: for when a schoolboy the abstract idea i had of an heroic painting--was what i cannot describe. i saw it somewhat sideways, large, prominent, round, and colour'd with magnificence--somewhat like the feel i have of anthony and cleopatra. or of alcibiades leaning on his crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea. with hunt also, in spite of the momentary causes of annoyance we have seen, keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with reynolds his intimacy grew daily closer. at hunt's he again saw something of shelley. 'the wednesday before last shelley, hunt, and i, wrote each a sonnet on the river nile,' he tells his brothers on the th of february, . the sonnets are preserved. they were to be written, it was agreed, in a quarter of an hour. shelley and keats were up to time, but hunt had to sit up half the night to finish his. it was worth the pains, and with it for once the small poet outdid the two great. 'i have been writing,' continues keats, 'at intervals, many songs and sonnets, and i long to be at teignmouth to read them over to you.' with the help of his manuscripts or of the transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. on the th of january was written the sonnet on mrs reynolds's cat, perhaps keats's best thing in the humorous vein; on the st, after seeing in leigh hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be milton's, the address to that poet beginning 'chief of organic numbers!' which he sends to the prime milton enthusiast among his friends, benjamin bailey, with the comment, 'this i did at hunt's, at his request,--perhaps i should have done something better alone and at home.' the first two lines,-- chief of organic numbers, old scholar of the spheres! read like an anticipation in the rough of the first stanza of tennyson's masterly set of alcaics already referred to, beginning 'o mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' to the nd belongs the sonnet, 'o golden tongued romance with serene lute,' in which keats bids himself lay aside (apparently) his spenser,[ ] in order to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _lear_. this is one of the last of his sonnets written in the petrarchan form as followed by milton and wordsworth, and from henceforth he follows the shakespearean form almost exclusively. on the st he writes to reynolds in a rollicking mood, and sends him the lines to apollo beginning 'hence burgundy, claret, and port,' part rant (the word is his own) pure and simple, part rant touched with genius, and giving words to a very frequent and intense phase of feeling in himself:-- aye, when the soul is fled too high above our head, affrighted do we gaze after its airy maze, as doth a mother wild, when her young infant child is in an eagle's claws-- and is not this the cause of madness?--god of song, thou bearest me along through, sights i scarce can bear: o let me, let me share with the hot lyre and thee, the staid philosophy. temper my lonely hours, and let me see thy bowers more unalarm'd! by way of a sober conclusion to the same letter, he adds the very fine and profoundly felt sonnet in the shakespearean form beginning 'when i have fears that i may cease to be,' which be calls his last. on the rd of february he sends two spirited sets of verses in the favourite four-beat measure, heptasyllable varied with octosyllable, of the later elizabethans and the youthful milton, namely those to robin hood (suggested by a set of sonnets by reynolds on sherwood forest) and those on the mermaid tavern. on the th comes another shakespearean sonnet, that beginning 'time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in which he recalls the memory of an old, persistent, haunting love-fancy. the two sonnets of january and february should be read strictly together:-- when i have fears that i may cease to be before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, before high-piled books, in charact'ry, hold like full garners the full-ripen'd grain; when i behold, upon the night's starr'd face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that i may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when i feel, fair creature of an hour! that i shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the faery power of unreflecting love!--then on the shore of the wide world i stand alone, and think, till love and fame to nothingness do sink. time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb; long hours have to and fro let creep the sand; since i was tangled in thy beauty's web, and snared by the ungloving of thine hand. and yet i never look on midnight sky, but i behold thine eyes' well memoried light; i cannot look upon the rose's dye, but to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight; i cannot look on any budding flower, but my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips, and hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour its sweets in the wrong sense:--thou dost eclipse every delight with sweet remembering, and grief unto my darling joys dost bring. the former is far the richer in contents, and in the light of the tragedy to come its two first quatrains now seem to thrill with prophetic meaning. but what is singular is that in the third quatrain should be recalled, in the same high strain of emotion, the vision of a beauty seen but not even accosted three-and-a-half years earlier (not really five) in the public gardens at vauxhall, and then (august, ) addressed in what are almost the earliest of keats's dated verses, those in which he calls for a 'brimming bowl,'-- from my despairing heart to charm the image of the fairest form that e'er my reveling eyes beheld, that e'er my wandering fancy spell'd....[ ] such, woodhouse assures us, is the case, and the same memory fills the second sonnet: but this it might be possible to take rather as a fine shakespearean exercise than as an expression of profound feeling. on the th, keats sends another sonnet postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of leigh hunt's to compose something in honour, or in emulation, of spenser; and on the th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest against one of reynolds preferring black, at least in the colouring of feminine eyes. about the same time he agreed with reynolds that they should each write some metrical tales from boccaccio, and publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with the first few stanzas of _isabella_ or the _pot of basil_. a little later in this so prolific month of february we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. he theorizes pleasantly in a letter to reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of subtle and haunting cadence, in which, disowning for the nonce his habitual doctrine of the poet's paramount need of knowledge, he makes the thrush say, o fret not after knowledge--i have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth, o fret not after knowledge--i have none, and yet the evening listens. in the course of the next fortnight we find him in correspondence with taylor about the corrections to _endymion_; and soon afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing to flit. his brother george, who had been taking care of tom at teignmouth since december, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a scheme of marriage and emigration; and tom's health having made a momentary rally, keats was unwilling that he should leave teignmouth, and determined to join him there. he started in the second week of march, and stayed almost two months. it was an unlucky season for weather,--the soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of devonshire rain renewing themselves wave on wave, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the scenery, the walks, and flowers. his letters are full of whimsical objurgations not only against the climate, but against the male inhabitants, whose fibre he chooses to conceive relaxed by it:-- you may say what you will of devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. the hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em--the primroses are out, but then you are in--the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them--the women like your london people in a sort of negative way--because the native men are the poorest creatures in england--because government never have thought it worth while to send a recruiting party among them. when i think of wordsworth's sonnet, 'vanguard of liberty! ye men of kent!' the degenerated race about me are pulvis ipecac. simplex--a strong dose. were i a corsair, i'd make a descent on the south coast of devon; if i did not run the chance of having cowardice imputed to me. as for the men, they'd run away into the methodist meeting-houses, and the women would be glad of it.... such a quelling power have these thoughts over me that i fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. i fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an acrasian spell about them--i feel able to beat off the devonshire waves like soap-froth. i think it well for the honour of britain that julius caesar did not first land in this county. a devonshirer standing on his native hills is not a distinct object--he does not show against the light--a wolf or two would dispossess him. a man of west-country descent should have known better. why did not the ghost of william browne of tavistock arise and check keats's hand, and recite for his rebuke the burst in praise of devon from _britannia's pastorals_, with its happy echo of the virgilian _salve magna parens_ and _haec genus acre virum_?-- hail thou my native soil: thou blessed plot whose equal all the world affordeth not! shew me who can so many christall rills, such sweet-clothed vallies, or aspiring hills, such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines, such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines: and if the earth can shew the like again; yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men. time never can produce men to o'er-take the fames of grenville, davies, gilbert, drake, or worthy hawkins or of thousands more that by their power made the devonian shore mock the proud tagus. of the devonshire girls keats thought better than of their menkind, and writes and rimes on them with a certain skittishness of admiration. with one local family, a mrs jeffrey and her daughters, he and his brothers were on terms of warm friendship, as is shown by his correspondence with them a year later. one of the daughters married afterwards a mr prowse, and published two volumes of very tolerable sentimental verse: some of their contents, as interpreted (says mr buxton forman) by teignmouth tradition, would indicate that her heart had been very deeply touched by the young poet during his stay: but of responsive feelings on his own part his letters give no hint, and it was only a few weeks later that he wrote how his love for his brothers had hitherto stifled any impression that a woman might have made on him. besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering the invalid tom, who had a relapse just after he came down, keats was busy during these devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of _endymion_. he also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had begun at hampstead, the whole of _isabella_ or _the pot of basil_, the first of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. at the same time, no doubt with his great intended effort, _hyperion_, in mind, he was studying and appreciating milton as he had never done before. he had been steeped since boyhood in the charm of the minor poems, from the _vacation exercise_ to _lycidas_, and had read but not greatly cared for _paradise lost_, until first severn, and then more energetically bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he now threw himself upon that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its power and beauty. his correspondence with his friends, particularly bailey and reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. sometimes his vein is light and titterly (to use a word of his own) as i have indicated, and sometimes he masks an anxious heart beneath a lively manner, as thus:-- but ah coward! to talk at this rate to a sick man, or, i hope, to one that was sick--for i hope by this you stand on your right foot. if you are not--that's all,--i intend to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut sickness--a fellow to whom i have a complete aversion, and who strange to say is harboured and countenanced in several houses where i visit--he is sitting now quite impudent between me and tom--he insults me at poor jem rice's--and you have seated him before now between us at the theatre, when i thought he looked with a longing eye at poor kean. i shall say, once for all, to my friends, generally and severally, cut that fellow, or i cut you. 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:-- it has as yet been a mystery to me how and where wordsworth went. i can't help thinking he has returned to his shell--with his beautiful wife and his enchanting sister. it is a great pity that people should by associating themselves with the finest things, spoil them. 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 damn'd music--hazlitt has damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the man? he is your only good damner, and if ever i am damn'd--damn me if i shouldn't like him to damn me. 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 (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).[ ] [illustration: 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:-- an extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people--it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery, a thing which i begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your letter. the difference of high sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again, without wings, and with all [the] horror of a bare-shouldered creature--in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. 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:-- and here i have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether milton's apparently less anxiety for humanity proceeds from his seeing further or not than wordsworth: and whether wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. in regard to his genius alone--we find what he says true as far as we have experienced and we can judge no further but by larger experience--for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. we read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.--i know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when i say that now i shall relish _hamlet_ more than i have ever done--or, better--you are sensible no man can set down venery as a bestial or joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophising on it would be mere wording. until we are sick, we understand not; in fine, as byron says, 'knowledge is sorrow'; and i go on to say that 'sorrow is wisdom'--and further for aught we can know for certainty 'wisdom is folly.' [illustration: 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:-- well--i compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which i can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me. the first we step into we call the infant, or thoughtless chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. we remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle within us--we no sooner get into the second chamber, which i shall call the chamber of maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight. however among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of man--of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression--whereby this chamber of maiden thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages. we see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are now in that state, we feel the 'burden of the mystery.' to this point was wordsworth come, as far as i can conceive, when he wrote _tintern abbey_, and it seems to me that his genius is explorative of those dark passages. now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them. 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 , 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 :-- my intellect must be in a degenerating state--it must be--for when i should be writing about--god knows what--i am troubling you with moods of my own mind, or rather body, for mind there is none. i am in that temper that if i were under water i would scarcely kick to come up to the top--i know very well 'tis all nonsense. in a short time i hope i shall be in a temper to feel sensibly your mention of my book. in vain have i waited till monday to have any interest in that, or anything else. i feel no spur at my brother's going to america, and am almost stony-hearted about his wedding. all this will blow over. all i am sorry for is having to write to you in such a time--but i cannot force my letters in a hotbed. i could not feel comfortable in making sentences for you. nine days later the mood has deepened to one of positive despondency, but it is the despondency of a great and generous spirit:-- were it in my choice, i would reject a petrarchal coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. i should not by right speak in this tone to you for it is an incendiary spirit that would do so. yet i am not old enough or magnanimous enough to annihilate self--and it would perhaps be paying you an ill compliment. i was in hopes some little time back to be able to relieve your dulness by my spirits--to point out things in the world worth your enjoyment--and now i am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. perhaps if my affairs were in a different state, i should not have written the above--you shall judge: i have two brothers; one is driven, by the 'burden of society,' to america; the other, with an exquisite love of life, is in a lingering state. my love for my brothers, from the early loss of our parents, and even from earlier misfortunes, has grown into an affection 'passing the love of women.' i have been ill-tempered with them--i have vexed them--but the thought of them has always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon me. i have a sister too, and may not follow them either to america or to the grave. life must be undergone, and i certainly derive some consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it ceases. 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 , 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.' footnotes: [ ] cary's dante: _inferno_, iv, . [ ] _diary of henry crabb robinson_, as quoted by w. knight, _life of wordsworth_, ii. - . [ ] c.c. clarke, _recollections of writers_, pp. - . [ ] hazlitt, _the spirit of the age_: collected works, iv, . [ ] woodhouse suggests that the romance which he lays aside is his own _endymion_, meaning his task of seeing it through the press: but this must surely be a mistake. [ ] woodhouse transcripts (poetry ii) in crewe ms. these verses are only to be found in the latest editions of keats. they are not good, but interesting as containing in embryo ideas which afterwards grew into great poetry in the nightingale ode, the first book of _endymion_, and the _ode to melancholy_. [ ] the 'enchanted castle,' which keats explicitly names, belonged at this date to mr wells of redleaf, and was not exhibited until , so that he probably knew it only through the engraving by vivarès and woollett. chapter ix june-august : the scottish tour first sight of windermere--ambleside, rydal, keswick--attitude towards scenery--ascent of skiddaw--a country dancing-school--dumfries--the galloway coast--meg merrilies--flying visit to belfast--contrasts and reflections--the duchess of dunghill--the ayrshire coast--in burns's cottage--lines on his pilgrimage--through glasgow to loch lomond--a confession--loch awe to the coast--hardships--kerre a and mull--staffa--a sea cathedral--ben nevis--tour cut short--return to hampstead. the farewells at liverpool over, keats and brown went on by coach to lancaster, thence to begin their tour on foot. keats took for his reading one book only, the miniature three-volume edition of cary's dante. brown, it would appear, carried a pocket milton. they found the town of lancaster in an uproar with the preparations for a contested election and were glad to leave it. rising at four in the morning (june th) to make a start before breakfast, they were detained by a downpour, during which brown preached patience from _samson agonistes_; at seven they set out in a still dripping mist; breakfasted at bolton-le-sands; stopped to dine at the village of burton-in-kendal, and found the inns crowded, to their hosts' distraction, with soldiers summoned by the lowther interest to keep order at the election. this was the famous contest where brougham had the effrontery, as his opponents considered it, to go down and challenge for the first time the power of that great family in their own country. the same state of things prevailed farther down the road. hearing that they could not hope to find a bed at kendal, they slept in a mean roadside inn at end moor, taking interested note of a sad old dog of a drunkard, fallen from better days, whom they found there; and the next morning walked on, passing kendal on their way, as far as bowness on windermere. as they dropped down the hill and came in sight of the lake the weather yielded fine effects of clearance after rain; and brown, in the account compiled twenty years later from his diaries written at the time,[ ] expatiates in full romantic vein on the joy and amazement with which keats and he drank in the beauties of the varied and shifting scene before them:-- on the next morning, after reaching kendal, we had our first really joyous walk of nine miles towards the lake of windermere. the country was mild and romantic, the weather fine, though not sunny, while the fresh mountain air, and many larks about us, gave us unbounded delight. as we approached the lake the scenery became more and more grand and beautiful, and from time to time we stayed our steps, gazing intently on it. hitherto, keats had witnessed nothing superior to devonshire; but, beautiful as that is, he was now tempted to speak of it with indifference. at the first turn from the road, before descending to the hamlet of bowness, we both simultaneously came to a full stop. the lake lay before us. his bright eyes darted on a mountain-peak, beneath which was gently floating on a silver cloud; thence to a very small island, adorned with the foliage of trees, that lay beneath us, and surrounded by water of ? glorious hue, when he exclaimed--'how can i believe in that a--surely it cannot be!' he warmly asserted that no view in the world could equal this--that it must beat all italy--yet, having moved onward but a hundred yards--catching the further extremity of the lake, he thought it 'more and more wonderfully beautiful!' the trees far and near, the grass immediately around us, the fern and the furze in their most luxuriant growth, all added to the charm. not a mist, but an imperceptible vapour bestowed a mellow, softened tint over the immense mountains on the opposite side and at the further end of the lake. after a bathe and a midday meal at bowness the friends walked on with ever increasing delight to ambleside. spending the night there they scrambled about the neighbouring waterfalls, and endured as patiently as they could the advances of a youth lately from oxford, touring knapsack on back like themselves but painfully bent on showing himself off for a scholar and buck about town, airing his pedigree and connexions while affecting to make light of them. the next day they went on by grasmere to rydal, where they paused that keats might call and pay his respects to wordsworth. but the poet was away at lowther castle electioneering (he had been exerting himself vigorously in the tory and lowther interest since the spring in prospect of this contest). complete want of sympathy with the cause of his absence made keats's disappointment the keener; and finding none of the family at home he could do no more than leave a note of regret. the same afternoon the travellers reached the hamlet of wythburn and slept there as well as fleas would allow, intending to climb helvellyn the next morning. heavy rain interfering, they pursued their way by thirlmere to keswick, made the circuit of derwentwater, visited the druids' circle and the falls of lodore, and set out at four the next morning to climb skiddaw. a cloud-cap settling down compelled them to stop a little short of the summit, and they resumed their tramp by bassenthwaite into the relatively commonplace country lying between the lakes and carlisle, making their next night's resting-place at the old market town of ireby. i have shown by a specimen how brown, working from his diaries of the tour, expatiates on his and his companion's enthusiasm over the romantic scenes they visited. keats in his own letters says comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the picturesque tourist: hardly indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and fastidious gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. partly, no doubt, a certain instinctive reticence, a restraining touch of the greek [greek: aidios], keeps him from fluent words on the beauties that most deeply moved him: his way rather is to let them work silently in his being until at the right moment, if the right moment comes, their essence and vital power shall distil themselves for him into a phrase of poetry. partly, also, the truth is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his hardly needs the stimulus of nature's beauties for long or at their highest power, but on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit sunsets, and glories of dream lake and mountain, richer and more varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery can witness and register in memory during a lifetime of travel and pursuit. in this respect keats's letters written on his northern tour seem more essentially the letters of a poet than shelley's from switzerland and italy. shelley pours out long, set, detailed descriptions, written as any cultivated and enthusiastic observer visiting such scenes for the first time might write, only with more beauty and resource of language, rather than as one made by imagination a born partner and co-creator with nature herself, free by birthright of her glories and knowing them all, as it were, beforehand. keats's way of telling about his travels is quite familiar and unstrained. here is a paragraph from his first letter to his brother tom, written at keswick after walking round derwentwater and climbing skiddaw:-- i had an easy climb among the streams, about the fragments of rocks, and should have got i think to the summit, but unfortunately i was damped by slipping one leg into a squashy hole. there is no great body of water, but the accompaniment is delightful; for it oozes out from a cleft in perpendicular rocks, all fledged with ash and other beautiful trees. it is a strange thing how they got there. at the south end of the lake the mountains of borrowdale are perhaps as fine as anything we have seen. on our return from this circuit, we ordered dinner, and set forth about a mile and a half on the penrith road, to see the druid temple. we had a fag up hill, rather too near dinner-time, which was rendered void by the gratification of seeing those aged stones on a gentle rise in the midst of the mountains, which at that time darkened all around, except at the fresh opening of the vale of st. john. we went to bed rather fatigued, but not so much so as to hinder us getting up this morning to mount skiddaw. it promised all along to be fair, and we had fagged and tugged nearly to the top, when, at half-past six, there came a mist upon us, and shut out the view. we did not, however, lose anything by it: we were high enough without mist to see the coast of scotland--the irish sea--the hills beyond lancaster--and nearly all the large ones of cumberland and westmoreland, particularly helvelleyn and scawfell. it grew colder and colder as we ascended, and we were glad, at about three parts of the way, to taste a little rum which the guide brought with him, mixed, mind ye, with mountain water. i took two glasses going and one returning. it is about six miles from where i am writing to the top. so we have walked ten miles before breakfast to-day. we went up with two others, very good sort of fellows. all felt, on arising into the cold air, that same elevation which a cold bath gives one--i felt as if i were going to a tournament. for an instant only, the poet in keats speaks vividly in the tournament touch; and farther back, illustrating what i have said about his instinct for distillation rather than description, will be found the germs of two famous passages in his later verse, the 'dark-clustered trees' that fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep in the _ode to psyche_, and the lines in _hyperion_ about the dismal cirque of druid stones, upon a forlorn moor when the chill rain begins at shut of eve, in dull november, and their chancel vault, the heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. a change, it should be added, was coming over keats's thoughts and feelings whereby natural scenery in general was beginning to interest him less and his fellow creatures more. in the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, among the suburban fields or on seaside holidays, he had instinctively, as if by actual partnership with and self-absorption into nature, gained enough delighted knowledge of her ways and doings for his faculties to work on through a lifetime of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of maiden-thought, the appeal of nature, even at its most thrilling, yields in his mind to that of humanity. 'scenery is fine,' he had already written from devonshire in the spring, 'but human nature is finer.' so far as concerns shrewd and interested observation of human types encountered by the way, he had a sympathetic companion in brown, whose diary sets effectively before us alike the sodden, wheedling old toper, staggering with hanging arms like a bear on its hind feet, in the inn at end moor, and the vulgar, uneasy gentlemanhood of the flash oxford man at ambleside. here is brown's account of what they saw at ireby:-- it is a dull, beggarly looking place. our inn was remarkably clean and neat, and the old host and hostess were very civil and prepossessing--but, heyday! what were those obstreperous doings overhead? it was a dancing school under the tuition of a travelling master! folks here were as partial to dancing as their neighbours, the scotch; and every little farmer sent his young ones to take lessons. we went upstairs to witness the skill of these rustic boys and girls--fine, healthy, clean-dressed, and withal perfectly orderly, as well as serious in their endeavours. we noticed some among them quite handsome, but the attention of none was drawn aside to notice us. the instant the fiddle struck up, the slouch in the gait was lost, the feet moved, and gracefully, with complete conformity to the notes; and they wove the figure, sometimes extremely complicated to my inexperienced eyes, without an error, or the slightest pause. there was no sauntering, half-asleep country dance among them; all were inspired. and here is the same scene as touched by keats:-- we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school holden at the tun, it was indeed 'no new cotillon fresh from france.' no, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go'd it, and twirl'd it, and whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad.[ ] the difference between our country dances and these scottish figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and beating up a batter-pudding. i was extremely gratified to think that, if i had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which i could not possibly enter. i hope i shall not return without having got the highland fling. there was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. i never felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier. this is what i like better than scenery. from ireby the friends walked by way of wigton to carlisle, arriving there on the last day of june. from carlisle they took coach to dumfries, having heard that the intervening country was not interesting: neither did keats much admire what he saw of it. besides the familiar beauties of the home counties of england, two ideals of landscape had haunted and allured his imagination almost equally, that of the classic south, harmonious and sunned and gay, and that of the shadowed, romantic and adventurous north; and the scottish border, with its bleak and moorish rain-swept distances, its 'huddle of cold old grey hills' (the phrase is stevenson's) struck him somehow as answering to neither. 'i know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-grecian and anti-charlemagnish.' so writes keats from dumfries, where they visited the tomb of burns and the ruins of lincluden college, and where keats expressed his sense of foreignness and dreamlike discomfort in a sonnet interesting as the record of a mood but of small merit poetically. brown also, a scotsman from the outer hebrides, as he believed, by descent, but by habit and education purely english, felt himself at first an alien in the scottish lowlands. on this stage of the walk they were both unpleasurably struck by the laughterless gravity and cold greetings of the people, ('more serious and solidly inanimated than necessary' brown calls them) and by the lack of anything like the english picturesque and gardened snugness in villages and houses: brown also by the barefoot habit of the girls and women, but this keats liked, expatiating to his friend on the beauty of a lassie's natural uncramped foot and its colour against the grass. from dumfries they started on july south-westward for galloway, a region not overmuch frequented even now, and then hardly at all, by tourists: even wordsworth on his several scottish trips passed it by unexplored. our travellers broke the journey first at dalbeattie: thence on to kirkcudbright, with a long morning pause for breakfast and letter-writing by the wayside near auchencairn. approaching the kirkcudbrightshire coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and rocky tufted headlands, its high craggy moors towering inland, and its backward views over the glimmering solway to the cumberland fells or the hazier hills of man, they began to enjoy themselves to the full. brown bethought him that this was guy mannering's country, and fell talking to keats about meg merrilies. keats, who according to the fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for scott's poetry, and of the waverley novels, at this time guessed but not known to be scott's, had read _the antiquary_ (to which he whimsically preferred smollett's _humphrey clinker_) but not _guy mannering_, was much struck by what he heard. i enjoyed the recollection of the events [writes brown] as i described them in their own scenes. there was a little spot, close to our pathway, where, without a shadow of doubt, old meg merrilies had often boiled her kettle, and, haply, cooked a chicken. it was among fragments of rock, and brambles, and broom, and most tastefully ornamented with a profusion of honeysuckle, wild roses, and fox-glove, all in the very blush and fullness of blossom. while finishing breakfast, and both employed in writing, i could not avoid noticing that keats's letter was not running in regular prose. he told me he was writing to his little sister, and giving a ballad on old meg for her amusement. though he called it too much a trifle to be copied, i soon inserted it in my journal. it struck me as a good description of that mystic link between mortality and the weird sisters; and, at the same time, in appropriate language to the person addressed. old meg she was a gipsy, and liv'd upon the moors: her bed it was the brown heath turf and her house was out of doors. her apples were swart blackberries, her currants pods o' broom; her wine was dew of the wild white rose, her book a churchyard tomb. her brothers were the craggy hills, her sisters larchen trees-- alone with her great family she liv'd as she did please. no breakfast had she many a morn, no dinner many a noon, and 'stead of supper she would stare full hard against the moon. but every morn of woodbine fresh she made her garlanding, and every night the dark glen yew she wove, and she would sing. and with her fingers old and brown she plaited mats o' rushes, and gave them to the cottagers she met among the bushes. old meg was brave as margaret queen and tall as amazon: an old red blanket cloak she wore; a chip hat had she on. god rest her aged bones somewhere-- she died full long agone! keats had in this 'trifle,' using the ballad form for the first time, handled it with faultless tact, and though leaving out the tragic features of scott's creation, had been able to evoke of his own an instantaneous vision of her in vitally conceived spiritual relation with her surroundings.[ ] he copied the piece out in letters written in pauses of their walk both to his young sister and to his brother tom. the letter to fanny keats is full of fun and nonsense, with a touch or two which shows that he was fully sensitive to the charm of the galloway coast scenery. 'since i scribbled the meg merrilies song we have walked through a beautiful country to kirkcudbright--at which place i will write you a song about myself.' then follows the set of gay doggrel stanzas telling of various escapades of himself as a child and since,--'there was a naughty boy;' and then the excuse for them,--'my dear fanny, i am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would i if it were not for being tired after my day's walking, and ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when i am in bed you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me.' it was his way on his tour, and indeed always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing and add scraps to them as the fancy took him. the systematic brown, on the other hand, wrote regularly and uniformly in the evenings. 'he affronts my indolence and luxury,' says keats, 'by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; secondly his pens; and last, his ink. now i would not care, if he would change a little. i say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? but i might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead of afterwards.' from kirkcudbright they walked on july ,--taking the beautiful coast road from gatehouse of fleet and passing where cairnsmore heaves a huge heathered shoulder above the fertile farmlands of the cree valley,--as far as newton stewart: thence across the low-rolling wigtownshire country by glenluce to stranraer and portpatrick. here they took the packet for donaghadee on the opposite coast of ireland, with the intention of seeing the giant's causeway, but finding the distances and expense much exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to belfast, and crossed back again to portpatrick on the third day. in a letter to his brother tom written during and immediately after this excursion, keats has some striking passages of human observation and reflection. the change of spirit between one generation and another is forcibly brought home to us when we think of johnson, setting forth on his scottish tour forty-five years earlier with the study of men, manners and social conditions in his mind as the one aim worthy of a serious traveller, (he had spoken scoffingly, not long before, of the 'prodigious noble wild prospects' which scotland, he understood, shared with lapland), yet forced now and again by the power of scenery to break, as it were half ashamedly, into stiff but striking phrases of descriptive admiration; and when now we find keats, carried northward by the romantic passion and fashion of a later day for nature and scenery, compelled in his turn by his innate human instincts to forget the landscape and observe and speculate upon problems of society and economics and racial character:-- these kirk-men have done scotland good. they have made men, women; old men, young men; old women, young women; boys, girls; and all infants careful; so that they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and gainers. such a thrifty army cannot fail to enrich their country, and give it a greater appearance of comfort than that of their poor rash neighbourhood [meaning ireland]. these kirk-men have done scotland harm; they have banished puns, and laughing, and kissing, etc., (except in cases where the very danger and crime must make it very gustful). i shall make a full stop at kissing, ... and go on to remind you of the fate of burns poor, unfortunate fellow! his disposition was southern! how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not!... i have not sufficient reasoning faculty to settle the doctrine of thrift, as it is consistent with the dignity of human society--with the happiness of cottagers. all i can do is by plump contrasts; were the fingers made to squeeze a guinea or a white hand?--were the lips made to hold a pen or a kiss? and yet in cities man is shut out from his fellows if he is poor--the cottager must be very dirty, and very wretched, if she be not thrifty--the present state of society demands this, and this convinces me that the world is very young, and in a very ignorant state. we live in a barbarous age--i would sooner be a wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the kirk; and i would sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's penance before those execrable elders. here is an impression received in ireland, followed by a promise, which was fulfilled a few days later with remarkable shrewdness and insight, of further considerations on the contrasts between the irish character and the scottish:-- on our return from belfast we met a sedan--the duchess of dunghill. it was no laughing matter though. imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. in such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from madagascar to the cape, with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered girls carried her along. what a thing would be a history of her life and sensations; i shall endeavour when i have thought a little more, to give you my idea of the difference between the scotch and irish. 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 ) 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:-- when we left cairn [writes keats] our road lay half way up the sides of a green mountainous shore, full of clefts of verdure and eternally varying--sometimes up sometimes down, and over little bridges going across green chasms of moss, rock and trees--winding about everywhere. after two or three miles of this we turned suddenly into a magnificent glen finely wooded in parts--seven miles long--with a mountain stream winding down the midst--full of cottages in the most happy situations--the sides of the hills covered with sheep--the effect of cattle lowing i never had so finely. at the end we had a gradual ascent and got among the tops of the mountains whence in a little time i descried in the sea ailsa rock feet high--it was miles distant and seemed close upon us. the effect of ailsa with the peculiar perspective of the sea in connection with the ground we stood on, and the misty rain then falling gave me a complete idea of a deluge. ailsa struck me very suddenly--really i was a little alarmed. 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:-- the man at the cottage was a great bore with his anecdotes--i hate the rascal--his life consists in fuz, fuzzy, fuzziest. he drinks glasses five for the quarter and twelve for the hour--he is a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew burns. he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him. he calls himself 'a curious old bitch'--but he is a flat old dog--i should like to employ caliph vathek to kick him. o the flummery of a birthplace! cant! cant! cant! it is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache. many a true word, they say, is spoken in jest--this may be because his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet. my dear reynolds--i cannot write about scenery and visitings--fancy is indeed less than a present palpable reality, but it is greater than remembrance--you would lift your eyes from _homer_ only to see close before you the real isle of tenedos--you would rather read _homer_ afterwards than remember yourself. one song of burns's is of more worth to you than all i could think for a whole year in his native country. his misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill--i tried to forget it--to drink toddy without any care--to write a merry sonnet--it won't do--he talked with bitches--he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. we can see horribly clear, in the works of such a man his whole life, as if we were god's spies.[ ] what were his addresses to jean in the latter part of his life? 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.--[ ] 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:-- i am certain i have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment i am striving to be just to them, but i cannot. is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? when i was a schoolboy i thought a fair woman a pure goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. i have no right to expect more than their reality--i thought them ethereal above men--i find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. one who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. i do not like to think insults in a lady's company--i commit a crime with her which absence would not have known.... i must absolutely get over this--but how? the only way is to find the root of the evil, and so cure it 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'--that is a difficult thing; for an obstinate prejudice can seldom be produced but from a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel, and care to keep unravelled. and then, as to his present doings and impressions:-- i should not have consented to myself these four months tramping in the highlands, but that i thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to more hardships, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though i should reach _homer_. by this time i am comparatively a mountaineer. i have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur. i have fed upon oat-cake--not long enough to be very much attached to it.--the first mountains i saw, though not so large as some i have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me. the effect is wearing away--yet i like them mainly. 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 glencroe[ ] 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:-- our walk was of this description--the near hills were not very lofty but many of them steep, beautifully wooded--the distant mountains in the hebrides very grand, the saltwater lakes coming up between crags and islands full tide and scarcely ruffled--sometimes appearing as one large lake sometimes as three distinct ones in different directions. at one point we saw afar off a rocky opening into the main sea.--we have also seen an eagle or two. they move about without the least motion of wings when in an indolent fit. 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:-- last night poor brown with his feet blistered and scarcely able to walk, after a trudge of miles down the side of loch awe had no supper but eggs and oat cake--we have lost the sight of white bread entirely--now we had eaten nothing but eggs all day--about a piece and they had become sickening--to-day we have fared rather better--but no oat cake wanting--we had a small chicken and even a good bottle of port but altogether the fare is too coarse--i feel it a little. 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:-- we had a horse with us for the convenience of carrying baggage--but contemning the paths of civilized man, we dared the deepest glens in search of trout. there is something abundantly delightful in the warmheartedness of the highland people. bating the article of inquisitiveness, they are as polite as courtiers. the moment we entered a cottage the wife began to bake her cakes--and having portable soup with us, our fare was really excellent. what think you of porritch and cream for breakfast? trout, pike, and herrings for dinner, and right peat-reek whisky? 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?[ ] 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_:-- the finest thing is fingal's cave--it is entirely a hollowing out of basalt pillars. suppose now the giants who rebelled against jove had taken a whole mass of black columns and bound them together like bunches of matches--and then with immense axes had made a cavern in the body of these columns--of course the roof and floor must be composed of the broken ends of the columns--such is fingal's cave except that the sea has done the work of excavations and is continually dashing there--so that we walk along the sides of the cave on the pillars which are left as if for convenient stairs--the roof is arched somewhat gothic-wise and the length of some of the entire side-pillars is feet.... the colour of the columns is a sort of black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. for solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest cathedral. 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 th 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 th 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. footnotes: [ ] this account was published in _the plymouth and devonport weekly journal_, beginning october , , but was unluckily stopped after the fourth number and carries us no farther than to ballantrae on the ayrshire coast. i believe this is the first time that it has been used or quoted. [ ] does the reader remember how in a similar scene from the other side of the solway, in scott's _redgauntlet_, dame martin, leading the dance, 'frisked like a kid, snapped her fingers like castanets, whooped like a bacchanal, and bounded from the floor like a tennis ball'? [ ] it is interesting to note that the present poet laureate has found something in this piece entitling it to a place in his severely sifted anthology, _the spirit of man_. [ ] the words are king lear's (act v, sc. iii). [ ] this metre is essentially the same as the 'common' measure, eight and six, of the hymn-books, only printed out in single lines to be spoken without--or with only very slight--pause. at the point quoted keats varies it, whether carelessly or on purpose, and the first lines of three successive couplets, beginning from 'runnels,' etc., are not in fourteeners but in twelves or alexandrines (='short measure,' six and six, printed out). a similar variation is frequent in early examples of the metre. [ ] printed in error 'glenside' in all the editions: but the ms. is quite clear, and even were it not so topography would require glencroe. [ ] see john campbell of islay, _popular tales of the west highlands_ ( ), vol. ii, p. . i owe the suggestion and the reference to my friend prof. w. p. ker. personally i have always associated the magic casements with the enchanted castle of claude's picture representing a very different scene. but the poet's mind is a crucible made for extracting from ingredients no matter how heterogeneous the quintessence, the elixir, which it needs. chapter x september-december : _blackwood_ and the _quarterly_ _blackwood's edinburgh magazine_--partisan excesses--wild inconsistency--virulences of first number--the 'z' papers and leigh hunt--blackwood and walter scott--_the chaldee manuscript_--scott's warning to lockhart--lockhart and keats--'z' on _endymion_--a lesson to critics--marks of lockhart's hand--the quarterly on _endymion_--indignant friends: bailey--reynolds--woodhouse and taylor--keats's composure under attack--subsequent effects--tom keats _in extremis_--three months by the sick-bed--first journal-letter to america--dread of love and marriage--death of tom keats. on the first of september, within a fortnight of keats's return from the north, appeared the threatened attack on him in blackwood's _edinburgh magazine_. much as has been said and written on the history and effect of the 'cockney school' articles, my task requires that the story should be retold, as accurately and fairly as may be, in the light of our present knowledge. the whig party in politics and letters had held full ascendency for half a generation in the periodical literature of scotland by means of the _edinburgh review_, published by archibald constable and edited at this time by jeffrey. the tory rival, the _quarterly_, was owned and published also by a scotsman, but a scotsman migrated to london, john murray. early in william blackwood, an able tory bookseller in edinburgh, projected a new monthly review which should be a thorn in the side of his astute and ambitious trade rival, constable, and at the same time should hold up the party flag against the blue and yellow whig colours in the north, and show a livelier and lustier fighting temper than the quarterly. the first number appeared in march under the title of _the edinburgh monthly magazine_. the first editors were two insignificant men who proved neither competent nor loyal, and flat failure threatening the enterprise, blackwood after six months got rid of the editors and determined to make a fresh start. he added his own name to the title of the magazine and called to his aid two brilliant young men who had been occasional contributors, john wilson and john gibson lockhart, both sound oxford scholars and lockhart moreover a well-read modern linguist, both penmen of extraordinary facility and power of work, both at this period of their lives given, in a spirit partly of furious partisanship partly of reckless frolic, to a degree of licence in controversy and satire inconceivable to-day. wilson, by birth the son of a rich glasgow manufacturer but now reduced in fortune, was in person a magnificent, florid, blue-eyed athlete of thirty, and in literature the bully and berserker of the pair. lockhart, the scion of an ancient lanarkshire house, a dark, proud, handsome and graceful youth of twenty-three, pensive and sardonically reserved, had a deadly gift of satire and caricature and a lust for exercising it which was for a time uncontrollable like a disease. wilson had lived on windermere in the intimacy of wordsworth and his circle, and already made a certain mark in literature with his poem _the isle of palms_. lockhart had made a few firm friends at oxford and after his degree had frequented the goethe circle at weimar, but was otherwise without social or literary experience. blackwood was the eager employer and unflinching backer of both. the trio were determined to push the magazine into notoriety by fair means or foul. its management was informally divided between them, so that no one person could be held responsible. of wilson and lockhart, each was at one time supposed to be editor, but neither ever admitted as much or received separate payment for editorial work. they were really chief contributors and trusted and insistent chief advisers, but blackwood never let go his own control, and took upon himself, now with effrontery, now with evasion, occasionally with compromise made and satisfaction given, all the risks and rancours which the threefold management chose to incur. wilson's obstreperousness, even when he had in some degree sobered down as a university professor, was at all times irresponsible and irrepressible, but for some of the excesses of those days he expressed regret and tried to make atonement; while lockhart, the vitriol gradually working out of his nature in the sunshine of domestic happiness and of scott's genial and paternal influence, sincerely repented them when it was too late. but they lasted long enough to furnish one of the most deplorable chapters in our literary history. the fury of political party spirit, infesting the whole field of letters, accounts for, without excusing much. it was a rough unscrupulous time, the literary as well as the political atmosphere thick, as we have seen, with the mud and stones of controversy, flung often very much at random. the _quarterly_, as conducted by the acrid and deformed pedant gifford, had no mercy for opponents: and one of the harshest of its contributors was the virtuous southey. on the other side the edinburgh, under the more urbane and temperate jeffrey, could sneer spitefully at all times and abuse savagely enough on occasion, especially when its contributor was hazlitt. if a notorious edinburgh attack on coleridge's _christabel_ volume was really by hazlitt, as coleridge always believed and hazlitt never denied, he in that instance added unpardonable personal ingratitude to a degree of critical blindness amazing in such a man. even leigh hunt, in private life one of the most amiable of hearts, could in controversy on the liberal side be almost as good a damner (to use keats's phrase) as his ally, the same hazlitt himself. but nowhere else were such felon strokes dealt in pure wantonness of heart as in the early numbers of blackwood. the notorious first number opened with an article on coleridge's _biographia literaria_ even more furiously insulting than the aforesaid edinburgh article on _christabel_ attributed to hazlitt. but for hazlitt coleridge was in politics an apostate not to be pardoned, while for the blackwood group he was no enemy but an ally. why treat him thus unless it were merely for the purpose of attracting a scandalized attention? more amazing even than the virulence of blackwood was its waywardness and inconsistency. will it be believed that less than three years later the same coleridge was being praised and solicited--and what is more, successfully solicited--for contributions? again, nothing is so much to the credit of wilson and lockhart in those days as their admiration for wordsworth. the sins of their first number are half redeemed by the article in wordsworth's praise, a really fine, eloquent piece of work in wilson's boisterous but not undiscriminating manner of laudation. but not even wordsworth could long escape the random swash of wilson's bludgeon, and a very few years later his friends were astonished to read a ferocious outbreak against him in one of the _noctes_ by the same hand. in regard even to the detested hazlitt the magazine blew in some degree hot and cold, printing through several numbers a series of respectful summaries, supplied from london by patmore, of his surrey institution lectures; in another number a courteous enough estimate of his and jeffrey's comparative powers in criticism; and a little later taking him to task on one page rudely, but not quite unjustly, for his capricious treatment of shakespeare's minor poems and on another page addressing to him an insulting catechism full of the vilest personal imputations. the only contemporary whose treatment by the blackwood trio is truly consistent was leigh hunt, and of him it was consistently blackguardly. to return to the first number of the new series, three articles were counted on to create an uproar. first, the aforesaid emptying of the critical slop-pail on coleridge. second, the _translation from an ancient chaldee manuscript_, being a biting personal satire, in language parodied from the bible, on noted edinburgh characters, including the blackwood group themselves, disguised under transparent nicknames that stuck, blackwood as ebony, wilson as the leopard, lockhart as the scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men. third, the article on the cockney school of poetry, numbered as the first of the series, headed with a quotation from cornelius webb, and signed with the initial 'z.' as a thing to hang gibes on, the quotation from the unlucky webb is aptly enough chosen:-- our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on) of chaucer, spenser, shakespeare, milton, byron, (our england's dante)--wordsworth, hunt, and keats, the muses' son of promise, and what feats he yet may do-- nor are the gibes themselves quite unjustified so far as they touch merely the underbred insipidities of leigh hunt's tea-party manner in _rimini_. but they are as outrageously absurd as they are gross and libellous when they go on to assail both poem and author on the score of immorality. the extreme moral depravity of the cockney school is another thing which is for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets. how could any man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day, to dip his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid obscenities which float on the surface of mr hunt's _hippocrene_? his poetry is that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. he talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl. some excuse for him there might have been, had he been hurried away by imagination or passion. but with him indecency is a disease, as he speaks unclean things from perfect inanition. the very concubine of so impure a wretch as leigh hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for the wife of such a husband! for him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he gloats over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest. such is the manner in which these censors set about showing their superior breeding and scholarship. 'z' was in most cases probably a composite and not a single personality, but the respective shares of wilson and lockhart can often be confidently enough disentangled by those who know their styles. the scandal created by the first number exceeded what its authors had hoped or expected. all edinburgh was in a turmoil about the _chaldee manuscript_, the victims writhing, their enemies chuckling, law-suits threatening right and left. in london the commotion was scarcely less. the london agents for the sale of the magazine protested strongly, and blackwood had to use some hard lying in order to pacify them. murray, who had a share in the magazine, soon began remonstrating against its scurrilities, and on their continuance withdrew his capital. leigh hunt in the _examiner_ retorted upon 'z' with natural indignation and a peremptory demand for the disclosure of his name. the libellers hugged their anonymity, and at first showed some slight movement of panic. in a second edition of the first number the _chaldee manuscript_ was omitted and the assault on hunt made a little less gross and personal. for a while hunt vigorously threatened legal proceedings, but after some time desisted, whether from lack of funds or doubt of a verdict or inability to identify his assailant we do not know, and declared, and stuck to the declaration, that he would take no farther notice. the attacks were soon renewed more savagely than ever. the second of the 'z' papers alone is scholarly and relatively reasonable. its phrase, 'the genteel comedy of incest,' fitly enough labels _rimini_ in contrast with the tragic treatment of kindred themes by real masters, as sophocles, dante, ford, alfieri, schiller, even byron in _manfred_ and _parisina_. the third article, and two other attacks in the form of letters addressed directly to hunt with the same signature, are merely rabid and outrageous. correspondents having urged in protest that hunt's domestic life was blameless, the assailant says in effect, so much the greater his offence for writing a profligate and demoralizing poem; and to this preposterous charge against one of the mildest pieces of milk-and-water sentimentality in all literature he returns (or they return) with furious iteration. the reasons for this special savagery against hunt have never been made fully clear. he and his circle used to think it was partly due to his slighting treatment of scott in the _feast of the poets_: nay, they even idly imagined for a moment that scott himself had been the writer,--scott, than whom no man was ever more magnanimously and humorously indifferent to harsh criticism or less capable of lifting a finger to resent it. but some of scott's friends and idolaters in edinburgh were sensitive on his behalf as he never was on his own. even for the blackwood assault on coleridge one rumoured reason was that coleridge had rudely denounced a play, the _bertram_ of maturin, admired and recommended to drury lane by scott; and it is, as a matter of fact, conceivable that a similar excess of loyalty may have had something to do with the rancour of the 'z' articles. looking back on the way in which the name of this great man got mixed up in some minds with matters so far beneath him, it seems worth while to set forth exactly what were his relations at this time to blackwood and the blackwood group. about - the two rival publishers blackwood and constable, were hot competitors for scott's favour, and constable had lately scored a point in the game in the matter of the _tales of my landlord_. it became in the eyes of blackwood and his associates a vital matter to secure some kind of countenance from scott for their new venture. they knew they would never attach him as a partisan or secure a monopoly of his favours, and the authors of the _chaldee manuscript_ divined his attitude wittily and shrewdly when they represented him as giving precisely the same answer to each of the two publishers who courted him, thus. (the man in plain apparel is blackwood and the jordan is the tweed):-- . then spake the man clothed in plain apparel to the great magician who dwelleth in the old fastness, hard by the river jordan, which is by the border. and the magician opened his mouth, and said, lo! my heart wisheth thy good, and let the thing prosper which is in thy hands to do it. . but thou seest that my hands are full of working and my labour is great. for lo i have to feed all the people of my land, and none knoweth whence his food cometh, but each man openeth his mouth, and my hand filleth it with pleasant things. . moreover, thine adversary also is of my familiars. . the land is before thee, draw thou up thy hosts for the battle in the place of princes, over against thine adversary, which hath his station near the mount of the proclamation; quit ye as men, and let favour be shewn unto him which is most valiant. . yet be thou silent, peradventure will i help thee some little. 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 : 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:-- i have hitherto avoided saying anything on this subject, though some little turn towards personal satire is, i think, the only drawback to your great and powerful talents, and i think i may have hinted as much to you. but i wished to see how this matter of wilson's would turn, before making a clean breast upon this subject.... now that he has triumphed i think it would be bad taste to cry out--'strike up our drums--pursue the scattered stray.' besides, the natural consequence of his situation must be his relinquishing his share in these compositions--at least, he will injure himself in the opinion of many friends, and expose himself to a continuation of galling and vexatious disputes to the embittering of his life, should he do otherwise. in that case i really hope you will pause before you undertake to be the boaz of the maga; i mean in the personal and satirical department, when the jachin has seceded. besides all other objections of personal enemies, personal quarrels, constant obloquy, and all uncharitableness, such an occupation will fritter away your talents, hurt your reputation both as a lawyer and a literary man, and waste away your time in what at best will be but a monthly wonder. what has been done in this department will be very well as a frolic of young men, but let it suffice.... remember it is to the _personal_ satire i object, and to the horse-play of your raillery.... revere yourself, my dear boy, and think you were born to do your country better service than in this species of warfare. i make no apology (i am sure you will require none) for speaking plainly what my anxious affection dictates.... i wish you to have the benefit of my experience without purchasing it; and be assured, that the consciousness of attaining complete superiority over your calumniators and enemies by the force of your general character, is worth a dozen of triumphs over them by the force of wit and raillery. 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 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.[ ] '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. and now, good-morrow to 'the muses' son of promise;' as for 'the feats he yet may do,' as we do not pretend to say like himself, 'muse of my native land am i inspired,' we shall adhere to the safe old rule of _pauca verba_. we venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £ upon any thing he can write. it is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop mr john, back to 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,' etc. but, for heaven's sake, young sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry. 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 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_.[ ] 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:-- he seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes. there is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book. he wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn. 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,[ ] 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:-- as to the poem, i am of all things anxious that you should publish it, for its completeness will be a full answer to all the ignorant malevolence of cold, lying scotchmen and stupid englishmen. the overweening struggle to oppress you only shows the world that so much of endeavour cannot be directed to nothing. men do not set their muscles and strain their sinews to break a straw. i am confident, keats, that the 'pot of basil' hath that simplicity and quiet pathos which are of a sure sovereignty over all hearts. i must say that it would delight me to have you prove yourself to the world what we know you to be--to have you annul _the quarterly review_ by the best of all answers. one or two of your sonnets you might print, i am sure. and i know that i may suggest to you which, because you can decide as you like afterward. you will remember that we were to print together. i give over all intention, and you ought to be alone. i can never write anything now--my mind is taken the other way. but i shall set my heart on having you high, as you ought to be. do _you_ get fame, and i shall have it in being your affectionate and steady friend. 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:-- i cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. as for the rest, i begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. my own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what 'blackwood' or the 'quarterly' could possibly inflict--and also when i feel i am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary re-perception and ratification of what is fine. j. s. is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod _endymion_. that it is so is no fault of mine. no!--though it may sound a little paradoxical. it is as good as i had power to make it--by myself. had i been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble--i will write independently.--i have written independently _without judgment_. i may write independently, and _with judgment_, hereafter. the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. that which is creative must create itself. in _endymion_ i leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if i had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. i was never afraid of failure; for i would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. but i am nigh getting into a rant. 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:-- there have been two letters in my defence in the 'chronicle,' and one in the 'examiner,' copied from the exeter paper, and written by reynolds. i don't know who wrote those in the 'chronicle.' this is a mere matter of the moment: i think i shall be among the english poets after my death. even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to crush me in the 'quarterly' has only brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among bookmen, 'i wonder the "quarterly" should cut its own throat.' it does me not the least harm in society to make me appear little and ridiculous: i know when a man is superior to me and give him all due respect--he will be the last to laugh at me and as for the rest i feel that i make an impression upon them which ensures me personal respect while i am in sight whatever they may say when my back is turned. 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:-- i wish i could say tom was better. his identity presses upon me so all day that i am obliged to go out--and although i had intended to have given some time to study alone, i am obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and feebleness--so that i live now in a continual fever. it must be poisonous to life, although i feel well. imagine 'the hateful siege of contraries'--if i think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and yet i must do so or suffer.' and again about the same time to reynolds:-- i never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverish relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. this morning poetry has conquered--i have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--i feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and i am thankful for it. there is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality. 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 or , he explains why it is not longer (it is over , 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:-- she has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. when she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess. she is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her--from habit she thinks that nothing _particular_. i always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which i cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. i am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble. i forget myself entirely because i live in her. you will by this time think i am in love with her; so before i go further i will tell you i am not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of mozart's might do. i speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement than which i can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman the very 'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a banquet. i don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket nor do i fret to leave her behind me. i like her and her like because one has no _sensations_--what we both are is taken for granted. you will suppose i have by this had much talk with her--no such thing--there are the miss reynoldses on the look out. they think i don't admire her because i did not stare at her. they call her a flirt to me. what a want of knowledge! she walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic power. this they call flirting! they do not know things. 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. notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendation i hope i shall never marry. though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on windermere, i should not feel--or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime. then instead of what i have described there is a sublimity to welcome me home. the roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the windowpane are my children. the mighty abstract idea i have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness--an amiable wife and sweet children i contemplate as a part of that beauty, but i must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. i feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that i do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. no sooner am i alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's body-guard--then 'tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' according to my state of mind i am with achilles shouting in the trenches, or with theocritus in the vales of sicily. or i throw my whole being into troilus, and repeating those lines, 'i wander like a lost soul upon the stygian banks staying for waftage,' i melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that i am content to be alone. these things, combined with the opinion i have of the generality of women--who appear to me as children to whom i would rather give a sugar plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which i rejoice in. 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 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.' footnotes: [ ] houghton mss. [ ] the source is the spanish _sangrador_, blood-letter; which le sage in _gil blas_ converts into a proper name, sangrado. [ ] the old _scots magazine_ lately re-started under a new name; see above, p. . chapter xi december -june : keats and brown housemates: fanny brawne: work and idleness removal to wentworth place--work on _hyperion_--the insatiable haydon--the misses porter--a mingled yarn--charles lamb and punning--hunt and his satellites--fanny brawne--a sudden enslavement--severn's impressions--visit to hampshire--_the eve of st. agnes_--return and engagement--ode to fanny--love and jealousy--haydon again--letters to fanny keats--two months' idleness--praise of claret--bailey's love-affairs--fit of languor--fight with a butcher--sonnet-confessions--reflections ethical and cosmic--meeting with coleridge--the same according to the sage--a tactful review--sonnets on fame--_la belle dame sans merci_--the right version quoted--the five odes--their date and order--a fruitful may--indecision and anxiety--a confidential letter--departure for shanklin. dilke and brown, as has been said already, had built for themselves a joint block of two houses in a garden near the bottom of john street, hampstead, and had called the property wentworth place, after a name hereditary in the dilke family. dilke and his wife occupied the larger of the two houses forming the block, and brown, who was a bachelor, the smaller house, standing to the west.[ ] the accommodation in brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them, and a small spare bedroom or 'crib' where a bachelor guest could be put up for the night. the arrangement with keats was that he should share household expenses, occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. his move to his new quarters does not seem to have been quite so immediate as brown represents it. beginning a new journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law a week or two after tom's death, keats writes, 'with dilke and brown i am quite thick--with brown indeed i am going to domesticate, that is, we shall keep house together. i shall have the front parlour and he the back one, by which i shall be able to avoid the noise of bentley's children--and be better able to go on with my studies--which have been greatly interrupted lately, so that i have not a shadow of an idea for books in my head, and my pen seems to have grown gouty for verse.' this phase of poetical stagnation, which had naturally set in as his cares for his dying brother grew more engrossing towards the end, passed away quickly. by about the middle of december keats was settled at wentworth place, whither his ex-landlord, bentley the postman, we are told, carried down his little library of some hundred and fifty books in a clothes-basket from well walk. in spite of the noisy children keats parted not without regret from the bentleys, and speaks feelingly of mrs bentley's kindness and attention during his late trouble. as soon, relates brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in some measure softened his grief, he plunged once more into poetry, his special task being _hyperion_, at which he had already begun to work before his brother died. but he never got into a quite happy or uninterrupted flow of work on it. once and again we find him moved to lay it aside for a bout of brotherly gossip with george and georgiana in america. 'just now i took out my poem to go on with it--but the thought of my writing so little to you came upon me and i could not get on--so i have begun at random and i have not a word to say--and yet my thoughts are so full of you that i can do nothing else.' and again: 'i have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of you--my poem cannot frequently drive it away--you will retard it much more than you could by taking up my time if you were in england. i never forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman--but that is a fever--the thought of you both is a passion with me, but for the most part a calm one.' this letter, covering some three weeks from mid-december to january , enables us, like others to the same correspondents, to lay our finger on almost every strand in the 'mingled yarn' of keats's life and doings. of one tiresome interruption which befell him about christmas he tells nothing, doubtless in order to spare his brother anxiety. this was a request for money from the insatiable haydon. the correspondence on the matter cannot be read without anger against the elder man and admiring affection for the generous lad--yet not foolishly or recklessly generous--on whom he sponged. haydon's only excuses are a recent eye-trouble which had hindered his work, and his inflated belief, which had so far successfully imposed both upon himself and his friends, in his own huge importance to art and to his country. keats writes, showing incidentally how last year's critical rebuffs had changed, more or less permanently, his attitude in regard to the public and public recognition:-- believe me haydon i have that sort of fire in my heart that would sacrifice everything i have to your service--i speak without any reserve--i know you would do so for me--i open my heart to you in a few words. i will do this sooner than you shall be distressed: but let me be the last stay--ask the rich lovers of art first--i'll tell you why--i have a little money which may enable me to study, and to travel for three or four years. i never expect to get anything by my books: and moreover i wish to avoid publishing--i admire human nature but i do not like _men_. i should like to compose things honourable to man--but not fingerable over by men. so i am anxious to exist without troubling the printer's devil or drawing upon men's or women's admiration--in which great solitude i hope god will give me strength to rejoice. try the long purses--but do not sell your drawings or i shall consider it a breach of friendship. haydon answers in a gush of grandiloquent gratitude, promising to try every corner first, but intimating pretty clearly that he knew his wealthier habitual helpers were for the present tired out with him. one of his phrases is a treasure. 'ah keats, this is sad work for one of my soul and ambition. the truest thing you ever said of mortal was that i had a touch of alexander in me! i have, i know it, and the world shall know it, but this is a purgative drug i must first take.' 'this' means his own perpetual need and habit of living on other people. in the next letter haydon of course accepts keats's offer, and in the christmas weeks, when he should have been wholly engrossed in _hyperion_, keats had much and for some time fruitless ado with bankers, lawyers, and guardian in endeavouring to fulfil his promise. to his brother he only says he has been dining with haydon and otherwise seeing much of him; mentions the painter's eye-trouble; and quotes him as describing vividly at second hand the sufferings of captain (afterwards sir john) ross and his party on their voyage in search of the north-west passage. from ross in baffin's bay the same letter rambles to ritchie in the deserts of morocco, and thence to gossip about the best way of keeping his own and george's brotherly intimacy unbroken across the ocean; about the 'sickening stuff' printed in hunt's new _literary pocket book_ (it was when he was seeing most of haydon that keats was always most inclined to harsh criticism of hunt); about mrs dilke's cats, and about godwin's novels and hazlitt's opinion of them, and the rare pleasure he has had at haydon's in looking through a book of engravings after early italian frescoes in a church at milan. 'milan' must be a mistake, for there are no such engravings,[ ] and what keats saw must certainly have been the fine series by lasinio, published in , after the frescoes of orcagna, benozzo gozzoli, and the rest in the campo santo at pisa. 'i do not think i ever had a greater treat out of shakespeare. full of romance and the most tender feeling--magnificence of draperies beyond everything i ever saw, not excepting raphael's. but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole--even finer to me than more accomplished works--as there was left so much room for imagination.' it is interesting to find keats thus vividly awake, as very few yet were either by instinct or fashion, to the charm of the italian primitives, and to remember how it was a copy of this same book of prints, in the possession of young john everett millais thirty years later, which first aroused the pre-raphaelite enthusiasm in him and his associates gabriel rossetti and holman hunt (the last-named is our witness for the fact). keats tells moreover how an unknown admirer from the west country had sent him a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a further tribute in the shape of a £ note; how he had been both pleased and displeased,--'if i had refused it i should have behaved in a very braggadocio dunderheaded manner, and yet the present galls me a little'; and again how he has received through woodhouse a glowing letter of sympathy and encouragement from miss jane porter, the then famous authoress of _thaddeus of warsaw_ and _the scottish chiefs_, who desires his acquaintance on her own behalf and that of her sister anna maria, almost equally popular at the hour by her romance of _the hungarian brothers_. by all this, says keats, he feels more obliged than flattered--'so obliged that i will not at present give you an extravaganza of a lady romancer. i will be introduced to them if it be merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it--i shall certainly see a new race of people.' pity he failed to carry out his purpose: pen-portraits satirical and other are not lacking of these admired sisters, the tall and tragical jane, the blonde and laughing anna maria, 'la penserosa' and 'l'allegra,' but a sketch by keats would have been an interesting addition to them. still in the same letter, he complains of the sore throat which he finds it hard to shake off, and tells how he has given up or all but given up taking snuff (nearly everybody in that generation snuffed), and how he has been shooting with dilke on hampstead heath and shot a tomtit,--a feat which for a moment calls up this divine poet to our minds in the guise of one of the cockney sportsmen of seymour's caricatures. never mind: he can afford it. from an enquiry about the expected baby in america,--'will the little bairn have made his entrance before you have this? kiss it for me, and when it can first know a cheese from a caterpillar show it my picture twice a week,'--from this he passes to the re-assuring statement that the attack upon him in the quarterly has in some quarters done him actual service. he tells how constrained and out of his element he feels in ordinary society; a common experience of genius, and part of the price it pays for living at a different level and temperature of thought and feeling from the herd. 'i am passing a quiet day--which i have not done for a long while--and if i do continue so, i feel i must again begin with my poetry--for if i am not in action of mind or body i am in pain--and from that i suffer greatly by going into parties where from the rules of society and a natural pride i am obliged to smother my spirit and look like an idiot--because i feel my impulses given way to would too much amaze them--i live under an everlasting restraint--never relieved except when i am composing--so i will write away.' and resuming apparently on christmas day:--'i think you knew before you left england, that my next subject would be "the fall of hyperion." i went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get into the vein again. i will not give you any extracts, because i wish the whole to make an impression. i have however a few poems which you will like, and i will copy out on the next sheet.' nearly a week later he adds, 'i will insert any little pieces i may write--though i will not give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began.' the phrase about _hyperion_ must be taken as indicating on how great a scale he had conceived the poem rather than how little he had yet written of it. in point of fact all we have of this mighty fragment must have been written either by his brother's bedside in september-october (but then certainly only a little) or else in these christmas weeks from mid-december to mid-january - . the short poems he sends are the spirited sets of heptasyllabics, _fancy_, and _lines on the mermaid tavern_, the former one of the best things in the second and lighter class of his work: and with them the fragment written for music, 'i had a dove.' in relation to these he says 'it is my intention to wait a few years before i publish any minor poems--and then i hope to have a volume of some worth--and which those people will relish who cannot bear the burthen of a long poem.' presently charles lamb comes for a moment upon the scene. 'i have seen lamb lately--brown and i were taken by hunt to novello's--there we were devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns--brown don't want to go again.' punning, like snuffing, was the all but universal fashion of that age, as those of us can best realize who are old enough to remember grandfathers that belonged to it; and judging by the specimens brown and keats have themselves left, puns too bad for them are scarce imaginable. novello is of course the distinguished organist, composer and music-publisher, vincent novello, whose sunday evening musical parties were frequented by all the lamb and hunt circle, and whose eldest daughter, mary victoria, was married some ten years later to cowden clarke. at this time she was but a child of ten, but writing many years afterwards she has left a vivid reminiscence of keats at her father's house, 'with his picturesque head, leaning against the instruments, one foot raised on his knee and smoothed beneath his hands' (an attitude said to have been perpetuated in a lost portrait by severn). is the above a memory of the one evening only which keats himself mentions, or of others when his love of music may have drawn him to the novellos' house in spite of the puns and of company for the moment not much to his taste? for the ways of hunt and some of his circle, their mutual flatteries, their habit of trivial, chirping ecstasy over the things they liked, their superfluity of glib, complacent comment rubbing the bloom off sacred beauties of art and poetry and nature, were jarring on keats's nerves just now; and though perfectly aware of hunt's essential virtues of kind-heartedness and good comradeship, he writes with some irritability of impatience:-- hunt has asked me to meet tom moore some day so you shall hear of him. 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 one 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 in morals. he understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself professes--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. this distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of beauty. 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:-- shall i give you miss brawne? she is about my height with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort--she manages to make her hair look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth is bad and good--her profile is better than her full-face which indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. her shape is very graceful and so are her movements--her arms are good, her hands bad-ish her feet tolerable--she is not seventeen--but she is ignorant--monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that i was forced lately to make use of the term _minx_--this is i think not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. i am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it. 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.[ ] 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.[ ] 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 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 th), 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 th and th 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.[ ] now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in february, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the th 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 th.[ ] 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 th 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 th, 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 th 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 £ , 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. ) against keeping live birds or fishes:-- they are better in the trees and the water,--though i must confess even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then i would have it hold ten pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. then i would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with myrtles and japonicas. i should like the window to open on to the lake of geneva--and there i'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading. [illustration: pl. viii _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 th or th) 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 , 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:-- i have come to this resolution--never to write for the sake of writing or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge or experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me; otherwise i will be dumb. what imagination i have i shall enjoy, and greatly, for i have experienced the satisfaction of having great conceptions without the trouble of sonnetteering. i will not spoil my love of gloom by writing an ode to darkness. with respect to my livelihood, i will not write for it,--for i will not run with that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary. such things i ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental weights, as it were. i am three and twenty, with little knowledge and middling intellect. it is true that in the height of enthusiasm i have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing. 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:-- i am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at the occasion of it,--for it must be some other disappointment; you seem'd so sure of some important help when last i saw you--now you have maimed me again; i was whole, i had begun reading again--when your note came i was engaged in a book. i dread as much as a plague the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. i will walk over the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and if they should continue gloomy walk into the city to abbey and get his consent for i am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot. 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,-- i am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in the course of a year or so i think i shall try the public again--in a selfish point of view i should suffer my pride and my contempt of public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and fanny's sake i will pluck up a spirit and try again. i have no doubt of success in a course of years if i persevere--but it must be patience--for the reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for themselves. these reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially the quarterly--they are like a superstition which the more it prostrates the crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. i was in hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like the spectators at the westminster cock-pit--they like the battle--and do not care who wins or who loses. 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,-- for the candles are burnt down and i am using the wax taper--which has a long snuff on it--the fire is at its last click--i am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet--i am writing this on the maid's tragedy which i have read since tea with great pleasure. beside this volume of beaumont and fletcher--there are on the table two volumes of chaucer and a new work of tom moore's called _tom cribb's memorial to congress_,--nothing in it. these are trifles but i require nothing so much of you but that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me. could i see that same thing done of any great man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position shakespeare sat when he began 'to be or not to be'--such things become interesting from distance of time or place. i hope you are both now in that sweet sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do--i must fancy you so--and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your lives--god bless you--i whisper good night in your ears and you will dream of me. this is on the th of march. six days later he gives another picture, this time of his state of body rather than of mind:-- this morning i am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless--i long after a stanza or two of thomson's _castle of indolence_--my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. if i had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies i should call it languor, but as i am i must call it laziness. in this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a greek vase--a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. this is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body over-powering the mind. [illustration: 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.'[ ] 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 th and th, 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: i am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that reason i did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether i have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. it will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were through my human passions--and perhaps i must confess a little bit of my heart-- why did i laugh to-night? no voice will tell: no god, no demon of severe response deigns to reply from heaven or from hell.-- then to my human heart i turn at once-- heart! thou and i are here sad and alone; say wherefore did i laugh? o mortal pain! o darkness! darkness! ever must i moan to question heaven and hell and heart in vain! why did i laugh? i know this being's lease; my fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: yet could i on this very midnight cease and the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds. verse, fame and beauty are intense indeed but death intenser--death is life's high meed. i went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. sane i went to bed and sane i arose. 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 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,-- even here, though i myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of, i am, however young, writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. yet may i not in this be free from sin? may there not be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though instinctive, attitude my mind may fall into as i am entertained with the alertness of the stoat or the anxiety of a deer? 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:-- last sunday i took a walk towards highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of lord mansfield's park i met mr green our demonstrator at guy's[ ] in conversation with coleridge--i joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable--i walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles i suppose. in those two miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if i can give you a list--nightingales, poetry--on poetical sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams--nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness--monsters--the kraken--mermaids--southey believes in them--southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--good morning--i heard his voice as he came towards me--i heard it as he moved away--i had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so. he was civil enough to ask me to call on him at highgate. 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:-- _c._ poor keats, i saw him once. mr green, whom you have heard me mention, and i were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken by a young man of a very striking countenance whom mr green recognised and shook hands with, mentioning my name; i wish mr green had introduced me, for i did not know who it was. he passed on, but in a few moments sprung back and said, 'mr coleridge, allow me the honour of shaking your hand.' i was struck by the energy of his manner, and gave him my hand. he passed on and we stood still looking after him, when mr green said, 'do you know who that is? that is keats, the poet.' 'heavens!' said i, 'when i shook him by the hand there was death!' this was about two years before he died. _f._ but what was it? _c._ i cannot describe it. there was a heat and a dampness in the hand. to say that his death was caused by the review is absurd, but at the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect which it must have had on his mind. it is very well for those who have a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious principle; but all men are not born philosophers, and all men have not those advantages of birth and education. poor keats had not, and it is impossible i say to conceive the effect which such a review must have had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.[ ] 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 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 , '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 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.'[ ] 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 feet[ ] 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 ) 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 , 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.[ ] 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.[ ] 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 temper when i tell you that the thing i have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to indolence. the reader will have noticed in the phrase about 'versifying pet-lamb' a repetition from this very ode _on indolence_. here is another confidence imparted to the same correspondent concerning his present mood and disposition:-- i have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a fly--my troubles were all of the imagination--my brother george always stood between me and any dealings with the world. now i find i must buffet it--i must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight--i must choose between despair and energy--i choose the latter though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which i once thought was impossible-- 'nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower.' i once thought this a melancholist's dream. his immediate object in writing had been to ask, in case he should decide against the indiaman project and in favour of another attempt at the literary life, for the address of a cheap lodging somewhere in the teign valley, the beauties of which, seen in glimpses through the rain, he had sung in some doggrel stanzas the year before. brown, more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of his friend's genius, was dead against the indiaman scheme and in the end persuaded keats to accept an advance of money for his present needs and to devote the summer to work in the country. part of such work was to be upon a tragedy to be written by the two in collaboration and on a basis of half profits. brown had not less belief in keats's future than affection for his person, and it was the two combined that made him ready and eager, as he frankly told keats, to sail in the same boat with him. in the end the devonshire idea gave place to a new plan, that of joining the invalid james rice for a stay at shanklin. 'i have given up the idea of the indiaman', keats writes to his young sister on june ; 'i cannot resolve to give up my favourite studies: so i propose to retire once more. a friend of mine who has an ill state of health called on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back of the isle of wight where he said we might live cheaply. i agreed to his proposal.' footnotes: [ ] later occupants re-named the place lawn bank and threw the two semi-detached houses into one, making alterations and additions the exact nature of which were pointed out to me in by mr william dilke, the then surviving brother of keats's friend. this gentleman also showed me a house across the road which he himself had built in early life, occupied for a while, and then let on a sixty years' lease: 'which lease,' he added, as though to outlive a sixty years' agreement contracted at thirty were the most ordinary occurrence in the world, 'fell in a year or two ago.' he died shortly afterwards, aged . he and mrs procter, the widow of barry cornwall the poet--staunchest, wittiest, and youngest-hearted defier of time that she was--were the only two persons i have known and spoken to who had known and spoken to keats. [ ] the only set of engravings existing in keats's time after pictures at milan was the raccolta, etc., of g. zanconi ( ), which gives only panels and canvases by masters of the full renaissance in private collections. [ ] the fullest and, it must be said, least favourable account we have of her is in the retrospect of a cousin who had frequented her mother's house as a young boy about - , and seventy years later gave his impressions as follows (_new york herald_, april , ). 'miss fanny brawne was very fond of admiration. i do not think she cared for keats, although she was engaged to him. she was very much affected when he died, because she had treated him so badly. she was very fond of dancing, and of going to the opera and to balls and parties. miss brawne's mother had an extensive acquaintance with gentlemen, and the society in which they mingled was musical and literary. through the dilkes, miss brawne was invited out a great deal, and as keats was not in robust health enough to take her out himself (for he never went with her), she used to go with military men to the woolwich balls and to balls in hampstead; and she used to dance with these military officers a great deal more than keats liked. she did not seem to care much for him. mr dilke, the grandfather of the present sir charles dilke, admired her very much in society, and although she was not a great beauty she was very lively and agreeable. i remember that among those frequenting mrs brawne's house in hampstead were a number of foreign gentlemen. keats could not talk french as they could, and their conversation with his fiancée in a language he could not understand was a source of continual disagreement between them. keats thought that she talked and flirted and danced too much with them, but his remonstrances were all unheeded by miss brawne.' against these impressions should be set brown's testimony, contained in letters of the time to severn and others, to her signs of acute distress on the news coming from italy of the hopelessness of her lover's condition and finally of his death: and stronger still, her own words written in later years to medwin, which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of his character if not of his genius (see below p. ). [ ] [greek: eros d' aute m' ho lysimelês donei glykypikron amachanon orpeton.]--sappho, fr. . [ ] there is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts by friends, and mr buxton forman was most likely right in suggesting that the true reading for 'not' should be 'out.' [ ] keats was staying that night and two more at mr taylor's in london: but there is nothing against my theory in this: he might have composed the sonnet as well in fleet street as at hampstead. [ ] in his printed account of the matter clarke calls the victim definitely a kitten, and says of keats: 'he thought he should be beaten, for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but like an authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow which "told" upon his antagonist; in every succeeding round therefore (for they fought nearly an hour), he never failed of returning to the weak point, and the contest ended in the hulk being led home.' [ ] joseph henry green, afterwards f.r.s. and professor of anatomy to the royal academy; distinguished alike as a teacher in his own profession and as a disciple and interpreter of coleridge's philosophy. [ ] _cornhill magazine_, april : 'a talk with coleridge,' edited by miss e. m. green. [ ] [greek: kai pheùgei philéonta kai où philéonta diôkei.] theocr. idyll. vi. . [ ] i use the foot nomenclature for convenience, because to count by stresses seems to make the point less immediately clear, while to count by syllables would involve pointing out that in the last lines of stanzas ii, iv, ix and xi the movement is varied by resolving the light first syllable into two that take the time of one. [ ] brown, writing many years after the events, must be a little out here, seeing that already on april th keats tells his brother that brown is busy 'rummaging out his keats's old sins, that is to say sonnets.' (note that keats mentions no odes). brown is in like manner wrong in remembering the draft of the nightingale ode as written on 'four or five scraps' when it was in fact written on two, as became apparent when it appeared in the market thirteen years ago (see _monthly review_, march ). it is now in the collection of lord crewe. [ ] when in - their existence was disclosed and they were divided on the order of the court of chancery between george keats and his sister, they amounted with accumulations of interest to a little over £ . chapter xii june -january : shanklin, winchester, hampstead: trouble and health failure work on _otho_ and _lamia_--letters to fanny brawne--keats as lover--an imagined future--change to winchester--work and fine weather--ill news from george--a run to town--a talk with woodhouse--woodhouse as critic--alone at winchester--spirited letters: to his brother--to reynolds, brown, and dilke--hopes and resolutions--will work for the press--attempt and breakdown--return to wentworth place--morning and evening tasks--cries of passion--signs of despondency--testimony of brown--haydon's exaggerations--schemes and doings--visit of george keats--pleasantry and bitterness--beginning of the end. 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,[ ] 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 £ or £ , 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:-- i am glad i had not an opportunity of sending off a letter which i wrote for you on tuesday night--'twas too much like one out of rousseau's _heloise_. i am more reasonable this morning. the morning is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful girl whom i love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the lonely, silent, unmusical chamber is waiting to receive me as into a sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then i would not have you see those rhapsodies which i once thought it impossible i should ever give way to, and which i have often laughed at in another, for fear you should think me either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad. i am now at a very pleasant cottage window, looking onto a beautiful hilly country, with a glimpse of the sea; the morning is very fine. i do not know how elastic my spirit might be, what pleasure i might have in living here and breathing and wandering as free as a stag about this beautiful coast if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me. i have never known any unalloy'd happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of some one has always spoilt my hours--and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. a fortnight later he manages to write a little more at ease of himself, his moods, and his doings:-- do not call it folly, when i tell you i took your letter last night to bed with me. in the morning i found your name on the sealing wax obliterated. i was startled at the bad omen till i recollected that it must have happened in my dreams, and they you know fall out by contraries. you must have found out by this time i am a little given to bode ill like the raven; it is my misfortune not my fault; it has proceeded from the general tenor of the circumstances of my life, and rendered every event suspicious. however i will no more trouble either you or myself with sad prophecies; though so far i am pleased at it as it has given me opportunity to love your disinterestedness towards me. i cannot say when i shall get a volume ready. i have three or four stories half done, but as i cannot write for the mere sake of the press, i am obliged to let them progress or lie still as my fancy chooses. by christmas perhaps they may appear, but i am not yet sure they ever will. 'twill be no matter, for poems are as common as newspapers and i do not see why it is a greater crime in me than in another to let the verses of an half-fledged brain tumble into the reading-rooms and drawing-room windows.... to-morrow i shall, if my health continues to improve during the night, take a look farther about the country, and spy at the parties about here who come hunting after the picturesque like beagles. it is astonishing how they raven down scenery like children do sweetmeats. the wondrous chine here is a very great lion: i wish i had as many guineas as there have been spy-glasses in it. 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:-- you would delight very greatly in the walks about here; the cliffs, woods, hills, sands, rocks, etc., about here. they are however not so fine but i shall give them a hearty goodbye to exchange them for my cathedral.--yet again i am not so tired of scenery as to hate switzerland. we might spend a pleasant year at berne or zurich--if it should please venus to hear my 'beseech thee to hear us o goddess.' and if she should hear, god forbid we should what people call, _settle_--turn into a pond, a stagnant lethe--a vile crescent, row or buildings. better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures. open my mouth at the street door like the lion's head at venice to receive hateful cards, letters, messages. go out and wither at tea parties; freeze at dinners; bake at dances; simmer at routs. no my love, trust yourself to me and i will find you nobler amusements, fortune favouring. 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:-- i see you through a mist: as i daresay you do me by this time. believe me in the first letters i wrote you: i assure you i felt as i wrote--i could not write so now. the thousand images i have had pass through my brain--my uneasy spirits--my unguess'd fate--all spread as a veil between me and you. remember i have had no idle leisure to brood over you.--'tis well perhaps i have not. i could not have endured the throng of jealousies that used to haunt me before i had plunged so deeply into imaginary interests. i would fain, as my sails are set, sail on without an interruption for a brace of months longer--i am in complete cue--in the fever; and shall in these four months do an immense deal. this page as my eye skims over it i see is excessively unloverlike and ungallant--i cannot help it--i am no officer in yawning quarters; no parson-romeo.... 'tis harsh, harsh, i know it. my heart seems now made of iron--i could not write a proper answer to an invitation to idalia.... this winchester is a fine place: a beautiful cathedral and many other ancient buildings in the environs. the little coffin of a room at shanklin is changed for a large room, where i can promenade at my pleasure.... one of the pleasantest things i have seen lately was at cowes. the regent in his yatch (i think they spell it) was anchored opposite--a beautiful vessel--and all the yatchs and boats on the coast were passing and repassing it; and circuiting and tacking about it in every direction--i never beheld anything so silent, light, and graceful.--as we pass'd over to southampton, there was nearly an accident. there came by a boat, well mann'd, with two naval officers at the stern. our bow-lines took the top of their little mast and snapped it off close by the board. had the mast been a little stouter they would have been upset. in so trifling an event i could not help admiring our seamen--neither officer nor man in the whole boat mov'd a muscle--they scarcely notic'd it even with words. forgive me for this flint-worded letter, and believe and see that i cannot think of you without some sort of energy--though mal à propos. even as i leave off it seems to me that a few more moments' thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. i must not give way to it--but turn to my writing again--if i fail i shall die hard. o my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--i must forget them. 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 th 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. the more i know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the more does my heart distend with pride and obstinacy[ ]--i feel it in my power to become a popular writer--i feel it in my power to refuse the poisonous suffrage of a public. my own being which i know to be becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of shadows in the shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. the soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home. those whom i know already, and who have grown as it were a part of myself, i could not do without: but for the rest of mankind, they are as much a dream to me as milton's hierarchies. i think if i had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox's, so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, i could pass my life very nearly alone though it should last eighty years. but i feel my body too weak to support me to the height, i am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing. a letter to his young sister of three days later is in quite another key, but one of wholesome and unforced high spirits:-- the delightful weather we have had for two months is the highest gratification i could receive--no chill'd red noses--no shivering--but fair atmosphere to think in--a clean towel mark'd with the mangle and a basin of clear water to drench one's face with ten times a day: no need of much exercise--a mile a day being quite sufficient. my greatest regret is that i have not been well enough to bathe though i have been two months by the sea side and live now close to delicious bathing--still i enjoy the weather--i adore fine weather as the greatest blessing i can have.... i should like now to promenade round your gardens--apple-tasting--pear-tasting--plum-judging--apricot nibbling--peach-scrunching--nectarine-sucking and melon-carving. i have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar cracks--and a white currant tree kept for company. i admire lolling on a lawn by a water lillied pond to eat white currants and see gold fish: and go to the fair in the evening if i'm good. there is not hope for that--one is sure to get into some mess before evening. a week later (september ) 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. - ), 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.[ ] 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?-- you were so flattered as to say the other day, you wished i had been in a company where you were, to defend keats.--in all places, and at all times, and before all persons, i would express and as far as i am able, support, my high opinion of his poetical merits--such a genius, i verily believe, has not appeared since shakspeare and milton.... but in our common conversation upon his merits, we should always bear in mind that his fame may be more hurt by indiscriminate praise than by wholesale censure. i would at once admit that he has great faults--enough indeed to sink another writer. but they are more than counter-balanced by his beauties: and this is the proper mode of appreciating an original genius. his faults will wear away--his fire will be chastened--and then eyes will do homage to his brilliancy. but genius is wayward, trembling, easily daunted. and shall we not excuse the errors, the luxuriancy of youth? are we to expect that poets are to be given to the world, as our first parents were, in a state of maturity? are they to have no season of childhood? are they to have no room to try their wings before the steadiness and strength of their flight are to be finally judged of?... now, while keats is unknown, unheeded, despised of one of our arch-critics, neglected by the rest--in the teeth of the world, and in the face of 'these curious days,' i express my conviction, that keats, during his life (if it please god to spare him to the usual age of man, and the critics not to drive him from the free air of the poetic heaven before his wings are fully fledged) will rank on a level with the best of the last or of the present generation: and after his death will take his place at their head. but, while i think thus, i would make persons respect my judgment by the discrimination of my praise, and by the freedom of my censure where his writings are open to it. these are the elements of true criticism. it is easy, like momus, to find fault with the clattering of the slipper worn by the goddess of beauty; but 'the serious gods' found better employment in admiration of her unapproachable loveliness. a poet ought to write for posterity. but a critic ought to do so too. by september 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 th and th 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. we are certainly in a very low estate--i say we, for i am in such a situation, that were it not for the assistance of brown and taylor, i must be as badly off as a man can be. i could not raise any sum by the promise of any poem, no, not by the mortgage of my intellect. we must wait a little while. i really have hopes of success. i have finished a tragedy, which if it succeeds will enable me to sell what i may have in manuscript to a good advantage. i have passed my time in reading, writing, and fretting, the last i intend to give up, and stick to the other two. they are the only chances of benefit to us. your wants will be a fresh spur to me. i assure you you shall more than share what i can get whilst i am still young. the time may come when age will make me more selfish. i have not been well treated by the world, and yet i have, capitally well. i do not know a person to whom so many purse-strings would fly open as to me, if i could possibly take advantage of them, which i cannot do, for none of the owners of these purses are rich.... mine, i am sure, is a tolerable tragedy; it would have been a bank to me, if just as i had finished it, i had not heard of kean's resolution to go to america. that was the worst news i could have had.... but be not cast down any more than i am; i feel i can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. whenever i find myself growing vapourish, i rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly, and in fact adonize as if i were going out. then, all clean and comfortable, i sit down to write. this i find the greatest relief. and again, in still better heart:-- with my inconstant disposition it is no wonder that this morning, amid all our bad times and misfortunes, i should feel so alert and well-spirited. at this moment you are perhaps in a very different state of mind. it is because my hopes are ever paramount to my despair. i have been reading over a part of a short poem i have composed lately, called _lamia_, and i am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way. give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation--what they want is a sensation of some sort. i wish i could pitch the key of your spirits as high as mine is; but your organ-loft is beyond the reach of my voice. 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:-- wait for the issue of this tragedy? no--there cannot be greater uncertainties east, west, north, and south than concerning dramatic composition. how many months must i wait! had i not better begin to look about me now? if better events supersede this necessity what harm will be done? i have no trust whatever on poetry. i don't wonder at it--the marvel is to me how people read so much of it. i think you will see the reasonableness of my plan. to forward it i purpose living in a cheap lodging in town, that i may be in the reach of books and information of which there is here a plentiful lack. if i can find any place tolerably comfortable i will settle myself and fag till i can afford to buy pleasure--which if i never can afford i must go without. 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. brown, returning to winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose him for housemate and doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected his motives too much to contend against them. it was accordingly settled that the two friends, after travelling up to london together, should part company, brown returning to his home at hampstead, while keats went to live by himself and look out for employment on the press. the dilkes, who were living in great smith street, westminster, at his desire engaged a lodging for him close by, at the corner of college street (no. ), and thither he betook himself, it would seem on the th or th of october. college street, as all londoners or visitors to london know, is one of sedately picturesque queen anne or early georgian houses overlooking the abbey gardens. no corner of the town could have been more fitted to soothe him with a sense of cathedral quietude resembling that which he had just left. but the wise and purposeful keats had reckoned without his other self, the keats distracted by uncontrollable love-cravings. his blood proved traitor to his will, and the plan of life and literary hackwork in london broke down at once on trial, or even before trial. on the th he went up to hampstead, and in a moment all his strength, to borrow words of his own, was uncrystallized and dissolved. it was the first time he had seen his mistress since june. he found her kind, and from that hour was utterly passion's slave again. in the solitude of his london lodging he found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. he writes to her three days later:-- this moment i have set myself to copy some verses out fair. i cannot proceed with any degree of content. i must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. upon my soul i can think of nothing else. the time is passed when i had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my life. my love has made me selfish. i cannot exist without you. i am forgetful of everything but seeing you again--my life seems to stop there--i see no further. you have absorb'd me. he seems to have spent the next week going backwards and forwards between hampstead and london, staying for three nights as a guest at her mother's house ('my three days' dream,' he calls the visit) and for one or two at the dilkes' in westminster, and finally about the th settling back into his old quarters with brown at wentworth place next door to her. 'i shall be able to do nothing,' he writes.--and again there comes the cry, 'i should like to cast the die for love or death.' it was for death that the die was cast, and three months later came the seizure which made manifest the certainty of the issue. in the meantime he lived outwardly through the autumn and early winter much the same life as before among his own friends and brown's. some of them noticed in him at times a loss of natural gaiety and an unaccustomed strain of recklessness and moodiness. severn, who had spent with him part of one of his days at the college street lodgings, hearing him read _lamia_ and tell of the change of mind about _hyperion_ (to severn as an ardent miltonian a sore disappointment), called there again a few days later only to find him flown; and going to see him the next sunday at hampstead was perturbed by the change in him. 'he seemed well neither in mind nor in body, with little of the happy confidence and resolute bearing of a week earlier: while alternating moods of apathetic dejection and spasmodic gaiety rendered him a companion somewhat difficult to humour.' his correspondence at the same time falls off, and from mid-october until past christmas we get only one letter to severn, one to rice, one to taylor the publisher, and three or four to his sister fanny. for other evidence we have the recollections, fairly full but somewhat enigmatical withal, of his housemate brown; some blatancies, little to be trusted, of haydon; and what is more revealing, the tenor of his own attempts at new poetical work, as well as a few private utterances in verse which the stress of passion forced from him. for some weeks he was able to ply at wentworth place a double daily task: one, that of writing each morning in the same sitting-room with brown, who copied as he wrote, some stanzas of a comic fairy poem which they had devised together, to be called _the cap and bells, or the jealousies_, and to come out under the pseudonym of 'lucy vaughan lloyd': the other, carried on each evening in the seclusion of his own room, that of remodelling _hyperion_ into the form of a dream or vision, in which parts of the poem as begun a year before should be incorporated with certain changes of style and diction. at the former scheme keats worked with great fluency but little felicity: the mere, almost mechanical act of spinning the verses of _the cap and bells_ seems to have come all the easier to him in that they sprang from no vital or inward part of his imaginative being, and the result is as nearly worthless as anything written by such a man can be conceived to be. in his solitary work on the recast of _hyperion_ keats wrote, on the other hand, out of the truest--which had come, alas! also to be the saddest--depths of himself; and the fragment needs to be studied with as much care as the best of his earlier work by those who would understand the ripening thoughts of this great, now stricken, spirit on the destinies of poets and the relation of poetry to human life. to that study we shall come by and by. for the present let it be only noted that these twofold occupations seem to have been kept up by keats through november, and broken off soon afterwards 'owing to a circumstance which,' says brown, mysteriously, 'it is needless to mention.' but judging by the rest of brown's narrative, as well as by some of keats's own private outpourings, no special or external circumstance can have been needed,--his inward sufferings were quite enough of themselves,--to put a stop to his writing. the wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his sensations and emotions into pain: at once darkening the shadow of impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied cravings of his passion. during his 'three days' dream' under the same roof with his betrothed in october he had been able to write peaceably at nightfall:-- faded the flower and all its budded charms, faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, faded the shape of beauty from my arms, faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise-- vanish'd unseasonably at shut of eve, when the dusk holiday--or holinight of fragrant-curtain'd love begins to weave the woof of darkness thick, for hid delight; but, as i've read love's missal through to-day, he'll let me sleep, seeing i fast and pray. but now the hunger is uncontrollable:-- yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, withold no atom's atom or i die, or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall. forget, in the mist of idle misery, life's purposes,--the palate of my mind losing its gust, and my ambition blind! and again he cries, what can he do to recover his old liberty?-- when every fair one that i saw was fair, enough to catch me in but half a snare, not keep me there: when, howe'er poor or particolour'd things, my muse had wings, and ever ready was to take her course whither i bent her force, unintellectual, yet divine to me;-- divine, i say!--what sea-bird o'er the sea is a philosopher the while he goes winging along where the great water throes? how shall i do to get anew those moulted feathers, and so mount once more above, above the reach of fluttering love, and make him cower lowly while i soar? shall i gulp wine? no, that is vulgarism, a heresy and schism, foisted into the canon law of love;-- no,--wine is only sweet to happy men; more dismal cares seize on me unawares,-- where shall i learn to get my peace again? to banish thoughts of that most hateful land, dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life; that monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour, ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, unown'd of any weedy-haired gods, whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, ic'd in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, would fright a dryad; whose harsh herbag'd meads make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds; there bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, and great unerring nature once seems wrong. with that image of the sea-bird winging untroubled its chosen way over the waves, and as free as they, the poet sheds a real light on his own psychology in happier days, while the later lines figure direfully the obsession that now seems to make him think of even his friendships as wrecked and darkened, and of love as a ghastly error in nature, no joy but a scourge that blights and devastates. that he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does not seem to have occurred to keats as possible at the present ebb-tide of his fortune. 'however selfishly i feel,' he had written to her some months earlier, 'i am sure i could never act selfishly.' the brawnes on their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. as the autumn wore into winter, he was not able to disguise his plight from his affectionate companion brown, though he shrank from speaking of its causes. looking back upon the time after ten years brown records the impression it left upon him thus:-- it was evident from the letters he had sent me, even in his self-deceived assurance that he was 'as far from being unhappy as possible,' that he was unhappy. i quickly perceived he was more so than i had feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great uneasiness. he was unwilling to speak on the subject; and i could do no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding that word however. brown then tells of his morning and evening work on _the cap and bells_ and the revised _hyperion_ and, in the vague terms i have quoted, of its cessation. and then, seeming to assign to money troubles an even greater part than they really bore in causing keats's distress of mind, brown goes on-- he could not resume his employment, and he became dreadfully unhappy. his hopes of fame, and other more tender hopes were blighted. his patrimony, though much consumed in a profession he was compelled to relinquish, might have upheld him through the storm, had he not imprudently lost a part of it in generous loans.... he possessed the noble virtues of friendship and generosity to excess; and they, in this world, may chance to spoil a man of independent feeling, till he is destitute. even the 'immediate cash,' of which he spoke in the extracts i have given from his letters, was lent, with no hope of its speedy repayment, and he was left worse than pennyless. all that a friend could say, or offer, or urge was not enough to heal his many wounds. he listened, and, in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. he was too thoughtful, or too unquiet; and he began to be reckless of health. among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. it was discovered by accident, and, without delay, revealed to me. he needed not to be warned of the danger of such a habit; but i rejoiced at his promise never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could induce him to break his word, when once given,--which was a difficulty. still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional proof of his rooted misery. where brown hints of his being 'careless of health,' haydon, referring apparently to this time of his life in particular, declares roundly and crudely as follows:-- unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength of mind enough to buckle himself together like a porcupine, and present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief, which after a temporary elevation of spirits plunged him into deeper despondency than ever. for six weeks he was scarcely sober, and--to show what a man does to gratify his appetites, when once they get the better of him--once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the 'delicious coldness of claret in all its glory,'--his own expression. if keats really told haydon that silly, and i should suppose impossible, story about the claret and cayenne it was probably only a piece of such 'rhodomontade' as his friends describe, invented on the spur of the moment to scandalize haydon or under the provocation of one of his preachments. that he may at moments during these unhappy months have sought relief in dissipation of one kind or another, as brown tells us he did in drug-taking, is likely: that he was now or at any time habitually given to drink is disproved by the explicit testimony of all his friends as well as of brown, his closest intimate. in his few letters of the time his secret misery is betrayed only by a single phrase. early in december he writes arranging to go with severn to see the picture with which severn was competing for, and eventually won, the annual gold medal of the academy for historical painting. the subject was 'the cave of despair' from spenser. keats in making the appointment adds parenthetically from his troubled heart, 'you had best put me into your cave of despair.' a little later we hear of him flinging out in a fit of angered loyalty from a company of elder artists, hilton, de wint and others, where the deserts of the winner were disparaged and his success put down to favouritism. it would seem that as late as november th he was still, or had quite lately been, going on with _the cap and bells_. he writes on that date to taylor depreciating what he has recently been about and indicating in what direction his thoughts, when he could bend them seriously upon work at all, were inclined to turn:-- as the marvellous is the most enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers i have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her manage for herself. i and myself cannot agree about this at all. wonders are no wonders to me. i am more at home amongst men and women. i would rather read chaucer than ariosto. the little dramatic skill i may as yet have however badly it might show in a drama would i think be sufficient for a poem. i wish to diffuse the colouring of st agnes eve throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. two or three such poems, if god should spare me, written in the course of the next six years, would be a famous gradus ad parnassum altissimum. i mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest ambition--when i do feel ambitious. i am sorry to say that is very seldom. the subject we have once or twice talked of appears a promising one, the earl of leicester's history. i am this morning reading holingshed's _elizabeth_. it does not seem clear whether his idea about leicester was to use the subject for a narrative poem or for a play. scott's _kenilworth_, be it remembered, had not yet been written. in december he writes to his sister fanny of the trouble his throat keeps giving him or threatening him with on exertion or cold, and says that he has been ordering a thick great coat and thick shoes on the advice of his doctor. he also mentions that he has begun to prepare a volume of poems to come out in the spring, and that he is touching up his and brown's tragedy in order to brighten its interest. it had been accepted, he tells her, by drury lane, but only with the promise of coming out next season, and as that is not soon enough they intend either to insist on its being brought out this season or else to transfer it to covent gardens. he has been anxiously expecting, and has just now received, news of george; and has promised to dine with mrs dilke in london on christmas day. whether he was able to keep this engagement we do not learn; but brown at any rate was there, and between him and dilke there arose a challenge on which keats among others was called to adjudicate. the conversation, writes mrs dilke, 'turned on fairy tales--brown's forte--dilke not liking them. brown said he was sure he could beat dilke, and to let him try they betted a beefsteak supper, and an allotted time was given. they had been read by the persons fixed on--keats, reynolds, rice, and taylor--and the wager was decided the night before last in favour of dilke. next saturday night the supper is to be given,--beefsteaks and punch--the food of the "cockney school."' so life went on for the friends, on the surface, pretty much as usual, into the new year ( ). early in january george keats came for a short visit to england to try and advance his affairs and get possession of more capital for his business. he seems not to have realized at all fully the true state of his brother's health or heart. he noticed, indeed, a change, and looking back on the time some years afterwards writes, 'he was not the same being; although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with former openness and unreserve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs.' george was probably too full of his own affairs to enquire very closely into john's, or he would never have allowed john, as he did, to strip himself practically bare of future means of subsistence in fulfilment of the brotherly promises of help conveyed, as we have seen, in his letter from winchester the previous september. 'it was not fair of him, was it?' john is recorded to have said a little later from his sick-bed, referring to george's action in so taking him at his word; and brown from this circumstance conceived of george a bitter bad opinion which nothing afterwards would shake. nevertheless there is ample evidence of george's honourable and affectionate character, and it seems clear that in striving for commercial success he had his brother's ultimate benefit in view as much as his own, and that in the meantime he believed he had reason to take for granted the willingness and ability of john's many friends to keep him afloat. on january th, a week after george's arrival, john took up his pen to try and write to his sister-in-law a journal letter in the old chatty affectionate style. if he had the means, he says, he would like to come and pay them a visit in america for a few months. 'i should not think much of the time, or my absence from my books; or i have no right to think, for i am very idle. but then i ought to be diligent, or at least to keep myself within reach of the materials for diligence. diligence, that i do not mean to say; i should say dreaming over my books, or rather over other people's books.' he gossips about friends and acquaintances, less good-naturedly than usual, as he seems to be aware when he says, 'any third person would think i was addressing myself to a lover of scandal. but we know we do not love scandal, but fun; and if scandal happens to be fun, that is no fault of ours.' he tells how george is making copies of his verses, including the ode to the nightingale; lets his inward embitterment show through for an instant when he says, 'if you should have a boy, do not christen him john, and persuade george not to let his partiality for me come across: 'tis a bad name, and goes against a man;' describes a dance he has been to at the dilkes, and among a good deal of rather irritable and wry-mouthed social satire, to which he tries to give a colour of pleasantry and playfulness, strikes into sharp definition with the fewest possible words the characters of some of his friends and acquaintances:-- i know three witty people, all distinct in their excellence--rice, reynolds, and richards. rice is the wisest, reynolds the playfullest, richards the out-o'-the-wayest. the first makes you laugh and think, the second makes you laugh and not think, the third puzzles your head. i admire the first, i enjoy the second, i stare at the third.... i know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence--a, b, and c. a is the foolishest, b the sulkiest, c is a negative. a makes you yawn, b makes you hate, as for c you never see him at all though he were six feet high.--i bear the first, i forbear the second, i am not certain that the third is. the first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up. this was written on january th. ten days later george started on his return journey, and john, having forgotten to hand him for delivery at home the budget he had been writing, was obliged to send it after him by post. a week later again, on february rd, came the crash towards which, as we can now see, keats's physical constitution had been hastening ever since the over exertion of his scottish tour twenty months before. the weather had been very variable, almost sultry in mid-january, then bitter cold with frost and sleet, then a thaw, whereby keats was tempted to leave off his greatcoat. coming from london to hampstead outside the stage coach on the night of thursday february rd, the chill of the thaw caught him. everyone knows the words in which brown relates the sequel:-- at eleven o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. such a state in him, i knew, was impossible; it therefore was the more fearful. i asked hurriedly, 'what is the matter? you are fevered?' 'yes, yes,' he answered, 'i was on the outside of the stage this bitter day till i was severely chilled,--but now i don't feel it. fevered!--of course, a little.' he mildly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my request that he should go to bed. i entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. on entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and i heard him say,--'that is blood from my mouth.' i went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. 'bring me the candle, brown, and let me see this blood.' after regarding it steadfastly he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that i can never forget, and said,--'i know the colour of that blood;--it is arterial blood;--i cannot be deceived in that colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--i must die.' i ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, i left him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep. keats lived for twelve months longer, but it was only, in his own words, a life in death. before narrating the end, let us pause and consider his work of the two preceding years, and , on which his fame as a great english poet is chiefly founded. footnotes: [ ] local tradition, i am informed, used to identify the house as one called eglantine villa, now demolished. the existing 'keats crescent' was so named, not as indicating the special neighbourhood where the poet lodged, but only by way of general commemoration of his sojourn. [ ] --and now his heart distends with pride, and hardening in his strength glories--. milton, _par. lost_, i. . [ ] morgan mss. chapter xiii work of , .--i. the achievements minor achievements--_bards of passion and of mirth_--_fancy_--the tales--_isabella_--story and metre--influence of chaucer--apostrophes and invocations--horror turned to beauty--the digging scene--its quality--_the eve of st agnes_--variety of sources--boccaccio's _filocolo_--poetic scope and method--examples--the unrobing scene--the feast of fruits--a rounded close--_lamia_--sources: and a comparison--metre and quality--beauties and faults--perplexing moral--the sage denounced: why?--comments of leigh hunt--the odes: _to psyche_--sources: burton and apuleius--qualities: a questionable claim--_on indolence_--_on a grecian urn_--sources: a composite--spheres of art and life contrasted--play between the two spheres--the nightingale ode--_ode on melancholy_--a grand close--the last of the odes--_to autumn_. 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 , 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 nd . 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.[ ] 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 author[ ]:-- _fancy._--it is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul ... it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things divorced in nature are married in fancy as in a lawless place. 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, ( ), 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.[ ] 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.[ ] 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. [illustration: 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.[ ] 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 th) 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,[ ] 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.[ ] 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.[ ] the painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out their beauties in detail, he calls-- innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,-- a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry.[ ] in the last line of the same stanza-- a shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings, --the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of her lineage and ancestral fame. observation, i believe, shows that moonlight has not the power to transmit the 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. ). 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,[ ] leigh hunt has some interesting things to say in his _autobiography_[ ]:-- 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. the reader will remember how bailey records this subject of the musical and emotional effect of vowel sounds, open and close, varied or iterated as the case might be, as one on which keats's talk had often run at oxford. whatever his theories, he was by this time showing himself as fine a master of such effects as any, even the greatest, of our poets. this same passage, or interlude, of the feast of fruits has despite its beauty been sometimes blamed as a 'digression.' a stanza which in keats's original draft stood near the beginning of the poem shows that in his mind it was no mere ornament and no digression at all, but an essential part of his scheme. in revision he dropped out this stanza, doubtless as being not up to the mark poetically: pity that he did not rather perfect it and let it keep its place: but even as it is the provision of the dainties made beforehand by the old nurse at porphyro's request (stanza xx) proves the feast essential to the story. while the unique charm of _the eve of st agnes_ lies thus in the richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions of the personages are not less happily conceived as far as they go. what can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the old nurse angela? how admirable in particular is the debate held by angela with porphyro in her little moonlight room pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb. madeline, a figure necessarily in the main passive, is none the less exquisite, whether in her gentle dealing with the nurse on the staircase, or when closing her chamber door she pants with quenched taper in the moonlight, and most of all when awakening she finds her lover beside her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:-- 'ah, porphyro!' said she, 'but even now thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear, made tuneable with every sweetest vow; and those sad eyes were spiritual and clear: how chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear! give me that voice again, my porphyro, those looks immortal, those complainings dear!'[ ] in all the doings and circumstances attending the departure of the lovers for a destination left thrillingly vague in the words, 'for o'er the southern moors i have a home for thee,'[ ]--in the elfin storm sent to cover their flight (the only touch of the supernatural in the story), their darkling grope down the stairway, the hush that holds the house and guest-chambers, the wind-shaken arras, the porter sprawling asleep beside his empty flagon, the awakened bloodhound who recognizes his mistress and is quiet--in keats's telling of all these things a like unflagging richness and felicity of imagination holds us spell-bound: and with the deaths of the old nurse and beadsman, once the house has lost its spirit of life and light in madeline, the poet brings round the tale, after all its glow of passionate colour and music, of trembling anticipation and love-worship enraptured or in suspense, to a chill and wintry close in subtlest harmony with its beginning:-- they glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; where lay the porter, in uneasy sprawl, with a huge empty flaggon by his side: the wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, but his sagacious eye an inmate owns: by one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: the chains lie silent on the footworn stones; the key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans. and they are gone: aye, ages long ago these lovers fled away into the storm. that night the baron dreamt of many a woe, and all his warrior-guests, with shade and form of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm, were long be-nightmar'd. angela the old died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform; the beadsman, after thousand aves told, for aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.[ ] the last of the trio of keats's tales in verse, _lamia_, owed its origin, and perhaps part of its temper, to his readings in burton's _anatomy of melancholy_. his own experiences under the stings of love and jealousy had led him, during those spring months of when he could write nothing, to pore much over the treatise of that prodigiously read, satiric old commentator on the maladies of the human mind and body, and especially over those sections of it which deal with the cause and cure of love-melancholy. entertainment in abundance, information in cartloads, keats could draw from the matter accumulated and glossed by burton, but little or nothing to gladden or soothe or fortify him. one story, however, he found which struck his imagination so much that he was moved to write upon it, and that was the old greek story, quoted by burton from philostratus, of _lamia_ the serpent-lady, at once witch and victim of witchcraft, who loved a youth of corinth and lived with him in a palace of delights built by her magic, until their happiness was shattered by the scrutiny of intrusive and coldblooded wisdom. in june , soon after the inspiration which produced the odes had passed away, and before he left hampstead for the isle of wight, keats made a beginning on this new task; continued it at intervals, concurrently with his attempts in drama, at shanklin and winchester; and finished it by the first week in september. it happened that thomas love peacock had published the year before a tale in verse on a nearly similar theme,--that of the beautiful thessalian enchantress rhododaphne: one wonders whether keats may not have felt in peacock's attempt a challenge and stimulus to his own. peacock's work, now unduly neglected, is that of an accomplished scholar and craftsman sitting down to tell an old greek tale of magic in the form of narrative verse then most fashionable, the mixed four-stressed couplet and ballad measure of scott and byron, and telling it, for a poet not of genius, gracefully and well. whether keats's _lamia_ is a work of genius there is no need to ask. no one can deny the truth of his own criticism of it when he says, 'i am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation.' but personally i cannot agree with the opinion of the late francis turner palgrave and other critics--i think they are the majority--who give it the first place among the tales. on the contrary, if an order of merit among them there must be, i should put it third and lowest, for several reasons of detail as well as for one reason affecting the whole design and composition. as to the technical qualities of the poetry, let it be granted that keats's handling of the heroic couplet, modelled this time on the example of dryden and not of the elizabethans, though retaining pleasant traces of the elizabethan usages of the over-run or _enjambement_ and the varied pause,--let it be granted that his handling of this mode of the metre is masterly. let it be admitted also that there are passages in the narrative imagined as intensely as any in _isabella_ or _the eve of st agnes_ and told quite as vividly in a style more rapid and condensed. such is the passage, in the introductory episode which fills so large a relative place in the poem, where mercury woos and wins his wood-nymph after lamia has lifted from her the spell of invisibility. such is the gorgeous, agonized transformation act of lamia herself from serpent to woman: such again the scene of her waylaying and ensnaring of the youth on his way to corinth. and such above all would be the whole final scene of the banquet and its break-up, from 'soft went the music with soft air along' to the end, but for the perplexing apostrophe, presently to be considered, which interrupts it. still counting up the things in the poem to be most praised, here is an example where the poetry of greek mythology is very eloquently woven into the rhetoric of love:-- leave thee alone! look back! ah! goddess, see whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! for pity do not this sad heart belie-- even as thou vanishest so i shall die. stay! though a naiad of the rivers, stay! to thy far wishes will thy streams obey: stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, alone they can drink up the morning rain: though a descended pleiad, will not one of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine? and here a beautiful instance of power and justness in scenic imagination:-- as men talk in a dream, so corinth all, throughout her palaces imperial, and all her populous streets and temples lewd, mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, to the wide-spreaded night above her towers. men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, companion'd or alone; while many a light flar'd here and there, from wealthy festivals, and threw their moving shadows on the walls, or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade. turning now to the other side of the account: for one thing, we find jarring and disappointing notes, such as had disappeared from keats's works since _endymion_, of the old tasteless manner of the hunt-taught days: for instance the unpalatable passage in the first book beginning 'let the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and worse still, with a new note of idle cynicism added, the lines about love which open the second book. misplaced archaisms also reappear, such as 'unshent' and the participle 'daft,' from the obsolete verb 'daff,' used as though it meant to puzzle or daze; with bad verbal coinages like 'piazzian,' 'psalterian.' moreover, though many things in the poem are potently conceived, others are not so. the description of the magical palace-hall is surely a failure, except for the one fine note in the lines,-- a haunting music, sole perhaps and lone supporters of the faery-roof, made moan throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade. the details of the structure, with its pairs of palms and plantains carved in cedar-wood, its walls lined with mirrors, its panels which change magically from plain marble to jasper, its fifty censers and 'twelve sphered tables, by twelve seats insphered,'--all this seems feebly and even tastelessly invented in comparison with the impressive dream-architecture in some of keats's other poems: i will even go farther, and say that it scarce holds its own against the not much dissimilar magic hall in the sixth canto of _rhododaphne_. but the one fundamental flaw in _lamia_ concerns its moral. the word is crude: what i mean is the bewilderment in which it leaves us as to the effect intended to be made on our imaginative sympathies. lamia is a serpent-woman, baleful and a witch, whose love for lycius fills him with momentary happiness but must, we are made aware, be fatal to him. apollonius is a philosopher who sees through her and by one steadfast look withers up her magic semblance and destroys her, but in doing so fails to save his pupil, who dies the moment his illusion vanishes. are these things a bitter parable, meaning that all love-joys are but deception, and that at the touch of wisdom and experience they melt away? if so, the tale might have been told either tragically or satirically, in either case leaving the reader impartial as between the sage and his victim. but keats in this apostrophe, which i wish he had left out, deliberately points a moral and expressly invites us to take sides:-- what wreath for lamia? what for lycius? what for the sage, old apollonius? upon her aching forehead be there hung the leaves of willow and of adder's tongue; and for the youth, quick, let us strip for him the thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim into forgetfulness; and, for the sage, let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage war on his temples. do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? there was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine-- unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made the tender-person'd lamia melt into a shade. these lines to my mind have not only the fault of breaking the story at a critical point and anticipating its issue, but challenge the mind to untimely questionings and reflections. the wreaths of ominous growth distributed to each of the three personages may symbolize the general tragedy: but why are we asked to take sides with the enchantress, ignoring everything about her except her charm, and against the sage? if she were indeed a thing of bale under a mask of beauty, was not the friend and tutor bound to unmask her? and if the pupil could not survive the loss of his illusion,--if he could not confront the facts of life and build up for himself a new happiness on a surer foundation,--was it not better that he should be let perish? is there not in all this a slackening of imaginative and intellectual grasp? and especially as to the last lines, do we not feel that they are but a cheap and unilluminating repetition of a rather superficial idea, the idea phrased shortly in campbell's _rainbow_ and at length in several well-known passages of wordsworth's _excursion_, particularly that in the fifth book beginning-- ambitious spirits!-- whom earth, at this late season, hath produced to regulate the moving spheres, and weigh the planets in the hollow of their hand; and they who rather dive than soar, whose pains have solved the elements, or analysed the thinking principle--shall they in fact prove a degraded race? wordsworth had fifteen years earlier written more wisely, 'poetry is the impassioned expression in the countenance of all science.' the latter-day wordsworth, and keats after him, should have realised that the discoveries of 'philosophy,' meaning science, create new mysteries while they solve the old, and leave the world as full of poetry as they found it: poetry, it may be, with its point of view shifted, poetry of a new kind, but none the less poetical. leigh hunt, in his review of _lamia_ published on the appearance of the volume, has some remarks partly justifying and partly impugning keats's treatment of the story in this respect:-- mr keats has departed as much from common-place in the character and moral of this story, as he has in the poetry of it. he would see fair play to the serpent, and makes the power of the philosopher an ill-natured and disturbing thing. lamia though liable to be turned into painful shapes had a soul of humanity; and the poet does not see why she should not have her pleasures accordingly, merely because a philosopher saw that she was not a mathematical truth. this is fine and good. it is vindicating the greater philosophy of poetry. so far, this is a manifest piece of special pleading by hunt on lamia's behalf. if she is nothing worse than a being with a soul of humanity liable to be turned into painful shapes, why must apollonius feel it his duty to wither and destroy her for the safeguarding of his pupil, even at the cost of that pupil's life? her witchcraft must consist in something much worse than not being a mathematical truth, else why is he her so bitter enemy? hunt proceeds, more to the purpose, to protest against the poet's implication-- 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 history and physics, by shewing us the nature of things, does away with 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, so 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 physical cause of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:--he was none before. the true poet will go deeper. he will ask himself what is the cause of that physical cause; whether truths to the senses are after all to be taken as truths to the imagination; and whether there is not room and mystery enough in the universe for the creation of infinite things, when the poor matter-of-fact philosopher has come to the end of his own vision. in _endymion_ keats had impeded and confused his narrative by working into it much incident and imagery symbolic of the cogitations and aspirations, the upliftings and misgivings, of his own unripe spirit. three years later, writing to shelley from his sickbed, he contrasts that former state of his mind with its present state, saying that it was then like a scattered pack of cards but is now sorted to a pip. the three tales just discussed, written in the interval, show how quickly the power of sorting and controlling his imaginations had matured itself in him. in them he is already an artist standing outside of his own conceptions, certain of his own aim in dealing with them (subject perhaps to some reservation in the case of _lamia_), and scarcely letting his personal self intrude upon his narrative at all to complicate or distract it. for the expression of his private moods and meditations he had perfected during the same interval a new and beautiful vehicle in the ode. he had been accustomed to try his hand at odes, or what he called such, from his earliest riming days: and odes also, to all intents and purposes, are the two great lyrics in _endymion_, the choral hymn to pan and the song of the indian maiden to sorrow. but those which he composed in quick succession, as we have seen, in the late spring of are of a reflective and meditative type, new in his work and highly personal. that which i have shown reason for believing to be the earliest of the group, the _ode to psyche_ written in the last days of april, differs somewhat from the rest both in form and spirit. its strophes are longer and more irregular: its strain less inward and brooding, with more of lyric ardour and exaltation. it tells of the poet's delight in that late, exquisitely and spiritually symbolic product of the mythologic spirit of expiring paganism, the story of cupid and psyche. what may have especially turned his attention to this fable at that moment we cannot tell. possibly the mention of it in burton's _anatomy_ may have set him on to reading the original source, the _golden ass_ of apuleius, in adlington's translation: there are passages in _lamia_ which suggest such a reading,[ ] and the noble, rhythmical english of that elizabethan version, loose as it may be in point of scholarship, could not fail to charm his ear. or possibly recent study of the plates in the _musée napoléon_ (as to which more by and by) may have brought freshly to his memory the sculptured group in which the story is embodied. but that he had always loved the story we know from the passage 'i stood tip-toe' beginning-- so felt he, who first told how psyche went on the smooth wind to realms of wonderment, as well as from his confession that in boyhood he used to admire its languid and long-drawn romantic treatment in the poem of mrs tighe. cloying touches of languor, such as often disfigure his own earlier work, are not wanting in the opening lines in which he tells how he came upon the fabled couple in a dream, but are more than compensated by the charm of the scene where he finds them reposing, 'mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' what other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the essential virtue of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with keats; and of spenser with his 'sea-shouldering whales' he is now more than the equal. the 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in _st agnes' eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'soft-conchèd ear' of psyche,--though the compound is perhaps a little forced and odd, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in _lamia_. the invocation in the third and fourth stanzas expresses, with the fullest reach of keats's felicity in style and a singular freshness and fire of music in the verse, both his sense of the meaning of greek nature-religion and his delight in imagining the beauty of its shrines and ritual. for the rest, there seems at first something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:-- yes, i will be thy priest, and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind, where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. but in a moment we are carried beyond criticism by that incomparable distillation of one, or many, of his impressions among the lakes or in scotland,-- far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep. for such a master-stroke of concentrated imaginative description no praise, much as has been showered on it by ruskin and lesser critics, can be too great. keats declares to his brother that this is the first of his poems with which he has taken even moderate pains. that being so, it is remarkable that he should have let stand in it as many as three unrimed line-endings: and what the poem truly bears in upon the reader is a sense less of special care and finish than of special glow and ardour, till he is left breathless and delighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener fancy,' his mind enthralled by the imagery and his ear by the verse, with its swift, mounting music and rich, vehemently iterated assonances towards the close:-- a rosy sanctuary will i dress with the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, with buds, and bells, and stars without a name, with all the gardener fancy e'er could feign, with breeding flowers, will never breed the same; and thither will i bring all soft delights that shadowy thought can win, a bright torch, and a casement ope at nights, to let the warm love in! the four remaining spring odes are slower-paced, as becomes their more musing tenour, and are all written in a succession of stanzas repeated uniformly or with slight variations. throughout them all each stanza is of ten lines and five rimes, the first and second rimes arranged in a quatrain, the third, fourth and fifth in a sestet: the order of rimes in the sestet varying in the different odes, and in one, the nightingale ode, the third line from the end being shortened so as to have three stresses instead of five. let us take first the two in which the imagery has been suggested to the poet by works of greek sculpture whether seen or imagined. in the _ode on indolence_ keats merely revives his memory of a special type of greek marble urn where draped figures of women, seasons, it may be, or priestesses, walk with joined hands behind a solemn bacchus, or priest in the god's guise (see plate viii, p. ),--he merely evokes this memory in order to describe the way in which certain symbolic personages have seemed in a day-dream to pass before him and re-pass and again re-pass, appearing and disappearing as the embossed figures on such an urn may be made to do by turning it round. from the 'man and two women' of the march letter they are changed to three women, whom at first he does not recognize; but seeing presently who they are, namely love, ambition, and that 'maiden most unmeek,' his 'demon poesy,' he for a moment longs for wings to follow and overtake them. the longing passes, and in his relaxed mood he feels that none of the three holds any joy for him-- so sweet as drowsy noons, and evenings steep'd in honey'd indolence. they come by once more, and again, barely aroused from the sweets of outdoor slumber and the spring afternoon, he will not so much as lift his head from where he lies, but bids them farewell and sees them depart without a tear. keats did not print this ode, thinking it perhaps not good enough or else too intimately personal. but writing to miss jeffrey a few weeks after it was composed, he tells her it is the thing he has most enjoyed writing this year. it is indeed a pleasant, lovingly meditated revival and casting into verse of the imagery which had come freshly into his mind when he wrote to his brother of his fit of languor in the previous march. it contains some powerful and many exquisite lines, but only one perfect stanza, the fifth: and there are slacknesses--shall we say lazinesses--in the execution, as where the need for rimes to 'noons' and 'indolence' prompts the all-too commonplace prayer-- that i may never know how change the moons, or hear the voice of busy common-sense; or where, thinking contemptuously of the old 'intercoronation' days with leigh hunt, he declines, in truly cockney rime, to raise his head from the flowery _grass_ in order to be fed with praise and become 'a pet-lamb in a sentimental _farce_.' in bidding the phantoms of this day-dream adieu, keats avows that there are others yet haunting him, and while imagery drawn from the sculptures on greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his famous _ode on a grecian urn_. it is no single or actually existing specimen of attic handicraft that he celebrates in this ode, but a composite conjured up instinctively in his mind out of several such known to him in reality or from engravings. during and after those hour-long silent reveries among the museum marbles of which severn tells us, the creative spirit within him will have been busy almost unaware combining such images and re-combining them. cricitism can plausibly analyse this creation into its several elements. in calling the scene a 'leaf-fringed legend' keats will have remembered that the necks and shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of leaf-pattern ornament. the idea of a sacrifice and a bacchic dance being figured together in one frieze, a thing scarcely elsewhere to be found, will have come to him from the well known vase of sosibios (so called from the name of the sculptor inscribed upon it), from the print of which in the _musée napoléon_ there actually exists a tracing by his hand.[ ] but this is a serene and ceremonial composition: for the tumult and 'wild ecstasy' of his imagined frieze, the 'pipes and timbrels,' the 'mad pursuit,' he will have had store of visions ready in his mind, from the bacchanal pictures of poussin, no doubt also from bacchic vases like that fine one in the townley collection at the british museum and the nearly allied borghese vase: while for the --heifer lowing at the skies and all her silken flanks in garlands drest, as well as for the thought of the pious morn and the little town emptied of its folk that old deep impression received from claude's 'sacrifice to apollo' will have been reinforced by others from works of sculpture easy to guess at: most of all, naturally, from the sacrificial processions in the parthenon frieze. [illustration: pl xi the sosibios vase profile and frieze: from engravings in the musÉe napoleon] in the ode we read how the sculptured forms of such an imaginary antique, visualized in full intensity before his mind's eye, have set his thoughts to work, on the one hand asking himself what living, human scenes of ancient custom and worship lay behind them, and on the other hand speculating upon the abstract relations of plastic art to life. the opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash their own answer upon us--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'what men or gods are these, what maidens loth?' etc. the second and third stanzas express with full felicity and insight the differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even richer than the real. the thought thrown by leonardo da vinci into a single line--'cosa bella mortal passa e non d'arte'--and expanded by wordsworth in his later days into the sonnet, 'praised be the art,' etc., finds here its most perfect utterance. ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; and, happy melodist, unwearied, for ever piping songs for ever new; more happy love! more happy, happy love! for ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, for ever panting, and for ever young; all breathing human passion far above, that leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, a burning forehead, and a parching tongue. then the questioning begins again, and again conjures up a choice of pictures,-- what little town by river or sea shore, or mountain built with peaceful citadel, is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? in the answering lines of the sestet-- and, little town, thy streets for evermore will silent be; and not a soul to tell why thou art desolate, can e'er return,-- in these lines we find that the poet's imagination has suddenly and lightly shifted its ground, and chooses to view the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. finally, dropping such airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, he consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,-- in midst of other woe than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, beauty is truth, truth beauty,-- thus re-asserting his old doctrine, 'what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth'; a doctrine which amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of keats's temper--the one anchorage to which his soul can and needs must cleave. [illustration: pl. xii 'what pipes and timbrels? what wild ecstasy' a. from the townly vase in the british museum b. from the borghese vase in the louvre] let us turn now to the second pair--for as such i regard them--of odes written in may-time, those _to a nightingale_ and _on melancholy_. like the _ode on indolence_, the nightingale ode begins with the confession of a mood of 'drowsy numbness,' but this time one deeper and nearer to pain and heartache. then invoking the nightingale, the poet attributes his mood not to envy of her song (perhaps, as mr bridges has suggested, there may be here an under-reminiscence from william browne[ ]), but to excess of happiness in it. just as his grecian urn was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular nightingale he had heard singing in the hampstead garden that keats thus invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. thither he sighs to follow her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he makes us realize in lines redolent, as are none others in our language, of the southern richness and joy which he had never known save in dreams. then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations which he will leave behind him. nay, he needs not the aid of bacchus,--poetry alone shall transport him. for a moment he mistrusts her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness all the secrets of the season and the night. while thus rapt he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to him, and feels that it would be more richly welcome now than ever. the nightingale would not cease to sing--and by this time, though he calls her 'immortal bird,' what he has truly in mind is not the song-bird at all, but the bird-song, thought of as though it were a thing self-existing and apart, imperishable through the ages. so thinking, he contrasts its permanence with the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the generations of individual men and women who have listened to it. this last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those memorable touches of far-off bible and legendary romance in the stanza closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes. throughout this ode keats's genius is at its height. imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretchedness of man's estate on earth, and conjecturing in the 'embalmed darkness' the divers odours of spring. to praise the art of a passage like that in the fourth stanza where with a light, lingering pause the mind is carried instantaneously away from the miseries of the world into the heart of the imagined forest,--to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader's power to perceive it for himself. let him be trusted to cherish and know the poem, as every lover of english poetry should, 'to its depths,' and let us go on to the last product, as i take it to be, of this spring month of inspiration, and that is the _ode on melancholy_. the music of the word--its hundred associations derived from the early seventeenth-century poetry in which his soul was steeped--foremost among them no doubt milton's _l'allegro_ and _il penseroso_, with the beautiful song from fletcher's _nice valour_ which inspired them--his recent familiarity with burton's _anatomy_, including those pithy stanzas of alternate praise and repudiation which preface it--all these things will have worked together with keats's own haunting and deepest mood throughout these days to set him composing on this theme, melancholy. he had dallied with an idea of doing so as far back as early in march, when being kept from writing both by physical disinclination and a temporary phase of self-criticism, he had written to haydon, 'i will not spoil my gloom by writing an ode to darkness.' now that in may the springs of inspiration were again unlocked in him, such negative purpose fails to hold, and he adds this ode to the rest, throwing into it some of his most splendid imagery and diction. its temper is nearly akin on the one hand to some of the gloomier passages in his letters to miss jeffrey of may and june , and on the other to the tragic third stanza of the nightingale ode. its main purport is to proclaim the spiritual nearness, the all but inseparableness, of joy and pain in human experience when either is present in its intensity. one of the attributes, it will be remembered, which he assigns to his enchantress _lamia_ is-- a sciential brain to unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain. in no nature have the sources of the two lain deeper or closer together than in his own, and it is from the fullness of impassioned experience that he writes. the real melancholy, he insists, is not that which belongs to things sad or direful in themselves. having written two stanzas piling up gruesome images of such things, and discarded on reflection the former and more gruesome of the two, he lets the second stand, and goes on, evoking contrasted images of opulent beauty, to show how the true, the utter melancholy is that which is inextricably coupled with every joy and resides at the heart of every pleasure: ending magnificently-- ay, in the very temple of delight veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine, though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst joy's grape against his palate fine; his soul shall taste the sadness of her might, and be among her cloudy trophies hung. one more ode remains, written in a different key and after a lapse of some four months, during which keats had been away in the country, quieted by absence from the object of his passion and working diligently at _otho the great_ and _lamia._ this is the ode _to autumn_. he was alone at winchester, rejoicing in perfect september weather and in a mood more serene and contented than he had known for long or was ever to know again. 'how beautiful the season is now,' he writes to reynolds, 'how fine the air--a temperate sharpness about it. really, without joking, chaste weather--dian skies. i never liked stubble fields so much as now--aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. this struck me so much in my sunday's walk that i composed upon it.' the vein in which he composed is one of simple objectivity, very different from the passionate and complex phases of introspective thought and feeling which inspired the spring odes. the result is the most greek thing, except the fragment _to maia_, which keats ever wrote. it opens up no such far-reaching avenues to the mind and soul of the reader as the odes _to a grecian urn_, _to a nightingale_, or _to melancholy_, but in execution is more complete and faultless than any of them. in the first stanza the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art and greek personification have an exquisite congruity and ease. keats himself has hardly anywhere else written with so fine a subtlety of nature-observation. students of form will notice a slight deviation from that of the spring odes, by which the second member of the stanza is now a septet instead of a sestet, one of its rimes being repeated three times instead of twice. season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; conspiring with him how to load and bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; to bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel; to set budding more, and still more, later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days will never cease, for summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor, thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: and sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep steady thy laden head across a brook; or by a cider-press, with patient look, thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. where are the songs of spring? ay, where are they? think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows, borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; and full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft the red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; and gathering swallows twitter in the skies. had keats been destined to know health and peace of mind, who can guess how much more work in this vein and of this quality the world might have owed to him? footnotes: [ ] _thoughts suggested on the banks of nith, near the poet's residence_: the third poem in _memorials of a tour in scotland_. [ ] first printed in hunt's _reflector_ and reprinted in the two-volume edition of lamb's works published in . [ ] a copy of fairfax's tasso appears in the list of books left by keats at his death. [ ] this point has been made by mr buxton forman, _complete works of j.k._, ii. p. , footnote. [ ] i let this paragraph, somewhat officious and over-explanatory though it now seems to me, stand as i wrote it thirty years ago, for the sake of the pleasure i have since had in learning that the identical passage was singled out by charles lamb, in a notice which has only lately come to light, (see below, p. ) as the pick of the whole _lamia_ volume. [ ] that published by allen awnmarsh, th ed. , notes woodhouse; and a copy of the same is noted in the list of keats's books. [ ] see article by h. noble m'cracken in _philological journal_ of the chicago university, . the romance of _floire and blancheflor_, which boccaccio in the _filocolo_ expands with additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a moorish prince in spain and a christian damsel, brought up together and loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse influences and ill fortune. after many chivalric and fantastic adventures both in west and east, of the kind usual in such romances, judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and the like, floire learns that blancheflor is immured with other ladies in an impregnable tower by the 'admiral of babylon,' who desires to marry her. to babylon floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one another's arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before they can be finally free and united. there exists a fragmentary english medieval version of this romance, which might easily have been known to keats from the abstract and quotations given by george ellis in his _specimens of early english metrical romance_ ( ). but unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the original french romance poem contains those incidents recounted in the _filocolo_ to which keats's poem runs most closely parallel. these we must accordingly suppose to be boccaccio's own invention and to have been known to keats, directly or indirectly, from the _filocolo_ itself. [ ] in both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there may be a memory of the following passage from cary's _dante_ (quoted by mr buxton forman and prof. de sélincourt):-- as to support incumbent floor or roof, for corbel is a figure sometimes seen that crumples up its knees into its breast; with the feign'd posture, stirring ruth unfeign'd in the beholder's fancy; so i saw these fashion'd--. [ ] it may be noted that in the corresponding scene in the _filocolo_ a single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles. [ ] _paradise lost_, v. - . [ ] ed. , pp. , . [ ] the final couplet of this stanza, as keats wrote it after several attempts, is weak. madeline continues,-- oh leave me not in this eternal woe, for if thou diest, my love, i know not where to go. in the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had happened, which he read to woodhouse and woodhouse disapproved, madeline's speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,-- see while she speaks his arms encroaching slow have zon'd her, heart to heart,--loud, loud, the dark winds blow. [ ] keats, mentally placing his story in england and writing it at teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,--'for o'er the bleak dartmoor i have a home for thee.' [ ] a critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of the beadsman and angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rime. on the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines, but no--already had his death-bell rung; the joys of all his life were said and sung; that of angela where she calls herself a poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll. the touch of flippant realism which keats had, again to woodhouse's distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as follows. for the four last lines of the last stanza keats had proposed to write,-- angela went off twitch'd with the palsy: and with face deform the beadsman stiffen'd, 'twixt a sigh and laugh ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough. in printing the poem keats, probably at the instance of taylor and woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version. [ ] may the following be counted evidence to the same effect? the old woman in _apuleius_, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her daughter the story of cupid and psyche, says, 'as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do often chance contrary.' compare keats at the end of the _ode on indolence_:-- farewell! i yet have visions for the night, and for the day faint visions there is store. [ ] the _musée napoléon_ is a set of four volumes illustrating with outline engravings the works of classic art collected by napoleon bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to paris. keats's original tracing from the sosibios vase was in the collection of sir charles dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the clarendon press edition of keats's poems, . the subject has been much discussed, but only from the point of view of the classical archaeologist, which ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in stimulating keats's imagination. from that point of view the nearest approach, as i hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by paul wolters, in _archiv für das studium der neueren sprachen_, band xx, heft / : braunschweig; though i think he is too positive in ruling out roman representations of the _suovetaurilia_ such as the fine urn at holland house suggested as keats's source by the late mr a. s. murray and reproduced in _the odes of keats_, by a. c. downer, m.a. (oxford, ). [ ] sweet philomela (then he heard her sing) i do not envy thy sweet carolling, but do admire thee each even and morrow canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow. chapter xiv work of , .--ii. the fragments and experiments snatches expressive of moods--_ode to maia_--_hyperion_: its scheme and scale--sources: homer and hesiod--pierre ronsard--miltonisms--voices of the titans--a match and no match for milton--a great beginning--question as to sequel--difficulties and a suggestion--the scheme abandoned--_the eve of st mark_--chaucer and morris--judgement of rossetti--dissent of w. b. scott--the solution--keats as dramatist--_otho_ and _king stephen_--_the cap and bells_--why a failure--flashes of beauty--recast of _hyperion_--its leading ideas--their history in keats's mind--preamble: another feast of fruits--the sanctuary--the admonition--the monitress--the attempt breaks off. much of our clearest insight into keats's mind and genius is gained from the class of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere snatches and momentary outpourings. such, though they only express a passing mood, are the lines in his letter to reynolds of february , translating the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge. such is the contrasted passage of shifting, perplexed meditation on the problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. such, very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its identity in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the passage in one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of a sparrow picking about the gravel:-- where's the poet? show him! show him, muses nine! that i may know him. 'tis the man who with a man is an equal, be he king, or poorest of the beggar-clan, or any other wondrous thing a man may be'twixt ape and plato; 'tis the man who with a bird, wren, or eagle, finds his way to all its instincts; he hath heard the lion's roaring, and can tell what his horny throat expresseth, and to him the tiger's yell comes articulate and presseth on his ear like mother-tongue. such again are the several passages in which he expressed a mood that frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and fear of coming madness:-- it is an awful mission, a terrible division; and leaves a gulph austere to be fill'd with worldly fear. aye, when the soul is fled too high above our head, affrighted do we gaze after its airy maze, as doth a mother wild, when her young infant child is in eagle's claws-- and is not this the cause of madness?--god of song, thou bearest me along through sights i scarce can bear; o let me, let me share with the hot lyre and thee, the staid philosophy. temper my lonely hours, and let me see thy bowers more unalarm'd! but our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating snatches such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not carried through. when keats, drawing near the end of his work on _endymion_, was meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem, _hyperion_, he still thought and spoke of it as a 'romance.' but a phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have to be more 'naked and grecian' than that of _endymion_. was he trying an experiment in the naked and grecian style when on may day he wrote at teignmouth the beginning of an ode on maia? he never went on with it, and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are in a more truly greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even excepting, as i have just said, the _ode to autumn_. the words figuring what greek poets were and did for greek communities, and expressing the aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the classic, mint-mark of absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. considering how meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning maia, the eldest of the pleiades and mother of hermes, and her late identification with the roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of may, and hence how little material for development the theme seems to offer,--considering these things, perhaps it is as well that keats, despite his promise to finish it 'all in good time,' should have tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did. the next fragment we come to is colossal,--it is _hyperion_ itself. from the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it was taken up as a 'feverous relief' from tendance on his dying brother, or that in continuing it later under brown's roof he had to put force upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of conceiving and handling the task itself. the impression _hyperion_ makes is one, as woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serene mastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:--'it has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power': and again,--'the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem.' woodhouse goes on to tell what he knew of the scheme of the work as keats had first conceived it:-- the poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of hyperion, the former god of the sun, by apollo,--and incidentally of those of oceanus by neptune, of saturn by jupiter, etc., and of the war of the giants for saturn's reestablishment-- with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of greece and rome. in fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the poet's brain. the statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in which the poem appeared in , that _hyperion_ was intended to be as long as _endymion_, is probably also due to woodhouse, their right-hand man (keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet's original idea. mr de sélincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when keats came to actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly and partially. clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. into this story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. when his poem opens, the younger gods, the olympians, have won their victory, and the titans, all except hyperion, are already overthrown. in their debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one of the fallen, enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or abdication of hyperion in favour of apollo. hyperion, it is true, has not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and keats might have made him side with enceladus and rouse his brethren to a temporary renewal of the strife. or leaving the titans conquered, he might, as woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second warfare, that waged against the olympians not by them but later by the giants in revolt. in either case we should have seen the poet try his hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle and violence. woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. beyond the bald notices in his classical dictionaries, chapman's _iliad_ would have given keats a picture of the dethroned saturn: chapman's homer's hymn to apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing, with visions of the youth of that god in delos,--'chief isle of the embowered cyclades': hesiod's _theogony_ (which he had doubtless read in the translation of pope's butt and enemy, thomas cooke) would have taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of gods, titans, and giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the titans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters from sandys's notes on certain passages of ovid. as far as his beloved english poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in the _faerie queene_ and in _paradise lost_, where milton includes the fallen titans among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of satan in hell. but i think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the famous french renaissance poet ronsard to his friend michel de l'hôpital. we know by his translation of the sonnet _nature ornant cassandre_ that keats had the works of ronsard in his hands--lent, it would seem, by mr taylor--exactly about this time. the ode in question, partly founded on hesiod, partly on horace,[ ] but largely on ronsard's own invention, relates the birth of the muses, their training by their mother mémoire (= mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their father jupiter, their mother's consent, their undersea journey to the palace of oceanus where jupiter is present at a high festival, their choral singing before him, first of the strife of neptune and pallas for the soil of attica, and then of the battle of the gods and giants:-- après sur la plus grosse corde d'un bruit qui tonnait jusqu'aux cieux, le pouce des muses accorde l'assaut des géants et des dieux. keats, although he writes of the battle of the gods not against the giants but against the earlier titans, yet when he rolls out rebel names like this,-- coeus, and gyges, and briareus; typhon, and dolor, and porphyrion were pent in regions of laborious breath dungeon'd in opaque elements,-- keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by the strophes of ronsard:-- styx d'un noir halecret rempare ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein, sa fille amenant par la main contre cotte, gyge, et briare.[ ] neptune à la fourche estofée de trois crampons vint se mesler par la troupe contre typhée qui rouoit une fonde en l'air: ici phoebus d'un trait qu'il jette fit encelade trébucher, là porphyre lui fit broncher hors des poings l'arc et la sagette. for such an epic theme keats felt instinctively, when he set to work, that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an english poet the obvious epic model is milton. ever since his visit to bailey at oxford, and especially during his stay at teignmouth the next year, keats had been absorbing milton and taking him into his being, as formerly he had taken shakespeare and the elizabethans, and now he can utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with milton's voice. speaking generally of the blank verse of _hyperion_, its rhythms are almost as full and sonorous as milton's own, but simpler; its march more straightforward, with less of what de quincey calls 'solemn planetary wheelings'; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to so stately and far foreseen a close. the miltonisms in _hyperion_ are rather matters of diction and construction--construction almost always derived from the latin--than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. to take a single instance out of many:-- for as among us mortals omens drear fright and perplex, so also shuddered he. it is only in _hyperion_ that keats habitually thus puts the noun latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that 'perplex' are derived from the eclipse which in _paradise lost_ 'with fear of change perplexes monarchs.' throughout the fragment keats uses frequently and with fine effect the miltonic figure of the 'turn' or rhetorical iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that noble phrase which seems to have inspired one of the finest passages in shelley's _defence of poesy_[ ]: how beautiful, if sorrow had not made sorrow more beautiful than beauty's self. it has been said, and justly, that keats has done nothing greater than the debate of the fallen titans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels in _paradise lost_, but with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. in creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show--to take one point only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise their voices. thus of the murmuring of the assembled gods when saturn is about to speak:-- there is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines when winter lifts his voice; there is a noise among immortals when a god gives sign, with hushing finger, how he means to load his tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, with thunder, and with music, and with pomp: such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines. this is not a whit the less keats for his use of the miltonic 'turn' in rounding the period by a repetition in the last line of the 'bleak-grown pines' from the first. again, of oceanus answering his fallen chief:-- so ended saturn; and the god of the sea, sophist and sage, from no athenian grove, but cogitation in his watery shades, arose, with locks not oozy, and began, in murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands. here the affirmation by negation in the second and fourth lines is a latin usage already employed by keats in the _pot of basil_[ ]: the 'locks not oozy' are a reminiscence from _lycidas_ and the 'first-endeavouring tongue' from _the vacation exercise_. but into what a vitally apt and beautiful new music of his own has keats moulded and converted all such echoes. once more, of clymene following enceladus in debate:-- so far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook that, lingering along a pebbled coast, doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, and shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice of huge enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: the ponderous syllables, like sullen waves in the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, came booming thus. in this last example the sublimity owes nothing to milton except in the single case of the repetition in the third line. even the scoffing byron recognized after keats's death the authentic 'large utterance of the early gods' in passages like these, though keats in his modesty had himself refused to recognize it. further to compare keats with milton,--the poet of _hyperion_ is naturally no match for milton in passages where the elder master has been inspired by life-long impassioned meditation on his readings of history and romance, like that famous one ending with what resounds in fable or romance of uther's son. begirt with british and armoric knights or all who since, baptized or infidel jousted in aspramont or montalban, damasco, or marocco, or trebizond, or whom biserta sent from afric shore when charlemain with all his peerage fell by fontarrabia-- on the other hand milton, even in the sweetness and the nearness to nature of _comus_ and his other early work, is scarce a match for keats when it comes to the evocation, even in a mode relatively simple, of nature's secret sources of delight,--as thus: throughout all the isle there was no covert, no retired cave unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves though scarcely heard in many a green recess: while comparison is scarcely possible in the case of the nature images most characteristically keats's own, for instance:-- as when, upon a tranced summer night, those green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, dream, and so dream all night without a stir--. neither to the greek nor the miltonic, but essentially to the modern, the romantic, sentiment of nature does it belong to try and express, by such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees--their quasi-human venerableness--their verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky. all good poems, it has been said, begin well. none begins better than _hyperion_, with its 'deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' and its grand mournful dialogue between the discrowned saturn and the titaness thea, his would-be comforter. then, with a rich contrast from this scene of despondency, comes the scene, dazzling and resplendent for all its ominousness, of the mingled wrath and terror of the threatened sun-god in his flaming palace. the second book, relating the council of the dethroned titans, has neither the contrasted sublimities of the first nor the intensity, rising almost to fever-point, of the unfinished third, where we leave apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the afflatus of mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. but it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind, fully on a level with the other two. and it is in this book, in the speech of oceanus, that keats sets forth the whole symbolical purport and meaning of the myth as he had conceived it:-- now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain; o folly! for to bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm, that is the top of sovereignty. mark well! as heaven and earth are fairer, fairer far than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs; and as we show beyond that heaven and earth in form and shape compact and beautiful, in will, in action free, companionship, and thousand other signs of purer life; so on our heels a fresh perfection treads, a power more strong in beauty, born of us and fated to excel us, as we pass in glory that old darkness: nor are we thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule of shapeless chaos. say, doth the dull soil quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, and feedeth still, more comely than itself? can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? or shall the tree be envious of the dove because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings to wander wherewithal and find its joys? we are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, but eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower above us in their beauty, and must reign in right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law that first in beauty should be first in might: that difficulty, to which we have referred, of surmising how there could have remained material to fill out a poem on the titanomachia which had begun with the titans, all but one, dethroned already, seems to increase when we consider the above speech of oceanus, setting forth with resigned prophetic wisdom the fated necessity of their fall. it increases still further when clymene, following on the same side as oceanus, tells how she has heard the strains of a new and ravishing music from the lyre of apollo which have made her cast away in despair the instrument of her own formless music, the sea-shell; and still further again when in the next book we witness the meeting of apollo with the titaness mnemosyne, mother of the muses, who for his sake has 'forsaken old and sacred thrones,' and when we hear him proclaim how in the inspiration of her presence, knowledge enormous makes a god of me. names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, majesties, sovran voices, agonies, creations and destroyings, all at once pour into the wide hollows of my brain, and deify me, as if some blithe wine or bright elixir peerless i had drunk, and so become immortal. before the glory of this new-deified apollo, what could long have delayed the defeat or abdication of the elder sun-god hyperion?--what could have remained for keats to invent that should have much enriched or lengthened out his poem? the sense of the difficulty of sustaining the battle of the primeval powers against these new and nobler successors may well have been one of the things (even had he not had milton's comparative failure with the warfare in heaven to warn him) that hindered his going on with his poem. to the reader there occurs another and even greater difficulty: and that is that keats had already given to his fallen elder gods or titans so much not only of majesty but of nobleness and goodness that it is hard to see wherein he could have shown their successors excelling them. he had represented saturn as wroth, indeed, at his downfall, but chiefly because it leaves him --smother'd up, and buried from all godlike exercise of influence benign on planets pale, of admonition to the winds and seas, of peaceful sway above man's harvesting, and all those acts which deity supreme doth ease its heart of love in. increase of knowledge, of skill in the arts of life and of beauty, the gods of the new dynasty might indeed extend to mankind, but what increase of love and beneficence? even the relations of saturn to his father coelus (the greek uranus), which in the ancient cosmogony are of the crudest barbarity, keats in _hyperion_ makes benignant and sympathetic. such inherent difficulties as these might well have made keats diffident of his power to complete his poem as a rounded or satisfying whole had its intended scope been what we are told. but i am sometimes tempted to conjecture that his root idea had been other than what his friends attributed to him,--that battle, and the victory of the olympians over the titans or giants or both, would not in fact have been his main theme, but that he intended to present to us apollo, enthroned after the abdication of hyperion, in the character of a prophet and to have put into his mouth revelations of things to come, a great monitory vision of the world's future. to such a supposition some colour is surely lent by the speech of apollo above quoted on the 'knowledge enormous' just poured into his brain by mnemosyne. on the other hand it has to be remembered that keats himself, in a forecast of his work made ten months before it was written, shows clearly that he then meant his apollo to be above all things a god of action. keats himself, writing some eight months later, when he had finally decided to give up his epic attempt, cites as his chief reason a re-action of his critical judgment against the miltonic style, at least as a style suitable for him, keats, to work in:-- i have given up _hyperion_--there were too many miltonic inversions in it--miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humour. i wish to give myself up to other sensations. english ought to be kept up. it may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from _hyperion_, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. upon my soul 'twas imagination--i cannot make the distinction--every now and then there is a miltonic intonation--but i cannot make the division properly. and again: 'i have but lately stood on my guard against milton. life to him would be death to me. miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. i wish to devote myself to another verse alone.' this re-action was certainly not fully conscious or formulated in keats's mind by the previous winter. but it would seem none the less to have been working in him instinctively: for the moment he had turned, in _the eve of st agnes_, to a romance in the flowing, straightforward, spenserian-chattertonian manner of narration, he had been able to carry his task through with felicity and ease. this was on his excursion to hampshire in the latter half of january. within three weeks of his return he was at work again on a kindred theme of popular and traditional belief, _the eve of st mark_. the belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or village on the evening before st mark's day (april th) might thereby gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously sick within the year. those destined to die would be seen passing in but not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and after a while come out. the heroine of the poem, to whom this vision would appear, was to be a maiden of canterbury named bertha, no doubt after the first christian queen of kent, the frankish wife of ethelbert; the scene, canterbury itself, memories of the poet's stay there in mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to chichester. keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days' work (february th- th ), and it remains a mere fragment, tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines' length. why? perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he became the accepted lover of fanny brawne. we have seen how various causes, but chiefly the obsession of that passion, paralysed his power of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks that held him fully occupied afterwards. it has been suggested by the late dante gabriel rossetti that keats meant to give the story a turn applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:--'i would show some one in love, as i am, with a person living in such liberty as you do.' i can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the suggestion or confirm it. the fragment of _the eve of st mark_ is keats's only attempt at narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. its pace and movement are nearer to chaucer in _the romaunt of the rose_ or _the house of fame_ than to coleridge or scott or any other model of keats's own time. that he was writing with chaucer in his mind is proved by some lines in which he tries in rowley fashion to reproduce chaucer's actual style and vocabulary, thus:-- gif ye wol stonden hardie wight-- amiddes of the blacke night-- righte in the churche porch, pardie ye wol behold a companie approchen thee full dolourouse for sooth to sain from everich house be it in city or village wol come the phantom and image of ilka gent and ilka carle who coldè deathè hath in parle and wol some day that very year touchen with foulè venime spear and sadly do them all to die-- hem all shalt thou see verilie-- and everichon shall by thee pass all who must die that year, alas. these lines give us a sure key to the main motive of the story which was to follow. with some others in the same style, they are quoted by the poet as composing a gloss written in minute script on the margin of a wonderful illuminated book over which the damsel is found poring and which is to have some mysterious influence on her destiny. more noticeable and interesting than their somewhat random rowleyism is the way in which some of the descriptive lines in the body of the poem anticipate the very cadences of chaucer's great latter-day disciple, william morris. the first eight or ten lines of the following might have come straight from _the man born to be king_ or _the land east of the sun_, and provide, as it were, in the history of our poetry a direct stepping-stone between chaucer and morris:-- the city streets were clean and fair from wholesome drench of april rains; and, on the western window panes, the chilly sunset faintly told of unmatur'd green vallies cold, of the green thorny bloomless hedge, of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, of primroses by shelter'd rills, and daisies on the aguish hills. twice holy was the sabbath-bell: the silent streets were crowded well with staid and pious companies, warm from their fire-side orat'ries; and moving, with demurest air, to even-song, and vesper prayer. each arched porch, and entry low, was fill'd with patient folk and slow, with whispers hush, and shuffling feet, while play'd the organ loud and sweet. the relation of this fragment to the pre-raphaelites of the mid nineteenth century and their work is altogether curious and interesting. it was natural that it should appeal to them by the pure and living freshness of english nature-description with which it opens, by the perfectly imagined scene of hushed movement in the twilight streets that follows, perhaps most of all by the insistent delight in vivid colour, and in minuteness of animated and suggestive detail, which marks the final indoor scene of the maiden bertha over her book by firelight. but what is strange is that rossetti should not only have coupled the fragment with _la belle dame sans merci_ as 'the chastest and choicest example of keats's maturing manner,' an opinion which may well pass, but that he should have claimed it as showing 'astonishingly real mediævalism for one not bred an artist,' and even as the finest picture of the middle age period ever done. the truth is that the description of the sabbath streets and the maiden's chamber are not mediæval at all and probably not intended to be, while the one thing so intended, the illuminated manuscript from which she reads, is a quite impossible invention jumbling fantastically together things that never could have figured in the same manuscript, things from the golden legend, from the book of exodus, the book of revelation, with others from no possible manuscript source at all. keats evidently took some interest in mediæval illuminations, for in speculating on the old skulls of supposed monks at beauly abbey he had apostrophized one of them,-- poor skull, thy fingers set ablaze with silver saint in golden rays, the holy missal: thou didst craze mid bead and spangle, while others pass'd their idle days in coil and wrangle. but he can have seen few and made no study of them, and his imagined mystically illuminated book in _the eve of st mark_ is invented with no such fine instinctive tact or likelihood as his imagined grecian urn of the ode. an elder member of the rossetti circle, that shrewd and caustic, very originally minded if only half accomplished scottish poet and painter, william bell scott, was much exercised over his friend's misconception in this matter. i will give his comment, certainly in some points just, as written to me in . 'on reading the fragment it seems to me impossible to resist the conclusion that the scene represented is of the present day. the dull and quiet sunday evening represented is of our time in any cathedral town in england, not the sunday evening of old when morning mass was the religious observance, and the evening was spent in long-bow and popinjay games and practice. the weary girl sits at a coal fire with a screen behind her, a japanese screen apparently,' [japanese or old english lacquer imitating oriental the screen certainly is]. 'every item of the description is modern. but alas! what shall we say to the ancient illuminated ms. she has in hand, with the pictures of early martyrs dying by fire, the inquisition punishment of heretics, and the writing annotated, the notes referred to modern printers' signs? as he describes a mediæval ms. book so badly, it may be said he intended the scene of the poem to be mediæval, but did the description also so badly. but no, the description of the dreariness of sunday evening, utterly silent but for the passing of the people going to evening sermon, is admirable.' by 'badly' my old friend meant inexactly. but keats never was nor tried to be exact in his antiquarianism. if we take _the eve of st agnes_ as intended to be a faithful picture from the middle ages, it simply goes to pieces in the line-- and the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. probably neither _the eve of st agnes_ nor _st mark's eve_ were dated with any definiteness in the poet's mind at all. a reference he makes to the last-named piece in a letter from winchester the following autumn lends no definite support either to the modern or the mediæval interpretation:--'some time since i began a poem called _the eve of st mark_, quite in the spirit of town quietude. i think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town on a coolish evening.' the impression of mediævalism which the two poems convey is not by any evidence of antiquarian knowledge or accuracy but by the intense spirit of romance that is in them,--by that impassioned delight in vivid colour and beautiful, imaginative detail which we have noted. after his four days' start on this poem in february came the spell of two months' idleness which towards its close yielded _la belle dame sans merci_ and came to an end with the _ode to psyche_, followed in the course of may by the four other odes. the choral _song of the four fairies_, for some inchoate opera, sent by keats to his brother together with _la belle dame_, is not worth pausing upon, and we may pass to keats's main work of the ensuing july and august, _otho the great_. this is no fragment, having been duly finished to the last scene of the last act; but it is very much of an experiment. the question whether keats, had he lived, might have become a great dramatic poet and creator is one of the most interesting possible. his intense and growing interest in humankind, together with his recorded and avowed liability to receive ('like putty,' as modern criticism has conjectured of shakespeare) the impression of any character he might come in contact with, has led many students to believe that he had in him the stuff of a great creative playwright. _otho the great_ does nothing to solve the question. the plot and construction, as we have said, were entirely brown's, building with quite arbitrary freedom on certain bald historical facts of the rebellion raised against otho, in the course of his hungarian wars, by his son ludolf and the red duke conrad of lorraine, whom the emperor subsequently forgave. creation demands fore-knowledge, premeditation on the characters you desire to create and the situations in which they are to be placed, and keats, brown tells us, only foreknew what was coming in any scene after they had sat down at the table to work on it. his business was to supply the words, and what the result shows is only the surprising facility with which he could by this time improvise poetry to order. the speeches in otho are much more than passably poetical, they are often quite brilliant and touched with keats's unique genius for felicity in lines and phrases. but they affect us as put into the mouths of puppet speakers, not as coming out of the hearts and passions of men and women. in rhythm they are vital and varied enough, in style extremely high-pitched, and they resemble much elizabethan work of the second order in smothering action and passion under a redundance and feverish excess of poetry. there is violence amounting to hysteria alike in the villainy of conrad and of his sister auranthe, the remorse of albert, and the mixture of filial devotion and lover's blindness in ludolf, with his vengeful frenzy when he finds how he has been gulled. keats, it is recorded, had in his eye the special gift of edmund kean for enacting frantic extremes and long-drawn agonies of passion; and it is possible that as played by him the last act, of which keats took the conduct as well as the writing into his own hands, might have proved effective on the stage. it shows the maddened conrad bent on executing vengeance on the traitress auranthe, and insanely stabbing empty air while he imagines he is stabbing his victim, until curtains drawn aside disclose an inner apartment where she has at the very moment fallen self-slain. but it is doubtful whether any acting could carry off a plot so ultra-romantically extravagant and in places so obscure, or characters so incommensurably more eloquent than they are alive. nor do lovers of keats commonly care to read the play twice, for all its bursts and coruscations of fine poetry, feeling that these do not spring from the poet's own inner self and imagination, but are rather as fireworks fitted by a man of genius on to a frame which another man, barely of talent, has put together. the case is different when we come to _king stephen_, the brief dramatic fragment on which keats wrought alone after _otho the great_ was finished. this teaches us one thing at any rate about keats, that he could at will call away his imagination from matters luxurious or refreshing to the spirit, from themes broodingly meditative or tragically tender, to deal in a manner of fiery energy with the clash of war. he is still enough a child of the renaissance to make his twelfth-century knights and princes quote homer in their taunts and counter-taunts; but in the three-and-a-half scenes which he wrote he makes us feel his stephen, defiant in defeat, a real elemental force and not a mere mouther of valiant rhetoric, fine and concentrated as the rhetoric sometimes is, as for instance when an enemy taunts him with being disarmed and helpless and he cries back, 'what weapons has the lion but himself?' in persuading keats to work with him on a tragedy for the stage, brown had had the entirely laudable motive of putting his friend in the way of earning money for them both. but what would we not have given that the time and labour thus, as it turned out, thrown away should have yielded us from keats's self another _isabella_ or _eve of st agnes_, or a finished _eve of st mark_, or even another _lamia_? brown's next piece of suggestion and would-be help was far more unfortunate still. we have seen how in the unhappy weeks after keats's return from winchester in october, he spent his mornings in brown's company spinning the verses of a comic and satiric fairy tale the scheme of which they had concocted together,--_the cap and bells_ or _the jealousies_. the idea of the friends in this was no doubt to throw a challenge to byron, the first cantos of whose _don juan_ had lately been launched upon a dazzled and scandalized world. byron's genius, the spirit, that is, of brilliant devilry and worldly mockery which was the sincerest part of his genius, with his rich experiences of life, travel and society, of passion and dissipation and the extremes of fame and obloquy, and his incomparable address and versatility in playing tricks of legerdemain with ideas and language, had here all found their perfect opportunity for display. attempts at worldly banter and satire by the tender-hearted, intensely loving and imagining keats, with his narrow and in the main rather second-rate social experience, were never more than wry-mouthed as i have called them, ineffectual, and essentially against the grain. his collaborator brown imagined he had a gift for satiric fairy tales, but his recorded efforts in that kind are silly and dull as well as inclining to coarseness. what happier result could be expected from their new joint work than that which posterity deplores in _the cap and bells_? the story is of an indian faery emperor elfinan,--a name suggested by spenser,--enamoured of an english maiden bertha pearl,--the very bertha of _the eve of st mark_, resuscitated to our amazement,--but having for political reasons to seek in marriage a faery princess bellanaine, who herself is in love with an english youth named hubert. the eighty-eight stanzas which keats wrote on those autumn mornings in brown's room carry the tale no farther than elfinan's despatching his chancellor crafticanto on an embassy to fetch bellanaine on an aerial journey from her home in imaus, his consultation with his magician hum as to the means of escaping the marriage and conveying himself secretly to england, his departure, and the arrival of bellanaine and her escort to find the palace empty and the emperor flown. how the seriously, perhaps tragically, conceived bertha of _st mark's eve_, with the mystic book fated to have influence on her life, could have been worked, as they were evidently meant to be worked, into this new ridiculous narrative, we cannot guess, nor how the relations of bellanaine with her mortal lover would have been managed. before keats's deepening despondency and recklessness caused him to drop writing altogether, which apparently happened early in december, he was evidently out of conceit with _the cap and bells_.[ ] one of the most unfortunate things about the attempt is the choice of the spenserian stanza for its metre. keats had probably wished to avoid seeming merely to imitate byron, as he might have seemed to do had he written in the _ottava rima_ of don juan, the one perfectly fit measure for such a blend of fantasy and satire as he was attempting. but not even keats's power over the spenserian stanza could make it a fit vehicle for his purpose. thomson and shenstone had used it in work of mild and leisurely playfulness, but to bite in satire or sting in epigram it cannot effectively be bent. to my sense the precedent most in keats's mind was not these, but the before-mentioned translation of wieland's _oberon_ by sotheby. sotheby had invented a modified form of the spenserian stanza riming _abbaccddc_ instead of _abcbbdbdd_ and keeping the final alexandrine. much of the machinery and spirit of _the cap and bells_--the magic journeys through the air--the comic atmosphere and adventures of the courts--are closely akin to the jocular parts of this _oberon_. some of the passages of mere fun and playfulness are pleasant enough, like that description of a dilapidated hackney coach (much resembling the four-wheeler of our youth) which hunt selected to publish in the _indicator_ while keats was lying sick in his house the next year: but the attempts at social satire are almost always feeble and tiresome, and still more so those at political satire, turning for the most part rather obscurely on the scandals, then at their height, attending the relations of the prince and princess of wales. in the faery narrative itself there break forth momentary flashes from the true genius of the poet, such as might delight the reader if he could lose his sense of irritation at the rubbish from amidst which they gleam. as thus, of the princess's flight through the air (was keats thinking, in the first line, of the children carried heavenward by angels in orcagna's _triumph of death_?) as in old pictures tender cherubim a child's soul thro' the sapphir'd canvas bear, so, thro' a real heaven, on they swim with the sweet princess on her plumag'd lair, speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair. or this, telling how bertha of canterbury, in keats's queer new conception of her, was really a changeling born in the jungle:-- she is a changeling of my management; she was born at midnight in an indian wild; her mother's screams with the striped tiger's blent, while the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent into the jungles. or again, some of the stanzas describing the welcome prepared in elfinan's capital for the faery princess after her flight: note in the last the persistence with which keats carries into these incongruous climates his passion for the english spring flowers:-- the morn is full of holiday; loud bells with rival clamours ring from every spire; cunningly-station'd music dies and swells in echoing places; when the winds respire, light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire; a metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm, comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire freckles with red and gold the moving swarm; while here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm. and again:-- as flowers turn their faces to the sun, so on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze, and, as we shap'd our course, this, that way run, with mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp'd amaze; sweet in the air a mild-ton'd music plays, and progresses through its own labyrinth; buds gather'd from the green spring's middle-days, they scatter'd,--daisy, primrose, hyacinth,-- or round white columns wreath'd from capital to plinth. after his mornings spent in brown's company over the strained frivolities of _the cap and bells_, keats was in the same weeks striving, alone with himself of an evening, to utter the new thoughts on life and poetry which he found taking shape in the depths of his being. he took up again the abandoned _hyperion_, and began rewriting it no longer as a direct narrative, but as a vision shewn and interpreted by a supernatural monitress acting to him somewhat the same part as virgil acts to dante. in altering the form and structure of the poem keats also takes pains to alter its style, de-miltonizing and de-latinizing, sometimes terribly to their disadvantage, the passages which he takes over from the earlier version. it is not in these, it is in the two hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new pre-amble or introduction that the value of the altered poem lies. the reader remembers how keats had broken off his work on the original _hyperion_ at the point where mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the muses, is enkindling the brain of apollo by mysteriously imparting to him her ancient wisdom and all-embracing knowledge. following a clue which he had found in a latin book of mythology he had lately bought,[ ] he now identifies this greek mnemosyne with the roman moneta, goddess of warning or admonition; and being possibly also aware that the temple of juno moneta on the capitol at rome was not far from that of saturn, makes his mnemosyne-moneta the priestess and guardian of saturn's temple. his vision takes him first into a grove or garden of trees and flowers and fountains, with a feast of summer fruits spread on the moss before an embowered arbour. the events that follow, and the converse held between the poet and the priestess, are in their ethical and allegoric meanings at many points obscure, and capable, like all symbols that are truly symbolic, of various interpretations. but the leading ideas they embody can be recognised clearly enough. they are primarily the same ideas, developed in a deeper and more sombre spirit, as had been present in keats's mind almost from the beginning: the idea that in the simple delights of nature and of art as unreflectingly felt in youth there is no abiding place for the poetic spirit, that from the enjoyment of such delights it must rise to thoughts higher and more austere and prompting to more arduous tasks: the further idea that to fit it for such tasks two things above all are necessary, growth in human sympathy through the putting down of self, and growth in knowledge and wisdom through strenuous study and meditation. such ideas had already been thrown out by keats in _sleep and poetry_; they had been developed with much more fullness, though in a manner made obscure from redundance of imagery, in _endymion_, especially in the third book: they had been expressed with a difference under the new and clearer symbolism of the two chambers of thought in keats's letter to reynolds from teignmouth. about the same hour, the hour, as i think, of the finest achievement of keats's genius as well as of its highest promise,--there had appeared in his letters and some of his verses the quite new idea, which would have been inconceivable to him a year earlier, of questioning whether poetry was a worthy pursuit at all in a world full of pain and destruction. musing beside the sea on a calm evening of april, he anticipates the tennysonian vision of 'nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine.' in letters written during the next few weeks he insists over and over again alike upon the acuteness of his new sense that the world is 'full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression,' and upon the poet's need of knowledge, and again knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to take away the heat and fever and ease 'the burden of the mystery.' the first passage that shows the dawn of a desire in his mind to do good to a suffering world by means possibly other than his art is that well-known and deeply significant one:-- i find earlier days are gone by--i find that i can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. i find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. some do it with their society--some with their wit--some with their benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great nature--there is but one way for me. the road lies through application, study, and thought. i will pursue it. the next time he expresses such an idea, it comes struck from him in a darker mood and in phrases of greater poignancy:--'were it in my choice, i would reject a petrarcal coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers ... i am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose.' the pressure of the sense of human misery, the hunger of the soul for knowledge and vision to lighten it, though they naturally do not colour his impersonal work of the next year and a half, nevertheless set their mark, the former strain in especial, upon his most deeply felt meditative verse, as in the odes to the nightingale and the grecian urn, and reappear occasionally in his private confessions to his friends. now, after intense experience both of personal sorrow and of poetic toil, and under the strain of incipient disease and consuming passion, it is borne in upon his solitary hours that such poetry as he has written, the irresponsible poetry of beauty and romance, has been mere idle dreaming, a refuge of the spirit from its prime duty of sharing and striving to alleviate the troubles of the world. it seems to him that every ordinary man and woman is worth more to mankind than such a dreamer. if poetry is to be worth anything to the world, it must be a different kind of poetry from this: the true poet is something the very opposite of the mere dreamer: he is one who has prepared himself through self-renunciation and arduous effort and extreme probation of the spirit to receive and impart the highest wisdom, the wisdom that comes from full knowledge of the past and foresight into the future. of such wisdom _the fall of hyperion_ in its amended form, as revealed and commented by mnemosyne-moneta, the great priestess and prophetess, remembrancer and admonisher in one, was meant to be a sample,--or such an attempt at a sample as keats at the present stage of his mental growth could supply. but the attempt soon proved beyond his strength and was abandoned. the preamble, or induction, he had finished; and this, if we leave out the futile eighteen lines with which it begins, contains much lofty thought conveyed in noble imagery and in a style of blank verse quite his own and independent of all models. take the feast of fruits, symbolic of the poet's early unreflecting joys, and the new thirst for some finer and more inspiring elixir which follows it:-- on a mound of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits, which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal by angel tasted or our mother eve; for empty shells were scattered on the grass, and grape-stalks but half bare, and remnants more sweet-smelling, whose pure kinds i could not know. still was more plenty than the fabled horn thrice emptied could pour forth at banqueting, for proserpine return'd to her own fields, where the white heifers low. and appetite, more yearning than on earth i ever felt, growing within, i ate deliciously,-- and, after not long, thirsted; for thereby stood a cool vessel of transparent juice sipp'd by the wander'd bee, the which i took, and pledging all the mortals of the world, and all the dead whose names are in our lips, drank. that full draught is parent of my theme. the draught plunges him into a profound sleep, from which he awakens a changed being among utterly changed surroundings. the world in which he finds himself is no longer a delicious garden but an ancient and august temple,--the noblest and most nobly described architectural vision in all keats's writings:-- i look'd around upon the curved sides of an old sanctuary, with roof august, builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds might spread beneath as o'er the stars of heaven. so old the place was, i remember'd none the like upon the earth: what i had seen of grey cathedrals, buttress'd walls, rent towers, the superannuations of sunk realms, or nature's rocks toil'd hard in waves and winds, seem'd but the faulture of decrepit things to that eternal domed monument. the sights the poet sees and the experiences which befall him within this temple; the black gates closed against the east,--which must symbolize the forgotten past of the world; the stupendous image enthroned aloft in the west, with the altar at its foot, approachable only by an interminable flight of steps; the wreaths of incense veiling the altar and spreading a mysterious sense of happiness; the voice of one ministering at the altar and shrouded in the incense--a voice at once of invitation and menace, bidding the dreamer climb to the summit of the steps by a given moment or he will perish utterly; the sense of icy numbness and death which comes upon him before he can reach even the lowest step; the new life that pours into him as he touches the step; his accosting of the mysterious veiled priestess who stands on the altar platform when he has climbed to it; all these phases of the poet's ordeal are impressively told, but are hard to interpret otherwise than dubiously and vaguely. matters become more definite a moment afterwards, when in answer to the poet's questions the priestess tells him that none can climb to the altar beside which he stands,--the altar, we must suppose, of historic and prophetic knowledge where alone, after due sacrifice of himself, the poet can find true inspiration,--except those to whom the miseries of the world are misery and will not let them rest. the poet pleads that there are thousands of ordinary men and women who feel the sorrows of the world and do their best to mitigate them, and is answered,-- 'those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries' rejoin'd that voice; 'they are no dreamers weak; they seek no wonder but the human face, no music but a happy-noted voice: they come not here, they have no thought to come; and thou art here, for thou art less than they. what benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, to the great world? thou art a dreaming thing, a fever of thyself: think of the earth; what bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? what haven? every creature hath its home, every sole man hath days of joy and pain, whether his labours be sublime or low-- the pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: only the dreamer venoms all his days, bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. what a pilgrimage has the soul of keats gone through, when he utters this heartrending cry, from the day, barely three years before, when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the poetic life and of the end that awaits it:-- these are the living pleasures of the bard, but richer far posterity's award. what shall he murmur with his latest breath, when his proud eye looks through the film of death? the truth is that, in all this, keats in his depression of mind and body has become fiercely unjust to his own achievements and their value: for if posterity were asked, would it not reply that the things of sheer beauty his youth has left us, draughts drawn from the inmost wells of nature and antiquity and romance, are of greater solace and refreshment to his kind than anything he could have been likely to achieve by deliberate effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature anticipation of its maturity? at this point there follows a fretful passage, ill-written or rather only roughly drafted, and therefore not included in the transcripts of the fragments by his friends, in which his monitress affirms contemptuously the gulf that separates the romantic dreamer from the true poet. he accepts the reproof and the threatened punishment, the more willingly if they are to extend to certain 'hectorers in proud bad verse' (he means byron) who have aroused his spleen. reverting to a loftier strain, and acknowledging the grace she has so far shown him, the poet asks his monitress to reveal herself. he had probably long before been impressed by engravings of the well-known ancient statue of the seated mnemosyne sitting forward with her chin resting on her hand, her arm and shoulder heavily swathed in drapery: but his vision of her here seems wholly independent, and is noble and mystically haunting. when she has signified to him in a softened voice that the gigantic image above the altar is that of saturn, and that the scenes of the world's past she is about to evoke before him are those of the fall of saturn, the poet relates:-- as near as an immortal's sphered words could to a mother's soften were these last: and yet i had a terror of her robes, and chiefly of the veils that from her brow hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries, that made my heart too small to hold its blood. this saw that goddess, and with sacred hand parted the veils. then saw i a wan face, not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd by an immortal sickness which kills not; it works a constant change, which happy death can put no end to; deathwards progressing to no death was that visage; it had past the lilly and the snow; and beyond these i must not think now, though i saw that face. but for her eyes i should have fled away; they held me back with a benignant light, soft, mitigated by divinest lids half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd of all external things; they saw me not, but in blank splendour beam'd, like the mild moon, who comforts those she sees not, who knows not what eyes are upward cast. the aspirant now adoringly entreats her to disclose the tragedy that he perceives to be working in her brain: she consents, and from this point begins the original _hyperion_ re-cast and narrated as a vision within the main vision, with comments put into the mouth of the prophetess. but the scheme, which under no circumstances, one would say, could have been a prosperous one, was soon abandoned, and this, the last of keats's great fragments, breaks off near the beginning of the second book. footnotes: [ ] _carm._ iii. , which probably keats knew also at first hand. [ ] the daughter of styx is victory, and 'halecret' is a corslet. [ ] the passage ending, 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.' [ ] with duller steel than the persèan sword they cut away no formless monster's head. [ ] see the letter to taylor quoted above, pp. , . [ ] _auctores mythographi latini_, ed. van staveren, leyden, . keats's copy of the book was bought by him in , and passed after his death into the hands first of brown, and afterwards of archdeacon bailey (houghton mss.). the passage about moneta which had wrought in keats's mind occurs at p. , in the notes to hyginus. chapter xv february-august : hampstead and kentish town: publication of _lamia_ volume. letters from the sick-bed--to fanny brawne--to james rice--barry cornwall--hopes of returning health--haydon's private view--improvement not maintained--summer at kentish town--kindness of leigh hunt--misery and jealousy--severn and mrs gisborne--invitation from shelley--keats on _the cenci_--_la belle dame_ published--a disfigured version--the _lamia_ volume published--charles lamb's appreciation--the _new monthly_--other favourable reviews--taylor and blackwood--a skirmish--impenitence--and impertinence--jeffrey in the _edinburgh_--appreciation full though tardy--fury of byron--shelley on _hyperion_--and on keats in general--impressions of crabb robinson. such and so gloomy, although with no ignoble gloom, had been keats's deeper thoughts on poetry and life, and such the imagery under which he figured them, during the last weeks when the state of his health enabled his mind to work with anything approaching its natural power. from the night of his seizure on february rd , which was three months after his twenty-fourth birthday, he never wrote verse again: unless indeed the lines found on the margin of his manuscript of _the cap and bells_ were written from his sick-bed and in a moment of bitterness addressed in his mind to fanny brawne: but from a certain pitch and formality of style in them, i should take them rather to be meant for putting into the mouth of one of the characters in some such historical play as he had been meditating in the weeks before christmas:-- this living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold and in the icy silence of the tomb, so haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights that thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood so in my veins red life might stream again, and thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is-- i hold it towards you. for several days after the hæmorrhage he was kept to his room and his bed, and for nearly two months had to lead a strictly invalid life. at first he could bear no one in the room except the doctor and brown. 'while i waited on him day and night,' testifies brown, 'his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, a motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment.' (how often have these words come home to the heart of the present writer in days when he used to be busy about the mute sick-bed of another of these shining ones!) severn, nursing keats later under conditions even more trying and hopeless, bears similar testimony to his unabated charm and sweetness in suffering. almost from the first he was able to write little letters to his sister fanny, and is careful to give them a cheering and re-assuring turn. when after some days he is down on a sofa-bed made up for him in the front parlour he tells her what an improvement it is:-- besides i see all that passes-for instance now, this morning--if i had been in my own room i should not have seen the coals brought in. on sunday between the hours of twelve and one i descried a pot boy. i conjectured it might be the one o'clock beer--old women with bobbins and red cloaks and unpresuming bonnets i see creeping about the heath. gipseys after hare skins and silver spoons. then goes by a fellow with a wooden clock under his arm that strikes a hundred and more. then comes the old french emigrant (who has been very well to do in france) with his hands joined behind on his hips, and his face full of political schemes. then passes mr david lewis, a very good-natured, good-looking old gentleman who has been very kind to tom and george and me. as for those fellows the brick-makers they are always passing to and fro. i mustn't forget the two old maiden ladies in well walk who have a lap dog between them that they are very anxious about. it is a corpulent little beast whom it is necessary to coax along with an ivory-tipp'd cane. carlo our neighbour mrs brawne's dog and it meet sometimes. lappy thinks carlo a devil of a fellow and so do his mistresses. very soon his betrothed was allowed to pay him little visits from next door, and he was able to take pleasure in these and in a constant interchange of notes with her. he tells her of his thoughts and some of his words (which are not quite the same as brown puts in his mouth) at the moment of his seizure:-- you must believe--you shall, you will--that i can do nothing, say nothing, think nothing of you but what has its spring in the love which has so long been my pleasure and torment. on the night i was taken ill--when so violent a rush of blood came to my lungs that i felt nearly suffocated--i assure you i felt it possible i might not survive, and at that moment thought of nothing but you. when i said to brown 'this is unfortunate' i thought of you. 'tis true that since the first two or three days other subjects have entered my head. on the whole his love-thoughts keep peaceable and contented, and his jealousies are for the moment at rest. but he has to struggle with the sense that considering his health and circumstances he is bound in fairness to release her from her engagement: an idea which to her credit she seems steadily to have refused to entertain. my greatest torment since i have known you has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the cressid; but that suspicion i dismiss utterly and remain happy in the surety of your love, which i assure you is as much a wonder to me as a delight. send me the words 'good night' to put under my pillow.... you know our situation--what hope is there if i should be recovered ever so soon--my very health will not suffer me to make any great exertion. i am recommended not even to read poetry, much less write it. i wish i had even a little hope. i cannot say forget me--but i would mention that there are impossibilities in the world. no more of this. i am not strong enough to be weaned--take no notice of it in your good night. the healthier and more tranquil tenor of his thoughts and feelings for the time is beautifully expressed in the often quoted letter written to james rice a fortnight after his attack:-- i may say that for six months before i was taken ill i had not passed a tranquil day. either that gloom overspread me, or i was suffering under some passionate feeling, or if i turned to versify, that acerbated the poison of either sensation. the beauties of nature had lost their power over me. how astonishingly (here i must premise that illness, as far as i can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! like poor falstaff, though i do not 'babble', i think of green fields; i muse with the greatest affection on every flower i have known from my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if i had just created them with a superhuman fancy. it is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. i have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but i do not care a straw for them. the simple flowers of our spring are what i want to see again. some time in the month he owns to his beloved that the thoughts of what he had hoped to do in poetry mingle with his thoughts of her:-- how illness stands as a barrier betwixt me and you! even if i was well--i must make myself as good a philosopher as possible. now i have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake i have found other thoughts intrude upon me. 'if i should die,' said i to myself, 'i have left no immortal work behind me--nothing to make my friends proud of my memory--but i have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if i had had time i would have made myself remember'd.' thoughts like these came very feebly whilst i was in health and every pulse beat for you--now you divide with this (may i say it?) 'last infirmity of noble minds' all my reflection. presently we learn from his letters that reynolds, dilke, and one or two other friends have been dropping in to see him. he expresses himself touched by the courtesy of a new poetical acquaintance of much more prosperous worldly connexions than his own, mr bryan waller procter ('barry cornwall') in sending him copies of his volumes lately published. keats does not mention that one of these contains a version, _the sicilian story_, of the same tale from boccaccio as his own as yet unpublished _isabella_: but he cannot quite conceal his perception of those qualities in barry cornwall's work, its prevailing strain of fluent imitative common-place, its affectations and exaggerations of hunt's and his own leanings towards over-lusciousness, which shelley, as we shall see, found so exasperating. 'however,' he adds, 'that is nothing--i think he likes poetry for its own sake not his.'[ ] before the end of the month we find him taking pleasure, as in earlier februaries, in the song of the thrush, which portends, he hopes, an end of the north-east wind. the month of march brings signs of gradually returning strength. brown, he says, declares he is getting stout; and having in the first weeks of his illness avowed that he was so feeble he could be flattered into a hope in which faith had no part, he now begins really to believe in his own recovery and to let his thoughts run again on fame and poetry. he writes to fanny brawne the most trustful and least agitated of all his love letters:-- you uttered a half complaint once that i only lov'd your beauty. have i nothing else then to love in you but that? do not i see a heart naturally furnish'd with wings imprison itself with me? no ill prospect has been able to turn your thoughts a moment from me. this perhaps should be as much a subject of sorrow as joy--but i will not talk of that. even if you did not love me i could not help an entire devotion to you: how much more deeply then must i feel for you knowing you love me. my mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it. i never felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no person but you. when you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses. the anxiety shown about our loves in your last note is an immense pleasure to me: however you must not suffer such speculations to molest you any more: nor will i any more believe you can have the least pique against me. and again: 'let me have another opportunity of years and i will not die without being remember'd. take care of yourself dear that we may both be well in the summer.' he began to get about again, and by the th of march was well enough to go into town to the private view of haydon's huge picture, finished at last, of christ's entry into jerusalem. this was the occasion which haydon in his autobiography describes in language so vivid and with a self-congratulation so boisterous and contagious that it is impossible in reading not to share his sense of the day's triumph. as in the case of the elgin marbles three years earlier, he had achieved his object in the face of a thousand difficulties and enmities, living the while on the bounty of friends, some of them rich, others, as we know, the reverse, whom his ardour and importunity had whipped up to his help. at the last moment he had contrived to scrape together money enough to stop the mouths of his creditors and to pay the cost of hiring the egyptian hall and hanging up his gigantic canvas there, with the help of three gigantic guardsmen, his models and assistants; and the world of taste and fashion, realising how haydon had been right and the established dilettanti wrong in regard to the elgin marbles, were determined to be on the safe side this time in case he should turn out to be right also about the merits of his own work. some exalted and many distinguished personages had been to see the picture in his studio, and now, on the opening day, the hall was thronged in answer to his invitations. 'all the ministers and their ladies, all the foreign ambassadors, all the bishops, all the beauties in high life, all the geniuses in town, and everybody of any note, were invited and came.... the room was full. keats and hazlitt were up in a corner, really rejoicing.' hazlitt expressed in the _edinburgh review_ for the following august a tempered, far from undiscriminating admiration of certain qualities in the painting. keats himself merely mentions to his sister fanny, without comment, the fact of his having been there. one wonders whether he witnessed the scene which haydon goes on in his effective way to narrate. he had tried to treat the head of christ unconventionally, had painted and repainted it, and was nervous and dissatisfied over the result. the crowd seemed doubtful too. 'everybody seemed afraid, when in walked, with all the dignity of her majestic presence, mrs siddons, like a ceres or a juno. the whole room remained dead silent, and allowed her to think. after a few minutes sir george beaumont, who was extremely anxious, said in a very delicate manner, "how do you like the christ?" everybody listened for her reply. after a moment, in a deep, loud, tragic tone she said, "it is completely successful." i was then presented with all the ceremonies of a levee, and she invited me to her house in an awful tone.'... i think it is not recorded whether northcote's acid comment in a different sense, 'mr haydon, your ass is the saviour of your picture', was made on this famous occasion or privately. certainly the ass, judging by photographs of the picture as it now hangs in a wrecked condition at cincinnati, is the object that first takes the eye with its black ears and shoulders strongly relieved against the white drapery of christ, and what looks like the realistic treatment of the creature in contrast with the 'ideal,' that is the vapidly pompous and pretentious, portraiture of geniuses past and present, newton, voltaire, wordsworth, hazlitt, keats, introduced among the crowd in the foreground.[ ] in the course of april the improvement in keats's health failed to maintain itself. we find him complaining much of nervous irritability and general weakness. he is recommended, one would like to know by whom, to avoid the excitement of writing or even reading poetry and turn to the study of geometry--of all things!--as a sedative. he has no strength for the walk to walthamstow to see his young sister, and even shrinks from the fatigue of going by coach. brown having arranged to let his house again and go for another tramp through scotland--not, one would have said under the circumstances, the course of a very considerate or solicitous friend, but he was probably misled by keats's apparent improvement the month before--brown having made this arrangement, keats, also on the recommendation of the doctors, thinks of sailing with him on the packet and returning alone, in hopes of getting strength from the sea-trip to scotland and back. this plan, when it came to the point, he gave up, and only accompanied his friend down the river as far as gravesend. having to turn out of wentworth place in favour of brown's summer tenants, he thought of taking a lodging a few doors from the house where leigh hunt was then living in kentish town, then still a village on the way between london and hampstead. almost at the same time he writes to dilke in regard to his future course of life, 'my mind has been at work all over the world to find out what to do. i have my choice of three things, or at least two, south america, or surgeon to an indiaman; which last, i think, will be my fate.' for the present he moved as he had proposed to kentish town ( wesleyan place). here he stayed for six or seven weeks (approximately may -june ), and then, having suffered a set-back in the shape of two slight returns of hæmorrhage from the lung, moved for the sake of better nursing into the household of the ever kind and affectionate, but not less ever feckless and ill-managing, leigh hunts at mortimer terrace. with them he remained for another period of about seven weeks, ending on august th. those three months in kentish town were to keats a time of distressing weakness and for the most part of terrible inward fretfulness and despondency. early in the time he speaks of intending soon to begin (meaning begin again) on _the cap and bells_. when we read those vivid stanzas quoted above (p. ) describing the welcome by the crowd of princess bellanaine after her aerial journey, we are inevitably reminded of an event--the triumphal approach and entry of queen caroline into london from dover--which happened on the th of june this same year. it would be tempting to suppose that keats may have witnessed the event and been thereby inspired to his description. but he was too ill for such outings, and moreover the earlier of the two stanzas comes well back in the poem (sixty-fourth out of eighty-eight) and it is impossible to suppose that in his then state he could have added so much to the fragment as that would imply. so we must credit the stanzas to imagination only, and take it as certain that his only real occupation with poetry in these days was in passing through the press the new volume of poems (_lamia_, _isabella_, etc.,) which his friends had at last persuaded him to put forward. even on this task his hold must have been loose, seeing that the publishers put in without his knowledge a note which he afterwards sharply disowned, to the effect that his reason for dropping _hyperion_ had been the ill reception of _endymion_ by the critics. his only outing, so far as we hear, was to an exhibition of english historical portraits at the british institution, of which he writes to brown with some interest and vividness. he tells at the same time of an invitation, which he was not well enough to accept, to meet wordsworth, southey, lamb, haydon, and some others at supper. leigh hunt, despite his engrossing literary and editorial occupations and a recent trying illness of his own, did his best, while keats was his inmate, to keep him interested and amused. keats in writing to his sister gratefully acknowledges as much. 'mr hunt does everything in his power to make the time pass as agreeably with me as possible. i read the greatest part of the day and generally take two half-hour walks a day up and down the terrace which is very much pester'd with cries, ballad singers, and street music.' but the obsession of his passion, its consuming jealousy and hopelessness, gave him little respite. he would keep his eyes fixed all day, as he afterwards avowed, on hampstead; and once when, at hunt's suggestion, they took a drive as far as the heath, he burst into a flood of unwonted tears and declared his heart was breaking. his letters to his beloved in these same months are too agonizing to read. he is so little himself in them, so merely and utterly, to borrow words of his own, 'a fever of himself,' that many of us could not endure, when they were first published, the thought of this keats-that-is-no-keats being exposed before a hastily reading and carelessly judging after-world, and even now cannot but regret it. all the morbid self-torturing elements of his nature, which in health it had been a main part of the battle of his life to subdue, and of which he never suffered those about him to see a sign, now burst from control and flamed out against the girl he loved and the friends he loved next best to her. once only, at the beginning of the time, he could write contentedly, telling her that he is marking for her the most beautiful passages in spenser, 'comforting myself in being somewhat occupied to give you however small a pleasure. it has lightened my time very much. god bless you.' his other letters are in a tortured, almost frenzied, strain of jealous suspicion and reproach against her and against those of his intimates who had, as he imagined, disapproved their attachment, or pried into or made light of it, or else had shown her too marked attentions. among the former were reynolds and his sisters, from whom for the time being he was tacitly estranged. among the latter he includes brown and dilke, with especial bitterness against brown. between them all they had made, he vows, a football of his heart, and again, 'hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is when he cried to ophelia, "go to a nunnery, go, go!".' that these were but the half-delirious promptings of his fevered blood is clear from the fact that a very few weeks both before and after such outbreaks he wrote to brown as though counting him as much a friend as ever. as for his betrothed, wound as his reproaches might at the time, we know from her own words that they left no lasting impression of unkindness on her memory. writing in riper years to medwin, who had asked her whether the accounts current in rome of keats's violence of nature were true, she says:-- that his sensibility was most acute, is true, and his passions were very strong, but not violent, if by that term, violence of temper is implied. his was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn on himself than on others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his friends. violence such as the letter describes, was quite foreign to his nature. for more than a twelvemonth before quitting england, i saw him every day, often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and i do not hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to any human being.[ ] these words of fanny brawne, then mrs lindon, to medwin are not well known, and it is only fair to quote them as proving that if in youth the lady had not been willing to sacrifice her gaieties and her pleasure in admiration for the sake of her lover's peace of mind, she showed at any rate in after life a true and loyal understanding of his character. while keats was staying in kentish town severn went often to see him, and in the second week of july writes to haslam struggling to keep up his hopes for their friend in spite of appearances and of keats's own conviction:--'it will give you pleasure to say i trust he will still recover. his appearance is shocking and now reminds me of poor tom and i have been inclined to think him in the same way. for himself--he makes sure of it--and seems prepossessed that he cannot recover--now i seem more than ever _not_ to think so and i know you will agree with me when you see him--are you aware another volume of poems was published last week--in which is "lovely isabel--poor simple isabel"? i have been delighted with this volume and think it will even please the million.' during the same period shelley's friends the gisbornes twice met him at leigh hunt's. the first time was on june . mrs gisborne writes in her journal that having lately been ill he spoke little and in a low tone: 'the _endymion_ was not mentioned, this person might not be its author; but on observing his countenance and eyes i persuaded myself that he was the very person.' it is always keats's eyes that strangers thus notice first: the late mrs procter, who met him only once, at a lecture of hazlitt's, remembered them to the end of her long life as like those of one 'who had been looking at some glorious sight.' this first time keats and mrs gisborne had some talk about music and singing, but some three weeks later, on july th, the same lady notes, 'drank tea at mr hunt's; i was much pained by the sight of poor keats, under sentence of death from dr lamb. he never spoke and looks emaciated.' doubtless it was under the impression of this last meeting that mr gisborne sent shelley the account of keats's state of health which moved shelley to write in his own and his wife's name urging that keats should come to italy to avoid the english winter and take up his quarters with or near them at pisa. shelley repeats nearly the same kind and just opinion of _endymion_ as he had previously expressed in writing to the olliers; saying he has lately read it again, 'and ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion. this people in general will not endure, and that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold. i feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but will.' at the same time shelley sends keats a copy of his _cenci_. keats's answer shows him touched and grateful for the kindness offered, but nevertheless, as always where shelley is in question, in some degree embarrassed and ungracious. he says nothing of the invitation to pisa, though he was already considering the possibility of going to winter in italy. as to _endymion_, he says he would willingly unwrite it did he care so much as once about reputation, and as to _the cenci_, and _the prometheus_ announced as forthcoming, he makes the well-known, rather obscurely worded criticism of which the main drift is that to his mind shelley pours out new poems too quickly and does not concentrate enough upon the purely artistic aims and qualities of his work. these, keats goes on, are 'by many spirits nowadays considered the mammon. a modern work, it is said, must have a purpose which may be the god. an artist must serve mammon; he must have 'self-concentration'--selfishness, perhaps. you, i am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.' keats in these admonitions was no doubt remembering views of shelley's such as are expressed in his words 'i consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.' judging by them, his mind would seem to have veered back from the convictions which inspired the pre-amble to the revised _hyperion_ the autumn before, insisting, in language which might almost seem borrowed from the preface to _alastor_, on the doom that awaits poets who play their art in selfishness instead of making it their paramount aim to 'pour balm' upon the miseries of mankind. with reference to the promised _prometheus_ he adds, 'could i have my own wish effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now putting an end to the second act. i remember your advising me not to publish my first blights, on hampstead heath. i am returning advice upon your hands.' finally, mentioning that he is sending out a copy of his lately published _lamia_ volume, he says that most of its contents have been written above two years (a slip of memory, the statement being only true of _isabella_ and of one or two minor pieces) and would never have been published now but for hope of gain. shelley's letter was written from pisa on the th of july and received by keats on the th of august. on the previous day he had fled suddenly from under the leigh hunts' roof, having been thrown into a fit of uncontrollable nervous agitation by the act of a discharged servant, who kept back a letter to him from fanny brawne and on quitting the house left it to be delivered, opened and two days late, by one of the children. his first impulse on leaving the hunts' was to go back to his old lodging with bentley the postman, but this mrs brawne would not hear of, and took him into her own house, where she and her daughter for the next few weeks nursed him and did all they could for his comfort. during those unhappy months at kentish town keats's best work was given to the world. first, in leigh hunt's _indicator_ for may , _la belle dame sans merci_, signed, obviously in bitterness, 'caviare' (hamlet's 'caviare to the general'), and unluckily enfeebled by changes for which we find no warrant either in keats's autograph or in extant copies made by his friends woodhouse and brown. keats's judgment in revising his own work had evidently by this time become unsure. we have seen how in recasting _hyperion_ the previous autumn he changed some of the finest of his original lines for the worse: and it is conceivable that in the case of _la belle dame_ he may have done so again of his own motion, but much more likely, i should say, that the changes, which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on hunt's suggestion and that keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference, or perhaps even from that very sense of lack of sympathy in most readers which made him sign 'caviare.' hunt introduced the piece with some commendatory words, showing that he at all events felt nothing amiss with it in its new shape, and added a short account of the old french poem by alain chartier from which the title was taken. it is to be deplored that in some recent and what should be standard editions of keats the poem stands as thus printed in the _indicator_, instead of in the original form rightly given by lord houghton from brown's transcript, in which it had become a classic of the language.[ ] it is surely a perversion in textual criticism to perpetuate the worse version merely because it happens to be the one printed in keats's lifetime. no sensitive reader but must feel that 'wretched wight' is a vague and vapid substitute for the clear image of the 'knight-at-arms,' while 'sigh'd full sore' is ill replaced by 'sighed deep,' and 'wild wild eyes' still worse by 'wild sad eyes': that the whimsical particularity of the 'kisses four,' removed in the new version, gives the poem an essential part of its savour (keats was fond of these fanciful numberings, compare the damsels who stand 'by fives and sevens' in the induction to calidore, and the 'four laurell'd spirits' in the epistle to george felton matthew): and again, that the loose broken construction--'so kissed to sleep' is quite uncharacteristic of the poet: and yet again, that the phrase 'and there we slumbered on the moss,' is what any amateur rimester might write about any pair of afternoon picknickers, while the phrase which was cancelled for it, 'and there she lulled me asleep,' falls with exactly the mystic cadence and hushing weight upon the spirit which was required. the reader may be interested to hear the effect which these changes had upon the late william morris, than whom no man had a better right to speak. mr sydney cockerell writes me:-- in february the last sheets of the kelmscott press keats, edited by f. s. ellis, were being printed. a specimen of each sheet of every book was brought in to morris as soon as it came off the press. i was with him when he happened to open the sheet on which _la belle dame sans merci_ was printed. he began to read it and was suddenly aware of unfamiliar words, 'wretched wight' for 'knight at arms,' verses and transposed, and several changes in verse . great was his indignation. he swiftly altered the words and then read the poem to me, remarking that it was the germ from which all the poetry of his group had sprung--the sheet was reprinted and the earlier and better version restored--i still have the cancelled sheet with his corrections. six weeks later, in the first days of july, appeared the volume _lamia, isabella, and other poems_ in right of which keats's name is immortal. _la belle dame_ was not in it, nor _in drear-nighted december_, nor any sonnets, nor any of the verses composed on the scotch tour, nor the fragment of _the eve of st mark_, nor, happily, _the cap and bells_: but it included all the odes except that on indolence and the fragment _to maia_, as well as nearly all the other minor pieces of any account written since _endymion_, such as _fancy_, the _mermaid tavern_ and _robin hood_ lines, with the three finished tales, _isabella_, _the eve of st agnes_, and _lamia_, and the great fragment of _hyperion_ in its original, not its recast, form. keats was too far gone in illness and the hopelessness of passion to be much moved by the success or failure of his new venture. but the story of its first reception is part of his biography, and shall be briefly told in this place. the first critic in the field was the best: no less a master than charles lamb, who within a fortnight of the appearance of the volume contributed to the _new times_ a brief notice, anonymous but marked with all the charm and authority of his genius.[ ] he begins by quoting the four famous stanzas picturing madeline at her prayers in the moonlit chamber, and comments--'like the radiance, which comes from those old windows upon the limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost chaucer-like painting, with which this poet illumes every subject he touches. we have scarcely anything like it in modern description. it brings us back to ancient days and "beauty making-beautiful old rhymes."' 'the finest thing,' lamb continues, 'in the volume is _the pot of basil_.' noting how the anticipation of the assassination is wonderfully conceived in the one epithet of 'the _murder'd_ man,' he goes on to quote the stanzas telling the discovery of and digging for the corpse, 'than which,' he says. 'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in dante, in chaucer or in spenser.' it is to be noted that lamb, who loved things gothic better than things grecian, ignores _hyperion_, which most critics in praising the volume pitched on to the neglect of the rest, and proceeds to tell of _lamia_, winding up with a return to _the pot of basil_:-- more exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the _lamia_. it is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of. her first appearance in serpentine form-- --a beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes-- her dialogue with hermes, the _star of lethe_, as he is called by one of these prodigal phrases which mr keats abounds in, which are each a poem in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the sudden coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into woman's shape again by the god; her marriage with the beautiful lycius; her magic palace, which those who knew the street, and remembered it complete from childhood, never remembered to have seen before; the few persian mutes, her attendants, --who that same year were seen about the markets: none knew where they could inhabit;-- the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of the whole pageantry, lamia, and all, away, before the glance of apollonius,--are all that fairy land can do for us. they are for younger impressibilities. to _us_ an ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies, rather than acknowledge she is fair. leigh hunt, who during all this time was in all ways loyally doing his best for keats's encouragement and comfort, and had just dedicated his translation of tasso's _aminta_ to him as to one 'equally pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical,'--leigh hunt within a month of the appearance of the volume reviewed and quoted from it with full appreciation in two numbers of the _indicator_. his notice contained those judicious remarks which we have already cited on the philosophical weakness of _lamia_, praising at the same time the gorgeousness of the snake description, and saying, of the lines on the music being the sole support of the magical palace-roof, 'this is the very quintessence of the romantic.' 'when mr keats errs in his poetry,' says hunt in regard to the _pot of basil_, 'it is from the ill-management of a good thing--exuberance of ideas'; and, comparing the contents of this volume with his earlier work, concludes as follows:-- 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 less combine them. mr keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets. but leigh hunt's praise of one of his own supposed disciples of the cockney school would carry little weight outside the circle of special sympathizers. a better index to the way the wind was beginning to blow was the treatment of the volume in colburn's _new monthly magazine_, of which the poet thomas campbell had lately been appointed editor, with the excellent cyrus redding as acting editor under him:--'these poems are very far superior', declares the critic, 'to any which the author has previously committed to the press. they have nothing showy, or extravagant, or eccentric about them; but are pieces of calm beauty, or of lone and self-supported grandeur.' in _lamia_, 'there is a mingling of greek majesty with fairy luxuriance which we have not elsewhere seen.' _isabella_ is compared with barry cornwall's _sicilian story_: 'the poem of mr keats has not the luxury of description, nor the rich love-scenes, of mr cornwall; but he tells the tale with a naked and affecting simplicity which goes irresistibly to the heart. _the eve of st agnes_ is 'a piece of consecrated fancy', in which 'a soft religious light is shed over the whole story.' in _hyperion_ 'the picture of the vast abode of cybele and the titans is 'in the sublimest style of Æschylus': and in conclusion the critic takes leave of mr keats 'with wonder at the gigantic stride which he has taken, and with the good hope that if he proceeds in the high and pure style which he has now chosen, he will attain an exalted and a lasting station among english poets.' of the other chief literary reviews in england, the old-established _monthly_ begins in a strain scarcely less laudatory, but wavers and becomes admonitory before the end, while keats's dismal monitor of three years before, the sententious _eclectic review_, acknowledging in him 'a young man possessed of an elegant fancy, a warm and lively imagination, and something above the average talents of persons who take to writing poetry', proceeds to warn him against regarding imagination as the proper organ of poetry, to lecture him on his choice of subjects, his addiction to the greek mythology, and to poetry for poetry's sake ('poetry, after all, if pursued as an end, is but child's play'). the _british critic_, more contemptuous even than blackwood or the quarterly in its handling of _endymion_, this time prints a kind of palinode, admitting that 'mr keats is a person of no ordinary genius', and prophesying that if he will take spenser and milton for models instead of leigh hunt he 'need not despair of attaining to a very high and enviable place in the public esteem'. writing to brown from hampstead in the latter half of august, keats seems aware that the critics are being kinder to him than before. 'my book,' he says, 'has had good success among the literary people, and i believe has a moderate sale;' and again, 'the sale of my book has been very slow, but it has been very highly rated.' the great guns of scottish criticism had not yet spoken. constable's _edinburgh_ (formerly the _scots_) _magazine_, which never either hit or bit hard, and whose managers had preferred the ways of prudence when bailey urged them two years before boldly to denounce the outrages of the 'z' gang in blackwood, in due course praised keats's new volume, but cautiously, saying that 'it must and ought to attract attention, for it displays the ore of true poetic genius, though mingled with a large portion of dross.... he is continually shocking our ideas of poetical decorum, at the very time when we are acknowledging the hand of genius. in thus boldly running counter to old opinions, however, we cannot conceive that mr keats merits bitter contempt or ridicule; the weapons which are too frequently employed when liberal discussion and argument would be unsuccessful.' as to _blackwood's magazine_ itself, we are fortunate in having an amusing first-hand narrative of an encounter of its owner and manager with keats's publisher which preceded the appearance of keats's new volume. the excellent taylor, staunch to his injured young friend and client even at some risk, as in his last words he shows himself aware, to his own interests, writes from fleet street on the last day of august to his partner hessey:-- i have had this day a call from mr blackwood. we shook hands and went into the back shop. after asking him what was new at edinburgh, and talking about clare, the _magazine_, baldwin, peter corcoran and a few other subjects,[ ] i observed that we had published another volume of keats's poems on which his editors would have another opportunity of being witty at his expense. he said they were disposed to speak favourably of mr k. this time--and he expected that the article would have appeared in this month's mag. 'but can they be so inconsistent?' 'there is no inconsistency in praising him if they think he deserves it.' 'after what has been said of his talents i should think it very inconsistent.' 'certainly they found fault with his former poems but that was because they thought they deserved it.' 'but why did they attack him personally?' 'they did not do so.' 'no? did not they speak of him in ridicule as johnny keats, describe his appearance while addressing a sonnet to ailsa crag, and compare him as a (?) hen to shelley as a bird of paradise, besides, what can you say to that cold blooded passage when they say they will take care he shall never get £ again for a vol. of his poems--what had he done to deserve such attacks as these?' 'oh, it was all a joke, the writer meant nothing more than to be witty. he certainly thought there was much affectation in his poetry, and he expressed his opinion only--it was done in the fair spirit of criticism.' 'it was done in the spirit of the devil, mr blackwood. so if a young man is guilty of affectation while he is walking the streets it is fair in another person because he dislikes it to come and knock him down.' 'no,' says b., 'but a poet challenges public opinion by printing his book, but i suppose you would have them not criticized at all?' 'i certainly think they are punished enough by neglect and by the failure of their hopes and to me it seems very cruel to abuse a man merely because he cannot give us as much pleasure as he wishes. but you go even beyond his ...(?) you strike a man when he is down. he gets a violent blow from the quarterly--and then you begin.' 'i beg your pardon,' says b., 'we were the first.' 'i think not, but if you were the first, you continued it after, for that truly diabolical thrust about the £ appeared after the critique in the quarterly.' 'you mistake that altogether,' said b., 'the writer does not like the cockney school, so he went on joking mr k. about it.' 'why should not the manners of gentlemen continue to regulate their conduct when they are writing of each other as much as when they are in conversation? no man would insult mr keats in this manner in his company, and what is the difference between writing and speaking of a person except that the written attack is the more base from being made anonymously and therefore at no personal risk.--i feel regard for mr keats as a man of real genius, a gentleman, nay more, one of the gentlest of human beings. he does not resent these things himself, he merely says of his opponents "they don't know me." now this mildness(?) his friends feel the more severely when they see him ill used. but this feeling is not confined to them. i am happy to say that the public interest is awakened to the sense of the injustice which has been done him and the attempts to ruin him will have in the end a contrary effect.' here i turned the conversation to another subject by asking b. if he read the _abbot_, and in about minutes more he made his exit with a formal bow and a good morning. the above is the substance and as clearly as possible the words, i made use of. his replies were a little more copious than i have stated but to the same effect. i have written this conversation down on the day it took place because i suspect some allusion may hereafter be made to it in the mag. and i fully expect that whatever books we publish will be received with reference to the feeling it is calculated to excite in the bosoms of these freebooting....[ ] in the upshot, the blackwood critics took no direct notice of the _lamia_ volume at all, but made occasion during the autumn to say their new say about keats in a review of shelley's _prometheus unbound_. this time the hand is unmistakably that of wilson. for the last year or more wilson, following a hint given him by de quincey, had chosen to take shelley boisterously under his patronage as a poet of true genius, for whom scarcely any praise would be too high could he only be weaned from his impious opinions. now, after rebutting a current and really gratuitous charge that the magazine praised shelley from the knowledge that he was a man of means and family, and denounced hunt and keats because they were poor and struggling, the critic blusters characteristically on, in a strain half apologetic in one breath and in the next as odiously insolent as ever:-- as for mr keats, we are informed that he is in a very bad state of health, and that his friends attribute a great deal of it to the pain he has suffered from the critical castigation his _endymion_ drew down on him in this magazine. if it be so, we are most heartily sorry for it, and have no hesitation in saying, that had we suspected that young author, of being so delicately nerved, we should have administered our reproof in a much more lenient shape and style. the truth is, we from the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in mr keats's verses, which made us think it very likely, he might become a real poet in england, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of mr leigh hunt. we, therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could do, for the flagrant affectations of those early productions of his. in the last volume he has published we find more beauties than in the former, both of language and of thought, but we are sorry to say, we find abundance of the same absurd affectations also, and superficial conceits, which first displeased us in his writings;--and which we are again very sorry to say, must in our opinion, if persisted in, utterly and entirely prevent mr keats from ever taking his place among the pure and classical poets of his mother tongue. it is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity of these cockneys makes them overrate their own importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of anything like anger or personal spleen. we should just as soon think of being wroth with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment, as we should of having any feelings at all about any of these people, other than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors. many of them, considered in any other character than that of authors, are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very worthy people in their own way. mr hunt is said to be a very amiable man in his own sphere, and we believe him to be so willingly. mr keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt his manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. but what has all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? what, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among themselves, with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter at highgate, hampstead, or lisson green?... last of all, what should forbid us to announce our opinion, that mr shelley, as a man of genius, is not merely superior, either to mr hunt, or to mr keats, but altogether out of their sphere, and totally incapable of ever being brought into the most distant comparison with either of them. the critical utterance on keats's side likely to tell most with general readers was that of jeffrey in the _edinburgh review_. a year earlier keats had written from winchester expressing impatience at what he thought the cowardice of the edinburgh in keeping silence as to _endymion_ in face of the quarterly attack. 'they do not know what to make of it, and they will not praise it for fear. they are as shy of it as i should be of wearing a quaker's hat. the fact is they have no real taste. they dare not compromise their judgments on so puzzling a question. if on my next publication they should praise me, and so lug in _endymion_, i will address them in a manner they will not at all relish. the cowardliness of the edinburgh is more than the abuse of the quarterly'. exactly what keats had anticipated now took place. jeffrey's natural taste in poetry was conservative, and favoured the correct, the classical and traditional: but in this case, whether from genuine and personal opinion, or to please influential well-wishers of keats on his own side in politics and criticism like sir james mackintosh, he on the appearance of the new volume took occasion to print, now when keats was far past caring about it, an article on his work which was mainly in eulogy of _endymion_: eulogy not unmixed with reasonable criticism, but in a strain, on the whole, gushing almost to excess:-- we had never happened to see either of these volumes till very lately--and have been exceedingly struck with the genius they display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. that imitation of our older writers, and especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry;--and few of its blossoms are either more profuse of sweetness or richer in promise than this which is now before us. mr keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. they are full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. they manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first attempt: but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present. the models upon which he has formed himself, in the _endymion_, the earliest and by much the most considerable of his poems, are obviously the _faithful shepherdess_ of fletcher, and the _sad shepherd_ of ben jonson;--the exquisite metres and inspired diction of which he has copied, with great boldness and fidelity--and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air which breathes only in them and in theocritus--which is at once homely and majestic, luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights and sounds and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of elysium. then, after acknowledgment of the confusedness of the narrative and the fantastic wilfulness of some of the incidents and style, the critic goes on:-- there is no work, accordingly, from which a malicious critic could cull more matter for ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or absurd passages. but we do not take _that_ to be our office:--and just beg leave, on the contrary, to say, that any one who, on this account, would represent the whole poem as despicable, must either have no notion of poetry, or no regard to truth. it is, in truth, at least is full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great deal in it to admire and to give delight, cannot in his heart see much beauty in the two exquisite dramas to which we have already alluded, or find any great pleasure in some of the finest creations of milton and shakespeare. there are many such persons, we verily believe, even among the reading and judicious part of the community--correct scholars we have no doubt many of them, and, it may be, very classical composers in prose and in verse--but utterly ignorant of the true genius of english poetry, and incapable of estimating its appropriate and most exquisite beauties. with that spirit we have no hesitation in saying that mr k. is deeply imbued--and of those beauties he has presented us with many striking examples. we are very much inclined indeed to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether anyone had in him a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm. one immediate result of the edinburgh criticism was to provoke an almost incredible outburst of jealous fury on the part of the personage then most conspicuous on the stage of england's, nay of the world's, poetry, lord byron. byron, with next to no real critical power, could bring dazzling resources of wit and rhetoric to the support of any random opinion, traditional or revolutionary, he might happen by whim or habit to entertain. in these days he was just entering the lists as a self-appointed champion of pope, the artificial school, and eighteenth century critical tradition in general, against pope's latest editor and depreciator, the clerical sonneteer william lisle bowles. ever since the pope-boileau passage in keats's _sleep and poetry_ it had been byron's pleasure to regard keats with gratuitous contempt and aversion. when murray sent him the _lamia_ volume with a parcel of other books to ravenna, he wrote back, 'pray send me _no more_ poetry but what is rare and decidedly good. there is such a trash of keats and the like upon my tables that i am ashamed to look at them.... no more keats, i entreat;--flay him alive; if some of you don't i must skin him myself; there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the mankin.' a month later, evidently not having read a word of keats's book, he comes across jeffrey's praise of it in the _edinburgh review_, and thereupon falls into a fit of anger so foul-mouthed and outrageous that his latest, far from squeamish editors have had to mask its grossness under a cloud of asterisks. a little later he repeats the same disgusting obscenities in cool blood: his only quotable remark on the subject being as follows:--'of the praises of that little dirty blackguard keates in the edinburgh, i shall observe as johnson did when sheridan the actor got a _pension_: "what, has he got a pension? then it is time i should give up _mine_." nobody could be prouder of the praises of the edinburgh than i was, or more alive to their censure. at present all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article.' by and by he proceeded to administer his own castigation to 'mr john ketch' in a second letter written for the pope-bowles controversy: but keats having died meanwhile he withheld this from publication, and a little later, perhaps at the prompting of his own better mind, but more probably through the good influence of shelley, took in _don juan_ the altered tone about keats which all the world knows, and having been at first thus savagely bent on hunting with the hounds, turned and chose to run part of the way, as far as suited him, with the hare. shelley, of course, judged for himself; was incapable of a thought towards a brother poet that was not generous; and had moreover a feeling of true and particular kindness towards keats. we have seen how wisely and fairly he judged _endymion_. were we to take merely his own words written at the time, we might think that he failed to do justice to the new volume as a whole. his first impression of it, coupled with a wildly overdrawn picture which had reached him of keats's sufferings under the stings of the reviewers, apparently determined him to sit down and draft that indignant letter to gifford, never completed or delivered, pleading against the repetition of any such treatment of his new volume as _endymion_ had received from the _quarterly_. in this shelley speaks of _hyperion_ as though it were the one thing he admired in the book: and writing about the same time to peacock, he says 'among modern things which have reached me is a volume of poems by keats; in other respects insignificant enough, but containing the fragment of a poem called _hyperion_. i dare say you have not time to read it; but it certainly is an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of keats which i confess i had not before.' and again, 'among your anathemas of modern poetry, do you include keats's _hyperion_? i think it very fine. his other poems are worth little; but if the _hyperion_ be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.' in considering these utterances we should remember that they were addressed to correspondents bound to be unsympathetic. gifford would be so as a matter of course: while peacock had from old marlow days been a disbeliever in keats and his poetry, and had lately adopted a public attitude of disbelief in modern poetry altogether. we must also remember that shelley had himself been wrought into a mood of unwonted intolerance of certain fashions in poetry by some of barry cornwall's recent performances, which he held to be an out-hunting of hunt and out-byroning of byron.[ ] there is a statement of medwin's which, if medwin were ever a witness much to be trusted, we would rather take as representing shelley's ripened and permanent opinion of the contents of the _lamia_ volume than his own words to gifford or peacock. 'he perceived', says medwin, 'in every one of these productions a marked and continually progressing improvement, and hailed with delight his release from his leading strings, his emancipation from what he called a "perverse and limited school". _the pot of basil_ and _the eve of st agnes_ he read and re-read with ever new delight, and looked upon _hyperion_ as almost faultless, grieving that it was but a fragment and that keats had not been encouraged to complete a work worthy of milton.' at all events shelley, apart from the immortal tribute of _adonais_, has left other words of his own which may content us, addressed to a different correspondent, as to what he felt about keats and his work and promise on the whole, without reference to one poem rather than another. i mean those in which he expresses to mrs leigh hunt his hope to see and take care of keats in italy:--'i consider his a most valuable life, and i am deeply interested in his safety. i intend to be the physician both of his body and of his soul, to keep the one warm, and to teach the other greek and spanish. i am aware, indeed, in part, that i am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me; and this is an additional motive, and will be an added pleasure.' the opinions of neither of these two famous men, byron and shelley, will have had any immediate effect in england. murray could not possibly disseminate byron's private obscenities, and byron's own intended public castigation of keats in a second letter to bowles was, as we have seen, withheld. on the other side shelley made no public use of the draft of his indignant letter to gifford, and peacock would not be by way of saying much about his private expressions of enthusiasm for _hyperion_. but we can gather the impression current in sympathetic circles about keats's future from a couple of entries in the december diaries of crabb robinson. he tells how he has been reading out some of the new volume, first _hyperion_ and then _the pot of basil_, to his friends the aders', and adds,--'there is a force, wildness, and originality in the works of this young poet which, if his perilous journey to italy does not destroy him, promise to place him at the head of our next generation of poets. lamb places him next to wordsworth--not meaning any comparison, for they are dissimilar' ... and again, 'i am greatly mistaken if keats do not soon take a high place among our poets. great feeling and a powerful imagination are shown in this little volume.' had his health held out, such recognition would have been all and more than all keats asked for or would have thought he had yet earned. but praise and dispraise were all one to him before now, and we must go back and follow the tragedy of his personal history to its close. footnotes: [ ] a letter of procter's to keats shows that he had been among keats's visitors during the weeks that followed his attack of hæmorrhage (see buxton forman, _complete works_, v. ). whether they had been much or at all acquainted before then seems uncertain, but procter's impressions of keats recorded almost half a century later read as though he had known him while still in health:-- 'i saw him only two or three times before his departure for italy. i was introduced to him by leigh hunt, and found him very pleasant, and free from all affectation in manner and opinion. indeed, it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright and open countenance. he was always ready to hear and to reply; to discuss, to reason, to admit; and to join in serious talk or common gossip. it has been said that his poetry was affected and effeminate. i can only say that i never encountered a more manly and simple young man. in person he was short, and had eyes large and wonderfully luminous, and a resolute bearing; not defiant, but well sustained.' [ ] as against this judgment, formed from photographs of the wrecked picture and from the general character of haydon's work, let it be remembered that hazlitt, no mean judge, declares that the head of wordsworth is of all his portraits 'the most like his drooping weight of thought and expression.' lamb's complimentary punning address, _in tabulam eximii pictoris_, with its english translation, may be taken as exercises in friendly congratulation rather than in criticism. the picture in its present state is reproduced and discussed by mr louis a. holman in the new york _bookman_, feb. , pp. _sqq._ [ ] medwin's carelessness of statement and workmanship are well known: he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks and the like, and in the original edition of his untrustworthy _life of shelley_ it was difficult to be sure that these words were quoted as textually mrs lindon's own. but in re-editing the book from its author's revised and expanded copy, mr buxton forman has left no doubt on the matter. [ ] i allude to the various editions issued in recent years by the delegates of the oxford university press, to whom i would hereby appeal to let the piece be cancelled on the plates and the earlier text re-established. [ ] the recognition of this review and its inclusion in the canon of lamb's works is one of the many services for which thanks are due to his never-enough-to-be-praised editor, mr e. v. lucas (_the works of charles and mary lamb_, vol. i, pp. , ). [ ] clare is john clare, the distressed peasant poet, in whom many kindly people fancied they had discovered an english burns, and on whose behalf, at the same time as on keats's, taylor was exerting himself to raise a fund. 'peter corcoran' refers to a brilliant medley called _the fancy_ lately published anonymously by john hamilton reynolds, and purporting to tell the fortunes and sample the poetical remains of an ill-starred youth so-named, lured away from fair prospects in love and literature by a passion for the prize ring. the gaps and queries in this letter, the ms. of which is in america, indicate places which its friendly transcriber found illegible. [ ] morgan mss. some words at the end have baffled the transcriber. [ ] _letters of percy bysshe shelley_, ed. ingpen, vol. ii, p. . chapter xvi august -february : voyage to italy: last days and death at rome resolve to winter in italy--severn as companion--the 'maria crowther'--fellow passengers--storm in the channel--held up in the solent--landing near lulworth--the 'bright star' sonnets--the voyage resumed--a meditated poem--incidents at sea--quarantine at naples--letters from keats and haslam--lady passengers described--a cry of agony--neapolitan impressions--on the road to rome--life at rome--apparent improvement--relapse and despair--severn's ministrations--his letters from the sickroom--the same continued--tranquil last days--choice of epitaph--spirit of charm and pleasantness--the end. in telling of the critical reception of keats's _lamia_ volume i have anticipated by three or four months the course of time. returning to his personal condition and doings, we find that by or before the date of his move from kentish town to be under the care of the brawne ladies at wentworth place, that is by mid-august, he had accepted the verdict of the doctors that a winter in italy would be the only thing to give him a chance of recovery. he determined accordingly, not without sore gain-giving and agitation of mind, to make the attempt. in his letter to shelley acknowledging receipt of _the cenci_ and answering shelley's invitation to pisa, he writes:--'there is no doubt that an english winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering, hateful, manner. therefore, i must either voyage or journey to italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery'. and again, using the same phrase, he writes to taylor on august th:--'this journey to italy wakes me at daylight every morning, and haunts me horribly. i shall endeavour to go, though it will be with the sensation of marching against a battery. the first step towards it is to know the expense of a journey and a year's residence, which if you will ascertain for me, and let me know early, you will greatly serve me.' the next day he sends taylor a note of his wish that in case of his death his books should be divided among his friends and that any assets arising or to arise from the sale of his poems should be devoted to paying his debts--those to brown and to taylor himself ranking first. the good publisher promptly bestirred himself to enquire about sailings and make provision for ways and means. for the latter purpose he bought the copyright of _endymion_ for £ , furnished keats at starting with a bill on london for £ , and procured promises of eventual help to the extent of £ more by subscription among persons interested in the poet's fate; james rice and the painters hilton and de wint being among guarantors of £ each and lord fitzwilliam closing the list with a promise of £ . the vessel chosen for the voyage was a merchant brigantine, the 'maria crowther,' having berth accommodation for a few passengers and due to sail from london about the middle of september. the four intervening weeks were spent by the invalid in comparative respite from suffering and distress under the eye and tendance of his beloved. by his desire haydon came one day to see him, and has told, with a painter's touch, how he found him 'lying in a white bed, with white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks.' haydon's vehement, self-confident and self-righteous manner of admonition to friends in trouble seems to have had an effect the reverse of consolatory, and elsewhere he amplifies this account of his last sight of keats, saying, 'he seemed to be going out of life with a contempt for this world and no hopes of the other. i told him to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would destroy himself. i tried to reason against such violence, but it was no use; he grew angry, and i went away deeply affected.' writing about the same time to his young sister, keats shows himself, as ever, thoughtful and wise on her behalf and does his best to be re-assuring on his own:-- now you are better, keep so. do not suffer your mind to dwell on unpleasant reflexions--that sort of thing has been the destruction of my health. nothing is so bad as want of health--it makes one envy scavengers and cinder sifters. there are enough real distresses and evils in wait for every one to try the most vigorous health. not that i would say yours are not real--but they are such as to tempt you to employ your imagination on them, rather than endeavour to dismiss them entirely. do not diet your mind with grief, it destroys the constitution; but let your chief care be of your health, and with that you will meet your share of pleasure in the world--do not doubt it. if i return well from italy i will turn over a new leaf for you. i have been improving lately, and have very good hopes of 'turning a neuk' and cheating the consumption. for a companion on his journey, keats's first thoughts turned to brown, who was still away on his second tramp through the highlands. but the letter he wrote asking whether brown could go with him missed its destination, and he was left with the prospect of having either to give up his journey or venture on it alone, a thing hardly to be thought of in his state of health. at this juncture haslam, always the most useful of friends in an emergency, betook himself to severn, whose prospects in london, in spite of the practice he had found as a miniature-painter and of his success in winning the gold medal of the academy the previous december, seemed far from bright, and urged him to go out with keats to rome. severn at once consented, his immediate impulse of devotion to his friend being strengthened, on reflection, both by the lure of rome itself and by the idea that he might be able while there to work for, and perhaps win, the travelling studentship of the royal academy. he made his arrangements on the shortest possible notice, while haslam undertook the business of procuring passports and the like. a weird incident marked severn's departure from his home. his father, passionately attached to him but resenting his resolve to go to italy now as fiercely as he had before resented his change of profession, on being asked to lend a hand in moving his trunk, in an uncontrollable fit of anger struck and felled him. how and with what rending of the heart keats took his own farewell from the home of his joy and torment at hampstead--of this we hear, and may be thankful to hear, nothing. he spent his last days in england with taylor in fleet street, having gone thither on wednesday september th to be at hand for the day and hour when the 'maria crowther' might be ready to sail. on the evening of sunday the th of september he and severn went on board at the london docks. here the kind taylor and the serviceable haslam took leave of them, and their ship weighed anchor and slipped down tide as far as gravesend, where she came to moorings for the night. moored close by her was a smack from dundee, and on board this smack, by one of the minor perversities of fate, who should be a passenger but charles brown? he had caught this means of conveyance as the first available when he at last got news of keats's plans, and had hoped to reach london in time to bid him farewell. but it was all unknowingly that the friends lay that night within earshot of one another. one lady passenger, a miss pidgeon, had come aboard at the docks: a pleasing person, the friends thought at first, but found reason to change their minds later. at gravesend early the next morning there came another, a pretty and gentle miss cotterell, as far gone in consumption as keats himself. keats was in lively spirits and exerted himself with severn to welcome and amuse the new comer. in the course of the day severn went ashore to buy medicines and other needments for the voyage, and among them, at keats's special request, a bottle of laudanum. the captain, by name thomas walsh, was kind and attentive and did his best, unsuccessfully, to find a goat for the supply of goat's milk to the invalids while on board ship. that evening they put to sea, and keats's health and spirits seemed to rise with the first excitements of the voyage. the events of the next days are best told in the words of the journal-letter written at the time by severn to haslam; vagueness of memory having made much less trustworthy the several accounts of the voyage which he wrote and rewrote in after years. severn was innocent of all stops save dashes, and i print exactly as he wrote:-- th sept. tuesday, off dover castle, etc. i arose at day break to see the glorious eastern gate--keats slept till --miss c. was rather ill this morning i prevailed on her to walk the deck with me at half past she recovered much--keats was still better this morning and mrs pidgeon looked and was the picture of health--but poor me! i began to feel a waltzing on my stomach at breakfast when i wrote the note to you i was going it most soundly--miss cotterell followed me--then keats who did it in the most gentlemanly manner--and then the saucy mrs pidgeon who had been laughing at us--four faces bequeathing to the mighty deep their breakfasts--here i must change to a minor key miss c. fainted--we soon recovered her--i was very ill nothing but lying down would do for me. keats ascended his bed--from which he dictated surgically like esculapius of old in basso-relievo through him miss c. was recovered we had a cup of tea each and no more went to bed and slept until it was time to go to bed--we could not get up again--and slept in our clothes all night--keats the king--not even looking pale. th sept. wednesday off brighton. beautiful morning--we all breakfasted on deck and recovered as we were could enjoy it--about keats said a storm was hatching--he was right--the rain came on and we retired to our cabin--it abated and once more we came on deck--at storm came on furiously--we retired to our beds. the rolling of the ship was death to us--towards it increased and our situation was alarming--the trunks rolled across the cabin--the water poured in from the sky-light and we were tumbled from one side to the other of our beds--my curiosity was raised to see the storm--and my anxiety to see keats for i could only speak to him when in bed--i got up and fell down on the floor from my weakness and the rolling of the ship. keats was very calm--the ladies were much frightened and would scarce speak--when i got up to the deck i was astounded--the waves were in mountains and washed the ship--the watery horizon was like a mountainous country--but the ship's motion was beautifully to the sea falling from one wave to the other in a very lovely manner--the sea each time crossing the deck and one side of the ship being level with the water--this when i understood gave me perfect ease--i communicated below and it did the same--but when the dusk came the sea began to rush in from the side of our cabin from an opening in the planks--this made us rather long faced--for it came by pail-fulls--again i got out and said to keats 'here's pretty music for you'--with the greatest calmness he answered me only by 'water parted from the sea.'[ ] i staggered up again and the storm was awful--the captain and mate soon came down--for our things were squashing about in the dark--they struck a light and i succeeded in getting my desk off the ground--with clothes and books, etc. the captain finding it could not be stopped--tacked about from our voyage--and the sea ceased to dash against the cabin for we were sailing against wind and tide--but the horrible agitation continued in the ship lengthways--here were the pumps working--the sails squalling the confused voices of the sailors--the things rattling about in every direction and us poor devils pinn'd up in our beds like ghosts by daylight--except keats he was himself all the time--the ladies suffered the most--but i was out of bed a dozen times to wait on them and tell them there was no danger--my sickness made me get into bed very soon each time--but keats this morning brags of my sailorship--he says could i have kept on my legs in the water cabin i should have been a standing miracle. th sept. i caught a sight of the moon about o'clock this morning--and ran down to tell the glad tidings--but the surly rolling of the sea was worse than the storm--the ship trembled to it--and the sea was scarcely calmed by daylight--so that we were kept from o'clock yesterday until this morning without anything--well it has done us good, we are like a quartett of fighting cocks this morning. the morning is serene we are now back again some miles--waiting for a wind--but full of spirits--keats is without even complaining and miss cottrell has a colour in her face--the sea has done his worst upon us. i am better than i have been for years. farewell my dear fellow. j. severn--show this to my family with my love to them. when you read this you will excuse the manner--i am quite beside myself--and have written the whole this morning thursday on the deck after a sleepless night and with a head full of care--you shall have a better the next time. the storm had driven them back from off brighton more than half way to the downs, and then abated enough to let them land for a scramble on the shingles at dungeness, where they excited the suspicions of the coast guard, and to get the above letter posted from romney. after this calms and contrary airs kept them beating about the channel for many more days yet. at portsmouth they were held up again, and to pass the time keats landed and went to call on dilke's sister mrs snook at bedhampton; again by ill chance barely missing brown, whom he supposed to be still in scotland but who was actually only ten miles away, having run down to stay with dilke's father at chichester. the next day, while the ship was still hanging in the solent off yarmouth, keats wrote unbosoming himself to brown of his inward agony more fully than he had ever done in speech:-- i wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much--there is one i must mention and have done with it. even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. the very thing which i want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. i cannot help it. who can help it? were i in health it would make me ill, and how can i bear it in my state? i dare say you will be able to guess on what subject i am harping--you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. i wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then i wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. when the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, i may say the bitterness of death is passed. i often wish for you that you might flatter me with the best. i think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to miss brawne when i am dead. you think she has many faults--but, for my sake, think she has not one. if there is anything you can do for her by word or deed i know you will do it. i am in a state at present in which woman merely as woman can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to miss brawne and my sister is amazing. the one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. i seldom think of my brother and sister in america. the thought of leaving miss brawne is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--i eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at wentworth place ring in my ears. is there another life? shall i awake and find all this a dream? there must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering. that night, (september ) adds keats, they expected to put into portland roads; but calms again held them up, and again they were allowed to land, having made only some few miles' headway down the dorsetshire coast. the day of this landing was for keats one of transitory calm and lightening of the spirit. the weather was fine, and 'for a moment,' says severn, 'he became like his former self. he was in a part that he already knew, and showed me the splendid caverns and grottoes with a poet's pride, as though they had been his birthright.' these are vivid phrases, that about the caverns and grottoes certainly a little over-coloured for the scene, which was lulworth cove and the remarkable, but scarcely splendid, rock tunnels and fissures of stair hole and durdle door. when severn says that keats knew the ground, one half wonders whether the dorsetshire keatses may really have been kindred of his to whom he had at some time paid an unrecorded visit: or otherwise, whether in travelling to and from teignmouth in , taking, as we know he did, the southern route from salisbury by bridport and axminster, he may have broken the journey at dorchester and visited the curiosities of the coast. but in truth, to understand and possess beauties of nature as a birthright, keats needed not to have seen them before. on board ship the same night keats borrowed the copy of shakespeare's poems which he had given severn a few days before, and wrote out fair and neatly for him, on the blank page opposite the heading _a lover's complaint_, the beautiful sonnet which every lover of english knows so well:-- bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art, not in lone splendour hung aloft the night and watching, with eternal lids apart, like nature's patient, sleepless eremite, the moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's human shores, or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors-- no--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, to feel for ever its soft fall and swell, awake for ever in a sweet unrest, still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, and so live ever--or else swoon to death. severn in later life clearly cherished the impression that the sonnet had been actually composed for him on the day of the dorsetshire landing. lord houghton in his _life and literary remains_ distinctly asserts as much, and it had seemed to us all a beautiful and consolatory circumstance, in the tragedy of keats's closing days, that his last inspiration in poetry should have come in a strain of such unfevered beauty and tenderness, and with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. but in point of fact the sonnet was work of an earlier date, and the autograph given to severn is on the face of it no draught but a fair copy. its original form had been this-- bright star! would i were stedfast as thou art! not in lone splendour hung amid the night; not watching, with eternal lids apart, like nature's devout sleepless eremite, the morning waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's human shores; or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors:-- no;--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, cheek-pillow'd on my love's white ripening breast, to touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell, awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest; to hear, to feel her tender-taken breath, half passionless, and so swoon on to death. the sonnet is copied in this form by charles brown, under date , in the collection of transcripts from keats's fugitive verses which from the spring of that year he regularly made as soon after they were written as he could lay hands on them. his dates i have found always trustworthy, and i have shown reason (above, p. ) for holding the sonnet to have been written in the last week of february, , and the first days of keats's engagement to fanny brawne. all that keats can actually have done during that evening of tranquillity off lulworth was to return to it in thought and recopy it for severn with changes which in the second line heightened the remoteness of the star; in the fourth made an inverted metrical stress normal by substituting 'patient' for 'devout'; in the fifth changed the word 'morning' into 'moving,'[ ] in the tenth cancelled one of his defining and arresting compound participles in favour of a simpler phrase; and in the four concluding lines varied a little the mood and temperature of the longing expressed, calling for death not as the sequel to his longing's fulfilment, but as the alternative for it. in severn's first mention of the subject, which is in a letter written from rome a few weeks after keats's death, he shows himself aware that brown might be in possession already of a version of the sonnet, which of course could only have been the case if it had been composed before keats left hampstead. 'do you know,' he writes, 'the sonnet beginning bright star etc., he wrote this down in the ship--it is one of his most beautiful things. i will send it, if you have it not.' the rest of the voyage, after getting clear of the english channel, was quick but uncomfortable, the weather variable and often squally. signs of improvement in keats's health alternated with alarming returns of hæmorrhage, and the painful symptoms of his fellow-traveller miss cotterell preyed sometimes severely on his nerves and spirits. at other times his thoughts ran pleasantly on poems yet to be written, and especially on one he had planned on the story of sabrina. 'he mentioned to me many times in our voyage', writes severn within a few weeks of the poet's death, 'his desire to write this story and to connect it with some points in the english history and character. he would sometimes brood over it with immense enthusiasm, and recite the story from milton's _comus_ in a manner that i will remember to the end of my days.' it is good to think of keats being thus able to occupy and soothe his fevered spirit with the lovely cadences that tell how nereus pitied the rescued nymph, and gave her to his daughters to imbathe in nectar'd lavers strew'd with asphodel, or with those that invoke her in the prayer,-- listen where thou art sitting under the glassie, cool, translucent wave, in twisted braids of lilies knitting the loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,-- it is good to think of this and to try and conceive what keats while he was in health might have made of this english theme which haunted his imagination now and afterwards at rome, when the power to shape and almost the power to live and breathe had left him. severn took during the voyage an opportunity to make a new drawing of keats as he lay propped and resting on his berth. such a drawing would have been an invaluable addition to our memorials of the poet: it remained long in the possession first of one and then of another of severn's sons, but has of late years unluckily disappeared: stolen, thinks its latest owner, mr arthur severn: let us hope that this mention may perhaps lead to its recognition and recovery. during some rough weather in the bay of biscay keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _don juan_, but presently found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and flung the volume from him in disgust. perhaps something of his real feelings, but certainly nothing of his way of expressing them, is preserved in severn's account of the matter written five-and-twenty years later:-- keats threw down the book and exclaimed: 'this gives me the most horrid idea of human nature, that a man like byron should have exhausted all the pleasures of the world so completely that there was nothing left for him but to laugh and gloat over the most solemn and heart-rending scenes of human misery, this storm of his is one of the most diabolical attempts ever made upon our sympathies, and i have no doubt it will fascinate thousands into extreme obduracy of heart--the tendency of bryon's poetry is based on a paltry originality, that of being new by making solemn things gay and gay things solemn.' in a calm off cape st vincent, keats was delighted with the play of silken colours on the sea, and interested in watching the movement of a whale. the next day there came an alarm: a shot was fired over the bows of the 'maria crowther' from one of two portuguese men of war becalmed close by; but drifting within hail one of the portuguese captains explained that there were supposed to be privateers in those waters and that he only wanted to learn whether the englishman had sighted any such. on october , thirty-four days out from london, the 'maria crowther' reached naples harbour and was promptly put in quarantine. in that predicament her passengers sweltered and fumed for ten full days, their number having been increased by the addition of a lieutenant and six seamen, who were despatched from an english man-of-war in the harbour to enquire as to the vessel's name and status, and having thoughtlessly gone on board her were forbidden by the port authorities to go off again. the friends found some alleviation from the tedium of the time through the kindness of miss cotterell's brother, a banker in naples, who kept them supplied with all manner of dainties and luxuries, and especially with abundance of fruit and flowers. 'keats', says severn, 'was never tired of admiring (not to speak of eating) the beautiful clusters of grapes and other fruits, and was scarce less enthusiastic over the autumn flowers, though i remember his saying once that he would gladly give them all for a wayside dog-rose bush covered with pink blooms.' the time of detention passed with a good deal of merriment, songs from the man-of-war's men on board, songs, laughter, and gibes from the neapolitan boatmen swarming round. in all this keats would join, feverishly enough it is evident, and declared afterwards that he had made more puns in the course of those ten days than in any whole year of his life beside. once he flashed into a characteristic heat of righteous wrath, when the seamen took to trolling obscene catches in full hearing of the ladies. on the fourth day of their detention he wrote to mrs brawne, (to fanny he dared not write, nor suffer his thoughts to dwell on her at all), saying what he thought of his own state:-- we have to remain in the vessel ten days and are at present shut in a tier of ships. the sea air has been beneficial to me about to as great extent as squally weather and bad accommodations and provisions has done harm. so i am about as i was. give my love to fanny and tell her, if i were well there is enough in this port of naples to fill a quire of paper--but it looks like a dream--every man who can row his boat and walk and talk seems a different being from myself. i do not feel in the world. it is impossible to describe exactly in what state of health i am--at this moment i am suffering from indigestion very much, which makes such stuff of this letter. i would always wish you to think me a little worse than i really am; not being of a sanguine disposition i am likely to succeed. if i do not recover your regret will be softened--if i do your pleasure will be doubled. i dare not fix my mind upon fanny, i have not dared to think of her. the only comfort i have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case--the hair in a locket--and the pocket book in a gold net. show her this. i dare say no more. yet you must not believe i am so ill as this letter may look, for if ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping i am he. severn is writing to haslam, and i have just asked him to request haslam to send you his account of my health. o what an account i could give you of the bay of naples if i could once more feel myself a citizen of this world--i feel a spirit in my brain would lay it forth pleasantly--o what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints! once released from quarantine and landed at naples severn wrote to haslam fully his impressions of the voyage and of its effects on his friend. naples, nov. . my dear haslam, we are just released from the loathsome misery of quarantine--foul weather and foul air for the whole days kept us to the small cabin--surrounded by about , ships in a wretched hole not sufficient for half the number, yet keats is still living--may i not have hopes of him? he has passed what i must have thought would kill myself. now that we are on shore and feel the fresh air, i am horror struck at his sufferings on this voyage, all that could be fatal to him in air and diet--with the want of medicine and conveniences he has weather'd it, if i may call his poor shattered frame and broken heart weathering it. for myself i have stood it firmly until this morning when in a moment my spirits dropt at the sight of his suffering--a plentiful shower of tears (which he did not see) has relieved me somewhat--what he passed still unnerves me. but now we are breathing in a large room with vesuvius in our view--keats has become calm and thinks favourably of this place for we are meeting with much kind treatment on every side--more particularly from an english gentleman here (brother to miss cottrell one of our lady passengers) who has shown unusually humane treatment to keats--unasked--these with very good accommodation at our inn (villa de londra) have kept him up through dinner--but on the other hand dr milner is at rome (whither keats is proposing to go) the weather is now cold wet and foggy, and we find ourselves on the wrong side for his hope for recovery (for the present i will talk to him--he is disposed to it. i will talk him to sleep for he has suffered much fatigue). nov. . keats went to bed much recovered--i took every means to remove from him a heavy grief that may tend more than anything to be fatal--he told me much--very much--and i don't know whether it was more painful for me or himself--but it had the effect of much relieving him--he went very calm to bed. poor fellow! he is still sleeping at half past nine, if i can but ease his mind i will bring him back to england _well_--but i fear it never can be done in this world--the grand scenery here affects him a little--but he is too infirm to enjoy it--his gloom deadens his sight to everything--and but for intervals of something like ease he must soon end it-- you will like to know how i have managed in respect to self. i have had a most severe task full of contrarieties what i did one way was undone another. the lady passenger though in the same state as keats--yet differing in constitution required almost everything the opposite to him--for instance if the cabin windows were not open she would faint and remain entirely insensible or hours together--if the windows were open poor keats would be taken with a cough (a violent one--caught from this cause) and sometimes spitting of blood, now i had this to manage continually for our other passenger is a most consumate brute--she would see miss cottrell stiffened like a corpse--i have sometimes thought her dead--nor ever lend the least aid--full a dozen times i have recovered this lady and put her to bed--sometimes she would faint times in a day yet at intervals would seem quite well--and was full of spirits--she is both young and lively--and but for her we should have had more heaviness--though much less trouble. she has benefited by keats's advice--i used to act under him--and reduced the fainting each time--she has recovered very much and gratefully ascribes it to us--her brother the same. the captain has behaved with great kindness to us all--but more particularly keats--everything that could be got or done--was at his service without asking--he is a good-natured man to his own injury--strange for a captain i won't say so much for his ship--it's a black hole-- sleeping in one cabin--the one you saw--the only one--during the voyage i have been frequently sea-sick--sometimes severely-- days together. we have had only one real fright on the seas--not to mention continued squalls--and a storm. 'all's well that ends well,' and these ended well. our fright was from two portugese ships of war--they brought us to with a shot--which passed close under our stern--this was not pleasant for us you will allow--nor was it decreased when they came up--for a more infernal set i never could imagine--after some trifling questions they allowed us to go on to our no small delight--our captain was afraid they would plunder the ship--this was in the bay of biscay--over which we were carried by a good wind. keats has written to brown--and in quarantine another to mrs brawne--he requests you will tell mrs brawne what i think of him--for he is too bad to judge of himself--this morning he is still very much better. we are in good spirits and i may say hopeful fellows--at least i may say as much for keats--he made an italian pun to-day--the rain is coming down in torrents. the confession keats had made to severn was of course that of the effects of the passion which had so long been racking and wasting him, and the violence of which he had shrunk till now from disclosing to friend or brother. writing on the same day to brown, he could not control or disguise the anguish of his heart. naples, november . my dear brown, yesterday we were let out of quarantine, during which my health suffered more from bad air and the stifled cabin than it had done the whole voyage. the fresh air revived me a little, and i hope i am well enough this morning to write to you a short calm letter;--if that can be called one, in which i am afraid to speak of what i would fainest dwell upon. as i have gone thus far into it, i must go on a little; perhaps it may relieve the load of wretchedness which presses upon me. the persuasion that i will see her no more will kill me. my dear brown, i should have had her when i was in health, and i should have remained well. i can bear to die--i cannot bear to leave her. o, god! god! god! everything i have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. the silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. my imagination is horribly vivid about her--i see her--i hear her. there is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. this was the case when i was in england; i cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that i was a prisoner at hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on hampstead all day. then there was a good hope of seeing her again--now!--o that i could be buried near where she lives! i am afraid to write to her--to receive a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my heart--even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than i can bear. my dear brown, what am i to do? where can i look for consolation or ease? i cannot say a word about naples; i do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me. i am afraid to write to her--i should like her to know that i do not forget her. oh, brown, i have coals of fire in my breast. it surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. was i born for this end? god bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and george, and his wife, and you, and all! during the four days they remained at naples keats received a second invitation in the kindest possible terms from shelley to come and settle near him in pisa, but determined to carry out his original plan of wintering at rome, where he was to place taylor's bill to his credit at torlonia's and whither he carried a special introduction to dr (afterwards sir james) clark. severn was also the bearer of one from sir thomas lawrence to canova. keats attempted to amuse himself reading _clarissa harlowe_, and also seeing some of the sights of naples. after almost a century there has lately come to light a record, set down at second-hand and probably touched up in the telling, of some things noticed and words spoken by the stricken poet in drives about the city and suburbs in the friendly company of mr charles cotterell, the brother of his invalid fellow-passenger. keats was driving, says the narrator, mr charles macfarlane,-- --he was driving with charles cottrell from the bourbon museum, up the beautiful open road which leads up to capo di monte and the ponte rossi. on the way, in front of a villa or cottage, he was struck and moved by the sight of some rose trees in full bearing. thinking to gratify the invalid, cottrell, a ci-devant officer in the british navy, jumped out of the carriage, spoke to somebody about the house or garden, and was back in a trice with a bouquet of roses. 'how late in the year! what an exquisite climate!' said the poet; but on putting them to his nose, he threw the flowers down on the opposite seat, and exclaimed: 'humbugs! they have no scent! what is a rose without its fragrance? i hate and abhor all humbug, whether in a flower or in a man or woman!' and having worked himself strongly up in the anti-humbug humour, he cast the bouquet out on the road. i suppose that the flowers were china roses, which have little odour at any time, and hardly any at the approach of winter. returning from that drive, he had intense enjoyment in halting close to the capuan gate, and in watching a group of lazzaroni or labouring men, as, at a stall with fire and cauldron by the roadside in the open air, they were disposing of an incredible quantity of macaroni, introducing it in long unbroken strings into their capacious mouths, without the intermediary of anything but their hands. 'i like this,' said he; 'these hearty fellows scorn the humbug of knives and forks. fingers were invented first. give them some _carlini_ that they may eat more! glorious sight! how they take it in!'[ ] but the political state and servile temper of the neapolitan people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms imposed on the bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous summer--grated on keats's liberal instincts, and misinterpreting at the theatre the sight of a couple of armed sentries posted (as was the custom of the time and country) on the stage, he broke into a fit of anger and determined suddenly to leave the place. accordingly on the th or th of november the friends set out for rome in a small hired carriage, which jogged so loiteringly on the road that severn was able to walk beside it almost all the way. keats suffered seriously at the stopping-places from bad quarters and bad food, and was for the most part listless and dispirited, but would become animated 'when an unusually fine prospect opened before us, or the breeze bore to us exquisite hill fragrances or breaths from the distant blue seas, and particularly when i literally filled the little carriage with flowers. he never tired of these, and they gave him a singular and almost fantastic pleasure which was at times almost akin to a strange joy.' entering rome by the lateran gate they settled at once in lodgings which dr clark, to whom keats had written from naples, had already secured for them, in the first house on the right going up the steps from the piazza di spagna to sta trinità dei monti. here, according to the manner of those days in italy, they were left pretty much to shift for themselves. neither could speak italian, and at first they were ill served by the trattorìa from which they got their meals, until keats, having bidden severn see how he would mend matters, one day coolly emptied all the dishes out of the window, and handed them back to the porter: a hint, says severn, which was quickly taken. for a while the patient seemed better. dr clark wished him to avoid the excitement of seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left severn to visit these alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the pincian close by. the season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. clark gave severn an introduction to gibson, the then famous american sculptor, and keats insisted on his delivering it at once and losing no opportunity of making acquaintances in rome that might be useful to him, and no time in getting to work on his projected competition picture, 'the death of alcibiades.' in severn's absence keats had a companion he liked in an invalid lieutenant elton. in their walks on the pincian these two often met the famous beauty pauline bonaparte, princess borghese. her charms were by this time failing--but not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affected keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of their walks. sometimes, instead of walking, they would take short invalid rides, on hired mounts suited to their respective statures, about the pincian or outside the porta del popolo, while severn was working among the ruins. the mitigation of keats's sufferings lasted for some five weeks, and filled the anxious heart of severn with hope. nevertheless he could not but be aware of the deep-seated dejection in his friend which found expression now and again in word or act, as when he began reading a volume of alfieri, but dropped it at the lines, too sadly applicable to himself:-- misera me! sollievo a me non resta altro che 'l pianto, ed il pianto è delitto. notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more placid. severn had hired a piano for their lodgings, and the patient often allowed himself to be soothed with music. his thoughts even turned towards verse, and he again meditated and spoke of his proposed poem on the subject of sabrina. severn began to believe he would get well, and on november keats himself wrote to brown in a strain far from cheerful, indeed, but much less desperate than before. i have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that i am leading a posthumous existence. god knows how it would have been--but it appears to me--however, i will not speak of that subject. i must have been at bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from chichester--how unfortunate--and to pass on the river too! there was my star predominant! i cannot answer anything in your letter, which followed me from naples to rome, because i am afraid to look it over again. i am so weak (in mind) that i cannot bear the sight of any handwriting of a friend i love so much as i do you. yet i ride the little horse, and, at my worst, even in quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. there is one thought enough to kill me; i have been well, healthy, alert, etc., walking with her, and now the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. there, you rogue, i put you to the torture; but you must bring your philosophy to bear, as i do mine, really, or how should i be able to live? dr clark is very attentive to me; he says there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. i am well disappointed in hearing good news from george, for it runs in my head we shall all die young. i have not written to reynolds yet, which he must think neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, i have delayed it from week to week. 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. severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. remember me to all friends, and tell haslam i should not have left london without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. write to george as soon as you receive this, and tell him how i am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost--she is so like tom. i can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. i always make an awkward bow. god bless you! but on the glimmering hopes of these first weeks at rome there suddenly followed despair. on dec. , 'when he was going on in good spirits, quite merrily,' says severn, came a relapse which left no doubt of the issue. hæmorrhage followed hæmorrhage on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and distressing. to put an end to his misery, keats with agonies of entreaty begged to have the bottle of laudanum which severn had by his desire bought at gravesend: and on severn's refusal, 'his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting heart.' it was no unmanly fear of pain in keats, severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. 'he explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him.' severn gently holding firm, keats for a while fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. from these relapses until the end severn had no respite from his devoted ministrations. writing to mrs brawne a week after the crisis, he says 'not a moment can i be from him. i sit by his bed and read all day, and at night i humour him in all his wanderings. he has just fallen asleep, the first sleep for eight nights, and now from mere exhaustion.' by degrees the tumult of his soul abated. his sufferings were very great, partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to combat it. his diet was at one time reduced to one anchovy and a small piece of toast a day, so that he endured cruel pangs of actual hunger. shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then were in italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous kindness of dr and mrs clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, mr ewing. the devotion and resource of severn were infinite, and had their reward. occasionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and his ruined hopes, and of all that he would have done in poetry had life and the fruition of his love been granted him, till his companion was almost exhausted with 'beating about in the tempest of his mind'; and once and again some fresh remembrance of his betrothed, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. but generally, after the first days of storm, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his companion soothed him with reading or music. the virulence of the reviewers, which most of his friends supposed to be what was killing him, was a matter, severn declares, scarcely ever on his lips or in his mind at all. gradually he seemed to mend and gather a little strength again, till severn actually began to dream that he might even yet recover, though he himself would admit no such hope. 'he says the continued stretch of his imagination has already killed him. he will not hear of his good friends in england, except for what they have done; and this is another load; but of their high hopes of him, his certain success, his experience, he will not hear a word. then the want of some kind of hope to feed his voracious imagination'--this is from a letter to mr taylor which severn began on christmas eve and never finished. on the th january, in one conveying to mrs brawne the reviving hopes he was beginning on the slenderest grounds to cherish, severn writes:-- now he has changed to calmness and quietude, as singular as productive of good, for his mind was most certainly killing him. he has now given up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish for recovery. his mind is in a state of peace from the final leave he has taken of this world and all its future hopes; this has been an immense weight for him to rise from. he remains quiet and submissive under his heavy fate. now, if anything will recover him, it is this absence of himself. i have perceived for the last three days symptoms of recovery. dr clark even thinks so. nature again revives in him--i mean where art was used before; yesterday he permitted me to carry him from his bedroom to our sitting-room--to put clean things on him--and to talk about my painting to him. this is my good news--don't think it otherwise, my dear madam, for i have been in such a state of anxiety and discomfiture in this barbarous place, that the least hope of my friend's recovery is a heaven to me. for three weeks i have never left him--i have sat up all night--i have read to him nearly all day, and even in the night--i light the fire--make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook--make his bed, and even sweep the room. i can have these things done, but never at the time when they must and ought to be done--so that you will see my alternative; what enrages me most is making a fire--i blow--blow for an hour--the smoke comes fuming out--my kettle falls over on the burning sticks--no stove--keats calling me to be with him--the fire catching my hands and the door-bell ringing: all these to one quite unused and not at all capable--with the want of even proper material--come not a little galling. but to my great surprise i am not ill--or even restless--nor have i been all the time; there is nothing but what i will do for him--there is no alternative but what i think and provide myself against--except his death--not the loss of him--i am prepared to bear that--but the inhumanity, the barbarism of these italians.... o! i would my unfortunate friend had never left your wentworth place--for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless italy. he has many, many times talked over 'the few happy days at your house, the only time when his mind was at ease.' i hope still to see him with you again. farewell, my dear madam. one more thing i must say--poor keats cannot see any letters, at least he will not--they affect him so much and increase his danger. the two last i repented giving, he made me put them into his box--unread. the complaint about the barbarity of rome and of italian law was due to a warning severn had received that on the death of his friend every stick and shred of furniture in the house would have to be burnt. within a few days the last thread of hope was snapped by fresh returns of hæmorrhage and utter prostration, with renewed feverish agitations of the tortured spirit. writing to haslam on january the th, severn shows himself almost broken down by the imminence of money difficulties about to add themselves to his other cares:-- poor keats has just fallen asleep--i have watched him and read to him--to his very last wink--he has been saying to me 'severn i can see under your quiet look--immense twisting and contending--you don't know what you are reading--you are enduring for me more than i'd have you--o that my last hour was come--what is it puzzles you now--what is it happens--' i tell him that 'nothing happens--nothing worries me beyond his seeing--that it has been the dull day.' getting from myself to his recovery--and then my painting--and then england--and then--but they are all lies--my heart almost leaps to deny them--for i have the veriest load of care--that ever came upon these shoulders of mine. for keats is sinking daily--perhaps another three weeks may lose me him for ever--this alone would break down the most gallant spirit--i had made sure of his recovery when i set out. i was selfish and thought of his value to me--and made a point of my future success depend on his candor to me--this is not all--i have prepared myself to bear this now--now that i must and should have seen it before--but torlonias the bankers have refused any more money--the bill is returned unaccepted--'no effects' and i tomorrow must--aye must--pay the last solitary crown for this cursed lodging place--yet more should our unfortunate friend die--all the furniture will be burnt--bed sheets--curtains and even the walls must be scraped--and these devils will come upon me for £ or £ --the making good--but above all this noble fellow lying on the bed is dying in horror--no kind hope smoothing down his suffering--no philosophy--no religion to support him--yet with all the most gnawing desire for it--yet without the possibility of receiving it.... now haslam what do you think of my situation--for i know not what may come with tomorrow--i am hedg'd in every way that you look at me--if i could leave keats for a while every day i could soon raise money by my face painting--but he will not let me out of his sight--he cannot bear the face of a stranger--he has made me go out twice and leave him solus. i'd rather cut my tongue out than tell him that money i must get--that would kill him at a word--i will not do anything that may add to his misery--for i have tried on every point to leave for a few hours in the day but he wont unless he is left alone--this won't do--nor shall not for another minute whilst he is john keats. yet will i not bend down under these--i will not give myself a jot of credit unless i stand firm--and will too--you'd be rejoiced to see how i am kept up--not a flinch yet--i read, cook, make the beds--and do all the menial offices--for no soul comes near keats except the doctor and myself--yet i do all this with a cheerful heart--for i thank god my little but honest religion stays me up all through these trials. i'll pray to god tonight that he may look down with mercy on my poor friend and myself. i feel no dread of what more i am to bear but look to it with confidence. in religion keats had been neither a believer nor by any means (except in the earliest days of his enthusiasm for leigh hunt) a scoffer; respecting christianity without calling himself a christian, and by turns clinging to and drifting from the doctrine of human immortality. now, on his death-bed, says severn, among the most haunting and embittering of his distresses was the thought that not for him were those ready consolations of orthodoxy which were within the reach of every knave and fool. after a time, contrasting the steadfast behaviour of the believer severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the power of the christian teaching and example, and bidding severn read to him from jeremy taylor's _holy dying and holy living_, strove to pass the remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy. the danger of money trouble must have been due to a pure misunderstanding, as the credit at torlonia's was in fact not exhausted, and a fresh communication from mr taylor removed all anxiety on that score. one day keats was seized with a desire for books and was able for a time to take pleasure in reading those which severn procured for him. another and continual pleasure was severn's playing on the piano, and especially his playing of haydn's sonatas. 'with all his suffering and consciousness of approaching death,' wrote severn in after years, 'he never quite lost the play of his cheerful and elastic mind, yet these happier moments were but slight snatches from his misery, like the flickering rays of the sun in a smothering storm. real rays of sunshine they were, all the same, such as would have done honour to the brightest health and the happiest mind: yet the storm of sickness and death was always going on, and i have often thought that these bursts of wit and cheerfulness were called up of set purpose--were, in fact, a great effort on my account.' neither patient nor watcher thought any more of recovery. for a few days severn had the help of an english nurse. it was doubtless then that keats made his friend go and see the place chosen for his burial. 'he expressed pleasure at my description of the locality of the pyramid of caius cestius, about the grass and the many flowers, particularly the innumerable violets--also about a flock of goats and sheep and a young shepherd--all these intensely interested him. violets were his favourite flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. he assured me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him': and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave for his epitaph the words, partly taken from a phrase in beaumont and fletcher's _philaster_,[ ]--'here lies one whose name was writ in water.' ever since his first attack at wentworth place he had been used to speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to the doctor when he came in was, 'doctor, when will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?'. as he turned to ask it neither physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. once or twice he was torn again by too sharp a reminder of vanished joys and hopes. severn handed him a letter which he supposed to be from mrs brawne, but which was really from her daughter. 'the glance of that letter tore him to pieces. the effects were on him for many days--he did not read it--he could not, but requested me to place it in his coffin together with a purse and a letter (unopened) of his sister's--since which time he has requested me not to place _that letter_, but only his sister's purse and letter with some hair.' loveable and considerate to the last, 'his generous concern for me,' reiterates severn, 'in my isolated position at rome was one of his greatest cares.' his response to kindness was irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to the end. severn tells how in watching keats he used sometimes to fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. 'to remedy this one night i tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all which i did without telling keats. when he awoke and found the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while doubting suddenly cried out, "severn, severn, here's a little fairy lamp-lighter actually lit up the other candle."' and again: 'poor keats has me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep.' life held out for six weeks after the second relapse, but from the first days of february the end was visibly drawing near. on one of his nights of vigil severn occupied himself in making that infinitely touching death-bed drawing in black and white of his friend with which all readers are familiar. between the th and nd of february severn wrote letters to brown, to mrs brawne, and to haslam to prepare them for the worst and to tell them of the reconciled and tranquil state into which the dying man had fallen. death came very peacefully at last. on the rd of that month, writes severn, 'about four, the approaches of death came on. 'severn--i--lift me up--i am dying--i shall die easy; don't be frightened--be firm, and thank god it has come.' i lifted him up in my arms. the phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that i still thought he slept.' three days later his body was carried, attended by several of the english in rome who had heard his story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the english-speaking world for ever. footnotes: [ ] a long-popular song from arne's opera _artaxerxes_. [ ] unless brown had transcribed 'morning' for 'moving' in error; and this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his version. [ ] _reminiscences of a literary life_, by charles macfarlane: london, john murray, , pp. - .--keats in his letters is apt enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and i suspect the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. with reference to mr macfarlane's account of keats generally as 'one of the most cheery and plucky little fellows i ever knew,' and as a man to have stood with composure a whole broadside of blackwood and quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can have seen enough of keats to form these impressions. from january , when he was in his seventeenth year, to , young macfarlane seems to have lived entirely at naples, except for some excursions to the levant and a short visit to england in , when keats was a consumptive patient already starting or started for italy. [ ] act v, sc. iii. see harrison s. morris in _bulletin and review of the keats-shelley memorial_, , p. . chapter xvii epilogue hopes and fears at home--fanny brawne: leigh hunt--supposed effect of reviews--shelley misled and inspired--_adonais_--a _blackwood_ parody--false impressions confirmed--death of shelley--hazlitt and severn--brown at florence--inscription for keats's grave--severn and walter scott--slow growth of keats's fame--its beginnings at cambridge--opinion in the early 'forties--would-be biographers at odds--taylor and brown: brown and dilke--a solution: monckton milnes--the old circle: hunt and haydon--john hamilton reynolds--haslam, severn, bailey--flaws and slips in milnes's work--its merit and timeliness--its reception--the pre-raphaelites--rossetti and morris--the battle won: later critics--keats and shelley--pitfalls and prejudices--arnold and palgrave--mr. buxton forman and others--latest eulogists--risks to permanence of fame--his will conquer--youth and its storms--the might-have-been--guesses and a certainty. the friends of keats at home had in their love for him tried hard after his departure to nurse some sparks of hope for his recovery. john hamilton reynolds, answering from exmouth a letter in which taylor told him of the poet's having sailed, wrote, 'i am _very_ much pleased at what you tell me. i cannot now but hold a hope of his refreshed health, which i confess his residence in england greatly discouraged.... keats, then, by this is at sea fairly--with england and one or two sincere friends behind him,--and with a warm clime before his face! if ever i wished well to man, i wish well to him!' haslam in a like strain of feeling wrote in december to severn at rome:--'the climate, however, will, i trust, avail him. keep him quiet, get the winter through; an opening year in italy will perfect everything. ere this reaches you, i trust doctor clark will have confirmed the most sanguine hopes of his friends in england; and to you, my friend, i hope he will have given what you stand much in need of--a confidence amounting to a faith.... keats must get himself well again, severn, if but for us. i, for one, cannot afford to lose him. if i know what it is to love, i truly love john keats.' the letters written by severn to this faithful friend during the voyage and from beside the sick-bed were handed round and eagerly scanned among the circle. brown, when they came into his hands, used to read passages from them at his discretion to the brawne ladies next door, keeping the darkest from the daughter by her mother's wish. mrs brawne, evidently believing her child's heart to be deeply engaged, dealt in the same manner with severn's letters to herself. the girl seems to have divined none the less that her lover's condition was past hope, and her demeanour, according to brown's account as follows, to have been human and natural. keats, writes brown in a broken style,-- keats is present to me everywhere and at all times--he now seems sitting by my side and looking hard in my face, though i have taken the opportunity of writing this in company--for i scarcely believe i could do it alone. much as i have loved him, i never knew how closely he was wound about my heart. mrs brawne was greatly agitated when i told her of--and her daughter--i don't know how--for i was not present--yet she bears it with great firmness, mournfully but without affectation. i understand she says to her mother, 'i believe he must soon die, and when you hear of his death, tell me immediately. i am not a fool!' as the news grew worse, it seems to have been more and more kept back from her, injudiciously as brown thought, and in a mutilated letter he gives glimpses of moods in her, apparently hysterical, of alternate forced gaiety and frozen silence. a letter or two which she had written to her dying lover were withheld from him, as we have seen, by reason of the terrible agitation into which the mere sight of her handwriting threw him. we hear in the meantime of her being in close correspondence with his young sister at walthamstow. when the news of the end came, brown writes,--'i felt at the moment utterly unprepared for it. then _she_--she was to have it told her, and the worst had been concealed from her knowledge ever since your december letter. it is now five days since she heard it. i shall not speak of the first shock, nor of the following days,--it is enough she is now pretty well,--and thro'out she has shown a firmness of mind which i little expected from one so young, and under such a load of grief.' leigh hunt had written in these days a letter to severn which did not reach rome until after keats's death. i must quote it as showing yet again the strength of the hold which keats had on the hearts of his friends, and how he, in a second degree only to shelley, had struck on something much deeper in hunt's nature than the sunny, kindly, easy-going affectionateness which was all that in most relations he had to bestow:-- judge how often i thought of keats, and with what feelings. mr brown tells me he is comparatively calm now. if he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it all already, and can put it in better language than any man. i hear 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 thrive. but if this persuasion should happen no longer to be so strong upon him, or if he can now put up with such attempts to console him, remind him of what i have said a thousand times, and what i still (upon my honour i swear) think always, that i have seen too many cases of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption, not to indulge in hope to the very last. if he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great poet and noble-hearted 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 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 that all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall meet somehow or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. tell him he is only before us on the road, as he was in everything else; or whether you tell him the latter or no, tell him the former, and add, that we shall never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. the tears are again in my eyes, and i must not afford to shed them. during keats's year of illness and dejection at home, and until the end and after it, the general impression among his friends and acquaintances was that the cause of all his troubles was the agony of mind into which the hostile reviews had thrown him. severn in the course of his tendance discovered, as we have seen, that this was not so, and learnt the full share which was due to the pangs of unsatisfied, and in a worldly sense hopeless, passion in a consumptive constitution. brown on his part, although he knew the secret of the heart which keats so jealously guarded, yet attributed the chief part of his friend's distress to the fear of impending poverty--truly another contributing cause--and conceived a fierce and obstinate indignation against george for having, as he quite falsely imagined, deliberately fleeced his brother, as well as against other friends who had borrowed money from the poet and failed to pay it back. but most of those who knew keats less intimately, seeing his sudden fall from robustness and high spirits,--having never thought of him as a possible consumptive subject,--and being themselves white-hot with anger against _blackwood_ and the _quarterly_,--inferred the poet's feelings from their own, and at the same time added fuel to their wrath against the critics, by taking it for granted that it was their cruelty which was killing him. to no one was this impression conveyed in a more extravagant form than to shelley, presumably through his friends the gisbornes. in that letter of remonstrance to gifford, as editor of the _quarterly_, which he drafted in the autumn of but never sent, shelley writes:-- poor keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which i am, persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing the effect, to which it has, at least, greatly contributed, of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. the first effects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. the agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun. in the preface to _adonais_, composed at san giuliano, near pisa, in the june following keats's death in the next year, shelley repeats the same delusion in different words, adding the still less justified statement,--probably founded by his informant, colonel finch, on expressions used by brown to severn about george keats and other borrowers,--that keats's misery had been 'exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits:--the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care.' of the critical attacks upon keats, shelley seems not to have known the _blackwood_ lampoons, and to have put down all the mischief (as did byron following him) to the _quarterly_ alone. with his heart and soul full of passionate poetic regret for what the world had lost in the death of the author of _hyperion_, and of passionate human indignation against the supposed agents of his undoing, shelley wrote that lament for keats which is the best of his longer poems and next to _lycidas_ the noblest of its class in the language. like milton, shelley chose to conform to a consecrated convention and link his work to a long tradition by going back to the precedent of the sicilian pastoral elegies, those beautiful examples of a form even in its own day conventional and literary. he took two masterpieces of that school, the dirge or ritual chant of bion on the death of adonis and the elegy of moschus on the death of bion, and into strains directly caught and blended from both of these wove inseparably a new strain of imagery and emotion entirely personal and his own. the human characteristics of the lamented person, the flesh and blood realities of life, are not touched or thought upon. a rushing train of abstractions, such as were at all times to shelley more inspiring and more intensely realized than persons and things,--a rushing train of beautiful and sorrowful abstractions sweeps by, in _adonais_, to a strain of music so entrancing that at a first, or even at a twentieth, reading it is perhaps more to the music of the poem than to its imagery that the spiritual sense of the reader attends. nevertheless he will find at last that the imagery, all unsubstantial as it is, has been floated along the music into his mental being to haunt and live with him: he will be conscious of a possession for ever in that invocation of the celestial muse to awake and weep for the youngest of her sons,--that pageant of the dead poet's own dreams and imaginations conceived as gathering 'like mist over an autumnal stream' to attend upon his corpse,--the voice of echo silenced (again a direct adaptation from the greek) since she has no longer words of his to repeat and awaken the spring withal,--the vision of the coming of urania to the death chamber,--her lament, with its side-shafts of indignation against the wolves and ravens who have made her youngest-born their prey--the approach and homage of the other 'mountain shepherds,' byron, shelley himself, moore, leigh hunt, all figured, especially shelley, in a guise purely abstract and mythologic and yet after its own fashion passionately true,--the bitter ironic application to the reviewers of the verses from moschus used as a motto to the poem,-- our adonais has drunk poison--oh! what deaf and viperous murderer could crown life's early cup with such a draught of woe?-- the swift change to a consolatory strain exhorting the mourners to cease their grief and recognise that the lost poet is made one with nature and that it is death who is dead, not he,--the invitation to the beautiful burial-place at rome,--the high strain of platonic meditation on the transcendental permanence of the one while the many change and pass,--the final vision by the rapt spirit of shelley of the soul of his brother poet beckoning like a star from the abode of the eternals. looking upon his own work in his modest and unsanguine way, shelley could not suppress the hope that this time he had written something that should not be utterly neglected. he had the poem printed at pisa, whence a small number of copies only were sent to england. one immediate effect was to instigate the last and silliest--happily, perhaps, also the least remembered--of the _blackwood_ blackguardries. not even the tragic experiences of the preceding winter had cured the conductors of that journal of their taste for savage ribaldry. john scott, the keen-witted and warm-hearted editor, formerly of the _champion_ and latterly of taylor's and hessey's _london magazine_, had denounced the 'z' papers, and demanded a disclosure of lockhart's share in them and in the management of the magazine, in terms so peremptory and scathing that the threat of a challenge from lockhart followed as an inevitable consequence. the clumsy, well meant intromission of third parties had only the effect of substituting lockhart's friend christie in the broil for lockhart himself. the duel was fought on january , , exactly a week before keats's death, and scott was killed. none the less, when late in the summer of the same year copies of _adonais_ reached england, remarks on it outdoing all previous outbreaks in folly and insolence were contributed to _blackwood_ by a comparatively new recruit, the learned and drunken young dublin scholar william maginn. professing absurdly to regard the cockney school as a continuation of the 'della cruscan' school laughed out of existence by gifford some five-and-twenty years earlier, the writer includes shelley of all men (forgetting former laudations of him) among the cockneys, flings up a heel at the memory of keats as 'a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of cockney-poetry and has lately died of a consumption after having written two or three little books of verse much neglected by the public'; and proceeds to give a comic analysis of _adonais_, with some specimens of parody upon it, which were afterwards re-published without shame under maginn's name. eight years later, as we shall see, it was on the enthusiasm of a band of young cambridge men for _adonais_ that the fame of keats began to be spread abroad among our younger generation in england. in the meantime the chief effect of the poem was to confirm in the minds of the few readers whom it reached the sentimental view of keats as an over-sensitive weakling whom the breath of hostile criticism had withered up. and when two years later byron printed in the eleventh canto of _don juan_ his patronizing semi-palinode, part laudatory part contemptuous, on keats, his closing couplet, strange that the mind, that very fiery particle, should let itself be snuffed out by an article, stamped that impression for good on the minds of men in far wider circles, until the publication of monckton milnes's memoir after five-and-twenty years brought evidence to modify if not to efface it. none of keats's friends at home did anything in the days following his death to counteract such impression. some of them, as we have said, fully shared and helped to propagate it. haydon, writing to miss mitford soon after the news of the death reached england, says 'keats was a victim of personal abuse and want of nerve to bear it. ought he to have sunk in that way because a few quizzers told him he was an apothecary's apprentice?... fiery, impetuous, ungovernable and undecided, he expected the world to bow at once to his talents as his friends had done, and he had not patience to bear the natural irritation of envy at the undoubted proof he gave of strength.' in his private journal haydon treats the events in the same spirit, not forgetting to imply a contrast between keats's weakness and his own power of stubbornly presenting his prickles to his enemies. reynolds, it would seem, had more excuse than others for adopting the same view, inasmuch as keats had said to him on his sick-bed, in one of his extremely rare allusions to the subject,--'if i die, you must ruin lockhart.' in the summer following keats's death, reynolds published a little volume of verse dedicated to the young bride at whose bidding he was abandoning literature for law, and included in it the two versified tales from boccaccio which he had originally planned for printing together with keats's _isabella_: as to which pieces he says,-- they were to have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been written by a friend, but illness on his part, and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the time; and death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated it for ever! he, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends i possessed, and yet he was not kinder perhaps to me, than to others. his intense mind and powerful feeling would, i truly believe, have done the world some service, had his life been spared--but he was of too sensitive a nature--and thus he was destroyed! later in the same summer, , befell the tragedy of shelley's own death, such a tragedy of a poet's death as a poet might have loved to invent with all its circumstances,--the disappearance of the boat in a squall; the recovery of the body with the volume of keats's poems in the coat-pocket; its consumption on a funeral pyre by the tuscan shore in the presence of leigh hunt, newly come to italy on shelley's invitation, of byron, and of the cornish sea-rover and social rebel trelawny, a personage who might well have been a creation of byron's brain; the snatching of the heart from the flames; the removal of the ashes to rome, and their deposit in a new protestant burial-ground adjacent to the old, where the remains of trelawny were to be laid beside them after the lapse of nearly sixty years. two years later again, when byron had himself died during the struggle for the liberation of greece, hazlitt took occasion to criticize shelley's posthumous poems in the _edinburgh review_, and having his own bitter grounds of quarrel with the _blackwood_ gang, strained the bonds of prose in an outburst of half-lyric indignation on behalf of keats as follows:-- mr shelley died, it seems, with a volume of mr keats's poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom! these are two out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited italy within a few years, both of whom have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. keats died young; and 'yet his infelicity had years too many.' a canker had blighted the tender bloom that o'erspread a face in which youth and genius strove with beauty; the shaft was sped--venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to his grave. and yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower--men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment--who laugh loud over the silent urn of genius, and play out their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims! severn, living on at rome in the halo of sympathy and regard with which the story of his friend's death and his own devotion had justly surrounded him, seems to have done nothing to remove from the minds of the english colony through successive years an impression which he knew to have been only in a very partial measure true. and even brown, when in the year after keats's death he came out with his natural son, a child of a few years, to make his home in italy, in his turn let himself fall in with the view of keats's sufferings and of their origin which had taken such strong hold on the minds of most persons interested and commended itself so naturally to the tender-hearted and the righteously indignant. brown did not come to rome, but established himself first at pisa and afterwards at florence. at pisa he saw something both of trelawny and of byron, who took to him kindly; and made several contributions to the _liberal_ during the brief period while hunt continued to conduct that journal at pisa after shelley's death and before his final rupture with byron and departure from italy. the greek adventure having in carried off trelawny for a season and byron never to return, brown settled at florence and became for some years a popular member of the lettered english colony in tuscany, living in intimacy with seymour kirkup, the artist and man of fortune who was for many years the centre of that circle, and before long admitted to the regard and hospitality of walter savage landor in his beautiful fiesolan villa. landor, as readers will hardly need to be reminded, was an early, firm, and just admirer of keats's poetry. it was not until some five years after byron's death in greece that trelawny came back to settle for a while again in tuscany. then, in , he and brown being at the time housemates, brown helped him in preparing for the press his autobiographical romance, _the adventures of a younger son_, and especially by supplying mottoes in verse for its chapter-headings, chiefly from the unpublished poems of keats in his possession. one day trelawny said to him that 'brown' was no right distinguishing name for a man, or even for a family, but merely the name of a tribe: whereupon and whenceforward, adding to his own christian name one that had been borne by a deceased brother, he took to styling himself, not always in familiar but regularly in formal signatures, charles armitage brown. it is both anachronism and pedantry to give him these names, as is often done, in writing of him in connexion with keats, to whom he was never anything but plain charles brown. of keats brown's thoughts had in the meantime remained full. from his first arrival in italy he had been in close communication with severn as to the memorial stone and inscription to be placed over the poet's grave at rome and as to the biography to be written of him. he let the wish expressed by keats that his epitaph should be 'here lies one whose name was writ in water' stand for him as an absolute command, and studied how to combine those words with others explaining their choice as due to the poet's sense of neglect by his countrymen. in the end the result agreed on between him and severn was that which, despite much after-regret on severn's and some on brown's part and many proposals of change, still stands, having been carefully re-cut and put in order more than half a century after the poet's death:--namely a design of a lyre with only two of its strings strung, and an inscription perpetuating the idea of the poet having been a victim to the malice of his enemies:-- this grave contains all that was mortal of a young english poet who on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tomb stone "here lies one whose name was writ in water." february th, . severn in his correspondence with brown at florence, and with haslam and other friends at home, shows himself always loyally anxious to attribute to his connexion with keats the social acceptance and artistic success which he found himself enjoying from the first at rome, and to which in fact his own actively amiable nature, his winning manners and facile, suave pictorial talent, in a great measure contributed. though the general feeling towards the memory of keats among english residents and visitors was sympathetic, there were not lacking voices to repeat the stock gibe,--'"his name was writ in water"; yes, and his poetry in milk and water.' severn eagerly notes any signs of increasing appreciation of his friend's poetry, or of changed opinion on the part of scoffers, that came under his notice. one touching incident he recorded in later life as having happened in the spring of , the eleventh year after keats's death. sir walter scott, stricken with premature decrepitude from the labour and strain of mind undergone in his six years' colossal effort to clear himself of debt after the constable crash, had come abroad with his daughter anne in the hope of regaining some measure of health and strength from rest and southern air.[ ] he spent a spring month at rome, surrounded with attentions and capable of some sight-seeing, but could not shake off his grief for what he had lost in the death there two years earlier of his beloved lady northampton, whose beauty and charm and gift for verse and song (her singing portrait by raeburn is one of the most beautiful in the world) had endeared her to him from childhood in her island home in mull. scott's distress in thinking of her was pitiable, and he found some relief in pouring himself out to the sympathetic severn, who had known her well. by scott's desire severn went every morning to see him, generally bringing some picture or sketch to amuse him. one morning severn having innocently shown him the portrait of keats reproduced at page of this book, and said something about his genius and fate, observed anne scott turn away flushed and embarrassed, while scott took severn's hand to close the interview, and said falteringly, 'yes, yes, the world finds out these things for itself at last.' the story has been commonly, but without reason, scouted as though it implied a guilty conscience in scott himself as to the _blackwood_ lampoons. it implies nothing of the kind. scott had indeed had nothing to do with these matters: but one of his nearest and dearest had. the current belief that the death of keats had been caused or hastened by lockhart's attack in _blackwood_, with the tragic circumstances of the christie-scott duel, however little he may have said about them, will assuredly have left in a heart so great and tender an abiding regret and pain, and his manner and words on being reminded of them, as recorded by severn, are perfectly in character. by degrees the signs of admiration for keats's work noted by severn become more frequent. young mr gladstone, coming fresh from oxford to rome in this same year , seeks him out because of his friendship for the poet. another year a group of gentlemen and ladies in the english colony propose to give an amateur performance of the unpublished _otto the great_, a proposal never, it would seem, carried out. but despite the loyal enthusiasm of special english circles abroad and the untiring tributes of leigh hunt and other friends and admirers at home, his repute among the reading public in general was of extraordinarily slow growth. in the interval of some score of years between the death of byron and the establishment--itself slow and contested--of tennyson's position, byron and scott held with most even of open-minded judges an uncontested sovereignty among recent english poets; while among a growing minority the fame of wordsworth steadily grew, and the popular and sentimental suffrage was given to writers of the calibre of felicia hemans and letitia landon, feminine talents and temperaments truly not to be despised, however ephemeral has proved their fame. so small was the demand for keats's poetry that the remaining stock of his original three volumes sufficed throughout nearly this score of years to supply it. the yeast was nevertheless working. we know of one famous instance, so far back as , when a gift of the original volumes of keats and shelley inspired the recipient--the lad robert browning, then aged fourteen--with a fervent and wholly new conception, as he used afterwards to declare, of the scope and power of poetry. young john sterling, writing in in the _athenaeum_, of which his friend and senior frederick denison maurice was for the time being editor, showed which way the wind was beginning to blow at cambridge when he said, 'keats, whose memory they (the _blackwood_ group) persevered only a few months back in spitting upon, was, as everyone knows who has read him, among the most intense and delightful english poets of our day.'[ ] but no reprint of keats's poems was published until , and then only by the paris house of galignani, who printed for the continental market, in a single tall volume with double columns, a collective edition of the poems of shelley, coleridge, and keats.[ ] the same year saw the reprint of _adonais_ on the initiative of arthur hallam and his group of undergraduate friends at cambridge, and the visit of three of the group, hallam himself, monckton milnes, and sunderland, to uphold in debate at oxford the opinion that shelley was a greater poet than byron. their enthusiasm for _adonais_ implied enthusiasm for its subject, keats, as a matter of course. alfred tennyson was a close associate of this group; and from the first, among recent influences, it was that of keats which did most to colour his style in poetry and make him strive to 'load every rift of a subject with ore.' his friend edward fitzgerald shared the same admiration to the full. but these young pioneer spirits still stood, except for the surviving band of keats's early friends, almost alone. wilson, it is true, with whom consistency counted for nothing, had by this time shown signs of wavering, and in his character as christopher north speaks of keats's 'genius' being shown to best advantage in _lamia_ and _isabella_,--but does so, we feel, less for the sake of praising keats than of getting in a dig at jeffrey for having praised him tardily and indiscriminately.[ ] the _quarterly_ remained quite impenitent, and in a review of tennyson's second volume of writes of him with viciously laboured irony as 'a new prodigy of genius--another and brighter star of a galaxy or _milky way_ of poetry, of which the lamented keats was the harbinger'; and then follows a gibing testimony, to be read in the same inverted sense, of the vast popularity which _endymion_ has notoriously attained.[ ] so far as popularity was concerned, the _quarterly_ gibe remained justified. it was not until that there appeared in england the first separate reprint of keats's collected poems:[ ] what is sad to relate is that even this edition found a scanty sale, and that before long 'remainder' copies of it were being bound up by the booksellers with the 'remainders' of another unsuccessful issue of the day, the series of _bells and pomegranates_ by robert browning. after an interval of thirteen years, john sterling must still, in , write to julius hare as follows:-- lately i have been reading again some of alfred tennyson's second volumes, and with profound admiration of his truly lyric and idyllic genius. there seems to me to have been more epic power in keats, that fiery beautiful meteor; but they are two most true and great poets. when one thinks of the amount of recognition they have received, one may well bless god that poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind or left alone in its own magic hermitage.[ ] so late as , jeffrey, who in spite of the justice he had been induced to do to keats in his lifetime, had no real belief in the new poetry and was an instinctive partisan of the conventional eighteenth-century style, could write that the 'rich melodies' of keats and shelley were passing out of public memory, and that the poets of their age destined to enduring fame were campbell and rogers. de quincey in could grotesquely insult the memory and belittle the work of keats in a passage pouring scorn on _endymion_, treating _hyperion_ as his only achievement that counted, and ending,--'upon this mother tongue, upon this english language has keats trampled as with the hoofs of a buffalo. with its syntax, with its prosody, with its idiom, he has played such fantastic tricks as could only enter the heart of a barbarian, and for which only the anarchy of chaos could furnish a forgiving audience. verily it required _hyperion_ to weigh against the deep treason of these unparalleled offences.'[ ] in the meantime none of keats's friends had succeeded in doing anything to strengthen his reputation or make his true character known by the publication either of a personal memoir or of his poetry that remained in manuscript. several of them had fully desired and intended to do both these things. but mutual jealousies and dislikes, such as are but too apt to break out among the surviving intimates of a man of genius, had prevented any such purpose taking effect. taylor and woodhouse had been first in the field, collecting what material for a memorial volume they could, including the transcripts zealously made by woodhouse from keats's papers while he was alive, and others, both verse and correspondence, which they had borrowed from reynolds. but help both from brown and from george keats would have been necessary to give anything like completeness to their work; and brown, who himself desired to be his friend's biographer, looked askance at them and their project. as for information or material from george keats, brown on his part was debarred from seeking it by his obstinate conviction, reiterated in all companies and on all occasions and naturally resented by its subject, that george was a traitor, cheat, and villain. when fanny keats came of age in , the duty devolved on dilke of going into the family accounts and putting pressure on abbey, who had proved a muddler both of his wards' affairs and of his own, to make over the residue of the estate which he held in trust. in the discharge of this duty dilke satisfied himself, as a practical man of business, that george's conduct had been strictly upright and his motives honourable. but brown refused to let his prejudices be shaken; and he and dilke, though they met both in italy and later in england, were never again on their old terms of friendship and mutual regard. brown, criticizing dilke in his influential position as editor of the _athenaeum_ after and as a learned and recognized authority on various problems of literary history, declares that he has become dogmatic and arrogant from success. dilke, writing confidentially of brown, scouts the notion which had got abroad of his having been a 'generous benefactor' to keats, and insists that he had always expected to profit by a literary partnership with the poet, and after his death had demanded and received from the estate payment in full, with interest, of all advances made by him. so much--and the reader may hold it more than enough--in order to explain why no sufficient memoir of keats or collection of his remains could be published by his surviving friends. brown, indeed, wrote some ten years after keats's death the brief memoir of which i have freely made use in these pages, and tried some editors with it, but in vain. destiny had provided otherwise and better. one of the cambridge group of shelley-keats enthusiasts of , richard monckton milnes, being in italy with his family not long after his degree, visited rome and florence in and , and with his genius for knowing, liking, and being liked by everybody, made immediate friends with severn at rome, and at florence soon found his way to landor's home at the villa gherardesca, and there met and was quickly on good terms with brown. some two or three years later brown left tuscany for good and established himself at laira green, near plymouth, where he lived the life of amateur in letters, a busy local lecturer and contributor to local journals, and published his very ingenious interpretation of shakespeare's sonnets as a cryptic autobiography of the poet, continuing the while to nurse the hope and desire of being keats's biographer. he had all but concluded an arrangement for the publication of his memoir in the _monthly chronicle_, when one day near the end of , having heard a lecture on the prospects of the then young colony of new zealand, he determined suddenly to emigrate thither with his son, who had been in training as a civil engineer; and before he left designated monckton milnes, with whom he had not ceased to keep in touch, as the fit man to do justice to keats's memory, and handed to him all his own cherished material. within a year brown had died in new zealand of an apoplectic stroke. monckton milnes was faithful to his trust, but not swift or prompt in fulfilling it. that was more than could well have been expected of a man of so many interests and pursuits and so eager in them all,--poet, politician, orator, wit, entertainer, athirst and full of relish for every varied cup of experience and every social or intellectual pleasure or activity, or opportunity for help or kindness, that life had to offer him. it was not until the fifth year after brown's departure that he buckled to his task. he began by collecting, with some measure of secretarial help from coventry patmore, further information and material from all the surviving friends of keats whom he could hear of. george keats had died at louisville, kentucky, in , leaving an honoured memory among his fellow citizens; and his widow had taken a second husband, a mr jeffrey, who on milnes's request sent him among other material copies, unluckily very imperfect, of keats's incomparable journal-letters to george and to herself. from cowden clarke, the happiest of all keats's friends in after-life, happy in a perfect marriage, the sunniest of dispositions, and a sustained success in the congenial occupation of a public reader in and lecturer on shakespeare and other poets,--from cowden clarke and from keats's younger school friend edward holmes, milnes drew the information about keats's school days which i have quoted above almost in full. leigh hunt, the friend whom keats owed to clarke and who had had the most decisive influence on his life, had passed with advancing years, not indeed out of his lifelong, lightly borne condition of debt and poverty and embarrassment and household worry, but out of the old atmosphere of obloquy and contention into one of peace, and of affectionate regard all but universal as the most genial and companionable, the most versatile, industrious and sweet-natured of literary veterans, praised and admired, to a pitch almost of generous passion, even by the growler carlyle, who had nothing but a gibe of contempt to bestow upon the weaknesses of a lamb or a keats. in regard to keats, hunt had said his say, personal and critical, long ago, in the unwise but in its day grossly over-reviled book _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_ ( ), as well as in many incidental notes and observations through thirty years, and especially in that masterpiece in his own vein of criticism, _imagination and fancy_ ( ). accordingly he had now little that was fresh to tell the biographer. as for haydon, the destiny he had in the old days been used to prophesy for hunt,--even such a destiny, and worse, had in the irony of things befallen himself. that tragic gulf which existed in him between ambition and endowment, between temperament and faculty, had led him through ever fiercer contentions and deeper and more desperate difficulties to the goal of suicide. this had happened in the days when the biographer of keats was just setting hand to his task; hence such accounts of the poet as i have quoted from haydon were not at milnes's disposal, but are drawn from later posthumous publications of the painter's journals and correspondence. by way of farewell to this ill-starred overweening half-genius, i add here the facsimile of a page from a letter he wrote to elizabeth barrett in , describing a scene of rather squalid tragi-comedy which he and keats had witnessed at hunt's hampstead cottage seventeen years before, and adding from memory a sketch of keats's profile, with an answer to his correspondent's conjecture that the poet's expression had been 'too subtle for the brush.' [illustration: pl. xiii page from a letter of benjamin robert haydon to elizabeth barrett, ] among keats's other intimate friends and associates, mr taylor let monckton milnes have the loan of the notes and transcripts bequeathed him by woodhouse, who had died in . reynolds heard by accident of the intended biography, and never having quite abandoned his own purpose in the matter, wrote at first complainingly, resenting that use should be made of those letters of keats to himself which he had allowed woodhouse to copy. but a gracious answer quickly won him over, and he made the new biographer welcome to all his material. his own career had been a rather melancholy failure. he had never quite given up literature in accordance with the purpose he had declared on marriage. indeed it was not until six years after that declaration, in , that his best piece of work was done, in collaboration with his brother-in-law, thomas hood: i mean the anonymous volume of humorous poems, not inferior to _rejected addresses_, called _odes and addresses to great people_, which coleridge confidently declared to be the work of lamb. in later years reynolds was a not infrequent contributor to the _edinburgh review_ and to the _athenaeum_ under the editorship of dilke. for some unspecified reason he did not prosper in the place which his friend rice had found for him with the eminent firm of solicitors, the fladgates; and in later life he was glad to accept a small piece of patronage as deputy clerk of the county court at newport in the isle of wight. here, if the latest mention of him is to be trusted, he fell into self-neglecting habits and consequent disrepute.[ ] in one of his letters to milnes he speaks about 'that poor, obscure, baffled thing, myself': in another he declares his entire confidence in his correspondent, and his unfading admiration and affection for his lost friend, as follows:-- all the papers i possess--all the information i can render--whatever i can do to aid your kind and judiciously intended work--are at your service! but a word or two on the great subject of our correspondence. he was hunted in his youth, before he had strength to escape his ban-dogs. he had the greatest power of poetry in him, of any one since shakespeare! he was the sincerest friend, the most lovable associate, the deepest listener to the griefs and disappointments of all around him 'that ever lived in the tide of times.' your expressed intentions as to the life are so clear and good; that i seem to have the weight of an undone work taken from me. haslam in like manner lends all the help he can, and from his office as a solicitor in copthall court writes somewhat dispiritedly about himself, and declares that this correspondence 'has been a clean taking me back to a separate state of existence that i had more than thirty years ago, a state that has long appeared to me almost as a dream. the realities of life have intervened, but god be praised they have but been laid upon the surface--have but hidden, not effaced those happy happy days.' he sends a number of letters from severn, including those written on the voyage to naples and quoted in full above. but as to letters from keats himself says he has found none,--'they probably were so well or intended to be so well taken care of, that every endeavour to lay my hands on them has proved unavailing.' one wonders whether they may not be lurking yet, a forgotten bundle, in the dust of some unexplored corner of a safe in that same office. severn was at this time living in london, and some correspondence passed between him and milnes about the biography, severn's chief point being to insist that not the malice of the critics, but the 'death-stricken' marriage project, was the trouble preying upon keats in his dying days, and that the outcries of his delirium ran constantly upon his unfulfilled love and unwritten poems together. as to yet another of keats's closest friends, benjamin bailey, milnes had somehow been misinformed, and believed and positively stated him to be dead. he had in fact risen to colonial preferment in the church, and was alive and well as archdeacon of colombo in ceylon. thence on the appearance of milnes's book he wrote to declare his survival, and forwarded to the biographer, for use in future editions, those memoranda of old days spent in keats's company upon which i have above (in chapter v) so fully drawn. there are a few other points upon which milnes's information was less accurate than might have been expected. he assumes that the _fiancée_ of keats's tragic passion was identical with the rich-complexioned charmian described in his autumn letters of , and ignores the existence of fanny brawne and of her family. one would have supposed that he must have heard the real story both from brown and from dilke, whom mrs brawne had appointed trustee for her children, and who had not since lost sight of them. that kind lady herself met an unhappy fate, burned to death upon her own doorstep. her daughter fanny, ten years after her poet-lover's death, married a mr lindo, who afterwards changed his name to lindon, and of whom we know little except that he was at one time drawn into the meshes of spanish politics and was afterwards one of the commissioners for the great exhibition of . not long before her marriage, mrs lindon is recorded to have said of keats that the kindest thing to his memory would be to let it die. little wonder, perhaps, that she should have felt thus, when she remembered the tortured, the terrifying vehemence of his passion for herself and when, being probably incapable of independent literary judgment, she saw his name and work still made customary objects of critical derision. it is harder to forgive her when some time later we find her parting with her lover's miniature, under pressure of some momentary money difficulty, to dilke. neither does the biographer seem to have made any attempt to get into touch with keats's young sister, who had been married long before this to an accomplished spanish man of letters, señor valentine llanos. he also was at various times involved in the political troubles of his country. of his and his wife's children, one attained distinction as an artist and assumed the name of keats y llanos. keats had written to his sister once as a child gaily prophesying that they all, her brothers and herself, would live to have 'tripple chins and stubby thumbs.' she in fact fully attained the predicted length of days, and having lived to be well assured of the full and final triumph of her brother's fame died less than thirty years ago at eighty-six. in mature life she had come into touch with one at least of her brother's surviving familiars, that is with severn at rome, and with more than one of his admirers in a younger generation. of these a good friend to her was mr buxton forman, through whose initiative a civil list pension was awarded her by lord beaconsfield. a subtle observer, the poet and humorist, frederick locker-lampson, has left a rather disappointing though not unkindly impression of her as follows:-- whilst i was in rome mr severn introduced me to m. and mme. valentine de llanos, a kindly couple. he was a spaniard, lean, silent, dusky, and literary, the author of _don esteban_ and _sandoval_. she was fat, blonde, and lymphatic, and both were elderly. _she was john keats's sister!_ i had a good deal of talk with her, or rather _at_ her, for she was not very responsive. i was disappointed, for i remember that my sprightliness made her yawn; she seemed inert and had nothing to tell me of her wizard brother of whom she spoke as of a mystery--with a vague admiration but a genuine affection. she was simple and natural--i believe she is a very worthy woman. gaps and errors there thus were not a few in monckton milnes's book when it appeared in two volumes in . but it served its purpose admirably for the time being, and with some measure of revision for long afterwards. distinguished in style and perfect in temper, the preface and introduction struck with full confidence the right note in challenging for keats the character of 'the marcellus of the empire of english song'; while the body of the book, giving to the world a considerable, though far from complete, series of those familiar letters, to his friends in which his genius shines almost as vividly as in his verse, established on full evidence the essential manliness of his character against the conception of him as a blighted weakling which both his friends and enemies had contrived to let prevail. among the posthumous poems printed for the first time, the two longest, _otho_ and the _cap and bells_ were not of his best, but masterpieces like _la belle dame_ and _the eve of st mark_, with many miscellaneous things of high interest, were included. the reception of the book, though not, of course, unmixed, was in all quarters respectful, and the old tone of flippant contempt hardly made itself heard at all. i shall quote only one critical dictum on its appearance, and that is the letter in which the veteran landor, in his highest style of urbanity and authority, acknowledged a copy sent him by the author:-- dear milnes, on my return to bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, i find your valuable present of keatses works. he better deserves such an editor than i such a mark of your kindness. of all our poets, excepting shakespeare and milton, and perhaps chaucer, he has most of the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity.... there is an effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of chaucer. the book appeared just at the right moment, when the mounting enthusiasm of the young generation for the once derided poet was either gradually carrying the elders along with it or leaving them bewildered behind. do readers remember how the simple soul of colonel newcome was perplexed by the talk of his son clive and of clive's friends?-- he heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him: he heard that byron was no great poet, though a very clever man ... that his favourite, doctor johnson, talked admirably, but did not write english; that young keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young raphael; and that a young gentleman of cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verses might take rank with the greatest poets of all. doctor johnson not write english! lord byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! sir walter a poet of the second order! mr pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; mr keats and this young mr. tennyson of cambridge, the chief of modern poetic literature! what were these new dicta, which mr. warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke; to which mr. honeyman blandly assented, and clive listened with pleasure? thackeray's sketch of clive and his companions scarcely suggests, nor was it meant to suggest, the characteristics of the special group of young artists in whom, almost contemporaneously with the appearance of milnes's book, the enthusiasm for keats had begun to burn at its whitest heat. i refer of course to the pre-raphaelite brotherhood. of the three leaders of that movement, holman hunt, millais, and rossetti, it is hard to say which, in the late 'forties and early 'fifties, declared himself first or most ardent in keats-worship.[ ] of hunt's exhibited pictures, one of the earliest showed the lovers in the _eve of st agnes_ stealing past the sprawling porter and the sleeping bloodhound into the night; and of millais's earliest, one is from _isabella or the pot of basil_, showing the merchant brothers and their sister and her lover at a meal in company (the well-known work, so queerly designed and executed with so much grip and character, now in the walker art gallery at liverpool). rossetti had in these early days much less technical skill and training than either of his two associates. but from the first he was poet as well as painter, and instinctively and spiritually stood, we can well discern, much nearer to keats than they did for all their enthusiasm. combining italian blood and temperament with british upbringing, rossetti added to his inherited and paternally inculcated knowledge and love of dante a no less intense love and knowledge of english romance poetry, both that of the old ballads and that of the revival of and onwards. in boyhood and early youth waves of enthusiasm for different recent poets had swept over him one after another, first shelley, then keats, then browning; but keats, and next to keats coleridge, kept the strongest and deepest hold on him. when his first associates hunt and millais had parted from him on their several, widely divergent paths of public success and distinction, rossetti became, in the comparative seclusion in which he chose to live, a powerful focus of romantic inspiration to younger men who came about him. he is reported to have urged upon william morris that he should become a painter and not a poet, seeing that keats had already done all there was to be done in poetry. of all keats's poems, it was _la belle dame sans merci_ and _the eve of st mark_ which most aroused the enthusiasm of rossetti and his group. we have already seen how the latter fragment stands in our nineteenth-century poetry as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between chaucer and morris. it was the task and destiny of morris as a writer to give, by his abounding fertility and brooding delight in the telling of greek and mediæval stories in verse, the most profuse and for the present perhaps the last expression to the pure romantic spirit in english narrative poetry: and to this effort keats had given him the immediate impulse, though chaucer was his ultimate great exemplar. answering a congratulatory letter addressed to him by the veteran cowden clarke on the publication of the first volume of the _earthly paradise_, morris speaks of 'keats for whom i have such a boundless admiration, and whom i venture to call one of my masters.' i have quoted above (page ) his emphatic later words to a like effect. while the leaven was thus intensely working among a special group in england, an english poetess of quite other training and associations, elizabeth barrett browning, paid in _aurora leigh_ ( ) her well-known tribute to keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less passionately felt and haunting:-- by keats's soul, the man who never stepped in gradual progress like another man, but, turning grandly on his central self, ensphered himself in twenty perfect years and died, not young, (the life of a long life distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn for ever;) by that strong accepted soul, i count it strange and hard to understand that nearly all young poets should write old. thus, between the effects of monckton milnes's book and the enthusiasm of various groups of university men and poets and artists, the previously current contempt for keats was from soon after the mid-century practically silenced and the battle for his fame, at least among the younger generation, won. he has counted for the last sixty years and more, alike in england and in america, as an uncontested great poet, whose works, collected or single, have been in demand in edition after edition. one of the earliest new issues was that edited in by monckton milnes, who continued nearly until the end, under his new style as lord houghton, to further by fresh editions and revisions the good work he had begun. not only every professed critic and historian of our poetry, but nearly all our chief poets themselves, as aubrey de vere, james russell lowell, matthew arnold, coventry patmore, swinburne, and latterly the present poet laureate, have been in various tones public commentators on keats. all such comments have shed light upon his work in their degree. i can here only touch on a few special points and mention in their order a few of the contributions to the knowledge or appreciation of the poet which i think have helped the most. one point to be remarked is that very few judges have seemed able to care equally for keats and shelley. a special devotion to shelley, the poet who wedded himself in youth to a set of ready-made beliefs from godwin, of which the chief was that all the miseries of the world were due to laws and institutions and could be cured by their abolition, who clothed these abstract beliefs in imagery of clouds and winds and ocean-streams, of meteor and rainbow and sunset and all things radiant and evanescent, and sang them to strains of music inimitably swift and passionate, seems incompatible with complete delight in the work of that other young poet who could hold fast no dogma spiritual or social, but found truth wherever his imagination could divine or create living and concrete beauty, and who, as to the sorrows of the world, was convinced that they were inherent in its very fabric and being, and yearned for knowledge and wisdom to assuage them but died before he had attained clearness or found his way. as between these two, tennyson's final and calm opinion is quoted by his son as follows:--'keats would have become one of the very greatest of all poets had he lived. at the time of his death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of development at the time. each new effort was a steady advance on that which had gone before. with all shelley's splendid imagery and colour, i find a sort of _tenuity_ in his poetry.' fitzgerald was much stronger on the same side, counting shelley, to use his own words, as not worth keats's little finger. matthew arnold, who has said some memorably fine and just things about keats, belittles the poetry of shelley and even paradoxically prefers the prose of his essays and letters to his verse. with ardent shelley-worshippers on the other hand full appreciation of keats is rare. swinburne, for one, has done little for keats's memory by the torrent of hyperbolical adjectives of alternate praise and blame which he has poured upon it. mr william rossetti, for whom shelley is 'one of the ultimate glories of our race and planet,' has in his monograph on keats, as i think, been icily unjust to his subject. and i can remember my admirable friend and colleague, mr richard garnett of the british museum, taking me roundly to task for the opinion, which i still stoutly hold, that the letters of keats, with all their every-day humanity and fun and gossip, are in their wonderful sudden gleams and intuitions more vitally the letters of a poet than shelley's. but such preferences between two such contrasted geniuses and creators of beauty are perhaps inevitable, and have at any rate not prevented the equal and brotherly association of the two in the memorial house--the house in which keats died--lately acquired and consecrated to their joint fame by representative english and americans at rome. one great snare in judging of keats is his variability of mood and opinion. the critic is apt to seize upon the expression of some one phase or attitude of mind that strikes him, and to theorize and draw conclusions from it as though it were permanent and dominant. the very excellence of what was best both in his poetry and himself is a second snare, tempting us to forget that after all he was but a lad, a genius and character not made but in the making. a third is the obvious and frankly avowed intensity of the sensuous elements in his nature. but the critic who casts these up against him should remember that it took the same capacity for sense-delights that inspired the rhapsodies on claret-drinking and nectarine-sucking in the letters, to inspire also, being spiritualized into imaginative emotion, the 'blushful hippocrene' passage in the nightingale ode or the feast of fruits, in all its pureness, of the revised _hyperion_; and also that keats, with his clear and sane self-consciousness, has rarely any doubt that the master bent within him was not his 'exquisite sense of the luxurious' but his love for the high things and thoughts which he calls 'philosophy.' it is a pity that the author of the one full and recent history of our poetry, the late mr w.j. courthope, should have been debarred from just appreciation of this poet alike by adopted dogma and by natural taste. both led him to hold that the true power of poetry, the true test by which posterity must judge it, lies in the direct relations which it bears to the social and political activities of its period. that the re-awakening of the western mind and imagination to nature and romance in the days of the revolutionary and napoleonic wars was a spiritual phenomenon not less important in human history than the wars themselves would have been a conception that his mind was incapable of entertaining. he supposed that keats was indifferent to history or politics. but of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in re-instating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. to that which lies behind and above politics and history, to the general destinies and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only too acutely and tragically sensitive. turning to the chief real contributions to our appreciation and knowledge of keats, i should give the first place to matthew arnold's well-known essay[ ] of . with his cunning art in the minting and throwing into circulation of phrases that cannot be forgotten, arnold balanced the weaknesses against the strength of keats's work and character, blaming the gushing admirers who injured his memory by their 'pawing and fondness,' insisting on the veins of 'flint and iron' in his nature, insisting on his clear-sightedness, his lucidity, his perception of the vital connexion of beauty with truth and of both with joy, declaring that 'no one else in english poetry, save shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of keats, his perfection of loveliness,' and clenching all, with reference to keats's own saying, 'i think i shall be among the english poets after my death,' by the comment, 'he is, he is with shakespeare.[ ] almost simultaneously with matthew arnold's essay, there appeared the very thoughtful and original study of mrs f.m. owen, in which were laid the foundations of a true understanding of _endymion_ as a parable of the experiences of a poet's soul in its quest after beauty. the years and were great keats years. in them there appeared the edition of the poems by the late w.t. arnold, the first which contained a scholar's investigations into the special sources of keats's poetic style and vocabulary: also the edition for the golden treasury series by francis turner palgrave, with a studiously collated text and a preface of more glowing and scarcely less just critical admiration than matthew arnold's, only flawed, as i think, by a revival of that obsolete heresy of the 'deadness' of the grecian mythology: and thirdly, the first issue of the late mr buxton forman's edition of the poetry and prose works together. all students know the results of this editor's devoted and unremitting industry, maintained through a full quarter of a century, in the textual criticism of his author and in the publication and re-publication of editions containing every variant reading and every scrap of scattered prose or verse that could be recovered. to the same worker is due the unearthing and giving to the world of two groups of the poet's letters which had been unknown to monckton milnes, the wholly admirable and delightful series addressed to his young sister, and the series, in great part distressing and deplorable, to fanny brawne. about , i was myself able to put straight two matters that needed it by publishing the true text of the letters to america and by rectifying the current notion that the revised _hyperion_ had been a first draft. before long came the essay of mr robert bridges, passing the whole of keats's poetry under review, and dealing out judgments in a terse authoritative style to which, as one poet estimating another, he was fully entitled, and which at all moments commands interest and respect if it sometimes challenges contradiction. on some matters, and especially on the relations of keats's early poetry to wordsworth, mr bridges has thrown a light too clear and convincing to be questioned. when in the late mr william sharp compiled his _life of joseph severn_ from the vast, almost unmanageable mass of papers in the possession of the artist's family (i had had them previously through my hands and can realize the difficulty of the task), he furnished valuable new material for our knowledge both of the life of keats and of his after life in the opinions of men. coming down to more recent years, we have the admirable editorial work of professor de sélincourt, as good, i think, as has been bestowed on any english poet, carrying out to the farthest point the researches initiated by w.t. arnold, and illuminating the text throughout with the comments and illustrations of a keen scholar in classical and english literature. nor can i leave unmentioned the several lectures by two successive oxford professors of poetry, that of mr a.c. bradley on keats's letters and that of mr. j.w. mackail on his poetry. from these two minds, ripened in daily familiarity with the best literatures of the world, we have, after a hundred years, praise of keats which almost makes shelley's seating of him among 'inheritors of unfulfilled renown' seem like an irony,--praise more splendid than he would have hoped for had he lived to fulfil even the most daring of his ambitions. a special point in mr mackail's work is to make clear how strong had been upon keats the influence of the _divine comedy_, his pocket companion on his scottish tour, and how in _hyperion_, written in the next months after his return, there appears here and there, amid the general miltonic strain of the verse, a quality of thought and vision drawn straight from and almost matching dante. lastly, there has recently come from america a tribute of quite another kind, showing how for purposes of systematic study keats has been thought worthy of an apparatus hitherto only bestowed on the great classics of literature: i refer to the elaborate and monumental _concordance_ to his poems lately issued from cornell university. and must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon keats's memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment,--must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, keats himself and his poetry? naturally in the course of my own work i have asked myself this question with qualms, bethinking myself of tennyson's phrase about swamping the sacred poets with themselves. the answer is,--no, such a poet can carry any weight we may choose to lay upon him, and more: he can never be smothered, inasmuch as he has both given the world something it can nevermore cease to want and suggested the existence within him of a power, quenched before its time, to give it something much more and greater yet. if the result of all our commentaries should be to provoke a reaction among readers, and to make them crave for a naked text both of the poems and letters and insist upon being left alone with that and their own meditations upon it,--well, so much the better. every reader of the english tongue that has the works of keats often enough in his hands, with or without comment, will find his life enriched with much of the best that poetry can do for human life, with achievements, very near to perfection, of that faculty which is the essential organ of poetry,--to which all others, spiritual and intellectual, are in poetry subordinate,--the faculty of imagination transfusing the vital beauty and magic and secret rhythm of things into the other magic and beauty and rhythm of words. over and above this, he will find himself living in the familiarity of a great and lovable spirit, dowered at birth with capacities for joy and misery more intense almost than any of which we have record, and retaining its lovableness to the last in spite of circumstances that gave misery too cruelly the upper hand. but, again the objector may ask, is it so certain that in the coming time the desire of readers for what keats has to give them will survive without abatement? have not the last three years been an utterly unprecedented, overwhelming and transforming experience for mankind? will not the new world after the war be a new world indeed, on the one hand filled, nay, gorged, with recollections of doing and undergoing, of endurance and adventure, of daring and suffering and horror, of hellishness and heroism, beside which all the dreams of bygone romance must forever seem tame and vapid; and on the other hand straining with a hungry forecast towards a future of peace and justice such as mankind has not known before, which it will be its tremendous task to try and establish? will not this world of so prodigiously intensified experiences and enlarged hopes and besetting anxieties require and produce new poets and a new poetry of its own that shall deal with the realities it has gone through and those it is striving for, and put away and cease to care for the old dreams and thrills and glamours of romance? have we not in fact witnessed the first-fruits of this new tremendous stimulus in the cloud of young poets who have appeared--too many of them alas! only to perish--since the war began? and again the answer is, no. however changed the world, work like that of keats is not what it will ever let perish. the thrills and glamours which pass away are only those of the second-rate and the second-hand sort that come in and go out with literary fashion; not those which have sprung from and struck deep into the innermost places of the spirit. doubtless there will arise and is arising a new poetry which will be very different from any phase of poetry produced by the romantic revolution and the generations that followed and nourished themselves on it. the new poetry may not be able fully to share keats's inspiring conviction of the sovereign, the transcendental truth of whatsoever ideas the imagination seizes as beauty. it may perhaps even abjure the direct search for beauty as its primary aim and impulse. but no matter: provided that its organ be the imagination, working with intensity on whatever themes the genius of the age may dictate, it cannot but achieve some phase, some incarnation, of beauty by the way. but gains like those which were made for the human spirit by the poetry of which keats was one of the chief masters will never be lost again. those who care for poetry at all must always care for those refreshing and inspiring draughts, as i have called them, from the innermost wells of antiquity, of nature, and of romance, those meditations of mingled joy and sorrow that search into the soul of things. moreover they will never cease to interest themselves in the question,--if only this great spirit had survived, what would have been those unwritten poems of which he saw in the sky the cloudy symbols, of which he felt the pressure and prescience forcing the blood into his brain or bringing about his heart an awful warmth 'like a load of immortality,' and the perishing of which unborn within him was one of the two great haunting distresses of his dying days? in letting speculation wander in this field, we are brought up by many problems as to what kind of manhood could have followed a youth like that of keats, had he had better fortune and had the conditions and accidents of his life been such as to fortify his bodily constitution instead of sapping it. youth, especially half-trained youth, is always subject to such storms and strains as those which keats experienced with a violence proportionate to the fervour of his being. to the sane and sweet, the manly and courageous, elements in his character we have found his friends bear unanimous evidence, amply supported by the self-revelation of his letters. but self-revealed also we see the morbid, the corroding elements which lay beneath these, just as beneath his vigorous frame and gallant bearing there lay the bodily susceptibilities that with ill-luck enabled lung disease to fasten on and kill him. what must under any conditions have made life hard for him was the habitual inner contention and disquiet of his instincts and emotions in regard to that most momentous of human matters, love. when he lets his mind dwell on the opposed extremes of human impulse and experience, from the vilest to the most exalted, which the word-of-all-work, love, is used to cover, he is more savagely perplexed and out of conceit with life than from any other cause or thought whatever.[ ] the ruling power in himself, as he declares over and over again, was the abstract passion for beauty, the love of the principle of beauty in all things. but even in the poem specially designed to embody and celebrate that passion, in _endymion_, we find his conception of realized and sexual human love to be mawkish and unworthy. when the actual experience befalls himself, he falls utterly and almost ignominiously a slave, at once enraptured and desperately resentful, to the jealous cravings which absorb and paralyse all his other faculties. would ripened manhood or a happier experience have been able to bring health and peace to his spirit on this supremely vital matter and to turn him into a poet of love, love both human and transcendental, such as at the outset he had longed and striven to be? again, along with his admirable capacity for loyal devotion and sympathy in friendship, we find in him capacities of quite another kind, capacities for disillusionment and for seeing through and chafing at human and social shams and pretensions and absurdities; and we ask ourselves, would this strain in him, which we find expressed with a degree of pettish and premature cynicism, for instance in the _cap and bells_ and in some of his later letters, have matured with time into a power either of virile satire or genial, reconciling comedy? and once more, would that haunting, that irrepressible sense of the miseries of the world which we find breaking through from time to time amid the beauty of the odes, or the playfulness and affectionate confidences of the letters, or dictating that tragical return against himself and his achievements in the revised _hyperion_,--could it and would it with experience have mellowed into such compassionate wisdom as might have made him one of the rare great healers and sages among the poets of the world? such speculations are as vain as they are inevitable. let us indulge ourselves at any rate by remembering that it is the greatest among his successors who have held the most sanguine view as to the powers that were in him. here are more words of tennyson's,--'keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us. there is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote.' leaving with these words the question of what he might have done, and looking only at what he did, it is enough for any man's glory. the days of the years of his life were few and evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines eternally. footnotes: [ ] everyone knows wordsworth's beautiful sonnet of god-speed to him. haydon went to call on the great man, who had always been kind to him, as he passed through london, and except for two unfortunately chosen words, is at his very best in this picture of their parting:--'after a quarter of an hour i took my leave, and as i arose he got up, took his stick, with that sidelong look of his, and then burst forth that beautiful smile of heart and feeling, geniality of soul, manly courage and tenderness of mien, which neither painter nor sculptor has ever touched. it was the smile of a superior creature who would have gathered humanity under the shelter of its wings and while he was amused at its follies would have saved it from sorrow and sheltered it from pain.' (_life of b. r. haydon_, ed. taylor, ii, .) [ ] john sterling, _essays and tales_, ii, . [ ] carefully edited, it is believed by cyrus redding, formerly an employé of the house. [ ] _noctes ambrosianæ_, ii, : from _blackwood_ for december, . [ ] _quarterly review_, april , page . the article was long supposed to be by lockhart himself, but mr prothero has proved that it was by croker. [ ] in w. smith's _standard library_, exactly reprinted from the galignani edition. america had in this matter been in advance of england, an edition of the poet's works having appeared at buffalo in . [ ] _essays and tales_, p. clxviii. [ ] _notes on gilfillan's literary portraits_: collected works, xi, . it is fair to add that twelve years later de quincey went a good way in recantation of this outburst. [ ] see _byron's collected works_, prose, iii, , note. [ ] see particularly chaps. iv and v of holman hunt's _pre-raphaelitism and the pre-raphaelite brotherhood_. [ ] first published in t.h. ward's _selections from the english poets_, and re-printed in the second series of _essays in criticism_ ( ). to this essay i possess a curious postscript in a note of arnold's written a few years later to myself. i had thought his treatment of _endymion_ too slighting. his answer shows how fastidiousness could prevail in him over judgment. 'if keats,' he writes, 'had left nothing but _endymion_, it would have alone shown his remarkable power and have been worth preserving on that account: but when he has left plenty which shows it much better i cannot but wish _endymion_ away from his volume.' [ ] see the bitter comment on a passage in burton's _anatomy_ quoted in mr buxton forman's _complete works of j. k._ iii, , where keats runs his head against the problem with which plato had tried to deal in his myth of the two aphrodites, pandêmos and urania. 'the word-of-all-work, love,' is a phrase of george eliot's. appendix i. _the alexander fragment_ (page ). here is the text:-- whenne alexandre the conqueroure was wayfayringe in y^e londe of inde, there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne the herbys and flourys. he colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. her forme was everyche whytte lyke y^e fayrest carvynge of quene cythere, onlie thatte y^t was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle. her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y^e talle hed of a norwegian pyne stelythe from y^e northerne wynde. one of her fayre hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth whytte was ymyngld as y^e gode arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest snowe; and her bryght eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke hesperus through an evenynge cloude. theye were yclosyd yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn sweetenesse, as whenne by chaunce y^e moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne y^e silverie dewe. the authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge y^e ladye's breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd--'cuthberte,' sayeth he, 'an thou canst not descrybe y^e ladye's breste, and fynde a simile thereunto, i forbyde thee to proceede yn thy romaunt.' thys, i kennd fulle welle, far surpassyd my feble powres, and forthwythe i was fayne to droppe my quille. this queer youthful passage in a would-be caxton or wynkyn de worde spelling seems scarcely worth taking trouble about, but i thought it worth while to try and trace what reading keats must have been fresh from when he wrote it, and consulted both prof. israel gollancz and mr henry bradley, with the result stated briefly in the text. at first i had thought keats must have drawn his idea from some one of the many versions of the great mediæval alexander romance--especially considering that in all forms of that romance a flight into the skies and a trip under the sea are regular incidents, and might later have suggested the parallel incidents in _endymion_. but neither in the version which keats is most likely to have known, the english _alisaunder_ as published in weber's collection of metrical romances, , nor indeed, i believe, in any other, is there any incident closely parallel to this of the indian maiden; although love and marriage generally come into the story towards the close. in the english version there is a beautiful candace who declares her passion for the hero: he puts her off for the time being, but goes disguised as an ambassador to her court, where he is recognized and imprisoned. among things derived from the main mediæval cycle, the nearest approach to such an idea as keats was working on is to be found in the _orlando innamorato_ of boiardo, book ii, canto i, stanzas , - ; but here the beauty is a lady of egypt whom boiardo calls elidonia. his description of the great painted hall of the giant agramante at biserta, adorned with pictures of the life and deeds of alexander, closes with the following:-- in somma, ogni sua guerra ivi è dipinta con gran richezza e bella a riguardare. poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta, a due grifon nel ciel si fè portare, col scudo in braccia e con la spada cinta; poi dentro un vetro si cala nel mare, e vede le balene e ogni gran pesce e campa e ancor quivi di fuor n'esce. da poi che vinto egli ha ben ogni cosa, vedesi lui che vinto è dall' amore, perchè elidonia, quella graziosa, co' suoi begli occhi gli ha passato il core-- and then ensues the history of their loves and of the hero's death. but keats in his hospital days knew no italian, and could only have heard of such a passage in boiardo through leigh hunt. so i think the derivation of his fragment from any of the regular alexander romances must be given up, and the source indicated in the text be accepted, namely the popular _fabliau_ of the _lai d'aristote_ (probably in way's rimed version), where the thing happens exactly as keats tells it, and whence the idea of the sudden encounter with an indian maiden probably lingered in his mind till he revived it in _endymion_. as for the sources of the attempt at voluptuous description, it is a little surprising to find milton's 'tallest pine hewn on norwegian hills' remembered in such a connexion: other things are an easily recognizable farrago from _cymbeline_,-- 'cytherea, how bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily, and whiter than the sheets!' from _venus and adonis_,-- 'a lily prison'd in a gaol of snow;' 'teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;' from _lucrece_,-- --'the morning's silver-melting dew;' from _twelfth night_, --'like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets;' and so forth. prof. gollancz suggests that 'cuthberte' as the name of the author is a reminiscence from the 'cuddie' of spenser's _shepheard's calendar_, and that the 'good arthure' may also be some kind of spenserian reference: but i suspect 'arthure' here to be a mis-transcription (we have no autograph) for 'authoure.' ii. _verses written by brown and keats after visiting beauly abbey_ (p. ).--the text, of which there exist two separate transcripts, is as follows. i have printed in italics the lines which keats, as he told woodhouse, contributed to the joint work. on some skulls in beauly abbey, near inverness i shed no tears; deep thought or awful vision, i had none by thousand petty fancies i was crossed. _wordsworth._ and mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by. _shakspeare._ _in silent barren synod met within these roofless walls_, where yet the shafted arch and carved fret cling to the ruin the brethren's skulls mourn, dewy wet, their creed's undoing. _the mitred ones of nice and trent were not so tongue-tied,--no, they went hot to their councils, scarce content with orthodoxy but ye, poor tongueless things, were meant to speak by proxy._ your chronicles no more exist since knox, the revolutionist destroy'd the work of every fist that scrawl'd black letter well! i'm a craniologist and may do better. this skull-cap won the cowl from sloth or discontent, perhaps from both and yet one day, against his oath he tried escaping for men, tho' idle may be loth to live on gaping. a toper this! he plied his glass more strictly than he said the mass and lov'd to see a tempting lass come to confession letting her absolution pass o'er fresh transgression. this crawl'd thro' life in feebleness boasting he never knew excess cursing those crimes he scarce could guess or feel but faintly with prayer that heaven would cease to bless men so unsaintly. here's a true churchman! he'd affect much charity and ne'r neglect to pray for mercy on th' elect but thought no evil in sending heathen, turk and scot all to the devil! _poor skull! thy fingers set ablaze, with silver saint in golden rays, the holy missal, thou didst craze 'mid bead and spangle while others passed their idle days in coil and wrangle._ long time this sconce a helmet wore, but sickness smites the conscience sore, he broke his sword and hither bore his gear and plunder took to the cowl--then rav'd and swore at his damn'd blunder! _this lily-coloured skull with all the teeth complete, so white and small belonged to one whose early pall a lover shaded. he died ere superstition's gall his heart invaded._ ha! here is 'undivulged crime!' despair forbad his soul to climb beyond this world, this mortal time of fever'd badness until this monkish pantomime dazzled his madness! a younger brother this! a man aspiring as a tartar khan but, curb'd and baffl'd he began the trade of frightening it smack'd of power! and how he ran to deal heaven's lightning! this idiot-skull belonged to one, a buried miser's only son who, penitent ere he'd begun to taste of pleasure and hoping heaven's dread wrath to shun gave hell his treasure. here is the forehead of an ape a robber's mask--and near the nape that bone--fie on't, bears just the shape of carnal passion ah! he was one for theft and rape in monkish fashion! this was the porter!--he could sing or dance, or play--do anything and what the friars bade him bring they ne'er were balked of; matters not worth remembering and seldom talk'd of. enough! why need i further pore? this corner holds at least a score, and yonder twice as many more of reverend brothers, 'tis the same story o'er and o'er they're like the others! iii. _list of books in keats's library compiled by richard woodhouse._--this list, of great interest to all students of keats, is in the possession of mr j.p. morgan, to whom i am much indebted for allowing it to be transcribed for my use. i give it _verbatim_, without attempting (though it would be an attractive bibliographical exercise) to identify particular editions. wordsworth's poems vo vol. fairfax's tasso " " bound petrarch's sonnets and odes " " hazlitt's principles of human action " " drayton's poems (edn. jno. smethwick) " " chaucer's poems mo " hunt's descent of liberty vo " dante's inferno by carey " " bound herrick's poems " " burton's anat. of melancholy " " bound aikin's history of the year mo " bound potter's grecian antiqs vo " adam's roman l " " davies' celtic researches " " spelman's xenophon " " bound vertot's roman revolutions (f) " " bound lady russell's letters mo " bacon's essays " " boyle's reflections " " cowley's essays " " locke's conduct " " clarendon's essays mo " bacon's essays vo " bound french prayer book mo " bound erasmus' moriae encomium mo " bound french rabelais mo " bound ovid's metamorphoses mo " ariosto da boschino " " coleridge, lamb and lloyd vo " bound prayer book folio " bound southwell's bible " " bound chaucer (black letter) " " levy's roman history ( ) " " bound auctores mythographi latini to " bound siècle de louis xiv (voltaire) mo " raleigh's hist. of the world folio " bound guzman d'alfarache " " bound les oeuvres d'amboise " " bound ciceronis orationes vo " bound lemprière's class. dict. " " an atlas " " bound ben johnson & beaumont & fletcher " " rime di petrarcha mo " bound ainsworth's dict. vo " bound z. jackson's illus. of shakespeare " " carew, suckling, prior, congreve, blackmore, fenton, granville and malden " " bound ovidii metamorphoseon " " bound bailey's dictionary " " bound hunt's juvenilia " " bound fencing familiarized " " bound aminta di tasso mo " bound burton (abridged) vo " poetae minores graeci " " bound greek grammar " " bound terentii comedia " " bound bishop beveridge's works " " bound old plays ( th vol. with reynolds) " " bible mo " bound conducteur à paris " " horatii opera " " bound burns's poems mo " bound mickle's lusiad " " bound palmerin of england vo " bound vocabulaire italien franc " " bound baldwin's pantheon " " bound oeuvres de molière mo " dict. phil. de voltaire " " essai sur les moeurs de do. " " nouv. héloise (rousseau) " " emile (rousseau) " " description des antiques vo " spectator ( st lost) vo " bound shakespeare ( th lost) mo " marmontel's incas ( rd lost) " " bound hist. of k. arthur ( nd lost) mo " odd vol. of spencer--damaged names of friends to whom keats had either given or lent certain works. mr b. bailey miss keats mrs brawne mrs jones mr s. brawne " mancur " browne " reynolds " clark " rice " dilke " richards " haslam " severn " hessey " taylor " hunt " woodhouse index abbey, mrs richard, in charge of fanny keats, , , abbey, richard, trustee for the keats family, , , , , , , , on mrs t. keats, - _abbot, the_ (scott), achilles, homeric character of, keats's admiration for, _acis and galatea_ (handel's libretto), song in, compared with passage in _endymion_, adam's dreams (_paradise lost_), keats's debt to, - aders family, _adonais_ (shelley), _blackwood_ parody on, enthusiasm for at cambridge ( ), , poetic form of, preface to, on the effect of hostile reviews on keats, reprint of ( ), tribute of to keats, , - adonis, awakening of, in _endymion_, _address to hope_ (keats), style and form of, adlington's translation of the _golden ass_ of apuleius, keats's possible reading of, _& n._ admonition, the, in _hyperion_, _adventures of a younger son_ (trelawny), brown's aid in, _aeneid_, keats's prose version of, _after dark vapours_, sonnet (keats), ailsa craig, keats on, - _alastor_ (shelley), allegoric theme of, - , - , date of publication, hunt's praise of, , influence of on keats, , - _alexander_ fragment (keats) in prose, , - _alexander's feast_ (dryden), wordsworth on, alfieri, lines by, applicable to keats, _alfred, the_, reynolds's article in, on keats's work, allegory, in _alastor_, - , - , _endymion_, - _et alibi_ _allegro, l'_ (milton), metre of, _alice fell_ (wordsworth), alps, the, impression made by on shelley, alsager, t.m., lender of chapman's homer to clarke, ambleside, keats at, , america, tribute from, to the value of keats's poems, american edition of keats's poems, date of the first, _n._ _aminta_ (tasso), hunt's translation dedicated to keats, _anatomy of melancholy_ (burton), keats's inspirations from, , , , - , - , , _n._ _ancient mariner_ (coleridge), , angela, in the _eve of st agnes_, - _& n._ _annals of the fine arts, ode to a nightingale_ published in, _annus mirabilis_ (dryden), echoed by keats, _& n._ _antiquary_ (scott), keats's attitude to, apollo in delos, hymn to, _see_ hymn apollo's speech in _hyperion_, , apuleius, _the golden ass_ of, keats's possible reading of, _& n._ _arabian nights_, influence of, seen in _endymion_, , , , , _archiv für das studium der neueren sprachen_ (wolters) cited, _n._ arethusa myth, in ovid, and keats's and shelley's poems, _arethusa_ (shelley), - , ariosto, keats's studies in, , arne's opera _artaxerxes_, a song in, quoted by keats, _& n._ arnold, matthew, on the works of keats and of shelley, , , _& n._ arnold, w. t., researches of, on keats's style, &c., and edition of his poems issued by, , _artaxerxes_, opera (arne), keats's quotation from, _& n._ arts, the, excellence of, keats on, _asclepiad, the_, cited on keats as medical student, _& n._ _as from the darkening gloom a silver dove_, sonnet (keats, ), _as late i rambled in the happy fields_, sonnet (keats), _astronomy_ (bonnycastle), keats's prize-book ( ), _n._ _athenaeum_, dilke's editorship of, , ; maurice's editorship, reynolds's contributions to, sterling's praise of keats in ( ), - _a thing of beauty is a joy for ever_ (keats), composition of, _& n._ _auctores mythographi latini_, ed. van staveren; owned and used by keats, _& n._ audubon, and george keats, 'augustan' poets, keats's dislike of, _aurora leigh_, mrs browning's tribute in, to keats, - _autobiographical fragment, an_ (procter), _n._ _autobiography_ (hunt), autumnal scenes in keats's poems, , - awnmarsh, allan, translation of the _decameron_ published by, _& n._ bacchic lyric in _endymion_: inspiration of, _et sqq._, possible influence on, of wordsworth, keats's term for, bacchus, in _alexander's feast_, wordsworth on, triumph of, figured on sarcophaguses, _& n._ 'bacchus and ariadne,' titian's picture of, as inspiration for keats, bailey, archdeacon benjamin, friend of keats, - , , , criticism of _endymion_ by, , , . impression made on, by _poems_, keats's visit to, at oxford, , in his own words, _et sqq._ letters to, from keats, - _et sqq._, , , , , - , - and lockhart and the reviews, - , , memoranda of, on keats, - milton enthusiasm of, suitor to mariane reynolds, ; the withdrawal, support of, to keats in the battle of the critics, - , , - , on keats's theory of vowel sounds, , on keats when reading aloud, , _n._ baldwin's _pantheon_, keats's debt to, , _bards of passion_, ode (keats), form, metre, hints of belief in immortality in, - 'barry cornwall,' _see_ procter beaconsfield, earl of, beadsman, the, in _eve of st agnes_, , , - _& n._ beattie, james, poems of, beauly abbey, skulls in, verses on by brown and keats, , , - beaumont and fletcher, references by to the endymion myth, beaumont, sir george, and haydon, , and mrs siddons, beaumont, sir john, on the rime-beat in the heroic measure, , beauty, in art and in poetry, keats's views on, , , essential, striving for communion with, the true subject of _endymion_, _et passim_. over-comment on, and the loss of bloom, keats on, bebr salim, arabian tale of, beckford's _vathek_ familiar to keats, bedford, duke of, carved sarcophaguses owned by, _n._ bedhampton, keats's visits to, , _eve of st agnes_ written at, belfast, keats's flying visit to, _bells and pomegranates_ (browning), ben nevis, keats on his climb up, - _ben nevis, sonnet written upon the top of_ (keats), bentham, jeremy, and hunt, bentley, keats's postman landlord, , mrs, kindness of, _beppo_ (byron), bertha in _eve of st mark_, , , and in _cap and bells_, - _bertram_, a play (maturin), coleridge and, bideford, a keats as rector of, _biographia literaria_ (coleridge), criticism of, in _blackwood's_, on the poetic revolution, on wordsworth's poems, - bion's dirge on adonis, shelley's use of, blackwood, william, and the _edinburgh magazine_, _et sqq._; scott's countenance sought by, - ; taylor's encounter with, over the criticism on keats, - _blackwood's (edinburgh) magazine_ critical savagery of, and attitude to coleridge, hunt, keats and others, , , , - , - ; first article of the 'cockney school series' in, attacking hunt, ; attacks in, on keats, ; details of the policy of the magazine, its editors, &c., _ et sqq._; "z" articles in, - , - , , ; fatal duel due to, ; indignation of keats's friends, _et sqq._, _et sqq._, ; scott's attitude, - , - hazlitt's quarrel with, , and accusation of, as to the death of keats, impenitence, and further berating of keats by, - blake, william, drawings of, poems of, new note in, - blank verse, corruption of, th century, blundell's school, tiverton, boccaccio, influence of, on keats, - , - , , _& n._ , _n._ boiardo, keats's reference to, bolton-le-sands, keats at, _bookman, the_, of new york, haydon's 'christ's entry into jerusalem' reproduced and discussed in, _n._ books in keats's library, _n._, _n._, _n._, _n._ list of, compiled by woodhouse, - borghese, princess (pauline bonaparte), and severn, borghese vase, the, borghese zodiac, picture of, as inspiration to keats, borrowers, keats's difficulties due to, - , - , , bowles, william lisle, editor of pope, ; byron's controversy with, bowness, view of windermere from, bradley, a. c., lectures by, on keats's letters, on the influence of _alastor_ on _endymion_, bradley, henry, brawne, fanny, appearance and character of, , _& n._ keats's love-affair with, and its effects on him, _et sqq._, , , , - , , , , keats's love-letters to, _et sqq._, , , , - , - , - , letters of, to keats at rome, effect of on him, , , marriage of, milnes's error as to, on keats's memory, on her love and fears for keats, on the strength and expression of keats's passions, - brawne, mrs, , , , keats's stay with, , - , letters to, from keats, in quarantine, - severn, on keats's state in rome, - , - tragic fate of, bridal night lines, in _sleep and poetry_, tenderness of, bridges, robert, on keats's poetry, and its relation to wordsworth, - , - on _endymion_ parallel between and moore's _epicurean_, _n._ structure of the poem, _bright star_, sonnet (keats), a cry of the heart, - ; two forms of, - _britannia's pastorals_ (browne), as model to keats, , , , - , double-endings in, , - , echoes of, in keats's poems, , - , , , , lines in, on devon, endymion, - _& n._ _british critic_, on _endymion_, and on the _lamia_ volume, british institution, pictures seen by keats at, , , british museum, art treasures in, keats's knowledge of, and inspiration from, , , - , broadmayne, dorset, the keatses of, brougham, lord, challenge of, to the lowthers, support given by, to hunt, brown, charles, attitude of, to george keats, , and dilke, relations between, - , fairy tales, satiric, by, - , friendship of with keats, , , , biographical designs of, , scottish walking tour with keats, , , _et sqq._; _diaries_ of, _cited_, _& n._ keats's life with, _et sqq._ collaboration in writing, , , , , , _et sqq._, - keats's (temporary) indignation against, loan by, to keats, , second tour of in scotland, ; leading to absence at keats's departure for italy, , , letters to, from keats, _et sqq._, , - , , - satiric verses on, by keats, keats's poems transcribed by, _n._, _& n._ later life in italy, and death in new zealand, - on fanny brawne and her love for keats, ; and on her grief at his death, on the cause of keats's illness, , , on the influence of the _faerie queene_ on keats, on the ireby dancing-school, on keats's first sight of windermere, - on keats's state of mind and health (oct. ), _et sqq._; on the fatal chill, ; on keats as invalid, on the writing of the _ode to a nightingale_, - _& n._ browne, william, of tavistock, works of (_see also_ britannia's pastoral), keats's familiarity with, ; as affecting his style, , , browning, elizabeth barrett, tribute of to keats, - browning, robert, inspiration derived by from gift of poems of keats and shelley, rossetti's enthusiasm for, slow sale of his _bells and pomegranates_ series, _bulletin and review of the keats-shelley memorial_ (morris), _n._ burford bridge inn, keats's stay at, - , , , _endymion_ finished at, , - burnet's _history of his own time_, influence of, on keats, burney, fanny, _n._ burns, robert, an english, _see_ clare keats on, , - burton, robert (_see anatomy of melancholy_), and the legend of st agnes' eve, - burton-in-kendal, keats at, byron, lord allusion to, in _hyperion_, attitude of, to keats, , - , , hunt, , _n._, and the elgin marbles, poems of (_see also under_ names), , early influences on, and sources of inspiration, , keats's appreciation of, , and sonnet on, monetary gains of, verse forms used by, , reynolds's poem dedicated to, sovereignty of, as poet, , at shelley's cremation, on the effect of the reviews on keats, , _& see_ on _hyperion_, on leigh hunt, _n._, and on his _story of rimini_, departure for italy, death of, _byron's collected works_, prose, on reynolds in later life, _& n._ _calidore_ (keats), and its _induction_, , sentiments, form and metre of, , , callington, the keatses of, cambridge students, enthusiasm of for _adonais_, and for keats, , , campbell, john, of islay, on the goylen story, _n._ campbell, thomas, poet, as editor, poems of heroic couplet used in, jeffrey on, hunt on, camelford, the keatses around, camperdown, sea fight of, keats's uncle in, canterbury, effect of on keats, canova, severn's introduction to, _cap and bells, the; or, the jealousies_ (keats), written with brown, , , copying of, , echoes in, _& n._ first printed, idea inspiring, story, metre, tone, &c., , , , keats's discontent with, , , _& n._ lines on margin of, stanzas in, suggestive of queen caroline's arrival, carisbrooke, _endymion_ begun at, , , _n._ carlyle, thomas, on hunt, lamb and keats, caroline, queen, at dover, caroline poetry, an instance of keats's interest in, cary's _dante_, echoes of, by keats _n._ _castle builder, the_ (keats), a fragment, _castle of indolence, the_ (thomson), , 'cave of despair,' severn's competition picture, cave of quietude, in _endymion_, _cenci, the_ (shelley) gift of by shelley to keats, , _chaldee ms., the_, - ; scott on, chamberlayne, william, misuse of the heroic couplet by, - , _n._ _champion, the_, ; stage criticisms in, by keats, - chapman, george, _see also_ homer, hymn to apollo, hymn to pan, iliad, odyssey heroic couplet used by, ; lines illustrating, metre used by, fault in, strained rimes of, translation of homer by, as influencing keats, _et sqq._, , , character in men of power, and its absence in men of genius, keats on, charioteer theme, in _sleep and poetry_, - , , - _charis_ lyrics (jonson), metre of, 'charmian,' an east-indian, - , ; milnes's error on, charles ii., scott's handling of, chartier, alain, and _la belle dame sans merci_, , chatterton, and the rowley forgeries, - ; english of, and verse-flow, ; keats's admiration for, - , and sonnet on, , chaucer, geoffrey, poems of, echoes of, in _eve of st mark_, - , heroic couplet as used in, lines illustrating, - influence on keats, keats's studies in, , & _see_ _& n._ landor on, morris' exemplar, verse of, as 'translated' by dryden, - cheapside, no. , lodging of the keats brothers, , chichester, keats at, _chief of organic numbers_ (keats), origin of, _childe harold_ (byron), _christabel_ (coleridge), ; criticism of, in the _edinburgh review_, , ; tags from, used by keats, christie, j. h., , ; duel of, with scott, over the 'z' papers, , 'christopher north,' _see_ wilson 'christ's entry into jerusalem,' haydon's picture, , , ; keats on, ; private view of, keats at, various comments; keats's head painted in, - christ's hospital, reynolds's father's post at, church street, edmonton, keats's home at, circe, in _endymion_, _et sqq._ clare, john, _& n._ clarendon press edition of keats's poems , frontispiece of, _n._ claret, and game, keats on his liking for, clark, sir james, keats's doctor in rome, , , , , ; kindness of, with his wife, to keats, clarke, charles cowden, , ; keats' sonnet on when asleep over chaucer, _& n._ _epistle_ to (keats), - , and hunt, in prison, - relations with keats, , , , , _et sqq._, - , , ; introduction by, to hunt, , and to homer's poems, _et sqq._ keats's letter to, in dean st. days, recollections, on keats at a bear-baiting, - ; on keats's fight with a butcher boy, ; on keats at school, , - , and his successes, ; on keats's introduction to leigh hunt, - ; on keats's power of self-expression, ; on keats's reading poetry, - ; on keats as surgeon's apprentice, _et sqq._, and medical student, ; on keats's verse-writing to a given subject, ; on last sight of keats, ; on the publication of _poems_, , on t. keats senior, clarke, john, keats's schoolmaster, , , , clarke, mrs. charles cowden, on keats at her father's house, claude, pictures by, inspiring keats, , _n._, clive newcome and his friends on the victorian poets, - closed or stopped couplet system, the, _et sqq._ avoidance of, by keats, , _n._ croker's attitude to, clowes, messrs., and webb, - cockerell, sydney, on morris and the changes in _la belle dame sans merci_, 'cockney school,' articles on, in _blackwood's_, , , , , - _et sqq._, - ; effect of, , , _et sqq._ shelley included in, by maginn, cockneyism, verses by keats charged with, _n._ colburn's _new monthly magazine_, _see new monthly_ coleridge, samuel taylor, anatomical studies of, critical style of, friend of haydon, lack of negative capability in, keats on, lectures by, on shakespeare, poems of, , disuse by, of the older verse form, , , , echo of, in _endymion_, galignani's edition of, _n._, hazlitt's criticism on, , hunt's verdict on, rossetti's enthusiasm for, political change of view of, relations with wordsworth, , , ; strained, - on the poetic revolution, ; on the reviews and keats's death, ; on his walk with keats ('there is death in that hand'), - ; on wordsworth's poems, - college st., westminster, keats's stay in, - collins, william, poems of, '_come hither, all sweet maidens_,' _see on a picture of leander_ commonwealth and restoration poets, use of the heroic couplet by, with illustrations, _et sqq._ complete works of john keats, edited by h. buxton forman, referred to, , _n._ , _n._, _n._ , _n._, _n._ compound epithets, keats's felicity in, - _comus_ (milton), , ; echoes of, in _endymion_, ; keats's recitations from, _concordance_ to keats's poems, published by cornell university, constable, archibald, owner of the _edinburgh review_, , - relations with scott, , - cooke, thomas, translator of hesiod, coolness and refreshment in nature, preferred in keats's imagery, - cooper, george, cooper, sir astley, and keats, , copthall court, possible treasures in, cornell, _see_ concordance. _cornhill magazine_ for april, , _cited_ on coleridge's talk with keats, - _& n._ cornish origin of keats's father, fanny keats on, _corsair, the_ (byron), form used in, cotterell, charles, kindness of, to keats, , , cotterell, miss, , , , , , country ballads, wordsworth's, strained simplicity of, , couplet, closed, _versus_ free system, _et sqq._ courthope, w. j., judgment of, on keats, - cowley, abraham, use of the heroic couplet by, crabbe, george, use of the heroic couplet by, craven st., city road, keats's home at, crewe, earl of, owner of ms. of the _ode to a nightingale_, _n._ cripps, ----, haydon, and keats, criticism, early th century amenities of, - destructive, jeffrey on, personalities in, scott on, - croker, john wilson, criticisms by, on endymion, - tennyson's and keats's poems, _n._ '_crown, a, of ivy_,' sonnet (hunt), occasion of, cupid and psyche myth, sources of, open to keats, _curse, the, of kehama_ (southey), _curse, the, of minerva_ (byron), cybele, passage on, in sandys's ovid's _metamorphoses_, compared with that in _endymion_, - cynthia and endymion story, keats's love for, , dancing, country school of, at ireby, described by brown, and by keats, - dante, poems of eagle in, influence of, on keats, _n._ , , keats's travelling book, , rossetti's love for, sonnet-beginnings used by, _davideis, the_ (cowley), metre of, dean st., no. , borough, keats's first independent abode, 'death of alcibiades,' severn's picture for competition, death and dying, keats's allusions to, in his poems, , , , deathbed feelings of a poet, keats on, in the _epistle to george keats_, decay of pagan beauty, keats's sonnet on, _see to leigh hunt_ _decameron_, influence of, on keats, _see_ boccaccio decasyllabic couplet, _see_ heroic couplet defence of poesy (shelley), miltonian passage in, & _n._ delight, the spirit animating keats's poetry, - 'della cruscan' school, 'dentatus,' picture by haydon, de quincey, thomas, as critic, , on keats, and his poetry, , and shelley's poetry, _descent, the, of liberty, a masque_ (hunt), de sélincourt, professor e., editorial work of, on keats's poems, on _endymion_ 'four elements' theory, 'moon' passage in, on _eve of st agnes_ 'corbels' passage in, _n._ on _hyperion_, the scale of, destructiveness of nature, keats's lines on, de vere, aubrey, devonshire, keats's visit to, _et sqq._; second visit planned, the keats of, , de wint, p., dilke, charles wentworth, friendship of, with keats and brown, - , , , - , , , , , , george keats exonerated by, house of, letters to, from keats, on supporting himself by his pen, on tom keats's illness, literary tastes and work of, - , editorship of the _athenaeum_, , relations of, with the brawnes, on james rice, views of, on keats's attachment to fanny brawne, _n._, dilke, mrs c. w., ; on the fairy tales competition, ; on keats, on his return from scotland, dilke, sir charles, keats collection given by, to hampstead public library, _n._, _n._ owner of keats's sosibio vase tracing, _n._ dilke, william, _n._ _divine comedy_ (dante), influence of, on keats, dodsley, james, 'old plays' by, dilke's continuation of, _don estehan_ (llanos), _don giovanni_, pantomime on, keats's criticism on, _don juan_ (byron), keats on, , metre of, reference in, to keats, , as killed by the reviews, donne, dr. john, methods of, with the heroic couplet, downer, a. c., _the odes of keats_ by, urn illustrated in, _n._ dragon-world and its hundred eyes, keats on, _dramatic specimens_ (lamb), fuller's words on fancy, quoted in - '_draught, a, of sunshine_' ('_hence burgundy_,' &c.) (keats), lines in, on the madness of song, drayton, michael, influence of, on keats, seen in _endymion_, , _epistle to reynolds_, _hyperion_, sprightly lines by, _n._ two poetic versions by, of the endymion theme, echoes of, in keats's poem, _et sqq._ use by, of heroic couplet, - _dream, a, after reading dante's episode of paolo and francesca_, sonnet (keats), drummond of hawthornden, william, references of, to endymion in his sonnets, dryden, john influence of, on keats, seen in _drear-nighted december_, _isabella_, use by, of heroic couplet, 'duchess of dunghill,' keats on, duncan, admiral, durdle door, duverger's french grammar owned by keats, _n._ eagle, the, in _endymion_ and other poems, _earthly paradise, the_ (morris), _eclectic review, the_, reviews by, of keats's poems _lamia_, _poems_, _eden, the, of imagination_ (reynolds), edgeworth, maria, and hunt, _edinburgh magazine_ on the _lamia_ volume, - _edinburgh monthly magazine_, _see blackwood's_ _edinburgh review_, politics, publisher and rival of, critical ferocity in, hazlitt in, on keats as killed by the reviews, - influence of, jeffrey's article in, on _endymion_, and on the _lamia_ volume, - reynolds's contributions to, edmonton, third home at, of keats, , , eglantine villa, shanklin, _n._ _election of a poet laureate_ (duke of buckingham), election contest, keats's contact with, , elgin, earl of, _n._; and the parthenon marbles, - elgin marbles, the, haydon's defence of the removal of, - , hunt's sonnet on, keats's reveries among, keats's sonnets on, - eliot, george, phrase of, on the word love, _n._ elizabethan poets and poetry, keats's introduction to, influence of, on keats's poems, , _et sqq._, , , , , _et sqq._, , , keats's studies of, spirit of, reborn in keats, use in, of the couplet, closed and free systems, , illustrations, _et sqq._, elizabethan versions of the endymion story, _et sqq._ ellis, george, and the legend of st. agnes' eve, _n._ elmes, james, and the _ode to a nightingale_, "enchanted castle," by claude, inspiration of, to keats, , _& n._; owner of _n._ _endimion_ (gombauld), parallels to, in keats's poem, _& n._ _endimion_ (lyly), edited by dilke, ; allegory in, _n._ _endimion and phoebe_ (drayton), ; echoed by keats, endings of lines closed, keats's avoidance of, double, keats's relinquishment of, end moor, the toper at, , end rime-syllables chaucerian, - elizabethan, _et sqq._ endymion, the greek myth of, _& n._ browne's reference to, - _& n._ in elizabethan poetry, _et sqq._ in _sleep and poetry_, _endymion_ (keats), _n._, , , , affinities of lines in, with those in other poems, _n._, _et sqq._, allegorical strain in, _et sqq._ analysis of, _et sqq._ reason for undertaking, - ascending scale in, - autumnal scene in, bailey's praise, and keats's apathy, beauties in, mixed with the faults, _et sqq._ begun at carisbrooke, , , _& n._; opening lines of, , partly written at oxford, - , ; progress of, , , keats's depression during, , and letters on to friend whilst writing, , , , study of, helpful to understanding the poem, brought to a close at burford bridge, - , ; last lines of, - ; copying of, by keats, , ; revision and correction of, for press, ; keats's letters on to taylor, ; seen through the press, book i., book ii., book iii., book iv., characters in, , _et alibi_ contemporary influences seen in, _et sqq._ date of publication, deeper speculative and symbolic meanings of, and of keats's other poems, key to, - dramatic promise of, elizabethan influence seen in, , _et sqq._, - , _et sqq._ english spirit in, exordium of, famous line in, _& n._ faults and flaws in, _et sqq._, , , spiritual, _et sqq._, technical, _et sqq._ inseparable from its beauties, first title of, germs of, - , _n._ hunt's views on, - , - , ideas in, in embryo, _n._ ironic power, promise of, in, as keats's test of his own poet-hood, ; his own judgment on the poem, long meditated, love as treated in, , , , , lyrics in, compared with their sources, _et sqq._ models for, jeffrey on, moods and aims governing the writing of, new sympathies awakened, pioneer work, keats on, poetic melody of, poetry of, qualities, affinities and defects of, _et sqq._ preface to, , modesty of, reference in, to the pymmes brook, reviews on, _et sqq._, , , - , - , _& n._ , , _n._ keats on, - source of the indian maiden in book iv., sources of inspiration, _et sqq._ study on, by mrs f. m. owen, subject: analysis of, , keats on, symbolism of, _et sqq._, , ; the four elements theory, - , error of, taylor's purchase of copyright of, true meaning of, endymion sarcophagus, from italy, at woburn, _n._ enfield, clarke's school at, _et sqq._; keats's attachment to, _et sqq._, and lines on, , enfield chase, beauties of, englefield, sir henry, and the _story of rimini_, english character of keats's poems, jeffrey on, english heroic metre, leigh hunt's effort to revive, - english historical portraits, show of keats at, english literature, hunt's predilections in, english poetry, history of, lines on, in _sleep and poetry_, - english poets, keats's attendance at hazlitt's lectures on, , english romance poetry, rossetti's love for, english spring flowers, keats's delight in, english writers, why so fine? keats on, - _enid_ (tennyson), a keats reminiscence in, epic poetry, the obvious model for, _epicurean, the_ (moore), model for, _n._ _epipsychidion_ (shelley), possible echoes in, of _endymion_, , _epistle to charles cowden clarke_ (keats), - , _epistle to george felton mathew_ (keats), , _& n._, , _epistle to henry reynolds_ (drayton), sprightly lines from, _epistle to maria gisborne_ (shelley), versification in, _epistle to my brother george_ (keats), , - _epistles_ (keats) group of (_see_ the foregoing), in _poems_, metre and form of, _epithalamion_ (spenser), lines in, on endymion, ; lyric effect in, epping forest, ; reminiscences of in keats's poems, _essays in criticism_, arnold's essay on keats reprinted in, _n._ _essays and studies_ (suddard), _n._ _essays and tales_ (sterling), praise in, of keats, _& n._ i, _n._ ethereal musings, keats on, eton, famous headmaster of, _n._ woodhouse at, eve of st agnes, legend of, jonson on, _eve, the, of st agnes_ (keats), , , , ; an achievement, , ; written at bedhampton, - ; read to cowden clarke, , feast of fruits in, miltonic parallel to, hunt's picture from, lines in, reminiscent of wieland's _oberon_, _n._ poetic scope and method of, _et sqq._ place of, in english poetry, , publication plans, shelley's delight in, some changes made in, sources, story, form, beauties, and metre of, _et sqq._, _eve, the, of st mark_ (keats), , , , bridge between chaucer and morris, date of, , , incomplete, included in milnes's book, sent to george keats, subject, metre, form; echoes in, relation of, to the p.r.b., and keats's own words on, - evocation, and exposition, the genius of keats and of wordsworth seen in, - , , - ewing, mr, kindness of, to keats, _examiner, the_, founded by john hunt, , edited from prison by leigh hunt, influence of, on keats, keats's critique in, on reynolds's skit on _peter bell_, poems published in, by keats, _& n._, , , , - , reynolds, - shelley, reynolds' _endymion_ article reissued in, shelley's _alastor_ praised in, on the new movement in poetry as shown in 'poems,' - _excursion, the_ (wordsworth), , effect of, on shelley, and on keats, - passage in, on greek mythology, keats on, , , exordium to book iii. of _endymion_, _fabliaux ou contes_, by le grand; way's translation of, _& n._ '_faded the flower_,' lines on fanny brawne, date and self-expression in, - _faerie queene_ (spenser, _q.v._), influence of, on keats, - , , , , fairfax, edward, italian stanza form used by, _fairies of the four elements_ (keats), words for operatic chorus, , _faithful shepherdess_ (fletcher), the endymion passage in, influence of, on keats, , , , metre of, falmouth district, the name jennings common in, '_fame like a wayward girl_,' sonnet (keats), echoes in, - _fancy_ (keats), , date, - metre, form, subject and inspiration of, , - published in the _lamia_ volume, _fancy, the_, a medley (reynolds), _n._ _faust_ (goethe), opening chorus of, feast of fruits, in _eve of st agnes_, miltonic parallel to, _hyperion_, - , _feast of the poets_ (hunt), earlier skits on which modelled, keats's allusion to, treatment in, of scott, , 'feel,' as used in '_in drear-nighted december_,' _n._ fetter lane, coleridge's lectures on shakespeare in, _filocolo, il_ (boccaccio), compared with _the eve of st agnes_, - _& n._ finch, colonel, finsbury, earliest home of keats in, fingal's cave, keats on, in prose and verse, fitzgerald, edward, admiration of, for keats, on the poetry of keats and shelley, fitzwilliam, earl, help from, to keats, fladgate firm of solicitors, reynolds with, fletcher, john, endymion passage by, influence seen in keats' poems, in _endymion_, in _sleep and poetry_, metre used by, faults in, _floire et blancheflor_, metrical romance on, in relation to _isabella_, - florence, artists and literati at, - , milnes's meeting at, with brown, _floure, the, and the lefe_ (pseudo-chaucer), echoes of, in keats's poems, , keats's sonnet on, _& n._ flowers, english spring, keats's lines on, - _foliage, 'laureation'_ sonnets published in, foot measure of stanzas, _& n._ forest scene and festival, in _endymion_, _et sqq._ forman, h. buxton, _complete works of john keats_ edited by, references to, , _n. & see footnotes_ help of, to señora llanos (_née_ keats), on the '_bright star_' sonnet, _n._ on the corbels, in _eve of st agnes_, _n._ on an echo of dryden by keats, _n._ on mrs lindon's letter on keats, _n._ on a reading in the _ode to fanny_, _n._ on a _tendresse_ felt for keats, french literature, the less well-known, keats's reading in, _n._ frere, hookham, ; use by, of the _ottava rima_, frere, john, and coleridge's meeting with keats in , - fuller, on fancy, - galignani's edition of the poems of shelley, coleridge, and keats ( ), '_in drear-nighted december_,' printed in, _n._ 'gallipots' article, in _blackwood's_, - galloway, keats in, _et sqq._ _garden of proserpine_ (swinburne), metre of, _garden of florence_ (reynolds), garnett, richard, on shelley's letters and those of keats, _gem, the, 'in a drearnighted december_' printed in, _n._ george, prince-regent, "baited" in _the twopenny post_, george iii., poetry of his period, gibson, john, the sculptor, and severn, gifford, william, editor of the _quarterly review_, critical ferocity of, hazlitt's _letter to_, shelley's letter of remonstrance to (unsent) on the hostile criticism on keats, , - _gil blas_ (le sage), and the word 'sangrado,' _& n._ _gipsies, the_ (wordsworth), keats on, gisborne, mr. & mrs., and keats, - , '_give me a golden pen_,' sonnet (keats), in _poems_, '_give me women, wine and snuff_,' couplets (keats), gladstone, rt hon. w. e., and severn, glaucus, in _endymion_, ; magic robe of, possible source of, , _et sqq._ gleig, bishop, gleig, chaplain-general, , , glencroe and loch awe, keats on, _& n._, '_glory and loveliness have pass'd away_,' sonnet to leigh hunt (keats), , '_god of the golden bow_,' in _hymn to apollo_ (keats), _godfrey of bulloigne_ (tasso, trs. fairfax), metre of, godwin, mary (mrs shelley), godwin, william, influence of, on shelley, primer of mythology by, _n._, on keats's poems, goethe circle, at weimar, lockhart's intimacy with, , _golden ass_ of apuleius, as possible inspiration to keats, _& n._ _golden treasury_ series edition of keats's poems, goldsmith's _greek history_, haydon's gift of, to keats, gollancz, prof. israel, , goylen, ruins and legend of, gray, thomas, poems of, ; influence of, on keats, verse-forms used by, great smith st., the dilkes in, '_great spirits now on earth are sojourning_,' sonnet to haydon (keats), , ; echoes of, in _endymion_, ; included in _poems_, _greek history_ (goldsmith), given by haydon to keats, greek liberation, byron, and trelawny, , mythology, the endymion legend in, _n._ keats's delight in , , , and poetical use of, - , _et sqq._, - , , , ; sources of his knowledge of, , , ; his talk on, ; its vitality to him, revitalization of, in europe, - religion, and its evolution, wordsworth on, - , sculpture, _see_ elgin marbles influence of, on keats, _n._, _et sqq._ style in poetry, keats on, green, joseph henry, _& n._, green, miss e. m., _a talk with coleridge_, edited by _cornhill magazine_, (april ), _cited_, - _& n._ _guy mannering_ (scott), guy's hospital, keats's student days at, _& n._ '_had i a man's fair form_,' sonnet (keats), included in _poems_, hadrian, age of, parthenon sculptures assigned to by the dilettanti, '_hadst thou lived in days of old_' (keats), valentine for miss wylie, metre of, , , halecret, meaning of, _& n._ hallam, arthur, and the poems of shelley and keats, hammond, thomas, surgeon, keats's apprenticeship to, _& n._ , _n._, hampstead, hunt's home at, keats's pleasure at, - keats's life at, , , _et sqq._, hampstead public library, the dilke keats collection at, _n._, _n._ _handful of pleasant delites_ (robinson), keats's possible knowledge of, _& n._ happiness, keats on, _happy is england_, sonnet (keats), ; included in _poems_, _happy warrior, the_ (wordsworth), form of, hare, julius, sterling's letter to, on the poems of tennyson & keats, haslam, william, the "oak friend" of keats, , , , in love, keats's mockery on, letters to, from severn, on keats's health in , ; on the voyage to italy, _et sqq._, and keats's life there, _et sqq._; on money troubles in rome, - and the milnes biography, on his love for keats, - haydon, benjamin, , appearance, as artist, controversialist, writer, - , characteristics, , _et sqq._, and the elgin marbles, - , friends of, and his quarrels with them, , , , friendship with keats, beginning and course of, _et sqq._, , , , , keats's sunday evenings with, and meeting with wordsworth during, _et sqq._ in great marlborough st., , letters from, to keats, on their friendship, - ; on prayer, , - letters to, from keats, on dissatisfaction with _endymion_, ; on haydon's painting, ; on a new romance in his mind, letters to and from keats, on a loan, - , - , - , - ; _see also_ and the _ode to a nightingale_, pictures by, "christ's entry into jerusalem," heads of his friends in, , , exhibition of, keats at, keats's estimation of, pseudo-vegetarianism of, and shelley, a heated dessert-talk between, sonnets addressed to, by keats, , , , , reynolds, wordsworth, sources of his accounts of keats used in present volume, on the dinner when keats met wordsworth, lamb and kingston, &c., _et sqq._; on keats as a child, on keats's eyes, on keats, as killed by the reviews, on keats's lack of decision, on keats's plunge into dissipation, - on his last sight of keats, - on reading shakespeare with keats, on _sleep and poetry_, on scott's beautiful smile, _n._ suicide of, '_haydon! forgive me that i cannot speak_,' sonnet (keats), on the elgin marbles, hazlitt, william, appearance and conversation of, attitude to, of _blackwood_, as critic, , , ; ferocity of, , , ; style of, , friendship of, with haydon, keats, , invective of, against gifford, lectures by, on english poets, , ; keats at, taste of, keats on, , wrath of, on the _blackwood_ reviews, , on haydon's "christ's entry into jerusalem," , _n._ on keats, as killed by the reviews, - on keats's verses, on shelley, on wordsworth, _aet._ , on wordsworth's conversation on poetic subjects, heine, heinrich, _heliconia_ (ed. park), _n._ hemans, felicia, verse of, '_hence burgundy, claret and port,' see draught of sunshine_ _henry vi._ (shakespeare), as played by kean, keats's criticism on, , hercules, triumphs of, figured on sarcophaguses, _& n._ _hero and leander_ (marlowe), heroic couplet as used in, metre of, 'heroic' couplet, the, history of _et sqq._ keats's use of, , _et sqq._, hessey, --, _see also_ taylor and hessey indignation of, at the _blackwood_ reviews, letters to, from keats, on the criticisms on _endymion_, and the defence by his friends, taylor, on his joust with w. blackwood, over keats's poems, - hesiod's _theogony_, the titans in, hilton, --, ; help from, for keats, holman, louis a., and haydon's "christ's entry into jerusalem," _n._ on the source of the p.r.b., holmes, edward, on keats as a boy, - _holy living and dying_ (jeremy taylor), keats soothed by, in rome, _holy state_ (fuller), on fancy, - homer, chapman's translation of, keats's delight in, and sonnet on, _et sqq._; influence seen in _endymion_, on the hyperion story, homeric _hymn to pan_ in chapman's translation, lines from, - hood, mrs. thomas (_née_ reynolds), hood, thomas, _n._, ; parodies written by, with reynolds, hope, lines on, in _endymion_, horace, influence of, on keats, _& n._ horne, richard hengist. schoolfellow of keats, ; on keats while with mr hammond, houghton, lord (_see also_ milnes), poems by keats, posthumously published by, - _& nn._ _la belle dame_ given from brown's transcript, houghton mss., referred to, _n._, _n._, _n._, _n._, _n._, _n._, _et alibi_ _house of fame_ (chaucer), the eagle in, ; influence seen in _the eve of st mark_, - _'how many bards gild the lapses of time_,' sonnet (keats), date and text of, echoes in, technique of, human life, keats's reflections on, human nature, keats's increasing interest in, _et sqq._ humour and wit, keats on, _humphrey clinker_ (smollett), preferred by keats to _the antiquary_ (scott), _hungarian brothers, the_ (porter), hunt, james henry leigh, & _n._, appearance and charm of, - attacks on, in _blackwood's_, , - , - , attitude of, to _blackwood's_, , scott's poems, , , wordsworths 'simple life' poems, champion of poetic revolution, , , , classical translations by, contrasts in his diction and breeding, , & _n._ as critic, - , , , criticisms on, by keats, , , - faults of style, , & _n._, , financial ineptitude of, _et alibi_ friendship of, with cowden clarke, _et sqq._ haydon, ; quarrels of, keats, and influence on him, , , _et sqq._, , _et sqq._, , , , , , , haydon's caution on, and keats's reply, - keats's changed attitude to, - kindness to keats in his illness ( ), , , ; and renewed friendliness, intercoronation episode, and his verses thereon, - , shelley, _et sqq._, and influence on him, ; present at his cremation, imprisonment of, , , keats's sonnet on his release, keats's first published work dedicated to, , , - in later life, letter from, to severn at rome, on the love of keats's friends for him, - letter to, from keats, of criticism, life at hampstead, _et sqq._, _et sqq._ lines from _cap and bells_ published by, literary industry of, and writings, , memories of keats in his writings, at novello's, , papers edited by, _see examiner, indicator, reflector_ as poet, poems by (_see under their_ titles), , , - , anapaestic verses by, to friends, , praise by, of _alastor_, in _the examiner_, religious views of, review by, of _lamia_ volume, - , - _poems_, - sketch of his origin, life and career, _et sqq._ and _the eve of st agnes_, tributes of, to keats, , views of, on _endymion_, and vexation caused thereby, - , - , young poets, promise of, noted in article of that title, , on the feast in _st agnes' eve_, - on _hyperion_, on _isabella_; _or_, _the pot of basil_, on keats's attitude to shelley, - , on keats's eyes, on keats and his poetry, on _la belle dame sans merci_, on _sleep and poetry_, _et sqq._ on wordsworth at , hunt, john, and the _examiner_, hunt, mrs leigh (_née_ kent), , hunt, w. holman, a keats worshipper, _huon of bordeaux_, source of shakespeare's oberon and titania, _n._ hyginus, notes to, in _auctores mythographi_, on moneta, & _n._ _hymn, a_, _to apollo_ (keats), _n._, _hymn to intellectual beauty_ (shelley), influence of, on keats, inspirations of, publication of, _hymn to pan_ (chapman), , - _hymn to pan_ (_endymion_), quality and affinities of, _et sqq._ ode-form of, wordsworth on, , _hymn to pan_ (shelley), _hymns of homer_ (chapman's version), influence seen in _endymion_, _hyperion_ (keats), , ; attitude to, of the critics, blank verse of, dante's influence seen in, de quincey's criticism on ( ), - & _n._ designed as a romance, its scheme and scale, subject, sources, model, lines from, fine start, difficulties, and abandonment, _et sqq._ epic quality of, feast of fruits in, - , fire referred to, in, first intimations of, , , ; first draft work on, , , , germ of lines in, keats's change of mind on, , miltonism of, , mistake on, set right, never finished, remodelling of, , , - ; errors made in, ; the induction, _et sqq._; leading ideas in, _et sqq._ shelley on, transcendental cosmopolities of, hunt on, _idiot boy, the_ (wordsworth), '_i had a dove_,' lines for music (keats), _iliad, the_, chapman's, keats's delight in, and sonnet on, , & _n._, , , , , ; echoes of, in other poems, , metre of, strained rimes of, _imagination and fancy_ (hunt), keats memories in, imagination and truth, relation between, elucidated by adam's dreams in _paradise lost_, , _imagines_, of philostratus, _n._ _imitation of spenser_ (keats), ; published in _poems_, immortality, keats's attitude to, , , , indiaman surgeoncy, keats's plan concerning, - , indian maiden, in _endymion_, _et sqq._; lines _cited_, - ; echoes in, and inspiration for, , _et sqq._ _indicator, the_, lines from _cap and bells_ published in, _la belle dame_ published in, - '_in drear-nighted december_,' an achievement, date and association of, _et sqq._ model of, , text, versions, _n._ induction to _calidore_, , , , _endymion_, the intended, , _hyperion_, _et sqq._ ingpen, roger, his edition of the _letters of percy bysshe shelley_ cited, & _n._ invention and imagination as the prime endowments of a poet, keats's insistence on, inverary, woods at, keats on, iona, keats's visit to, ireby, keats at, brown's account of the dancing, school at, and keats's of the same, & _n._, _irish melodies_ (moore), money-worth to the poet, _isabella_; _or_, _the pot of basil_. _a story from boccaccio_ (keats), , , , , ; an achievement, apostrophes and invocations in, - beauties of, , - , and horror turned to beauty, _et sqq._, date of, , , digging scene in, lamb on, dryden echoes in, included in the _lamia_ volume, , keats's distaste for, , latin usage in, lines in, on the bitter-sweet of love, metre of, millais' picture from, reynolds's boccaccio tales intended for issue with, - , , procter's poem on the same subject, shelley's delight in, story of, lamb on, reynolds on, - wilson on ( ), _isle of palms, the_ (wilson), isle of wight, keats's visits to, - , , _et sqq._, '_i stood tip-toe upon a little hill_' (keats), cupid and psyche reference in, date of, , , included in _poems_, influence on, of a passage in _the excursion_, metre, diction and subject of, - planned as induction to _endymion_, , references in, to the moon, , scene described in, italian attitude to the sick, literature, hunt's preferences in, keats's studies in, , primitives, keats's appreciation of, italy, winter in, planned for keats, , , and undertaken, , journey to, illness and death of keats, _et sqq._ _it is an awful mission_ (keats), lines quoted, '_it is a lofty feeling_,' sonnet (hunt), occasion of, jacobean poetry, influence of, seen in _endymion_, , , _n._ james i., jasmine bower scene in _endymion_, a flaw in the poem, - jeffrey, francis, editor of the _edinburgh review_, ; as critic, , on keats's poems, - , , on shelley's poems, jeffrey, miss, letters to, from keats, on going as ship's doctor, - ; on writing the _ode to indolence_, jeffrey, mrs, and her daughters, keats's friendship with, jeffrey, mrs (mrs g. keats), and the letters of keats to his brother, jennings, a common name in cornwall, jennings, captain midgley john, of the royal marines, uncle of the poet, , , jennings, frances (mrs t. keats, _q.v._, later mrs rawlings), mother of the poet, jennings, john, grandfather of the poet, , will and bequests of, , & _n._ jennings, john, of penryn, jennings, mrs john, grandmother of keats, character of, legacy of, to keats, , & _n._ trustees appointed by, for the keats children, - death of, & _n._ . jennings, mrs midgley john, lawsuit by, as affecting keats, , johnson, dr samuel, ; tour of, in the highlands, on greek mythology, on sheridan's pension, jones, mrs, the mysterious, jonson, ben, poems of, influence of on keats, , , , life of, keats on, metre used by, ; faults in, use by, of the heroic couplet, _joseph and his brethren_ (wells), enthusiasm for, of swinburne and rossetti, 'judgment of solomon,' picture by haydon, _julian and maddalo_ (shelley), junius, taylor an authority on, 'junkets,' keats's nickname, kean, edmund, , departure to america, , dramatic powers of, in shakespearean parts, keats's criticisms on, - keast, thomas, of st agnes' parish, cornwall, keate, catherine, keate, dr., headmaster of eton, _n._ keats, edward, keats family of dorsetshire, , , keats family (the poet's) brotherly affection in, , , , , , - , , , , , , , keats, frances mary (fanny), sister of the poet (later llanos, _q.v._), , inheritance of, & _n._, keats's affection for, letters to, from keats, charm of, ; on being friends, and on the story of _endymion_, - ; on dancing, - ; on fine weather, - ; on going to the isle of wight, ; on going as a ship's doctor, ; on his health and on _otho the great_, ; on his idleness, ; in illness, ; on keeping well, ; on the scotch tour, marriage of, verses addressed to, by keats, - visit to, by keats, keats, george, brother of the poet, , , , , ; at school, biographical references to, in order of date business life of, ; money troubles of, - ; and the publishers of the _poems_, ; at teignmouth, with tom, ; marriage and emigration of, , , - ; business troubles of, ; keats's generosity to, ; visit of, to england, and keats's further generosity, - ; good news from, ; inheritance of, _n._; death of, brotherly devotion of, to keats, , , , - , ; keats on, brown's indignation with, , , ; proved unjust, character of, , letters to, from keats, and keats's journal letters to him and his wife, - , , , ; on becoming a ship's surgeon, ; on being a poet, and on _endymion_ as the test of this, - ; on his defenders, ; on the hostile reviews and on his reading, and idleness, _et sqq._; on his brotherly love, , , ; on miss brawne, ; on sea passage to london, value of, _et sqq._ wealth of topics in ( ), _et sqq._, on his brother as a boy, on his grandfather and mother, on keats's temper, keats, john, the poet acquaintance of, with chaucer, _n._, and with the elizabethans (_q.v._), appearance of, at different dates, , , , , , , , , , , , , , _n._, eyes, , _n._, , height, , , portraits of, by haydon, severn, , , , appreciation by, of wordsworth's poems, , - attitude of, to criticism, _et sqq._, love, , , , , , - , _et sqq._, _passim_, , & _n._ scenery, , _et sqq._ scott's writings, women, , - , , , , - biographical projects of friends, - biographies, appreciation and collections of his works, _et sqq._ memoir of, by monckton milnes, biographical references in order of date - parentage, birth and family, , _et sqq._; school days, _et sqq._; boyish amusements, his lines on, , ; industry, , and successes, ; apprenticeship to mr hammond, surgeon, & _n._ _et sqq._, silence of, on this period, ; beginnings of poetry-writing, , , influences, , _et sqq._, vocation first felt, , - life as medical student, , & _n._, , _et sqq._; the doctor's life abandoned, , ; notebook of, & _n._ ; friendships made and renewed, (_see also_ friends, _infra_), with cowden clarke, ; with leigh hunt, - _et sqq._, _et alibi_, effect of the friendship with hunt on his career, , _et sqq._, friendships, formed through hunt, _et sqq._; the laurel crown episode and his verses thereon then, and later, , - , ; verse-writing on a given subject, with hunt, _et sqq._; at margate, the _epistles_ written from, ; first reading of chapman's homer, the great sonnet written on it, _et sqq._; walk of, to the poultry, _n._; haydon's acquaintance made, ; other new friendships, _et sqq._; social surroundings, - ; social surroundings, _aet._ , - ; at a bear fight, - ; growing passion for the poetic life, first book, _poems_ (_q.v._), published, _et sqq._, _et sqq._; new publishers found, and new friends gained, _et sqq._; stay in the isle of wight, shakespeare studies and work on _endymion_, during, _et sqq._; visit to canterbury, effect of, ; visit to bailey at oxford, described by the latter, _et sqq._; stay at burford bridge, , _endymion_ finished at, , ; end of first phase of mind and art of, dec. -june dramatic criticism undertaken, _et sqq._, life at hampstead, , meeting with wordsworth, ; stay at teignmouth, _et sqq._, ; marriage and emigration of his brother george, _et sqq._ june -june the scottish tour with brown, _et sqq._, and its effect on his health, _et sqq._, , ; the attacks on him in _blackwood_, and the _quarterly review_, _et sqq._; the defence by his friends, , _et sqq._, _et sqq._; effects of, _et sqq._, , , , , , ; the nursing of tom keats till his death, - ; the attraction of 'charmian,' - ; life with brown at wentworth place, _et sqq._; work on _hyperion_, , , ; harassed by borrowers, , _et sqq._, - ; gift to, from an unknown admirer, ; meeting with fanny brawne and his love for her, _et sqq._, _passim_, , , ; financial position of, - , - , lightened by brown, ; fight of, with a butcher-boy, - & _n._; idleness, and work, _et sqq._, meeting with coleridge, - , unsettlement in health and plans, _et sqq._ june -feb. stay at shanklin and work on _lamia_ and _king otho_, _et sqq._; love letters from, to fanny brawne, _et sqq._; stay at winchester, , ; letters from, _et sqq._; determination to work for the press, ; his financial position, ; attempted parting from brown, stay with the dilkes and return to brown at hampstead, - ; collaboration with brown, _et sqq._, ; fluctuating spirits of, before his seizure, ; hard work, - , ; inward sufferings, _et sqq._; laudanum--taking by ( ), , , _et sqq._; financial position, at this time, ; trouble and health failure, _et sqq.;_ work of this period, _et sqq.;_ the fatal chill, , ; invalid life, _et sqq._; letters from his sick bed, ; slight improvement, ; relapses, ; at kentish town, , , ; shelley's invitation to italy, - ; work published while at kentish town, - ; the _lamia_ volume issued, _et sqq._, the reviews again severe, _et sqq._; stay with the brawnes, , ; wintering in italy decided on, with severn as companion, - ; the voyage, _et sqq._; life in naples, _et sqq._, and in rome, ; his 'posthumous existence' , , ; the last days, _et sqq._; choice by, of his own epitaph, , - ; death, , and after, _et sqq._; burial place and memorial stone, , - ; the 'might-have been' had he lived, _et sqq._; posthumous attacks on, in, and by _blackwood_, - , de quincey, - & _n._, and _quarterly review_, - ; rare allusion by, to the reviews, ; shelley's lament for, in _adonais_, - character and characteristics admiration of, for chatterton, - artistic tastes of, , , - , in boyhood, _et sqq._; in young manhood, , brotherly affection of, , , , , , , , , - , _see also_ keats, fanny, george, and tom contrasted with shelley, - conversation of, - , _n._ devotion of, to his mother, , - duality of, , early tendency to rhyming, feeling of, for the poetry of the past, genius of, - , , - , , his own statements on, , - , , , , indecision, indefiniteness and variableness of, - , , , , , , , - , interest of, in history and politics, keenness of perception, late awakening of literary proclivities, limitations due to social setting, love of english spring flowers, - liberty, foundations of, the moon, , - , , - _et sqq._ nature, and its expression in his poems, , , , - , , , , , - , , , , - , _et sqq._, _et sqq._, , as lover, seen in his letters, _et sqq._ loyalty to his given word, manner, manners, , , _n._ as mimic, - modesty, , , morbidity of temperament, , , , , , - morals, naturalness and simplicity, perceptiveness, - pride, , , pugnacity as schoolboy, _et sqq._, , in later years, reading, and reading gifts of, , wide range of, religious indefiniteness, , , reserve and inward bitterness ( ), , sensitiveness as to his origin, - skill of, in friendship, social qualities, powers and taste, - as sportsman, temper of, tender-heartedness &c., thirst for knowledge, , , 'vein of flint and iron' in, , voice, , chief agent in revitalization of greek mythology, _et sqq._ critics and commentators of, as dramatist, _et sqq._ epitaph of, chosen by himself, , effect of, on public opinion on his poems, - eulogists of, - fame of, slow growth and spread of, , _et sqq._; triumph of, , ; forecasts on its disability, - favourite flowers of, friends and friendships of, _see also_ names of friends estrangement from, in illness, indignation of, at the reviews, _et sqq._, _et sqq._, love of his friends, _et sqq._, loyalty of, long surviving, heir of the elizabethans, italian studies of, , letters from, and to, _see_, chiefly, _under_ names of correspondents, _and epistles_ bradley's lectures on, compared with shelley's, dr. garnett on, on _endymion_, , , , value of, in the study of the poem, journal-letters from, to george keats, value of, _et sqq._ riches of, _et sqq._ self-revelation in, - , library of books in, _n._, _n._, _n._ , _n._ list of, _et sqq._ poems and verses by, _see also, and chiefly, under_ names achievements, _et sqq._ beauties in, charm of, - cockneyism charged against (_see also_ cockney school), _n._ collected editions of first english, forman's, , , & _see_ footnotes galignani's, _n._, milnes's, , _et sqq._ concordance to, published by cornell university, copy of, carried about by shelley, , couplet as used in, _et sqq._, - , _et sqq._, _n._ criticism of, easy, - echoes in, of earlier poets, , _et passim_ early writings, - elizabethan influence on, , essential principle of versification, faults avoided in, faults existing in, , , , _et sqq._, , , , - , , , , felicitous compound epithets in, - flippant note in, fragments and experiments, , _et sqq._ insight into keats's mind and genius from, _et sqq._ fugitive pieces, - genius in, evocative not expository, - , , - gift of, to browning and the effect, growing appreciation of, , _et sqq._ inspiration of, from art, , , , , , , _n._, , - & _n._, , nature, - , - sources, nature of, - last lines written by, latest eulogists of, lectures on, of mackail, lyric experiments, _et sqq._, mental experiences worked into, method of composition, - metres and styles used in, - , - , , _n._, , , , & _n._ , , , models of, _see_ echoes, _supra_, _see also_ elizabethan, & hunt naturalness of, nature of, nature poems, _see endymion_ odes written in , _et sqq._ opinions on, in the early ' 's, _poems_, published, _et sqq._ poor sale of, , posthumous, two printed in milnes's book, in progress and written in early , promise in, of dramatic and ironic power, publishing schemes ( ), referring to his love for fanny brawne, _et sqq._ revision of, uncertainty and un-wisdom shewn in, rimes used by, , - , self-expression in, - , snatches expressive of moods, - speculative and symbolic meanings underlying, the key to, - sterling's appreciation of, technique of, _see also_ metre, rime, &c., thackeray's allusion to, unquenchable by literary work done on them, unwritten, his distress over, , value of, to the reader, , as poet, milnes's words on, poetic impulses, causes checking, in , , , political interests and views of, , , portraits of, by haydon, , severn, , , , reflections by, ethical and cosmic, - spirit of poetry and pleasantness retained by, to the end, sayings on abandoning _hyperion_, and on its miltonisms, ; on beauty and truth, ; on brotherly affection, ; on brown's regular habits, ; on bailey's appetite for books, - ; on the _blackwood_ article on hunt, ; on fanny brawne's appearance &c., ; on brown's rummaging out his old sonnets, _n._; on devonshire weather and folk, - , ; on the effect of the reviews on the public, - ; on _endymion_, his aims in, , , his dissatisfaction with it, , and its defence by his friends, - , on its theme, ; on endymion's confession, ; on george keats's money troubles, ; on hazlitt's shakespearean lectures, ; on his ambitions as poet, ; on his feelings on life and literature, ; on his own attitude to women, ; on his own capacity for judging paintings, ; on his own character, - , - , , , as poet, , - ; on his own need of poetry, ; on his own place in poetry, ; on his plans for _hyperion_, ; on his own pride &c., ; on his poetry, and determination never to write for writing's sake or for a livelihood, - ; on his poetry-writing idleness, ( ), , , , , ; on his 'posthumous existence,' - , ; on his sensations in ordinary society, ; on his own skill as operator, ; on his state of mind in , , , - ; on his unwritten poems, , ; on his wishes as to future work (nov. ), - ; on his work on the _ode to psyche_, - ; on the ireby dancing-school, & _n._, ; on the lasinio engravings, ; on a mawkish popularity, ; on his nile sonnet and other writings ( ), ; on the quarrels of his friends, ; on the _quarterly's_ attack and its good results, ; on his reading, and on his mental state ( ), , ; on the scotch tour, ; on sickness, in the lighter vein, ; on some friction with hunt and others, - ; on street quarrels, ; on three witty friends, ; on winchester ways, ; on wordsworth in , , on his dogmatism and hunt's, - , on his genius and milton's, keats, mrs george (_née_ wylie, _q.v._, later mrs. jeffrey), , keats's pleasant relations with, , letter to, from keats, remarriage of, keats, mrs thomas (_née_ jennings), mother of the poet, appearance and character of, - devotion to, of keats, , , second marriage of, - death of, , keats, sir richard godwin, of the 'superb,' keats, thomas, father of the poet, - , characteristics of, death of, origin of, señora llanos on, keats, thomas (tom), brother of the poet, , , , , , ill-health of, keats's devotion during, , , , , , , _et sqq._, , letters to, from keats, on fingal's cave, , and on his health, ; on the lake district, - ; on scottish society, economics and racial character, - wells's hoax of, , death of, , , , keats, d.j. llanos y, artist, son of fanny keats, - keats crescent, shanklin, _n._ keats, the name, its variants and locales, - keats-shelley memorial at rome, ; _bulletin_ of, _n._, _n._ '_keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there_,' sonnet (keats), , included in _poems_, kelmscott press edition of keats, and the restoration of the text of _la belle dame_, kendal, keats at, kent, miss (mrs leigh hunt), kentish town, keats stay in, and health during, ker, prof. w.p., suggestion of, on source of keats's 'magic casements' lines, & _n._ kerrera, and the goylen legend, kete, meaning of, _king lear_, words from, used by keats, & _n._ _king stephen_, dramatic fragment (keats), , , kingston, ----, and wordsworth, - , kirkmen, the, keats on, - kirkup, seymour, at florence, _knight's tale_ (chaucer), metre of, _kubla khan_ (coleridge), echo of, in _endymion_, _la belle dame sans merci_ (keats), an achievement, date of, , included in milnes's book, morris, william, on, publication of, alterations in, and notices of, - rossetti on, subject, perfection, and metre of, & _n._ transcript of, by brown, & _n._ true version, given in full, - _lai d'aristote_, _ladye, the, of provence_ (reynolds), laidlaw, william, scott, and _blackwood_, laira green, brown's life at, lake district, places visited in, by keats with brown, - _et sqq._ lake school poets, morbidity asscribed to, by hunt, _lalla rookh_ (moore), price paid for, ; popularity of, lamb, charles, appearance, conversation and habits of, , _et sqq._, and the baby, - champion of the poetic revolution, and the enfield stiles, friendship of, with haydon, hunt, keats, parties of, given with mary, publishers of, verse-letters to, from hunt, works of, two volume ed. of , fuller's _holy state_ quoted in _specimens_, & _n._ on the digging scene in _isabella_, , on keats's place in poetry, on the _lamia_ volume poems, ; the pick of, _n._ on shelley, lamb, dr, lamb, mary, , lambeth, brown's birthplace, _lamia_ (keats), , , , , keats on, after re-reading, keats's reading of, keats's wish for instant publication of, place of, in the volume of , _n._ publication of, with other poems, full title and contents, - reception of, and criticisms on, _et sqq._, subject, source, metre and form of, , - hunt on, - lamb on, and other critics, _et sqq._ wilson on ( ), _lamia, isabella, and other poems_, keats's immortality secured by, byron's fury over, gift of, by keats to shelley, passage singled out from, by lamb, _n._ publication of, , - publishers' note in, disowned by keats, lancaster, keats at, _land, the, east of the sun_ (morris), landon, letitia, verse of, landor, walter savage, ; admirer of keats's poems, on milnes's book, landseer, sir edwin henry, at haydon's, land's end, keats's father said to have come from, lang, andrew, on errors in criticism, on the 'gallipots' article, , - lanteglos, the keats of, _laon and cythna_ (shelley), _lara_ (byron), form used in, lasinio, engravings by, keats's delight in, laureation or intercoronation affair, reference to, in the _ode to indolence_ (keats), sonnets on, by hunt, keats, , , amplification of, in _endymion_, - , law life insurance society, woodhouse's connection with, . lawn bank, hampstead, _n._ lawrence, sir thomas, . _lay sermons_ (coleridge), _lay, the, of the last minstrel_ (scott), leander, sonnet on (keats), _see on a picture of leander_ leander gems of tassie, _& n. _ lea valley, in keats's day, - leicester, earl of, keats's notion of, writing about, lelant, the name jennings at, le sage, name 'sangrado' borrowed from, _n._ _letter to william gifford, esq._ (hazlitt), _letters of percy bysshe shelley_, ed. ingpen, _n._ _liberal, the,_ brown's contributions to, 'libertas,' hunt's sobriquet, l.s.a. degree, obtained by keats, _life of, dryden_ (scott), _life of joseph severn_ (sharp), new knowledge of keats given in, _life, letters, and literary remains of john keats_, edited by richard monckton milnes ( ), , _et sqq._ _life of scott_, by lockhart, lindo, ---- (later lindon, ----), husband of fanny brawne, lindon, mrs, _see_ brawne, fanny. line endings of couplets closed or open, varieties of usage, _et sqq._ double, objections to, and usual employment of, ; illustrated, _lines composed a few miles above tintern abbey_ (wordsworth), keats on, _lines on the mermaid tavern_ (keats), ; date and metre of, , ; hints on immortality in ; included in the _lamia_ volume, _lines written in the highlands after a visit to burns's country_ (keats), ; metre and interest of, _& n._ lisbon, keats scheme of a visit to, , _abandoned_, list of books in keats's library, _n._, _n._, _et sqq._ literary criticism, cruelty of, early th century, _et sqq._ literary ladies and 'the matchless orinda,' _literary pocket book_ (hunt), little britain, the reynolds's house in, , littlehampton, the reynolds' at, live pets, keats on keeping, , llanos, fanny (_née_ keats), civil list pension secured for, by forman, death of, in ripe years, on the cornish origin of her father, llanos, valentine, husband of fanny keats, loch awe, keats on the first sight of, loch fyne, doggerel verses on (keats), loch lomond, keats on, - locker-lampson, frederick, on señora llanos and her husband, lockharts, the, scotch tour of, - lockhart, john gibson, co-editor of _blackwood_, partisan excesses of, , - , and later regrets, , article attributed to, in error, _n._ challenge of, to john scott, and the death of keats, current belief as to, - keats's death-bed saying on, at weimar, , _london magazine, the_, and its editor-publisher, , , _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, (hunt, ), keats memories in, , louisville, kentucky, george keats's death at, love, effect of, on keats, , _et sqq._ keats's conception and treatment of, , , , , , _& n._ love and death, keats's double goal, , , , , love and marriage, keats's early fears of, and attitude to, , - , justified, _et sqq. passim_ love and war, poetry of, _lover's complaint, a_, sonnet (keats), when written, - lowell, james russell, lowther family, and the election of , , lucas, ----, surgeon, described by south, ; keats as dresser to, lucas, e.v., debt to, as concerning charles lamb, _n._ lucy, wordsworth's poem on, keats on, lulworth cove, landing at, , _lycidas_ (milton), , adonais compared with, echoed by keats, , lyric effects in, lyly, john, prose comedy of _endimion_, by, , allegorical nature of, _n._ _lyrical ballads_ of coleridge and wordsworth, , poetical revolution introduced by, , , , lyrical effect attempted by keats in _i stood tip-toe_, and elsewhere, lyrics, in _endymion_, in relation to the classics and elizabethan poets, _et sqq._ 'macbeth,' picture by haydon, macfarlane, charles, on keats and the scentless roses, , and on the macaroni eaters, _& n._ mackail, j.w., lectures of, on keats' poetry, ; on the mystic shell in _endymion_ & in _the prelude_, _& n._ mackereth, george wilson, fellow-student of keats, , mackintosh, sir james, and _endymion_, macpherson, james, and the pseudo-_ossian_ poems, m'cracken, h. noble, article by, referred to, _n._ macready, william charles, in _retribution_, keats's criticism on, _mad banker of amsterdam_, comic poem (lockhart), madeline, in the _eve of st agnes_, _et sqq._, _et alibi_ _mad mother, the_ (wordsworth), madness, from ecstasy, keats on, keats's fear of, lines on, 'magic casements' phrase, possible sources of, - , maginn, william, critical ferocity of, ; insolent article and parody by, on _adonais_, - _maid's tragedy_ (beaumont and fletcher), ; _endymion_ references in, man, relations of to nature, wordsworth's exposition of, , _man, the, born to be king_ (morris), _man, the, in the moone_ (drayton), echoes from, in _endymion_, _et sqq._ _manfred_ (byron), _margaret_ (wordsworth), margate, letters from, by keats, to, various friends, _et sqq._ _maria crowther_, ship which took keats to italy, , , fellow-passengers on, - , , , , marlowe, christopher, poems by, , _endymion_ lines in, ; use in, of the heroic couplet, - marvell, andrew, use by, of the heroic couplet, mathew, ann, and caroline, ; keats's verses to, , , mathew, george felton, _epistle_ to, by keats, , _& n._, , on keats in early manhood, - , and on his appearance, maurice, rev. frederick denison, editor of _the athenæum_, _measure for measure_, words from, used in _endymion_, mediæval mythology, vitality of, to keats, mediævalism of keats, - medwin, t., letter to, from fanny brawne, on keats and his passions, _n._, _& n._ on shelley's views on the poems in the _lamia_ volume, - _meg merrilees, ballad of_ (keats), - , melody in verse, and the vowel sounds, keats's ideas on, , , - _memorials of a tour in scotland_, poems (wordsworth), _& n._ '_me rather all that bowery loneliness_' alcaics (tennyson), _mermaid tavern_, verses on, _see_ '_lines on the mermaid tavern_' _metamorphoses_ (ovid), in sandys' translation, source of keats's mythological knowledge, , _n._, influence of in _endymion_, , , , metre, decay of, metres employed by keats, ; keats's revolutionary treatment of, _et sqq._ _midsummer night's dream_, ; source of oberon &c. in, _n._ milanese pictures, engravings of, _& n._ "milky way" of poetry, _quarterly's_ phrase on keats's work, mill, james, and hunt, millais, sir john everett, the italian primitives and the pre-raphaelite brotherhood, ; a keats worshipper, milman, h. h., milnes, monckton (lord houghton, _q.v._), memoir of keats by, , sources, _et sqq._, merit and timeliness, gaps and errors in, and reception of, _et sqq._ milton, john, and the _faithful shepherdess_, genius of, relative to that of wordsworth, keats on, ; keats compared with, by landor, hair of, lines on, by keats, poems of, brown's travelling book, influence of, on keats, and keats's study of, , , , , , , - , model for english epic poetry, sprightly lines in, _n._ use in, of the heroic couplet, - sicilian pastoral elegy form, _'minutes are flying,' see on receiving a laurel crown from leigh hunt_ _minstrel, the_ (beattie), mitford, mary russell, friend of haydon, , his letter to her, on keats's death, mnemosyne, in _hyperion_, , _et sqq._, _passim_ mole river, in keats's poem, moneta, in _hyperion_, _& n._, montagu, basil, on keats's poems, monitress, the, in _hyperion_, - monkhouse, cosmo, _monthly chronicle, the_, _monthly review_, _n._; on the _lamia_ volume, moods, keats on, , , - , , ; his sufferings from, _et sqq._, _passim_ moon, the, keats's attitude to, , - , fine lines on, in _endymion_, - moore, thomas, , poems of, hunt's verdict on, lines on the hunts in prison, popularity of _lalla rookh_, sums received for, prose works, _see epicurean, & tom cribb's memorial_ verse-letter to, from hunt, - morgan mss., _n._, _n._ _morning chronicle_, attitude of, to _endymion_, morris, harrison s., on keats's choice of epitaph, _n._ morris, william, anticipations of, by keats, - true text of _la belle dame_, restored by, poems of, inspiration and model for, on keats's poetry, , moschus, his elegy on the death of bion, , _mother hubbard's tale_ (spenser), heroic couplet used in, mountain scenery as inspiration for a poet, keats's rare phrase on, mull, keats's expedition to, , and the first failure of his health, murray, a. s., on the inspiration of the _ode to a grecian urn_, _n._ murray, john, and blackwood, ; and the _quarterly review_, muse of his native land, address to, in _endymion_, _musée napoleon, the_, classic prints in, keats's tracing from, _& n._ '_my spirit is too weak,' see on seeing the elgin marbles_ mythology, greek and mediæval, vitality of, to keats, _naiad, the_ (reynolds), napoleon i., _& n._; aggressions of, effect on the lake poets, art collection of, _& n._ naples, keats in quarantine at, ill-effects of, _narensky_, opera (brown), nature, attitude to, of keats, and its influences as seen in his poems, - , - , , - , , - _et alibi_ 'nature, red in tooth and claw' (tennyson), keats's anticipation of, - negative capability, keats on, - nelson, admiral lord, newcome, colonel in _the newcomes_, and his son's views on keats, newmarch, ----, and keats, _new monthly magazine_, colburn's, review in, of the _lamia_ volume, - newport, isle of wight, reynolds's county court post at, _new times_, lamb's critique in, of the _lamia_ volume, - newton, sir isaac, in haydon's picture, , _new york herald_, , recollections of fanny brawne, by a cousin, published in, _n._ new zealand, brown's death in, nile, the, sonnets on, by shelley, keats, and hunt, _noctes ambrosianæ_ (wilson), on keats's poems ( ), _n._ wordsworth, northampton, countess of, death of, scott's grief at, northcote, james, on the ass in haydon's painting, '_not aladdin magian_' (keats), referring to fingal's cave, - _notes on gilfillan's literary portraits_ (de quincey), outburst in, against keats, - _& n._ novello, mary victoria, _see_ clarke, mrs charles cowden novello, vincent, musical parties of, keats at, , '_nymph of the downward smile_,' sonnet (keats), addressed to miss wylie, and included in _poems_, , _nymphs, the_ (hunt), oberon (wieland), sotheby's translation of, - & _n._, modified spenserian stanza in, oberon and titania, keats's lines on, and possible sources, , & _n._ ocean floor theme, in _endymion_, in relation to shakespeare and shelley, , oceanus (_hyperion_), speech of, - _ode to apollo_ (keats), _ode to autumn_ (keats), ; date of, , ; form, perfections, and lines from, - greek influence seen in, _ode to fanny_ (keats), as a cry of the heart, ; date of, , ; lines from, quoted, - _ode on a grecian urn_ (keats), , , , a masterpiece; inspiration, sources, subject, &c., , , , & _n._, - date of, , _ode to hope_ (keats), _ode on intimations of immortality_ (wordsworth), keats's comment on, - , _n._ _ode on indolence_ (keats), ; date of, , echo from, greek influence seen in, keats's pleasure in writing, lines on visions in, probable source of, _n._ not included in the _lamia_ volume, _ode to maia_ (keats), unfinished, ; greek influence seen in, ; included in the _lamia_ volume, _ode on melancholy_ (keats), ; date of, , , embryo ideas of, _n._ subject and splendours of, - _ode to a nightingale_ (keats), , , date of, , - , echoes in, , embryo ideas of, _n._ hippocrene passage in, keats's genius at its height in, inspirations of, - line in, anticipated, publication of, _ode to psyche_ (keats), ; date, , , germ of lines in, sources, qualities, faults and beauties, , & _n._, - _odes and addresses by eminent hands_ (hood and reynolds), odes (keats), in _lamia_ volume, odes, the six (keats), dates of, _et sqq._, metre and form of, - , - _odes, the, of keats_ (downer), urn illustrated in, _n._ _odyssey_ (chapman's version), influence seen in _endymion_, use in, of the heroic couplet, '_o fret not after knowledge--i have none_,' lines by keats, , '_o golden-tongued romance with serene lute_,' sonnet (keats), date and subject of, _old plays_ (dodsley), dilke's continuation of, ollier brothers, publishers for shelley, keats and others, , ; and the unsuccess of _poems_, , ollier, charles, sonnet by, on _poems_, ollier, james, on the public attitude to _poems_, '_o melancholy, linger here awhile_,' invocation in _isabella_, beauties of, '_o mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies_' (tennyson), a keats anticipation of, _on first looking into chapman's homer_ sonnet (keats), , & _n._, , full text of, included in _poems_, technical perfection of, _on the grasshopper and cricket_, sonnet (keats), ; included in _poems_, _on leaving some friends at an early hour_, sonnet (keats), _on leigh hunt's poem_ '_the story of rimini_,' sonnet (keats), _on the peace of paris_ ( ), sonnet (keats), , , _on [an engraved gem of] leander_, sonnet (keats), & _nn._ & _on receiving a laurel crown from leigh hunt_, sonnet (keats), _on receiving a curious shell and a copy of verses_ [_from some ladies_], stanza (keats), metre of, _on the sea_, sonnet (keats), written at carisbrooke, _on seeing the elgin marbles_, sonnet (keats), _on sitting down to read king lear once again_, sonnet (keats), _opposites, a song of_ (keats) , optics and the poet, - orcagna, picture by, possibly inspiring keats, _orlando innamorato_ (boiardo), '_o solitude! if i with thee must dwell_,' sonnet (keats), & _n._; included in _poems_, _othello_ (shakespeare), kean's voice in, keats on, _otho the great_, a tragedy by keats and brown, , , , , an experiment, , admiration for, at rome, first printed, plot, construction and poetry of, - production of, difficulties on, , , _ottava rima_, used by byron, ovid, arethusa myth as told by, cosmology of, & _n._ echoes of, in _endymion_, , , & _n._, , , _metamorphoses_ of, in sandys' translation, value of, to keats, , _n._; influence seen in _endymion_, , , , oxford, keats's visit to, , ; his own words on, _et sqq._ _endymion_ partly written at, - , _oxford herald, endymion_ praised in, by bailey, oxford university press, delegates of, edition issued by, of _la belle dame_, & _n._ owen, mrs f.m., study by, on _endymion_, _pain, the, of memory_, a variant of _in drear-nighted december_, third stanza of, _n._ palgrave, f.t., admiration of, for the sonnet _woman, when i behold thee flippant, vain_, ; place given by, to _lamia_, on keats's _poems_ (_golden treasury series_), pan, _see_ hymn to _pan's anniversary_ (jonson), , lines from, _paradise lost_ (milton), compared with _hyperion_, echoes of, in keats's poems, , , , , and in shelley's, feast of fruits in, keats's notes to, keats's study of, and criticisms on, , titans in, _parisina_ (byron), park, mungo, park, thomas, editor of _heliconia_, _n._ _parnaso italiano_, hunt's reading of, parsons, keats on, parthenon marbles, _see_ elgin marbles pastoral spirit of the elizabethans blent with love of country pleasures, and renaissance delight in classic poetry, re-emergence in keats's poetry, patmore, coventry, ; and milnes's _life_ of keats, , , pause, the, in metre, - peacock, thomas love, keats on, letter to, from shelley, on _hyperion_, poem by, metre of, and similarity of subject to _lamia_, _penseroso, il_ (milton), metre of, peona, in _endymion_, , , , ; the confession to, , her expostulation, , and his defence, _et sqq._ percy's _reliques_, 'peter corcoran,' in reynolds's _the fancy_, & _n._ _peter bell_ (wordsworth), skit on, by reynolds: notice of the latter by keats, petersburg, brown's connection with, 'pet lamb' phrase, in _the ode to indolence_, _pharonnida_, (chamberlayne), character of the verse of in, - _philaster_ (beaumont and fletcher), phrase from, adapted by keats in his epitaph, philips, katherine (orinda), poems of, keats on, ; use by, of the heroic couplet, _philological journal_ of chicago university, article in, on keats, _n._ _philosophy_, keats's use of the word, pidgeon, miss, keats's fellow-passenger, , , piron, allusions to, by lockhart, pisa, , _adonais_ printed at, plato, and the myths of the aphrodites, pandêmos and urania, _n._ shelley's enthusiasm for; keats's indirect knowledge of, plays, keats's ambition to write, _plymouth and devonport weekly journal_, brown's touring diary published in, _n._ _poems_, keats's first book, its spirit and contents, _et sqq._; publication of, ; public reception of, and reviews on, - , sonnet dedicating it to hunt, , , and the reply, - poems, long, hunt's adverse view on; contraverted by keats, poet, the, death-bed feelings of, keats on, in the _epistle to george keats_, prime endowments of, keats on, wordsworth's doctrine on, - , endorsed by keats and by shelley, _et sqq._ _poet, the_, a fragment (keats), poetic license revived by keats, revolution, the captains of, , , , style, hunt's views on, , _poetical sketches_ (blake), on the older style of verse, poetry, keats on axioms, conception of, - his own need of, polar star of, new, arising from the world war, - renaissance of, in england, , , romantic, th century, morris's perhaps the last of, weirdness and terror in the early period, technique of, keats's insight into, _polymetis_ (spence), picture in, , possibly inspiring keats, , polyphemus and galatea story; ovid's version, and keats's, , pope, alexander, poems of (and of his school), byron's championship of, early victorian depreciation of, keats's dislike of, , , , use by, of the heroic couplet, long ascendancy of his method, , - ; illustration and contrast with shakespeare, - on 'our rustic vein' in poetry, pope-boileau passage in _sleep and poetry_, _blackwood_ on, ; byron's rage at, - _popular antiquities_ (brand), on the legend of st agnes' eve _popular tales of the west highlands_ (campbell), on the goylen story, _n._ porphyro, in _eve of st agnes_, _et sqq._ porter, jane, and anna maria, works of, and encouragement by, of keats, pen portraits by the former, portsmouth, keats's landing at, poultry, the, home at, of the keats brothers, , , _n._, poussin, nicholas, picture by, inspiration of, to keats, , , prayer, haydon's letter on, to keats, , - pre-raphaelitism, evoking cause, _pre-raphaelitism and the pre-raphaelite brotherhood_ (morris), _n._ pre-raphaelite brotherhood, enthusiasm of, for keats, as shown by its paintings, and _the eve of st mark_, _prelude, the_ (wordsworth), ; the last published passages in, - ; the mystic shell in, mackail on, _n._ prince regent, the, and _the examiner_, ; moore's skits on, pride in his work, keats on, _& see n._ prior, matthew, metre of his day, procter, bryan walter (barry cornwall), _n._; kindness of, to keats, poem by, on the same subject as _isabella_, style of, shelley's disgust at, on keats's manner, conversation and appearance, _n._ on the lambs' evening parties, on leigh hunt, _n._ procter, mrs, _n._; on keats's eyes, _prometheus unbound_ (shelley), ; keats echoes in, ; lines _cited_, keats on, in advance, review of, in _blackwood_, - proper wooing song, a, echo of, by keats, - prothero, george, _n._ prowse, mrs, and keats, _psyche_ (tighe), , punning, _purgatory_, (dante), the eagle in, pymmes brook, the, keats's allusions to, _quarterly review, the_, harsh criticisms in, on _endymion_, , - , , - influence of, , keats on, keats's illness ascribed to, by his friends, _et sqq._ politics, publisher and rivals of, review in, of tennyson's poems, - queen lab, oriental counterpart of circe, _raccolta_ of prints by zanconi, _n._ raeburn, sir henry, portrait by, of the countess of northampton singing, _rainbow, the_ (campbell), echoed by keats, - rawlings, mrs, _see_ keats, mrs thomas rawlings, william, stepfather of keats, - rawlings _v._ jennings, _n._ '_read me a lesson, muse,' see ben nevis_, sonnet _recollections of writers_ (cowden clarke), _n._ redding, cyrus, , and galignani's edition of keats's and other poems, _n._ _redgauntlet_ (scott), the dancing dame in, _n._ _reflector_, edited by hunt, lamb's _specimens_ printed in, _n._ regalities, keats on, in _endymion_, _rejected addresses_, _reminiscences of a literary life_ (macfarlane), _n._ restoration poets, compared with georgian, _retribution, or the chieftain's daughter_ (dillon), macready in, keats's criticism on, reviews, effect of, on the public, keats on, - hostile to keats, and their effect, _see_ coleridge, severn and others on, _see also blackwood's_, 'cockney school,' _quarterly review_, severn, shelley, taylor, 'z' articles _revolt of islam_ (shelley), first title for, reynolds, charlotte, , reynolds family, ; keats's estrangement from, reynolds, jane (later mrs thomas hood), keats's verses in her album, letter to, from keats, on gay and grave, on the date of '_in a drear-nighted december_,' reynolds, john hamilton, friendship of, with keats, , - , , , , , bailey's friendship with, and with his family, , _epistle to_, from keats, latter days of, as lawyer, , , letters to, from keats, on autumn weather, - ; on being haunted by a woman's shape and voice, - ; on confused and clear mental images, - ; on _endymion_, and on shakespeare's sonnets, , on the intended preface to _endymion_, ; on his feelings on life and literature ( ), ; on the genius of wordsworth and milton, ; on human life, ; on _isabella_, or, _the pot of basil_, - ; on leaving town, , and one from carisbrooke, - ; at oxford, ; on social doings, ; on his thirst for knowledge, - ; on thrush music, , ; on the two chambers of thought, , ; on the visit to burns's cottage, , ; with lines to apollo, ; from winchester, _et sqq._; on wordsworth's dogmatism and on hunt's, - literary work of, , , , , _n._, , and milnes's _biography_, - medley by (_the fancy_), _n._ poems, , letters on, from byron and from wordsworth, models of, inspired by boccaccio, - , , parodies, skit by, on _peter bell_ (wordsworth), sonnet to keats (_thy thoughts, dear keats_), sonnet to haydon, quarrels of, - wit of, keats on, on _endymion_, - , and on the preface thereto, on fanny brawne, ; on hopes for keats's recovery, ; on _isabella_, - ; on keats, as killed by the reviews, reynolds, mariane, , bailey's attachment to, , end of, reynolds, misses keats's letter to, from oxford, keats's changed feelings for, reynolds, mr and mrs, friends and home of, _rhododaphne_, poem (peacock), resemblance of, to _lamia_, , rice, james, friend of reynolds and of keats, , , , , , help from, to keats, keats's stay with, at shanklin, - letter to, from keats, during his illness, wit of, keats on, _richard, duke of york_, and kean's acting in, keats's criticism on, - _richard iii._ (shakespeare), keats's criticism of, and of kean's acting in, - undersea lines in, keats's challenging passage in _endymion_, , jeffrey's praise of, and shelley's assimilation of, - richards, ----. wit of, keats on, richardson, sir b.w., on the composition of the line 'a thing of beauty,' _n._ rime, keats's faults in use of, - rimed couplet, shelley's use of, ritchie, joseph, the explorer, _et sqq._, _robin hood_, poem (keats), ; date of, ; included in the _lamia_ volume, robinson, clement, echo of, in keats, & _n._ robinson, henry crabb, - ; friendly to keats, on poems in the _lamia_ volume, on wordsworth at the time of keats's meeting with him, _et sqq._ _rob roy_ (scott), wordsworth's advance criticism on, _rob roy_ (wordsworth's ballad), the writer's estimate of, rogers, samuel, poems of, jeffrey on, use by, of the heroic couplet, roman laws on infectious disease, romantic poetry of the th century, morris's perhaps the last of, weirdness and terror of, in early period, _romaunt of the rose_ (chaucer), rome, keats's journey to, and death in, , , _et sqq._, _et sqq._ keats-shelley memorial at, severn at, after keats's death, , shelley's burial place at, rondeau, the, keats's view on, ronsard, pierre, ode of, to michel de l'hôpital, on the titans, - ross, sir john, and the search for the north-west passage, rossetti, dante gabriel, enthusiasms of, and high tribute to keats, , evocation in, of pre-raphaelitism, on _the eve of st mark_, , - rossetti, william, on the poetry of shelley and of keats, 'rowleyism' of _the eve of st mark_, rune-inscribed shell, in _endymion_, & _n._ ruskin, john, and others, praises by, of the _ode to psyche_, _ruth_ (wordsworth), rydal, keats's visit to, in wordsworth's absence, sabrina, keats's poem planned on, , 'sacrifice to apollo,' picture by claude, as inspiration to keats, _sad shepherd, the_ (fletcher), 'sad stories of the deaths of kings,' shelley's outburst with, & _n._ _safie_ (reynolds), st columb major, the keats of, st paul's school, reynolds at, saintsbury, professor, and the debt of _endymion_ to the _pharonnida_ of chamberlayne, _n._ st. stephen's, colman street burial-place of keats's grandmother, _n._ st thomas's street, keats's "chummery" at, , _samson agonistes_ (milton), st. teath, the keats' of, _n._, sanctuary, the, in _hyperion_, - sandell, rowland, _sandoval_ (llanos), sandys, george, translation by, of ovid's _metamorphoses_, keats' use of, echoes of, in keats's poems, , , use in, of the heroic couplet, - san giuliano, _adonais_ composed at, sangrado, dr., origin of the name, & _n._ sappho, lines from, on love, the limb-loosener, & _n._ poem of, on the endymion legend, _n._ sarcophagus reliefs, as inspiration of keats's bacchic lines, , & _n._, _satyr, the_, masque (jonson), and the legend of st. agnes' eve, metre of, scenery, keats's attitude to, , _et sqq._ science and poetry, views on, of hunt, keats and wordsworth, - scotland, keats's comments on, , _et sqq._ scott, anne, scott, john, the 'z' papers denounced by, ; duel over, resulting in death of, , scott, sir walter, friend of haydon, letter from, to lockhart, on his method of criticism, - poems of, , , , attitude to, of hunt, , , environment as affecting, commercial success of, position of, as poet, and his publishers, relations of, with the _blackwood_ group and lockhart, - in rome, smile of, haydon on, _n._ wordsworth's sonnet to, _n._ on the _chaldee manuscript_, on criticism, - on keats, scott, william bell, on _the eve of st mark_, - _scottish chiefs, the_ (porter), scottish lowlands, keats's tour in, _scots and edinburgh magazine_, review in of 'poems,' , & _n._ scylla, in _endymion_, _et sqq._ sea, the, keats on, sonnet on (keats), _selections from the english poets_ (ward), arnold's essay on keats in, _n._ selene, artemis, diana, and the endymion myth, _n._ sensations, keats's use of the term, - , sentence-structure, keats's aptitude for, that of _endymion_ and of _pharonnida_ compared, _n._ _session of the poets_ (suckling), _sethos_, old french romance, imitations of, _n._ severn, james, father of joseph, ; wrath at severn's going to italy with keats, severn, arthur, and the lost drawing of keats, severn, joseph, artistic gifts of, account by, of the voyage with keats to italy, _et sqq._ and _a lover's complaint_, - attitude of, to fanny brawne, & _n._, drawings by, of keats in his berth at sea, (lost); in his bed in rome, ; at novello's (lost), ; a miniature once owned by fanny brawne, friendship of, with keats, - , , keats's companion in italy, _et sqq._; devotion shown by to the end, _et sqq._; and the effect of the reviews on keats, , ; loyalty to keats, ; a touching incident recorded by, - letters from, to various friends on the journey to italy and keats's last days there, _et sqq._, _passim_ letters to, from keats's friends, while in rome, _et sqq._ life of, in rome, , parents of, pictures by, , religious views of, sharp's _life_ of, new knowledge of keats derived from, on fanny brawne, : on keats's artistic instincts, - ; on keats's eyes, ; on keats' elation over a meeting with wordsworth, ; on keats as invalid, ; on keats's museum reveries, ; on the true cause of keats's distress in his illness, shakespeare, william, birth-place of, keats's visit to, coleridge's lectures on, influence seen in _endymion_, , , , , keats compared with, , keats's study of, - , keats on his understanding of, line by, criticised by wordsworth, lines of, on endymion, middle age of, keats on, negative capability of, plays of, _see under_ names sonnets of, brown's book on, - ; keats' appreciation of, use by, of the couplet compared with pope's, shakespearean quality of certain lines in _endymion_, , shanklin, keats's stay at, and writings while there, _et sqq._, sharp, william, new knowledge of keats furnished by his _life of severn_, on keats at , shelley, harriet, death of, shelley, percy bysshe, anatomical studies of, appearance, voice and manner of, , challenge to, in _endymion_, , characteristics, contrasted with those of keats, - debt of, to _endymion_, , - derivation and nature of the beliefs sung by, , - devotion to, apparently incompatible with full justice to keats, - domestic difficulties of, and generosity during that time to hunt, - eccentricities of, & _n._ exasperation of, with certain verse, friendship of, with hunt, _et sqq._, impression made on, by the alps, wordsworth's _excursion_, - influence of, seen in _endymion_, _et sqq._ and keats, relations between, , , - , , , keats's fear of being influenced by, letter drafted by, to the _quarterly review_ after the attack on keats, letters from, to keats, inviting him to italy, , from switzerland, &c., compared with those of keats, from the lakes, &c., to mrs leigh hunt on his desire to take care of keats in italy, letters to, from keats, on the invitation to italy, ; on his own unripe mentality, poems of, _see under_ names allegoric theme of _alastor_, - beauty of rhythm used by, cambridge enthusiasm for, , , echoes in, of milton, freedom of, from faults, galignani's edition of, _n._ , & _n._ gift of, to browning, effect of, keats, the reception of, influences moulding, lyrics in, posthumous, hazlitt's criticism of, - rossetti's enthusiasm for, referred to by hunt in _young poets_, , use by, of rimed couplet, publishers of, , views of, on the _blackwood_ and _quarterly_ reviews on keats's poems, , , death of ( ), , on _endymion_, , , ; on keats's place among the poets, ; on the _lamia_ volume, - ; on study of the great poets, shenstone, w., poems of, use by, of spenserian stanza, _shepheard's calendar, the_, sheridan, richard brinsley, pension of, _sicilian story, the_ (procter), identical in subject with _isabella_, sickness, keats on, siddons, mrs. on the head of christ in haydon's painting, sidmouth, reynolds's love of, _siege of corinth_ (byron), tag from, used by keats, skiddaw, keats's climb on, , - sleep, invocations to, in keats's poems, _sleep and poetry_ (keats), , , _n._, adverse criticism on, affinities with lines in _endymion_, _n._, - analysis of, with quotations, _et sqq._ date discussed, echoes in, of the '_great spirits_' sonnet, haydon on, ideas in, invocation in, to sleep, metre, diction and subject of, - , , pope-boileau passage in, derided by _blackwood_, ; wrath of byron on, - published in _poems_, , place of in the volume, references in, to the intimacy with hunt, - relation of, to contemporaries, , and to the elizabethans, - use in, of the couplet, - '_small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals_' (_to my brothers_) sonnet (keats) included in _poems_, smith, horace, friend of haydon, keats's acquaintance with, smith's _standard library_, first separate collected edition of keats's poems issued in, _n._ snook, john and mrs, keats's visits to, , soames, william, solitude wrong for the poet, wordsworth's doctrine on, endorsed by keats and shelley, _et sqq._ '_some titian colours touched into real life_' (keats), from epistle to reynolds, somerset, the keates of, _n._ _song of the four fairies_ (keats), , song of the indian maiden in _endymion_, fine quality of, ; in style an ode, _song, a, about myself_ (keats), ('_there was a naughty boy_'), - _song, a, of opposites_ (keats), , sonnet-beginnings of dante, and of keats, _& n._ sonnet-forms employed by keats, , sonnet on _poems_ (hunt), - sonnets by keats, _see under_ first lines, and titles in _poems_ character of, classes or groups autumn group, - exceptions chapman sonnet, - kosciusko sonnet, margate sonnet, leigh hunt group, occasional, ; the great exception, - sex-chivalry group, forms employed, haydon pair, the, problems of selection, - sonnet, written at the end of _the floure and the lefe_ (keats), sonnets on the nile by hunt, keats, and shelley, sonnets showing strain of keats's love affair, - _so reaching back to boyhood: make me ships_, lines in _endymion_, sosibios, vase of, keats's tracing of, _& n._ sotheby, w., translator of wieland's oberon, - _& n._, stanza invented by, south, john flint, on lucas, southey, robert, as critic, poems by, political change of view of, hazlitt's fierce criticism on, spaniards inn, nightingales near, as inspiration to keats, _spanish fryar_ (dryden), as model for _in a drear-nighted december_, _specimens of early english metrical romance_ (ellis), the st agnes eve legend in, _n._ spence's _polymetis_, picture in, as inspiration to keats, , spenser, edmund, compound epithets of, equalled by keats, keats's delight in, - , and influence of, seen in the poems, - , , , , , , , , , , , , , lines of, on the endymion story, platonism in the _hymns_ of, sonnet on, or in imitation of, by keats, postponed, use by of the heroic couplet, spenserian stanza unfit for satire, used by chatterton, _spirit, the, of the age_ (hazlitt), _n._ _spirit, the, of man_ (ed. bridges), keats's _meg merrilees_ ballad included in, n. _staffa_ (keats), on fingal's cave, - staffa, visited by keats, - stair hole, stephens, henry, fellow-student of keats, on the composition of 'a thing of beauty,' _& n._ on the date at which keats entered guy's, _n._ on keats as medical student, - on mrs george keats, sterling, john, on keats and his poems ( ), - on the poems of tennyson and of keats, _story, the, of rimini_, poem (hunt), , aims of, - , - criticism of, in _blackwood_, - haydon on, keats's allusion to, lines quoted illustrative of the style, _stranger, the_, performed to bagpipes, keats on, stratford-on-avon, keats's visit to, styx, the, _n._ _subaltern, the_ (gleig), suddard, mary, critic, on keats's _unfelt, unheard, unseen_, _& n._ _suovetaurilia_ urn, at holland house, as possible inspiration to keats, _n._ _superb_, h.m.s., and its keats captain, surrey institution, hazlitt's lectures at, , swan and hoop stables, birth-place of keats, '_sweet philomela_,' lines by browne, echoed by keats, _n._ swinburne, algernon charles, metrical magic of, and use by, of the heroic measure, on keats's poetry, , symbolism in keats's poems, - ; wordsworth's influence shown in, _table talk_ (coleridge), on the meeting with keats in , - tales, his own, and brown's, sent by keats to his brother, _tales of my landlord_ (scott), talfourd, sergeant, _talk, a, with coleridge_, in _cornhill_ for april, , ed. miss e. m. green, _cited_, - _& n._ tassie, james, paste reproductions by, of antique gems, , taylor, john, keats's publisher, _n._, _n._, copyright of _endymion_ bought by, ; further financial help from, letters to, from keats, on _cap and bells_, , , & n.; corrections to _endymion_, ; endymion's confession, ; on the journey to italy, - ; on his thirst for knowledge, ; on plans for work, - , _n._ woodhouse, on keats's pride, &c., severn (unfinished), on keats's condition in rome, - literary standing of, memorial volume on keats projected, with woodhouse, ; the woodhouse transcripts lent by, to milnes, on _endymion_, taylor and hessey, messrs, keats's second publishers, , , keats's applications to, for advances on _endymion_, , notice appended by, to _hyperion_, steadfast loyalty of, teignmouth, george and tom keats at, , keats's letters to, _et sqq._; keats's stay at, _et sqq._, teniers, wordsworth's pun on, tennyson, alfred, fame of, , , slow growth of, poems by alcaics, , influence on, of keats, _quarterly's_ criticism on ( ), - reminiscence of keats, in _enid_, thackeray's allusion to, - sterling's appreciation of, on the poetry of keats, , and of shelley, terror, the, effect of, on the lake poets, textual criticism, perversion in, _thaddeus of warsaw_ (porter), theocritus, echoes of, in _endymion_, , and in the sonnet on _fame_, - _& n._ endymion passage from, paraphrased by fletcher, _theogony_ of hesiod, cooke's translation of, '_there is a charm in footing slow_,' _see lines written in the highlands_ '_there was a naughty boy_,' _see song about myself_ '_think not of it, sweet one, so_,' love-lyric (keats), '_this pleasant tale is like a little copse_,' sonnet on _floure and lefe_ (keats), thomson, james, poems of, influence of, on keats, verse forms used in, , 'thought appalling,' in one version of _in drear-nighted december_, possible source of, _thoughts suggested on the banks of nith ..._ (wordsworth), _& n._ thrush, song of, keats's pleasure in, , , and lines on, '_thus have i thought: and days on days have flown_,' _epistle to cowden clarke_ (keats), '_thy thoughts, dear keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves_,' sonnet by reynolds, on keats's sonnet on _the floure and the lefe_, tighe, mrs, poem of, on cupid and psyche, , _times, the_, '_time's sea_,' sonnet, _see to a lady seen for a few moments at vauxhall_ _tintern abbey_ (wordsworth), ideas in paralleled in _sleep and poetry_, bridges on, _et sqq._ passage in, discussed by keats, 'tion,' or 'shion' termination, as used by keats, titans, the, in _hyperion_, sources of, _et sqq._ titian's bacchus and ariadne picture, as inspiration for keats, tiverton, the name keat at, _& n._, _to ailsa rock_, sonnet (keats), _to byron_, sonnet (keats), , _to a cat_, sonnet (keats), _to celia_ (jonson), metre of, _to chatterton_, sonnet (keats), , _to g. a. w._, sonnet (keats), , _to haydon_, sonnet (keats), ('_great spirits_'), ; echoes of, in _sleep and poetry_, ; included in _poems_, _to haydon_ (sonnet), _with a sonnet written on seeing the elgin marbles_ (keats), - _to kosciusko_, sonnet (keats), _to a lady seen for a few moments at vauxhall_, sonnet (keats), , and the allied sonnet, - _to the ladies who saw me crowned_, sonnet (keats), _to leigh hunt, esq._, dedication of _poems_, sonnet (keats), - , - _to m. a, at parting_, verses (katherine philips), keats's pleasure in, _tom cribb's memorial to congress_ (moore), _to my brothers_, sonnet (keats), _see keen fitful gusts; small, busy flames; to one who has been long in city pent_ _to the nile_, sonnet (keats), _to one who has been long in city pent_, sonnet (keats), in _poems_, tory critics, ferocity of, matched by hazlitt and others, _to some ladies_, verses (keats), metre of, townley (bacchic) vase, _translation from an ancient chaldee manuscript_, satire, in _blackwood_, , , , scott on, trelawny, edward john, ; relations of, with brown, , , and with shelley, 'triumph of death,' picture by orcagna, _troilus and criseyde_ (chaucer), two chambers of thought, keats on, , _twopenny post bag, the_ (moore), and the prince-regent, 'ugly clubs,' in _sleep and poetry_, - _& n._ underground journey theme in _endymion_, _& n._ undying art, the great poets on, '_unfelt, unheard, unseen_,' stanzas (keats), _& n._ unknown beloved, the, in _endymion_, , 'unseam,' used by keats and by shakespeare, _& n._ unwritten poems, keats' distress over, , _vacation exercise_ (milton), echoed by keats, ; keats's knowledge of, ; sprightly lines from, _n._; versification of, - valentine, by keats, for miss wylie, _see_ '_hadst thou lived in days of old_' valleys, keats's love of, and notes on, van staveren's edition of _auctores mythographi latini_, keats's copy of, _& n._ _vathek_ (beckford), echoes of, in _endymion_, vegetable diet, in hunt's circle, wordsworth on, _venus and adonis_ (shakespeare), beauties of, keats on, verses written during medical lecture (keats), 'versifying pet-lamb,' phrase of keats, victorian poets, _the newcomes_ cited on, - victory, parentage of, _n._ villa aldobrandini, sarcophagus from, _n._ villa gherardesca, landor's florentine home, visconti, ----, and the elgin marbles, _vita nuova_ (dante), sonnet-beginnings in, _& n._ vivarès, ----, engraver of the "enchanted castle," _n._ voltaire, called dull, by wordsworth, head of, in haydon's picture, vowel sounds, keats's use of, , , - _voyage d'anténor_, parallel in, to passage in _endymion_, _n._ wade, keats's school-fellow, pranks of, walker art gallery, liverpool, millais' "isabella" picture in, waller, edmund, mythological poetry of, jonson on, use by, of the heroic couplet, walsh, captain thomas, of the 'maria crowther,' kindness of, to keats, - , walthamstow, fanny keats at school at, , , war, the world's, as stimulus to poetry, - ward, t. h., book by, containing arnold's measured judgment on keats, _n._ warton, joseph, protest of, against moral essays in verse, , echoed by keats, use by, of the heroic couplet, warton, thomas, poet laureate, pioneer of change in spirit of poetry, , warwickshire, the keytes of, waverley novels, authorship unknown ( ), way, mr, a great jew-converter, way, g.l., translation by, of le grand's _fabliaux_, _& n._ , webb, cornelius, verses by, gibes at, in _blackwood_, , , , weirdness and terror, in romantic poetry, early th century, '_welcome joy, and welcome sorrow_,' _see song of opposites_ well walk, hampstead, home in, of the keats brothers, , friends frequenting and frequented, , keats's life at ( - ), ; described by himself, _et sqq._ wells, ----, of redleaf, owner of claude's 'enchanted castle,' _n._ wells, charles, author of _joseph and his brethren_, association of, with keats, hoax by, on tom keats, , wentworth place, hampstead, keats's life at, with brown, _et sqq._ wesleyan place, no. , kentish town, keats at, west, ----, '_what is there in the universal earth_' (intercoronation sonnet by keats), _what the thrush said_ (keats), , '_when i have fears that i may cease to be_,' sonnet (keats), date, subject and pendant of, - '_where's the poet_,' fragment (keats), _whistlecraft, orlando_ (j. h. frere), white hart hotel, bath, '_who loves to peer_,' sonnet (keats), _see on leigh hunt's poem 'the story of rimini'_ '_why did i laugh to-night_,' sonnet (keats), , text of, wieland, _endymion_ by, _oberon_ by, translation of, by sotheby, - _& n._, stanza used in, wilkie, sir david, and hunt, letter to, from haydon, on hunt and his _story of rimini_, - wilson, dr. john ('christopher north') ferocious criticism by, , - , , ; on _lamia_ and _isabella_, &c., - , ; on shelley's _prometheus_, - winchester, keats and brown at ( ), , ; last good days spent there, - , work done during the stay, 'wind, across the barley,' keats's delight in, windermere, keats's first sight of, woburn, carven sarcophaguses at, _n._ wolters, paul, on keats's inspirations from the antique, _n._ '_woman, when i behold thee flippant, vain_,' sonnet (keats), ; published in _poems_, women, keats's attitude to, and idealisation of, , - , , , , - , ; _see also_ brawne, fanny woodhouse, richard, friend of taylor and of keats, , , , _n._, ; loyalty of, letters of, to taylor and another, on keats, list of books in keats's library, compiled by, - memorial volume on keats, planned by, with taylor, , _see_ woodhouse transcripts sonnet by, on 'poems,' on the date of _in a drear-nighted december_, on the inspiration of the two sonnets _when i have fears_, and _time's sea_, and the lines _from my despairing heart_, _& n._ on _hyperion_, - ; on _isabella_, on keats's reading aloud and on the changes in _eve of st agnes_, - ; on keats's character and poetry, ; on a long talk with keats ( ), _et sqq._ woodhouse transcripts in crewe mss., _n._ lent by taylor to milnes, woollett, w., engraver of 'the enchanted castle,' _n._ 'word-of-all-work, love,' phrase of george eliot, _n._ words, lax use of, and free modification of, in _endymion_, - wordsworth, dorothy, , wordsworth, mrs, wordsworth, rev. christopher, wordsworth, william, ; absent on keats's visit to rydal, appearance, voice, manner and mannerisms of, , bailey's acquaintance with, characteristics of, , , conversation of, hazlitt on, fame of, steady growth of, friendship of, with haydon, , _& n._ genius of, compared with that of keats, , - , ; bridges and the author on, - in relation to that of milton, keats on, and greek mythology, - , head of, in haydon's picture, _& n._ hunt's verdict on, keats's meeting with and relations with, _et sqq._ and kingston, _et sqq._, letter from, to reynolds on his poem _the naiad_, poetry of, , _n._ disuse in, of the older verseforms, , influence of, on keats, seen in _endymion_, , , - _la belle dame_, keats's appreciation of, - , and critical judgments on, - , , local influences on, poems of humble life, attitude to, of the hunt circle, , poems of tragic life, stanzas on burns, countered by keats in '_bards of passion_,' political change of view of, reminiscence of, in the _solitude_ sonnet by keats, sonnets of god-speed to scott, _n._ to haydon, three, scotch tour of, with his sister, wilson's attitude to, in _noctes ambrosianæ_, on keats's _hymn to pan_, , ; on the poetic revolution, ; on the sources of poetic inspiration, ; on vowel-variation, - world-sadness, keats on, and on the duty of relieving it, - _et sqq._ _written on the day that mr leigh hunt left prison_, sonnet (keats), _written in disgust of vulgar superstition_, sonnet (keats), wylie, georgiana augusta (afterwards mrs george keats, and later mrs jeffrey), ; engagement of, to george keats, , keats's poems written for, , , , , marriage of, , , ; second marriage, ; hereafter _see_ jeffrey, mrs, _and_ keats, george and his wife wylie family, _young poets_, essay (hunt) beginners of promise referred to, , keats's chapman sonnet printed in, '_you say you love, but with a voice_,' love-plaint by keats, elizabethan echo in, - 'z' papers in _blackwood_, gibes of at hunt and keats, - , - , ; fatal duel fought over, 'zack,' zanconi, milanese prints by, _n._ glasgow: printed at the university press by robert maclehose and co. ltd. generously made available by the internet archive/canadian libraries.) columbia university studies in english leigh hunt's relations with byron, shelley and keats leigh hunt's relations with byron, shelley and keats by barnette miller, ph.d. new york the columbia university press _all rights reserved_ copyright, by the columbia university press printed from type april, press of the new era printing company lancaster, pa. _this monograph has been approved by the department of english in columbia university as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication._ a. h. thorndike, _secretary_. preface the relations of leigh hunt to byron, shelley and keats have been treated in a fragmentary way in various works of biography and criticism, and from many points of view. yet hitherto there has been no attempt to construct a whole out of the parts. this led professor trent to suggest the subject to me about five years ago. the publication of the results of my investigation has been unfortunately delayed for nearly four years after the work was finished. i am indebted to mr. s. l. wolff for reading the first and second chapters; to professors g. r. krapp, w. w. lawrence, a. h. thorndike, of columbia university, and professor william alan nielson, now of harvard, for suggestions throughout. i am especially glad to have this opportunity to record my gratitude to prof. trent, whose inspiration and guidance and kindness from beginning to end have alone made completion of the study possible. b. m. constantinople, turkey. march , . contents chapter i. leigh hunt - chapter ii. keats chapter iii. shelley chapter iv. byron and _the liberal_ chapter v. the cockney school chapter vi. conclusion bibliography chapter i revolutionary tendencies of the age--the reaction--counter reform movement--leigh hunt--his ancestry--school days--career as a journalist--imprisonment--finances--politics--religion--poetry. since contemporary social conditions played an important part in the relations of leigh hunt with byron, shelley, and keats, a brief survey of the period in question is necessary to an understanding of the forces at play on their intellect and conduct. the english mind had been admirably prepared for the principles of the french revolution by the progressive tendency since the revolution of . the new order promised by france was acclaimed in england as one destined to right the wrongs of humanity; through unending progress mankind was to attain unlimited perfection. upon such a prospect both parties were agreed, and the warnings of burke were vain when pitt, rationalizing, led the tories, and fox, rhapsodizing, led the whigs. in , godwin's _political justice_, with its anarchistic doctrines of individual perfectibility and of individual self-reliance, rallied more recruits to the standard of liberty, though his theories of community of property and annulment of the marriage bond were somewhat charily received. the early writings of wordsworth, southey and coleridge were colored with enthusiasm for the new movement. the agitation and the enactment of reform measures made actual advances towards the expected millennium. but the excesses of the revolutionary régime in france bred in england, ever inclined to order, an opposition in many conservative minds that resulted in positive panic at the menace to state and church and property. the reaction swung the pendulum far in the opposite direction from justice and philanthropy. the first two decades of the new century continued to suffer from a counter-reform movement when the actual fright had subsided. during that period, anything which savored of reform was labelled as seditious. at the very beginning of this reaction william pitt's efforts for the extension of the franchise were summarily put an end to, and the house of commons remained as little representative of the english people as formerly. catholics and non-conformists were denied, from the period of the union of ireland with england in until , the right to vote and to hold office. pitt's efforts to frustrate such discrimination in ireland were as unavailing as in his own country, for the prejudices and obstinacy of george iii, in both instances, neutralized the good intentions of the liberal ministry. the corrupt influence of the crown in parliament was undiminished except by the disfranchisement of persons holding contracts from the crown and of incumbents of revenue offices. the wars with america and with france greatly increased the public debt, threatened the national credit and burdened with taxes an already overburdened people. oppressive industrial conditions made the life of the masses still more unendurable. the rise of manufacturing and the consequent adoption of inventions that dispensed with much hand labor decreased the number of the employed and reduced wages, while the enormous increase in population during the eighteenth century multiplied the number of the idle and the poor. it is true that the wealth of the country became much greater through the development of new resources, but the profits were distributed among the few and gave no relief to the majority. the government was indifferent to the sufferings of the poor, to the severity of the penal code, to the horrors of the slave traffic. in great britain the habeas corpus act was suspended, public assemblies were forbidden, the press was more narrowly restricted, right of petition was limited, and the legal definition of treason was greatly extended; in scotland the barbarous statute of transportation for political offenses was revived; in ireland industry and commerce were discouraged. the re-accession of the tories to power in , followed by their long ascendancy and abuse of power, led inevitably to a revival of the questions of revolution and of reform. lord byron, shelley and leigh hunt were among the leaders of this second band of agitators, the "new camp," as professor dowden has designated them. it was their love of humanity, perhaps to a greater degree than their poetic genius and their æsthetic ideals, that made these men akin. of the four poets with whom we deal keats alone was comparatively indifferent to the strife about him. * * * * * besides the political background of the times, personal influence and literary imitation enter into consideration in the present study. especially in the case of hunt, whose unique personality has been so variously interpreted, a brief biographical review is necessary. james henry leigh hunt was born october , , in the village of southgate, middlesex. he was descended on the father's side from "tory cavaliers" of west indian adoption, and on the mother's from american quakers of irish extraction--an exotic combination of celtic and creole strains which never coalesced but in turn affected his temperament. his father was an engaging and gifted clergyman who quoted horace and drank claret--a sanguine, careless child of the south who made the acquaintance alike of good society and of debtor's prisons. this parent's cheerfulness and courage were his most fortunate legacies to his son; a speculative turn in matters of religion and government and a general financial irresponsibility constituted his most unfortunate legacy. his mother was as shrinking as his father was convivial, but, like her husband, possessed a strong sense of duty and of loyalty. her son inherited her love of books and of nature. of his heritage from his parents leigh hunt wrote: "i may call myself, in every sense of the word ... a son of mirth and melancholy;... and, indeed, as i do not remember to have ever seen my mother smile, except in sorrowful tenderness, so my father's shouts of laughter are now ringing in my ears."[ ] as leigh hunt was heir to his ancestry in an unusual degree, so in an extraordinary measure was the child father of the man. the atmosphere of the home, tense with discussions of theology and politics and bitter with hardships of poverty and prisons, gave him a precocious acquaintance with weighty matters and with many miseries. in he entered christ's hospital. like shelley he rebelled against the time-honored custom of fagging, and chose instead a beating every night with a knotted handkerchief. he avoided personal encounters in self-defense, but was valiant enough where others were concerned, or where a principle was involved. haydon said: "he was a man who would have died at the stake for a principle, though he might have cried like a child from physical pain, and would have screamed still louder if he put his foot in the gutter! yet not one iota of recantation would have quivered on his lips, if all the elysium of all the religions on earth had been offered and realized to induce him to do so."[ ] his wonderful power of forming friendships--a power with which the present study is so much concerned--was first developed at christ's hospital. as he sentimentally expressed it, "the first heavenly taste it gave me of that most spiritual of the affections. i use the word 'heavenly' advisedly; and i call friendship the most spiritual of the affections, because even one's kindred, in partaking of our flesh and blood, become, in a manner, mixed up with our entire being. not that i would disparage any other form of affection, worshipping as i do, all forms of it, love in particular, which in its highest state, is friendship and something more. but if i ever tasted a disembodied transport on earth, it was in those friendships which i entertained at school, before i dreamt of any maturer feeling."[ ] like shelley, hunt had so great an inclination to sentimentalize and idealize friendship that sometimes after the first brief rhapsody of fresh acquaintance he suffered bitter disillusionment. the majority, however, of the ties formed were lasting.[ ] the abridgements of the _spectator_, set hunt as a school task, instilled a dislike of prose-writing that may account for his preference through life for verse composition, although he was by nature less a poet than an essayist. from cooke's edition of the _british poets_ he learned to love gray, collins, thomson, blair and spenser--influences responsible in part for his dislike of eighteenth century convention and for his historical prominence in the romantic movement. spenser later became the literary passion of his life. other books which he read at this period were tooke's _pantheon_, lemprière's _classical dictionary_, and spence's _polymetis_, three favorites with keats; _peter wilkins_, _thalaba_ and _german romances_, three favorites with shelley. later hunt and shelley's reading was closely paralleled in godwin's _political justice_, _lucretius_, _pliny_, _plato_, _aristotle_, _voltaire_, _condorcet_ and the _dictionnaire philosophique_. with the years hunt's list swelled to an almost incredible degree. it was through books that he knew life. he left christ hospital in . the eight years spent there were his only formal preparation for a literary profession. he greatly regretted his lack of a university education, but he consoled himself by quoting with true cockney spirit goldsmith's saying: "london is the first of universities."[ ] through his father's connections he met many prominent men in london and was made much of. this premature association accounts for some of the arrogance so conspicuous in his early journalistic work, which, in middle life, sobered down into a harmless vanity. in hunt started a sunday newspaper, _the examiner_. the letter tendering his resignation[ ] of a position in the office of the secretary of war, coming from an inexperienced man of twenty-four is pompous in tone and heavy with the weight of his duty to the english nation. his subsequent assurance and boldness resulted in in his being indicted for a libel of the prince regent, afterwards george iv, and in an imprisonment for two years dating from february , . his elder brother john, the publisher of the paper, served the same sentence in a separate prison. they shared between them a fine of £ , . by special dispensation hunt's family was allowed to reside with him in prison and, stranger still, he was allowed to continue his work on the libellous journal. at the same time he wrote in jail the _descent of liberty_ and part of the _story of rimini_. he transformed his prison yard into a garden and his prison room into a bower by papering the walls with trellises of roses and by coloring his ceiling like the sky. his books and piano-forte, his flowers and plaster casts surrounded him as at home. old friends gathered about and new ones sought him as a martyr to the liberal cause. but the picture has a darker side which it is necessary to notice in order to understand hunt's personal relations. an imaginative and over-sensitive brain in a feeble body had peopled his childhood with creatures of fear, the precursors of the morbid fancies of later years. from to he suffered from a trouble that seems to have been mental rather than physical, probably a form of melancholia or hypochondria. he tortured himself with problems of metaphysics and philosophy. he was haunted with the hallucination that he was deficient in physical courage, and therefore subjected himself to all kinds of tests. at the beginning of his imprisonment he was suffering from a second attack of his malady. the injurious effects upon his health of close confinement at this time can be traced to the end of his life. after his release his morbid fear of cowardice and his habit of seclusion were so strong upon him that for months at a time he would not venture out upon the streets. yet in spite of all this and of frequent illnesses, his animal spirits were invincible. his optimism was proverbial; indeed, it was a part of his religion. coventry patmore tells us that on entering a room and being presented to hunt for the first time, he received the greeting "this is a beautiful world, mr. patmore."[ ] his wonderful fancy colored his life as it colored his poetry. with his flowers and his friends and his fancies he turned life into a perpetual arcadia. it has been many times asserted that leigh hunt was morally weak. his self-depreciation is largely responsible for such assertions. it is true that he fell short of great accomplishment and that he was guilty of small foibles which haydon exaggerated into "petticoat twaddling and grandisonian cant."[ ] yet the struggle and the suffering of his life show more virility and nobility than he is generally credited with, and prove that beneath a veneer of affectation lay strong and healthy qualities. a second lasting and disastrous result that followed hunt's incarceration and that greatly affected his relations with byron and shelley was the crippling of his finances. while it cannot be said that he ever showed any real business ability, yet, at the beginning of the trials for libel, his money matters were in fair condition. the heavy fine and costs permanently disabled him. in his affairs were in such a bad state that, with the hope of bettering them, he left england on a precarious journalistic venture, an injudicious step, the cause of which can be traced to the lingering effects of his labors in the cause of liberalism. from to his misfortunes reached a climax. he sold his books to get something to eat. the pain of giving up his beloved _parnaso italiano_ was like that of a violinist parting with his instrument. he lived in continual fear of arrest for debt. at the same time, family troubles and ill-health combined to torment him. in sir percy shelley gave him an annuity of £ , and in , the same year of the benefit performance of _every man in his humour_, he was granted through the efforts of lord john russell, macaulay and carlyle, an annual pension of £ on the civil list. there were also two separate grants of £ each from the royal bounty, one from william iv, and the other from queen victoria. in his last years there is no mention made of want.[ ] hunt's attitude in respect to money obligations was unique, but well-defined and consistent. it was not, as is often inferred, either puling or unscrupulous.[ ] he was absolutely incapable of the skimpole vices.[ ] his dilemmas were not due to indolence. on the contrary, he labored indefatigably as results show. the trouble was his "hugger-mugger" management, as carlyle expressed it. he adopted william godwin's doctrine that the distribution of property should depend on justice and necessity, and thought with him that the teachers of religion were pernicious in treating the practice of justice "not as a debt, but as an affair of spontaneous generosity and bounty. they have called upon the rich to be clement and merciful to the poor. the consequence of this has been that the rich, when they bestowed the slender pittance of their enormous wealth in acts of charity, as they were called, took merit to themselves for what they gave, instead of considering themselves delinquents for what they withheld."[ ] godwin held gratitude to be a superstition. consequently, when in need, hunt thought he had a right to assistance from such friends as had the wherewithal to give. he accepted obligations, as will be shown in the following chapters, much as a matter of course.[ ] but even in his worst distresses, he never desired nor accepted promiscuous charity; and he did not always willingly accept aid even from his friends. he refused offers of help from trelawney. he returned a bank bill sent him by his sister-in-law, £ sent by de wilde as part of the compensation fund, and $ presented by james russell lowell. in reynell forfeited £ as security for hunt. twenty years later, on the payment of the first installment of the shelley legacy, hunt discharged the debt.[ ] he rejected several offers to pay his fine at the time of his imprisonment.[ ] mary shelley, who more than any one had cause to complain of hunt's attitude in money matters, wrote in in announcing to him the forthcoming annuity from her son: "i know your real delicacy about money matters."[ ] in the _correspondence_ there are mysterious allusions made by hunt and by his son thornton to a veiled influence on hunt's life, to some one who acted as trustee for him and who, without his knowledge or consent, made indiscriminating appeals in his behalf. the discovery of refusals and repulses led him to write the following to william story, through whom came lowell's offer: "nor do i think the man truly generous who cannot both give and receive. but, my dear story, my heart has been deeply wounded, some time back, in consequence of being supposed to carry such opinions to a practical extreme.... it gave me a shock so great that, as long as i live, it will be impossible for me to forego the hope of outliving all similar chances, by conduct which none can misinterpret."[ ] * * * * * leigh hunt's work which comes into the period of his association with byron, shelley and keats falls into four divisions: his theatrical criticism, his political journals, his poetry and his miscellaneous essays. the first and the last, although important in themselves, do not enter into his relations with the three men in question and will not be considered here. his political activity is important in his relations with byron and shelley; his poetry in his relations with keats and shelley. in leigh hunt's career, the step most significant in its far-reaching effects was the establishment of _the examiner_.[ ] its professed object was the discussion of politics. it contained, in addition to foreign and provincial intelligence, criticism of the theatre, of literature, and of the fine arts. full reports were given of the proceedings in parliament. at different times, various series of articles appeared, such as the _essays on methodism_ by hunt, and _the round table_ by hunt and hazlitt. fox-bourne says that previous to hunt's _examiner_ there had been weeklies or "essay sheets" such as defoe, steele, addison and goldsmith had developed, and that there had been dailies or "news sheets" which gave bare facts, but that _the examiner_ was the first to give the news faithfully in essay style.[ ] it soon raised the character of the weeklies. during the first year the circulation reached , , a large number at that time. carlyle said: "i well remember how its weekly coming was looked for in our village in scotland. the place of its delivery was besieged by an eager crowd, and its columns furnished the town talk till the next number came."[ ] redding says "everybody in those days read _the examiner_."[ ] the prospectus contained a severe criticism of contemporary journalism:[ ] "mean in its subserviency to the follies of the day, very miserably merry in its fuss and stories, extremely furious in politics, and quite as feeble in criticism. you are invited to a literary conversation, and you find nothing but scandal and commonplace. there is a flourish of trumpets, and enter tom thumb. there is an earthquake and a worm is thrown up.... the gentleman who until lately conducted the theatrical department in the _news_ will criticise the theatre in the examiner; and as the public have allowed the possibility of impartiality in that department, we do not see why the same possibility may not be obtained in politics." then followed a declaration against party as a factor in politics: party, it was declared, should not exist "abstracted from its utility"; in the present day every man must belong to some class; "he is either pittite or foxite, windhamite, wilberforcite or burdettite; though, at the same time, two thirds of these disturbers of coffee-houses might with as much reason call themselves hivites, or shunamites, or perhaps bedlamites."[ ] although _the examiner_ thus firmly announced its intentions, nevertheless in the heat of political contest it soon became the organ of a group of men known as "reformers," who were laboring and clamoring for constitutional and administrative improvement. it became the avowed enemy of the tory party and its journals, and in particular of the ministry during the long tory ascendancy; the enemy, at times, of royalty itself. the prospectus likewise announced an intention to reform the manners and morals of the age. hunt could write a sermon with the same ease as a song or a satire. horse-racing, cock-fighting and prize-fighting were condemned; most of all the publication of scandal and crime. a passage on advertisements is humorous and still of living interest: "the public shall neither be tempted to listen to somebody in the shape of wit who turns out to be a lottery-keeper, nor seduced to hear a magnificent oration which finishes by retreating into a peruke, or rolling off into a blacking ball ... and as there is perhaps about one person in a hundred who is pleased to see two or three columns occupied with the mutabilities of cotton and the vicissitudes of leather, the proprietors will have as little to do with bulls and raw-hides, as with lottery-men and wig-makers." the editorials, which occupied the foremost columns of the paper, attacked corruption and injustice of every kind without respect of persons, currying favor with neither party nor individual, and laboring above all for the people. international relations and continental conditions were kept track of, but chief prominence was given to domestic affairs. the editor warred against all abuses of power in the cabinet and in all offices under the crown. in particular he attacked with merciless persistence the prince regent in regard to his private life and his public conduct, and his brother frederick the duke of york, for his inefficiency as commander-in-chief of the army.[ ] his definition of the english army was "a host of laced jackets and long pigtails."[ ] he condemned the numerous subsidies of the crown, the royal pensions and salaries for nominal service. he ridiculed the divine right of kings and exposed court scandal and immorality. the chief measures for which he labored were catholic emancipation; reform of parliamentary representation; liberty of the press; reduction and equalization of taxes; greater discretion in increasing the public debt; education of the poor and amelioration of their sufferings; abolition of child-labor and of the slave trade; reform of military discipline, of prison conditions, and of the criminal and civil laws, particularly those governing debtors. it is not a matter of marvel that the paper made hosts of enemies on every side. charges of libel quickly followed its onslaughts. before the paper was a year old a prosecution was begun in connection with the major hogan and mrs. clarke case,[ ] but it was dropped when an investigation was begun by the house of commons. within a year's time after this prosecution a second indictment was brought because of the sentence: "of all monarchs since the revolution the successor of george the third will have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular."[ ] the _morning chronicle_ copied it, and was indicted, but both cases were dismissed. the third offense was the quotation of an article by john scott on the cruelty of military flogging[ ] but, like the others, this prosecution came to nothing. the fourth and most disastrous misdemeanor was libel of the prince regent, a man of shocking morals and of unstable character. before his appointment as regent he had leaned to the whig party and advocated catholic emancipation, but at his accession to power he retained the tory ministry. the whigs were greatly angered in consequence, and _the examiner_ took it upon itself to voice their indignation.[ ] at a dinner given at the freemason's tavern on st. patrick's day, march , , lord moira, an old friend of the prince's, omitted mentioning him in his speech. later, when a toast was proposed to the prince, it was greeted with hisses. mr. sheridan, because of lord moira's omission, spoke later in the evening in defense of the regent, but he, too, was received with hisses. the _morning chronicle_ reported the dinner; the _morning post_ replied with fulsome praise of the prince; _the examiner_ with its usual alacrity joined in the fray and took sides with the _chronicle_, dissecting, phrase by phrase, the adulation heaped upon the prince by the _post_. the following is the bitterest part of the polemic against him: "what person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this 'glory of the people' was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches!--that this 'protector of the arts' had named a wretched foreigner his historical painter, in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen!--that this 'mæcenas of the age' patronized not a single deserving writer!--that this 'breather of eloquence' could not say a few decent extempore words, if we are to judge, at least, from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation for portugal!--that this 'conqueror of hearts' was the disappointer of hopes!--that this 'exciter of desire' [bravo! messieurs of the post!]--this 'adonis in loveliness', was a corpulent man of fifty!--in short, this _delightful_, _blissful_, _wise_, _pleasurable_, _honourable_, _virtuous_, _true_ and _immortal_ prince, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a dispiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity!"[ ] it was said that the chief offense was given by the statement that "this 'adonis in loveliness' was a corpulent man of fifty." the article, although true, was of doubtful expediency and offensively violent and personal. further, the unremitting attacks of _the examiner_ had been neither dignified nor charitable in their searchlight penetration into the prince's private affairs.[ ] an indictment for libel naturally followed at once. lord brougham's "masterly defense"[ ] failed to avert the determined efforts of the prosecution to make an example of the editor and the publisher of _the examiner_. they were sentenced to the imprisonment and fine already mentioned. they refused all overtures for alleviation of the sentence:--overtures from the government; from the whigs who, in the person of perry of the _morning chronicle_, proposed to obtain a compromise from the prosecution by threatening the regent with the publication of state secrets from friends; and even from a juror who offered to pay the fine. leigh hunt wrote: "i am an englishman setting an example to my children and my country; and it would be hard, under all these circumstances, if i could not suffer my extremity rather than disgrace myself by effeminate lamentation or worse compromise."[ ] the two hunts thought that the serving of the sentence would be beneficial to the liberal cause, particularly in increasing the freedom of the press. the general method of _the examiner_ was vigorous attack. there was no circumlocution, no mincing of language, but aggressive candour, and, when it was considered necessary, wholesale censure and vituperation. a typical illustration is given in this passage, describing a dinner of the common council: "it is the fashion just now to call bonaparte antichrist, the beast with seven heads and ten horns, ... but if you wish to see those who have the 'real mark of the beast' upon them, go to a city dinner, and after battles for trout and the buffetings for turtle, after the rattling of wine glasses and plethoric throats, after the swillings and the gormandizings, and the maudlin hobs-and-nobs, and the disquisitions on smothered rabbits, and the bloated hectics, and the blinking eyes and slurred voices, and the hiccups, the rantings, and the roars, hear an unwieldy loan-jobber descanting on our glorious king and unshaken constitution. the stranger, that after this sight, goes to see the beasts in the tower, is an enemy to all true climax."[ ] in actual results _the examiner_ accomplished a great deal in the counter movement for reform. while hunt had no original or constructive political theory, little power of philosophical or logical thought, and no special equipment besides wide general knowledge, he had great sincerity and courage and a defiant attitude toward corruption of all kinds.[ ] he was himself absolutely incorruptible. if he preferred any form of government above another--for he was more interested in the pure administration of an established government than in the form itself--his preference was for a liberal monarchy. notwithstanding this moderate attitude, _the examiner_ was accused of radical, even revolutionary opinions. it was charged with being an enemy of the constitution, a traitor to the king, a foe to the established church.[ ] hunt's positive achievement in political journalism was two-fold: he obtained additional freedom for the press and he elevated journalistic style to a literary level. monkhouse says that hunt "established for the first time a paper which fought, and fought effectively, with prejudice and privilege, with superstition and tyranny, which was a bearer of light to all men of liberal principles in that country, and set the example of the independent thought and fearless expression of opinion, which has since become the very light and power of the press."[ ] of the hunt brothers coventry patmore writes: "i verily believe that, without the manly firmness, the immaculate political honesty, and the vigorous good sense of the one, and the exquisite genius and varied accomplishments, guided by the all-pervading and all-embracing humanity of the other, we should at this moment have been without many of those writers and thinkers on whose unceasing efforts the slow but sure march of our political, and with it, our social regeneration as a people mainly depends."[ ] hunt assisted in bringing about reforms in the interest of the people by calling attention to abuses that demanded investigation, and by advocating correction. his ideas on national finance and practical administration are wonderful when contrasted with his inefficiency in his own affairs. he lacked largeness of perspective and masculine grasp. his work is all the more remarkable when his temperament and tastes are considered; for his was a nature, as professor dowden has put it, "framed less for the rough and tumble of english radical politics than for 'dance and provençal song and sunburnt mirth.'" as a factor in the reform movement begun in the first decade of the nineteenth century leigh hunt has not yet come into his own.[ ] his was no cosmic theory, nor search after the origin of evil, nor magnificent rebellion like shelley's and byron's; but in his own smaller way he played as courageous and as effective a part in the cause of liberty as those greater spirits.[ ] in , the two brothers had established a quarterly, _the reflector_, of much the same nature and creed as _the examiner_. it was unsuccessful and was discontinued after the fourth number. it differed from its predecessor in combining literature with politics. hunt's reason for this innovation displays a rare power to judge of contemporary movements: "politics, in times like these, should naturally take the lead in periodical discussion, because they have an importance almost unexampled in history, and because _they are now, in their turn, exhibiting their reaction upon literature, as literature in the preceding age exhibited its action upon them_."[ ] although hunt continued to be editor of _the examiner_ until he went to italy in , his aggressive political activity seemed to die out of him after his release from prison. he was never so prominently again before the public; in , he ceased altogether to write on political questions. he retired more and more into the seclusion of his books, and from about , denied himself to all but a small circle of congenial spirits. hunt, like the others of his group, was deeply influenced by the liberal movement in religion as well as in politics. he had seen his father's progress from the anglican church through the unitarian[ ] to the universalist. at the age of twelve he repudiated the doctrine of eternal punishment and declared himself a believer in the "exclusive goodness of futurity." in his early manhood he decried the superstition of catholicism, the intolerance of calvinism, and the emotionality of methodism. yet he acknowledged a great first cause and a divine paternity. he refused, like shelley, to recognize the existence of evil, and thought everything finally good and beautiful in nature.[ ] he believed that universal happiness would come about through individual excellence, through performance of duty and avoidance of excess. those who disagreed with him in this respect he considered blasphemers of nature. as lord houghton in his address in the cemetery of kensal green on the unveiling of a bust of hunt remarked, he had an "absolute superstition for good." similar testimony was borne by r. h. horne when he said that chaucer's "'ah, benedicite' was falling forever from his lips."[ ] his religion was one of charity and cheerfulness, of love and truth, which is but to affirm that the humanitarian moral of _abou ben adhem_ was realized in his own life.[ ] on the death of shelley's child william, hunt wrote to the bereaved father: "i do not know that a soul is born with us; but we seem, to me, to _attain_ to a soul, some later, some earlier; and when we have got that, there is a look in our eye, a sympathy in our cheerfulness, and a yearning and grave beauty in our thoughtfulness that seems to say, 'our mortal dress may fall off when it will; our trunk and our leaves may go; we have shot up our blossom into an immortal air.'"[ ] hunt, like byron and shelley, had curious ideas about the relation of the sexes, ideas which hazlitt said, were "always coming out like a rash."[ ] this "crotchet" was taken over likewise from godwin, who thought it checked the progress of the mind for one individual to be obliged to live for a long period in conformity to the desires of another and therefore disapproved of the marriage relation. but, like godwin and shelley, hunt bowed to the conventions. his life was a singularly pure one. the influence of hunt's poetry upon keats and shelley, in its general romantic tendencies, particularly in respect to diction and metre, deserves equal consideration with the influence of his politics upon shelley and byron. _juvenilia_, a volume of hunt's poems collected by his father and issued by subscription in contains original work and translations which show wide reading for a boy of seventeen and some fluency in versification. otherwise the writer's own opinion in is correct: "my work was a heap of imitations, all but absolutely worthless.... i wrote 'odes' because collins and gray had written them, 'pastorals' because pope had written them, 'blank verse' because akenside and thomson had written blank verse, and a 'palace of pleasure' because spenser had written a 'bower of bliss.'"[ ] hunt's chief defect in taste, that of introducing in the midst of highly poetical conceptions, disagreeable physical conditions or symptoms, is as conspicuous in this volume[ ] as in his more mature work. the _feast of the poets_, ,[ ] is a light satire in the manner of sir john suckling's _session of the poets_. it spares few poets since the days of milton and dryden, and it includes in its revilings most of hunt's contemporaries. gifford, the editor of the _quarterly review_, comes in for the worst castigation. it is not remarkable that the satire antagonized people on every side in the literary world as _the examiner_ had done in the political. hunt believed that "its offences, both of commission and of omission, gave rise to some of the most inveterate enmities" of his life.[ ] it is important in the history to be discussed in a later chapter of the literary feud which resulted in the creation of the so-called cockney school. later revisions included some poets who had been intentionally ignored at first in both poems and notes, or who, like shelley and keats, naturally would not have been included in the edition; and it softened down the harsh criticism of those who were unfortunate enough to have been included, except gifford, whom hunt could never forgive. the irony is fresh and there are occasional spicy flashes of wit. the narrative is clear and the characterization vivid. byron pronounced it "the best session we have."[ ] the _descent of liberty_,[ ] , is a masque celebrating the triumph of liberty, in the person of the allies, over the enchanter, napoleon. there is little plot or human interest; the natural, the supernatural, and the mythical are confusedly interwoven. the pictorial effect, however, is one of great richness and color, and some of the songs and passages have fine lyrical feeling and melody. it is interesting in this connection to note a vague general resemblance between the _descent of liberty_ and shelley's _queen mab_ ( - ) in the worship of liberty, in the hope and promise of her ultimate triumph, and in the wild imagination which hunt probably never again equalled. it is not likely, however, that hunt knew shelley's poem at the time he was writing his own. _the story of rimini_, produced in and dedicated to lord byron, is the most important of hunt's works in a consideration of his relations with the enemies of the cockney school[ ] and with byron, shelley, and keats. byron criticised it severely. shelley thought it carried uncommon and irresistible interest with it, but he agreed with byron in thinking that the style had fettered hunt's genius.[ ] keats wrote a sonnet[ ] on _rimini_ in , and in his own works shows unmistakably the influence of hunt's poem in diction and versification. the story is founded, of course, on the francesca episode in the fifth canto of the _inferno_ of dante. it was a dangerous thing for hunt to undertake an elaboration of the marvelous episode of dante. had he been a man of greater genius it would have been a risk; as it was, he produced a diffuse and sentimental narrative which bears little resemblance to the singular perfection of the original. on the other hand, the _story of rimini_ does possess indubitable merits: directness of narrative, minute observation, sensuous richness of pictorial description, and occasional delicate felicity of language.[ ] byron wrote of the third canto which he saw in manuscript: "you have excelled yourself--if not all your contemporaries--in the canto which i have just finished. i think it above the former books; but that is as it should be; it rises with the subject, the conception seems to me perfect, and the execution perhaps as nearly so as verse will admit. there is more originality than i recollect to have seen elsewhere within the same compass, and frequent and great happiness of expression." the faults he said were "occasional quaintnesses and obscurity, and a kind of harsh and yet colloquial compounding of epithets, as if to avoid saying common things in a common way."[ ] october , , in reply to these objections hunt sent forth this defense: "we accomodate ourselves to certain habitual, sophisticated phrases of _written_ language, and thus take away from real feeling of any sort the only language _it ever actually uses_, which is the _spoken_ language." at the same time he made a few alterations at byron's suggestion.[ ] and again the latter wrote: "you have two excellent points in that poem--originality and italianism."[ ] after the _story of rimini_ appeared he wrote 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."[ ] in byron's opinion had changed somewhat: "when i saw _rimini_ in ms., i told him i deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. his answer was, that his style was a system, or _upon system_, or some other such cant; and when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless; so i said no more to him, and very little to anyone else. he believed his trash of vulgar phrases tortured into compound barbarisms to be _old_ english[ ] ... hunt, who had powers to make the _story of rimini_ as perfect as a fable of dryden, has thought fit to sacrifice his genius to some unintelligible notion of wordsworth, which i defy him to explain.[ ]... a friend of mine calls 'rimini' _nimini pimini_; and 'foliage' _follyage_. perhaps he had a tumble in 'climbing trees in the hesperides'! but rimini has a great deal of merit. there never were so many fine things spoiled as in 'rimini.'"[ ] hunt had a distinct theory of language based on a few crude principles. as his practical application of them had its effect upon keats, a somewhat full consideration of them is desirable here. the first and most conspicuous one, promoted by what hunt called "an idiomatic spirit in verse,"[ ] was a preference for colloquial words.[ ] he mistook for grace and fluency of diction, a turn of phrase that was without poetic connection and often in very poor taste. in dialogue, particularly, the effect is undignified. this professed doctrine was a fuller development[ ] of the statement in the advertisement to the _lyrical ballads_ of : in hunt's opinion, wordsworth failed to consider duly meter in its essential relations to poetry, and while hunt himself desired a "return to nature and a natural style" he thought that wordsworth had substituted puerility for simplicity and affectation for nature. hunt's acknowledged model for the poem was dryden,[ ] but hunt's colloquial phrasing, peculiar diction, elision,[ ] and loose expansion approach much more closely to chamberlayne's _pharronida_ ( ) than to anything in dryden.[ ] the following extract is one of many that might be cited as suggestive of hunt's _story of rimini_: "to his cold clammy lips joining her balmy twins, she from them sips so much of death's oppressing dews, that, by that touch revived, his soul, though winged to fly her ruined seat, takes time to breathe these sad notes forth: "farewell, my dear, beneath my fainting spirits sink."[ ] occasionally hunt's choice of colloquial words fitted the subject, as in the _feast of the poets_, where humor and satire permit such expressions as "bards of old england had all been rung in," "twiddling a sunbeam," "bloated his wits," "tricksy tenuity" or such words as "smack," "pop-in" and "sing-song." his poetical epistles suffer without injury such departures from dignified diction, but in other cases, of which the _story of rimini_ is a notable example, a grave subject in the garb of everyday language is degraded into the incongruous and prosaic. it is in physical descriptions that this undignified diction most strikingly violates good taste. examples are: "and both their cheeks, like peaches on a tree, leaned with a touch together, thrillingly." "so lightsomely dropped in, his lordly back, his thigh so fitted for the tilt or dance." sometimes the prosaic quality of hunt's diction is due to its being pitched upon a merely "society" level: "may i come in? said he:--it made her start,-- that smiling voice;--she coloured, pressed her heart a moment, as for breath and then with free and usual tone said, 'o yes,--certainly.'" such a treatment of the meeting of paolo and francesca in the bower is wholly inadequate to the situation and the emotion of the moment. additional illustrations of his colloquialisms from the _story of rimini_ and from other poems of the same period are: "to bless his shabby eyes," "that to the stander near looks awfully," "banquet small, and cheerful, and considerate," "clipsome waist," "jauntiness behind and strength before" (description of a horse), "lend their streaming tails to the fond air," "sweepy shape," "cored in our complacencies," "lumps of flowers," "smooth, down-arching thigh," "tapering with tremulous mass internally." hunt's second principle to be considered is the excessive use of vague and passionless words. instances of such words to be found very frequently in his poetry are: fond, amiable, fair, rural, cordial, cheerful, gentle, calm, smooth, serene, earnest, lovely, balmy, dainty, mild, meek, tender, kind, elegant, quiet, sweet, fresh, pleasant, warm, social, and many others of like character. a third principle was the employment of unusual words; examples are found in the _story of rimini_ in the first edition and in other poems produced about this same time. in the _poetical works_, , most of them have been discarded. the preface states that the "occasional quaintnesses and neologisms" which "formerly disfigured the poems did not arise from affectation but from the sheer license of animal spirits"; that they are not worth defending and that he has left only two in the _story of rimini_, "swirl" and "cored." "swaling" had been the most famous one in the poem because of the ridicule heaped upon it by the enemies of the cockney school. to use ordinary words in an extraordinary sense was a fourth principle. the effect was often extremely awkward. core passes as a synonym for heart; fry occurs in _rimini_ in a strange sense; hip and tiptoe are employed with a special huntian significance. nouns and adjectives are used as verbs and verbs as nouns and adjectives with an unpoetical effect: cored (verb); drag (noun); frets (noun); feel (noun); patting (adjective); spanning (adjective); lull'd (adjective); smearings; measuring; doings.[ ] the use of compounds is a fifth distinguishing feature. such combinations are found as bathing-air, house-warm lips, side-long pillowed meekness, fore-thoughted chess, pin-drop silence, tear-dipped feeling. the sixth and last peculiarity is the preference for adjectives in _y_ and _ing_, many of them of his own coinage; for adverbs in _ly_; and for unauthorized or awkward comparatives: examples are plumpy (cheeks), knify, perky, sweepy, farmy, bosomy, pillowy, arrowy, liny, leafy, scattery, winy, globy; hasting, silvering, doling, blubbing, firming, thickening, quickening, differing, perking; lightsomely, refreshfully, thrillingly, kneadingly, lumpishly, smilingly, preparingly, crushingly,[ ] finelier, martialler, tastefuller, apter. the colloquial vocabulary, the familiar tone, and the expansion of thought into phrases and clauses where it would have gained by condensed expression, give to the _story of rimini_ a prosaic and eccentric style. yet hunt declared he held in horror eccentricity and prosiness.[ ] in a discussion of the influence of leigh hunt upon the versification of his contemporaries and successors it is necessary to consider not only his theory but also the active part played by him as a conscious reviver of the older heroic couplet. in this reaction against the school of pope, as also in the use of blank verse, he showed great independence in discarding approved models. the notes added to the _feast of the poets_ in , when it was republished from the _reflector_ of , are important in this connection. they show a wide familiarity with modern poetry. he writes: "the late dr. darwin, whose notion of poetical music, in common with that of goldsmith and others, was of the school of pope, though his taste was otherwise different, was perhaps the first, who by carrying it to the extreme pitch of sameness, and ringing it affectedly in one's ears, gave the public at large a suspicion that there was something wrong in its nature. but of those who saw its deficiencies, part had the ambition without the taste or attention requisite for striking into a better path, and became eccentric in another extreme; while others, who saw the folly of both, were content to keep the beaten track and set a proper example to neither. by these appeals, however, the public ear has been excited to expect something better; and perhaps there was never a more favourable time than the present for an attempt to bring back the real harmonies of the english heroic, and to restore it to half the true principle of its music, variety. i am not here joining the cry of those, who affect to consider pope as no poet at all. he is, i confess, in my judgment, at a good distance from dryden, and at an immeasurable one from such men as spenser and milton; but if the author of the _rape of the lock_, of _eloisa to abelard_, and of the _elegy on an unfortunate lady_, is no poet, then are fancy and feeling no properties belonging to poetry. i am only considering his versification; and upon that point i do not hesitate to say, that i regard him, not only as no master of his art, but as a very indifferent practiser, and one whose reputation will grow less and less, in proportion as the lovers of poetry become intimate with his great predecessors, and with the principles of musical beauty in general."[ ] the remarks on pope close with the hope that the imitation of the best work of dryden, milton and spenser "might lead the poets of the present age to that proper mixture of sweetness and strength--of modern finish and ancient variety--from which pope and his rhyming facilities have so long withheld us."[ ] hunt closes with an appeal for the return to italian models, and says that hayley, in his _triumphs of temper_ was "the quickest of our late writers to point out the great superiority of the italian school over the french." he protests against the wide influence of boileau.[ ] the introduction to the _poetical works_ of contains a concise and technical statement of hunt's theory of the heroic couplet. he argues that the triplet tends to condensation, three lines instead of four; that it carries onward the fervor of the poet's feeling, delivering him from the ordinary laws of his verse, and that it expresses continuity. of the bracket he says: "i confess i like the very bracket that marks out the triplet to the reader's eye, and prepares him for the music of it. it has a look like the bridge of a lute."[ ] the use of the alexandrine in the heroic couplet, he avers, gives variety and energy. double rhymes are defended on historical grounds. for himself he claims credit as a restorer, not an innovator, and prophesies that the perfection of the heroic couplet is "to come about by a blending between the inharmonious freedom of our old poets in general ... and the regularity of dryden himself.... if anyone could unite the vigor of dryden with the ready and easy variety of pause in the works of the late mr. crabbe, and the lovely poetic consciousness in the _lamia_ of keats ... he would be a perfect master of the rhyming couplet." a study of the heroic couplet from dryden to shelley based on two hundred lines from each poet has yielded the results indicated in the table on the following page. professor saintsbury says: "there is no doubt that his [hunt's] versification in _rimini_ (which may be described as chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture of dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music of the followers of spenser, especially browne and wither) had a very strong influence both on keats and on shelley, and that it drew from them music much better than itself. this fluent, musical, many-colored-verse was a capital medium for tale telling."[ ] professor herford marks it as the "starting point of that free or chaucerian treatment of the heroic couplet and of the colloquial style, eschewing epigram and full of familiar turns, which shelley in _julian and maddalo_, and keats in _lamia_, made classical."[ ] mr. r. b. johnson calls it "a protest against the polished couplet of pope--a protest already expressed to some extent in the _lyrical ballads_, but through hunt's influence, guiding the pens of keats, shelley and some of his noblest successors."[ ] mr. a. j. kent says that "no one-sided sentiment of reaction against our so-called augustan literature disqualified leigh hunt from becoming, as he afterwards became, the greatest master since the days of dryden of the heroic couplet."[ ] leigh hunt's greatest mistake in the handling of the couplet has been clearly pointed out by mr. colvin, who says that he "blended the grave and the colloquial cadences of dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in either."[ ] the late dr. garnett said that the ease and variety of dryden was restored by hunt to english literature.[ ] monkhouse pointed out that keats and shelley, more than hunt, reaped the rewards of his revivification of the heroic couplet. the diffuseness of the diction of the _story of rimini_ results in a movement weaker than dryden's and less buoyant than chaucer's. yet the verse is distinguished by a fluency and grace and melody that at times are very pleasing. it had a notable influence on english verse--an influence begun by others but strongly reinforced by hunt. further treatment of the influence of hunt's diction and versification upon keats and shelley is reserved for chapters ii and iii of the present study. ---------------+------------------------------------------------- |dryden, |_absalom & achitophel_, | . | +---------------------------------------------- | |wm. chamberlayne, | |_pharronida_, . | + +------------------------------------------- | | |alexander pope, | | |_dunciad_, . | | + +---------------------------------------- | | | |leigh hunt,[ ] | | | |_story of rimini_, . | | | + +------------------------------------- | | | | |john keats, | | | | |_i stood tiptoe_, . | | | | + +---------------------------------- | | | | | |keats, | | | | | |_sleep and poetry_, . | | | | | + +------------------------------- | | | | | | |keats, | | | | | | |_endymion_, . | | | | | | + +---------------------------- | | | | | | | |keats,[ ] | | | | | | | |_lamia_, . | | | | | | | + +------------------------- | | | | | | | | |shelley, | | | | | | | | |_julian & maddalo_, . ---------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+------------------------- run-on couplets| | | | | | | | | run-on lines | | | | | | | | | triplets | | | | | | | | | alexandrines | | | | | | | | | ---------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+-- hunt's next poetical work after _rimini_ was _foliage_, published in . it is a collection of original poems under the title _greenwoods_, and of translations under the title _evergreens_.[ ] in the preface hunt announces the main features to be a love of sociability, of the country, and of the "fine imagination of the greeks."[ ] the first predilection runs the gamut from "sociability" to "domestic interest" and is the most fundamental characteristic of the author and of his writing. in the preface to _one hundred romances of real life_ he declares sociability to be "the greatest of all interests." it rarely failed to crop out when he was writing even on the gravest and most impersonal of subjects. in his intercourse with strangers, this same "sociability," added to a natural kindliness and sympathy, caused a familiarity of bearing that was often misunderstood. the _nymphs_, the longest poem of the volume, is founded on greek mythology and is interesting in connection with keats's poems on classical subjects. shelley said that the _nymphs_ was "truly _poetical_, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word. if miles were not between us, i should say what pity that _glib_ was not omitted, and that the poem is not so faultless as it is beautiful."[ ] in general shelley overestimated hunt's poetry, though he saw some of its affectations. shorter pieces were epistles to byron, moore, hazlitt and lamb--a kind of verse in which hunt excelled, for his attitude and style were peculiarly adapted to the familiar tone permissible in such writing. among hunt's best poems may be counted the sonnets to shelley, keats, haydon, raphael, and kosciusko; those entitled the _grasshopper and the cricket_, _to the nile_, _on a lock of milton's hair_, and the series on hampstead. the suburban charms of hampstead were very dear to hunt and he never tired of celebrating them in poetry and in prose. no amount of derision from the _quarterly_ or _blackwood's_ stopped him. the general characteristics of _foliage_ are much the same as those of the _story of rimini_. there are poor lines and good ones, never sustained power, and no poetry of a very high order. the subjects themselves are often unpoetical. hunt obtrudes himself too frequently in a breezy, offhand manner. byron's opinion of the book was scathing: "of all the ineffable centaurs that were ever begotten by self-love upon a nightmare, i think 'this monstrous sagittary' the most prodigious. _he_ (leigh h.) is an honest charlatan, who has persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures, and talks punch in pure simplicity of heart, taking himself (as poor fitzgerald said of _him_self in the _morning post_) for vates in both senses and nonsenses of the word. did you [moore] look at the translations of his own which he prefers to pope and cowper, and says so?--did you read his skimble-skamble about wordsworth being at the head of his own _profession_, in the _eyes_ of _those_ who followed it? i thought that poetry was an _art_, or an _attribute_, and not a _profession_; but be it one, is that ... at the head of _your_ profession in your eyes?"[ ] other poems belonging to this period are _hero and leander_ and _bacchus and ariadne_ in , and a translation of tasso's _aminta_ in . the first two show hunt's faculty for poetical narrative and description, and, in common with keats, a partiality for classical subjects. the three are in no way radically different from the poems already considered. the _literary pocket book_ which hunt edited in , and , the _new monthly magazine_ to which he began contributing in , and the _literary examiner_, which he established in , complete the enumeration of his writings during the period of his association with byron, shelley and keats. beyond the contributions of shelley and keats to the first and the reviews of byron's poems in the third, they are unimportant here. 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 _. it was about the year 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] with the same power of prophetic discernment, writing in , he realized to the full the greatness of keats and predicted that growth of his fame in the future which has since taken place.[ ] 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, , to the end of the year . he says: "it was not at hampstead that i first saw keats. it was in york buildings, in the new road (no. ), where i wrote part of the _indicator_--and he resided with me while in mortimer terrace, kentish town (no. ), where i concluded it. i mention this for the curious in such things, among whom i am one."[ ] 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 , and he did not begin work on the _indicator_ until october, . clarke states positively that the meeting took place at hampstead. from this evidence mr. colvin has suggested the early spring of as the most probable date.[ ] what seems better evidence than any that has yet been brought forward is a passage in _the examiner_ of june , , in hunt's review of keats's _poems_ of , 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 , ) 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,[ ] 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 , for hunt's testimony written in , 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 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] keats's interest in his profession had decreased as his knowledge and love of poetry grew. with the publication of his _poems_ in , 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.[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] in , hunt dedicated his translation of tasso's _aminta_ to keats. in spite of a eulogistic article by hunt running in _the examiners_ of june , july and , , and other notices in some of the provincial papers, the _poems_ sold not very well at first, and later, not at all.[ ] 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;[ ] 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.[ ] 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.[ ] 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."[ ] 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 , 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 , , 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."[ ] a letter written by haydon to keats, dated may , , 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."[ ] 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...."[ ] 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."[ ] in the last days of his life, his suspicion and bitterness were general. in a letter to bailey, june, , keats says: "i have suspected everybody."[ ] january, , he wrote georgiana keats, "upon the whole i dislike mankind."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] on his return to hampstead in october, , keats found affairs among the circle in a very bad way.[ ] 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 , lines--ah! says hunt, had it not been for me they would have been , ! 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?"[ ] hunt had tried to persuade keats not to write a long poem. keats wrote of this: "hunt's dissuasion was of no avail[ ]--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."[ ] during , 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 , , he writes to his brothers of the "drivelling egotism" of _the examiner_ article on the obsoletion of christmas gambols and pastimes.[ ] in a journal letter written to george keats and his wife in louisville during december and january, , 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";[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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?!"[ ] 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.[ ] "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."[ ] 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.[ ] 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":[ ] "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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] haydon's influence over keats was at its height in and .[ ] his gifts and his enthusiasm, his "fresh magnificence"[ ] carried keats by storm. it was not until about july 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.[ ] 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,[ ] seem to have been renewed. in , 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."[ ] in a letter to fanny brawne, keats said hunt "amuses me very kindly."[ ] 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, , keats left his rooms and moved to leigh hunt's home to be nursed.[ ] he remained about seven weeks with the family, when there occurred an unfortunate incident which resulted in his abrupt departure august , . 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] 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 , . the story of the personal relations of the two men could not be better closed than with the words of hunt written march , , 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."[ ] 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 st, , 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."[ ] leigh hunt's review of the _poems_ of [ ] 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[ ] 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 st 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."[ ] leigh hunt expressed himself thus in : "_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."[ ] _la belle dame sans merci_, which appeared first in _the indicator_,[ ] 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 and , , contained a review of the volume of . 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."[ ] much the same line of discussion is reported of the conversation at haydon's "immortal dinner," december , , 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."[ ] 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_[ ] "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.[ ] 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."[ ] 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 , , 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 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."[ ] "or by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves."[ ] "the ripples seem right glad to reach those cresses."[ ] "... you just now are stooping to pick up the keepsake intended for me."[ ] "of this fair world, and all its gentle livers."[ ] "the evening weather was so bright, and clear, that men of health were of unusual cheer."[ ] "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."[ ] "the lamps that from the high roof'd wall were pendant and gave the steel a shining quite transcendent."[ ] "or on the wavy grass outstretch'd supinely, pry 'mong the stars, to strive to think divinely."[ ] 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."[ ] "... some lady sweet who cannot feel for cold her tender feet."[ ] "rein in the swelling of his ample might."[ ] "nor will a bee buzz round two swelling peaches."[ ] "... 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."[ ] "... 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."[ ] descriptive passages in the huntian style are not infrequent: the opening lines from the _imitation of spenser_[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] a third is: "across the lawny fields, and pebbly water." single phrases showing the influence of hunt[ ] 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"[ ] 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."[ ] 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, , before keats had met hunt and before the publication of the latter's epistles;[ ] 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 allusions, and by the direct references[ ] to hunt. _on the grasshopper and the cricket_[ ] and _to the nile_[ ] 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.[ ] the title of _on leigh hunt's poem, the story of rimini_[ ] speaks for itself.[ ] to put it briefly, the _poems_ of 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[ ] 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, , 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."[ ] 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.[ ] specific passages in _endymion_ reminiscent of hunt are rare, but book iii, ll. - 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."[ ] 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.'"[ ] 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--"[ ] 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."[ ] in july, , 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."[ ] one of the few occurrences of hunt's manner is seen in the _eve of st. agnes_. "paining with eloquence her balmy side."[ ] 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.[ ] 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 , in the _gentle armour_, hunt is the imitator of keats, as mr. colvin has already pointed out.[ ] 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[ ] 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."[ ] keats's _poems_ of 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,[ ] delicious,[ ] 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 . ordinary words used peculiarly include "nips" (they gave each other's cheeks), "core" (for heart) and "luxury"[ ] (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.[ ] 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."[ ] 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."[ ] keats, following the lead of hunt, used the free heroic couplet in several of the 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."[ ] in its want of couplet and line units, this is not very far from the truth. writing of it again in , 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."[ ] _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."[ ] leigh hunt said that "the lines seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty like sea nymphs luxuriating through the water."[ ] 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. chapter iii shelley finnerty case--correspondence of hunt and shelley--their political and religious sympathy--hunt's defense of shelley--hunt's italian journey--shelley's death--hunt's criticism--literary influence--shelley's estimate of hunt. the friendship of shelley and leigh hunt is the simple story of an intimacy founded on a common endowment of independence of thought and of capacity for self-sacrifice. although both were sensitive and shrinking by nature, and preferred to dwell in an isolated world of books and dreams, yet for the sake of abstract principles and for love of humanity, both expended much time and endured much pain in the arena of public strife. in _the examiners_ of february and , , appeared articles by hunt on the finnerty case. peter finnerty, hunt's successor as editor of _the statesman_, had been prosecuted and imprisoned on the charge of libelling lord castlereagh. hunt's defense drew shelley's attention to the case and may have inspired him, it has been suggested, to write his _political essay on the existing state of things_. the proceeds went to finnerty.[ ] on march shelley subscribed to the finnerty fund and, on the same day, wrote hunt, whom he had never met, a letter from oxford, congratulating him on his acquittal from a third charge of libel and proposing that an association should be formed to establish "rational liberty," to resist the enemies of justice, and to protect each other.[ ] shelley's political creed was, in the main, that of william godwin, with an admixture of holbach, volney and rousseau at first hand.[ ] in english philosophic literature he knew berkeley, hume, reid and locke. his watchword was the cry of the french revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity, to be gained, not by violence and bloodshed, but by a steady and unyielding resistance of the masses against the corrupt institutions of church and state. like godwin, he believed man capable of his own redemption and, with tradition and tyranny overthrown and reason and nature enthroned, he hoped for universal justice and ultimate perfectibility of mankind. his poetry and his prose represent a development from the impassioned and imaginative enthusiasm of an uncompromising youth, who would single-handed revolutionize the world in the twinkling of an eye, to the saner hope of a man who took somewhat into account the necessarily gradual nature of ethical evolution. his chief fallacy lay in the failure to recognize evil as an inherent force in human nature and to acknowledge sect and state, to which he attributed the origin of all error, as inventions of man's ingenuity. neither did he perceive the necessity of certain restrictions on the individual for the preservation of law and order. he believed in no distinctions of rank except those based on individual talent and virtue. he wrote in : "i am no aristocrat, nor '_crat_' at all, but vehemently long for the time when men may dare to live in accordance with nature and reason--in consequence with virtue, to which i firmly believe that religion and its establishments, polity and its establishments, are the formidable though destructible barriers."[ ] shelley knew of leigh hunt first as a political writer of considerable importance. in this respect he never ceased to admire him or to be influenced by _the examiner_ in the campaign against government corruption. yet his own equipment of mind and training, visionary as his theories seem, gave him a power of speculation and grasp of situation that ignored the limitations of time and space, while hunt, with his narrower view, never got beyond the petty and immediate details of one nation or of one age. the social improvements which shelley advocated were catholic emancipation, brought about later, as has been pointed out by symonds, by the very means which shelley foresaw and prophesied; reform of parliamentary representation[ ] similar to that carried into effect in , and ; freedom of the press[ ] and repeal of the union of great britain and ireland; the abolition of capital punishment and of war.[ ] during the fourteen years of hunt's editorship, among the reforms for which he fought in _the examiner_ were the first three of these measures. he denounced capital punishment and war in the same paper and later in his poem _captain sword and captain pen_.[ ] shelley's moral code was based on an idealized sense of justice, and was a kind of "natural piety."[ ] with one marked exception, he seems to have been true to the pursuit of it, both in his standards of conduct and in his relations with others. his life was a model of generosity, purity of thought, and unselfish devotion. hunt reported shelley as having said: "what a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really the principle of it, instead of faith."[ ] he was atheist only in the sense of discarding the dogmas of theology and of superstition, and in his spirit of scientific inquiry. he did not deny the existence in nature of an all-pervading spirit. hunt thought the popular misconception of shelley's opinions was due to his misapplication of the names of the deity and to his identification of them with vulgar superstitions. of shelley's attitude he wrote: "his want of faith in the letter, and his exceeding faith in the spirit of christianity, formed a comment, the one on the other, very formidable to those who chose to forget what scripture itself observes on that point."[ ] whether or not shelley believed in immortality is still a vexed question and is likely to remain so, since he had not reached convictions sufficiently stable to permit a formal statement on his part. many of the passages in _adonais_ would lead one to believe that he did; certainly he did, like hunt, cling to the idea of the persistence, in some form or other, of the good and the beautiful. the close conformity of their views is seen in the latter's two sonnets in _foliage_[ ] addressed to shelley, where the poet condemns the degrading notions so prevalent concerning the deity and celebrates the spirit of beauty and goodness in all things. but, in religion as in politics, shelley was bolder and more speculative than hunt. the fine of £ , and imprisonment of the hunt brothers in drew from shelley a vehement protest. in a letter to hogg[ ] he lamented the inadequacy of lord brougham's defense and fairly boiled with indignation at "the horrible injustice and tyranny of the sentence" and pronounced hunt "a brave, a good, and an enlightened man." he started a subscription with twenty pounds, and later he must have offered to pay the entire fine, for hunt recorded in his _autobiography_ that shelley had made him "a princely offer,"[ ] which he declined, as he did not need it. the offer was actuated solely by a hatred of oppression, for the two men had little or no personal knowledge of each other at the time. it is impossible to decide the exact date of their first meeting. hunt says that it took place before the indictment for libel on the prince regent.[ ] this evidence would make it fall sometime between march, , the date of shelley's letter mentioned above, and february, , the beginning of the incarceration. but a letter from shelley to hunt dated december , , demanding if he had made the statement that milton had died an atheist, from its very formal tone, leads one to believe that they had not met up to that time and that hunt, writing from memory many years afterwards, made a mistake. thornton hunt gives as the immediate cause of the two men coming together, shelley's application to mr. rowland hunter, the publisher and stepfather of mrs. hunt, for advice regarding the publication of a poem. he referred shelley to leigh hunt. the next meeting was in surrey street gaol. thornton hunt, in a delightful reminiscence of shelley,[ ] says that he had no recollection of him among his father's visitors in prison, but he remembered perfectly the latter's description of his "angelic" appearance, his classic thoughts, and his dreams for the emancipation of mankind. the real intimacy began after shelley's return from the continent in when shelley, in search of a house before he settled at marlow, was the guest of hunt at hampstead during a part of december.[ ] a close companionship followed uninterruptedly for two years until shelley went to italy, and there are recorded in the letters and journals of each many pleasant evenings at hampstead and at marlow, filled with poetry and music, with talks on art and trials of wit, with dinners and theater parties. mary shelley and mrs. hunt became as great friends as their husbands. when harriet committed suicide and shelley went up to london to institute proceedings for possession of their children, hunt remained constantly with him and gave him as much sympathy and support as it is possible for one fellow-being to extend to another whom all the world has deserted.[ ] he attended the chancery suit and stated shelley's position in _the examiner_.[ ] this sympathy and support, given shelley in his hour of greatest need and desolation, have never been sufficiently valued in a comparative estimate of the relative indebtedness of the two men. if shelley gave freely of his money, hunt, devoid of worldly goods, gave unstintingly, to the detriment of his reputation, of those things which money cannot purchase. that he incurred the displeasure of men in power, and ran the risk of being misunderstood by the public in befriending shelley, did not deter him for an instant. during shelley made the acquaintance, through hunt, of the cockney circle, including keats, reynolds, hazlitt, brougham, novello and horace smith. the last-named became one of shelley's most trusted friends.[ ] these new friends enlarged his list of acquaintances considerably, for up to this time he seems to have had no friends except godwin, hogg and peacock. in the early spring of , the shelleys went to italy, melancholy with the thought of separation from the hunts.[ ] the letters from shelley to hunt during the next four years form an important part of shelley's correspondence. the part played by shelley in the invitation extended to hunt to join lord byron and himself in italy and to become one of the editors of a periodical will be treated minutely in the next chapter. it is sufficient here to say that he was actuated by a desire to better hunt's finances and to enjoy his society--a pleasure he had been pining for ever since they had been separated, and, in case of a return to england, regarded as the one joy "among all the other sources of regret and discomfort with which england abounds for me.... shaking hands with you is worth all the trouble; the rest is clear loss."[ ] further, he knew that hunt longed for italy, and he wished to help byron in the cause of liberalism. to bring both ends about, he shouldered a burden that he was ill able to bear. an annuity of £ for the support of his two children, an annuity of £ to peacock, perpetual demand for large sums from godwin, occasional assistance rendered the gisbornes, partial support of jane claremont, loans to byron, and the support of his family, were the drains already upon him--met, in the main by money raised on _post obits_ at half value. the amount of hunt's indebtedness to shelley can be estimated only approximately. the first reference to a financial transaction between them after the "princely offer"[ ] is to be found in mary shelley's letter of december , , in which she wondered that hunt had not acknowledged the "receipt of so large a sum." professor dowden thinks this may be an allusion to shelley's response to an appeal for the poor of spitalfields which had appeared in _the examiner_ five days previously.[ ] shelley's offers to hunt to borrow £ from byron[ ] and to stand security for a loan from charles cowden clarke,[ ] and an attempt to borrow from samuel rogers[ ] are not developed by any further facts, but it is necessary to take note of them in a general estimate. before leaving england, shelley arranged with ollier for a loan of £ for hunt, a debt which was later liquidated by the sale of the _literary pocket book_.[ ] at some time before leaving england, shelley also gave hunt in one year £ , [ ] for the liquidation of his debts, which money was, medwin says, borrowed from horace smith.[ ] unfortunately for shelley, the sum was insufficient to extricate hunt from his difficulties. miss mitford gives the amount as £ , , instead of £ , , and adds that shelley's furniture and bedding were swept off to pay hunt's creditors;[ ] the inaccuracy of the first statement and the lack of any evidence to support the second, lead one to doubt the story. but it is true that shelley's income at the time was only £ , . even when so far away as italy, hunt's money troubles weighed heavily upon shelley in a continual regret that he could not set him entirely free from his creditors;[ ] he feared that the incredible exertions hunt was making on _the indicator_ and on _the examiner_, and the privations that he endured, would undermine his health.[ ] when hunt finally decided to go to italy, shelley assumed, as a matter of course, the chief responsibility of providing the means. as early as , when shelley and byron met in venice, the matter of the journal was discussed between them and broached to hunt. december , , shelley wrote him that byron wished him to come to italy and that, if money considerations prevented, byron would lend him £ or £ . he added that hunt should not feel uncomfortable in accepting the offer, as it was frankly made, and that his society would give byron pleasure and service.[ ] hunt does not seem to have seriously considered the proposition, for there are few references to it in his correspondence of this year. on the renewal of the plan in , shelley would never have called on byron for assistance for hunt if he himself could have provided otherwise, for his opinion of byron had changed in the meantime.[ ] january , , shelley sent £ for the expenses of the voyage, "within or pounds of what i have contrived to scrape together";[ ] and again on february , £ ,[ ] borrowed with security from byron. yet shelley's own exchequer at the time was so low that mary shelley wrote in the spring: "we are drearily behindhand with money at present. hunt and our furniture has swallowed up more than our savings."[ ] on april shelley stated that he was trying to finish _charles the first_ in order that he might earn £ for hunt. in round numbers it may be calculated that the sum total of hunt's indebtedness, exclusive of the yearly bequest of £ paid by shelley's son, was about £ , , a very large sum in the light of shelley's limited resources and other obligations. but it was as ungrudgingly given as it was graciously received. between the two men there was no distinction of _meum_ and _tuum_. more remarkable still, mary shelley gave as willingly as her husband. if one is inclined to marvel at such an unusual state of affairs, it must be recalled that both men were under the spell of william godwin's theories of community of property. shelley gave as his duty and hunt received as his due. that the effort involved much deprivation and distress of mind on the part of the giver mars the justice of acceptance by the recipient, retrieved only in part by the belief that hunt probably did not know the full extent of shelley's sacrifice, and the knowledge that the former would gladly have endured as much if the conditions had been reversed. the element of self-sacrifice and delicacy on the part of shelley in concealing it, in after years only added to the beauty of the gift in hunt's eyes, and even at the time he cannot be accused of indifference.[ ] jeaffreson makes the absurd suggestion that shelley gave the money as a bribe to the editor of a powerful and flourishing literary journal.[ ] he thinks dodging creditors was a strong bond of mutual interest between the two men. there is evidence that hunt was in difficulty at the time and that shelley left a surgeon's bill unpaid,[ ] but there is no proof extant of deliberate mutual protection. on the contrary, it is most unlikely. the hunts sailed from england in november, , and reached leghorn nearly nine months after first setting out on a voyage which, in its delays and dangers, byron compared to the "periplus of hanno the carthaginian, and with much the same speed";[ ] peacock to that of ulysses.[ ] of shelley's suggestion to make the trip by sea, hunt wrote: "if he had recommended a balloon, i should have been inclined to try it."[ ] hogg, with his characteristic humour, remarked that a journey by land would have taken equally long, since hunt would have stopped to gather all the daisies by the wayside from paris to pisa. both men looked forward to many years together[ ] and shelley, in his letter of welcome, wrote that wind and waves parted them no more,[ ] an assertion which now sounds like a knell of doom. from leghorn shelley conveyed the party to pisa and installed them in the lower floor of byron's dwelling, the lanfranchi palace.[ ] to shelley fell the difficult task of keeping lord byron in heart for the new undertaking and of reviving hunt's drooping spirits. hunt's funds were all gone and in their place was a debt of sixty crowns. the next few days were full of grave anxiety and foreboding for the future, broken only by a delightful sunday spent in seeing the cathedral and the tower. of this day hunt wrote: "good god! what a day was that, compared with all that have followed it! i had my friend with me, arm-in-arm, after a separation of years: he was looking better than i had ever seen him--we talked of a thousand things--we anticipated a thousand pleasures."[ ] then came the fatal monday with its shipwreck of many hopes--in its tragic sequel too well known to need repetition here. hunt's last services to his friend were his assistance rendered at the cremation and his contribution of the now famous latin epitaph "_cor cordium_."[ ] with shelley perished hunt's chief hope in life; in the opinion of his son, he was never the same man again. in , at his period of darkest depression, he wrote: "if you ask me how it is that i bear all this, i answer, that i love nature and books, and think well of the capabilities of human kind. i have known shelley, i have known my mother."[ ] in he claimed as his proudest title, the "friend of shelley."[ ] the first printed notice of shelley was in _the examiner_ of december , . therefore to hunt belongs in this case, as in that of keats, the credit of discovery. it is difficult to account for hunt's tardiness of recognition,[ ] coming as it did six years after shelley first wrote him, five years after the finnerty poem, three years after _queen mab_, and two years after the visit in prison.[ ] also shelley had sent contributions to _the examiner_, which hunt had not accepted, but which he vaguely recalled at the time of writing his first review on shelley. it was inspired by the announcement of _alastor_, and consisted of about ten lines, embodied in the article on keats and reynolds already referred to. hunt pronounced shelley "a very striking and original thinker." shelley's reply to a letter from hunt, telling him of the notice, pictures him anxiously scouring the countryside about bath for the sight of a copy and buoyed up at last by the news of one five miles distant. this notice was followed by the publication of the _hymn to intellectual beauty_ in _the examiner_ of january , ; a notice of the chancery suit, january and february ; and an extract from _laon and cythna_, november . a review of the _revolt of islam_ ran through three numbers, january , february and , . shelley's system of charity and his crusade against tyranny, as set forth in the preface, hunt loudly applauded. many extracts were italicized for the guidance of the public. the beauties of the poem were pronounced to be its mysticism, its wildness, its depth of sentiment, its grandeur of imagery, and its varied and sweet versification. in the boldness of speculation and in the love of virtue hunt saw a resemblance to lucretius, while in the gloom and imagination of certain passages, particularly in the grandeur of the supernatural architecture, he was reminded of dante. the defects were pronounced to be obscurity of narrative and sameness of image and metaphor. the review closed with the prophecy "we have no doubt he is destined to be one of the leading spirits of the age." the _quarterly review_ of may, , accused shelley[ ] of atheism and of dissolute conduct in private life; the same journal of april, , reviewing the _revolt of islam_ on the basis of the suppressed version of _laon and cythna_, though it did not fail to appreciate the genius and beauty of the poem, charged shelley with a predilection for incest and with a frantic dislike for christianity. it called the support of _the examiner_ "the sweet undersong of the weekly journal."[ ] the two attacks were met by a strong protest from hunt,[ ] particularly in regard to the part dealing with shelley's life. he denied the propriety of such discussion in public criticism and declared that he had never known shelley to "deviate, notwithstanding his theories, even into a single action which those who differ with him might think blameable." his life at marlow was described as spent in "beautiful charity and generosity" and was likened to that of plato. in an attack on shelley by hazlitt was met by an angry warning from hunt and a threat to become his public enemy, if the offense were repeated.[ ] hunt's reason for taking this defensive attitude was that he knew that shelley suffered greatly from such malignant exploitations and that he would not defend himself; therefore he made his friend's cause his own and wrote: "i reckon upon your leaving your personal battles to me,"[ ] much in the same manner as shelley had assumed his money troubles. following the review of the _revolt of islam_, a notice of _rosalind and helen_ and of _lines written among the euganean hills_[ ] appeared in _the examiner_ of may , . attention was called to the poet's optimism and to his great love of nature: "the beauty of the external world has an answering heart, and the very whispers of the wind a meaning." _the cenci_, published in , contained in its dedication a glowing tribute to hunt, an honour in shelley's opinion only in a small degree worthy of his friend.[ ] hunt was intoxicated with the honour and wrote: "i feel as if you had bound, not only my head, but my very soul and body with laurels."[ ] on the subject of the tragedy he was equally enthusiastic: "what a noble book, shelley, have you given us! what a true, stately, and yet affectionate mixture of poetry, philosophy, and human nature, horror, and all redeeming sweetness of intention, for there is an undersong of suggestion through it all, that sings, as it were, after the storm is over, like a brook in april."[ ] in a public expression of his opinion in _the examiner_ of march , , hunt pronounced _the cenci_ the greatest dramatic production of the day. writing of the drama again in the same journal of july and , , he called shelley "a framer of mighty lines" and continued: "majesty and love do sit on one throne in the lofty buildings of his poetry; and they will be found there, at a late and we trust a happier day, on a seat immortal as themselves." one of hunt's most perfect poems, _jaffár_, is inscribed to the memory of shelley. the praise of _jaffár_ and his friend's undying loyalty immediately suggest to the reader that hunt may have been celebrating his own and shelley's friendship. the last review to appear during shelley's lifetime by hunt was that of _prometheus unbound_ in three numbers of _the examiner_ of . a projected review of _adonais_ alluded to in a letter of hunt's does not seem to have seen the light of publication, but a reference in a letter at the time is worth noting: "it is the most delphic poety i have seen in a long while: full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy imaginations,--those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy yearnings of our being."[ ] the well-known account of shelley's rescue of a woman on hampstead heath was told in _the literary examiner_ of august , .[ ] the same magazine of september of the same year[ ] contained the following _sonnet to percy shelley_, given here because of its general inaccessibility: "hast thou from earth, then, really passed away, and mingled with the shadowy mass of things which were, but are not? will thy harp's dear strings no more yield music to the rapid play of thy swift thoughts, now turned thou art to clay? hark! is that rushing of thy spirit's wings, when (like the skylark, who in mounting sings) soaring through high imagination's way, thou pour'dst thy melody upon the earth, silent for ever? yes, wild ocean's wave hath o'er thee rolled. but whilst within the grave thou sleepst, let me in the love of thy pure worth one thing foretell,--that thy great fame shall be progressive as time's flood, eternal as the sea!" in _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_ appeared the first biographical memoir of shelley, a sketch of some seventy pages.[ ] it shows great appreciation of the fine and gentle qualities of his rare genius and defends some of the weak points of his career. the description of his personal appearance, of the life at marlowe, and the few anecdotes are often quoted. but on the whole, it lacks the bold strokes of vivid portraiture and it is very disappointing.[ ] there was probably no one, with the exception of his wife, who knew shelley so well as hunt and who was, therefore, in a position to give as complete and intimate an idea of him. it was mrs. shelley's wish that hunt should be her husband's biographer, for she thought that he, "perhaps above all others, understood his nature and his genius."[ ] hunt, in _the spectator_ of august , , gave as his reason for not writing shelley's life that he "could not survive enough persons." but it is to be questioned if he were fitted for the task. his son did not think that he was because of his attention to details and his irresistible tendency to analysis: "a mind, in short, like that of hamlet, cultivated rather than corrected by the trials of life, was scarcely suited to comprehend the strong instincts, indomitable will, and complete unity of idea which distinguished shelley."[ ] in the _tatler_ of august , , hunt wrote that "mr. shelley was a platonic philosopher, of the acutest and loftiest kind," and that he belonged to the school of plato and Æschylus, as keats belonged to that of spenser and milton. following _the tatler_ was the preface to _the mask of anarchy_,[ ] published in , originally designed for _the examiner_ in , but laid aside by the editor because he thought the public not discerning enough "to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse." the preface eulogizes the poet's spiritual nature and his "seraphic purpose of good." in _the seer_, , shelley's qualities of heart were pronounced more enduring than his genius.[ ] _imagination and fancy_ contained an essay and selections from his poems. here hunt makes the curious statement that little in the poems is purely poetical, but rather moral, political, and speculative. it is noteworthy that he predicts, probably for the first time, that, had shelley lived, he would have been the greatest dramatic writer since the days of elizabeth, if not, indeed, actually so, through what he did accomplish; a statement often repeated. he says: "if coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, shelley is at once the most ethereal and gorgeous, the one who has clothed his thought in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery.... shelley ... might well call himself ariel."[ ] in connection with shelley's ethereal qualities, mrs. james t. fields quotes hunt as having said on another occasion that shelley always seemed to him as if he were "just alit from the planet mercury, bearing a winged wand tipped with flame."[ ] in _imagination and fancy_, hunt continues: "not milton himself is more learned in grecisms, or nicer in entomological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so orphic and primeval." it is a touching circumstance that hunt's last letter bore reference to shelley, and that his last effort as a public writer, made only a few days before his death, was in vindication of shelley's character.[ ] the publication of the _shelley memorials_, , in which hunt had a part, provoked an unfavorable review in _the spectator_. hunt replied in the next number[ ] of the same paper. in particular he asserted shelley's truthfulness, which had been assailed in respect to his story of the attempted assassination in wales. he held that shelley was not a man to be judged by ordinary rules, but that he was the highest possible exponent of humanity--an approach to divinity. hunt's literary relation with shelley falls into two divisions; publications written for hunt's periodicals, and received by hunt in order to give shelley an outlet of expression denied him in the more conservative papers; and second, positive literary imitation. besides the poems quoted in hunt's criticisms of shelley, the first includes a review of godwin's _mandeville_,[ ] a letter of protest regarding the second edition of _queen mab_,[ ] _marianne's dream_,[ ] _song on a faded violet_,[ ] _the sunset_,[ ] _the question_,[ ] _good night_,[ ] _sonnet, ye hasten to the grave_,[ ] _to ---- (lines to a reviewer)_,[ ] _november, _,[ ] _love's philosophy_,[ ] and the contributions designed by shelley for _the liberal_ and published after his death.[ ] productions which were written for hunt's papers, but were not accepted, were _peter bell the third_, _the mask of anarchy_, _julian and maddalo_, a letter on the persecution of richard carlile,[ ] letters on italy, and a review of peacock's _rhododaphne_. hunt's failure to accept what was sent him greatly discouraged shelley at times: "mine is a life of failures; peacock says my poetry is composed of day dreams and nightmares, and leigh hunt does not think it good enough for _the examiner_." _on a fete at carlton house_, an attack on the prince regent, though perhaps directly inspired by the account in the dailies of the ball at carlton house on june , , was doubtless influenced by the continued attacks of _the examiner_. as there are extant only two or three lines of the poem,[ ] it is impossible to judge of the extent of the influence, but in shelley's letters to hogg and to edward graham describing the poem, there is resemblance in tone and epithet to _the examiner_. a letter from shelley to lord ellenborough on the occasion of eaton's sentence for publishing the third part of paine's _age of reason_ followed a long series of articles by hunt on the prerogative of liberty of speech.[ ] a meeting of reformers at manchester on the sixteenth of august, , for the purpose of discussing quietly the annual meeting of parliament, universal suffrage, and voting by ballot, was dispersed by military force. articles setting forth the long sufferings of the reformers, charging the authorities with wanton bloodshed, and ridiculing the absurd trial of the offenders, appeared in _the examiner_ of august , , september , and . _the mask of anarchy_, written on the occasion of the massacre at manchester, was sent to leigh hunt for publication sometime before the first of november, . the sentiment of both men is the same regarding the affair. accounts of the death of the princess charlotte and of the executions for high treason at derby of brandreth, ludlam and turner, after a horrible imprisonment, two articles in _the examiner_ of november , , inspired shelley's _address to the people on the death of the princess charlotte_, sometimes known as _we pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird_, dated november of the same year. hunt followed with a second article, _death of the princess charlotte and indecent advantage taken of it_, november , . both writers called attention to the disposition of the public to forget the sufferings of the poor, while it mourned hysterically with royalty; they declared that the administration of justice and the events leading to such crimes were of much greater importance. three articles in _the examiner_ of october , and , , on the trial of richard carlile for libel, were followed by an open letter on the same case from shelley to hunt dated november , . by scattered references it can be seen that shelley fully agreed with hunt in his opinion of the prince regent and of the ministers, in his attitude toward the corruption of the court and of the army; and in his proposed regulation of taxes and of the public debt. _oedipus tyrannus or swellfoot the tyrant_, begun august, , succeeded a series of articles, beginning in _the examiner_ of june , , and continuing throughout nineteen numbers,[ ] on the subject of george iv's attempt to divorce his wife.[ ] abhorrence of the king's perfidy and of his ministers' support, sympathy for queen caroline, and minor details parallel closely hunt's version in _the examiner_. this passage occurs in the article of june : "an animal sets himself down, month after month, at milan, to watch at her doors and windows, to intercept discarded servants and others who know what a deposition might be worth, and thus to gather poison for one of those venomous green bags, which have so long infected and nauseated the people, and are now to infect the queen." this seems to be the germ of the passage in shelley's poem beginning: "behold this bag! it is the poison bag of that green spider huge, on which our spies sulked in ovation through the streets of thebes, when they were paved with dead." then follows the plot to throw the contents upon the queen. the handling of the heroic couplet, employed in the _letter to maria gisborne_ and in _epipsychidon_, as well as in _julian and maddalo_,[ ] has been already discussed in its relationship to hunt's use of the same. shelley, in a letter to hunt, explains his position in regard to the language of _julian and maddalo_: "you will find the little piece, i think, in some degree consistent with your own ideas of the manner in which poetry ought to be written. i have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk to each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms. i use the word _vulgar_ in its most extensive sense. the vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross, in its way, as that of poverty, and its cant terms equally expressive of base conceptions, and therefore, equally unfit for poetry. not that the familiar style is to be admitted in the treatment of a subject wholly ideal, or in that part of any subject which relates to common life, where the passion, exceeding a certain limit, touches the boundary of that which is ideal. strong passion expresses itself in metaphor, borrowed alike from subjects remote or near, and casts over all the shadow of its own greatness."[ ] _rosalind and helen_, the _letter to maria gisborne_, _swellfoot the tyrant_, and _peter bell the third_[ ] show a similar influence. _the letter to maria gisborne_ bears a resemblance to hunt's epistolary style, and was written, mr. forman thinks, for circulation in the hunt circle only.[ ] it was through hunt, so shelley states in the dedication, that he knew the _peter bells_ of wordsworth and of john hamilton reynolds. shelley's qualified adoption in these poems of hunt's theory of poetic language is seen in the choice of a vocabulary in dialogue nearer everyday usage than the more remote one of his other poems. yet the result does not bear any great resemblance to hunt. shelley's unvarying refinement and sensibility kept him from committing the same errors of taste, but his work suffered rather than gained by an innovation which was probably a concession to his friendship for hunt and not a strong conviction. with the exception of the descriptive passages, the keynote of these poems is on a lower poetic pitch. on subjects of italian art and literature the friends held much the same opinion. at times shelley seems to have been led by hunt's judgment, as in his conclusions regarding raphael and michaelangelo.[ ] one passage on the italian poets indicates a possible borrowing of thought and figure on shelley's part when he wrote of boccaccio that he was superior to ariosto and to tasso, "the children of a later and colder day.... how much do i admire boccaccio! what descriptions of nature are those in his little introduction to every new day! it is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us."[ ] hunt wrote: "petrarch, boccaccio and dante are the morning, noon and night of the great italian day."[ ] poems which refer directly to hunt are the fourteen lines in the _letter to maria gisborne_;[ ] possibly the fragment, beginning, "for me, my friend, if not that tears did tremble."[ ] a cancelled passage of the _adonais_ describes hunt thus: and then came one of sweet and carnal looks, those soft smiles to his dark and night-like eyes were as the clear and ever-living brooks are to the obscure fountains whence they rise, showing how pure they are; a paradise of happy truth upon his forehead low lay, making wisdom lovely, in the guise of earth-awakening morn upon the brow of star-deserted heaven, while ocean gleams below, * * * * * his song, though very sweet, was low and faint, a single strain--[ ] the thirty-fifth strophe of the present version refers to hunt. shelley's last letter had reference to hunt.[ ] his last literary effort was a poem comparing hunt to a firefly and welcoming him to italy, just as hunt's last letter and last public utterance bore reference to shelley--strange coincidence, but striking testimony to their mutual devotion. an instance of shelley's overestimation of hunt's ability is seen in a passage where he says that hunt excels in tragedy in the power of delineating passion and, what is more necessary, of connecting and developing it, "the last an incredible effort for himself but easy for hunt."[ ] he greatly valued and trusted hunt's affection, at times calling him his best[ ] and his only friend.[ ] if the tender solicitude and veneration of a beautiful spirit for a man of vastly inferior abilities seems strange, it is but a witness to the humility of true genius. chapter iv. byron's politics and religion--his sympathy with hunt in prison--his impression of the man--hunt's defense of byron and criticism of his works--_the liberal_--_lord byron and some of his contemporaries_. it is not strange that lord byron, son of an english father and a scotch mother, born of a long line of adventurous and warlike sailors and illustrious and loyal knights, with a strain of royalty and madness on one side and eccentricity and immorality on the other, should have fallen heir in an unusual degree to a nature whose virtues and vices were complex and contradictory. its singularities are nowhere more apparent than in the mutations of his friendships. prior to his acquaintance with hunt, byron had taken his seat in the house of lords and had made speeches against the framebreakers of nottingham and in behalf of catholic emancipation. a month after their meeting he made a third speech introducing major cartwright's petition for reform in parliament. the second and third of these measures, in particular, were warmly advocated by _the examiner_, with which paper byron was familiar, as references in his letters show. it is therefore not hazardous to surmise that his sympathy with liberal policies, alien to his tory blood and aristocratic spirit, was due, in part at least, to this influence. byron's political principles on the whole were as evanescent and intermittent as a will-o'-the-wisp.[ ] his chief tenets were the assertion of the individual; antagonism against all authority; a striving after freedom. brandes, elze and treitscke agree in attributing his political enthusiasm to the intense passion of his nature rather than to his moral convictions.[ ] his religious convictions were as fugitive as his political and, like those of hunt and other advanced thinkers of the age, seem to have been without deference to any existing creed or dogma. at his gloomiest moments he confessed that he denied nothing but doubted everything. hunt says of byron's religion that he "did not know what he was.... he was a christian by education, he was an infidel by reading. he was a christian by habit, but he was no christian upon reflection."[ ] the phrase, "i am of the opposition" applies to his religion as well as to his politics, as indeed it serves as the key-note to almost every action of his life. leigh hunt has given a characteristic account of his first sight of byron "rehearsing the part of leander," in the river thames sometime before he went to greece in : "i saw nothing in lord byron at that time, but a young man, who, like myself, had written a bad volume of poems; and though i had sympathy with him on this account, and more respect for his rank than i was willing to suppose, my sympathy was not an agreeable one; so, contenting myself with seeing his lordship's head bob up and down in the water, like a buoy, i came away. lord byron when he afterwards came to see me in prison, was pleased to regret that i had not stayed. he told me, that the sight of my volume at harrow had been one of his incentives to write verses, and that he had had the same passion for friendship which i had displayed in it. to my astonishment he quoted some of the lines, and would not hear me speak ill of them."[ ] hunt's _juvenilia_, beyond having served as one of the incentives to the writing of byron's _hours of idleness_, does not seem to have affected it. for hunt's undercurrent of friendship and cheerfulness were substituted byron's prevailing notes of amorousness and melancholy. the actual acquaintance of the two men did not begin until , when thomas moore, since a staunch admirer of hunt's political courage and of his literary talent, and one of the visitors welcomed to surrey gaol, mentioned the circumstances of his imprisonment to lord byron, likewise a sympathizer with the attitude of _the examiner_ towards the prince regent. mr. cordy jeaffreson[ ] thinks that it was this reckless sympathy with the libeller of the prince regent that led byron to reprint with _the corsair_, eight lines addressed in to the princess charlotte, _weep, daughter of a royal line_. the retaliation of one of the tory papers goaded byron to write in return an article which strongly resembles hunt's famous libel[ ] on the prince regent. byron expressed a wish to call on hunt with moore, and a visit followed on may , .[ ] five days later hunt wrote: "i have had lord b. here again. he came on sunday, by himself, in a very frank, unceremonious manner, and knowing what i wanted for my poem [_story of rimini_] brought me the last new _travels in italy_ in two quarto volumes, of which he requests my acceptance, with the air of one who did not seem to think himself conferring the least obligation. this will please you. it strikes me that he and i shall become _friends_, literally and cordially speaking: there is something in the texture of his mind and feelings that seems to resemble mine to a thread; i think we are cut out of the same piece, only a little different wear may have altered our respective naps a little."[ ] with the pride of a sycophant in the presence of a lord hunt relates that byron would not let the footman carry the books but gave "you to understand that he was prouder of being a friend and a man of letters than a lord. it was thus by flattering one's vanity he persuaded us of his own freedom from it: for he could see very well, that i had more value for lords than i supposed."[ ] in june of the same year hunt invited byron, moore and mitchell to dine with him in prison. among several others who came in during the evening was mr. john scott, later a severe critic of byron in _the champion_.[ ] many years after moore, in his _life of byron_, wrote of the gathering with venom, recalling scott as an assailant of byron's "living fame, while another [hunt] less manful, would reserve the cool venom for his grave."[ ] byron esteemed hunt greatly during the first year of their acquaintance. his advances show a desire for intimacy which goes far toward contradicting the statements sometimes made that the overtures were on hunt's side only.[ ] byron expressed himself thus at the time: "hunt is an extraordinary character and not exactly of the present age. he reminds me more of the pym and hampden times--much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive, aspect. if he goes on _qualis ab incepto_, i know few men who will deserve more praise or obtain it. i must go and see him again--a rapid succession of adventures since last summer, added to some serious uneasiness and business, have interrupted our acquaintance; but he is a man worth knowing; and though for his own sake, i wish him out of prison, i like to study character in such situations. he has been unshaken and will continue so. i don't think him deeply versed in life:--he is the bigot of virtue (not religion) and enamoured of the beauty of that 'empty name,' as the last breath of brutus pronounced and every day proves it. he is perhaps, a little opinionated, as all men who are the _center of circles_, wide or narrow--the sir oracles--in whose name two or three are gathered together--must be, and as even johnson was: but withal, a valuable man, and less vain than success and even the consciousness of preferring 'the right to the expedient,' might excuse." december , , he wrote to hunt: "it is my wish that our acquaintance, or, if you please to accept it, friendship, may be permanent.... i have a thorough esteem for that independence of spirit which you have maintained with sterling talent, and at the expense of some suffering."[ ] cordial intercourse between the two men continued after hunt's removal from surrey gaol to lodgings in edgeware road, where byron became one of his most frequent visitors and correspondents. in the hunt household byron laid aside his ordinary reserve. there are records of his riding the children's rocking horse; of presents of game; loans of books; letters presented from a paris correspondent for _the examiner_; and gifts of boxes and tickets for drury lane theatre, of which he was one of the managers. this last hunt would not accept for fear of sacrificing his critical independence. in _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, hunt claims that this familiarity proceeded from an "instinct of immeasureable distance."[ ] it was not until byron's matrimonial difficulties in that hunt, inert and depressed from his long confinement, bestirred himself to return a single one of the calls. byron's separation from his wife in and the subsequent scandal aroused in hunt that instinctive protection and active loyalty for friends abused, already discussed in a review of his relations with keats and shelley. the conjugal troubles and libertinism of the prince regent had brought forth only scorn and vituperation from the editor of _the examiner_, but difficulties of equal notoriety at closer range in the lives of his friends evoked only sympathy and protection. he asserted that there was no positive knowledge as to the cause of the trouble and much depraved speculation, envy and falsehood, yet "had he [byron] been as the scandal-mongers represented him, we should nevertheless, if we thought our arm worth his using, have stood by him in his misfortunes to the last."[ ] a prophecy of a near reconciliation and a too-gushing picture of renewed domesticity are somewhat grotesque in the light of later events. for this defense byron was very grateful. january , , he wrote that scott, jeffrey and leigh hunt "were the only literary men of numbers whom i know (and some of whom i have served,) who dared venture even an anonymous word in my favour, just then ... the third was under no kind of obligation to me."[ ] hunt's opinion in the matter underwent a transformation after the fateful italian visit; he then declared that byron wooed with genius, married for money, and strove for a reconciliation because of pique.[ ] the _story of rimini_, which had been submitted to byron from time to time and which was dedicated to him, appeared likewise in . byron seems to have accepted the familiar tone of the inscription at the time in all good faith "as a public compliment and a private kindness"[ ] although _blackwood's_ of march, , states, perhaps not seriously, that byron in his copy had substituted for hunt's name "impudent varlet." as late as april , , byron wrote from italy that he expected to return to venice by ravenna and rimini that he might take notes of the scenery for hunt.[ ] but a letter to moore from venice, june , , seems to mark a disillusionment on the part of byron: "hunt's letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry that you might expect from his situation. he is a good man with some practical element in his chaos, but spoilt by the christ church hospital and a sunday newspaper to say nothing of the surrey gaol, which converted him into a martyr.... of my friend hunt, i have already said that he is anything but vulgar in his manners [a statement repeated again in [ ]]; and of his disciples, therefore, i will not judge of their manners from their verses. they may be honourable and gentlemanly men for what i know; but the latter quality is studiously excluded from their publications."[ ] hunt did not see or hear from byron from until . no further mention of hunt occurs in byron's writings during this period except the reference to his influence on barry cornwall's _sicilian story_ and _marcian colonna_,[ ] and another to the cockney school in byron's controversy with bowles. in explanation of this break in the intercourse hunt said, in , that "byron had become not very fond of his reforming acquaintances."[ ] hunt's criticism of byron's writings was not an important factor in his early literary development, as was the case with shelley and keats. yet it deserves brief attention. _the examiner_ of october , , contained the address of byron on the opening of the drury lane theatre and a commendation of its "natural domestic touch" and of its independence. hunt's _feast of the poets_ as it appeared first in _the reflector_ contained no mention of byron. the separate edition of devoted seven pages of the added notes to a wordy discussion of his work and to personal advice. byron in a letter of february , , thanked hunt for the "handsome note." the next mentions of bryon were in _the examiner_: a notice of his ode on napoleon april , ; _illustrations of lord byron's works_ on september of the same year; an elegy, _oh snatched away in beauty's bloom_, april , ; _the renegade's feelings among the tombs of heroes_, march , ; and finally, an announcement of an opera founded on _the corsair_, august , . a review of the first and second cantos of _don juan_ appeared in _the examiner_ of october , . byron's extraordinary variety and sudden transition of mood, his power in wielding satire and humor, his knowledge of human nature in its highest and lowest passions, his contribution to the mock-heroic and the sincere, the "strain of rich and deep beauty" in the descriptions were pointed out. any immoral tendency is denied: "the fact is at the bottom of these questions, that many things are made vicious which are not so by nature; and many things made virtuous, which are only so by calling and agreement; and it is on the horns of this self-created dilemma, that society is continually writhing and getting desperate!" _the examiner_ of august , containing a critique of the third and fourth cantos of _don juan_, condemned the "careless contempt of canting moralists." january , , there was a notice in _the examiner_ telling of byron's munificence to a shoemaker; in comment _the examiner_ said: "his lordship's virtues are his own. his frailties have been made for him, in more respects than one, by the faults and follies of society." january , , appeared a reprint of _my boat is on the shore_; april , the two stanzas from childe harold beginning, _italia, oh! italia_; april , _byron's letters on bowles's strictures on pope_; may , a review of two of bowles's letters to byron; july , an article entitled _sketches of the living poets_.[ ] the last gave a biographical account of byron. the general traits of his poety were said to be passion, humour, and learning. it criticized the narrative poems as "too melodramatic, hasty and vague." hunt's summary of the dramas and of _don juan_ shows excellent judgment: "for the drama, whatever good passages such a writer will always put forth, we hold that he has no more qualifications than we have; his tendency being to spin every thing out of his own perceptions, and colour it with his own eye. his _don juan_ is perhaps his best work, and the one by which he will stand or fall with readers who see beyond time and toilets. it far surpasses, in our opinion, all the italian models on which it is founded, not excepting the far famed _secchia rapita_."[ ] on june , , _the examiner_ reviewed _cain_. the article is chiefly a discussion of the origin of evil. the issue of september contained a reprint of _america_; that of november denied byron's authorship of _anastasius_. from july , , to november of the same year, there appeared in the _literary examiner_ friendly criticisms of the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth cantos of _don juan_. the reviews consisted chiefly of extracts and a summary of the narrative. the liberal. a letter from lord byron dated december , , had proposed to thomas moore to set up secretly, on their return to london, a weekly newspaper for the purpose of giving "the age some new lights upon policy, poesy, biography, criticism, morality, theology, and all other ism, ality and ology whatsoever. why, man, if we were to take to this in good earnest, your debts would be paid off in a twelvemonth, and by dint of a little diligence and practice, i doubt not that we could distance the common-place blackguards who have so long disgraced common sense and the common reader. they have no merit but practice and imprudence, both of which we may acquire; and, as for talent and culture, the devil's in't if such proofs as we have given of both can't furnish out something better than the 'funeral baked meats' which have coldly set forth the breakfast table of great britain for so many years."[ ] moore cautiously refused the offer and the idea lay dormant in byron's mind until he met shelley at ravenna in . he then proposed that they should establish a radical paper with leigh hunt as editor, the three to be equal partners. power, money, and notoriety were byron's chief objects. he frankly acknowledged a desire for enormous gains. he designed to use his proprietory privileges to publish those of his writings that murray dared not. at the same time byron had, without doubt, a desire to reform home government and to repay hunt for his public defense in .[ ] he may have wished to please shelley by asking hunt.[ ] undoubtedly he valued hunt's wide journalistic experience. moore asserts that in extending the invitation, byron inconsistently admitted hunt "not to any degree of confidence or intimacy but to a declared fellowship of fame and interest."[ ] this, like other of moore's statements regarding hunt, is not very plausible in view of the past intimacy. the most discussed question regarding byron's motives in inviting hunt is the extent of his relation to _the examiner_ at that time, and byron's knowledge of it. trelawny states that when byron "_consented_ to join leigh hunt and others in writing for the 'liberal,' i think his principal inducement was in the belief that john and leigh hunt were proprietors of the 'examiner';--so when leigh hunt at pisa told him that he was no longer connected with that paper, byron was taken aback, finding that hunt would be entirely dependent upon the success of their hazardous project, while he himself would be deprived of that on which he had set his heart,--the use of a weekly paper in great circulation."[ ] moore heard indirectly in that byron, shelley and hunt were to "_conspire_ together" in _the examiner_[ ]--a plan nowhere mentioned in the writings of the three men concerned and most unlikely. what trelawney "thought" conflicts with what moore "heard." the suggestions of both are open to doubt. byron was most assuredly the projector of _the liberal_ and did not "_consent_ to join leigh hunt and others." besides, granting that trelawney's opinion was based on a statement of byron's, even that would not be convincing, since byron made a number of mis-statements about the matter after he grew weary of it. questionable as the assertion is, it has been made the basis of accusations against hunt of deliberate deceit and of breach of contract. had it been true that there was an understanding of coöperation between the two papers, byron and moore would have made much of the charge. trelawney's opinion, first noticed by _blackwood's_ in march, , has been elaborated by jeaffreson,[ ] and accepted by leslie stephen[ ] and kent.[ ] elze, who seems to have labored under the impression that harold skimpole was a faithful portraiture of hunt, states that his connection with byron began with a falsehood.[ ] r. b. johnson says, in defense of hunt, that the accusation "is quite unreasonable and contrary to all the evidence."[ ] monkhouse thinks that it is doubtful if byron reckoned on the support of the london paper.[ ] j. ashcroft noble says that byron had much to say about the hunts in his letters, "and made the most of all kinds of trivial or imaginary grievances; it is simply incredible that had a grievance of such reality and magnitude as this really existed he would have refrained from mentioning it." as proof against it, he quotes byron's belief in hunt's honesty as late as september ; and he points out the "obvious absurdity of the idea that in the year a weekly newspaper could be conducted successfully, or at all, by an editor in pisa or genoa."[ ] the strong probability, gathered from all the extant evidence, is that byron and shelley, in inviting hunt to italy, expected, and very naturally, that he would continue to share in the profits of _the examiner_. shelley, indeed, in a letter dated as late as january , , urged hunt not to leave england without a regular income from that journal[ ]--an injunction which hunt unfairly disregarded. it is also likely that his connection with _the examiner_ was one of byron's reasons in extending the partnership to include hunt. but it is practically certain that there was no contract nor even understanding as regards the coöperation of _the liberal_ and the london paper. the question does not therefore, involve hunt's honor at all. if byron expected to profit by the influence of _the examiner_, his silence shows a manliness that noble does not credit him with. hunt, in accepting byron's offer, was actuated by motives both selfish and unselfish. the fine of £ , imposed at the time of his conviction of libel was not all paid; _the indicator_ had been abandoned; _the examiner_ was on its last legs; his health was broken by overwork undertaken in the effort not to call upon his friends for aid;[ ] an invalid wife and seven children were to be supported by his pen; his brother john was in prison. from january, , to august of the same year he had been unable to write. in accepting byron's offer he thought to recover his health in a southern climate, to regain his political influence which had been on the decrease during the last four or five years, and at the same time to aid aggressively the liberal movement.[ ] moreover, he was flattered immensely by the prospective public association with lord byron. he had little to lose and a prospect of large gain. hunt should have weighed more gravely such a step before he embarked on such a hazardous venture with so large a family, but, with a buoyancy and irresponsibility in practical affairs peculiar to himself, he clutched at the new proposition as a way out of all difficulties and did not look beyond immediate necessities. he pictured himself and his family healthy and wealthy in a land he had always sighed for. if the skies lowered, he fancied shelley always at hand. his description of preparations for the voyage is as airy as his pocketbook was light: "my family, therefore, packed up such goods and chattels as they had a regard for, my books in particular, and we took, with strange new thoughts and feelings, but in high expectation, our journey by sea."[ ] the part shelley played in the invitation to hunt is more difficult of interpretation. the original proposition to become an equal partner in the transaction he never seriously entertained. he consented to become a contributor only. his reasons for his refusal he gave to others, but, for fear of endangering hunt's prospects, withheld from byron; for the same reason he dissembled at times concerning his real feelings. yet he was equally responsible with byron in extending the invitation to hunt, as will be shown later. although shelley could not have foreseen the full consequences of such a course of action, he was deficient in frankness toward byron and undoubtedly sacrificed him somewhat in the transaction to his affection for hunt. while byron continued to hold the highest opinion of shelley, between the time of their meeting in switzerland and at ravenna, shelley had experienced three separate revulsions of feeling.[ ] at the time in question his distrust had returned. hunt's pecuniary troubles made their relations still more difficult. this state of affairs between byron and shelley must have given hunt great concern, and shelley suspecting his distress wrote march , : "the aspect of affairs has somewhat changed since the date of that in which i expressed a repugnance to a continuance of intimacy with lord byron as close as that which now exists; at least it has changed so far as regards you and the intended journal."[ ] in january, , mrs. hunt wrote mary shelley, begging that they might come to italy. the subject was thus revived and a formal invitation was conveyed in a letter of august , , from shelley to hunt. it proves beyond a doubt that byron was the chief projector of the journal: "he (byron) proposes that you should come out and go shares with him and me, in a periodical work, to be conducted here; in which each of the contracting parties should publish all their original compositions and share the profits.... there can be no doubt that the _profits_ of any scheme in which you and lord byron engage, must, from various, yet co-operating reasons, be very great. as for myself, i am, for the present, only a sort of link between you and him, until you can know each other and effectuate the arrangement; since (to entrust you with a secret which, for your sake, i withhold from lord byron), nothing would induce me to share in the profits, and still less, in the borrowed splendor of such a partnership. you and he, in different manners, would be equal, and would bring, in a different manner, but in the same proportion, equal stocks of reputation and success.... i did not ask lord byron to assist me in sending a remittance for your journey; because there are men, however excellent, from whom we would never receive an obligation, in the worldly sense of the word; and i am as jealous for my friend as for myself.... he has many generous and exalted qualities, but the canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out."[ ] hunt's answer was full of expectation and hope. he wrote that "are there not three of us?... we will divide the world between us, like the triumvirate, and you shall be the sleeping partner, if you will."[ ] to shelley's reply of october , thanking him for coming, hunt answered: "you say, shelley, you thank me for coming. the pleasure of being obliged by those we love is so great that i do not wonder that you continue to muster up some obligation to me, but if you are obliged, how much am i?"[ ] from the beginning of the enterprise thomas moore and john murray scented trouble and made more. they continued their intermeddling after _the liberal_ was launched, and doubtless ministered to byron's vacillation. hunt and murray had disagreed over the _story of rimini_[ ] and an attack on southey in _the examiner_ of may and , , had included murray as well. moreover, murray saw in john hunt,[ ] the publisher of the new periodical, a dangerous future rival in his business relations with byron. after matters became unpleasant in italy, murray took his revenge by making public byron's letters containing ill-natured remarks about hunt.[ ] the relations of moore and hunt had been very friendly[ ] but at this juncture both became too proud of having a "noble lord" for a friend.[ ] moore, writing to byron in the latter part of , said: "i heard some time ago that leigh hunt was on his way to genoa with all of his family; and the idea seems to be, that you and shelley and he are to _conspire_ together in _the examiner_. i cannot believe this--and deprecate such a plan with all my might. _alone_ you may do anything, but partnerships in fame, like those in trade, make the strongest party answerable for the deficiencies or delinquencies of the rest, and i tremble even for you with such a bankrupt company.... they are both clever fellows, and shelley i look upon as a man of real genius; but, i must say again, you could not give your enemies (the ... s 'et hoc genus omne') a greater triumph than by joining such an unequal and unholy alliance,"[ ] an astounding statement from a man of pronounced liberal views. byron's answer of january was indefinite and perhaps intentionally misleading: "be assured that there is no such coalition as you apprehend."[ ] february , moore advised byron not to discuss religious matters in the new work, but to confine himself to political theories; "if you have any political catamarans to explode this (london) is your place."[ ] after _the liberal_ was begun, moore wrote: "it grieves me to urge anything so much against hunt's interest, but i should not hesitate to use the same language to himself were i near him. i would, if i were you, serve him in every possible way but this--i would give him (if he would accept of it) the profits of the same works, published separately--but i would not mix myself up in this way with others. i would not become a partner in this sort of miscellaneous '_pot au feu_' where the bad flavour of one ingredient is sure to taint all the rest. i would be, if i were _you_, alone, single-handed and as such, invincible."[ ] the hunts started for italy november , , but on account of various setbacks and delays did not really leave the coast of england until may , . in the ten months which elapsed between the invitation to hunt and his arrival, it is not surprising that byron's enthusiasm had cooled. he would have withdrawn if he could have done so, although byron, trelawny says, was at first more eager than shelley for hunt's arrival.[ ] as has already been stated above, affairs between byron and shelley had been very strained in january. in the letter of march , already referred to, shelley informed hunt that matters had improved between byron and himself and that byron expressed the "greatest eagerness to proceed with the journal, he dilates with impatience on the delay, and he disregards the opinion of those who have advised him against it." shelley thought that their strained relations would in no way interfere with hunt's prospects, and, with what looks a little like double-dealing, that it would be possible for him to preserve what influence he had over the "proteus" until hunt arrived: "it will be no very difficult task to execute that you have assigned me--to keep him in heart with the project until your arrival."[ ] april , shelley wrote again to hunt of byron's eagerness for his arrival: "he urges me to press you to depart." but a reference to the state of affairs in the two households in italy carries a foreboding note: "lord byron has made me bitterly feel the inferiority which the world has presumed to place between us, and which subsists nowhere in reality but in our own talents, which are not our own but nature's--or in our rank, which is not our own but fortune's." with his usual humility, shelley closes the letter with an apology for carrying his jealousy of byron into hunt's relations with him, and says: "you in the superiority of a wise and tranquil nature have well corrected and justly reproved me ... you will find much in me to correct and reprove."[ ] during the summer shelley continued to shrink more than ever from byron; june he declared to hunt that he would not be the link between them for byron is the "nucleus of all that is hateful." his one dread was that he might injure hunt's prospects.[ ] between april and july byron's enthusiasm had again cooled. trelawny relates that shelley when he went to leghorn to meet hunt, was greatly depressed by lord byron's "shuffling and equivocating," and, "but for imperilling hunt's prospects," that shelley would have abruptly terminated their intercourse.[ ] on july shelley wrote to mary from pisa that "things are in the worst possible situation with respect to poor hunt.... lord byron must of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as i cannot, but he seems inclined to depart without the necessary explanations and arrangements due to such a situation as hunt's. these, in spite of delicacy, i must procure."[ ] this dual attitude of shelley has been variously viewed. professor dowden thinks it a "triumph of diplomacy,"[ ] while jeaffreson deems it a conspiracy of hunt and shelley against the innocent and unsuspecting byron. hunt gave the following ominous description of his first call upon lord byron: "the day was very hot; the road to mount nero was very hot, through dusty suburbs; and when i got there i found the hottest looking house i ever saw. it was salmon colour. think of this, flaring over the country in a hot italian sun! but the greatest of all the heats was within. upon seeing lord byron, i hardly knew him, he was grown so fat; and he was longer in recognizing me, i had grown so thin."[ ] hunt wrote to england that byron received him with marked cordiality[ ] but shelley's friend williams, in his last letter to his wife, stated that byron treated hunt vilely and "actually said as much that he did not wish his name to be attached to the work, and of course to theirs"; that his treatment of mrs. hunt was "most shameful"; and that his "conduct cut h. to the soul."[ ] the hunt family was quickly quartered on the ground floor of byron's palace, which byron had furnished at a cost of £ .[ ] shelley's sensible suggestions to hunt about his furniture,[ ] about the income from _the examiner_, and worse still, his delicately given advice that it was not possible for him to bring _all_ of his family, had been ignored.[ ] with shelley's tragic death a few days after their arrival, the only "link of the two thunderbolts,"[ ] as he had called himself, was broken. hunt was left in an awkward position which no one could have foreseen. a few days later he wrote to friends at home of byron's kindness.[ ] in he gave a different version: "lord byron requested me to look upon him as standing in mr. s.'s place. my heart died within me to hear him; i made the proper acknowledgment, but i knew what he meant, and i more than doubted whether even in that, the most trivial part of the friendship, he could resemble mr. shelley, if he would. circumstances unfortunately rendered the matter of too much importance to me at the moment. i had reason to fear:--i was compelled to try:--and things turned out as i had dreaded. the public have been given to understand that lord byron's purse was at my command, and that i used it according to the spirit with which it was offered. _i did so._ stern necessity and a family compelled me."[ ] with the magazine scarcely likely to yield an income for some time, it was absolutely necessary for hunt to get money from somewhere for living expenses and, shelley gone, there was no one left to tide over the interval but byron. the latter did not relish the position of sole banker to a family of nine and doled out £ in small doses through his steward, hunt says, just as if his "disgraces were being counted."[ ] he was embittered by his position as suppliant and dependent, though there is nothing to show that he was ever refused what he asked for or requested to pay back what he owed.[ ] hunt's entire money obligation to byron has been comprehensively calculated by galt at £ : £ for the journey from england, £ at pisa for living expenses, the cost of the journey from pisa to genoa, and £ from genoa to florence. galt thought the use of the ground floor a small favor since byron could use only one floor for himself. such practices were very common, italian palaces often being built for that purpose.[ ] it is likely that until the step was irrevocable byron did not correctly gauge hunt's resources and the responsibility which he was assuming in transporting a large family to a foreign country. if he did, he expected to share the burden with shelley. had hunt been financially independent, it is probable that he and byron would have remained on amicable enough terms, for the former asserts that the first time he was treated with disrespect was when byron knew he was in want.[ ] yet that neither shelley nor byron were wholly ignorant of what to expect before hunt's arrival in italy is apparent from shelley's letter to byron, february , : "hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. my answer consisted in sending him all i could spare, which i have now literally done. your kindness in fitting up a part of your own home for his accommodation i sensibly felt, and willingly accept from you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of imposing, or, if i could help it, of allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. as it has come to this in spite of my exertions, i will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment,--that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting hunt further. i do not think poor hunt's promise to pay in a given time is worth very much, but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and i should be happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed to you."[ ] mrs. hunt seems to have widened further the breach between the two men.[ ] she did not speak italian and the countess guiccioli, the head of byron's establishment, did not speak english. neither made any linguistic efforts and consequently there was no intercourse between the families of the two households. this, hunt later says, was the first cause of diminished cordiality between byron and himself. the hunt children were a further cause of trouble. byron wrote of them to mrs. shelley: "they were dirtier and more mischievous than yahoos. what they can't destroy with their feet they will with their fingers."[ ] again he described them as "six little blackguards ... kraal out of the hottentot country."[ ] the question of rank was a thorn in the flesh, particularly to hunt. while in open theory he had no respect for titles, in actual practice he groveled before them. pride, as he thought, had made him decline all advances from men of rank, but it was more with the air of being afraid to trust himself than with real indifference. his exception, made in the case of lord byron, is thus explained: "but talents, poetry, similarity of political opinion, flattery of early sympathy with my boyish writings, more flattering offers of friendship and the last climax of flattery, an earnest waiving of his rank, were too much for me in the person of lord byron."[ ] on the renewal of the acquaintance in italy, the very familiar attitude seen in the dedication of the _story of rimini_, which hunt himself had decided was "foolish," was changed at the advice of shelley to an extremely formal manner of address. hunt says that byron did not like the change.[ ] as a matter of fact, six years of separation had brought about other more important changes: byron had grown more selfish and avaricious, hunt more helpless and vain. three months were spent in pisa after shelley's death. in september the two families left for genoa, travelling in separate parties and, on their arrival, settling in separate homes, the hunts with mrs. shelley. from this time on there was little intercourse between byron and hunt. october , , byron wrote to england and denied that all three families were living under one roof. he said that he rarely saw hunt, not more than once a month.[ ] hunt to the contrary said that they saw less of each other than in genoa yet "considerable."[ ] although at no time was there an open breach, yet cordiality and sympathy were wholly lost on both sides in the strain of the financial situation. they failed of agreement even on impersonal matters. byron had looked forward with great pleasure to hunt's companionship. before they met he had written: "when leigh hunt comes we shall have banter enough about those old _ruffiani_, the old dramatists, with their tiresome conceits, their jingling rhymes, and endless play upon words."[ ] this pleasant anticipation was not realized, for hunt's sensitiveness in petty matters and byron's scorn of hunt's affectation and of his ill-bred personal applications,[ ] or so the hearer interpreted them, reduced safe topics to boswell's _life of johnson_. even a mutual admiration of pope and dryden was forgotten. literary jealousy and vanity fed the flames. hunt was unable to appreciate manhood of byron's virile type, and he did not try to conceal the fact from one who was hungry for praise. on the other hand, byron did not render to hunt the homage he was accustomed to receive from the cockney circle and had nothing but contempt for all his works except the _story of rimini_. a statement in the anonymous _life of lord byron_, published by iley, that the misunderstanding was the result of a criticism by hunt of _parisina_ in the leghorn and lucca newspapers and that byron never spoke to him after the discovery[ ] is a fabrication as unsubstantial as the greater part of the other statements in the same book. hunt denied the charge. his sole connection with _parisina_ was that he supplied the incident of the heroine talking in her sleep,[ ] a device that he had already made use of in _rimini_. on his arrival in italy hunt wrote back to england that byron entered into _the liberal_ with great ardor, and that he had presented the _vision of judgment_ to his brother and himself for their mutual benefit.[ ] yet four days later in a letter to moore byron wrote: "hunt seems sanguine about the matter but (entre nous) i am not. i do not, however, like to put him out of spirits by saying so, for he is bilious and unwell. do, pray, answer _this_ letter immediately. do send hunt anything in prose or verse of yours, to start him handsomely--and lyrical, _iri_cal, or what you please."[ ] at the time of trelawny's first visit after the work had begun, byron said impatiently: "it will be an abortion," and again in trelawny's presence he called to his bull-dog on the stairway, "don't let any cockneys pass this way."[ ] sometime previous to october his endurance must have given way completely, for in that month hunt wrote that byron was _again_ for the plan.[ ] in january byron urged john hunt to employ good writers for _the liberal_ that it might succeed.[ ] march , , byron, in a letter to john hunt, said that he attributed the failure of _the liberal_ to his own contributions and that the magazine would stand a better chance without him. he desired to sever the partnership if the magazine was to be continued.[ ] his constant vacillation in part supports the charge made by hunt that byron under protest contributed his worse productions in order to make a show of coöperation.[ ] insinuations from moore and murray had fallen on fertile ground and had persuaded byron that the association jeopardized his reputation. hobhouse, byron's friend, joined his dissenting voice to theirs, and "rushed over the alps" to add to his disapproval.[ ] hazlitt's account of the conspiracy of byron's friends against _the liberal_ is very fiery.[ ] the first number of _the liberal_ appeared october , . there were three subsequent numbers. byron's contributions were his brilliant and masterly satire, the _vision of judgment_, _heaven and earth_, _a letter to the editor of my grandmother's review_, _the blues_, and his translation of the first canto of pulci's _morgante maggiore_. murray had withheld the preface to the _vision of judgment_ and this omission, combined with an unwise announcement in _the examiner_ of september , , by john hunt, made the reception even worse than it might otherwise have been. hunt said the _vision of judgment_ "played the devil with all of us."[ ] shelley had made ready for the forthcoming magazine his exquisite translation of goethe's _may day night_ and a prose narrative, _a german apologue_. these appeared in the first number. hunt's best contributions were two poems, _lines to a spider_ and _mahmoud_. _letters from abroad_ are good in spots only. his two satires, _the dogs_ and _the book of beginners_, are pale reflections in meter and tone of _don juan_ and _beppo_ combined. the _florentine lovers_ is a good story spoiled. _rhyme and reason_, _the guili tre_, and the rest are purely hack work, with the possible exceptions of the translation from ariosto and the modernization of the _squire's tale_. hazlitt contributed _pulpit oratory_, _on the spirit of monarchy_, a pithy dissertation _on the scotch character_, and a delightful reminiscence of coleridge in _my first acquaintance with poets_. mrs. shelley wrote _a tale of the passions_, _mme. d'houdetot_, and _giovanni villani_, all rather stilted and heavy. charles browne contributed _shakespear's fools_. a number of unidentified prose articles and poems, many of the latter translations from alfieri, completed the list. the causes of the failure of _the liberal_ were very complex, but quite obvious. there was no definite political campaign mapped out, no proportion outlined for the various departments, no assignments of individual responsibility, no attempt to cater to the public appetite or to mollify the public prejudices for expediency's sake, and an utter want of harmony among its supporters. each contributor rode his own hobby. each vented his private spleen without regard to the common good. it was a vague, up-in-the-air scheme, wholly lacking in coördination and common sense. byron's fickleness and want of genuine interest in a small affair among many other greater ones; the disappointment of both byron[ ] and hunt in not realizing the enormous profits that they had looked forward to--although hunt wrote later that the "moderate profits" were quite enough to have encouraged perseverance on the part of byron; hunt's ill-health and unhappy situation which rendered it difficult for him to write; john hunt's inexperience as a bookseller; the general unpopularity of the editor, the publisher, and the contributors; and last, the pent-up storm of rage from the press which greeted the first number of _the liberal_,[ ] were other reasons that contributed to its ultimate downfall. in seeking hunt for the editor of such a venture, as gait had pointed out,[ ] byron had mistaken his political notoriety for solid literary reputation. hunt, notwithstanding his confession[ ] of an inability to write at his best and of his brother's inexperience, throws the burden of failure solely on byron. he asserts that _the liberal_ had no enemies and, worst of all, that byron when he foresaw hostility and failure, gave him and his brother the profits that they might carry the responsibility of an "ominous partnership"[ ]--a statement ungenerously distorted by bitter memories, for when john hunt was prosecuted for the publication of the _vision of judgment_, byron offered to stand trial in his stead. neither does hunt state that byron's contributions were _gratis_ and that the "moderate profits" enabled him and his brother to pay off some of their old debts.[ ] byron, strong with the prescience of failure, likewise shifted the blame to other shoulders and with the aid of a strong imagination tried to persuade himself and his friends that the hunts had projected the affair and that he had consented in an evil hour to engage in it;[ ] that they were the cause of the failure; that his motives throughout had been philanthropic only in nature;[ ] and that he was sacrificing himself for others. such statements are inventions born of self-accusation and of self-defense. the worst that can be said of byron from beginning to end of the affair is that he was not conscientious in his endeavors to make the journal a success; that, after it failed, he evaded financial responsibility by placing barriers of coldness and ungraciousness between hunt and himself. on october , , he wrote to moore that he had done all he could for hunt "but in the affairs of this world he himself is a child";[ ] "as it is, i will not quit them (the hunts) in their adversity, though it should cost me my character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera.... had their journal gone on well, and i could have aided to make it better for them, i should then have left them; after my safe pilotage off a lee shore, to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. as it is, i can't, or would not, if i could, leave them amidst the breakers. as to any community of feeling, thought, or opinions between l. h. and me, there is little or none; we meet rarely, hardly ever; but i think him a good-principled and able man.[ ]... you would not have had me leave him in the street with his family, would you? and as to the other plan you mention, you forget how it would humiliate him--that his writings should be supposed to be dead weight! think a moment--he is perhaps the vainest man on earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were in other circumstances i might be tempted to take him down a peg; but not now--it would be cruel.[ ]... a more amiable man in society i know not, nor (when he will allow his sense to prevail over his sectarian principles) a better writer. when he was writing his _rimini_ i was not the last to discover its beauties, long before it was published. even then i remonstrated against its vulgarisms; which are the more extraordinary, because the author is anything but a vulgar man."[ ] during april, , the countess of blessington had a conversation with byron in which he said that while he regretted having embarked in _the liberal_, yet he had a good opinion of the talents and principles of hunt, despite their diametrically opposed tastes.[ ] on april , , he wrote that hunt was incapable or unwilling to help himself; that he could not keep up this "genuine philanthropy" permanently; and that he would furnish hunt with the means to return to england in comfort.[ ] there is no proof that byron ever made such an offer to hunt. the purchase money of hunt's journey home was _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_. on july , , byron went to greece. the hunts, provided by him with £ for the trip, left genoa about the same time for florence, where they were literally stranded, in ill-health and without sufficient means for support,[ ] until their departure for england in september, . the suffering there and the foul calumny at home magnified in hunt's mind[ ] the indignity and injustice that had been put upon him and warped his sense of gratitude and honor in the whole affair. he wrote from florence: "the stiffness of age has come into my joints; my legs are sore and fevered; and i sometimes feel as if i were a ship rotting in a stagnant harbour."[ ] mrs. shelley protested to byron concerning his treatment of hunt[ ] but she received no further satisfaction than the statement that he had engaged in the journal for good-will and respect for hunt solely.[ ] the publisher colburn in made hunt an advance of money for the return journey, to be repaid by a volume of selections from _his own writings preceded by a biographical sketch_.[ ] an irresistible longing for england and a crisis in the disagreement with john hunt regarding the proprietary rights of _the examiner_ and the publication of the _wishing cap papers_ in that paper, made hunt seize at the first opportunity by which he might return home. from paris, on his way to england, he wrote: "if i delayed i might be pinned forever to a distance, like a fluttering bird to a wall, and so die in helpless yearning. i have been mistaken. during my strength my weakness perhaps, was only apparent; now that i am weaker, indignation has given a fillip to my strength."[ ] from his severance with _the examiner_ and the publication of _bacchus in tuscany_ in , hunt was idle until . then, pressed by his obligation to colburn and stung by the misrepresentations of the press regarding his relations with byron in italy, he scored even, as he thought, by producing _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, the blunder of his life and the one blot upon his honor. in addition to the part dealing with byron, it contained autobiographical reminiscences and memoirs of shelley, keats, moore, lamb and others. it went rapidly through three editions. the body of the work is a discussion of the defects of byron's character and a detailed analysis of his actions. in brief, he is charged with insincerity in the cause of liberty; an impatience of any despotism save his own; a vain pride of rank, although his friends were of humble origin; a "libelling all around" of friends; an ignorance of real love, consanguineous or sexual; coarseness in speaking of women or to them;[ ] a voluptuous indolence; weak impulses; a habit of miscellaneous confidences and exaggeration; untruthfulness; susceptibility to influence; avarice even in his patriotism and debauchery; a willingness to receive petty obligations; jealousy of the great and small; no powers of conversation and a want of self-possession; bad temper and self-will; an inordinate desire for flattery; egotism and love of notoriety. more petty accusations are excess in his eating and drinking, though hunt complains that byron would not "drink like a lord"; his fondness for communicating unpleasant tidings; his inclination to the mock heroic; his effeminacy and old-womanish superstition; his easily-aroused suspicions; his imitativeness in writing poetry; his slight knowledge of languages; his physical cowardice. the virtues of this monster, small in number and grudgingly allowed, were admitted to be good horsemanship, good looks, a delicate hand, amusing powers of mimicry, pleasantry in his cups, masterly swimming. unfortunately these statements were usually damned with a "but" or "yet." while it is now generally believed that many of the accusations made by hunt were true,[ ] inasmuch as they are confirmed in large part by contemporary evidence, and as truthfulness was one of hunt's dominant traits, yet, on the other hand, it is quite necessary to make large allowance for the point of view and the color given by prejudice and bitterness of spirit. that hunt told only the truth does not justify the injury in the slightest, for he had slept under byron's roof and eaten of his bread. the obligations conferred were not exactly those of benefactor to suppliant; they were perhaps no more than hunt's due in the light of the responsibility voluntarily assumed by byron; yet they could not be destroyed or forgotten because of a refusal to acknowledge them. worse still, hunt's motives proceeded from impecuniosity and revenge. such petty gossip of private affairs was worthy of a smaller and meaner soul. that hunt did not have the sanction of his own judgment and conscience is clearly seen in the preface to the first edition where he confesses an unwilling hand and gives as a reason for the change of scheme a too long holiday taken after the advance of money from colburn. he says that the book would never have been written at all, or consigned to the flames when finished, if he could have repaid the money.[ ] his one poor defense is that "byron talked freely of me and mine," that the public had talked, and that byron knew how he felt.[ ] the book had a very large circulation. but hunt, who had hoped to defend himself in this manner from the calumnies afloat since the failure of _the liberal_, brought down a storm of abuse from the press that resulted in his degradation and byron's canonization. moore's welcome was a poem, _the living dog and the dead lion_.[ ] hunt's friends replied with _the giant and the dwarf_.[ ] in his life of byron published some years later, moore speaks reservedly of the book, merely saying it had sunk into deserved oblivion.[ ] hunt's public apology and reparation, in so far as such lay in his power, were first made in in _a saunter through the west end_: "no. (formerly no. of what was piccadilly terrace) was the last house which byron inhabited in england. nobody needs to be told what a great wit and fine poet he was: but everybody does not know that he was by nature a genial and generous man spoiled by the most untoward circumstances in early life. he vexed his enemies, and sometimes his friends; but his very advantages have been hard upon him, and subjected him to all sorts of temptations. may peace rest upon his infirmities, and his fame brighten as it advances."[ ] in , he wrote in praise of the ave maria stanza in _don juan_.[ ] and finally and completely in his _autobiography_ he apologized for the heat and venom of _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_: "i wrote nothing which i did not feel to be true, or think so. but i can say with alamanni, that i was then a young man, and that i am now advanced in years. i can say, that i was agitated by grief and anger, and that i am now free from anger. i can say, that i was far more alive to other people's defects than to my own, and that i am now sufficiently sensible of my own to show to others the charity which i need myself. i can say, moreover, that apart from a little allowance for provocation, i do not think it right to exhibit what is amiss, or may be thought amiss, in the character of a fellow-creature, out of any feeling but unmistakable sorrow, or the wish to lessen evils which society itself may have caused. "lord byron, with respect to the points on which he erred and suffered (for on all others, a man like himself, poet and wit, could not but give and receive pleasure), was the victim of a bad bringing up, of a series of false positions in society, of evils arising from the mistakes of society itself, of a personal disadvantage (which his feelings exaggerated), nay, of his very advantages of person, and of a face so handsome as to render with strong tendencies of natural affection," and declared that his fickleness had been "nurtured by an excessively bad training." in exoneration of hunt he said that if "disappointment and the fervour of a new literary work--which often draws the pen beyond its original intention--led leigh hunt into a book that was too severe, perhaps too one-sided in its views, he himself afterwards corrected the one-sidedness, and recalled to mind the earlier and undoubtedly the more correct impression he had had of lord byron." i, - . him an object of admiration. even the lameness, of which he had such a resentment, only softened the admiration with tenderness. "but he did not begin life under good influences. he had a mother, herself, in all probability, the victim of bad training, who would fling the dishes from table at his head, and tell him he would be a scoundrel like his father. his father, who was cousin to the previous lord, had been what is called a man upon town, and was neither rich nor very respectable. the young lord, whose means had not yet recovered themselves, went to school, noble but poor, expecting to be in the ascendant with his title, yet kept down by the inconsistency of his condition. he left school to put on the cap with the gold tuft, which is worshipped at college:--he left college to fall into some of the worst hands on the town:--his first productions were contemptuously criticised, and his genius was thus provoked into satire:--his next were overpraised, which increased his self-love:--he married when his temper had been soured by difficulties, and his will and pleasure pampered by the sex:--and he went companionless into a foreign country, where all this perplexity could repose without being taught better, and where the sense of a lost popularity could be drowned in license. "i am sorry i ever wrote a syllable respecting lord byron which might have been spared. i have still to relate my connection with him, but it will be related in a different manner. pride, it is said, will have a fall; and i must own, that on this subject i have experienced the truth of the saying. i had prided myself--i should pride myself now if i had not been thus rebuked--on not being one of those who talk against others. i went counter to this feeling in a book; and to crown the absurdity of the contradiction, i am foolish enough to suppose that the very fact of my so doing would show that i had done it in no other instance! that having been thus public in the error, credit would be given me for never having been privately so! such are the delusions inflicted on us by self-love. when the consequence was represented to me as characterized by my enemies, i felt, enemies though they were, as if i blushed from head to foot. it is true i had been goaded to the task by misrepresentation:--i had resisted every other species of temptation to do it:--and, after all, i said more in his excuse, and less to his disadvantage, than many of those who reproved me. but enough. i owed the acknowledgment to him and to myself; and i shall proceed on my course with a sigh for both, and i trust in the good will of the sincere."[ ] chapter v characteristics of the "cockney school"--reasons for tory enmity--establishment of _blackwood's magazine_ and the _quarterly review_--their methods of attack--other targets--authorship of anonymous articles--members of the cockney group--byron--hunt--keats--shelley-- hazlitt. the word "cockney" says bulwer-lytton, signifies the "archetype of the londoner east of temple bar, and is as grotesquely identified with the bells of bow as quasimodo with those of notre dame."[ ] the epithet remains doubtful in origin but is proverbially significant of odium and of ridicule. r. h. horne asserts that, in its first application, it meant merely "pastoral, minus nature."[ ] the word did not long carry so harmless a connotation. it was first applied to hunt by the tory journals in and, in the phrase "cockney school," was gradually extended until it included most of his associates. the group of men thus arbitrarily banded together did not form a _school_ or cult, and themselves resented such a classification. they differed widely in their fundamental principles of life and art. they were not all of one vocation. on the other hand they had certain superficial points in common which made them collectively vulnerable to the dart of the enemy. they were londoners[ ] by birth or by adoption; with the exception of shelley they may all be said to have belonged to the middle class; the most cockneyfied of them had certain vulgar mannerisms; they egotistically paraded their personal affairs in public; they praised each other somewhat fulsomely in dedications and elsewhere, though not always to the full satisfaction of everybody concerned; they presented each other with wreaths of bay, laurel, and roses, and with locks of hair; they agreed in liking thomas moore and in disliking southey; they moved with complacency within a limited circle to the exclusion of a large city; in general they were liberal in politics and in religion; they were in revolt against french criticism; they chose elizabethan or italian models, and, as a rule, they conceitedly ignored or contemned contemporary writers. the gatherings of the coterie have been nowhere better described than by cowden clarke: "evenings of mozartian operatic and chamber music at vincent novello's own house, where leigh hunt, shelley, keats and the lambs were invited guests; the brilliant supper parties at the alternate dwellings of the novellos, the hunts and the lambs, who had mutually agreed that bread and cheese, with celery, and elia's immortalized 'lutheran beer' were to be the sole cates provided; the meetings at the theatres, when munden, dowton, liston, bannister, elliston and fanny kelly were on the stage; the picnic repasts enjoyed together by appointment in the fields that lay spread in green breadth and luxuriance between the west end of oxford street and the western slope of hampstead hill--are things never to be forgotten."[ ] miss mitford relates a ludicrous incident of one of these meetings: "leigh hunt (not the notorious mr. henry hunt, but the fop, poet and politician of the 'examiner') is a great keeper of birthdays. he was celebrating that of haydn, the great composer--giving a dinner, crowning his bust with laurels, berhyming the poor dear german, and conducting an apotheosis in full form. somebody told mr. haydon they were celebrating _his_ birthday. so off he trotted to hampstead, and bolted into the company--made a very fine animated speech--thanked him most sincerely for what they had done him and the arts in his person."[ ] at one time the set became violently vegetarian. the enthusiasm came to a sudden end, as narrated by joseph severn: "leigh hunt most eloquently discussed the charms and advantages of these vegetable banquets, depicting in glowing words the cauliflowers swimming in melted butter, and the peas and beans never profaned with animal gravy. in the midst of his rhapsody he was interrupted by the venerable wordsworth, who begged permission to ask a question. 'if,' he said, 'by chance of good luck they ever met with a caterpillar, they thanked their stars for the delicious morsel of animal food.' this absurdity all came to an end by an ugly discovery. haydon, whose ruddy face had kept the other enthusiasts from sinking under their scanty diet--for they clung fondly to the hope that they would become like him, although they increased daily in pallor and leanness--this haydon was discovered one day coming out of a chop-house. he was promptly taxed with treachery, when he honestly confessed that every day after the vegetable repast he ate a good beef-steak. this fact plunged the others in despair, and leigh hunt assured me that on vegetable diet his constitution had received a blow from which he had never recovered. with shelley it was different, for he was by nature formed to regard animal food repulsively."[ ] the causes of the enmity of the press were political rather than literary or personal and have already been sufficiently dwelt upon in the preceding chapters. the strong rivalry between edinburgh and london as publishing strongholds intensified the strife. hunt in particular had centered attention upon himself by his persistent and violent attacks on gifford and southey for several years previous to . besides _the examiner's_ persistent allusions to these two unregenerates, a savage diatribe had appeared in the _feast of the poets_, which alluded to gifford's humble origin and mediocre ability, charged him with being a government tool, and continued: "but a vile, peevish temper, the more inexcusable in its indulgence, because he appears to have had early warning of its effects, breaks out in every page of his criticism, and only renders his affected grinning the more obnoxious ... i pass over the nauseous epistle to peter pindar, and even notes to his baviad and moeviad, where though less vulgar in his language, he has a great deal of the pert cant and snip-snap which he deprecates."[ ] during , _the examiner_ had concerned itself particularly with southey. he had been called an apostate, a hypocrite, and almost every other name in hunt's abusive vocabulary. sir walter scott had not been spared. his politics were said to be easily estimated by the "simple fact, that of all the advocates of charles the second, he is the least scrupulous in mentioning his crimes, because he is the least abashed;" his command of prose was declared equal to nothing beyond "a plain statement or a brief piece of criticism;" his poetry "a little thinking conveyed in a great many words."[ ] hunt thus secured to himself, through offensive and aggressive abuse, the hostility of the tories both in england and in scotland. his weaknesses and affectations made him a conspicuous and assailable target for the inevitable return fire.[ ] the establishment by the tories of the _quarterly review_ in and of _blackwood's magazine_ in was with the view of opposing and, if possible, of suppressing the _edinburgh review_ and _the examiner_. the brunt of the hostility fell upon the latter, for hunt, by reason of his extreme social and religious policy, could not always rally the _edinburgh review_ to his support. with the founding of the _london magazine_ in he had a new ally in its editor, john scott, but the war had then already raged for three years, and scott fell a victim to it in two years' time.[ ] by a process of elimination scott fixed the identity of "z"--such was the only signature of the articles on the cockney school in _blackwood's_--upon lockhart. he also asserted that lockhart was the editor of the magazine. lockhart demanded an apology. his friend christie took up the quarrel. in the duel which followed scott was fatally wounded. his death followed keats's within four days. the method of attack with the _quarterly_ and with _blackwood's_ was much the same. they differed chiefly in the style of approach. the former may be compared to heavy artillery, slow, cumbrous and crushing. the reviews indeed often verge on dullness and stupidity. neither gifford nor southey seemed to have been blessed with the saving grace of humor in dealing with the cockney school. _blackwood's_, on the other hand, had too much, for whenever one of the so-called cockneys was mentioned, its contributors wallowed in the mire of coarse buffoonery and cruel satire, disgusting scandal and vulgar parody. the only counter-irritant to such a dose is the clever joking and keen humor; but even when this is clean, which is rare, the whole is rendered unpalatable by the thought of its cruelty and of its frequent falsity. furthermore, _blackwood's_ was more merciless in its persecution than the _quarterly_ in that it was untiring. it was perpetually discharging a fresh fusilade. both magazines disguised their real motives under a cloak of religious zeal and monarchical loyalty. while hunt did much to bring the hornet's nest about his ears, he was not wholly deserving of the amount, and not at all of the kind, of stinging calumny that he had to endure. neither were the members of the cockney school the only ones who provoked such antagonism from the same magazine. other famous libels of _blackwood's_ that should be mentioned to show the disposition of its controllers were the _chaldee manuscript_; the _madonna of dresden_ and other effusions of the "_baron von lauerwinckel_"; the _diary_ and _horæ sinicæ of ensign o'doherty_; and the _diary of william wastle, blackwood and dr. morris_. _letter to sir walter scott, bart., on the moral and other characteristics of the ebony and shandrydan school_,[ ] cites a full list of _blackwood's_ victims. these, besides those of the cockney school, were said to be jeffrey, professor playfair, professor dugald stewart, professor leslie, james macintosh, lord brougham, moore, professor david ricardo, wordsworth, coleridge, pringle, dalzell, cleghorn, graham, sharpe, jameson, and hogg, the ettrick shepherd. the characters in _noctes ambrosianæ_, ticklers, scorpions and shepherds, were said by the pamphleteer to respectively tickle, sting and stultify, and to make a business "of insulting worth, offending delicacy, caluminating genius, and outraging the decencies and violating all the sanctities of life." their weapons were "loathsome billingsgate and brutality," and "sublime bathos." an interesting statement, not elsewhere found, is made by the anonymous author of the pamphlet that the proprietor of the black bull inn imputed the death of his wife to the first volume of _peter's letters to his kinsfolk_, a series similar to the _noctes ambrosianæ_. sir walter scott is told that he cannot remain innocent if he remains indifferent to the machinations of the "ebony and shandrydan school"--as the writer pleases to call the _blackwood's_ group. another interesting pamphlet of like nature is _the scorpion critic unmasked; or animadversions on a pretended review of "fleurs, a poem, in four books," which appeared in blackwood's edinburgh magazine for june, , in a letter to a friend_.[ ] _blackwood's_ had called nathaniel john hollingsworth, the author of the poem, and others of his type, the "leg of mutton school."[ ] nothing in fact seems to have given this magazine so much malicious delight as to create schools, perhaps in a spirit of rivalry with the "lake school" of the _edinburgh review_. in the preceding april the "manchester school" had been presented by _blackwood's_ to the public. hollingsworth in turn created the "scorpion school" in order to deride _blackwood's_. other pamphlets of the same kind were _rebellion again gulliver; or r-d-c-l-sm in lilliput_. _a poetical fragment from a lilliputian manuscript_, an anonymous publication which appeared in edinburgh in ; _aspersions answered: an explanatory statement, advanced to the public at large, and to every reader of the quarterly review in particular_;[ ] and _another article for the quarterly review_;[ ] both by william hone in reply to the charge of irreligion made by the _quarterly_ against him. william blackwood, john wilson or "christopher north," lockhart, and perhaps maginn, share the blame severally of _blackwood's_; while in the case of the _quarterly_, to gifford and southey, already mentioned, must be added sir walter scott and croker. the two last certainly countenanced the actions of the others, even if they took no more active part. there seems to be no way of determining the individual authorship of the various articles. it was a secret jealously guarded at the time and it is unlikely that any further disclosures will come to light. the victims themselves hazarded as many guesses as more recent critics with no greater degree of certainty. leigh hunt thought that the articles were written by sir walter scott;[ ] hazlitt said, "to pay those fellows _in their own coin_, the way would be to begin with walter scott _and have at his clump foot_;"[ ] charles dilke thought that the articles were written by lockhart with the encouragement of scott;[ ] haydon thought that "z" was terry the actor, an intimate of the blackwood party, who had been exasperated because hunt had failed to notice him in _the examiner_;[ ] shelley fancied that the articles in the _quarterly_ were by southey, and, on his denial, attributed them to henry hart milman.[ ] mrs. oliphant in her two ponderous volumes, _william blackwood and his sons_, practically asserts that "z" was lockhart.[ ] if the extent of her research is to be the gauge of its value, her opinion is a very valuable one. mr. colvin advances the theory that "z" was wilson or lockhart, possibly revised by william blackwood.[ ] mr. courthope thinks that croker was the author of the articles on _endymion_ in the _quarterly_.[ ] mr. herford thinks that the whole campaign against the cockney school was "largely worked out" by lockhart.[ ] * * * * * hunt, shelley, hazlitt and keats were the chief targets in the cockney school. the attacks on each of these are of such length as to require separate discussion and will be returned to later. those who attained lesser notoriety were charles lamb, haydon, barry cornwall, john hamilton reynolds, cornelius webb, charles wells, charles dilke, charles lloyd, p. g. patmore and john ketch (abraham franklin). those who moved within the same circle and who may by attraction be considered cockneys are charles cowden clarke and his wife, vincent novello, charles armitage brown, the olliers, horace and james smith, douglas jerrold, joseph severn, laman blanchard, thomas noon talfourd, thomas love peacock, and perhaps thomas hood. charles lamb was first attacked in . he had written essays somewhat in the manner of hunt and he was a contributor to the _london magazine_, which had blundered by censuring castlereagh, canning, and wilberforce. the much-despised hazlitt was another of its force. accordingly, "elia" was pronounced a "cockney scribbler," _christ's hospital_ an essay full of offensive and reprehensible personalities,[ ] and _all fool's day_ "mere inanity and very cockneyism."[ ] in april, , _blackwood's_ returned to the attack but with more than usual good nature. in _noctes ambrosianæ_ of that month tickler is made to say: "elia in his happiest moods delights me; he is a fine soul; but when he is dull, his dullness sets human stupidity at defiance. he is like a well-bred, ill-trained pointer. he has a fine nose, but he can't or won't range. he always keeps close to your foot, and then he points larks or tit-mice. you see him snuffing and snoking and brandishing his tail with the most impassioned enthusiasm, and then drawn round into a semi-circle he stands beautifully--dead set. you expect a burst of partridges, or a towering cock-pheasant, when lo, and behold, away flits a lark, or you discover a mouse's nest, or there is absolutely nothing at all. perhaps a shrew has been there the day before. yet if elia were mine, i would not part with him, for all his faults." a few years later lamb became one of _blackwood's_ contributors. two attacks on lamb proceeded from the _quarterly_. the _confessions of a drunkard_, the writer says, "affords a fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance which we have reason to know is a true tale."[ ] in his _progress of infidelity_, southey asserted that elia's volume of essays wanted "only sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original."[ ] lamb's wrath had been slowly gathering under the strain of repeated attacks on hunt, hazlitt and himself. it culminated with southey's article. in the _london magazine_ of october, , he repudiated at considerable length the compliments thrust upon him at the expense of his friends, and denied the arraignment of drunkenness and heterodoxy. matters were then smoothed over between him and southey through an explanation which his unfailing good nature could not resist. haydon was nick-named the "raphael of the cockneys."[ ] until the exhibition of _christ's entry into jerusalem_ in edinburgh in , he underwent the same kind of persecution as his friends. his "greasy hair" was about as notorious as hazlett's "pimpled face." but the picture converted _blackwood's_ crew. they apologized and confessed that their misapprehensions had been due to the absurd style of laudation in _the examiner_. henceforward they acknowledged him to be "a high tory and an aristocrat, and a sound christian."[ ] bryan waller procter, or barry cornwall, was satirized in _blackwood's_ for his so-called effeminacy. in october, , the following facetious passage occurs: "the merry thought of a chick--three tea-spoonsfulls of peas, the eighth part of a french roll, a sprig of cauliflower, and an almost imperceptible dew of parsley" would dine the author of _the deluge_. the article on shelley's _posthumous poems_ in the _edinburgh_ of july, , was attributed to procter by _blackwood's_ and assailed in a most disgusting manner. the article was by hazlitt. john hamilton reynolds was a friend of keats, one of the _young poets_ reviewed by hunt in _the examiner_, and a contributor to the _london magazine_. his two poems, _eden of the imagination_ and _fairies_, showed hunt's influence. in the former he had even dared to praise hunt in the notes. cornelius webb was the author of numerous poems which exhibit in a marked degree the huntian peculiarities of diction pointed out in the first chapter. he is moreover responsible for the unfortunate lines so often quoted in derision by blackwood's: "keats the muses' son of promise! and what feats he yet may do." his sonnets in the _literary pocket book_ were thus reviewed in _blackwood's_ of december, : "now, cornelius webbe is a jaw-breaker. let any man who desires to have his ivory dislodged, read the above sonnet to march. or shall we call cornelius, the grinder? after reading aloud these fourteen lines, we called in our odontist, and he found that every tooth in our head was loosened, and a slight fracture in the jaw. 'my dearest christopher', said the odontist, in his wonted classical spirit, 'beware the ides of march.' so saying, he bounced up in our faces and disappeared." charles wells was a friend of hazlitt and of keats. in true cockney fashion he sent the latter a sonnet and some roses and thus began the acquaintance. dilke was a friend of keats, a radical, and an independent critic in the manner of hunt. charles lloyd was lamb's friend, one of the contributors to the _literary pocket book_ of , and a poet of sentimental and descriptive propensities. p. g. patmore was "count tims, the cockney."[ ] although he was a correspondent of _blackwood's_, his son has remarked that he was not _persona grata_, but was employed to secure news from london; and permitted to write only when he did not defend his friends too much.[ ] "john ketch" (abraham franklin) is mentioned by lord byron as one of the "cockney scribblers."[ ] thomas hood, as brother-in-law of reynolds, as assistant editor of the _london magazine_, and as an imitator in a small degree in his early work of lamb and of hunt may be enumerated among the cockneys, although he is not usually included. laman blanchard was the friend of procter, lamb and hunt. he imitated procter's _dramatic sketches_ and lamb's _essays_. talfourd was a member of the circle and the friend and biographer of lamb. he defended edward moxon when he was prosecuted for publishing _queen mab_. peacock was the friend of shelley. the ollier brothers, publishers, introduced keats, shelley, hunt, lamb and procter to the public.[ ] although byron was frequently at war with _blackwood's_ and the _quarterly_, and although he was closely associated with shelley and hunt, he was never stigmatized as a member of the cockney school. yet through his alliance with them he came in for some opprobrium that he would otherwise have escaped. _blackwood's_ strove through ridicule to prevent any growth of familiarity with hunt or his fraternity. its attitude towards the dedication to byron of the _story of rimini_ has already been mentioned. hunt's statement already quoted on p. that "for the drama, whatever good passages such a writer will always put forth, we hold that he (byron) has no more qualification than we have" was a choice morsel for the scotch birds of prey, enjoyed to the fullest extent in a review of _lyndsay's dramas of the ancient world_: "prigs will be preaching--and nothing but conceit cometh out of cockaigne. what an emasculated band of dramatists have deployed upon our boards. a pale-faced, sallow set, like the misses of some cockney boarding-school, taking a constitutional walk, to get rid of their habits of eating lime out of the wall.... but it was reserved to the spirit of atheism of an age, to talk of a cockney writing a tragedy. when the mind ceases to believe in a providence, it can believe in anything else; but the pious soul feels that while to dream, even in sleep, that a cockney had written a successful tragedy, would be repugnant to reason; certainly a more successful tragedy could not be imagined, from the utter destruction of cockaigne and all its inhabitants. an earthquake or a shower of lava would be too complimentary to the cockneys; but what do you think of a shower of soot from a multitude of foul chimneys, and the smell of gas from exploded pipes. something might be made of the idea.... the truth is, that these mongrel and doggerel drivellers have an instinctive abhorrence of a true poet; and they all ran out like so many curs baying at the feet of the pegasus on which byron rode ... and the eulogists of homely, and fireside, and little back-parlour incest, what could they imagine of the unseduceable spirit of the spotless angiolina?... when elliston, ignorant of what one gentleman owes to another, or driven by stupidity to forget it, brought the doge on the stage, how crowed the bantam cocks of cockaigne to see it damned!... but manfred and the doge are not dead; while all that small fry have disappeared in the mud, and are dried up like so many tadpoles in a ditch, under the summer drowth. 'lord byron,' quoth mr. leigh hunt, 'has about as much dramatic genius as _ourselves_!' he might as well have said, 'lucretia had about as much chastity as my own heroine in rimini;' or, 'sir phillip sidney was about as much of the gentleman as myself!'"[ ] byron's attitude toward the cockney school was expressed in a letter written to john murray during the bowles controversy: "with the rest of his (hunt's) young people i have no acquaintance, except through some things of theirs (which have been sent out without my desire), and i confess that till i had read them i was not aware of the full extent of human absurdity. like garrick's 'ode to shakespeare,' _they_ '_defy criticism_.' these are of the personages who decry pope.... mr. hunt redeems himself by occasional beauties; but the rest of these poor creatures seem so far gone that i would not 'march through coventry with them, that's flat!' were i in mr. hunt's place. to be sure, he has 'led his ragamuffins where they will be well peppered'; but a system-maker must receive all sorts of proselytes. when they have really seen life--when they have felt it--when they have travelled beyond the far distant boundaries of the wilds of middlesex--when they have overpassed the alps of highgate, and traced to its sources the nile of the new river--then, and not till then, can it properly be permitted to them to despise pope.... the grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their _vulgarity_. by this i do not mean that they are coarse, but 'shabby-genteel,' as it is termed. a man may be _coarse_ and yet not _vulgar_, and the reverse.... it is in their _finery_ that the new school are _most_ vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at harrow "a sunday blood" might be easily distinguished from a gentleman, although his clothes might be the better cut, and his boots the best blackened of the two:--probably because he made the one or cleaned the other, with his own hands.... in the present case, i speak of writing, not of persons. of the latter i know nothing; of the former i judge as it is found."[ ] byron's opinion of keats is too well known to need repetition. he thought there was hope for barry cornwall if "he don't get spoiled by green tea and the praises of pentonville and paradise row. the pity of these men is, that they never lived in _high life_ nor in _solitude_: there is no medium for the knowledge of the _busy_ or the _still_ world. if admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as _spectators_--they form no part of the mechanism thereof."[ ] _blackwood's_ of december, , in a review of _the liberal_, advised byron to "cut the cockney"--"by far the most unaccountable of god's works." hunt is denominated "the menial of a lord." when byron notwithstanding its advice continued his "conjunction with these deluded drivellers of cockaigne" _blackwood's_ grew savage towards the peer himself: it is said that he suffered himself "to be so enervated by the unworthy delilahs which have enslaved his imagination, as to be reduced to the foul office of displaying blind buffooneries before the philistines of cockaigne ... i feel a moral conviction that his lordship must have taken the examiner, the liberal, the rimini, the round table, as his model, and endeavored to write himself down to the level of the capacities and the swinish tastes of those with whom he has the misfortune, originally, i believe, from charitable motives, to associate. this is the most charitable hypothesis which i can frame. indeed there are some verses which have all the appearance of having been interpolated by the king of the cockneys."[ ] when byron and hunt had separated, _blackwood's_ attempted to reinstate byron in his former position by declaring that he had been disgusted beyond endurance on hunt's arrival in italy and that he had cut him very soon in a "paroxysm of loathing."[ ] * * * * * the declaration of war between the cockneys and the tory press was made with a review of the _story of rimini_ in the _quarterly_ of january, . from this time on hunt was the choice prey of the two magazines, and others were attacked principally on account of him, or reached through him. hunt's writings were termed "eruptions of a disease" with which he insists upon "inoculating mankind;" his language "an ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon." _blackwood's_ of october, , contained the first of the long series of abusive articles which appeared in its columns. hazlitt in the _edinburgh review_ in june of the preceding year had acclaimed the _story of rimini_ to be "a reminder of the pure and glorious style that prevailed among us before french modes and french methods of criticism." in it he had discovered a resemblance to chaucer, to the voluptuous pathos of boccaccio and to the laughing graces of ariosto. to offset such statements _blackwood's_ dubbed the new school the "cockney school" and made hunt its chief doctor and professor. (later, in , _blackwood's_ proudly claimed the honor of christening and said that the _quarterly_ used the epithet only when it had become a part of english criticism.) it declared the dedication to byron an insult and the poem the product of affectation and gaudiness and continued: "the beaux are attorney's apprentices, with chapeau bras and limerick gloves--fiddlers, harp teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded, fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizen's wives. the company are entertained with luke-warm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano forte.... his poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. his muse talks indelicately like the tea-sipping milliner's girl. some excuse for her there might have been, had she been hurried away by imagination or passion; but with her, indecency seems a disease, she appears to speak unclean things from perfect inanition." hunt "would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and he is very sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-colored silk stockings. he sticks an artificial rosebud in his button hole in the midst of winter. he wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the prints of petrarch." nature in the eyes of a cockney was said to consist only of "green fields, jaunty streams, and o'er-arching leafiness;" no mountains were higher than highgate-hill nor streams more pastoral than the serpentine river.[ ] _blackwood's_ was near the truth in its criticism of hunt's conception of nature. while his appreciation was very genuine, it was restricted to rural or suburban scenes, "of the town, towny."[ ] the scale was that of the window garden or a flower pot. who but he could rhapsodize over a cut flower or a bit of green; or could speak in spring "of being gay and vernal and daffodilean?"[ ] yet he produced some delightful rural poetry. take this for instance: "you know the rural feeling, and the charm that stillness has for a world-fretted ear, 'tis now deep whispering all about me here, with thousand tiny bushings, like a swarm of atom bees, or fairies in alarm or noise of numerous bliss from distant spheres."[ ] the general characteristics of the school, briefly summarized, were said to be ignorance and vulgarity, an entire absence of religion, a vague and sour jacobinism for patriotism, admiration of chaucer and spenser when they resemble hunt, and extreme moral depravity and obscenity. november, , of _blackwood's_ contained the notorious accusation against the _story of rimini_ of immorality of purpose.[ ] the poem was called "the genteel comedy of incest." francesca's sin was declared voluntary and her sufferings sentimental. the changes from the historical version, an espousal by proxy instead of betrothal, the omission of deformity, the substitution of the duel for murder, and the happy opening, were pronounced wilful perversions for the furtherance of corruption. ford's treatment of the same theme much more elevated. hunt's defense was that the catastrophe was francesca's sufficient punishment.[ ] in may, , the same charge was repeated: "no woman who has not either lost her chastity, or is desirous of losing it, ever read the 'story of rimini' without the flushings of shame and of self-reproach." _the examiner_ of november and , , quoted extracts from the first of these articles and called upon the author to avow himself; otherwise to an "utter disregard of _truth_ and decency, he adds the height of meanness and cowardice."[ ] as might have been expected, this demand brought forth nothing more than a disavowal from the london publishers who handled _blackwood's_ of all responsibility in the matter. june , , _the examiner_ assailed the editor of the _quarterly_ as a government critic who disguised a political quarrel in literary garb, as a sycophant to power and wealth: "grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence, and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets of his spleen and impertinence on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness, not to be imposed upon by shallow pretensions; unprincipled rancor for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, and peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental infirmity, for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding." this condescension to a use of his enemies' weapons only weakened hunt's position. yet in the light of the secrecy maintained at the time and the mystery surrounding the matter ever since, it is interesting to read _blackwood's_ contorted reply to hunt's demand for an open fight, written as late as january, : "nor let it be said that, either on this or any other occasion, the moral satyrists (sic) in this magazine ever wished to remain unknown. how, indeed, could they wish for what they well knew was impossible? all the world has all along known the names of the gentlemen who have uttered our winged words. nor did it ever, for one single moment, enter into the head of any one of them to wish--not to scorn concealment. to gentlemen, too, they at all times acted like gentlemen; but was it ever dreamt by the wildest that they were to consider as such the scum of the earth? 'if i but knew who was my slanderer,' was at one time the ludicrous skraigh of the convicted cockney. why did he not ask? and what would he have got by asking? shame and confusion of face--unanswerable argument and cruel chastisement. for before one word would have been deigned to the sinner, he must have eaten--and the bitter roll is yet ready for him--all the lies he had told for the last twenty years, and must either have choked or been kicked." in january, , _blackwood's_ issued a manifesto of their future campaign. the keatses, shelleys, and webbes, were to be taken in turn. the charges of profligacy and obscenity against hunt's poem were repeated, but it was emphatically stated that there was no implication made in reference to his private character--an ominous statement that any one with any knowledge of _blackwood's_ usual methods could only construe into a warning that such an implication would speedily follow. the article was signed "z," a shadowy personage who sorrowfully called himself the "present object" of hunt's resentment and dislike. he seems to have expected gratitude and affection in return for articles that would compare favorably with the most scurrilous billingsgate of any of the humanistic controversies. in may, , with due ceremony, hunt was proclaimed "king of the cockneys" and editor of the cockney court-gazette. his kingdom was the "land of cockaigne," a borrowing, most probably, from the thirteenth century satire by that name. keats's sonnet containing the line "he of the rose, the violet, the spring" became the official cockney poem--by an "amiable but infatuated bardling." john hunt was made prince john. with the lapse of time hunt's crimes seem to have multiplied. he is called a lunatic, a libeller, an abettor of murder and of assassination, a coward, an incendiary, a jacobin, a plebeian and a foe to virtue. he is instructed, if sickened with the sins and follies of mankind, to withdraw "to the holy contemplation of your own divine perfections, and there 'perk up with timid mouth' 'and lamping eyes' (as you have it) upon what to you is dearer and more glorious than all created things besides, till you become absorbed in your own identity--motionless, mighty, and magnificent, in the pure calm of cockneyism ... instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedgehog, that has crawled out into the 'crisp' gravel walk round your box at hampstead, and oppose only the feeble pricks of your hunch'd-up back to the kicks of any one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den." the _quarterly_ of the same month contained the notorious review of _foliage_. southey, in a counterfeited cockney style, contorts hunt's devotion to his leafy luxuries, his flowerets, wine, music and other social joys into epicureanism[ ] and like unsound principles. he even goes so far as to accuse him of incest and adultery in his private life. there are disguised but unmistakable references to keats and to shelley; the latter is credited with evil doings that fall little short of machinations with the devil. the volume of poems, which was the ostensible pretext for this parade of foul slander, not a word of which was true, has, southey says, richness of language and picturesqueness of imagery.[ ] the july number of _blackwood's_ went a step beyond southey and identified the characters of the _story of rimini_ with hunt and his sister-in-law, elizabeth kent. after ostentatiously giving currency to the scandal, "z" then proceeds to deny the rumor--which had no existence save in the minds of hunt's vilifiers--in order to preserve immunity from libel. at the time that lamb replied to southey in he took up these charges made against hunt in . he said: "i was admitted to his household for several years, and do most solemnly aver that i believe him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. he chose an ill-judged subject for a poem.... in spite of 'rimini,' i must look upon its author as a man of taste and a poet. he is better than so; he is one of the most cordial-minded men that i ever knew, and matchless as a fireside companion. i do not mean to affront or wound your feelings when i say that in his more genial moods, he has often reminded me of you."[ ] a facetious bit of prose _on sonnet writing_ and a _sonnet on myself_ in _blackwood's_ of april, , parodied excellently the cockney conceit and mannerisms. the september number contrasted henry hunt, the representative of the cockney school of politics, with leigh hunt, of the cockney school of poetry; resenting loudly the claim of the two to prominence for "even douglasses never had more than one bell-the-cat at a time." while henry hunt "the brawny white feather of cockspur-street" addresses street mobs, the other hunt, "the lank and sallow hypochondriac of the 'leafy rise' and 'farmy fields' of hampstead," "the whining milk-sop sonneteer of the examiner" is said to speak to a "sorely depressed remnant of 'single gentlemen' in lodgings, and single ladies we know not where--a generation affected with headaches, tea-drinking and all the nostalgia of the nerves." it is hardly necessary to add that there was no connection whatsoever between the two men. _blackwood's_ of october, , announced _foliage_ to be a posthumous publication of hunt's, presented to the public by his three friends, keats, haydon and novello. an affecting picture is drawn of the now-departed hunt in his once familiar costume of dressing-gown, yellow breeches and red slippers, sipping tea, playing whist and writing sonnets. his statement in the preface that a "love of sociability, of the country, and the fine imagination of the greeks" had prompted the poems is greatly ridiculed. the first is said to have caused his death by an over-indulgence in tea-drinking; his feeling for nature is said to be limited to the lawns, stiles and hedges of hampstead and his knowledge of the imagination of the greeks to quotations. the _sonnet on receiving a crown of ivy from keats_ came in for especial derision--"a blister clapped on his head" would have been considered more appropriate. hunt's _literary pocket books_ for and were reviewed in _blackwood's_ in december, , in a remarkably kind article. they are recommended as worth three times the price. the reviewer, who was no other than "christopher north," stated that he had purchased six copies. _blackwood's_ of september, , reviewed _the indicator_; of december, , the _literary pocket book_; the last contained coarse and unkind allusions to hunt's health. it declared the production of sonnets in london and its suburbs about equal to the number of births and deaths. in reply, _the examiner_ of december , , in an article entitled _modern criticism_, italicised extracts from _blackwood's_ to bring out peculiarities of grammar and diction. _blackwood's_ of january, , contained a sonnet which it was pretended was hunt's new year's greeting, but which was instead a clever parody on his sonnet-style. the issue of the next month announced the triumvirate of _the liberal_ and, through byron's "noble generosity," hunt's departure with his wife and "little johnnys" upon a "perilous voyage on the un-cockney ocean.... he and his companions will now, like his own nereids, turn and toss upon the ocean's lifting billows, making them _banks and_ pillows, upon whose _springiness_ they lean and ride; some with an _inward back_; some _upward-eyed_, feeling the sky; and some with _sidelong hips_, o'er which the surface of the water slips." the first number of the _noctes ambrosianæ_ appeared in march. the following passage refers to the launching of _the liberal_ in a dialogue between the editor and o'doherty: o. hand me the lemons. this holy alliance of pisa will be a queer affair. _the examiner_ has let down its price from a tenpenny to a sevenpenny. they say the editor here is to be one of that faction, for they must publish in london, of course. ed. of course, but i doubt if they will be able to sell many. byron is a prince, but these dabbling dogglerers destroy every dish they dip in. o. apt alliteration's artful aid. ed. imagine shelly [sic], with his spavin, and hunt, with his staingalt, going in harness with such a caperer as byron, three-a-breast. he'll knock the wind out of them both the first canter. o. 'tis pity keats is dead.--i suppose you could not venture to publish a sonnet in which he is mentioned now? the _quarterly_ (who killed him, as shelly says) would blame you. ed. let's hear it. is it your own? o. no; 'twas written many months ago by a certain great italian genius, who cuts a figure about the london routs--one fudgiolo. ed. try to recollect it. (here follows the sonnet.) _blackwood's_ of december, , had passages on the cockney school in _noctes ambrosianæ_. number vii. of the series of articles on its members reviewed hunt's _florentine lovers_, or, in their phrasing, his _art of love_, the story of which is wilfully misrepresented. hunt is declared "the most irresistible knight-errant errotic extant ... the most contemptible little capon of the bantam breed that ever vainly dropped a wing, or sidled up to a partlet. he can no more crow than a hen. byron makes love like sir peter, moore like a tom-tit and hunt like a bantam." the writer then charges hunt with irreligion, indecency, sensuality and licentiousness. he is called "a fool" and an "exquisite idiot." such a burst of rage on the part of the anti-cockneys, after their wrath had begun to cool as seen in the review of the _literary pocket book_, was doubtless due to hunt's association in _the liberal_ with byron: "what can byron mean by patronizing a cockney?... by far the most unaccountable of god's works ... a scavenger raking in the filth of the common sewers and stews, for a few gold pieces thrown down by a nobleman.... but that satan should stoop to associate with an incubus, shows that there is degeneracy in hell." the tirade closes with a poem of six stanzas of which this is a fair sample: "the kind cockney monarch, he bids us farewell taking his place in the leghorn-bound smack-- in the smack, in the smack--ah! will he ne'er come back?" at the appearance of the last number of _the liberal_, _blackwood's_ rejoiced thus: "their hum, to be sure, is awfully subdued. they remind me of a mutchkin of wasps in a bottle, all sticking to each other--heads and tails--rumps glued with treacle and vinegar, wax and pus--helpless, hopeless, stingless, wingless, springless--utterly abandoned of air--choked and choking--mutually entangling and entangled--and mutually disgusting and disgusted--the last blistering ferment of incarnate filth working itself into one mass of oblivion in one bruised and battered sprawl of swipes and venom."[ ] _blackwood's_ of october, , declared hazlitt to be the most loathsome and hunt the most ludicrous of the group. before the close of the year hunt threatened the magazine with a suit for libel. this threat did not prevent in january a notice of hunt's _ultra-crepidarius_, a satire on gifford much in the vein and style of the _feast of the poets_. mercury and venus come to earth in search of the former's lost shoe. on their arrival they discover that it has been converted by command of the gods into a man named gifford. the satire is facetiously attributed by _blackwood's_ to master hunt, aged ten; a "small, smart, smattering satirist of an air-haparent ... cockney chick." the parent is reproached for putting a child in such a position. "had leigh hunt, the papa, boldly advanced on any great emergency, at the peril of his life and crown, to snatch the legitimate issue of his own loins from the shrivelled hands of some blear-eyed old beldam, into whose small cabbage-garden maximilian had headed a forlorn hope, good and well, and beautiful; but not so, when a stalwart and cankered carl like mr. gifford, with his quarter-staff, belabours the shoulders of his majesty, and sire shoves son between himself and the pounder ... such pusillanimity involves forfeiture of the crown, and from this hour we declare leigh dethroned, and the boy-bard of _ultra-crepidarius_ king of cockaigne." wearying of this make-believe, the reviewer discards such a possibility of authorship and considers hunt's grandfather, a legendary personage whose age is put at ninety-six and who is given the name of zachariah hunt: "what a gross, vulgar, leering old dog it is! was ever the couch of the celestials so profaned before! one thinks of some aged cur, with mangy back, glazed eye-balls dropping rheum, and with most disconsolate muzzard muzzling among the fleas of his abominable loins, by some accident lying upon the bed where love and beauty are embracing and embraced." as a final potentiality the reviewer deliberates whether hunt by any possibility could have been the author and closes with this peroration: "there he goes soaking, and swaling, and straddling up the sky, like daniel o'rouke on goose back!... toes in if you please. the goose is galloping--why don't you stand in the stirrups?... alas pegasus smells his native marshes; instead of making for olympus, he is off in a wallop to the fens of lincolnshire! bellerophon has lost his seat--now he clings desperately by the tail--a single feather holds him from eternity." article viii of the regular series, reviewing hunt's _bacchus in tuscany_, appeared in _blackwood's_ of august, . his allegiance to apollo in cockaigne is declared to have been changed to bacchus in tuscany, and his usual beverage of weak tea to a diet of wine on which he swills like a hippopotamus. he is depicted as jupiter tonans and his manner to hebe is compared with a "natty bagman to the barmaid of the hen and chickens." the same number noticed sotheby's translation of homer. the opportunity was not lost to refer unfavorably to hunt's translations of the same in _foliage_. _the rebellion of the beasts_; or _the ass is dead! long live the ass!!! by a late fellow of st. john's college, cambridge_, with the motto "a man hath pre-eminence above a beast," was published anonymously by j. & h. l. hunt in london in . there is every reason to believe that it was by hunt, although he does not mention it elsewhere. it is an exceedingly clever satire on monarchy and far surpasses anything else of the kind that he ever did. had the tories of edinburgh suspected the author it would probably have made them apoplectic with rage. with _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_ the rage of the two periodicals reached a grand climax and seemingly exhausted itself. the _quarterly_ in march of the same year in which it appeared said: "the last wiggle of expiring imbecility appears in these days to be a volume of personal reminiscences." it characterized the book as a melancholy product of coxcombry and cockneyism: as "dirty gabble about men's wives and men's mistresses--and men's lackeys, and even the mistresses of the lackeys:" as "the miserable book of a miserable man; the little airy fopperies of its manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor worn-out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through her tears." _blackwood's_ of the same month pictured hunt riding in the tourney lists of cockaigne to the tune of cock-a-doodle-doo. it accused him, besides those misdemeanors many times previously exploited, of clumsy casuistry, of falsehood regarding his transaction with colburn, of ill-breeding in dragging his wife into such a book. the following is the culmination of the author's anger: "mr. hunt, who to the prating pertness of the parrot, the chattering impudence of the magpie--to say nothing of the mowling malice of the monkey--adds the hissiness of the bill-pouting gander, and the gobble-bluster of the bubbly-jock--to say nothing of the forward valour of the brock or badger--threatens death and destruction to all writers of prose or verse, who shall dare to say white is the black of his eye, or that his book is not like a vase lighted up from within with the torch of truth ... frezeland bantam is the vainest bird that attempts to crow; and by and by our feverish friend comes out into the light, and begins to trim his plumage! his toilet over he basks on the ditch side, and has not the smallest doubt in the world that he is a bird of paradise." the _literary gazette_ joined in the hue-and-cry against "the pert vulgarity and miserable low-mindedness of cockney-land," against "the disagreeable, envious, bickering, hating, slandering, contemptible, drivelling and be-devilling wretches."[ ] _blackwood's_ of february, , in a review of moore's _life, letters and journals of lord byron_, satirizes the conversational habits of the cockneys "who all keep chattering during meals and after them, like so many monkeys, emulous and envious of each other's eloquence, and pulling out with their paws fetid observations from their cheek-pouches, which are nuts to them, though instead of kernel, nothing but snuff." not only did the articles in _blackwood's_ cease after this last, but in a full and complete apology was tendered hunt by christopher north: "and shelley truly loved leigh hunt. their friendship was honorable to both, for it was as disinterested as sincere; and i hope gurney will let a certain person in the city understand that i treat his offer of a reviewal of mr. hunt's _london journal_ with disdain. if he has anything to say against us or that gentleman, either conjunctly or severally, let him out with it in some other channel; and i promise him a touch and taste of the crutch. he talks to me of _maga's_ desertion of principle; but if he were a christian--nay, a man--his heart and his head would tell him that the animosities are mortal, but the humanities live for ever--and that leigh hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture christopher north in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods."[ ] professor wilson's invitation to hunt to contribute to his magazine was declined politely but firmly. leigh hunt wrote to charles cowden clarke: "_blackwood's_ and i, poetically, are becoming the best friends in the world. the other day there was an ode in _blackwood_ in honour of the memory of shelley; and i look for one of keats. i hope this will give you faith in glimpses of the golden age."[ ] nowhere does hunt show resentment or malice for the sufferings of years. yet mrs. oliphant, in her advocacy of the blackwood group, goes the length of saying that he displayed "feebleness of mind and body," "petty meannesses," "unwillingness or incapacity to take a high view even of friends or benefactors," a lightheartedness and frivolity, and "enduring spite." she grudgingly admits his "almost feminine grace and charm." she says that he thought his friends deserved only "casual thanks when they did what was but their manifest duty ... bitter and spiteful satire when they attended to their own affairs instead." she makes a radically false statement when she says that he defended byron, shelley, keats, moore, and many others in _the examiner_, but found an opportunity to say an evil word of most of them afterwards; and that when _blackwood's_ or the _quarterly_ attacked him, he was convinced that "it must be really one of his friends who was being struck at through him."[ ] the _quarterly_ delayed longer in assuming a friendly attitude. it remained silent until , when bulwer, in a comparison of hunt and hazlitt, conceded to the former a gracefulness and kindliness of disposition, a smoothness of tone and delicacy of finish in his writing. there was no formal apology as in the case of _blackwood's_. carlyle says that hunt suffered an "obloquy and calumny through the tory press--perhaps a greater quantity of baseness, persevering, implacable calumny, than any other living writer has undergone; which long course of hostility ... may be regarded as the beginning of his worst distresses, and a main cause of them down to this day."[ ] macaulay said: "there is hardly a man living whose merits have been so grudgingly allowed, and whose faults have been so cruelly expiated."[ ] for a period of more than a quarter of a century, from the beginning of the crusade against him until about , partly as the result of the misrepresentation of the press, and partly as a natural consequence of his own foibles and early blunders, a pretty general antagonism existed against him. at the end of that time his honesty and talents were recognized and rewarded publicly by the government. and the public has come more and more to esteem his personal character. * * * * * the _quarterly_ of april, , contained the stupid and savage review of _endymion_, provoked almost solely by the keats's offence in being the friend and public protégé of leigh hunt. the simple and manly preface[ ] was misconstrued into a formula for huntian poetry, and its allusion to a "london drizzle or a scotch mist" into a "deprecation of criticism in a feverish manner." leigh hunt asked years afterwards how "anybody could answer such an appeal to the mercy of strength with the cruelty of weakness. all the good for which mr. gifford pretended to be zealous, he might have effected with pain to no one, and glory to himself; and therefore all the evil he mixed with it was of his own making."[ ] the general trend of the article and the reviewer's acknowledgment that he had read only the first book of the poem are well known. the following passage refers directly to keats's connection with hunt: "the author is a copyist of mr. hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype; who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. but mr. keats advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense is therefore quite gratuitous; he writes it for his own sake, and, being bitten by mr. leigh hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry."[ ] _blackwood's_ followed the _quarterly's_ lead in august, reviewing keats's first volume at the same time with _endymion_. he is reproached with madness, with metromania, with low origin, with perversion of talents suited only to an apprenticeship, all because he admired hunt sufficiently to adopt some of his theories and because he had been called in _the examiner_ one of "two stars of glorious magnitude." the sonnet _written on the day that mr. leigh hunt left prison_, the _sonnet to haydon_, and _sleep and poetry_, are anathematized. in the last keats is said to speak with "contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits that the world ever produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard at vauxhall; in short, because they chose to be wits, philosophers, patriots, and poets, rather than to found the cockney school of versification, morality and politics, a century before its time. after blaspheming himself into a fury against boileau, etc., mr. keats comforts himself and his readers with a view of the present more promising state of affairs; above all, with the ripened glories of the poet of _rimini_." the denunciation of the "calm, settled, drivelling idiocy" of _endymion_ in the same article is famous, but in a discussion of the cockney school it is well to recall the following: "from his prototype hunt, john keats has acquired a sort of vague idea, that the greeks were a most tasteful people, and that no mythology can be so finely adopted for the purpose of poetry as theirs. it is amusing to see what a hand the cockneys make of this mythology; the one confesses that he never read the greek tragedians and the other knows homer only from chapman; and both of them write about apollo, pan, nymphs, muses, and mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education. we shall not, however, enlarge at present upon this subject, as we mean to dedicate an entire paper to the classical attainments and attempts of the cockney poets." the versification is said to expose the defects of hunt's system ten times more than hunt's own poetry. the mocking close is as follows: "it is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, mr. john, back to 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,' etc. but, for heaven's sake, young sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry." the delusion that these articles were the direct cause of keats's death, an impression given wide currency by the passages in _adonais_[ ] and _don juan_,[ ] has long since been dispelled by the evidence of hunt,[ ] fanny brawne, c. c. clarke and, most important of all, keats's own letters.[ ] it is not likely that he was affected by them as much as either hunt or hazlitt, for he showed more indifference and greater dignity under fire than either. his courage and his craving for future fame do not seem to have wavered during the year in which they appeared. joseph severn has testified that he never heard keats mention _blackwood's_ and that he considered what his friend endured from the press as "one of the least of his miseries"; that he knew so little about the whole matter that when he met sir walter scott in rome many years after he was at a loss to understand scott's embarrassment when keats's name was mentioned; and it was not until a friend afterwards explained that scott was connected with one of the magazines which was popularly supposed to have caused keats's death that he could fathom it.[ ] it would have been impossible for a more obtuse man than leigh hunt not to have realized from the import of these two articles that keats was abused largely because of the association with himself and, but for that, might have remained in peaceful obscurity. hunt therefore wisely refrained from further defense as it would only have made matters worse. during the year only one notice of keats appeared in _the examiner_.[ ] during the same year three sonnets to keats appeared in _foliage_. yet it has been several times stated that hunt forsook keats at this time. keats, under the hallucination of disease himself, accused hunt of neglect, yet there were three reasons which made a persistent defense on the part of hunt not to be expected. first, he was unaware, according to his own statement, of the extent of the defamation; second, he realized that his championship and friendship had been the original cause of wrath in the enemies' camp against keats and that any activity on his part would only incense them further,[ ] and third, he did not approve of keats's only publication of that year and could not give it his support, as he frankly told keats himself. mr. forman and mr. rossetti both scout the idea of disertion and disloyalty. yet mr. hall caine has made much[ ] of a charge which has been denied by hunt and ultimately repudiated by keats. he has, moreover, overlooked the fact that hunt's bitter satire, _ultra-crepidarius_, was written in _ _ as a reply to keats's critics but was withheld from publication, presumably only for reasons of prudence, until . when keats's feeling on the subject was brought to his knowledge years later, hunt wrote: "keats appears to have been of opinion that i ought to have taken more notice of what the critics said against him. and perhaps i ought. my notices of them may not have been sufficient. i may have too much contented myself with panegyrizing his genius, and thinking the objections to it of no ultimate importance. had he given me a hint to another effect, i should have acted upon it. but in truth, as i have before intimated, i did not see a twentieth part of what was said against us; nor had i the slightest notion, at that period, that he took criticism so much to heart. i was in the habit, though a public man, of living in a world of abstractions of my own; and i regarded him as of a nature still more abstracted, and sure of renown. though i was a politician (so to speak), i had scarcely a political work in my library. spensers and arabian tales filled up the shelves; and spenser himself was not remoter, in my eyes, from all the common-places of life, than my new friend. our whole talk was made up of idealisms. in the streets we were in the thick of the old woods. i little suspected, as i did afterwards, that the hunters had struck him; and never at any time did i suspect that he could have imagined it desired by his friends. let me quit the subject of so afflicting a delusion."[ ] the _edinburgh review_ of august, , discussed _endymion_ and the volume. while it lamented the extravagances and obscurities, the "intoxication of sweetness" and the perversion of rhyme, it gave keats due credit for his genius and his appreciation of the spirit of poetry. hunt's review of _lamia_[ ] and the other poems of the volume appeared in _the indicator_ of the same month. _blackwood's_ answered the next month, abusing hunt roundly and faintly praising the poems. the following proves that their chief object was to strike hunt through keats: "it is a pity that this young man, john keats, author of _endymion_, and some other poems, should have belonged to the cockney school--for he is evidently possessed of talents that, under better direction, might have done very considerable things. as it is, he bids fair to sink himself beneath such a mass of affectation, conceit, and cockney pedantry, as i never expected to see heaped together by anybody, except the first founder of the school.... there is much merit in some of the stanzas of mr. keats's last volume, which i have just seen; no doubt he is a fine feeling lad--and i hope he will live to despise leigh hunt and be a poet." hazlitt, in may of the next year wrote of the persecution of keats in the _edinburgh review_: "nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves, but all their friends and acquaintances, and those whom they casually notice, that come under their sweeping anathema. it is proper to make a clear stage. the friends of caesar must not be suspected of an amicable intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. a young poet comes forward; an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses of his in the _examiner_, independently of all political opinion. that alone decides fate; and from that moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him. it was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable a quarter." in a letter from hunt in italy to _the examiner_, july , , an inquiry is made why mr. gifford has never noticed keats's last volume: "that beautiful volume containing _lamia_, the story from boccaccio, and that magnificent fragment _hyperion_?" _blackwood's_ of august replied to these two defenses in a tirade of twenty-two pages against the _edinburgh review_, hazlitt, and hunt. the _noctes ambrosianæ_ of october continued in the same strain and, though the grave should have protected keats from such banter, revived the old allusions to the apothecary and his pills. in self defense against the charge, that its attacks and those of the _quarterly_ had broken keats's heart, _blackwood's_ in january, , said that it alone had dealt with keats, shelley and procter with "_common sense_ or _common feeling_"; that, seeing keats in the road to ruin with the cockneys, it had "tried to save him by wholesome and severe discipline--they drove him to poverty, expatriation and death." the most remarkable part of this remarkable justification is this: "keats outhunted hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that, although invented in little britain, looks as if it were the prospect of some imaginative eunuch's muse within the melancholy inspiration of the haram" (_sic_). in march, , in a review of _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, the _quarterly_ seized the opportunity to revert to the author's friendship for keats in its old hostile manner; and, in a criticism of coleridge's poems in august, , to speak of his "dreamy, half-swooning style of verse criticised by lord byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of mr. john keats." finally in march, , in _journalism in france_, there is another feeble effort at defense; a resentment of the "twaddle" against the _quarterly_ "when they had the misfortune to criticise a sickly poet, who died soon afterwards, apparently for the express purpose of dishonoring us." one of hunt's utterances in regard to keats and his critics disposes finally of the matter: "his fame may now forgive the critics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry."[ ] * * * * * from italy shelley wrote to peacock: "i most devoutly wish i were living near london.... my inclination points to hampstead; but i do not know whether i should not make up my mind to something more completely suburban. what are mountains, trees, heaths, or even glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such sunsets as i have seen at hampstead, to friends? social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the alpha and the omega of existence. all that i see in italy--and from my tower window i now see the magnificent peaks of the apennine half enclosing the plain--is nothing. it dwindles into smoke in the mind, when i think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour."[ ] the attacks of the _quarterly_ of may, , on shelley's private life and of april, , on the _revolt of islam_, and the reply of _the examiner_, have already been discussed on p. of the third chapter. the assault was renewed in october, . the dominating characteristic of shelley's poetry is said to be "its frequent and total want of meaning." in _prometheus unbound_ there were said to be many absurdities "in defiance of common sense and even of grammar ... a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas, connected by slight and accidental associations, among which it is impossible to distinguish the principal object from the accessory." the poem is declared to be full of "flagrant offences against morality and religion" and the poet to have gone out of his way to "revile christianity and its author." as a final verdict the reviewer says: "mr. shelley's poetry is, in sober sadness, _drivelling prose run mad_.... be his private qualities what they may, his poems ... are at war with reason, with taste, with virtue, in short, with all that dignifies man, or that man reveres." the _london literary gazette_ joined its forces to the _quarterly_ and scored _prometheus unbound_ in , _queen mab_ in . _the examiner_ of june , and july , , contained hunt's answer to the two onslaughts. he accused the writer in the _quarterly_ of having used six stars to indicate an omission, in order to imply that the name of christ had been blasphemously used; of having put quotation marks to sentences not in the author criticised and of having intentionally left out so much at times as to make the context seem absurd. at the same time hunt stated that he agreed that shelley's poetry was of "too abstract and metaphysical a cast ... too wilful and gratuitous in its metaphors"; and that it would have been better if he had kept metaphysics and polemics out of poetry. but at the same time he asserted that shelley had written much that was unmetaphysical and poetically beautiful, as _the cenci_, the _ode to a skylark_ and _adonais_. of the second he wrote: "i know of nothing more beautiful than this,--more choice of tones, more natural in words, more abundant in exquisite, cordial, and most poetic associations." he characterized southey's reviews as cant, gifford's as bitter commonplace and croker's as pettifogging. _blackwood's_ reviewed _adonais_ and _the cenci_ in december, . the della cruscans were reported to have come again from "retreats of cockney dalliance in the london suburbs" and "by wainloads from pisa." the cockneys were said to hate everything that was good and true and honorable, all moral ties and christian principles, and to be steeped in desperate licentiousness. _adonais_ is fifty-five stanzas of "unintelligible stuff" made up of every possible epithet that the poet has been able to "conglomerate in his piracy through the lexicon." the sense has been wholly subordinated to the rhymes. the author is a "glutton of names and colours" and has accomplished no more than might be done on such subjects as mother goose, waterloo or tom thumb. two cruel and loathsome parodies follow: _wouther the city marshal broke his leg_ and an _elegy on my tom cat_, which, it is claimed, are less nonsensical, verbose and inflated than _adonais_. _the cenci_ is "a vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and reptilism" in an "odiferous, colorific and daisy-enamoured style." it is regretted by the writer that it is impossible to believe that shelley's reason is unsettled, for this would be the best apology for the poem.[ ] when _the liberal_ was organized shelley was spoken of thus: "but percy bysshe shelly has now published a long series of poems, the only object of which seems to be the promotion of _atheism_ and _incest_; and we can no longer hesitate to avow our belief, that he is as worthy of co-operating with the king of cockaigne, as he is unworthy of co-operating with lord byron. shelley is a man of genius, but he has no sort of sense or judgment. he is merely 'an inspired idiot.' leigh hunt is a man of talents, but vanity and vulgarity neutralize all his efforts to pollute the public mind. lord byron we regard not only as a man of lofty genius, but of great shrewdness and knowledge of the world. what can he seriously hope from associating his name with such people as these?"[ ] as in the case of keats, _blackwood's_ did not have the decency to desist from its indecent articles after shelley's death. september, , this vulgar ridicule of the two dead poets appeared in answer to bryan waller procter's review of shelley's poems in the preceding number of the _edinburgh review_: "mr. shelley died, it seems, with a volume of mr. keats's poetry grasped with the hand in his bosom--rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. but what a rash man shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with jack's poetry on board. why, man, it would sink a trireme. in the preface to mr. shelley's poems we are told that his 'vessel bore out of sight with a favorable wind;' but what is that to the purpose? it had endymion on board, and there was an end. seventeen ton of pig iron would not be more fatal ballast. down went the boat with a 'swirl'! i lay a wager that it righted soon after evicting jack." in the face of these articles against it as evidence, _blackwood's_, as early as january, , had the audacity to claim--perhaps with the expectation that its audience was gifted with a sense of subtle humor--that shelley had been praised in its pages for his fortitude, patience, and many other noble qualities, and that this praise had irritated the other cockneys and made the whole trouble. if keats suffered at the hands of the edinburgh dictators for his association with hunt the balance weighed in the other direction in the case of shelley. all the crimes and opinions of which he was deemed guilty were passed on to hunt. but hunt gladly suffered for shelley. hazlitt, although of irish descent and a native of shropshire, and of such independence as to belong to no school whatsoever, came in for a share of abuse second only in virulence to that showered on hunt.[ ] in the _quarterly_ of april, , in a review of the _round table_, probably in retaliation for his abuse of southey in _the examiner_, hazlitt's papers are denominated "vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken english, ill-humour and rancorous abuse." his characterizations of pitt and burke are "vulgar and foul invective," and "loathsome trash." the author might have described washerwomen forever, the reviewer asserts, "but if the creature, in his endeavours to see the light, must make his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his tracks, it is right to point out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel." the _characters of shakespeare's plays_ was made an excuse for dissecting the morals and understanding of this "poor cankered creature."[ ] the _lectures on the english poets_ is characterized as a "third predatory incursion on taste and common sense ... either completely unintelligible, or exhibits only faint and dubious glimpses of meaning ... of that happy texture that leaves not a trace in the mind of either reader or hearer."[ ] the _political essays_ was said to mark the writer as a death's head hawk-moth, a creature already placed in a state of damnation, the drudge of _the examiner_, the ward of billingsgate, the slanderer of the human race, one of the plagues of england.[ ] later, in a discussion of _table talk_,[ ] he becomes a "slang-whanger" ("a gabbler who employs slang to amuse the rabble"). hazlitt's _letter to gifford_, , was a reply to all previous attacks of the _quarterly_. for a pamphlet of eighty-seven pages on such a subject it is "lively reading," for hazlitt, like burke, as mr. birrell has remarked, excelled in a quarrel.[ ] he calls gifford a cat's paw, the government critic, the paymaster of the band of gentleman pensioners, a nuisance, a "dull, envious, pragmatical, low-bred man.... grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets and spleen of his wrath on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness; not to be imposed upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding."[ ] _blackwood's_ had accepted abstracts of hazlitt's _lectures on the english poets_[ ] from p. g. patmore without comment and even managed a lengthy comparison of jeffrey and hazlitt with an approach to fair dealing. but by august, , he had been identified with the "cockney crew" and he became "that wild, black-bill hazlitt," a "lounge in third-rate bookshops"; and as a critic of shakspere, a gander gabbling at that "divine swan." in april of the following year he was christened the "aristotle" of the cockneys. his _table talk_ provoked ten pages of vituperation,[ ] and _liber amoris_, two reviews as coarse as the provocation.[ ] in the first of these, apropos of his contributions to the _edinburgh review_ and in particular of his article on the _periodical press of britain_, the downfall of the magazine and its editor is announced as certain. hazlitt is called a literary flunky, a sore, an ulcer, a poor devil. in the second he is hunt's orderly, the "mars of the hampstead heavy dragoons." hazlitt found relief for his feelings by threatening _blackwood's_ with a lawsuit. yet in july, , appeared an elaborate comparison of hunt and hazlitt in _blackwood's_ choicest manner and in march, , a review of the _spirit of the age_. after the defamatory articles ceased entirely. in appeared what might be construed into an attempt at reparation by bulwer-lytton. hazlitt was still spoken of as the most aggressive of the cockneys, discourteous and unscrupulous, a bitter politician who would substitute universal submission to napoleon for established monarchial institutions; but he is credited with strong powers of reason, of judicial criticism and of metaphysical speculation, and with perception of sentiment, truth and beauty. chapter vi conclusion it is curious that, in the lives of three such geniuses as shelley, byron and keats a man of lesser gifts and of weaker fibre should have played so large a part as did leigh hunt. it is more curious in view of the fact that the period of intimate association in each case extended over only a few years. the explanation must be sought in the accident of the age and in the personality of the man himself. it was an era of stirring action and of strong feeling. men were clamoring for freedom from the trammels of the past and were pressing forward to the new day. through the union of some of the qualities of the pioneer and of the prophet, leigh hunt was thrust into a position of prominence that he might not have gained at any other time, for he lacked the vital requisites of true leadership. his personal quality was as rare as his opportunity. he had a personal ascendancy, a strange fascination born of the sympathy and chivalry, the sweetness and joyousness of his nature. an exotic warmth and glow worked its spell upon those about him. barry cornwall said that he was a "compact of all the spring winds that blew." his lovableness and very "genius for friendship" bound intimately to him those who were thus attracted. there was, besides, an elusiveness and an ethereality about him--as carlyle expressed it--"a fine tricksy medium between the poet and the wit, half a sylph and half an ariel ... a fairy fluctuating bark." the "vinous quality" of his mind, hazlitt said, intoxicated those who came in contact with him. in the case of shelley it was hunt the man, rather than the writer, that held him. charm was the magnet in a friendship that, in its perfection and deep intimacy, deserves to be ranked with the fabled ones of old--a love passing the love of woman. there is no single cloud of distrust or disloyalty in the whole story of their relations. second to the personal tie may be ranked hunt's influence on shelley's politics, greater in this instance than in the case of byron or keats. hunt's attitude was an important factor in forming shelley's political creed. with godwin, he drew shelley's attention from the creation of imaginary universes to the less speculative issues of earth. indeed, shelley's main reliance for a knowledge of political happenings during many years, and practically his only one for the last four years of his life, was _the examiner_. he was guided and moderated by it in his general attitude. in the specific instances already cited, the stimulus for poems or the information for prose tracts and articles can be directly traced to hunt. in regard to literary art hunt did not affect shelley beyond pointing the way to a freer use of the heroic couplet, and in a limited degree, in four or five of his minor poems, influencing him in the use of a familiar diction. only in his letters does shelley show any inclination to emphasize "social enjoyments" or suburban delights. that the literary influence was so slight is not surprising when shelley's powers of speculation and accurate scholarship are compared with hunt's want of concentration and shallow attainments. notwithstanding this intellectual gulf, strong convictions, with a moral courage sufficient to support them, and a congeniality of tastes and temperament, made possible an ideal comradeship. byron, like shelley, was attracted by hunt's charm of personality. an imprisoned martyr and a persecuted editor appealed to byron's love of the spectacular. political sympathy furthered the friendship. in a literary way, byron influenced hunt more than hunt influenced him. their intercourse is the story of a pleasant acquaintance with a disagreeable sequel and much error on both sides. with two men of such varying caliber and tastes, the "wren and eagle" as shelley called them, thrown together under such trying circumstances, it could hardly have been otherwise. their love of liberty and courage of opposition were the only things in common. byron recognized to the last hunt's good qualities and hunt, except for the bitter years in italy and immediately after his return, proclaimed byron's genius; but, for all that, they were temperamentally opposed. byron detested hunt's small vulgarities as much as hunt loathed byron's assumed superiority. the relation with keats was the reverse of that in the other two cases. it was an intellectual affinity throughout. at no time were keats and hunt very close to each other. nor, indeed, does keats seem to have had the capacity for intimate friendship, except with his brothers and, possibly, brown and severn. the intercourse of the two men had its disadvantages for keats in an injurious influence on his early work and in the public association of his name with that of hunt's; but the latter's literary patronage and loving interpretation when keats was wholly unknown, the friendships made possible for him with others, the open home and tender care whenever needed, the unfailing sympathy, encouragement and admiration so freely given, the new fields of art, music and books opened up, and the pleasantness of the connection at the first, should more than compensate for the attacks which keats suffered as a member of the cockney school. from this view it seems very ungrateful of george keats to have said that he was sorry that his brother's name should go down to posterity associated with hunt's. keats received far more than he gave in return. briefly stated, keats's early work shows the marked influence of hunt in the selection of subjects, in a love of italian and older english literature, in the "domestic" touch, in the colloquial and feeble diction, and in the lapses of taste. it is only fair to hunt to emphasize that this was not wholly a question of influence. it was due, as keats himself confessed, to a natural affinity of gifts and tastes, though the one was so much more highly gifted than the other. keats soon saw his mistake. _endymion_ showed a great improvement and the volume an almost complete absence of his own _bourgeois_ tendencies and of the effect of hunt's specious theories. yet it was undoubtedly through hunt that keats in his later poems began to imitate dryden. in connection with the work of all three poets, hunt's criticism is a more important fact of literary history than his services of friendship. he had, as bulwer-lytton has remarked, the first requisite of a good critic, a good heart. he had also wonderful sympathy with aspiring authorship. his insight was most remarkable of all in the appreciation of his contemporaries. with powers of critical perception that might be called an instinct for genius, he discovered shelley and keats and heralded them to the public. the same ability helped him to appreciate byron, hazlitt and lamb. browning, tennyson and rossetti were other young poets whom he encouraged and supported. he defended the lake school in when it still had many deriders. he anticipated arnold's judgment when he wrote that "wordsworth was a fine lettuce, with too many outside leaves." as early as he wrote of the "wonderful works of sir walter scott, the remarkable criticism of hazlitt, the magnetism of keats, the tragedy and winged philosophy of shelley, the passion of byron, the art and festivity of moore." to value correctly such criticism it is necessary to remember that the romantic movement was still in its first youth at the time. his criticism of the three men in question, like his criticisms in general, is distinguished by great fairness and absence of all personal jealousy, by a delicacy of feeling that will not be fully felt until scattered notes and buried prefaces are gathered together. he was animated chiefly by an inborn love of poetry and enjoyment of all beautiful things. if he sometimes fell short in understanding homer, dante and shakespeare, he was perfectly sincere and independent, and pretended nothing that he did not feel. his range of information was truly remarkable, though not deep and accurate. his style was slipshod. with the exception of the essay _what is poetry_, he fails in concentration and generalization. he never clinched his results, but was forever flitting from one sweet to another. his method was impressionistic in its appreciation of physical beauty. there is no comprehension whatsoever of mystical beauty. it is the curious instance of a man of almost ascetic habits who revelled and luxuriated in the sensuous beauties of literature. the reader of such books as _imagination and fancy_ and the half dozen others of the same kind will see his wonderful power of selection. his attempt to interpret and "popularize literature"--a cause in which he laboured long and steadfastly--was one of the greatest services he rendered his age, even if his habit of italicization and running comment for the purpose of calling attention to perfectly patent beauties irritated some of his readers. his critical taste, when exercised on the work of others, was almost faultless. the occasional vulgarities of which he was guilty in his original work do not intrude here; they were superficial and were not a part of the man. through his criticism he discovered and championed illustrious contemporaries; he instituted the italian revival in creative literature in the early part of the century; he assisted in resuscitating the interest in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature. hunt's services of friendship to byron, shelley and keats, his able criticism and just defense of them, have found their reward in the inseparable association of his name with their immortal ones. they easily surpassed him in every department of writing in which they contested, yet the _man_ was strong and alluring enough in his relations with them to prove a determining and, on the whole, beneficent influence in their lives. bibliography the following list includes only the most important contributions to the present study. where the indebtedness consists merely of one or two references, such indebtedness is acknowledged in a footnote. alden, raymond macdonald. english verse. new york, . andrews, a. the history of british journalism. london, . arnold, matthew. essays in criticism. london and new york, . beers, h. a. history of english romanticism in the nineteenth century. new york, . blessington, countess of. conversations of lord byron with the countess of blessington. london, . blackwood's edinburgh magazine. byron, george gordon noel. the works of lord byron. a new, revised and enlarged edition, with illustrations. poetry. ed. by ernest hartley coleridge. vols. letters and journals. ed. by rowland e. prothero. vols. london and new york, . letters and journals of lord byron: with notices of his life, by thomas moore. vols. london, . brandes, george. main currents in nineteenth century literature. vols. new york, . caine, t. hall. cobwebs of criticism. 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(golden treasury series.) edited by francis t. palgrave. london and new york, . poems of john keats. ed. by e. de sélincourt. new york, . mac-carthy, denis florence. shelley's early life. london, n. d. martineau, harriet. autobiography. ed. by maria weston chapman. vols. boston, . masson, david. wordsworth, shelley, keats, and other essays. london, . meade, w. e. the versification of pope in its relation to the seventeenth century. leipsic, . medwin, thomas. the life of percy bysshe shelley. london, . journal of the conversations of lord byron. new york and philadelphia, . milnes, richard moncton. (lord houghton.) life, letters and literary remains of john keats. vols. london, . mitford, mary russell. recollections of a literary life. vols. london, . monkhouse, cosmo. life of leigh hunt. ("great writers.") london, . moore, thomas. memoirs, journal, and correspondence. ed. by the right honorable lord john russell, m. p. vols. london, . morley, john. critical miscellanies. london and new york, . nichol, john. byron. (english men of letters.) london and new york, . nicoll, w. robertson, and wise, thomas j. literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century. vols. london. noble, j. ashcroft. the sonnet in england and other essays. london and chicago, . oliphant, mrs. margaret. the literary history of england in the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. vols. london, . patmore, coventry. memoirs and correspondence. ed. by basil champneys. vols. london, . patmore, p. g. my friends and acquaintance. vols. london, . procter, bryan waller. (barry cornwall.) an autobiographical fragment and biographical notes. london, . the quarterly review. rossetti, william michael. life of john keats. ("great writers.") london, . saintsbury, george. essays in english literature. ( - .) london, . a history of nineteenth century literature. ( - .) london and new york, . schipper, jakob m. englische metrik. bonn, . severn, joseph. life and letters. by william sharp. new york, . sharp, william. life of percy bysshe shelley. (great writers.) london, . shelley, percy bysshe. works. ed. by harry buxton forman. vols. london, . the complete poetical works. (centenary edition.) ed. by george edward woodberry. new york, . poetical works. ed. by mrs. shelley. vols. london, . smith, george barnett. shelley, a critical biography. edinburgh, . trelawney, e. j. recollections of the last days of shelley and byron. boston, . records of shelley, byron, and the author. london, . woodberry, george edward. makers of literature. new york, . studies in letters and life. boston and new york, . symonds, john addington. shelley. (english men of letters.) london and new york, . footnotes: [ ] _autobiography of leigh hunt_, i, p. . [ ] _correspondence of leigh hunt_, i, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, i, p. . compare the above quotation with shelley's description of his first friendship. (hogg, _life of percy bysshe shelley_, pp. - .) [ ] this early passion for friendship, which developed into a power of attracting men vastly more gifted than himself, brought about him besides byron, shelley and keats, such men as charles lamb, robert browning, carlyle, dickens, horace and james smith, charles cowden clarke, vincent novello, william godwin, macaulay, thackeray, lord brougham, bentham, haydon, hazlitt, r. h. horne, sir john swinburne, lord john russell, bulwer lytton, thomas moore, barry cornwall, theodore hook, j. egerton webbe, thomas campbell, the olliers, joseph severn, miss edgeworth, mrs. gaskell, mrs. browning and macvey napier. hawthorne, emerson, james russel lowell and william story sought him out when they were in london. [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] _ibid._, i, p. . [ ] _memoirs and correspondence of coventry patmore_, ed. basil champney, i, p. . [ ] _life, letters and table talk of benjamin robert haydon_, ed. by stoddard, p. . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] on once being accused of speculation hunt replied that he had never been "in a market of any kind but to buy an apple or a flower." (_atlantic monthly_, liv, p. .) nor did hunt admire money-getting propensities in others. he said of americans: "they know nothing so beautiful as the ledger, no picture so lively as the national coin, no music so animating as the chink of a purse." (_the examiner_, , p. .) [ ] dickens did hunt an irreparable injury in caricaturing him as harold skimpole. the character bore such an unmistakable likeness to hunt that it was recognized by every one who knew him, yet the weaknesses and vices were greatly multiplied and exaggerated. before the appearance of _bleak house_, dickens wrote hunt in a letter which accompanied the presentation copies of _oliver twist_ and the new american edition of the _pickwick papers_: "you are an old stager in works, but a young one in faith--faith in all beautiful and excellent things. if you can only find in that green heart of yours to tell me one of these days, that you have met, in wading through the accompanying trifles, with anything that felt like a vibration of the old chord you have touched so often and sounded so well, you will confer the truest gratification on your old friend, charles dickens." (_littell's living age_, cxciv, p. .) his apology after hunt's death was complete, but it could not destroy the lasting memory of an immortal portrait. he wrote: "a man who had the courage to take his stand against power on behalf of right--who in the midst of the sorest temptations, maintained his honesty unblemished by a single stain--who, in all public and private transactions, was the very soul of truth and honour--who never bartered his opinion or betrayed his friend--could not have been a weak man; for weakness is always treacherous and false, because it has not the power to resist." (_all the year round_, april , .) [ ] godwin, _enquiry concerning political justice_, book viii, chap. i. [ ] prof. saintsbury has very plausibly suggested that a similar attitude in godwin, coleridge and southey in respect to financial assistance was a legacy from patronage days. (_a history of nineteenth century literature_, p. .) the same might be said of hunt. [ ] s. c. hall, _a book of memories of great men and women of the age, from personal acquaintance_, p. . [ ] his feeling on the subject is set forth clearly in a letter where he is writing of the generosity of dr. brocklesby to johnson and burke: "the extension of obligations of this latter kind is, for many obvious reasons, not to be desired. the necessity on the one side must be of as peculiar, and, so to speak, of as noble a kind as the generosity on the other; and special care would be taken by a necessity of that kind, that the generosity should be equalled by the means. but where the circumstances have occurred, it is delightful to record them." (hunt, _men, women and books_, p. .) [ ] _correspondence_, ii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, ii, p. . [ ] hunt's work as a political journalist had begun in with _the statesman_, a joint enterprise with his brother. it was very short-lived and is now very scarce. perhaps it is due to this rarity that it is not usually mentioned in bibliographies of hunt. [ ] h. r. fox-bourne, _english newspapers_, i, p. . [ ] _harper's new monthly magazine_, xl, p. . [ ] redding, _personal reminiscences of eminent men_, p. , ff. [ ] contemporary dailies were the _morning chronicle_, _morning post_, _morning herald_, _morning advertiser_, and the _times_. in there were sixteen sunday weeklies. among the weeklies published on other days, the _observer_ and the _news_ were conspicuous. in all, there were in the year , fifty-six newspapers circulating in london. (andrews, _history of british journalism_, vol. ii, p. .) [ ] _the examiner_, january , . [ ] on the subject of military depravity _the examiner_ contained the following: "the presiding genius of army government has become a perfect falstaff, a carcass of corruption, full of sottishness and selfishness, preying upon the hard labour of honest men, and never to be moved but by its lust for money; and the time has come when either the vices of one man must be sacrificed to the military honour of the country, or the military honour of the country must be sacrificed to the vices of one man." (_the examiner_, october , .) [ ] _the examiner_, april , . [ ] maj. hogan, an irishman in the english army, unable to gain promotion by the customary method of purchase, after a personal appeal to the duke of york, commander-in-chief of the army, gave an account of his grievences in a pamphlet entitled, _appeal to the public and a farewell address to the army_. before it appeared mrs. clarke, the mistress of the duke of york, sent maj. hogan £ to suppress it. he returned the money and made public the offer. the subsequent investigation showed that mrs. clarke was in the habit of securing through her influence with the commander-in-chief promotion for those who would pay her for it. after these disclosures, the duke resigned. _the examiner_ sturdily supported maj. hogan as one who refused to owe promotion "to low intrigue or petticoat influence." it likened mrs. clarke to mme. du barry and called the duke her tool. [ ] _the examiner_, october , . [ ] _ibid._, march , . [ ] "surely it is too gross to suppose that the prince of wales, the friend of fox, can have been affecting habits of thinking, and indulging habits of intimacy, which he is to give up at a moment's notice for nobody knows what:--surely it cannot be, that the prince regent, the whig prince, the friend of ireland--the friend of fox,--the liberal, the tolerant, experienced, large-minded heir apparent, can retain in power the very men, against whose opinions he has repeatedly declared himself, and whose retention in power hitherto he has explicitly stated to be owing solely to a feeling of delicacy with respect to his father." (_the examiner_, february , .) [ ] _the examiner_, march , . the contention between canon ainger and mr. gosse in respect to charles lamb's supposed part in this libel is set forth in _the athenaeum_ of march , . mr. gosse's evidence came through robert browning from john forster, who first told browning as early as that lamb was concerned in it. [ ] mr. monkhouse says that it was then politically unjustifiable. (_life of leigh hunt_, p. .) [ ] brougham wrote of his intended defense, "it will be a thousand times more unpleasant than the libel." for a narration of his friendship for hunt, see _temple bar_, june, . [ ] _the examiner_, february , . [ ] _the examiner_, december , . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] _the reflector_, i, p. . [ ] monkhouse, _life of leigh hunt_, p. . [ ] patmore, _my friends and acquaintance_, iii, p. . [ ] the _edinburgh review_ of may, , in an article entitled _the periodical press_ ranked hunt next to cobbett in talent and _the examiner_ as the ablest and most respectable of weekly publications, when allowance had been made for the occasional twaddle and flippancy, the mawkishness about firesides and bonaparte, and the sickly sonnet-writing. [ ] mazzini wrote hunt: "your name is known to many of my countrymen; it would no doubt impart an additional value to the thoughts embodied in the league. [international league.] it is the name not only of a patriot, but of a high literary man and a poet. it would show at once that _natural_ questions are questions not of merely _political_ tendencies, but of feeling, eternal trust, and godlike poetry. it would show that poets understand their active mission down here, and that they are also prophets and apostles of things to come. i was told only to-day that you had been asked to be a member of the league's council, and feel a want to express the joy i too would feel at your assent." (_cornhill magazine_, lxv, p. ff.) [ ] _the reflector_, i, p. . [ ] hunt accepted the _monthly repository_ in as a gift from w. j. fox in order to free it from unitarian influence. carlyle, landor, browning and miss martineau were contributors. [ ] ( ) "besides, it is my firm belief--as firm as the absence of positive, tangible proof can let it be (and if we had that, we should all kill ourselves, like plato's scholars, and go and enjoy heaven at once), that whatsoever of just and affectionate the mind of man is made by nature to desire, is made by her to be realized, and that this is the special good, beauty and glory of that illimitable thing called space--in her there is room for everything." _correspondence_, ii, p. . ( ) and faith, some day, will all in love be shown. ("abraham and the fire-worshipper," _poetical works of leigh hunt_, , p. .) [ ] _a new spirit of the age_, ii, p. . [ ] hunt wrote two religious books, _christianism_ and _religion of the heart_. the second, which is an expansion of the first, contains a ritual of daily and weekly service. for the most part it contains reflections on duty and service. [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] bryan waller proctor (barry cornwall), _an autobiographical fragment and biographical notes_, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, i, p. - . [ ] _a morning walk and view_; _sonnet on the sickness of eliza_. [ ] it had appeared previously in _the reflector_, no. , article . in the separate edition it was expanded and pages of notes were added. [ ] _poetical works_, , preface, p. . [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, iii, p. , february , . [ ] the same volume contained a preface on the origin and history of masques and an _ode for the spring of _. byron said of the latter that the "expressions were _buckram_ except here and there." the masque, he thought, contained "not only poetry and thought in the body, but much research and good old reading in your prefatory matter." byron, _letters and journals_, iii, p. , june , . [ ] see chapter v, p. . [ ] nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century_, p. . [ ] who loves to peer up at the morning sun, with half-shut eyes and comfortable cheek, let him, with this sweet tale, full often seek for meadows where the little rivers run; who loves to linger with the brightest one of heaven (hesperus) let him lowly speak these numbers to the night, and starlight meek, or moon, if that her hunting be begun. he who knows these delights, and too is prone to moralize upon a smile or tear, will find at once religion of his own, a bower for his spirit, and will steer to alleys where the fir-tree drops its cone, where robins hop, and fallen leaves are seer. (_complete works of john keats_, ed by forman, ii, p. .) [ ] lowell said of hunt: "no man has ever understood the delicacies and luxuries of the language better than he." [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, iii, p. , october , . [ ] _ibid._, iii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, iii, p. , october , . [ ] _ibid._, iii, p. , february , . [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. , june , . [ ] _ibid._, iv, pp. - . [ ] medwin, _journal of the conversations of lord byron_, p. . [ ] in the preface to the _story of rimini_ (london, , p. ), hunt says that a poet should use an actual existing language, and quotes as authorities, chaucer, ariosto, pulci, even homer and shakespeare. he thought simplicity of language of greater importance even than free versification in order to avoid the cant of art: "the proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks, omitting mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases which are cant of ordinary discourse." [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, iii, p. . [ ] mr. a. t. kent in the _fortnightly review_ (vol. , p. ), points out that leigh hunt in the preface to the _story of rimini_, avoided the mistake of wordsworth in "looking to an unlettered peasantry for poetical language," and quotes him as saying that one should "add a musical modulation to what a fine understanding might naturally utter in the midst of its griefs and enjoyments." kent says we have here "two vital points on which wordsworth, in his capacity of critic, had failed to insist." [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] to be found chiefly in the _feast of the poets_. [ ] in , in _stories in verse_, hunt changed his acknowledged allegiance from dryden to chaucer. [ ] canto, ii, ll. - . [ ] e. de selincourt gives these three last as examples of hunt's derivation of the abstract noun from the present participle (_poems of john keats_, p. ). [ ] de selincourt notes that these adverbs are usually formed from present participles. (_poems of john keats_, p. .) [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, iii, p. . [ ] "for ever since pope spoiled the ears of the town with his cuckoo-song verses, half up and half down, there has been such a doling and sameness,--by jove, i'd as soon have gone down to see kemble in love." (_feast of the poets._) hunt calls pope's translation of the moonlight picture from _homer_ "a gorgeous misrepresentation" (_ibid._, p. ) and the whole translation "that elegant mistake of his in two volumes octavo." (_foliage_, p. .) [ ] _feast of the poets_, p. . the same opinions are expressed in _the examiner_ of june , ; in the preface to _foliage_, . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] p. . [ ] saintsbury, _essays in english literature, - _, p. . [ ] hunt, _story of rimini_, london, , p. , lines beginning with top of page. in the lines of the poem, there are run-on couplets and run-on lines. there are alexandrines and triplets. in the edition of the number of triplets has been increased to . there are double rhymes. in a study of the cæsura based on the first lines there are medial, double cæsuras. the remaining lines have irregular or double cæsura. [ ] keats, _lamia_, bk. i, ll. - . in the lines of _lamia_, there are run-on couplets, run-on lines, alexandrines and triplets. the cæsura is handled with greater freedom than in the _story of rimini_. [ ] c. h. herford, _age of wordsworth_, p. . [ ] r. b. johnson, _leigh hunt_, p. . [ ] _leigh hunt as a poet, fortnightly review_, xxxvi: . [ ] sidney colvin, _keats_, p. . [ ] garnett, _age of dryden_, p. . [ ] from homer, theocritus, bion, moschus, anacreon, and catullus. [ ] p. . [ ] hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, iv, p. . [ ] charles and mary cowden clarke, _recollections of writers_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] hunt, _lord byron and some of his contemporaries; with recollections of the author's life and of his visit to italy_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _ibid._, pp. - . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, pp. , . [ ] colvin, _keats_, p. . [ ] this refers to keats's first published poem, the sonnet _o solitude, if i must with thee dwell_, published (without comment) in _the examiner_ of may , . [ ] colvin, _keats_, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, pp. - . [ ] sharp, _life and letters of joseph severn_, p. . [ ] _works_, i, p. . [ ] mr. forman, after a systematic search has been able to find no proof in either direction. (_works_, iii, p. .) [ ] _works_, i, p. . [ ] _foliage_, p. . [ ] colvin, _keats_, p. . [ ] a further account of the disastrous effects of his partisanship will be found in the discussion of the cockney school, ch. v. [ ] the _century magazine_, xxiii, p. . [ ] palgrave, _poetical works of john keats_, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _works_, iv, p. . [ ] haydon and hunt had originally been very intimate, as is shown by the letters written by the former from paris during , and by his attentions to hunt in surrey gaol. a letter to wilkie, dated october , , gives an attractive portrait of hunt, and from this evidence it is inferred that the change in haydon's attitude came about in the early part of , and that a small unpleasantness was allowed by him to outweigh a friendship of long standing. after two weeks spent with hunt he had written of him as "one of the most delightful companions. full of poetry and art, and amiable humour, we argue always with full hearts on everything but religion and bonaparte.... though leigh hunt is not deep in knowledge, moral metaphysical or classical, yet he is intense in feeling and has an intellect forever on the alert. he is like one of those instruments on three legs, which, throw it how you will, always pitches on two, and has a spike sticking for ever up and ever ready for you. he "sets" at a subject with a scent like a pointer. he is a remarkable man, and created a sensation by his independence, his disinterestedness in public matters; and by the truth, acuteness and taste of his dramatic criticisms, he raised the rank of newspapers, and gave by his example a literary feeling to the weekly ones more especially. as a poet, i think him full of the genuine feeling. his third canto in _rimini_ is equal to anything in any language of that sweet sort. perhaps in his wishing to avoid the monotony of the pope school, he may have shot into the other extreme; and his invention of obscene [sic] words to express obscene feelings borders sometimes on affectation. but these are trifles compared with the beauty of the poem, the intense painting of the scenery, and the deep burning in of the passion which trembles in every line. thus far as a critic, an editor and a poet. as a man i know none with such an affectionate heart, if never opposed in his opinions. he has defects of course: one of his great defects is getting inferior people about him to listen, too fond of shining at any expense in society, and love of approbation from the darling sex bordering on weakness; though to women he is delightfully pleasant, yet they seem more to handle him as a delicate plant. i don't know if they do not put a confidence in him which to me would be mortifying. he is a man of sensibility tinged with morbidity and of such sensitive organization of body that the plant is not more alive to touch than he.... he is a composition, as we all are, of defects and delightful qualities, indolently averse to worldly exertion, because it harasses the musings of his fancy, existing only by the common duties of life, yet ignorant of them, and often suffering from their neglect." (haydon, _life, letters and table talk_, ed. r. h. stoddard, pp. - .) haydon said that the rupture came about because hunt insisted upon speaking of our lord and his apostles in a condescending manner, and that he rebelled against hunt's "audacious romancing over the biblical conceptions of the almighty." (haydon, _life, letters and table talk_, p. .) this view, in the light of haydon's general unreliability, may be mere romancing; for keats, writing on january , , gave the following explanation of the quarrel: "mrs. h. (hunt) was in the habit of borrowing silver from haydon--the last time she did so, haydon asked her to return it at a certain time--she did not--haydon sent for it--hunt went to expostulate on the indelicacy, etc.--they got to words and parted for ever." (keats, _works_, iv, p. ). [ ] _works_, iv, p. . [ ] milnes, _life, letters and literary remains of john keats_, ii, p. . [ ] _works_, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] _life, letters and table talk_, p. . [ ] _works_, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, iv, pp. - . [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. , keats gives his argument in favor of a long poem. [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, iv, pp. - . [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, iv, p. . [ ] _ibid._, i, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] haydon attempted also to make trouble between wordsworth and hunt, by telling the former that hunt's admiration for him was only a "weather cock estimation" and by insinuations concerning his sincerity in friendships. (haydon, _life, letters and table talk_, p. .) [ ] j. ashcroft noble, _the sonnet in england, and other essays_, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _works_, v, p. . [ ] keats wrote haydon, "there are three things to rejoice at in this age the excursion, your pictures, and hazlitt's depth of taste." (_works_, iv, p. .) [ ] _works_, ii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] that he needed better attention than he could receive in lodgings is seen from an account of keats's condition given in _maria gisborne's journal_ (_ibid._, v, p. ), which says that when she drank tea there in july, keats was under sentence of death from dr. lamb: "he never spoke and looks emaciated." [ ] _works_, v, p. - . the quotation follows keats's punctuation. [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] _cornhill magazine_, . [ ] _works_, v, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] p. . [ ] _the examiner_, june st, july th, and th, . [ ] lines - . [ ] _works_, iv, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] may , . [ ] cf. with poe's sonnet, _science, true daughter of old time thou art_. [ ] haydon, _life, letters and table talk_, p. . [ ] in connection with _hyperion_, it is interesting to note that the manuscript in keats's handwriting recently discovered, survived through the agency of leigh hunt. from him it passed into the ownership of his son thornton, and later to the sister of dr. george bird. it has been purchased from her by the british museum. (_athenæum_, march , .) [ ] this is, of course, a mistake. [ ] for other criticism of the poems by hunt, see _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, pp. - . [ ] _i stood tiptoe_, l. . [ ] _ibid._, l. . [ ] _ibid._, l. . [ ] _to some ladies_, l. . [ ] _ibid._, l. . [ ] _i stood tiptoe_, l. . [ ] _ibid._, l. . [ ] _calidore_, l. . also pointed out by mr. colvin, _keats_, p. . [ ] _to my brother george_, l. . [ ] _i stood tiptoe_, l. . [ ] hunt quotes this with approbation, as showing a "human touch." (_specimen of an induction to a poem_, ll. - .) [ ] _specimen of an induction to a poem_, l. . [ ] _calidore_, l. . [ ] _ibid._, l. ff. [ ] _to ..._, l. ff. [ ] mr. de selincourt in _notes and queries_, feb. , , dates the _imitation of spenser_ " ." he does not produce documentary evidence, however. the discovery of the hitherto unpublished poem, _fill for me a brimming bowl_, in imitation of milton's early poems, dated in the woodhouse transcript aug. , is of considerable interest in determining the date of keats's earliest composition of verse. a sonnet _on peace_ found in the same ms. is a second discovery of an unpublished poem of the same period. [ ] _works_, i, p. . [ ] _ibid._, i. p. . mr. w. t. arnold, _poetical works of john keats_, london, , has remarked upon the similar use of _so_ by hunt and keats. he compares the "so elegantly" of this passage with the line from _rimini_ "leaves so finely suit." [ ] _to charles cowden clarke_, l. . [ ] _calidore_, ll. - . [ ] _story of rimini_, p. . [ ] colvin, _keats_, p. . [ ] references to hunt in the sonnets and other poems of are the following: . "he of the rose, the violet, the spring the social smile, the chain for freedom's sake:" (_addressed to the same_ [haydon].) this sonnet did not appear in , although it belongs to this period. . "... thy tender care thus startled unaware be jealous that the foot of other wight should madly follow that bright path of light trac'd by thy lov'd libertas; he will speak, and tell thee that my prayer is very meek * * * * * him thou wilt hear." (_specimen of an introduction_, l. ff.) mrs. clarke is the authority that "libertas" was hunt. . "with him who elegantly chats, and talks-- the wrong'd libertas." (_epistle to charles cowden clarke_, l. - .) . "i turn full-hearted to the friendly aids that smooth the path of honour; brotherhood, and friendliness the nurse of mutual good. _the hearty grasp that sends a pleasant sonnet into the brain ere one can think upon it_; the silence when some rhymes are coming out; and when they're come, the very pleasant rout: the message certain to be done tomorrow. 'tis perhaps as well that it should be to borrow some precious book from out its snug retreat, to cluster round it when we next shall meet." (_sleep and poetry._) lines - of the same, nearly one fifth of the entire poem, are a description of hunt's library. mr. de selincourt calls it "a glowing tribute to the sympathetic friendship which keats had enjoyed at the hampstead cottage and an attempt to express in the style of the _story of rimini_ something of the spirit which had informed the _lines written above tintern abbey_." (_poems of john keats._ introduction p. .) (_a_) of this room hunt wrote: "keats's _sleep and poetry_ is a description of a parlour that was mine, no bigger than an old mansion's closet." _correspondence_ i, p. . see also _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . (_b_) further description of the same room is to be found in _shelley's letter to maria gisborne_, ll. - . (_c_) clarke refers to it in the _gentleman's magazine_, february, , and in _recollections of writers_, p. . in the letter he says that a bed was made up in the library for keats and that he was installed as a member of the household. here he composed the framework of the poem. lines - are "an inventory of the art garniture of the room." (_d_) the most intresting record in regard to the room is that given by mrs. j. t. fields in a _shelf of old books_, who says that her husband saw the library treasures which had inspired keats--greek casts of sappho, casts of kosciusko and alfred, with engravings, sketches and well-worn books. among the books collected by mr. fields was a copy of shelley, coleridge and keats bound together, with an autograph of all three men, formerly owned by hunt. the fly leaf "at the back contained the sonnet written by keats on the _story of rimini_." [ ] the two sonnets were published in _the examiner_ of september , ; keats's had been included previously in the _poems of _; hunt's appeared later in _foliage_, . [ ] this did not appear in , but belongs to this period. see _works_, ii, p. . for a comparison of these two sonnets with shelley's on the same subject, see rossetti's _life of keats_, p. . [ ] _works_, ii, p. . [ ] compare with _a dream, after reading dante's episode of paolo and francesca_, . (_works_, iii, p. .) [ ] a pocket-book given keats by hunt and containing many of the first drafts of the sonnets belonged to charles wentworth dilke. it is still in the possession of the dilke family. [ ] for instances of keats's interest in politics, see _to kosciusko_, _to hope_, ll. - , and scattered references to wallace, william tell and similar characters. most of these references have already been called attention to by others. [ ] _works_, iv, pp. - . the poem follows. [ ] colvin, _keats_, p. . [ ] _endymion_, bk. ii, ll. - . [ ] _ibid._, bk. iv, l. ff. [ ] _ibid._, bk. ii, l. ff. [ ] _ibid._, bk. ii, l. ff. [ ] _keats_, p. . [ ] stanza , l. . [ ] _hero and leander_ and _bacchus and ariadne_, , p. . [ ] mr. w. t. arnold makes the mistake of thinking that keats imitated hunt's _gentle armour_. mr. colvin corrects this statement. (keats, _poetical works_, p. .) [ ] (_a_) w. t. arnold, keats, _poetical works_, p. . (_b_) j. hoops, _keats's jungend und jugendgedichte_, englische studien, xxi, . (_c_) w. a. read, _keats and spenser_. [ ] _works_, v, p. . [ ] this same expression occurs in _hero and leander_, , in the phrase, "half set in trees and leafy luxury." keats's dedication sonnet in which it occurs was written in . therefore mr. w. t. arnold makes a mistake when he says (in his edition of keats, p. ) it was taken direct from hunt's poem, although the two separate words are among his favorites and keats probably took them from him and combined them. [ ] mr. arnold says "delicious" is used sixteen times by keats. (keats, _poetical works_, p. ). he quotes a passage from one of hunt's prefaces in which the latter comments on chaucer's use of the word: "the word _deliciously_ is a venture of animal spirits which in a modern writer some critics would pronounce to be too affected or too familiar; but the enjoyment, and even incidental appropriateness and relish of it, will be obvious to finer senses." in _rimini_ this line occurs: "distils the next note more deliciously." [ ] palgrave, _poetical works of john keats_, p. , notices leigh hunt's misuse of this word in his review of _i stood tiptoe_, quoted on p. . see his use of the same on p. . in _bacchus and ariadne_ it occurs in this passage "all luxuries that come from odorous gardens." [ ] this is used in _hyperion_, ii, l. . the expression "plashy pools" occurs in the _story of rimini_. [ ] november , . [ ] _life of percy bysshe shelly_, ii, p. . [ ] _imagination and fancy_, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, pp. - . [ ] palgrave, _poetical works of john keats_, p. . [ ] _poetical works_, , p. . [ ] the poem is reported to have brought £ , more than any poem sold during his lifetime. it is now lost. [ ] mac-carthay, who has fully treated this incident, thinks that the account hunt gave of the matter many years later is so incoherent as to indicate that he did not receive the letter until after he met shelley, or perhaps not at all. he also points out that two passages in the letter to hunt of march , , important in their bearing upon shelley's political theories at this time, are identical with passages in a letter of february of the same year, addressed to the editor of _the statesman_, presumably finnerty. (_shelley's early life_, pp. - .) [ ] hancock, _the french revolution and english poets_, pp. - . [ ] letter to miss hitchener, june , . [ ] g. b. smith, _shelley, a critical biography_, p. . [ ] see the _letter to lord ellenborough_. [ ] smith, _shelley, a critical biography_, p. . [ ] for shelley's opinion on the coincidence of their political views, see the last paragraph of the dedication of _the cenci_. [ ] hunt, _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] pp. , . [ ] december , . [ ] ii, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _atlantic monthly_, february, . [ ] december , , shelley wrote to hunt: "i have not in all my intercourse with mankind experienced sympathy and kindness with which i have been so affected, or which my whole being has so sprung forward to meet and to return.... with you, and perhaps some others (though in a less degree, i fear) my gentleness and sincerity find favour, because they are themselves gentle and sincere: they believe in self-devotion and generosity because they are themselves generous and self-devoted." (nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century_, p. .) [ ] december , , shelley wrote mary godwin: hunt's "delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of you, have sustained me against the weight of the horror of this event." (dowden, _life of shelley_, ii, p. .) [ ] (_a_) _the examiner_, january , . (_b_) _ibid._, february , . (_c_) _ibid._, august , . (_d_) hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. ; august , . [ ] shelley said of horace smith: "but is it not odd that the only truly generous person i ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker." (hunt, _autobiography_, i, p. .) see also _letter to maria gisborne_, ll. - ; forman, _works of shelley_, iii, p. ff. [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; march , . [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; november , . [ ] professor masson says that one of shelley's first acts was to offer hunt £ . it is probable he refers to the occasion already discussed. (_wordsworth, shelley, keats and other essays_, p. .) [ ] dowden, _life of shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century_, p. ; december , . [ ] _ibid._, p. ; august , . [ ] rogers, _table talk_, p. . [ ] hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. ; september , . [ ] hunt, _autobiography_, ii, p. ; _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] medwin, _life of shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] mitford, _life_, i, p. . jeaffreson, _the real shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes_, p. ; april , . he assumed the debt for hunt's piano as naturally as he did for his own. prof. dowden says that john hunt expected shelley to become responsible for all of his brother's debts. (_life of shelley_, ii, p. .) [ ] hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. ; november , . [ ] nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century_, p. . [ ] see chapter iv, p. . [ ] dowden, _life of shelley_, ii, p. ; also _works of shelley_, viii, p. . [ ] (_a_) nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes_, pp. , . (_b_) byron, _letters and journals_, vi, p. . [ ] dowden, _life of shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] hunt, _autobiography_, ii, pp. - . in august, , hunt importunes shelley to give no thought to his affairs (_correspondence_, i, p. ). hunt wrote mary shelley on september , : "pray thank shelley or rather do not, for that kind part of his offer relating to the expenses. i find i have omitted it; but the instinct that led me to do so is more honorable to him than thanks." (_correspondence_, i, p. .) [ ] jeaffreson, _the real shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] w. m. rossetti, _complete poetical works of percy bysshe shelley_, i, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, p. . [ ] kent, _leigh hunt as poet and essayist_, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _atlantic monthly_, february, . [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. . june , . [ ] built by michaelangelo and situated on the arno. [ ] _the liberal_, i, p. . [ ] brandes attributes the inscription to mary shelley. (_main currents in nineteenth century literature_, iv, p. .) [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] after shelley's death, mary shelley decided to remain in italy in order to assist with _the liberal_. she considered hunt "expatriated at the request and desire of others," and, in helping him, she thought to fulfil any obligation that shelley might have assumed in the scheme. for her services she received thirty-three pounds. she lived for some time in the same house with the hunts after they separated from lord byron, but the arrangement was an unhappy one. disagreements, beginning with a misunderstanding concerning the possession of shelley's heart, dragged through the winter. fortunately everything was adjusted before they separated. july, , she wrote of hunt: "he is all kindness, consideration and friendship--all feeling of alienation towards me has disappeared to its last dregs." (marshall, _the life and letters of mary wollstonecraft godwin_, london, , ii, p. .) and again: "but thank heaven we are now the best friends in the world.... it is a delightful thing, my dear jane, to be able to express one's affection upon an old and tried friend like hunt, and one so passionately attached to my shelley as he was, and is.... he was displeased with me for many just reasons, but he found me willing to expiate, as far as i could, the evil i had done; his heart again warmed, and if when i return you find me more amiable, and more willing to suffer with patience than i was, it is to him that i owe this benefit." (_ibid._, ii, p. .) [ ] jeaffreson assigns the cause of hunt's neglect to his ignorance of the fact that he could suck money out of shelley. _the real shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] mac-carthay in _literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century_, p. . [ ] shelley was deeply wounded by the attack. he wrote hunt: "as to what relates to yourself and me, it makes me melancholy to consider the dreadful wickedness of the heart which would have prompted such expressions as those with which the anonymous writer gloats over my domestic calamities and the perversion of understanding with which he paints your character." (nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes_, p. ; december , .) [ ] shelley at first attributed the article in the _quarterly_ to southey on the grounds of his enmity to _the examiner_ which, shelley declared, had been the "crown of thorns worn by this unredeemed redeemer for many years." southey denied the authorship. (nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes_, p. ; december , .) [ ] _the examiner_, september , october and , . see also _correspondence_, i, pp. - . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] _ibid._, i, p. . [ ] see hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] for shelley's desire for hunt's good opinion, see _works of shelley_, viii, p. . hunt's collection of poems, published during , under the title of _foliage_ was dedicated to shelley: "had i known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all the qualities that it becomes a man to possess, i had selected for this work the ornament of his name. one more gentle, honorable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration of all who do and think evil; one who knows better how to receive, and how to confer a benefit though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners i never knew: and i had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list." [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] _ibid._, i, p. . [ ] _ibid._, i, p. ; march , . [ ] in an article on the _suburbs of genoa and the country about london_, pp. - . [ ] dated august , . [ ] the second part of the sketch was in answer to the _quarterly review's_ attack on the _posthumous poems_, which mrs. shelley, aided by hunt, had published in . this account was reworked in for the _autobiography_ and was taken in part for the preface to an edition of shelley's works in . hunt wrote another biographical sketch of shelley for s. c. hall's _book of gems_ (p. ). he gave a fine description of his physical appearance not often quoted. [ ] it was considered by the _athaneum_ to be the best part of the book, and to be the "powerful portrait of a benevolent man." (vi, p. .) [ ] letter to ollier, february, . [ ] _atlantic monthly_, february, . [ ] forman, _shelley library_, p. , says that the motto from _laon and cythna_ was added by hunt. [ ] pt. , p. . [ ] p. . [ ] _a shelf of old books_, p. . [ ] hunt's _book of the sonnet_, which appeared posthumously, contained a criticism of shelley's sonnet on _ozymandyas_ (i, p. ). [ ] august and , . [ ] _the examiner_, december , . [ ] _ibid._, july , . [ ] _literary pocket book_, london, . shelley's signature was [greek: d] and [greek: s]. see hunt, _correspondence_, i, . [ ] _literary pocket book_, . (_works of shelley_, iii, p. .) [ ] _literary pocket book_, . (_works of shelley_, iii, p. .) [ ] _literary pocket book_, . (_works of shelley_, iv, p. .) [ ] _ibid._, . (_works of shelley_, iv, p. .) [ ] _ibid._, . (_works of shelley_, iv, p. .) [ ] _ibid._, . (_works of shelley_, iv, p. .) [ ] _ibid._, . mr. forman thinks that the poem refers to harriet shelley's death and that the date is a disguise. (_works of shelley_, iii, p. .) [ ] _the indicator_, december , . [ ] chapter iv. [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; november , . [ ] _works of shelley_, iv, p. . [ ] six months later, december , , hunt addressed a letter to lord ellenborough on the same subject in regard to his own sentence. [ ] june , , , july , , august , september , , october , , , , december , , ; in , february , august , , and september . the last three articles were written after the queen's death. [ ] keats's _the cap and bells_ deals with the same. [ ] shelley gave directions that the poem should be printed like hunt's _hero and leander_. _works of shelley_, iii, p. . [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; august , . the letter instructs hunt to throw the poem into the fire or not as he sees fit and requests him, in preference to peacock, to correct the proofs. "can you take it as a compliment that i prefer to trouble you?" [ ] forman wrongly attributes the review of reynolds' _peter bell_ in _the examiner_ of april , , to hunt and says that this "flippant notice" by hunt inspired shelley's poem. _ibid._, ii, p. . reynolds asked keats to request hunt to review his poem. keats did it himself. (keats, _works_, iii, pp. - .) [ ] _works of shelley_, iii, p. . [ ] hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. , ; april , , and september , . cf. with _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; september , . (editor says dated wrongly.) [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; september , . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. ; august , . [ ] "you will see hunt--one of those happy souls which are the salt of the earth, and without whom this world would smell like what it is--a tomb; who is what others seem; his room no doubt is still adorned by many a cast from shout, with graceful flowers tastefully placed about, and coronals of bay from ribbons hung, and brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,-- the gifts of the most learned among some dozens of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins. and there he is with his eternal puns, which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns thundering for money at a poet's door; alas! it is no use to say 'i'm poor!'" [ ] mr. forman thinks that it may be part of the original draft of _rosalind and helen_; if so, it is still a very close approximation of shelley's opinion of hunt (_works of shelley_, iii, p. ). william rossetti and felix rabbe think that it was addressed to hunt. [ ] wise's edition of _adonais_, p. . london, . [ ] to his wife. _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; july , . [ ] nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes_, p. ; april , . [ ] hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. . professor george edward woodberry says that shelley had the "kindest feeling of gratitude and respect ... but nothing more" towards hunt. (_studies in letters and life_, p. .) [ ] _ibid._, i, p. . november , . _works of shelley_, viii, p. ; november , . [ ] sir walter scott has given a good estimate of them: "our sentiments agreed a good deal, except on the subject of religion and politics, upon neither of which i was inclined to believe that lord byron entertained very fixed principles.... on politics he used sometimes to express a high strain of what is now called liberalism; but it appeared to me that the pleasure that it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of his habit of thinking. at heart i would have termed byron a patrician on principle." (moore, _letters and journals of lord byron_, i, p. .) [ ] hancock, _the french revolution and english poets_, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. ; _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _the real lord byron_, i, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, iii, pp. - . the article was not published. [ ] nichol, _life of bryon_, p. , incorrectly gives as the date. [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. , may , . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _the champion_, april , , , . [ ] _letters and journals of lord byron_, p. . [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, ii, p. , december , . [ ] _ibid._, ii, pp. - . [ ] page . [ ] _the examiner_, april , . [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, pp. - . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, iii, p. . [ ] in byron translated the rimini episode of the _divine comedy_. [ ] trelawney, _recollections of the last days of shelley and byron_, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, v, pp. - . [ ] _letters and journals_, v, p. . this passage is omitted from the letter in which it occurs in moore's _letters and journals of lord byron_, ii, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] hunt wrongly gives byron's date of birth as . the article is accompanied with a woodcut. [ ] see _blackwood's_, x, pp. , . [ ] _letters and journals_, v, pp. - . [ ] medwin, _journal of the conversations of lord byron_, p. . [ ] jeaffreson, _the real lord byron_, ii, p. , says that byron through shelley's mediation could secure hunt as editor. [ ] _ibid._, _letters and journals of lord byron_, ii, p. . [ ] _recollections of the last days of shelley and byron_, p. . [ ] see p. . [ ] _the real lord byron_, ii, p. . [ ] _dictionary of national biography._ [ ] _leigh hunt as poet and essayist_, p. . [ ] _life of byron_, pp. - . [ ] _leigh hunt_, p. , note. [ ] _life of leigh hunt_, p. . [ ] _the sonnet in england_, pp. - . [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] after shelley's meeting with byron in switzerland in , before they met again in venice, there had been a lapse of two years bridged only by a not always pleasant correspondence relating to allegra, byron's natural daughter. shelley occupied the unenviable position of mediator between him and jane clairmont, the child's mother. yet when the two men met again in august, , it was at first on the terms recorded in _julian and maddalo_. byron's influence served as a stimulus to this and to other poems of the same period. by december of that year shelley's opinion of byron had changed; on the d, he wrote to peacock of _childe harold_ in terms that show how quickly his views could alter: "the spirit in which it is written, is, if insane, the most wicked and mischievous insanity that was ever given forth. it is a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly, in which he hardens himself. i remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises.... he (byron) associates with wretches who seem to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but i believe seldom even conceived in england. he says he disapproves, but he endures. he is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature and destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and despair? but that he is a great poet, i think the address to ocean proves. and he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to him, but unfortunately it does not outlast your departure. no, i do not doubt, and for his own sake, i ought to hope, that his present career must soon end in some violent circumstance." (_works of shelley_, viii, pp. - .) from the close of until , they were again separated. their correspondence, as previously, related chiefly to allegra and was of a still less agreeable nature. byron had refused to deal directly with jane clairmont and all communications had to pass through shelley's hands. in the interval, as though in retaliation, byron had believed the shiloh story, a fabrication by a nurse of the shelleys that jane clairmont was shelley's mistress, but he does not seem to have condemned such a state of affairs. (_letters and journals_, v, p. , october, .) yet he testified in his letters his great admiration of shelley's poetry (_ibid._, vi, p. ), and after his death he called him "the best and least selfish man i ever knew." (_ibid._, vi, p. ; august , .) but before , a reversal of the opinion formed in shelley's mind at the time of byron's venetian excesses, came about. november , , he wrote to mrs. hunt: "his indecencies, too, both against sexual nature, and against human nature in general, sit very awkwardly upon him. he only affects the libertine; he is, really, a very amiable, friendly and agreeable man, i hear." (hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. .) this corroborates thornton hunt's statement that byron had risen in shelley's estimation before and that otherwise _the liberal_ would never have been started. (_atlantic monthly_, february, .) at byron's invitation they met again in ravenna. shelley's letters dated from there show unstinted admiration of byron's genius and of the man himself. he wrote in august, , that he was living a "life totally the reverse of that which he led at venice.... (_works of shelley_, viii, p. , august , .) l. b. is greatly improved in every respect. in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness.... he has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued, and he is becoming what he should be, a virtuous man.... (_ibid._, viii, p. , august , .) lord byron and i are excellent friends, and were i reduced to poverty, or were i a writer who had no claims to a higher station than i possess--or did i possess a higher than i deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and i would freely ask him any favour. such is not now the case. the daemon of mistrust and pride lurks between two persons in our station, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse. this is a tax and a heavy one, which we must pay for being human." of _don juan_ he wrote: "it sets him not only above, but far above, all the poets of the day--every word is stamped with immortality. i despair of rivalling lord byron, as well i may, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending. (_ibid._, viii, p. , august , .) during the visit shelley served as ambassador to the countess guiccioli in persuading her not to go to switzerland, and in the same capacity to byron in the arrangement of allegra's affairs. it was then settled that byron should reside for the winter at pisa. shelley had misgivings about such an arrangement on his own and on miss clairmont's account, for he had previously intended to settle in the same vicinity. he finally decided not to let it make any difference in his plans. in january, , shelley wrote from pisa to peacock: "lord byron is established here, and we are his constant companions. no small relief this, after the dreary solitude of the understanding and the imagination in which we passed the first years of our expatriation, yoked to all sorts of miseries and discomforts.... if you before thought him a great poet, what is your opinion now that you have read _cain_?" (_works of shelley_, viii, p. ; january , .) during the same month he wrote to john gisborne: "what think you of lord byron now? space wondered less at the swift and fair creations of god, when he grew weary of vacancy, than i at this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body." (_ibid._, viii, p. , january, .) a letter to leigh hunt gives the first intimation of the return of the ill-feeling toward byron: "past circumstances between lord b. and me render it _impossible_ that i should accept any supply from him for my own use, or that i should ask for yours if the contribution could be supposed in any manner to relieve me, or to do what i could otherwise have done." (_works of shelley_, viii, p. , january , .) this referred to more entanglements with byron about allegra. shelley wrote to jane clairmont: "it is of vital importance, both to me and yourself, to allegra even, that i should put a period to my intimacy with lord byron, and that without éclat. no sentiments of honour and of justice restrain him (as i strongly suspect) from the basest suspicion, and the only mode in which i could effectually silence him i am reluctant (even if i had proof) to employ during my father's life. but for your immediate feelings, i would suddenly and irrevocably leave the country which he inhabits, nor even enter it but as an enemy to determine our differences without words." (_the nation_, xlviii, p. .) [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, viii, p. , august , . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. , september , . [ ] _ibid._, i, p. , november , . [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, iv, p. , june , . [ ] _ibid._, vi, pp. , , , , , , . [ ] _ibid._, vi, p. . [ ] in moore showed considerable pride in being included as one of the four poets to sup with apollo in the _feast of the poets_ and said that he was "particularly flattered by praise from hunt, because he is one of the most honest and candid men" that he knew. (_memoirs, journal and correspondence_, ii, p. .) in hunt had urged upon perry, the editor of the _morning chronicle_, the necessity of a public subscription for moore. (_ibid._, ii, p. ). an unfavorable review of moore's political principles in _the examiner_ during the same year may have done something to bring about the change in moore's feelings, though he was eulogized in a later issue of january , . [ ] b. w. procter, _an autobiographical fragment_, p. . [ ] _letters and journals of lord byron_, ii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, ii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, ii, p. . [ ] jeaffreson, _the real lord byron_, ii, p. . [ ] _recollections of the last days of shelley and byron_, p. . [ ] nicoll, _literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century_, p. , march, . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _fortnightly_, xxix, p. . [ ] _recollections of the last days of shelley and byron_, p. . [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. - . [ ] _life of shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] monkhouse, _life of leigh hunt_, p. . [ ] hunt refuted the statement that byron had walled off part of his dwelling and furnished it handsomely. (_lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. ff.) [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, pp. , . [ ] nicoll and wise, _literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century_, p. , december , . [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] "i could always procure what i wanted from lord byron, and living here is divinely cheap." (_correspondence_, i, p. , november , .) [ ] _life of byron_, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _works of shelley_, viii, p. . [ ] she used no tact in her dealings with lord byron. she let him see that she had no respect for rank or titles. she even went beyond the limits of courtesy in her remarks to him. on byron's saying, "what do you think, mrs. hunt? trelawny had been speaking of my morals! what do you think of that?" "it is the first time," said mrs. hunt, "i ever heard of them." (_lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. ). of his portrait by harlowe she said "that it resembled a great schoolboy, who had had a plain bun given him, instead of a plum one," a facetious speech indiscreetly repeated by hunt to byron. [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, p. . [ ] _ibid._, vi, pp. - . hunt's view was quite different. byron was, he thought, intimidated "out of his reasoning" by his children and their principles. (_lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. .) [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, pp. , . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] medwin, _conversations of lord byron_, p. . [ ] monkhouse, _life of leigh hunt_, pp. - . [ ] ii, pp. - . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. , july , . letter to his sister-in-law. [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, p. , july , . [ ] _recollections of the last days of shelley and byron_, i, p. . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . october (?), . [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, p. . january , . [ ] _ibid._, vi, pp. - . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, pp. , . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] "_blackwood's magazine_ overflowed, as might be expected, with ten-fold gall and bitterness; the _john bull_ was outrageous; and mr. jerdan black in the face at this unheard-of and disgraceful union. but who would have supposed that mr. thomas moore and mr. hobhouse, those staunch friends and partisans of the people, should also be thrown into almost hysterical agonies of well-bred horror at the coalition between their noble and ignoble acquaintance, between the patrician and the 'newspaper-man'? mr. moore darted backwards and forwards from cold-bath-fields' prison to the examiner-office, from mr. longman's to mr. murray's shop, in a state of ridiculous trepidation, to see what was to be done to prevent this degradation of the aristocracy of letters, this indecent encroachment of plebeian pretensions, this undue extension of patronage and compromise of privilege. the tories were shocked that lord byron should grace the popular side by his direct countenance and assistance--the whigs were shocked that he should share his confidence and councils with any one who did not unite the double recommendations of birth and genius--but themselves!" (hazlitt, _the plain speaker_, ii, p. ff.) [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] galt in his _life of byron_ says: "whether mr. hunt was or was not a fit co-partner for one of his lordship's rank and celebrity, i do not undertake to judge; but every individual was good enough for that vile prostitution of his genius, to which in an unguarded hour, he submitted for money." (p. .) [ ] _the literary gazette_ of october , , was one of the notable opponents. [ ] _life of byron_, p. . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, vi, p. . [ ] _ibid._, vi, p. . [ ] _ibid._, vi, p. , p. . (letters to mrs. shelley.) [ ] _ibid._, vi, p. . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. , december , . [ ] _ibid._, vi, pp. - . [ ] _ibid._, v, p. . [ ] lady blessington, _conversations of lord byron_, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, pp. - , april , . [ ] hunt's only means of support were the income from his contributions to _colburn's new monthly magazine_, from the _wishing cap papers_ in _the examiner_, and an annuity of £ . (_correspondence_, i, p. .) [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. - . [ ] _correspondence_, i, p. . see hazlitt's account of hunt in italy given in a letter from haydon to miss mitford. (haydon, _life, letters and table talk_, pp. - .) [ ] moore, _memoirs_, iv, p. ; v, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, vi, p. , . [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, preface, p. . [ ] clarke, _recollection of writers_, p. . [ ] but compare hunt's own remarks on p. . [ ] the biographers of the two men have taken various attitudes toward the value of _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_. galt says that the pains hunt took to elaborate faults of byron make one think hunt was treated according to his deserts, and that the troubles he labored under may have caused him to misapprehend byron's jocularity for sarcasm, and caprice for insolence. (_life of byron_, p. .) garnett considers the book a "corrective of merely idealized estimates of lord byron," and its "reception more unfavorable than its deserts." (_encyclopædia britannica_, "byron," ninth edition.) nichol thinks that while the book was prompted by uncharitableness and egotism, byron's faults were only slightly magnified: that the poetic insight, the cosmopolitan sympathy and courage of hunt have given a view that nothing else could have done. (_life of byron_, p. .) r. b. johnson thinks that it was a correct estimate written in self-justification. undoubtedly it should not have come from hunt, yet if it had not been written hunt would not have been defended nor byron so well known. he says there is "no reason to regret any part of the affair but the heated and persistent abuse with which one of the most sensitive and humane of men has been loaded on account of it." (_leigh hunt_, p. .) noble says that "byron's friends met unpleasant truths by still more unpleasant falsehoods." (_the sonnet in england_, p. .) alexander ireland, says the book was the great blunder of hunt's life, "ought not to have been written, far less published." (_dictionary of national biography._) [ ] _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, pp. - . [ ] byron, _letters and journals_, ii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, ii, p. . [ ] thornton hunt, in his edition of his father's _correspondence_, , in this connection defended byron, and credited him with "a strong sympathy with all that was beautiful and generous, with a desire to do right, [ ] p. . for an apology made six years earlier see a letter from hunt to thomas moore. (_correspondence_, ii, p. .) [ ] hunt, _a jar of honey from mt. hybia_, p. . [ ] ii, pp. - . [ ] _charles lamb and some of his companions_ in the _quarterly review_ of january, . [ ] _a new spirit of the age_, p. . [ ] near the close of his life hunt wrote: "the jests about london and the cockneys did not affect me in the least, as far as my faith was concerned. they might as well have said that hampstead was not beautiful, or richmond lovely; or that chaucer and milton were cockneys when they went out of london to lie on the grass and look at the daisies. the cockney school is the most illustrious in england; for, to say nothing of pope and gray, who were both veritable cockneys, 'born within the sound of bow bell,' milton was so too; and chaucer and spenser were both natives of the city. of the four greatest english poets, shakespeare only was not a londoner." (_autobiography_, ii, p. .) [ ] _recollections of writers_, p. . other accounts of these suppers are to be found in hazlitt's _on the conversations of authors_; in the works dealing with charles lamb; and in the _cornhill magazine_, november, . [ ] _the life of mary russell mitford_. edited by a. j. k. l'estrange, new york, , i, p. , november , . [ ] sharp, _the life and letters of joseph severn_, p. . [ ] notes, pp. - . [ ] _ibid._, pp. - . [ ] other controversies, such as the one with antoine dubost, show hunt's aggressiveness. dubost had sold a painting of damocles to his patron, a mr. hope. the latter became convinced that the author was an imposter and tore the signature from the picture. in retaliation dubost painted and exhibited _beauty and the beast_, a caricature of the whole incident. _the examiner_ accused him of forgery and rank ingratitude. hunt does not seem to have had any particular proof or knowledge on the subject, yet he employed scathing denunciation in writing of it. dubost replied and asserted that hunt was hope's hireling, and that he had "ransacked the whole calendar of scurrility, and hunted for nick-names through all the common places of blackguardism." (dubost, _an appeal to the public against the calumnies of the examiner_, london, n. d., p. .) [ ] he undertook a vindication of the cockney school in a series of four articles, in which he pointed out the "mean insincerity," the "vulgar slander," the "mouthing cant," the "shabby spite," the falsehoods and the recantations of blackwood's. the description of the conditions, under which scott pictured the articles of his enemies to have been written, smacks of the mocking humor of _blackwood's_ itself: "a redolency of leith-ale, and tobacco smoke, which floats about all the pleasantry in question,--giving one the idea of its facetious articles having been written on the slopped table of a tavern parlour in the back-wynd, after the _convives_ had retired, and left the author to solitude, pipe-ashes, and the dregs of black-strap." [ ] published in edinburgh in and signed by "an american scotchman." [ ] published in newcastle in . [ ] the school was thus described in blackwood's: "the chief constellations, in this poetical firmament, consist of led captains, and clerical hangers-on, whose pleasure, and whose business, it is, to celebrate in tuneful verse, the virtues of some angelic patron, who keeps a good table, and has interest with the archbishop, or the india house. verily they have their reward." in other words this group was composed of diners-out or parasites, and sycophants for livings and military appointments. [ ] published in london, . [ ] published in london also in . [ ] keats, _works_, iv, p. . [ ] c. c. clarke, _recollections of writers_, p. . [ ] keats, _works_, iv, p. . [ ] _life of benjamin robert haydon_, p. . [ ] dowden, _life of shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] i, p. . [ ] _keats_, p. . [ ] _life in poetry: law in taste_, pp. - . [ ] _age of wordsworth_, p. . [ ] _blackwood's_, november, . [ ] _ibid._, may, . [ ] _quarterly_, april, . [ ] _ibid._, january, . [ ] _blackwood's_, april, . [ ] _life, letters and table talk of benjamin robert haydon_, p. . [ ] _blackwood's_, may, , pp. - . [ ] _memoirs and correspondence of coventry patmore_, i, p. . [ ] _letters and journals_, v, p. . [ ] _st. james magazine_, xxxv, p. ff. [ ] _blackwood's_, december, . [ ] _letters and journals_, v, pp. - . march , . [ ] _ibid._, v, pp. - . september , . [ ] _letters of timothy tickler, esq._, july, . [ ] september, . [ ] hunt, _correspondence_, i, p. . [ ] daniel maclise, _a gallery of illustrious literary characters_ ( - ). london, n. d., p. . [ ] william dorling, _memoirs of dora greenwell_, london, , p. . [ ] _epistle to barnes._ [ ] this accusation has been made still more recently by mr. palgrave, who speaks of the "slipshod morality of _rimini_ and _hero_." _poetical works of john keats_, p. . [ ] in , however, he refashioned the whole poem, now representing giovanni as deformed and as the murderer of his wife and brother, whereas in the version of paolo had been slain in a duel and francesca had died of grief. in , he made a second change and went back to the version. the duel he preserved in the fragment, _corso and emilia_. hunt's translation of dante's episode appeared in _stories of verse_, . in he made a third change and restored the version of . [ ] the editor of _blackwood's_ in a letter dated april , , offered space to p. g. patmore for a favourable critique of hunt's poetry, reserving to himself the privilege of answering such an article. he stated further that if hunt had employed less violent language towards the reviewer of _rimini_ he might have been given a friendly explanation. _memoirs and correspondence of coventry patmore_, ii, p. . [ ] this charge was renewed in a review of hunt's _autobiography_ in in the _eclectic review_, xcii, p. . [ ] byron greatly resented southey's article: "i am glad mr. southey owns that article on _foliage_ which excited my choler so much. but who else could have been the author? who but southey would have had the baseness, under the pretext of reviewing the work of one man, insidiously to make it nest work for hatching malicious calumnies against others?... i say nothing of the critique itself on _foliage_; with the exception of a few sonnets, it was unworthy of hunt. but what was the object of that article? i repeat, to villify and scatter his dark and devilish insinuation against me and others." (medwin, _conversations of lord byron_, p. .) again byron wrote of southey in : "hence his quarterly overflowings, political and literary, in what he has termed himself 'the ungentle craft,' and his special wrath against mr. leigh hunt, not withstanding that hunt has done more for wordsworth's reputation as a poet (such as it is), than all the lakers could in their interchange of praises for the last twenty-five years." (_letters and journals_, v, p. .) [ ] _london magazine_, october, . [ ] september, . [ ] reprinted in the _museum of foreign literature_, xii, p. . [ ] august, , xxvi, p. . [ ] c. c. clarke, _recollections of writers_, p. . the year in which the letter was written is not given, but it must fall within the years - , the period of hunt's residence at chelsea. [ ] _the victorian age_, i, pp. - . [ ] hunt, _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] _critical, historical and miscellaneous essays_, new york and boston, , iv, p. . [ ] the first preface to _endymion_ was rejected by keats on the advice of his friends who thought that it was in the vain yet deprecating tone of hunt's prefaces. to this charge keats replied: "i am not aware that there is anything like hunt in it (and if there is, it is my natural way, and i have something in common with hunt)." the second preface justifies the charge. [ ] _london journal_, january , . [ ] of southey's attack on hunt and others in may, , keats wrote: "i have more than a laurel from the quarterly reviewers, for they have smothered me in 'foliage.'" (_works_, iv, p. .) [ ] shelley wrote also a letter to the _quarterly review_ remonstrating against its treatment of keats but the letter was never sent. (milnes, _life, letters and literary remains of john keats_, i, p. ff.) [ ] in _lord byron and some of his contemporaries_, hunt states that he informed byron of his mistake and received a promise that it would be altered, but that the rhyme about _article_ and _particle_ was too good to throw away (p. ). [ ] just before leaving england, keats with hunt visited the house where tom had died. he told hunt in _this_ connection that he was "dying of a broken heart." (_literary examiner_, , p. .) [ ] _works_, iv, pp. - , - , , , ; v, pp. , . [ ] _atlantic monthly_, xi, p. . [ ] october , . it included two reprints from other papers. the first was a letter taken from the _morning chronicle_ signed j. s. it predicted that if keats would "apostatise his friendship, his principles, and his politics (if he have any) he may even command the approbation of the _quarterly review_." this was followed by extracts from an article by john hamilton reynolds in the _alfred exeter paper_ praising keats for his power of vitalizing heathen mythology and for his resemblance to chapman and calling gifford "a lottery commissioner and government pensioner" who persecuted keats by "intrigue of literature and contrivance of political parties." [ ] dante gabriel rossetti suggests this possibility in a letter to mr. hall caine. (caine, _recollections of dante gabriel rossetti_, p. .) [ ] _cobwebs of criticism_, p. . [ ] _autobiography_, ii, p. . [ ] see p. ff. [ ] _imagination and fancy_, p. . [ ] dowden, _life of shelley_, ii, p. . [ ] other hostile reviews of _the cenci_ appeared in the _literary gazette_ of april , ; the _monthly magazine_ of the same month; and the _london magazine_ of may of the same year. [ ] _blackwood's_, january, . [ ] alexander ireland has pointed out curious correspondences in the lives and intrests of hazlitt and hunt. (_memoir of hazlitt_, pp. - .) [ ] _quarterly_, may, . [ ] _ibid._, december, . [ ] _ibid._, july, . [ ] _ibid._, october, . [ ] birrell, _william hazlitt_, new york, , p. . [ ] _the examiner_ of march and , , contained extracts from the _letter_ and comments by hunt upon this "quint-essential salt of an epistle," as he called it. lamb's _letter to southey_, already referred to, contained a defense of hazlitt as well as of hunt. [ ] february, -april, . [ ] august, . 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[illustration: john keats. portrait by joseph severn in the national portrait gallery.] letters of john keats to his family and friends edited by sidney colvin with frontispiece macmillan and co., limited st. martin's street, london copyright first edition (globe vo) june reprinted october , , reprinted (crown vo) printed in great britain contents letter date page preface xi . to charles cowden clarke oct. , . to benjamin robert haydon nov. , . " " nov. , . to charles cowden clarke dec. , . to john hamilton reynolds mar. , ? . " " mar. , . to george and thomas keats april , . to john hamilton reynolds april , . to leigh hunt may , . to benjamin robert haydon may , . to messrs. taylor and hessey may , . " " july , . to mariane and jane reynolds sept. , . to fanny keats sept. , . to jane reynolds sept. , . to john hamilton reynolds sept. , . to benjamin robert haydon sept. , . to benjamin bailey oct. , . " " about nov. , . " " nov. , . to charles wentworth dilke nov. . to benjamin bailey nov. , . to john hamilton reynolds nov. , . to george and thomas keats dec. , . " " jan. , . to benjamin robert haydon jan. , . to john taylor jan. , . to george and thomas keats jan. - , . to john taylor jan. , . to george and thomas keats jan. , . to benjamin bailey jan. , . to john taylor jan. , . to john hamilton reynolds jan. , . " " feb. , . to john taylor feb. , . to george and thomas keats feb. , . to john hamilton reynolds feb. , . to george and thomas keats feb. , . to john taylor feb. , . to messrs. taylor and hessey mar. ? . to benjamin bailey mar. , . to john hamilton reynolds mar. , . to benjamin robert haydon mar. , . to messrs. taylor and hessey mar. , . to james rice mar. , . to john hamilton reynolds mar. , . to benjamin robert haydon april , . to john hamilton reynolds april , . " " april , . to john taylor april , . to john hamilton reynolds april , . " " may , . to benjamin bailey may , . " " june , . to john taylor june , . to thomas keats june -july , . to fanny keats july - , . to thomas keats july - , . " " july - , . to john hamilton reynolds july - , . to thomas keats july - , . to benjamin bailey july - , . to thomas keats july - , . " " aug. , . to mrs. wylie aug. , . to fanny keats aug. , . " " aug. , . to jane reynolds sept. , . to charles wentworth dilke sept. , . to john hamilton reynolds about sept. , . to fanny keats oct. , . to james augustus hessey oct. , . to george and georgiana keats oct. - , . to fanny keats oct. , . " " oct. , . to richard woodhouse oct. , . to fanny keats nov. , . to james rice nov. , . to fanny keats dec. , . to george and georgiana keats {about dec. , { -jan. , . to richard woodhouse dec. , . to mrs. reynolds dec. , . to benjamin robert haydon dec. , . to john taylor dec. , . to benjamin robert haydon dec. , . to fanny keats dec. , . to benjamin robert haydon jan. , . " " {between jan. {and , . " " jan. . to fanny keats jan. . " " feb. , . to george and georgiana keats feb. -may , . to fanny keats feb. , . " " mar. , . " " mar. , . to joseph severn mar. ? . to fanny keats april , . to benjamin robert haydon april , . to fanny keats april , ? . " " may , . " " may , . " " june , . to james elmes june , . to fanny keats june , . " " june , . to benjamin robert haydon june , . to fanny keats july , . to john hamilton reynolds july , . to charles wentworth dilke july , . to benjamin bailey aug. , . to john taylor aug. , . to john hamilton reynolds aug. , . to fanny keats aug. , . to john taylor sept. , . " " sept. , . to george and georgiana keats sept. - , . to john hamilton reynolds sept. , . to charles wentworth dilke sept. , . to charles brown sept. , . " " sept. , . to charles wentworth dilke oct. , . to benjamin robert haydon oct. , . to fanny keats oct. , . to joseph severn oct. ? . to john taylor nov. , . to fanny keats nov. , . to joseph severn dec. ? . to james rice dec. . to fanny keats dec. , . " " dec. , . to georgiana keats jan. - , . to fanny keats feb. , . " " feb. , . " " feb. , . " " feb. , . to james rice feb. , . to fanny keats feb. , . to john hamilton reynolds feb. or , . to fanny keats feb. , . to charles wentworth dilke mar. , . to fanny keats mar. , . " " april , . " " april . " " april , . " " april , . " " may , . to charles wentworth dilke may . to john taylor june , . to charles brown june . to fanny keats june , . " " july , . to benjamin robert haydon july . to fanny keats july , . " " aug. , . to percy bysshe shelley aug. . to john taylor aug. , . to benjamin robert haydon aug. . to charles brown aug. . to fanny keats aug. , . to charles brown aug. . " " sept. , . to mrs. brawne oct. , . to charles brown nov. , , . " " nov. , preface the object of the present volume is to supply the want, which many readers must have felt, of a separate and convenient edition of the letters of keats to his family and friends. he is one of those poets whose genius makes itself felt in prose-writing almost as decisively as in verse, and at their best these letters are among the most beautiful in our language. portions of them lent an especial charm to a book charming at any rate--the biography of the poet first published more than forty years ago by lord houghton. but the correspondence as given by lord houghton is neither accurate nor complete. he had in few cases the originals before him, but made use of copies, some of them quite fragmentary, especially those supplied him from america; and moreover, working while many of the poet's friends were still alive, he thought it right to exercise a degree of editorial freedom for which there would now be neither occasion nor excuse. while i was engaged in preparing the life of keats for mr. morley's series some years since, the following materials for an improved edition of his letters came into my hands:-- ( ) the copies made by richard woodhouse, a few years after keats's death, of the poet's correspondence with his principal friends, viz. the publishers, messrs. taylor and hessey; the transcriber, woodhouse himself, who was a young barrister of literary tastes in the confidence of those gentlemen; john hamilton reynolds, solicitor, poet, humourist, and critic (born , died ); jane and mariane reynolds, sisters of the last-named, the former afterwards mrs. tom hood; james rice, the bosom friend of reynolds, and like him a young solicitor; benjamin bailey, undergraduate of magdalen hall, oxford, afterwards archdeacon of colombo ( ?- ), and one or two more. ( ) the imperfect copies of the poet's letters to his brother and sister-in-law in america, which were made by the sister-in-law's second husband, mr. jeffrey of louisville, and sent by him to lord houghton, who published them with further omissions and alterations of his own. ( ) somewhat later, after the publication of my book, the autograph originals of some of these same letters to america were put into my hands, including almost the entire text of nos. lxiii. lxxiii. lxxx. and xcii. in the present edition. the three last are the long and famous journal-letters written in the autumn of and spring of , and between them occupy nearly a quarter of the whole volume. i have shown elsewhere[ ] how much of their value and interest was sacrificed by mr. jeffrey's omissions. besides these manuscript sources, i have drawn largely on mr. buxton forman's elaborate edition of keats's works in four volumes ( ),[ ] and to a much less extent on the edition published by the poet's american grand nephew, mr. speed ( )[ ]. even thus, the correspondence is still probably not quite complete. in some of the voluminous journal-letters there may still be gaps, where a sheet of the autograph has gone astray; and since the following pages have been in print, i have heard of the existence in private collections of one or two letters which i have not been able to include. but it is not a case in which absolute completeness is of much importance. in matters of the date and sequence of the letters, i have taken pains to be more exact than previous editors, especially in tracing the daily progress and different halting-places of the poet on his scotch tour (which it takes some knowledge of the ground to do), and in dating the successive parts, written at intervals sometimes during two or three months, of the long journal-letters to america. on these particulars keats himself is very vague, and his manuscript sometimes runs on without a break at points where the sense shows that he has dropped and taken it up again after a pause of days or weeks.[ ] again, i have in all cases given in full the verse and other quotations contained in the correspondence, where other editors have only indicated them by their first lines. it is indeed from these that the letters derive a great part of their character. writing to his nearest relatives or most intimate friends, he is always quoting for their pleasure poems of his own now classical, then warm from his brain, sent forth uncertain whether to live or die, or snatches of doggrel nonsense as the humour of the moment takes him. the former, familiar as we may be with them, gain a new interest and freshness from the context: the latter are nothing apart from it, and to print them gravely, as has been done, among the poetical works, is to punish the levities of genius too hard. as to the text, i have followed the autograph wherever it was possible, and in other cases the manuscript or printed version which i judged nearest the autograph; with this exception, that i have not thought it worth while to preserve mere slips of the pen or tricks of spelling. the curious in such matters will find them religiously reproduced by mr. buxton forman wherever he has had the opportunity. the poet's punctuation, on the other hand, and his use of capitals, which is odd and full of character, i have preserved. as is well known, his handwriting is as a rule clear and beautiful, quite free from unsteadiness or sign of fatigue; and as mere specimens for the collector, few autographs can compare with these close-written quarto (or sometimes extra folio) sheets, in which the young poet has poured out to those he loved his whole self indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness, ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a spirit unsurpassed for native poetic gift and insight. the editor of familiar correspondence has at all times a difficult task before him in the choice what to give and what to withhold. in the case of keats the difficulty is greater than in most, from the ferment of opposing elements and impulses in his nature, and from the extreme unreserve with which he lays himself open alike in his weakness and his strength. the other great letter-writers in english are men to some degree on their guard: men, if not of the world, at least of some worldly training and experience, and of characters in some degree formed and set. the phase of unlimited youthful expansiveness, of enthusiastic or fretful outcry, they have either escaped or left behind, and never give themselves away completely. gray is of course an extreme case in point. with a masterly breadth of mind he unites an even finicking degree of academic fastidiousness and personal reserve, and his correspondence charms, not by impulse or openness, but by urbanity and irony, by ripeness of judgment and knowledge, by his playful kindliness towards the few intimates he has, and the sober wistfulness with which he looks out, from his pisgah-height of universal culture, over regions of imaginative delight into which it was not given to him nor his contemporaries to enter fully. to take others differing most widely both as men and poets: cowper, whether affectionately "chatting and chirping" to his cousin lady hesketh, or confiding his spiritual terrors to the rev. john newton, that unwise monitor who would not let them sleep,--cowper is a letter-writer the most unaffected and sincere, but has nevertheless the degree of reticence natural to his breeding, as well as a touch of staidness and formality proper to his age. byron offers an extreme contrast; unrestrained he is, but far indeed from being unaffected; the greatest attitudinist in literature as in life, and the most brilliant of all letter-writers after his fashion, with his wit, his wilfulness, his flash, his extraordinary unscrupulousness and resource, his vulgar pride of caste, his everlasting restlessness and egotism, his occasional true irradiations of the divine fire. shelley, again--but he, as has been justly said, must have his singing robes about him to be quite truly shelley, and in his correspondence is little more than any other amiable and enthusiastic gentleman and scholar on his travels. to the case of keats, at any rate, none of these other distinguished letter-writers affords any close parallel. that admirable genius was from the social point of view an unformed lad in the flush and rawness of youth. his passion for beauty, his instinctive insight into the vital sources of imaginative delight in nature, in romance, and in antiquity, went along with perceptions painfully acute in matters of daily life, and nerves high-strung in the extreme. he was moreover almost incapable of artifice or disguise. writing to his brothers and sister or to friends as dear, he is secret with them on one thing only, and that is his unlucky love-passion after he became a prey to it: for the rest he is open as the day, and keeps back nothing of what crosses his mind, nothing that vexes or jars on him or tries his patience. his character, as thus laid bare, contains elements of rare nobility and attraction--modesty, humour, sweetness, courage, impulsive disinterestedness, strong and tender family affection, the gift of righteous indignation, the gift of sober and strict self-knowledge. but it is only a character in the making. a strain of hereditary disease, lurking in his constitution from the first, was developed by over-exertion and aggravated by mischance, so that he never lived to be himself; and from about his twenty-fourth birthday his utterances are those of one struggling in vain against a hopeless distemper both of body and mind. if a selection could be made from those parts only of keats's correspondence which show him at his best, we should have an anthology full of intuitions of beauty, even of wisdom, and breathing the very spirit of generous youth; one unrivalled for zest, whim, fancy, and amiability, and written in an english which by its peculiar alert and varied movement sometimes recalls, perhaps more closely than that of any other writer (for the young cockney has shakspeare in his blood), the prose passages of _hamlet_ and _much ado about nothing_. had the correspondence never been printed before, were it there to be dealt with for the first time, this method of selection would no doubt be the tempting one to apply to it. but such a treatment is now hardly possible, and in any case would hardly be quite fair; since the object, or at all events the effect, of publishing a man's correspondence is not merely to give literary pleasure--it is to make the man himself known; and the revelation, though it need not be wholly without reserve, is bound to be just and proportionate as far as it goes. even as an artist, in the work which he himself published to the world, keats was not one of those of whom it could be said, "his worst he kept, his best he gave." rather he gave promiscuously, in the just confidence that among the failures and half-successes of his inexperienced youth would be found enough of the best to establish his place among the poets after his death. considering all things, the nature of the man, the difficulty of separating the exquisite from the common, the healthful from the diseased, in his mind and work, considering also the use that has already been made of the materials, i have decided in this edition to give the correspondence almost unpruned; omitting a few passages of mere crudity, hardly more than two pages in all, but not attempting to suppress those which betray the weak places in the writer's nature, his flaws of taste and training, his movements of waywardness, irritability, and morbid suspicion. only the biographer without tact, the critic without balance, will insist on these. a truer as well as more charitable judgment will recognise that what was best in keats was also what was most real, and will be fortified by remembering that to those who knew him his faults were almost unapparent, and that no man was ever held by his friends in more devoted or more unanimous affection while he lived and afterwards. there is one thing, however, which i have not chosen to do, and that is to include in this collection the poet's love-letters to fanny brawne. as it is, the intimate nature of the correspondence must sometimes give the reader a sense of eavesdropping, of being admitted into petty private matters with which he has no concern. if this is to some extent inevitable, it is by no means inevitable that the public should be farther asked to look over the shoulder of the sick and presently dying youth while he declares the impatience and torment of his passion to the object, careless and unresponsive as she seems to have been, who inspired it. these letters too have been printed. as a matter of feeling i cannot put myself in the place of the reader who desires to possess them; while as a matter of literature they are in a different key from the rest,--not lacking passages of beauty, but constrained and painful in the main, and quite without the genial ease and play of mind which make the letters to his family and friends so attractive. therefore in this, which i hope may become the standard edition of his correspondence, they shall find no place. as to the persons, other than those already mentioned, to whom the letters here given are addressed:--shelley of course needs no words; nor should any be needed for the painter haydon ( - ), or the poet and critic leigh hunt ( - ). theirs were the chief inspiring influences which determined the young medical student, about his twentieth year, at the time when this correspondence opens, to give up his intended profession for poetry. both were men of remarkable gifts and strong intellectual enthusiasm, hampered in either case by foibles of character which their young friend and follower, who has left so far more illustrious a name, was only too quick to detect. charles cowden clarke ( - ), the son of keats's schoolmaster at enfield, had exercised a still earlier influence on the lad's opening mind, and was himself afterwards long and justly distinguished as a shakspearean student and lecturer and essayist on english literature. charles wentworth dilke ( - ), having begun life in the civil service, early abandoned that calling for letters, and lived to be one of the most influential of english critics and journalists; he is chiefly known from his connection with the _athenæum_, and through the memoir published by his grandson. charles brown, afterwards styling himself charles armitage brown ( - ), who became known to keats through dilke in the summer of , and was his most intimate companion during the two years june to june , had begun life as a merchant in st. petersburg, and failing, came home, and took, he also, to literature, chiefly as a contributor to the various periodicals edited by leigh hunt. he lived mostly in italy from to , then for six years at plymouth, and in emigrated to new zealand, where he died the following year. joseph severn ( - ) was the son of a musician, himself beginning to practise as a painter when keats knew him. his devoted tendance of the poet during the last sad months in italy was the determining event of severn's career, earning him the permanent regard and gratitude of all lovers of genius. he established himself for good in rome, where he continued to practise his art, and was for many years english consul, and one of the most familiar figures in the society of the city. lastly, of the poet's own relations, george keats ( - ) after his brother's death continued to live at louisville in america, where he made and lost a fortune in business before he died. his widow (born georgiana augusta wylie), so often and affectionately addressed in these letters, by and by took a second husband, a mr. jeffrey, already mentioned as the correspondent of lord houghton. frances mary keats ( - ), always called fanny in the delightful series of letters which her brother addressed to her as a young girl,[ ] in course of time married a spanish gentleman, señor llanos, and lived in madrid to a great old age. several other members of the poet's circle enjoyed unusual length of days--mr. william dilke, for instance, dying a few years ago at ninety, and mr. gleig, long chaplain-general of the forces, at ninety-two. but with the death of his sister a year and a half ago, passed away probably the last survivor of those who could bear in memory the voice and features of adonais. s. c. _may ._ letters of john keats to his family and friends i.--to charles cowden clarke. [london, october , .] my daintie davie--i will be as punctual as the bee to the clover. very glad am i at the thoughts of seeing so soon this glorious haydon and all his creation. i pray thee let me know when you go to ollier's and where he resides--this i forgot to ask you--and tell me also when you will help me waste a sullen day--god 'ield you[ ]-- j. k. ii.--to benjamin robert haydon. [london,] november , . my dear sir--last evening wrought me up, and i cannot forbear sending you the following-- yours unfeignedly, john keats. removed to cheapside. great spirits now on earth are sojourning; he of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, who on helvellyn's summit, wide awake, catches his freshness from archangel's wing: he of the rose, the violet, the spring, the social smile, the chain for freedom's sake: and lo!--whose stedfastness would never take a meaner sound than raphael's whispering. and other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the world another heart, and other pulses. hear ye not the hum of mighty workings in the human mart? listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb.[ ] iii.--to benjamin robert haydon. [london,] thursday afternoon, november , . my dear sir--your letter has filled me with a proud pleasure, and shall be kept by me as a stimulus to exertion--i begin to fix my eye upon one horizon. my feelings entirely fall in with yours in regard to the ellipsis, and i glory in it. the idea of your sending it to wordsworth put me out of breath--you know with what reverence i would send my well-wishes to him. yours sincerely john keats. iv.--to charles cowden clarke. [london,] tuesday [december , ]. my dear charles--you may now look at minerva's Ã�gis with impunity, seeing that my awful visage[ ] did not turn you into a john doree. you have accordingly a legitimate title to a copy--i will use my interest to procure it for you. i'll tell you what--i met reynolds at haydon's a few mornings since--he promised to be with me this evening and yesterday i had the same promise from severn and i must put you in mind that on last all hallowmas' day you gave me your word that you would spend this evening with me--so no putting off. i have done little to endymion lately[ ]--i hope to finish it in one more attack. i believe you i went to richards's--it was so whoreson a night that i stopped there all the next day. his remembrances to you. (ext. from the common place book of my mind--mem.--wednesday--hampstead--call in warner street--a sketch of mr. hunt.)--i will ever consider you my sincere and affectionate friend--you will not doubt that i am yours. god bless you-- john keats. v.--to john hamilton reynolds. [london,] sunday evening [march , ?].[ ] my dear reynolds--your kindness affects me so sensibly that i can merely put down a few mono-sentences. your criticism only makes me extremely anxious that i should not deceive you. it's the finest thing by god as hazlitt would say. however i hope i may not deceive you. there are some acquaintances of mine who will scratch their beards and although i have, i hope, some charity, i wish their nails may be long. i will be ready at the time you mention in all happiness. there is a report that a young lady of has written the new tragedy, god bless her--i will know her by hook or by crook in less than a week. my brothers' and my remembrances to your kind sisters. yours most sincerely john keats. vi.--to john hamilton reynolds. [london, march , .] my dear reynolds--my brothers are anxious that i should go by myself into the country--they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that i should be alone to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me continually for a great good which i hope will follow. so i shall soon be out of town. you must soon bring all your present troubles to a close, and so must i, but we must, like the fox, prepare for a fresh swarm of flies. banish money--banish sofas--banish wine--banish music; but right jack health, honest jack health, true jack health--banish health and banish all the world. i must ... if i come this evening, i shall horribly commit myself elsewhere. so i will send my excuses to them and mrs. dilke by my brothers. your sincere friend john keats. vii.--to george and thomas keats. [southampton,] tuesday morn [april , ]. my dear brothers--i am safe at southampton--after having ridden three stages outside and the rest in for it began to be very cold. i did not know the names of any of the towns i passed through--all i can tell you is that sometimes i saw dusty hedges--sometimes ponds--then nothing--then a little wood with trees look you like launce's sister "as white as a lily and as small as a wand"--then came houses which died away into a few straggling barns--then came hedge trees aforesaid again. as the lamplight crept along the following things were discovered--"long heath broom furze"--hurdles here and there half a mile--park palings when the windows of a house were always discovered by reflection--one nymph of fountain--_n.b. stone_--lopped trees--cow ruminating--ditto donkey--man and woman going gingerly along--william seeing his sisters over the heath--john waiting with a lanthorn for his mistress--barber's pole--doctor's shop--however after having had my fill of these i popped my head out just as it began to dawn--_n.b. this tuesday morn saw the sun rise_--of which i shall say nothing at present. i felt rather lonely this morning at breakfast so i went and unbox'd a shakspeare--"there's my comfort."[ ] i went immediately after breakfast to southampton water where i enquired for the boat to the isle of wight as i intend seeing that place before i settle--it will go at , so shall i after having taken a chop. i know nothing of this place but that it is long--tolerably broad--has bye streets--two or three churches--a very respectable old gate with two lions to guard it. the men and women do not materially differ from those i have been in the habit of seeing. i forgot to say that from dawn till half-past six i went through a most delightful country--some open down but for the most part thickly wooded. what surprised me most was an immense quantity of blooming furze on each side the road cutting a most rural dash. the southampton water when i saw it just now was no better than a low water water which did no more than answer my expectations--it will have mended its manners by . from the wharf are seen the shores on each side stretching to the isle of wight. you, haydon, reynolds, etc. have been pushing each other out of my brain by turns. i have conned over every head in haydon's picture--you must warn them not to be afraid should my ghost visit them on wednesday--tell haydon to kiss his hand at betty over the way for me yea and to spy at her for me. i hope one of you will be competent to take part in a trio while i am away--you need only aggravate your voices a little and mind not to speak cues and all--when you have said rum-ti-ti--you must not be rum any more or else another will take up the ti-ti alone and then he might be taken god shield us for little better than a titmouse. by the by talking of titmouse remember me particularly to all my friends--give my love to the miss reynoldses and to fanny who i hope you will soon see. write to me soon about them all--and you george particularly how you get on with wilkinson's plan. what could i have done without my plaid? i don't feel inclined to write any more at present for i feel rather muzzy--you must be content with this fac simile of the rough plan of aunt dinah's counterpane. your most affectionate brother john keats. reynolds shall hear from me soon. viii.--to john hamilton reynolds. carisbrooke, april th [ ]. my dear reynolds--ever since i wrote to my brothers from southampton i have been in a taking--and at this moment i am about to become settled--for i have unpacked my books, put them into a snug corner, pinned up haydon, mary queen of scots, and milton with his daughters in a row. in the passage i found a head of shakspeare which i had not before seen. it is most likely the same that george spoke so well of, for i like it extremely. well--this head i have hung over my books, just above the three in a row, having first discarded a french ambassador--now this alone is a good morning's work. yesterday i went to shanklin, which occasioned a great debate in my mind whether i should live there or at carisbrooke. shanklin is a most beautiful place--sloping wood and meadow ground reach round the chine, which is a cleft between the cliffs of the depth of nearly feet at least. this cleft is filled with trees and bushes in the narrow part, and as it widens becomes bare, if it were not for primroses on one side, which spread to the very verge of the sea, and some fishermen's huts on the other, perched midway in the balustrades of beautiful green hedges along their steps down to the sands. but the sea, jack, the sea--the little waterfall--then the white cliff--then st. catherine's hill--"the sheep in the meadows, the cows in the corn." then, why are you at carisbrooke? say you. because, in the first place, i should be at twice the expense, and three times the inconvenience--next that from here i can see your continent--from a little hill close by the whole north angle of the isle of wight, with the water between us. in the rd place, i see carisbrooke castle from my window, and have found several delightful wood-alleys, and copses, and quick freshes.[ ] as for primroses--the island ought to be called primrose island--that is, if the nation of cowslips agree thereto, of which there are divers clans just beginning to lift up their heads. another reason of my fixing is, that i am more in reach of the places around me. i intend to walk over the island east--west--north--south. i have not seen many specimens of ruins--i don't think however i shall ever see one to surpass carisbrooke castle. the trench is overgrown with the smoothest turf, and the walls with ivy. the keep within side is one bower of ivy--a colony of jackdaws have been there for many years. i dare say i have seen many a descendant of some old cawer who peeped through the bars at charles the first, when he was there in confinement. on the road from cowes to newport i saw some extensive barracks, which disgusted me extremely with the government for placing such a nest of debauchery in so beautiful a place. i asked a man on the coach about this--and he said that the people had been spoiled. in the room where i slept at newport, i found this on the window--"o isle spoilt by the mil_a_tary!..." the wind is in a sulky fit, and i feel that it would be no bad thing to be the favourite of some fairy, who would give one the power of seeing how our friends got on at a distance. i should like, of all loves, a sketch of you and tom and george in ink which haydon will do if you tell him how i want them. from want of regular rest i have been rather _narvus_--and the passage in _lear_--"do you not hear the sea?"--has haunted me intensely. on the sea it keeps eternal whisperings around desolate shores, and with its mighty swell gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell of hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. often 'tis in such gentle temper found, that scarcely will the very smallest shell be mov'd for days from where it sometime fell, when last the winds of heaven were unbound. o ye! who have your eye-balls vex'd and tir'd, feast them upon the wideness of the sea; o ye! whose ears are dinn'd with uproar rude, or fed too much with cloying melody-- sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood until ye start as if the sea nymphs quired--[ ] april th. will you have the goodness to do this? borrow a botanical dictionary--turn to the words laurel and prunus, show the explanations to your sisters and mrs. dilke and without more ado let them send me the cups basket and books they trifled and put off and off while i was in town. ask them what they can say for themselves--ask mrs. dilke wherefore she does so distress me--let me know how jane has her health--the weather is unfavourable for her. tell george and tom to write. i'll tell you what--on the d was shakspeare born. now if i should receive a letter from you and another from my brothers on that day 'twould be a parlous good thing. whenever you write say a word or two on some passage in shakspeare that may have come rather new to you, which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same play forty times--for instance, the following from the tempest never struck me so forcibly as at present, "urchins _shall, for the vast of night that they may work_, all exercise on thee--" how can i help bringing to your mind the line-- _in the dark backward and abysm of time_-- i find i cannot exist without poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--i began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan. i had become all in a tremble from not having written anything of late--the sonnet overleaf did me good. i slept the better last night for it--this morning, however, i am nearly as bad again. just now i opened spenser, and the first lines i saw were these-- "the noble heart that harbours virtuous thought, and is with child of glorious great intent, can never rest until it forth have brought th' eternal brood of glory excellent--" let me know particularly about haydon, ask him to write to me about hunt, if it be only ten lines--i hope all is well--i shall forthwith begin my endymion, which i hope i shall have got some way with by the time you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place i have set my heart upon, near the castle. give my love to your sisters severally--to george and tom. remember me to rice, mr. and mrs. dilke and all we know. your sincere friend john keats. direct j. keats, mrs. cook's, new village, carisbrooke. ix.--to leigh hunt. margate, may , . my dear hunt--the little gentleman that sometimes lurks in a gossip's bowl, ought to have come in the very likeness of a _roasted_ crab, and choaked me outright for not answering your letter ere this: however, you must not suppose that i was in town to receive it: no, it followed me to the isle of wight, and i got it just as i was going to pack up for margate, for reasons which you anon shall hear. on arriving at this treeless affair, i wrote to my brother george to request c. c. c.[ ] to do the thing you wot of respecting rimini; and george tells me he has undertaken it with great pleasure; so i hope there has been an understanding between you for many proofs: c. c. c. is well acquainted with bensley. now why did you not send the key of your cupboard, which, i know, was full of papers? we would have locked them all in a trunk, together with those you told me to destroy, which indeed i did not do, for fear of demolishing receipts, there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others) than to pay a bill twice. mind you, old wood's a "very varmint," shrouded in covetousness:--and now i am upon a horrid subject--what a horrid one you were upon last sunday, and well you handled it. the last examiner[ ] was a battering-ram against christianity, blasphemy, tertullian, erasmus, sir philip sidney; and then the dreadful petzelians and their expiation by blood; and do christians shudder at the same thing in a newspaper which they attribute to their god in its most aggravated form? what is to be the end of this? i must mention hazlitt's southey.[ ] o that he had left out the grey hairs; or that they had been in any other paper not concluding with such a thunderclap! that sentence about making a page of the feeling of a whole life, appears to me like a whale's back in the sea of prose. i ought to have said a word on shakspeare's christianity. there are two which i have not looked over with you, touching the thing: the one for, the other against: that in favour is in measure for measure, act ii. scene ii.-- _isab._ alas, alas! why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; and he that might the 'vantage best have took, found out the remedy. that against is in twelfth night, act iii. scene ii.-- _maria._ for there is no christian that means to be saved by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. before i come to the nymphs,[ ] i must get through all disagreeables. i went to the isle of wight, thought so much about poetry, so long together, that i could not get to sleep at night; and, moreover, i know not how it was, i could not get wholesome food. by this means, in a week or so, i became not over capable in my upper stories, and set off pell-mell for margate, at least a hundred and fifty miles, because, forsooth, i fancied that i should like my old lodging here, and could contrive to do without trees. another thing, i was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource. however, tom is with me at present, and we are very comfortable. we intend, though, to get among some trees. 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 libya 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. i vow that i have been down in the mouth lately at this work. these last two days, however, i have felt more confident--i have asked myself so often why i should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is,--how great things are to be gained by it, what a thing to be in the mouth of fame,--that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment, that the other day i nearly consented with myself to drop into a phaethon. yet 'tis a disgrace to fail, even in a huge attempt; and at this moment i drive the thought from me. i began my poem about a fortnight since, and have done some every day, except travelling ones. perhaps i may have done a good deal for the time, but it appears such a pin's point to me, that i will not copy any out. when i consider that so many of these pin-points go to form a bodkin-point (god send i end not my life with a bare bodkin, in its modern sense!), and that it requires a thousand bodkins to make a spear bright enough to throw any light to posterity, i see nothing but continual uphill journeying. now is there anything more unpleasant (it may come among the thousand and one) than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last? but i intend to whistle all these cogitations into the sea, where i hope they will breed storms violent enough to block up all exit from russia. does shelley go on telling strange stories of the deaths of kings?[ ] tell him, there are strange stories of the deaths of poets. some have died before they were conceived. "how do you make that out, master vellum?" does mrs. s. cut bread and butter as neatly as ever? tell her to procure some fatal scissors, and cut the thread of life of all to-be-disappointed poets. does mrs. hunt tear linen as straight as ever? tell her to tear from the book of life all blank leaves. remember me to them all; to miss kent and the little ones all. your sincere friend john keats _alias_ junkets. you shall hear where we move. x.--to benjamin robert haydon. margate, saturday eve [may , ]. my dear haydon, "let fame, that all pant after in their lives, live register'd upon our brazen tombs, and so grace us in the disgrace of death: when spite of cormorant devouring time the endeavour of this present breath may buy that honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge and make us heirs of all eternity."[ ] to think that i have no right to couple myself with you in this speech would be death to me, so i have e'en written it, and i pray god that our "brazen tombs" be nigh neighbours. it cannot be long first; the "endeavour of this present breath" will soon be over, and yet it is as well to breathe freely during our sojourn--it is as well as if you have not been teased with that money affair, that bill-pestilence. however, i must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man--they make our prime objects a refuge as well as a passion. the trumpet of fame is as a tower of strength, the ambitious bloweth it and is safe. i suppose, by your telling me not to give way to forebodings, george has mentioned to you what i have lately said in my letters to him--truth is i have been in such a state of mind as to read over my lines and hate them. i am one that "gathers samphire, dreadful trade"--the cliff of poesy towers above me--yet when tom who meets with some of pope's homer in plutarch's lives reads some of those to me they seem like mice to mine. i read and write about eight hours a day. there is an old saying "well begun is half done"--'tis a bad one. i would use instead, "not begun at all till half done;" so according to that i have not begun my poem and consequently (à priori) can say nothing about it. thank god! i do begin arduously where i leave off, notwithstanding occasional depressions; and i hope for the support of a high power while i climb this little eminence, and especially in my years of more momentous labour. i remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius presiding over you. i have of late had the same thought, for things which i do half at random are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in a dozen features of propriety. is it too daring to fancy shakspeare this presider? when in the isle of wight i met with a shakspeare in the passage of the house at which i lodged--it comes nearer to my idea of him than any i have seen--i was but there a week, yet the old woman made me take it with me though i went off in a hurry. do you not think this is ominous of good? i am glad you say every man of great views is at times tormented as i am. sunday after [may ]. this morning i received a letter from george by which it appears that money troubles are to follow us up for some time to come--perhaps for always--these vexations are a great hindrance to one--they are not like envy and detraction stimulants to further exertion as being immediately relative and reflected on at the same time with the prime object--but rather like a nettle leaf or two in your bed. so now i revoke my promise of finishing my poem by the autumn which i should have done had i gone on as i have done--but i cannot write while my spirit is fevered in a contrary direction and i am now sure of having plenty of it this summer. at this moment i am in no enviable situation--i feel that i am not in a mood to write any to-day; and it appears that the loss of it is the beginning of all sorts of irregularities. i am extremely glad that a time must come when everything will leave not a wrack behind. you tell me never to despair--i wish it was as easy for me to observe 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 that it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment. however every ill has its share of good--this very bane would at any time enable me to look with an obstinate eye on the devil himself--aye to be as proud of being the lowest of the human race as alfred could be in being of the highest. i feel confident i should have been a rebel angel had the opportunity been mine. i am very sure that you do love me as your very brother--i have seen it in your continual anxiety for me--and i assure you that your welfare and fame is and will be a chief pleasure to me all my life. i know no one but you who can be fully sensible of the turmoil and anxiety, the sacrifice of all what is called comfort, the readiness to measure time by what is done and to die in six hours could plans be brought to conclusions--the looking upon the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth and its contents, as materials to form greater things--that is to say ethereal things--but here i am talking like a madman,--greater things than our creator himself made!! 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 humor with either his or mine. his self-delusions are very lamentable--they have enticed 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. 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 an idea of being a great poet--or one of those beings who are privileged to wear out their lives in the pursuit of honor--how comfortable a feel it is to feel that such a crime must bring its heavy penalty? that if one be a self-deluder accounts must be balanced? i am glad you are hard at work--'t will now soon be done--i long to see wordsworth's as well as to have mine in:[ ] but i would rather not show my face in town till the end of the year--if that will be time enough--if not i shall be disappointed if you do not write for me even when you think best. i never quite despair and i read shakspeare--indeed i shall i think never read any other book much. now this might lead me into a long confab but i desist. i am very near agreeing with hazlitt that shakspeare is enough for us. by the by what a tremendous southean article his last was--i wish he had left out "grey hairs." it was very gratifying to meet your remarks on the manuscript--i was reading anthony and cleopatra when i got the paper and there are several passages applicable to the events you commentate. you say that he arrived by degrees and not by any single struggle to the height of his ambition--and that his life had been as common in particulars as other men's. shakspeare makes enobarb say-- where's antony? _eros._--he's walking in the garden, and _spurns the rush that lies_ before him; cries, fool, lepidus! in the same scene we find-- let determined things to destiny hold unbewailed their way. dolabella says of anthony's messenger, an argument that he is pluck'd when hither he sends so poor a pinion of his wing. then again-- _eno._--i see men's judgments are a parcel of their fortunes; and things outward do draw the inward quality after them, to suffer all alike. the following applies well to bertrand[ ]-- yet he that can endure to follow with allegiance a fallen lord, does conquer him that did his master conquer, and earns a place i' the story. but how differently does buonaparte bear his fate from anthony! 'tis good, too, that the duke of wellington has a good word or so in the examiner. a man ought to have the fame he deserves--and i begin to think that detracting from him as well as from wordsworth is the same thing. i wish he had a little more taste--and did not in that respect "deal in lieutenantry." you should have heard from me before this--but in the first place i did not like to do so before i had got a little way in the first book, and in the next as g. told me you were going to write i delayed till i had heard from you. give my respects the next time you write to the north and also to john hunt. remember me to reynolds and tell him to write. ay, and when you send westward tell your sister that i mentioned her in this. so now in the name of shakspeare, raphael and all our saints, i commend you to the care of heaven! your everlasting friend john keats. xi.--to messrs. taylor and hessey. margate, may , . my dear sirs--i am extremely indebted to you for your liberality in the shape of manufactured rag, value £ , and shall immediately proceed to destroy some of the minor heads of that hydra the dun; to conquer which the knight need have no sword shield cuirass, cuisses herbadgeon spear casque greaves paldrons spurs chevron or any other scaly commodity, but he need only take the bank-note of faith and cash of salvation, and set out against the monster, invoking the aid of no archimago or urganda, but finger me the paper, light as the sibyl's leaves in virgil, whereat the fiend skulks off with his tail between his legs. touch him with this enchanted paper, and he whips you his head away as fast as a snail's horn--but then the horrid propensity he has to put it up again has discouraged many very valiant knights. he is such a never-ending still-beginning sort of a body--like my landlady of the bell. i should conjecture that the very spright that "the green sour ringlets makes whereof the ewe not bites" had manufactured it of the dew fallen on said sour ringlets. i think i could make a nice little allegorical poem, called "the dun," where we would have the castle of carelessness, the drawbridge of credit, sir novelty fashion's expedition against the city of tailors, etc. etc. i went day by day at my poem for a month--at the end of which time the other day i found my brain so over-wrought that i had neither rhyme nor reason in it--so was obliged to give up for a few days. i hope soon to be able to resume my work--i have endeavoured to do so once or twice; but to no purpose. instead of poetry, i have a swimming in my head and feel all the effects of a mental debauch, lowness of spirits, anxiety to go on without the power to do so, which does not at all tend to my ultimate progression. however to-morrow i will begin my next month. this evening i go to canterbury, having got tired of margate. i was not right in my head when i came--at canterbury i hope the remembrance of chaucer will set me forward like a billiard ball. i am glad to hear of mr. t.'s health, and of the welfare of the "in-town-stayers." and think reynolds will like his trip--i have some idea of seeing the continent some time this summer. in repeating how sensible i am of your kindness, i remain y{r} obed{t} serv{t} and friend john keats. i shall be happy to hear any little intelligence in the literary or friendly way when you have time to scribble. xii.--to messrs. taylor and hessey. [london] tuesday morn [july , ]. my dear sirs--i must endeavour to lose my maidenhead with respect to money matters as soon as possible--and i will too--so, here goes! a couple of duns that i thought would be silent till the beginning, at least, of next month (when i am certain to be on my legs, for certain sure), have opened upon me with a cry most "untuneable"; never did you hear such _un-_"gallant chiding." now you must know, i am not desolate, but have, thank god, good notes in my fob. but then, you know, i laid them by to write with and would stand at bay a fortnight ere they should grab me. in a month's time i must pay, but it would relieve my mind if i owed you, instead of these pelican duns. i am afraid you will say i have "wound about with circumstance," when i should have asked plainly--however as i said i am a little maidenish or so, and i feel my virginity come strong upon me, the while i request the loan of a £ and a £ , which, if you would enclose to me, i would acknowledge and save myself a hot forehead. i am sure you are confident of my responsibility, and in the sense of squareness that is always in me. your obliged friend john keats. xiii.--to mariane and jane reynolds. [oxford,[ ] september , ]. my dear friends--you are i am glad to hear comfortable at hampton,[ ] where i hope you will receive the biscuits we ate the other night at little britain.[ ] i hope you found them good. there you are among sands, stones, pebbles, beeches, cliffs, rocks, deeps, shallows, weeds, ships, boats (at a distance), carrots, turnips, sun, moon, and stars and all those sort of things--here am i among colleges, halls, stalls, plenty of trees, thank god--plenty of water, thank heaven--plenty of books, thank the muses--plenty of snuff, thank sir walter raleigh--plenty of segars,--ditto--plenty of flat country, thank tellus's rolling-pin. i'm on the sofa--buonaparte is on the snuff-box--but you are by the seaside--argal, you bathe--you walk--you say "how beautiful"--find out resemblances between waves and camels--rocks and dancing-masters-- fireshovels and telescopes--dolphins and madonas--which word, by the way, i must acquaint you was derived from the syriac, and came down in a way which neither of you i am sorry to say are at all capable of comprehending. but as a time may come when by your occasional converse with me you may arrive at "something like prophetic strain," i will unbar the gates of my pride and let my condescension stalk forth like a ghost at the circus.--the word ma-don-a, my dear ladies--or--the word mad--ona--so i say! i am not mad--howsumever when that aged tamer kewthon sold a certain camel called peter to the overseer of the babel sky-works, he thus spake, adjusting his cravat round the tip of his chin--"my dear ten-story-up-in-air! this here beast, though i say it as shouldn't say't, not only has the power of subsisting days and nights without fire and candle but he can sing.--here i have in my pocket a certificate from signor nicolini of the king's theatre; a certificate to this effect----" i have had dinner since i left that effect upon you, and feel too heavy in mentibus to display all the profundity of the polygon--so you had better each of you take a glass of cherry brandy and drink to the health of archimedes, who was of so benign a disposition that he never would leave syracuse in his life--so kept himself out of all knight-errantry.--this i know to be a fact; for it is written in the th book of winkine's treatise on garden-rollers, that he trod on a fishwoman's toe in liverpool, and never begged her pardon. now the long and short is this--that is by comparison--for a long day may be a short year--a long pole may be a very stupid fellow as a man. but let us refresh ourself from this depth of thinking, and turn to some innocent jocularity--the bow cannot always be bent--nor the gun always loaded, if you ever let it off--and the life of man is like a great mountain--his breath is like a shrewsbury cake--he comes into the world like a shoeblack, and goes out of it like a cobbler--he eats like a chimney-sweeper, drinks like a gingerbread baker--and breathes like achilles--so it being that we are such sublunary creatures, let us endeavour to correct all our bad spelling--all our most delightful abominations, and let us wish health to marian and jane, whoever they be and wherever. yours truly john keats. xiv--to fanny keats. oxford, september [ ]. my dear fanny--let us now begin a regular question and answer--a little pro and con; letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favorite little wants and enjoyments, that i may meet them in a way befitting a brother. we have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that i know not whether you prefer the history of king pepin to bunyan's pilgrim's progress--or cinderella and her glass slipper to moore's almanack. however in a few letters i hope i shall be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your pleasure. you must tell me about all you read if it be only six pages in a week and this transmitted to me every now and then will procure you full sheets of writing from me pretty frequently.--this i feel as a necessity for we ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that i may not only, as you grow up love you as my only sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend. when i saw you last i told you of my intention of going to oxford and 'tis now a week since i disembark'd from his whipship's coach the defiance in this place. i am living in magdalen hall on a visit to a young man with whom i have not been long acquainted, but whom i like very much--we lead very industrious lives--he in general studies and i in proceeding at a pretty good rate with a poem which i hope you will see early in the next year.--perhaps you might like to know what i am writing about. i will tell you. many years ago there was a young handsome shepherd who fed his flocks on a mountain's side called latmus--he was a very contemplative sort of a person and lived solitary among the trees and plains little thinking that such a beautiful creature as the moon was growing mad in love with him.--however so it was; and when he was asleep on the grass she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of that high mountain latmus while he was a dreaming--but i daresay you have read this and all the other beautiful tales which have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful greece. if you have not let me know and i will tell you more at large of others quite as delightful. this oxford i have no doubt is the finest city in the world--it is full of old gothic buildings--spires-- towers--quadrangles--cloisters--groves, etc., and is surrounded with more clear streams than ever i saw together. i take a walk by the side of one of them every evening and, thank god, we have not had a drop of rain these many days. i had a long and interesting letter from george, cross lines by a short one from tom yesterday dated paris. they both send their loves to you. like most englishmen they feel a mighty preference for everything english--the french meadows, the trees, the people, the towns, the churches, the books, the everything--although they may be in themselves good: yet when put in comparison with our green island they all vanish like swallows in october. they have seen cathedrals, manuscripts, fountains, pictures, tragedy, comedy,--with other things you may by chance meet with in this country such as washerwomen, lamplighters, turnpikemen, fishkettles, dancing masters, kettle drums, sentry boxes, rocking horses, etc.--and, now they have taken them over a set of boxing-gloves. i have written to george and requested him, as you wish i should, to write to you. i have been writing very hard lately, even till an utter incapacity came on, and i feel it now about my head: so you must not mind a little out-of-the-way sayings--though by the bye were my brain as clear as a bell i think i should have a little propensity thereto. i shall stop here till i have finished the d book of my story; which i hope will be accomplish'd in at most three weeks from to-day--about which time you shall see me. how do you like miss taylor's essays in rhyme--i just look'd into the book and it appeared to me suitable to you--especially since i remember your liking for those pleasant little things the original poems--the essays are the more mature production of the same hand. while i was speaking about france it occurred to me to speak a few words on their language--it is perhaps the poorest one ever spoken since the jabbering in the tower of babel, and when you come to know that the real use and greatness of a tongue is to be referred to its literature--you will be astonished to find how very inferior it is to our native speech.--i wish the italian would supersede french in every school throughout the country, for that is full of real poetry and romance of a kind more fitted for the pleasure of ladies than perhaps our own.--it seems that the only end to be gained in acquiring french is the immense accomplishment of speaking it--it is none at all--a most lamentable mistake indeed. italian indeed would sound most musically from lips which had began to pronounce it as early as french is crammed down our mouths, as if we were young jackdaws at the mercy of an overfeeding schoolboy. now fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--you need not do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it be a diary of your little life. you will preserve all my letters and i will secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and god knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come. give my respects to the ladies--and so my dear fanny i am ever your most affectionate brother john. if you direct--post office, oxford--your letter will be brought to me. xv.--to jane reynolds. oxford, sunday evg. [september , ]. my dear jane--you are such a literal translator, that i shall some day amuse myself with looking over some foreign sentences, and imagining how you would render them into english. this is an age for typical curiosities; and i would advise you, as a good speculation, to study hebrew, and astonish the world with a figurative version in our native tongue. the mountains skipping like rams, and the little hills like lambs, you will leave as far behind as the hare did the tortoise. it must be so or you would never have thought that i really meant you would like to pro and con about those honeycombs--no, i had no such idea, or, if i had, 'twould be only to tease you a little for love. so now let me put down in black and white briefly my sentiments thereon.--imprimis--i sincerely believe that imogen is the finest creature, and that i should have been disappointed at hearing you prefer juliet--item--yet i feel such a yearning towards juliet that i would rather follow her into pandemonium than imogen into paradise--heartily wishing myself a romeo to be worthy of her, and to hear the devils quote the old proverb, "birds of a feather flock together"--amen.-- now let us turn to the seashore. believe me, my dear jane, it is a great happiness to see that you are in this finest part of the year winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. in truth, the great elements we know of, are no mean comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the air is our robe of state--the earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel playing before it--able, like david's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life. i have found in the ocean's music,--varying (tho self-same) more than the passion of timotheus, an enjoyment not to be put into words; and, "though inland far i be," i now hear the voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your sensations. ---- is getting well apace, and if you have a few trees, and a little harvesting about you, i'll snap my fingers in lucifer's eye. i hope you bathe too--if you do not, i earnestly recommend it. bathe thrice a week, and let us have no more sitting up next winter. which is the best of shakspeare's plays? i mean in what mood and with what accompaniment do you like the sea best? it is very fine in the morning, when the sun, "opening on neptune with fair blessed beams, turns into yellow gold his salt sea streams," and superb when "the sun from meridian height illumines the depth of the sea, and the fishes, beginning to sweat, cry d---- it! how hot we shall be," and gorgeous, when the fair planet hastens "to his home within the western foam." but don't you think there is something extremely fine after sunset, when there are a few white clouds about and a few stars blinking--when the waters are ebbing, and the horizon a mystery? this state of things has been so fulfilling to me that i am anxious to hear whether it is a favourite with you. so when you and marianne club your letter to me put in a word or two about it. tell dilke that it would be perhaps as well if he left a pheasant or partridge alive here and there to keep up a supply of game for next season--tell him to rein in if possible all the nimrod of his disposition, he being a mighty hunter before the lord--of the manor. tell him to shoot fair, and not to have at the poor devils in a furrow--when they are flying, he may fire, and nobody will be the wiser. give my sincerest respects to mrs. dilke, saying that i have not forgiven myself for not having got her the little box of medicine i promised, and that, had i remained at hampstead i would have made precious havoc with her house and furniture--drawn a great harrow over her garden--poisoned boxer--eaten her clothes-pegs--fried her cabbages--fricaseed (how is it spelt?) her radishes--ragout'd her onions--belaboured her _beat_-root--outstripped her scarlet-runners--parlez-vous'd with her french-beans--devoured her mignon or mignionette--metamorphosed her bell-handles--splintered her looking-glasses--bullocked at her cups and saucers--agonised her decanters--put old phillips to pickle in the brine-tub--dis_organ_ised her piano--dislocated her candlesticks--emptied her wine-bins in a fit of despair--turned out her maid to grass--and astonished brown; whose letter to her on these events i would rather see than the original copy of the book of genesis. should you see mr. w. d.[ ] remember me to him, and to little robinson crusoe, and to mr. snook. poor bailey, scarcely ever well, has gone to bed, pleased that i am writing to you. to your brother john (whom henceforth i shall consider as mine) and to you, my dear friends, marianne and jane, i shall ever feel grateful for having made known to me so real a fellow as bailey. he delights me in the selfish and (please god) the disinterested part of my disposition. if the old poets have any pleasure in looking down at the enjoyers of their works, their eyes must bend with a double satisfaction upon him. i sit as at a feast when he is over them, and pray that if, after my death, any of my labours should be worth saving, they may have so "honest a chronicler" as bailey. out of this, his enthusiasm in his own pursuit and for all good things is of an exalted kind--worthy a more healthful frame and an untorn spirit. he must have happy years to come--"he shall not die by god." a letter from john the other day was a chief happiness to me. i made a little mistake when, just now, i talked of being far inland. how can that be when endymion and i are at the bottom of the sea? whence i hope to bring him in safety before you leave the seaside; and, if i can so contrive it, you shall be greeted by him upon the sea-sands, and he shall tell you all his adventures, which having finished, he shall thus proceed--"my dear ladies, favourites of my gentle mistress, however my friend keats may have teased and vexed you, believe me he loves you not the less--for instance, i am deep in his favour, and yet he has been hauling me through the earth and sea with unrelenting perseverance. i know for all this that he is mighty fond of me, by his contriving me all sorts of pleasures. nor is this the least, fair ladies, this one of meeting you on the desert shore, and greeting you in his name. he sends you moreover this little scroll--" my dear girls, i send you, per favour of endymion, the assurance of my esteem for you, and my utmost wishes for your health and pleasure, being ever, your affectionate brother john keats. xvi.--to john hamilton reynolds. oxford, sunday morn [september , ]. my dear reynolds--so you are determined to be my mortal foe--draw a sword at me, and i will forgive--put a bullet in my brain, and i will shake it out as a dew-drop from the lion's mane--put me on a gridiron, and i will fry with great complacency--but--oh, horror! to come upon me in the shape of a dun! send me bills! as i say to my tailor, send me bills and i'll never employ you more. however, needs must, when the devil drives: and for fear of "before and behind mr. honeycomb" i'll proceed. i have not time to elucidate the forms and shapes of the grass and trees; for, rot it! i forgot to bring my mathematical case with me, which unfortunately contained my triangular prism so that the hues of the grass cannot be dissected for you-- for these last five or six days, we have had regularly a boat on the isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eye-lashes. we sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become naturalised river-folks,--there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened "reynolds's cove," in which we have read wordsworth and talked as may be. i think i see you and hunt meeting in the pit.--what a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. what evenings we might pass with him, could we have him from mrs. h. failings i am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a level. he has them, but then his makes-up are very good. he agrees with the northern poet in this, "he is not one of those who much delight to season their fireside with personal talk"--i must confess however having a little itch that way, and at this present moment i have a few neighbourly remarks to make. the world, and especially our england, has, within the last thirty years, been vexed and teased by a set of devils, whom i detest so much that i almost hunger after an acherontic promotion to a torturer, purposely for their accommodation. these devils are a set of women, who having taken a snack or luncheon of literary scraps, set themselves up for towers of babel in languages, sapphos in poetry, euclids in geometry, and everything in nothing. among such the name of montague has been pre-eminent. the thing has made a very uncomfortable impression on me. i had longed for some real feminine modesty in these things, and was therefore gladdened in the extreme on opening the other day, one of bailey's books--a book of poetry written by one beautiful mrs. philips, a friend of jeremy taylor's, and called "the matchless orinda--" you must have heard of her, and most likely read her poetry--i wish you have not, that i may have the pleasure of treating you with a few stanzas--i do it at a venture--you will not regret reading them once more. the following, to her friend mrs. m. a. at parting, you will judge of. i have examin'd and do find, of all that favour me there's none i grieve to leave behind but only, only thee. to part with thee i needs must die, could parting sep'rate thee and i. but neither chance nor complement did element our love; 'twas sacred sympathy was lent us from the quire above. that friendship fortune did create, still fears a wound from time or fate. our chang'd and mingled souls are grown to such acquaintance now, that if each would resume their own, alas! we know not how. we have each other so engrost, that each is in the union lost. and thus we can no absence know, nor shall we be confin'd; our active souls will daily go to learn each others mind. nay, should we never meet to sense, our souls would hold intelligence. inspired with a flame divine i scorn to court a stay; for from that noble soul of thine i ne're can be away. but i shall weep when thou dost grieve; nor can i die whil'st thou dost live. by my own temper i shall guess at thy felicity, and only like my happiness because it pleaseth thee. our hearts at any time will tell if thou, or i, be sick, or well. all honour sure i must pretend, all that is good or great; she that would be _rosania's_ friend, must be at least compleat.[a] if i have any bravery, 'tis cause i have so much of thee. thy leiger soul in me shall lie, and all thy thoughts reveal; then back again with mine shall flie, and thence to me shall steal. thus still to one another tend; such is the sacred name of _friend_. thus our twin-souls in one shall grow, and teach the world new love, redeem the age and sex, and show a flame fate dares not move: and courting death to be our friend, our lives together too shall end. a dew shall dwell upon our tomb of such a quality, that fighting armies, thither come, shall reconciled be. we'll ask no epitaph, but say orinda and rosania. in other of her poems there is a most delicate fancy of the fletcher kind--which we will con over together. so haydon is in town. i had a letter from him yesterday. we will contrive as the winter comes on--but that is neither here nor there. have you heard from rice? has martin met with the cumberland beggar, or been wondering at the old leech-gatherer? has he a turn for fossils? that is, is he capable of sinking up to his middle in a morass? how is hazlitt? we were reading his table[ ] last night. i know he thinks him self not estimated by ten people in the world--i wish he knew he is. i am getting on famous with my third book--have written lines thereof, and hope to finish it next week. bailey likes what i have done very much. believe me, my dear reynolds, one of my chief layings-up is the pleasure i shall have in showing it to you, i may now say, in a few days. i have heard twice from my brothers, they are going on very well, and send their remembrances to you. we expected to have had notices from little-hampton this morning--we must wait till tuesday. i am glad of their days with the dilkes. you are, i know, very much teased in that precious london, and want all the rest possible; so i shall be contented with as brief a scrawl--a word or two, till there comes a pat hour. send us a few of your stanzas to read in "reynolds's cove." give my love and respects to your mother, and remember me kindly to all at home. yours faithfully john keats. i have left the doublings for bailey, who is going to say that he will write to you to-morrow. xvii.--to benjamin robert haydon. oxford, september [ ]. my dear haydon--i read your letter to the young man, whose name is cripps. he seemed more than ever anxious to avail himself of your offer. i think i told you we asked him to ascertain his means. he does not possess the philosopher's stone--nor fortunatus's purse, nor gyges's ring--but at bailey's suggestion, whom i assure you is a very capital fellow, we have stummed up a kind of contrivance whereby he will be enabled to do himself the benefits you will lay in his path. i have a great idea that he will be a tolerable neat brush. 'tis perhaps the finest thing that will befal him this many a year: for he is just of an age to get grounded in bad habits from which you will pluck him. he brought a copy of mary queen of scots: it appears to me that he has copied the bad style of the painting, as well as coloured the eyeballs yellow like the original. he has also the fault that you pointed out to me in hazlitt on the constringing and diffusing of substance. however i really believe that he will take fire at the sight of your picture--and set about things. if he can get ready in time to return to town with me, which will be in a few days--i will bring him to you. you will be glad to hear that within these last three weeks i have written 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. bailey's kindest wishes, and my vow of being yours eternally john keats. xviii.--to benjamin bailey. hampstead, wednesday [october , ]. my dear bailey--after a tolerable journey, i went from coach to coach as far as hampstead where i found my brothers--the next morning finding myself tolerably well i went to lamb's conduit street and delivered your parcel. jane and marianne were greatly improved. marianne especially, she has no unhealthy plumpness in the face, but she comes me healthy and angular to the chin--i did not see john--i was extremely sorry to hear that poor rice, after having had capital health during his tour, was very ill. i daresay you have heard from him. from no. i went to hunt's and haydon's who live now neighbours.--shelley was there--i know nothing about anything in this part of the world--every body seems at loggerheads. there's hunt infatuated--there's haydon's picture in statu quo--there's hunt walks up and down his painting room criticising every head most unmercifully. there's horace smith tired of hunt. "the web of our life is of mingled yarn."[ ] haydon having removed entirely from marlborough street, cripps must direct his letter to lisson grove, north paddington. yesterday morning while i was at brown's, in came reynolds, he was pretty bobbish, we had a pleasant day--he would walk home at night that cursed cold distance. mrs. bentley's children are making a horrid row[ ]--whereby i regret i cannot be transported to your room to write to you. i am quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except wordsworth--no not even byron. here is an instance of the friendship of such. haydon and hunt have known each other many years--now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours--haydon says to me, keats, don't show your lines to hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you--so it appears hunt wishes it to be thought. when he met reynolds in the theatre, john told him that i was getting on to the completion of lines--ah! says hunt, had it not been for me they would have been ! 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, through him, on the subject--now is not all this a most paltry thing to think about? you may see the whole of the case by the following extract from a letter i wrote to george in the spring--"as to what you say about my being a poet, i can return no answer but by saying that the high idea i have of poetical fame makes me think i see it towering too high above me. at any rate, i have no right to talk until endymion is finished--it will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my invention, which is a rare thing indeed--by which i must make lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry: and when i consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame--it makes me say--god forbid that i should be without such a task! i have heard hunt say, and i may be asked--_why endeavour after a long poem?_ to which i should answer, do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading: which may be food for a week's stroll in the summer? do not they like this better than what they can read through before mrs. williams comes down stairs? a morning work at most. "besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which i take to be the polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails--and imagination the rudder. did our great poets ever write short pieces? i mean in the shape of tales--this same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a poetical excellence--but enough of this, i put on no laurels till i shall have finished endymion, and i hope apollo is not angered at my having made a mockery at him at hunt's"---- you see, bailey, how independent my writing has been. hunt's dissuasion was of no avail--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. 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. haydon promised to give directions for those casts, and you may expect to see them soon, with as many letters--you will soon hear the dinning of bells--never mind! you and gleig[ ] will defy the foul fiend--but do not sacrifice your health to books: do take it kindly and not so voraciously. i am certain if you are your own physician, your stomach will resume its proper strength and then what great benefits will follow.--my sister wrote a letter to me, which i think must be at the post-office--ax will to see. my brother's kindest remembrances to you--we are going to dine at brown's where i have some hopes of meeting reynolds. the little mercury i have taken has corrected the poison and improved my health--though i feel from my employment that i shall never be again secure in robustness. would that you were as well as your sincere friend and brother john keats. xix.--to benjamin bailey. [hampstead: about november , .] my dear bailey--so you have got a curacy--good, but i suppose you will be obliged to stop among your oxford favourites during term time. never mind. when do you preach your first sermon?--tell me, for i shall propose to the two r.'s[ ] to hear it,--so don't look into any of the old corner oaken pews, for fear of being put out by us. poor johnny moultrie can't be there. he is ill, i expect--but that's neither here nor there. all i can say, i wish him as well through it as i am like to be. for this fortnight i have been confined at hampstead. saturday evening was my first day in town, when i went to rice's--as we intend to do every saturday till we know not when. we hit upon an old gent we had known some few years ago, and had a _veiry pleasante daye_. in this world there is no quiet,--nothing but teasing and snubbing and vexation. my brother tom looked very unwell yesterday, and i am for shipping him off to lisbon. perhaps i ship there with him. i have not seen mrs. reynolds since i left you, wherefore my conscience smites me. i think of seeing her to-morrow; have you any message? i hope gleig came soon after i left. i don't suppose i've written as many lines as you have read volumes, or at least chapters, since i saw you. however, i am in a fair way now to come to a conclusion in at least three weeks, when i assure you i shall be glad to dismount for a month or two; although i'll keep as tight a rein as possible till then, nor suffer myself to sleep. i will copy for you the opening of the fourth book, in which you will see from the manner i had not an opportunity of mentioning any poets, for fear of spoiling the effect of the passage by particularising them. thus far had i written when i received your last, which made me at the sight of the direction caper for despair; but for one thing i am glad that i have been neglectful, and that is, therefrom i have received a proof of your utmost kindness, which at this present i feel very much, and i wish i had a heart always open to such sensations; but there is no altering a man's nature, and mine must be radically wrong, for it will lie dormant a whole month. this leads me to suppose that there are no men thoroughly wicked, so as never to be self-spiritualised into a kind of sublime misery; but, alas! 'tis but for an hour. he is the only man "who has kept watch on man's mortality," who has philanthropy enough to overcome the disposition to an indolent enjoyment of intellect, who is brave enough to volunteer for uncomfortable hours. you remember in hazlitt's essay on commonplace people he says, "they read the edinburgh and quarterly, and think as they do." now, with respect to wordsworth's "gipsy," i think he is right, and yet i think hazlitt is right, and yet i think wordsworth is rightest. if wordsworth had not been idle, he had not been without his task; nor had the "gipsies"--they in the visible world had been as picturesque an object as he in the invisible. the smoke of their fire, their attitudes, their voices, were all in harmony with the evenings. it is a bold thing to say--and i would not say it in print--but it seems to me that if wordsworth had thought a little deeper at that moment, he would not have written the poem at all. i should judge it to have been written in one of the most comfortable moods of his life--it is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after truth, nor is it fair to attack him on such a subject; for it is with the critic as with the poet; had hazlitt thought a little deeper, and been in a good temper, he would never have spied out imaginary faults there. the sunday before last i asked haydon to dine with me, when i thought of settling all matters with him in regard to cripps, and let you know about it. now, although i engaged him a fortnight before, he sent illness as an excuse. he never will come. i have not been well enough to stand the chance of a wet night, and so have not seen him, nor been able to expurgatorise more masks for you; but i will not speak--your speakers are never doers. then reynolds,--every time i see him and mention you, he puts his hand to his head and looks like a son of niobe's; but he'll write soon. rome, you know, was not built in a day. i shall be able, by a little perseverance, to read your letters off-hand. i am afraid your health will suffer from over study before your examination. i think you might regulate the thing according to your own pleasure,--and i would too. they were talking of your being up at christmas. will it be before you have passed? there is nothing, my dear bailey, i should rejoice at more than to see you comfortable with a little peona wife; an affectionate wife, i have a sort of confidence, would do you a great happiness. may that be one of the many blessings i wish you. let me be but the one-tenth of one to you, and i shall think it great. my brother george's kindest wishes to you. my dear bailey, i am, your affectionate friend john keats. i should not like to be pages in your way; when in a tolerable hungry mood you have no mercy. your teeth are the rock tarpeian down which you capsize epic poems like mad. i would not for forty shillings be coleridge's lays in your way. i hope you will soon get through this abominable writing in the schools, and be able to keep the terms with more comfort in the hope of retiring to a comfortable and quiet home out of the way of all hopkinses and black beetles. when you are settled, i will come and take a peep at your church, your house; try whether i shall have grown too lusty for my chair by the fireside, and take a peep at my earliest bower. a question is the best beacon towards a little speculation. then ask me after my health and spirits. this question ratifies in my mind what i have said above. health and spirits can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man--the man who thinks much of his fellows can never be in spirits. you must forgive, although i have only written three hundred lines; they would have been five, but i have been obliged to go to town. yesterday i called at lamb's. st. jane looked very flush when i first looked in, but was much better before i left. xx.--to benjamin bailey. [_fragment from an outside sheet: postmark_ london, november , .] ... i will speak of something else, or my spleen will get higher and higher--and i am a bearer of the two-edged sword.--i hope you will receive an answer from haydon soon--if not, pride! pride! pride! i have received no more subscription--but shall soon have a full health, liberty and leisure to give a good part of my time to him. i will certainly be in time for him. we have promised him one year: let that have elapsed, then do as we think proper. if i did not know how impossible it is, i should say--"do not at this time of disappointments, disturb yourself about others." there has been a flaming attack upon hunt in the e_n_dinburgh magazine. i never read anything so virulent--accusing him of the greatest crimes, depreciating his wife, his poetry, his habits, his company, his conversation. these philippics are to come out in numbers--called "the cockney school of poetry." there has been but one number published--that on hunt--to which they have prefixed a motto from one cornelius webb poetaster--who unfortunately was of our party occasionally at hampstead and took it into his head to write the following,--something about "we'll talk on wordsworth, byron, a theme we never tire on;" and so forth till he comes to hunt and keats. in the motto they have put hunt and keats in large letters--i have no doubt that the second number was intended for me: but have hopes of its non-appearance, from the following advertisement in last sunday's examiner:--"to z.--the writer of the article signed z., in blackwood's edinburgh magazine for october is invited to send his address to the printer of the examiner, in order that justice may be executed on the proper person." i don't mind the thing much--but if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with hunt, i must infallibly call him to an account if he be a human being, and appears in squares and theatres, where we might possibly meet--i don't relish his abuse.... xxi.--to charles wentworth dilke. [hampstead, november .] my dear dilke--mrs. dilke or mr. wm. dilke, whoever of you shall receive this present, have the kindness to send pr. bearer sibylline leaves, and your petitioner shall ever pray as in duty bound. given under my hand this wednesday morning of novr. . john keats. vivant rex et regina--amen. xxii.--to benjamin bailey. [burford bridge, november , .] my dear bailey--i will get over the first part of this (_un_said[ ]) letter as soon as possible, for it relates to the affairs of poor cripps.--to a man of your nature such a letter as haydon's must have been extremely cutting--what occasions the greater part of the world's quarrels?--simply this--two minds meet, and do not understand each other time enough to prevent any shock or surprise at the conduct of either party--as soon as i had known haydon three days, i had got enough of his character not to have been surprised at such a letter as he has hurt you with. nor, when i knew it, was it a principle with me to drop his acquaintance; although with you it would have been an imperious feeling. i wish you knew all that i think about genius and the heart--and yet i think that you are thoroughly acquainted with my innermost breast in that respect, or you could not have known me even thus long, and still hold me worthy to be your dear friend. in passing, however, i must say one thing that has pressed upon me lately, and increased my humility and capability of submission--and that is this truth--men of genius are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on the mass of neutral intellect--but they have not any individuality, any determined character--i would call the top and head of those who have a proper self men of power. but i am running my head into a subject which i am certain i could not do justice to under five years' study, and vols. octavo--and, moreover, i long to be talking about the imagination--so my dear bailey, do not think of this unpleasant affair, if possible do not--i defy any harm to come of it--i defy. i shall write to cripps this week, and request him to tell me all his goings-on from time to time by letter wherever i may be. it will go on well--so don't because you have suddenly discovered a coldness in haydon suffer yourself to be teased--do not my dear fellow--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 reflection, 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. what a time! i am continually running away from the subject. sure this cannot be exactly the case with a complex mind--one that is imaginative, and at the same time careful of its fruits,--who would exist partly on sensation, partly on thought--to whom it is necessary that years should bring the philosophic mind? such a one i consider yours, and therefore it is necessary to your eternal happiness that you not only drink this old wine of heaven, which i shall call the redigestion of our most ethereal musings upon earth, but also increase in knowledge and know all things. i am glad to hear that you are in a fair way for easter. you will soon get through your unpleasant reading, and then!--but the world is full of troubles, and i have not much reason to think myself pestered with many. i think jane or marianne has a better opinion of me than i deserve: for, really and truly, i do not think my brother's illness connected with mine--you know more of the real cause than they do; nor have i any chance of being rack'd as you have been. you perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away--i scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--i look not for it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the moment. the setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, i take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. the first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this--"well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his spirit"--and i beg now, my dear bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for i assure you i sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or affection during a whole week--and so long this sometimes continues, i begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times--thinking them a few barren tragedy tears. my brother tom is much improved--he is going to devonshire--whither i shall follow him. at present, i am just arrived at dorking--to change the scene--change the air, and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting lines. i should have been here a day sooner, but the reynoldses persuaded me to stop in town to meet your friend christie. there were rice and martin--we talked about ghosts. i will have some talk with taylor and let you know,--when please god i come down at christmas. i will find that examiner if possible. my best regards to gleig, my brothers' to you and mrs. bentley. your affectionate friend john keats. i want to say much more to you--a few hints will set me going. direct burford bridge near dorking. xxiii.--to john hamilton reynolds. [burford bridge,] november , . my dear reynolds--there are two things which tease me here--one of them cripps, and the other that i cannot go with tom into devonshire. however, i hope to do my duty to myself in a week or so; and then i'll try what i can do for my neighbour--now, is not this virtuous? on returning to town i'll damm all idleness--indeed, in superabundance of employment, i must not be content to run here and there on little two-penny errands, but turn rakehell, _i.e._ go a masking, or bailey will think me just as great a promise keeper as _he_ thinks you; for myself i do not, and do not remember above one complaint against you for matter o' that. bailey writes so abominable a hand, to give his letter a fair reading requires a little time: so i had not seen, when i saw you last, his invitation to oxford at christmas. i'll go with you. you know how poorly rice was. i do not think it was all corporeal,--bodily pain was not used to keep him silent. i'll tell you what; he was hurt at what your sisters said about his joking with your mother, he was, soothly to sain. it will all blow over. god knows, my dear reynolds, i should not talk any sorrow to you--you must have enough vexations--so i won't any more. if i ever start a rueful subject in a letter to you--blow me! why don't you?--now i am going to ask you a very silly question neither you nor anybody else could answer, under a folio, or at least a pamphlet--you shall judge--why don't you, as i do, look unconcerned at what may be called more particularly heart-vexations? they never surprise me--lord! a man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world. 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, and not engaged in a continued poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric--but i am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole to send you a particle. one of the three books i have with me is shakspeare's poems: 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. is this to be borne? hark ye! when lofty trees i see barren of leaves, which erst from heat did canopy the head, and summer's green all girded up in sheaves, borne on the bier with white and bristly head. he has left nothing to say about nothing or anything: for look at snails--you know what he says about snails--you know when he talks about "cockled snails"--well, in one of these sonnets, he says--the chap slips into--no! i lie! this is in the venus and adonis: the simile brought it to my mind. as the snail, whose tender horns being hit, shrinks back into his shelly cave with pain, and there all smothered up in shade doth sit, long after fearing to put forth again; so at his bloody view her eyes are fled, into the deep dark cabins of her head. he overwhelms a genuine lover of poesy with all manner of abuse, talking about-- "a poet's rage and stretched metre of an antique song." which, by the bye, will be a capital motto for my poem, won't it? he speaks too of "time's antique pen"--and "april's first-born flowers"--and "death's eternal cold."--by the whim-king! i'll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connection, and when i wrote it i wanted you--to give your vote, pro or con.-- crystalline brother of the belt of heaven, aquarius! to whom king jove hath given two liquid pulse-streams, 'stead of feather'd wings-- two fan-like fountains--thine illuminings for dian play: dissolve the frozen purity of air; let thy white shoulders, silvery and bare, show cold through wat'ry pinions: make more bright the star-queen's crescent on her marriage night: haste, haste away! ... i see there is an advertisement in the _chronicle_ to poets--he is so over-loaded with poems on the "late princess." i suppose you do not lack--send me a few--lend me thy hand to laugh a little--send me a little pullet-sperm, a few finch-eggs--and remember me to each of our card-playing club. when you die you will all be turned into dice, and be put in pawn with the devil: for cards, they crumple up like anything.... i rest your affectionate friend john keats. give my love to both houses--hinc atque illinc. xxiv.--to george and thomas keats. hampstead, december , . my dear brothers--i must crave your pardon for not having written ere this.... i saw kean return to the public in richard iii., and finely he did it, and, at the request of reynolds, i went to criticise his _duke_ in rich{d.}--the critique is in to-day's champion, which i send you with the examiner, in which you will find very proper lamentation on the obsoletion of christmas gambols and pastimes: but it was mixed up with so much egotism of that drivelling nature that pleasure is entirely lost. hone the publisher's trial, you must find very amusing, and as englishmen very encouraging: his _not guilty_ is a thing, which not to have been, would have dulled still more liberty's emblazoning--lord ellenborough has been paid in his own coin--wooler and hone have done us an essential service. i have had two very pleasant evenings with dilke yesterday and to-day, and am at this moment just come from him, and feel in the humour to go on with this, begun in the morning, and from which he came to fetch me. i spent friday evening with wells[ ] and went next morning to see _death on the pale horse_. it is a wonderful picture, when west's age is considered; but there is nothing to be intense upon, no women one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth--examine king lear, and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness--the picture is larger than christ rejected. i dined with haydon the sunday after you left, and had a very pleasant day, i dined too (for i have been out too much lately) with horace smith and met his two brothers with hill and kingston and one du bois, they only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment--these men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling a decanter. they talked of kean and his low company--would i were with that company instead of yours said i to myself! i know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet i am going to reynolds, on wednesday. brown and dilke walked with me and back from the christmas pantomime. i had not a dispute, but a disquisition, with dilke upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which shakspeare possessed so enormously--i mean _negative capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery,[ ] from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. this pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. shelley's poem[ ] is out and there are words about its being objected to, as much as queen mab was. poor shelley i think he has his quota of good qualities, in sooth la! write soon to your most sincere friend and affectionate brother john. xxv.--to george and thomas keats. featherstone buildings,[ ] monday [january , ]. my dear brothers--i ought to have written before, and you should have had a long letter last week, but i undertook the champion for reynolds, who is at exeter. i wrote two articles, one on the drury lane pantomime, the other on the covent garden new tragedy, which they have not put in;[ ] the one they have inserted is so badly punctuated that you perceive i am determined never to write more, without some care in that particular. wells tells me that you are licking your chops, tom, in expectation of my book coming out. i am sorry to say i have not begun my corrections yet: to-morrow i set out. i called on sawrey[ ] this morning. he did not seem to be at all put out at anything i said and the inquiries i made with regard to your spitting of blood, and moreover desired me to ask you to send him a correct account of all your sensations and symptoms concerning the palpitation and the spitting and the cough--if you have any. your last letter gave me a great pleasure, for i think the invalid is in a better spirit there along the edge; and as for george, i must immediately, now i think of it, correct a little misconception of a part of my last letter. the misses reynolds have never said one word against me about you, or by any means endeavoured to lessen you in my estimation. that is not what i referred to; but the manner and thoughts which i knew they internally had towards you, time will show. wells and severn dined with me yesterday. we had a very pleasant day. i pitched upon another bottle of claret, we enjoyed ourselves very much; were all very witty and full of rhymes. we played a concert from o'clock till --drank your healths, the hunts', and (_n.b._) seven peter pindars. i said on that day the only good thing i was ever guilty of. we were talking about stephens and the st gallery. i said i wondered that careful folks would go there, for although it was but a shilling, still you had to pay through the nose. i saw the peachey family in a box at drury one night. i have got such a curious[ ] ... or rather i had such, now i am in my own hand. i have had a great deal of pleasant time with rice lately, and am getting initiated into a little band. they call drinking deep dyin' scarlet. they call good wine a pretty tipple, and call getting a child knocking out an apple; stopping at a tavern they call hanging out. where do you sup? is where do you hang out? thursday i promised to dine with wordsworth, and the weather is so bad that i am undecided, for he lives at mortimer street. i had an invitation to meet him at kingston's,[ ] but not liking that place i sent my excuse. what i think of doing to-day is to dine in mortimer street (words{th}), and sup here in the feath{s} buildings, as mr. wells has invited me. on saturday, i called on wordsworth before he went to kingston's, and was surprised to find him with a stiff collar. i saw his spouse, and i think his daughter. i forget whether i had written my last before my sunday evening at haydon's--no, i did not, or i should have told you, tom, of a young man you met at paris, at scott's, ... ritchie. i think he is going to fezan, in africa; then to proceed if possible like mungo park. he was very polite to me, and inquired very particularly after you. then there was wordsworth, lamb, monkhouse, landseer, kingston, and your humble servant. lamb got tipsy and blew up kingston--proceeding so far as to take the candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft fellow he was.[ ] i astonished kingston at supper with a pertinacity in favour of drinking, keeping my two glasses at work in a knowing way. i have seen fanny twice lately--she inquired particularly after you and wants a co-partnership letter from you. she has been unwell, but is improving. i think she will be quick. mrs. abbey was saying that the keatses were ever indolent, that they would ever be so, and that it is born in them. well, whispered fanny to me, if it is born with us, how can we help it? she seems very anxious for a letter. as i asked her what i should get for her, she said a "medal of the princess." i called on haslam--we dined very snugly together. he sent me a hare last week, which i sent to mrs. dilke. brown is not come back. i and dilke are getting capital friends. he is going to take the champion. he has sent his farce to covent garden. i met bob harris[ ] on the steps at covent garden; we had a good deal of curious chat. he came out with his old humble opinion. the covent garden pantomime is a very nice one, but they have a middling harlequin, a bad pantaloon, a worse clown, and a shocking columbine, who is one of the miss dennets. i suppose you will see my critique on the new tragedy in the next week's champion. it is a shocking bad one. i have not seen hunt; he was out when i called. mrs. hunt looks as well as ever i saw her after her confinement. there is an article in the se'nnight examiner on godwin's mandeville, signed e. k.--i think it miss kent's--i will send it. there are fine subscriptions going on for hone. you ask me what degrees there are between scott's novels and those of smollett. they appear to me to be quite distinct in every particular, more especially in their aims. scott endeavours to throw so interesting and romantic a colouring into common and low characters as to give them a touch of the sublime. smollett on the contrary pulls down and levels what with other men would continue romance. the grand parts of scott are within the reach of more minds than the finest humours in humphrey clinker. i forget whether that fine thing of the serjeant is fielding or smollett, but it gives me more pleasure than the whole novel of the antiquary. you must remember what i mean. some one says to the serjeant: "that's a non-sequitur!"--"if you come to that," replies the serjeant, "you're another!"-- i see by wells's letter mr. abbey[ ] does not overstock you with money. you must write. i have not seen ... yet, but expect it on wednesday. i am afraid it is gone. severn tells me he has an order for some drawings for the emperor of russia. you must get well tom, and then i shall feel whole and genial as the winter air. give me as many letters as you like, and write to sawrey soon. i received a short letter from bailey about cripps, and one from haydon, ditto. haydon thinks he improved very much. mrs. wells desires particularly ... to tom and her respects to george, and i desire no better than to be ever your most affectionate brother john. _p.s._--i had not opened the champion before i found both my articles in it. i was at a dance at redhall's, and passed a pleasant time enough--drank deep, and won . at cutting for half guineas.... bailey was there and seemed to enjoy the evening. rice said he cared less about the hour than any one, and the proof is his dancing--he cares not for time, dancing as if he was deaf. old redhall not being used to give parties, had no idea of the quantity of wine that would be drank, and he actually put in readiness on the kitchen stairs eight dozen. every one inquires after you, and desires their remembrances to you. your brother john. xxvi.--to benjamin robert haydon. [hampstead,] saturday morn [january , ]. my dear haydon--i should have seen you ere this, but on account of my sister being in town: so that when i have sometimes made ten paces towards you, fanny has called me into the city; and the christmas holydays are your only time to see sisters, that is if they are so situated as mine. i will be with you early next week--to-night it should be, but we have a sort of a club every saturday evening--to-morrow, but i have on that day an insuperable engagement. cripps has been down to me, and appears sensible that a binding to you would be of the greatest advantage to him--if such a thing be done it cannot be before £ or £ are secured in subscriptions to him. i will write to bailey about it, give a copy of the subscribers' names to every one i know who is likely to get a £ for him. i will leave a copy at taylor and hessey's, rodwell and martin, and will ask kingston and co. to cash up. your friendship for me is now getting into its teens--and i feel the past. also every day older i get--the greater is my idea of your achievements in art: and i am convinced that there are three things to rejoice at in this age--the excursion, your pictures, and hazlitt's depth of taste. yours affectionately john keats. xxvii.--to john taylor. [hampstead,] saturday morning [january , ]. my dear taylor--several things have kept me from you lately:--first you had got into a little hell, which i was not anxious to reconnoitre-- secondly, i have made a vow not to call again without my first book: so you may expect to see me in four days. thirdly, i have been racketing too much, and do not feel over well. i have seen wordsworth frequently--dined with him last monday--reynolds, i suppose you have seen. just scribble me thus many lines, to let me know you are in the land of the living, and well. remember me to the fleet street household--and should you see any from percy street, give my kindest regards to them. your sincere friend john keats. xxviii.--to george and thomas keats. [hampstead,] tuesday [january , ]. my dear brothers--i am certain i think of having a letter to-morrow morning for i expected one so much this morning, having been in town two days, at the end of which my expectations began to get up a little. i found two on the table, one from bailey and one from haydon, i am quite perplexed in a world of doubts and fancies--there is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music--i don't mean to include bailey in this and so dismiss him from this with all the opprobrium he deserves--that is in so many words, he is one of the noblest men alive at the present day. in a note to haydon about a week ago (which i wrote with a full sense of what he had done, and how he had never manifested any little mean drawback in his value of me) i said if there were three things superior in the modern world, they were "the excursion," "haydon's pictures," and "hazlitt's depth of taste"--so i do believe--not thus speaking with any poor vanity that works of genius were the first things in this world. no! for that sort of probity and disinterestedness which such men as bailey possess, does hold and grasp the tiptop of any spiritual honours that can be paid to anything in this world--and moreover having this feeling at this present come over me in its full force, i sat down to write to you with a grateful heart, in that i had not a brother who did not feel and credit me for a deeper feeling and devotion for his uprightness, than for any marks of genius however splendid. i was speaking about doubts and fancies--i mean there has been a quarrel of a severe nature between haydon and reynolds and another ("the devil rides upon a fiddlestick") between hunt and haydon--the first grew from the sunday on which haydon invited some friends to meet wordsworth. reynolds never went, and never sent any notice about it, this offended haydon more than it ought to have done--he wrote a very sharp and high note to reynolds and then another in palliation--but which reynolds feels as an aggravation of the first--considering all things, haydon's frequent neglect of his appointments, etc. his notes were bad enough to put reynolds on the right side of the question--but then reynolds has no power of sufferance; no idea of having the thing against him; so he answered haydon in one of the most cutting letters i ever read; exposing to himself all his own weaknesses and going on to an excess, which whether it is just or no, is what i would fain have unsaid, the fact is, they are both in the right and both in the wrong. the quarrel with hunt i understand thus far. mrs. h. was in the habit of borrowing silver of haydon--the last time she did so, haydon asked her to return it at a certain time--she did not--haydon sent for it--hunt went to expostulate on the indelicacy, etc.--they got to words and parted for ever. all i hope is at some time to bring them together again.--lawk! molly there's been such doings--yesterday evening i made an appointment with wells to go to a private theatre, and it being in the neighbourhood of drury lane, and thinking we might be fatigued with sitting the whole evening in one dirty hole, i got the drury lane ticket, and therewith we divided the evening with a spice of richard iii---- [later, january or .] good lord! i began this letter nearly a week ago, what have i been doing since--i have been--i mean not been--sending last sunday's paper to you. i believe because it was not near me--for i cannot find it, and my conscience presses heavy on me for not sending it. you would have had one last thursday, but i was called away, and have been about somewhere ever since. where? what! well i rejoice almost that i have not heard from you because no news is good news. i cannot for the world recollect why i was called away, all i know is that there has been a dance at dilke's, and another at the london coffee house; to both of which i went. but i must tell you in another letter the circumstances thereof--for though a week should have passed since i wrote on the other side it quite appals me. i can only write in scraps and patches. brown is returned from hampstead. haydon has returned an answer in the same style--they are all dreadfully irritated against each other. on sunday i saw hunt and dined with haydon, met hazlitt and bewick there, and took haslam with me--forgot to speak about cripps though i broke my engagement to haslam's on purpose. mem.--haslam came to meet me, found me at breakfast, had the goodness to go with me my way--i have just finished the revision of my first book, and shall take it to taylor's to-morrow--intend to persevere--do not let me see many days pass without hearing from you. your most affectionate brother john. xxix.--to john taylor. [hampstead,] friday d [january ]. my dear taylor--i have spoken to haydon about the drawing. he would do it with all his art and heart too, if so i will it; however, he has written thus to me; but i must tell you, first, he intends painting a finished picture from the poem. thus he writes--"when i do anything for your poem it must be effectual--an honour to both of us: to hurry up a sketch for the season won't do. i think an engraving from your head, from a chalk drawing of mine, done with all my might, to which i would put my name, would answer taylor's idea better than the other. indeed, i am sure of it. this i will do, and this will be effectual, and as i have not done it for any other human being, it will have an effect." what think you of this? let me hear. i shall have my second book in readiness forthwith. yours most sincerely john keats. if reynolds calls tell him three lines will be acceptable, for i am squat at hampstead. xxx.--to george and thomas keats. [hampstead,] friday d january [ ]. my dear brothers--i was thinking what hindered me from writing so long, for i have so many things to say to you, and know not where to begin. it shall be upon a thing most interesting to you, my poem. well! i have given the first book to taylor; he seemed more than satisfied with it, and to my surprise proposed publishing it in quarto if haydon would make a drawing of some event therein, for a frontispiece. i called on haydon, he said he would do anything i liked, but said he would rather paint a finished picture, from it, which he seems eager to do; this in a year or two will be a glorious thing for us; and it will be, for haydon is struck with the st book. i left haydon and the next day received a letter from him, proposing to make, as he says, with all his might, a finished chalk sketch of my head, to be engraved in the first style and put at the head of my poem, saying at the same time he had never done the thing for any human being, and that it must have considerable effect as he will put his name to it--i begin to-day to copy my nd book--"thus far into the bowels of the land"--you shall hear whether it will be quarto or non quarto, picture or non picture. leigh hunt i showed my st 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 and from several hints i have had they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomise any trip or slip i may have made.--but who's afraid? ay! tom! demme if i am. i went last tuesday, an hour too late, to hazlitt's lecture on poetry, got there just as they were coming out, when all these pounced upon me. hazlitt, john hunt and son, wells, bewick, all the landseers, bob harris, aye and more--the landseers enquired after you particularly--i know not whether wordsworth has left town--but sunday i dined with hazlitt and haydon, also that i took haslam with me--i dined with brown lately. dilke having taken the champion theatricals was obliged to be in town--fanny has returned to walthamstow.--mr. abbey appeared very glum, the last time i went to see her, and said in an indirect way, that i had no business there--rice has been ill, but has been mending much lately-- i think a little change has taken place in my intellect lately--i cannot bear to be uninterested or unemployed, i, who for so long a time have been addicted to passiveness. nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers. as an instance of this--observe--i sat down yesterday to read king lear once again: the thing appeared to demand the prologue of a sonnet, i wrote it, and began to read--(i know you would like to see it.) on sitting down to king lear once again. o golden-tongued romance with serene lute! fair-plumed syren, queen of far-away! leave melodising on this wintry day, shut up thine olden volume and be mute. adieu! for once again the fierce dispute betwixt hell torment and impassion'd clay must i burn through; once more assay the bitter sweet of this shakspearian fruit. chief poet! and ye clouds of albion, begetters of our deep eternal theme, when i am through the old oak forest gone let me not wander in a barren dream, but, when i am consumed with the fire, give me new phoenix-wings to fly at my desire. so you see i am getting at it, with a sort of determination and strength, though verily i do not feel it at this moment--this is my fourth letter this morning, and i feel rather tired, and my head rather swimming--so i will leave it open till to-morrow's post.-- i am in the habit of taking my papers to dilke's and copying there; so i chat and proceed at the same time. i have been there at my work this evening, and the walk over the heath takes off all sleep, so i will even proceed with you. i left off short in my last just as i began an account of a private theatrical--well it was of the lowest order, all greasy and oily, insomuch that if they had lived in olden times, when signs were hung over the doors, the only appropriate one for that oily place would have been--a guttered candle. they played john bull, the review, and it was to conclude with bombastes furioso--i saw from a box the first act of john bull, then went to drury and did not return till it was over--when by wells's interest we got behind the scenes--there was not a yard wide all the way round for actors, scene-shifters, and interlopers to move in--for 'nota bene' the green room was under the stage, and there was i threatened over and over again to be turned out by the oily scene-shifters, there did i hear a little painted trollop own, very candidly, that she had failed in mary, with a "damn'd if she'd play a serious part again, as long as she lived," and at the same time she was habited as the quaker in the review.--there was a quarrel, and a fat good-natured looking girl in soldiers' clothes wished she had only been a man for tom's sake. one fellow began a song, but an unlucky finger-point from the gallery sent him off like a shot. one chap was dressed to kill for the king in bombastes, and he stood at the edge of the scene in the very sweat of anxiety to show himself, but alas the thing was not played. the sweetest morsel of the night moreover was, that the musicians began pegging and fagging away--at an overture--never did you see faces more in earnest, three times did they play it over, dropping all kinds of corrections and still did not the curtain go up. well then they went into a country dance, then into a region they well knew, into the old boonsome pothouse, and then to see how pompous o' the sudden they turned; how they looked about and chatted; how they did not care a damn; was a great treat---- i hope i have not tired you by this filling up of the dash in my last. constable the bookseller has offered reynolds ten guineas a sheet to write for his magazine--it is an edinburgh one, which blackwood's started up in opposition to. hunt said he was nearly sure that the 'cockney school' was written by scott[ ] so you are right tom!--there are no more little bits of news i can remember at present. i remain, my dear brothers, your very affectionate brother john. xxxi.--to benjamin bailey. [hampstead,] friday jan{y.} [ ]. my dear bailey--twelve days have pass'd since your last reached me.--what has gone through the myriads of human minds since the th? we talk of the immense number of books, the volumes ranged thousands by thousands--but perhaps more goes through the human intelligence in twelve days than ever was written.--_how has that unfortunate family lived through the twelve?_ one saying of yours i shall never forget--you may not recollect it--it being perhaps said when you were looking on the surface and seeming of humanity alone, without a thought of the past or the future--or the deeps of good and evil--you were at that moment estranged from speculation, and i think you have arguments ready for the man who would utter it to you--this is a formidable preface for a simple thing--merely you said, "_why should woman suffer?_" aye, why should she? "by heavens i'd coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas!" these things are, and he, who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of thought.--your tearing, my dear friend, a spiritless and gloomy letter up, to re-write to me, is what i shall never forget--it was to me a real thing--things have happened lately of great perplexity--you must have heard of them--reynolds and haydon retorting and recriminating--and parting for ever--the same thing has happened between haydon and hunt. it is unfortunate--men should bear with each other: there lives not the man who may not be cut up, aye lashed to pieces on his weakest side. the best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with circumstance. the sure way, bailey, is first to know a man's faults, and then be passive--if after that he insensibly draws you towards him then you have no power to break the link. before i felt interested in either reynolds or haydon, i was well read in their faults; yet, knowing them, i have been cementing gradually with both. i have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite--and to both must i of necessity cling, supported always by the hope that, when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully in their esteem, i may be able to bring them together. the time must come, because they have both hearts: and they will recollect the best parts of each other, when this gust is overblown.--i had a message from you through a letter to jane--i think, about cripps--there can be no idea of binding until a sufficient sum is sure for him--and even then the thing should be maturely considered by all his helpers--i shall try my luck upon as many fat purses as i can meet with.--cripps is improving very fast: i have the greater hopes of him because he is so slow in development. a man of great executing powers at , with a look and a speech almost stupid, is sure to do something. i have just looked through the second side of your letter--i feel a great content at it.--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_:-- on seeing a lock of milton's hair. chief of organic numbers! old scholar of the spheres! thy spirit never slumbers, but rolls about our ears for ever, and for ever! o what a mad endeavour worketh he, who to thy sacred and ennobled hearse would offer a burnt sacrifice of verse and melody. how heavenward thou soundest, live temple of sweet noise, and discord unconfoundest, giving delight new joys, and pleasure nobler pinions! o, where are thy dominions? lend thine ear to a young delian oath,--aye, by thy soul, by all that from thy mortal lips did roll, and by the kernel of thine earthly love, beauty, in things on earth, and things above, i swear! when every childish fashion has vanish'd from my rhyme, will i, gray-gone in passion, leave to an after-time, hymning and harmony of thee, and of thy works, and of thy life; but vain is now the burning and the strife, pangs are in vain, until i grow high-rife with old philosophy, and mad with glimpses of futurity! for many years my offering must be hush'd; when i do speak, i'll think upon this hour, because i feel my forehead hot and flush'd, even at the simplest vassal of thy power,-- a lock of thy bright hair,-- sudden it came, and i was startled, when i caught thy name coupled so unaware; yet, at the moment, temperate was my blood. i thought i had beheld it from the flood. this i did at hunt's at his request--perhaps i should have done something better alone and at home.--i have sent my first book to the press, and this afternoon shall begin preparing the second--my visit to you will be a great spur to quicken the proceeding.--i have not had your sermon returned--i long to make it the subject of a letter to you--what do they say at oxford? i trust you and gleig pass much fine time together. remember me to him and whitehead. my brother tom is getting stronger, but his spitting of blood continues. i sat down to read king lear yesterday, and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a sonnet preparatory thereto--in my next you shall have it.--there were some miserable reports of rice's health--i went, and lo! master jemmy had been to the play the night before, and was out at the time--he always comes on his legs like a cat. i have seen a good deal of wordsworth. hazlitt is lecturing on poetry at the surrey institution--i shall be there next tuesday. your most affectionate friend john keats. xxxii.--to john taylor. [hampstead, january , .] my dear taylor--these lines as they now stand about "happiness," have rung in my ears like "a chime a mending"--see here, "behold wherein lies happiness, peona? fold, etc." it appears to me the very contrary of blessed. i hope this will appear to you more eligible. "wherein lies happiness? in that which becks our ready minds to fellowship divine, a fellowship with essence till we shine full alchemised, and free of space--behold the clear religion of heaven--fold, etc." you must indulge me by putting this in, for setting aside the badness of the other, such a preface is necessary to the subject. 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 playing of different natures with joy and sorrow--do me this favour, and believe me your sincere friend j. keats. i hope your next work will be of a more general interest. i suppose you cogitate a little about it, now and then. xxxiii.--to john hamilton reynolds. hampstead, saturday [january , ]. my dear reynolds--i have parcelled out this day for letter writing--more resolved thereon because your letter will come as a refreshment and will have (sic parvis etc.) the same effect as a kiss in certain situations where people become over-generous. i have read this first sentence over, and think it savours rather; however an inward innocence is like a nested dove, as the old song says.... now i purposed to write to you a serious poetical letter, but i find that a maxim i met with the other day is a just one: "on cause míeux quand on ne dit pas _causons_." i was hindered, however, from my first intention by a mere muslin handkerchief very neatly pinned--but "hence, vain deluding," etc. yet i cannot write in prose; it is a sunshiny day and i cannot, so here goes,-- hence burgundy, claret, and port, away with old hock and madeira, too earthly ye are for my sport; there's a beverage brighter and clearer. instead of a pitiful rummer, my wine overbrims a whole summer; my bowl is the sky, and i drink at my eye, till i feel in the brain a delphian pain-- then follow, my caius! then follow: on the green of the hill we will drink our fill of golden sunshine, till our brains intertwine with the glory and grace of apollo! god of the meridian, and of the east and west, to thee my soul is flown, and my body is earthward press'd.-- it is an awful mission, a terrible division; and leaves a gulph austere to be fill'd with worldly fear. aye, when the soul is fled too high above our head, affrighted do we gaze after its airy maze, as doth a mother wild, when her young infant child is in an eagle's claws-- and is not this the cause of madness?--god of song, thou bearest me along through sights i scarce can bear: o let me, let me share with the hot lyre and thee, the staid philosophy. temper my lonely hours, and let me see thy bowers more unalarm'd! my dear reynolds, you must forgive all this ranting--but the fact is, i cannot write sense this morning--however you shall have some--i will copy out my last sonnet. when i have fears that i may cease to be before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, before high piled books in charactery, hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain-- when i behold, upon the night's starr'd face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that i may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when i feel, fair creature of an hour, that i shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the faery power of unreflecting love;--then on the shore of the wide world i stand alone, and think till love and fame to nothingness do sink. i must take a turn, and then write to teignmouth. remember me to all, not excepting yourself. your sincere friend john keats. xxxiv.--to john hamilton reynolds. hampstead, tuesday [february , ]. my dear reynolds--i thank you for your dish of filberts--would i could get a basket of them by way of dessert every day for the sum of twopence.[ ] would we were a sort of ethereal pigs, and turned loose to feed upon spiritual mast and acorns--which would be merely being a squirrel and feeding upon filberts, for what is a squirrel but an airy pig, or a filbert but a sort of archangelical acorn? about the nuts being worth cracking, all i can say is, that where there are a throng of delightful images ready drawn, simplicity is the only thing. the first is the best on account of the first line, and the "arrow, foil'd of its antler'd food," and moreover (and this is the only word or two i find fault with, the more because i have had so much reason to shun it as a quicksand) the last has "tender and true." we must cut this, and not be rattlesnaked into any more of the like. it may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that wordsworth, etc., should have their due from us. but, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist? every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. many a man can travel to the very bourne of heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing. sancho will invent a journey heavenward as well as anybody. we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself--but with its subject. how beautiful are the retired flowers!--how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, "admire me, i am a violet! dote upon me, i am a primrose!" modern poets differ from the elizabethans in this: each of the moderns like an elector of hanover governs his petty state and knows how many straws are swept daily from the causeways in all his dominions, and has a continual itching that all the housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the ancients were emperors of vast provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them. i will cut all this--i will have no more of 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? why should we be owls, when we can be eagles? why be teased with "nice-eyed wagtails," when we have in sight "the cherub contemplation"? why with wordsworth's "matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand," when we can have jacques "under an oak," etc.? the secret of the bough of wilding will run through your head faster than i can write it. old matthew spoke to him some years ago on some nothing, and because he happens in an evening walk to imagine the figure of the old man, he must stamp it down in black and white, and it is henceforth sacred. i don't mean to deny wordsworth's grandeur and hunt's merit, but i mean to say we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. let us have the old poets and robin hood. your letter and its sonnets gave me more pleasure than will the fourth book of childe harold and the whole of anybody's life and opinions. in return for your dish of filberts, i have gathered a few catkins, i hope they'll look pretty. to j. h. r. in answer to his robin hood sonnets. no! those days are gone away, and their hours are old and gray, and their minutes buried all under the down-trodden pall of the leaves of many years. many times have winter's shears, frozen north and chilling east, sounded tempests to the feast of the forest's whispering fleeces, since men paid no rent on leases. no! the bugle sounds no more, and the twanging bow no more; silent is the ivory shrill past the heath and up the hill; there is no mid-forest laugh, where lone echo gives the half to some wight amaz'd to hear jesting, deep in forest drear. on the fairest time of june you may go with sun or moon, or the seven stars to light you, or the polar ray to right you; but you never may behold little john or robin bold; never any of all the clan, thrumming on an empty can some old hunting ditty, while he doth his green way beguile to fair hostess merriment down beside the pasture trent, for he left the merry tale, messenger for spicy ale. gone the merry morris din, gone the song of gamelyn, gone the tough-belted outlaw idling in the "grenè shawe": all are gone away and past! and if robin _should_ be cast sudden from his turfed grave, and if marian _should_ have once again her forest days, she would weep, and he would craze: he would swear, for all his oaks, fall'n beneath the dock-yard strokes, have rotted on the briny seas; she would weep that her wild bees sang not to her--"strange that honey can't be got without hard money!" so it is! yet let us sing, honour to the old bow-string, honour to the bugle-horn, honour to the woods unshorn, honour to the lincoln green, honour to the archer keen, honour to tight little john, and the horse he rode upon: honour to bold robin hood, sleeping in the underwood! honour to maid marian, and to all the sherwood clan-- though their days have hurried by let us two a burden try. i hope you will like them--they are at least written in the spirit of outlawry. here are the mermaid lines, souls of poets dead and gone, what elysium have ye known, happy field, or mossy cavern, fairer than the mermaid tavern? have ye tippled drink more fine than mine host's canary wine? or are fruits of paradise sweeter than those dainty pies of venison? o generous food drest as though bold robin hood would with his maid marian, sup and bowse from horn and can. i have heard that, on a day, mine host's sign-board flew away, no body knew whither, till an astrologer's old quill to a sheepskin gave the story, said he saw you in your glory, underneath a new old-sign sipping beverage divine, and pledging with contented smack, the mermaid in the zodiac. souls of poets dead and gone, are the winds a sweeter home? richer is uncellar'd cavern, than the merry mermaid tavern?[ ] i will call on you at to-morrow, and we will trudge together, for it is not the thing to be a stranger in the land of harpsicols. i hope also to bring you my nd book. in the hope that these scribblings will be some amusement for you this evening, i remain, copying on the hill, your sincere friend and co-scribbler john keats. xxxv.--to john taylor. fleet street, thursday morn [february , ]. my dear taylor--i have finished copying my second book--but i want it for one day to overlook it. and moreover this day i have very particular employ in the affair of cripps--so i trespass on your indulgence, and take advantage of your good nature. you shall hear from me or see me soon. i will tell reynolds of your engagement to-morrow. yours unfeignedly john keats. xxxvi.--to george and thomas keats. hampstead, saturday night [february , ]. my dear brothers--when once a man delays a letter beyond the proper time, he delays it longer, for one or two reasons--first, because he must begin in a very common-place style, that is to say, with an excuse; and secondly things and circumstances become so jumbled in his mind, that he knows not what, or what not, he has said in his last--i shall visit you as soon as i have copied my poem all out, i am now much beforehand with the printer, they have done none yet, and i am half afraid they will let half the season by before the printing. i am determined they shall not trouble me when i have copied it all.--horace smith has lent me his manuscript called "nehemiah muggs, an exposure of the methodists"--perhaps i may send you a few extracts--hazlitt's last lecture was on thomson, cowper, and crabbe, he praised thomson and cowper but he gave crabbe an unmerciful licking--i think hunt's article of fazio--no it was not, but i saw fazio the first night, it hung rather heavily on me--i am in the high way of being introduced to a squad of people, peter pindar, mrs. opie, mrs. scott--mr. robinson a great friend of coleridge's called on me.[ ] richards tells me that my poems are known in the west country, and that he saw a very clever copy of verses, headed with a motto from my sonnet to george--honours rush so thickly upon me that i shall not be able to bear up against them. what think you--am i to be crowned in the capitol, am i to be made a mandarin--no! i am to be invited, mrs. hunt tells me, to a party at ollier's, to keep shakspeare's birthday--shakspeare would stare to see me there.[ ] the wednesday before last shelley, hunt and i wrote each a sonnet on the river nile, some day you shall read them all. i saw a sheet of endymion, and have all reason to suppose they will soon get it done, there shall be nothing wanting on my part. i have been writing at intervals many songs and sonnets, and i long to be at teignmouth, to read them over to you: however i think i had better wait till this book is off my mind; it will not be long first. reynolds has been writing two very capital articles, in the yellow dwarf, on popular preachers--all the talk here is about dr. croft the duke of devon etc. your most affectionate brother john. xxxvii.--to john hamilton reynolds. [hampstead, february , .] my dear reynolds--i had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner--let him on a certain day read a certain page of full poesy or distilled prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale--but when will it do so? never--when man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all "the two-and-thirty palaces." how happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent indolence! a doze upon a sofa does not hinder it, and a nap upon clover engenders ethereal finger-pointings--the prattle of a child gives it wings, and the converse of middle-age a strength to beat them--a strain of music conducts to "an odd angle of the isle," and when the leaves whisper it puts a girdle round the earth.--nor will this sparing touch of noble books be any irreverence to their writers--for perhaps the honors paid by man to man are trifles in comparison to the benefit done by great works to the "spirit and pulse of good" by their mere passive existence. memory should not be called knowledge--many have original minds who do not think it--they are led away by custom. now it appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel--the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine web of his soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean--full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his luxury. but the minds of mortals are so different and bent on such diverse journeys that it may at first appear impossible for any common taste and fellowship to exist between two or three under these suppositions. it is however quite the contrary. minds would leave each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in numberless points, and at last greet each other at the journey's end. an old man and a child would talk together and the old man be led on his path and the child left thinking. man should not dispute or assert, but whisper results to his neighbour, and thus by every germ of spirit sucking the sap from mould ethereal every human might become great, and humanity instead of being a wide heath of furze and briars, with here and there a remote oak or pine, would become a grand democracy of forest trees. it has been an old comparison for our urging on--the beehive--however it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the bee--for it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving than giving--no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. the flower, i doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the bee--its leaves blush deeper in the next spring--and who shall say between man and woman which is the most delighted? now it is more noble to sit like jove than to fly like mercury:--let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at. but let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye of apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit--sap will be given us for meat, and dew for drink. i was led into these thoughts, my dear reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of idleness. i have not read any books--the morning said i was right--i had no idea but of the morning, and the thrush said i was right--seeming to say, "o thou whose face hath felt the winter's wind, whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist, and the black elmtops 'mong the freezing stars: to thee the spring will be a harvest-time-- o thou, whose only book has been the light of supreme darkness which thou feddest on night after night, when phoebus was away, to thee the spring shall be a triple morn-- o fret not after knowledge--i have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. o fret not after knowledge--i have none, and yet the evening listens. he who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, and he's awake who thinks himself asleep." now i am sensible all this is a mere sophistication (however it may neighbour to any truths), to excuse my own indolence--so i will not deceive myself that man should be equal with jove--but think himself very well off as a sort of scullion-mercury or even a humble-bee. it is no matter whether i am right or wrong either one way or another, if there is sufficient to lift a little time from your shoulders-- your affectionate friend john keats. xxxviii.--to george and thomas keats. hampstead, saturday [february , ]. my dear brothers--i am extremely sorry to have given you so much uneasiness by not writing; however, you know good news is no news or vice versâ. i do not like to write a short letter to you, or you would have had one long before. the weather although boisterous to-day has been very much milder; and i think devonshire is not the last place to receive a temperate change. i have been abominably idle since you left, but have just turned over a new leaf, and used as a marker a letter of excuse to an invitation from horace smith. the occasion of my writing to-day is the enclosed letter--by postmark from miss w----[ ] does she expect you in town george? i received a letter the other day from haydon, in which he says, his essays on the elgin marbles are being translated into italian, the which he superintends. i did not mention that i had seen the british gallery, there are some nice things by stark, and bathsheba by wilkie, which is condemned. i could not bear alston's uriel. reynolds has been very ill for some time, confined to the house, and had leeches applied to his chest; when i saw him on wednesday he was much the same, and he is in the worst place for amendment, among the strife of women's tongues, in a hot and parch'd room: i wish he would move to butler's for a short time. the thrushes and blackbirds have been singing me into an idea that it was spring, and almost that leaves were on the trees. so that black clouds and boisterous winds seem to have mustered and collected in full divan, for the purpose of convincing me to the contrary. taylor says my poem shall be out in a month, i think he will be out before it.... the thrushes are singing now as if they would speak to the winds, because their big brother jack, the spring, was not far off. i am reading voltaire and gibbon, although i wrote to reynolds the other day to prove reading of no use; i have not seen hunt since, i am a good deal with dilke and brown, we are very thick; they are very kind to me, they are well. i don't think i could stop in hampstead but for their neighbourhood. i hear hazlitt's lectures regularly, his last was on gray, collins, young, etc., and he gave a very fine piece of discriminating criticism on swift, voltaire, and rabelais. i was very disappointed at his treatment of chatterton. i generally meet with many i know there. lord byron's th canto is expected out, and i heard somewhere, that walter scott has a new poem in readiness. i am sorry that wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry. yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher. i have not yet read shelley's poem, i do not suppose you have it yet, at the teignmouth libraries. these double letters must come rather heavy, i hope you have a moderate portion of cash, but don't fret at all, if you have not--lord! i intend to play at cut and run as well as falstaff, that is to say, before he got so lusty. i remain praying for your health my dear brothers your affectionate brother john. xxxix.--to john taylor. hampstead, february [ ]. my dear taylor--your alteration strikes me as being a great improvement--and now i will attend to the punctuations you speak of--the comma should be at _soberly_, and in the other passage, the comma should follow _quiet_. i am extremely indebted to you for this alteration, and also for your after admonitions. it is a sorry thing for me that any one should have to overcome prejudices in reading my verses--that affects me more than any hypercriticism on any particular passage--in endymion, i have most likely but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings--in poetry i have a few axioms, and you will see how far i am from their centre. st. i think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. d. its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. but it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it--and this leads me to another axiom--that if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.--however it may be with me, i cannot help looking into new countries with "o for a muse of fire to ascend!" if endymion serves me as a pioneer, perhaps i ought to be content--i have great reason to be content, for thank god i can read, and perhaps understand shakspeare to his depths; and i have i am sure many friends, who, if i fail, will attribute any change in my life and temper to humbleness rather than pride--to a cowering under the wings of great poets, rather than to a bitterness that i am not appreciated. i am anxious to get endymion printed that i may forget it and proceed. i have copied the rd book and begun the th. on running my eye over the proofs, i saw one mistake--i will notice it presently, and also any others, if there be any. there should be no comma in "the raft branch down sweeping from a tall ash-top." i have besides made one or two alterations, and also altered the thirteenth line p. to make sense of it, as you will see. i will take care the printer shall not trip up my heels. there should be no dash after dryope, in the line "dryope's lone lulling of her child." remember me to percy street. your sincere and obliged friend john keats. _p.s._--you shall have a short preface in good time. xl.--to messrs. taylor and hessey. [hampstead, march ?] my dear sirs--i am this morning making a general clearance of all lent books--all--i am afraid i do not return all--i must fog your memories about them--however with many thanks here are the remainder--which i am afraid are not worth so much now as they were six months ago--i mean the fashions may have changed-- yours truly john keats. xli.--to benjamin bailey. teignmouth, friday [march , ].[ ] my dear bailey--when a poor devil is drowning, it is said he comes thrice to the surface ere he makes his final sink--if however even at the third rise he can manage to catch hold of a piece of weed or rock he stands a fair chance, as i hope i do now, of being saved. i have sunk twice in our correspondence, have risen twice, and have been too idle, or something worse, to extricate myself. i have sunk the third time, and just now risen again at this two of the clock p.m., and saved myself from utter perdition by beginning this, all drenched as i am, and fresh from the water. and i would rather endure the present inconvenience of a wet jacket than you should keep a laced one in store for me. why did i not stop at oxford in my way? how can you ask such a question? why, did i not promise to do so? did i not in a letter to you make a promise to do so? then how can you be so unreasonable as to ask me why i did not? this is the thing--(for i have been rubbing up my invention--trying several sleights--i first polished a cold, felt it in my fingers, tried it on the table, but could not pocket it:--i tried chillblains, rheumatism, gout, tight boots,--nothing of that sort would do,--so this is, as i was going to say, the thing)--i had a letter from tom, saying how much better he had got, and thinking he had better stop--i went down to prevent his coming up. will not this do? turn it which way you like--it is selvaged all round. i have used it, these three last days, to keep out the abominable devonshire weather--by the by, you may say what you will of devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. the hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em--the primroses are out, but then you are in--the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them--the women like your london people in a sort of negative way--because the native men are the poorest creatures in england--because government never have thought it worth while to send a recruiting party among them. when i think of wordsworth's sonnet "vanguard of liberty! ye men of kent!" the degenerated race about me are pulvis ipecac. simplex--a strong dose. were i a corsair, i'd make a descent on the south coast of devon; if i did not run the chance of having cowardice imputed to me. as for the men, they'd run away into the methodist meeting-houses, and the women would be glad of it. had england been a large devonshire, we should not have won the battle of waterloo. there are knotted oaks--there are lusty rivulets? there are meadows such as are not--there are valleys of feminine[ ] climate--but there are no thews and sinews--moore's almanack is here a curiosity--arms, neck, and shoulders may at least be seen there, and the ladies read it as some out-of-the-way romance. such a quelling power have these thoughts over me that i fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. i fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an acrasian spell about them--i feel able to beat off the devonshire waves like soapfroth. i think it well for the honour of britain that julius cæsar did not first land in this county. a devonshirer standing on his native hills is not a distinct object--he does not show against the light--a wolf or two would dispossess him. i like, i love england. i like its living men--give me a long brown plain "for my morning,"[ ] so i may meet with some of edmund ironside's descendants. give me a barren mould, so i may meet with some shadowing of alfred in the shape of a gipsy, a huntsman or a shepherd. scenery is fine--but human nature is finer--the sward is richer for the tread of a real nervous english foot--the eagle's nest is finer, for the mountaineer has looked into it. are these facts or prejudices? whatever they be, for them i shall never be able to relish entirely any devonshire scenery--homer is fine, achilles is fine, diomed is fine, shakspeare is fine, hamlet is fine, lear is fine, but dwindled englishmen are not fine. where too the women are so passable, and have such english names, such as ophelia, cordelia etc. that they should have such paramours or rather imparamours--as for them, i cannot in thought help wishing, as did the cruel emperor, that they had but one head, and i might cut it off to deliver them from any horrible courtesy they may do their undeserving countrymen, i wonder i meet with no born monsters--o devonshire, last night i thought the moon had dwindled in heaven---- i have never had your sermon from wordsworth, but mr. dilke lent it me. you know my ideas about religion. i do not think myself more in the right than other people, and that nothing in this world is proveable. i wish i could enter into all your feelings on the subject, merely for one short minutes, and give you a page or two to your liking. i am sometimes so very sceptical as to think poetry itself a mere jack o' lantern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance. as tradesmen say everything is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer--being in itself a nothing. ethereal things may at least be thus real, divided under three heads--things real--things semireal--and nothings. things real, such as existences of sun moon and stars--and passages of shakspeare.--things semireal, such as love, the clouds etc., which require a greeting of the spirit to make them wholly exist--and nothings, which are made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit--which, by the by, stamp the burgundy mark on the bottles of our minds, insomuch as they are able to "_consecrate whate'er they look upon_." i have written a sonnet here of a somewhat collateral nature--so don't imagine it an "apropos des bottes"-- four seasons fill the measure of the year; there are four seasons in the mind of man: he hath his lusty spring, when fancy clear takes in all beauty with an easy span: he has his summer, when luxuriously he chews the honied cud of fair spring thoughts, till in his soul, dissolv'd, they come to be part of himself: he hath his autumn ports and havens of repose, when his tired wings are folded up, and he content to look[ ] on mists in idleness--to let fair things pass by unheeded as a threshold brook. he has his winter too of pale misfeature, or else he would forego his mortal nature. aye, this may be carried--but what am i talking of?--it is an old maxim of mine, and of course must be well known, that every point of thought is the centre of an intellectual world. the two uppermost thoughts in a man's mind are the two poles of his world--he revolves on them, and everything is southward or northward to him through their means.--we take but three steps from feathers to iron.--now, my dear fellow, i must once for all tell you i have not one idea of the truth of any of my speculations--i shall never be a reasoner, because i care not to be in the right, when retired from bickering and in a proper philosophical temper. so you must not stare if in any future letter, i endeavour to prove that apollo, as he had catgut strings to his lyre, used a cat's paw as a pecten--and further from said pecten's reiterated and continual teasing came the term _hen-pecked_. my brother tom desires to be remembered to you; he has just this moment had a spitting of blood, poor fellow--remember me to gleig and whitehead. your affectionate friend john keats. xlii.--to john hamilton reynolds. teignmouth, saturday [march , ]. dear reynolds--i escaped being blown over and blown under and trees and house being toppled on me.--i have since hearing of brown's accident had an aversion to a dose of parapet, and being also a lover of antiquities i would sooner have a harmless piece of herculaneum sent me quietly as a present than ever so modern a chimney-pot tumbled on to my head--being agog to see some devonshire, i would have taken a walk the first day, but the rain would not let me; and the second, but the rain would not let me; and the third, but the rain forbade it. ditto --ditto --ditto--so i made up my mind to stop indoors, and catch a sight flying between the showers: and, behold i saw a pretty valley--pretty cliffs, pretty brooks, pretty meadows, pretty trees, both standing as they were created, and blown down as they are uncreated--the green is beautiful, as they say, and pity it is that it is amphibious--_mais!_ but alas! the flowers here wait as naturally for the rain twice a day as the mussels do for the tide; so we look upon a brook in these parts as you look upon a splash in your country. there must be something to support this--aye, fog, hail, snow, rain, mist blanketing up three parts of the year. this devonshire is like lydia languish, very entertaining when it smiles, but cursedly subject to sympathetic moisture. you have the sensation of walking under one great lamplighter: and you can't go on the other side of the ladder to keep your frock clean, and cosset your superstition. buy a girdle--put a pebble in your mouth--loosen your braces--for i am going among scenery whence i intend to tip you the damosel radcliffe--i'll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you. i'll make a lodgment on your glacis by a row of pines, and storm your covered way with bramble bushes. i'll have at you with hip and haw small-shot, and cannonade you with shingles--i'll be witty upon salt-fish, and impede your cavalry with clotted cream. but ah coward! to talk at this rate to a sick man, or, i hope, to one that was sick--for i hope by this you stand on your right foot. if you are not--that's all,--i intend to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut sickness--a fellow to whom i have a complete aversion, and who strange to say is harboured and countenanced in several houses where i visit--he is sitting now quite impudent between me and tom--he insults me at poor jem rice's--and you have seated him before now between us at the theatre, when i thought he looked with a longing eye at poor kean. i shall say, once for all, to my friends generally and severally, cut that fellow, or i cut you-- i went to the theatre here the other night, which i forgot to tell george, and got insulted, which i ought to remember to forget to tell any body; for i did not fight, and as yet have had no redress--"lie thou there, sweetheart!"[ ] i wrote to bailey yesterday, obliged to speak in a high way, and a damme who's afraid--for i had owed him so long; however, he shall see i will be better in future. is he in town yet? i have directed to oxford as the better chance. i have copied my fourth book, and shall write the preface soon. i wish it was all done; for i want to forget it and make my mind free for something new--atkins the coachman, bartlett the surgeon, simmons the barber, and the girls over at the bonnet-shop, say we shall now have a month of seasonable weather--warm, witty, and full of invention--write to me and tell me that you are well or thereabouts, or by the holy beaucoeur, which i suppose is the virgin mary, or the repented magdalen (beautiful name, that magdalen), i'll take to my wings and fly away to anywhere but old or nova scotia--i wish i had a little innocent bit of metaphysic in my head, to criss-cross the letter: but you know a favourite tune is hardest to be remembered when one wants it most and you, i know, have long ere this taken it for granted that i never have any speculations without associating you in them, where they are of a pleasant nature, and you know enough of me to tell the places where i haunt most, so that if you think for five minutes after having read this, you will find it a long letter, and see written in the air above you, your most affectionate friend john keats. remember me to all. tom's remembrances to you. xliii.--to benjamin robert haydon. teignmouth, saturday morn [march , ]. my dear haydon--in sooth, i hope you are not too sanguine about that seal--in sooth i hope it is not brumidgeum--in double sooth i hope it is his--and in triple sooth i hope i shall have an impression.[ ] such a piece of intelligence came doubly welcome to me while in your own county and in your own hand--not but i have blown up the said county for its urinal qualifications--the six first days i was here it did nothing but rain; and at that time having to write to a friend i gave devonshire a good blowing up--it has been fine for almost three days, and i was coming round a bit; but to-day it rains again--with me the county is yet upon its good behaviour. i have enjoyed the most delightful walks these three fine days beautiful enough to make me content. here all the summer could i stay, for there's bishop's teign and king's teign and coomb at the clear teign head-- where close by the stream you may have your cream all spread upon barley bread. there's arch brook and there's larch brook both turning many a mill; and cooling the drouth of the salmon's mouth, and fattening his silver gill. there is wild wood, a mild hood to the sheep on the lea o' the down, where the golden furze, with its green, thin spurs, doth catch at the maiden's gown. there is newton marsh with its spear grass harsh-- a pleasant summer level where the maidens sweet of the market street, do meet in the dusk to revel. there's the barton rich with dyke and ditch and hedge for the thrush to live in and the hollow tree for the buzzing bee and a bank for the wasp to hive in. and o, and o the daisies blow and the primroses are waken'd, and the violets white sit in silver plight, and the green bud's as long as the spike end. then who would go into dark soho, and chatter with dack'd hair'd critics, when he can stay for the new-mown hay, and startle the dappled prickets? i know not if this rhyming fit has done anything--it will be safe with you if worthy to put among my lyrics. here's some doggrel for you--perhaps you would like a bit of b----hrell-- where be ye going, you devon maid? and what have you there in the basket? ye tight little fairy just fresh from the dairy, will ye give me some cream if i ask it? i love your meads, and i love your flowers, and i love your junkets mainly, but 'hind the door i love kissing more, o look not so disdainly. i love your hills, and i love your dales, and i love your flocks a-bleating-- but o, on the heather to lie together, with both our hearts a-beating! i'll put your basket all safe in a nook, your shawl i hang up on the willow, and we will sigh in the daisy's eye and kiss on a grass green pillow. how does the work go on? i should like to bring out my "dentatus"[ ] at the time your epic makes its appearance. i expect to have my mind soon clear for something new. tom has been much worse: but is now getting better--his remembrances to you. i think of seeing the dart and plymouth--but i don't know. it has as yet been a mystery to me how and where wordsworth went. i can't help thinking he has returned to his shell--with his beautiful wife and his enchanting sister. it is a great pity that people should by associating themselves with the finest things, spoil them. 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 damn'd music--hazlitt has damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the man?! he is your only good damner, and if ever i am damn'd--damn me if i shouldn't like him to damn me. it will not be long ere i see you, but i thought i would just give you a line out of devon. yours affectionately john keats. remember me to all we know. xliv.--to messrs. taylor and hessey. teignmouth, saturday morn [march , ]. my dear sirs--i had no idea of your getting on so fast--i thought of bringing my th book to town all in good time for you--especially after the late unfortunate chance. i did not however for my own sake delay finishing the copy which was done a few days after my arrival here. i send it off to-day, and will tell you in a postscript at what time to send for it from the bull and mouth or other inn. you will find the preface and dedication and the title page as i should wish it to stand--for a romance is a fine thing notwithstanding the circulating libraries. my respects to mrs. hessey and to percy street. yours very sincerely john keats. _p.s._--i have been advised to send it to you--you may expect it on monday--for i sent it by the postman to exeter at the same time with this letter. adieu! xlv.--to james rice. teignmouth, tuesday [march , ]. my dear rice--being in the midst of your favourite devon, i should not, by rights, pen one word but it should contain a vast portion of wit, wisdom and learning--for i have heard that milton ere he wrote his answer to salmasius came into these parts, and for one whole month, rolled himself for three whole hours (per day?), in a certain meadow hard by us--where the mark of his nose at equidistances is still shown. the exhibitor of the said meadow further saith, that, after these rollings, not a nettle sprang up in all the seven acres for seven years, and that from the said time, a new sort of plant was made from the whitethorn, of a thornless nature, very much used by the bucks of the present day to rap their boots withal. this account made me very naturally suppose that the nettles and thorns etherealised by the scholar's rotatory motion, and garnered in his head, thence flew after a process of fermentation against the luckless salmasius and occasioned his well-known and unhappy end. what a happy thing it would be if we could settle our thoughts and make our minds up on any matter in five minutes, and remain content--that is, build a sort of mental cottage of feelings, quiet and pleasant--to have a sort of philosophical back-garden, and cheerful holiday-keeping front one--but alas! this never can be: for as the material cottager knows there are such places as france and italy, and the andes and burning mountains, so the spiritual cottager has knowledge of the terra semi-incognita of things unearthly, and cannot for his life keep in the check-rein--or i should stop here quiet and comfortable in my theory of nettles. you will see, however, i am obliged to run wild being attracted by the load-stone concatenation. no sooner had i settled the knotty point of salmasius, than the devil put this whim into my head in the likeness of one of pythagoras's questionings--did milton do more good or harm in the world? he wrote, let me inform you (for i have it from a friend, who had it of ----,) he wrote lycidas, comus, paradise lost and other poems, with much delectable prose--he was moreover an active friend to man all his life, and has been since his death.--very good--but, my dear fellow, i must let you know that, as there is ever the same quantity of matter constituting this habitable globe--as the ocean notwithstanding the enormous changes and revolutions taking place in some or other of its demesnes--notwithstanding waterspouts whirlpools and mighty rivers emptying themselves into it--still is made up of the same bulk, nor ever varies the number of its atoms--and as a certain bulk of water was instituted at the creation--so very likely a certain portion of intellect was spun forth into the thin air, for the brains of man to prey upon it. you will see my drift without any unnecessary parenthesis. that which is contained in the pacific could not lie in the hollow of the caspian--that which was in milton's head could not find room in charles the second's--he like a moon attracted intellect to its flow--it has not ebbed yet, but has left the shore-pebbles all bare--i mean all bucks, authors of hengist, and castlereaghs of the present day; who without milton's gormandising might have been all wise men--now forasmuch as i was very predisposed to a country i had heard you speak so highly of, i took particular notice of everything during my journey, and have bought some folio asses' skins for memorandums. i have seen everything but the wind--and that, they say, becomes visible by taking a dose of acorns, or sleeping one night in a hog-trough, with your tail to the sow sow-west. some of the little bar-maids look'd at me as if i knew jem rice.... well, i can't tell! i hope you are showing poor reynolds the way to get well. send me a good account of him, and if i can, i'll send you one of tom--oh! for a day and all well! i went yesterday to dawlish fair. over the hill and over the dale, and over the bourne to dawlish, where ginger-bread wives have a scanty sale, and ginger-bread nuts are smallish, etc. etc. tom's remembrances and mine to you all. your sincere friend john keats. xlvi.--to john hamilton reynolds. [teignmouth, march , .] my dear reynolds--in hopes of cheering you through a minute or two, i was determined will he nill he to send you some lines, so you will excuse the unconnected subject and careless verse. you know, i am sure, claude's enchanted castle,[ ] and i wish you may be pleased with my remembrance of it. the rain is come on again--i think with me devonshire stands a very poor chance. i shall damn it up hill and down dale, if it keep up to the average of six fine days in three weeks. let me have better news of you. tom's remembrances to you. remember us to all. your affectionate friend, john keats. dear reynolds! as last night i lay in bed, there came before my eyes that wonted thread of shapes, and shadows, and remembrances, that every other minute vex and please: things all disjointed come from north and south,-- two witch's eyes above a cherub's mouth, voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon, and alexander with his nightcap on; old socrates a-tying his cravat, and hazlitt playing with miss edgeworth's cat; and junius brutus, pretty well so so, making the best of's way towards soho. few are there who escape these visitings,-- perhaps one or two whose lives have patent wings, and thro' whose curtains peeps no hellish nose, no wild-boar tushes, and no mermaid's toes; but flowers bursting out with lusty pride, and young Ã�olian harps personify'd; 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. you know the enchanted castle,--it doth stand upon a rock, on the border of a lake, nested in trees, which all do seem to shake from some old magic-like urganda's sword. o phoebus! that i had thy sacred word to show this castle, in fair dreaming wise, unto my friend, while sick and ill he lies! you know it well enough, where it doth seem a mossy place, a merlin's hall, a dream; you know the clear lake, and the little isles, the mountains blue, and cold near neighbour rills, all which elsewhere are but half animate; there do they look alive to love and hate, to smiles and frowns; they seem a lifted mound above some giant, pulsing underground. part of the building was a chosen see, built by a banish'd santon of chaldee; the other part, two thousand years from him, was built by cuthbert de saint aldebrim; then there's a little wing, far from the sun, built by a lapland witch turn'd maudlin nun; and many other juts of aged stone founded with many a mason-devil's groan. the doors all look as if they op'd themselves the windows as if latch'd by fays and elves, and from them comes a silver flash of light, as from the westward of a summer's night; or like a beauteous woman's large blue eyes gone mad thro' olden songs and poesies. see! what is coming from the distance dim! a golden galley all in silken trim! three rows of oars are lightening, moment whiles into the verd'rous bosoms of those isles; towards the shade, under the castle wall, it comes in silence,--now 'tis hidden all. the clarion sounds, and from a postern-gate an echo of sweet music doth create a fear in the poor herdsman, who doth bring his beasts to trouble the enchanted spring,-- he tells of the sweet music, and the spot, to all his friends, and they believe him not. o that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, would all their colours from the sunset take: from something of material sublime, rather than shadow our own soul's day-time in the dark void of night. for in the world we jostle,--but my flag is not unfurl'd on the admiral-staff,--and so philosophise i dare not yet! oh, never will the prize, high reason, and the love of good and ill, be my award! things cannot to the will be settled, but they tease us out of thought; or is it that imagination brought beyond its proper bound, yet still confin'd, lost in a sort of purgatory blind, cannot refer to any standard law of either earth or heaven? it is a flaw in happiness, to see beyond our bourn,-- it forces us in summer skies to mourn, it spoils the singing of the nightingale. dear reynolds! i have a mysterious tale, and cannot speak it: the first page i read upon a lampit rock of green sea-weed among the breakers; 'twas a quiet eve, the rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave an untumultuous fringe of silver foam along the flat brown sand; i was at home and should have been most happy,--but i saw too far into the sea, where every maw the greater on the less feeds evermore.-- but i saw too distinct into the core of an eternal fierce destruction, and so from happiness i far was gone. still am i sick of it, and tho' to-day, i've gather'd 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! you know i hate them well. you know i'd sooner be a clapping bell to some kamtschatkan missionary church, than with these horrid moods be left i' the lurch. xlvii.--to benjamin robert haydon. wednesday, [teignmouth, april , ]. my dear haydon--i am glad you were pleased with my nonsense, and if it so happen that the humour takes me when i have set down to prose to you i will not gainsay it. i should be (god forgive me) ready to swear because i cannot make use of your assistance in going through devon if i was not in my own mind determined to visit it thoroughly at some more favourable time of the year. but now tom (who is getting greatly better) is anxious to be in town--therefore i put off my threading the county. i purpose within a month to put my knapsack at my back and make a pedestrian tour through the north of england, and part of scotland--to make a sort of prologue to the life i intend to pursue--that is to write, to study and to see all europe at the lowest expence. i will clamber through the clouds and exist. i will get such an accumulation of stupendous recollections that as i walk through the suburbs of london i may not see them--i will stand upon mount blanc and remember this coming summer when i intend to straddle ben lomond--with my soul!--galligaskins are out of the question. i am nearer myself to hear your "christ" is being tinted into immortality. believe me haydon your picture is part of myself--i have ever been too sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in art (judging from poetry) ever to think i understood the emphasis of painting. the innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty. i know not your many havens of intenseness--nor ever can know them: but for this i hope not you achieve is lost upon me[ ]: for when a schoolboy the abstract idea i had of an heroic painting--was what i cannot describe. i saw it somewhat sideways, large, prominent, round, and colour'd with magnificence--somewhat like the feel i have of anthony and cleopatra. or of alcibiades leaning on his crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea. that passage in shakspeare is finer than this-- see how the surly warwick mans the wall. i like your consignment of corneille--that's the humour of it--they shall be called your posthumous works.[ ] i don't understand your bit of italian. i hope she will awake from her dream and flourish fair--my respects to her. 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--ladies' mares have but half an allowance of food. it rains here again, has been doing so for three days--however as i told you i'll take a trial in june, july, or august next year. i am afraid wordsworth went rather huff'd out of town--i am sorry for it--he cannot expect his fireside divan to be infallible--he cannot expect but that every man of worth is as proud as himself. o that he had not fit with a warrener[ ]--that is dined at kingston's. i shall be in town in about a fortnight and then we will have a day or so now and then before i set out on my northern expedition--we will have no more abominable rows--for they leave one in a fearful silence--having settled the methodists let us be rational--not upon compulsion--no--if it will out let it--but i will not play the bassoon any more deliberately. remember me to hazlitt, and bewick-- your affectionate friend, john keats. xlviii.--to john hamilton reynolds. thy. morng., [teignmouth, april , ]. my dear reynolds--since you all agree that the thing[ ] is bad, it must be so--though i am not aware there is anything like hunt in it (and if there is, it is my natural way, and i have something in common with hunt). look it over again, and examine into the motives, the seeds, from which any one sentence sprung--i have not the slightest feel of humility towards the public--or to anything in existence,--but the eternal being, the principle of beauty, and the memory of great men. when i am writing for myself for the mere sake of the moment's enjoyment, perhaps nature has its course with me--but a preface is written to the public; a thing i cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which i cannot address without feelings of hostility. if i write a preface in a supple or subdued style, it will not be in character with me as a public speaker--i would be subdued before my friends, and thank them for subduing me--but among multitudes of men--i have no feel of stooping, i hate the idea of humility to them. i never wrote one single line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought. forgive me for vexing you and making a trojan horse of such a trifle, both with respect to the matter in question, and myself--but it eases me to tell you--i could not live without the love of my friends--i would jump down Ã�tna for any great public good--but i hate a mawkish popularity. i cannot be subdued before them--my glory would be to daunt and dazzle the thousand jabberers about pictures and books--i see swarms of porcupines with their quills erect "like lime-twigs set to catch my wingëd book," and i would fright them away with a torch. you will say my preface is not much of a torch. it would have been too insulting "to begin from jove," and i could not set a golden head upon a thing of clay. if there is any fault in the preface it is not affectation, but an undersong of disrespect to the public--if i write another preface it must be done without a thought of those people--i will think about it. if it should not reach you in four or five days, tell taylor to publish it without a preface, and let the dedication simply stand--"inscribed to the memory of thomas chatterton." i had resolved last night to write to you this morning--i wish it had been about something else--something to greet you towards the close of your long illness. i have had one or two intimations of your going to hampstead for a space; and i regret to see your confounded rheumatism keeps you in little britain where, i am sure the air is too confined. devonshire continues rainy. as the drops beat against the window, they give me the same sensation as a quart of cold water offered to revive a half-drowned devil--no feel of the clouds dropping fatness; but as if the roots of the earth were rotten, cold, and drenched. i have not been able to go to kent's cave at babbicombe--however on one very beautiful day i had a fine clamber over the rocks all along as far as that place. i shall be in town in about ten days--we go by way of bath on purpose to call on bailey. i hope soon to be writing to you about the things of the north, purposing to wayfare all over those parts. i have settled my accoutrements in my own mind, and will go to gorge wonders. however, we'll have some days together before i set out-- i have many reasons 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 economise shoe-leather. i'll have leather buttons and belt; and, if brown holds his mind, over the hills we go. if my books will help me to it, then will i take all europe in turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. tom is getting better, he hopes you may meet him at the top o' the hill. my love to your nurses. i am ever your affectionate friend john keats. xlix.--to john hamilton reynolds. [teignmouth,] friday [april , ]. my dear reynolds--i am anxious you should find this preface tolerable. if there is an affectation in it 'tis natural to me. do let the printer's devil cook it, and let me be as "the casing air." you are too good in this matter--were i in your state, i am certain i should have no thought but of discontent and illness--i might though be taught patience: i had an idea of giving no preface; however, don't you think this had better go? o, let it--one should not be too timid--of committing faults. the climate here weighs us down completely; tom is quite low-spirited. it is impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches. who would live in a region of mists, game laws, indemnity bills, etc., when there is such a place as italy? it is said this england from its clime produces a spleen, able to engender the finest sentiments, and cover the whole face of the isle with green--so it ought, i'm sure.--i should still like the dedication simply, as i said in my last. i wanted to send you a few songs written in your favorite devon--it cannot be--rain! rain! rain! i am going this morning to take a facsimile of a letter of nelson's, very much to his honour--you will be greatly pleased when you see it--in about a week. what a spite it is one cannot get out--the little way i went yesterday, i found a lane banked on each side with store of primroses, while the earlier bushes are beginning to leaf. i shall hear a good account of you soon. your affectionate friend john keats. my love to all and remember me to taylor. l.--to john taylor. teignmouth, friday [april , ]. my dear taylor--i think i did wrong to leave to you all the trouble of endymion--but i could not help it then--another time i shall be more bent to all sorts of troubles and disagreeables. young men for some time have an idea that such a thing as happiness is to be had, and therefore are extremely impatient under any unpleasant restraining. in time however, of such stuff is the world about them, they know better, and instead of striving from uneasiness, greet it as an habitual sensation, a pannier which is to weigh upon them through life--and in proportion to my disgust at the task is my sense of your kindness and anxiety. the book pleased me much. it is very free from faults: and, although there are one or two words i should wish replaced, i see in many places an improvement greatly to the purpose. i think those speeches which are related--those parts where the speaker repeats a speech, such as glaucus's repetition of circe's words, should have inverted commas to every line. in this there is a little confusion.--if we divide the speeches into _identical_ and _related_; and to the former put merely one inverted comma at the beginning and another at the end; and to the latter inverted commas before every line, the book will be better understood at the st glance. look at pages , , you will find in the d line the beginning of a related speech marked thus "ah! art awake--" while, at the same time, in the next page the continuation of the _identical_ speech is marked in the same manner, "young man of latmos--" you will find on the other side all the parts which should have inverted commas to every line. i was proposing to travel over the north this summer. there is but one thing to prevent me.--i know nothing--i have read nothing--and i mean to follow solomon's directions, "get learning--get understanding." i find earlier days are gone by--i find that i can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. i find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world--some do it with their society--some with their wit--some with their benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good-humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great nature--there is but one way for me. the road lies through application, study, and thought.--i will pursue it; and for that end, purpose retiring for some years. i have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious, and a love for philosophy,--were i calculated for the former, i should be glad. but as i am not, i shall turn all my soul to the latter.--my brother tom is getting better, and i hope i shall see both him and reynolds better before i retire from the world. i shall see you soon, and have some talk about what books i shall take with me. your very sincere friend john keats. pray remember me to hessey woodhouse and percy street. li.--to john hamilton reynolds. teignmouth, april , . my dear reynolds--it is an awful while since you have heard from me--i hope i may not be punished, when i see you well, and so anxious as you always are for me, with the remembrance of my so seldom writing when you were so horribly confined. the most unhappy hours in our lives are those in which we recollect times past to our own blushing--if we are immortal that must be the hell. if i must be immortal, i hope it will be after having taken a little of "that watery labyrinth" in order to forget some of my school-boy days and others since those. i have heard from george at different times how slowly you were recovering--it is a tedious thing--but all medical men will tell you how far a very gradual amendment is preferable; you will be strong after this, never fear. we are here still enveloped in clouds--i lay awake last night listening to the rain with a sense of being drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat. there is a continual courtesy between the heavens and the earth. the heavens rain down their unwelcomeness, and the earth sends it up again to be returned to-morrow. tom has taken a fancy to a physician here, dr. turton, and i think is getting better--therefore i shall perhaps remain here some months. i have written to george for some books--shall learn greek, and very likely italian--and in other ways prepare myself to ask hazlitt in about a year's time the best metaphysical road i can take. for although i take poetry to be chief, yet there is something else wanting to one who passes his life among books and thoughts on books--i long to feast upon old homer as we have upon shakspeare, and as i have lately upon milton. if you understood greek, and would read me passages, now and then, explaining their meaning, 'twould be, from its mistiness, perhaps, a greater luxury than reading the thing one's self. i shall be happy when i can do the same for you. i have written for my folio shakspeare, in which there are the first few stanzas of my "pot of basil." i have the rest here finished, and will copy the whole out fair shortly, and george will bring it you--the compliment is paid by us to boccace, whether we publish or no: so there is content in this world--_mine_ is short--you must be deliberate about yours: you must not think of it till many months after you are quite well:--then put your passion to it, and i shall be bound up with you in the shadows of mind, as we are in our matters of human life. perhaps a stanza or two will not be too foreign to your sickness. were they unhappy then?--it cannot be-- too many tears for lovers have been shed, too many sighs give we to them in fee, too much of pity after they are dead, too many doleful stories do we see, whose matter in bright gold were best be read; except in such a page where theseus' spouse over the pathless waves towards him bows. but, for the general award of love the little sweet doth kill much bitterness; though dido silent is in under-grove, and isabella's was a great distress, though young lorenzo in warm indian clove was not embalm'd, this truth is not the less-- even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers, know there is richest juice in poison-flowers. * * * * * she wept alone for pleasures not to be; sorely she wept until the night came on, and then, instead of love, o misery! she brooded o'er the luxury alone: what might have been too plainly did she see,[ ] and to the silence made a gentle moan, spreading her perfect arms upon the air, and on her couch low murmuring "where? o where?" i heard from rice this morning--very witty--and have just written to bailey. don't you think i am brushing up in the letter way? and being in for it, you shall hear again from me very shortly:--if you will promise not to put hand to paper for me until you can do it with a tolerable ease of health--except it be a line or two. give my love to your mother and sisters. remember me to the butlers--not forgetting sarah. your affectionate friend john keats. lii.--to john hamilton reynolds. teignmouth, may d [ ]. my dear reynolds--what i complain of is that i have been in so uneasy a state of mind as not to be fit to write to an invalid. i cannot write to any length under a disguised feeling. i should have loaded you with an addition of gloom, which i am sure you do not want. i am now thank god in a humour to give you a good groat's worth--for tom, after a night without a wink of sleep, and over-burthened with fever, has got up after a refreshing day-sleep and is better than he has been for a long time; and you i trust have been again round the common without any effect but refreshment. as to the matter i hope i can say with sir andrew[ ] "i have matter enough in my head" in your favour--and now, in the second place, for i reckon that i have finished my imprimis, i am glad you blow up the weather--all through your letter there is a leaning towards a climate-curse, and you know what a delicate satisfaction there is in having a vexation anathematised: one would think there has been growing up for these last four thousand years, a grand-child scion of the old forbidden tree, and that some modern eve had just violated it; and that there was come with double charge "notus and afer, black with thundrous clouds from serraliona--" i shall breathe worsted stockings[ ] sooner than i thought for--tom wants to be in town--we will have some such days upon the heath like that of last summer--and why not with the same book? or what say you to a black letter chaucer, printed in : aye i've got one huzza! i shall have it bound en gothique--a nice sombre binding--it will go a little way to unmodernise. and also i see no reason, because i have been away this last month, why i should not have a peep at your spenserian--notwithstanding you speak of your office, in my thought a little too early, for i do not see why a mind like yours is not capable of harbouring and digesting the whole mystery of law as easily as parson hugh does pippins, which did not hinder him from his poetic canary.[ ] were i to study physic or rather medicine again, i feel it would not make the least difference in my poetry; when the mind is in its infancy a bias is in reality a bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a bias becomes no bias. every department of knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole--i am so convinced of this that i am glad at not having given away my medical books, which i shall again look over to keep alive the little i know thitherwards; and moreover intend through you and rice to become a sort of pip-civilian. an extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people--it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery, a thing which i begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your letter. the difference of high sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again, without wings, and with all horror of a bare-shouldered creature--in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. this is running one's rigs on the score of abstracted benefit--when we come to human life and the affections, it is impossible to know how a parallel of breast and head can be drawn (you will forgive me for thus privately treading out of my depth, and take it for treading as school-boys tread the water); it is impossible to know how far knowledge will console us for the death of a friend, and the ill "that flesh is heir to." with respect to the affections and poetry you must know by a sympathy my thoughts that way, and i daresay these few lines will be but a ratification: i wrote them on mayday--and intend to finish the ode all in good time-- mother of hermes! and still youthful maia! may i sing to thee as thou wast hymned on the shores of baiæ? or may i woo thee in earlier sicilian? or thy smiles seek as they once were sought, in grecian isles, by bards who died content on pleasant sward, leaving great verse unto a little clan? o, give me their old vigour, and unheard save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven and few ears, rounded by thee, my song should die away content as theirs, rich in the simple worship of a day.-- you may perhaps be anxious to know for fact to what sentence in your letter i allude. you say, "i fear there is little chance of anything else in this life"--you seem by that to have been going through with a more painful and acute zest the same labyrinth that i have--i have come to the same conclusion thus far. my branchings out therefrom have been numerous: one of them is the consideration of wordsworth's genius and as a help, in the manner of gold being the meridian line of worldly wealth, how he differs from milton. and here i have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether milton's apparently less anxiety for humanity proceeds from his seeing further or not than wordsworth: and whether wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. in regard to his genius alone--we find what he says true as far as we have experienced, and we can judge no further but by larger experience--for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. we read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.--i know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when i say that now i shall relish hamlet more than i ever have done--or, better--you are sensible no man can set down venery as a bestial or joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophising on it would be mere wording. until we are sick, we understand not; in fine, as byron says, "knowledge is sorrow"; and i go on to say that "sorrow is wisdom"--and further for aught we can know for certainty "wisdom is folly"--so you see how i have run away from wordsworth and milton, and shall still run away from what was in my head, to observe, that some kind of letters are good squares, others handsome ovals, and other some orbicular, others spheroid--and why should not there be another species with two rough edges like a rat-trap? i hope you will find all my long letters of that species, and all will be well; for by merely touching the spring delicately and ethereally, the rough-edged will fly immediately into a proper compactness; and thus you may make a good wholesome loaf, with your own leaven in it, of my fragments--if you cannot find this said rat-trap sufficiently tractable, alas for me, it being an impossibility in grain for my ink to stain otherwise: if i scribble long letters i must play my vagaries--i must be too heavy, or too light, for whole pages--i must be quaint and free of tropes and figures--i must play my draughts as i please, and for my advantage and your erudition, crown a white with a black, or a black with a white, and move into black or white, far and near as i please--i must go from hazlitt to patmore, and make wordsworth and coleman play at leap-frog, or keep one of them down a whole half-holiday at fly-the-garter--"from gray to gay, from little to shakspeare." also as a long cause requires two or more sittings of the court, so a long letter will require two or more sittings of the breech, wherefore i shall resume after dinner-- have you not seen a gull, an orc, a sea-mew, or anything to bring this line to a proper length, and also fill up this clear part; that like the gull i may _dip_[ ]--i hope, not out of sight--and also, like a gull, i hope to be lucky in a good-sized fish--this crossing a letter is not without its association--for chequer-work leads us naturally to a milkmaid, a milkmaid to hogarth, hogarth to shakspeare--shakspeare to hazlitt--hazlitt to shakspeare--and thus by merely pulling an apron-string we set a pretty peal of chimes at work--let them chime on while, with your patience, i will return to wordsworth--whether or no he has an extended vision or a circumscribed grandeur--whether he is an eagle in his nest or on the wing--and to be more explicit and to show you how tall i stand by the giant, i will put down a simile of human life as far as i now perceive it; that is, to the point to which i say we both have arrived at--well--i compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which i can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me--the first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think--we remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle within us--we no sooner get into the second chamber, which i shall call the chamber of maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight: however among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of man--of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression--whereby this chamber of maiden thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages--we see not the balance of good and evil--we are in a mist--we are now in that state--we feel the "burden of the mystery." to this point was wordsworth come, as far as i can conceive, when he wrote 'tintern abbey,' and it seems to me that his genius is explorative of those dark passages. now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them--he is a genius and superior to us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light in them--here i must think wordsworth is deeper than milton, though i think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind--from the paradise lost and the other works of milton, i hope it is not too presuming, even between ourselves, to say, that his philosophy, human and divine, may be tolerably understood by one not much advanced in years. in his time, englishmen were just emancipated from a great superstition, and men had got hold of certain points and resting-places in reasoning which were too newly born to be doubted, and too much opposed by the mass of europe not to be thought ethereal and authentically divine--who could gainsay his ideas on virtue, vice, and chastity in comus, just at the time of the dismissal of a hundred disgraces? who would not rest satisfied with his hintings at good and evil in the paradise lost, when just free from the inquisition and burning in smithfield? the reformation produced such immediate and great benefits, that protestantism was considered under the immediate eye of heaven, and its own remaining dogmas and superstitions then, as it were, regenerated, constituted those resting-places and seeming sure points of reasoning--from that i have mentioned, milton, whatever he may have thought in the sequel, appears to have been content with these by his writings--he did not think into the human heart as wordsworth has done--yet milton as a philosopher had sure as great powers as wordsworth--what is then to be inferred? o many things--it proves there is really a grand march of intellect,--it proves that a mighty providence subdues the mightiest minds to the service of the time being, whether it be in human knowledge or religion. i have often pitied a tutor who has to hear "nom. musa" so often dinn'd into his ears--i hope you may not have the same pain in this scribbling--i may have read these things before, but i never had even a thus dim perception of them; and moreover i like to say my lesson to one who will endure my tediousness for my own sake--after all there is certainly something real in the world--moore's present to hazlitt is real--i like that moore, and am glad i saw him at the theatre just before i left town. tom has spit a _leetle_ blood this afternoon, and that is rather a damper--but i know--the truth is there is something real in the world. your third chamber of life shall be a lucky and a gentle one--stored with the wine of love--and the bread of friendship--when you see george if he should not have received a letter from me tell him he will find one at home most likely--tell bailey i hope soon to see him--remember me to all. the leaves have been out here for mony a day--i have written to george for the first stanzas of my isabel--i shall have them soon, and will copy the whole out for you. your affectionate friend john keats. liii.--to benjamin bailey. hampstead, thursday [may , ]. my dear bailey--i should have answered your letter on the moment, if i could have said yes to your invitation. what hinders me is insuperable: i will tell it at a little length. you know my brother george has been out of employ for some time: it has weighed very much upon him, and driven him to scheme and turn over things in his mind. the result has been his resolution to emigrate to the back settlements of america, become farmer and work with his own hands, after purchasing hundred acres of the american government. this for many reasons has met with my entire consent--and the chief one is this; he is of too independent and liberal a mind to get on in trade in this country, in which a generous man with a scanty resource must be ruined. i would sooner he should till the ground than bow to a customer. there is no choice with him: he could not bring himself to the latter. i would not consent to his going alone;--no--but that objection is done away with: he will marry before he sets sail a young lady he has known for several years, of a nature liberal and high-spirited enough to follow him to the banks of the mississippi. he will set off in a month or six weeks, and you will see how i should wish to pass that time with him.--and then i must set out on a journey of my own. brown and i are going a pedestrian tour through the north of england and scotland as far as john o' grot's. i have this morning such a lethargy that i cannot write. the reason of my delaying is oftentimes from this feeling,--i wait for a proper temper. now you ask for an immediate answer, i do not like to wait even till to-morrow. however, i am now so depressed that i have not an idea to put to paper--my hand feels like lead--and yet it is an unpleasant numbness; it does not take away the pain of existence. i don't know what to write. monday [june ]. you see how i have delayed; and even now i have but a confused idea of what i should be about. my intellect must be in a degenerating state--it must be--for when i should be writing about--god knows what--i am troubling you with moods of my own mind, or rather body, for mind there is none. i am in that temper that if i were under water i would scarcely kick to come up to the top--i know very well 'tis all nonsense--in a short time i hope i shall be in a temper to feel sensibly your mention of my book. in vain have i waited till monday to have any interest in that or anything else. i feel no spur at my brother's going to america, and am almost stony-hearted about his wedding. all this will blow over--all i am sorry for is having to write to you in such a time--but i cannot force my letters in a hotbed. i could not feel comfortable in making sentences for you. i am your debtor--i must ever remain so--nor do i wish to be clear of any rational debt: there is a comfort in throwing oneself on the charity of one's friends--'tis like the albatross sleeping on its wings. i will be to you wine in the cellar, and the more modestly, or rather, indolently, i retire into the backward bin, the more falerne will i be at the drinking. there is one thing i must mention--my brother talks of sailing in a fortnight--if so i will most probably be with you a week before i set out for scotland. the middle of your first page should be sufficient to rouse me. what i said is true, and i have dreamt of your mention of it, and my not answering it has weighed on me since. if i come, i will bring your letter, and hear more fully your sentiments on one or two points. i will call about the lectures at taylor's, and at little britain, to-morrow. yesterday i dined with hazlitt, barnes, and wilkie, at haydon's. the topic was the duke of wellington--very amusingly pro-and-con'd. reynolds has been getting much better; and rice may begin to crow, for he got a little so-so at a party of his, and was none the worse for it the next morning. i hope i shall soon see you, for we must have many new thoughts and feelings to analyse, and to discover whether a little more knowledge has not made us more ignorant. yours affectionately john keats. liv.--to benjamin bailey. london [june , ]. my dear bailey--i have been very much gratified and very much hurt by your letters in the oxford paper:[ ] because independent of that unlawful and mortal feeling of pleasure at praise, there is a glory in enthusiasm; and because the world is malignant enough to chuckle at the most honourable simplicity. yes, on my soul, my dear bailey, you are too simple for the world--and that idea makes me sick of it. how is it that by extreme opposites we have, as it were, got discontented nerves? you have all your life (i think so) believed everybody. i have suspected everybody. and, although you have been so deceived, you make a simple appeal--the world has something else to do, and i am glad of it--were it in my choice, i would reject a petrarchal coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. i should not by rights speak in this tone to you for it is an incendiary spirit that would do so. yet i am not old enough or magnanimous enough to annihilate self--and it would perhaps be paying you an ill compliment. i was in hopes some little time back to be able to relieve your dulness by my spirits--to point out things in the world worth your enjoyment--and now i am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. perhaps if my affairs were in a different state, i should not have written the above--you shall judge: i have two brothers; one is driven, by the "burden of society," to america; the other with an exquisite love of life, is in a lingering state--my love for my brothers, from the early loss of our parents, and even from earlier misfortunes,[ ] has grown into an affection "passing the love of women." i have been ill-tempered with them--i have vexed them--but the thought of them has always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon me. i have a sister too, and may not follow them either to america or to the grave. life must be undergone, and i certainly derive some consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it ceases. i have heard some hints of your retiring to scotland--i should like to know your feeling on it--it seems rather remote. perhaps gleig will have a duty near you. i am not certain whether i shall be able to go any journey, on account of my brother tom, and a little indisposition of my own. if i do not you shall see me soon, if _no_ on my return or i'll quarter myself on you next winter. i had known my sister-in-law some time before she was my sister, and was very fond of her. i like her better and better. she is the most disinterested woman i ever knew--that is to say, she goes beyond degree in it. to see an entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world--it depends upon a thousand circumstances--on my word it is extraordinary. women must want imagination, and they may thank god for it; and so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of crime. it puzzles me, and i have no sort of logic to comfort me--i shall think it over. i am not at home, and your letter being there i cannot look it over to answer any particular--only i must say i feel that passage of dante. if i take any book with me it shall be those minute volumes of carey, for they will go into the aptest corner. reynolds is getting, i may say, robust, his illness has been of service to him--like every one just recovered, he is high-spirited--i hear also good accounts of rice. with respect to domestic literature, the edinburgh magazine, in another blow-up against hunt, calls me "the amiable mister keats"--and i have more than a laurel from the quarterly reviewers for they have smothered me in "foliage." i want to read you my "pot of basil"--if you go to scotland, i should much like to read it there to you, among the snows of next winter. my brothers' remembrances to you. your affectionate friend john keats. lv.--to john taylor. [hampstead,] sunday evening [june , ]. my dear taylor--i am sorry i have not had time to call and wish you health till my return--really i have been hard run these last three days--however, au revoir, god keep us all well! i start to-morrow morning. my brother tom will i am afraid be lonely. i can scarce ask a loan of books for him, since i still keep those you lent me a year ago. if i am overweening, you will i know be indulgent. therefore when you shall write, do send him some you think will be most amusing--he will be careful in returning them. let him have one of my books bound. i am ashamed to catalogue these messages. there is but one more, which ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. i promised mrs. reynolds one of my books bound. as i cannot write in it let the opposite[ ] be pasted in 'prythee. remember me to percy st.--tell hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged on a history piece to his own content--and tell dewint i shall become a disputant on the landscape--bow for me very genteelly to mrs. d. or she will not admit your diploma. remember me to hessey, saying i hope he'll _cary_ his point. i would not forget woodhouse. adieu! your sincere friend john o' grots. lvi.--to thomas keats. keswick, june th [ ]. my dear tom--i cannot make my journal as distinct and actual as i could wish, from having been engaged in writing to george, and therefore i must tell you without circumstance that we proceeded from ambleside to rydal, saw the waterfalls there, and called on wordsworth, who was not at home, nor was any one of his family. i wrote a note and left it on the mantel-piece. thence on we came to the foot of helvellyn, where we slept, but could not ascend it for the mist. i must mention that from rydal we passed thirlswater, and a fine pass in the mountains--from helvellyn we came to keswick on derwent water. the approach to derwent water surpassed windermere--it is richly wooded, and shut in with rich-toned mountains. from helvellyn to keswick was eight miles to breakfast, after which we took a complete circuit of the lake, going about ten miles, and seeing on our way the fall of lowdore. i had an easy climb among the streams, about the fragments of rocks and should have got i think to the summit, but unfortunately i was damped by slipping one leg into a squashy hole. there is no great body of water, but the accompaniment is delightful; for it oozes out from a cleft in perpendicular rocks, all fledged with ash and other beautiful trees.[ ] it is a strange thing how they got there. at the south end of the lake, the mountains of borrowdale are perhaps as fine as anything we have seen. on our return from this circuit, we ordered dinner, and set forth about a mile and a half on the penrith road, to see the druid temple. we had a fag up hill, rather too near dinner-time, which was rendered void by the gratification of seeing those aged stones on a gentle rise in the midst of the mountains, which at that time darkened all around, except at the fresh opening of the vale of st. john. we went to bed rather fatigued, but not so much so as to hinder us getting up this morning to mount skiddaw. it promised all along to be fair, and we had fagged and tugged nearly to the top, when, at half-past six, there came a mist upon us and shut out the view. we did not, however, lose anything by it: we were high enough without mist to see the coast of scotland--the irish sea--the hills beyond lancaster--and nearly all the large ones of cumberland and westmoreland, particularly helvellyn and scawfell. it grew colder and colder as we ascended, and we were glad, at about three parts of the way, to taste a little rum which the guide brought with him, mixed, mind ye, with mountain water. i took two glasses going and one returning. it is about six miles from where i am writing to the top--so we have walked ten miles before breakfast to-day. we went up with two others, very good sort of fellows--all felt, on arising into the cold air, that same elevation which a cold bath gives one--i felt as if i were going to a tournament. wordsworth's house is situated just on the rise of the foot of mount rydal; his parlour-window looks directly down windermere; i do not think i told you how fine the vale of grasmere is, and how i discovered "the ancient woman seated on helm crag"[ ]--we shall proceed immediately to carlisle, intending to enter scotland on the st of july viâ-- [carlisle,] july st. we are this morning at carlisle. after skiddaw, we walked to treby the oldest market town in cumberland--where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school holden at the tun, it was indeed "no new cotillon fresh from france." no, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed it, and go'd it, and twirl'd it, and whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad. the difference between our country dances and these scottish figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and beating up a batter-pudding. i was extremely gratified to think that, if i had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which i could not possibly enter. i hope i shall not return without having got the highland fling. there was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. i never felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier. this is what i like better than scenery. i fear our continued moving from place to place will prevent our becoming learned in village affairs: we are mere creatures of rivers, lakes, and mountains. our yesterday's journey was from treby to wigton, and from wigton to carlisle. the cathedral does not appear very fine--the castle is very ancient, and of brick. the city is very various--old white-washed narrow streets--broad red-brick ones more modern--i will tell you anon whether the inside of the cathedral is worth looking at. it is built of sandy red stone or brick. we have now walked miles, and are merely a little tired in the thighs, and a little blistered. we shall ride miles to dumfries, when we shall linger awhile about nithsdale and galloway. i have written two letters to liverpool. i found a letter from sister george; very delightful indeed: i shall preserve it in the bottom of my knapsack for you. [dumfries, evening of same day, july .] on visiting the tomb of burns. the town, the churchyard, and the setting sun, the clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem, though beautiful, cold--strange--as in a dream, i dreamed long ago, now new begun. the short-liv'd, paly summer is but won from winter's ague, for one hour's gleam; though sapphire-warm, their stars do never beam: all is cold beauty; pain is never done: for who has mind to relish, minos-wise, the real of beauty, free from that dead hue sickly imagination and sick pride cast wan upon it! burns! with honour due i oft have honour'd thee. great shadow, hide thy face; i sin against thy native skies. you will see by this sonnet that i am at dumfries. we have dined in scotland. burns's tomb is in the churchyard corner, not very much to my taste, though on a scale large enough to show they wanted to honour him. mrs. burns lives in this place; most likely we shall see her to-morrow--this sonnet i have written in a strange mood, half-asleep. i know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-grecian and anti-charlemagnish. i will endeavour to get rid of my prejudices and tell you fairly about the scotch. [dumfries,] july nd. in devonshire they say, "well, where be ye going?" here it is, "how is it wi' yoursel?" a man on the coach said the horses took a hellish heap o' drivin'; the same fellow pointed out burns's tomb with a deal of life--"there de ye see it, amang the trees--white, wi' a roond tap?" the first well-dressed scotchman we had any conversation with, to our surprise confessed himself a deist. the careful manner of delivering his opinions, not before he had received several encouraging hints from us, was very amusing. yesterday was an immense horse-fair at dumfries, so that we met numbers of men and women on the road, the women nearly all barefoot, with their shoes and clean stockings in hand, ready to put on and look smart in the towns. there are plenty of wretched cottages whose smoke has no outlet but by the door. we have now begun upon whisky, called here whuskey,--very smart stuff it is. mixed like our liquors, with sugar and water,'tis called toddy; very pretty drink, and much praised by burns. lvii.--to fanny keats. dumfries, july nd [ ]. my dear fanny--i intended to have written to you from kirkcudbright, the town i shall be in to-morrow--but i will write now because my knapsack has worn my coat in the seams, my coat has gone to the tailor's and i have but one coat to my back in these parts. i must tell you how i went to liverpool with george and our new sister and the gentleman my fellow traveller through the summer and autumn--we had a tolerable journey to liverpool--which i left the next morning before george was up for lancaster--then we set off from lancaster on foot with our knapsacks on, and have walked a little zig-zag through the mountains and lakes of cumberland and westmoreland--we came from carlisle yesterday to this place--we are employed in going up mountains, looking at strange towns, prying into old ruins and eating very hearty breakfasts. here we are full in the midst of broad scotch "how is it a' wi' yoursel"--the girls are walking about bare-footed and in the worst cottages the smoke finds its way out of the door. i shall come home full of news for you and for fear i should choak you by too great a dose at once i must make you used to it by a letter or two. we have been taken for travelling jewellers, razor sellers and spectacle vendors because friend brown wears a pair. the first place we stopped at with our knapsacks contained one richard bradshaw, a notorious tippler. he stood in the shape of a [symbol: ounce] and ballanced himself as well as he could saying with his nose right in mr. brown's face "do--yo--u sell spect--ta--cles?" mr. abbey says we are don quixotes--tell him we are more generally taken for pedlars. all i hope is that we may not be taken for excisemen in this whisky country. we are generally up about walking before breakfast and we complete our miles before dinner.--yesterday we visited burns's tomb and this morning the fine ruins of lincluden. [auchencairn, same day, july .] i had done thus far when my coat came back fortified at all points--so as we lose no time we set forth again through galloway--all very pleasant and pretty with no fatigue when one is used to it--we are in the midst of meg merrilies's country of whom i suppose you have heard. old meg she was a gipsy, and liv'd upon the moors: her bed it was the brown heath turf, and her house was out of doors. her apples were swart blackberries, her currants pods o' broom; her wine was dew of the wild white rose, her book a churchyard tomb. her brothers were the craggy hills, her sisters larchen trees-- alone with her great family she liv'd as she did please. no breakfast had she many a morn, no dinner many a noon, and 'stead of supper she would stare full hard against the moon. but every morn of woodbine fresh she made her garlanding, and every night the dark glen yew she wove, and she would sing. and with her fingers old and brown she plaited mats o' rushes, and gave them to the cottagers she met among the bushes. old meg was brave as margaret queen and tall as amazon: an old red blanket cloak she wore; a chip hat had she on. god rest her aged bones somewhere-- she died full long agone! if you like these sort of ballads i will now and then scribble one for you--if i send any to tom i'll tell him to send them to you. [kirkcudbright, evening of same day, july .] i have so many interruptions that i cannot manage to fill a letter in one day--since i scribbled the song we have walked through a beautiful country to kirkcudbright--at which place i will write you a song about myself-- there was a naughty boy, a naughty boy was he, he would not stop at home, he could not quiet be-- he took in his knapsack a book full of vowels and a shirt with some towels-- a slight cap for night cap-- a hair brush, comb ditto, new stockings for old ones would split o! this knapsack tight at's back he rivetted close and followéd his nose to the north, to the north, and follow'd his nose to the north. there was a naughty boy and a naughty boy was he, for nothing would he do but scribble poetry-- he took an inkstand in his hand and a pen big as ten in the other, and away in a pother he ran to the mountains and fountains and ghostes and postes and witches and ditches and wrote in his coat when the weather was cool, fear of gout, and without when the weather was warm-- och the charm when we choose to follow one's nose to the north, to the north, to follow one's nose to the north! there was a naughty boy and a naughty boy was he, he kept little fishes in washing tubs three in spite of the might of the maid nor afraid of his granny-good-- he often would hurly burly get up early and go by hook or crook to the brook and bring home miller's thumb, tittlebat not over fat, minnows small as the stall of a glove, not above the size of a nice little baby's little fingers-- o he made 'twas his trade of fish a pretty kettle a kettle-- a kettle of fish a pretty kettle a kettle! there was a naughty boy, and a naughty boy was he, he ran away to scotland the people for to see-- then he found that the ground was as hard, that a yard was as long, that a song was as merry, that a cherry was as red-- that lead was as weighty, that fourscore was as eighty, that a door was as wooden as in england-- so he stood in his shoes and he wonder'd he wonder'd, he stood in his shoes and he wonder'd. [newton stewart, july .] my dear fanny, i am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would i if it were not for being tired after my day's walking, and ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when i am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. then i get so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to me--a batch of bread i make no more ado with than a sheet of parliament; and i can eat a bull's head as easily as i used to do bull's eyes. i take a whole string of pork sausages down as easily as a pen'orth of lady's fingers. ah dear i must soon be contented with an acre or two of oaten cake a hogshead of milk and a clothes-basket of eggs morning noon and night when i get among the highlanders. before we see them we shall pass into ireland and have a chat with the paddies, and look at the giant's causeway which you must have heard of--i have not time to tell you particularly for i have to send a journal to tom of whom you shall hear all particulars or from me when i return. since i began this we have walked sixty miles to newton stewart at which place i put in this letter--to-night we sleep at glenluce--to-morrow at portpatrick and the next day we shall cross in the passage boat to ireland. i hope miss abbey has quite recovered. present my respects to her and to mr. and mrs. abbey. god bless you. your affectionate brother, john. do write me a letter directed to _inverness_, scotland. lviii.--to thomas keats. auchtercairn [for auchencairn,] rd [for d] july . my dear tom--we are now in meg merrilies's country, and have this morning passed through some parts exactly suited to her. kirkcudbright county is very beautiful, very wild, with craggy hills, somewhat in the westmoreland fashion. we have come down from dumfries to the sea-coast part of it. the following song you will have from dilke, but perhaps you would like it here.[ ]... [newton stewart,] july th [for th]. yesterday was passed in kirkcudbright, the country is very rich, very fine, and with a little of devon. i am now writing at newton stewart, six miles into wigtown. our landlady of yesterday said very few southerners passed hereaways. the children jabber away, as if in a foreign language; the bare-footed girls look very much in keeping, i mean with the scenery about them. brown praises their cleanliness and appearance of comfort, the neatness of their cottages, etc.--it may be--they are very squat among trees and fern and heath and broom, on levels slopes and heights--but i wish they were as snug as those up the devonshire valleys. we are lodged and entertained in great varieties. we dined yesterday on dirty bacon, dirtier eggs, and dirtiest potatoes, with a slice of salmon--we breakfast this morning in a nice carpeted room, with sofa, hair-bottomed chairs, and green-baized mahogany. a spring by the road-side is always welcome: we drink water for dinner, diluted with a gill of whisky. [donaghadee] july . yesterday morning we set out from glenluce, going some distance round to see some rivers: they were scarcely worth the while. we went on to stranraer, in a burning sun, and had gone about six miles when the mail overtook us: we got up, were at port patrick in a jiffey, and i am writing now in little ireland. the dialects on the neighbouring shores of scotland and ireland are much the same, yet i can perceive a great difference in the nations, from the chamber-maid at this _nate toone_ kept by mr. kelly. she is fair, kind, and ready to laugh, because she is out of the horrible dominion of the scotch kirk. a scotch girl stands in terrible awe of the elders--poor little susannahs, they will scarcely laugh, and their kirk is greatly to be damned. these kirk-men have done scotland good (query?). they have made men, women; old men, young men; old women, young women; boys, girls; and all infants careful--so that they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and gainers. such a thrifty army cannot fail to enrich their country, and give it a greater appearance of comfort, than that of their poor rash neighbourhood--these kirk-men have done scotland harm; they have banished puns, and laughing, and kissing, etc. (except in cases where the very danger and crime must make it very gustful). i shall make a full stop at kissing, for after that there should be a better parenthesis, and go on to remind you of the fate of burns--poor unfortunate fellow, his disposition was southern--how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and rot[ ] in things attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not. no man, in such matters, will be content with the experience of others--it is true that out of suffering there is no dignity, no greatness, that in the most abstracted pleasure there is no lasting happiness--yet who would not like to discover over again that cleopatra was a gipsy, helen a rogue, and ruth a deep one? i have not sufficient reasoning faculty to settle the doctrine of thrift, as it is consistent with the dignity of human society--with the happiness of cottagers. all i can do is by plump contrasts; were the fingers made to squeeze a guinea or a white hand?--were the lips made to hold a pen or a kiss? and yet in cities man is shut out from his fellows if he is poor--the cottager must be very dirty, and very wretched, if she be not thrifty--the present state of society demands this, and this convinces me that the world is very young, and in a very ignorant state--we live in a barbarous age--i would sooner be a wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the kirk; and i would sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's penance before those execrable elders. it is not so far to the giant's causeway as we supposed--we thought it , and hear it is only miles--so we shall leave one of our knapsacks here at donaghadee, take our immediate wants, and be back in a week, when we shall proceed to the county of ayr. in the packet yesterday we heard some ballads from two old men--one was a romance which seemed very poor--then there was "the battle of the boyne," then "robin huid," as they call him--"before the king you shall go, go, go; before the king you shall go." [stranraer,] july th. we stopped very little in ireland, and that you may not have leisure to marvel at our speedy return to port patrick, i will tell you that it is as dear living in ireland as at the hummums--thrice the expense of scotland--it would have cost us £ before our return; moreover we found those miles to be irish ones, which reach to english--so having walked to belfast one day, and back to donaghadee the next, we left ireland with a fair breeze. we slept last night at port patrick, when i was gratified by a letter from you. on our walk in ireland, we had too much opportunity to see the worse than nakedness, the rags, the dirt and misery, of the poor common irish--a scotch cottage, though in that sometimes the smoke has no exit but at the door, is a palace to an irish one. we could observe that impetuosity in man and woman--we had the pleasure of finding our way through a peat-bog, three miles long at least--dreary, flat, dank, black, and spongy--here and there were poor dirty creatures, and a few strong men cutting or carting peat--we heard on passing into belfast through a most wretched suburb, that most disgusting of all noises, worse than the bagpipes--the laugh of a monkey--the chatter of women--the scream of a macaw--i mean the sound of the shuttle. what a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of such people. i cannot conceive how a mind "_with child_" of philanthrophy could grasp at its possibility--with me it is absolute despair-- at a miserable house of entertainment, half-way between donaghadee and belfast, were two men sitting at whisky--one a labourer, and the other i took to be a drunken weaver--the labourer took me to be a frenchman, and the other hinted at bounty-money; saying he was ready to take it--on calling for the letters at port patrick, the man snapped out "what regiment?" on our return from belfast we met a sedan--the duchess of dunghill. it is no laughing matter though. imagine the worst dog kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing--in such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved, from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from madagascar to the cape, with a pipe in her mouth, and looking out with a round-eyed skinny-lidded inanity; with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head--squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged tattered girls carried her along. what a thing would be a history of her life and sensations; i shall endeavour when i have thought a little more, to give you my idea of the difference between the scotch and irish--the two irishmen i mentioned were speaking of their treatment in england, when the weaver said--"ah you were a civil man, but i was a drinker." till further notice you must direct to inverness. your most affectionate brother john. lix.--to thomas keats. belantree [for ballantrae,] july ah! ken ye what i met the day out oure the mountains a coming down by craggies gray an mossie fountains-- ah goud-hair'd marie yeve i pray ane minute's guessing-- for that i met upon the way is past expressing. as i stood where a rocky brig a torrent crosses i spied upon a misty rig a troup o' horses-- and as they trotted down the glen i sped to meet them to see if i might know the men to stop and greet them. first willie on his sleek mare came at canting gallop his long hair rustled like a flame on board a shallop, then came his brother rab and then young peggy's mither and peggy too--adown the glen they went togither-- i saw her wrappit in her hood frae wind and raining-- her cheek was flush wi' timid blood twixt growth and waning-- she turn'd her dazed head full oft for there her brithers came riding with her bridegroom soft and mony ithers. young tam came up and eyed me quick with reddened cheek-- braw tam was daffed like a chick-- he could na speak-- ah marie they are all gane hame through blustering weather an' every heart is full on flame an' light as feather. ah! marie they are all gone hame frae happy wadding, whilst i--ah is it not a shame? sad tears am shedding. my dear tom--the reason for my writing these lines was that brown wanted to impose a galloway song upon dilke--but it won't do. the subject i got from meeting a wedding just as we came down into this place--where i am afraid we shall be imprisoned a while by the weather. yesterday we came miles from stranraer--entered ayrshire a little beyond cairn, and had our path through a delightful country. i shall endeavour that you may follow our steps in this walk--it would be uninteresting in a book of travels--it can not be interesting but by my having gone through it. when we left cairn our road lay half way up the sides of a green mountainous shore, full of clefts of verdure and eternally varying--sometimes up sometimes down, and over little bridges going across green chasms of moss, rock and trees--winding about everywhere. after two or three miles of this we turned suddenly into a magnificent glen finely wooded in parts--seven miles long--with a mountain stream winding down the midst--full of cottages in the most happy situations--the sides of the hills covered with sheep--the effect of cattle lowing i never had so finely. at the end we had a gradual ascent and got among the tops of the mountains whence in a little time i descried in the sea ailsa rock feet high--it was miles distant and seemed close upon us. the effect of ailsa with the peculiar perspective of the sea in connection with the ground we stood on, and the misty rain then falling gave me a complete idea of a deluge. ailsa struck me very suddenly--really i was a little alarmed. [girvan, same day, july .] thus far had i written before we set out this morning. now we are at girvan miles north of belantree. our walk has been along a more grand shore to-day than yesterday--ailsa beside us all the way.--from the heights we could see quite at home cantire and the large mountains of arran, one of the hebrides. we are in comfortable quarters. the rain we feared held up bravely and it has been "fu fine this day."----to-morrow we shall be at ayr. [kirkoswald, july .] 'tis now the th of july and we have come miles to breakfast to kirkoswald. i hope the next kirk will be kirk alloway. i have nothing of consequence to say now concerning our journey--so i will speak as far as i can judge on the irish and scotch--i know nothing of the higher classes--yet i have a persuasion that there the irish are victorious. as to the profanum vulgus i must incline to the scotch. they never laugh--but they are always comparatively neat and clean. their constitutions are not so remote and puzzling as the irish. the scotchman will never give a decision on any point--he will never commit himself in a sentence which may be referred to as a meridian in his notion of things--so that you do not know him--and yet you may come in nigher neighbourhood to him than to the irishman who commits himself in so many places that it dazes your head. a scotchman's motive is more easily discovered than an irishman's. a scotchman will go wisely about to deceive you, an irishman cunningly. an irishman would bluster out of any discovery to his disadvantage. a scotchman would retire perhaps without much desire for revenge. an irishman likes to be thought a gallous fellow. a scotchman is contented with himself. it seems to me they are both sensible of the character they hold in england and act accordingly to englishmen. thus the scotchman will become over grave and over decent and the irishman over-impetuous. i like a scotchman best because he is less of a bore--i like the irishman best because he ought to be more comfortable.--the scotchman has made up his mind within himself in a sort of snail shell wisdom. the irishman is full of strongheaded instinct. the scotchman is farther in humanity than the irishman--there he will stick perhaps when the irishman will be refined beyond him--for the former thinks he cannot be improved--the latter would grasp at it for ever, place but the good plain before him. maybole, [same day, july ]. since breakfast we have come only four miles to dinner, not merely, for we have examined in the way two ruins, one of them very fine, called crossraguel abbey--there is a winding staircase to the top of a little watch tower. kingswells, july . i have been writing to reynolds--therefore any particulars since kirkoswald have escaped me--from said kirk we went to maybole to dinner--then we set forward to burness' town ayr--the approach to it 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 epic?" the bonny doon is the sweetest river i ever saw--overhung with fine trees as far as we could see--we stood some time on the brig across it, over which tam o' shanter fled--we took a pinch of snuff on the key stone--then we proceeded to the "auld kirk alloway." as we were looking at it a farmer pointed the spots where mungo's mither hang'd hersel' and "drunken charlie brake's neck's bane." then we proceeded to the cottage he was born in--there was a board to that effect by the door side--it had the same effect as the same sort of memorial at stratford on avon. we drank some toddy to burns's memory with an old man who knew burns--damn him and damn his anecdotes--he was a great bore--it was impossible for a southron to understand above words in a hundred.--there was something good in his description of burns's melancholy the last time he saw him. i was determined to write a sonnet in the cottage--i did--but it was so bad i cannot venture it here. next we walked into ayr town and before we went to tea saw the new brig and the auld brig and wallace tower. yesterday we dined with a traveller. we were talking about kean. he said he had seen him at glasgow "in othello in the jew, i mean er, er, er, the jew in shylock." he got bother'd completely in vague ideas of the jew in othello, shylock in the jew, shylock in othello, othello in shylock, the jew in othello, etc. etc. etc.--he left himself in a mess at last.--still satisfied with himself he went to the window and gave an abortive whistle of some tune or other--it might have been handel. there is no end to these mistakes--he'll go and tell people how he has seen "malvolio in the countess"--"twelfth night in midsummer night's dream"--bottom in much ado about nothing--viola in barrymore--antony in cleopatra--falstaff in the mouse trap.-- [glasgow,] july . we enter'd glasgow last evening under the most oppressive stare a body could feel. when we had crossed the bridge brown look'd back and said its whole population had turned out to wonder at us--we came on till a drunken man came up to me--i put him off with my arm--he returned all up in arms saying aloud that, "he had seen all foreigners bu-u-ut he never saw the like o' me." i was obliged to mention the word officer and police before he would desist.--the city of glasgow i take to be a very fine one--i was astonished to hear it was twice the size of edinburgh. it is built of stone and has a much more solid appearance than london. we shall see the cathedral this morning--they have devilled it into "high kirk." i want very much to know the name of the ship george is gone in--also what port he will land in--i know nothing about it. i hope you are leading a quiet life and gradually improving. make a long lounge of the whole summer--by the time the leaves fall i shall be near you with plenty of confab--there are a thousand things i cannot write. take care of yourself--i mean in not being vexed or bothered at anything. god bless you! john ----. lx.--to john hamilton reynolds. maybole, july [ ]. my dear reynolds--i'll not run over the ground we have passed; that would be merely as bad as telling a dream--unless perhaps i do it in the manner of the laputan printing press--that is i put down mountains, rivers, lakes, dells, glens, rocks, and clouds, with beautiful enchanting, gothic picturesque fine, delightful, enchanting, grand, sublime--a few blisters, etc.--and now you have our journey thus far: where i begin a letter to you because i am approaching burns's cottage very fast. we have made continual inquiries from the time we saw his tomb at dumfries--his name of course is known all about--his great reputation among the plodding people is, "that he wrote a good _mony_ sensible things." 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 hereafter with unmixed pleasure, as i do upon my stratford-on-avon day with bailey. i shall fill this sheet for you in the bardie's country, going no further than this till i get into the town of ayr which will be a miles' walk to tea. [kingswells, july .] we were talking on different and indifferent things, when on a sudden we turned a corner upon the immediate country of ayr--the sight was as rich as possible. i had no conception that the native place of burns was so beautiful--the idea i had was more desolate, his 'rigs of barley' seemed always to me but a few strips of green on a cold hill--o prejudice! it was as rich as devon--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--besides all the beauty, there were the mountains of arran isle, black and huge over the sea. we came down upon everything suddenly--there were in our way the 'bonny doon,' with the brig that tam o' shanter crossed, kirk alloway, burns's cottage, and then the brigs of ayr. first we stood upon the bridge across the doon; surrounded by every phantasy of green in tree, meadow, and hill,--the stream of the doon, as a farmer told us, is covered with trees from head to foot--you know those beautiful heaths so fresh against the weather of a summer's evening--there was one stretching along behind the trees. i wish i knew always the humour my friends would be in at opening a letter of mine, to suit it to them as nearly as possible. i could always find an egg shell for melancholy, and as for merriment a witty humour will turn anything to account--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. my wig! burns and sentimentality coming across you and frank fladgate in the office--o scenery that thou shouldst be crushed between two puns--as for them i venture the rascalliest in the scotch region--i hope brown does not put them punctually in his journal--if he does i must sit on the cutty-stool all next winter. we went to kirk alloway--"a prophet is no prophet in his own country"--we went to the cottage and took some whisky. i wrote a sonnet for the mere sake of writing some lines under the roof--they are so bad i cannot transcribe them--the man at the cottage was a great bore with his anecdotes--i hate the rascal--his life consists in fuz, fuzzy, fuzziest--he drinks glasses five for the quarter and twelve for the hour--he is a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew burns--he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him. he calls himself "a curious old bitch"--but he is a flat old dog--i should like to employ caliph vathek to kick him. o the flummery of a birthplace! cant! cant! cant! it is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache--many a true word, they say, is spoken in jest--this may be because his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet. my dear reynolds--i cannot write about scenery and visitings--fancy is indeed less than a present palpable reality, but it is greater than remembrance--you would lift your eyes from homer only to see close before you the real isle of tenedos--you would rather read homer afterwards than remember yourself--one song of burns's is of more worth to you than all i could think for a whole year in his native country. his misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill--i tried to forget it--to drink toddy without any care--to write a merry sonnet--it won't do--he talked with bitches--he drank with blackguards, he was miserable--we can see horribly clear, in the works of such a man his whole life, as if we were god's spies.--what were his addresses to jean in the latter part of his life? i should not speak so to you--yet why not--you are not in the same case--you are in the right path, and you shall not be deceived. i have spoken to you against marriage, but it was general--the prospect in those matters has been to me so blank, that i have not been unwilling to die--i would not now, for i have inducements to life--i must see my little nephews in america, and i must see you marry your lovely wife. my sensations are sometimes deadened for weeks together--but believe me i have more than once yearned for the time of your happiness to come, as much as i could for myself after the lips of juliet.--from the tenor of my occasional rodomontade in chit-chat, you might have been deceived concerning me in these points--upon my soul, i have been getting more and more close to you, every day, ever since i knew you, and now one of the first pleasures i look to is your happy marriage--the more, since i have felt the pleasure of loving a sister in law. i did not think it possible to become so much attached in so short a time--things like these, and they are real, have made me resolve to have a care of my health--you must be as careful. the rain has stopped us to-day at the end of a dozen miles, yet we hope to see loch lomond the day after to-morrow;--i will piddle out my information, as rice says, next winter, at any time when a substitute is wanted for vingt-un. we bear the fatigue very well-- miles a day in general--a cloud came over us in getting up skiddaw--i hope to be more lucky in ben lomond--and more lucky still in ben nevis. what i think you would enjoy is poking about ruins--sometimes abbey, sometimes castle. the short stay we made in ireland has left few remembrances--but an old woman in a dog-kennel sedan with a pipe in her mouth, is what i can never forget--i wish i may be able to give you an idea of her--remember me to your mother and sisters, and tell your mother how i hope she will pardon me for having a scrap of paper pasted in the book sent to her. i was driven on all sides and had not time to call on taylor--so bailey is coming to cumberland--well, if you'll let me know where at inverness, i will call on my return and pass a little time with him--i am glad 'tis not scotland--tell my friends i do all i can for them, that is, drink their healths in toddy. perhaps i may have some lines by and by to send you fresh, on your own letter--tom has a few to show you. your affectionate friend john keats. lxi.--to thomas keats. cairn-something [for cairndow,] july , [ ]. my dear tom--here's brown going on so that i cannot bring to mind how the two last days have vanished--for example he says the lady of the lake went to rock herself to sleep on arthur's seat and the lord of the isles coming to press a piece.... i told you last how we were stared at in glasgow--we are not out of the crowd yet. steam boats on loch lomond and barouches on its sides take a little from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as brown and i. the banks of the clyde are extremely beautiful--the north end of loch lomond grand in excess--the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part from a little distance is precious good--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--i must give you an outline as well as i can.[ ] no{t} b--the water was a fine blue silvered and the mountains a dark purple, the sun setting aslant behind them--meantime the head of ben lomond was covered with a rich pink cloud. we did not ascend ben lomond--the price being very high and a half a day of rest being quite acceptable. we were up at this morning and have walked to breakfast miles through two tremendous glens--at the end of the first there is a place called rest and be thankful which we took for an inn--it was nothing but a stone and so we were cheated into more miles to breakfast--i have just been bathing in loch fyne a salt water lake opposite the windows,--quite pat and fresh but for the cursed gad flies--damn 'em they have been at me ever since i left the swan and two necks.[ ] all gentle folks who owe a grudge to any living thing open your ears and stay your trudge whilst i in dudgeon sing. the gadfly he hath stung me sore-- o may he ne'er sting you! but we have many a horrid bore he may sting black and blue. has any here an old gray mare with three legs all her store, o put it to her buttocks bare and straight she'll run on four. has any here a lawyer suit of , take lawyer's nose and put it to't and you the end will see. is there a man in parliament dumbfounder'd in his speech, o let his neighbour make a rent and put one in his breech. o lowther how much better thou hadst figur'd t'other day when to the folks thou mad'st a bow and hadst no more to say. if lucky gadfly had but ta'en his seat upon thine a--e and put thee to a little pain to save thee from a worse. better than southey it had been, better than mr. d----, better than wordsworth too, i ween, better than mr. v----. forgive me pray good people all for deviating so-- in spirit sure i had a call-- and now i on will go. has any here a daughter fair too fond of reading novels, too apt to fall in love with care and charming mister lovels, o put a gadfly to that thing she keeps so white and pert-- i mean the finger for the ring, and it will breed a wort. has any here a pious spouse who seven times a day scolds as king david pray'd, to chouse and have her holy way-- o let a gadfly's little sting persuade her sacred tongue that noises are a common thing, but that her bell has rung. and as this is the summum bo- num of all conquering, i leave "withouten wordes mo" the gadfly's little sting. [inverary, july .] last evening we came round the end of loch fyne to inverary--the duke of argyle's castle is very modern magnificent and more so from the place it is in--the woods seem old enough to remember two or three changes in the crags about them--the lake was beautiful and there was a band at a distance by the castle. i must say i enjoyed two or three common tunes--but nothing could stifle the horrors of a solo on the bag-pipe--i thought the beast would never have done.--yet was i doomed to hear another.--on entering inverary we saw a play bill. brown was knocked up from new shoes--so i went to the barn alone where i saw the stranger accompanied by a bag-pipe. there they went on about interesting creaters and human nater till the curtain fell and then came the bag-pipe. when mrs. haller fainted down went the curtain and out came the bag-pipe--at the heartrending, shoemending reconciliation the piper blew amain. i never read or saw this play before; not the bag-pipe nor the wretched players themselves were little in comparison with it--thank heaven it has been scoffed at lately almost to a fashion-- of late two dainties were before me placed sweet, holy, pure, sacred and innocent, from the ninth sphere to me benignly sent that gods might know my own particular taste: first the soft bag-pipe mourn'd with zealous haste, the stranger next with head on bosom bent sigh'd; rueful again the piteous bag-pipe went, again the stranger sighings fresh did waste. o bag-pipe thou didst steal my heart away-- o stranger thou my nerves from pipe didst charm-- o bag-pipe thou didst re-assert thy sway-- again thou stranger gav'st me fresh alarm-- alas! i could not choose. ah! my poor heart mumchance art thou with both oblig'd to part. i think we are the luckiest fellows in christendom--brown could not proceed this morning on account of his feet and lo there is thunder and rain. [kilmelfort,] july th. for these two days past we have been so badly accommodated more particularly in coarse food that i have not been at all in cue to write. last night poor brown with his feet blistered and scarcely able to walk, after a trudge of miles down the side of loch awe had no supper but eggs and oat cake--we have lost the sight of white bread entirely--now we had eaten nothing but eggs all day--about a piece and they had become sickening--to-day we have fared rather better--but no oat cake wanting--we had a small chicken and even a good bottle of port but all together the fare is too coarse--i feel it a little.--another week will break us in. i forgot to tell you that when we came through glenside it was early in the morning and we were pleased with the noise of shepherds, sheep and dogs in the misty heights close above us--we saw none of them for some time, till two came in sight creeping among the crags like emmets, yet their voices came quite plainly to us--the approach to loch awe was very solemn towards nightfall--the first glance was a streak of water deep in the bases of large black mountains.--we had come along a complete mountain road, where if one listened there was not a sound but that of mountain streams. we walked miles by the side of loch awe--every ten steps creating a new and beautiful picture--sometimes through little wood--there are two islands on the lake each with a beautiful ruin--one of them rich in ivy.--we are detained this morning by the rain. i will tell you exactly where we are. we are between loch craignish and the sea just opposite long island.[ ] yesterday our walk was of this description--the near hills were not very lofty but many of them steep, beautifully wooded--the distant mountains in the hebrides very grand, the saltwater lakes coming up between crags and islands full tide and scarcely ruffled--sometimes appearing as one large lake, sometimes as three distinct ones in different directions. at one point we saw afar off a rocky opening into the main sea.--we have also seen an eagle or two. they move about without the least motion of wings when in an indolent fit.--i am for the first time in a country where a foreign language is spoken--they gabble away gaelic at a vast rate--numbers of them speak english. there are not many kilts in argyleshire--at fort william they say a man is not admitted into society without one--the ladies there have a horror at the indecency of breeches. i cannot give you a better idea of highland life than by describing the place we are in. the inn or public is by far the best house in the immediate neighbourhood. it has a white front with tolerable windows--the table i am writing on surprises me as being a nice flapped mahogany one.... you may if you peep see through the floor chinks into the ground rooms. the old grandmother of the house seems intelligent though not over clean. _n.b._ no snuff being to be had in the village she made us some. the guid man is a rough-looking hardy stout man who i think does not speak so much english as the guid wife who is very obliging and sensible and moreover though stockingless has a pair of old shoes--last night some whisky men sat up clattering gaelic till i am sure one o'clock to our great annoyance. there is a gaelic testament on the drawers in the next room. white and blue china ware has crept all about here--yesterday there passed a donkey laden with tin-pots--opposite the window there are hills in a mist--a few ash trees and a mountain stream at a little distance.--they possess a few head of cattle.--if you had gone round to the back of the house just now--you would have seen more hills in a mist--some dozen wretched black cottages scented of peat smoke which finds its way by the door or a hole in the roof--a girl here and there barefoot. there was one little thing driving cows down a slope like a mad thing. there was another standing at the cowhouse door rather pretty fac'd all up to the ankles in dirt. [oban, july .] we have walk'd miles in a soaking rain to oban opposite the isle of mull which is so near staffa we had thought to pass to it--but the expense is guineas and those rather extorted.--staffa you see is a fashionable place and therefore every one concerned with it either in this town or the island are what you call up. 'tis like paying sixpence for an apple at the playhouse--this irritated me and brown was not best pleased--we have therefore resolved to set northward for fort william to-morrow morning. i fed upon a bit of white bread to-day like a sparrow--it was very fine--i cannot manage the cursed oat cake. remember me to all and let me hear a good account of you at inverness--i am sorry georgy had not those lines. good-bye. your affectionate brother john ----. lxii.--to benjamin bailey. inverary, july [ ]. my dear bailey--the only day i have had a chance of seeing you when you were last in london i took every advantage of--some devil led you out of the way--now i have written to reynolds to tell me where you will be in cumberland--so that i cannot miss you. and when i see you, the first thing i shall do will be to read that about milton and ceres, and proserpine--for though i am not going after you to john o' grot's, it will be but poetical to say so. and here, bailey, i will say a few words written in a sane and sober mind, a very scarce thing with me, for they may, hereafter, save you a great deal of trouble about me, which you do not deserve, and for which i ought to be bastinadoed. i carry all matters to an extreme--so that when i have any little vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for sophocles. then, and in that temper, if i write to any friend, i have so little self-possession that i give him matter for grieving at the very time perhaps when i am laughing at a pun. your last letter made me blush for the pain i had given you--i know my own disposition so well that i am certain of writing many times hereafter in the same strain to you--now, you know how far to believe in them. you must allow for imagination. i know i shall not be able to help it. i am sorry you are grieved at my not continuing my visits to little britain--yet i think i have as far as a man can do who has books to read and subjects to think upon--for that reason i have been nowhere else except to wentworth place so nigh at hand--moreover i have been too often in a state of health that made it prudent not to hazard the night air. yet, further, i will confess to you that i cannot enjoy society small or numerous--i am certain that our fair friends are glad i should come for the mere sake of my coming; but i am certain i bring with me a vexation they are better without--if i can possibly at any time feel my temper coming upon me i refrain even from a promised visit. i am certain i have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment, i am striving to be just to them, but i cannot--is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? when i was a schoolboy i thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. i have no right to expect more than their reality--i thought them ethereal above men--i find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action--one who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. i do not like to think insults in a lady's company--i commit a crime with her which absence would not have known. is it not extraordinary?--when among men, i have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen--i feel free to speak or to be silent--i can listen, and from every one i can learn--my hands are in my pockets, i am free from all suspicion and comfortable. when i am among women, i have evil thoughts, malice, spleen--i cannot speak, or be silent--i am full of suspicions and therefore listen to nothing--i am in a hurry to be gone. you must be charitable and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood. yet with such feelings i am happier alone among crowds of men, by myself, or with a friend or two. with all this, trust me, i have not the least idea that men of different feelings and inclinations are more short-sighted than myself. i never rejoiced more than at my brother's marriage, and shall do so at that of any of my friends. i must absolutely get over this--but how? the only way is to find the root of the evil, and so cure it "with backward mutters of dissevering power"--that is a difficult thing; for an obstinate prejudice can seldom be produced but from a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel, and care to keep unravelled. i could say a good deal about this, but i will leave it, in hopes of better and more worthy dispositions--and also content that i am wronging no one, for after all i do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether mister john keats five feet high likes them or not. you appeared to wish to know my moods on this subject--don't think it a bore my dear fellow, it shall be my amen. i should not have consented to myself these four months tramping in the highlands, but that i thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use to more hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though i should reach homer. by this time i am comparatively a mountaineer. i have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur. i have fed upon oat-cake--not long enough to be very much attached to it.--the first mountains i saw, though not so large as some i have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me. the effect is wearing away--yet i like them mainly. [island of mull, july .] we have come this evening with a guide--for without was impossible--into the middle of the isle of mull, pursuing our cheap journey to iona, and perhaps staffa. we would not follow the common and fashionable mode, from the great imposition of expense. we have come over heath and rock, and river and bog, to what in england would be called a horrid place. yet it belongs to a shepherd pretty well off perhaps. the family speak not a word but gaelic, and we have not yet seen their faces for the smoke, which, after visiting every cranny (not excepting my eyes very much incommoded for writing), finds its way out at the door. i am more comfortable than i could have imagined in such a place, and so is brown. the people are all very kind--we lost our way a little yesterday; and inquiring at a cottage, a young woman without a word threw on her cloak and walked a mile in a mizzling rain and splashy way to put us right again. i could not have had a greater pleasure in these parts than your mention of my sister. she is very much prisoned from me. i am afraid it will be some time before i can take her to many places i wish. i trust we shall see you ere long in cumberland--at least i hope i shall, before my visit to america, more than once. i intend to pass a whole year there, if i live to the completion of the three next. my sister's welfare, and the hopes of such a stay in america, will make me observe your advice. i shall be prudent and more careful of my health than i have been. i hope you will be about paying your first visit to town after settling when we come into cumberland--cumberland however will be no distance to me after my present journey. i shall spin to you in a minute. i begin to get rather a contempt of distances. i hope you will have a nice convenient room for a library. now you are so well in health, do keep it up by never missing your dinner, by not reading hard, and by taking proper exercise. you'll have a horse, i suppose, so you must make a point of sweating him. you say i must study dante--well, the only books i have with me are those little volumes.[ ] i read that fine passage you mention a few days ago. your letter followed me from hampstead to port-patrick, and thence to glasgow. you must think me by this time a very pretty fellow. one of the pleasantest bouts we have had was our walk to burns's cottage, over the doon, and past kirk alloway. i had determined to write a sonnet in the cottage. i did--but lawk! it was so wretched i destroyed it--however in a few days afterwards i wrote some lines cousin-german to the circumstance, which i will transcribe, or rather cross-scribe in the front of this. reynolds's illness has made him a new man--he will be stronger than ever--before i left london he was really getting a fat face. brown keeps on writing volumes of adventures to dilke. when we get in of an evening and i have perhaps taken my rest on a couple of chairs, he affronts my indolence and luxury by pulling out of his knapsack st his paper-- ndly his pens and last his ink. now i would not care if he would change a little. i say now why not bailey, take out his pens first sometimes--but i might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks instead of afterwards. your affectionate friend, john keats. lines written in the highlands after a visit to burns's country there is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain, where patriot battle has been fought, where glory had the gain; there is a pleasure on the heath where druids old have been, where mantles gray have rustled by and swept the nettles green; there is a joy in every spot made known by times of old, new to the feet, although each tale a hundred times be told; there is a deeper joy than all, more solemn in the heart, more parching to the tongue than all, of more divine a smart, when weary steps forget themselves, upon a pleasant turf, upon hot sand, or flinty road, or sea-shore iron scurf, toward the castle, or the cot, where long ago was born one who was great through mortal days, and died of fame unshorn. 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.-- aye, if a madman could have leave to pass a healthful day to tell his forehead's swoon and faint when first began decay, he might make tremble many a one whose spirit had gone forth to find a bard's low cradle-place about the silent north. scanty the hour and few the steps beyond the bourn of care, beyond the sweet and bitter world,--beyond it unaware! scanty the hour and few the steps, because a longer stay would bar return, and make a man forget his mortal way: o horrible! to lose the sight of well remember'd face, of brother's eyes, of sister's brow--constant to every place; filling the air, as on we move, with portraiture intense; more warm than those heroic tints that pain a painter's sense, when shapes of old come striding by, and visages of old, locks shining black, hair scanty gray, and passions manifold. no no, that horror cannot be, for at the cable's length man feels the gentle anchor pull and gladdens in its strength:-- one hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall, but in the very next he reads his soul's memorial:-- he reads it on the mountain's height, where chance he may sit down upon rough marble diadem--that hill's eternal crown. yet be his anchor e'er so fast, room is there for a prayer that man may never lose his mind on mountains black and bare; that he may stray league after league some great birthplace to find and keep his vision clear from speck, his inward sight unblind. lxiii.--to thomas keats. dun an cullen,[ ] island of mull [july , ]. my dear tom--just after my last had gone to the post, in came one of the men with whom we endeavoured to agree about going to staffa--he said what a pity it was we should turn aside and not see the curiosities. so we had a little talk, and finally agreed that he should be our guide across the isle of mull. we set out, crossed two ferries--one to the isle of kerrara, of little distance; the other from kerrara to mull miles across--we did it in forty minutes with a fine breeze. the road through the island, or rather the track, is the most dreary you can think of--between dreary mountains, over bog and rock and river with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in hand. about o'clock we arrived at a shepherd's hut, into which we could scarcely get for the smoke through a door lower than my shoulders. we found our way into a little compartment with the rafters and turf-thatch blackened with smoke, the earth floor full of hills and dales. we had some white bread with us, made a good supper, and slept in our clothes in some blankets; our guide snored on another little bed about an arm's length off. this morning we came about sax miles to breakfast, by rather a better path, and we are now in by comparison a mansion. our guide is i think a very obliging fellow--in the way this morning he sang us two gaelic songs--one made by a mrs. brown on her husband's being drowned, the other a jacobin one on charles stuart. for some days brown has been enquiring out his genealogy here--he thinks his grandfather came from long island. he got a parcel of people about him at a cottage door last evening, chatted with ane who had been a miss brown, and who i think from a likeness, must have been a relation--he jawed with the old woman--flattered a young one--kissed a child who was afraid of his spectacles and finally drank a pint of milk. they handle his spectacles as we do a sensitive leaf. [oban,] july th. well--we had a most wretched walk of miles across the island of mull and then we crossed to iona or icolmkill--from icolmkill we took a boat at a bargain to take us to staffa and land us at the head of loch nakgal,[ ] whence we should only have to walk half the distance to oban again and on a better road. all this is well passed and done, with this singular piece of luck, that there was an interruption in the bad weather just as we saw staffa at which it is impossible to land but in a tolerable calm sea. but i will first mention icolmkill--i know not whether you have heard much about this island; i never did before i came nigh it. it is rich in the most interesting antiquities. who would expect to find the ruins of a fine cathedral church, of cloisters colleges monasteries and nunneries in so remote an island? the beginning of these things was in the sixth century, under the superstition of a would-be-bishop-saint, who landed from ireland, and chose the spot from its beauty--for at that time the now treeless place was covered with magnificent woods. columba in the gaelic is colm, signifying dove--kill signifies church, and i is as good as island--so i-colm-kill means the island of saint columba's church. now this saint columba became the dominic of the barbarian christians of the north and was famed also far south--but more especially was reverenced by the scots the picts the norwegians the irish. in a course of years perhaps the island was considered the most holy ground of the north, and the old kings of the aforementioned nations chose it for their burial-place. we were shown a spot in the churchyard where they say kings are buried scotch from fergus ii. to macbeth irish norwegians and french--they lie in rows compact. then we were shown other matters of later date, but still very ancient--many tombs of highland chieftains--their effigies in complete armour, face upwards, black and moss-covered--abbots and bishops of the island always of one of the chief clans. there were plenty macleans and macdonnels; among these latter, the famous macdonel lord of the isles. there have been crosses in the island but the presbyterians destroyed all but two, one of which is a very fine one, and completely covered with a shaggy coarse moss. the old schoolmaster, an ignorant little man but reckoned very clever, showed us these things. he is a maclean, and as much above foot as he is under foot three inches. he stops at one glass of whisky unless you press another and at the second unless you press a third-- i am puzzled how to give you an idea of staffa. it can only be represented by a first-rate drawing. one may compare the surface of the island to a roof--this roof is supported by grand pillars of basalt standing together as thick as honeycombs. the finest thing is fingal's cave--it is entirely a hollowing out of basalt pillars. suppose now the giants who rebelled against jove had taken a whole mass of black columns and bound them together like bunches of matches--and then with immense axes had made a cavern in the body of these columns--of course the roof and floor must be composed of the broken ends of the columns--such is fingal's cave, except that the sea has done the work of excavations, and is continually dashing there--so that we walk along the sides of the cave on the pillars which are left as if for convenient stairs. the roof is arched somewhat gothic-wise, and the length of some of the entire side-pillars is fifty feet. about the island you might seat an army of men each on a pillar. the length of the cave is feet, and from its extremity the view into the sea, through the large arch at the entrance--the colour of the columns is a sort of black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. for solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest cathedral. at the extremity of the cave there is a small perforation into another cave, at which the waters meeting and buffeting each other there is sometimes produced a report as of a cannon heard as far as iona, which must be miles. as we approached in the boat, there was such a fine swell of the sea that the pillars appeared rising immediately out of the crystal. but it is impossible to describe it-- not aladdin magian ever such a work began. not the wizard of the dee ever such a dream could see, not st. john in patmos isle in the passion of his toil when he saw the churches seven golden-aisled built up in heaven gaz'd at such a rugged wonder. as i stood its roofing under lo! i saw one sleeping there on the marble cold and bare. while the surges wash'd his feet and his garments white did beat drench'd about the sombre rocks, on his neck his well-grown locks lifted dry above the main were upon the curl again-- "what is this? and what art thou?" whisper'd i, and touch'd his brow; "what art thou? and what is this?" whisper'd i, and strove to kiss the spirit's hand, to wake his eyes; up he started in a trice: "i am lycidas," said he, "fam'd in funeral minstrelsy-- this was architected thus by the great oceanus. here his mighty waters play hollow organs all the day, here, by turns, his dolphins all, finny palmers great and small, come to pay devotion due-- each a mouth of pearls must strew! many a mortal of these days dares to pass our sacred ways, dares to touch, audaciously this cathedral of the sea-- i have been the pontiff-priest, where the waters never rest, where a fledgy sea-bird choir soars for ever--holy fire i have hid from mortal man. proteus is my sacristan. but the stupid eye of mortal hath pass'd beyond the rocky portal. 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 every farthing quadrille dance."[ ] so saying with a spirit's glance he dived---- i am sorry i am so indolent as to write such stuff as this. it can't be helped. the western coast of scotland is a most strange place--it is composed of rocks, mountains, mountainous and rocky islands intersected by lochs--you can go but a short distance anywhere from salt water in the highlands. i have a slight sore throat and think it best to stay a day or two at oban--then we shall proceed to fort william and inverness, where i am anxious to be on account of a letter from you. brown in his letters puts down every little circumstance. i should like to do the same, but i confess myself too indolent, and besides next winter everything will come up in prime order as we verge on such and such things. have you heard in any way of george? i should think by this time he must have landed. i in my carelessness never thought of knowing where a letter would find him on the other side--i think baltimore, but i am afraid of directing it to the wrong place. i shall begin some chequer work for him directly, and it will be ripe for the post by the time i hear from you next after this. i assure you i often long for a seat and a cup o' tea at well walk, especially now that mountains, castles, and lakes are becoming common to me. yet i would rather summer it out, for on the whole i am happier than when i have time to be glum--perhaps it may cure me. immediately on my return i shall begin studying hard, with a peep at the theatre now and then--and depend upon it i shall be very luxurious. with respect to women i think i shall be able to conquer my passions hereafter better than i have yet done. you will help me to talk of george next winter, and we will go now and then to see fanny. let me hear a good account of your health and comfort, telling me truly how you do alone. remember me to all including mr. and mrs. bentley. your most affectionate brother john. lxiv.--to thomas keats. letter findlay, august [ ]. ah mio ben. my dear tom--we have made but poor progress lately, chiefly from bad weather, for my throat is in a fair way of getting quite well, so i have had nothing of consequence to tell you till yesterday when we went up ben nevis, the highest mountain in great britain. on that account i will never ascend another in this empire--skiddaw is nothing to it either in height or in difficulty. it is above feet from the sea level, and fortwilliam stands at the head of a salt water lake, consequently we took it completely from that level. i am heartily glad it is done--it is almost like a fly crawling up a wainscoat. imagine the task of mounting ten saint pauls without the convenience of staircases. we set out about five in the morning with a guide in the tartan and cap, and soon arrived at the foot of the first ascent which we immediately began upon. after much fag and tug and a rest and a glass of whisky apiece we gained the top of the first rise and saw then a tremendous chap above us, which the guide said was still far from the top. after the first rise our way lay along a heath valley in which there was a loch--after about a mile in this valley we began upon the next ascent, more formidable by far than the last, and kept mounting with short intervals of rest until we got above all vegetation, among nothing but loose stones which lasted us to the very top. the guide said we had three miles of a stony ascent--we gained the first tolerable level after the valley to the height of what in the valley we had thought the top and saw still above us another huge crag which still the guide said was not the top--to that we made with an obstinate fag, and having gained it there came on a mist, so that from that part to the very top we walked in a mist. the whole immense head of the mountain is composed of large loose stones--thousands of acres. before we had got halfway up we passed large patches of snow and near the top there is a chasm some hundred feet deep completely glutted with it.--talking of chasms they are the finest wonder of the whole--they appear great rents in the very heart of the mountain though they are not, being at the side of it, but other huge crags arising round it give the appearance to nevis of a shattered heart or core in itself. these chasms are feet in depth and are the most tremendous places i have ever seen--they turn one giddy if you choose to give way to it. we tumbled in large stones and set the echoes at work in fine style. sometimes these chasms are tolerably clear, sometimes there is a misty cloud which seems to steam up and sometimes they are entirely smothered with clouds. after a little time the mist cleared away but still there were large clouds about attracted by old ben to a certain distance so as to form as it appeared large dome curtains which kept sailing about, opening and shutting at intervals here and there and everywhere: so that although we did not see one vast wide extent of prospect all round we saw something perhaps finer--these cloud-veils opening with a dissolving motion and showing us the mountainous region beneath as through a loophole--these cloudy loopholes ever varying and discovering fresh prospect east, west, north and south. then it was misty again, and again it was fair--then puff came a cold breeze of wind and bared a craggy chap we had not yet seen though in close neighbourhood. every now and then we had overhead blue sky clear and the sun pretty warm. i do not know whether i can give you an idea of the prospect from a large mountain top. you are on a stony plain which of course makes you forget you are on any but low ground--the horizon or rather edges of this plain being above feet above the sea hide all the country immediately beneath you, so that the next object you see all round next to the edges of the flat top are the summits of mountains of some distance off. as you move about on all sides you see more or less of the near neighbour country according as the mountain you stand upon is in different parts steep or rounded--but the most new thing of all is the sudden leap of the eye from the extremity of what appears a plain into so vast a distance. on one part of the top there is a handsome pile of stones done pointedly by some soldiers of artillery; i clim[b]ed on to them and so got a little higher than old ben himself. it was not so cold as i expected--yet cold enough for a glass of whisky now and then. there is not a more fickle thing than the top of a mountain--what would a lady give to change her head-dress as often and with as little trouble!--there are a good many red deer upon ben nevis--we did not see one--the dog we had with us kept a very sharp look out and really languished for a bit of a worry. i have said nothing yet of our getting on among the loose stones large and small sometimes on two, sometimes on three, sometimes four legs--sometimes two and stick, sometimes three and stick, then four again, then two, then a jump, so that we kept on ringing changes on foot, hand, stick, jump, boggle, stumble, foot, hand, foot (very gingerly), stick again, and then again a game at all fours. after all there was one mrs. cameron of years of age and the fattest woman in all inverness-shire who got up this mountain some few years ago--true she had her servants--but then she had her self. she ought to have hired sisyphus,--"up the high hill he heaves a huge round--mrs. cameron." 'tis said a little conversation took place between the mountain and the lady. after taking a glass of whisky as she was tolerably seated at ease she thus began-- _mrs. c._ upon my life sir nevis i am pique'd that i have so far panted tugg'd and reek'd to do an honor to your old bald pate and now am sitting on you just to bait, without your paying me one compliment. alas 'tis so with all, when our intent is plain, and in the eye of all mankind we fair ones show a preference, too blind! you gentle man immediately turn tail-- o let me then my hapless fate bewail! ungrateful baldpate have i not disdain'd the pleasant valleys--have i not madbrain'd deserted all my pickles and preserves my china closet too--with wretched nerves to boot--say wretched ingrate have i not left my soft cushion chair and caudle pot. 'tis true i had no corns--no! thank the fates my shoemaker was always mr. bates. and if not mr. bates why i'm not old! still dumb ungrateful nevis--still so cold! here the lady took some more whisky and was putting even more to her lips when she dashed it to the ground for the mountain began to grumble--which continued for a few minutes before he thus began-- _ben nevis._ what whining bit of tongue and mouth thus dares disturb my slumber of a thousand years? even so long my sleep has been secure-- and to be so awaked i'll not endure. oh pain--for since the eagle's earliest scream i've had a damn'd confounded ugly dream, a nightmare sure. what madam was it you? it cannot be! my old eyes are not true! red-crag, my spectacles! now let me see! good heavens lady how the gemini did you get here? o i shall split my sides! i shall earthquake---- _mrs. c._ sweet nevis do not quake, for though i love your honest countenance all things above truly i should not like to be convey'd so far into your bosom--gentle maid loves not too rough a treatment gentle sir-- pray thee be calm and do not quake nor stir no not a stone or i shall go in fits-- _ben nevis._ i must--i shall--i meet not such tit bits-- i meet not such sweet creatures every day-- by my old night cap night cap night and day i must have one sweet buss--i must and shall! red crag!--what madam can you then repent of all the toil and vigour you have spent to see ben nevis and to touch his nose? red crag i say! o i must have them close! red crag, there lies beneath my furthest toe a vein of sulphur--go dear red crag, go-- and rub your flinty back against it--budge! dear madam i must kiss you, faith i must! i must embrace you with my dearest gust! block-head, d'ye hear--block-head i'll make her feel there lies beneath my east leg's northern heel a cave of young earth dragons--well my boy go thither quick and so complete my joy take you a bundle of the largest pines and when the sun on fiercest phosphor shines fire them and ram them in the dragon's nest then will the dragons fry and fizz their best until ten thousand now no bigger than poor alligators--poor things of one span-- will each one swell to twice ten times the size of northern whale--then for the tender prize-- the moment then--for then will red crag rub his flinty back--and i shall kiss and snub and press my dainty morsel to my breast. block-head make haste! o muses weep the rest-- the lady fainted and he thought her dead so pulled the clouds again about his head and went to sleep again--soon she was rous'd by her affrighted servants--next day hous'd safe on the lowly ground she bless'd her fate that fainting fit was not delayed too late. but what surprises me above all is how this lady got down again. i felt it horribly. 'twas the most vile descent--shook me all to pieces. over leaf you will find a sonnet i wrote on the top of ben nevis. we have just entered inverness. i have three letters from you and one from fanny--and one from dilke. i would set about crossing this all over for you but i will first write to fanny and mrs. wylie. then i will begin another to you and not before because i think it better you should have this as soon as possible. my sore throat is not quite well and i intend stopping here a few days. 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 vapourous 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! good-bye till to-morrow. your most affectionate brother john ----. lxv.--to mrs. wylie. inverness, august [ ]. my dear madam--it was a great regret to me that i should leave all my friends, just at the moment when i might have helped to soften away the time for them. i wanted not to leave my brother tom, but more especially, believe me, i should like to have remained near you, were it but for an atom of consolation after parting with so dear a daughter. my brother george has ever been more than a brother to me; he has been my greatest friend, and i can never forget the sacrifice you have made for his happiness. as i walk along the mountains here i am full of these things, and lay in wait, as it were, for the pleasure of seeing you immediately on my return to town. i wish, above all things, to say a word of comfort to you, but i know not how. it is impossible to prove that black is white; it is impossible to make out that sorrow is joy, or joy is sorrow. tom tells me that you called on mr. haslam, with a newspaper giving an account of a gentleman in a fur cap falling over a precipice in kirkcudbrightshire. if it was me, i did it in a dream, or in some magic interval between the first and second cup of tea; which is nothing extraordinary when we hear that mahomet, in getting out of bed, upset a jug of water, and, whilst it was falling, took a fortnight's trip, as it seemed, to heaven; yet was back in time to save one drop of water being spilt. as for fur caps, i do not remember one beside my own, except at carlisle: this was a very good fur cap i met in high street, and i daresay was the unfortunate one. i daresay that the fates, seeing but two fur caps in the north, thought it too extraordinary, and so threw the dies which of them should be drowned. the lot fell upon jones: i daresay his name was jones. all i hope is that the gaunt ladies said not a word about hanging; if they did i shall repent that i was not half-drowned in kirkcudbright. stop! let me see!--being half-drowned by falling from a precipice, is a very romantic affair: why should i not take it to myself? how glorious to be introduced in a drawing-room to a lady who reads novels, with "mr. so-and-so--miss so-and-so; miss so-and-so, this is mr. so-and-so, who fell off a precipice and was half-drowned." now i refer to you, whether i should lose so fine an opportunity of making my fortune. no romance lady could resist me--none. being run under a waggon--side-lamed in a playhouse, apoplectic through brandy--and a thousand other tolerably decent things for badness, would be nothing, but being tumbled over a precipice into the sea--oh! it would make my fortune--especially if you could contrive to hint, from this bulletin's authority, that i was not upset on my own account, but that i dashed into the waves after jessy of dumblane, and pulled her out by the hair. but that, alas! she was dead, or she would have made me happy with her hand--however in this you may use your own discretion. but i must leave joking, and seriously aver, that i have been very romantic indeed among these mountains and lakes. i have got wet through, day after day--eaten oat-cake, and drank whisky--walked up to my knees in bog--got a sore throat--gone to see icolmkill and staffa; met with wholesome food just here and there as it happened--went up ben nevis, and--_n.b._, came down again. sometimes when i am rather tired i lean rather languishingly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down from her palfrey in passing, approach me, with--her saddle-bags, and give me--a dozen or two capital roastbeef sandwiches. when i come into a large town, you know there is no putting one's knapsack into one's fob, so the people stare. we have been taken for spectacle-vendors, razor-sellers, jewellers, travelling linendrapers, spies, excisemen, and many things i have no idea of. when i asked for letters at port patrick, the man asked what regiment? i have had a peep also at little ireland. tell henry i have not camped quite on the bare earth yet, but nearly as bad, in walking through mull, for the shepherds' huts you can scarcely breathe in, for the smoke which they seem to endeavour to preserve for smoking on a large scale. besides riding about , we have walked above miles, and may therefore reckon ourselves as set out. i assure you, my dear madam, that one of the greatest pleasures i shall have on my return, will be seeing you, and that i shall ever be yours, with the greatest respect and sincerity, john keats. lxvi.--to fanny keats. hampstead, august [ ]. my dear fanny--i am afraid you will think me very negligent in not having answered your letter--i see it is dated june . i did not arrive at inverness till the th of this month so i am very much concerned at your being disappointed so long a time. i did not intend to have returned to london so soon but have a bad sore throat from a cold i caught in the island of mull: therefore i thought it best to get home as soon as possible, and went on board the smack from cromarty. we had a nine days' passage and were landed at london bridge yesterday. i shall have a good deal to tell you about scotland--i would begin here but i have a confounded toothache. tom has not been getting better since i left london and for the last fortnight has been worse than ever--he has been getting a little better for these two or three days. i shall ask mr. abbey to let me bring you to hampstead. if mr. a. should see this letter tell him that he still must if he pleases forward the post bill to perth as i have empowered my fellow traveller to receive it. i have a few scotch pebbles for you from the island of icolmkill--i am afraid they are rather shabby--i did not go near the mountain of cairn gorm. i do not know the name of george's ship--the name of the port he has gone to is philadelphia whence he will travel to the settlement across the country--i will tell you all about this when i see you. the title of my last book is endymion--you shall have one soon.--i would not advise you to play on the flageolet--however i will get you one if you please. i will speak to mr. abbey on what you say concerning school. i am sorry for your poor canary. you shall have another volume of my first book. my toothache keeps on so that i cannot write with any pleasure--all i can say now is that your letter is a very nice one without fault and that you will hear from or see in a few days if his throat will let him, your affectionate brother john. lxvii.--to fanny keats. hampstead, tuesday [august , ]. my dear fanny--i have just written to mr. abbey to ask him to let you come and see poor tom who has lately been much worse. he is better at present--sends his love to you and wishes much to see you--i hope he will shortly--i have not been able to come to walthamstow on his account as well as a little indisposition of my own. i have asked mr. a. to write me--if he does not mention anything of it to you, i will tell you what reasons he has though i do not think he will make any objection. write me what you want with a flageolet and i will get one ready for you by the time you come. your affectionate brother john ----. lxviii.--to jane reynolds. well walk, september st [ ]. my dear jane--certainly your kind note would rather refresh than trouble me, and so much the more would your coming if as you say, it could be done without agitating my brother too much. receive on your hearth our deepest thanks for your solicitude concerning us. i am glad john is not hurt, but gone safe into devonshire--i shall be in great expectation of his letter--but the promise of it in so anxious and friendly a way i prize more than a hundred. i shall be in town to-day on some business with my guardian "as was" with scarce a hope of being able to call on you. for these two last days tom has been more cheerful: you shall hear again soon how he will be. remember us particularly to your mother. your sincere friend john keats. lxix.--to charles wentworth dilke. [hampstead, september .] my dear dilke--according to the wentworth place bulletin you have left brighton much improved: therefore now a few lines will be more of a pleasure than a bore. i have things to say to you, and would fain begin upon them in this fourth line: but i have a mind too well regulated to proceed upon anything without due preliminary remarks.--you may perhaps have observed that in the simple process of eating radishes i never begin at the root but constantly dip the little green head in the salt--that in the game of whist if i have an ace i constantly play it first. so how can i with any face begin without a dissertation on letter-writing? yet when i consider that a sheet of paper contains room only for three pages and a half, how can i do justice to such a pregnant subject? however, as you have seen the history of the world stamped as it were by a diminishing glass in the form of a chronological map, so will i "with retractile claws" draw this into the form of a table--whereby it will occupy merely the remainder of this first page-- folio--parsons, lawyers, statesmen, physicians out of place--ut--eustace--thornton--out of practice or on their travels. foolscap-- . superfine--rich or noble poets--ut byron. . common ut egomet. quarto--projectors, patentees, presidents, potato growers. bath--boarding schools, and suburbans in general. gilt edge--dandies in general, male, female, and literary. octavo or tears--all who make use of a lascivious seal. duodec.--may be found for the most part on milliners' and dressmakers' parlour tables. strip--at the playhouse-doors, or anywhere. slip--being but a variation. snip--so called from its size being disguised by a twist. i suppose you will have heard that hazlitt has on foot a prosecution against blackwood. i dined with him a few days since at hessey's--there was not a word said about it, though i understand he is excessively vexed. reynolds, by what i hear, is almost over-happy, and rice is in town. i have not seen him, nor shall i for some time, as my throat has become worse after getting well, and i am determined to stop at home till i am quite well. i was going to town to-morrow with mrs. d. but i thought it best to ask her excuse this morning. i wish i could say tom was any better. his identity presses upon me so all day that i am obliged to go out--and although i intended to have given some time to study alone, i am obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and feebleness--so that i live now in a continual fever. it must be poisonous to life, although i feel well. imagine "the hateful siege of contraries"--if i think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and yet i must do so or suffer. i am sorry to give you pain--i am almost resolved to burn this--but i really have not self-possession and magnanimity enough to manage the thing otherwise--after all it may be a nervousness proceeding from the mercury. bailey i hear is gaining his spirits, and he will yet be what i once thought impossible, a cheerful man--i think he is not quite so much spoken of in little britain. i forgot to ask mrs. dilke if she had anything she wanted to say immediately to you. this morning look'd so unpromising that i did not think she would have gone--but i find she has, on sending for some volumes of gibbon. i was in a little funk yesterday, for i sent in an unseal'd note of sham abuse, until i recollected, from what i heard charles say, that the servant could neither read nor write--not even to her mother as charles observed. i have just had a letter from reynolds--he is going on gloriously. the following is a translation of a line of ronsard-- love pour'd her beauty into my warm veins. you have passed your romance, and i never gave in to it, or else i think this line a feast for one of your lovers. how goes it with brown? your sincere friend john keats. lxx.--to john hamilton reynolds. [hampstead, about september , .] my dear reynolds--believe me i have rather rejoiced at your happiness than fretted at your silence. indeed i am grieved on your account that i am not at the same time happy--but i conjure you to think at present of nothing but pleasure--"gather the rose, etc."--gorge the honey of life. i pity you as much that it cannot last for ever, as i do myself now drinking bitters. give yourself up to it--you cannot help it--and i have a consolation in thinking so. i never was in love--yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days[ ]--at such a time, when the relief, the feverous relief of poetry seems a much less crime--this morning poetry has conquered--i have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--i feel escaped from a new strange and threatening sorrow--and i am thankful for it--there is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality. poor tom--that woman--and poetry were ringing changes in my senses--now i am in comparison happy--i am sensible this will distress you--you must forgive me. had i known you would have set out so soon i could have sent you the 'pot of basil' for i had copied it out ready.--here is a free translation of a sonnet of ronsard, which i think will please you--i have the loan of his works--they have great beauties. nature withheld cassandra in the skies, for more adornment, a full thousand years; she took their cream of beauty's fairest dyes, and shap'd and tinted her above all peers: meanwhile love kept her dearly with his wings, and underneath their shadow fill'd her eyes with such a richness that the cloudy kings of high olympus utter'd slavish sighs. when from the heavens i saw her first descend, my heart took fire, and only burning pains, they were my pleasures--they my life's sad end; love pour'd her beauty into my warm veins. * * * * * * * * * * i had not the original by me when i wrote it, and did not recollect the purport of the last lines. i should have seen rice ere this--but i am confined by sawrey's mandate in the house now, and have as yet only gone out in fear of the damp night.--you know what an undangerous matter it is. i shall soon be quite recovered--your offer i shall remember as though it had even now taken place in fact--i think it cannot be. tom is not up yet--i cannot say he is better. i have not heard from george. your affectionate friend john keats. lxxi.--to fanny keats. [hampstead, october , .] my dear fanny--poor tom is about the same as when you saw him last; perhaps weaker--were it not for that i should have been over to pay you a visit these fine days. i got to the stage half an hour before it set out and counted the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook's window and was just beginning with the jellies. there was no one in the coach who had a mind to eat me like mr. sham-deaf. i shall be punctual in enquiring about next thursday-- your affectionate brother john. lxxii.--to james augustus hessey. [hampstead, october , .] my dear hessey--you are very good in sending me the letters from the chronicle--and i am very bad in not acknowledging such a kindness sooner--pray forgive me. it has so chanced that i have had that paper every day--i have seen to-day's. i cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part--as for the rest, i begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness.--praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. my own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what blackwood or the quarterly could possibly inflict--and also when i feel i am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. j. s. is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod endymion.[ ] that it is so is no fault of mine. no!--though it may sound a little paradoxical. it is as good as i had power to make it--by myself--had i been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble--i will write independently.--i have written independently _without judgment_. i may write independently, and _with judgment_, hereafter. the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself--that which is creative must create itself--in endymion, i leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if i had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. i was never afraid of failure; for i would sooner fail than not be among the greatest--but i am nigh getting into a rant. so, with remembrances to taylor and woodhouse etc. i am yours very sincerely john keats. lxxiii.--to george and georgiana keats. [hampstead, october or , .] my dear george--there was a part in your letter which gave me a great deal of pain, that where you lament not receiving letters from england. i intended to have written immediately on my return from scotland (which was two months earlier than i had intended on account of my own as well as tom's health) but then i was told by mrs. w. that you had said you would not wish any one to write till we had heard from you. this i thought odd and now i see that it could not have been so; yet at the time i suffered my unreflecting head to be satisfied, and went on in that sort of abstract careless and restless life with which you are well acquainted. this sentence should it give you any uneasiness do not let it last for before i finish it will be explained away to your satisfaction-- i am grieved to say i am not sorry you had not letters at philadelphia; you could have had no good news of tom and i have been withheld on his account from beginning these many days; i could not bring myself to say the truth, that he is no better but much worse--however it must be told; and you must my dear brother and sister take example from me and bear up against any calamity for my sake as i do for yours. our's are ties which independent of their own sentiment are sent us by providence to prevent the deleterious effects of one great solitary grief. 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-- i will relieve you of one uneasiness of overleaf: i returned i said on account of my health--i am now well from a bad sore throat which came of bog trotting in the island of mull--of which you shall hear by the copies i shall make from my scotch letters-- your content in each other is a delight to me which i cannot express--the moon is now shining full and brilliant--she is the same to me in matter, what you are to me in spirit. if you were here my dear sister i could not pronounce the words which i can write to you from a distance: i have a tenderness for you, and an admiration which i feel to be as great and more chaste than i can have for any woman in the world. you will mention fanny--her character is not formed, her identity does not press upon me as yours does. i hope from the bottom of my heart that i may one day feel as much for her as i do for you--i know not how it is, but i have never made any acquaintance of my own--nearly all through your medium my dear brother--through you i know not only a sister but a glorious human being. and now i am talking of those to whom you have made me known i cannot forbear mentioning haslam as a most kind and obliging and constant friend. his behaviour to tom during my absence and since my return has endeared him to me for ever--besides his anxiety about you. to-morrow i shall call on your mother and exchange information with her. on tom's account i have not been able to pass so much time with her as i would otherwise have done--i have seen her but twice--once i dined with her and charles--she was well, in good spirits, and i kept her laughing at my bad jokes. we went to tea at mrs. millar's, and in going were particularly struck with the light and shade through the gate way at the horse guards. i intend to write you such volumes that it will be impossible for me to keep any order or method in what i write: that will come first which is uppermost in my mind, not that which is uppermost in my heart--besides i should wish to give you a picture of our lives here whenever by a touch i can do it; even as you must see by the last sentence our walk past whitehall all in good health and spirits--this i am certain of, because i felt so much pleasure from the simple idea of your playing a game at cricket. at mrs. millar's i saw henry quite well--there was miss keasle--and the good-natured miss waldegrave--mrs. millar began a long story and you know it is her daughter's way to help her on as though her tongue were ill of the gout. mrs. m. certainly tells a story as though she had been taught her alphabet in crutched friars. dilke has been very unwell; i found him very ailing on my return--he was under medical care for some time, and then went to the sea side whence he has returned well. poor little mrs. d. has had another gall-stone attack; she was well ere i returned--she is now at brighton. dilke was greatly pleased to hear from you, and will write a letter for me to enclose--he seems greatly desirous of hearing from you of the settlement itself-- [october or .] i came by ship from inverness, and was nine days at sea without being sick--a little qualm now and then put me in mind of you--however as soon as you touch the shore all the horrors of sickness are soon forgotten, as was the case with a lady on board who could not hold her head up all the way. we had not been in the thames an hour before her tongue began to some tune; paying off as it was fit she should all old scores. i was the only englishman on board. there was a downright scotchman who hearing that there had been a bad crop of potatoes in england had brought some triumphant specimens from scotland--these he exhibited with national pride to all the lightermen and watermen from the nore to the bridge. i fed upon beef all the way; not being able to eat the thick porridge which the ladies managed to manage with large awkward horn spoons into the bargain. severn has had a narrow escape of his life from a typhus fever: he is now gaining strength--reynolds has returned from a six weeks' enjoyment in devonshire--he is well, and persuades me to publish my pot of basil as an answer to the attacks made on me in blackwood's magazine and the quarterly review. there have been two letters in my defence in the chronicle and one in the examiner, copied from the alfred exeter paper, and written by reynolds. i do not know who wrote those in the chronicle. this is a mere matter of the moment--i think i shall be among the english poets after my death. even as a matter of present interest the attempt to crush me in the quarterly has only brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among book men "i wonder the quarterly should cut its own throat." it does me not the least harm in society to make me appear little and ridiculous: i know when a man is superior to me and give him all due respect--he will be the last to laugh at me and as for the rest i feel that i make an impression upon them which insures me personal respect while i am in sight whatever they may say when my back is turned. poor haydon's eyes will not suffer him to proceed with his picture--he has been in the country--i have seen him but once since my return. i hurry matters together here because i do not know when the mail sails--i shall enquire to-morrow, and then shall know whether to be particular or general in my letter--you shall have at least two sheets a day till it does sail whether it be three days or a fortnight--and then i will begin a fresh one for the next month. the miss reynoldses are very kind to me, but they have lately displeased me much, and in this way--now i am coming the richardson. on my return the first day i called they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs who having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner was invited by mrs. r. to take asylum in her house. she is an east indian and ought to be her grandfather's heir.[ ] at the time i called mrs. r. was in conference with her up stairs, and the young ladies were warm in her praises down stairs, calling her genteel, interesting and a thousand other pretty things to which i gave no heed, not being partial to days' wonders--now all is completely changed--they hate her, and from what i hear she is not without faults--of a real kind: but she has others which are more apt to make women of inferior charms hate her. she is not a cleopatra, but she is at least a charmian. she has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. when she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess. she is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her--from habit she thinks that nothing _particular_. i always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which i cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. i am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. i forget myself entirely because i live in her. you will by this time think i am in love with her; so before i go any further i will tell you i am not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of mozart's might do. i speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which i can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very "yes" and "no" of whose lips is to me a banquet. i don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket nor do i fret to leave her behind me. i like her and her like because one has no _sensations_--what we both are is taken for granted. you will suppose i have by this had much talk with her--no such thing--there are the miss reynoldses on the look out--they think i don't admire her because i did not stare at her. they call her a flirt to me--what a want of knowledge! she walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic power. this they call flirting! they do not know things. they do not know what a woman is. i believe though she has faults--the same as charmian and cleopatra might have had. yet she is a fine thing speaking in a worldly way: for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things--the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal--in the former buonaparte, lord byron and this charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, john howard, bishop hooker rocking his child's cradle and you my dear sister are the conquering feelings. as a man in the world i love the rich talk of a charmian; as an eternal being i love the thought of you. i should like her to ruin me, and i should like you to save me. do not think, my dear brother, from this that my passions are headlong, or likely to be ever of any pain to you-- "i am free from men of pleasure's cares, by dint of feelings far more deep than theirs." this is lord byron, and is one of the finest things he has said. i have no town talk for you, as i have not been much among people--as for politics they are in my opinion only sleepy because they will soon be too wide awake. perhaps not--for the long and continued peace of england itself has given us notions of personal safety which are likely to prevent the re-establishment of our national honesty. there is, of a truth, nothing manly or sterling in any part of the government. there are many madmen in the country i have no doubt, who would like to be beheaded on tower hill merely for the sake of éclat, there are many men like hunt who from a principle of taste would like to see things go on better, there are many like sir f. burdett who like to sit at the head of political dinners,--but there are none prepared to suffer in obscurity for their country--the motives of our worst men are interest and of our best vanity. we have no milton, no algernon sidney--governors in these days lose the title of man in exchange for that of diplomat and minister. we breathe in a sort of officinal atmosphere--all the departments of government have strayed far from simplicity which is the greatest of strength there is as much difference in this respect between the present government and oliver cromwell's as there is between the tables of rome and the volumes of civil law which were digested by justinian. a man now entitled chancellor has the same honour paid to him whether he be a hog or a lord bacon. no sensation is created by greatness but by the number of orders a man has at his button holes. notwithstanding the part which the liberals take in the cause of napoleon, i cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of liberty than any one else could have done: not that the divine right gentlemen have done or intend to do any good--no they have taken a lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done without any of the good. the worst thing he has done is, that he has taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. the emperor alexander it is said intends to divide his empire as did diocletian--creating two czars besides himself, and continuing the supreme monarch of the whole. should he do this and they for a series of years keep peaceable among themselves russia may spread her conquest even to china--i think it a very likely thing that china itself may fall, turkey certainly will. meanwhile european north russia will hold its horns against the rest of europe, intriguing constantly with france. dilke, whom you know to be a godwin perfectibility man, pleases himself with the idea that america will be the country to take up the human intellect where england leaves off--i differ there with him greatly--a country like the united states, whose greatest men are franklins and washingtons will never do that. they are great men doubtless, but how are they to be compared to those our countrymen milton and the two sidneys? the one is a philosophical quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims, the other sold the very charger who had taken him through all his battles. those americans are great, but they are not sublime man--the humanity of the united states can never reach the sublime. birkbeck's mind is too much in the american style--you must endeavour to infuse a little spirit of another sort into the settlement, always with great caution, for thereby you may do your descendants more good than you may imagine. if i had a prayer to make for any great good, next to tom's recovery, it should be that one of your children should be the first american poet. i have a great mind to make a prophecy, and they say prophecies work out their own fulfilment-- 'tis the witching time of night, orbed is the moon and bright, and the stars they glisten, glisten, seeming with bright eyes to listen. for what listen they? for a song and for a charm, see they glisten in alarm and the moon is waxing warm to hear what i shall say. moon keep wide thy golden ears hearken stars and hearken spheres hearken thou eternal sky i sing an infant's lullaby, o pretty lullaby! listen, listen, listen, listen glisten, glisten, glisten, glisten and hear my lullaby! though the rushes that will make its cradle still are in the lake, though the linen that will be its swathe, is on the cotton tree, though the woollen that will keep it warm, is on the silly sheep; listen starlight, listen, listen glisten, glisten, glisten, glisten and hear my lullaby! child! i see thee! child, i've found thee midst of the quiet all around thee! child, i see thee! child, i spy thee and thy mother sweet is nigh thee!-- child, i know thee! child no more but a poet _ever_more see, see the lyre, the lyre in a flame of fire upon the little cradle's top flaring, flaring, flaring past the eyesight's bearing-- awake it from its sleep, and see if it can keep its eyes upon the blaze-- amaze, amaze! it stares, it stares, it stares it dares what no one dares it lifts its little hand into the flame unharm'd, and on the strings paddles a little tune and sings with dumb endeavour sweetly! bard art thou completely! little child o' the western wild, bard art thou completely!-- sweetly, with dumb endeavour-- a poet now or never! little child o' the western wild a poet now or never! [october .] this is friday, i know not what day of the month--i will enquire to-morrow, for it is fit you should know the time i am writing. i went to town yesterday, and calling at mrs. millar's was told that your mother would not be found at home--i met henry as i turned the corner--i had no leisure to return, so i left the letters with him. he was looking very well. poor tom is no better to-night--i am afraid to ask him what message i shall send from him. and here i could go on complaining of my misery, but i will keep myself cheerful for your sakes. with a great deal of trouble i have succeeded in getting fanny to hampstead. she has been several times. mr. lewis has been very kind to tom all the summer, there has scarce a day passed but he has visited him, and not one day without bringing or sending some fruit of the nicest kind. he has been very assiduous in his enquiries after you--it would give the old gentleman a great deal of pleasure if you would send him a sheet enclosed in the next parcel to me, after you receive this--how long it will be first--why did i not write to philadelphia? really i am sorry for that neglect. i wish to go on writing ad infinitum to you--i wish for interesting matter and a pen as swift as the wind--but the fact is i go so little into the crowd now that i have nothing fresh and fresh every day to speculate upon except my own whims and theories. i have been but once to haydon's, once to hunt's, once to rice's, once to hessey's. i have not seen taylor, i have not been to the theatre. now if i had been many times to all these and was still in the habit of going i could on my return at night have each day something new to tell you of without any stop--but now i have such a dearth that when i get to the end of this sentence and to the bottom of this page i must wait till i can find something interesting to you before i begin another. after all it is not much matter what it may be about, for the very words from such a distance penned by this hand will be grateful to you--even though i were to copy out the tale of mother hubbard or little red riding hood. [later.] i have been over to dilke's this evening--there with brown we have been talking of different and indifferent matters--of euclid, of metaphysics, of the bible, of shakspeare, of the horrid system and consequences of the fagging at great schools. i know not yet how large a parcel i can send--i mean by way of letters--i hope there can be no objection to my dowling up a quire made into a small compass. that is the manner in which i shall write. i shall send you more than letters--i mean a tale--which i must begin on account of the activity of my mind; of its inability to remain at rest. it must be prose and not very exciting. i must do this because in the way i am at present situated i have too many interruptions to a train of feeling to be able to write poetry. so i shall write this tale, and if i think it worth while get a duplicate made before i send it off to you. [october .] this is a fresh beginning the st october. charles and henry were with us on sunday, and they brought me your letter to your mother--we agreed to get a packet off to you as soon as possible. i shall dine with your mother to-morrow, when they have promised to have their letters ready. i shall send as soon as possible without thinking of the little you may have from me in the first parcel, as i intend, as i said before, to begin another letter of more regular information. here i want to communicate so largely in a little time that i am puzzled where to direct my attention. haslam has promised to let me know from capper and hazlewood. for want of something better i shall proceed to give you some extracts from my scotch letters--yet now i think on it why not send you the letters themselves--i have three of them at present--i believe haydon has two which i will get in time. i dined with your mother and henry at mrs. millar's on thursday, when they gave me their letters. charles's i have not yet--he has promised to send it. the thought of sending my scotch letters has determined me to enclose a few more which i have received and which will give you the best cue to how i am going on, better than you could otherwise know. your mother was well, and i was sorry i could not stop later. i called on hunt yesterday--it has been always my fate to meet ollier there--on thursday i walked with hazlitt as far as covent garden: he was going to play racquets. i think tom has been rather better these few last days--he has been less nervous. i expect reynolds to-morrow. [later, about october .] since i wrote thus far i have met with that same lady again, whom i saw at hastings and whom i met when we were going to the english opera. it was in a street which goes from bedford row to lamb's conduit street.--i passed her and turned back: she seemed glad of it--glad to see me, and not offended at my passing her before. we walked on towards islington, where we called on a friend of hers who keeps a boarding school. she has always been an enigma to me--she has been in a room with you and reynolds, and wishes we should be acquainted without any of our common acquaintance knowing it. as we went along, sometimes through shabby, sometimes through decent streets, i had my guessing at work, not knowing what it would be, and prepared to meet any surprise. first it ended at this house at islington: on parting from which i pressed to attend her home. she consented, and then again my thoughts were at work what it might lead to, though now they had received a sort of genteel hint from the boarding school. our walk ended in gloucester street, queen square--not exactly so, for we went upstairs into her sitting-room, a very tasty sort of place with books, pictures, a bronze statue of buonaparte, music, æolian harp, a parrot, a linnet, a case of choice liqueurs, etc. etc. she behaved in the kindest manner--made me take home a grouse for tom's dinner. asked for my address for the purpose of sending more game.... i expect to pass some pleasant hours with her now and then: in which i feel i shall be of service to her in matters of knowledge and taste: if i can i will.... she and your george are the only women à peu près de mon age whom i would be content to know for their mind and friendship alone.--i shall in a short time write you as far as i know how i intend to pass my life--i cannot think of those things now tom is so unwell and weak. notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendation i hope i shall never marry. though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on winander mere, i should not feel--or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime. then instead of what i have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home--the roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. the mighty abstract idea i have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness--an amiable wife and sweet children i contemplate as a part of that beauty, but i must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. i feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that i do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds--no sooner am i alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's bodyguard--then "tragedy with sceptred pall comes sweeping by." according to my state of mind i am with achilles shouting in the trenches, or with theocritus in the vales of sicily. or i throw my whole being into troilus, and repeating those lines, "i wander like a lost soul upon the stygian banks staying for waftage," i melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that i am content to be alone. these things, combined with the opinion i have of the generality of women--who appear to me as children to whom i would rather give a sugar plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which i rejoice in. i have written this that you might see i have my share of the highest pleasures, and that though i may choose to pass my days alone i shall be no solitary. you see there is nothing spleenical in all this. the only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one short passing day, is any doubt about my powers for poetry--i seldom have any, and i look with hope to the nighing time when i shall have none. i am as happy as a man can be--that is, in myself i should be happy if tom was well, and i knew you were passing pleasant days. then i should be most enviable--with the yearning passion i have for the beautiful, connected and made one with the ambition of my intellect. think of my pleasure in solitude in comparison of my commerce with the world--there i am a child--there they do not know me, not even my most intimate acquaintance--i give into their feelings as though i were refraining from irritating a little child. some think me middling, others silly, others foolish--every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will, when in truth it is with my will--i am content to be thought all this because i have in my own breast so great a resource. this is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room and eclipse from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good poet. i hope i am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': i think not: for i have not the least contempt for my species, and though it may sound paradoxical, my greatest elevations of soul leave me every time more humbled--enough of this--though in your love for me you will not think it enough. [later, october or .] haslam has been here this morning and has taken all the letters except this sheet, which i shall send him by the twopenny, as he will put the parcel in the boston post bag by the advice of capper and hazlewood, who assure him of the safety and expedition that way--the parcel will be forwarded to warder and thence to you all the same. there will not be a philadelphia ship for these six weeks--by that time i shall have another letter to you. mind you i mark this letter a. by the time you will receive this you will have i trust passed through the greatest of your fatigues. as it was with your sea sickness i shall not hear of them till they are past. do not set to your occupation with too great an anxiety--take it calmly--and let your health be the prime consideration. i hope you will have a son, and it is one of my first wishes to have him in my arms--which i will do please god before he cuts one double tooth. 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. think of me, and for my sake be cheerful. believe me, my dear brother and sister, your anxious and affectionate brother john. this day is my birth day. all our friends have been anxious in their enquiries, and all send their remembrances. lxxiv.--to fanny keats. hampstead, friday morn [october , ]. my dear fanny--you must not condemn me for not being punctual to thursday, for i really did not know whether it would not affect poor tom too much to see you. you know how it hurt him to part with you the last time. at all events you shall hear from me; and if tom keeps pretty well to-morrow, i will see mr. abbey the next day, and endeavour to settle that you shall be with us on tuesday or wednesday. i have good news from george--he has landed safely with our sister--they are both in good health--their prospects are good--and they are by this time nighing to their journey's end--you shall hear the particulars soon. your affectionate brother john. tom's love to you. lxxv.--to fanny keats. [hampstead, october , .] my dear fanny--i called on mr. abbey in the beginning of last week: when he seemed averse to letting you come again from having heard that you had been to other places besides well walk. i do not mean to say you did wrongly in speaking of it, for there should rightly be no objection to such things: but you know with what people we are obliged in the course of childhood to associate, whose conduct forces us into duplicity and falsehood to them. to the worst of people we should be openhearted: but it is as well as things are to be prudent in making any communication to any one, that may throw an impediment in the way of any of the little pleasures you may have. i do not recommend duplicity but prudence with such people. perhaps i am talking too deeply for you: if you do not now, you will understand what i mean in the course of a few years. i think poor tom is a little better: he sends his love to you. i shall call on mr. abbey to-morrow: when i hope to settle when to see you again. mrs. dilke has been for some time at brighton--she is expected home in a day or two. she will be pleased i am sure with your present. i will try for permission for you to remain here all night should mrs. d. return in time. your affectionate brother john ----. lxxvi.--to richard woodhouse. [hampstead, october , .] my dear woodhouse--your letter gave me great satisfaction, more on account of its friendliness than any relish of that matter in it which is accounted so acceptable to the "genus irritabile." the best answer i can give you is in a clerklike manner to make some observations on two principal points which seem to point like indices into the midst of the whole pro and con about genius, and views, and achievements, and ambition, et cætera.-- st. as to the poetical character itself (i mean that sort, of which, if i am anything, i am a member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone,) it is not itself--it has no self--it is everything and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated--it has as much delight in conceiving an iago as an imogen. what shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. it does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. a poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity--he is continually in for and filling some other body. the sun,--the moon,--the sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity--he is certainly the most unpoetical of all god's creatures.--if then he has no self, and if i am a poet, where is the wonder that i should say i would write no more? might i not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of saturn and ops?[ ] it is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that not one word i ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature--how can it, when i have no nature? when i am in a room with people, if i ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that i am in a very little time annihilated--not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children. i know not whether i make myself wholly understood: i hope enough so to let you see that no dependence is to be placed on what i said that day. in the d place, i will speak of my views, and of the life i purpose to myself. i am ambitious of doing the world some good: if i should be spared, that may be the work of maturer years--in the interval i will assay to reach to as high a summit in poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. the faint conceptions i have of poems to come bring the blood frequently into my forehead--all i hope is, that i may not lose all interest in human affairs--that the solitary indifference i feel for applause, even from the finest spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision i may have. i do not think it will. i feel assured i should write from the mere yearning and fondness i have for the beautiful, even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever shine upon them. but even now i am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul i now live. i am sure however that this next sentence is from myself--i feel your anxiety, good opinion, and friendship, in the highest degree, and am yours most sincerely john keats. lxxvii.--to fanny keats. [hampstead, november , .] my dear fanny--i have seen mr. abbey three times about you, and have not been able to get his consent. he says that once more between this and the holidays will be sufficient. what can i do? i should have been at walthamstow several times, but i am not able to leave tom for so long a time as that would take me. poor tom has been rather better these last days in consequence of obtaining a little rest a nights. write to me as often as you can, and believe that i would do anything to give you any pleasure--we must as yet wait patiently. your affectionate brother john ----. lxxviii.--to james rice. well walk [hampstead,] nov{r.} , [ ]. my dear rice--your amende honorable i must call "un surcroît d'amitié," for i am not at all sensible of anything but that you were unfortunately engaged and i was unfortunately in a hurry. i completely understand your feeling in this mistake, and find in it that balance of comfort which remains after regretting your uneasiness. i have long made up my mind to take for granted the genuine-heartedness of my friends, notwithstanding any temporary ambiguousness in their behaviour or their tongues, nothing of which however i had the least scent of this morning. i say completely understand; for i am everlastingly getting my mind into such-like painful trammels--and am even at this moment suffering under them in the case of a friend of ours.--i will tell you two most unfortunate and parallel slips--it seems down-right pre-intention--a friend says to me, "keats, i shall go and see severn this week."--"ah! (says i) you want him to take your portrait."--and again, "keats," says a friend, "when will you come to town again?"--"i will," says i, "let you have the ms. next week." in both these cases i appeared to attribute an interested motive to each of my friends' questions--the first made him flush, the second made him look angry:--and yet i am innocent in both cases; my mind leapt over every interval, to what i saw was per se a pleasant subject with him. you see i have no allowances to make--you see how far i am from supposing you could show me any neglect. i very much regret the long time i have been obliged to exile from you: for i have one or two rather pleasant occasions to confer upon with you. what i have heard from george is favourable--i expect a letter from the settlement itself. your sincere friend john keats. i cannot give any good news of tom. lxxix.--to fanny keats. [hampstead,] tuesday morn [december , ]. my dear fanny--poor tom has been so bad that i have delayed your visit hither--as it would be so painful to you both. i cannot say he is any better this morning--he is in a very dangerous state--i have scarce any hopes of him. keep up your spirits for me my dear fanny--repose entirely in your affectionate brother john. lxxx.--to george and georgiana keats. [hampstead,[ ] about dec{r.} , .] my dear brother and sister--you will have been prepared before this reaches you for the worst news you could have, nay, if haslam's letter arrives in proper time, i have a consolation in thinking that the first shock will be past before you receive this. the last days of poor tom were of the most distressing nature; but his last moments were not so painful, and his very last was without a pang. i will not enter into any parsonic comments on death--yet the common observations of the commonest people on death are as true as their proverbs. i have scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature or other--neither had tom. my friends have been exceedingly kind to me every one of them--brown detained me at his house. i suppose no one could have had their time made smoother than mine has been. during poor tom's illness i was not able to write and since his death the task of beginning has been a hindrance to me. within this last week i have been everywhere--and i will tell you as nearly as possible how all go on. with dilke and brown i am quite thick--with brown indeed i am going to domesticate--that is, we shall keep house together. i shall have the front parlour and he the back one, by which i shall avoid the noise of bentley's children--and be the better able to go on with my studies--which have been greatly interrupted lately, so that i have not the shadow of an idea of a book in my head, and my pen seems to have grown too gouty for sense. how are you going on now? the goings on of the world makes me dizzy--there you are with birkbeck--here i am with brown--sometimes i fancy an immense separation, and sometimes as at present, a direct communication of spirit with you. that will be one of the grandeurs of immortality--there will be no space, and consequently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other--when they will completely understand each other, while we in this world merely comprehend each other in different degrees--the higher the degree of good so higher is our love and friendship. i have been so little used to writing lately that i am afraid you will not smoke my meaning so i will give an example--suppose brown or haslam or any one whom i understand in the next degree to what i do you, were in america, they would be so much the farther from me in proportion as their identity was less impressed upon me. now the reason why i do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that i remember your ways and manners and actions; i know your manner of thinking, your manner of feeling: i know what shape your joy or your sorrow would take; i know the manner of your walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laughing, punning, and every action so truly that you seem near to me. you will remember me in the same manner--and the more when i tell you that i shall read a passage of shakspeare every sunday at ten o'clock--you read one at the same time, and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room. i saw your mother the day before yesterday, and intend now frequently to pass half a day with her--she seem'd tolerably well. i called in henrietta street and so was speaking with your mother about miss millar--we had a chat about heiresses--she told me i think of or eight dying swains. charles was not at home. i think i have heard a little more talk about miss keasle--all i know of her is she had a new sort of shoe on of bright leather like our knapsacks. miss millar gave me one of her confounded pinches. _n.b._ did not like it. mrs. dilke went with me to see fanny last week, and haslam went with me last sunday. she was well--she gets a little plumper and had a little colour. on sunday i brought from her a present of facescreens and a work-bag for mrs. d.--they were really very pretty. from walthamstow we walked to bethnal green--where i felt so tired from my long walk that i was obliged to go to bed at ten. mr. and mrs. keasle were there. haslam has been excessively kind, and his anxiety about you is great; i never meet him but we have some chat thereon. he is always doing me some good turn--he gave me this thin paper[ ] for the purpose of writing to you. i have been passing an hour this morning with mr. lewis--he wants news of you very much. haydon was here yesterday--he amused us much by speaking of young hoppner who went with captain ross on a voyage of discovery to the poles. the ship was sometimes entirely surrounded with vast mountains and crags of ice, and in a few minutes not a particle was to be seen all round the horizon. once they met with so vast a mass that they gave themselves over for lost; their last resource was in meeting it with the bowsprit, which they did, and split it asunder and glided through it as it parted, for a great distance--one mile and more. their eyes were so fatigued with the eternal dazzle and whiteness that they lay down on their backs upon deck to relieve their sight on the blue sky. hoppner describes his dreadful weariness at the continual day--the sun ever moving in a circle round above their heads--so pressing upon him that he could not rid himself of the sensation even in the dark hold of the ship. the esquimaux are described as the most wretched of beings--they float from their summer to their winter residences and back again like white bears on the ice floats. they seem never to have washed, and so when their features move the red skin shows beneath the cracking peel of dirt. they had no notion of any inhabitants in the world but themselves. the sailors who had not seen a star for some time, when they came again southwards on the hailing of the first revision of one, all ran upon deck with feelings of the most joyful nature. haydon's eyes will not suffer him to proceed with his picture--his physician tells him he must remain two months more, inactive. hunt keeps on in his old way--i am completely tired of it all. he has lately publish'd a pocket book called the literary pocket-book--full of the most sickening stuff you can imagine. reynolds is well; he has become an edinburgh reviewer. i have not heard from bailey. rice i have seen very little of lately--and i am very sorry for it. the miss r's. are all as usual. archer above all people called on me one day--he wanted some information by my means, from hunt and haydon, concerning some man they knew. i got him what he wanted, but know none of the whys and wherefores. poor kirkman left wentworth place one evening about half-past eight and was stopped, beaten and robbed of his watch in pond street. i saw him a few days since; he had not recovered from his bruises. i called on hazlitt the day i went to romney street--i gave john hunt extracts from your letters--he has taken no notice. i have seen lamb lately--brown and i were taken by hunt to novello's--there we were devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns--brown don't want to go again. we went the other evening to see brutus a new tragedy by howard payne, an american--kean was excellent--the play was very bad. it is the first time i have been since i went with you to the lyceum. mrs. brawne who took brown's house for the summer, still resides in 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 a little better, or i must have sheered off.[ ] i find by a sidelong report from your mother that i am to be invited to miss millar's birthday dance. shall i dance with miss waldegrave? eh! i shall be obliged to shirk a good many there. i shall be the only dandy there--and indeed i merely comply with the invitation that the party may not be entirely destitute of a specimen of that race. i shall appear in a complete dress of purple, hat and all--with a list of the beauties i have conquered embroidered round my calves. thursday [december ]. this morning is so very fine, i should have walked over to walthamstow if i had thought of it yesterday. what are you doing this morning? have you a clear hard frost as we have? how do you come on with the gun? have you shot a buffalo? have you met with any pheasants? my thoughts are very frequently in a foreign country--i live more out of england than in it. the mountains of tartary are a favourite lounge, if i happen to miss the alleghany ridge, or have no whim for savoy. there must be great pleasure in pursuing game--pointing your gun--no, it won't do--now, no--rabbit it--now bang--smoke and feathers--where is it? shall you be able to get a good pointer or so? have you seen mr. trimmer? he is an acquaintance of peachey's. now i am not addressing myself to g. minor, and yet i am--for you are one. have you some warm furs? by your next letters i shall expect to hear exactly how you go on--smother nothing--let us have all; fair and foul, all plain. will the little bairn have made his entrance before you have this? kiss it for me, and when it can first know a cheese from a caterpillar show it my picture twice a week. you will be glad to hear that gifford's attack upon me has done me service--it has got my book among several _sets_--nor must i forget to mention once more what i suppose haslam has told you, the present of a £ note i had anonymously sent me. i have many things to tell you--the best way will be to make copies of my correspondence; and i must not forget the sonnet i received with the note. last week i received the following from woodhouse whom you must recollect:-- "my dear keats--i send enclosed a letter, which when read take the trouble to return to me. the history of its reaching me is this. my cousin, miss frogley of hounslow, borrowed my copy of _endymion_ for a specified time. before she had time to look into it, she and my friend mr. hy. neville of esher, who was house surgeon to the late princess charlotte, insisted upon having it to read for a day or two, and undertook to make my cousin's peace with me on account of the extra delay. neville told me that one of the misses porter (of romance celebrity) had seen it on his table, dipped into it, and expressed a wish to read it. i desired he should keep it as long and lend it to as many as he pleased, provided it was not allowed to slumber on any one's shelf. i learned subsequently from miss frogley that these ladies had requested of mr. neville, if he was acquainted with the author, the pleasure of an introduction. about a week back the enclosed was transmitted by mr. neville to my cousin, as a species of apology for keeping her so long without the book, and she sent it to me, knowing that it would give me pleasure--i forward it to you for somewhat the same reason, but principally because it gives me the opportunity of naming to you (which it would have been fruitless to do before) the opening there is for an introduction to a class of society from which you may possibly derive advantage, as well as qualification, if you think proper to avail yourself of it. in such a case i should be very happy to further your wishes. but do just as you please. the whole is entirely _entre nous_.-- yours, etc., r. w." well--now this is miss porter's letter to neville-- "dear sir--as my mother is sending a messenger to esher, i cannot but make the same the bearer of my regrets for not having had the pleasure of seeing you the morning you called at the gate. i had given orders to be denied, i was so very unwell with my still adhesive cold; but had i known it was you i should have taken off the interdict for a few minutes, to say how very much i am delighted with _endymion_. i had just finished the poem and have done as you permitted, lent it to miss fitzgerald. i regret you are not personally acquainted with the author, for i should have been happy to have acknowledged to him, through the advantage of your communication, the very rare delight my sister and myself have enjoyed from the first fruits of genius. i hope the ill-natured review will not have damaged" (or damped) "such true parnassian fire--it ought not, for when life is granted, etc." --and so she goes on. now i feel more obliged than flattered by this--so obliged that i will not at present give you an extravaganza of a lady romancer. i will be introduced to them if it be merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it--i shall certainly see a new race of people. i shall more certainly have no time for them. hunt has asked me to meet tom moore some day--so you shall hear of him. 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 one 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 in morals. he understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself professes--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. this distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of beauty. martin is very much irritated against blackwood for printing some letters in his magazine which were martin's property--he always found excuses for blackwood till he himself was injured, and now he is enraged. i have been several times thinking whether or not i should send you the examiners, as birkbeck no doubt has all the good periodical publications--i will save them at all events. i must not forget to mention how attentive and useful mrs. bentley has been--i am very sorry to leave her--but i must, and i hope she will not be much a loser by it. bentley is very well--he has just brought me a clothes'-basket of books. brown has gone to town to-day to take his nephews who are on a visit here to see the lions. i am passing a quiet day--which i have not done for a long while--and if i do continue so, i feel i must again begin with my poetry--for if i am not in action mind or body i am in pain--and from that i suffer greatly by going into parties where from the rules of society and a natural pride i am obliged to smother my spirit and look like an idiot--because i feel my impulses given way to would too much amaze them. i live under an everlasting restraint--never relieved except when i am composing--so i will write away. friday [december ]. i think you knew before you left england that my next subject would be "the fall of hyperion." i went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get into the vein again. i will not give you any extracts because i wish the whole to make an impression. i have however a few poems which you will like, and i will copy out on the next sheet. i shall dine with haydon on sunday, and go over to walthamstow on monday if the frost hold. i think also of going into hampshire this christmas to mr. snook's[ ]--they say i shall be very much amused--but i don't know--i think i am in too huge a mind for study--i must do it--i must wait at home and let those who wish come to see me. i cannot always be (how do you spell it?) trapsing. here i must tell you that i have not been able to keep the journal or write the tale i promised--now i shall be able to do so. i will write to haslam this morning to know when the packet sails, and till it does i will write something every day--after that my journal shall go on like clockwork, and you must not complain of its dulness--for what i wish is to write a quantity to you--knowing well that dulness itself will from me be interesting to you--you may conceive how this not having been done has weighed upon me. i shall be able to judge from your next what sort of information will be of most service or amusement to you. perhaps as you were fond of giving me sketches of character you may like a little picnic of scandal even across the atlantic. but now i must speak particularly to you, my dear sister--for i know you love a little quizzing better than a great bit of apple dumpling. do you know uncle redhall? he is a little man with an innocent powdered upright head, he lisps with a protruded under lip--he has two nieces, each one would weigh three of him--one for height and the other for breadth--he knew bartolozzi. he gave a supper, and ranged his bottles of wine all up the kitchen and cellar stairs--quite ignorant of what might be drunk--it might have been a good joke to pour on the sly bottle after bottle into a washing tub, and roar for more--if you were to trip him up it would discompose a pigtail and bring his under lip nearer to his nose. he never had the good luck to lose a silk handkerchief in a crowd, and therefore has only one topic of conversation--bartolozzi. shall i give you miss brawne? she is about my height--with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort--she wants sentiment in every feature--she manages to make her hair look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth is bad and good--her profile is better than her full-face which indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. her shape is very graceful and so are her movements--her arms are good her hands baddish--her feet tolerable. she is not seventeen--but she is ignorant--monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions--calling people such names that i was forced lately to make use of the term _minx_--this is i think not from any innate vice, but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly--i am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it. she had a friend to visit her lately--you have known plenty such--her face is raw as if she was standing out in a frost; her lips raw and seem always ready for a pullet--she plays the music without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her fingers. she is a downright miss without one set off--we hated her and smoked her and baited her and i think drove her away. miss b. thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only woman she would change persons with. what a stupe--she is superior as a rose to a dandelion. when we went to bed brown observed as he put out the taper what a very ugly old woman that miss robinson would make--at which i must have groaned aloud for i'm sure ten minutes. i have not seen the thing kingston again--george will describe him to you--i shall insinuate some of these creatures into a comedy some day--and perhaps have hunt among them-- 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," etc.--_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 floridise 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. [december .] it is some days since i wrote the last page--and what i have been about since i have no idea. i dined at haslam's on sunday--with haydon yesterday, and saw fanny in the morning; she was well. just now i took out my poem to go on with it, but the thought of my writing so little to you came upon me and i could not get on--so i have began at random and i have not a word to say--and yet my thoughts are so full of you that i can do nothing else. i shall be confined at hampstead a few days on account of a sore throat--the first thing i do will be to visit your mother again. the last time i saw henry he show'd me his first engraving, which i thought capital. mr. lewis called this morning and brought some american papers--i have not look'd into them--i think we ought to have heard of you before this--i am in daily expectation of letters--nil desperandum. mrs. abbey wishes to take fanny from school--i shall strive all i can against that. there has happened a great misfortune in the drewe family--old drewe has been dead some time; and lately george drewe expired in a fit--on which account reynolds has gone into devonshire. he dined a few days since at horace twisse's with liston and charles kemble. i see very little of him now, as i seldom go to little britain because the _ennui_ always seizes me there, and john reynolds is very dull at home. nor have i seen rice. how you are now going on is a mystery to me--i hope a few days will clear it up. [december .] i never know the day of the month. it is very fine here to-day, though i expect a thundercloud, or rather a snow cloud, in less than an hour. i am at present alone at wentworth place--brown being at chichester and mr. and mrs. dilke making a little stay in town. i know not what i should do without a sunshiny morning now and then--it clears up one's spirits. dilke and i frequently have some chat about you. i have now and then some doubt, but he seems to have a great confidence. i think there will soon be perceptible a change in the fashionable slang literature of the day--it seems to me that reviews have had their day--that the public have been surfeited--there will soon be some new folly to keep the parlours in talk--what it is i care not. we have seen three literary kings in our time--scott, byron, and then the scotch novels. all now appears to be dead--or i may mistake, literary bodies may still keep up the bustle which i do not hear. haydon show'd me a letter he had received from tripoli--ritchie was well and in good spirits, among camels, turbans, palm trees, and sands. you may remember i promised to send him an endymion which i did not--however he has one--you have one. one is in the wilds of america--the other is on a camel's back in the plains of egypt. i am looking into a book of dubois's--he has written directions to the players--one of them is very good. "in singing never mind the music--observe what time you please. it would be a pretty degradation indeed if you were obliged to confine your genius to the dull regularity of a fiddler--horse hair and cat's guts--no, let him keep _your_ time and play _your_ tune--_dodge him_." i will now copy out the letter and sonnet i have spoken of. the outside cover was thus directed, "messrs. taylor and hessey, (booksellers), no. fleet street, london," and it contained this: 'messrs. taylor and hessey are requested to forward the enclosed letter by some _safe_ mode of conveyance to the author of endymion, who is not known at teignmouth: or if they have not his address, they will return the letter by post, directed as below, within a _fortnight_, "mr. p. fenbank, p. o., teignmouth." th novr. .' in this sheet was enclosed the following, with a superscription--'mr. john keats, teignmouth.' then came sonnet to john keats--which i would not copy for any in the world but you--who know that i scout "mild light and loveliness" or any such nonsense in myself. star of high promise!--not to this dark age do thy mild light and loveliness belong; for it is blind, intolerant, and wrong; dead to empyreal soarings, and the rage of scoffing spirits bitter war doth wage with all that bold integrity of song. yet thy clear beam shall shine through ages strong to ripest times a light and heritage. and there breathe now who dote upon thy fame, whom thy wild numbers wrap beyond their being, who love the freedom of thy lays--their aim above the scope of a dull tribe unseeing-- and there is one whose hand will never scant from his poor store of fruits all _thou_ canst want. november . turn over. i turn'd over and found a £ note. now this appears to me all very proper--if i had refused it i should have behaved in a very bragadochio dunderheaded manner--and yet the present galls me a little, and i do not know whether i shall not return it if i ever meet with the donor after, whom to no purpose i have written. i have your miniature on the table george the great--it's very like--though not quite about the upper lip. i wish we had a better of your little george. i must not forget to tell you that a few days since i went with dilke a shooting on the heath and shot a tomtit. there were as many guns abroad as birds. i intended to have been at chichester this wednesday--but on account of this sore throat i wrote him (brown) my excuse yesterday. thursday [december ]. (i will date when i finish.)--i received a note from haslam yesterday--asking if my letter is ready--now this is only the second sheet--notwithstanding all my promises. but you must reflect what hindrances i have had. however on sealing this i shall have nothing to prevent my proceeding in a gradual journal, which will increase in a month to a considerable size. i will insert any little pieces i may write--though i will not give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began. i want to hear very much whether poetry and literature in general has gained or lost interest with you--and what sort of writing is of the highest gust with you now. with what sensation do you read fielding?--and do not hogarth's pictures seem an old thing to you? yet you are very little more removed from general association than i am--recollect that no man can live but in one society at a time--his enjoyment in the different states of human society must depend upon the powers of his mind--that is you can imagine a roman triumph or an olympic game as well as i can. we with our bodily eyes see but the fashion and manners of one country for one age--and then we die. now to me manners and customs long since passed whether among the babylonians or the bactrians are as real, or even more real than those among which i now live--my thoughts have turned lately this way--the more we know the more inadequacy we find in the world to satisfy us--this is an old observation; but i have made up my mind never to take anything for granted--but even to examine the truth of the commonest proverbs--this however is true. mrs. tighe and beattie once delighted me--now i see through them and can find nothing in them but weakness, and yet how many they still delight! perhaps a superior being may look upon shakspeare in the same light--is it possible? no--this same inadequacy is discovered (forgive me, little george, you know i don't mean to put you in the mess) in women with few exceptions--the dress maker, the blue stocking, and the most charming sentimentalist differ but in a slight degree and are equally smokeable. but i'll go no further--i may be speaking sacrilegiously--and on my word i have thought so little that i have not one opinion upon anything except in matters of taste--i never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its beauty--and i find myself very young minded even in that perceptive power--which i hope will increase. a year ago i could not understand in the slightest degree raphael's cartoons--now i begin to read them a little--and how did i learn to do so? by seeing something done in quite an opposite spirit--i mean a picture of guido's in which all the saints, instead of that heroic simplicity and unaffected grandeur which they inherit from raphael, had each of them both in countenance and gesture all the canting, solemn, melodramatic mawkishness of mackenzie's father nicholas. when i was last at haydon's i looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of the church at milan, the name of which i forget--in it are comprised specimens of the first and second age of art in italy. i do not think i ever had a greater treat out of shakspeare. full of romance and the most tender feeling--magnificence of draperies beyond any i ever saw, not excepting raphael's. but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole--even finer to me than more accomplish'd works--as there was left so much room for imagination. i have not heard one of this last course of hazlitt's lectures. they were upon 'wit and humour,' 'the english comic writers.' saturday, jan{y.} nd [ ]. yesterday mr. and mrs. d. and myself dined at mrs. brawne's--nothing particular passed. i never intend hereafter to spend any time with ladies unless they are handsome--you lose time to no purpose. for that reason i shall beg leave to decline going again to redall's or butler's or any squad where a fine feature cannot be mustered among them all--and where all the evening's amusement consists in saying 'your good health, _your_ good health, and your good health--and (o i beg your pardon) yours, miss ----,' and such thing not even dull enough to keep one awake--with respect to amiable speaking i can read--let my eyes be fed or i'll never go out to dinner anywhere. perhaps you may have heard of the dinner given to thos. moore in dublin, because i have the account here by me in the philadelphia democratic paper. the most pleasant thing that occurred was the speech mr. tom made on his father's health being drank. i am afraid a great part of my letters are filled up with promises and what i will do rather than any great deal written--but here i say once for all--that circumstances prevented me from keeping my promise in my last, but now i affirm that as there will be nothing to hinder me i will keep a journal for you. that i have not yet done so you would forgive if you knew how many hours i have been repenting of my neglect. for i have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of you--my poem cannot frequently drive it away--you will retard it much more than you could by taking up my time if you were in england. i never forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman--but that is a fever--the thought of you both is a passion with me, but for the most part a calm one. i asked dilke for a few lines for you--he has promised them--i shall send what i have written to haslam on monday morning--what i can get into another sheet to-morrow i will--there are one or two little poems you might like. i have given up snuff very nearly quite--dilke has promised to sit with me this evening, i wish he would come this minute for i want a pinch of snuff very much just now--i have none though in my own snuff box. my sore throat is much better to-day--i think i might venture on a pinch. here are the poems--they will explain themselves--as all poems should do without any comment-- 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 towards heaven 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 doth its blossoming: autumn's red-lipped fruitage too blushing through the mist and dew, cloys with kissing. what do then? sit thee in an ingle when the sear faggot blazes bright, spirit of a winter night: when the soundless earth is muffled, and the caked snow is shuffled from the ploughboy's heavy shoon: when the night doth meet the moon in a dark conspiracy to banish vesper from the sky. sit thee then and send abroad with a mind self-overaw'd fancy high-commission'd; send her,-- she'll have vassals to attend her-- she will bring thee, spite of frost, beauties that the earth has lost; she will bring thee all together all delights of summer weather; all the faery buds of may, on spring turf or scented spray; all the heaped autumn's wealth with a still mysterious stealth; she will mix these pleasures up like three fit wines in a cup and thou shalt quaff it--thou shalt hear instant harvest carols clear, bustle of the reaped corn sweet birds antheming the morn; and in the same moment hark to the early april lark, and the rooks with busy caw foraging for sticks and straw. thou shalt at one glance behold the daisy and the marigold; white plumed lilies and the first hedgerow primrose that hath burst; shaded hyacinth alway sapphire queen of the mid-may; and every leaf and every flower pearled with the same soft shower. thou shalt see the fieldmouse creep meagre from its celled sleep, and the snake all winter shrank cast its skin on sunny bank; freckled nest eggs shalt thou see hatching in the hawthorn tree; when the hen-bird's wing doth rest quiet on its mossy nest; then the hurry and alarm when the beehive casts its swarm-- acorns ripe down scattering while the autumn breezes sing, for the same sleek throated mouse to store up in its winter house. o, sweet fancy, let her loose! every joy is spoilt by use: every pleasure, every joy-- not a mistress but doth cloy. where's the cheek that doth not fade, too much gaz'd at? where's the maid whose lip mature is ever new? where's the eye, however blue, doth not weary? where's the face one would meet in every place? where's the voice however soft one would hear too oft and oft? at a touch sweet pleasure melteth like to bubbles when rain pelteth. let then winged fancy find thee a mistress to thy mind. dulcet-eyed as ceres' daughter ere the god of torment taught her how to frown and how to chide: with a waist and with a side white as hebe's when her zone slipp'd its golden clasp, and down fell her kirtle to her feet while she held the goblet sweet, and jove grew languid--mistress fair! thou shalt have that tressed hair adonis tangled all for spite; and the mouth he would not kiss, and the treasure he would miss; and the hand he would not press and the warmth he would distress. o the ravishment--the bliss! fancy has her there she is-- never fulsome, ever new, there she steps! and tell me who has a mistress so divine? be the palate ne'er so fine she cannot sicken. break the mesh of the fancy's silken leash; where she's tether'd to the heart. quickly break her prison string and such joys as these she'll bring, let the winged fancy roam, pleasure never is at home. i did not think this had been so long a poem. i have another not so long--but as it will more conveniently be copied on the other side i will just put down here some observations on caleb williams by hazlitt--i meant to say st. leon, for although he has mentioned all the novels of godwin very freely i do not quote them, but this only on account of its being a specimen of his usual abrupt manner, and fiery laconicism. he says of st. leon-- "he is a limb torn off society. in possession of eternal youth and beauty he can feel no love; surrounded, tantalised, and tormented with riches, he can do no good. the faces of men pass before him as in a speculum; but he is attached to them by no common tie of sympathy or suffering. he is thrown back into himself and his own thoughts. he lives in the solitude of his own breast--without wife or child or friend or enemy in the world. _this is the solitude of the soul, not of woods or trees or mountains_--but the desert of society--the waste and oblivion of the heart. he is himself alone. his existence is purely intellectual, and is therefore intolerable to one who has felt the rapture of affection, or the anguish of woe." as i am about it i might as well give you his character of godwin as a romancer:-- "whoever else is, it is pretty clear that the author of caleb williams is not the author of waverley. nothing can be more distinct or excellent in their several ways than these two writers. if the one owes almost everything to external observations and traditional character, the other owes everything to internal conception and contemplation of the possible workings of the human mind. there is little knowledge of the world, little variety, neither an eye for the picturesque nor a talent for the humorous in caleb williams, for instance, but you cannot doubt for a moment of the originality of the work and the force of the conception. the impression made upon the reader is the exact measure of the strength of the author's genius. for the effect both in caleb williams and st. leon is entirely made out, not by facts nor dates, by blackletter, or magazine learning, by transcript nor record, but by intense and patient study of the human heart, and by an imagination projecting itself into certain situations, and capable of working up its imaginary feelings to the height of reality." this appears to me quite correct--now i will copy the other poem--it is on the double immortality of poets-- bards of passion and of mirth ye have left your souls on earth-- have ye souls in heaven too, double liv'd in regions new? yes--and those of heaven commune with the spheres of sun and moon; with the noise of fountains wondrous and the parle of voices thund'rous; with the whisper of heaven's trees, and one another, in soft ease seated on elysian lawns browsed by none but dian's fawns; underneath large bluebells tented, where the daisies are rose scented, and the rose herself has got perfume that on earth is not. where the nightingale doth sing not a senseless, tranced thing; but melodious truth divine, philosophic numbers fine; tales and golden histories of heaven and its mysteries. thus ye live on earth, and then on the earth ye live again; and the souls ye left behind you teach us here the way to find you, where your other souls are joying never slumber'd, never cloying. here your earth born souls still speak to mortals of the little week they must sojourn with their cares; of their sorrows and delights of their passions and their spites; of their glory and their shame-- what doth strengthen and what maim. thus ye teach us every day wisdom though fled far away. 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! these are specimens of a sort of rondeau which i think i shall become partial to--because you have one idea amplified with greater ease and more delight and freedom than in the sonnet. it is my intention to wait a few years before i publish any minor poems--and then i hope to have a volume of some worth--and which those people will relish who cannot bear the burthen of a long poem. in my journal i intend to copy the poems i write the days they are written--there is just room, i see, in this page to copy a little thing i wrote off to some music as it was playing-- i had a dove and the sweet dove died, and i have thought it died of grieving: o what could it mourn for? it was tied with a silken thread of my own hand's weaving. sweet little red-feet why did you die? why would you leave me--sweet dove why? you lived alone on the forest tree. why pretty thing could you not live with me? i kissed you oft and i gave you white peas. why not live sweetly as in the green trees? sunday [january ]. i have been dining with dilke to-day--he is up to his ears in walpole's letters. mr. manker is there, and i have come round to see if i can conjure up anything for you. kirkman came down to see me this morning--his family has been very badly off lately. he told me of a villainous trick of his uncle william in newgate street, who became sole creditor to his father under pretence of serving him, and put an execution on his own sister's goods. he went in to the family at portsmouth; conversed with them, went out and sent in the sherriff's officer. he tells me too of abominable behaviour of archer to caroline mathew--archer has lived nearly at the mathews these two years; he has been amusing caroline--and now he has written a letter to mrs. m. declining, on pretence of inability to support a wife as he would wish, all thoughts of marriage. what is the worst is caroline is years old. it is an abominable matter. he has called upon me twice lately--i was out both times. what can it be for?--there is a letter to-day in the examiner to the electors of westminster on mr. hobhouse's account. in it there is a good character of cobbett--i have not the paper by me or i would copy it. i do not think i have mentioned the discovery of an african kingdom--the account is much the same as the first accounts of mexico--all magnificence--there is a book being written about it. i will read it and give you the cream in my next. the romance we have heard upon it runs thus: they have window frames of gold-- , infantry--human sacrifices. the gentleman who is the adventurer has his wife with him--she, i am told, is a beautiful little sylphid woman--her husband was to have been sacrificed to their gods and was led through a chamber filled with different instruments of torture with privilege to choose what death he would die, without their having a thought of his aversion to such a death, they considering it a supreme distinction. however he was let off, and became a favourite with the king, who at last openly patronised him, though at first on account of the jealousy of his ministers he was wont to hold conversations with his majesty in the dark middle of the night. all this sounds a little bluebeardish--but i hope it is true. there is another thing i must mention of the momentous kind;--but i must mind my periods in it--mrs. dilke has two cats--a mother and a daughter--now the mother is a tabby and the daughter a black and white like the spotted child. now it appears to me, for the doors of both houses are opened frequently, so that there is a complete thoroughfare for both cats (there being no board up to the contrary), they may one and several of them come into my room ad libitum. but no--the tabby only comes--whether from sympathy for ann the maid or me i cannot tell--or whether brown has left behind him any atmospheric spirit of maidenhood i cannot tell. the cat is not an old maid herself--her daughter is a proof of it--i have questioned her--i have look'd at the lines of her paw--i have felt her pulse--to no purpose. why should the _old_ cat come to me? i ask myself--and myself has not a word to answer. it may come to light some day; if it does you shall hear of it. kirkman this morning promised to write a few lines to you and send them to haslam. i do not think i have anything to say in the business way. you will let me know what you would wish done with your property in england--what things you would wish sent out--but i am quite in the dark about what you are doing--if i do not hear soon i shall put on my wings and be after you. i will in my next, and after i have seen your next letter, tell you my own particular idea of america. your next letter will be the key by which i shall open your hearts and see what spaces want filling with any particular information--whether the affairs of europe are more or less interesting to you--whether you would like to hear of the theatres--of the bear garden--of the boxers--the painters, the lectures--the dress--the progress of dandyism--the progress of courtship--or the fate of mary millar--being a full, true, and très particular account of miss m.'s ten suitors--how the first tried the effect of swearing; the second of stammering; the third of whispering;--the fourth of sonnets--the fifth of spanish leather boots;--the sixth of flattering her body--the seventh of flattering her mind--the eighth of flattering himself--the ninth stuck to the mother--the tenth kissed the chambermaid and told her to tell her mistress--but he was soon discharged, his reading led him into an error; he could not sport the sir lucius to any advantage. and now for this time i bid you good-bye--i have been thinking of these sheets so long that i appear in closing them to take my leave of you--but that is not it--i shall immediately as i send this off begin my journal--when some days i shall write no more than lines and others times as much. mrs. dilke is knocking at the wall for tea is ready--i will tell you what sort of a tea it is and then bid you good-bye. [january .] this is monday morning--nothing particular happened yesterday evening, except that when the tray came up mrs. dilke and i had a battle with celery stalks--she sends her love to you. i shall close this and send it immediately to haslam--remaining ever, my dearest brother and sister, your most affectionate brother john. lxxxi.--to richard woodhouse. wentworth place, friday morn [december , ]. my dear woodhouse--i am greatly obliged to you. i must needs feel flattered by making an impression on a set of ladies. i should be content to do so by meretricious romance verse, if they alone, and not men, were to judge. i should like very much to know those ladies--though look here, woodhouse--i have a new leaf to turn over: i must work; i must read; i must write. i am unable to afford time for new acquaintances. i am scarcely able to do my duty to those i have. leave the matter to chance. but do not forget to give my remembrances to your cousin. yours most sincerely john keats. lxxxii.--to mrs. reynolds. wentworth place, tuesd. [december , ]. my dear mrs. reynolds--when i left you yesterday, 'twas with the conviction that you thought i had received no previous invitation for christmas day: the truth is i had, and had accepted it under the conviction that i should be in hampshire at the time: else believe me i should not have done so, but kept in mind my old friends. i will not speak of the proportion of pleasure i may receive at different houses--that never enters my head--you may take for a truth that i would have given up even what i did see to be a greater pleasure, for the sake of old acquaintanceship--time is nothing--two years are as long as twenty. yours faithfully john keats. lxxxiii.--to benjamin robert haydon. wentworth place, tuesday [december , ]. my dear haydon--upon my soul i never felt your going out of the room at all--and believe me i never rhodomontade anywhere but in your company--my general life in society is silence. i feel in myself all the vices of a poet, irritability, love of effect and admiration--and influenced by such devils i may at times say more ridiculous things than i am aware of--but i will put a stop to that in a manner i have long resolved upon--i will buy a gold ring and put it on my finger--and from that time a man of superior head shall never have occasion to pity me, or one of inferior nunskull to chuckle at me. i am certainly more for greatness in a shade than in the open day--i am speaking as a mortal--i should say i value more the privilege of seeing great things in loneliness than the fame of a prophet. yet here i am sinning--so i will turn to a thing i have thought on more--i mean your means till your picture be finished: not only now but for this year and half have i thought of it. believe me haydon i have that sort of fire in my heart that would sacrifice everything i have to your service--i speak without any reserve--i know you would do so for me--i open my heart to you in a few words. i will do this sooner than you shall be distressed: but let me be the last stay--ask the rich lovers of art first--i'll tell you why--i have a little money which may enable me to study, and to travel for three or four years. i never expect to get anything by my books: and moreover i wish to avoid publishing--i admire human nature but i do not like _men_. i should like to compose things honourable to man--but not fingerable over by _men_. so i am anxious to exist without troubling the printer's devil or drawing upon men's or women's admiration--in which great solitude i hope god will give me strength to rejoice. try the long purses--but do not sell your drawings or i shall consider it a breach of friendship. i am sorry i was not at home when salmon called. do write and let me know all your present whys and wherefores. yours most faithfully john keats. lxxxiv.--to john taylor. wentworth place, [december , ]. my dear taylor--can you lend me £ for a short time? ten i want for myself--and twenty for a friend--which will be repaid me by the middle of next month. i shall go to chichester on wednesday and perhaps stay a fortnight--i am afraid i shall not be able to dine with you before i return. remember me to woodhouse. yours sincerely john keats. lxxxv.--to benjamin robert haydon. wentworth place, [december , ]. my dear haydon--i had an engagement to-day--and it is so fine a morning that i cannot put it off--i will be with you to-morrow--when we will thank the gods, though you have bad eyes and i am idle. i regret more than anything the not being able to dine with you to-day. i have had several movements that way--but then i should disappoint one who has been my true friend. i will be with you to-morrow morning and stop all day--we will hate the profane vulgar and make us wings. god bless you. j. keats. lxxxvi.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, wednesday [december , ]. my dear fanny--i am confined at hampstead with a sore throat; but i do not expect it will keep me above two or three days. i intended to have been in town yesterday but feel obliged to be careful a little while. i am in general so careless of these trifles, that they tease me for months, when a few days' care is all that is necessary. i shall not neglect any chance of an endeavour to let you return to school--nor to procure you a visit to mrs. dilke's which i have great fears about. write me if you can find time--and also get a few lines ready for george as the post sails next wednesday. your affectionate brother john ----. lxxxvii.--to benjamin robert haydon. wentworth place, monday aft. [january , ]. my dear haydon--i have been out this morning, and did not therefore see your note till this minute, or i would have gone to town directly--it is now too late for to-day. i will be in town early to-morrow, and trust i shall be able to lend you assistance noon or night. i was struck with the improvement in the architectural part of your picture--and, now i think on it, i cannot help wondering you should have had it so poor, especially after the solomon. excuse this dry bones of a note: for though my pen may grow cold, i should be sorry my life should freeze-- your affectionate friend john keats. lxxxviii.--to benjamin robert haydon. wentworth place, [between january and , ]. my dear haydon--we are very unlucky--i should have stopped to dine with you, but i knew i should not have been able to leave you in time for my plaguy sore throat; which is getting well. i shall have a little trouble in procuring the money and a great ordeal to go through--no trouble indeed to any one else--or ordeal either. i mean i shall have to go to town some thrice, and stand in the bank an hour or two--to me worse than anything in dante--i should have less chance with the people around me than orpheus had with the stones. i have been writing a little now and then lately: but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting. yet i do not think i shall ever come to the rope or the pistol, for after a day or two's melancholy, although i smoke more and more my own insufficiency--i see by little and little more of what is to be done, and how it is to be done, should i ever be able to do it. on my soul, there should be some reward for that continual _agonie ennuyeuse_. i was thinking of going into hampshire for a few days. i have been delaying it longer than i intended. you shall see me soon; and do not be at all anxious, for _this_ time i really will do, what i never did before in my life, business in good time, and properly.--with respect to the bond--it may be a satisfaction to you to let me have it: but as you love me do not let there be any mention of interest, although we are mortal men--and bind ourselves for fear of death. yours for ever john keats. lxxxix.--to benjamin robert haydon. wentworth place, [january ]. my dear haydon--my throat has not suffered me yet to expose myself to the night air: however i have been to town in the day time--have had several interviews with my guardian--have written him rather a plain-spoken letter--which has had its effect; and he now seems inclined to put no stumbling-block in my way: so that i see a good prospect of performing my promise. what i should have lent you ere this if i could have got it, was belonging to poor tom--and the difficulty is whether i am to inherit it before my sister is of age; a period of six years. should it be so i must incontinently take to corduroy trousers. but i am nearly confident 'tis all a bam. i shall see you soon--but do let me have a line to-day or to-morrow concerning your health and spirits. your sincere friend john keats. xc.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, [january ]. my dear fanny--i send this to walthamstow for fear you should not be at pancras lane when i call to-morrow--before going into hampshire for a few days--i will not be more i assure you--you may think how disappointed i am in not being able to see you more and spend more time with you than i do--but how can it be helped? the thought is a continual vexation to me--and often hinders me from reading and composing--write to me as often as you can--and believe me, your affectionate brother john ----. xci.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, feb{y.} [ , ]. thursday. my dear fanny--your letter to me at bedhampton hurt me very much,--what objection can there be to your receiving a letter from me? at bedhampton i was unwell and did not go out of the garden gate but twice or thrice during the fortnight i was there--since i came back i have been taking care of myself--i have been obliged to do so, and am now in hopes that by this care i shall get rid of a sore throat which has haunted me at intervals nearly a twelvemonth. i had always a presentiment of not being able to succeed in persuading mr. abbey to let you remain longer at school--i am very sorry that he will not consent. i recommend you to keep up all that you know and to learn more by yourself however little. the time will come when you will be more pleased with life--look forward to that time and, though it may appear a trifle be careful not to let the idle and retired life you lead fix any awkward habit or behaviour on you--whether you sit or walk endeavour to let it be in a seemly and if possible a graceful manner. we have been very little together: but you have not the less been with me in thought. you have no one 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.--i should not perhaps write in this manner, if it were not for the fear of not being able to see you often or long together. i am in hopes mr. abbey will not object any more to your receiving a letter now and then from me. how unreasonable! i want a few more lines from you for george--there are some young men, acquaintances of a schoolfellow of mine, going out to birkbeck's at the latter end of this month--i am in expectation every day of hearing from george--i begin to fear his last letters miscarried. i shall be in town to-morrow--if you should not be in town, i shall send this little parcel by the walthamstow coach--i think you will like goldsmith--write me soon-- your affectionate brother john ----. mrs. dilke has not been very well--she is gone a walk to town to-day for exercise. xcii.--to george and georgiana keats. sunday morn{g.} february , [ ]. my dear brother and sister--how is it that we have not heard from you from the settlement yet? the letters must surely have miscarried. i am in expectation every day. peachey wrote me a few days ago, saying some more acquaintances of his were preparing to set out for birkbeck; therefore, i shall take the opportunity of sending you what i can muster in a sheet or two. i am still at wentworth place--indeed, i have kept indoors lately, resolved if possible to rid myself of my sore throat; consequently i have not been to see your mother since my return from chichester; but my absence from her has been a great weight upon me. i say since my return from chichester--i believe i told you i was going thither. i was nearly a fortnight at mr. john snook's and a few days at old mr. dilke's. nothing worth speaking of happened at either place. i took down some thin paper and wrote on it a little poem called st. agnes's eve, which you shall have as it is when i have finished the blank part of the rest for you. i went out twice at chichester to dowager card parties. i see very little now, and very few persons, being almost tired of men and things. brown and dilke are very kind and considerate towards me. the miss r.'s have been stopping next door lately, but are very dull. miss brawne and i have every now and then a chat and a tiff. brown and dilke are walking round their garden, hands in pockets, making observations. the literary world i know nothing about. there is a poem from rogers dead born; and another satire is expected from byron, called "don giovanni." yesterday i went to town for the first time for these three weeks. i met people from all parts and of all sets--mr. towers, one of the holts, mr. dominie williams, mr. woodhouse, mrs. hazlitt and son, mrs. webb, and mrs. septimus brown. mr. woodhouse was looking up at a book window in newgate street, and, being short-sighted, twisted his muscles into so queer a stage that i stood by in doubt whether it was him or his brother, if he has one, and turning round, saw mrs. hazlitt, with that little nero, her son. woodhouse, on his features subsiding, proved to be woodhouse, and not his brother. i have had a little business with mr. abbey from time to time; he has behaved to me with a little brusquerie: this hurt me a little, especially when i knew him to be the only man in england who dared to say a thing to me i did not approve of without its being resented, or at least noticed--so i wrote him about it, and have made an alteration in my favour--i expect from this to see more of fanny, who has been quite shut out from me. i see cobbett has been attacking the settlement, but i cannot tell what to believe, and shall be all out at elbows till i hear from you. i am invited to miss millar's birthday dance on the th--i am nearly sure i shall not be able to go. a dance would injure my throat very much. i see very little of reynolds. hunt, i hear, is going on very badly--i mean in money matters. i shall not be surprised to hear of the worst. haydon too, in consequence of his eyes, is out at elbows. i live as prudently as it is possible for me to do. i have not seen haslam lately. i have not seen richards for this half year, rice for three months, or charles cowden clarke for god knows when. when i last called in henrietta street[ ] miss millar was very unwell, and miss waldegrave as staid and self-possessed as usual. henry was well. there are two new tragedies--one by the apostate maw, and one by miss jane porter. next week i am going to stop at taylor's for a few days, when i will see them both and tell you what they are. mr. and mrs. bentley are well, and all the young carrots. i said nothing of consequence passed at snook's--no more than this--that i like the family very much. mr. and mrs. snook were very kind we used to have a little religion and politics together almost every evening,--and sometimes about you. he proposed writing out for me his experience in farming, for me to send to you. if i should have an opportunity of talking to him about it, i will get all i can at all events; but you may say in your answer to this what value you place upon such information. i have not seen mr. lewis lately, for i have shrank from going up the hill. mr. lewis went a few mornings ago to town with mrs. brawne. they talked about me, and i heard that mr. l. said a thing i am not at all contented with. says he, "o, he is quite the little poet." now this is abominable--you might as well say buonaparte is quite the little soldier. you see what it is to be under six foot and not a lord. there is a long fuzz to-day in the examiner about a young man who delighted a young woman with a valentine--i think it must be ollier's. brown and i are thinking of passing the summer at brussels--if we do, we shall go about the first of may. we--_i.e._ brown and i--sit opposite one another all day authorizing (_n.b._, an "s" instead of a "z" would give a different meaning). he is at present writing a story of an old woman who lived in a forest, and to whom the devil or one of his aides-de-feu came one night very late and in disguise. the old dame sets before him pudding after pudding--mess after mess--which he devours, and moreover casts his eyes up at a side of bacon hanging over his head, and at the same time asks if her cat is a rabbit. on going he leaves her three pips of eve's apple, and somehow she, having lived a virgin all her life, begins to repent of it, and wished herself beautiful enough to make all the world and even the other world fall in love with her. so it happens, she sets out from her smoky cottage in magnificent apparel.--the first city she enters, every one falls in love with her, from the prince to the blacksmith. a young gentleman on his way to the church to be married leaves his unfortunate bride and follows this nonsuch--a whole regiment of soldiers are smitten at once and follow her--a whole convent of monks in corpus christi procession join the soldiers.--the mayor and corporation follow the same road--old and young, deaf and dumb,--all but the blind,--are smitten, and form an immense concourse of people, who----what brown will do with them i know not. the devil himself falls in love with her, flies away with her to a desert place, in consequence of which she lays an infinite number of eggs--the eggs being hatched from time to time, fill the world with many nuisances, such as john knox, george fox, johanna southcote, and gifford. there have been within a fortnight eight failures of the highest consequence in london. brown went a few evenings since to davenport's, and on his coming in he talked about bad news in the city with such a face i began to think of a national bankruptcy. i did not feel much surprised and was rather disappointed. carlisle, a bookseller on the hone principle, has been issuing pamphlets from his shop in fleet street called the deist. he was conveyed to newgate last thursday; he intends making his own defence. i was surprised to hear from taylor the amount of money of the bookseller's last sale. what think you of £ , ? he sold copies of lord byron. i am sitting opposite the shakspeare i brought from the isle of wight--and i never look at him but the silk tassels on it give me as much pleasure as the face of the poet itself.[ ] in my next packet, as this is one by the way, i shall send you the 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 radcliff 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. the only time i went out from bedhampton was to see a chapel consecrated--brown, i, and john snook the boy, went in a chaise behind a leaden horse. brown drove, but the horse did not mind him. this chapel is built by a mr. way, a great jew converter, who in that line has spent one hundred thousand pounds. he maintains a great number of poor jews--_of course his communion plate was stolen_. he spoke to the clerk about it--the clerk said he was very sorry, adding, "_i dare shay, your honour, it's among ush_." the chapel is built in mr. way's park. the consecration was not amusing. there were numbers of carriages--and his house crammed with clergy--they sanctified the chapel, and it being a wet day, consecrated the burial-ground through the vestry window. i begin to hate parsons; they did not make me love them that day when i saw them in their proper colours. a parson is a lamb in a drawing-room, and a lion in a vestry. the notions of society will not permit a parson to give way to his temper in any shape--so he festers in himself--his features get a peculiar, diabolical, self-sufficient, iron stupid expression. he is continually acting--his mind is against every man, and every man's mind is against him--he is a hypocrite to the believer and a coward to the unbeliever--he must be either a knave or an idiot--and there is no man so much to be pitied as an idiot parson. the soldier who is cheated into an esprit du corps by a red coat, a band, and colours, for the purpose of nothing, is not half so pitiable as the parson who is led by the nose by the bench of bishops and is smothered in absurdities--a poor necessary subaltern of the church. friday, feb{y.} . the day before yesterday i went to romney street--your mother was not at home--but i have just written her that i shall see her on wednesday. i call'd on mr. lewis this morning--he is very well--and tells me not to be uneasy about letters, the chances being so arbitrary. he is going on as usual among his favourite democrat papers. we had a chat as usual about cobbett and the westminster electors. dilke has lately been very much harrassed about the manner of educating his son--he at length decided for a public school--and then he did not know what school--he at last has decided for westminster; and as charley is to be a day boy, dilke will remove to westminster. we lead very quiet lives here--dilke is at present in greek histories and antiquities, and talks of nothing but the electors of westminster and the retreat of the ten-thousand. i never drink now above three glasses of wine--and never any spirits and water. though by the bye, the other day woodhouse took me to his coffee house and ordered a bottle of claret--now i like claret, whenever i can have claret i must drink it,--'tis the only palate affair that i am at all sensual in. would it not be a good speck to send you some vine roots--could it be done? i'll enquire--if you could make some wine like claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! for really 'tis so fine--it fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness--then goes down cool and feverless--then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver--no, it is rather a peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape; then it is as fragrant as the queen bee, and the more ethereal part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad-house looking for his trull and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainstcoat, but rather walks like aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step. other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man to a silenus: this makes him a hermes--and gives a woman the soul and immortality of ariadne, for whom bacchus always kept a good cellar of claret--and even of that he could never persuade her to take above two cups. i said this same claret is the only palate-passion i have--i forgot game--i must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant and a woodcock _passim_. talking of game (i wish i could make it), the lady whom i met at hastings and of whom i said something in my last i think has lately made me many presents of game, and enabled me to make as many. she made me take home a pheasant the other day, which i gave to mrs. dilke; on which to-morrow rice, reynolds and the wentworthians will dine next door. the next i intend for your mother. these moderate sheets of paper are much more pleasant to write upon than those large thin sheets which i hope you by this time have received--though that can't be, now i think of it. i have not said in any letter yet a word about my affairs--in a word i am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in the course of a year or so i think i shall try the public again--in a selfish point of view i should suffer my pride and my contempt of public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and fanny's sake i will pluck up a spirit and try again. i have no doubt of success in a course of years if i persevere--but it must be patience, for the reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for themselves. these reviews too are getting more and more powerful, especially the quarterly--they are like a superstition which the more it prostrates the crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. i was in hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like the spectators at the westminster cock-pit--they like the battle and do not care who wins or who loses. brown is going on this morning with the story of his old woman and the devil--he makes but slow progress--the fact is it is a libel on the devil, and as that person is brown's muse, look ye, if he libels his own muse how can he expect to write? either brown or his muse must turn tail. yesterday was charley dilke's birthday. brown and i were invited to tea. during the evening nothing passed worth notice but a little conversation between mrs. dilke and mrs. brawne. the subject was the watchman. it was ten o'clock, and mrs. brawne, who lived during the summer in brown's house and now lives in the road, recognised her old watchman's voice, and said that he came as far as her now. "indeed," said mrs. d., "does he turn the corner?" there have been some letters passed between me and haslam but i have not seen him lately. the day before yesterday--which i made a day of business--i called upon him--he was out as usual. brown has been walking up and down the room a-breeding--now at this moment he is being delivered of a couplet, and i daresay will be as well as can be expected. gracious--he has twins! i have a long story to tell you about bailey--i will say first the circumstances as plainly and as well as i can remember, and then i will make my comment. you know that bailey was very much cut up about a little jilt in the country somewhere. i thought he was in a dying state about it when at oxford with him: little supposing, as i have since heard, that he was at that very time making impatient love to marian reynolds--and guess my astonishment at hearing after this that he had been trying at miss martin. so matters have been--so matters stood--when he got ordained and went to a curacy near carlisle, where the family of the gleigs reside. there his susceptible heart was conquered by miss gleig--and thereby all his connections in town have been annulled--both male and female. i do not now remember clearly the facts--these however i know--he showed his correspondence with marian to gleig, returned all her letters and asked for his own--he also wrote very abrupt letters to mrs. reynolds. i do not know any more of the martin affair than i have written above. no doubt his conduct has been very bad. the great thing to be considered is--whether it is want of delicacy and principle or want of knowledge and polite experience. and again weakness--yes, that is it; and the want of a wife--yes, that is it; and then marian made great bones of him although her mother and sister have teased her very much about it. her conduct has been very upright throughout the whole affair--she liked bailey as a brother but not as a husband--especially as he used to woo her with the bible and jeremy taylor under his arm--they walked in no grove but jeremy taylor's. marian's obstinacy is some excuse, but his so quickly taking to miss gleig can have no excuse--except that of a ploughman who wants a wife. the thing which sways me more against him than anything else is rice's conduct on the occasion; rice would not make an immature resolve: he was ardent in his friendship for bailey, he examined the whole for and against minutely; and he has abandoned bailey entirely. all this i am not supposed by the reynoldses to have any hint of. it will be a good lesson to the mother and daughters--nothing would serve but bailey. if you mentioned the word tea-pot some one of them came out with an à propros about bailey--noble fellow--fine fellow! was always in their mouths--this may teach them that the man who ridicules romance is the most romantic of men--that he who abuses women and slights them loves them the most--that he who talks of roasting a man alive would not do it when it came to the push--and above all, that they are very shallow people who take everything literally. a man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life--a life like the scriptures, figurative--which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew bible. lord byron cuts a figure but he is not figurative--shakspeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it-- march , friday. i went to town yesterday chiefly for the purpose of seeing some young men who were to take some letters for us to you--through the medium of peachey. i was surprised and disappointed at hearing they had changed their minds, and did not purpose going so far as birkbeck's. i was much disappointed, for i had counted upon seeing some persons who were to see you--and upon your seeing some who had seen me. i have not only lost this opportunity, but the sail of the post-packet to new york or philadelphia, by which last your brothers have sent some letters. the weather in town yesterday was so stifling that i could not remain there though i wanted much to see kean in hotspur. i have by me at present hazlitt's letter to gifford--perhaps you would like an extract or two from the high-seasoned parts. it begins thus: "sir, you have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of any one you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it. you say what you please of others; it is time you were told what you are. in doing this give me leave to borrow the familiarity of your style:--for the fidelity of the picture i shall be answerable. you are a little person but a considerable cat's paw; and so far worthy of notice. your clandestine connection with persons high in office constantly influences your opinions and alone gives importance to them. you are the government critic, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy--the invisible link which connects literature with the police." again: "your employers, mr. gifford, do not pay their hirelings for nothing--for condescending to notice weak and wicked sophistry; for pointing out to contempt what excites no admiration; for cautiously selecting a few specimens of bad taste and bad grammar where nothing else is to be found. they want your invisible pertness, your mercenary malice, your impenetrable dulness, your bare-faced impudence, your pragmatical self-sufficiency, your hypocritical zeal, your pious frauds to stand in the gap of their prejudices and pretensions to fly-blow and taint public opinion, to defeat independent efforts, to apply not the touch of the scorpion but the touch of the torpedo to youthful hopes, to crawl and leave the slimy track of sophistry and lies over every work that does not dedicate its sweet leaves to some luminary of the treasury bench, or is not fostered in the hotbed of corruption. this is your office; 'this is what is look'd for at your hands, and this you do not baulk'--to sacrifice what little honesty and prostitute what little intellect you possess to any dirty job you are commission'd to execute. 'they keep you as an ape does an apple in the corner of his jaw, first mouth'd to be at last swallow'd.' you are by appointment literary toadeater to greatness and taster to the court. you have a natural aversion to whatever differs from your own pretensions, and an acquired one for what gives offence to your superiors. your vanity panders to your interest, and your malice truckles only to your love of power. if your instructive or premeditated abuse of your enviable trust were found wanting in a single instance; if you were to make a single slip in getting up your select committee of enquiry and green bag report of the state of letters, your occupation would be gone. you would never after obtain a squeeze of the hand from acquaintance, or a smile from a punk of quality. the great and powerful whom you call wise and good do not like to have the privacy of their self-love startled by the obtrusive and unmanageable claims of literature and philosophy, except through the intervention of people like you, whom, if they have common penetration, they soon find out to be without any superiority of intellect; or if they do not, whom they can despise for their meanness of soul. you 'have the office opposite to saint peter.' you keep a corner in the public mind for foul prejudice and corrupt power to knot and gender in; you volunteer your services to people of quality to ease scruples of mind and qualms of conscience; you lay the flattering unction of venal prose and laurell'd verse to their souls. you persuade them that there is neither purity of morals, nor depth of understanding except in themselves and their hangers-on; and would prevent the unhallow'd names of liberty and humanity from ever being whispered in ears polite! you, sir, do you not all this? i cry you mercy then: i took you for the editor of the quarterly review." this is the sort of feu de joie he keeps up. there is another extract or two--one especially which i will copy to-morrow--for the candles are burnt down and i am using the wax taper--which has a long snuff on it--the fire is at its last click--i am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet--i am writing this on the maid's tragedy, which i have read since tea with great pleasure--besides this volume of beaumont and fletcher, there are on the table two volumes of chaucer and a new work of tom moore's, called tom cribb's memorial to congress--nothing in it. these are trifles--but i require nothing so much of you but that you will give one a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me. could i see the same thing done of any great man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position shakspeare sat when he began "to be or not to be"--such things become interesting from distance of time or place. i hope you are both now in that sweet sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do--i must fancy so--and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your lives--god bless you--i whisper good-night in your ears, and you will dream of me. march , saturday. i have written to fanny this morning and received a note from haslam. i was to have dined with him to-morrow: he gives me a bad account of his father, who has not been in town for five weeks, and is not well enough for company. haslam is well--and from the prosperous state of some love affair he does not mind the double tides he has to work. i have been a walk past west end--and was going to call at mr. monkhouse's--but i did not, not being in the humour. i know not why poetry and i have been so distant lately; i must make some advances soon or she will cut me entirely. hazlitt has this fine passage in his letter: gifford in his review of hazlitt's characters of shakspeare's plays attacks the coriolanus critique. he says that hazlitt has slandered shakspeare in saying that he had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question. hazlitt thus defends himself, "my words are, 'coriolanus is a storehouse of political commonplaces. the arguments for and against aristocracy and democracy on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher. shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin, and to have spared no occasion of bating the rabble. what he says of them is very true; what he says of their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it.' i then proceed to account for this by showing how it is that 'the cause of the people is but little calculated for a subject for poetry; or that the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.' i affirm, sir, that poetry, that the imagination generally speaking, delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good, in right, whereas pure reason and the moral sense approve only of the true and good. i proceed to show that this general love or tendency to immediate excitement or theatrical effect, no matter how produced, gives a bias to the imagination often consistent with the greatest good, that in poetry it triumphs over principle, and bribes the passions to make a sacrifice of common humanity. you say that it does not, that there is no such original sin in poetry, that it makes no such sacrifice or unworthy compromise between poetical effect and the still small voice of reason. and how do you prove that there is no such principle giving a bias to the imagination and a false colouring to poetry? why, by asking in reply to the instances where this principle operates, and where no other can with much modesty and simplicity--'but are these the only topics that afford delight in poetry, etc.?' no; but these objects do afford delight in poetry, and they afford it in proportion to their strong and often tragical effect, and not in proportion to the good produced, or their desireableness in a moral point of view. do we read with more pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey than of the shepherd's pipe upon the mountain? no; but we do read with pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey, and we do so on the principle i have stated, namely, from the sense of power abstracted from the sense of good; and it is the same principle that makes us read with admiration and reconciles us in fact to the triumphant progress of the conquerors and mighty hunters of mankind, who come to stop the shepherd's pipe upon the mountains and sweep away his listening flock. do you mean to deny that there is anything imposing to the imagination in power, in grandeur, in outward show, in the accumulation of individual wealth and luxury, at the expense of equal justice and the common weal? do you deny that there is anything in the 'pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, that makes ambition virtue' in the eyes of admiring multitudes? is this a new theory of the pleasures of the imagination, which says that the pleasures of the imagination do not take rise solely in the calculation of the understanding? is it a paradox of my creating that 'one murder makes a villain millions a hero'? or is it not true that here, as in other cases, the enormity of the evil overpowers and makes a convert of the imagination by its very magnitude? you contradict my reasoning because you know nothing of the question, and you think that no one has a right to understand what you do not. my offence against purity in the passage alluded to, 'which contains the concentrated venom of my malignity,' is that i have admitted that there are tyrants and slaves abroad in the world; and you would hush the matter up and pretend that there is no such thing in order that there may be nothing else. further, i have explained the cause, the subtle sophistry of the human mind, that tolerates and pampers the evil in order to guard against its approaches; you would conceal the cause in order to prevent the cure, and to leave the proud flesh about the heart to harden and ossify into one impenetrable mass of selfishness and hypocrisy, that we may not 'sympathise in the distresses of suffering virtue' in any case in which they come in competition with the fictitious wants and 'imputed weaknesses of the great.' you ask, 'are we gratified by the cruelties of domitian or nero?' no, not we--they were too petty and cowardly to strike the imagination at a distance; but the roman senate tolerated them, addressed their perpetrators, exalted them into gods, the fathers of the people, they had pimps and scribblers of all sorts in their pay, their senecas, etc., till a turbulent rabble, thinking there were no injuries to society greater than the endurance of unlimited and wanton oppression, put an end to the farce and abated the sin as well as they could. had you and i lived in those times we should have been what we are now, i 'a sour malcontent,' and you 'a sweet courtier.'" the manner in which this is managed: the force and innate power with which it yeasts and works up itself--the feeling for the costume of society; is in a style of genius. he hath a demon, as he himself says of lord byron. we are to have a party this evening. the davenports from church row--i don't think you know anything of them--they have paid me a good deal of attention. i like davenport himself. the names of the rest are miss barnes, miss winter with the children. [later, march or .] on monday we had to dinner severn and cawthorn, the bookseller and print-virtuoso; in the evening severn went home to paint, and we other three went to the play, to see sheil's new tragedy ycleped evadné. in the morning severn and i took a turn round the museum--there is a sphinx there of a giant size, and most voluptuous egyptian expression, i had not seen it before. the play was bad even in comparison with , the augustan age of the drama, "comme on sait," as voltaire says--the whole was made up of a virtuous young woman, an indignant brother, a suspecting lover, a libertine prince, a gratuitous villain, a street in naples, a cypress grove, lilies and roses, virtue and vice, a bloody sword, a spangled jacket, one lady olivia, one miss o'neil alias evadné, alias bellamira, alias--alias--yea, and i say unto you a greater than elias--there was abbot, and talking of abbot his name puts me in mind of a spelling-book lesson, descriptive of the whole dramatis personæ--abbot--abbess--actor-- actress--the play is a fine amusement, as a friend of mine once said to me--"do what you will," says he, "a poor gentleman who wants a guinea, cannot spend his two shillings better than at the playhouse." the pantomime was excellent, i had seen it before and i enjoyed it again. your mother and i had some talk about miss h.---- says i, will henry have that miss ----, a lath with a boddice, she who has been fine drawn--fit for nothing but to cut up into cribbage pins, to the tune of . ; one who is all muslin; all feathers and bone; once in travelling she was made use of as a lynch pin; i hope he will not have her, though it is no uncommon thing to be _smitten with a staff_; though she might be very useful as his walking-stick, his fishing-rod, his tooth-pik, his hat-stick (she runs so much in his head)--let him turn farmer, she would cut into hurdles; let him write poetry, she would be his turn-style. her gown is like a flag on a pole; she would do for him if he turn freemason; i hope she will prove a flag of truce; when she sits languishing with her one foot on a stool, and one elbow on the table, and her head inclined, she looks like the sign of the crooked billet--or the frontispiece to cinderella, or a tea-paper wood-cut of mother shipton at her studies; she is a make-believe--she is bona _s_ide a thin young 'oman--but this is mere talk of a fellow-creature; yet pardie i would not that henry have her--non volo ut eam possideat, nam, for, it would be a bam, for it would be a sham-- don't think i am writing a petition to the governors of st. luke--no, that would be in another style. may it please your worships; forasmuch as the undersigned has committed, transferred, given up, made over, consigned, and aberrated himself, to the art and mystery of poetry; forasmuch as he hath cut, rebuffed, affronted, huffed, and shirked, and taken stint at, all other employments, arts, mysteries, and occupations, honest, middling, and dishonest; forasmuch as he hath at sundry times and in divers places, told truth unto the men of this generation, and eke to the women; moreover, forasmuch as he hath kept a pair of boots that did not fit, and doth not admire sheil's play, leigh hunt, tom moore, bob southey, and mr. rogers; and does admire wm. hazlitt; moreoverer for as more as he liketh half of wordsworth, and none of crabbe; moreover-est for as most as he hath written this page of penmanship--he prayeth your worships to give him a lodging--witnessed by rd. abbey and co., cum familiaribus et consanguineis (signed) count de cockaigne. the nothing of the day is a machine called the velocipede. it is a wheel carriage to ride cock-horse upon, sitting astride and pushing it along with the toes, a rudder wheel in hand--they will go seven miles an hour--a handsome gelding will come to eight guineas; however they will soon be cheaper, unless the army takes to them. i look back upon the last month, i find nothing to write about; indeed i do not recollect anything particular in it. it's all alike; we keep on breathing. the only amusement is a little scandal, of however fine a shape, a laugh at a pun--and then after all we wonder how we could enjoy the scandal, or laugh at the pun. i have been at different times turning it in my head whether i should go to edinburgh and study for a physician; i am afraid i should not take kindly to it; i am sure i could not take fees--and yet i should like to do so; it's not worse than writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the review shambles. everybody is in his own mess. here is the parson at hampstead quarrelling with all the world, he is in the wrong by this same token; when the black cloth was put up in the church for the queen's mourning, he asked the workmen to hang it the wrong side outwards, that it might be better when taken down, it being his perquisite--parsons will always keep up their character, but as it is said there are some animals the ancients knew which we do not, let us hope our posterity will miss the black badger with tri-cornered hat; who knows but some reviewer of buffon or pliny may put an account of the parson in the appendix; no one will then believe it any more than we believe in the phoenix. i think we may class the lawyer in the same natural history of monsters; a green bag will hold as much as a lawn sleeve. the only difference is that one is fustian and the other flimsy; i am not unwilling to read church history at present and have milner's in my eye; his is reckoned a very good one. th september . [in looking over some of my papers i found the above specimen of my carelessness. it is a sheet you ought to have had long ago--my letter must have appeared very unconnected, but as i number the sheets you must have discovered how the mistake happened. how many things have happened since i wrote it--how have i acted contrary to my resolves. the interval between writing this sheet and the day i put this supplement to it, has been completely filled with generous and most friendly actions of brown towards me. how frequently i forget to speak of things which i think of and feel most. 'tis very singular, the idea about buffon above has been taken up by hunt in the examiner, in some papers which he calls "a preter-natural history."][ ] friday th march. this morning i have been reading "the false one." shameful to say, i was in bed at ten--i mean this morning. the blackwood reviewers have committed themselves in a scandalous heresy--they have been putting up hogg, the ettrick shepherd, against burns: the senseless villains! the scotch cannot manage themselves at all, they want imagination, and that is why they are so fond of hogg, who has a little of it. this morning i am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless--i long after a stanza or two of thomson's castle of indolence--my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. if i had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies i should call it languor, but as i am[b] i must call it laziness. in this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a greek vase--a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement.[ ] this is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the mind. i have this moment received a note from haslam, in which he expects the death of his father, who has been for some time in a state of insensibility; his mother bears up he says very well--i shall go to town to-morrow to see him. this is the world--thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure. circumstances are like clouds continually gathering and bursting--while we are laughing, the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events--while we are laughing it sprouts it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck. even so we have leisure to reason on the misfortunes of our friends; our own touch us too nearly for words. very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of mind: very few have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of others,--in the greater part of the benefactors to humanity some meretricious motive has sullied their greatness--some melodramatic scenery has fascinated them. from the manner in which i feel haslam's misfortune i perceive how far i am from any humble standard of disinterestedness. yet this feeling ought to be carried to its highest pitch, as there is no fear of its ever injuring society--which it would do, i fear, pushed to an extremity. for in wild nature the hawk would lose his breakfast of robins and the robin his of worms--the lion must starve as well as the swallow. the greater part of men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the hawk. the hawk wants a mate, so does the man--look at them both, they set about it and procure one in the same manner. they want both a nest and they both set about one in the same manner--they get their food in the same manner. the noble animal man for his amusement smokes his pipe--the hawk balances about the clouds--that is the only difference of their leisures. this it is that makes the amusement of life--to a speculative mind--i go among the fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. i go amongst the buildings of a city and i see a man hurrying along--to what? the creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. but then, as wordsworth says, "we have all one human heart----" there is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify--so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. the pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish. i have no doubt that thousands of people never heard of have had hearts completely disinterested: i can remember but two--socrates and jesus--their histories evince it. what i heard a little time ago, taylor observe with respect to socrates, may be said of jesus--that he was so great a man that though he transmitted no writing of his own to posterity, we have his mind and his sayings and his greatness handed to us by others. it is to be lamented that the history of the latter was written and revised by men interested in the pious frauds of religion. yet through all this i see his splendour. even here, though i myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of, i am, however young, writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. yet may i not in this be free from sin? may there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive, attitude my mind may fall into as i am entertained with the alertness of a stoat or the anxiety of a deer? though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel. by a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone--though erroneous they may be fine. this is the very thing in which consists poetry, and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy--for the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth. give me this credit--do you not think i strive--to know myself? give me this credit, and you will not think that on my own account i repeat milton's lines-- "how charming is divine philosophy, not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is apollo's lute." no--not for myself--feeling grateful as i do to have got into a state of mind to relish them properly. nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. i am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that reason i did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether i have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. it will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were through my human passions--they went away and i wrote with my mind--and perhaps i must confess a little bit of my heart-- why did i laugh to-night? no voice will tell: no god, no deamon of severe response deigns to reply from heaven or from hell.-- then to my human heart i turn at once-- heart! thou and i are here sad and alone; say, wherefore did i laugh? o mortal pain! o darkness! darkness! ever must i moan, to question heaven and hell and heart in vain! why did i laugh? i know this being's lease, my fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: yet could i on this very midnight cease,[ ] and the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds; verse, fame and beauty are intense indeed but death intenser--death is life's high meed. i went to bed and enjoyed an uninterrupted sleep. sane i went to bed and sane i arose. [april .] this is the th of april--you see what a time it is since i wrote; all that time i have been day by day expecting letters from you. i write quite in the dark. in the hopes of a letter daily i have deferred that i might write in the light. i was in town yesterday, and at taylor's heard that young birkbeck had been in town and was to set forward in six or seven days--so i shall dedicate that time to making up this parcel ready for him. i wish i could hear from you to make me "whole and general as the casing air."[ ] a few days after the th of april[ ] i received a note from haslam containing the news of his father's death. the family has all been well. haslam has his father's situation. the framptons have behaved well to him. the day before yesterday i went to a rout at sawrey's--it was made pleasant by reynolds being there and our getting into conversation with one of the most beautiful girls i ever saw--she gave a remarkable prettiness to all those commonplaces which most women who talk must utter--i liked mrs. sawrey very well. the sunday before last your brothers were to come by a long invitation--so long that for the time i forgot it when i promised mrs. brawne to dine with her on the same day. on recollecting my engagement with your brothers i immediately excused myself with mrs. brawne, but she would not hear of it, and insisted on my bringing my friends with me. so we all dined at mrs. brawne's. i have been to mrs. bentley's this morning, and put all the letters to and from you and poor tom and me.[ ] i found some of the correspondence between him and that degraded wells and amena. it is a wretched business; i do not know the rights of it, but what i do know would, i am sure, affect you so much that i am in two minds whether i will tell you anything about it. and yet i do not see why--for anything, though it be unpleasant, that calls to mind those we still love has a compensation in itself for the pain it occasions--so very likely to-morrow i may set about copying the whole of what i have about it: with no sort of a richardson self-satisfaction--i hate it to a sickness--and i am afraid more from indolence of mind than anything else. i wonder how people exist with all their worries. i have not been to westminster but once lately, and that was to see dilke in his new lodgings--i think of living somewhere in the neighbourhood myself. your mother was well by your brothers' account. i shall see her perhaps to-morrow--yes i shall. we have had the boys[ ] here lately--they make a bit of a racket--i shall not be sorry when they go. i found also this morning, in a note from george to you and my dear sister a lock of your hair which i shall this moment put in the miniature case. a few days ago hunt dined here and brown invited davenport to meet him, davenport from a sense of weakness thought it incumbent on him to show off--and pursuant to that never ceased talking and boring all day till i was completely fagged out. brown grew melancholy--but hunt perceiving what a complimentary tendency all this had bore it remarkably well--brown grumbled about it for two or three days. i went with hunt to sir john leicester's gallery; there i saw northcote--hilton--bewick, and many more of great and little note. haydon's picture is of very little progress this year--he talks about finishing it next year. wordsworth is going to publish a poem called peter bell--what a perverse fellow it is! why will he talk about peter bells--i was told not to tell--but to you it will not be telling--reynolds hearing that said peter bell was coming out, took it into his head to write a skit upon it called peter bell. he did it as soon as thought on, it is to be published this morning, and comes out before the real peter bell, with this admirable motto from the "bold stroke for a wife" "i am the real simon pure." it would be just as well to trounce lord byron in the same manner. i am still at a stand in versifying--i cannot do it yet with any pleasure--i mean, however, to look round on my resources and means, and see what i can do without poetry--to that end i shall live in westminster--i have no doubt of making by some means a little to help on, or i shall be left in the lurch--with the burden of a little pride--however i look in time. the dilkes like their lodgings at westminster tolerably well. i cannot help thinking what a shame it is that poor dilke should give up his comfortable house and garden for his son, whom he will certainly ruin with too much care. the boy has nothing in his ears all day but himself and the importance of his education. dilke has continually in his mouth "my boy." this is what spoils princes: it may have the same effect with commoners. mrs. dilke has been very well lately--but what a shameful thing it is that for that obstinate boy dilke should stifle himself in town lodgings and wear out his life by his continual apprehension of his boy's fate in westminster school, with the rest of the boys and the masters. every one has some wear and tear. one would think dilke ought to be quiet and happy--but no--this one boy makes his face pale, his society silent and his vigilance jealous--he would i have no doubt quarrel with any one who snubb'd his boy--with all this he has no notion how to manage him. o what a farce is our greatest cares! yet one must be in the pother for the sake of clothes food and lodging. there has been a squabble between kean and mr. bucke--there are faults on both sides--on bucke's the faults are positive to the question: kean's fault is a want of genteel knowledge and high policy. the former writes knavishly foolish, and the other silly bombast. it was about a tragedy written by said mr. bucke which, it appears, mr. kean kick'd at--it was so bad--after a little struggle of mr. bucke's against kean, drury lane had the policy to bring it out and kean the impolicy not to appear in it. it was damn'd. the people in the pit had a favourite call on the night of "buck, buck, rise up" and "buck, buck, how many horns do i hold up." kotzebue the german dramatist and traitor to his country was murdered lately by a young student whose name i forget--he stabbed himself immediately after crying out germany! germany! i was unfortunate to miss richards the only time i have been for many months to see him. shall i treat you with a little extempore?-- when they were come into the faery's court they rang--no one at home--all gone to sport and dance and kiss and love as faerys do for faries be as humans lovers true. amid the woods they were so lone and wild, where even the robin feels himself exil'd, and where the very brooks, as if afraid, hurry along to some less magic shade. 'no one at home!' the fretful princess cry'd; 'and all for nothing such a dreary ride, and all for nothing my new diamond cross; no one to see my persian feathers toss, no one to see my ape, my dwarf, my fool, or how i pace my otaheitan mule. ape, dwarf, and fool, why stand you gaping there, burst the door open, quick--or i declare i'll switch you soundly and in pieces tear.' the dwarf began to tremble, and the ape star'd at the fool, the fool was all agape, the princess grasp'd her switch, but just in time the dwarf with piteous face began to rhyme. 'o mighty princess, did you ne'er hear tell what your poor servants know but too too well? know you the three great crimes in faery land? the first, alas! poor dwarf, i understand, i made a whipstock of a faery's wand; the next is snoring in their company; the next, the last, the direst of the three, is making free when they are not at home. i was a prince--a baby prince--my doom, you see, i made a whipstock of a wand, my top has henceforth slept in faery land. he was a prince, the fool, a grown-up prince, but he has never been a king's son since he fell a snoring at a faery ball. your poor ape was a prince, and he poor thing picklock'd a faery's boudoir--now no king but ape--so pray your highness stay awhile, 'tis sooth indeed, we know it to our sorrow-- persist and _you_ may be an ape to-morrow.' while the dwarf spake the princess, all for spite, peel'd the brown hazel twig to lilly white, clench'd her small teeth, and held her lips apart, try'd to look unconcern'd with beating heart. they saw her highness had made up her mind, a-quavering like the reeds before the wind-- and they had had it, but o happy chance the ape for very fear began to dance and grinn'd as all his ugliness did ache-- she staid her vixen fingers for his sake, he was so very ugly: then she took her pocket-mirror and began to look first at herself and then at him, and then she smil'd at her own beauteous face again. yet for all this--for all her pretty face-- she took it in her head to see the place. women gain little from experience either in lovers, husbands, or expense. the more their beauty the more fortune too-- beauty before the wide world never knew-- so each fair reasons--tho' it oft miscarries. she thought _her_ pretty face would please the fairies. 'my darling ape i won't whip you to-day, give me the picklock sirrah and go play.' they all three wept but counsel was as vain as crying cup biddy to drops of rain. yet lingering by did the sad ape forth draw the picklock from the pocket in his jaw. the princess took it, and dismounting straight tripp'd in blue silver'd slippers to the gate and touch'd the wards, the door full courteously opened--she enter'd with her servants three. again it clos'd and there was nothing seen but the mule grazing on the herbage green. end of canto xii. canto the xiii. the mule no sooner saw himself alone than he prick'd up his ears--and said 'well done; at least unhappy prince i may be free-- no more a princess shall side-saddle me. o king of otaheite--tho' a mule, aye, every inch a king'--tho' 'fortune's fool,' well done--for by what mr. dwarfy said i would not give a sixpence for her head.' even as he spake he trotted in high glee to the knotty side of an old pollard tree, and rubb'd his sides against the mossed bark till his girths burst and left him naked stark except his bridle--how get rid of that buckled and tied with many a twist and plait. at last it struck him to pretend to sleep, and then the thievish monkies down would creep and filch the unpleasant trammels quite away. no sooner thought of than adown he lay, shamm'd a good snore--the monkey-men descended, and whom they thought to injure they befriended. they hung his bridle on a topmost bough and off he went run, trot, or anyhow-- brown is gone to bed--and i am tired of rhyming--there is a north wind blowing playing young gooseberry with the trees--i don't care so it helps even with a side wind a letter to me--for i cannot put faith in any reports i hear of the settlement; some are good and some bad. last sunday i took a walk towards highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of lord mansfield's park i met mr. green our demonstrator at guy's in conversation with coleridge--i joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable--i walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles i suppose. in those two miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if i can give you a list--nightingales--poetry--on poetical sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams--nightmare--a dream accompanied by a sense of touch--single and double touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness--monsters-- the kraken--mermaids--southey believes in them--southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--good morning--i heard his voice as he came towards me--i heard it as he moved away--i had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so. he was civil enough to ask me to call on him at highgate. good-night! [later, april or .] it looks so much like rain i shall not go to town to-day: but put it off till to-morrow. brown this morning is writing some spenserian stanzas against mrs., miss brawne and me; so i shall amuse myself with him a little: in the manner of spenser-- he is to weet a melancholy carle thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair as hath the seeded thistle when in parle it holds the zephyr, ere it sendeth fair its light balloons into the summer air thereto his beard had not begun to bloom no brush had touch'd his chin or razor sheer no care had touch'd his cheek with mortal doom, but new he was and bright as scarf from persian loom. ne cared he for wine, or half-and-half ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl, and sauces held he worthless as the chaff he 'sdeign'd the swineherd at the wassail bowl ne with lewd ribbalds sat he cheek by jowl ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair but after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul panted, and all his food was woodland air though he would ofttimes feast on gilliflowers rare-- the slang of cities in no wise he knew _tipping the wink_ to him was heathen greek; he sipp'd no olden tom or ruin blue or nantz or cherry brandy drunk full meek by many a damsel hoarse and rouge of cheek nor did he know each aged watchman's beat-- nor in obscured purlieus would he seek for curled jewesses, with ankles neat who as they walk abroad make tinkling with their feet. this character would ensure him a situation in the establishment of patient griselda. the servant has come for the little browns this morning--they have been a toothache to me which i shall enjoy the riddance of--their little voices are like wasps' stings--sometimes am i all wound with browns.[ ] we had a claret feast some little while ago. there were dilke, reynolds, skinner, mancur, john brown, martin, brown and i. we all got a little tipsy--but pleasantly so--i enjoy claret to a degree. [later, april or .] i have been looking over the correspondence of the pretended amena and wells this evening--i now see the whole cruel deception. i think wells must have had an accomplice in it--amena's letters are in a man's language and in a man's hand imitating a woman's. the instigations to this diabolical scheme were vanity, and the love of intrigue. it was no thoughtless hoax--but a cruel deception on a sanguine temperament, with every show of friendship. i do not think death too bad for the villain. the world would look upon it in a different light should i expose it--they would call it a frolic--so i must be wary--but i consider it my duty to be prudently revengeful. i will hang over his head like a sword by a hair. i will be opium to his vanity--if i cannot injure his interests--he is a rat and he shall have ratsbane to his vanity--i will harm him all i possibly can--i have no doubt i shall be able to do so--let us leave him to his misery alone, except when we can throw in a little more. the fifth canto of dante pleases me more and more--it is that one in which he meets with paolo and francesca. i had passed many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them i dreamt of being in that region of hell. the dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments i ever had in my life. i floated about the whirling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined as it seemed for an age--and in the midst of all this cold and darkness i was warm--even flowery tree-tops sprung up, and we rested on them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind blew us away again. i tried a sonnet upon it--there are fourteen lines, but nothing of what i felt in it--o that i could dream it every night-- as hermes once took to his feathers light when lulled argus, baffled, swoon'd and slept, so on a delphic reed my idle spright so play'd, so charm'd, so conquer'd, so bereft the dragon world of all its hundred eyes; and seeing it asleep, so fled away;-- not to pure ida with its snow-cold skies, nor unto tempe where jove grieved that day; but to that second circle of sad hell where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw of rain and hailstones, lovers need not tell their sorrows. pale were the sweet lips i saw, pale were the lips i kiss'd, and fair the form i floated with about that melancholy storm. i want very very much a little of your wit, my dear sister--a letter or two of yours just to bandy back a pun or two across the atlantic, and send a quibble over the floridas. now you have by this time crumpled up your large bonnet, what do you wear--a cap? do you put your hair in papers of a night? do you pay the miss birkbecks a morning visit--have you any tea? or do you milk-and-water with them--what place of worship do you go to--the quakers, the moravians, the unitarians, or the methodists? are there any flowers in bloom you like--any beautiful heaths--any streets full of corset makers? what sort of shoes have you to fit those pretty feet of yours? do you desire compliments to one another? do you ride on horseback? what do you have for breakfast, dinner, and supper? without mentioning lunch and bever,[ ] and wet and snack--and a bit to stay one's stomach? do you get any spirits--now you might easily distill some whiskey--and going into the woods, set up a whiskey shop for the monkeys--do you and the miss birkbecks get groggy on anything--a little so-soish so as to be obliged to be seen home with a lantern? you may perhaps have a game at puss in the corner--ladies are warranted to play at this game though they have not whiskers. have you a fiddle in the settlement--or at any rate a jew's harp--which will play in spite of one's teeth--when you have nothing else to do for a whole day i tell you how you may employ it--first get up and when you are dressed, as it would be pretty early with a high wind in the woods, give george a cold pig with my compliments. then you may saunter into the nearest coffee-house, and after taking a dram and a look at the chronicle--go and frighten the wild boars upon the strength--you may as well bring one home for breakfast, serving up the hoofs garnished with bristles and a grunt or two to accompany the singing of the kettle--then if george is not up give him a colder pig always with my compliments--when you are both set down to breakfast i advise you to eat your full share, but leave off immediately on feeling yourself inclined to anything on the other side of the puffy--avoid that, for it does not become young women--after you have eaten your breakfast keep your eye upon dinner--it is the safest way--you should keep a hawk's eye over your dinner and keep hovering over it till due time then pounce taking care not to break any plates. while you are hovering with your dinner in prospect you may do a thousand things--put a hedgehog into george's hat--pour a little water into his rifle--soak his boots in a pail of water--cut his jacket round into shreds like a roman kilt or the back of my grandmother's stays--sew _off_ his buttons-- [later, april or .] yesterday i could not write a line i was so fatigued, for the day before i went to town in the morning, called on your mother, and returned in time for a few friends we had to dinner. these were taylor, woodhouse, reynolds: we began cards at about o'clock, and the night coming on, and continuing dark and rainy, they could not think of returning to town--so we played at cards till very daylight--and yesterday i was not worth a sixpence. your mother was very well but anxious for a letter. we had half an hour's talk and no more, for i was obliged to be home. mrs. and miss millar were well, and so was miss waldegrave. i have asked your brothers here for next sunday. when reynolds was here on monday he asked me to give hunt a hint to take notice of his peter bell in the examiner--the best thing i can do is to write a little notice of it myself, which i will do here, and copy out if it should suit my purpose-- _peter bell._ there have been lately advertised two books both peter bell by name; what stuff the one was made of might be seen by the motto--"i am the real simon pure." this false florimel has hurried from the press and obtruded herself into public notice, while for aught we know the real one may be still wandering about the woods and mountains. let us hope she may soon appear and make good her right to the magic girdle. the pamphleteering archimage, we can perceive, has rather a splenetic love than a downright hatred to real florimels--if indeed they had been so christened--or had even a pretention to play at bob cherry with barbara lewthwaite: but he has a fixed aversion to those three rhyming graces alice fell, susan gale and betty foy; and now at length especially to peter bell--fit apollo. it may be seen from one or two passages in this little skit, that the writer of it has felt the finer parts of mr. wordsworth, and perhaps expatiated with his more remote and sublimer muse. this as far as it relates to peter bell is unlucky. the more he may love the sad embroidery of the excursion, the more he will hate the coarse samplers of betty foy and alice fell; and as they come from the same hand, the better will he be able to imitate that which can be imitated, to wit peter bell--as far as can be imagined from the obstinate name. we repeat, it is very unlucky--this real simon pure is in parts the very man--there is a pernicious likeness in the scenery, a 'pestilent humour' in the rhymes, and an inveterate cadence in some of the stanzas, that must be lamented. if we are one part amused with this we are three parts sorry that an appreciator of wordsworth should show so much temper at this really provoking name of peter bell--![ ] this will do well enough--i have copied it and enclosed it to hunt. you will call it a little politic--seeing i keep clear of all parties. i say something for and against both parties--and suit it to the tune of the examiner--i meant to say i do not unsuit it--and i believe i think what i say, nay i am sure i do--i and my conscience are in luck to-day--which is an excellent thing. the other night i went to the play with rice, reynolds, and martin--we saw a new dull and half-damn'd opera call'd the 'heart of midlothian,' that was on saturday--i stopt at taylor's on sunday with woodhouse--and passed a quiet sort of pleasant day. i have been very much pleased with the panorama of the ship at the north pole--with the icebergs, the mountains, the bears, the wolves--the seals, the penguins--and a large whale floating back above water--it is impossible to describe the place-- wednesday evening [april ]. la belle dame sans merci o what can ail thee knight at arms alone and palely loitering? the sedge has 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 look'd 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 sidelong would she bend 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 wept and sigh'd full sore, and there i shut her wild, wild eyes with kisses four-- and there she lulled me asleep, and there i dream'd ah woe betide! the latest dream i ever dreamt on the cold hill side. i saw pale kings and princes too pale warriors death-pale were they all they cried--la belle dame sans merci thee hath in thrall. i saw their starv'd lips in the gloam with horrid warning gaped wide, and i awoke, and found me here on the cold hill's side. and this is why i sojourn here alone and palely loitering; though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing.[ ]... why four kisses--you will say--why four, because i wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my muse--she would have fain said "score" without hurting the rhyme--but we must temper the imagination, as the critics say, with judgment. i was obliged to choose an even number, that both eyes might have fair play, and to speak truly i think two a piece quite sufficient. suppose i had said seven there would have been three and a half a piece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side-- [later.] chorus of fairies. --fire, air, earth, and water--salamander, zephyr, dusketha, breama. _sal._ happy happy glowing fire! _zep._ fragrant air, delicious light! _dusk._ let me to my glooms retire. _bream._ i to greenweed rivers bright. _salam._ happy, happy glowing fire! dazzling bowers of soft retire, ever let my nourish'd wing, like a bat's still wandering, faintly fan your fiery spaces spirit sole in deadly places, in unhaunted roar and blaze open eyes that never daze let me see the myriad shapes of men and beasts and fish and apes, portray'd in many a fiery den, and wrought by spumy bitumen on the deep intenser roof, arched every way aloof. let me breathe upon my skies, and anger their live tapestries; free from cold and every care, of chilly rain and shivering air. _zephyr._ spright of fire--away away! or your very roundelay will sear my plumage newly budded from its quilled sheath and studded with the self-same dews that fell on the may-grown asphodel. spright of fire away away! _breama._ spright of fire away away! zephyr blue-eyed faery turn, and see my cool sedge-shaded urn, where it rests its mossy brim mid water-mint and cresses dim; and the flowers, in sweet troubles, lift their eyes above the bubbles, like our queen when she would please to sleep, and oberon will tease-- love me blue-eyed faery true soothly i am sick for you. _zephyr._ gentle breama! by the first violet young nature nurst, i will bathe myself with thee, so you sometime follow me to my home far far in west, far beyond the search and quest of the golden-browed sun. come with me, o'er tops of trees, to my fragrant palaces, where they ever-floating are beneath the cherish of a star call'd vesper--who with silver veil ever hides his brilliance pale, ever gently drows'd doth keep twilight of the fays to sleep. fear not that your watery hair will thirst in drouthy ringlets there-- clouds of stored summer rains thou shalt taste before the stains of the mountain soil they take, and too unlucent for thee make. i love thee, crystal faery true sooth i am as sick for you-- _salam._ out ye agueish faeries out! chilly lovers, what a rout keep ye with your frozen breath colder than the mortal death-- adder-eyed dusketha speak, shall we leave them and go seek in the earth's wide entrails old couches warm as their's is cold? o for a fiery gloom and thee, dusketha, so enchantingly freckle-wing'd and lizard-sided! _dusketha._ by thee spright will i be guided i care not for cold or heat frost and flame or sparks or sleet to my essence are the same-- but i honour more the flame-- spright of fire i follow thee wheresoever it may be; to the torrid spouts and fountains, underneath earth-quaked mountains or at thy supreme desire, touch the very pulse of fire with my bare unlidded eyes. _salam._ sweet dusketha! paradise! off ye icy spirits fly! frosty creatures of the sky! _dusketha._ breathe upon them fiery spright! _zephyr, breama (to each other)._ away away to our delight! _salam._ go feed on icicles while we bedded in tongued-flames will be. _dusketha._ lead me to those fev'rous glooms, spright of fire-- _breama._ me to the blooms blue-eyed zephyr of those flowers far in the west where the may cloud lours; and the beams of still vesper, where winds are all whist are shed through the rain and the milder mist, and twilight your floating bowers-- i have been reading lately two very different books, robertson's america and voltaire's siècle de louis xiv. it is like walking arm and arm between pizarro and the great-little monarch. in how lamentable a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances; in the first, where men might seem to inherit quiet of mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontamination of civilisation, and especially from their being, as it were, estranged from the mutual helps of society and its mutual injuries--and thereby more immediately under the protection of providence--even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad, or even worse than bailiffs, debts, and poverties of civilised life. the whole appears to resolve into this--that man is originally a poor forked creature subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. if he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts--at each stage, at each ascent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars above his head. the most interesting question that can come before us is, how far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing socrates mankind may be made happy--i can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme, but what must it end in?--death--and who could in such a case bear with death? the whole troubles of life, which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who instead of hailing its approach would leave this world as eve left paradise. but in truth i do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility--the nature of the world will not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself. let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. look at the poles and at the sands of africa, whirlpools and volcanoes--let men exterminate them and i will say that they may arrive at earthly happiness. the point at which man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. for instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning, it enjoys itself, but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun--it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native to the world as itself: no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his nature. the common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is "a vale of tears," from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of god and taken to heaven--what a little circumscribed straightened notion! call the world if you please "the vale of soul-making." then you will find out the use of the world (i am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which i will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) i say '_soul-making_'--soul as distinguished from an intelligence. there may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. intelligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are god--how then are souls to be made? how then are these sparks which are god to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? how, but by the medium of a world like this? this point i sincerely wish to consider because i think it a grander system of salvation than the christian religion--or rather it is a system of spirit-creation--this is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--these three materials are the _intelligence_--the _human heart_ (as distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the _world_ or _elemental space_ suited for the proper action of _mind and heart_ on each other for the purpose of forming the _soul_ or _intelligence destined to possess the sense of identity_. i can scarcely express what i but dimly perceive--and yet i think i perceive it--that you may judge the more clearly i will put it in the most homely form possible. i will call the _world_ a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--i will call the _human heart_ the _horn book_ used in that school--and i will call the _child able to read, the soul_ made from that _school_ and its _horn book_. do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. not merely is the heart a hornbook, it is the mind's bible, it is the mind's experience, it is the text from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity. as various as the lives of men are--so various become their souls, and thus does god make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence. this appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not offend our reason and humanity--i am convinced that many difficulties which christians labour under would vanish before it--there is one which even now strikes me--the salvation of children. in them the spark or intelligence returns to god without any identity--it having had no time to learn of and be altered by the heart--or seat of the human passions. it is pretty generally suspected that the christian scheme has been copied from the ancient persian and greek philosophers. why may they not have made this simple thing even more simple for common apprehension by introducing mediators and personages, in the same manner as in the heathen mythology abstractions are personified? seriously i think it probable that this system of soul-making may have been the parent of all the more palpable and personal schemes of redemption among the zoroastrians the christians and the hindoos. for as one part of the human species must have their carved jupiter; so another part must have the palpable and named mediator and saviour, their christ, their oromanes, and their vishnu. if what i have said should not be plain enough, as i fear it may not be, i will put you in the place where i began in this series of thoughts--i mean i began by seeing how man was formed by circumstances--and what are circumstances but touchstones of his heart? and what are touchstones but provings of his heart, but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? and what is his altered nature but his soul?--and what was his soul before it came into the world and had these provings and alterations and perfectionings?--an intelligence without identity--and how is this identity to be made? through the medium of the heart? and how is the heart to become this medium but in a world of circumstances? there now i think what with poetry and theology, you may thank your stars that my pen is not very long-winded. yesterday i received two letters from your mother and henry, which i shall send by young birkbeck with this. friday, april . brown has been here rummaging up some of my old sins--that is to say sonnets. i do not think you remember them, so i will copy them out, as well as two or three lately written. i have just written one on fame--which brown is transcribing and he has his book and mine. i must employ myself perhaps in a sonnet on the same subject-- on fame _you cannot eat your cake and have it too._--proverb. how fever'd is that man who cannot look upon his mortal days with temperate blood who vexes all the leaves of his life's book and robs his fair name of its maidenhood. it is as if the rose should pluck herself or the ripe plum finger its misty bloom, as if a clear lake meddling with itself should cloud its clearness with a muddy gloom. but the rose leaves herself upon the briar for winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed, and the ripe plum still wears its dim attire, the undisturbed lake has crystal space-- why then should man, teasing the world for grace spoil his salvation by a fierce miscreed? another on 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 think they scandal her who talk about her-- a very gipsy is she nilus born, sister-in-law to jealous potiphar-- ye lovesick bards, repay her scorn for scorn, ye lovelorn artists, madmen that ye are, make your best bow to her and bid adieu, then if she likes it she will follow you. to sleep o soft embalmer of the still midnight shutting with careful fingers and benign our gloom-pleased eyes embowered from the light enshaded in forgetfulness divine-- o soothest sleep, if so it please thee close in midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes, or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws around my bed its dewy charities. then save me or the passed day will shine upon my pillow breeding many woes. save me from curious conscience that still lords its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole-- turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, and seal the hushed casket of my soul. the following poem--the last i have written--is the first and the only one with which i have taken even moderate pains. i have for the most part dash'd off my lines in a hurry. this i have done leisurely--i think it reads the more richly for it, and will i hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. you must recollect that psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of apuleius the platonist who lived after the augustan age, and consequently the goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour--and perhaps never thought of in the old religion--i am more orthodox than to let a heathen goddess be so neglected-- ode to psyche o goddess hear these tuneless numbers, wrung by sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, and pardon that thy secrets should be sung even into thine own soft-conched ear! surely i dreamt to-day; or did i see the winged psyche, with awaked eyes? i wandered in a forest thoughtlessly, and on the sudden, fainting with surprise, saw two fair creatures couched side by side in deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring fan of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran a brooklet scarce espied 'mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, blue, freckle pink, and budded syrian they lay, calm-breathing on the bedded grass; their arms embraced and their pinions too; their lips touch'd not, but had not bid adieu, as if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, and ready still past kisses to outnumber at tender dawn of aurorian love. the winged boy i knew: but who wast thou o happy happy dove? his psyche true? o latest born, and loveliest vision far of all olympus' faded hierarchy! fairer than phoebe's sapphire-region'd star, or vesper amorous glow-worm of the sky; fairer than these though temple thou hadst none, nor altar heap'd with flowers; nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan upon the midnight hours; no voice, no lute, no pipe no incense sweet from chain-swung censer teeming-- no shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat of pale mouth'd prophet dreaming! o bloomiest! though too late for antique vows; too, too late for the fond believing lyre, when holy were the haunted forest boughs, holy the air, the water and the fire; yet even in these days so far retir'd from happy pieties, thy lucent fans, fluttering among the faint olympians, i see, and sing by my own eyes inspired. o let me be thy choir and make a moan upon the midnight hours; thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet from swinged censer teeming; thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming! yes, i will be thy priest and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind, where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. far, far around shall those dark cluster'd trees fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; and there by zephyrs streams and birds and bees the moss-lain dryads shall be lulled to sleep. and in the midst of this wide-quietness a rosy sanctuary will i dress with the wreath'd trellis of a working brain; with buds and bells and stars without a name; with all the gardener-fancy e'er could feign, who breeding flowers will never breed the same-- and there shall be for thee all soft delight that shadowy thought can win; a bright torch and a casement ope at night to let the warm love in. here endethe ye ode to psyche. incipit altera sonneta i have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have. the legitimate does not suit the language over well from the pouncing rhymes--the other kind appears too elegiac--and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect--i do not pretend to have succeeded--it will explain itself. if by dull rhymes our english must be chained, and, like andromeda, the sonnet sweet fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness; let us find out, if we must be constrain'd, sandals more interwoven and complete to fit the naked foot of poesy; let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress of every chord, and see what may be gain'd by ear industrious, and attention meet; misers of sound and syllable, no less than midas of his coinage, let us be jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown, so, if we may not let the muse be free, she will be bound with garlands of her own. [may .] this is the third of may, and everything is in delightful forwardness; the violets are not withered before the peeping of the first rose. you must let me know everything--how parcels go and come, what papers you have, and what newspapers you want, and other things. god bless you, my dear brother and sister. your ever affectionate brother john keats. xciii.--to fanny keats. wentworth place. saturday morn. [_postmark_, february , .] my dear fanny--i intended to have not failed to do as you requested, and write you as you say once a fortnight. on looking to your letter i find there is no date; and not knowing how long it is since i received it i do not precisely know how great a sinner i am. i am getting quite well, and mrs. dilke is getting on pretty well. you must pay no attention to mrs. abbey's unfeeling and ignorant gabble. you can't stop an old woman's crying more than you can a child's. the old woman is the greatest nuisance because she is too old for the rod. many people live opposite a blacksmith's till they cannot hear the hammer. i have been in town for two or three days and came back last night. i have been a little concerned at not hearing from george--i continue in daily expectation. keep on reading and play as much on the music and the grassplot as you can. i should like to take possession of those grassplots for a month or so; and send mrs. a. to town to count coffee berries instead of currant bunches, for i want you to teach me a few common dancing steps--and i would buy a watch box to practise them in by myself. i think i had better always pay the postage of these letters. i shall send you another book the first time i am in town early enough to book it with one of the morning walthamstow coaches. you did not say a word about your chillblains. write me directly and let me know about them--your letter shall be answered like an echo. your affectionate brother john ----. xciv.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, march [ ]. my dear fanny--i have been employed lately in writing to george--i do not send him very short letters, but keep on day after day. there were some young men i think i told you of who were going to the settlement: they have changed their minds, and i am disappointed in my expectation of sending letters by them.--i went lately to the only dance i have been to these twelve months or shall go to for twelve months again--it was to our brother in law's cousin's--she gave a dance for her birthday and i went for the sake of mrs. wylie. i am waiting every day to hear from george--i trust there is no harm in the silence: other people are in the same expectation as we are. on looking at your seal i cannot tell whether it is done or not with a tassie--it seems to me to be paste. as i went through leicester square lately i was going to call and buy you some, but not knowing but you might have some i would not run the chance of buying duplicates. tell me if you have any or if you would like any--and whether you would rather have motto ones like that with which i seal this letter; or heads of great men such as shakspeare, milton, etc.--or fancy pieces of art; such as fame, adonis, etc.--those gentry you read of at the end of the english dictionary. tell me also if you want any particular book; or pencils, or drawing paper--anything but live stock. though i will not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond i used to be of goldfinches, tomtits, minnows, mice, ticklebacks, dace, cock salmons and all the whole tribe of the bushes and the brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the water--though i must confess even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then i would have it hold pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. then i would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with myrtles and japonicas. i should like the window to open onto the lake of geneva--and there i'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading. the weather now and then begins to feel like spring; and therefore i have begun my walks on the heath again. mrs. dilke is getting better than she has been as she has at length taken a physician's advice. she ever and anon asks after you and always bids me remember her in my letters to you. she is going to leave hampstead for the sake of educating their son charles at the westminster school. we (mr. brown and i) shall leave in the beginning of may; i do not know what i shall do or where be all the next summer. mrs. reynolds has had a sick house; but they are all well now. you see what news i can send you i do--we all live one day like the other as well as you do--the only difference is being sick and well--with the variations of single and double knocks, and the story of a dreadful fire in the newspapers. i mentioned mr. brown's name--yet i do not think i ever said a word about him to you. he is a friend of mine of two years' standing, with whom i walked through scotland: who has been very kind to me in many things when i most wanted his assistance and with whom i keep house till the first of may--you will know him some day. the name of the young man who came with me is william haslam. ever your affectionate brother john. xcv.--to fanny keats. [_postmark_, hampstead, march , .] my dear fanny--it is impossible for me to call on you to-day--for i have particular business at the other end of the town this morning, and must be back to hampstead with all speed to keep a long agreed on appointment. to-morrow i shall see you. your affectionate brother john ----. xcvi.--to joseph severn. wentworth place, monday aft. [march ? ]. my dear severn--your note gave me some pain, not on my own account, but on yours. of course i should never suffer any petty vanity of mine to hinder you in any wise; and therefore i should say "put the miniature in the exhibition" if only myself was to be hurt. but, will it not hurt you? what good can it do to any future picture. even a large picture is lost in that canting place--what a drop of water in the ocean is a miniature. those who might chance to see it for the most part if they had ever heard of either of us and know what we were and of what years would laugh at the puff of the one and the vanity of the other. i am however in these matters a very bad judge--and would advise you to act in a way that appears to yourself the best for your interest. as your "hermia and helena" is finished send that without the prologue of a miniature. i shall see you soon, if you do not pay me a visit sooner--there's a bull for you. yours ever sincerely john keats. xcvii.--to fanny keats. wentworth place [april , ]. my dear fanny--i have been expecting a letter from you about what the parson said to your answers. i have thought also of writing to you often, and i am sorry to confess that my neglect of it has been but a small instance of my idleness of late--which has been growing upon me, 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. one most discouraging thing hinders me--we have no news yet from george--so that i cannot with any confidence continue the letter i have been preparing for him. many are in the same state with us and many have heard from the settlement. they must be well however: and we must consider this silence as good news. i ordered some bulbous roots for you at the gardener's, and they sent me some, but they were all in bud--and could not be sent--so i put them in our garden. there are some beautiful heaths now in bloom in pots--either heaths or some seasonable plants i will send you instead--perhaps some that are not yet in bloom that you may see them come out. to-morrow night i am going to a rout, a thing i am not at all in love with. mr. dilke and his family have left hampstead--i shall dine with them to-day in westminster where i think i told you they were going to reside for the sake of sending their son charles to the westminster school. i think i mentioned the death of mr. haslam's father. yesterday week the two mr. wylies dined with me. i hope you have good store of double violets--i think they are the princesses of flowers, and in a shower of rain, almost as fine as barley sugar drops are to a schoolboy's tongue. i suppose this fine weather the lambs' tails give a frisk or two extraordinary--when a boy would cry huzza and a girl o my! a little lamb frisks its tail. i have not been lately through leicester square--the first time i do i will remember your seals. i have thought it best to live in town this summer, chiefly for the sake of books, which cannot be had with any comfort in the country--besides my scotch journey gave me a dose of the picturesque with which i ought to be contented for some time. westminster is the place i have pitched upon--the city or any place very confined would soon turn me pale and thin--which is to be avoided. you must make up your mind to get stout this summer--indeed i have an idea we shall both be corpulent old folks with triple chins and stumpy thumbs. your affectionate brother john. xcviii.--to benjamin robert haydon. tuesday [april , ]. my dear haydon--when i offered you assistance i thought i had it in my hand; i thought i had nothing to do but to do. the difficulties i met with arose from the alertness and suspicion of abbey: and especially from the affairs being still in a lawyer's hand--who has been draining our property for the last six years of every charge he could make. i cannot do two things at once, and thus this affair has stopped my pursuits in every way--from the first prospect i had of difficulty. i assure you i have harassed myself ten times more than if i alone had been concerned in so much gain or loss. i have also ever told you the exact particulars as well as and as literally as any hopes or fear could translate them: for it was only by parcels that i found all those petty obstacles which for my own sake should not exist a moment--and yet why not--for from my own imprudence and neglect all my accounts are entirely in my guardian's power. this has taught me a lesson. hereafter i will be more correct. i find myself possessed of much less than i thought for and now if i had all on the table all i could do would be to take from it a moderate two years' subsistence and lend you the rest; but i cannot say how soon i could become possessed of it. this would be no sacrifice nor any matter worth thinking of--much less than parting as i have more than once done with little sums which might have gradually formed a library to my taste. these sums amount together to nearly £ , which i have but a chance of ever being repaid or paid at a very distant period. i am humble enough to put this in writing from the sense i have of your struggling situation and the great desire that you should do me the justice to credit me the unostentatious and willing state of my nerves on all such occasions. it has not been my fault. i am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at the occasion of it,--for it must be some other disappointment; you seem'd so sure of some important help when i last saw you--now you have maimed me again; i was whole, i had began reading again--when your note came i was engaged in a book. i dread as much as a plague the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. i will walk over the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and if they should continue gloomy walk into the city to abbey and get his consent for i am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot. xcix.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, saturday. [april , ?] my dear fanny--if it were but six o'clock in the morning i would set off to see you to-day: if i should do so now i could not stop long enough for a how d'ye do--it is so long a walk through hornsey and tottenham--and as for stage coaching it besides that it is very expensive it is like going into the boxes by way of the pit. i cannot go out on sunday--but if on monday it should promise as fair as to-day i will put on a pair of loose easy palatable boots and me rendre chez vous. i continue increasing my letter to george to send it by one of birkbeck's sons who is going out soon--so if you will let me have a few more lines, they will be in time. i am glad you got on so well with mons{r.} le curé. is he a nice clergyman?--a great deal depends upon a cock'd hat and powder--not gunpowder, lord love us, but lady-meal, violet-smooth, dainty-scented, lilly-white, feather-soft, wigsby-dressing, coat-collar-spoiling, whisker-reaching, pig-tail-loving, swans-down-puffing, parson-sweetening powder. i shall call in passing at the tottenham nursery and see if i can find some seasonable plants for you. that is the nearest place--or by our la'kin or lady kin, that is by the virgin mary's kindred, is there not a twig-manufacturer in walthamstow? mr. and mrs. dilke are coming to dine with us to-day. they will enjoy the country after westminster. o there is nothing like fine weather, and health, and books, and a fine country, and a contented mind, and diligent habit of reading and thinking, and an amulet against the ennui--and, please heaven, a little claret wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep--with a few or a good many ratafia cakes--a rocky basin to bathe in, a strawberry bed to say your prayers to flora in, a pad nag to go you ten miles or so; two or three sensible people to chat with; two or three spiteful folks to spar with; two or three odd fishes to laugh at and two or three numskulls to argue with--instead of using dumb bells on a rainy day-- two or three posies with two or three simples-- two or three noses with two or three pimples-- two or three wise men and two or three ninny's-- two or three purses and two or three guineas-- two or three raps at two or three doors-- two or three naps of two or three hours-- two or three cats and two or three mice-- two or three sprats at a very great price-- two or three sandies and two or three tabbies-- two or three dandies and two mrs.---- mum two or three smiles and two or three frowns-- two or three miles to two or three towns-- two or three pegs for two or three bonnets-- two or three dove eggs to hatch into sonnets-- good-bye i've an appointment--can't stop pon word--good-bye--now don't get up--open the door my- self--good-bye--see ye monday. j. k. c.--to fanny keats. [hampstead, may , .] my dear fanny--i have a letter from george at last--and it contains, considering all things, good news--i have been with it to-day to mrs. wylie's, with whom i have left it. i shall have it again as soon as possible and then i will walk over and read it to you. they are quite well and settled tolerably in comfort after a great deal of fatigue and harass. they had the good chance to meet at louisville with a schoolfellow of ours. you may expect me within three days. i am writing to-night several notes concerning this to many of my friends. good-night! god bless you. john keats. ci.--to fanny keats. [hampstead, may , .] my dear fanny--i have been looking for a fine day to pass at walthamstow: there has not been one morning (except sunday and then i was obliged to stay at home) that i could depend upon. i have i am sorry to say had an accident with the letter--i sent it to haslam and he returned it torn into a thousand pieces. so i shall be obliged to tell you all i can remember from memory. you would have heard from me before this but that i was in continual expectation of a fine morning--i want also to speak to you concerning myself. mind i do not purpose to quit england, as george has done; but i am afraid i shall be forced to take a voyage or two. however we will not think of that for some months. should it be a fine morning to-morrow you will see me. your affectionate brother john ----. cii.--to fanny keats. wentworth place [june , ]. my dear fanny--i shall be with you next monday at the farthest. i could not keep my promise of seeing you again in a week because i am in so unsettled a state of mind about what i am to do--i have given up the idea of the indiaman; i cannot resolve to give up my favorite studies: so i purpose to retire into the country and set my mind at work once more. a friend of mine who has an ill state of health called on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back of the isle of wight where he said we might live very cheaply. i agreed to his proposal. i have taken a great dislike to town--i never go there--some one is always calling on me and as we have spare beds they often stop a couple of days. i have written lately to some acquaintances in devonshire concerning a cheap lodging and they have been very kind in letting me know all i wanted. they have described a pleasant place which i think i shall eventually retire to. how came you on with my young master yorkshire man? did not mrs. a. sport her carriage and one? they really surprised me with super civility--how did mrs. a. manage it? how is the old tadpole gardener and little master next door? it is to be hop'd they will both die some of these days. not having been to town i have not heard whether mr. a. purposes to retire from business. do let me know if you have heard anything more about it. if he should not i shall be very disappointed. if any one deserves to be put to his shifts it is that hodgkinson--as for the other he would live a long time upon his fat and be none the worse for a good long lent. how came miledi to give one lisbon wine--had she drained the gooseberry? truly i cannot delay making another visit--asked to take lunch, whether i will have ale, wine, take sugar,--objection to green--like cream--thin bread and butter--another cup--agreeable--enough sugar--little more cream--too weak-- shillin etc. etc. etc.--lord i must come again. we are just going to dinner i must must[ ] with this to the post---- your affectionate brother john ----. ciii.--to james elmes. wentworth place, hampstead [june , ]. sir--i did not see your note till this saturday evening, or i should have answered it sooner--however as it happens i have but just received the book which contains the only copy of the verses in question.[ ] i have asked for it repeatedly ever since i promised mr. haydon and could not help the delay; which i regret. the verses can be struck out in no time, and will i hope be quite in time. if you think it at all necessary a proof may be forwarded; but as i shall transcribe it fairly perhaps there may be no need. i am, sir, your obed{t} serv{t} john keats. civ.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, [june , ]. my dear fanny--i cannot be with you to-day for two reasons-- {ly} i have my sore-throat coming again to prevent my walking. {ly} i do not happen just at present to be flush of silver so that i might ride. to-morrow i am engaged--but the day after you shall see me. mr. brown is waiting for me as we are going to town together, so good-bye. your affectionate brother john. cv.--to fanny keats. wentworth place [june , ]. my dear fanny--still i cannot afford to spend money by coachhire and still my throat is not well enough to warrant my walking. i went yesterday to ask mr. abbey for some money; but i could not on account of a letter he showed me from my aunt's solicitor. you do not understand the business. i trust it will not in the end be detrimental to you. i am going to try the press once more, and to that end shall retire to live cheaply in the country and compose myself and verses as well as i can. i have very good friends ready to help me--and i am the more bound to be careful of the money they lend me. it will all be well in the course of a year i hope. i am confident of it, so do not let it trouble you at all. mr. abbey showed me a letter he had received from george containing the news of the birth of a niece for us--and all doing well--he said he would take it to you--so i suppose to-day you will see it. i was preparing to enquire for a situation with an apothecary, but mr. brown persuades me to try the press once more; so i will with all my industry and ability. mr. rice a friend of mine in ill health has proposed retiring to the back of the isle of wight--which i hope will be cheap in the summer--i am sure it will in the winter. thence you shall frequently hear from me and in the letters i will copy those lines i may write which will be most pleasing to you in the confidence you will show them to no one. i have not run quite aground yet i hope, having written this morning to several people to whom i have lent money requesting repayment. i shall henceforth shake off my indolent fits, and among other reformation be more diligent in writing to you, and mind you always answer me. i shall be obliged to go out of town on saturday and shall have no money till to-morrow, so i am very sorry to think i shall not be able to come to walthamstow. the head mr. severn did of me is now too dear, but here inclosed is a very capital profile done by mr. brown. i will write again on monday or tuesday--mr. and mrs. dilke are well. your affectionate brother john ----. cvi.--to benjamin robert haydon. wentworth place. thursday morning [june , ]. my dear haydon--i know you will not be prepared for this, because your pocket must needs be very low having been at ebb tide so long: but what can i do? mine is lower. i was the day before yesterday much in want of money: but some news i had yesterday has driven me into necessity. i went to abbey's for some cash, and he put into my hand a letter from my aunt's solicitor containing the pleasant information that she was about to file a bill in chancery against us. now in case of a defeat abbey will be very undeservedly in the wrong box; so i could not ask him for any more money, nor can i till the affair is decided; and if it goes against him i must in conscience make over to him what little he may have remaining. my purpose is now to make one more attempt in the press--if that fail, "ye hear no more of me" as chaucer says. brown has lent me some money for the present. do borrow or beg somehow what you can for me. do not suppose i am at all uncomfortable about the matter in any other way than as it forces me to apply to the needy. i could not send you those lines, for i could not get the only copy of them before last saturday evening. i sent them mr. elmes on monday. i saw monkhouse on sunday--he told me you were getting on with the picture. i would have come over to you to-day, but i am fully employed. yours ever sincerely john keats. cvii.--to fanny keats. shanklin, isle of wight, tuesday, july . my dear fanny--i have just received another letter from george--full of as good news as we can expect. i cannot inclose it to you as i could wish because it contains matters of business to which i must for a week to come have an immediate reference. i think i told you the purpose for which i retired to this place--to try the fortune of my pen once more, and indeed i have some confidence in my success: but in every event, believe me my dear sister, i shall be sufficiently comfortable, as, if i cannot lead that life of competence and society i should wish, i have enough knowledge of my gallipots to ensure me an employment and maintenance. the place i am in now i visited once before and a very pretty place it is were it not for the bad weather. our window looks over house-tops and cliffs onto the sea, so that when the ships sail past the cottage chimneys you may take them for weathercocks. we have hill and dale, forest and mead, and plenty of lobsters. i was on the portsmouth coach the sunday before last in that heavy shower--and i may say i went to portsmouth by water--i got a little cold, and as it always flies to my throat i am a little out of sorts that way. there were on the coach with me some common french people but very well behaved--there was a woman amongst them to whom the poor men in ragged coats were more gallant than ever i saw gentleman to lady at a ball. when we got down to walk up hill--one of them pick'd a rose, and on remounting gave it to the woman with "ma'mselle voila une belle rose!" i am so hard at work that perhaps i should not have written to you for a day or two if george's letter had not diverted my attention to the interests and pleasure of those i love--and ever believe that when i do not behave punctually it is from a very necessary occupation, and that my silence is no proof of my not thinking of you, or that i want more than a gentle fillip to bring your image with every claim before me. you have never seen mountains, or i might tell you that the hill at steephill is i think almost of as much consequence as mount rydal on lake winander. bonchurch too is a very delightful place--as i can see by the cottages, all romantic--covered with creepers and honeysuckles, with roses and eglantines peeping in at the windows. fit abodes for the people i guess live in them, romantic old maids fond of novels, or soldiers' widows with a pretty jointure--or any body's widows or aunts or anythings given to poetry and a piano-forte--as far as in 'em lies--as people say. if i could play upon the guitar i might make my fortune with an old song--and get two blessings at once--a lady's heart and the rheumatism. but i am almost afraid to peep at those little windows--for a pretty window should show a pretty face, and as the world goes chances are against me. i am living with a very good fellow indeed, a mr. rice.--he is unfortunately labouring under a complaint which has for some years been a burthen to him. this is a pain to me. he has a greater tact in speaking to people of the village than i have, and in those matters is a great amusement as well as good friend to me. he bought a ham the other day for says he "keats, i don't think a ham is a wrong thing to have in a house." write to me, shanklin, isle of wight, as soon as you can; for a letter is a great treat to me here--believing me ever, your affectionate brother john ----. cviii.--to john hamilton reynolds. _extract from a letter dated_ shanklin, n{r} ryde, isle of wight, sunday, th [for th] july, . * * * * * you will be glad to hear, under my own hand (though rice says we are like sauntering jack and idle joe), how diligent i have been, and am being. i have finished the act, and in the interval of beginning the {d} have proceeded pretty well with lamia, finishing the {st} part which consists of about lines. i have great hopes of success, because i make use of my judgment more deliberately than i have yet done; but in case of failure with the world, i shall find my content. and here (as i know you have my good at heart as much as a brother), i can only repeat to you what i have said to george--that however i should like to enjoy what the competencies of life procure, i am in no wise dashed at a different prospect. i have spent too many thoughtful days and moralised through too many nights for that, and fruitless would they be indeed, if they did not by degrees make me look upon the affairs of the world with a healthy deliberation. i have of late been moulting: not for fresh feathers and wings: they are gone, and in their stead i hope to have a pair of patient sublunary legs. i have altered, not from a chrysalis into a butterfly, but the contrary; having two little loopholes, whence i may look out into the stage of the world: and that world on our coming here i almost forgot. the first time i sat down to write, i could scarcely believe in the necessity for so doing. it struck me as a great oddity--yet the very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market; so, why should i be delicate? * * * * * cix.--to charles wentworth dilke. shanklin, saturday evening [july , ]. my dear dilke--i will not make my diligence an excuse for not writing to you sooner--because i consider idleness a much better plea. a man in the hurry of business of any sort is expected and ought to be expected to look to everything--his mind is in a whirl, and what matters it what whirl? but to require a letter of a man lost in idleness is the utmost cruelty; you cut the thread of his existence, you beat, you pummel him, you sell his goods and chattels, you put him in prison; you impale him; you crucify him. if i had not put pen to paper since i saw you this would be to me a vi et armis taking up before the judge; but having got over my darling lounging habits a little, it is with scarcely any pain i come to this dating from shanklin and dear dilke. the isle of wight is but so so, etc. rice and i passed rather a dull time of it. i hope he will not repent coming with me. he was unwell, and i was not in very good health: and i am afraid we made each other worse by acting upon each other's spirits. we would grow as melancholy as need be. i confess i cannot bear a sick person in a house, especially alone--it weighs upon me day and night--and more so when perhaps the case is irretrievable. indeed i think rice is in a dangerous state. i have had a letter from him which speaks favourably of his health at present. brown and i are pretty well harnessed again to our dog-cart. i mean the tragedy, which goes on sinkingly. we are thinking of introducing an elephant, but have not historical reference within reach to determine us as to otho's menagerie. when brown first mentioned this i took it for a joke; however he brings such plausible reasons, and discourses so eloquently on the dramatic effect that i am giving it a serious consideration. the art of poetry is not sufficient for us, and if we get on in that as well as we do in painting, we shall by next winter crush the reviews and the royal academy. indeed, if brown would take a little of my advice, he could not fail to be first palette of his day. but odd as it may appear, he says plainly that he cannot see any force in my plea of putting skies in the background, and leaving indian ink out of an ash tree. the other day he was sketching shanklin church, and as i saw how the business was going on, i challenged him to a trial of skill--he lent me pencil and paper--we keep the sketches to contend for the prize at the gallery. i will not say whose i think best--but really i do not think brown's done to the top of the art. a word or two on the isle of wight. i have been no further than steephill. if i may guess, i should say that there is no finer part in the island than from this place to steephill. i do not hesitate to say it is fine. bonchurch is the best. but i have been so many finer walks, with a background of lake and mountain instead of the sea, that i am not much touch'd with it, though i credit it for all the surprise i should have felt if it had taken my cockney maidenhead. but i may call myself an old stager in the picturesque, and unless it be something very large and overpowering, i cannot receive any extraordinary relish. i am sorry to hear that charles is so much oppress'd at westminster, though i am sure it will be the finest touchstone for his metal in the world. his troubles will grow day by day less, as his age and strength increase. the very first battle he wins will lift him from the tribe of manasseh. i do not know how i should feel were i a father--but i hope i should strive with all my power not to let the present trouble me. when your boy shall be twenty, ask him about his childish troubles and he will have no more memory of them than you have of yours. brown tells me mrs. dilke sets off to-day for chichester. i am glad--i was going to say she had a fine day--but there has been a great thunder cloud muttering over hampshire all day--i hope she is now at supper with a good appetite. so reynolds's piece succeeded--that is all well. papers have with thanks been duly received. we leave this place on the th, and will let you know where we may be a few days after--brown says he will write when the fit comes on him. if you will stand law expenses i'll beat him into one before his time. when i come to town i shall have a little talk with you about brown and one jenny jacobs. open daylight! he don't care. i am afraid there will be some more feet for little stockings--[_of keats's making_. (_i mean the feet._)[ ]] brown here tried at a piece of wit but it failed him, as you see, though long a brewing.--[_this is a {d} lie._] men should never despair--you see he has tried again and succeeded to a miracle.--he wants to try again, but as i have a right to an inside place in my own letter--i take possession. your sincere friend john keats. cx.--to benjamin bailey. [_fragment (outside sheet) of a letter addressed to bailey at st. andrews._ winchester, august , .] * * * * * we removed to winchester for the convenience of a library, and find it an exceeding pleasant town, enriched with a beautiful cathedral, and surrounded by a fresh-looking country. we are in tolerably good and cheap lodgings--within these two months i have written lines, most of which, besides many more of prior composition, you will probably see by next winter. i have written tales, one from boccaccio, called the pot of basil, and another called st. agnes's eve, on a popular superstition, and a {rd} called lamia (half finished). i have also been writing parts of my "hyperion," and completed acts of a tragedy. it was the opinion of most of my friends that i should never be able to write a scene. i will endeavour to wipe away the prejudice--i sincerely hope you will be pleased when my labours, since we last saw each other, shall reach you. one of my ambitions is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as kean has done in acting. another to upset the drawling of the blue-stocking literary world--if in the course of a few years i do these two things, i ought to die content, and my friends should drink a dozen of claret on my tomb. i am convinced more and more every day that (excepting the human friend philosopher), a fine writer is the most genuine being in the world. shakspeare and the paradise lost every day become greater wonders to me. i look upon fine phrases like a lover. i was glad to see by a passage of one of brown's letters, some time ago, from the north that you were in such good spirits. since that you have been married, and in congratulating you i wish you every continuance of them. present my respects to mrs. bailey. this sounds oddly to me, and i daresay i do it awkwardly enough: but i suppose by this time it is nothing new to you. brown's remembrances to you. as far as i know, we shall remain at winchester for a goodish while. ever your sincere friend john keats. cxi.--to john taylor. winchester, monday morn [august , ]. my dear taylor-- ... brown and i have together been engaged (this i should wish to remain secret) on a tragedy which i have just finished and from which we hope to share moderate profits.... i feel every confidence that, if i choose, i may be a popular writer. that i will never be; but for all that i will get a livelihood. i equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman. they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence. i shall ever consider them (people) as debtors to me for verses, not myself to them for admiration--which i can do without. i have of late been indulging my spleen by composing a preface at them: after all resolving never to write a preface at all. "there are so many verses," would i have said to them, "give so much means for me to buy pleasure with, as a relief to my hours of labour"--you will observe at the end of this if you put down the letter, "how a solitary life engenders pride and egotism!" true--i know it does: but this pride and egotism will enable me to write finer things than anything else could--so i will indulge it. just so much as i am humbled by the genius above my grasp am i exalted and look with hate and contempt upon the literary world.--a drummer-boy who holds out his hand familiarly to a field marshal,--that drummer-boy with me is the good word and favour of the public. who could wish to be among the common-place crowd of the little famous--who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves? is this worth louting or playing the hypocrite for? to beg suffrages for a seat on the benches of a myriad-aristocracy in letters? this is not wise.--i am not a wise man--'tis pride--i will give you a definition of a proud man--he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom--one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise. pardon me for hammering instead of writing. remember me to woodhouse hessey and all in percy street. ever yours sincerely john keats. cxii.--to john hamilton reynolds. winchester, august [ ]. my dear reynolds--by this post i write to rice, who will tell you why we have left shanklin; and how we like this place. i have indeed scarcely anything else to say, leading so monotonous a life, except i was to give you a history of sensations, and day-nightmares. you would not find me at all unhappy in it, as all my thoughts and feelings which are of the selfish nature, home speculations, every day continue to make me more iron--i am convinced more and more, every day, that fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing in the world; the paradise lost becomes a greater wonder. the more i know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the more does my heart distend with pride and obstinacy--i feel it in my power to become a popular writer--i feel it in my power to refuse the poisonous suffrage of a public. my own being which i know to be becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of shadows in the shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. the soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home. those whom i know already, and who have grown as it were a part of myself, i could not do without: but for the rest of mankind, they are as much a dream to me as milton's hierarchies. i think if i had a free and healthy and lasting organisation of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox's so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, i could pass my life very nearly alone though it should last eighty years. but i feel my body too weak to support me to the height, i am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing. it would be vain for me to endeavour after a more reasonable manner of writing to you. i have nothing to speak of but myself, and what can i say but what i feel? if you should have any reason to regret this state of excitement in me, i will turn the tide of your feelings in the right channel, by mentioning that it is the only state for the best sort of poetry--that is all i care for, all i live for. forgive me for not filling up the whole sheet; letters become so irksome to me, that the next time i leave london i shall petition them all to be spared me. to give me credit for constancy, and at the same time waive letter writing will be the highest indulgence i can think of. ever your affectionate friend john keats. cxiii.--to fanny keats. winchester, august [ ]. my dear fanny--you must forgive me for suffering so long a space to elapse between the dates of my letters. it is more than a fortnight since i left shanklin chiefly for the purpose of being near a tolerable library, which after all is not to be found in this place. however we like it very much: it is the pleasantest town i ever was in, and has the most recommendations of any. there is a fine cathedral which to me is always a source of amusement, part of it built years ago; and the more modern by a magnificent man, you may have read of in our history, called william of wickham. the whole town is beautifully wooded. from the hill at the eastern extremity you see a prospect of streets, and old buildings mixed up with trees. then there are the most beautiful streams about i ever saw--full of trout. there is the foundation of st. croix about half a mile in the fields--a charity greatly abused. we have a collegiate school, a roman catholic school; a chapel ditto and a nunnery! and what improves it all is, the fashionable inhabitants are all gone to southampton. we are quiet--except a fiddle that now and then goes like a gimlet through my ears--our landlady's son not being quite a proficient. i have still been hard at work, having completed a tragedy i think i spoke of to you. but there i fear all my labour will be thrown away for the present, as i hear mr. kean is going to america. for all i can guess i shall remain here till the middle of october--when mr. brown will return to his house at hampstead; whither i shall return with him. i some time since sent the letter i told you i had received from george to haslam with a request to let you and mrs. wylie see it: he sent it back to me for very insufficient reasons without doing so; and i was so irritated by it that i would not send it travelling about by the post any more: besides the postage is very expensive. i know mrs. wylie will think this a great neglect. i am sorry to say my temper gets the better of me--i will not send it again. some correspondence i have had with mr. abbey about george's affairs--and i must confess he has behaved very kindly to me as far as the wording of his letter went. have you heard any further mention of his retiring from business? i am anxious to hear whether hodgkinson, whose name i cannot bear to write, will in any likelihood be thrown upon himself. the delightful weather we have had for two months is the highest gratification i could receive--no chill'd red noses--no shivering--but fair atmosphere to think in--a clean towel mark'd with the mangle and a basin of clear water to drench one's face with ten times a day: no need of much exercise--a mile a day being quite sufficient. my greatest regret is that i have not been well enough to bathe though i have been two months by the seaside and live now close to delicious bathing--still i enjoy the weather--i adore fine weather as the greatest blessing i can have. give me books, fruit, french wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody i do not know--not pay the price of one's time for a jig--but a little chance music: and i can pass a summer very quietly without caring much about fat louis, fat regent or the duke of wellington. why have you not written to me? because you were in expectation of george's letter and so waited? mr. brown is copying out our tragedy of otho the great in a superb style--better than it deserves--there as i said is labour in vain for the present. i had hoped to give kean another opportunity to shine. what can we do now? there is not another actor of tragedy in all london or europe. the covent garden company is execrable. young is the best among them and he is a ranting coxcombical tasteless actor--a disgust, a nausea--and yet the very best after kean. what a set of barren asses are actors! i should like now to promenade round your gardens--apple-tasting--pear-tasting--plum-judging--apricot-nibbling-- peach-scrunching--nectarine-sucking and melon-carving. i have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar cracks--and a white currant tree kept for company. i admire lolling on a lawn by a water lilied pond to eat white currants and see gold-fish: and go to the fair in the evening if i'm good. there is not hope for that--one is sure to get into some mess before evening. have these hot days i brag of so much been well or ill for your health? let me hear soon. your affectionate brother john ----. cxiv.--to john taylor. winchester, september , . my dear taylor--brown and i have been employed for these weeks past from time to time in writing to our different friends--a dead silence is our only answer--we wait morning after morning. tuesday is the day for the examiner to arrive, this is the d tuesday which has been barren even of a newspaper--men should be in imitation of spirits "responsive to each other's note." instead of that i pipe and no one hath danced. we have been cursing like mandeville and lisle--with this i shall send by the same post a d letter to a friend of mine, who though it is of consequence has neither answered right or left. we have been much in want of news from the theatres, having heard that kean is going to america--but no--not a word. why i should come on you with all these complaints i cannot explain to myself, especially as i suspect you must be in the country. do answer me soon for i really must know something. i must steer myself by the rudder of information.... ever yours sincerely john keats. cxv.--to john taylor. winchester, september [ ]. my dear taylor--this morning i received yours of the d, and with it a letter from hessey enclosing a bank post bill of £ , an ample sum i assure you--more i had no thought of.--you should not have delayed so long in fleet st.--leading an inactive life as you did was breathing poison: you will find the country air do more for you than you expect. but it must be proper country air. you must choose a spot. what sort of a place is retford? you should have a dry, gravelly, barren, elevated country, open to the currents of air, and such a place is generally furnished with the finest springs--the neighbourhood of a rich enclosed fulsome manured arable land, especially in a valley and almost as bad on a flat, would be almost as bad as the smoke of fleet st.--such a place as this was shanklin, only open to the south-east, and surrounded by hills in every other direction. from this south-east 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--i felt it very much. since i have been here at winchester i have been improving in health--it is not so confined--and there is on one side of the city a dry chalky down, where the air is worth sixpence a pint. so if you do not get better at retford, do not impute it to your own weakness before you have well considered the nature of the air and soil--especially as autumn is encroaching--for the autumn fog over a rich land is like the steam from cabbage water. what makes the great difference between valesmen, flatlandmen and mountaineers? the cultivation of the earth in a great measure--our health temperament and disposition are taken more (notwithstanding the contradiction of the history of cain and abel) from the air we breathe, than is generally imagined. see the difference between a peasant and a butcher.--i am convinced a great cause of it is the difference of the air they breathe: the one takes _his_ mingled with the fume of slaughter, the other from the dank exhalement from the glebe; the teeming damp that comes up from the plough-furrow is of great effect in taming the fierceness of a strong man--more than his labour--let him be mowing furze upon a mountain, and at the day's end his thoughts will run upon a..axe[ ] if he ever had handled one; let him leave the plough, and he will think quietly of his supper. agriculture is the tamer of men--the steam from the earth is like drinking their mother's milk--it enervates their nature--this appears a great cause of the imbecility of the chinese: and if this sort of atmosphere is a mitigation to the energy of a strong man, how much more must it injure a weak one unoccupied unexercised--for what is the cause of so many men maintaining a good state in cities, but occupation--an idle man, a man who is not sensitively alive to self-interest in a city cannot continue long in good health. this is easily explained--if you were to walk leisurely through an unwholesome path in the fens, with a little horror of them, you would be sure to have your ague. but let macbeth cross the same path, with the dagger in the air leading him on, and he would never have an ague or anything like it--you should give these things a serious consideration. notts, i believe, is a flat county--you should be on the slope of one of the dry barren hills in somersetshire. i am convinced there is as harmful air to be breathed in the country as in town. i am greatly obliged to you for your letter. perhaps, if you had had strength and spirits enough, you would have felt offended by my offering a note of hand, or rather expressed it. however, i am sure you will give me credit for not in anywise mistrusting you: or imagining that you would take advantage of any power i might give you over me. no--it proceeded from my serious resolve not to be a gratuitous borrower, from a great desire to be correct in money matters, to have in my desk the chronicles of them to refer to, and know my worldly non-estate: besides in case of my death such documents would be but just, if merely as memorials of the friendly turns i had done to me--had i known of your illness i should not have written in such fiery phrase in my first letter. i hope that shortly you will be able to bear six times as much. brown likes the tragedy very much: but he is not a fit judge of it, as i have only acted as midwife to his plot; and of course he will be fond of his child. i do not think i can make you any extracts without spoiling the effect of the whole when you come to read it--i hope you will then not think my labour mis-spent. since i finished it, i have finished lamia, and am now occupied in revising st. agnes's eve, and studying italian. ariosto i find as diffuse, in parts, as spenser--i understand completely the difference between them. i will cross the letter with some lines from lamia. brown's kindest remembrances to you--and i am ever your most sincere friend john keats. a haunting music sole perhaps and lone supportress of the fairy roof made moan throughout as fearful the whole charm might fade. fresh carved cedar mimicking a glade of palm and plantain met from either side in the high midst in honour of the bride-- two palms, and then two plantains and so on from either side their stems branch'd one to one all down the aisled place--and beneath all there ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall. so canopied lay an untasted feast teeming a perfume. lamia regal drest silverly paced about and as she went mission'd her viewless servants to enrich the splendid finish of each nook and niche-- between the tree stems wainscoated at first came jasper panels--then anon there burst forth creeping imagery of slighter trees and with the larger wove in small intricacies-- and so till she was sated--then came down soft lighting on her head a brilliant crown wreath'd turban-wise of tender wannish fire and sprinkled o'er with stars like ariadne's tiar, approving all--she faded at self will and shut the chamber up close hush'd and still; complete, and ready, for the revels rude when dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude the day came soon and all the gossip-rout-- o senseless lycius[ ] ... * * * * * this is a good sample of the story. brown is gone to chichester a-visiting--i shall be alone here for weeks, expecting accounts of your health. cxvi.--to george and georgiana keats. winchester, september [ , ], friday. my dear george--i was closely employed in reading and composition in this place, whither i had come from shanklin for the convenience of a library, when i received your last dated th july. you will have seen by the short letter i wrote from shanklin how matters stand between us and mr. jennings. they had not at all moved, and i knew no way of overcoming the inveterate obstinacy of our affairs. on receiving your last, i immediately took a place in the same night's coach for london. mr. abbey behaved extremely well to me, appointed monday evening at seven to meet me, and observed that he should drink tea at that hour. i gave him the enclosed note and showed him the last leaf of yours to me. he really appeared anxious about it, and promised he would forward your money as quickly as possible. i think i mentioned that walton was dead.... he will apply to mr. gliddon the partner, endeavour to get rid of mrs. jennings' claim, and be expeditious. he has received an answer from my letter to fry. that is something. we are certainly in a very low estate--i say we, for i am in such a situation, that were it not for the assistance of brown and taylor, i must be as badly off as a man can be. i could not raise any sum by the promise of any poem, no, not by the mortgage of my intellect. we must wait a little while. i really have hopes of success. i have finished a tragedy, which if it succeeds will enable me to sell what i may have in manuscript to a good advantage. i have passed my time in reading, writing, and fretting--the last i intend to give up, and stick to the other two. they are the only chances of benefit to us. your wants will be a fresh spur to me. i assure you you shall more than share what i can get whilst i am still young. the time may come when age will make me more selfish. i have not been well treated by the world, and yet i have, capitally well. i do not know a person to whom so many purse-strings would fly open as to me, if i could possibly take advantage of them, which i cannot do, for none of the owners of these purses are rich. your present situation i will not suffer myself to dwell upon. when misfortunes are so real, we are glad enough to escape them and the thought of them. i cannot help thinking mr. audubon a dishonest man. why did he make you believe that he was a man of property? how is it that his circumstances have altered so suddenly? in truth, i do not believe you fit to deal with the world, or at least the american world. but, good god! who can avoid these chances? you have done your best. take matters as coolly as you can; and confidently expecting help from england, act as if no help were nigh. mine, i am sure, is a tolerable tragedy; it would have been a bank to me, if just as i had finished it, i had not heard of kean's resolution to go to america. that was the worst news i could have had. there is no actor can do the principal character besides kean. at covent garden there is a great chance of its being damm'd. were it to succeed even there it would lift me out of the mire; i mean the mire of a bad reputation which is continually rising against me. my name with the literary fashionables is vulgar. i am a weaver-boy to them. a tragedy would lift me out of this mess, and mess it is as far as regards our pockets. but be not cast down any more than i am; i feel that i can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. whenever i find myself growing vapourish, i rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly, and in fact adonise as i were going out. then, all clean and comfortable, i sit down to write. this i find the greatest relief. besides i am becoming accustomed to the privations of the pleasures of sense. in the midst of the world i live like a hermit. i have forgot how to lay plans for the enjoyment of any pleasure. i feel i can bear anything,--any misery, even imprisonment, so long as i have neither wife nor child. perhaps you will say yours are your only comfort; they must be. i returned to winchester the day before yesterday, and am now here alone, for brown, some days before i left, went to bedhampton, and there he will be for the next fortnight. the term of his house will be up in the middle of next month when we shall return to hampstead. on sunday, i dined with your mother and hen and charles in henrietta street. mrs. and miss millar were in the country. charles had been but a few days returned from paris. i daresay you will have letters expressing the motives of his journey. mrs. wylie and miss waldegrave seem as quiet as two mice there alone. i did not show your last. i thought it better not, for better times will certainly come, and why should they be unhappy in the meantime? on monday morning i went to walthamstow. fanny looked better than i had seen her for some time. she complains of not hearing from you, appealing to me as if it were half my fault. i had been so long in retirement that london appeared a very odd place. i could not make out i had so many acquaintances, and it was a whole day before i could feel among men. i had another strange sensation. there was not one house i felt any pleasure to call at. reynolds was in the country, and, saving himself, i am prejudiced against all that family. dilke and his wife and child were in the country. taylor was at nottingham. i was out, and everybody was out. i walked about the streets as in a strange land. rice was the only one at home. i passed some time with him. i know him better since we have lived a month together in the isle of wight. he is the most sensible and even wise man i know. he has a few john bull prejudices, but they improve him. his illness is at times alarming. we are great friends, and there is no one i like to pass a day with better. martin called in to bid him good-bye before he set out for dublin. if you would like to hear one of his jokes, here is one which, at the time, we laughed at a good deal: a miss ----, with three young ladies, one of them martin's sister, had come a-gadding in the isle of wight and took for a few days a cottage opposite ours. we dined with them one day, and as i was saying they had fish. miss ---- said she thought _they tasted of the boat_. "no" says martin, very seriously, "they haven't been kept long enough." i saw haslam. he is very much occupied with love and business, being one of mr. saunders' executors and lover to a young woman. he showed me her picture by severn. i think she is, though not very cunning, too cunning for him. nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. a man in love i do think cuts the sorriest figure in the world; queer, when i know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, i could burst out laughing in his face. his pathetic visage becomes irresistible. not that i take haslam as a pattern for lovers; he is a very worthy man and a good friend. his love is very amusing. somewhere in the spectator is related an account of a man inviting a party of stutterers and squinters to his table. it would please me more to scrape together a party of lovers--not to dinner, but to tea. there would be no fighting as among knights of old. pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes, nibble their toast and cool their tea with sighs; or else forget the purpose of the night, forget their tea, forget their appetite. see, with cross'd arms they sit--ah! hapless crew, the fire is going out and no one rings for coals, and therefore no coals betty brings. a fly is in the milk-pot. must he die circled by a humane society? no, no; there, mr. werter takes his spoon, inserts it, dips the handle, and lo! soon the little straggler, sav'd from perils dark, across the tea-board draws a long wet mark. romeo! arise take snuffers by the handle, there's a large cauliflower in each candle. a winding sheet--ah, me! i must away to no. , just beyond the circus gay. alas, my friend, your coat sits very well; where may your taylor live? i may not tell. o pardon me. i'm absent now and then. where _might_ my taylor live? i say again i cannot tell. let me no more be teased; he lives in wapping, might live where he pleased. you see, i cannot get on without writing, as boys do at school, a few nonsense verses. i begin them, and before i have written six the whim has passed--if there is anything deserving so respectable a name in them. i shall put in a bit of information anywhere, just as it strikes me. mr. abbey is to write to me as soon as he can bring matters to bear, and then i am to go to town and tell him the means of forwarding to you through capper and hazlewood. i wonder i did not put this before. i shall go on to-morrow; it is so fine now i must take a bit of a walk. saturday [september ]. with my inconstant disposition it is no wonder that this morning, amid all our bad times and misfortunes, i should feel so alert and well-spirited. at this moment you are perhaps in a very different state of mind. it is because my hopes are ever paramount to my despair. i have been reading over a part of a short poem i have composed lately, called lamia, and i am certain there is that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people some way. give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation--what they want is a sensation of some sort. i wish i could pitch the key of your spirits as high as mine is; but your organ-loft is beyond the reach of my voice. i admire the exact admeasurement of my niece in your mother's letter--o! the little span-long elf. i am not in the least a judge of the proper weight and size of an infant. never trouble yourselves about that. she is sure to be a fine woman. let her have only delicate nails both on hands and feet, and both as small as a may-fly's, who will live you his life on a square inch of oak-leaf; and nails she must have, quite different from the market-women here, who plough into butter and make a quarter pound taste of it. i intend to write a letter to your wife, and there i may say more on this little plump subject--i hope she's plump. still harping on my daughter. this winchester is a place tolerably well suited to me. there is a fine cathedral, a college, a roman catholic chapel, a methodist do., and independent do.; and there is not one loom, or anything like manufacturing beyond bread and butter, in the whole city. there are a number of rich catholics in the place. it is a respectable, ancient, aristocratic place, and moreover it contains a nunnery. our set are by no means so hail fellow well met on literary subjects as we were wont to be. reynolds has turn'd to the law. by the bye, he brought out a little piece at the lyceum call'd one, two, three, four: by advertisement. it met with complete success. the meaning of this odd title is explained when i tell you the principal actor is a mimic, who takes off four of our best performers in the course of the farce. our stage is loaded with mimics. i did not see the piece, being out of town the whole time it was in progress. dilke is entirely swallowed up in his boy. it is really lamentable to what a pitch he carries a sort of parental mania. i had a letter from him at shanklin. he went on, a word or two about the isle of wight, which is a bit of hobby horse of his, but he soon deviated to his boy. "i am sitting," says he, "at the window expecting my boy from ----." i suppose i told you somewhere that he lives in westminster, and his boy goes to school there, where he gets beaten, and every bruise he has, and i daresay deserves, is very bitter to dilke. the place i am speaking of puts me in mind of a circumstance which occurred lately at dilke's. i think it very rich and dramatic and quite illustrative of the little quiet fun that he will enjoy sometimes. first i must tell you that their house is at the corner of great smith street, so that some of the windows look into one street, and the back windows into another round the corner. dilke had some old people to dinner--i know not who, but there were two old ladies among them. brown was there--they had known him from a child. brown is very pleasant with old women, and on that day it seems behaved himself so winningly that they became hand and glove together, and a little complimentary. brown was obliged to depart early. he bid them good-bye and passed into the passage. no sooner was his back turned than the old women began lauding him. when brown had reached the street door, and was just going, dilke threw up the window and called: "brown! brown! they say you look younger than ever you did!" brown went on, and had just turned the corner into the other street when dilke appeared at the back window, crying: "brown! brown! by god, they say you're handsome!" you see what a many words it requires to give any identity to a thing i could have told you in half a minute. i have been reading lately burton's anatomy of melancholy, and i think you will be very much amused with a page i here copy for you. i call it a feu de joie round the batteries of fort st. hyphen-de-phrase on the birthday of the digamma. the whole alphabet was drawn up in a phalanx on the corner of an old dictionary, band playing, "amo, amas," etc. "every lover admires his mistriss, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tan'd, tallow-faced, have a swoln juglers platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-ey'd, blear-ey'd or with staring eys, she looks like a squis'd cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-mouthed, persean hook-nosed, have a sharp jose nose, a red nose, china flat, great nose, _nare simo patuloque_, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle browed, a witches beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer with a bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave eared, with a long cranes neck, which stands awry too, _pendulis mammis, her dugs like two double jugs_, or else no dugs in the other extream, bloody faln fingers, she have filthy long unpaired nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tan'd skin, a rotten carkass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splea-footed, _as slender in the middle as a cow in the waste_, gowty legs, her ankles hang over her shooes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an aufe imperfect, her whole complexion savours, an harsh voyce, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (_sí qua latent meliora puta_), and to thy judgment looks like a mard in a lanthorn, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, lothest, and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosome, _remedium amoris_ to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, rank, rammy, filthy, beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggerly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish, irus' daughter, thersite's sister, grobian's schollar; if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors, or imperfections of body or minde." there's a dose for you. fire!! i would give my favourite leg to have written this as a speech in a play. with what effect could matthews pop-gun it at the pit! this i think will amuse you more than so much poetry. of that i do not like to copy any, as i am afraid it is too mal à propos for you at present; and yet i will send you some, for by the time you receive it, things in england may have taken a different turn. when i left mr. abbey on monday evening, i walked up cheapside, but returned to put some letters in the post, and met him again in bucklesbury. we walked together through the poultry as far as the baker's shop he has some concern in--he spoke of it in such a way to me, i thought he wanted me to make an offer to assist him in it. i do believe if i could be a hatter i might be one. he seems anxious about me. he began blowing up lord byron while i was sitting with him: "however, may be the fellow says true now and then," at which he took up a magazine, and read me some extracts from don juan (lord byron's last flash poem), and particularly one against literary ambition. i do think i must be well spoken of among sets, for hodgkinson is more than polite, and the coffee german endeavoured to be very close to me the other night at covent garden, where i went at half price before i tumbled into bed. every one, however distant an acquaintance, behaves in the most conciliating manner to me. you will see i speak of this as a matter of interest. on the next sheet i will give you a little politics. in every age there has been in england, for two or three centuries, subjects of great popular interest on the carpet, so that however great the uproar, one can scarcely prophecy any material change in the government, for as loud disturbances have agitated the country many times. all civilised countries become gradually more enlightened, and there should be a continual change for the better. look at this country at present, and remember it when it was even thought impious to doubt the justice of a trial by combat. from that time there has been a gradual change. three great changes have been in progress: first for the better, next for the worse, and a third for the better once more. the first was the gradual annihilation of the tyranny of the nobles, when kings found it their interest to conciliate the common people, elevate them, and be just to them. just when baronial power ceased, and before standing armies were so dangerous, taxes were few, kings were lifted by the people over the heads of their nobles, and those people held a rod over kings. the change for the worse in europe was again this: the obligation of kings to the multitude began to be forgotten. custom had made noblemen the humble servants of kings. then kings turned to the nobles as the adorners of their power, the slaves of it, and from the people as creatures continually endeavouring to check them. then in every kingdom there was a long struggle of kings to destroy all popular privileges. the english were the only people in europe who made a grand kick at this. they were slaves to henry viii, but were freemen under william iii at the time the french were abject slaves under louis xiv. the example of england, and the liberal writers of france and england, sowed the seed of opposition to this tyranny, and it was swelling in the ground till it burst out in the french revolution. that has had an unlucky termination. it put a stop to the rapid progress of free sentiments in england, and gave our court hopes of turning back to the despotism of the eighteenth century. they have made a handle of this event in every way to undermine our freedom. they spread a horrid superstition against all innovation and improvement. the present struggle in england of the people is to destroy this superstition. what has roused them to do it is their distresses. perhaps, on this account, the present distresses of this nation are a fortunate thing though so horrid in their experience. you will see i mean that the french revolution put a temporary stop to this third change--the change for the better--now it is in progress again, and i think it is an effectual one. this is no contest between whig and tory, but between right and wrong. there is scarcely a grain of party spirit now in england. right and wrong considered by each man abstractedly, is the fashion. i know very little of these things. i am convinced, however, that apparently small causes make great alterations. there are little signs whereby we may know how matters are going on. this makes the business of carlisle the bookseller of great amount in my mind. he has been selling deistical pamphlets, republished tom paine, and many other works held in superstitious horror. he even has been selling, for some time, immense numbers of a work called the deist, which comes out in weekly numbers. for this conduct he, i think, has had about a dozen indictments issued against him, for which he has found bail to the amount of many thousand pounds. after all, they are afraid to prosecute. they are afraid of his defence; it would be published in all the papers all over the empire. they shudder at this. the trials would light a flame they could not extinguish. do you not think this of great import? you will hear by the papers of the proceedings at manchester, and hunt's triumphal entry into london. it would take me a whole day and a quire of paper to give you anything like detail. i will merely mention that it is calculated that , people were in the streets waiting for him. the whole distance from the angel at islington to the crown and anchor was lined with multitudes. as i passed colnaghi's window i saw a profile portrait of sandt, the destroyer of kotzebue. his very look must interest every one in his favour. i suppose they have represented him in his college dress. he seems to me like a young abelard--a fine mouth, cheek bones (and this is no joke) full of sentiment, a fine, unvulgar nose, and plump temples. on looking over some letters i found the one i wrote, intended for you, from the foot of helvellyn to liverpool; but you had sailed, and therefore it was returned to me. it contained, among other nonsense, an acrostic of my sister's name--and a pretty long name it is. i wrote it in a great hurry which you will see. indeed i would not copy it if i thought it would ever be seen by any but yourselves. give me your patience, sister, while i frame exact in capitals your golden name, or sue the fair apollo, and he will rouse from his heavy slumber and instil great love in me for thee and poesy. imagine not that greatest mastery and kingdom over all the realms of verse nears more to heaven in aught than when we nurse and surety give to love and brotherhood. anthropopagi in othello's mood; ulysses storm'd, and his enchanted belt glowed with the muse: but they are never felt unbosom'd so, and so eternal made, such tender incense in their laurel shade to all the recent sisters of the nine, as this poor offering to you, sister mine. kind sister! aye, this third name says you are; enchanted has it been the lord knows where; and may its taste to you, like good old wine, take you to real happiness, and give sons, daughters, and a home like honied hive. foot of helvellyn, june . i sent you in my first packet some of my scotch letters. i find i have one kept back, which was written in the most interesting part of our tour, and will copy part of it in the hope you will not find it unamusing. i would give now anything for richardson's power of making mountains of molehills. incipit epistola caledoniensa-- "dunancullen." (i did not know the day of the month, for i find i have not added it. brown must have been asleep). "just after my last had gone to the post" (before i go any further, i must premise that i would send the identical letter, instead of taking the trouble to copy it; i do not do so, for it would spoil my notion of the neat manner in which i intend to fold these three genteel sheets. the original is written on coarse paper, and the soft one would ride in the post bag very uneasy. perhaps there might be a quarrel)[ ] * * * * * i ought to make a large "?" here, but i had better take the opportunity of telling you i have got rid of my haunting sore throat, and conduct myself in a manner not to catch another. you speak of lord byron and me. there is this great difference between us: he describes what he sees--i describe what i imagine. mine is the hardest task; now see the immense difference. the edinburgh reviewers are afraid to touch upon my poem. they do not know what to make of it; they do not like to condemn it, and they will not praise it for fear. they are as shy of it as i should be of wearing a quaker's hat. the fact is, they have no real taste. they dare not compromise their judgments on so puzzling a question. if on my next publication they should praise me, and so lug in endymion, i will address them in a manner they will not at all relish. the cowardliness of the edinburgh is more than the abuse of the quarterly. monday [september ]. this day is a grand day for winchester. they elect the mayor. it was indeed high time the place should have some sort of excitement. there was nothing going on--all asleep. not an old maid's sedan returning from a card party; and if any old women have got tipsy at christenings, they have not exposed themselves in the street. the first night, though, of our arrival here there was a slight uproar took place at about ten of the clock. we heard distinctly a noise patting down the street, as of a walking-cane of the good old dowager breed; and a little minute after we heard a less voice observe, "what a noise the ferril made--it must be loose." brown wanted to call the constables, but i observed it was only a little breeze, and would soon pass over. the side streets here are excessively maiden-lady-like; the door-steps always fresh from the flannel. the knockers have a very staid, serious, nay almost awful quietness about them. i never saw so quiet a collection of lions' and rams' heads. the doors most part black, with a little brass handle just above the keyhole, so that you may easily shut yourself out of your own house. he! he! there is none of your lady bellaston ringing and rapping here; no thundering jupiter-footmen, no opera-treble tattoos, but a modest lifting up of the knocker by a set of little wee old fingers that peep through the gray mittens, and a dying fall thereof. the great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting. the palatine venice and the abbotine winchester are equally interesting. some time since i began a poem called "the eve of st. mark," quite in the spirit of town quietude. i think i will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish evening. i know not whether i shall ever finish it; i will give it as far as i have gone. ut tibi placeat-- the eve of st. mark. upon a sabbath-day it fell; twice holy was the sabbath-bell, that call'd the folk to evening prayer; the city streets were clean and fair from wholesome drench of april rains; and, when on western window panes, the chilly sunset faintly told of unmatured green vallies cold, of the green thorny bloomless hedge, of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, of primroses by shelter'd rills, and daisies on the aguish hills. twice holy was the sabbath-bell: the silent streets were crowded well with staid and pious companies, warm from their fireside orat'ries; and moving, with demurest air, to even-song, and vesper prayer. each arched porch, and entry low, was fill'd with patient folk and slow, with whispers hush, and shuffling feet, while play'd the organ loud and sweet. the bells had ceas'd, the prayers begun, and bertha had not yet half done a curious volume, patch'd and torn, that all day long, from earliest morn, had taken captive her two eyes, among its golden broideries; perplex'd her with a thousand things,-- the stars of heaven, and angels' wings, martyrs in a fiery blaze, azure saints and silver rays, moses' breastplate, and the seven candlesticks john saw in heaven, the winged lion of st. mark, and the covenantal ark, with its many mysteries, cherubim and golden mice. bertha was a maiden fair, dwelling in the old minster-square; from her fireside she could see, sidelong, its rich antiquity, far as the bishop's garden-wall, where sycamores and elm-trees tall, full-leav'd the forest had outstript, by no sharp north-wind ever nipt, so shelter'd by the mighty pile. bertha arose, and read awhile, with forehead 'gainst the window-pane. again she try'd, and then again, until the dusk eve left her dark upon the legend of st. mark. from plaited lawn-frill, fine and thin, she lifted up her soft warm chin, with aching neck and swimming eyes, and dazed with saintly imageries. all was gloom, and silent all, save now and then the still footfall of one returning homewards late, past the echoing minster-gate. the clamorous daws, that all the day above tree-tops and towers play, pair by pair had gone to rest, each in ancient belfry-nest, where asleep they fall betimes, to music and the drowsy chimes. all was silent, all was gloom, abroad and in the homely room: down she sat, poor cheated soul! and struck a lamp from the dismal coal; lean'd forward, with bright drooping hair and slant book, full against the glare. her shadow, in uneasy guise, hover'd about, a giant size, on ceiling-beam and old oak chair, the parrot's cage, and panel square; and the warm angled winter-screen, on which were many monsters seen, call'd doves of siam, lima mice, and legless birds of paradise, macaw and tender avadavat, and silken-furr'd angora cat. untir'd she read, her shadow still glower'd about, as it would fill the room with wildest forms and shades, as though some ghostly queen of spades had come to mock behind her back, and dance, and ruffle her garments black, untir'd she read the legend page, of holy mark, from youth to age, on land, on sea, in pagan chains, rejoicing for his many pains. sometimes the learned eremite, with golden star, or dagger bright, referr'd to pious poesies written in smallest crow-quill size beneath the text; and thus the rhyme was parcelled out from time to time: "... als writith he of swevenis, man han beforne they wake in bliss, whanne that hir friendes thinke him bound in crimped shroude farre under grounde; and how a litling child mote be a saint er its nativitie, gif that the modre (god her blesse!) kepen in solitarinesse, and kissen devoute the holy croce. of goddes love, and sathan's force,-- he writith; and thinges many mo of swiche thinges i may not show bot i must tellen verilie somdel of saintè cicilie, and chieflie what he auctorethe of saintè markis life and dethe;" at length her constant eyelids come upon the fervent martyrdom; then lastly to his holy shrine, exalt amid the tapers' shine at venice,-- i hope you will like this for all its carelessness. i must take an opportunity here to observe that though i am writing _to_ you, i am all the while writing _at_ your wife. this explanation will account for my speaking sometimes hoity-toity-ishly, whereas if you were alone, i should sport a little more sober sadness. i am like a squinty gentleman, who, saying soft things to one lady ogles another, or what is as bad, in arguing with a person on his left hand, appeals with his eyes to one on the right. his vision is elastic; he bends it to a certain object, but having a patent spring it flies off. writing has this disadvantage of speaking--one cannot write a wink, or a nod, or a grin, or a purse of the lips, or a _smile--o law!_ one cannot put one's finger to one's nose, or yerk ye in the ribs, or lay hold of your button in writing; but in all the most lively and titterly parts of my letter you must not fail to imagine me, as the epic poets say, now here, now there; now with one foot pointed at the ceiling, now with another; now with my pen on my ear, now with my elbow in my mouth. o, my friends, you lose the action, and attitude is everything, as fuseli said when he took up his leg like a musket to shoot a swallow just darting behind his shoulder. and yet does not the word "mum" go for one's finger beside the nose? i hope it does. i have to make use of the word "mum" before i tell you that severn has got a little baby--all his own, let us hope. he told brown he had given up painting, and had turned modeller. i hope sincerely 'tis not a party concern--that no mr. ---- or ---- is the real pinxit and severn the poor sculpsit to this work of art. you know he has long studied in the life academy. "haydon--yes," your wife will say, "here is a sum total account of haydon again. i wonder your brother don't put a monthly bulletin in the philadelphia papers about him. i won't hear--no. skip down to the bottom, and there are some more of his verses--skip (lullaby-by) them too."--"no, let's go regularly through."--"i won't hear a word about haydon--bless the child, how rioty she is--there, go on there." now, pray go on here, for i have a few words to say about haydon. before this chancery threat had cut off every legitimate supply of cash from me, i had a little at my disposal. haydon being very much in want, i lent him £ of it. now in this see-saw game of life, i got nearest to the ground, and this chancery business rivetted me there, so that i was sitting in that uneasy position where the seat slants so abominably. i applied to him for payment. he could not. that was no wonder; but goodman delver, where was the wonder then? why marry in this: he did not seem to care much about it, and let me go without my money with almost nonchalance, when he ought to have sold his drawings to supply me. i shall perhaps still be acquainted with him, but for friendship, that is at an end. brown has been my friend in this. he got him to sign a bond, payable at three months. haslam has assisted me with the return of part of the money you lent him. hunt--"there," says your wife, "there's another of those dull folk! not a syllable about my friends? well, hunt--what about hunt? you little thing, see how she bites my finger! my! is not this a tooth?" well when you have done with the tooth, read on. not a syllable about your friends! here are some syllables. as far as i could smoke things on the sunday before last, thus matters stood in henrietta street. henry was a greater blade then ever i remember to have seen him. he had on a very nice coat, a becoming waistcoat, and buff trousers. i think his face has lost a little of the spanish-brown, but no flesh. he carved some beef exactly to suit my appetite, as if i had been measured for it. as i stood looking out of the window with charles, after dinner, quizzing the passengers,--at which i am sorry to say he is too apt,--i observed that this young son of a gun's whiskers had begun to curl and curl, little twists and twists, all down the sides of his face, getting properly thickest on the angles of the visage. he certainly will have a notable pair of whiskers. "how shiny your gown is in front," says charles. "why don't you see? 'tis an apron," says henry; whereat i scrutinised, and behold your mother had a purple stuff gown on, and over it an apron of the same colour, being the same cloth that was used for the lining. and furthermore to account for the shining, it was the first day of wearing. i guessed as much of the gown--but that is entre nous. charles likes england better than france. they've got a fat, smiling, fair cook as ever you saw; she is a little lame, but that improves her; it makes her go more swimmingly. when i asked "is mrs. wylie within?" she gave me such a large five-and-thirty-year-old smile, it made me look round upon the fourth stair--it might have been the fifth; but that's a puzzle. i shall never be able, if i were to set myself a recollecting for a year, to recollect. i think i remember two or three specks in her teeth, but i really can't say exactly. your mother said something about miss keasle--what that was is quite a riddle to me now, whether she had got fatter or thinner, or broader or longer, straiter, or had taken to the zigzags--whether she had taken to or had left off asses' milk. that, by the bye, she ought never to touch. how much better it would be to put her out to nurse with the wise woman of brentford. i can say no more on so spare a subject. miss millar now is a different morsel, if one knew how to divide and subdivide, theme her out into sections and subsections, lay a little on every part of her body as it is divided, in common with all her fellow-creatures, in moor's almanack. but, alas, i have not heard a word about her, no cue to begin upon: there was indeed a buzz about her and her mother's being at old mrs. so and so's, _who was like to die_, as the jews say. but i dare say, keeping up their dialect, _she was not like to die_. i must tell you a good thing reynolds _did_. 'twas the best thing he ever _said_. you know at taking leave of a party at a doorway, sometimes a man dallies and foolishes and gets awkward, and does not know how to make off to advantage. good-bye--well, good-bye--and yet he does not go; good-bye, and so on,--well, good bless you--you know what i mean. now reynolds was in this predicament, and got out of it in a very witty way. he was leaving us at hampstead. he delayed, and we were pressing at him, and even said "be off," at which he put the tails of his coat between his legs and sneak'd off as nigh like a spaniel as could be. he went with flying colours. this is very clever. i must, being upon the subject, tell you another good thing of him. he began, for the service it might be of to him in the law, to learn french; he had lessons at the cheap rate of s. d. per fag, and observed to brown, "gad," says he, "the man sells his lessons so cheap he must have stolen 'em." you have heard of hook, the farce writer. horace smith said to one who asked him if he knew hook, "oh yes, hook and i are very intimate." there's a page of wit for you, to put john bunyan's emblems out of countenance. tuesday [september ]. you see i keep adding a sheet daily till i send the packet off, which i shall not do for a few days, as i am inclined 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. from the time you left me our friends say i have altered completely--am not the same person. perhaps in this letter i am, for in a letter one takes up one's existence from the time we last met. i daresay you have altered also--every man does--our bodies every seven years are completely material'd. seven years ago it was not this hand that clinched itself against hammond. we are like the relict garments of a saint--the same and not the same, for the careful monks patch it and patch it till there's not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for st. anthony's shirt. this is the reason why men who have been bosom friends, on being separated for any number of years meet coldly, neither of them knowing why. the fact is they are both altered. men who live together have a silent moulding and influencing power over each other. they interassimilate. 'tis an uneasy thought, that in seven years the same hands cannot greet each other again. all this may be obviated by a wilful and dramatic exercise of our minds towards each other. some think i have lost that poetic ardour and fire 'tis said i once had--the fact is, perhaps i have; but, instead of that, i hope i shall substitute a more thoughtful and quiet power. i am more frequently now contented to read and think, but now and then haunted with ambitious thoughts. quieter in my pulse, improved in my digestion, exerting myself against vexing speculations, scarcely content to write the best verses for the fever they leave behind. i want to compose without this fever. i hope i one day shall. you would scarcely imagine i could live alone so comfortably. "kepen in solitarinesse." i told anne, the servant here, the other day, to say i was not at home if any one should call. i am not certain how i should endure loneliness and bad weather together. now the time is beautiful. i take a walk every day for an hour before dinner, and this is generally my walk: i go out the back gate, across one street into the cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there i pass under the trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the cathedral, turn to the left under a stone doorway,--then i am on the other side of the building,--which leaving behind me, i pass on through two college-like squares, seemingly built for the dwelling-place of deans and prebendaries, garnished with grass and shaded with trees; then i pass through one of the old city gates, and then you are in one college street, through which i pass, and at the end thereof crossing some meadows, and at last a country alley of gardens, i arrive, that is my worship arrives, at the foundation of st. cross, which is a very interesting old place, both for its gothic tower and alms square and for the appropriation of its rich rents to a relation of the bishop of winchester. then i pass across st. cross meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river--now this is only one mile of my walk. i will spare you the other two till after supper, when they would do you more good. you must avoid going the first mile best after dinner-- [wednesday, september .] i could almost advise you to put by this nonsense until you are lifted out of your difficulties; but when you come to this part, feel with confidence what i now feel, that though there can be no stop put to troubles we are inheritors of, there can be, and must be, an end to immediate difficulties. rest in the confidence 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. let the next year be managed by you as well as possible--the next month, i mean, for i trust you will soon receive abbey's remittance. what he can send you will not be a sufficient capital to ensure you any command in america. what he has of mine i have nearly anticipated by debts, so i would advise you not to sink it, but to live upon it, in hopes of my being able to increase it. to this end i will devote whatever i may gain for a few years to come, at which period i must begin to think of a security of my own comforts, when quiet will become more pleasant to me than the world. still, i would have you doubt my success. 'tis at present the cast of a die with me. you say, "these things will be a great torment to me." i shall not suffer them to be so. i shall only exert myself the more, while the seriousness of their nature will prevent me from nursing up imaginary griefs. i have not had the blue devils once since i received your last. i am advised not to publish till it is seen whether the tragedy will or not succeed. should it, a few months may see me in the way of acquiring property. should it not, it will be a drawback, and i shall have to perform a longer literary pilgrimage. you will perceive that it is quite out of my interest to come to america. what could i do there? how could i employ myself out of reach of libraries? you do not mention the name of the gentleman who assists you. 'tis an extraordinary thing. how could you do without that assistance? i will not trust myself with brooding over this. the following is an extract from a letter of reynolds to me:-- "i am glad to hear you are getting on so well with your writings. i hope you are not neglecting the revision of your poems for the press, from which i expect more than you do." the first thought that struck me on reading your last was to mortgage a poem to murray, but on more consideration, i made up my mind not to do so; my reputation is very low; he would not have negotiated my bill of intellect, or given me a very small sum. i should have bound myself down for some time. 'tis best to meet present misfortunes; not for a momentary good to sacrifice great benefits which one's own untrammell'd and free industry may bring one in the end. in all this do never think of me as in any way unhappy: i shall not be so. i have a great pleasure in thinking of my responsibility to you, and shall do myself the greatest luxury if i can succeed in any way so as to be of assistance to you. we shall look back upon these times, even before our eyes are at all dim--i am convinced of it. but be careful of those americans. i could almost advise you to come, whenever you have the sum of £ , to england. those americans will, i am afraid, still fleece you. if ever you think of such a thing, you must bear in mind the very different state of society here,--the immense difficulties of the times, the great sum required per annum to maintain yourself in any decency. in fact the whole is with providence. i know not how to advise you but by advising you to advise with yourself. in your next tell me at large your thoughts about america--what chance there is of succeeding there, for it appears to me you have as yet been somehow deceived. i cannot help thinking mr. audubon has deceived you. i shall not like the sight of him. i shall endeavour to avoid seeing him. you see how puzzled i am. i have no meridian to fix you to, being the slave of what is to happen. i think i may bid you finally remain in good hopes, and not tease yourself with my changes and variations of mind. if i say nothing decisive in any one particular part of my letter, you may glean the truth from the whole pretty correctly. you may wonder why i had not put your affairs with abbey in train on receiving your letter before last, to which there will reach you a short answer dated from shanklin. i did write and speak to abbey, but to no purpose. your last, with the enclosed note, has appealed home to him. he will not see the necessity of a thing till he is hit in the mouth. 'twill be effectual. i am sorry to mix up foolish and serious things together, but in writing so much i am obliged to do so, and i hope sincerely the tenor of your mind will maintain itself better. in the course of a few months i shall be as good an italian scholar as i am a french one. i am reading ariosto at present, not managing more than six or eight stanzas at a time. when i have done this language, so as to be able to read it tolerably well, i shall set myself to get complete in latin, and there my learning must stop. i do not think of returning upon greek. i would not go even so far if i were not persuaded of the power the knowledge of any language gives one. the fact is i like to be acquainted with foreign languages. it is, besides, a nice way of filling up intervals, etc. also the reading of dante is well worth the while; and in latin there is a fund of curious literature of the middle ages, the works of many great men--aretino and sannazaro and machiavelli. 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 curiosity, 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 purest--is chatterton's. the language had existed long enough to be entirely uncorrupted of chaucer's gallicisms, and still the old words are used. chatterton's language is entirely northern. i prefer the native music of it to milton's, cut by feet. i have but lately stood on my guard against milton. life to him would be death to me. miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. i wish to devote myself to another verse alone. friday [september ]. i have been obliged to intermit your letter for two days (this being friday morning), from having had to attend to other correspondence. brown, who was at bedhampton, went thence to chichester, and i am still directing my letters bedhampton. there arose a misunderstanding about them. i began to suspect my letters had been stopped from curiosity. however, yesterday brown had four letters from me all in a lump, and the matter is cleared up. brown complained very much in his letter to me of yesterday of the great alteration the disposition of dilke has undergone. he thinks of nothing but political justice and his boy. now, the first political duty a man ought to have a mind to is the happiness of his friends. i wrote brown a comment on the subject, wherein i explained what i thought of dilke's character, which resolved itself into this conclusion, that dilke was a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything. the only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. the genus is not scarce in population; all the stubborn arguers you meet with are of the same brood. they never begin upon a subject they have not pre-resolved on. they want to hammer their nail into you, and if you have the point, still they think you wrong. dilke will never come at a truth as long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. he is a godwin methodist. i must not forget to mention that your mother show'd me the lock of hair--'tis of a very dark colour for so young a creature. then it is two feet in length. i shall not stand a barley corn higher. that's not fair; one ought to go on growing as well as others. at the end of this sheet i shall stop for the present and send it off. you may expect another letter immediately after it. as i never know the day of the month but by chance, i put here that this is the th september. i would wish you here to stop your ears, for i have a word or two to say to your wife. * * * * * my dear sister--in the first place i must quarrel with you for sending me such a shabby piece of paper, though that is in some degree made up for by the beautiful impression of the seal. you should like to know what i was doing the first of may. let me see--i cannot recollect. i have all the examiners ready to send--they will be a great treat to you when they reach you. i shall pack them up when my business with abbey has come to a good conclusion, and the remittance is on the road to you. i have dealt round your best wishes like a pack of cards, but being always given to cheat myself, i have turned up ace. you see i am making game of you. i see you are not all happy in that america. england, however, would not be over happy for you if you were here. perhaps 'twould be better to be teased here than there. i must preach patience to you both. no step hasty or injurious to you must be taken. you say let one large sheet be all to me. you will find more than that in different parts of this packet for you. certainly, i have been caught in rains. a catch in the rain occasioned my last sore throat; but as for red-haired girls, upon my word, i do not recollect ever having seen one. are you quizzing me or miss waldegrave when you talk of promenading? as for pun-making, i wish it was as good a trade as pin-making. there is very little business of that sort going on now. we struck for wages, like the manchester weavers, but to no purpose. so we are all out of employ. i am more lucky than some, you see, by having an opportunity of exporting a few--getting into a little foreign trade, which is a comfortable thing. i wish one could get change for a pun in silver currency. i would give three and a half any night to get into drury pit, but they won't ring at all. no more will notes you will say; but notes are different things, though they make together a pun-note as the term goes. if i were your son, i shouldn't mind you, though you rapt me with the scissors. but, lord! i should be out of favour when the little un be comm'd. you have made an uncle of me, you have, and i don't know what to make of myself. i suppose next there will be a nevey. you say in my last, write directly. i have not received your letter above ten days. the thought of your little girl puts me in mind of a thing i heard a mr. lamb say. a child in arms was passing by towards its mother, in the nurse's arms. lamb took hold of the long clothes, saying: "where, god bless me, where does it leave off?" saturday [september ]. if you would prefer a joke or two to anything else, i have two for you, fresh hatched, just ris, as the bakers' wives say by the rolls. the first i played off on brown; the second i played on myself. brown, when he left me, "keats," says he, "my good fellow" (staggering upon his left heel and fetching an irregular pirouette with his right); "keats," says he (depressing his left eyebrow and elevating his right one), though by the way at the moment i did not know which was the right one; "keats," says he (still in the same posture, but furthermore both his hands in his waistcoat pockets and putting out his stomach), "keats--my--go-o-ood fell-o-o-ooh," says he (interlarding his exclamation with certain ventriloquial parentheses),--no, this is all a lie--he was as sober as a judge, when a judge happens to be sober, and said: "keats, if any letters come for me, do not forward them, but open them and give me the marrow of them in a few words." at the time i wrote my first to him no letter had arrived. i thought i would invent one, and as i had not time to manufacture a long one, i dabbed off a short one, and that was the reason of the joke succeeding beyond my expectations. brown let his house to a mr. benjamin--a jew. now, the water which furnishes the house is in a tank, sided with a composition of lime, and the lime impregnates the water unpleasantly. taking advantage of this circumstance, i pretended that mr. benjamin had written the following short note-- sir--by drinking your damn'd tank water i have got the gravel. what reparation can you make to me and my family? nathan benjamin. by a fortunate hit, i hit upon his right--heathen name--his right pronomen. brown in consequence, it appears, wrote to the surprised mr. benjamin the following-- sir--i cannot offer you any remuneration until your gravel shall have formed itself into a stone--when i will cut you with pleasure. c. brown. this of brown's mr. benjamin has answered, insisting on an explanation of this singular circumstance. b. says: "when i read your letter and his following, i roared; and in came mr. snook, who on reading them seem'd likely to burst the hoops of his fat sides." so the joke has told well. now for the one i played on myself. i must first give you the scene and the dramatis personæ. there are an old major and his youngish wife here in the next apartments to me. his bedroom door opens at an angle with my sitting-room door. yesterday i was reading as demurely as a parish clerk, when i heard a rap at the door. i got up and opened it; no one was to be seen. i listened, and heard some one in the major's room. not content with this, i went upstairs and down, looked in the cupboards and watch'd. at last i set myself to read again, not quite so demurely, when there came a louder rap. i was determined to find out who it was. i looked out; the staircases were all silent. "this must be the major's wife," said i. "at all events i will see the truth." so i rapt me at the major's door and went in, to the utter surprise and confusion of the lady, who was in reality there. after a little explanation, which i can no more describe than fly, i made my retreat from her, convinced of my mistake. she is to all appearance a silly body, and is really surprised about it. she must have been, for i have discovered that a little girl in the house was the rapper. i assure you she has nearly made me sneeze. if the lady tells tits, i shall put a very grave and moral face on the matter with the old gentleman, and make his little boy a present of a humming top. [monday, september .] my dear george--this monday morning, the th, i have received your last, dated th july. you say you have not heard from england for three months. then my letter from shanklin, written, i think, at the end of june, has not reach'd you. you shall not have cause to think i neglect you. i have kept this back a little time in expectation of hearing from mr. abbey. you will say i might have remained in town to be abbey's messenger in these affairs. that i offered him, but he in his answer convinced me that he was anxious to bring the business to an issue. he observed, that by being himself the agent in the whole, people might be more expeditious. you say you have not heard for three months, and yet your letters have the tone of knowing how our affairs are situated, by which i conjecture i acquainted you with them in a letter previous to the shanklin one. that i may not have done. to be certain, i will here state that it is in consequence of mrs. jennings threatening a chancery suit that you have been kept from the receipt of monies, and myself deprived of any help from abbey. i am glad you say you keep up your spirits. i hope you make a true statement on that score. still keep them up, for we are all young. i can only repeat here that you shall hear from me again immediately. notwithstanding this bad intelligence, i have experienced some pleasure in receiving so correctly two letters from you, as it gives me, if i may so say, a distant idea of proximity. this last improves upon my little niece--kiss her for me. do not fret yourself about the delay of money on account of my immediate opportunity being lost, for in a new country whoever has money must have an opportunity of employing it in many ways. the report runs now more in favour of kean stopping in england. if he should, i have confident hopes of our tragedy. if he invokes the hot-blooded character of ludolph,--and he is the only actor that can do it,--he will add to his own fame and improve my fortune. i will give you a half-dozen lines of it before i part as a specimen-- not as a swordsman would i pardon crave, but as a son: the bronz'd centurion, long-toil'd in foreign wars, and whose high deeds are shaded in a forest of tall spears, known only to his troop, hath greater plea of favour with my sire than i can have. believe me, my dear brother and sister, your affectionate and anxious brother john keats. cxvii.--to john hamilton reynolds. winchester, september , . my dear reynolds--i was very glad to hear from woodhouse that you would meet in the country. i hope you will pass some pleasant time together. which i wish to make pleasanter by a brace of letters, very highly to be estimated, as really i have had very bad luck with this sort of game this season. i "kepen in solitarinesse," for brown has gone a-visiting. i am surprised myself at the pleasure i live alone in. i can give you no news of the place here, or any other idea of it but what i have to this effect written to george. yesterday i say to him was a grand day for winchester. they elected a mayor. it was indeed high time the place should receive some sort of excitement. there was nothing going on: all asleep: not an old maid's sedan returning from a card party: and if any old woman got tipsy at christenings they did not expose it in the streets. the first night though of our arrival here, there was a slight uproar took place at about o' the clock. we heard distinctly a noise pattering down the high street as of a walking cane of the good old dowager breed; and a little minute after we heard a less voice observe "what a noise the ferril made--it must be loose." brown wanted to call the constables, but i observed 'twas only a little breeze and would soon pass over.--the side streets here are excessively maiden-lady-like: the door-steps always fresh from the flannel. the knockers have a staid serious, nay almost awful quietness about them. i never saw so quiet a collection of lions' and rams' heads. the doors are most part black, with a little brass handle just above the keyhole, so that in winchester a man may very quietly shut himself out of his own house. how beautiful the season is now--how fine the air. a temperate sharpness about it. really, without joking, chaste weather--dian skies--i never liked stubble-fields so much as now--aye better than the chilly green of the spring. somehow, a stubble-field looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm. this struck me so much in my sunday's walk that i composed upon it.[ ] i hope you are better employed than in gaping after weather. i have been at different times so happy as not to know what weather it was--no i will not copy a parcel of verses. i always somehow associate chatterton with autumn. he is the purest writer in the english language. he has no french idiom or particles, like chaucer--'tis genuine english idiom in english words. i have given up hyperion--there were too many miltonic inversions in it--miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or, rather, artist's humour. i wish to give myself up to other sensations. english ought to be kept up. it may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from hyperion, and put a mark Ã� to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one || to the true voice of feeling. upon my soul 'twas imagination--i cannot make the distinction--every now and then there is a miltonic intonation--but i cannot make the division properly. the fact is, i must take a walk: for i am writing a long letter to george: and have been employed at it all the morning. you will ask, have i heard from george. i am sorry to say not the best news--i hope for better. this is the reason, among others, that if i write to you it must be in such a scrap-like way. i have no meridian to date interests from, or measure circumstances-- to-night i am all in a mist; i scarcely know what's what--but you knowing my unsteady and vagarish disposition, will guess that all this turmoil will be settled by to-morrow morning. it strikes me to-night that i have led a very odd sort of life for the two or three last years--here and there--no anchor--i am glad of it.--if you can get a peep at babbicombe before you leave the country, do.--i think it the finest place i have seen, or is to be seen, in the south. there is a cottage there i took warm water at, that made up for the tea. i have lately shirk'd some friends of ours, and i advise you to do the same, i mean the blue-devils--i am never at home to them. you need not fear them while you remain in devonshire--there will be some of the family waiting for you at the coach office--but go by another coach. i shall beg leave to have a third opinion in the first discussion you have with woodhouse--just half-way, between both. you know i will not give up my argument--in my walk to-day i stoop'd under a railing that lay across my path, and asked myself "why i did not get over." "because," answered i, "no one wanted to force you under." i would give a guinea to be a reasonable man--good sound sense--a says what he thinks and does what he says man--and did not take snuff. they say men near death, however mad they may have been, come to their senses--i hope i shall here in this letter--there is a decent space to be very sensible in--many a good proverb has been in less--nay, i have heard of the statutes at large being changed into the statutes at small and printed for a watch paper. your sisters, by this time, must have got the devonshire "ees"--short ees--you know 'em--they are the prettiest ees in the language. o how i admire the middle-sized delicate devonshire girls of about fifteen. there was one at an inn door holding a quartern of brandy--the very thought of her kept me warm a whole stage--and a miler too--"you'll pardon me for being jocular." ever your affectionate friend john keats. cxviii.--to charles wentworth dilke. winchester, wednesday eve. [september , .] my dear dilke--whatever i take to for the time i cannot leave off in a hurry; letter writing is the go now; i have consumed a quire at least. you must give me credit, now, for a free letter when it is in reality an interested one, on two points, the one requestive, the other verging to the pros and cons. as i expect they will lead me to seeing and conferring with you in a short time, i shall not enter at all upon a letter i have lately received from george, of not the most comfortable intelligence: but proceed to these two points, which if you can theme out into sections and subsections, for my edification, you will oblige me. the first i shall begin upon, the other will follow like a tail to a comet. i have written to brown on the subject, and can but go over the same ground with you in a very short time, it not being more in length than the ordinary paces between the wickets. it concerns a resolution i have taken to endeavour to acquire something by temporary writing in periodical works. you must agree with me how unwise it is to keep feeding upon hopes, which depending so much on the state of temper and imagination, appear gloomy or bright, near or afar off, just as it happens. now an act has three parts--to act, to do, and to perform--i mean i should _do_ something for my immediate welfare. even if i am swept away like a spider from a drawing-room, i am determined to spin--homespun anything for sale. yea, i will traffic. anything but mortgage my brain to blackwood. i am determined not to lie like a dead lump. if reynolds had not taken to the law, would he not be earning something? why cannot i. you may say i want tact--that is easily acquired. you may be up to the slang of a cock pit in three battles. it is fortunate i have not before this been tempted to venture on the common. i should a year or two ago have spoken my mind on every subject with the utmost simplicity. i hope i have learned a little better and am confident i shall be able to cheat as well as any literary jew of the market and shine up an article on anything without much knowledge of the subject, aye like an orange. i would willingly have recourse to other means. i cannot; i am fit for nothing but literature. wait for the issue of this tragedy? no--there cannot be greater uncertainties east, west, north, and south than concerning dramatic composition. how many months must i wait! had i not better begin to look about me now? if better events supersede this necessity what harm will be done? i have no trust whatever on poetry. i don't wonder at it--the marvel is to me how people read so much of it. i think you will see the reasonableness of my plan. to forward it i purpose living in cheap lodging in town, that i may be in the reach of books and information, of which there is here a plentiful lack. if i can find any place tolerably comfortable i will settle myself and fag till i can afford to buy pleasure--which if i never can afford i must go without. talking of pleasure, this moment i was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine--good god how fine. it went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy--all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified strawberry. i shall certainly breed. now i come to my request. should you like me for a neighbour again? come, plump it out, i won't blush. i should also be in the neighbourhood of mrs. wylie, which i should be glad of, though that of course does not influence me. therefore will you look about marsham, or rodney street for a couple of rooms for me. rooms like the gallant's legs in massinger's time, "as good as the times allow, sir." i have written to-day to reynolds, and to woodhouse. do you know him? he is a friend of taylor's at whom brown has taken one of his funny odd dislikes. i'm sure he's wrong, because woodhouse likes my poetry--conclusive. i ask your opinion and yet i must say to you as to him, brown, that if you have anything to say against it i shall be as obstinate and heady as a radical. by the examiner coming in your handwriting you must be in town. they have put me into spirits. notwithstanding my aristocratic temper i cannot help being very much pleased with the present public proceedings. i hope sincerely i shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the question before i die. if you should have left town again (for your holidays cannot be up yet) let me know when this is forwarded to you. a most extraordinary mischance has befallen two letters i wrote brown--one from london whither i was obliged to go on business for george; the other from this place since my return. i can't make it out. i am excessively sorry for it. i shall hear from brown and from you almost together, for i have sent him a letter to-day: you must positively agree with me or by the delicate toe nails of the virgin i will not open your letters. if they are as david says "suspicious looking letters" i won't open them. if st. john had been half as cunning he might have seen the revelations comfortably in his own room, without giving angels the trouble of breaking open seals. remember me to mrs. d. and the west-monasteranian and believe me ever your sincere friend john keats. cxix.--to charles brown. winchester, september , . * * * * * now i am going to enter on the subject of self. it is quite time i should set myself doing something, and live no longer upon hopes. i have never yet exerted myself. i am getting into an idle-minded, vicious way of life, almost content to live upon others. in no period of my life have i acted with any self-will but in throwing up the apothecary profession. that i do not repent of. look at reynolds, if he was not in the law, he would be acquiring, by his abilities, something towards his support. my occupation is entirely literary: i will do so, too. i will write, on the liberal side of the question, for whoever will pay me. i have not known yet what it is to be diligent. i purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper. when i can afford to compose deliberate poems, i will. i shall be in expectation of an answer to this. look on my side of the question. i am convinced i am right. suppose the tragedy should succeed,--there will be no harm done. and here i will take an opportunity of making a remark or two on our friendship, and on all your good offices to me. i have a natural timidity of mind in these matters; liking better to take the feeling between us for granted, than to speak of it. but, good god! what a short while you have known me! i feel it a sort of duty thus to recapitulate, however unpleasant it may be to you. you have been living for others more than any man i know. this is a vexation to me, because it has been depriving you, in the very prime of your life, of pleasures which it was your duty to procure. as i am speaking in general terms, this may appear nonsense; you perhaps will not understand it; but if you can go over, day by day, any month of the last year, you will know what i mean. on the whole however this is a subject that i cannot express myself upon--i speculate upon it frequently; and believe me the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your happiness. this anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to the plan i purpose pursuing. i had got into a habit of mind of looking towards you as a help in all difficulties--this very habit would be the parent of idleness and difficulties. you will see it is a duty i owe myself to break the neck of it. i do nothing for my subsistence--make no exertion--at the end of another year you shall applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct. while i have some immediate cash, i had better settle myself quietly, and fag on as others do. i shall apply to hazlitt, who knows the market as well as any one, for something to bring me in a few pounds as soon as possible. i shall not suffer my pride to hinder me. the whisper may go round; i shall not hear it. if i can get an article in the edinburgh, i will. one must not be delicate--nor let this disturb you longer than a moment. i look forward with a good hope that we shall one day be passing free, untrammelled, unanxious time together. that can never be if i continue a dead lump. i shall be expecting anxiously an answer from you. if it does not arrive in a few days this will have miscarried, and i shall come straight to ---- before i go to town, which you i am sure will agree had better be done while i still have some ready cash. by the middle of october i shall expect you in london. we will then set at the theatres. if you have anything to gainsay, i shall be even as the deaf adder which stoppeth her ears. * * * * * cxx.--to charles brown. winchester, september , . * * * * * do not suffer me to disturb you unpleasantly: i do not mean that you should not suffer me to occupy your thoughts, but to occupy them pleasantly; for i assure you i am as far from being unhappy as possible. imaginary grievances have always been more my torment than real ones--you know this well--real ones will never have any other effect upon me than to stimulate me to get out of or avoid them. this is easily accounted for--our imaginary woes are conjured up by our passions, and are fostered by passionate feeling: our real ones come of themselves, and are opposed by an abstract exertion of mind. real grievances are displacers of passion. the imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him up into an agent. i wish, at one view, you would see my heart towards you. 'tis only from a high tone of feeling that i can put that word upon paper--out of poetry. i ought to have waited for your answer to my last before i wrote this. i felt however compelled to make a rejoinder to yours. i had written to dilke on the subject of my last, i scarcely know whether i shall send my letter now. i think he would approve of my plan; it is so evident. nay, i am convinced, out and out, that by prosing for a while in periodical works i may maintain myself decently. * * * * * cxxi.--to charles wentworth dilke. winchester, friday, october [ ]. my dear dilke--for sundry reasons, which i will explain to you when i come to town, i have to request you will do me a great favour as i must call it knowing how great a bore it is. that your imagination may not have time to take too great an alarm i state immediately that i want you to hire me a couple of rooms (a sitting room and bed room for myself alone) in westminster. quietness and cheapness are the essentials: but as i shall with brown be returned by next friday you cannot in that space have sufficient time to make any choice selection, and need not be very particular as i can when on the spot suit myself at leisure. brown bids me remind you not to send the examiners after the third. tell mrs. d. i am obliged to her for the late ones which i see are directed in her hand. excuse this mere business letter for i assure you i have not a syllable at hand on any subject in the world. your sincere friend john keats. cxxii.--to benjamin robert haydon. winchester, sunday morn [october , ]. my dear haydon--certainly i might: but a few months pass away before we are aware. i have a great aversion to letter writing, which grows more and more upon me; and a greater to summon up circumstances before me of an unpleasant nature. i was not willing to trouble you with them. could i have dated from my palace of milan you would have heard from me. not even now will i mention a word of my affairs--only that "i rab am here" but shall not be here more than a week more, as i purpose to settle in town and work my way with the rest. i hope i shall never be so silly as to injure my health and industry for the future by speaking, writing or fretting about my non-estate. i have no quarrel, i assure you, of so weighty a nature, with the world, on my own account as i have on yours. i have done nothing--except for the amusement of a few people who refine upon their feelings till anything in the un-understandable way will go down with them--people predisposed for sentiment. i have no cause to complain because i am certain anything really fine will in these days be felt. i have no doubt that if i had written othello i should have been cheered by as good a mob as hunt. so would you be now if the operation of painting was as universal as that of writing. it is not: and therefore it did behove men i could mention among whom i must place sir george beaumont to have lifted you up above sordid cares. that this has not been done is a disgrace to the country. i know very little of painting, yet your pictures follow me into the country. when i am tired of reading i often think them over and as often condemn the spirit of modern connoisseurs. upon the whole, indeed, you have no complaint to make, being able to say what so few men can, "i have succeeded." on sitting down to write a few lines to you these are the uppermost in my mind, and, however i may be beating about the arctic while your spirit has passed the line, you may lay to a minute and consider i am earnest as far as i can see. though at this present "i have great dispositions to write" i feel every day more and more content to read. books are becoming more interesting and valuable to me. i may say i could not live without them. if in the course of a fortnight you can procure me a ticket to the british museum i will make a better use of it than i did in the first instance. i shall go on with patience in the confidence that if i ever do anything worth remembering the reviewers will no more be able to stumble-block me than the royal academy could you. they have the same quarrel with you that the scotch nobles had with wallace. the fame they have lost through you is no joke to them. had it not been for you fuseli would have been not as he is major but maximus domo. what reviewers can put a hindrance to must be--a nothing--or mediocre which is worse. i am sorry to say that since i saw you i have been guilty of a practical joke upon brown which has had all the success of an innocent wildfire among people. some day in the next week you shall hear it from me by word of mouth. i have not seen the portentous book which was skummer'd at you just as i left town. it may be light enough to serve you as a cork jacket and save you for a while the trouble of swimming. i heard the man went raking and rummaging about like any richardson. that and the memoirs of menage are the first i shall be at. from sr. g. b.'s, lord ms[ ] and particularly sr. john leicesters good lord deliver us. i shall expect to see your picture plumped out like a ripe peach--you would not be very willing to give me a slice of it. i came to this place in the hopes of meeting with a library but was disappointed. the high street is as quiet as a lamb. the knockers are dieted to three raps per diem. the walks about are interesting from the many old buildings and archways. the view of the high street through the gate of the city in the beautiful september evening light has amused me frequently. the bad singing of the cathedral i do not care to smoke--being by myself i am not very coy in my taste. at st. cross there is an interesting picture of albert dürer's--who living in such war-like times perhaps was forced to paint in his gauntlets--so we must make all allowances. i am, my dear haydon, yours ever john keats. brown has a few words to say to you and will cross this. cxxiii.--to fanny keats. wentworth place[ ] [october , ]. my dear fanny--my conscience is always reproaching me for neglecting you for so long a time. i have been returned from winchester this fortnight, and as yet i have not seen you. i have no excuse to offer--i should have no excuse. i shall expect to see you the next time i call on mr. a. about george's affairs which perplex me a great deal--i should have to-day gone to see if you were in town--but as i am in an industrious humour (which is so necessary to my livelihood for the future) i am loath to break through it though it be merely for one day, for when i am inclined i can do a great deal in a day--i am more fond of pleasure than study (many men have prefer'd the latter) but i have become resolved to know something which you will credit when i tell you i have left off animal food that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature--i took lodgings in westminster for the purpose of being in the reach of books, but am now returned to hampstead being induced to it by the habit i have acquired in this room i am now in and also from the pleasure of being free from paying any petty attentions to a diminutive house-keeping. mr. brown has been my great friend for some time--without him i should have been in, perhaps, personal distress--as i know you love me though i do not deserve it, i am sure you will take pleasure in being a friend to mr. brown even before you know him.--my lodgings for two or three days were close in the neighbourhood of mrs. dilke who never sees me but she enquires after you--i have had letters from george lately which do not contain, as i think i told you in my last, the best news--i have hopes for the best--i trust in a good termination to his affairs which you please god will soon hear of--it is better you should not be teased with the particulars. the whole amount of the ill news is that his mercantile speculations have not had success in consequence of the general depression of trade in the whole province of kentucky and indeed all america.--i have a couple of shells for you you will call pretty. your affectionate brother john ----. cxxiv.--to joseph severn. wentworth place, wednesday [october ? ]. dear severn--either your joke about staying at home is a very old one or i really call'd. i don't remember doing so. i am glad to hear you have finish'd the picture and am more anxious to see it than i have time to spare: for i have been so very lax, unemployed, unmeridian'd, and objectless these two months that i even grudge indulging (and that is no great indulgence considering the lecture is not over till and the lecture room seven miles from wentworth place) myself by going to hazlitt's lecture. if you have hours to the amount of a brace of dozens to throw away you may sleep nine of them here in your little crib and chat the rest. when your picture is up and in a good light i shall make a point of meeting you at the academy if you will let me know when. if you should be at the lecture to-morrow evening i shall see you--and congratulate you heartily--haslam i know "is very beadle to an amorous sigh." your sincere friend john keats. cxxv.--to john taylor. wentworth place, hampstead, november [ ]. my dear taylor--i have come to a determination not to publish anything i have now ready written: but, for all that, to publish a poem before long, and that i hope to make a fine one. as the marvellous is the most enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, i have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy, and to let her manage for herself.[ ] i and myself cannot agree about this at all. wonders are no wonders to me. i am more at home amongst men and women. i would rather read chaucer than ariosto. the little dramatic skill i may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, i think, be sufficient for a poem. i wish to diffuse the colouring of st. agnes's eve throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. two or three such poems, if god should spare me, written in the course of the next six years, would be a famous gradus ad parnassum altissimum--i mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest ambition, when i do feel ambitious. i am sorry to say that is very seldom. the subject we have once or twice talked of appears a promising one--the earl of leicester's history. i am this morning reading holinshed's "elizabeth." you had some books a while ago, you promised to send me, illustrative of my subject. if you can lay hold of them, or any others which may be serviceable to me, i know you will encourage my low-spirited muse by sending them, or rather by letting me know where our errand-cart man shall call with my little box. i will endeavour to set myself selfishly at work on this poem that is to be. your sincere friend john keats. cxxvi.--to fanny keats. wednesday morn--[november , ]. my dear fanny--i received your letter yesterday evening and will obey it to-morrow. i would come to-day--but i have been to town so frequently on george's business it makes me wish to employ to-day at hampstead. so i say thursday without fail. i have no news at all entertaining--and if i had i should not have time to tell them as i wish to send this by the morning post. your affectionate brother john. cxxvii.--to joseph severn. wentworth place, monday morn-- [december ? ]. my dear severn--i am very sorry that on tuesday i have an appointment in the city of an undeferable nature; and brown on the same day has some business at guildhall. i have not been able to figure your manner of executing the cave of despair,[ ] therefore it will be at any rate a novelty and surprise to me--i trust on the right side. i shall call upon you some morning shortly, early enough to catch you before you can get out--when we will proceed to the academy. i think you must be suited with a good painting light in your bay window. i wish you to return the compliment by going with me to see a poem i have hung up for the prize in the lecture room of the surry institution. i have many rivals, the most threatening are an ode to lord castlereagh, and a new series of hymns for the new, new jerusalem chapel. (you had best put me into your cave of despair.) ever yours sincerely john keats. cxxviii.--to james rice. wentworth place [december ]. my dear rice--as i want the coat on my back mended, i would be obliged if you would send me the one brown left at your house by the bearer--during your late contest i had regular reports of you, how that your time was completely taken up and your health improving--i shall call in the course of a few days, and see whether your promotion has made any difference in your behaviour to us. i suppose reynolds has given you an account of brown and elliston. as he has not rejected our tragedy, i shall not venture to call him directly a fool; but as he wishes to put it off till next season, i cannot help thinking him little better than a knave.--that it will not be acted this season is yet uncertain. perhaps we may give it another furbish and try it at covent garden. 'twould do one's heart good to see macready in ludolph. if you do not see me soon it will be from the humour of writing, which i have had for three days continuing. i must say to the muses what the maid says to the man--"take me while the fit is on me."... ever yours sincerely john keats. cxxix.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, monday morn-- [december , .] my dear fanny--when i saw you last, you ask'd me whether you should see me again before christmas. you would have seen me if i had been quite well. i have not, though not unwell enough to have prevented me--not indeed at all--but fearful lest the weather should affect my throat which on exertion or cold continually threatens me.--by the advice of my doctor i have had a warm great coat made and have ordered some thick shoes--so furnish'd i shall be with you if it holds a little fine before christmas day.--i have been very busy since i saw you, especially the last week, and shall be for some time, in preparing some poems to come out in the spring, and also in brightening the interest of our tragedy.--of the tragedy i can give you but news semigood. it is accepted at drury lane with a promise of coming out next season: as that will be too long a delay we have determined to get elliston to bring it out this season or to transfer it to covent garden. this elliston will not like, as we have every motive to believe that kean has perceived how suitable the principal character will be for him. my hopes of success in the literary world are now better than ever. mr. abbey, on my calling on him lately, appeared anxious that i should apply myself to something else--he mentioned tea brokerage. i supposed he might perhaps mean to give me the brokerage of his concern which might be executed with little trouble and a good profit; and therefore said i should have no objection to it, especially as at the same time it occurred to me that i might make over the business to george--i questioned him about it a few days after. his mind takes odd turns. when i became a suitor he became coy. he did not seem so much inclined to serve me. he described what i should have to do in the progress of business. it will not suit me. i have given it up. i have not heard again from george, which rather disappoints me, as i wish to hear before i make any fresh remittance of his property. i received a note from mrs. dilke a few days ago inviting me to dine with her on xmas day which i shall do. mr. brown and i go on in our old dog trot of breakfast, dinner (not tea, for we have left that off), supper, sleep, confab, stirring the fire and reading. whilst i was in the country last summer, mrs. bentley tells me, a woman in mourning call'd on me,--and talk'd something of an aunt of ours--i am so careless a fellow i did not enquire, but will particularly: on tuesday i am going to hear some schoolboys speechify on breaking up day--i'll lay you a pocket piece we shall have "my name is norval." i have not yet look'd for the letter you mention'd as it is mix'd up in a box full of papers--you must tell me, if you can recollect, the subject of it. this moment bentley brought a letter from george for me to deliver to mrs. wylie--i shall see her and it before i see you. the direction was in his best hand written with a good pen and sealed with a tassie's shakspeare such as i gave you--we judge of people's hearts by their countenances; may we not judge of letters in the same way?--if so, the letter does not contain unpleasant news--good or bad spirits have an effect on the handwriting. this direction is at least unnervous and healthy. our sister is also well, or george would have made strange work with ks and ws. the little baby is well or he would have formed precious vowels and consonants--he sent off the letter in a hurry, or the mail bag was rather a warm berth, or he has worn out his seal, for the shakspeare's head is flattened a little. this is close muggy weather as they say at the ale houses. i am ever, my dear sister, yours affectionately john keats. cxxx.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, wednesday. [december , .] my dear fanny--i wrote to you a letter directed walthamstow the day before yesterday wherein i promised to see you before christmas day. i am sorry to say i have been and continue rather unwell, and therefore shall not be able to promise certainly. i have not seen mrs. wylie's letter. excuse my dear fanny this very shabby note. your affectionate brother john. cxxxi.--to georgiana keats. thursday, january , . my dear sister--by the time you receive this your trouble will be over. i wish you knew they were half over. i mean that george is safe in england and in good health.[ ] to write to you by him is almost like following one's own letter in the mail. that it may not be quite so, i will leave common intelligence out of the question, and write wide of him as i can. i fear i must be dull, having had no good-natured flip from fortune's finger since i saw you, and no sideway comfort in the success of my friends. i could almost promise that if i had the means i would accompany george back to america, and pay you a visit of a few months. i should not think much of the time, or my absence from my books; or i have no right to think, for i am very idle. but then i ought to be diligent, and at least keep myself within the reach of materials for diligence. diligence, that i do not mean to say; i should say dreaming over my books, or rather other people's books. george has promised to bring you to england when the five years have elapsed. i regret very much that i shall not be able to see you before that time, and even then i must hope that your affairs will be in so prosperous a way as to induce you to stop longer. yours is a hardish fate, to be so divided among your friends and settled among a people you hate. you will find it improve. you have a heart that will take hold of your children; even george's absence will make things better. his return will banish what must be your greatest sorrow, and at the same time minor ones with it. robinson crusoe, when he saw himself in danger of perishing on the waters, looked back to his island as to the haven of his happiness, and on gaining it once more was more content with his solitude. we smoke george about his little girl. he runs the common-beaten road of every father, as i dare say you do of every mother: there is no child like his child, so original,--original forsooth! however, i take you at your words. i have a lively faith that yours is the very gem of all children. ain't i its uncle? on henry's marriage there was a piece of bride cake sent me. it missed its way. i suppose the carrier or coachman was a conjuror, and wanted it for his own private use. last sunday george and i dined at millar's. there were your mother and charles with fool lacon, esq., who sent the sly, disinterested shawl to miss millar, with his own heathen name engraved in the middle. charles had a silk handkerchief belonging to a miss grover, with whom he pretended to be smitten, and for her sake kept exhibiting and adoring the handkerchief all the evening. fool lacon, esq., treated it with a little venturesome, trembling contumely, whereupon charles set him quietly down on the floor, from where he as quietly got up. this process was repeated at supper time, when your mother said, "if i were you mr. lacon i would not let him do so." fool lacon, esq., did not offer any remark. he will undoubtedly die in his bed. your mother did not look quite so well on sunday. mrs. henry wylie is excessively quiet before people. i hope she is always so. yesterday we dined at taylor's, in fleet street. george left early after dinner to go to deptford; he will make all square there for me. i could not go with him--i did not like the amusement. haslam is a very good fellow indeed; he has been excessively anxious and kind to us. but is this fair? he has an innamorata at deptford, and he has been wanting me for some time past to see her. this is a thing which it is impossible not to shirk. a man is like a magnet--he must have a repelling end. so how am i to see haslam's lady and family, if i even went? for by the time i got to greenwich i should have repell'd them to blackheath, and by the time i got to deptford they would be on shooter's hill; when i came to shooter hill they would alight at chatham, and so on till i drove them into the sea, which i think might be indictable. the evening before yesterday we had a pianoforte hop at dilke's. there was very little amusement in the room, but a scotchman to hate. some people, you must have observed, have a most unpleasant effect upon you when you see them speaking in profile. this scotchman is the most accomplished fellow in this way i ever met with. the effect was complete. it went down like a dose of bitters, and i hope will improve my digestion. at taylor's too, there was a scotchman,--not quite so bad, for he was as clean as he could get himself. not having succeeded in drury lane with our tragedy, we have been making some alterations, and are about to try covent garden. brown has just done patching up the copy--as it is altered. the reliance i had on it was in kean's acting. i am not afraid it will be damn'd in the garden. you said in one of your letters that there was nothing but haydon and co. in mine. there can be nothing of him in this, for i never see him or co. george has introduced to us an american of the name of hart. i like him in a moderate way. he was at mrs. dilke's party--and sitting by me; we began talking about english and american ladies. the miss ---- and some of their friends made not a very enticing row opposite us. i bade him mark them and form his judgment of them. i told him i hated englishmen because they were the only men i knew. he does not understand this. who would be braggadochio to johnny bull? johnny's house is his castle--and a precious dull castle it is; what a many bull castles there are in so-and-so crescent! i never wish myself an unversed writer and newsmonger but when i write to you. i should like for a day or two to have somebody's knowledge--mr. lacon's for instance--of all the different folks of a wide acquaintance, to tell you about. only let me have his knowledge of family minutiæ and i would set them in a proper light; but, bless me, i never go anywhere. my pen is no more garrulous than my tongue. any third person would think i was addressing myself to a lover of scandal. but we know we do not love scandal, but fun; and if scandal happens to be fun, that is no fault of ours. there were very good pickings for me in george's letters about the prairie settlement, if i had any taste to turn them to account in england. i knew a friend of miss andrews, yet i never mentioned her to him; for after i had read the letter i really did not recollect her story. now i have been sitting here half an hour with my invention at work, to say something about your mother or charles or henry, but it is in vain. i know not what to say. three nights since, george went with your mother to the play. i hope she will soon see mine acted. i do not remember ever to have thanked you for your tassels to my shakspeare--there he hangs so ably supported opposite me. i thank you now. it is a continual memento of you. if you should have a boy, do not christen him john, and persuade george not to let his partiality for me come across. 'tis a bad name, and goes against a man. if my name had been edmund i should have been more fortunate. i was surprised to hear of the state of society at louisville; it seems to me you are just as ridiculous there as we are here--threepenny parties, halfpenny dances. the best thing i have heard of is your shooting; for it seems you follow the gun. give my compliments to mrs. audubon, and tell her i cannot think her either good-looking or honest. tell mr. audubon he's a fool, and briggs that 'tis well i was not mr. a. saturday, january . it is strange that george having to stop so short a time in england, i should not have seen him for nearly two days. he has been to haslam's and does not encourage me to follow his example. he had given promise to dine with the same party to-morrow, but has sent an excuse which i am glad of, as we shall have a pleasant party with us to-morrow. we expect charles here to-day. this is a beautiful day. i hope you will not quarrel with it if i call it an american one. the sun comes upon the snow and makes a prettier candy than we have on twelfth-night cakes. george is busy this morning in making copies of my verses. he is making one now of an "ode to the nightingale," which is like reading an account of the black hole at calcutta on an iceberg. you will say this is a matter of course. i am glad it is--i mean that i should like your brothers more the more i know them. i should spend much more time with them if our lives were more run in parallel; but we can talk but on one subject--that is you. the more i know of men the more i know how to value entire liberality in any of them. thank god, there are a great many who will sacrifice their worldly interest for a friend. i wish there were more who would sacrifice their passions. the worst of men are those whose self-interests are their passion; the next, those whose passions are their self-interest. upon the whole i dislike mankind. whatever people on the other side of the question may advance, they cannot deny that they are always surprised at hearing of a good action, and never of a bad one. i am glad you have something to like in america--doves. gertrude of wyoming and birkbeck's book should be bound up together like a brace of decoy ducks--one is almost as poetical as the other. precious miserable people at the prairie. i have been sitting in the sun whilst i wrote this till it's become quite oppressive--this is very odd for january. the vulcan fire is the true natural heat for winter. the sun has nothing to do in winter but to give a little glooming light much like a shade. our irish servant has piqued me this morning by saying that her father in ireland was very much like my shakspeare, only he had more colour than the engraving. you will find on george's return that i have not been neglecting your affairs. the delay was unfortunate, not faulty. perhaps by this time you have received my three last letters, not one of which had reached before george sailed. i would give twopence to have been over the world as much as he has. i wish i had money enough to do nothing but travel about for years. were you now in england i dare say you would be able (setting aside the pleasure you would have in seeing your mother) to suck out more amusement for society than i am able to do. to me it is all as dull here as louisville could be. i am tired of the theatres. almost all the parties i may chance to fall into i know by heart. i know the different styles of talk in different places,--what subjects will be started, how it will proceed like an acted play, from the first to the last act. if i go to hunt's i run my head into many tunes heard before, old puns, and old music; to haydon's worn-out discourses of poetry and painting. the miss ---- i am afraid to speak to, for fear of some sickly reiteration of phrase or sentiment. when they were at the dance the other night i tried manfully to sit near and talk to them, but to no purpose; and if i had it would have been to no purpose still. my question or observation must have been an old one, and the rejoinder very antique indeed. at dilke's i fall foul of politics. 'tis best to remain aloof from people and like their good parts without being eternally troubled with the dull process of their everyday lives. when once a person has smoked the vapidness of the routine of society he must either have self-interest or the love of some sort of distinction to keep him in good humour with it. all i can say is that, standing at charing cross and looking east, west, north, and south, i can see nothing but dulness. i hope while i am young to live retired in the country. when i grow in years and have a right to be idle, i shall enjoy cities more. if the american ladies are worse than the english they must be very bad. you say you should like your emily brought up here. you had better bring her up yourself. you know a good number of english ladies; what encomium could you give of half a dozen of them? the greater part seem to me downright american. i have known more than one mrs. audubon. her affectation of fashion and politeness cannot transcend ours. look at our cheapside tradesmen's sons and daughters--only fit to be taken off by a plague. i hope now soon to come to the time when i shall never be forced to walk through the city and hate as i walk. monday, january . george had a quick rejoinder to his letter of excuse to haslam, so we had not his company yesterday, which i was sorry for as there was our old set. i know three witty people all distinct in their excellence--rice, reynolds, and richards. rice is the wisest, reynolds the playfullest, richards the out-o'-the-wayest. the first makes you laugh and think, the second makes you laugh and not think, the third puzzles your head. i admire the first, i enjoy the second, i stare at the third. the first is claret, the second ginger-beer, the third crême de byrapymdrag. the first is inspired by minerva, the second by mercury, the third by harlequin epigram, esq. the first is neat in his dress, the second slovenly, the third uncomfortable. the first speaks adagio, the second allegretto, the third both together. the first is swiftean, the second tom-crib-ean, the third shandean. and yet these three eans are not three eans but one ean. charles came on saturday but went early; he seems to have schemes and plans and wants to get off. he is quite right; i am glad to see him employed at business. you remember i wrote you a story about a woman named alice being made young again, or some such stuff. in your next letter tell me whether i gave it as my own, or whether i gave it as a matter brown was employed upon at the time. he read it over to george the other day, and george said he had heard it all before. so brown suspects i have been giving you his story as my own. i should like to set him right in it by your evidence. george has not returned from town; when he does i shall tax his memory. we had a young, long, raw, lean scotchman with us yesterday, called thornton. rice, for fun or for mistake, would persist in calling him stevenson. i know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence--a, b, and c. a is the foolishest, b the sulkiest, c is a negative. a makes you yawn, b makes you hate, as for c you never see him at all though he were six feet high--i bear the first, i forbear the second, i am not certain that the third is. the first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wip'd up. a is inspired by jack-o'-the-clock, b has been drilled by a russian serjeant, c, they say, is not his mother's true child, but she bought him of the man who cries, young lambs to sell. twang-dillo-dee--this you must know is the amen to nonsense. i know a good many places where amen should be scratched out, rubbed over with ponce made of momus's little finger bones, and in its place twang-dillo-dee written. this is the word i shall be tempted to write at the end of most modern poems. every american book ought to have it. it would be a good distinction in society. my lords wellington and castlereagh, and canning, and many more, would do well to wear twang-dillo-dee on their backs instead of ribbons at their button-holes; how many people would go sideways along walls and quickset hedges to keep their "twang-dillo-dee" out of sight, or wear large pig-tails to hide it. however there would be so many that the twang-dillo-dees would keep one another in countenance--which brown cannot do for me--i have fallen away lately. thieves and murderers would gain rank in the world, for would any of them have the poorness of spirit to condescend to be a twang-dillo-dee? "i have robbed many a dwelling house; i have killed many a fowl, many a goose, and many a man (would such a gentleman say) but, thank heaven, i was never yet a twang-dillo-dee." some philosophers in the moon, who spy at our globe as we do at theirs, say that twang-dillo-dee is written in large letters on our globe of earth; they say the beginning of the "t" is just on the spot where london stands, london being built within the flourish; "wan" reaches downward and slants as far as timbuctoo in africa; the tail of the "g" goes slap across the atlantic into the rio della plata; the remainder of the letters wrap around new holland, and the last "e" terminates in land we have not yet discovered. however, i must be silent; these are dangerous times to libel a man in--much more a world. friday [for th january ]. i wish you would call me names: i deserve them so much. i have only written two sheets for you, to carry by george, and those i forgot to bring to town and have therefore to forward them to liverpool. george went this morning at o'clock by the liverpool coach. his being on his journey to you prevents my regretting his short stay. i have no news of any sort to tell you. henry is wife bound in camden town; there is no getting him out. i am sorry he has not a prettier wife: indeed 'tis a shame: she is not half a wife. i think i could find some of her relations in buffon, or capt{n} cook's voyages or the hie_rogue_glyphics in moor's almanack, or upon a chinese clock door, the shepherdesses on her own mantelpiece, or in a _cruel_ sampler in which she may find herself worsted, or in a dutch toyshop window, or one of the daughters in the ark, or any picture shop window. as i intend to retire into the country where there will be no sort of news, i shall not be able to write you very long letters. besides i am afraid the postage comes to too much; which till now i have not been aware of. people in military bands are generally seriously occupied. none may or can laugh at their work but the kettle drum, long drum, do. triangle and cymbals. thinking you might want a rat-catcher i put your mother's old quaker-colour'd cat into the top of your bonnet. she's wi' kitten, so you may expect to find a whole family. i hope the family will not grow too large for its lodging. i shall send you a close written sheet on the first of next month, but for fear of missing the liverpool post i must finish here. god bless you and your little girl. your affectionate brother john keats. cxxxii.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, sunday morning. [february , .] my dear sister--i should not have sent those letters without some notice if mr. brown had not persuaded me against it on account of an illness with which i was attack'd on thursday.[ ] after that i was resolved not to write till i should be on the mending hand; thank god, i am now so. from imprudently leaving off my great coat in the thaw i caught cold which flew to my lungs. every remedy that has been applied has taken the desired effect, and i have nothing now to do but stay within doors for some time. if i should be confined long i shall write to mr. abbey to ask permission for you to visit me. george has been running great chance of a similar attack, but i hope the sea air will be his physician in case of illness--the air out at sea is always more temperate than on land--george mentioned, in his letters to us, something of mr. abbey's regret concerning the silence kept up in his house. it is entirely the fault of his manner. you must be careful always to wear warm clothing not only in frost but in a thaw.--i have no news to tell you. the half-built houses opposite us stand just as they were and seem dying of old age before they are brought up. the grass looks very dingy, the celery is all gone, and there is nothing to enliven one but a few cabbage stalks that seem fix'd on the superannuated list. mrs. dilke has been ill but is better. several of my friends have been to see me. mrs. reynolds was here this morning and the two mr. wylie's. brown has been very alert about me, though a little wheezy himself this weather. everybody is ill. yesterday evening mr. davenport, a gentleman of hampstead, sent me an invitation to supper, instead of his coming to see us, having so bad a cold he could not stir out--so you see 'tis the weather and i am among a thousand. whenever you have an inflammatory fever never mind about eating. the day on which i was getting ill i felt this fever to a great height, and therefore almost entirely abstained from food the whole day. i have no doubt experienced a benefit from so doing--the papers i see are full of anecdotes of the late king: how he nodded to a coal-heaver and laugh'd with a quaker and lik'd boiled leg of mutton. old peter pindar is just dead: what will the old king and he say to each other? perhaps the king may confess that peter was in the right, and peter maintain himself to have been wrong. you shall hear from me again on tuesday. your affectionate brother john. cxxxiii.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, tuesday morn. [february , .] my dear fanny--i had a slight return of fever last night, which terminated favourably, and i am now tolerably well, though weak from the small quantity of food to which i am obliged to confine myself: i am sure a mouse would starve upon it. mrs. wylie came yesterday. i have a very pleasant room for a sick person. a sofa bed is made up for me in the front parlour which looks on to the grass plot as you remember mrs. dilke's does. how much more comfortable than a dull room up stairs, where one gets tired of the pattern of the bed curtains. besides i see all that passes--for instance now, this morning--if i had been in my own room i should not have seen the coals brought in. on sunday between the hours of twelve and one i descried a pot boy. i conjectured it might be the one o'clock beer--old women with bobbins and red cloaks and unpresuming bonnets i see creeping about the heath. gipsies after hare skins and silver spoons. then goes by a fellow with a wooden clock under his arm that strikes a hundred and more. then comes the old french emigrant (who has been very well to do in france) with his hands joined behind on his hips, and his face full of political schemes. then passes mr. david lewis, a very good-natured, good-looking old gentleman who has been very kind to tom and george and me. as for those fellows the brickmakers they are always passing to and fro. i mus'n't forget the two old maiden ladies in well walk who have a lap dog between them that they are very anxious about. it is a corpulent little beast whom it is necessary to coax along with an ivory-tipp'd cane. carlo our neighbour mrs. brawne's dog and it meet sometimes. lappy thinks carlo a devil of a fellow and so do his mistresses. well they may--he would sweep 'em all down at a run; all for the joke of it. i shall desire him to peruse the fable of the boys and the frogs: though he prefers the tongues and the bones. you shall hear from me again the day after to-morrow. your affectionate brother john keats. cxxxiv.--to fanny keats. wentworth place [february , ]. my dear fanny--i am much the same as when i last wrote. i hope a little more verging towards improvement. yesterday morning being very fine, i took a walk for a quarter of an hour in the garden and was very much refresh'd by it. you must consider no news, good news--if you do not hear from me the day after to-morrow. your affectionate brother john. cxxxv.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, monday morn. [february , .] my dear fanny--i am improving but very gradually and suspect it will be a long while before i shall be able to walk six miles--the sun appears half inclined to shine; if he obliges us i shall take a turn in the garden this morning. no one from town has visited me since my last. i have had so many presents of jam and jellies that they would reach side by side the length of the sideboard. i hope i shall be well before it is all consumed. i am vexed that mr. abbey will not allow you pocket money sufficient. he has not behaved well--by detaining money from me and george when we most wanted it he has increased our expenses. in consequence of such delay george was obliged to take his voyage to england which will be £ out of his pocket. i enclose you a note--you shall hear from me again the day after to-morrow. your affectionate brother john. cxxxvi.--to james rice. wentworth place, february , . my dear rice--i have not been well enough to make any tolerable rejoinder to your kind letter. i will, as you advise, be very chary of my health and spirits. i am sorry to hear of your relapse and hypochondriac symptoms attending it. let us hope for the best, as you say. i shall follow your example in looking to the future good rather than brooding upon the present ill. i have not been so worn with lengthened illnesses as you have, therefore cannot answer you on your own ground with respect to those haunting and deformed thoughts and feelings you speak of. when i have been, or supposed myself in health, i have had my share of them, especially within the last year. i may say, that for six months before i was taken ill i had not passed a tranquil day. either that gloom overspread me, or i was suffering under some passionate feeling, or if i turned to versify, that acerbated the poison of either sensation. the beauties of nature had lost their power over me. how astonishingly (here i must premise that illness, as far as i can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! like poor falstaff, though i do not "babble," i think of green fields; i muse with the greatest affection on every flower i have known from my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if i had just created them with a superhuman fancy. it is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. i have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but i do not care a straw for them. the simple flowers of our spring are what i want to see again. brown has left the inventive and taken to the imitative art. he is doing his forte, which is copying hogarth's heads. he has just made a purchase of the methodist meeting picture, which gave me a horrid dream a few nights ago. i hope i shall sit under the trees with you again in some such place as the isle of wight. i do not mind a game of cards in a saw-pit or waggon, but if ever you catch me on a stage-coach in the winter full against the wind, bring me down with a brace of bullets, and i promise not to 'peach. remember me to reynolds, and say how much i should like to hear from him; that brown returned immediately after he went on sunday, and that i was vexed at forgetting to ask him to lunch; for as he went towards the gate, i saw he was fatigued and hungry. i am, my dear rice, ever most sincerely yours john keats. i have broken this open to let you know i was surprised at seeing it on the table this morning, thinking it had gone long ago. cxxxvii.--to fanny keats. [february , .] my dear fanny--being confined almost entirely to vegetable food and the weather being at the same time so much against me, i cannot say i have much improved since i wrote last. the doctor tells me there are no dangerous symptoms about me, and quietness of mind and fine weather will restore me. mind my advice to be very careful to wear warm cloathing in a thaw. i will write again on tuesday when i hope to send you good news. your affectionate brother john ----. cxxxviii.--to john hamilton reynolds. [february or , .] my dear reynolds--i have been improving since you saw me: my nights are better which i think is a very encouraging thing. you mention your cold in rather too slighting a manner--if you travel outside have some flannel against the wind--which i hope will not keep on at this rate when you are in the packet boat. should it rain do not stop upon deck though the passengers should vomit themselves inside out. keep under hatches from all sort of wet. i am pretty well provided with books at present, when you return i may give you a commission or two. mr. b. c. has sent me not only his sicilian story but yesterday his dramatic scenes--this is very polite, and i shall do what i can to make him sensible i think so. i confess they teaze me--they are composed of amiability, the seasons, the leaves, the moons, etc., upon which he rings (according to hunt's expression), triple bob majors. however that is nothing--i think he likes poetry for its own sake, not his. i hope i shall soon be well enough to proceed with my faeries and set you about the notes on sundays and stray-days. if i had been well enough i should have liked to cross the water with you. brown wishes you a pleasant voyage--have fish for dinner at the sea ports, and don't forget a bottle of claret. you will not meet with so much to hate at brussels as at paris. remember me to all my friends. if i were well enough i would paraphrase an ode of horace's for you, on your embarking in the seventy years ago style. the packet will bear a comparison with a roman galley at any rate. ever yours affectionately j. keats. cxxxix.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, thursday. [february , .] my dear fanny--i am sorry to hear you have been so unwell: now you are better, keep so. remember to be very careful of your clothing--this climate requires the utmost care. there has been very little alteration in me lately. i am much the same as when i wrote last. when i am well enough to return to my old diet i shall get stronger. if my recovery should be delay'd long i will ask mr. abbey to let you visit me--keep up your spirits as well as you can. you shall hear soon again from me. your affectionate brother john ----. cxl.--to charles wentworth dilke. [hampstead, march , .] my dear dilke--since i saw you i have been gradually, too gradually perhaps, improving; and though under an interdict with respect to animal food, living upon pseudo victuals, brown says i have pick'd up a little flesh lately. if i can keep off inflammation for the next six weeks i trust i shall do very well. you certainly should have been at martin's dinner, for making an index is surely as dull work as engraving. have you heard that the bookseller is going to tie himself to the manger eat or not as he pleases. he says rice shall have his foot on the fender notwithstanding. reynolds is going to sail on the salt seas. brown has been mightily progressing with his hogarth. a damn'd melancholy picture it is, and during the first week of my illness it gave me a psalm-singing nightmare, that made me almost faint away in my sleep. i know i am better, for i can bear the picture. i have experienced a specimen of great politeness from mr. barry cornwall. he has sent me his books. some time ago he had given his first publish'd book to hunt for me; hunt forgot to give it and barry cornwall thinking i had received it must have thought me a very neglectful fellow. notwithstanding he sent me his second book and on my explaining that i had not received his first he sent me that also. i am sorry to see by mrs. d.'s note that she has been so unwell with the spasms. does she continue the medicines that benefited her so much? i am afraid not. remember me to her, and say i shall not expect her at hampstead next week unless the weather changes for the warmer. it is better to run no chance of a supernumerary cold in march. as for you, you must come. you must improve in your penmanship; your writing is like the speaking of a child of three years old, very understandable to its father but to no one else. the worst is it looks well--no, that is not the worst--the worst is, it is worse than bailey's. bailey's looks illegible and may perchance be read; yours looks very legible and may perchance not be read. i would endeavour to give you a fac-simile of your word thistlewood if i were not minded on the instant that lord chesterfield has done some such thing to his son. now i would not bathe in the same river with lord c. though i had the upper hand of the stream. i am grieved that in writing and speaking it is necessary to make use of the same particles as he did. cobbett is expected to come in. o that i had two double plumpers for him. the ministry are not so inimical to him but it would like to put him out of coventry. casting my eye on the other side i see a long word written in a most vile manner, unbecoming a critic. you must recollect i have served no apprenticeship to old plays. if the only copies of the greek and latin authors had been made by you, bailey and haydon they were as good as lost. it has been said that the character of a man may be known by his handwriting--if the character of the age may be known by the average goodness of said, what a slovenly age we live in. look at queen elizabeth's latin exercises and blush. look at milton's hand. i can't say a word for shakspeare's. your sincere friend john keats. cxli.--to fanny keats. [march , .] my dear fanny--according to your desire i write to-day. it must be but a few lines, for i have been attack'd several times with a palpitation at the heart and the doctor says i must not make the slightest exertion. i am much the same to-day as i have been for a week past. they say 'tis nothing but debility and will entirely cease on my recovery of my strength which is the object of my present diet. as the doctor will not suffer me to write i shall ask mr. brown to let you hear news of me for the future if i should not get stronger soon. i hope i shall be well enough to come and see your flowers in bloom. ever your most affectionate brother john ----. cxlii.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, april [ ]. my dear fanny--i am getting better every day and should think myself quite well were i not reminded every now and then by faintness and a tightness in the chest. send your spaniel over to hampstead, for i think i know where to find a master or mistress for him. you may depend upon it if you were even to turn it loose in the common road it would soon find an owner. if i keep improving as i have done i shall be able to come over to you in the course of a few weeks. i should take the advantage of your being in town but i cannot bear the city though i have already ventured as far as the west end for the purpose of seeing mr. haydon's picture, which is just finished and has made its appearance. i have not heard from george yet since he left liverpool. mr. brown wrote to him as from me the other day--mr. b. wrote two letters to mr. abbey concerning me--mr. a. took no notice and of course mr. b. must give up such a correspondence when as the man said all the letters are on one side. i write with greater ease than i had thought, therefore you shall soon hear from me again. your affectionate brother john ----. cxliii.--to fanny keats. [april .] my dear fanny--mr. brown is waiting for me to take a walk. mrs. dilke is on a visit next door and desires her love to you. the dog shall be taken care of and for his name i shall go and look in the parish register where he was born--i still continue on the mending hand. your affectionate brother john ----. cxliv.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, april [ ]. my dear fanny--excuse these shabby scraps of paper i send you--and also from endeavouring to give you any consolation just at present, for though my health is tolerably well i am too nervous to enter into any discussion in which my heart is concerned. wait patiently and take care of your health, being especially careful to keep yourself from low spirits which are great enemies to health. you are young and have only need of a little patience. i am not yet able to bear the fatigue of coming to walthamstow, though i have been to town once or twice. i have thought of taking a change of air. you shall hear from me immediately on my moving anywhere. i will ask mrs. dilke to pay you a visit if the weather holds fine, the first time i see her. the dog is being attended to like a prince. your affectionate brother john. cxlv.--to fanny keats. [hampstead, april , .] my dear fanny--i have been slowly improving since i wrote last. the doctor assures me that there is nothing the matter with me except nervous irritability and a general weakness of the whole system, which has proceeded from my anxiety of mind of late years and the too great excitement of poetry. mr. brown is going to scotland by the smack, and i am advised for change of exercise and air to accompany him and give myself the chance of benefit from a voyage. mr. h. wylie call'd on me yesterday with a letter from george to his mother: george is safe at the other side of the water, perhaps by this time arrived at his home. i wish you were coming to town that i might see you; if you should be coming write to me, as it is quite a trouble to get by the coaches to walthamstow. should you not come to town i must see you before i sail, at walthamstow. they tell me i must study lines and tangents and squares and angles to put a little ballast into my mind. we shall be going in a fortnight and therefore you will see me within that space. i expected sooner, but i have not been able to venture to walk across the country. now the fine weather is come you will not find your time so irksome. you must be sensible how much i regret not being able to alleviate the unpleasantness of your situation, but trust my dear fanny that better times are in wait for you. your affectionate brother john ----. cxlvi.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, thursday [may , ]. my dear fanny--i went for the first time into the city the day before yesterday, for before i was very disinclined to encounter the scuffle, more from nervousness than real illness; which notwithstanding i should not have suffered to conquer me if i had not made up my mind not to go to scotland, but to remove to kentish town till mr. brown returns. kentish town is a mile nearer to you than hampstead--i have been getting gradually better, but am not so well as to trust myself to the casualties of rain and sleeping out which i am liable to in visiting you. mr. brown goes on saturday, and by that time i shall have settled in my new lodging, when i will certainly venture to you. you will forgive me i hope when i confess that i endeavour to think of you as little as possible and to let george dwell upon my mind but slightly. the reason being that i am afraid to ruminate on anything which has the shade of difficulty or melancholy in it, as that sort of cogitation is so pernicious to health, and it is only by health that i can be enabled to alleviate your situation in future. for some time you must do what you can of yourself for relief; and bear your mind up with the consciousness that your situation cannot last for ever, and that for the present you may console yourself against the reproaches of mrs. abbey. whatever obligations you may have had to her you have none now, as she has reproached you. i do not know what property you have, but i will enquire into it: be sure however that beyond the obligation that a lodger may have to a landlord you have none to mrs. abbey. let the surety of this make you laugh at mrs. a.'s foolish tattle. mrs. dilke's brother has got your dog. she is now very well--still liable to illness. i will get her to come and see you if i can make up my mind on the propriety of introducing a stranger into abbey's house. be careful to let no fretting injure your health as i have suffered it--health is the greatest of blessings--with _health_ and _hope_ we should be content to live, and so you will find as you grow older. i am, my dear fanny, your affectionate brother john ----. cxlvii.--to charles wentworth dilke. [hampstead, may ]. my dear dilke--as brown is not to be a fixture at hampstead, i have at last made up my mind to send home all lent books. i should have seen you before this, but my mind has been at work all over the world to find out what to do. i have my choice of three things, or at least two,--south america, or surgeon to an indiaman, which last, i think, will be my fate. i shall resolve in a few days. remember me to mrs. d. and charles, and your father and mother. ever truly yours john keats. cxlviii.--to john taylor. [wesleyan place, kentish town][ ] june [ ]. my dear taylor--in reading over the proof of st. agnes's eve since i left fleet street, i was struck with what appears to me an alteration in the seventh stanza very much for the worse. the passage i mean stands thus-- her maiden eyes incline still on the floor, while many a sweeping train pass by. 'twas originally written-- her maiden eyes divine fix'd on the floor, saw many a sweeping train pass by. my meaning is quite destroyed in the alteration. i do not use _train_ for _concourse of passers by_, but for _skirts_ sweeping along the floor. in the first stanza my copy reads, second line-- bitter _chill_ it was, to avoid the echo _cold_ in the second line. ever yours sincerely john keats. cxlix.--to charles brown. [wesleyan place, kentish town, june .] my dear brown--i have only been to ----'s once since you left, when ---- could not find your letters. now this is bad of me. i should, in this instance, conquer the great aversion to breaking up my regular habits, which grows upon me more and more. true, i have an excuse in the weather, which drives one from shelter to shelter in any little excursion. i have not heard from george. my book is coming out with very low hopes, though not spirits, on my part. this shall be my last trial; not succeeding, i shall try what i can do in the apothecary line. when you hear from or see ---- it is probable you will hear some complaints against me, which this notice is not intended to forestall. the fact is, i did behave badly; but it is to be attributed to my health, spirits, and the disadvantageous ground i stand on in society. i could go and accommodate matters if i were not too weary of the world. i know that they are more happy and comfortable than i am; therefore why should i trouble myself about it? i foresee i shall know very few people in the course of a year or two. men get such different habits that they become as oil and vinegar to one another. thus far i have a consciousness of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase; i might add, enigmatical. i am in the wrong, and the world is in the right, i have no doubt. fact is, i have had so many kindnesses done me by so many people, that i am cheveaux-de-frised with benefits, which i must jump over or break down. i met ---- in town, a few days ago, who invited me to supper to meet wordsworth, southey, lamb, haydon, and some more; i was too careful of my health to risk being out at night. talking of that, i continue to improve slowly, but i think surely. there is a famous exhibition in pall-mall of the old english portraits by vandyck and holbein, sir peter lely, and the great sir godfrey. pleasant countenances predominate; so i will mention two or three unpleasant ones. there is james the first, whose appearance would disgrace a "society for the suppression of women;" so very squalid and subdued to nothing he looks. then, there is old lord burleigh, the high-priest of economy, the political save-all, who has the appearance of a pharisee just rebuffed by a gospel bon-mot. then, there is george the second, very like an unintellectual voltaire, troubled with the gout and a bad temper. then, there is young devereux, the favourite, with every appearance of as slang a boxer as any in the court; his face is cast in the mould of blackguardism with jockey-plaster. i shall soon begin upon "lucy vaughan lloyd."[ ] i do not begin composition yet, being willing, in case of a relapse, to have nothing to reproach myself with. i hope the weather will give you the slip; let it show itself and steal out of your company. when i have sent off this, i shall write another to some place about fifty miles in advance of you. good morning to you. yours ever sincerely john keats. cl.--to fanny keats. friday morn [wesleyan place, kentish town, june , .] my dear fanny--i had intended to delay seeing you till a book which i am now publishing was out,[ ] expecting that to be the end of this week when i would have brought it to walthamstow: on receiving your letter of course i set myself to come to town, but was not able, for just as i was setting out yesterday morning a slight spitting of blood came on which returned rather more copiously at night. i have slept well and they tell me there is nothing material to fear. i will send my book soon with a letter which i have had from george who is with his family quite well. your affectionate brother john ----. cli.--to fanny keats. mortimer terrace,[ ] wednesday [july , ]. my dear fanny--i have had no return of the spitting of blood, and for two or three days have been getting a little stronger. i have no hopes of an entire re-establishment of my health under some months of patience. my physician tells me i must contrive to pass the winter in italy. this is all very unfortunate for us--we have no recourse but patience, which i am now practising better than ever i thought it possible for me. i have this moment received a letter from mr. brown, dated dunvegan castle, island of skye. he is very well in health and spirits. my new publication has been out for some days and i have directed a copy to be bound for you, which you will receive shortly. no one can regret mr. hodgkinson's ill fortune: i must own illness has not made such a saint of me as to prevent my rejoicing at his reverse. keep yourself in as good hopes as possible; in case my illness should continue an unreasonable time many of my friends would i trust for my sake do all in their power to console and amuse you, at the least word from me--you may depend upon it that in case my strength returns i will do all in my power to extricate you from the abbeys. be above all things careful of your health which is the corner stone of all pleasure. your affectionate brother john ----. clii.--to benjamin robert haydon. [mortimer terrace, july .] my dear haydon--i am sorry to be obliged to try your patience a few more days when you will have the book[ ] sent from town. i am glad to hear you are in progress with another picture. go on. i am afraid i shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone. your sincere friend john keats. cliii.--to fanny keats. mortimer terrace [july , ]. my dear fanny--i have been gaining strength for some days: it would be well if i could at the same time say i am gaining hopes of a speedy recovery. my constitution has suffered very much for two or three years past, so as to be scarcely able to make head against illness, which the natural activity and impatience of my mind renders more dangerous. it will at all events be a very tedious affair, and you must expect to hear very little alteration of any sort in me for some time. you ought to have received a copy of my book ten days ago. i shall send another message to the booksellers. one of the mr. wylie's will be here to-day or to-morrow when i will ask him to send you george's letter. writing the smallest note is so annoying to me that i have waited till i shall see him. mr. hunt does everything in his power to make the time pass as agreeably with me as possible. i read the greatest part of the day, and generally take two half-hour walks a-day up and down the terrace which is very much pester'd with cries, ballad singers, and street music. we have been so unfortunate for so long a time, every event has been of so depressing a nature that i must persuade myself to think some change will take place in the aspect of our affairs. i shall be upon the look out for a trump card. your affectionate brother john ----. cliv.--to fanny keats. wentworth place [august , ]. my dear fanny--'tis a long time since i received your last. an accident of an unpleasant nature occurred at mr. hunt's and prevented me from answering you, that is to say made me nervous. that you may not suppose it worse i will mention that some one of mr. hunt's household opened a letter of mine--upon which i immediately left mortimer terrace, with the intention of taking to mrs. bentley's again; fortunately i am not in so lone a situation, but am staying a short time with mrs. brawne who lives in the house which was mrs. dilke's. i am excessively nervous: a person i am not quite used to entering the room half chokes me. 'tis not yet consumption i believe, but it would be were i to remain in this climate all the winter: so i am thinking of either voyaging or travelling to italy. yesterday i received an invitation from mr. shelley, a gentleman residing at pisa, to spend the winter with him: if i go i must be away in a month or even less. i am glad you like the poems, you must hope with me that time and health will produce you some more. this is the first morning i have been able to sit to the paper and have many letters to write if i can manage them. god bless you my dear sister. your affectionate brother john ----. clv.--to percy bysshe shelley. [wentworth place, hampstead, august .] my dear shelley--i am very much gratified that you, in a foreign country, and with a mind almost over-occupied, should write to me in the strain of the letter beside me. if i do not take advantage of your invitation, it will be prevented by a circumstance i have very much at heart to prophesy. there is no doubt that an english winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering, hateful manner. therefore, i must either voyage or journey to italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery. my nerves at present are the worst part of me, yet they feel soothed that, come what extreme may, i shall not be destined to remain in one spot long enough to take a hatred of any four particular bedposts. i am glad you take any pleasure in my poor poem, which i would willingly take the trouble to unwrite, if possible, did i care so much as i have done about reputation. i received a copy of the cenci, as from yourself, from hunt. there is only one part of it i am judge of--the poetry and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the mammon. a modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the god. an artist must serve mammon; he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness, perhaps. you, i am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore. the thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furled for six months together. and is not this extraordinary talk for the writer of endymion, whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards? i am picked up and sorted to a pip. my imagination is a monastery, and i am its monk. i am in expectation of prometheus every day. could i have my own wish effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now putting an end to the second act. i remember you advising me not to publish my first blights, on hampstead heath. i am returning advice upon your hands. most of the poems in the volume i send you have been written above two years, and would never have been published but for hope of gain; so you see i am inclined enough to take your advice now. i must express once more my deep sense of your kindness, adding my sincere thanks and respects for mrs. shelley. in the hope of soon seeing you, i remain most sincerely yours john keats. clvi.--to john taylor. wentworth place [august , ]. my dear taylor--my chest is in such a nervous state, that anything extra, such as speaking to an unaccustomed person, or writing a note, half suffocates me. this journey to italy wakes me at daylight every morning, and haunts me horribly. i shall endeavour to go, though it be with the sensation of marching up against a battery. the first step towards it is to know the expense of a journey and a year's residence, which if you will ascertain for me, and let me know early, you will greatly serve me. i have more to say, but must desist, for every line i write increases the tightness of my chest, and i have many more to do. i am convinced that this sort of thing does not continue for nothing. if you can come, with any of our friends, do. your sincere friend john keats. clvii.--to benjamin robert haydon. mrs. brawne's next door to brown's, wentworth place, hampstead, [august] . my dear haydon--i am much better this morning than i was when i wrote the note: that is my hopes and spirits are better which are generally at a very low ebb from such a protracted illness. i shall be here for a little time and at home all and every day. a journey to italy is recommended me, which i have resolved upon and am beginning to prepare for. hoping to see you shortly i remain your affectionate friend john keats. clviii.--to charles brown. [wentworth place, august .] my dear brown--you may not have heard from ----, or ----, or in any way, that an attack of spitting of blood, and all its weakening consequences, has prevented me from writing for so long a time. i have matter now for a very long letter, but not news: so i must cut everything short. i shall make some confession, which you will be the only person, for many reasons, i shall trust with. a winter in england would, i have not a doubt, kill me; so i have resolved to go to italy, either by sea or land. not that i have any great hopes of that, for, i think, there is a core of disease in me not easy to pull out. i shall be obliged to set off in less than a month. do not, my dear brown, teaze yourself about me. you must fill up your time as well as you can, and as happily. you must think of my faults as lightly as you can. when i have health i will bring up the long arrear of letters i owe you. my book has had good success among the literary people, and i believe has a moderate sale. i have seen very few people we know. ---- has visited me more than any one. i would go to ---- and make some inquiries after you, if i could with any bearable sensation; but a person i am not quite used to causes an oppression on my chest. last week i received a letter from shelley, at pisa, of a very kind nature, asking me to pass the winter with him. hunt has behaved very kindly to me. you shall hear from me again shortly. your affectionate friend john keats. clix.--to fanny keats. wentworth place, wednesday morning. [august , .] my dear fanny--it will give me great pleasure to see you here, if you can contrive it; though i confess i should have written instead of calling upon you before i set out on my journey, from the wish of avoiding unpleasant partings. meantime i will just notice some parts of your letter. the seal-breaking business is over blown. i think no more of it. a few days ago i wrote to mr. brown, asking him to befriend me with his company to rome. his answer is not yet come, and i do not know when it will, not being certain how far he may be from the post office to which my communication is addressed. let us hope he will go with me. george certainly ought to have written to you: his troubles, anxieties and fatigues are not quite a sufficient excuse. in the course of time you will be sure to find that this neglect, is not forgetfulness. i am sorry to hear you have been so ill and in such low spirits. now you are better, keep so. do not suffer your mind to dwell on unpleasant reflections--that sort of thing has been the destruction of my health. nothing is so bad as want of health--it makes one envy scavengers and cinder-sifters. there are enough real distresses and evils in wait for every one to try the most vigorous health. not that i would say yours are not real--but they are such as to tempt you to employ your imagination on them, rather than endeavour to dismiss them entirely. do not diet your mind with grief, it destroys the constitution; but let your chief care be of your health, and with that you will meet your share of pleasure in the world--do not doubt it. if i return well from italy i will turn over a new leaf for you. i have been improving lately, and have very good hopes of "turning a neuk" and cheating the consumption. i am not well enough to write to george myself--mr haslam will do it for me, to whom i shall write to-day, desiring him to mention as gently as possible your complaint. i am, my dear fanny, your affectionate brother john. clx.--to charles brown. [wentworth place, august .] my dear brown--i ought to be off at the end of this week, as the cold winds begin to blow towards evening;--but i will wait till i have your answer to this. i am to be introduced, before i set out, to a dr. clark, a physician settled at rome, who promises to befriend me in every way there. the sale of my book is very slow, though it has been very highly rated. one of the causes, i understand from different quarters, of the unpopularity of this new book, is the offence the ladies take at me. on thinking that matter over, i am certain that i have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman i would care to please; but still there is a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats,--they never see themselves dominant. i will say no more, but, waiting in anxiety for your answer, doff my hat, and make a purse as long as i can. your affectionate friend john keats. clxi.--to charles brown. saturday, september [ ], _maria crowther_, off yarmouth, isle of wight. my dear brown--the time has not yet come for a pleasant letter from me. i have delayed writing to you from time to time, because i felt how impossible it was to enliven you with one heartening hope of my recovery; this morning in bed the matter struck me in a different manner; i thought i would write "while i was in some liking," or i might become too ill to write at all; and then if the desire to have written should become strong it would be a great affliction to me. i have many more letters to write, and i bless my stars that i have begun, for time seems to press,--this may be my best opportunity. we are in a calm, and i am easy enough this morning. if my spirits seem too low you may in some degree impute it to our having been at sea a fortnight without making any way.[ ] i was very disappointed at not meeting you at bedhampton, and am very provoked at the thought of you being at chichester to-day. i should have delighted in setting off for london for the sensation merely,--for what should i do there? i could not leave my lungs or stomach or other worse things behind me. i wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much--there is one i must mention and have done with it. even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. the very thing which i want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. i cannot help it. who can help it? were i in health it would make me ill, and how can i bear it in my state? i daresay you will be able to guess on what subject i am harping--you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. i wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then i wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. when the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, i may say the bitterness of death is passed. i often wish for you that you might flatter me with the best. i think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to miss brawne when i am dead. you think she has many faults--but for my sake think she has not one. if there is anything you can do for her by word or deed i know you will do it. i am in a state at present in which woman merely as woman can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to miss brawne and my sister is amazing. the one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. i seldom think of my brother and sister in america. the thought of leaving miss brawne is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--i eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at wentworth place ring in my ears. is there another life? shall i awake and find all this a dream? there must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering. the receiving this letter is to be one of yours. i will say nothing about our friendship, or rather yours to me, more than that, as you deserve to escape, you will never be so unhappy as i am. i should think of--you in my last moments. i shall endeavour to write to miss brawne if possible to-day. a sudden stop to my life in the middle of one of these letters would be no bad thing, for it keeps one in a sort of fever awhile. though fatigued with a letter longer than any i have written for a long while, it would be better to go on for ever than awake to a sense of contrary winds. we expect to put into portland roads to-night. the captain, the crew, and the passengers, are all ill-tempered and weary. i shall write to dilke. i feel as if i was closing my last letter to you. my dear brown, your affectionate friend john keats. clxii.--to mrs. brawne. october [ ], naples harbour. my dear mrs. brawne--a few words will tell you what sort of a passage we had, and what situation we are in, and few they must be on account of the quarantine, our letters being liable to be opened for the purpose of fumigation at the health office. we have to remain in the vessel ten days and are at present shut in a tier of ships. the sea air has been beneficial to me about to as great an extent as squally weather and bad accommodations and provisions has done harm. so i am about as i was. give my love to fanny and tell her, if i were well there is enough in this port of naples to fill a quire of paper--but it looks like a dream--every man who can row his boat and walk and talk seems a different being from myself. i do not feel in the world. it has been unfortunate for me that one of the passengers is a young lady in a consumption--her imprudence has vexed me very much--the knowledge of her complaints--the flushings in her face, all her bad symptoms have preyed upon me--they would have done so had i been in good health. severn now is a very good fellow but his nerves are too strong to be hurt by other people's illnesses--i remember poor rice wore me in the same way in the isle of wight--i shall feel a load off me when the lady vanishes out of my sight. it is impossible to describe exactly in what state of health i am--at this moment i am suffering from indigestion very much, which makes such stuff of this letter. i would always wish you to think me a little worse than i really am; not being of a sanguine disposition i am likely to succeed. if i do not recover your regret will be softened--if i do your pleasure will be doubled. i dare not fix my mind upon fanny, i have not dared to think of her. the only comfort i have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case--the hair in a locket--and the pocket book in a gold net. show her this. i dare say no more. yet you must not believe i am so ill as this letter may look, for if ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping i am he. severn is writing to haslam, and i have just asked him to request haslam to send you his account of my health. o what an account i could give you of the bay of naples if i could once more feel myself a citizen of this world--i feel a spirit in my brain would lay it forth pleasantly--o what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints! my love again to fanny--tell tootts i wish i could pitch her a basket of grapes--and tell sam the fellows catch here with a line a little fish much like an anchovy, pull them up fast. remember me to mr. and mrs. dilke--mention to brown that i wrote him a letter at portsmouth which i did not send and am in doubt if he ever will see it. my dear mrs. brawne, yours sincerely and affectionate john keats. good bye fanny! god bless you. clxiii.--to charles brown. naples, november [ ]. my dear brown--yesterday we were let out of quarantine, during which my health suffered more from bad air and the stifled cabin than it had done the whole voyage. the fresh air revived me a little, and i hope i am well enough this morning to write to you a short calm letter;--if that can be called one, in which i am afraid to speak of what i would fainest dwell upon. as i have gone thus far into it, i must go on a little;--perhaps it may relieve the load of wretchedness which presses upon me. the persuasion that i shall see her no more will kill me. my dear brown, i should have had her when i was in health, and i should have remained well. i can bear to die--i cannot bear to leave her. oh, god! god! god! every thing i have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. the silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. my imagination is horribly vivid about her--i see her--i hear her. there is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. this was the case when i was in england; i cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that i was a prisoner at hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on hampstead all day. then there was a good hope of seeing her again--now!--o that i could be buried near where she lives! i am afraid to write to her--to receive a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my heart--even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than i can bear. my dear brown, what am i to do? where can i look for consolation or ease? if i had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me. indeed, through the whole of my illness, both at your house and at kentish town, this fever has never ceased wearing me out. when you write to me, which you will do immediately, write to rome (poste restante)--if she is well and happy, put a mark thus +; if---- remember me to all. i will endeavour to bear my miseries patiently. a person in my state of health should not have such miseries to bear. write a short note to my sister, saying you have heard from me. severn is very well. if i were in better health i would urge your coming to rome. i fear there is no one can give me any comfort. is there any news of george? o that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers!--then i might hope,--but despair is forced upon me as a habit. my dear brown, for my sake be her advocate for ever. i cannot say a word about naples; i do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me. i am afraid to write to her--i should like her to know that i do not forget her. oh, brown i have coals of fire in my breast--it surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. was i born for this end? god bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and george, and his wife, and you, and all! your ever affectionate friend john keats. [thursday, november .] i was a day too early for the courier. he sets out now. i have been more calm to-day, though in a half dread of not continuing so. i said nothing of my health; i know nothing of it; you will hear severn's account from haslam. i must leave off. you bring my thoughts too near to fanny. god bless you! clxiv.--to charles brown. rome, november , . my dear brown--'tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. my stomach continues so bad, that i feel it worse on opening any book,--yet i am much better than i was in quarantine. then i am afraid to encounter the pro-ing and con-ing of anything interesting to me in england. i have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that i am leading a posthumous existence. god knows how it would have been--but it appears to me--however, i will not speak of that subject. i must have been at bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from chichester--how unfortunate--and to pass on the river too! there was my star predominant! i cannot answer anything in your letter, which followed me from naples to rome, because i am afraid to look it over again. i am so weak (in mind) that i cannot bear the sight of any handwriting of a friend i love so much as i do you. yet i ride the little horse, and at my worst even in quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. there is one thought enough to kill me; i have been well, healthy, alert, etc., walking with her, and now--the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. there, you rogue, i put you to the torture; but you must bring your philosophy to bear, as i do mine, really, or how should i be able to live? dr. clark is very attentive to me; he says, there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. i am well disappointed in hearing good news from george, for it runs in my head we shall all die young. i have not written to reynolds yet, which he must think very neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, i have delayed it from week to week. 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. severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. remember me to all friends, and tell haslam i should not have left london without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. write to george as soon as you receive this, and tell him how i am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost--she is so like tom. i can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. i always made an awkward bow. god bless you! john keats.[ ] index note.--the first lines of all verses quoted in the letters are given here under the first word. an asterisk is prefixed to the names of those to whom letters are written, the letters themselves, as well as the addresses from which keats wrote, being given under the heading "letters." abbey, miss, abbey, mr., and note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . referred to as "my guardian," abbey, mrs., , , , , , abbeys, the, abbot, abelard, sandt, like a young, academy, the royal, achievement, a man of, needs negative capability, achilles, , , adam's dream (_paradise lost_, bk. viii.), compared to imagination, , _adonais_, xix. adonis, _adonis, venus and_, quoted, _agnes, st., eve of_, , , , , , note; an alteration in it censured, agriculture, influence of, _seq._ "a haunting music sole perhaps and lone," etc., "ah, ken ye what i met the day," etc., aladdin, alcibiades, alexander, the emperor, alfred (exeter paper), the, alfred, king, , alice fell, "all gentle folks who owe a grudge," etc., _all's well that ends well_, quoted, and note alston's "uriel," _altam and his wife_, by ollier, amena (and wells), , america, george k. goes to, americans distrusted, _anatomy of melancholy_, quoted, , andrew, sir [aguecheek], misquoted, and note andrews, miss, _annals of fine arts_, contributed to, , note ann or anne, the maid, , anthony, st., anthony, mark, compared to buonaparte, _anthony and cleopatra_, ; quoted, , apollo, , apuleius, the platonist, archer, , archimage, archimago, archimedes, aretino, ariadne, ariosto, note, , , art, the excellence of, its intensity, arthur's seat, "as hermes once took to his feathers light," athenæum, dilke connected with, xviii. a[ubrey], mrs. m[ary], verses to, by mrs. philips, audubon, , , audubon, mrs., , augustan age, aunt, j. k.'s, . _see_ mrs. jennings autograph originals of j. k.'s letters, xii. xiii. _autumn, ode to_, and note ayr described, b., miss. _see_ brown, miss babel, the tower of, , bacchus, bacon, lord, bagpipe, effect of, *bailey, benjamin, xii., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; his character, , ; his curacy, ; his appreciation of _endymion_, ; his love affairs, _seq._; k.'s visit to him at oxford, and note bailey, mrs., barbara lewthwaite, "bards of passion and of mirth," barley, rigs of, by burns, barnes, barnes, miss, bartolozzi, , _basil, pot of_, , , , , ; few stanzas of, written in folio shakspeare, "bathsheba," by wilkie, beattie, beaumont, sir george, , note beaumont and fletcher, bedhampton, visit to, , , _beggar of cumberland_, bellaston, lady, benjamin, mr., bensley, bentley (j. k.'s landlord), note, , , , bentley, mrs., , , , , , , bentley children, the, , note, bertrand, general, note betty foy, bewick [j.], , , , bible, the, , , birkbeck, , , , , , , , , birkbeck, the misses, blackwood, , , , , , , boccaccio, ; tales from, bonchurch described, , "book, my" (the vol. containing _lamia_, _isabella_, _the eve of st. agnes_, _hyperion_, and the _odes_), , , , boxer (mrs. dilke's dog), box hill ascended, boys, the. _see_ brown's brothers bradshaw, richard, braggadochio, brawne, fanny, and note, , ; described, ; k.'s feelings towards, , , , ; letters to, xii. note; reasons for their being omitted, xvii. *brawne, mrs., , , , , , , , [brawne], sam, briggs, brigs of ayr, britain, little. _see_ reynoldses, the british gallery seen, british museum, brothers. _see_ keats, george and tom *brown, charles armitage, xviii., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , note, , , , , and note, , , , , , , note, , ; anecdote of, , ; as a draughtsman, , ; and jenny jacobs, ; a joke on, , ; his kindness, ; lends k. money, , ; lives with k., note, , note; his odd dislikes, ; a story by, , , ; tour to scotland with k., [ - ]; writes a tragedy with k. _see otho the great_ brown's brothers, note, brown, john, brown, mrs. septimus, b[rown], miss, bucke, mr. (dramatic author), buffon, , bunyan's _pilgrim's progress_, ; his _emblems_, buonaparte, , , ; compared to mark anthony, burdett, sir f., burford bridge visited, - burleigh, lord, burns, , , , ; spoilt by the kirk, ; lines after visiting his country, ; after visiting his tomb, ; his misery, ; his native place described, burns, mrs., burton's _anatomy of melancholy_ quoted, , butler, , , butler, sarah, byron, , , , , , , , , ; his _don juan_, ; fourth canto of _childe harold_ expected, ; _don giovanni_ expected, cæsar, julius, _caleb williams_, caliban, note, , note cameron, mrs., _seq._ canning, canterbury, a visit to, projected, _cap and bells_, note, and note, note capital letters, peculiar use of, xiv. capper, , , carisbrooke visited, _seq._ carlisle, deist bookseller, , carlisle visited, cary's _dante_, "castle, the enchanted," by claude, and note castlereagh, , ; an ode to, _cave of despair_, spenser's, a picture by severn, and note, ceres, chambers of life--the infant or thoughtless chamber, and the chamber of maiden thought, , ; the third chamber, _champion_, the, a number written by k., , , ; a sonnet by k. printed in, chapman's _homer_, and note charlemagne, charles. _see_ wylie, charles charles i., charles ii., charles stuart, a "jacobin" song on, charlotte, princess, "charmian," note, , . _see_ cox, miss charlotte chatterton, _endymion_, dedicated to, ; hazlitt on, ; writes the purest english, , chaucer, , , , ; his gallicisms, , chesterfield, lord, chichester visited, , , "chief of organic numbers!" etc., christ rejected (haydon's picture), , christianity v. _the examiner_, ; shakspeare's, christians, a query concerning, christie, _chronicle_, the, , , ; john scott's defence of k. in, cinderella, , circe (in _endymion_), claret, a rhapsody concerning, , clark, dr., , *clarke, c. c., xvii., , ; his influence on k., xviii. claude's "enchanted castle," and note cleopatra, , clinker, humphrey, cobbett, , , , cockney school, , and note cockney, the young, xvi. coleridge, , ; his limitations, ; his talk, collins, hazlitt on, colnaghi, colvin, s., allowed h. buxton forman to use autographs in his possession, xii. note; his life of k. in _men of letters_, xi., note, note commonplace people, hazlitt on, _comus_, , constable, the bookseller, continent, k.'s thoughts of visiting the, cook, captain, cordelia, _coriolanus_, hazlitt on, corneille, and note c[ornwall] b[arry], mr., , country, the, k.'s opinion of, ; k. thinks of settling in, covent garden tragedy [_retribution, or the chieftain's daughter_], an article on, and note cowes visited, cowper, ; as a letter-writer, xiv. cox, miss charlotte, and note, and note, . _see_ "charmian" crabbe, , cripps, , , , , , , , , ; introductions to haydon, , criticism, k.'s independence of, croft, dr., cromwell, _crusoe, robinson_, , "crystalline brother of the belt of heaven," etc., _cumberland beggar_, the, dance, a highland, described, dante, note, , , , , davenports, the, , , , david, , "dear reynolds! as last night i lay in bed," etc., death, k.'s thoughts of, when alone, _deist, the_, dennet, miss, a columbine, "dentatus," haydon's picture, devereux, devon, duke of, devonshire described, , , , , , , , , , ; like lydia languish, dewint, dewint, mrs., *dilke, charles wentworth, xii. note, , , , , , , , , , , , , note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; a capital friend, ; takes the _champion_, , ; his character, ; his devotion to his son, , , , ; editor follows his dates, xiii.; a "godwin methodist," ; a "godwin perfectibility man," ; ill, , ; neighbour to k., note dilke, charley, , , , , , , , , , dilke, mrs., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; her brother, dilke, william, and note dinah, aunt, diocletian, diomed, dolabella (in _anthony and cleopatra_), don juan, drawing of k., a, and note drewe family, the, drewe, george, drury lane pantomime [_don giovanni_], and note, dryope (in _endymion_), du bois, , dunghill, duchess of, duns, besieged by, , dürer, albert, _edinburgh review_, the, , , , , , , , edmund ironside, elements, the, regarded as comforters, _elizabeth, queen_, holinshed's, ; her latin exercises, elizabethans, compared with moderns, ellenborough, lord, ellipsis, recommended by haydon, elliston, , elmes, james, note, _emblems_, the, of bunyan, _endymion_ ["i stood tiptoe upon a little hill"], note _endymion_, , , , , , . _first book_ begun, ; prospects of, ; in the press, ; readings in, : _second book_ copied, ; proofs of, : _third book_, progressing, ; finished, : _third and fourth books_, copied, : _fourth book_, quoted, ; finished, . alterations suggested by taylor, ; anxiety to get it printed, ; appreciated by bailey, ; dedicated to chatterton, ; described, ; cheque sent to author of it, , ; engravings by haydon for it, ; referred to by k. as a pioneer, ; admired by the miss porters, , ; the preface to it, , , , ; readings in, ; called slipshod, and note; the story of it told to fanny k., enfield, school at, xviii. english, chatterton's is the purest, enobarb (in _anthony and cleopatra_), erasmus, , esau, euclid, , eustace, _evadné_, by sheil, , evans, sir hugh (in _merry wives_), and note eve, , "ever let the fancy roam," etc., _examiner_, the, , , , , , , , , , ; its defence of k., ; k.'s notice of reynolds' _peter bell_ in it, , ; v. christianity, _excursion_, wordsworth's, one of the three good things of the age, , fagging at schools, _fairies, chorus of_, falstaff, , fame, sonnets on, "fame like a wayward girl will still be coy," etc., family letters, xi. fanny. _see_ keats, fanny "far, far around shall those dark-crested trees," etc., fazio, fenbank, mr. p., fielding, , fingal's cave described, fitzgerald, miss, fladgate, frank, flageolet, not admired, , fleet street household (_i.e._ taylor's. _see_ p. ), fletcher, mrs. philips, compared to, fletcher and beaumont, flirting, _florence, a garden of_, by reynolds, and note florimel, , _foliage_, by leigh hunt, note; reviewed in the quarterly, forman, h. buxton, his edition, xii.; letters to fanny k. printed in this volume by his permission, xii. note fortunatus's purse, "four seasons fill the measure of the year," etc., framptons, the, francesca, , franklin, benjamin, french dramatists, and note french language inferior to english, frogley, miss, fry, fuseli, , g. minor (_see_ wylie, georgiana), gaelic talked, gattie, gay, genesis, genius, of k. in prose writing, xi.; men of, have not individuality, george. _see_ keats, george george, little (_see_ wylie, georgiana), , george ii., _gertrude of wyoming_, ghosts, gibbon, gifford, , _seq._, ; his attack on k., _giovanni, don_, by byron, expected, gipsies, _gipsy, the_, of wordsworth, glasgow visited, , glaucus (in _endymion_), gleig, xix., , , , , , ; described, note gleig, miss, gliddon, godwin, , , , ; his _mandeville_, , ; his _caleb williams_ and _st. leon_, gray, ; as a letter writer, xiv.; hazlitt on, "great spirits now on earth are sojourning," etc., greek, k. determines to learn, green, mr., griselda, grover, miss, guido, gyges's ring, h., miss, , _hamlet_, , hammond, handwriting of k., xiv. happiness not expected, "happy happy glowing fire," etc., _harold, childe_, harris, bob, , hart, haslam, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; his father's death, , ; a kind friend, , ; his "lady and family," ; in love, ; "is very beadle to an amorous sigh," ; a message to, hastings, lady, met at, , *haydon, xii. note, and note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; his autobiography, and note; his "christ" contained a portrait of k., ; and is "tinted into immortality," ; his "dentatus," ; on elgin marbles, ; his eyes weak, ; on french dramatists, etc., and note; his "life and love," and note; loved as a brother, ; his pictures one of the three glories of the age, , ; his portrait, ; quarrels with hunt, , , , , ; and with reynolds, , ; discovers a seal of shakspeare, ; "this glorious haydon and all his creation," ; his "solomon," hazlewood, , , hazlitt, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; his prosecution of blackwood, ; his essay on commonplace people, ; the only good damner, ; his lectures, , , , ; his letter to gifford quoted, _seq._, ; on shakspeare, , , ; his review of southey, and note, ; his depth of taste, , ; his _round table_, and note hazlitt, mrs., _heart of midlothian_ (an opera), heart's affections and beauty of imagination the only certain things, hebrew, the study of, advised, "he is to weet a melancholy carle," etc., helen, "hence burgundy, claret, and port," etc., hengist, henrietta street. _see_ wylies, the henry. _see_ wylie, henry herculaneum, a piece of, "here all the summer could i stay," etc., hermes, "hermia and helena," by severn, hesketh, lady, xv. *hessey, xi., , , , , , note, , , hessey, mrs., hesseys, the. _see_ percy street hill, hilton, , hindoos, hobhouse, hodgkinson, , , , hogarth, , , hogg, holbein, holinshed's _queen elizabeth_, holts, one of the, _homer_, , note, , , ; pope's, , ; chapman's, and note hone, , , honeycomb, mr., hook, hooker, bishop, hopkinses, the, hoppner, , horace, houghton, lord, xix., note, note; his life of k., xii. "how fever'd is that man who cannot look," etc., howard, john, hubbard, mother, hugh, parson, and note humour superior to wit, hunger and sleepiness, hunt, henry, his triumphal entry into london, , hunt, john, , , , note, , *hunt, leigh, xviii., note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; attacked, , ; "cockney school articles" thought to be by scott, and note; criticises _endymion_, , ; his _foliage_, note; damned hampstead, ; his influence on k., xviii.; k. his _élève_, ; k. moves near to him, note; k. stays in his house, note, ; his kindness, ; his lock of milton's hair, ; his money difficulties, ; his _nymphs_, ; his sonnet on the nile, ; his paper on preternatural history, ; his _literary pocket-book_, , ; his quarrel with haydon, , , , , ; his self-delusions, hunt, mrs., , , _hyperion_, note, note; begun, , ; not continued, ; continued, ; given up because of its miltonic inversions, iago, idleness, "if by dull rhymes our english must be chained," etc., "i had a dove and the sweet dove died," "i have examin'd and do find," etc., by mrs. philips, imagination, , , , ; the rudder of poetry, ; its beauty and the heart's affections alone certain, ; compared to adam's dream (_paradise lost_, book viii.), , imogen, , _indolence, ode on_, and note; _the castle of_, by thomson, invention, the polar star of poetry, iona [iconkill] visited, , ireby, ; country dancing school at, ireland visited, irish and scotch compared, , _isabella_, or _the pot of basil_, , , note isis, k.'s boating on the, italian, studied, , ; the language full of poetry, italy, xix. "it keeps eternal whisperings around," etc., jacobs, jenny, and brown, jacques, james i., jane, st. _see_ reynolds, jane jean, burns', jeffrey, xii., xix. jemmy, master. _see_ rice, james jennings, mrs., , ; referred to as "my aunt," _jessy of dumblane_, jesus and socrates, _joanna, to_, by wordsworth, note john (_see_ reynolds), , , john, st., jonson, ben, note journal-letters, xii. jove better than mercury, , judea, juliet, , junkets, _i.e._ john keats, kean, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , keasle, keasle, miss, , , keasle, mrs., keats, emily (daughter of george k.), , , , , ; her birth announced, keats family, letters to, xi. *keats, fanny, xii. note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; she is kept from k. by the abbeys, , ; the story of _endymion_ is related to her, keats, frances. _see_ keats, fanny *keats, george, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; his affairs troublesome, , , ; he goes to america, , ; he visits england, and note; he returns to america, ; he is more than a brother to john k., ; he copies john k.'s verses, ; he is devoted to his little girl, ; bad news from him, , , ; j. k.'s sonnet to him, keats, georgiana. _see_ wylie, georgiana keats, john, his genius in prose-writing, xi.; his life by colvin, xi., note; and by lord houghton, xi.; the characteristics of his letters, xiv. xv.; his character, "the young cockney," shakspeare in his blood, xvi., ; his reticence about fanny brawne, xvi.; the influence of haydon, leigh hunt, and charles cowden clarke over him, xviii.; his school at enfield, xviii.; his portrait, ; his thoughts of settling in the country, ; he writes in the _champion_, , , ; he cannot exist without poetry, , ; "why i should be a poet," ; his money troubles, , , ; he reads and writes eight hours a day, but cannot compose when "fevered in a contrary direction," ; his morbidity, , , , ; his excitement during composition, ; his thoughts of visiting the country, ; he writes with energy, ; he regards the elements as comforters, ; he projects a romance, ; he expects to be called hunt's _élève_, ; he does not expect happiness, ; his article on "covent garden," and note; his views of religion, , ; his plan of life, ; he regards the public as an enemy but does not write under its shadow, ; he studies italian, , ; he determines to learn greek, ; his thoughts of death when alone, ; is noticed in the _edinburgh_ and _quarterly_, ; his ill-health, , - ; his independence of criticism, ; he expects to be among the english poet after his death, ; his defence by reynolds, ; his declamations against matrimony, ; his pleasure in solitude, ; he talks of giving up writing, ; a sonnet and cheque to him, , ; his notion of a rondeau, ; his thoughts of the country, ; his notice of reynolds' _peter bell_, , ; he feels himself the protector of fanny k., ; "he is quite the little poet," ; his rhapsody about claret, , ; his scorn of parsons, _seq._, , ; he talks of turning physician, ; his portrait by severn, ; his change of character, ; his distrust of americans, ; his feelings towards fanny brawne during his last illness, , *keats, tom, , , , , note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , note, ; his death, and note; his illness, , , , , , , , , , ; his belief in immortality, ; his likeness to fanny k., ; his low spirits, ; wells' treatment of him, , kelly, mr., kemble, kent, miss, , keswick visited, , kingston, , and note, , , ; his criticisms, kirkman, , , ; his uncle william, kneller, sir g., knox, john, kotzebue, , _la belle dame sans merci_, lacon, fool, _lady of the lake_, lakes, the, described, , lamb, charles, , , , ; his practical jokes, _lamia_, , , , note; finished, ; quoted, and note landseer, , _laon and cythna_, by shelley, and note launce (in _two gentlemen of verona_), _lear, king_, , , , ; a sonnet on, _leech-gatherer_, the, leicester, sir john, lely, sir peter, _leon, st._, by godwin, letters, those to fanny brawne omitted, xvii.; frivolous classification of, , ; characteristics of k.'s, xv.; dated from, burford bridge, - ; carisbrooke, ; carlisle, ; donaghadee, ; featherstone buildings, ; fleet street (wells'), ; hampstead (well walk), - , , - , - , - , - ; hampstead (wentworth place), - , - ; keswick, ; london, - , , ; margate, - ; the _maria crowther_, ; mortimer terrace (leigh hunt's), ; naples, - ; oxford, - ; rome, ; scotland, - , - auchen-cairn, , ; ballantrae, ; cairndow, ; dumfries, ; girvan, ; glasgow, ; inverness, ; inverary, , ; island of mull, - ; kilmelfort, ; kingswells, , ; kirkcudbright, ; kirkoswald, ; letter findlay, ; maybole, ; newton-stewart, , ; oban, , ; stranraer, ; shanklin, - ; southampton, ; teignmouth, - ; wentworth place (mrs. brawne's), - ; wesleyan place, kentish town, - ; winchester, - . to bailey, benjamin, , , , , , , , , , ; brawne, mrs., ; brown, charles, , , , , , , ; clarke, charles cowden, , ; dilke, charles wentworth, , , , , , , ; elmes, james, ; haydon, benjamin robert, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; hessey, james augustus, ; hunt, leigh, ; keats, fanny, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; keats, george and georgiana, , , , ; keats, george and thomas, , , , , , , ; keats, georgiana, ; keats, thomas, , , , , , ; reynolds, jane, , ; reynolds, john hamilton, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; reynolds, mariane and jane, ; reynolds, mrs., ; rice, james, , , , ; severn, joseph, , , ; shelley, percy bysshe, ; taylor, john, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; messrs. taylor and hessey, , , , ; woodhouse, richard, ; wylie, mrs., lewis, , , , , lewis, david, life, a palace with chambers, , ; a pleasant life, ; that projected by j. k., ; of a man worth anything is an allegory, lisle, listen, little, little britain. _see_ reynoldses, the llanos, señor, xix. "lloyd, lacy vaughan," _i.e._ j. k., and note _lord of the isles_, lover, the, a ridiculous person, lucifer, lucius, sir, ludolph (in _otho the great_), , lyceum, lycidas, lydia languish, macbeth, machiavelli, mackenzie, _macmillan's magazine_, xii. note macready, magdalen hall visited, note, ; a beautiful name, mahomet, maiden-thought, the second chamber of life, _maid's tragedy_, by beaumont and fletcher, man is like a hawk, ; is a poor forked creature, - mancur or manker, , _mandeville_, by godwin, , margate visited, - _maria crowther_ (the ship in which k. went to naples), , note mariane. _see_ reynolds, mariane _mark, st., eve of_, ; quoted, , marlowe, note martin, , , , , , , , , martin, miss, , mary queen of scots, , massinger, mathew, caroline, mathew, mrs., _matthew_ (wordsworth's), matthews, the comedian, matrimony, k. declaims against, maw the apostate, _measure for measure_ quoted, medicine, the study of, meg merrilies's country, , mercury, , mermaid lines, , and note _merry wives of windsor_ quoted, and note methodists exposed by horace smith, millar, millar, mary, , , , , , ; her suitors, , millar, mrs., , , , milman, milton, , , , , , , ; anecdote of, , , ; his hierarchies, ; his influence shown in _hyperion_, ; his latinised language, , ; a picture of him, ; his philosophy, ; quoted, , ; k.'s verses on his hair, ; compared to wordsworth, minerva, ; her Ã�gis, monkhouse, , , montague, lady m. w., moore, thomas, , , , ; his _tom cribb's memorial to congress_, moore's almanack, , , morbidity of temperament, morley, john, xi. "mother, your" (in k.'s american letters). _see_ wylie, mrs. "mother of hermes! and still youthful maia!" etc., mountains, effect of, mozart, , muggs, nehemiah, by horace smith, mulgrave, lord, and note murray, naples harbour, _seq._ napoleon, "nature withheld cassandra in the skies," etc., negative capability needed by men of achievement, nelson, neville, henry, , nevis, ben, described, newport visited, , newton, rev. john, xv. nicolini, the singer, niece. _see_ keats, emily _nightingale, ode to_, note, note, nile, sonnets on, nimrod, niobe, northcote, norval, "no! those days are gone away," etc., "not aladdin magian," "not as a swordsman would i pardon crave," etc., novello, , , novello, mrs., _nymphs, the_, by leigh hunt, odes, the, note "of late two dainties were before me placed," etc., "o goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung," etc., "o golden-tongued romance with serene lute!" etc., "old meg she was a gipsy," etc., ollier, , , , , ; published k.'s _poems_, ; his _altam and his wife_, _one, two, three, four_, by reynolds, "opening on neptune with fair blessed beams," etc., ophelia, opie, mrs., ops, _original poems_, by miss taylor, orinda, the matchless. _see_ philips, mrs. orpheus, "o soft embalmer of the still midnight," etc., _othello_, _otho the great_, , , , , , , , , , , (sometimes referred to as the, or our, tragedy) "o those whose face hath felt the winter's wind," etc., "over the hill and over the dale," etc., "o what can ail thee knight-at-arms," etc., oxford described, , ; visited, - _oxford herald_, the, and note paine, tom, paolo, _paradise lost_, , , , , , park, mungo, parsons, _seq._, , patmore, payne, howard, peachey, , , peachey family, peacock, "pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes," etc., peona, pepin, king, the history of, percy street (_i.e._ the hesseys), , , , , , _peter bell_, by wordsworth, and the parody by reynolds, , , petzelians, phaethon, philips, mrs., her verses to mrs. m[ary] a[ubrey], phillips, old, philosopher's stone, philosopher's back-garden, physician, k.'s thoughts of becoming a, _pilgrim's progress_, pindar, peter, , , pistol (in _henry iv._), and note pizarro, pliny, _plutarch's lives_, _pocket-book, the literary_, by leigh hunt, , poems of , note poems, original, by miss taylor, "poet, he is quite the little," said of k., poet, the northern, _i.e._ wordsworth, "poet, why i should be a," poets, advertisement to, in the _chronicle_, poets, the english, k. expects to be among, after death, poets, the vices of, , poetry, axioms of, ; genius of, , ; effect of writing on k., ; k. cannot exist without, , ; k. cannot write when "fevered in a contrary direction," ; invention the polar star of, ; a jack o'lantern, ; other things necessary, ; not written under the shadow of public thought, ; should be retiring, unobtrusive, politics, pope's _homer_, , popularity, porter, jane, porter, the misses, , _pot of basil_, , present, an anonymous, , primrose island, the isle of wight, proserpine, prose writing, genius of k. in, xi. protector of fanny k., protestantism discussed, _psyche, ode to_, note, public, the, an enemy to k., punctuation peculiar, preserved, xiv. pythagoras, _quarterly review_, the, , , , , , _queen mab_, r.'s, the miss. _see_ reynolds, misses rabelais, radcliffe, mrs., , rakehell, raleigh, sir w., raphael, , "read me a lesson, muse, and speak it loud," etc., red riding hood, redhall, , , reformation, effects of, religion, k. on, , _revolt of islam_, note *reynolds, jane, xii., , , , ; as st. jane, ; a translator, *reynolds, john hamilton, xi., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , (sometimes as john); anecdote of, ; two articles by, ; his character, ; defends k., ; writes for the _edinburgh review_, , , ; poetical epistle by k. to, ; his farce, ; his _garden of florence_, and note; his illness, , , , , , ; he takes up law, , ; his quarrel with haydon, , ; his _peter bell_, , , ; his sonnets, note, and note, ; his spenserian, , *reynolds, mariane, xii., , , , ; her attitude towards bailey, reynolds, the misses, , , , , , , , , , (sometimes as sisters of j. h. r.) *reynolds, mrs., , , , , , , , , (mother of j. h. r.) reynoldses, the, , , , , , , , note, , , (sometimes as little britain) "reynolds's cove," a spot so called by k., , _rhyme, essays in_, by miss taylor, *rice, james, xii., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; (once as master jemmy) and the barmaids, ; his character, ; his ill health, , , , , , richards, , , , , richardson, , _rimini, the story of_, by hunt, , ritchie, , robertson's _america_, robin hood, ; sonnets to, by reynolds, note; j. k. answers above, , and note robinson, crabb, and note robinson, miss, rodwell, rogers, , romance, a fine thing, ; projected by k., rome visited, , romeo, rondeau, k.'s notion of, ronsard translated by k., , ross, captain, _round table_, by hazlitt, and note ruth, salmasius, , salmon, mr., sam [brawne], sancho, sandt, sannazaro, sappho, saturn, saunders, sawrey, dr., , sawrey, mrs., , scenery, schoolmaster of k., xviii. scotch, the, , , scotland visited, , - scott, john (editor of the _champion_), note, , note scott, mrs., scott, sir w., , ; author of "cockney" articles, and note; compared to smollett, , sea, a sonnet on the, serjeant, the, of fielding or smollett, *severn, joseph, xix., , , , , , ; orders for drawing from emperor of russia, ; his illness, ; his "hermia and helena," ; draws a head of k., ; his "cave of despair," and note, ; is with k. during his last illness and death, , , note shakspeare, xvi., xviii., note, note, note, , , , , , , , , , , , , note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; his christianity, ; a presiding genius to k., ; his seal, ; his sonnets, shandy, tristram, shanklin described, _seq._; visited, - sheil's play, , *shelley, and note, , , , ; captious about _endymion_, ; his _laon and cythna_ and _queen mab_ objected to, ; as a letter-writer, xv.; his sonnet on the nile, shelley, mrs., , shipton, mother, _sibylline leaves_, , sidney, algernon, , sidney, sir philip, silenus, simon pure, , simple (in _merry wives_), note sister or sister-in-law (in k.'s american letters). _see_ wylie, georgiana skinner, slang of the rice set, sleep, sonnet on, slips of the pen, not preserved in this edition, xiv. smith, horace, , , , smith, sidney, smith, william, southey's letter to, note smithfield, the burnings at, smollett compared to scott, , snook, , and note, , , note; visited by k., socrates, ; and jesus, solitude, k.'s pleasure in, solomon, "solomon," by haydon, songs, many written by k., sonnet to keats, a, sonnets by k., , , , , , , , , , , , ; a new form, ; many written, ; one on the nile, and note sophocles, "souls of poets dead and gone," etc., southampton, road to, described, _seq._ southcote, joanna, southey, , , ; hazlitt on, and note, _spectator_, the, speed's edition of k., xiii. and note spelling tricks, k.'s, not followed in this edition, xiv. spenser, ; his _cave of despair_ subject of a picture by severn, note, staffa described, stark (the artist), "star of high promise!--not to this dark age," etc. (sonnet to k.), stephens, stevenson (rice's nickname for thornton), susan gale, swift, , t., mr., . _see_ taylor tam o' shanter, , tarpeian rock, tasso, note taste, hazlitt's depth of, , *taylor, xi., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; he helps k., ; he is pleased with _endymion_, ; and suggests changes, taylor, jeremy, taylor, miss (author of _essays in rhyme_ and _original poems_), taylors, the (as fleet street), teignmouth visited, - _tempest_ quoted, note, note, , tertullian, text of this edition, xiv. theatricals, private, described, theocritus, "there is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain," etc., "there was a naughty boy," etc., "the sun from meridian height," etc., "the town, the churchyard, and the setting sun," etc., thomson, , thornton, , thought, the centre of the intellectual world, tighe, mrs., timotheus, _tintern abbey_, by wordsworth, "'tis the witching time of night," etc., tom. _see_ keats, tom _tom cribb's memorial to congress_, by moore, , tootts, tournament, suggested by mountains, towers, mr., tragedy. _see_ _otho the great_ trimmer, mr., troilus, trojan horse, turton, dr., _twelfth night_, quoted twisse, horace, "two or three posies," etc., unreserve of k.'s letters, xiv. "upon a sabbath-day it fell," etc., "upon my life sir nevis i am pique'd," urganda, "uriel," by alston, vandyck, vathek, caliph, velocipede, venery, the philosophy of, _venus and adonis_, quoted, verse and other quotations in letters given in full in this edition, xiii. _virgil_, voltaire, , , , waldegrave, miss, , , , , , wallace, walpole's letters, walton, warder, warner street, washington, way, webb, cornelius, webb, mrs., wellington, duke of, , well walk (where the brothers k. lodged), , wells, charles, and note, note, , , , , , ; his treatment of george k., , wells, mrs., wentworth place (occupied by dilke and brown), , , (k. moves to), wentworthians, the, "were they unhappy then?--it cannot be," etc., west, ; his "death on the pale horse," "when i have fears that i may cease to be," etc., "when they were come into the faery's court," etc., "where be ye going, you devon maid?" etc., "wherein lies happiness! in that which becks," etc., whitehead, , "why did i laugh to-night? no voice will tell," etc., wight, isle of, "the primrose island," ; visited, - , - , wilkie, , wilkinson, william of wickham, williams, dominie, williams, mrs., winchester described, _seq._, , ; visited, - winkine (author of treatise on garden-rollers), winter, miss, women, the influence of, ; classed with "roses and sweetmeats," ; why should they suffer? wood, *woodhouse, richard, , , , , , , , note, note, note, , ; copied letters, xi.; a letter from him introducing miss porter, , wooler, wordsworth, and note, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , (as the northern poet, ); his character, ; his genius, - ; his _gipsy_, ; his house, ; damned the lakes, ; his _peter bell_, ; his philosophy illustrated by his _matthew_, , ; his portrait in haydon's "christ," and note; he is read by k., ; his _tintern abbey_, ; the "wordsworthian or egotistical sublime style of poetry," wordsworth, mrs. and miss (as w. w.'s wife and sister), wylie, charles, , , , , , , , , , (sometimes as charles) *wylie, georgiana, and note, , , , , , , , (sometimes as sister, sister-in-law, g. minor, or little george); an acrostic on her name, ; admired by k., , , ; married to george k., xix. wylie, henry, , , , , , , , , , , (sometimes as henry); "a greater blade than ever," ; his bride cake, *wylie, mrs., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , (sometimes as mother) wylie, mrs. henry, , wylies, the two, _i.e._ charles and henry, , , , , (sometimes as brothers) wylies, the (as henrietta street), _wyoming, gertrude of_, _yellow dwarf_, the, note, young (the actor), zoroastrians, the end _printed in great britain by_ r. & r. clark, limited, _edinburgh_. footnotes: [a] a complete friend. this line sounded very oddly to me at first. [b] especially as i have a black eye. [ ] macmillan's magazine, august . [ ] for the letters already printed by lord houghton, mr. forman as a rule simply copied the text of that editor. the letters to fanny brawne and fanny keats, on the other hand, he printed with great accuracy from the autographs, and had autographs also before him in revising those to dilke, haydon, and several besides. the correspondence with fanny keats he kindly gave me leave to use for the present volume, receiving from me in return the right to use my ms. materials for a revised issue of his own work. in that issue, which appeared at the end of , the new matter is, however, printed separately, in the form of scraps and addenda detached from their context; and the present edition (the appearance of which has been delayed for two years by accidental circumstances) is the only one in which the true text of the american and miscellaneous letters is given consecutively and in proper order. [ ] the letters in which i have relied wholly or in part on mr. speed's text are nos. xxv. lxxx. (only for a few passages missing in the autograph) cxvi. and cxxxi. [ ] where the dates in my text are printed without brackets, they are those given by keats himself; the dates within brackets have been supplied either from the postmarks (as was done by woodhouse in all his transcripts) or by inference from the text. [ ] the autographs of these letters, all except three, are now in the british museum. [ ] the early letters of keats are full of these shakspearean tags and allusions: some of the less familiar i have thought it worth while to mark in the footnotes. [ ] the references are of course to wordsworth, leigh hunt, and haydon. in the sonnet as printed in the _poems_ of , and all later editions, the last line but one breaks off at "workings," the words "in the human mart" having been omitted by haydon's advice. [ ] presumably as shown in some drawing or miniature. [ ] not the long poem published under that title in , but the earlier attempt beginning, "i stood tiptoe upon a little hill," which was printed as a fragment in the _poems_ of . [ ] this letter, which is marked by woodhouse in his copy "no date, sent by hand," i take to be an answer to the commendatory sonnet addressed by reynolds to keats on february , : see _keats_ (men of letters series), appendix, p. . [ ] for stephano's "here's my comfort," twice in _tempest_, ii. ii. [ ] "i'll not show him where the quick freshes are." caliban in _tempest_, iii. ii. [ ] this sonnet was first published in the _champion_ (edited by john scott) for august , . [ ] charles cowden clarke. [ ] for sunday, may , . [ ] the first part, published in the same number of the _examiner_, of a ferocious review by hazlitt of southey's _letter to william smith, esq., m.p._ [ ] the poem so entitled on which hunt was now at work, and which was published in the volume called _foliage_ ( ). [ ] alluding to the well-known story of shelley dismaying an old lady in a stage-coach by suddenly, _à propos_ of nothing, crying out to leigh hunt in the words of richard ii., "for god's sake, let us sit upon the ground," etc. [ ] opening speech of the king in _love's labour's lost_. [ ] _i.e._, their likenesses, as introduced by haydon into his picture of christ's entry into jerusalem. [ ] general bertrand, who followed napoleon to st. helena. [ ] on a visit to benjamin bailey at magdalen hall. [ ] littlehampton. [ ] reynolds's family lived in little britain. [ ] william dilke, a younger brother of charles dilke, who had served in the commissariat department in the peninsula, america, and paris. he died in at the age of . [ ] the _round table_: republished from the _examiner_ of the two preceding years. [ ] first lord in _all's well that ends well_, iv. iii. [ ] bentley, the hampstead postman, was keats's landlord at the house in well walk where he and his brothers had taken up their quarters the previous june. [ ] g. r. gleig, son of the bishop of stirling: born , died : served in the peninsula war and afterwards took orders: chaplain-general to the forces from to : author of the _subaltern_ and many military tales and histories. [ ] reynolds and rice. [ ] _sic_: for "unpaid"? [ ] "she disappear'd, and left me dark: i waked 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." _paradise lost_, book viii. [ ] charles wells, a schoolmate of tom keats; afterwards author of _stories after nature_ and _joseph and his brethren_. for keats's subsequent cause of quarrel with him see below, letter xcii. [ ] an admirable phrase!--if only _penetralium_ were latin. [ ] _laon and cythna_, presently changed to _the revolt of islam_. [ ] the family of charles wells lived at this address. [ ] both in fact appeared in the number for sunday, january : see postscript below. [ ] the hampstead doctor who attended the keats brothers. [ ] the text of this letter is described by its american editor (who seems to have mistaken the order of one or two passages) as written in an evident hurry and almost illegible. [ ] mr. kingston was a commissioner of stamps, an acquaintance and tiresome hanger-on of wordsworth. [ ] for a more glowing account of this supper party of december , , compare haydon, _autobiography_, i. p. . the mr. ritchie referred to started on a government mission to fezzan in september , and died at morzouk the following november. an account of the expedition was published by his travelling companion, captain g. f. lyon, r.n. [ ] the manager: of whom macready in his _reminiscences_ has so much that is pleasant to say. [ ] tea-merchant, of pancras lane and walthamstow: guardian to the keats brothers and their sister. [ ] of course a mere delusion; but hunt and those of his circle retained for years afterwards an impression that scott had in some way inspired or encouraged the _cockney school_ articles. [ ] alluding to two sonnets of reynolds _on robin hood_, copies of which keats had just received from him by post. they were printed in the _yellow dwarf_ (edited by john hunt) for february , , and again in the collection of poems published by reynolds in under the title _a garden of florence_. [ ] both the _robin hood_ and the _mermaid_ lines as afterwards printed vary in several places from these first drafts. [ ] henry crabb robinson, author of the _diaries_. [ ] the olliers (shelley's publishers) had brought out keats's _poems_ the previous spring, and the ill success of the volume had led to a sharp quarrel between them and the keats brothers. [ ] georgiana wylie, to whom george keats was engaged. [ ] this letter has been hitherto erroneously printed under date september . [ ] reading doubtful. [ ] the five lines ending here keats afterwards re-cast, doubtless in order to get rid of the cockney rhyme "ports" and "thoughts." [ ] "and, sweetheart, lie thou there":--pistol (to his sword) in _henry iv._, part , ii. iv. [ ] replying to an ecstatic note of haydon's about a seal with a true lover's knot and the initials w. s., lately found in a field at stratford-on-avon. [ ] _dentatus_ was the subject of haydon's new picture. [ ] the famous picture now belonging to lady wantage, and exhibited at burlington house in . whether keats ever saw the original is doubtful (it was not shown at the british institution in his time), but he must have been familiar with the subject as engraved by vivarès and woollett, and its suggestive power worked in his mind until it yielded at last the distilled poetic essence of the "magic casement" passage in the _ode to a nightingale_. it is interesting to note the theme of the grecian urn ode coming in also amidst the "unconnected subject and careless verse" of this rhymed epistle. [ ] _sic_: probably, as suggested by mr. forman, for "i hope what you achieve is not lost upon me." [ ] the english rebels against tradition in poetry and art at this time took much the same view of the french dramatists of the _grand siècle_ as was taken by the _romantiques_ of their own nation a few years later; and haydon had written to keats in his last letter, "when i die i'll have shakspeare placed on my heart, with homer in my right hand and ariosto in the other, dante at my head, tasso at my feet, and corneille under my ----" [ ] "he hath fought with a warrener":--simple in _merry wives_, i. iv. [ ] the first draught of the proposed preface to _endymion_. [ ] changed in the printed version to--"his image in the dusk she seemed to see." [ ] the quotation is from slender in _merry wives of windsor_, i. i. [ ] meaning the atmosphere of the little bentleys in well walk. [ ] "i will make an end of my dinner; there's pippins and cheese to come":--sir hugh evans in _merry wives of windsor_, i. ii. [ ] the crossing of the letter, begun at the words "have you not," here _dips_ into the original writing. [ ] the _oxford herald_ for june , . [ ] referring probably to the unfortunate second marriage made by their mother. [ ] a leaf with the name and "from the author," notes woodhouse. [ ] _compare the ode to psyche_:-- "far, far around shall those dark-crested trees fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep." [ ] wordsworth's lines "to joanna" seem to have been special favourites with keats. [ ] keats here repeats for his brother the meg merrilies piece contained in the preceding letter to fanny. [ ] reading doubtful. [ ] here follows a sketch. [ ] the swan and two necks, lad lane, london, seems to have been the coach office for liverpool and the north-west; compare lamb's _letters_ (ed. ainger), vol. i. p. . [ ] by long island keats means, not of course the great chain of the outer hebrides so styled, but the little island of luing, east of scarba sound. his account of the place from which he is writing, and its distance from oban as specified in the paragraph added there next day, seem to identify it certainly as kilmelfort. [ ] cary's translation. [ ] no place so named appears on any map: but at the foot of the cruach-doire-nan-cuílean, off the road, is a house named derrynaculan, and a few miles farther on, at the head of loch seridain, an ancient fortified site or _dun_, with an inn on the road near by. [ ] for loch na keal. [ ] the six lines from "place" to "dance" were judiciously omitted by keats in copying these verses later. [ ] miss charlotte cox, an east-indian cousin of the reynoldses--the "charmian" described more fully in letter lxxiii. [ ] referring to these words in john scott's letter in his defence, _morning chronicle_, october , :--"that there are also many, very many passages indicating both haste and carelessness i will not deny; nay, i will go further, and assert that a real friend of the author would have dissuaded him from immediate publication." [ ] miss charlotte cox; see above, letter lxx. [ ] this, notes woodhouse, is in reply to a letter of protest he had written keats concerning "what had fallen from him, about six weeks back, when we dined together at mr. hessey's, respecting his continuing to write; which he seemed very doubtful of." [ ] on the death of his brother tom (which took place december , a few hours after the last letter was written) brown urged keats to leave the lodgings where the brothers had lived together, and come and live with him at wentworth place--a block of two semi-detached houses in a large garden at the bottom of john street, of which dilke occupied the larger and brown the smaller: see _keats_ (men of letters series), p. . keats complied; and henceforth his letters dated hampstead must be understood as written not from well walk, but from wentworth place. [ ] a paper of the largest folio size, used by keats in this letter only, and containing some eight hundred words a page of his writing. [ ] this is keats's first mention of fanny brawne. his sense on first acquaintance of her power to charm and tease him must be understood, in spite of his reticence on the subject, as having grown quickly into the absorbing passion which tormented the remainder of his days. [ ] of bedhampton castle: a connection of the dilkes and special friend of brown. [ ] _i.e._ on george keats's mother-in-law, mrs. wylie. [ ] the tassels were a gift from his sister-in-law. [ ] the sheet which keats accidentally left out in making up his packet in the spring, and which he forwarded with this supplement from winchester the following september, seems to have begun with the words, "on monday we had to dinner," etc. (p. ), and to have ended with the words, "but as i am" (p. , line ): at least this portion of the letter is missing in the autograph now before me. i supply it from jeffrey's transcript. [ ] to about this date must belong the posthumously printed _ode on indolence_, which describes the same mood with nearly the same imagery. possibly the "black eye" mentioned by keats in his footnote, together with the reflections on street-fighting later on, may help us to fix the date of his famous fight with the butcher boy. [ ] compare the repetition of the same thought and phrase in the ode _to a nightingale_ written two months later. [ ] slightly misquoted from _macbeth_ in the banquet scene. [ ] by mistake for the th of march. [ ] for "put together"? [ ] brown's younger brothers: see below, p. . [ ] "sometime am i all wound with adders, who with cloven tongues do hiss me into madness." caliban in _tempest_, ii. ii. [ ] this old word for a snack between meals is used by marlowe and ben jonson, and i believe still survives at some of the public schools. [ ] this notice of reynolds's parody was printed, with some revision, in the _examiner_ for april , . [ ] there is no other autograph copy of this famous poem except the draft here given. it contains several erasures and corrections. in verse keats had written first, for "a lily" and "a fading rose," "death's lily" and "death's fading rose": in verse , for "meads," "wilds": in verse , for "manna dew," "honey dew": in verse , for "and sigh'd full sore," "and there she sigh'd"; in verse , for "gaped wide," "wide agape": and in verse , for "sojourn," "wither." [ ] _sic_: obviously for "run" or "go." [ ] in all probability the _ode to a nightingale_, published in the july number of the _annals of the fine arts_, of which james elmes was editor. [ ] this and the next interpolation are brown's. [ ] so copied by woodhouse: query "battle-axe"? [ ] keats's quotation from his first draft of lamia continued, says woodhouse, for thirty lines more: but as the text varied much from that subsequently printed, and as woodhouse's notes of these variations are lost, i can only give thus much, from an autograph first draft of the passage in the possession of lord houghton. [ ] keats here copies, with slight changes and abridgments, his letter to tom of july , (see above, p. ), ending with the lines written after visiting staffa: as to which he adds, "i find i must keep memorandums of the verses i send you, for i do not remember whether i have sent the following lines upon staffa. i hope not; 'twould be a horrid bore to you, especially after reading this dull specimen of description. for myself i hate descriptions. i would not send it if it were not mine." [ ] the beautiful _ode to autumn_, the draft of which keats had copied in a letter (unluckily not preserved) written earlier in the same day to woodhouse. [ ] sir george beaumonts and lord mulgraves: compare haydon's _life_ and _correspondence_. [ ] in the interval between the last letter and this, keats had tried the experiment of living alone in westminster lodgings, and failed. after a visit to his beloved at hampstead, he could keep none of his wise resolutions, but wrote to her, "i can think of nothing else ... i cannot exist without you ... you have absorb'd me ... i shall be able to do nothing--i should like to cast the die for love or death--i have no patience with anything else" ... and at the end of a week he had gone back to live next door to her with brown at wentworth place. here he quickly fell into that state of feverish despondency and recklessness to which his friends, especially brown, have borne witness, and the signs of which are perceptible in his letters of the time, and still more in his verse, viz. the remodelled _hyperion_ and the _cap and bells_: see _keats_ (men of letters series), pp. - . [ ] referring to the fairy poem of _the cap and bells_, the writing of which, says brown, was keats's morning occupation during these weeks. [ ] spenser's cave of despair was the subject of the picture (already referred to in letter cxxiv.) with which severn won the royal academy premium, awarded december of this year. [ ] george keats had come over for a hurried visit to england on business. [ ] hemorrhage from the lungs; in which keats recognised his death-warrant, and after which the remainder of his life was but that of a doomed invalid. the particulars of the attack, as related by charles brown, are given by lord houghton, and in _keats_ (men of letters series), p. . [ ] brown having let his house (wentworth place) when he started for a fresh scotch tour on may , keats moved to lodgings at the above address in order to be near leigh hunt, who was then living in mortimer terrace, kentish town. [ ] the _cap and bells_ was to have appeared under this pseudonym. by "begin" keats means begin again (compare above, cxxxviii.): he did not, however, do so, and the eighty-eight stanzas of the poem which are left all belong to the previous year (end of october--beginning of december ). [ ] the volume containing _lamia_, _isabella_, _the eve of st. agnes_, _hyperion_, and the _odes_. [ ] after the attack last mentioned, keats went to be taken care of in hunt's house, and stayed there till august . [ ] chapman's _homer_. [ ] the _maria crowther_ had in fact sailed from london september : contrary winds holding her in the channel, keats had landed at portsmouth for a night's visit to the snooks of bedhampton. [ ] on the th of december following came a renewal of fever and hemorrhage, extinguishing the last hope of recovery: and after eleven more weeks of suffering, only alleviated by the devoted care of severn, the poet died in his friend's arms on the d of february . proofreaders adonais by shelley edited with introduction and notes by william michael rossetti contents. preface memoir of shelley memoir of keats adonais: its composition and bibliography its argument general exposition bion and moschus adonais: preface adonais cancelled passages of adonais and its preface notes preface. _adonais_ is the first writing by shelley which has been included in the _clarendon press series_. it is a poem of convenient length for such a purpose, being neither short nor decidedly long; and--leaving out of count some of the short poems--is the one by this author which approaches nearest to being 'popular.' it is elevated in sentiment, classical in form,--in substance, biographical in relation to keats, and in some minor degree autobiographical for shelley himself. on these grounds it claimed a reasonable preference over all his other poems, for the present method of treatment; although some students of shelley, myself included, might be disposed to maintain that, in point of absolute intrinsic beauty and achievement, and of the qualities most especially characteristic of its author, it is not superior, or indeed is but barely equal, to some of his other compositions. to take, for instance, two poems not very different in length from _adonais_--_the witch of atlas_ is more original, and _epipsychidion_ more abstract in ideal. i have endeavoured to present in my introductory matter a comprehensive account of all particulars relevant to _adonais_ itself, and to keats as its subject, and shelley as its author. the accounts here given of both these great poets are of course meagre, but i assume them to be not insufficient for our immediate and restricted purpose. there are many other books which the reader can profitably consult as to the life and works of shelley; and three or four (at least) as to the life and works of keats. my concluding notes are, i suppose, ample in scale: if they are excessive, that is an involuntary error on my part. my aim in them has been to illustrate and elucidate the poem in its details, yet without travelling far afield in search of remote analogies or discursive comment--my wish being rather to 'stick to my text': wherever a difficulty presents itself, i have essayed to define it, and clear it up--but not always to my own satisfaction. i have seldom had to discuss the opinions of previous writers on the same points, for the simple reason that of detailed criticism of _adonais_, apart from merely textual memoranda, there is next to none. it has appeared to me to be part of my duty to point out here and there, but by no means frequently, some special beauty in the poem; occasionally also something which seems to me defective or faulty. i am aware that this latter is an invidious office, which naturally exposes one to an imputation, from some quarters, of obtuseness, and, from others, of presumption; none the less i have expressed myself with the frankness which, according to my own view, belongs to the essence of such a task as is here undertaken. _adonais_ is a composition which has retorted beforehand upon its actual or possible detractors. in the poem itself, and in the prefatory matter adjoined to it, shelley takes critics very severely to task: but criticism has its discerning and temperate, as well as its 'stupid and malignant' phases. w.m. rossetti. _july, ._ memoir of shelley. the life of percy bysshe shelley is one which has given rise to a great deal of controversy, and which cannot, for a long time to come, fail to be regarded with very diverse sentiments. his extreme opinions on questions of religion and morals, and the great latitude which he allowed himself in acting according to his own opinions, however widely they might depart from the law of the land and of society, could not but produce this result. in his own time he was generally accounted an outrageous and shameful offender. at the present date many persons entertain essentially the same view, although softened by lapse of years, and by respect for his standing as a poet: others regard him as a conspicuous reformer. some take a medium course, and consider him to have been sincere, and so far laudable; but rash and reckless of consequences, and so far censurable. his poetry also has been subject to very different constructions. during his lifetime it obtained little notice save for purposes of disparagement and denunciation. now it is viewed with extreme enthusiasm by many, and is generally admitted to hold a permanent rank in english literature, though faulty (as some opine) through vague idealism and want of backbone. these are all points on which i shall here offer no personal opinion. i shall confine myself to tracing the chief outlines of shelley's life, and (very briefly) the sequence of his literary work. percy bysshe shelley came of a junior and comparatively undistinguished branch of a very old and noted family. his branch was termed the worminghurst shelleys; and it is only quite lately[ ] that the affiliation of this branch to the more eminent and senior stock of the michelgrove shelleys has passed from the condition of a probable and obvious surmise into that of an established fact. the family traces up to sir william shelley, judge of the common pleas under henry vii, thence to a member of parliament in , and to the reign of edward i, or even to the norman conquest. the worminghurst shelleys start with henry shelley, who died in . it will be sufficient here to begin with the poet's grandfather, bysshe shelley. he was born at christ church, newark, north america, and raised to a noticeable height, chiefly by two wealthy marriages, the fortunes of the junior branch. handsome, keen-minded, and adventurous, he eloped with mary catherine, heiress of the rev. theobald michell, of horsham; after her death he eloped with elizabeth jane, heiress of mr. perry, of penshurst. by this second wife he had a family, now represented, by the baron de l'isle and dudley: by his first wife he had (besides a daughter) a son timothy, who was the poet's father, and who became in due course sir timothy shelley, bart., m.p. his baronetcy was inherited from his father bysshe--on whom it had been conferred, in , chiefly through the interest of the duke of norfolk, the head of the whig party in the county of sussex, to whose politics the new baronet had adhered. mr. timothy shelley was a very ordinary country gentleman in essentials, and a rather eccentric one in some details. he was settled at field place, near horsham, sussex, and married elizabeth, daughter of charles pilfold, of effingham, surrey; she was a beauty, and a woman of good abilities, but without any literary turn. their first child was the poet, percy bysshe, born at field place on aug. , : four daughters also grew up, and a younger son, john: the eldest son of john is now the baronet, having succeeded, in , sir percy florence shelley, the poet's only surviving son. no one has managed to discover in the parents of percy bysshe any qualities furnishing the prototype or the nucleus of his poetical genius, or of the very exceptional cast of mind and character which he developed in other directions. the parents were commonplace: if we go back to the grandfather, sir bysshe, we encounter a man who was certainly not commonplace, but who seems to have been devoid of either poetical or humanitarian fervour. he figures as intent upon his worldly interests, accumulating a massive fortune, and spending lavishly upon the building of castle goring; in his old age, penurious, unsocial, and almost churlish in his habits. his passion was to domineer and carry his point; of this the poet may have inherited something. his ideal of success was wealth and worldly position, things to which the poet was, on the contrary, abnormally indifferent. shelley's schooling began at six years of age, when he was placed under the rev. mr. edwards, at warnham. at ten he went to sion house school, brentford, of which the principal was dr. greenlaw, the pupils being mostly sons of local tradesmen. in july, , he proceeded to eton, where dr. goodall was the head master, succeeded, just towards the end of shelley's stay, by the far severer dr. keate. shelley was shy, sensitive, and of susceptible fancy: at eton we first find him insubordinate as well. he steadily resisted the fagging-system, learned more as he chose than as his masters dictated, and was known as 'mad shelley,' and 'shelley the atheist.' it has sometimes been said that an eton boy, if rebellious, was termed 'atheist,' and that the designation, as applied to shelley, meant no more than that. i do not feel satisfied that this is true at all; at any rate it seems to me probable that shelley, who constantly called himself an atheist in after-life, received the epithet at eton for some cause more apposite than disaffection to school-authority. he finally left eton in july, . he had already been entered in university college, oxford, in april of that year, and he commenced residence there in october. his one very intimate friend in oxford was thomas jefferson hogg, a student from the county of durham. hogg was not, like shelley, an enthusiast eager to learn new truths, and to apply them; but he was a youth appreciative of classical and other literature, and little or not at all less disposed than percy to disregard all prescription in religious dogma. by demeanour and act they both courted academic censure, and they got it in its extremest form. shelley wrote, probably with some co-operation from hogg, and he published anonymously in oxford, a little pamphlet called _the necessity of atheism_; he projected sending it round broadcast as an invitation or challenge to discussion. this small pamphlet--it is scarcely more than a flysheet--hardly amounts to saying that atheism is irrefragably true, and theism therefore false; but it propounds that the existence of a god cannot be proved by reason, nor yet by testimony; that a direct revelation made to an individual would alone be adequate ground for convincing that individual; and that the persons to whom such a revelation is not accorded are in consequence warranted in remaining unconvinced. the college authorities got wind of the pamphlet, and found reason for regarding shelley as its author, and on march , , they summoned him to appear. he was required to say whether he had written it or not. to this demand he refused an answer, and was then expelled by a written sentence, ready drawn up. with hogg the like process was repeated. their offence, as entered on the college records, was that of 'contumaciously refusing to answer questions,' and 'repeatedly declining to disavow' the authorship of the work. in strictness therefore they were expelled, not for being proclaimed atheists, but for defying academic authority, which required to be satisfied as to that question. shortly before this disaster an engagement between shelley and his first cousin on the mother's side, miss harriet grove, had come to an end, owing to the alarm excited by the youth's sceptical opinions. settling in lodgings in london, and parting from hogg, who went to york to study conveyancing, percy pretty soon found a substitute for harriet grove in harriet westbrook, a girl of fifteen, schoolfellow of two of his sisters at clapham. she was exceedingly pretty, daughter of a retired hotel-keeper in easy circumstances. shelley wanted to talk both her and his sisters out of christianity; and he cultivated the acquaintance of herself and of her much less juvenile sister eliza, calling from time to time at their father's house in chapel street, grosvenor square. harriet fell in love with him: besides, he was a highly eligible _parti_, being a prospective baronet, absolute heir to a very considerable estate, and contingent heir (if he had assented to a proposal of entail, to which however he never did assent, professing conscientious objections) to another estate still larger. shelley was not in love with harriet; but he liked her, and was willing to do anything he could to further her wishes and plans. mr. timothy shelley, after a while, pardoned his son's misadventure at oxford, and made him a moderate allowance of £ a-year. percy then visited a cousin in wales, a member of the grove family. he was recalled to london by harriet westbrook, who protested against a project of sending her back to school. he counselled resistance. she replied in july (to quote a contemporary letter from shelley to hogg), 'that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, and threw herself upon my protection.' this was clearly a rather decided step upon the damsel's part: we may form our own conclusions whether she was willing to unite with percy without the bond of marriage; or whether she confidently calculated upon inducing him to marry her, her family being kept in the dark; or whether the whole affair was a family manoeuvre for forcing on an engagement and a wedding. shelley returned to london, and had various colloquies with harriet: in due course he eloped with her to edinburgh, and there on th august he married her. his age was then just nineteen, and hers sixteen. shelley, who was a profound believer in william godwin's _political justice_, rejected the institution of marriage as being fundamentally irrational and wrongful. but he saw that he could not in this instance apply his own pet theories without involving in discredit and discomfort the woman whose love had been bestowed upon him. either his opinion or her happiness must be sacrificed to what he deemed a prejudice of society: he decided rather to sacrifice the former. for two years, or up to an advanced date in , the married life of shelley and harriet appears to have been a happy one, so far as their mutual relation was concerned; though rambling and scrambling, restricted by mediocrity of income (£ a year, made up between the two fathers), and pestered by the continual, and to percy at last very offensive, presence of miss westbrook as an inmate of the house. they lived in york, keswick in cumberland, dublin (which shelley visited as an express advocate of catholic emancipation and repeal of the union), nantgwillt in radnorshire, lynmouth in devonshire, tanyrallt in carnarvonshire, london, bracknell in berkshire: ireland and edinburgh were also revisited. various strange adventures befell; the oddest of all being an alleged attempt at assassination at tanyrallt. shelley asserted it, others disbelieved it: after much disputation the biographer supposes that, if not an imposture, it was a romance, and, if not a romance, at least a hallucination,--shelley, besides being wild in talk and wild in fancy, being by this time much addicted to laudanum-dosing. in june harriet gave birth, in london, to her first child, ianthe eliza (she married a mr. esdaile, and died in ). about the same time shelley brought out his earliest work of importance, the poem of _queen mab_: its speculative audacities were too extreme for publication, so it was only privately printed. amiable and accommodating at first, and neither ill-educated nor stupid, harriet did not improve in tone as she advanced in womanhood. her sympathy or tolerance for her husband's ideals and vagaries flagged; when they differed she gave him the cold shoulder; she wanted luxuries--such as a carriage of her own--which he neither cared for nor could properly afford. he even said--and one can hardly accuse him of saying it insincerely--that she had been unfaithful to him: this however remains quite unproved, and may have been a delusion. he sought the society of the philosopher godwin, then settled as a bookseller in skinner street, holborn. godwin's household at this time consisted of his second wife, who had been a mrs. clairmont; mary, his daughter by his first wife, the celebrated mary wollstonecraft; and his young son by his second wife, william; also his step-children, charles and clare clairmont, and fanny wollstonecraft (or imlay), the daughter of mary wollstonecraft by her first irregular union with gilbert imlay. until may , when she was getting on towards the age of seventeen, shelley had scarcely set eyes on mary godwin: he then saw her, and a sudden passion sprang up between them--uncontrollable, or, at any rate, uncontrolled. harriet shelley has left it on record that the advances and importunities came from mary godwin to shelley, and were for a while resisted: it was natural for harriet to allege this, but i should not suppose it to be true, unless in a very partial sense. shelley sent for his wife, who had gone for a while to bath (perhaps in a fit of pettishness, but this is not clear), and explained to her in june that they must separate--a resolve which she combated as far as seemed possible, but finally she returned to bath, staying there with her father and sister. shelley made some arrangements for her convenience, and on the th of july he once more eloped, this time with mary godwin. clare clairmont chose to accompany them. godwin was totally opposed to the whole transaction, and mrs. godwin even pursued the fugitives across the channel; but her appeal was unavailing, and the youthful and defiant trio proceeded in much elation of spirit, and not without a good deal of discomfort at times, from calais to paris, and thence to brunen by the lake of uri in switzerland. it is a curious fact, and shows how differently shelley regarded these matters from most people, that he wrote to harriet in affectionate terms, urging her to join them there or reside hard by them. mary, before the elopement took place, had made a somewhat similar proposal. harriet had no notion of complying; and, as it turned out, the adventurers had no sooner reached brunen than they found their money exhausted, and they travelled back in all haste to london in september,--clare continuing to house with them now, and for the most part during the remainder of shelley's life. even a poet and idealist might have been expected to show a little more worldly wisdom than this. after his grievous experiences with eliza westbrook, the sister of his first wife, shelley might have managed to steer clear of clare clairmont, the sister by affinity of his second partner in life. he would not take warning, and he paid the forfeit: not indeed that clare was wanting in fine qualities both of mind and of character, but she proved a constant source of excitement and uneasiness in the household, of unfounded scandal, and of harassing complications. in london shelley and mary lived in great straits, abandoned by almost all their acquaintances, and playing hide-and-seek with creditors. but in january sir bysshe shelley died, and percy's money affairs improved greatly. an arrangement was arrived at with his father, whereby he received a regular annual income of £ , out of which he assigned to harriet £ for herself and her two children--a son, charles bysshe, having been born in november (he died in ). shelley and mary next settled at bishopgate, near windsor forest. in may they went abroad, along with miss clairmont and their infant son william, and joined lord byron on the shore of the lake of geneva. an amour was already going on between byron and miss clairmont; it resulted in the birth of a daughter, allegra, in january ; she died in , very shortly before shelley. he and mary had returned to london in september . very shortly afterwards, th of november, the ill-starred harriet shelley drowned herself in the serpentine: her body was only recovered on the th of december, and the verdict of the coroner's jury was 'found drowned,' her name being given as 'harriet smith.' the career of harriet since her separation from her husband is very indistinctly known. it has indeed been asserted in positive terms that she formed more than one connexion with other men: she had ceased to live along with her father and sister, and is said to have been expelled from their house. in these statements i see nothing either unveracious or unlikely: but it is true that a sceptical habit of mind, which insists upon express evidence and upon severe sifting of evidence, may remain unconvinced[ ]. this was the second suicide in shelley's immediate circle, for fanny wollstonecraft had taken poison just before under rather unaccountable circumstances. no doubt he felt dismay and horror, and self-reproach as well; yet there is nothing to show that he condemned his conduct, at any stage of the transactions with harriet, as heinously wrong. he took the earliest opportunity-- th of december--of marrying mary godwin; and thus he became reconciled to her father and to other members of the family. it was towards the time of harriet's suicide that shelley, staying in and near london, became personally intimate with the essayist and poet, leigh hunt, and through him he came to know john keats: their first meeting appears to have occurred on th february, . as this matter bears directly upon our immediate theme, the poem of _adonais_, i deal with it at far greater length than its actual importance in the life of shelley would otherwise warrant. hunt, in his _autobiography_, narrates as follows. 'i had not known the young poet [keats] long when shelley and he became acquainted under my roof. keats did not take to shelley as kindly as shelley did to him. shelley's only thoughts of his new acquaintance were such as regarded his bad health with which he sympathised [this about bad health seems properly to apply to a date later than the opening period when the two poets came together], and his poetry, of which he has left such a monument of his admiration as _adonais_. 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. their styles in writing also were very different; and 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 [an allusion to the motto appended to _queen mab_]. i am bound to state thus much; because, hopeless of recovering his health, under circumstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, 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 ... that keats, at one period of his intercourse with us, suspected both 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.' it is to be observed that hunt is here rather putting the cart before the horse. keats (as we shall see immediately) suspected shelley and hunt 'of a wish to see him undervalued' as early as february ; but his 'irritable morbidity' when 'hopeless of recovering his health' belongs to a later date, say the spring and summer of . it is said that in the spring of shelley and keats agreed that each of them would undertake an epic, to be written in a space of six months: shelley produced _the revolt of islam_ (originally entitled _laon and cythna_), and keats produced _endymion_. shelley's poem, the longer of the two, was completed by the early autumn, while keats's occupied him until the winter which opened . on th october, , keats wrote to a friend, 'i refused to visit shelley, that i might have my own unfettered scope; meaning presumably that he wished to finish _endymion_ according to his own canons of taste and execution, without being hampered by any advice from shelley. there is also a letter from keats to his two brothers, nd december, , saying: 'shelley's poem _laon and cythna_ is out, and there are words about its being objected to as much as _queen mab_ was. poor shelley, i think he has his quota of good qualities.' as late as february he wrote, 'i have not yet read shelley's poem.' on rd january of the same year he had written: 'the fact is, he [hunt] and shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair [_endymion_ in ms.] officiously; and, from several hints i have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip i may have made.' it was at nearly the same date, th february, that keats, shelley, and hunt wrote each a sonnet on _the nile_: in my judgment, shelley's is the least successful of the three. soon after their marriage, shelley and his second wife settled at great marlow, in buckinghamshire. they were shortly disturbed by a chancery suit, whereby mr. westbrook sought to deprive shelley of the custody of his two children by harriet, ianthe and charles. towards march , lord chancellor eldon pronounced judgment against shelley, on the ground of his culpable conduct as a husband, carrying out culpable opinions upheld in his writings. the children were handed over to dr. hume, an army-physician named by shelley: he had to assign for their support a sum of £ per annum, brought up to £ by a supplement from mr. westbrook. about the same date he suffered from an illness which he regarded as a dangerous pulmonary attack, and he made up his mind to quit england for italy; accompanied by his wife, their two infants william and clara, miss clairmont, and her infant allegra, who was soon afterwards consigned to lord byron in venice. mr. charles cowden clarke, who was keats's friend from boyhood, writes: 'when shelley left england for italy, keats told me that he had received from him an invitation to become his guest, and in short to make one of his household. it was upon the purest principle that keats declined his noble proffer, for he entertained an exalted opinion of shelley's genius--in itself an inducement. he also knew of his deeds of bounty, and from their frequent social intercourse he had full faith in the sincerity of his proposal.... keats said that, in declining the invitation, his sole motive was the consciousness, which would be ever prevalent with him, of his being, in its utter extent, not a free agent, even within such a circle as shelley's--he himself nevertheless being the most unrestricted of beings.' mr. clarke seems to mean in this passage that shelley, _before_ starting for italy, invited keats to accompany him thither--a fact, if such it is, of which i find no trace elsewhere. it is however just possible that clarke was only referring to the earlier invitation, previously mentioned, for keats to visit at great marlow; or he may most probably, with some confusion as to dates and details, be thinking of the message which shelley, when already settled in italy for a couple of years, addressed to his brother-poet--of which more anon. shelley and his family--including for the most part miss clairmont--wandered about a good deal in italy. they were in milan, leghorn, the bagni di lucca, venice and its neighbourhood, rome, naples, florence, pisa, the bagni di pisa, and finally (after shelley had gone to ravenna by himself) in a lonely house named casa magni, between lerici and san terenzio, on the bay of spezzia. their two children died; but in another was born, the sir percy florence shelley who lived on till november . they were often isolated or even solitary. among their interesting acquaintances at one place or another were, besides byron, mr. and mrs. gisborne (the latter had previously been mrs. reveley, and had been sought in marriage by godwin after the death of mary wollstonecraft in ); the contessina emilia viviani, celebrated in shelley's poem of _epipsychidion_; captain medwin, shelley's cousin and schoolfellow; the greek prince, alexander mavrocordato; lieutenant and mrs. williams, who joined them at casa magni; and edward john trelawny, an adventurous and daring sea-rover, who afterwards accompanied byron to greece. it was only towards the summer of that shelley read the _endymion_. he wrote of it thus in a letter to his publisher, mr. ollier, september , . 'i have read ... keats's poem.... much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. i think, if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, i should have been led to admire keats as a poet more than i ought--of which there is now no danger.' shelley regarded the hymn to pan, in the first book of _endymion_, as affording 'the surest promise of ultimate excellence.' the health of keats having broken down, and consumption having set in, shelley wrote to him from pisa urging him to come over to italy as his guest. keats did not however go to pisa, but, along with the young painter joseph severn, to naples, and thence to rome. i here subjoin shelley's letter. 'pisa-- july, . 'my dear keats, 'i hear with great pain the dangerous accident you have undergone [recurrence of blood-spitting from the lungs], and mr. gisborne, who gives me the account of it, adds that you continue to wear a consumptive appearance. this consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done, and with the assistance of an english winter, it can often indulge its selection. i do not think that young and amiable poets are bound to gratify its taste: they have entered into no bond with the muses to that effect. but seriously (for i am joking on what i am very anxious about) i think you would do well to pass the winter in italy, and avoid so tremendous an accident; and, if you think it as necessary as i do, so long as you continue to find pisa or its neighbourhood agreeable to you, mrs. shelley unites with myself in urging the request that you would take up your residence with us. you might come by sea to leghorn (france is not worth seeing, and the sea is particularly good for weak lungs)--which is within a few miles of us. you ought, at all events, to see italy; and your health, which i suggest as a motive, may be an excuse to you. i spare declamation about the statues and paintings and ruins, and (what is a greater piece of forbearance) about the mountains and streams, the fields, the colours of the sky, and the sky itself. 'i have lately read your _endymion_ again, and even with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains--though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion. this people in general will not endure; and that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold. i feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but will. i always tell ollier to send you copies of my books. _prometheus unbound_ i imagine you will receive nearly at the same time with this letter. _the cenci_ i hope you have already received: it was studiously composed in a different style. "below the _good_ how far! but far above the _great_[ ]!" in poetry i have sought to avoid system and mannerism. i wish those who excel me in genius would pursue the same plan. 'whether you remain in england, or journey to italy, believe that you carry with you my anxious wishes for your health and success--wherever you are, or whatever you undertake--and that i am 'yours sincerely, 'p.b. shelley.' keats's reply to shelley ran as follows:-- 'hampstead--august , . 'my dear shelley, 'i am very much gratified that you, in a foreign country, and with a mind almost over-occupied, should write to me in the strain of the letter beside me. if i do not take advantage of your invitation, it will be prevented by a circumstance i have very much at heart to prophesy[ ]. there is no doubt that an english winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering hateful manner. therefore i must either voyage or journey to italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery. my nerves at present are the worst part of me: yet they feel soothed that, come what extreme may, i shall not be destined to remain in one spot long enough to take a hatred of any four particular bedposts. 'i am glad you take any pleasure in my poor poem--which i would willingly take the trouble to unwrite if possible, did i care so much as i have done about reputation. 'i received a copy of _the cenci_, as from yourself, from hunt. there is only one part of it i am judge of--the poetry and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the mammon. a modern work, it is said, must have a purpose; which may be the god. an artist must serve mammon: he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness perhaps. you, i am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore. the thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furled for six months together. and is not this extraordinary talk for the writer of _endymion_, whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards? i am picked up and sorted to a pip. my imagination is a monastery, and i am its monk. 'i am in expectation of _prometheus_ every day. could i have my own wish effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now putting an end to the second act. i remember you advising me not to publish my first blights, on hampstead heath[ ]. i am returning advice upon your hands. most of the poems in the volume i send you [this was the volume containing _lamia, hyperion_, &c.] have been written above two years[ ], and would never have been published but for hope of gain: so you see i am inclined enough to take your advice now. 'i must express once more my deep sense of your kindness, adding my sincere thanks and respects for mrs. shelley. in the hope of soon seeing you i remain 'most sincerely yours, 'john keats.' it may have been in the interval between writing his note of invitation to keats, and receiving the reply of the latter, that shelley penned the following letter to the editor of the _quarterly review_--the periodical which had taken (or had shared with _blackwood's magazine_) the lead in depreciating _endymion_. the letter, however, was left uncompleted, and was not dispatched. (i omit such passages as are not directly concerned with keats):-- 'sir, 'should you cast your eye on the signature of this letter before you read the contents, you might imagine that they related to a slanderous paper which appeared in your review some time since.... i am not in the habit of permitting myself to be disturbed by what is said or written of me.... the case is different with the unfortunate subject of this letter, the author of _endymion_, to whose feelings and situation i entreat you to allow me to call your attention. i write considerably in the dark; but, if it is mr. gifford that i am addressing, i am persuaded that, in an appeal to his humanity and justice, he will acknowledge the _fas ab hoste doceri_. i am aware that the first duty of a reviewer is towards the public; and i am willing to confess that the _endymion_ is a poem considerably defective, and that perhaps it deserved as much censure as the pages of your review record against it. but, not to mention that there is a certain contemptuousness of phraseology, from which it is difficult for a critic to abstain, in the review of _endymion_, i do not think that the writer has given it its due praise. surely the poem, with all its faults, is a very remarkable production for a man of keats's age[ ]; and the promise of ultimate excellence is such as has rarely been afforded even by such as have afterwards attained high literary eminence. look at book , line , &c., and book , lines to ; read down that page, and then again from line [ ]. i could cite many other passages to convince you that it deserved milder usage. why it should have been reviewed at all, excepting for the purpose of bringing its excellences into notice, i cannot conceive; for it was very little read, and there was no danger that it should become a model to the age of that false taste with which i confess that it is replenished. 'poor keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which, i am persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing the effect--to which it has at least greatly contributed--of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. the first effects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. the agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun. he is coming to pay me a visit in italy; but i fear that, unless his mind can be kept tranquil, little is to be hoped from the mere influence of climate. 'but let me not extort anything from your pity. i have just seen a second volume, published by him evidently in careless despair. i have desired my bookseller to send you a copy: and allow me to solicit your especial attention to the fragment of a poem entitled _hyperion_, the composition of which was checked by the review in question. the great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry. i speak impartially, for the canons of taste to which keats has conformed in his other compositions are the very reverse of my own. i leave you to judge for yourself: it would be an insult to you to suppose that, from motives however honourable, you would lend yourself to a deception of the public.' the question arises, how did shelley know what he here states--that keats was thrown, by reading the _quarterly_ article, into a state resembling insanity, that he contemplated suicide, &c.? not any document has been published whereby this information could have been imparted to shelley: his chief informant on the subject appears to have been mr. gisborne, who had now for a short while returned to england, and some confirmation may have come from hunt. as to the statements themselves, they have, ever since the appearance in of lord houghton's _life of keats_, been regarded as very gross exaggerations: indeed, i think the tendency has since then been excessive in the reverse direction, and the vexation occasioned to keats by hostile criticism has come to be underrated. shelley addressed to keats in naples another letter, 'anxiously enquiring about his health, offering him advice as to the adaptation of diet to the climate, and concluding with an urgent invitation to pisa, where he could assure him every comfort and attention.' shelley did not, however, re-invite keats to his own house on the present occasion; writing to miss clairmont, 'we are not rich enough for that sort of thing.' the letter to miss clairmont is dated february, , and appears to have been almost simultaneous with the one sent to keats. in that case, keats cannot be supposed to have received the invitation; for he had towards the middle of november quitted naples for rome, and by february he was almost at his last gasp. shelley's feeling as to keats's final volume of poems is further exhibited in the following extracts, (to thomas love peacock, november, .) 'among the modern things which have reached me is a volume of poems by keats; in other respects insignificant enough, but containing the fragment of a poem called _hyperion_, i dare say you have not time to read it; but it is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of keats which i confess i had not before.' (to mrs. leigh hunt, november, .) 'keats's new volume has arrived to us, and the fragment called _hyperion_ promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age. his other things are imperfect enough[ ], and, what is worse, written in the bad sort of style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy that they are imitating hunt and wordsworth.... where is keats now? i am anxiously expecting him in italy, when i shall take care to bestow every possible attention on him. i consider his a most valuable life, and i am deeply interested in his safety. i intend to be the physician both of his body and his soul,--to keep the one warm, and to teach the other greek and spanish. i am aware indeed, in part, that i am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me; and this is an additional motive, and will be an added pleasure.' (to peacock, february, .) 'among your anathemas of the modern attempts in poetry do you include keats's _hyperion_? i think it very fine. his other poems are worth little; but, if the _hyperion_ be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.' there is also a phrase in a letter to mr. ollier, written on may, , before the actual publication of the _lamia_ volume: 'keats, i hope, is going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through the clouds which, though dyed in the finest colours of the air, obscured his rising.' keats died in rome on february, . soon afterwards shelley wrote his _adonais_. he has left various written references to _adonais_, and to keats in connexion with it: these will come more appropriately when i speak of that poem itself. but i may here at once quote from the letter which shelley addressed on june, , to mr. gisborne, who had sent on to him a letter from colonel finch[ ], giving a very painful account of the last days of keats, and especially (perhaps in more than due proportion) of the violence of temper which he had exhibited. shelley wrote thus: 'i have received the heartrending account of the closing scene of the great genius whom envy and ingratitude[ ] scourged out of the world. i do not think that, if i had seen it before, i could have composed my poem. the enthusiasm of the imagination would have overpowered the sentiment. as it is, i have finished my elegy; and this day i send it to the press at pisa. you shall have a copy the moment it is completed, i think it will please you. i have dipped my pen in consuming fire for his destroyers: otherwise the style is calm and solemn[ ]. as i have already said, the last residence of shelley was on the gulf of spezzia. he had a boat built named the ariel (by byron, the don juan), boating being his favourite recreation; and on july, , he and lieut. williams, along with a single sailor-lad, started in her for leghorn, to welcome there leigh hunt. the latter had come to italy with his family, on the invitation of byron and shelley, to join in a periodical to be called _the liberal_. on july shelley, with his two companions, embarked to return to casa magni. towards half-past six in the evening a sudden and tremendous squall sprang up. the ariel sank, either upset by the squall, or (as some details of evidence suggest) run down near viareggio by an italian fishing-boat, the crew of which had plotted to plunder her of a sum of money. the bodies were eventually washed ashore; and on august the corpse of shelley was burned on the beach under the direction of trelawny. in the pocket of his jacket had been found two books--a sophocles, and the _lamia_ volume, doubled back as if it had at the last moment been thrust aside. his ashes were collected, and, with the exception of the heart which was delivered to mrs. shelley, were buried in rome, in the new protestant cemetery. the corpse of shelley's beloved son william had, in , been interred hard by, and in that of keats, in the old cemetery--a space of ground which had, by , been finally closed. the enthusiastic and ideal fervour which marks shelley's poetry could not possibly be simulated--it was a part, the most essential part, of his character. he was remarkably single-minded, in the sense of being constantly ready to do what he professed as, in the abstract, the right thing to be done; impetuous, bold, uncompromising, lavishly generous, and inspired by a general love of humankind, and a coequal detestation of all the narrowing influences of custom and prescription. pity, which included self-pity, was one of his dominant emotions. if we consider what are the uses, and what the abuses, of a character of this type, we shall have some notion of the excellences and the defects of shelley. in person he was well-grown and slim; more nearly beautiful than handsome; his complexion brilliant, his dark-brown but slightly grizzling hair abundant and wavy, and his eyes deep-blue, large, and fixed. his voice was high-pitched--at times discordant, but capable of agreeable modulation; his general aspect uncommonly youthful. the roll of shelley's publications is a long one for a man who perished not yet thirty years of age. i append a list of the principal ones, according to date of publication, which was never very distant from that of composition. several minor productions remain unspecified. . zastrozzi, a romance. puerile rubbish. " original poetry, by victor and cazire. withdrawn, and ever since unknown. " posthumous fragments of margaret nicholson. balderdash, partly (it would appear) intended as burlesque. . st. irvyne, or the rosicrucian, a romance. no better than zastrozzi. . queen mab. didactic and subversive. . alastor, or the spirit of solitude, and other poems. the earliest volume fully worthy of its author. . laon and cythna--reissued as the revolt of islam. an epic of revolution and emancipation in the spenserian stanza. . rosalind and helen, a modern eclogue, and other poems. the character of 'lionel' is an evident idealisation of shelley himself. . the cenci, a tragedy. has generally been regarded as the finest english tragedy of modern date. " prometheus unbound, a lyrical drama, and other poems. the prometheus ranks as at once the greatest and the most thoroughly characteristic work of shelley. . oedipus tyrannus, or swellfoot the tyrant. a satirical drama on the trial of queen caroline. . epipsychidion. a poem of ideal love under a human personation. " adonais. . hellas. a drama on the grecian war of liberation. . posthumous poems. include julian and maddalo, written in , the witch of atlas, , the triumph of life, , and many other compositions and translations. the _masque of anarchy_ and _peter bell the third_, both written by shelley in , were published later on; also various minor poems, complete or fragmentary. _peter bell the third_ has a certain fortuitous connexion with keats. it was written in consequence of shelley's having read in _the examiner_ a notice of _peter bell, a lyrical ballad_ (the production of john hamilton reynolds): and this notice, as has very recently been proved, was the handiwork of keats. shelley cannot have been aware of that fact. his prose _essays and letters_, including _the defence of poetry_, appeared in . the only known work of shelley, extant but yet unpublished, is the _philosophical view of reform_: an abstract of it, with several extracts, was printed in the _fortnightly review_ in . memoir of keats. the parents of john keats were thomas keats, and frances, daughter of mr. jennings, who kept a large livery-stable, the swan and hoop, in the pavement, moorfields, london. thomas keats was the principal stableman or assistant in the same business. john, a seven months' child, was born at the swan and hoop on october, . three other children grew up--george, thomas, and fanny, john is said to have been violent and ungovernable in early childhood. he was sent to a very well-reputed school, that of the rev. john clarke, at enfield: the son charles cowden clarke, whom i have previously mentioned, was an undermaster, and paid particular attention to keats. the latter did not show any remarkable talent at school, but learned easily, and was 'a very orderly scholar,' acquiring a fair amount of latin but no greek. he was active, pugnacious, and popular among his school-fellows. the father died of a fall from his horse in april, : the mother, after re-marrying, succumbed to consumption in february, . before the close of the same year john left school, and he was then apprenticed, to a surgeon at edmonton. in july, , he passed with credit the examination at apothecaries' hall. in keats read for the first time spenser's _faery queen_, and was fascinated with it to a singular degree. this and other poetic reading made him flag in his surgical profession, and finally he dropped it, and for the remainder of his life had no definite occupation save that of writing verse. from his grandparents he inherited a certain moderate sum of money--not more than sufficient to give him a tolerable start in life. he made acquaintance with leigh hunt, then editor of the _examiner_, john hunt, the publisher, charles wentworth dilke who became editor of the _athenaeum_, the painter haydon, and others. his first volume of poems (memorable for little else than the sonnet _on reading chapman's homer_) was published in . it was followed by _endymion_ in april, . in june of the same year keats set off with his chief intimate, charles armitage brown (a retired russia merchant who afterwards wrote a book on shakespeare's sonnets), on a pedestrian tour in scotland, which extended into north ireland as well. in july, in the isle of mull, he got a bad sore throat, of which some symptoms had appeared also in earlier years: it may be regarded as the beginning of his fatal malady. he cut short his tour and returned to hampstead, where he had to nurse his younger brother tom, a consumptive invalid, who died in december of the same year. at the house of the dilkes, in the autumn of , keats made the acquaintance of miss fanny brawne, the orphan daughter of a gentleman of independent means: he was soon desperately in love with her, having 'a swooning admiration of her beauty:' towards the spring of they engaged to marry, with the prospect of a long engagement. on the night of february, , on returning to the house at hampstead which he shared with mr. brown, the poet had his first attack, a violent one, of blood-spitting from the lungs. he rallied somewhat, but suffered a dangerous relapse in june, just prior to the publication of his final volume, containing all his best poems--_isabella, hyperion, the eve of st. agnes, lamia_, and the leading odes. his doctor ordered him off, as a last chance, to italy; previously to this he had been staying in the house of mrs. and miss brawne, who tended him affectionately. keats was now exceedingly unhappy. his passionate love, his easily roused feelings of jealousy of miss brawne, and of suspicious rancour against even the most amicable and attached of his male intimates, the general indifference and the particular scorn and ridicule with which his poems had been received, his narrow means and uncertain outlook, and the prospect of an early death closing a painful and harassing illness--all preyed upon his mind with unrelenting tenacity. the worst of all was the sense of approaching and probably final separation from fanny brawne. on september, , he left england for italy, in company with mr. joseph severn, a student of painting in the royal academy, who, having won the gold medal, was entitled to spend three years abroad for advancement in his art. they travelled by sea to naples; reached that city late in october; and towards the middle of november went on to rome. here keats received the most constant and kind attention from dr. (afterwards sir james) clark. but all was of no avail: after continual and severe suffering, devotedly watched by severn, he expired on february, . he was buried in the old protestant cemetery of rome, under a little altar-tomb sculptured with a greek lyre. his name was inscribed, along with the epitaph which he himself had composed in the bitterness of his soul, 'here lies one whose name was writ in water.' keats was an undersized man, little more than five feet high. his face was handsome, ardent, and full of expression; the hair rich, brown, and curling; the hazel eyes 'mellow and glowing--large, dark, and sensitive.' he was framed for enjoyment; but with that acuteness of feeling which turned even enjoyment into suffering, and then again extracted a luxury out of melancholy. he had vehemence and generosity, and the frankness which belongs to these qualities, not unmingled, however, with a strong dose of suspicion. apart from the overmastering love of his closing years, his one ambition was to be a poet. his mind was little concerned either with the severe practicalities of life, or with the abstractions of religious faith. his poems, consisting of three successive volumes, have been already referred to here. the first volume, the _poems_ of , is mostly of a juvenile kind, containing only scattered suggestions of rich endowment and eventual excellence. _endymion_ is lavish and profuse, nervous and languid, the wealth of a prodigal scattered in largesse of baubles and of gems. the last volume--comprising the _hyperion_--is the work of a noble poetic artist, powerful and brilliant both in imagination and in expression. of the writings published since their author's death, the only one of first-rate excellence is the fragmentary _eve of st. mark_. there is also the drama of _otho the great_, written in co-operation with armitage brown; and in keats's letters many admirable thoughts are admirably worded. as to the relations between shelley and keats, i have to refer back to the preceding memoir of shelley. adonais: its composition and bibliography. for nearly two months after the death of keats, february, , shelley appears to have remained in ignorance of the event: he knew it on or before april. the precise date when he began his elegy does not seem to be recorded: one may suppose it to have been in the latter half of may. on june he wrote to mr. and mrs. gisborne: 'i have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of keats, which will shortly be finished; and i anticipate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it. it is a highly wrought piece of art, and perhaps better, in point of composition, than anything i have written.' a letter to mr. ollier followed immediately afterwards. 'pisa, june th, , 'you may announce for publication a poem entitled _adonais_. it is a lament on the death of poor keats, with some interspersed stabs on the assassins of his peace and of his fame; and will be preceded by a criticism on _hyperion_, asserting the due claims which that fragment gives him to the rank which i have assigned him. my poem is finished, and consists of about forty spenser stanzas [fifty-five as published]. i shall send it to you, either printed at pisa, or transcribed in such a manner as it shall be difficult for the reviser to leave such errors as assist the obscurity of the _prometheus_. but in case i send it printed, it will be merely that mistakes may be avoided. i shall only have a few copies struck off in the cheapest manner. if you have interest enough in the subject, i could wish that you enquired of some of the friends and relations of keats respecting the circumstances of his death, and could transmit me any information you may be able to collect; and especially as [to] the degree in which (as i am assured) the brutal attack in the _quarterly review_ excited the disease by which he perished.' the criticism which shelley intended to write on _hyperion_ remained, to all appearance, unwritten. it will be seen, from the letter of shelley to mr. severn cited further on (p. ), that, from the notion of writing a criticism on _hyperion_ to precede _adonais_, his intention developed into the project of writing a criticism and biography of keats in general, to precede a volume of his entire works; but that, before the close of november, the whole scheme was given up, on the ground that it would produce no impression on an unregardful public. in another letter to ollier, june, the poet says: 'adonais is finished, and you will soon receive it. it is little adapted for popularity, but is perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions.' shelley on june caused his elegy to be printed in pisa, 'with the types of didot': a small quarto, and a handsome one (notwithstanding his project of cheapness); the introductory matter filling five pages, and the poem itself going on from p. to p. . it appeared in blue paper wrappers, with a woodcut of a basket of flowers within an ornamental border. its price was three and sixpence: of late years £ has been given for it--perhaps more. up to july only one copy had reached the author's hands: this he then sent on to the gisbornes, at leghorn. some copies of the pisa edition were afterwards put into circulation in london: there was no separate english edition. the gisbornes having acknowledged the elegy with expressions of admiration, the poet replied as follows: 'bagni [di pisa], july . 'my dearest friends, 'i am fully repaid for the painful emotions from which some verses of my poem sprung by your sympathy and approbation; which is all the reward i expect, and as much as i desire. it is not for me to judge whether, in the high praise your feelings assign me, you are right or wrong. the poet and the man are two different natures: though they exist together, they may be unconscious of each other, and incapable of deciding on each other's powers and efforts by any reflex act. the decision of the cause whether or not i am a poet is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity shall assemble: but the court is a very severe one, and i fear that the verdict will be "guilty--death."' a letter to mr. ollier was probably a little later. it says: 'i send you a sketch for a frontispiece to the poem _adonais_. pray let it be put into the engraver's hands immediately, as the poem is already on its way to you, and i should wish it to be ready for its arrival. the poem is beautifully printed, and--what is of more consequence--correctly: indeed, it was to obtain this last point that i sent it to the press at pisa. in a few days you will receive the bill of lading.' nothing is known as to the sketch which shelley thus sent. it cannot, i presume, have been his own production, nor yet severn's: possibly it was supplied by lieutenant williams, who had some aptitude as an amateur artist. i add some of the poet's other expressions regarding _adonais_, which he evidently regarded with more complacency than any of his previous works--at any rate, as a piece of execution. hitherto his favourite had been _prometheus unbound_: i am fain to suppose that that great effort did not now hold a second place in his affections, though he may have considered that the _adonais_, as being a less arduous feat, came nearer to reaching its goal. (to peacock, august, .) 'i have sent you by the gisbornes a copy of the elegy on keats. the subject, i know, will not please you; but the composition of the poetry, and the taste in which it is written, i do not think bad.' (to hunt, august.) 'before this you will have seen _adonais_. lord byron--i suppose from modesty on account of his being mentioned in it--did not say a word of _adonais_[ ], though he was loud in his praise of _prometheus_, and (what you will not agree with him in) censure of _the cenci_.' (to horace smith, september,) 'i am glad you like _adonais_, and particularly that you do not think it metaphysical, which i was afraid it was. i was resolved to pay some tribute of sympathy to the unhonoured dead; but i wrote, as usual, with a total ignorance of the effect that i should produce.' (to ollier, september.) 'the _adonais_, in spite of its mysticism, is the least imperfect of my compositions; and, as the image of my regret and honour for poor keats, i wish it to be so. i shall write to you probably by next post on the subject of that poem; and should have sent the promised criticism for the second edition, had i not mislaid, and in vain sought for, the volume that contains _hyperion_.' (to ollier, november.) 'i am especially curious to hear the fate of _adonais_. i confess i should be surprised if that poem were born to an immortality of oblivion.' (to ollier, january, .) 'i was also more than commonly interested in the success of _adonais_. i do not mean the sale, but the effect produced; and i should have [been] glad to have received some communication from you respecting it. i do not know even whether it has been published, and still less whether it has been republished with the alterations i sent.' as to the alterations sent nothing definite is known, but some details bearing on this point will be found in our notes, p. , &c. (to gisborne, april) 'i know what to think of _adonais_, but what to think of those who confound it with the many bad poems of the day i know not.' this expression seems to indicate that mr. gisborne had sent shelley some of the current criticisms--there were probably but few in all--upon _adonais_: to this matter i shall recur further on. (to gisborne, june.) 'the _adonais_ i wished to have had a fair chance, both because it is a favourite with me, and on account of the memory of keats--who was a poet of great genius, let the classic party say what it will.' earlier than the latest of these extracts shelley had sent to mr. severn a copy of _adonais_, along with a letter which i append. 'pisa, nov. th, . 'dear sir, 'i send you the elegy on poor keats, and i wish it were better worth your acceptance. you will see, by the preface, that it was written before i could obtain any particular account of his last moments. all that i still know was communicated to me by a friend who had derived his information from colonel finch, i have ventured [in the preface] to express as i felt the respect and admiration which _your_ conduct towards him demands. 'in spite of his transcendent genius, keats never was, nor ever will be, a popular poet; and the total neglect and obscurity in which the astonishing remains of his mind still lie was hardly to be dissipated by a writer who, however he may differ from keats in more important qualities, at least resembles him in that accidental one, a want of popularity. 'i have little hope therefore that the poem i send you will excite any attention, nor do i feel assured that a critical notice of his writings would find a single reader. but for these considerations, it had been my intention to have collected the remnants of his compositions, and to have published them with a life and criticism. has he left any poems or writings of whatsoever kind, and in whose possession are they? perhaps you would oblige me by information on this point. 'many thanks for the picture you promise me [presumably a portrait of keats, but shelley does not seem ever to have received one from severn]: i shall consider it among the most sacred relics of the past. for my part, i little expected, when i last saw keats at my friend leigh hunt's, that i should survive him. 'should you ever pass through pisa, i hope to have the pleasure of seeing you, and of cultivating an acquaintance into something pleasant, begun under such melancholy auspices. 'accept, my dear sir, the assurance of my highest esteem, and believe me 'your most sincere and faithful servant, 'percy b. shelley. 'do you know leigh hunt? i expect him and his family here every day.' it may have been observed that shelley, whenever he speaks of critical depreciation of keats, refers only to one periodical, the _quarterly review_: probably he did not distinctly know of any other: but the fact is that _blackwood's magazine_ was worse than the _quarterly_. the latter was sneering and supercilious: _blackwood_ was vulgarly taunting and insulting, and seems to have provoked keats the more of the two, though perhaps he considered the attack in the _quarterly_ to be more detrimental to his literary standing. the _quarterly_ notice is of so much import in the life and death of keats, and in the genesis of _adonais_, that i shall give it, practically _in extenso_, before closing this section of my work: with _blackwood_ i can deal at once. a series of articles _on the cockney school of poetry_ began in this magazine in october, , being directed mainly and very venomously against leigh hunt. no. of the series appeared in august, , falling foul of keats. it is difficult to say whether the priority in abusing keats should of right be assigned to _blackwood_ or to the _quarterly_: the critique in the latter review belongs to the number for april, , but this number was not actually issued until september. the writer of the _blackwood_ papers signed himself z. z. is affirmed to have been lockhart, the son-in-law of sir walter scott, and afterwards editor of the _quarterly review_: more especially the article upon keats is attributed to lockhart. a different account, as to the series in general, is that the author was john wilson (christopher north), revised by mr. william blackwood. but z. resisted more than one vigorous challenge to unmask, and some doubt as to his identity may still remain. here are some specimens of the amenity with which keats was treated in _blackwood's magazine_:-- 'his friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town.... the frenzy of the _poems_ [keats's first volume, ] was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _endymion_.... we hope however that, in so young a person and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable.... mr. hunt is a small poet, but 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.... it is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet: so back to the shop, mr. john, back to "plaster, pills, and ointment-boxes," &c. but for heaven's sake, young sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.' even the death of keats, in , did not abate the rancour of _blackwood's magazine_. witness the following extracts. ( ) 'keats had been dished--utterly demolished and dished--by _blackwood_ long before mr. gifford's scribes mentioned his name.... but let us hear no more of johnny keats. it is really too disgusting to have him and his poems recalled in this manner after all the world thought they had got rid of the concern.' ( ) 'mr. shelley died, it seems, with a volume of mr. keats's poetry "grasped with one hand in his bosom"--rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. but what a rash man shelley was to put to sea in a frail boat with jack's poetry on board!... down went the boat with a "swirl"! i lay a wager that it righted soon after ejecting jack.'... ( ) 'keats was a cockney, and cockneys claimed him for their own. never was there a young man so encrusted with conceit.' if this is the tone adopted by _blackwood's magazine_ in relation to keats living and dead, one need not be surprised to find that the verdict of the same review upon the poem of _adonais_, then newly published, ran to the following effect:-- 'locke says the most resolute liar cannot lie more than once in every three sentences. folly is more engrossing; for we could prove from the present elegy that it is possible to write two sentences of pure nonsense out of three. a more faithful calculation would bring us to ninety-nine out of every hundred; or--as the present consists of only fifty-five stanzas--leaving about five readable lines in the entire.... a mr. keats, who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of cockney poetry, has lately died of a consumption, after having written two or three little books of verses much neglected by the public.... the new school, however, will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism of the _quarterly review_: "o flesh, how art thou fishified!" there is even an aggravation in this cruelty of the review--for it had taken three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow having been inflicted at least as long since. [this is not correct: the _quarterly_ critique, having appeared in september, , preceded the death of keats by two years and five months].... the fact is, the _quarterly_, finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the servile _slang_ that cockaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that grub street empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners[ ] and of masters to the scribbler. keats wrote on; but he wrote _indecently_, probably in the indulgence of his social propensities.' the virulence with which shelley, as author of _adonais_, was assailed by _blackwood's magazine_, is the more remarkable, and the more symptomatic of partizanship against keats and any of his upholders, as this review had in previous instances been exceptionally civil to shelley, though of course with some serious offsets. the notices of _alastor, rosalind and helen_, and _prometheus unbound_--more especially the first--in the years and , would be found to bear out this statement. from the dates already cited, it may be assumed that the pisan edition of _adonais_ was in london in the hands of mr. ollier towards the middle of august, , purchasable by whoever might be minded to buy it. very soon afterwards it was reprinted in the _literary chronicle and weekly review_, published by limbird in the strand-- december, : a rather singular, not to say piratical, proceeding. an editorial note was worded thus: 'through the kindness of a friend, we have been favoured with the latest production of a gentleman of no ordinary genius, mr. bysshe shelley. it is an elegy on the death of a youthful poet of considerable promise, mr. keats, and was printed at pisa. as the copy now before us is perhaps [surely not] the only one that has reached england, and the subject is one that will excite much interest, we shall print the whole of it.' this promise was not literally fulfilled, for stanzas to were omitted, not apparently with any special object. after the publication in london of the pisan edition of _adonais_, the poem remained unreprinted until . it was then issued at cambridge, at the instance of lord houghton (mr. richard monckton milnes) and mr. arthur hallam, the latter having brought from italy a copy of the original pamphlet. the cambridge edition, an octavo in paper wrappers, is now still scarcer than the pisan one. the only other separate edition of _adonais_ was that of mr. buxton forman, , corresponding substantially with the form which the poem assumes in the _complete works of shelley_, as produced by the same editor. it need hardly be said that _adonais_ was included in mrs. shelley's editions of her husband's poems, and in all other editions of any fulness: it has also appeared in most of the volumes of selections. as early as there was an italian translation of this elegy. it is named _adone, nella morte di giovanni keats, elegia di percy bishe shelley, tradotta da l. a. damaso pareto_. _genova, dalla tifografia pellas_, . in this small quarto thirty pages are occupied by a notice of the life and poetry of shelley. i shall not here enter upon a consideration of the cancelled passages of _adonais_: they will appear more appositely further on (see pp. - , &c.). i therefore conclude the present section by quoting the _quarterly review_ article upon _endymion_--omitting only a few sentences which do not refer directly to keats, but mostly to leigh hunt:-- 'reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. on the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. not that we have been wanting in our duty; far from it; indeed, we have made efforts, almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it: but, with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this poetic romance consists. we should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into. 'it is not that mr. keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)--it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius. he has all these: but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called "cockney poetry," which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. 'of this school mr. leigh hunt, as we observed in a former number, aspires to be the hierophant.... this author is a copyist of mr. hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd, than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. but mr. keats had advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples. his nonsense, therefore, is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by mr. leigh hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry. 'mr. keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances. "knowing within myself." he says, "the manner in which this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that i make it public. what manner i mean will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished." we humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be "quite so clear"; we really do not know what he means. but the next passage is more intelligible. "the two first books, and indeed the two last, i feel sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press." thus "the two first books" are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and "the two last" are, it seems, in the same condition; and, as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear, and we believe a very just, estimate of the entire work. 'mr. keats, however, deprecates criticism on this "immature and feverish work" in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the "fierce hell" of criticism[ ] which terrify his imagination if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which at least ought to be warned of the wrong; and if finally he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline. 'of the story we have been able to make out but little. it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of diana and endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty, and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification. and here again we are perplexed and puzzled. at first it appeared to us that mr. keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at _bouts rimés_; but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play that the rhymes, when filled up, shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. he seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes. there is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. he wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn. 'we shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem;-- "such the sun, the moon, trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep; and such are daffodils, with the green world they live in; and clear rills that for themselves a cooling covert make 'gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms; and such too is the grandeur of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead," &c. here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_, produces the simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that "the _dooms_ of the mighty dead" would never have intruded themselves but for the "fair musk-rose _blooms_." 'again:-- "for 'twas the morn. apollo's upward fire made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre of brightness so unsullied that therein a melancholy spirit well might win oblivion, and melt out his essence fine into the winds. rain-scented eglantine gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; the lark was lost in him; cold springs had run to warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass of nature's lives and wonders pulsed tenfold to feel this sunrise and its glories old." here apollo's _fire_ produces a _pyre_--a silvery pyre--of clouds, _wherein_ a spirit might _win_ oblivion, and melt his essence _fine_; and scented _eglantine_ gives sweets to the _sun_, and cold springs had _run_ into the _grass_; and then the pulse of the _mass_ pulsed _tenfold_ to feel the glories _old_ of the new-born day, &c. 'one example more:-- "be still the unimaginable lodge for solitary thinkings, such as dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven, then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven that spreading in this dull and clodded earth, gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth." _lodge, dodge--heaven, leaven--earth, birth_--such, in six words, is the sum and substance of six lines. 'we come now to the author's taste in versification. he cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. let us see. the following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our english heroic metre:-- "dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, the passion poesy, glories infinite. "so plenteously all weed-hidden roots. "of some strange history, potent to send. "before the deep intoxication. "her scarf into a fluttering pavilion. "the stubborn canvas for my voyage prepared. "endymion, the cave is secreter than the isle of delos. echo hence shall stir no sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys and trembles through my labyrinthine hair." 'by this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. we now present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of mr. leigh hunt, he adorns our language. 'we are told that turtles _passion_ their voices; that an arbour was _nested_, and a lady's locks _gordianed_ up; and, to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalized, mr. keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and human _serpentry_, the _honey-feel_ of bliss, wives prepare _needments_, and so forth. 'then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads. thus the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night up-took: the wind up-blows, and the hours are down-sunken. but, if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. thus a lady whispers _pantingly_ and close, makes _hushing_ signs, and steers her skiff into a _ripply_ cove, a shower falls _refreshfully_, and a vulture has a _spreaded_ tail. 'but enough of mr. leigh hunt and his simple neophyte. if any one should be bold enough to purchase this poetic romance, and so much more patient than ourselves as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success. we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to mr. keats and to our readers.' this criticism is not, i think, exactly what shelley called it in the preface to _adonais_--'savage:' it is less savage than contemptuous, and is far indeed from competing with the abuse which was from time to time, and in various reviews, poured forth upon shelley himself. it cannot be denied that some of the blemishes which it points out in _endymion_ are real blemishes, and very serious ones. the grounds on which one can fairly object to the criticism are that its tone is purposely ill-natured; its recognition of merits scanty out of all proportion to its censure of defects; and its spirit that of prepense disparagement founded not so much on the poetical errors of keats as on the fact that he was a friend of leigh hunt, the literary and also the political antagonist of the _quarterly review_. the editor, mr. gifford, seems always to have been regarded as the author of this criticism--i presume, correctly so. that keats was a friend of leigh hunt in the earlier period of his own poetical career is a fact; but not long after the appearance of the _quarterly review_ article he conceived a good deal of dislike and even animosity against this literary ally. possibly the taunts of the _quarterly review_, and the alienation of keats from hunt, had some connexion as cause and effect. in a letter from john keats to his brother george and his sister-in-law occurs the following passage[ ], dated towards the end of : 'hunt has asked me to meet tom moore some day--so you shall hear of him. 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 one 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 in morals. he understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself professes, he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love are 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. this distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of beauty.' for the text of _adonais_ in the present edition i naturally have recourse to the original pisan edition, but without neglecting such alterations as have been properly introduced into later issues; these will be fully indicated and accounted for in my notes. in the minor matters of punctuation, &c., i do not consider myself bound to reproduce the first or any other edition, but i follow the plan which appears to myself most reasonable and correct; any point worthy of discussion in these details will also receive attention in the notes. adonais: its argument. the poem of _adonais_ can of course be contemplated from different points of view. its biographical relations have been already considered in our preceding sections: its poetical structure and value, its ideal or spiritual significance, and its particular imagery and diction, will occupy us much as we proceed. at present i mean simply to deal with the argument of _adonais_. it has a thread--certainly a slender thread--of narrative or fable; the personation of the poetic figure adonais, as distinct from the actual man john keats, and the incidents with which that poetic figure is associated. the numerals which i put in parentheses indicate the stanzas in which the details occur. ( ) adonais is now dead: the hour which witnessed his loss mourns him, and is to rouse the other hours to mourn. ( ) he was the son of the widowed urania, ( ) her youngest and dearest son. ( ) he was slain by a nightly arrow--'pierced by the shaft which flies in darkness.' at the time of his death urania was in her paradise (pleasure-garden), slumbering, while echoes listened to the poems which he had written as death was impending. ( ) urania should now wake and weep; yet wherefore? 'he is gone where all things wise and fair descend.' ( ) nevertheless let her weep and lament. ( ) adonais had come to rome. ( ) death and corruption are now in his chamber, but corruption delays as yet to strike. ( ) the dreams whom he nurtured, as a herdsman tends his flock, mourn around him, ( ) one of them was deceived for a moment into supposing that a tear shed by itself came from the eyes of adonais, and must indicate that he was still alive. ( ) another washed his limbs, and a third clipped and shed her locks upon his corpse, &c. ( ) then came others--desires, adorations, fantasies, &c. ( to ) morning lamented, and echo, and spring. ( ) aibion wailed. may 'the curse of cain light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,' and scared away its angel soul! ( ) can it be that the soul alone dies, when nothing else is annihilated? ( ) misery aroused urania: urged by dreams and echoes, she sprang up, and ( ) sought the death-chamber of adonais, ( ) enduring much suffering from 'barbèd tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they.' ( ) as she arrived, death was shamed for a moment, and adonais breathed again: but immediately afterwards 'death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.' ( ) urania would fain have died along with adonais; but, chained as she was to time, this was denied her. ( ) she reproached adonais for having, though defenceless, dared the dragon in his den. had he waited till the day of his maturity, 'the monsters of life's waste' would have fled from him, as ( ) the wolves, ravens, and vultures had fled from, and fawned upon, 'the pythian of the age.' ( ) then came the mountain shepherds, bewailing adonais: the pilgrim of eternity, the lyrist of lerne, and ( ) among others, one frail form, a pard-like spirit. ( ) urania asked the name of this last shepherd: he then made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, which was like cain's or christ's. ( ) another mountain shepherd, 'the gentlest of the wise,' leaned over the deathbed. ( ) adonais has drunk poison. some 'deaf and viperous murderer' gave him the envenomed draught. [i must here point out a singular discrepancy in the poem of _adonais_, considered as a narrative or apologue. hitherto we had been told that adonais was killed by an arrow or dart--he was 'pierced by the shaft which flies in darkness,' and the man who 'pierced his innocent breast' had incurred the curse of cain: he had 'a wound' (stanza ). there was also the alternative statement that adonais, unequipped with the shield of wisdom or the spear of scorn, had been so rash as to 'dare the unpastured dragon in his den'; and from this the natural inference is that not any 'shaft which flies in darkness,' but the dragon himself, had slaughtered the too-venturous youth. but now we hear that he was done to death by poison. certainly when we look beneath the symbol into the thing symbolized, we can see that these divergent allegations represent the same fact, and the readers of the elegy are not called upon to form themselves into a coroner's jury to determine whether a 'shaft' or a 'dragon' or 'poison' was the instrument of murder: nevertheless the statements in the text are neither identical nor reconcileable for purposes of mythical narration, and it seems strange that the author should not have taken this into account. it will be found as we proceed (see p. ) that the reference to 'poison' comes into the poem as a direct reproduction from the elegy of moschus upon bion--being the passage which forms the second of the two mottoes to _adonais_.] ( ) this murderer, a 'nameless worm,' was alone callous to the prelude of the forthcoming song. ( ) let him live on in remorse and self-contempt. ( ) neither should we weep that adonais has 'fled far from these carrion-kites that scream below.' his spirit flows back to its fountain, a portion of the eternal. ( ) indeed, he is not dead nor sleeping, but 'has awakened from the dream of life.' not he decays, but we. ( ) let not us, nor the powers of nature, mourn for _adonais_. ( ) he is made one with nature. ( ) in 'the unapparent' he was welcomed by chatterton, sidney, lucan, and ( ) many more immortals, and was hailed as the master of a 'kingless sphere' in a 'heaven of song.' ( ) let any rash mourner go to rome, and ( ) visit the cemetery. ( ) and thou, my heart, why linger and shrink? adonais calls thee: be no longer divided from him. ( ) the soul of adonais beacons to thee 'from the abode where the eternal are.' this may he the most convenient place for raising a question of leading importance to the argument of _adonais_--who is the personage designated under the name urania?--a question which, so far as i know, has never yet been mooted among the students of shelley. who is urania? why is she represented as the mother of adonais (keats), and the chief mourner for his untimely death? in mythology the name urania is assigned to two divinities wholly distinct. the first is one of the nine muses, the muse of astronomy: the second is aphrodite (venus). we may without any hesitation assume that shelley meant one of these two: but a decision, as to which of the two becomes on reflection by no means so obvious as one might at first suppose. we will first examine the question as to the muse urania. to say that the poet keats, figured as adonais, was son to one of the muses, appears so natural and straightforward a symbolic suggestion as to command summary assent. but why, out of the nine sisters, should the muse of astronomy be selected? keats never wrote about astronomy, and had no qualifications and no faintest inclination for writing about it: this science, and every other exact or speculative science, were highly alien from his disposition and turn of mind. and yet, on casting about for a reason, we can find that after all and in a certain sense there is one forthcoming, of some considerable amount of relevancy. in the eyes of shelley, keats was principally and above all the poet of _hyperion_; and _hyperion_ is, strictly speaking, a poem about the sun. in like manner, _endymion_ is a poem about the moon. thus, from one point of view--i cannot see any other--keats might be regarded as inspired by, or a son of, the muse of astronomy. a subordinate point of some difficulty arises from stanza , where adonais is spoken of as 'the nursling of thy [urania's] widowhood'--which seems to mean, son of urania, born after the father's death. urania is credited in mythology with the motherhood of two sons--linus, her offspring by amphimacus, who was a son of poseidon, and hymenaeus, her offspring by apollo. it might be idle to puzzle over this question of urania's 'widowhood,' or to attempt to found upon it (on the assumption that urania the muse is referred to) any theory as to who her deceased consort could have been: for it is as likely as not that the phrase which i have cited from the poem is not really intended to define with any sort of precision the parentage of the supposititious adonais, but, practically ignoring adonais, applies to keats himself, and means simply that keats, as the son of the muse, was born out of time--born in an unpoetical and unappreciative age. many of my readers will recollect that milton, in the elaborate address which opens book of _paradise lost_, invokes urania. he is careful however to say that he does not mean the muse urania, but the spirit of 'celestial song,' sister of eternal wisdom, both of them well-pleasing to the 'almighty father.' thus far for urania the muse. i now come to aphrodite urania. this deity is to be carefully distinguished from the cyprian or pandemic aphrodite: she is different, not only in attribute and function, but even in personality and origin. she is the daughter of heaven (uranus) and light; her influence is heavenly: she is heavenly or spiritual love, as distinct from earthly or carnal love. if the personage in shelley's elegy is to be regarded, not as the muse urania, but as aphrodite urania, she here represents spiritual or intellectual aspiration, the love of abstract beauty, the divine element in poesy or art. as such, aphrodite urania would be no less appropriate than urania or any other muse to be designated as the mother of adonais (keats). but the more cogent argument in favour of aphrodite urania is to be based upon grounds of analogy or transfer, rather than upon any reasons of antecedent probability. the part assigned to urania in shelley's elegy is very closely modelled upon the part assigned to aphrodite in the elegy of bion upon adonis (see the section in this volume, _bion and moschus_). what aphrodite cypris does in the _adonis_, that urania does in the _adonais_. the resemblances are exceedingly close, in substance and in detail: the divergences are only such as the altered conditions naturally dictate. the cyprian aphrodite is the bride of adonis, and as such she bewails him: the uranian aphrodite is the mother of adonais, and she laments him accordingly. carnal relationship and carnal love are transposed into spiritual relationship and spiritual love. the hands are the hands, in both poems, of aphrodite: the voices are respectively those of cypris and of urania. it is also worth observing that the fragmentary poem of shelley named _prince athanase_, written in , was at first named _pandemos and urania_; and was intended, as mrs. shelley informs us, to embody the contrast between 'the earthly and unworthy venus,' and the nobler ideal of love, the heaven-born or heaven-sent venus. the poem would thus have borne a certain relation to _alastor_, and also to _epipsychidion_. the use of the name 'urania' in this proposed title may help to confirm us in the belief that there is no reason why shelley should not have used the same name in _adonais_ with the implied meaning of aphrodite urania. on the whole i am strongly of opinion that the urania of _adonais_ is aphrodite, and not the muse. adonais: general exposition. the consideration which, in the preceding section, we have bestowed upon the 'argument' of _adonais_ will assist us not a little in grasping the full scope of the poem. it may be broadly divided into three currents of thought, or (as one might say) into three acts of passion. i. the sense of grievous loss in the death of john keats the youthful and aspiring poet, cut short as he was approaching his prime; and the instinctive impulse to mourning and desolation. . the mythical or symbolic embodiment of the events in the laments of urania and the mountain shepherds, and in the denunciation of the ruthless destroyer of the peace and life of adonais. . the rejection of mourning as one-sided, ignorant, and a reversal of the true estimate of the facts; and a recognition of the eternal destiny of keats in the world of mind, coupled with the yearning of shelley to have done with the vain shows of things in this cycle of mortality, and to be at one with keats in the mansions of the everlasting. such is the evolution of this elegy; from mourning to rapture: from a purblind consideration of deathly phenomena to the illumination of the individual spirit which contemplates the eternity of spirit as the universal substance. shelley raises in his poem a very marked contrast between the death of adonais (keats) as a mortal man succumbing to 'the common fate,' and the immortality of his spirit as a vital immaterial essence surviving the death of the body: he uses terms such as might be adopted by any believer in the doctrine of 'the immortality of the soul,' in the ordinary sense of that phrase. it would not however be safe to infer that shelley, at the precise time when he wrote _adonais_, was really in a more definite frame of mind on this theme than at other periods of his life, or of a radically different conviction. as a fact, his feelings on the great problems of immortality were acute, his opinions regarding them vague and unsettled. he certainly was not an adherent of the typical belief on this subject; the belief that a man on this earth is a combination of body and soul, in a state--his sole state--of 'probation'; that, when the body dies and decays, the soul continues to be the same absolute individual identity; and that it passes into a condition of eternal and irreversible happiness or misery, according to the faith entertained or the deeds done in the body. his belief amounted more nearly to this: that a human soul is a portion of the universal soul, subjected, during its connexion with the body, to all the illusions, the dreams and nightmares, of sense; and that, after the death of the body, it continues to be a portion of the universal soul, liberated, from those illusions, and subsisting in some condition which the human reason is not capable of defining as a state either of personal consciousness or of absorption. and, so far as the human being exercised, during the earthly life, the authentic functions of soul, that same exercise of function continues to be the permanent record of the soul in the world of mind. if any reader thinks that this seems a vague form of belief, the answer is that the belief of shelley was indeed a vague one. in the poem of _adonais_ it remains, to my apprehension, as vague as in his other writings: but it assumes a shape of greater definition, because the poem is, by its scheme and intent, a personating poem, in which the soul of keats has to be greeted by the soul of chatterton, just as the body of adonais has to be caressed and bewailed by urania. using language of a semi-emblematic kind, we might perhaps express something of shelley's belief thus:--mankind is the microcosm, as distinguished from the rest of the universe, which forms the macrocosm; and, as long as a man's body and soul remain in combination, his soul pertains to the microcosm: when this combination ceases with the death of the body, his soul, in whatever sense it may be held to exist, lapses into the macrocosm, but there is neither knowledge as to the mode of its existence, nor speech capable of recording this. as illustrating our poet's conceptions on these mysterious subjects, i append extracts from three of his prose writings. the first extract comes from his fragment _on life_, which may have been written (but this is quite uncertain) towards ; the second from his fragment _on a future state_, for which some similar date is suggested; the third from the notes to his drama of _hellas_, written in , later than _adonais_. ( ) 'the most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life which, though startling to the apprehension, is in fact that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. it strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. i confess that i am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent[ ] to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived. it is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle--and we must be long convicted before we can be convinced that the solid universe of external things is "such stuff as dreams are made of." the shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their [? the] violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism. this materialism is a seducing system to young and superficial minds: it allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. but i was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded. man is a being of high aspirations, "looking both before and after," whose "thoughts wander through eternity," disclaiming alliance with transcience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and the past; being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be. whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. this is the character of all life and being. each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained. such contemplations as these materialism, and the popular philosophy of mind and matter, alike forbid: they are only consistent with the intellectual system.... the view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the intellectual philosophy is that of unity. nothing exists but as it is perceived. the difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of "ideas" and of "external objects." pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. the words "i, you, they," are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind. let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption that i, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. i am but a portion of it.' ( ) 'suppose however that the intellectual and vital principle differs in the most marked and essential manner from all other known substances; that they have all some resemblance between themselves which _it_ in no degree participates. in what manner can this concession be made an argument for its imperishability? all that we see or know perishes[ ] and is changed. life and thought differ indeed from everything else: but that it survives that period beyond which we have no experience of its existence such distinction and dissimilarity affords no shadow of proof, and nothing but our own desires could have led us to conjecture or imagine. have we existed before birth? it is difficult to conceive the possibility of this.... if we have _not_ existed before birth; if, at the period when the parts of our nature on which thought and life depend seem to be woven together, they _are_ woven together; if there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our existence apparently commences; then there are no grounds for supposition that we shall continue to exist after our existence has apparently ceased. so far as thought and life is concerned, the same will take place with regard to us, individually considered, after death, as had place before our birth. it is said that it is possible that we should continue to exist in some mode totally inconceivable to us at present. this is a most unreasonable presumption.... such assertions ... persuade indeed only those who desire to be persuaded. this desire to be for ever as we are--the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change which is common to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe--is indeed the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a future state.' ( . note to the chorus, 'worlds on worlds are rolling ever,' &c.) 'the first stanza contrasts the immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the planets and (to use a common and inadequate phrase) clothe themselves in matter, with the transcience of the noblest manifestations of the external world. the concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or less exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have attained. let it not be supposed that i mean to dogmatise upon a subject concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that i think the gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions.... that there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain: meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. until better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.' the reader will perceive that in these three passages the dominant ideas, very briefly stated, are as follows:--( ) mind is the aggregate of all individual minds; ( ) man has no reason for expecting that his mind or soul will be immortal; ( ) no reason, except such as inheres in the very desire which he feels for immortality. these opinions, deliberately expressed by shelley at different dates as a theorist in prose, should be taken into account if we endeavour to estimate what he means when, as a poet, he speaks, whether in _hellas_ or in _adonais_, of an individual, his mind and his immortality. when shelley calls upon us to regard keats (adonais) as mortal in body but immortal in soul or mind, his real intent is probably limited to this: that keats has been liberated, by the death of the body, from the dominion and delusions of the senses; and that he, while in the flesh, developed certain fruits of mind which survive his body, and will continue to survive it indefinitely, and will form a permanent inheritance of thought and of beauty to succeeding generations. keats himself, in one of his most famous lines, expressed a like conception, 'a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' shelley was faithful to his canons of highest literary or poetical form in giving a greek shape to his elegy on keats; but it may be allowed to his english readers, or at any rate to some of them, to think that he hereby fell into a certain degree of artificiality of structure, undesirable in itself, and more especially hampering him in a plain and self-consistent expression both of his real feeling concerning keats, and of his resentment against those who had cut short, or were supposed to have cut short, the career and the poetical work of his friend. moreover shelley went beyond the mere recurrence to greek forms of impersonation and expression: he took two particular greek authors, and two particular greek poems, as his principal model. these two poems are the elegy of bion on adonis, and the elegy of moschus on bion. to imitate is not to plagiarize; and shelley cannot reasonably be called a plagiarist because he introduced into _adonais_ passages which are paraphrased or even translated from bion and moschus. it does seem singular however that neither in the _adonais_ volume nor in any of his numerous written remarks upon the poem does shelley ever once refer to this state of the facts. possibly in using the name 'adonais' he intended to refer the reader indirectly to the 'adonis' of bion; and he prefixed to the preface of his poem, as a motto, four verses from the elegy of moschus upon bion. this may have been intended for a hint to the reader as to the grecian sources of the poem. the whole matter will receive detailed treatment in our next section, as well as in the notes. the passages of _adonais_ which can be traced back to bion and moschus are not the finest things in the poem: mostly they fill out its fabular 'argument' with brilliancy and suavity, rather than with nerve and pathos. the finest things are to be found in the denunciation of the 'deaf and viperous murderer;' in the stanzas concerning the 'mountain shepherds,' especially the figure representing shelley himself; and in the solemn and majestic conclusion, where the poet rises from the region of earthly sorrow into the realm of ideal aspiration and contemplation. shelley is generally--and i think most justly--regarded as a peculiarly melodious versifier: but it must not be supposed that he is rigidly exact in his use of rhyme. the contrary can be proved from the entire body of his poems. _adonais_ is, in this respect, neither more nor less correct than his other writings. it would hardly be reasonable to attribute his laxity in rhyming to either carelessness, indifference, or unskilfulness: but rather to a deliberate preference for a certain variety in the rhyme-sounds--as tending to please the ear, and availing to satisfy it in the total effect, without cloying it by any tight-drawn uniformity. such a preference can be justified on two grounds: firstly, that the general effect of the slightly varied sounds is really the more gratifying of the two methods, and i believe that, practised within reasonable limits, it is so; and secondly, that the requirements of sense are superior to those of sound, and that, in the effort after severely exact rhyming, a writer would often, be compelled to sacrifice some delicacy of thought, or some grace or propriety of diction. looking through the stanzas of _adonais_, i find the following laxities of rhyming: compeers, dares; anew, knew (this repetition of an identical syllable as if it were a rhyme is very frequent with shelley, who evidently considered it to be permissible, and even right--and in this view he has plenty of support): god; road; last, waste; taught, not; break, cheek (two instances); ground, moaned; both, youth; rise, arise; song, stung; steel, fell; light, delight; part, depart; wert, heart; wrong, tongue; brow, so; moan, one; crown, tone; song, unstrung; knife, grief; mourn, burn; dawn, moan; bear, bear; blot, thought; renown, chatterton; thought, not; approved, reproved; forth, earth; nought, not; home, tomb; thither, together; wove, of; riven, heaven. these are instances of irregularity. the number of stanzas in _adonais_ is : therefore there is more than one such irregularity for every two stanzas. it may not be absolutely futile if we bestow a little more attention upon the details of these laxities of rhyme. the repetition of an identical syllable has been cited times. in instances the sound of _taught_ is assimilated to that of _not_ (i take here no account of differences of spelling, but only of the sounds); in , the sound of _ground_ and of _renown_ to that of _moaned_, or of _chatterton_; in , the sound of _o_ in _road, both_, and _wove_, to that in _god, youth_, and _of_; in , the sound of _song_ to that of _stung_; in , the sound of _ee_ in _compeers, steel, cheek_, and _grief_, to that in _dares, fell, break_ and _knife_; in , the sound of _e_ in _wert_ and _earth_ to that in _heart_ and _forth_; in , the sound of _o_ in _moan_ and _home_ to that in _one, dawn_, and _tomb_; in , the sound of _thither_ to that of _together_. the other cases which i have cited have only a single instance apiece. it results therefore that the vowel-sound subjected to the most frequent variations is that of _o_, whether single or in combination. shelley may be considered to allow himself more than an average degree of latitude in rhyming: but it is a fact that, if the general body of english poetry is scrutinized, it will be found to be more or less lax in this matter. this question is complicated by another question--that of how words were pronounced at different periods in our literary history: in order to exclude the most serious consequent difficulties, i shall say nothing here about any poet prior to milton. i take at haphazard four pages of rhymed verse from each of the following six poets, and the result proves to be as follows:-- _milton._--pass, was; feast, rest; come, room; still, invisible; vouchsafe, safe; moon, whereon; ordained, land. instances. _dryden._--alone, fruition; guard, heard; pursued, good: procured, secured, instances. _pope._--given, heaven; steer, character; board, lord; fault, thought; err, singular. instances. _gray._--beech, stretch; borne, thorn; abode, god; broke, rock, instances. _coleridge._--not a single instance. _byron._--given, heaven; moore, yore; look, duke; song, tongue; knot, not; of, enough; bestowed, mood. instances. in all these cases, as in that of shelley's _adonais_, i have taken no count of those instances of lax sound-rhyme which are correct letter-rhyme--such as the coupling of _move_ with _love_, or of _star_ with _war_; for these, however much some more than commonly purist ears may demur to them, appear to be part and parcel of the rhyming system of the english language. i need hardly say that, if these cases had been included, my list would in every instance have swelled considerably; nor yet that i am conscious how extremely partial and accidental is the test, as to comparative number of laxities, which i have here supplied. the spenserian metre, in which _adonais_ is written, was used by shelley in only one other instance--his long ideal epic _the revolt of islam_. bion and moschus. the relation of shelley's elegy of _adonais_ to the two elegies written by bion and by moschus must no doubt have been observed, and been more or less remarked upon, as soon as _adonais_ obtained some currency among classical readers; captain medwin, in his _shelley papers_, , referred to it. i am not however aware that the resemblances had ever been brought out in detail until mr. g.s.d. murray, of christ church, oxford, noted down the passages from bion, which were published accordingly in my edition of shelley's poems, . since then, , lieut.-colonel hime, r.a., issued a pamphlet (dulau & co.) entitled _the greek materials of shelley's adonais, with remarks on the three great english elegies_, entering into further, yet not exhaustive, particulars on the same subject. shelley himself made a fragmentary translation from the elegy of bion on adonis: it was first printed in mr. forman's edition of shelley's poems, . i append here those passages which are directly related to _adonais_:-- 'i mourn adonis dead--loveliest adonis-- dead, dead adonis--and the loves lament. sleep no more, venus, wrapped in purple woof-- wake, violet-stoled queen, and weave the crown of death,--'tis misery calls,--for he is dead. ... aphrodite with hair unbound is wandering through the woods, wildered, ungirt, unsandalled--the thorns pierce her hastening feet, and drink her sacred blood. * * * * * the flowers are withered up with grief. * * * * * echo resounds, . . "adonis dead!" * * * * * she clasped him, and cried ... "stay, adonis! stay, dearest one,... and mix my lips with thine! wake yet a while, adonis--oh but once!-- that i may kiss thee now for the last time-- but for as long as one short kiss may live!" the reader familiar with _adonais_ will recognise the passages in that poem of which we here have the originals. to avoid repetition, i do not cite them at the moment, but shall call attention to them successively in my notes at the end of the volume. for other passages, also utilised by shelley, i have recourse to the volume of mr. andrew lang (macmillan & co. ), _theocritus, bion, and moschus, rendered into english prose_. and first, from bion's elegy on adonis:-- 'the flowers flush red for anguish.... this kiss will i treasure, even as thyself, adonis, since, ah ill-fated! thou art fleeing me,... while wretched i yet live, being a goddess, and may not follow thee. persephone, take thou my lover, my lord, for thyself art stronger than i, and all lovely things drift down to thee.... for why ah overbold! didst thou follow the chase, and, being so fair, why wert thou thus over-hardy to fight with beasts?... a tear the paphian sheds for each blood-drop of adonis, and tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers.... ah even in death he is beautiful, beautiful in death, as one that hath fallen on sleep.... all things have perished in his death, yea all the flowers are faded.... he reclines, the delicate adonis, in his raiment of purple, and around him the loves are weeping and groaning aloud, clipping their locks for adonis. and one upon his shafts, another on his bow, is treading, and one hath loosed the sandal of adonis, and another hath broken his own feathered quiver, and one in a golden vessel bears water, and another laves the wound, and another, from behind him, with his wings is fanning adonis.... thou must again bewail him, again must weep for him another year.... he does not heed them [the muses]; not that he is doth to hear, but that the maiden of hades doth not let him go.' the next-ensuing passages come from the elegy of moschus for bion:-- 'ye flowers, now in sad clusters breathe yourselves away. now redden, ye roses, in your sorrow, and now wax red, ye wind-flowers; now, thou hyacinth, whisper the letters on thee graven, and add a deeper ai ai to thy petals: he is dead, the beautiful singer.... ye nightingales that lament among the thick leaves of the trees, tell ye to the sicilian waters of arethusa the tidings that bion the herdsman is dead.... thy sudden doom, o bion, apollo himself lamented, and the satyrs mourned thee, and the priapi in sable raiment, and the panes sorrow for thy song, and the fountain-fairies in the wood made moan, and their tears turned to rivers of waters. and echo in the rocks laments that thou art silent, and no more she mimics thy voice. and in sorrow for thy fall the trees cast down their fruit, and all the flowers have faded.... nor ever sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs,... nor so much, by the grey sea-waves, did ever the sea-bird sing, nor so much in the dells of dawn did the bird of memnon bewail the son of the morning, fluttering around his tomb, as they lamented for bion dead.... echo, among the reeds, doth still feed upon thy songs.... this, o most musical of rivers, is thy second sorrow,--this, meles, thy new woe. of old didst thou lose homer:... now again another son thou weepest, and in a new sorrow art thou wasting away.... nor so much did pleasant lesbos mourn for alcaeus, nor did the teian town so greatly bewail her poet,... and not for sappho but still for thee doth mitylene wail her musical lament.... ah me! when the mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley, and the curled tendrils of the anise, on a later day they live again, and spring in another year: but we men, we the great and mighty or wise, when once we have died, in hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence.... poison came, bion, to thy mouth--thou didst know poison. to such lips as thine did it come, and was not sweetened? what mortal was so cruel that could mix poison for thee, or who could give thee the venom that heard thy voice? surely he had no music in his soul,... but justice hath overtaken them all.' bion was born in smyrna, or in a neighbouring village named phlossa, and may have died at some date not far from b.c. the statement of moschus that bion was poisoned by certain enemies appears to be intended as an assertion of actual fact. of moschus nothing distinct is known, beyond his being a native of sicily. adonais; an elegy on the death of john keats, author of _endymion, hyperion,_ etc. [greek: astaer prin men elampes eni zooisin eoos. nun de thanon lampeis esperos en phthimenois.] plato. preface. [greek: pharmakon aelthe bion poti son stoma, pharmakon eides. pos teu tois cheilessi potedrame kouk eglukanthae; tis de brotos tossouton anameros ae kerasai toi, ae dounai laleonti to pharmakon; ekphugen odan.] moschus, epitaph. bion. it is my intention to subjoin to the london edition of this poem a criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. my known repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which several of his earlier compositions were modelled proves at least that i am an impartial judge. i consider the fragment of _hyperion_ as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years. john keats died at rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year, on the [ rd] of [february] ; and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient rome. the cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. it might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. the genius of the lamented person to whose memory i have dedicated these unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and, where canker-worms abound, what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud? the savage criticism on his _endymion_ which appeared in the _quarterly review_ produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind. the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued; and the succeeding acknowledgments, from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted. it may be well said that these wretched men know not what they do. they scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows, or one, like keats's, composed of more penetrable stuff. one of their associates is, to my knowledge, a most base and unprincipled calumniator. as to _endymion_, was it a poem, whatever might be its defects, to be treated contemptuously by those who had celebrated with various degrees of complacency and panegyric _paris_, and _woman_ and _a syrian tale_, and mrs. lefanu, and mr. barrett, and mr. howard payne, and a long list of the illustrious obscure? are these the men who, in their venal good-nature, presumed to draw a parallel between the rev. mr. milman and lord byron? what gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels? against what woman taken in adultery dares the foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest, specimens of the workmanship of god. nor shall it be your excuse that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers, but used none. the circumstances of the closing scene of poor keats's life were not made known to me until the elegy was ready for the press. i am given to understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit had received from the criticism of _endymion_ was exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care. he was accompanied to rome, and attended in his last illness, by mr. severn, a young artist of the highest promise, who, i have been informed, 'almost risked his own life, and sacrificed every prospect to unwearied attendance upon his dying friend.' had i known these circumstances before the completion of my poem, i should have been tempted to add my feeble tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own motives. mr. severn can dispense with a reward from 'such stuff as dreams are made of.' his conduct is a golden augury of the success of his future career. may the unextinguished spirit of his illustrious friend animate the creations of his pencil, and plead against oblivion for his name! adonais. . i weep for adonais--he is dead! oh weep for adonais, though our tears thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! and thou, sad hour selected from all years to mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, and teach them thine own sorrow! say: 'with me died adonais! till the future dares forget the past, his fate and fame shall be an echo and a light unto eternity.' . where wert thou, mighty mother, when he lay, when thy son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies in darkness? where was lorn urania when adonais died? with veilèd eyes, 'mid listening echoes, in her paradise she sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath, rekindled all the fading melodies with which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, he had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death. . oh weep for adonais--he is dead! wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!-- yet wherefore? quench within their burning bed thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep, like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep; for he is gone where all things wise and fair descend. oh dream not that the amorous deep will yet restore him to the vital air; death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair. . most musical of mourners, weep again! lament anew, urania!--he died who was the sire of an immortal strain, blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride the priest, the slave, and the liberticide, trampled and mocked with many a loathèd rite of lust and blood. he went unterrified into the gulf of death; but his clear sprite yet reigns o'er earth, the third among the sons of light. . most musical of mourners, weep anew! not all to that bright station dared to climb: and happier they their happiness who knew, whose tapers yet burn through that night of time in which suns perished. others more sublime, struck by the envious wrath of man or god, have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime; and some yet live, treading the thorny road which leads, through toil and hate, to fame's serene abode. . but now thy youngest, dearest one has perished, the nursling of thy widowhood, who grew, like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, and fed with true love tears instead of dew. most musical of mourners, weep anew! thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last, the bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew, died on the promise of the fruit, is waste; the broken lily lies--the storm is overpast. . to that high capital where kingly death keeps his pale court in beauty and decay he came; and bought, with price of purest breath, a grave among the eternal.--come away! haste, while the vault of blue italian day is yet his fitting charnel-roof, while still he lies as if in dewy sleep he lay. awake him not! surely he takes his fill of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill. . he will awake no more, oh never more! within the twilight chamber spreads apace the shadow of white death, and at the door invisible corruption waits to trace his extreme way to her dim dwelling-place; the eternal hunger sits, but pity and awe soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface so fair a prey, till darkness and the law of change shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw. . oh weep for adonais!--the quick dreams, the passion-wingèd ministers of thought, who were his flocks, whom near the living streams of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught the love which was its music, wander not-- wander no more from kindling brain to brain, but droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot round the cold heart where, after their sweet pain, they ne'er will gather strength or find a home again. . and one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, and fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries, 'our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead! see, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies a tear some dream has loosened from his brain,' lost angel of a ruined paradise! she knew not 'twas her own,--as with no stain she faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain. . one from a lucid urn of starry dew washed his light limbs, as if embalming them; another dipt her profuse locks, and threw the wreath upon him, like an anadem which frozen tears instead of pearls begem; another in her wilful grief would break her bow and wingèd reeds, as if to stem a greater loss with one which was more weak, and dull the barbèd fire against his frozen cheek. . another splendour on his mouth alit, that mouth whence it was wont to draw the breath which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit, and pass into the panting heart beneath with lightning and with music: the damp death quenched its caress upon his icy lips; and, as a dying meteor stains a wreath of moonlight vapour which the cold night clips, it flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse. . and others came,--desires and adorations, wingèd persuasions, and veiled destinies, splendours, and glooms, and glimmering incarnations of hopes and fears, and twilight phantasies; and sorrow, with her family of sighs, and pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam of her own dying smile instead of eyes, came in slow pomp;--the moving pomp might seem like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream. . all he had loved, and moulded into thought from shape and hue and odour and sweet sound. lamented adonais. morning sought her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day; afar the melancholy thunder moaned, pale ocean in unquiet slumber lay, and the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay. . lost echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, and feeds her grief with his remembered lay, and will no more reply to winds or fountains, or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day; since she can mimic not his lips, more dear than those for whose disdain she pined away into a shadow of all sounds:--a drear murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear. . grief made the young spring wild, and she threw down her kindling buds, as if she autumn were, or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown, for whom should she have waked the sullen year? to phoebus was not hyacinth so dear, nor to himself narcissus, as to both thou, adonais; wan they stand and sere amid the faint companions of their youth, with dew all turned to tears,--odour, to sighing ruth. . thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale, mourns not her mate with such melodious pain; not so the eagle, who like thee could scale heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain her mighty young with morning, doth complain, soaring and screaming round her empty nest, as albion wails for thee: the curse of cain light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast, and scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest! . ah woe is me! winter is come and gone, but grief returns with the revolving year. the airs and streams renew their joyous tone; the ants, the bees, the swallows, re-appear; fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead seasons' bier; the amorous birds now pair in every brake, and build their mossy homes in field and brere; and the green lizard and the golden snake, like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake. . through wood and stream and field and hill and ocean, a quickening life from the earth's heart has burst, as it has ever done, with change and motion, from the great morning of the world when first god dawned on chaos. in its steam immersed, the lamps of heaven flash with a softer light; all baser things pant with life's sacred thirst, diffuse themselves, and spend in love's delight the beauty and the joy of their renewèd might. . the leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender, exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath; like incarnations of the stars, when splendour is changed to fragrance, they illumine death, and mock the merry worm that wakes beneath. nought we know dies: shall that alone which knows be as a sword consumed before the sheath by sightless lightning? th' intense atom glows a moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. . alas that all we loved of him should be, but for our grief, as if it had not been, and grief itself be mortal! woe is me! whence are we, and why are we? of what scene the actors or spectators? great and mean meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. as long as skies are blue and fields are green, evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow. . _he_ will awake no more, oh never more! 'wake thou,' cried misery, 'childless mother; rise out of thy sleep, and slake in thy heart's core a wound more fierce than his, with tears and sighs.' and all the dreams that watched urania's eyes, and all the echoes whom their sister's song had held in holy silence, cried 'arise!' swift as a thought by the snake memory stung, from her ambrosial rest the fading splendour sprung. . she rose like an autumnal night that springs out of the east, and follows wild and drear the golden day, which on eternal wings, even as a ghost abandoning a bier, had left the earth a corpse. sorrow and fear so struck, so roused, so rapt, urania; so saddened round her like an atmosphere of stormy mist; so swept her on her way, even to the mournful place where adonais lay. . out of her secret paradise she sped, through camps and cities rough with stone and steel and human hearts, which, to her aery tread yielding not, wounded the invisible palms of her tender feet where'er they fell. and barbèd tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they, rent the soft form they never could repel, whose sacred blood, like the young tears of may, paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way. . in the death-chamber for a moment death, shamed by the presence of that living might, blushed to annihilation, and the breath revisited those lips, and life's pale light flashed through those limbs so late her dear delight. 'leave me not wild and drear and comfortless, as silent lightning leaves the starless night! leave me not!' cried urania. her distress roused death: death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress. . 'stay yet awhile! speak to me once again! kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live! and in my heartless breast and burning brain that word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive, with food of saddest memory kept alive, now thou art dead, as if it were a part of thee, my adonais! i would give all that i am, to be as thou now art:-- but i am chained to time, and cannot thence depart. 'o gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart dare the unpastured dragon in his den? defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?-- or, hadst thou waited the full cycle when thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere, the monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer. . 'the herded wolves bold only to pursue, the obscene ravens clamorous o'er the dead, the vultures to the conqueror's banner true, who feed where desolation first has fed, and whose wings rain contagion,--how they fled, when like apollo, from his golden bow, the pythian of the age one arrow sped, and smiled!--the spoilers tempt no second blow, they fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low. . 'the sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn: he sets, and each ephemeral insect then is gathered into death without a dawn, and the immortal stars awake again. so is it in the world of living men: a godlike mind soars forth, in its delight making earth bare and veiling heaven; and, when it sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night.' . thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came, their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent. the pilgrim of eternity, whose fame over his living head like heaven is bent, an early but enduring monument, came, veiling all the lightnings of his song in sorrow. from her wilds ierne sent the sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong, and love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue. . 'midst others of less note came one frail form, a phantom among men, companionless as the last cloud of an expiring storm whose thunder is its knell. he, as i guess, had gazed on nature's naked loveliness actaeon-like; and now he fled astray with feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, and his own thoughts along that rugged way pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey. . a pard-like spirit beautiful and swift-- a love in desolation masked--a power girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift the weight of the superincumbent hour. it is a dying lamp, a falling shower, a breaking billow;--even whilst we speak is it not broken? on the withering flower the killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek the life can burn in blood even while the heart may break. . his head was bound with pansies overblown, and faded violets, white and pied and blue; and a light spear topped with a cypress cone, round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew, vibrated, as the ever-beating heart shook the weak hand that grasped it. of that crew he came the last, neglected and apart; a herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart. . all stood aloof, and at his partial moan smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band who in another's fate now wept his own; as in the accents of an unknown land he sang new sorrow; sad urania scanned the stranger's mien, and murmured 'who art thou?' he answered not, but with a sudden hand made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, which was like cain's or christ's--oh that it should be so! . what softer voice is hushed over the dead? athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown? what form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed, in mockery of monumental stone, the heavy heart heaving without a moan? if it be he who, gentlest of the wise, taught, soothed, loved, honoured, the departed one. let me not vex with inharmonious sighs the silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice. . our adonais has drunk poison--oh what deaf and viperous murderer could crown life's early cup with such a draught of woe? the nameless worm would now itself disown; it felt, yet could escape, the magic tone whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong, but what was howling in one breast alone, silent with expectation of the song whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung. . live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! live! fear no heavier chastisement from me, thou noteless blot on a remembered name! but be thyself, and know thyself to be! and ever at thy season be thou free to spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow; remorse and self-contempt shall cling to thee, hot shame shall burn upon thy secret brow, and like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt--as now. . nor let us weep that our delight is fled far from these carrion kites that scream below. he wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead; thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. dust to the dust: but the pure spirit shall flow back to the burning fountain whence it came, a portion of the eternal, which must glow through time and change, unquenchably the same, whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame. . peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! he hath awakened from the dream of life. 'tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife, and in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife invulnerable nothings. _we_ decay like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief convulse us and consume us day by day, and cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. . he has outsoared the shadow of our night. envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again. from the contagion of the world's slow stain he is secure; and now can never mourn a heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain-- nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, with sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. . he lives, he wakes--'tis death is dead, not he; mourn not for adonais.--thou young dawn, turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee the spirit thou lamentest is not gone! ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! cease, ye faint flowers and fountains! and thou air, which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown o'er the abandoned earth, now leave it bare even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair! . he is made one with nature. there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird. he is a presence to be felt and known in darkness and in light, from herb and stone, spreading itself where'er that power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own, which wields the world with never wearied love, sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. . he is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely. he doth bear his part, while the one spirit's plastic stress sweeps through the dull dense world; compelling there all new successions to the forms they wear; torturing th' unwilling dross, that checks its flight, to its own likeness, as each mass may bear; and bursting in its beauty and its might from trees and beasts and men into the heaven's light. . the splendours of the firmament of time may be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; like stars to their appointed height they climb, and death is a low mist which cannot blot the brightness it may veil. when lofty thought lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, and love and life contend in it for what shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there, and move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. . the inheritors of unfulfilled renown rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, far in the unapparent. chatterton rose pale, his solemn agony had not yet faded from him; sidney, as he fought and as he fell and as he lived and loved sublimely mild, a spirit without spot, arose; and lucan, by his death approved;-- oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. . and many more, whose names on earth are dark but whose transmitted effluence cannot die so long as fire outlives the parent spark, rose, robed in dazzling immortality. 'thou art become as one of us,' they cry; 'it was for thee yon kingless sphere has long swung blind in unascended majesty, silent alone amid an heaven of song. assume thy wingèd throne, thou vesper of our throng!' . who mourns for adonais? oh come forth, fond wretch, and know thyself and him aright. clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous earth; as from a centre, dart thy spirit's light beyond all worlds, until its spacious might satiate the void circumference: then shrink even to a point within our day and night; and keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink when hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink. . or go to rome, which is the sepulchre, oh not of him, but of our joy. 'tis nought that ages, empires, and religions, there lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; for such as he can lend--they borrow not glory from those who made the world their prey: and he is gathered to the kings of thought who waged contention with their time's decay, and of the past are all that cannot pass away. . go thou to rome,--at once the paradise, the grave, the city, and the wilderness; and where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, and flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress the bones of desolation's nakedness, pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead thy footsteps to a slope of green access, where, like an infant's smile, over the dead a light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. . and grey walls moulder round, on which dull time feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand; and one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, pavilioning the dust of him who planned this refuge for his memory, doth stand like flame transformed to marble; and beneath a field is spread, on which a newer band have pitched in heaven's smile their camp of death, welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath. . here pause. these graves are all too young as yet to have outgrown the sorrow which consigned its charge to each; and, if the seal is set here on one fountain of a mourning mind, break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find thine own well full, if thou returnest home, of tears and gall. from the world's bitter wind seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. what adonais is why fear we to become? . the one remains, the many change and pass; heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly; life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity, until death tramples it to fragments.--die, if thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! follow where all is fled!--rome's azure sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak the glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. . why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my heart? thy hopes are gone before: from all things here they have departed; thou shouldst now depart! a light is past from the revolving year, and man and woman; and what still is dear attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. the soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near: 'tis adonais calls! oh hasten thither! no more let life divide what death can join together. . that light whose smile kindles the universe, that beauty in which all things work and move, that benediction which the eclipsing curse of birth can quench not, that sustaining love which, through the web of being blindly wove by man and beast and earth and air and sea, burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of the fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. . the breath whose might i have invoked in song descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven far from the shore, far from the trembling throng whose sails were never to the tempest given. the massy earth and spherèd skies are riven! i am borne darkly, fearfully, afar! whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, the soul of adonais, like a star, beacons from the abode where the eternal are. cancelled passages of adonais, and of its preface. the expression of my indignation and sympathy. i will allow myself a first and last word on the subject of calumny as it relates to me. as an author i have dared and invited censure. if i understand myself, i have written neither for profit nor for fame: i have employed my poetical compositions and publications simply as the instruments of that sympathy between myself and others which the ardent and unbounded love i cherished for my kind incited me to acquire. i expected all sorts of stupidity and insolent contempt from those.... these compositions (excepting the tragedy of _the cenci_, which was written rather to try my powers than to unburden my full heart) are insufficiently.... commendation then perhaps they deserve, even from their bitterest enemies; but they have not obtained any corresponding popularity. as a man, i shrink from notice and regard: the ebb and flow of the world vexes me: i desire to be left in peace. persecution, contumely, and calumny, have been heaped upon me in profuse measure; and domestic conspiracy and legal oppression have violated in my person the most sacred rights of nature and humanity. the bigot will say it was the recompense of my errors--the man of the world will call it the result of my imprudence: but never upon one head.... reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. as a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic. but a young spirit panting for fame, doubtful of its powers, and certain only of its aspirations, is ill-qualified to assign its true value to the sneer of this world. he knows not that such stuff as this is of the abortive and monstrous births which time consumes as fast as it produces. he sees the truth and falsehood, the merits and demerits, of his case, inextricably entangled.... no personal offence should have drawn from me this public comment upon such stuff. the offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in his intimacy with leigh hunt, mr. hazlitt, and some other enemies of despotism and superstition. my friend hunt has a very hard skull to crack, and will take a deal of killing. i do not know much of mr. hazlitt, but.... i knew personally but little of keats; but, on the news of his situation, i wrote to him, suggesting the propriety of trying the italian climate, and inviting him to join me. unfortunately he did not allow me. * * * * * . and the green paradise which western waves embosom in their ever-wailing sweep,-- talking of freedom to their tongueless caves, or to the spirits which within them keep a record of the wrongs which, though they sleep, die not, but dream of retribution,--heard his hymns, and echoing them from steep to steep, kept-- * * * * * . and ever as he went he swept a lyre of unaccustomed shape, and ... strings now like the ... of impetuous fire which shakes the forest with its murmurings, now like the rush of the aërial wings of the enamoured wind among the treen, whispering unimaginable things, and dying on the streams of dew serene which feed the unmown meads with ever-during green. . and then came one of sweet and earnest looks, whose soft smiles to his dark and night-like eyes were as the clear and ever-living brooks are to the obscure fountains whence they rise, showing how pure they are: a paradise of happy truth upon his forehead low lay, making wisdom lovely, in the guise of earth-awakening morn upon the brow of star-deserted heaven while ocean gleams below. . his song, though very sweet, was low and faint, a simple strain. * * * * * . a mighty phantasm, half concealed in darkness of his own exceeding light, which clothed his awful presence unrevealed, charioted on the ... night of thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite. . and like a sudden meteor which outstrips the splendour-wingèd chariot of the sun, ... eclipse the armies of the golden stars, each one pavilioned in its tent of light--all strewn over the chasms of blue night-- notes. preface. line . _adonais_. there is nothing to show positively why shelley adopted the name adonais as a suitable hellenic name for john keats. i have already suggested (p. ) that he may perhaps have wished to indicate, in this indirect way, that his poem was founded partly upon the elegy of bion for adonis. i believe the name adonais was not really in use among the greeks, and is not anywhere traceable in classical grecian literature. it has sometimes been regarded as a doricized form of the name adonis: mr. william cory says that it is not this, but would properly be a female form of the same name. dr. furnivall has suggested to me that adonais is 'shelley's variant of adonias, the women's yearly mourning for adonis.' disregarding details, we may perhaps say that the whole subject of his elegy is treated by shelley as a transposition of the lament, as conceived by bion, of the cyprian aphrodite for adonis; and that, as he changes the cyprian into the uranian aphrodite, so he changes the dead youth from adonis into adonais. . . _motto from the poet plato_. this motto has been translated by shelley himself as follows: 'thou wert the morning star among the living, ere thy fair light had fled:-- now, having died, thou art as hesperus, giving new splendour to the dead.' . . _motto from moschus_. translated on p. , 'poison came, bion,' &c. . . _it is my intention to subjoin to the london edition of this poem a criticism_, &c. as to the non-fulfilment of this intention see p. . . . _my known repugnance ... proves at least_. in the pisa edition the word is printed 'prove' (not 'proves'). shelley was far from being an exact writer in matters of this sort. . . _john keats died ... in his twenty-fourth year, on the [ rd] of [february]_ . keats, at the time of his death, was not really in his twenty-fourth, but in his twenty-sixth year: the date of his birth was october, . in the pisa edition of _adonais_ the date of death is given thus--'the----of---- ': for shelley, when he wrote his preface, had no precise knowledge of the facts. in some later editions, 'the th of december ' was erroneously substituted. shelley's mistake in supposing that keats, in , was aged only twenty-three, may be taken into account in estimating his previous observation, 'i consider the fragment of _hyperion_ as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.' keats, writing in august, , had told shelley (see p. ) that some of his poems, perhaps including _hyperion_, had been written 'above two years' preceding that date. if shelley supposed that keats was twenty-three years old at the beginning of , and that _hyperion_ had been written fully two years prior to august, , he must have accounted that poem to be the product of a youth of twenty, or at most twenty-one, which would indeed be a marvellous instance of precocity. as a matter of fact, _hyperion_ was written by keats when in his twenty-fourth year. this diminishes the marvel, but does not make shelley's comment on the poem any the less correct. . . _was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of cestius._ as to the burial of the ashes of shelley himself in a separate portion of the same cemetery, see p. . shelley lies nearer than keats to the pyramid of c. cestius. . . _the savage criticism on his_ endymion _which appeared in the_ quarterly review. as to this matter see the prefatory memoirs of shelley and of keats, and especially, at p. &c., a transcript of the criticism. . . _the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs._ see pp. and , the _quarterly_ critique was published in september , and the first rupture of a blood-vessel occurred in february . whether the mortification felt by keats at the critique was small (as is now generally opined) or great (as shelley thought), it cannot reasonably be propounded that this caused, or resulted in, the rupture of the pulmonary blood-vessel. keats belonged to a consumptive family; his mother died of consumption, and also his younger brother: and the preliminaries of his mortal illness (even if we do not date them farther back, for which some reason appears) began towards the middle of july , when, in very rough walking in the island of mull, he caught a severe and persistent attack of sore throat. . . _the succeeding acknowledgments, from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers._ the notice here principally referred to is probably that which appeared in the _edinburgh review_ in august , written by lord jeffrey. . . _whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows._ shelley, in this expression, has no doubt himself in view. he had had serious reason for complaining of the treatment meted out to him by the _quarterly review_: see the opening (partially cited at p. ) of his draft-letter to the editor. . . _one of their associates is, to my knowledge, a most base and unprincipled calumniator._ shelley here refers to the writer of the critique in the _quarterly review_ of his poem _laon and cythna (the revolt of islam)_. at first he supposed the writer to be southey; afterwards, the rev. mr. (dean) milman. his indignant phrase is therefore levelled at milman. but shelley was mistaken, for the article was in fact written by mr. (afterwards judge) coleridge. . . _those who had celebrated with various degrees of complacency and panegyric_ paris, _and_ woman, _and_ a syrian tale, _and mrs. lefanu, and mr. barrett, and mr. howard payne._ i presume that most readers of the present day are in the same position as i was myself--that of knowing nothing about these performances and their authors. in order to understand shelley's allusion, i looked up the _quarterly review_ from april to april , and have ascertained as follows, ( ) the _quarterly_ of april contains a notice of _paris in , a poem_. the author's name is not given, nor do i know it. the poem, numbering about a thousand lines, is in the spenserian stanza, varied by the heroic metre, and perhaps by some other rhythms. numerous extracts are given, sufficient to show that the poem is at any rate a creditable piece of writing. some of the critical dicta are the following:--'the work of a powerful and poetic imagination.... the subject of the poem is a desultory walk through paris, in which the author observes, with very little regularity but--with great force, on the different objects which present themselves.... sketching with the hand of a master.... in a strain of poetry and pathos which we have seldom seen equalled.... an admirable mirable poet.' ( ) _woman_ is a poem by the mr. barrett whom shelley names, termed on the title-page 'the author of _the heroine._' it was noticed in the _quarterly_ for april , the very same number which contained the sneering critique of _endymion_. this poem is written in the heroic metre; and the extracts given do certainly comprise some telling and felicitous lines. such are-- 'the beautiful rebuke that looks surprise. the gentle vengeance of averted eyes;' also (a line which has borne, and may yet bear, frequent re-quoting) 'last at his cross, and earliest at his grave.' for critical utterances we have the ensuing:--'a strain of patriotism pure, ardent, and even sublime.... versification combining conciseness and strength with a considerable degree of harmony.... both talent and genius.... some passages of it, and those not a few, are of the first order of the pathetic and descriptive.' ( ) _a syrian tale._ of this book i have failed to find any trace in the _quarterly review_, or in the catalogue of the british museum. ( ) mrs. lefanu. neither can i trace this lady in the _quarterly_. mrs. alicia lefanu, who is stated to have been a sister of richard brinsley sheridan, and also her daughter, miss alicia lefanu, published books during the lifetime of shelley. the former printed _the flowers, a fairy tale_, , and _the sons of erin, a comedy_, . to the latter various works are assigned, such as _rosard's chain, a poem_. ( ) mr. john howard payne was author of _brutus, or the fall of tarquin, an historical tragedy_, criticized in the _quarterly_ for april, . i cannot understand why shelley should have supposed this criticism to be laudatory: it is in fact unmixed censure. as thus:--'he appears to us to have no one quality which we should require in a tragic poet.... we cannot find in the whole play a single character finely conceived or rightly sustained, a single incident well managed, a single speech--nay a single sentence--of good poetry.' it is true that the same article which reviews payne's _brutus_ notices also, and with more indulgence, sheil's _evadne_: possibly shelley glanced at the article very cursorily, and fancied that any eulogistic phrases which he found in it applied to payne. . . _a parallel between the rev. mr. milman and lord byron._ i have not succeeded in finding this parallel. the _quarterly_ _review_ for july contains a critique of milman's poem, _samor, lord of the bright city_; and the number for may , a critique of milman's _fall of jerusalem_. neither of these notices draws any parallel such as shelley speaks of. . . _what gnat did they strain at here_. the word 'here' will be perceived to mean 'in _endymion_,' or 'in reference to _endymion_'; but it is rather far separated from its right antecedent. . . _the circumstances of the closing scene of poor keats's life were not made known to me until the elegy was ready for the press_. see p. . . . _the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care_. this statement of shelley is certainly founded upon a passage in the letter (see p. ) addressed by colonel finch to mr. gisborne. colonel finch said that keats had reached italy, 'nursing a deeply rooted disgust to life and to the world, owing to having been infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe.' the colonel's statement seems (as i have previously intimated) to be rather haphazard; and shelley's recast of it goes to a further extreme. . . _'almost risked his own life'_ &c. the substance of the words in inverted commas is contained in colonel finch's letter, but shelley does not cite verbatim. * * * * * +stanza ,+ . . _i weep for adonais--he is dead._ modelled on the opening of bion's elegy for adonis. see p. . . . _the frost which binds so dear a head_: sc. the frost of death. . , . _and thou, sad hour,... rouse thy obscure compeers._ the compeers are clearly the other hours. why they should be termed 'obscure' is not quite manifest. perhaps shelley means that the weal or woe attaching to these hours is obscure or uncertain; or perhaps that they are comparatively obscure, undistinguished, as not being marked by any such conspicuous event as the death of adonais. . , . _his fate and fame shall be an echo and a light unto eternity._ by 'eternity' we may here understand, not absolute eternity as contradistinguished from time, but an indefinite space of time, the years and the centuries. his fate and fame shall be echoed on from age to age, and shall be a light thereto. +stanza ,+ . . _where wert thou, mighty mother._ aphrodite urania. see pp. , . shelley constantly uses the form 'wert' instead of 'wast.' this phrase may be modelled upon two lines near the opening of milton's _lycidas_-- 'where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep closed o'er the head of your loved lycidas?' . . _the shaft which flies in darkness._ as adonis was mortally wounded by a boar's tusk, so (it is here represented) was adonais slain by an insidiously or murderously launched dart: see p. . the allusion is to the truculent attack made upon keats by the _quarterly review_. it is true that 'the shaft which flies in darkness' might be understood in merely a general sense, as the mysterious and unforeseen arrow of death: but i think it clear that shelley used the phrase in a more special sense. . . _with veiled eyes_, &c. urania is represented as seated in her paradise (pleasure-ground, garden-bower), with veiled eyes-- downward-lidded, as in slumber: an echo chaunts or recites the 'melodies,' or poems, which adonais had composed while death was rapidly advancing towards him: urania is surrounded by other echoes, who hearken, and repeat the strain. a hostile reviewer might have been expected to indulge in one of the most familiar of cheap jokes, and to say that urania had naturally fallen asleep over keats's poems: but i am not aware that any critic of _adonais_ did actually say this. the phrase, 'one with soft enamoured breath,' means 'one of the echoes'; this is shown in stanza , 'all the echoes whom _their sister's song_.' +stanza ,+ . , . _for he is gone where all things wise and fair descend._ founded on bion (p. ), 'persephone,... all lovely things drift down to thee.' . , _the amorous deep._ the depth of earth, or region of the dead; amorous, because, having once obtained possession of adonais, it retains him in a close embrace, and will not restore him to the land of the living. this passage has a certain analogy to that of bion (p. ), 'not that he is loth to hear, but that the maiden of hades will not let him go.' +stanza ,+ . . _most musical of mourners._ this phrase, applying to urania, is one of those which might seem to favour the assumption that the deity here spoken of is the muse urania, and not aphrodite urania, but on this point see pp. to . . . _weep again._ the poem seems to indicate that urania, slumbering, is not yet aware of the death of adonais. therefore she cannot as yet have wept for his death: but she may have wept in anticipation that he would shortly die, and thus can be now adjured to 'weep _again_.' (see also p. .) . . _he died._ milton. . . _when his country's pride,_ &c. construe: when the priest, the slave, and the liberticide, trampled his country's pride, and mocked [it] with many a loathèd rite of lust and blood. this of course refers to the condition of public affairs and of court-life in the reign of charles ii. the inversion in this passage is not a very serious one, although, for the sense, slightly embarrassing. occasionally shelley conceded to himself great latitude in inversion: as for instance in the _revolt of islam_, canto , st. , 'and the swift boat the little waves which bore were cut by its keen keel, though slantingly,' which means 'and the little waves, which bore the swift boat, were cut,' &c.; also in the _ode to naples_, strophe , 'florence, beneath the sun, of cities fairest one, blushes within her bower for freedom's expectation.' . . _his clear sprite._ to substitute the word 'sprite' for 'spirit,' in an elevated passage referring to milton, appears to me one of the least tolerable instances of make-rhyme in the whole range of english poetry. 'sprite' is a trivial and distorted misformation of 'spirit'; and can only, i apprehend, be used with some propriety (at any rate, in modern poetry) in a more or less bantering sense. the tricksy elf puck may be a sprite, or even the fantastic creation ariel; but neither milton's satan nor milton's ithuriel, nor surely milton himself, could possibly be a sprite, while the limits of language and of common sense are observed. . . _the third among the sons of light._ at first sight this phrase might seem to mean 'the third-greatest poet of the world': in which case one might suppose homer and shakespear to be ranked as the first and second. but it may be regarded as tolerably clear that shelley is here thinking only of _epic_ poets; and that he ranges the epic poets according to a criterion of his own, which is thus expressed in his _defence of poetry_ (written in the same year as _adonais_, ): 'homer was the first and dante the second epic poet; that is, the second poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it--developing itself in correspondence with their development....milton was the third epic poet.' the poets whom shelley admired most were probably homer, aeschylus, sophocles, lucretius, dante, shakespear, and milton; he took high delight in the _book of job_, and presumably in some other poetical books of the old testament; calderon also he prized greatly; and in his own time goethe, byron, and (on some grounds) wordsworth and coleridge. +stanza ,+ . . _not all to that bright station dared to climb._ the conception embodied in the diction of this stanza is not quite so clear as might be wished. the first statement seems to amount to this--that some poets, true poets though they were, did not aspire so high, nor were capable of reaching so high, as homer, dante, and milton, the typical epic poets. a statement so obviously true that it hardly extends, in itself, beyond a truism. but it must be read as introductory to what follows. . . _and happier they their happiness who knew._ clearly a recast of the phrase of vergil, 'o fortunati nimium sua si bona nôrint agricolae.' but vergil speaks of men who did not adequately appreciate their own happiness; shelley (apparently) of others who did so. he seems to intimate that the poetical temperament is a happy one, in the case of those poets who, unconcerned with the greatest ideas and the most arduous schemes of work, pour forth their 'native wood-notes wild.' i think it possible however that shelley intended, his phrase to be accepted with the same meaning as vergil's--'happier they, supposing they had known their happiness.' in that case, the only reason implied why these minor poets were the happier is that their works have endured the longer. . , . _whose tapers yet burn through that night of time in which suns perished._ shelley here appears to say that the minor poets have left works which survive, while some of the works of the very greatest poets have disappeared: as, for instance, his own lyrical models in _adonais_, bion and moschus, are still known by their writings, while many of the master-pieces of aeschylus and sophocles are lost. some _tapers_ continue to burn; while some _suns_ have perished. . - . _others more sublime, struck by the envious wrath of man or god, have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime._ these others include keats (adonais) himself, to whom the phrase, 'struck by the envious wrath of man,' may be understood as more peculiarly appropriated. and generally the 'others' may be regarded as nearly identical with 'the inheritors of unfulfilled renown' who appear (some of them pointed out by name) in stanza . the word god is printed in the pisan edition with a capital letter: it may be questioned whether shelley meant to indicate anything more definite than 'some higher power--fate.' . , . _and some yet live, treading the thorny road which leads, through toil and hate, to fame's serene abode._ byron must be supposed to be the foremost among these; also wordsworth and coleridge; and doubtless shelley himself should not he omitted. +stanza ,+ . . _the nursling of thy widowhood._ as to this expression see p. . i was there speaking only of the muse urania; but the observations are equally applicable to aphrodite urania, and i am unable to carry the argument any further. . , . _like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, and fed with true love tears instead of dew._ it seems sufficiently clear that shelley is here glancing at a leading incident in keats's poem of _isabella, or the pot of basil_, founded upon a story in boccaccio's _decameron_. isabella unburies her murdered lover lorenzo; preserves his head in a pot of basil; and (as expressed in st. of the poem) 'hung over her sweet basil evermore, and moistened it with tears unto the core.' i give shelley's words 'true love tears' as they appear in the pisan edition: 'true-love tears' might be preferable. . . _the broken lily lies--the storm is overpast._ as much as to say: the storm came, and shattered the lily; the storm has now passed away, but the lily will never revive. +stanza ,+ . i. _to that high capital where kingly death_, &c. the capital is rome (where keats died). death is figured as the king of rome, who there 'keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,'--amid the beauties of nature and art, and amid the decay of monuments and institutions. . , . _and bought, with price of purest breath, a grave among the eternal._ keats, dying in rome, secured sepulture among the many illustrious persons who are there buried. this seems to be the only meaning of 'the eternal' in the present passage: the term does not directly imply (what is sufficiently enforced elsewhere) keats's own poetic immortality. . . _come away!_ this call is addressed in fancy to any persons present in the chamber of death. they remain indefinite both to the poet and to the reader. the conclusion of the stanza, worded with great beauty and delicacy, amounts substantially to saying--'take your last look of the dead adonais while he may still seem to the eye to be rather sleeping than dead.' . . _he lies as if in dewy sleep he lay._ see bion (p. ), 'beautiful in death, as one that hath fallen on sleep.' the term 'dewy sleep' means probably 'sleep which refreshes the body as nightly dew refreshes the fields.' this phrase is followed by the kindred expression 'liquid rest.' +stanza ,+ . . _the shadow of white death_, &c. the use of 'his' and 'her' in this stanza is not wholly free from ambiguity. in st. death was a male impersonation--'kingly death' who 'keeps his pale court.' it may be assumed that he is the same in the present stanza. corruption, on the other hand, is a female impersonation: she (not death) must be the same as 'the eternal hunger,' as to whom it is said that 'pity and awe soothe _her_ pale rage.' premising this, we read:--'within the twilight chamber spreads apace the shadow of white death, and at the door invisible corruption waits to trace his [adonais's] extreme way to her [corruption's] dim dwelling-place; the eternal hunger [corruption] sits [at the door], but pity and awe soothe her pale rage, nor dares she,' &c. the unwonted phrase 'his extreme way' seems to differ in meaning little if at all from the very ordinary term 'his last journey.' the statement in this stanza therefore is that corruption does not assail adonais lying on his deathbed; but will shortly follow his remains to the grave, the dim [obscure, lightless] abode of corruption itself. . , . _till darkness and the law of change shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw._ until the darkness of the grave and the universal law of change and dissolution shall draw the curtain of death over his sleep--shall prove his apparent sleep to be veritable death. the prolonged interchange in _adonais_ between the ideas of death and of sleep may remind us that shelley opened with a similar contrast or approximation his first considerable (though in part immature) poem _queen mab_-- 'how wonderful is death,-- death, and his brother sleep!' &c. the mind may also revert to the noble passage in byron's _giaour_-- 'he who hath bent him o'er the dead ere the first day of death is fled,' &c.-- though the idea of actual sleep is not raised in this admirably beautiful and admirably realistic description. perhaps the poem, of all others, in which the conception of death is associated with that of sleep with the most poignant pathos, is that of edgar poe entitled _for annie_-- 'thank heaven, the crisis, the danger, is past, and the lingering illness is over at last, and the fever called living is conquered at last,' &c.-- where real death is spoken of throughout, in a series of exquisite and thrilling images, as being real sleep. in shelley's own edition of _adonais_, the lines which we are now considering are essentially different. they run 'till darkness and the law of mortal change shall fill the grave which is her maw.' this is comparatively poor and rude. the change to the present reading was introduced by mrs. shelley in her edition of shelley's poems in . she gives no information as to her authority: but there can be no doubt that at some time or other shelley himself made the improvement. see p. . +stanza ,+ . i. _the quick dreams._ with these words begins a passage of some length, which is closely modelled upon the passage of bion (p. ), 'and around him the loves are weeping,' &c.: modelled upon it, and also systematically transposed from it. the transposition goes on the same lines as that of adonis into adonais, and of the cyprian into the uranian aphrodite; i.e. the personal or fleshly loves are spiritualized into dreams (musings, reveries, conceptions) and other faculties or emotions of the mind. it is to be observed, moreover, that the trance of adonis attended by cupids forms an incident in keats's own poem of _endymion_, book ii-- 'for on a silken couch of rosy pride, in midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth of fondest beauty; fonder, in fair sooth, than sighs could fathom or contentment reach. * * * * * ... hard by stood serene cupids, watching silently. one, kneeling to a lyre, touched the strings, muffling to death the pathos with his wings, and ever and anon uprose to look at the youth's slumber; while another took a willow-bough distilling odorous dew, and shoot it on his hair; another flew in through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise rained violets upon his sleeping eyes.' . . _the passion-winged ministers of thought._ the 'dreams' are here defined as being thoughts (or ministers of thought) winged with passion; not mere abstract cogitations, but thoughts warm with the heart's blood, emotional conceptions--such thoughts as subserve the purposes of poetry, and enter into its structure: in a word, poetic thoughts. . . _who were his flocks_, &c. these dreams were in fact the very thoughts of adonais, as conveyed in his poems. he being dead, they cannot assume new forms of beauty in any future poems, and cannot be thus diffused from mind to mind, but they remain mourning round their deceased herdsman, or master. it is possible that this image of a flock and a herdsman is consequent upon the phrase in the elegy of moschus for bion--'bion the herdsman is dead' (p. ). +stanza ,+ . . _and fans him with her moonlight wings._ see bion (p. ), 'and another, from behind him, with his wings is fanning adonis.' the epithet 'moonlight' may indicate either delicacy of colour, or faint luminosity--rather the latter, . . _a tear some dream has loosened from his brain._ i follow shelley's edition in printing dream with a capital letter. i do not however think this helpful to the right sense. the capitalized dream might appear to be one of those impersonated dreams to whom these stanzas relate: but in the present line the word 'dream' would be more naturally construed as meaning simply 'thought, mental conception.' . . _lost angel of a ruined paradise._ the ruined paradise is the mind, now torpid in death, of adonais. the 'dream' which has been speaking is a lost angel of this paradise, in the sense of being a messenger or denizen of the mind of adonais, incapacitated for exercising any further action: indeed, the dream forthwith fades, and is for ever extinct. . . _with no stain._ leaving no trace behind. the rhyme has entailed the use of the word 'stain,' which is otherwise a little arbitrary in this connexion. . . _she faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain._ a rain-cloud which has fully discharged its rain would no longer constitute a cloud--it would be dispersed and gone. the image is therefore a very exact one for the dream which, having accomplished its function and its life, now ceases to be. there appears to be a further parallel intended--between the dream whose existence closes in a _tear_, and the rain-cloud which has discharged its _rain_: this is of less moment, and verges upon a conceit. this passage in _adonais_ is not without some analogy to one in keats's _endymion_ (quoted on p. )-- 'therein a melancholy spirit well might win oblivion, and melt out his essence fine into the winds.' stanza + . , . _one from a lucid urn of starry dew washed his light limbs, as if embalming them._ see the passage from bion (p. ), 'one in a golden vessel bears water, and another laves the wound.' the expression 'starry dew' is rather peculiar: the dew may originally have 'starred' the grass, but, when collected into an urn, it must have lost this property: perhaps we should rather understand, nocturnal dew upon which the stars had been shining. it is difficult to see how the act of washing the limbs could simulate the process of embalming. . . _another clipt her profuse locks._ see bion (p. ), 'clipping their locks for adonis.' 'profuse' is here accented on the first syllable; although indeed the line can be read with the accent, as is usual, on the second syllable. . - . _and threw the wreath upon him like an anadem which frozen tears instead of pearls begem._ the wreath is the lock of hair--perhaps a plait or curl, for otherwise the term wreath is rather wide of the mark. the idea that the tears shed by this dream herself (or perhaps other dreams) upon the lock are 'frozen,' and thus stand in lieu of pearls upon an anadem or circlet, seems strained, and indeed incongruous: one might wish it away. . , . _another in her wilful grief would break her bow and wingèd reeds._ follows bion closely--'and one upon his shafts, another on his bow, is treading' (p. ). this is perfectly appropriate for the loves, or cupids: not equally so for the dreams, for it is not so apparent what concern they have with bows and arrows. these may however be 'winged thoughts' or 'winged words'--[greek: epea pteroenta]. mr. andrew lang observes (introduction to his theocritus volume), 'in one or other of the sixteen pompeian pictures of venus and adonis, the loves are breaking their bows and arrows for grief, as in the hymn of bion.' . , . _as if to stem a greater loss with one which was more weak._ 'to stem a loss' is a very lax phrase--and more especially 'to stem a loss with another loss.' 'to stem a torrent--or, the current of a river,' is a well-known expression, indicating one sort of material force in opposition to another. hence we come to the figurative expression, 'to stem the torrent of his grief,' &c. shelley seems to have yielded to a certain analogy in the sentiment, and also to the convenience of a rhyme, and thus to have permitted himself a phrase which is neither english nor consistent with sense. line seems to me extremely feeble throughout. . . _and dull the barbèd fire against his frozen cheek._ the construction runs--'another would break, &c., and [would] dull, &c.' the term 'the barbèd fire' represents of course 'the winged reeds,' or arrows: actual reeds or arrows are now transmuted into flame-tipped arrows (conformable to the spiritual or immaterial quality of the dreams): the fire is to be quenched against the frost of the death-cold cheek of adonais. 'frozen tears--frozen cheek:' shelley would scarcely, i apprehend, have allowed this repetition, but for some inadvertence. i am free to acknowledge that i think the whole of this stanza bad. its _raison d'être_ is a figurative but perfectly appropriate and straightforward passage in bion: shelley has attempted to turn that into a still more figurative passage suitable for _adonais_, with a result anything but happy. he fails to make it either straightforward or appropriate, and declines into the super-subtle or wiredrawn. +stanza ,+ . . _another splendour._ another luminous dream. . . _that mouth whence it was wont to draw the breath,_ &c. adonais (keats), as a poet, is here figured as if he were a singer; consequently we are referred to his 'mouth' as the vehicle of his thoughts or poetic imaginings--not to his hand which recorded them. . . _to pierce the guarded wit._ to obtain entry into the otherwise unready minds of others--the hearers (or readers) of the poet. . , . _the damp death quenched its caress upon his icy lips._ this phrase is not very clear. i understand it to mean--the damps of death [upon the visage of adonais] quenched the caress of the splendour [or dream] imprinted on his icy lips. it might however be contended that the term 'the damp death' is used as an energetic synonym for the 'splendour' itself. in this case the sense of the whole passage may be amplified thus: the splendour, in imprinting its caress upon the icy lips of adonais, had its caress quenched by the cold, and was itself converted into dampness and deathliness: it was no longer a luminous splendour, but a vaporous and clammy form of death. the assumption that 'the damp death' stands as a synonym for the 'splendour' obtains some confirmation from the succeeding phrase about the '_dying_ meteor'--for this certainly seems used as a simile for the 'splendour.' . . _'and, as a dying meteor,'_ &c. the dying meteor, in this simile, must represent the splendour; the wreath of moonlight vapour stands for the pale limbs of adonais; the cold night may in a general way symbolize the night of death. . . _it flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse._ the splendour flushed through the limbs of adonais, and so became eclipsed,--faded into nothingness. this terminates the episode of the 'quick dreams,' beginning with stanza . +stanza ,+ . . _and others came,--desires and adorations,_ &c. this passage is the first in which shelley has direct recourse, no longer to the elegy of bion for adonis, but to the elegy of moschus for bion. as he had spiritualized the impersonations of bion, so he now spiritualizes those of moschus. the sicilian lyrist gives us (see p. ) apollo, satyrs, priapi, panes, and fountain-fairies. shelley gives us desires, adorations, persuasions, destinies, splendours, glooms, hopes, fears, phantasies, sorrow, sighs, and pleasure. all these 'lament adonais' (stanza ): they are such emotional or abstract beings as 'he had loved, and moulded into thought from shape and hue and odour and sweet sound.' the adjectival epithets are worth noting for their poetic felicity: wingèd persuasions (again hinting at [greek: epea pteroenta]), veiled destinies, glimmering hopes and fears, twilight phantasies. . . _and pleasure, blind with tears_, &c. the rev. stopford brooke, in an eloquent lecture delivered to the shelley society in june, , dwelt at some length upon the singular mythopoeic gift of the poet. these two lines are an instance in point, of a very condensed kind. pleasure, heart-struck at the death of adonais, has abrogated her own nature, and has become blinded with tears; her eyes can therefore serve no longer to guide her steps. her smile too is dying, but not yet dead; it emits a faint gleam which, in default of eyes, serves to distinguish the path. if one regards this as a mere image, it may be allowed to approach close to a conceit; but it suggests a series of incidents and figurative details which may rather count as a compendious myth. . . _came in slow pomp:--the moving pomp might seem._ the repetition of the word 'pomp' gives a certain poverty to the sound of this line; it can hardly, i think, have been deliberately intended. in other respects this stanza is one of the most melodious in the poem. +stanza +, . , . _morning sought her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound_, &c. whether shelley wished the reader to attribute any distinct naturalistic meaning to the 'hair' of morning is a question which may admit of some doubt. if he did so, the 'hair unbound' is probably to be regarded as streaks of rain-cloud; these cloudlets ought to fertilize the soil with their moisture; but, instead of that, they merely dim the eyes of morning, and dull the beginnings of day. in this instance, and in many other instances ensuing, shelley represents natural powers or natural objects--morning, echo, flowers, &c.--as suffering some interruption or decay of essence or function, in sympathy with the stroke which has cut short the life of adonais. it need hardly be said that, in doing this, he only follows a host of predecessors. he follows, for example, his special models bion and moschus. they probably followed earlier models; but i have failed in attempting to trace how far back beyond them this scheme of symbolism may have extended; something of it can be found in theocritus. the legend--doubtless a very ancient one--that the sisters of phaeton wept amber for his fall belongs to the same order of ideas (as a learned friend suggests to me). . . _pale ocean_. as not only the real keats, but also the figurative adonais, died in rome, the ocean cannot be a feature in the immediate scene; it lies in the not very remote distance, felt rather than visible to sight. of course too, ocean (as well as thunder and winds) is personated in this passage; he is a cosmic deity, lying pale in unquiet slumber. +stanza +, . . _lost echo sits_, &c. echo is introduced into both the grecian elegies, that of moschus as well as that of bion. bion (p. ) simply says that 'echo resounds, "adonis dead!"' but moschus (p. ), whom shelley substantially follows, sets forth that 'echo in the rocks laments that thou [bion] art silent, and no more she mimics thy voice'; also, 'echo, among the reeds, doth still feed upon thy songs.' it will be observed that in this stanza echo is a single personage--the nymph known to mythological fable: but in stanza we had various 'echoes,' spirits of minor account, who, in the paradise of urania, were occupied with the poems of adonais. . - . _his lips, more dear than those for whose disdain she pined away into a shadow of all sounds._ echo is, in mythology, a nymph who was in love with narcissus. he, being enamoured of his own beautiful countenance, paid no heed to echo, who consequently 'pined away into a shadow of all sounds.' in this expression one may discern a delicate double meaning. ( ) echo pined away into (as the accustomed phrase goes) 'a mere shadow of her former self.' ( ) just as a solid body, lighted by the sun, casts, as a necessary concomitant, a shadow of itself, so a sound, emitted under the requisite conditions, casts an echo of itself; echo is, in relation to sound, the same sort of thing as shadow in relation to substance. . , . _a drear murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear._ echo will not now repeat the songs of the woodmen; she merely murmurs some snatches of the 'remembered lay' of adonais. +stanza +, . . _grief made the young spring wild._ this introduction of spring may be taken as implying that shelley supposed keats to have died in the spring: but in fact he died in the winter-- february. as to this point see pp. and . . - . _and she threw down her kindling buds, as if she autumn were, or they dead leaves._ this corresponds to a certain extent with the phrases in bion, 'the flowers are withered up with grief,' and 'yea all the flowers are faded' (p. ); and in moschus, 'and in sorrow for thy fall the trees cast down their fruit, and all the flowers have faded' (p. ). it may be worth observing that shelley says--'as if she autumn were, _or_ they dead leaves' (not '_and_ they dead leaves'). he therefore seems to present the act of spring from two separate points of view: ( ) she threw down the buds, as if she had been autumn, whose office it is to throw down, and not to cherish and develope; ( ) she threw down the buds as if they had been, not buds of the nascent year, but such dead leaves of the olden year as still linger on the spray when spring arrives, . . _for whom should she have waked the sullen year?_ the year, beginning on january, may in a certain sense be conceived as sleeping until roused by the call of spring. but more probably shelley here treats the year as beginning on march--which date would witness its awakening, and practically its first existence. . - . _to phoebus was not hyacinth so dear, nor to himself narcissus, as to both thou, adonais; wan they stand and sere_, &c. this passage assimilates two sections in the elegy of moschus, p. : 'now, thou hyacinth, whisper the letters on thee graven, and add a deeper ai ai to thy petals: he is dead, the beautiful singer.... nor so much did pleasant lesbos mourn for alcaeus,' &c. the passage of shelley is rather complicated in its significance, because it mixes up the personages hyacinthus and narcissus with the flowers hyacinth and narcissus. the beautiful youth hyacinthus was dear to phoebus; on his untimely death (he was slain by a quoit which phoebus threw, and which the jealous zephyrus blew aside so that it struck hyacinthus on the head), the god changed his blood into the flower hyacinth, which bears markings interpreted by the grecian fancy into the lettering [greek: ai ai] (alas, alas!). the beautiful youth narcissus, contemplating himself in a streamlet, became enamoured of his own face; and pining away, was converted into the flower narcissus. this accounts for the lines, 'to phoebus was not hyacinth so dear, nor to himself narcissus.' but, when we come to the sequence, 'as to both thou, adonais.' we have to do, no longer with the youths hyacinthus and narcissus, but with the flowers hyacinth and narcissus: it is the flowers which (according to shelley) loved adonais better than the youths were loved, the one by phoebus and the other by himself. these flowers--being some of the kindling buds which spring had thrown down--stand 'wan and sere.' (this last point is rather the reverse of a phrase in bion's elegy, p. , 'the flowers flush red for anguish.') it may perhaps be held that the transition from the youths to the flowers, and from the emotions of phoebus and of narcissus to those assigned to the flowers, is not very happily managed by shelley: it is artificial, and not free from confusion. as to the hyacinth, the reader will readily perceive that a flower which bears markings read off into [greek: ai ai] (or [greek: ai ai] seems more correct) cannot be the same which we now call hyacinth. ovid says that in form the hyacinth resembles a lily, and that its colour is 'purpureus,' or deep red. john martyn, who published in _the georgicks of virgil with an english translation_, has an elaborate note on the subject. he concludes thus: 'i am pretty well satisfied that the flower celebrated by the poets is what we now are acquainted with under the name 'lilium floribus reflexis,' or martagon, and perhaps may be that very species which we call imperial martagon. the flowers of most sorts of martagons have many spots of a deeper colour: and sometimes i have seen these spots run together in such a manner as to form the letters ai in several places.' shelley refers to the hyacinth in another passage (_prometheus unbound_, act , sc. ) which seems to indicate that he regarded the antique hyacinth as being the same as the modern hyacinth,-- 'as the _blue bells_ of hyacinth tell apollo's written grief.' . . _amid the faint companions of their youth._ in shelley's edition the words are 'amid the drooping comrades,' &c. the change was made under the same circumstances as noted on p. . whether it is a change for the better may admit of some question. the faint companions of the youth of the hyacinth and the narcissus must be other flowers, such as spring had thrown down. . . _with dew all turned to tears,--odour, to sighing ruth._ the dew upon the hyacinth and narcissus is converted into tears: they exhale sighs, instead of fragrance. all this is in rather a _falsetto_ tone. it has some resemblance to the more simple and touching phrase in the elegy by moschus (p. ): 'ye flowers, now in sad clusters breathe yourselves away.' +stanza +, . . _thy spirits sister, the lorn nightingale, mourns not her mate_, &c. the reason for calling the nightingale the sister of the spirit of keats (adonais) does not perhaps go beyond this--that, as the nightingale is a supreme songster among birds, so was keats a supreme songster among men. it is possible however--and one willingly supposes so--that shelley singled out the nightingale for mention, in recognition of the consummate beauty of keats's _ode to the nightingale_, published in the same volume with _hyperion_. the epithet 'lorn' may also be noted in the same connexion; as keats's ode terminates with a celebrated passage in which 'forlorn' is the leading word (but not as an epithet for the nightingale itself)-- 'forlorn!--the very word is as a knell,' &c. the nightingale is also introduced into the elegy of moschus for bion; 'ye nightingales that lament,' &c. (p. ), and 'nor ever sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs.' poets are fond of speaking of the nightingale as being the hen-bird, and shelley follows this precedent. it is a fallacy, for the songster is always the cock-bird. . . _not so the eagle_, &c. the general statement in these lines is that albion wails for the death of keats more melodiously than the nightingale mourning for her lost mate, and more passionately than the eagle robbed of her young. this statement has proved true enough in the long run: when shelley wrote, it was only prospectively or potentially true, for the death of keats excited no immediate widespread concern in england. it should be observed that, by introducing albion as a figurative personage in his elegy, shelley disregards his emblematic grecian youth adonais, and goes straight to the actual englishman keats. this passage, taken as a whole, is related to that of moschus (p. ) regarding the nightingale, the sea-bird, and the bird of memnon; see also the passage, 'and not for sappho, but still for thee,' &c. . , . _could nourish in the sun's domain her mighty youth with morning._ this phrase seems to have some analogy to that of milton in his _areopagitica_: 'methinks i see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks. methinks i see her as an eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam--purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance.' . , . _the curse of cain light on his head_, &c. an imprecation against the critic of keats's _endymion_ in the _quarterly review_: see especially p. , &c. the curse of cain was that he should be 'a fugitive and a vagabond,' as well as unsuccessful in tilling the soil. shelley probably pays no attention to these details, but simply means 'the curse of murder.' +stanza ,+ . , . _ah woe is me! winter is come and gone, but grief returns with the revolving year_, &c. see the passage in moschus (p. ): 'ah me! when the mallows wither,' &c. the phrase in bion has also a certain but restricted analogy to this stanza: 'thou must again bewail him, again must weep for him another year' (p. ). as to the phrase 'winter is come and gone,' see the note (p. ) on 'grief made the young spring wild.' . . _fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead seasons' bier._ this phrase is barely consistent with the statement (st. ) as to spring throwing down her kindling buds. perhaps, moreover, it was an error of print to give 'seasons' in the plural: 'season's' (meaning winter) would seem more accurate. a somewhat similar idea is conveyed in one of shelley's lyrics, _autumn, a dirge_, written in :-- 'and the year on the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, is lying.' . . _brere._ an antiquated form of the word briar. . . _like unimprisoned flames._ flames which, after being pent up within some substance or space, finally find a vent. +stanza ,+ . . _a quickening life_, &c. the present stanza is generally descriptive of the effects of springtime upon the earth. this reawakening of nature (shelley says) has always taken place, in annual recurrence, since 'the great morning of the world when first god dawned on chaos.' this last expression must be construed with a certain latitude. the change from an imagined chaos into a divinely-ordered cosmos is not necessarily coincident with the interchange of seasons, and especially the transition from winter to spring, upon the planet earth. all that can be safely propounded on such a subject is that the sequence of seasons is a constant and infallible phenomenon of nature in that condition of our planet with which alone we have, or can have, any acquaintance. . . _in its steam immersed_: i.e. in the steam--or vapour or exhalation--of the 'quickening life.' +stanza ,+ . , . _the leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender, exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath._ 'this spirit tender' is the 'quickening life' of the renascent year; or briefly the spring. by 'the leprous corpse' shelley may mean, not the corpse of an actual leper, but any corpse in a loathsome state of decay. even so abhorrent an object avails to fertilize the soil, and thus promotes the growth of odorous flowers. . . _like incarnations of the stars_, &c. these flowers--star-like blossoms--illumine death and the grave: the light which would belong to them as stars is converted into the fragrance proper to them as flowers. this image is rather confused, and i think rather stilted: moreover, 'incarnation' (or embodiment in _flesh_) is hardly the right word for the vegetative nature of flowers. as forms of life, the flowers mock or deride the grave-worm which battens or makes merry on corruption. the appropriateness of the term 'merry worm' seems very disputable. . . _nought we know dies._ this affirmation springs directly out of the consideration just presented to us--that even the leprous corpse does not, through various stages of decay, pass into absolute nothingness: on the contrary, its constituents take new forms, and subserve a re-growth of life, as in the flowers which bedeck the grave. from this single and impressive instance the poet passes to the general and unfailing law--no material object of which we have cognizance really dies: all such objects are in a perpetual cycle of change. this conception has been finely developed in a brace of early poems of lord tennyson, _all things will die_, and _nothing will die_:-- 'the stream will cease to flow, the wind will cease to blow, the clouds will cease to fleet, the heart will cease to beat-- for all things must die. * * * * * 'the stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets, the heart beats, nothing will die. nothing will die; all things will change through eternity.' . - . _shall that alone which knows be as a sword consumed before the sheath by sightless lightning?_ from the axiom 'nought we know dies'--an axiom which should be understood as limited to what we call material objects (which shelley however considered to be indistinguishable, in essence, from ideas, see p, )--he proceeds to the question, 'shall that alone which knows'--i.e. shall the mind alone--die and be annihilated? if the mind were to die, while the body continues extant (not indeed in the form of a human body, but in various phases of ulterior development), then the mind would resemble a sword which, by the action of lightning, is consumed (molten, dissolved) within its sheath, while the sheath itself remains unconsumed. this is put as a question, and shelley does not supply an answer to it here, though the terms in which his enquiry is couched seem intended to suggest a reply to the effect that the mind shall _not_ die. the meaning of the epithet 'sightless,' as applied to lightning, seems disputable. of course the primary sense of this word is 'not-seeing, blind'; but shelley would probably not have scrupled to use it in the sense of 'unseen.' i incline to suppose that shelley means 'unseen'; not so much that the lightning is itself unseen as that its action in fusing the sword, which remains concealed within the sheath, is unseen. but the more obvious sense of 'blind, unregardful,' could also be justified. . , . _th' intense atom glows a moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose._ the term 'th' intense atom' is a synonym for 'that which knows,' or the mind. by death it is 'quenched in a most cold repose': but the repose is not necessarily extinction. +stanza ,+ . , . _alas that all we loved of him should be, but for our grief, as if it had not been._ 'all we loved of him' must be the mind and character--the mental and personal endowments--of adonais: his bodily frame is little or not at all in question here. by these lines therefore shelley seems to intimate that the mind or soul of adonais is indeed now and for ever extinct: it lives no longer save in the grief of the survivors. but it does not follow that this is a final expression of shelley's conviction on the subject: the passage should be read as in context with the whole poem. . , . _great and mean meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow._ the meaning of the last words is far from clear to me. i think shelley may intend to say that, in this our mortal state, death is the solid and permanent fact; it is rather a world of death than of life. the phenomena of life are but like a transitory loan from the great emporium, death. shelley no doubt wanted a rhyme for 'morrow' and 'sorrow': he has made use of 'borrow' in a compact but not perspicuous phrase. +stanza ,+ . . _'wake thou,' cried misery, 'childless mother!'_ we here return to urania, of whom we had last heard in st. . see the passage translated by shelley from bion (p. ), 'sleep no more, venus:... 'tis misery calls,' &c.; but here the phrase, ''tis misery calls,' is shelley's own. he more than once introduces misery (in the sense of unhappiness, tribulation) as an emblematic personage. there is his lyric named _misery_, written in , which begins-- 'come, be happy,--sit by me, shadow-vested misery: coy, unwilling, silent bride, mourning in thy robe of pride, desolation deified.' there is also the briefer lyric named _death_, , which begins-- 'they die--the dead return not. misery sits near an open grave, and calls them over, a youth with hoary hair and haggard eye.' . , . _'slake in thy hearts core a wound--more fierce than his, with tears and sighs.'_ construe: slake with tears and sighs a wound in thy heart's core--a wound more fierce than his.' see (p. ) the remarks, apposite to st. , upon the use of inversion by shelley. . . _all the dreams that watched urania's eyes._ we had not hitherto heard of 'dreams' in connexion with urania, but only in connexion with adonais himself. these 'dreams that watched urania's eyes' appear to be dreams in the more obvious sense of that word-visions which had haunted the slumbers of urania. . . _swift as a thought by the snake memory stung._ the context suggests that the 'thought' here in question is a grievous thought, and the term 'the snake memory' conveys therefore a corresponding impression of pain. shelley however had not the usual feeling of repulsion or abhorrence for snakes and serpents. various passages could be cited to prove this; more especially canto of _the revolt of islam,_ where the spirit of good is figured under the form of a serpent. . . _front her ambrosial rest the fading splendour sprung._ urania. she is in her own nature a splendour, or celestial deity: at the present moment her brightness is 'fading,' as being overcast by sorrow and dismay. 'her ambrosial rest' does not appear to signify anything more precise than 'her rest, proper to an immortal being.' the forms 'sprung, sung,' &c. are constantly used by shelley instead of 'sprang, sang,' &c. +stanza ,+ . . _had left the earth a corpse._ shelley, in this quasi-greek poem, takes no count of the fact that the sun, when it ceases to illumine one part of the earth, is shining upon another part. he treats the unillumined part as if it were the whole earth--which has hereby become 'a corpse.' +stanza ,+ . , _through camps and cities_, &c. in highly figurative language, this stanza pictures the passage of urania from 'her secret paradise' to the death-chamber of adonais in rome, as if the spiritual essence and external form of the goddess were wounded by the uncongenial atmosphere of human malice and detraction through which she has to pass. the whole description is spiritualized from that of bion (p. ):-- 'wildered, ungirt, unsandalled--the thorns pierce her hastening feet, and drink her sacred blood.' . , . _the invisible palms of her tender feet._ shelley more than once uses 'palms' for 'soles' of the feet. see _prometheus unbound_, act :-- 'our feet now, every palm, are sandalled with calm'; and _the triumph of life_:-- 'as she moved under the mass of the deep cavern, and, with palms so tender their tread broke not the mirror of the billow, glided along the river.' perhaps shelley got this usage from the italian: in that language the web-feet of aquatic birds are termed 'palme.' . , . _whose sacred blood, like the young tears of may, paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way._ the tears of may are rain-drops; young, because the year is not far advanced. 'that undeserving way' seems a very poor expression. see (p. ) the passage from bion: 'a tear the paphian sheds for each blood-drop of adonis, and tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers.' +stanza ,+ . . _death ... blushed to annihilation._ this very daring hyperbole will hardly bear--nor does it want--manipulation into prose. briefly, the nature of death is to be pallid: therefore death, in blushing, abnegates his very nature, and almost ceases to be death. . , . _the breath revisited those lips_, &c. as death tended towards 'annihilation,' so adonais tended towards revival. . . _'silent lightning.'_ this means, i suppose, lightning unaccompanied by thunder--summer lightning. +stanza ,+ . . _'stay yet awhile.'_ see bion (p. ): 'stay, adonis! stay, dearest one!' . , _'kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live.'_ see as above:-- 'that i may kiss thee now for the last time-- but for as long as one short kiss may live!' . . _'my heartless breast.'_ urania's breast will henceforth be heartless, in the sense that, having bestowed her whole heart upon adonais, she will have none to bestow upon any one else: so i understand the epithet. . . _'that word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,'_ &c. see bion (p. ): 'this kiss will i treasure,' &c. . - . _'i would give all that i am, to be as thou now art:--but i am chained to time, and cannot thence depart.'_ founded on bion (p. ): 'while wretched i yet live, being a goddess, and may not follow thee.' the alteration of phrase is somewhat remarkable. in bion's elegy the cyprian aphrodite is 'a goddess,' and therefore immortal. in shelley's elegy the uranian aphrodite does not speak of herself under any designation of immortality or eternity, but as 'chained to _time_,' and incapable of departing from time. as long as time lives and operates, urania must do the same. the dead have escaped from the dominion of time: this urania, cannot do. there is a somewhat similar train of thought in _prometheus unbound_,--where prometheus the titan, after enduring the torture of the furies (act ), says-- 'peace is in the grave: the grave holds all things beautiful and good, i am a god, and cannot find it _there_.' +stanza ,+ . - . _'o gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, why didst thou leave,'_ &c. this is founded on--and as usual spiritualized from--the passage in bion (p. ); 'for why, ah overbold! didst thou follow the chase, and, being so fair, why wert thou thus over-hardy to fight with beasts?' . . _'dare the unpastured dragon in his den.'_ this phrase must no doubt be interpreted, not only in relation to the figurative adonais. but also to the actual keats, keats had dared the unpastured dragon in his den, in the sense that he made a bold adventure into the poetical field, under conditions certain to excite the ire of adherents of the old school, whether in literature or in politics. . . _'wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear.'_ urania arraigns keats for having made his inroad upon the dragon, unguarded by wisdom or by scorn. his want of wisdom was shown (we may assume) by the grave blemishes and defects in his _endymion_, the wilful faults and perverse excesses and extravagances which mark its composition, and wantonly invited attack. his want of scorn was (according to shelley's view of the facts), clear enough: he had not been equal to despising a spiteful attack, but had fretted himself to death under it. in terming these two defensive weapons, wisdom and scorn, a mirrored shield and a spear, shelley was, i apprehend, thinking of the orlando furioso of ariosto. in that poem we read of a magic shield which casts a supernatural and intolerable splendour, whereby every gazer is cast into a trance; and of a spear whose lightest touch overthrows every opponent. a sea-monster--not a dragon, so far as i recollect--becomes one of the victims of the 'mirrored shield.' . , . _'the full cycle when thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere.'_ the spirit of keats is here assimilated to the moon, which grows from a crescent into a spherical form. . . _'the monsters of life's waste.'_ the noxious creatures which infest the wilderness of human life. +stanza ,+ . . _'the herded wolves,'_ &c. these same 'monsters' are now pictured under three aspects. they are herded wolves, which will venture to pursue a traveller, but will not face him if he turns upon them boldly; and obscene ravens, which make an uproar over dead bodies, or dead reputations; and vultures, which follow in the wake of a conqueror, and gorge upon that which is already overthrown. in the succeeding stanza, , two other epithetal similes are bestowed upon the monsters--they become 'reptiles' and 'ephemeral insects.' all these repulsive images are of course here applied to critics of wilfully obtuse or malignant mind, such as shelley accounted the _quarterly_ reviewer of keats to be. . , &c. _'how they fled when, like apollo,'_ &c. the allusion is to perfectly well-known incidents in the opening poetic career of lord byron. his lordship, in earliest youth, published a very insignificant volume of verse named _hours of idleness_. the _edinburgh review_--rightly in substance, but with some superfluous harshness of tone--pronounced this volume to be poor stuff. byron retaliated by producing his satire entitled _english bards and scotch reviewers_. with this book he scored a success. his next publication was the generally and enthusiastically admired commencement of _childe harold_, ; after which date the critics justly acclaimed him as a poet--although in course of time they grew lavishly severe upon him from the point of view of morals and religion. i reproduce from the pisan edition the punctuation--'when like apollo, from his golden bow'; but i think the exact sense would be better brought out if we read--'when, like apollo from his golden bow, the pythian,' &c. . , . _'the pythian of the age one arrow sped, and smiled.'_ byron is here assimilated to apollo pythius--apollo the python-slayer. the statue named apollo belvedere is regarded as representing the god at the moment after he has discharged his arrow at the python (serpent), his countenance irradiated with a half-smile of divine scorn and triumph. the terms employed by shelley seem to glance more particularly at that celebrated statue: this was the more appropriate as byron had devoted to the same figure two famous stanzas in the th canto of _childe harold_-- 'or view the lord of the unerring bow, the god of life and poesy and light,' &c. . . _'they fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.'_ in the pisan edition we read 'that spurn them as they go.' no doubt the change (introduced as in other instances named on pp. and ) must be shelley's own. the picture presented to the mind is more consistent, according to the altered reading. the critics, as we are told in this stanza, had at first 'fled' from byron's arrow; afterwards they 'fawned on his proud feet.' in order to do this, they must have paused in their flight, and returned; and, in the act of fawning on byron's feet, they must have crouched down, or were 'lying low.' (mr. forman, in his edition of shelley, pointed this out.) with the words 'as they go' the image was not self-consistent: for the critics could not be 'going,' or walking away, at the same time when they were fawning on the poet's feet. this last remark assumes that the words 'as they go' mean 'as the critics go ': but perhaps (and indeed i think this is more than probable) the real meaning was 'as the feet of byron go'--as byron proceeds disdainfully on his way. if this was shelley's original meaning, he probably observed after a while that the words 'as _they_ go' seem to follow on with '_they_ fawn,' and not with 'the proud feet'; and, in order to remove the ambiguity, he substituted the expression 'lying low.' +stanza ,+ . - . _'the sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn; he sets, and each ephemeral insect then is gathered into death.'_ the spawning of a reptile (say a lizard or toad), and the death of an insect (say a beetle or gnat), are two things totally unconnected. shelley however seems to link them together, as if this spawning were the origin of the life, the brief life, of the insect. he appears therefore to use 'reptile,' not in the defined sense which we commonly attach to the word, but in the general sense of 'a creeping creature,' such for instance as a grub or caterpillar, the first form of an insect, leading on to its final metamorphosis or development. even so his natural history is curiously at fault: for no grub or caterpillar can spawn--which is the function of the fully-developed insect itself, whether 'ephemeral' or otherwise. can shelley have been ignorant of this? . . _'and the immortal stars awake again.'_ the imagery of this stanza (apart from the 'reptiles' and 'ephemeral insects') deserves a little consideration. the sun (says shelley) arises, and then sets: when it sets, the immortal stars awake again. similarly, a godlike mind (say the mind of keats) appears, and its light illumines the earth, and veils the heaven: when it disappears, 'the spirit's awful night' is left to 'its kindred lamps.' this seems as much as to say that the splendour of a new poetic genius appears to contemporaries to throw preceding poets into obscurity; but this is only a matter of the moment, for, when the new genius sinks in death, the others shine forth again as stars of the intellectual zenith, to which the new genius is kindred indeed, but not superior. with these words concludes the speech of urania, which began in stanza . +stanza ,+ . . _the mountain shepherds_. these are contemporary british poets, whom shelley represents as mourning the death of keats. shepherds are such familiar figures in poetry--utilized for instance in milton's _lycidas_, as well as by many poets of antiquity--that the introduction of them into shelley's elegy is no matter for surprise. why they should be '_mountain_ shepherds' is not so clear. perhaps shelley meant to indicate a certain analogy between the exalted level at which the shepherds dwelt and the exalted level at which the poets wrote. as the shepherds do not belong to the low-country, so neither do the poets belong to the flats of verse. shelley may have written with a certain degree of reference to that couplet in _lycidas_-- 'for we were nursed upon the self-same _hill_, fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill.' . . _their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent._ the garlands or chaplets of the mountain shepherds have become sere because (it may be presumed) the wearers, in their grief for the mortal illness and death of adonais, have for some little while left them unrenewed. or possibly the garlands withered at the moment when spring 'threw down her kindling buds' (stanza ), i do not well understand the expression 'magic mantles.' there seems to be no reason why the mantles of the shepherds, considered as shepherds, should be magic. even when we contemplate the shepherds as poets, we may fail to discern why any magical property should be assigned to their mantles. by the use of the epithet 'magic' shelley must have intended to bridge over the gap between the nominal shepherds and the real poets, viewed as inspired singers: for this purpose he has adopted a bold verbal expedient, but not i think an efficient one. it may be noticed that the 'uncouth swain' who is represented in _lycidas_ as singing the dirge (in other words, milton himself) is spoken of as having a mantle--it is a 'mantle blue' (see the penultimate line of that poem). . . _the pilgrim of eternity._ this is lord byron. as inventor of the personage childe harold, the hero and so-called 'pilgrim' of the poem _childe harold's pilgrimage_, and as being himself to a great extent identical with his hero, byron was frequently termed 'the pilgrim.' shelley adopts this designation, which he magnifies into 'the pilgrim of eternity,' he admired byron most enthusiastically as a poet, and was generally on easy--sometimes on cordial--terms with him as a man. he has left us a fine and discriminating portrait of byron in the 'count maddalo' of his poem _julian and maddalo_, written in . at times however shelley felt and expressed great indignation against byron, especially in reference to the ungenerous and cruel conduct of the latter towards miss clairmont. see some brief reference to this matter at p. . . - . _whose fame over his living head like heaven is bent, an early but enduring monument._ these phrases are not very definite. when fame is spoken of as being bent over byron's head, we must conceive of fame as taking a form cognizable by the senses. i think shelley means to assimilate it to the rainbow; saying substantially--fame is like an arc bent over byron's head, as the arc of the rainbow is bent over the expanse of heaven. the ensuing term 'monument' applies rather to fame in the abstract than to any image of fame as an arc. . , . _came, veiling all the lightnings of his song in sorrow._ no doubt it would have been satisfactory to shelley if he could have found that byron entertained or expressed any serious concern at keats's premature death, and at the hard measure which had been meted out to him by critics. byron did in fact admire _hyperion_; writing (in november , not long after the publication of _adonais_)--'his fragment of _hyperion_ seems actually inspired by the titans, and is as sublime as aeschylus'; and other utterances of his show that--being with difficulty persuaded to suppose that keats's health and life had succumbed to the attack in the _quarterly_--he fittingly censured the want of feeling or want of reflection on the critic's part which had produced so deplorable a result. but on the whole byron's feeling towards keats was one of savage contempt during the young poet's life, and of bantering levity after his death. here are some specimens. (from a letter to mr. murray, october, ). 'there is such a trash of keats and the like upon my tables that i am ashamed to look at them.... no more keats, i entreat. flay him alive: if some of you don't, i must skin him myself. there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin.' '"who killed john keats?" "i," says the quarterly, so savage and tartarly; "'twas one of my feats."' 'john keats, who was killed off by one critique just as he really promised something great if not intelligible, without greek contrived to talk about the gods of late, much as they might have been supposed to speak. poor fellow, his was an untoward fate! 'tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, should let itself be snuffed out by an article.' . - . _from her wilds ierne sent the sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong, and love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue._ ierne (ireland) sent thomas moore, the lyrist of her wrongs--an allusion to the _irish melodies_, and some other poems. there is not, i believe, any evidence to show that moore took the slightest interest in keats, his doings or his fate: shelley is responsible for moore's love, grief, and music, in this connexion. a letter from keats has been published showing that at one time he expected to meet moore personally (see p. ). whether he did so or not i cannot say for certain, but i apprehend not: the published diary of moore, of about the same date, suggests the negative. +stanza ,+ . . _'midst others of less note._ shelley clearly means 'less note' than byron and moore--not less note than the 'one frail form.' . . _came one frail form,_ &c. this personage represents shelley himself. shelley here describes himself under a profusion of characteristics, briefly defined: it may be interesting to summarize them, apart from the other details with which they are interspersed. he is a frail form; a phantom among men; companionless; one who had gazed actaeon-like on nature's naked loveliness, and who now fled with feeble steps, hounded by his own thoughts; a pard-like spirit beautiful and swift; a love masked in desolation; a power begirt with weakness, scarcely capable of lifting the weight of the hour; a breaking billow, which may even now be broken; the last of the company, neglected and apart--a herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart; in keats's fate, he wept his own; his brow was branded and ensanguined. most of these attributes can be summed up under one heading--that of extreme sensitiveness and susceptibility, which meet with no response or sustainment, but rather with misjudgment, repulse, and outrage. some readers may think that shelley insists upon this aspect of his character to a degree rather excessive, and dangerously near the confines of feminine sensibility, rather than virile fortitude. apart from this predominant type of character, shelley describes his spirit as 'beautiful and swift'--which surely it was: and he says that, having gazed upon nature's naked loveliness, he had suffered the fate of a second actseon, fleeing 'o'er the world's wilderness,' and pursued by his own thoughts like raging hounds. by this expression shelley apparently means that he had over-boldly tried to fathom the depths of things and of mind, but, baffled and dismayed in the effort, suffered, as a man living among men, by the very tension and vividness of his thoughts, and their daring in expression. see what he says of himself, in prose, on p. . . , . _he, as i guess, had gazed,_ &c. the use of the verb 'guess' in the sense of 'to surmise, conjecture, infer,' is now mostly counted as an americanism. this is not correct; for the verb has often been thus used by standard english authors. such a practice was not however common in shelley's time, and he may have been guided chiefly by the rhyming. +stanza ,+ . . _the weight of the superincumbent hour._ this line is scarcely rhythmical: to bring it within the ordinary scheme of ryhthm, one would have to lay an exaggerated stress on two of its feet--'thé supérincumbent.' neither this treatment of the line, nor the line itself apart from this treatment, can easily be justified. +stanza ,+ . , . _his head was bound with pansies overblown, and faded violets._ the pansy is the flower of thought, or memory: we commonly call it heartsease, but shelley no doubt uses it here with a different, or indeed contrary, meaning. the violet indicates modesty. a stanza from one of his lyrics may be appropriately cited--_remembrance_, dated :-- 'lilies for a bridal bed, roses for a matron's head, violets for a maiden dead, pansies let _my_ flowers be. on the living grave i bear scatter them without a tear; let no friend, however dear, waste a hope, a fear, for me.' . . _a light spear topped with a cypress cone._ the funereal cypress explains itself. . . _dark ivy tresses._ the ivy indicates constancy in friendship. +stanza ,+ . . _his partial moan._ the epithet 'partial' is accounted for by what immediately follows--viz. that shelley 'in another's fate now wept his own.' he, like keats, was the object of critical virulence, and he was wont (but on very different grounds) to anticipate an early death. see (on p. ) the expression in a letter from shelley--'a writer who, however he may differ,' &c. . . _as in the accents of an unknown land he sang new sorrow._ it is not very clear why shelley should represent that he, as one of the mountain shepherds, used a language different (as one might infer) from that of his companions. all those whom he particularizes were his compatriots. perhaps however shelley merely means that the language (english) was that of a land unknown to the greek deity aphrodite urania. the phrase 'new sorrow' occurs in the elegy by moschus (p. ). by the use of this phrase shelley seems to mean not merely that the death of keats was a recent and sorrowful event, but more especially that it constituted a new sorrow--one more sorrow--to shelley himself. . , . i reproduce the punctuation of the pisan edition, with a colon after 'his own,' and a semicolon after 'sorrow.' it appears to me however that the sense would rather require either a full stop after 'his own,' and a comma after 'sorrow,' or else a comma after 'his own,' and a full stop or colon after 'sorrow.' yet it is possible that the phrase, 'as in the accents,' &c., forms a separate clause by itself, meaning, 'as _if_ in the accents of an unknown land, he sang new sorrow.' . , . _made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, which was like cain's or christ's._ shelley represents his own brow as being branded like cain's--stamped with the mark of reprobation; and ensanguined like christ's--bleeding from a crown of thorns. this indicates the extreme repugnance with which he was generally regarded, and in especial perhaps the decree of the court of chancery which deprived him of his children by his first marriage--and generally the troubles and sufferings which he had undergone. the close coupling-together, in this line, of the names of cain and christ, was not likely to conciliate antagonists; and indeed one may safely surmise that it was done by shelley more for the rather wanton purpose of exasperating them than with any other object.--in this stanza urania appears for the last time. +stanza ,+ , . _what softer voice is hushed over the dead?_ the personage here referred to is leigh hunt. see p. . . . _gentlest of the wise._ it is apparent that shelley entertained a very sincere affection and regard for leigh hunt. he dedicated to hunt the tragedy of _the cenci_, using the following expressions among others: 'had i known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, i had solicited for this work the ornament of his name. one more gentle, honourable, innocent, and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive and how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler and (in the highest sense of the word) of purer life and manners, i never knew: and i had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list.' . . _taught, soothed, loved, honoured, the departed one._ it has sometimes been maintained that hunt, whatever may have been the personal friendship which he felt for keats, did not, during the latter's lifetime, champion his literary cause with so much zeal as might have been expected from his professions. this is a point open to a good deal of discussion from both sides. mr. buxton forman, who, as editor of keats, had occasion to investigate the matter attentively, pronounces decidedly in favour of hunt. +stanza ,+ . . _our adonais has drunk poison._ founded on those lines of moschus which appear as a motto to shelley's elegy. see also p. . . . _what deaf and viperous murderer._ deaf, because insensible to the beauty of keats's verse; and viperous, because poisonous and malignant. the juxtaposition of the two epithets may probably be also partly dependent on that passage in the psalms (lviii. , ) which has become proverbial: 'they are as venomous as the poison of a serpent: even like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears; which refuseth to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.' . . _the nameless worm._ a worm, as being one of the lowest forms of life, is constantly used as a term implying contempt; but it may be assumed that shelley here uses 'worm' in its original sense, that of any crawling creature, more especially of the snake kind. there would thus be no departure from the previous epithet 'viperous.' see the remarks as to 'reptiles,' st. . . , . _the magic tone whose prelude,_ &c. shelley, it will be perceived, here figures keats as a minstrel striking the lyre, and preparing to sing. he strikes the lyre in a 'magic tone'; the very 'prelude' of this was enough to command silent expectation. this prelude is the poem of _endymion_, to which the _quarterly_ reviewer alone (according to shelley) was insensitive, owing to feelings of 'envy, hate, and wrong.' the prelude was only an induction to the 'song,'--which was eventually poured forth in the _lamia_ volume, and especially (as our poet opined) in _hyperion_. but now keats's hand is cold in death, and his lyre unstrung. as i have already observed--see p. , &c.--shelley was mistaken in supposing that the _quarterly review_ had held a monopoly of 'envy, hate, and wrong'--or, as one might now term them, detraction, spite, and unfairness--in reference to keats. +stanza ,+ . . _but be thyself, and know thyself to be!_ the precise import of this line is not, i think, entirely plain at first sight. i conceive that we should take the line as immediately consequent upon the preceding words--'live thou, live!' premising this, one might amplify the idea as follows; 'while keats is dead, be it thy doom, thou his deaf and viperous murderer, to live! but thou shalt live in thine own degraded identity, and shalt thyself be conscious how degraded thou art.' another suggestion might be that the words 'but be thyself are equivalent to 'be but thyself.' . , . _and ever at thy season be thou free to spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow._ this keeps up the image of the 'viperous' murderer--the viper. 'at thy season' can be understood as a reference to the periodical issues of the _quarterly review_. the word 'o'erflow' is, in the pisan edition, printed as two words--'o'er flow.' . . _remorse and self-contempt._ shelley frequently dwells upon self-contempt as one of the least tolerable of human distresses. thus in the _revolt of islam_ (canto , st. ): 'yes, it is hate--that shapeless fiendly thing of many names, all evil, some divine-- whom self-contempt arms with a mortal sting,' &c. and in _prometheus unbound_ (act i)-- 'regard this earth made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise? and toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, with fear and self-contempt and barren hope.' again (act ii, sc. )-- 'and self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood.' +stanza ,+ . . _nor let us weep,_ &c. so far as the broad current of sentiment is concerned, this is the turning-point of shelley's elegy. hitherto the tone has been continuously, and through a variety of phases, one of mourning for the fact that keats, the great poetical genius, is untimely dead. but now the writer pauses, checks himself, and recognises that mourning is not the only possible feeling, nor indeed the most appropriate one. as his thought expands and his rapture rises, he soon acknowledges that, so far from grieving for keats who _is_ dead, it were far more relevant to grieve for himself who is _not_ dead. this paean of recantation and aspiration occupies the remainder of the poem. . . _these carrion kites._ a term of disparagement corresponding nearly enough to the 'ravens' and 'vultures' of st. . . . _he wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead._ with such of the dead as have done something which survives themselves. it will be observed that the phrase 'he wakes _or_ sleeps' leaves the question of personal or individual immortality quite open. as to this point see the remarks on p. , &c. . . thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. this is again addressed to the 'deaf and viperous murderer,' regarded for the moment as a 'carrion kite.' as kites are eminently high flyers, the phrase here used becomes the more emphatic. this line of shelley's is obviously adapted from a passage in milton's _paradise lost_, where satan addresses the angels in eden (book )-- 'ye knew me once, no mate for you, there sitting where ye durst not soar.' . . _the pure spirit shall flow_, &c. the spirit which once was the vital or mental essence--the soul--of adonais came from the eternal soul, and, now that he is dead, is re-absorbed into the eternal soul: as such, it is imperishable. . . _whilst thy cold embers choke_, &c. the spirit of adonais came as a flame from the 'burning fountain' of the eternal, and has now reverted thither, he being one of the 'enduring dead.' but the 'deaf and viperous murderer' must not hope for a like destiny. his spirit, after death, will be merely like 'cold embers,' cumbering the 'hearth of shame.' as a rhetorical antithesis, this serves its purpose well: no doubt shelley would not have pretended that it is a strictly reasoned antithesis as well, or furnishes a full account of the _post-mortem_ fate of the _quarterly_ reviewer. +stanza ,+ . , . _peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! he hath awakened from the dream of life._ shelley now proceeds boldly to declare that the state which we call death is to be preferred to that which we call life. keats is neither dead nor sleeping. he used to be asleep, perturbed and tantalized by the dream which is termed life. having at last awakened from the dream, he is no longer asleep: and, if life is no more than a dream, neither does the cessation of life deserve to be named death. the transition from one emotion to another in this passage, and also in the preceding stanza, 'nor let us weep,' &c., resembles the transition towards the close of _lycidas_-- 'weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more, for lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,' &c. the general view has considerable affinity to that which is expounded in a portion of plato's dialogue _phaedo_, and which has been thus summarised. 'death is merely the separation of soul and body. and this is the very consummation at which philosophy aims: the body hinders thought,--the mind attains to truth by retiring into herself. through no bodily sense does she perceive justice, beauty, goodness, and other ideas. the philosopher has a lifelong quarrel with bodily desires, and he should welcome the release of his soul.' . . _'tis we who, lost in stormy visions_, &c. we, the so-called living, are in fact merely beset by a series of stormy visions which constitute life; all our efforts are expended upon mere phantoms, and are therefore profitless; our mental conflict is an act of trance, exercised upon mere nothings. the very energetic expression, 'strike with our spirit's knife invulnerable nothings,' is worthy of remark. it will be remembered that, according to shelley's belief, 'nothing exists but as it is perceived': see p. . the view of life expressed with passionate force in this passage of _adonais_ is the same which forms the calm and placid conclusion of _the sensitive plant_, a poem written in ;-- 'but, in this life of error, ignorance, and strife, where nothing is but all things seem. and we the shadows of the dream, it is a modest creed, and yet pleasant if one considers it, to own that death itself must be, like all the rest, a mockery. that garden sweet, that lady fair, and all sweet shapes and odours there, in truth have never passed away: 'tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they. for love, and beauty, and delight, there is no death nor change; their might exceeds our organs, which endure no light, being themselves obscure.' . , . _we decay like corpses in a charnel_, &c. human life consists of a process of decay. while living, we are consumed by fear and grief; our disappointed hopes swarm in our living persons like worms in our corpses. +stanza ,+ . . _he has outsoared the shadow of our night._ as human life was in the last stanza represented as a dream, so the state of existence in which it is enacted is here figured as night. . . _from the contagion of the world's slow stain._ it may be said that 'the world's slow stain'--the lowering influence of the aims and associations of all ordinary human life--is the main subject-matter of shelley's latest important poem, _the triumph of life._ . . _with sparkless ashes._ see the cognate expression, 'thy cold embers,' in st. . +stanza ,+ . . _he lives, he wakes--'tis death is dead, not he._ in the preceding three stanzas adonais is contemplated as being alive, owing to the very fact that his death has awakened him 'from the dream of life'--mundane life. death has bestowed upon him a vitality superior to that of mundane life. death therefore has performed an act contrary to his own essence as death, and has practically killed, not adonais, but himself. . . _thou young dawn._ we here recur to the image in st. , 'morning sought her eastern watch-tower,' &c. . . _ye caverns and ye forests_, &c. the poet now adjures the caverns, forests, flowers, fountains, and air, to 'cease to moan.' of the flowers we had heard in st. : but the other features of nature which are now addressed had not previously been individually mentioned--except, to some extent, by implication, in st. , which refers more directly to 'echo.' the reference to the air had also been, in a certain degree, prepared for in stanza . the stars are said to smile on the earth's despair. this does not, i apprehend, indicate any despair of the earth consequent on the death of adonais, but a general condition of woe. a reference of a different kind to stars--a figurative reference--appears in st. . +stanza ,+ . . _he is made one with nature._ this stanza ascribes to keats the same phase of immortality which belongs to nature. having 'awakened from the dream of [mundane] life,' his spirit forms an integral portion of the universe. those acts of intellect which he performed in the flesh remain with us, as thunder and the song of the nightingale remain with us. . , . _where'er that power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own._ this corresponds to the expression in st. --'the pure spirit shall flow back to the burning fountain whence it came, a portion of the eternal.' . . _who wields the world with never wearied love_, &c. these two lines are about the nearest approach to definite theism to be found in any writing of shelley. the conception, which may amount to theism, is equally consistent with pantheism. even in his most anti-theistic poem, _queen mab_, shelley said in a note--'the hypothesis of a pervading spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken.' +stanza ,+ . - . _he is a portion of the loveliness which ones he made more lovely. he doth bear his part_, &c. the conception embodied in this passage may become more clear to the reader if its terms are pondered in connexion with the passage of shelley's prose extracted on p. --'the existence of distinct individual minds,' &c. keats, while a living man, had made the loveliness of the universe more lovely by expressing in poetry his acute and subtle sense of its beauties--by lavishing on it (as we say) 'the colours of his imagination,' he was then an 'individual mind'--according to the current, but (as shelley held) inexact terminology. he has now, by death, wholly passed out of the class of individual minds; and he forms a portion of the universal mind (the 'one spirit') which is the animation of the universe. . , . _while the one spirit's plastic stress sweeps through the dull dense world_, &c. the function ascribed in these lines to the one spirit is a formative or animating function: the spirit constitutes the life of 'trees and beasts and men.' this view is strictly within the limits of pantheism. +stanza ,+ . . _the splendours of the firmament of time_, &c. as there are stars in the firmament of heaven, so are there splendours--luminous intellects--in the firmament of time. the stars, though at times eclipsed, are not extinguished; nor yet the mental luminaries. this asseveration may be considered in connexion with the passage in st. : 'others more sublime, struck by the envious wrath of man or god, have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime.' . , . _when lofty thought lifts a young heart_, &c. the sense of this passage may be paraphrased thus:--when lofty thought lifts a young heart above its mundane environments, and when its earthly doom has to be determined by the conflicting influences of love, which would elevate it, and the meaner cares and interests of life, which would drag it downwards, then the illustrious dead live again in that heart--for its higher emotions are nurtured by their noble thoughts and aspirations,--and they move, like exhalations of light along dark and stormy air. this illustrates the previous proposition, that the splendours of the firmament of time are not extinguished; and, in the most immediate application of the proposition, keats is not extinguished--he will continue an ennobling influence upon minds struggling towards the light. +stanza ,+ . . _the inheritors of unfulfilled renown rose from their thrones._ there is a grand abruptness in this phrase, which makes it--as a point of poetical or literary structure--one of the finest things in the elegy. we are to understand (but shelley is too great a master to formulate it in words) that keats, as an 'inheritor of unfulfilled renown'--i.e. a great intellect cut off by death before its maturest fruits could be produced--has now arrived among his compeers: they rise from their thrones to welcome him. in this connexion shelley chooses to regard keats as still a living spiritual personality--not simply as 'made one with nature.' he is one of those 'splendours of the firmament of time' who 'may be eclipsed, but are extinguished not.' . - . _chatterton rose pale, his solemn agony had not yet faded from him._ for precocity and exceptional turn of genius chatterton was certainly one of the most extraordinary of 'the inheritors of unfulfilled renown'; indeed, the most extraordinary: he committed suicide by poison in , before completing the eighteenth year of his age. his supposititious modern-antique _poems of rowley_ may, as actual achievements, have been sometimes overpraised: but at the lowest estimate they have beauties and excellences of the most startling kind. he wrote besides a quantity of verse and prose, of a totally different order. keats admired chatterton profoundly, and dedicated _endymion_ to his memory. i cannot find that shelley, except in _adonais_, has left any remarks upon chatterton: but he is said by captain medwin to have been, in early youth, very much impressed by his writings. . . _sidney, as he fought_, &c. sir philip sidney, author of _the countess of pembroke's arcadia_, the _apology for poetry_, and the sonnets named _astrophel and stella_, died in his thirty-second year, of a wound received in the battle of zutphen, . shelley intimates that sidney maintained the character of being 'sublimely mild' in fighting, falling (dying), and loving, as well as generally in living. the special references appear to be these. ( ) sidney, observing that the lord marshal, the earl of leicester, had entered the field of zutphen without greaves, threw off his own, and thus exposed himself to the cannon-shot which slew him. ( ) being mortally wounded, and receiving a cup of water, he handed it (according to a tradition which is not unquestionable) to a dying soldier. ( ) his series of sonnets record his love for penelope devereux, sister to the earl of essex, who married lord rich. she had at one time been promised to sidney. he wrote the sonnets towards : in he married another lady, daughter of sir francis walsingham. it has been said that shelley was wont to make some self-parade in connexion with sir philip sidney, giving it to be understood that he was himself a descendant of the hero--which was not true, although the sidney blood came into a different line of the family. of this story i have not found any tangible confirmation. . . _lucan, by his death approved._ lucan, the author of the _pharsalia_, was condemned under nero as being an accomplice in the conspiracy of piso: he caused his veins to be opened, and died magnanimously, aged about twenty-six, a.d. . shelley, in one instance, went so far as to pronounce lucan superior to vergil. +stanza ,+ . , . _and many more, whose names on earth are dark, but whose transmitted effluence cannot die_, &c. this glorious company would include no doubt, not only the recorders of great thoughts, or performers of great deeds, which are still borne in memory although the names of the authors are forgotten, but also many whose work is as totally unknown as their names, but who exerted nevertheless a bright and elevating ascendant over other minds, and who thus conduced to the greatness of human-kind. . . _it was for thee_, &c. the synod of the inheritors of unfulfilled renown here invite keats to assume possession of a sphere, or constellation, which had hitherto been 'kingless,' or unappropriated. it had 'swung blind in unascended majesty': had not been assigned to any radiant spirit, whose brightness would impart brilliancy to the sphere itself. . . _silent alone amid an heaven of song._ this phrase points primarily to 'the music of the spheres': the sphere now assigned to keats had hitherto failed to take part in the music of its fellows, but henceforward will chime in. probably there is also a subsidiary, but in its context not less prominent meaning--namely, that, while the several poets (such as chatterton, sidney, and lucan) had each a vocal sphere of his own, apposite to his particular poetic quality, the sphere which keats is now to control had hitherto remained unoccupied because no poet of that special type of genius which it demanded had as yet appeared. its affinity was for keats, and for no one else. this is an implied attestation of keats's poetic originality. . . _assume thy wingèd throne, thou vesper of our throng!_ the wingèd throne is, i think, a synonym of the 'sphere' itself--not a throne within the sphere: 'wingèd,' because the sphere revolves in space. yet the statement in stanza that 'the inheritors of unfulfilled renown rose from their thrones' (which cannot be taken to represent distinct spheres or constellations) suggests the opposite interpretation. keats is termed 'thou vesper of our throng' because he is the latest member of this glorified band--or, reckoning the lapse of ages as if they were but a day, its 'evening star.' the exceptional brilliancy of the vesper star is not, i think, implied--though it may be remotely suggested. +stanza ,+ . . _clasp with thy panting soul_, &c. the significance of this stanza--perhaps a rather obscure one--requires to be estimated as a whole. shelley summons any person who persists in mourning for adonais to realise to his own mind what are the true terms of comparison between adonais and himself. after this, he says in this stanza no more about adonais, but only about the mourner. he calls upon the mourner to consider ( ) the magnitude of the planet earth; then, using the earth as his centre, to consider ( ) the whole universe of worlds, and the illimitable void of space beyond all worlds; next he is to consider ( ) what he himself is--he is confined within the day and night of our planet, and, even within those restricted limits, he is but an infinitesimal point. after he shall have realised this to himself, and after the tension of his soul in ranging through the universe and through space shall have kindled hope after hope, wonderment and aspiration after aspiration and wonderment, then indeed will he need to keep his heart light, lest it make him sink at the contemplation of his own nullity. . . _and lured thee to the brink._ this phrase is not definitely accounted for in the preceding exposition. i think shelley means that the successive hopes kindled in the mourner by the ideas of a boundless universe of space and of spirit will have lured him to the very brink of mundane life--to the borderland between life and death: he will almost have been tempted to have done with life, and to explore the possibilities of death. +stanza ,+ . . _or go to rome._ this is still addressed to the mourner, the 'fond wretch' of the preceding stanza. he is here invited to adopt a different test for 'knowing himself and adonais aright'; namely, he is to visit rome, and muse over the grave of the youthful poet. . , . _which is the sepulchre, oh not of him, but of our joy._ keats is not entombed in rome: his poor mortal remains are there entombed, and, along with them, the joy which we felt in him as a living and breathing presence. . , . _'tis nought that ages, empires, and religions, &c._ keats, and others such as he, derive no adventitious honour from being buried in rome, amid the wreck of ages, empires, and religions: rather they confer honour. he is among his peers, the kings of thought, who, so far from being dragged down in the ruin of institutions, contended against that ruin, and are alone immortal while all the rest of the past has come to nought. this consideration may be said to qualify, but not to reverse, that which is presented in stanza , that keats 'bought, with price of purest breath, a grave among the eternal'; those eternal ones, buried in rome, include many of the 'kings of thought.' +stanza ,+ . , . _and where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, and flowering weeds_, &c. these expressions point more especially, but not exclusively, to the coliseum and the baths of caracalla. in shelley's time (and something alike was the case in , the year when the present writer saw them first) both these vast monuments were in a state wholly different from that which they now, under the hands of learned archaeologists and skilled restorers, present to the eye. shelley began, probably in , a romantic or ideal tale named _the coliseum_; and, ensconced amid the ruins of the baths of caracalla, he composed, in the same year, a large part of _promethens unbound_. a few extracts from his letters may here be given appropriately. (to t.l. peacock, december, i ). 'the coliseum is unlike any work of human hands i ever saw before. it is of enormous height and circuit, and the arches, built of massy stones, are piled, on one another, and jut into the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhanging rocks. it has been changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and the figtree, and threaded by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable galleries: the copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths.'--(to the same, march, ). 'the next most considerable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the thermae of caracalla. these consist of six enormous chambers, above feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. there are in addition a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of weeds and ivy. never was any desolation so sublime and lovely.... at every step the aërial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling rapidly along the plain.... around rise other crags and other peaks--all arrayed, and the deformity of their vast desolation softened down, by the undecaying investiture of nature.' . . _a slope of green access._ the old protestant cemetery. shelley described it thus in his letter to mr. peacock of december, . 'the english burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of cestius, and is, i think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery i ever beheld. to see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion.'--see also pp. , . +stanza ,+ . . _one keen pyramid._ the tomb (see last note) of caius cestius, a tribune of the people. . , . _the dust of him who planned this refuge for his memory._ shelley probably means that this sepulchral pyramid alone preserves to remembrance the name of cestius: which is true enough, as next to nothing is otherwise known about him. . . _have pitched in heaven's smile their camp of death._ the practice which shelley follows in this line of making 'heaven' a dissyllable is very frequent with him. so also with 'even, higher,' and other such words. +stanza ,+ . , . _if the seal is set here on one fountain of a mourning mind._ shelley certainly alludes to himself in this line. his beloved son william, who died in june , in the fourth year of his age, was buried in this cemetery: the precise spot is not now known. . - . _too surely shalt thou find thine own well full, if thou returnest home, of tears and gall. from the world's bitter wind_, &c. the apposition between the word 'well' and the preceding word 'fountain' will be observed. the person whom shelley addresses would, on returning home from the cemetery, find more than, ample cause, of one sort or another, for distress and discomposure. hence follows the conclusion that he would do well to 'seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb': he should prefer the condition of death to that of life. and so we reach in stanza the same result which, in stanza , was deduced from a different range of considerations. +stanza ,+ . . _the one remains, the many change and pass._ see the notes on stanzas and . 'the one' is the same as 'the one spirit' in stanza --the universal mind. the universal mind has already been spoken of (stanza ) as 'the eternal.' on the other hand, 'the many' are the individuated minds which we call 'human beings': they 'change and pass'--the body perishing, the mind which informed it being (in whatever sense) reabsorbed into 'the eternal.' . . _heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly._ this is in strictness a physical descriptive image: in application, it means the same as the preceding line. . - . _life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity, until death tramples it to fragments._ perhaps a more daring metaphorical symbol than this has never been employed by any poet, nor one that has a deeper or a more spacious meaning. eternity is figured as white light--light in its quintessence. life, mundane life, is as a dome of glass, which becomes many-coloured by its prismatic diffraction of the white light: its various prisms reflect eternity at different angles. death ultimately tramples the glass dome into fragments; each individual life is shattered, and the whole integer of life, constituted of the many individual lives, is shattered. if everything else written by shelley were to perish, and only this consummate image to remain--so vast in purport, so terse in form--he would still rank as a poet of lofty imagination. _ex pede herculem._ . , . _die, if thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek._ this phrase is addressed by the poet to anybody, and more especially to himself. as in stanza --'the pure spirit shall flow back to the burning fountain whence it came, a portion of the eternal.' . - . _rome's azure sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak the glory thy transfuse with fitting truth to speak._ i follow here the punctuation of the pisan edition--with a comma after 'words,' as well as after 'sky, flowers,' &c. according to this punctuation, the words of rome, as well as her sky and other beautiful endowments, are too weak to declare at full the glory which they impart; and the inference from this rather abruptly introduced recurrence to rome is (i suppose), that the spiritual glory faintly adumbrated by rome can only be realised in that realm of eternity to which death gives access. taken in this sense, the 'words' of rome appear to mean 'the beautiful language spoken in rome'--the roman or latin language, as modified into modern italian. the pronunciation of italian in rome is counted peculiarly pure and rich: hence the italian axiom, 'lingua toscana in bocca romana'--tuscan tongue in roman mouth. at first sight, it would seem far more natural to punctuate thus: rome's azure sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music,--words are weak the glory, &c. the sense would then be--words are too weak to declare at full the glory inherent in the sky, flowers, &c. of rome. yet, although this seems a more straightforward arrangement for the words of the sentence, as such, it is not clear that such a comment on the beauties of rome would have any great relevancy in its immediate context. +stanza ,+ . . _thy hopes are gone before_, &c. this stanza contains some very pointed references to the state of shelley's feelings at the time when he was writing _adonais_; pointed, but not so clearly defined as to make his actual meaning transparent. we are told that his hopes are gone before (i.e. have vanished before the close of his life has come), and have departed from all things here. this may partly refer to the deaths of william shelley and of keats; but i think the purport of the phrase extends further, and implies that shelley's hopes generally--those animating conceptions which had inspired him in early youth, and had buoyed him up through many adversities--are now waning in disappointment. this is confirmed by the ensuing statement--that 'a light is past from the revolving year [a phrase repeated from stanza ], and man and woman.' next we are told that 'what still is dear attracts to crush, repels to make thee [me] wither.' the _persons_ who were more particularly dear to shelley at this time must have been (not to mention the two children percy florence shelley and allegra clairmont) his wife, miss clairmont, emilia viviani, and lieutenant and mrs. williams: byron, leigh hunt, and godwin, can hardly be in question. no doubt shelley's acute feelings and mobile sympathies involved him in some considerable agitations, from time to time, with all the four ladies here named: but the strong expressions which he uses as to attracting and repelling, crushing and withering, seem hardly likely to have been employed by him in this personal sense, in a published book. perhaps therefore we shall be safest in supposing that he alludes, not to _persons_ who are dear, but to circumstances and conditions of a more general kind--such as are involved in his self-portraiture, stanzas - . . . _'tis adonais calls! oh hasten thither!_ 'thither' must mean 'to adonais': a laxity of expression. +stanza ,+ . . _that light whose smile kindles the universe_, &c. this is again the 'one spirit' of stanza . and see, in stanza , the cognate expression, 'kindles it above.' . , . _that benediction which the eclipsing curse of birth can quench not._ the curse of birth is, i think, simply the calamitous condition of mundane life--so often referred to in this elegy as a condition of abjection and unhappiness. the curse of birth can eclipse the benediction of universal mind, but cannot quench it: in other words, the human mind, in its passage from the birth to the death of the body, is still an integral portion of the universal mind. . . _each are mirrors._ this is of course a grammatical irregularity--the verb should be 'is.' it is not the only instance of the same kind in shelley's poetry. . . _consuming the last clouds of cold mortality._ this does not imply that shelley is shortly about to die. 'cold mortality' is that condition in which the human mind, a portion of the universal mind, is united to a mortal body: and the general sense is that the universal mind at this moment beams with such effulgence upon shelley that his mind responds to it as if the mortal body no longer interposed any impediment. +stanza ,+ . . _the breath whose might i have invoked in song._ the breath or afflatus of the universal mind. it has been 'invoked in song' throughout the whole later section of this elegy, from stanza onwards. . . _my spirits bark is driven_, &c. as was observed with reference to the preceding stanza, line , this phrase does not forecast the author's death: it only re-emphasises the abnormal illumination of his mind by the universal mind--as if his spirit (like that of keats) 'had flowed back to the burning fountain whence it came, a portion of the eternal' (stanza ). nevertheless, it is very remarkable that this image of 'the spirit's _bark_,' beaconed by 'the soul of adonais,' should have been written so soon before shelley's death by drowning, which occurred on july, ,--but little more than a year after he had completed this elegy. besides this passage, there are in shelley's writings, both verse and prose, several other passages noticeable on the same account--relating to drowning, and sometimes with a strong personal application; and in various instances he was in imminent danger of this mode of death before the end came. . , . _far from the shore, far from the trembling throng whose sails were never to the tempest given._ in saying that his spirit's bark is driven far from the shore, shelley apparently means that his mind, in speculation and aspiration, ranges far beyond those mundane and material interests with which the mass of men are ordinarily concerned. 'the trembling throng' is, i think, a throng of men: though it might be a throng of barks, contrasted with 'my spirit's bark.' their sails 'were never to the tempest given,' in the sense that they never set forth on a bold ideal or spiritual adventure, abandoning themselves to the stress and sway of a spiritual storm. . . _the massy earth_, &c. as the poet launches forth on his voyage upon the ocean of mind, the earth behind him seems to gape, and the sky above him to open: his course however is still held on in darkness--the arcanum is hardly or not at all revealed. . . _whilst burning through the inmost veil_, &c. a star pilots his course: it is the soul of adonais, which, being still 'a portion of the eternal' (st. ), is in 'the abode where the eternal are,' and testifies to the eternity of mind. in this passage, and in others towards the conclusion of the poem, we find the nearest approach which shelley can furnish to an answer to that question which he asked in stanza --'shall that alone which knows be as a sword consumed before the sheath by sightless lightning?' +stanzas . to +--(i add here a note out of its due place, which would be on p. : at the time when it occurred to me to raise this point, the printing had gone too far to allow of my inserting the remark there.)--on considering these three stanzas collectively, it may perhaps be felt that the references to milton and to keats are more advisedly interdependent than my notes on the details of the stanzas suggest. shelley may have wished to indicate a certain affinity between the inspiration of milton as the poet of _paradise lost_, and that of keats as the poet of _hyperion_. urania had had to bewail the death of milton, who died old when 'the priest, the slave, and the liberticide,' outraged england. now she has to bewail the death of her latest-born, keats, who has died young, and (as shelley thought) in a similarly disastrous condition of the national affairs. had he not been 'struck by the envious wrath of man,' he might even have 'dared to climb' to the 'bright station' occupied by milton.--the phrase in st. , 'most musical of mourners, weep again,' with what follows regarding grief for the loss of milton, and again of keats, is modelled upon the passage in moschus (p. )--'this, o most musical of rivers, is thy second sorrow,--this, meles, thy new woe. of old didst thou love homer:... now again another son thou weepest.' my remark upon st. , that there shelley first had direct recourse to the elegy of moschus, should be modified accordingly. _cancelled passages of adonais, preface._ these are taken from dr. garnett's _relics of shelley_, published in . he says: 'among shelley's mss. is a fair copy of the _defence of poetry_, apparently damaged by sea-water, and illegible in many places. being prepared for the printer, it is written on one side of the paper only: on the blank pages, but frequently undecipherable for the reason just indicated, are many passages intended for, but eventually omitted from, the preface to _adonais_.' _i have employed my poetical compositions and publications simply as the instruments of that sympathy between myself and others which the ardent and unbounded love i cherished for my kind incited me to acquire._ this is an important indication of the spirit in which shelley wrote, and consequently of that in which his reader should construe his writings. he poured out his full heart, craving for 'sympathy.' loving mankind, he wished to find some love in response. _domestic conspiracy and legal oppression_, &c. the direct reference here is to the action taken by shelley's father-in-law and sister-in-law, mr. and miss westbrook, which resulted in the decree of lord chancellor eldon whereby shelley was deprived of the custody of the two children of his first marriage. see p. . _as a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic._ various writers have said something of this kind. i am not sure how far back the sentiment can be traced; but i presume that shelley was not the first. some readers will remember a passage in the dedication to his _peter bell the third_ ( ), which forestalled macaulay's famous phrase about the 'new zealander on the ruins of london bridge.' shelley wrote: 'in the firm expectation that, when london shall be an habitation of bitterns;... when the piers of waterloo bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream; some transatlantic commentator will be weighing, in the scales of some new and unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the bells and the fudges, and their historians, i remain,' &c. _the offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in his intimacy with leigh hunt_, &c. see the remarks on p. . there can be no doubt that shelley was substantially correct in this opinion. not only the _quarterly review_, of which he knew, but also _blackwood's magazine_, which did not come under his notice, abused keats because he was personally acquainted with hunt, and was, in one degree or another, a member of the literary coterie in which hunt held a foremost place. and hunt was in bad odour with these reviews because he was a hostile politician, still more than because of any actual or assumed defects in his performances as an ordinary man of letters. _mr. hazlitt._ william hazlitt was (it need scarcely be said) a miscellaneous writer of much influence in these years, in politics an advanced liberal. a selection of his writings was issued by mr. william ireland in . keats admired hazlitt much more than hunt. _i wrote to him, suggesting the propriety_, &c. see pp. , . _cancelled passages of adonais_ (the poem). these passages also were in the first instance published in the _shelley relics_ of dr. garnett. they come, not from the same ms. which contains the prefatory fragments, but from some of shelley's notebooks. +stanza ,+ . . _and the green paradise_, &c. the green paradise is the 'emerald isle'--ireland. this stanza refers to thomas moore, and would have followed on after st. in the body of the poem. +stanza ,+ . . _and ever as he went he swept a lyre of unaccustomed shape._ 'he' has always hitherto, i think, been understood as the 'one frail form' of st --i.e. shelley himself. the lyre might be of unaccustomed shape for the purpose of indicating that shelley's poetry differs very essentially, in tone and treatment, from that of other writers. but i incline to think that shelley, in this stanza, refers not to himself but to moore. moore was termed a 'lyrist,' and here we are told about his lyre. the latter would naturally be the irish harp, and therefore 'of unaccustomed shape': the concluding reference to 'ever-during green' might again glance at the 'emerald isle.' as to shelley, he was stated in st. to be carrying 'a light spear': if he was constantly sweeping a lyre as well, he must have had his hands rather full. . . _now like the ... of impetuous fire_, &c. shelley compares the strains of the lyre--the spirit of the poetry--to two things: ( ) to a conflagration in a forest; and ( ) to the rustling of wind among the trees. the former image may be understood to apply principally to the revolutionary audacity and fervour of the ideas expressed; the latter, to those qualities of imagination, fantasy, beauty, and melody, which characterise the verse. of course all this would be more genuinely appropriate to shelley himself than to moore: still it would admit of _some_ application to moore, of whom our poet spoke highly more than once elsewhere. the image of a forest on fire is more fully expressed in a passage from the _lines written among the euganean hills_, composed by him in :-- 'now new fires from antique light spring beneath the wide world's might,-- but their spark lies dead in thee [i.e. in padua], trampled out by tyranny, as the norway woodman quells, in the depths of piny dells, one light flame among the brakes, while the boundless forest shakes, and its mighty trunks are torn, by the fire thus lowly born;-- the spark beneath his feet is dead; he starts to see the flames it fed howling through the darkened sky with a myriad tongues victoriously, and sinks down in fear;-so thou, o tyranny! beholdest now light around thee, and thou hearest the loud flames ascend, and fearest. grovel on the earth! ay, hide in the dust thy purple pride!' +stanza ,+ . . _and then came one of sweet and earnest looks._ it is sufficiently clear that this stanza, and also the fragmentary beginning of stanza , refer to leigh hunt--who, in the body of the elegy, is introduced in st. . the reader will observe, on looking back to that stanza, that the present one could not be added on to the description of hunt: it is an alternative form, ultimately rejected. its tone is ultra-sentimental, and perhaps on that account it was condemned. the simile at the close of the present stanza is ambitious, but by no means felicitous. +stanza ,+ . , . _his song, though very sweet, was low and faint, a simple strain._ it may be doubted whether this description of hunt's poetry, had it been published in _adonais_, would have been wholly pleasing to hunt. neither does it define, with any exceptional aptness, the particular calibre of that poetry. +stanza ,+ . , . _a mighty phantasm, half concealed in darkness of his own exceeding light._ it seems to have been generally assumed that shelley, in this stanza, describes one more of the 'mountain shepherds' (see st. )--viz. coleridge. no doubt, if any poet or person is here indicated, it must be coleridge: and the affirmative assumption is so far confirmed by the fact that in another poem--the _letter to maria gisborne_, --shelley spoke of coleridge in terms partly similar to these:-- 'you will see coleridge; he who sits obscure in the exceeding lustre and the pure intense irradiation of a mind which, with its own internal lightning blind, flags wearily through darkness and despair-- a cloud-encircled meteor of the air, a hooded eagle among blinking owls.' but the first question is--does this cancelled stanza relate to a mountain shepherd at all? to speak of a mountain shepherd as a 'mighty phantasm,' having an 'awful presence unrevealed,' seems to be taking a considerable liberty with language. to me it appears more likely that the stanza relates to some abstract impersonation--perhaps death, or else eternity. it is true that death figures elsewhere in _adonais_ (stanzas , , ) under an aspect with which the present phrases are hardly consistent: but, in the case of a cancelled stanza, that counts for very little. in _prometheus unbound_ (act ii, sc. ) eternity, symbolised in demo-gorgon, is described in terms not wholly unlike those which we are now debating:-- 'i see a mighty darkness filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom dart round, as light from the meridian sun, ungazed upon and shapeless. neither limb, nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is a living spirit.' as to the phrase in the cancelled stanza, 'in darkness of his own exceeding light,' it need hardly be observed that this is modified from the expression in paradise lost (book ):-- 'dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear.' . . _thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite._ technically, chrysolite is synonymous with the precious stone peridot, or olivine--its tint is a yellowish green. but probably shelley thought only of the primary meaning of the word chrysolite, 'golden-stone,' and his phrase as a whole comes to much the same thing as 'a cloud with a golden lining.' +stanza ,+ . . _and like a sudden meteor._ we here have a fragmentary simile which may--or equally well may not--follow on as connected with st. . see on p. , for whatever it may be worth in illustration, the line relating to coleridge:-- 'a cloud-encircled meteor of the air.' . . _pavilioned in its tent of light._ shelley was fond of the word pavilion, whether as substantive or as verb. see st. : 'pavilioning the dust of him,' &c. footnotes: [ ] see the _life of mrs. shelley_, by lucy madox rossetti (_eminent women series_), published in . the connexion between the two branches of the shelley family is also set forth--incidentally, but with perfect distinctness--in collins's _peerage of england_( ), vol. iii. p. . he says that viscount lumley (who died at some date towards ) 'married frances, daughter of henry shelley, of warminghurst in sussex, esq. (a younger branch of the family seated at michaelgrove, the seat of the present sir john shelley, bart.).' [ ] i am indebted to mr. j. cordy jeaffreson for some strongly reasoned arguments, in private-correspondence, tending to harriet's disculpation. [ ] this line (should be '_beneath_ the good,' &c.) is the final line of gray's _progress of poesy_. the sense in which shelley intends to apply it to _the cenci_ may admit of some doubt. he seems to mean that _the cenci_ is not equal to really good tragedies; but still is superior to some tragedies which have recently appeared, and which bad critics have dubbed great. [ ] this phrase is not very clear to me. from the context ensuing, it might seem that the 'circumstance' which prevented keats from staying with shelley in pisa was that his nerves were in so irritable a state as to prompt him to move from place to place in italy rather than fix in any particular city or house. [ ] though shelley gave this advice, which was anything but unsound, he is said to have taken good-naturedly some steps with a view to getting the volume printed. mr. john dix, writing in , says: 'he [shelley] went to charles richards, the printer in st. martin's lane, when quite young, about the printing a little volume of keats's first poems.' [ ] this statement is not correct--so far at least as the longer poems in the volume are concerned. _isabella_ indeed was finished by april, ; but _hyperion_ was not relinquished till late in , and the _eve of st. agnes_ and _lamia_ were probably not even begun till . [ ] see p, as to shelley's under-rating of keats's age. he must have supposed that keats was only about twenty years old at the date when _endymion_ was completed. the correct age was twenty-two. [ ] the passages to which shelley refers begin thus: 'and then the forest told it in a dream;' 'the rosy veils mantling the east;' 'upon a weeded rock this old man sat.' [ ] i do not find in shelley's writings anything which distinctly modifies this opinion. however, his biographer, captain medwin, avers that shelley valued all the poems in keats's final volume; he cites especially _isabella_ and _the eve of st. agnes_. [ ] in books relating to keats and shelley the name of this gentleman appears repeated, without any explanation of who he was. in a ms. diary of dr. john polidori, byron's travelling physician (my maternal uncle), i find the following account of colonel finch, whom polidori met in milan in : 'colonel finch, an extremely pleasant, good-natured, well-informed, clever gentleman, spoke italian extremely well, and was very well read in italian literature. a ward of his gave a masquerade in london upon her coming of age. she gave to each a character in the reign of queen elizabeth to support, without the knowledge of each other; and received them in a saloon in proper style as queen elizabeth. he mentioned to me that nelli had written a life of galileo, extremely fair, which, if he had money by him, he would buy, that it might be published. finch is a great admirer of architecture in italy. mr. werthern, a gentleman most peaceable and quiet i ever saw, accompanying finch, whose only occupation [i understand this to mean the occupation of wethern, but possibly it means of finch] is, when he arrives at a town or other place, to set about sketching, and then colouring, so that he has perhaps the most complete collection of sketches of his tour possible. he invited me (taking me for an italian), in case i went to england, to see him; and, hearing i was english, he pressed me much more,' the name 'werthern' is not distinctly written: should it be 'wertheim'? [ ] 'envy' refers no doubt to hostile reviewers. 'ingratitude' refers to a statement of colonel finch that keats had 'been infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe.' it is not quite clear who were the persons alluded to by finch. keats's brother george (then in america) was presumably one: he is, however, regarded as having eventually cleared himself from the distressing imputation. i know of no one else, unless possibly the painter haydon may be glanced at: as to him also the charge appears to be too severe and sweeping. [ ] shelley wrote another letter on june--to miss clairmont, then in florence. it contains expressions to nearly the same purport. 'i have received a most melancholy account of the last illness of poor keats; which i will neither tell you nor send you, for it would make you too low-spirited. my elegy on him is finished. i have dipped my pen in consuming fire to chastise his destroyers; otherwise the tone of the poem is solemn and exalted. i send it to the press here, and you will soon have a copy.' [ ] as byron is introduced into _adonais_ as mourning for keats, and as in fact he cared for keats hardly at all, it seems possible that his silence was dictated by antagonism rather than by modesty. [ ] _blackwood_ seems to imply that the _quarterly_ accused _endymion_ of indecency; this is not correct. [ ] the reader of keats's preface will find that this is a misrepresentation. keats did not speak of any fierce hell of criticism, nor did he ask to remain uncriticised in order that he might write more. what he said was that a feeling critic would not fall foul of him for hoping to write good poetry in the long run, and would be aware that keats's own sense of failure in _endymion_ was as fierce a hell as he could be chastised by. [ ] this passage of the letter had remained unpublished up to . it then appeared in mr. buxton forman's volume, _poetry and prose by john keats_. some authentic information as to keats's change of feeling had, however, been published before. [ ] this phrase is lumbering and not grammatical. the words 'i confess that i am unable to refuse' would be all that the meaning requires. [ ] this seems to contradict the phrase in _adonais_ (stanza ) 'nought we know dies.' probably shelley, in the prose passage, does not intend 'perishes' to be accepted in the absolute sense of 'dies,' or 'ceases to have any existence;' he means that all things undergo a process of deterioration and decay, leading on to some essential change or transmutation. the french have the word 'dêpérir' as well as 'périr': shelley's 'perishes' would correspond to 'dépérit.' generously made available by the internet archive.) english men of letters edited by john morley keats keats by sidney colvin macmillan and co., limited st martin's street, london _first edition ._ _reprinted , , , , ._ _library edition ._ _reprinted ._ _pocket edition ._ preface. with the name of keats that of his first biographer, the late lord houghton, must always justly remain associated. but while the sympathetic charm of lord houghton's work will keep it fresh, as a record of the poet's life it can no longer be said to be sufficient. since the revised edition of the _life and letters_ appeared in , other students and lovers of keats have been busy, and much new information concerning him been brought to light, while of the old information some has been proved mistaken. no connected account of keats's life and work, in accordance with the present state of knowledge, exists, and i have been asked to contribute such an account to the present series. i regret that lack of strength and leisure has so long delayed the execution of the task entrusted to me. the chief authorities and printed texts which i have consulted (besides the original editions of the poems) are the following:-- . lord byron and some of his contemporaries. by leigh hunt. london, . . the life of percy bysshe shelley. by thomas medwin. london, vols., . . life, letters, and literary remains of john keats. edited by richard monckton milnes. vols., london, . . life of benjamin robert haydon. edited and compiled by tom taylor. second edition. vols., london, . . the autobiography of leigh hunt, with reminiscences of friends and contemporaries. vols., london, . . the poetical works of john keats. with a memoir by richard monckton milnes. london, . . the autobiography of leigh hunt. [revised edition, edited by thornton hunt.] london, . . the vicissitudes of keats's fame: an article by joseph severn in the _atlantic monthly magazine_ for (vol. xi. p. ). . the life and letters of john keats. by lord houghton. new edition, london, . . recollections of john keats: an article by charles cowden clarke in the _gentleman's magazine_ for (n. s. vol. xii. p. ). afterwards reprinted with modifications in recollections of writers, by charles and mary cowden clarke. london, . . the papers of a critic. selected from the writings of the late charles wentworth dilke. with a biographical notice by sir charles wentworth dilke, bart., m.p. vols., london, . . benjamin robert haydon: correspondence and table-talk. with a memoir by frederic wordsworth haydon. vols., london, . . the poetical works of john keats, chronologically arranged and edited, with a memoir, by lord houghton [aldine edition of the british poets]. london, . . letters of john keats to fanny brawne, with introduction and notes by harry buxton forman. london, . a biographer cannot ignore these letters now that they are published: but their publication must be regretted by all who hold that human respect and delicacy are due to the dead no less than to the living, and to genius no less than to obscurity. . the poetical works and other writings of john keats. edited with notes and appendices by harry buxton forman. vols., london, . in this edition, besides the texts reprinted from the first editions, all the genuine letters and additional poems published in , , , , and of the above are brought together, as well as most of the biographical notices contained in , , , , , , and : also a series of previously unpublished letters of keats to his sister: with a great amount of valuable illustrative and critical material besides. except for a few errors, which i shall have occasion to point out, mr forman's work might for the purpose of the student be final, and i have necessarily been indebted to it at every turn. . the letters and poems of john keats. edited by john gilmer speed. vols., new york, . . the poetical works of john keats. edited by william t. arnold. london, . the introduction to this edition contains the only attempt with which i am acquainted at an analysis of the formal elements of keats's style. . an Æsculapian poet--john keats: an article by dr b. w. richardson in the _asclepiad_ for (vol. i. p. ). . notices and correspondence concerning keats which have appeared at intervals during a number of years in the _athenæum_. in addition to printed materials i have made use of the following unprinted, viz.:-- i. houghton mss. under this title i refer to the contents of an album from the library at fryston hall, in which the late lord houghton bound up a quantity of the materials he had used in the preparation of the _life and letters_, as well as of correspondence concerning keats addressed to him both before and after the publication of his book. the chief contents are the manuscript memoir of keats by charles brown, which was offered by the writer in vain to _galignani_, and i believe other publishers; transcripts by the same hand of a few of keats's poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs of the poet by his friends charles cowden clarke (the first draft of the paper above cited as no. ), henry stephens, george felton mathew, joseph severn, and benjamin bailey; together with letters from all the above, from john hamilton reynolds, and several others. for the use of this collection, without which my work must have been attempted to little purpose, i am indebted to the kindness of its owner, the present lord houghton. ii. woodhouse mss. a. a common-place book in which richard woodhouse, the friend of keats and of his publishers messrs taylor and hessey, transcribed--as would appear from internal evidence, about midsummer --the chief part of keats's poems at that date unpublished. the transcripts are in many cases made from early drafts of the poems: some contain gaps which woodhouse has filled up in pencil from later drafts: to others are added corrections, or suggestions for corrections, some made in the hand of mr taylor and some in that of keats himself. iii. woodhouse mss. b. a note-book in which the same woodhouse has copied--evidently for mr taylor, at the time when that gentleman was meditating a biography of the poet--a number of letters addressed by keats to mr taylor himself, to the transcriber, to reynolds and his sisters, to rice, and bailey. three or four of these letters, as well as portions of a few others, are unpublished. both the volumes last named were formerly the property of mrs taylor, a niece by marriage of the publisher, and are now my own. a third note-book by woodhouse, containing personal notices and recollections of keats, was unluckily destroyed in the fire at messrs kegan paul and co's. premises in . a copy of _endymion_, annotated by the same hand, has been used by mr forman in his edition (above, no. ). iv. severn mss. the papers and correspondence left by the late joseph severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable biography, have been put into the hands of mr william sharp, to be edited and published at his discretion. in the meantime mr sharp has been so kind as to let me have access to such parts of them as relate to keats. the most important single piece, an essay on 'the vicissitudes of keats's fame,' has been printed already in the _atlantic monthly_ (above, no. ), but in the remainder i have found many interesting details, particularly concerning keats's voyage to italy and life at rome. v. _rawlings v. jennings._ when keats's maternal grandfather, mr john jennings, died in , leaving property exceeding the amount of the specific bequests under his will, it was thought necessary that his estate should be administered by the court of chancery, and with that intent a friendly suit was brought in the names of his daughter and her second husband (frances jennings, _m._ st thomas keats, and nd william rawlings) against her mother and brother, who were the executors. the proceedings in this suit are referred to under the above title. they are complicated and voluminous, extending over a period of twenty years, and my best thanks are due to mr ralph thomas, of chancery lane, for his friendly pains in searching through and making abstracts of them. for help and information, besides what has been above acknowledged, i am indebted first and foremost to my friend and colleague, mr richard garnett; and next to the poet's surviving sister, mrs llanos; to sir charles dilke, who lent me the chief part of his valuable collection of keats's books and papers (already well turned to account by mr forman); to dr b. w. richardson, and the rev. r. h. hadden. other incidental obligations will be found acknowledged in the footnotes. among essays on and reviews of keats's work i need only refer in particular to that by the late mrs f. m. owen (keats: a study, london, ). in its main outlines, though not in details, i accept and have followed this lady's interpretation of _endymion_. for the rest, every critic of modern english poetry is of necessity a critic of keats. the earliest, leigh hunt, was one of the best; and to name only a few among the living--where mr matthew arnold, mr swinburne, mr lowell, mr palgrave, mr w. m. rossetti, mr w. b. scott, mr roden noel, mr theodore watts, have gone before, for one who follows to be both original and just is not easy. in the following pages i have not attempted to avoid saying over again much that in substance has been said already, and doubtless better, by others: by mr matthew arnold and mr palgrave especially. i doubt not but they will forgive me: and at the same time i hope to have contributed something of my own towards a fuller understanding both of keats's art and life. contents. page chapter i. birth and parentage--school life at enfield--life as surgeon's apprentice at edmonton--awakening to poetry--life as hospital student in london. [ - ] chapter ii. particulars of early life in london--friendships and first poems--henry stephens--felton mathew--cowden clarke--leigh hunt: his literary and personal influence--john hamilton reynolds--james rice--cornelius webb--shelley--haydon--joseph severn--charles wells--personal characteristics-- determination to publish. [ -april, ] chapter iii. the _poems_ of chapter iv. excursion to isle of wight, margate, and canterbury--summer at hampstead--new friends: dilke: brown: bailey--with bailey at oxford--return: old friends at odds--burford bridge--winter at hampstead--wordsworth: lamb: hazlitt--poetical activity-- spring at teignmouth--studies and anxieties--marriage and emigration of george keats. [april, -may, ] chapter v. _endymion_ chapter vi. northern tour--the _blackwood_ and _quarterly_ reviews--death of tom keats--removal to wentworth place--fanny brawne-- excursion to chichester--absorption in love and poetry--haydon and money difficulties--family correspondence--darkening prospects--summer at shanklin and winchester--wise resolutions--return from winchester. [june, -october, ] chapter vii. _isabella_--_hyperion_--_the eve of st agnes_--_the eve of st mark_--_la belle dame sans merci_--_lamia_--the odes--the plays chapter viii. return to wentworth place--autumn occupations--the _cap and bells_--recast of _hyperion_--growing despondency--visit of george keats to england--attack of illness in february--rally in the spring--summer in kentish town--publication of the _lamia_ volume--relapse--ordered south--voyage to italy-- naples--rome--last days and death. [october, -feb. ] chapter ix. character and genius appendix index keats. chapter i. birth and parentage--school life at enfield--life as surgeon's apprentice at edmonton--awakening to poetry--life as hospital student in london. [ - .] science may one day ascertain the laws of distribution and descent which govern the births of genius; but in the meantime a birth like that of keats presents to the ordinary mind a striking instance of nature's inscrutability. if we consider the other chief poets of the time, we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood, or some strong inspiring influence in the scenery and traditions of their home. thus we see scott prepared alike by his origin, associations, and circumstances to be the 'minstrel of his clan' and poet of the romance of the border wilds; while the spirit of the cumbrian hills, and the temper of the generations bred among them, speak naturally through the lips of wordsworth. byron seems inspired in literature by demons of the same froward brood that had urged others of his lineage through lives of adventure or of crime. but keats, with instincts and faculties more purely poetical than any of these, was paradoxically born in a dull and middling walk of english city life; and 'if by traduction came his mind,'--to quote dryden with a difference,--it was through channels too obscure for us to trace. his father, thomas keats, was a west-country lad who came young to london, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable kept by a mr john jennings in finsbury. presently he married his employer's daughter, frances jennings; and mr jennings, who was a man of substance, retiring about the same time to live in the country, at ponder's end, left the management of the business in the hands of his son-in-law. the young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the swan-and-hoop, finsbury pavement, facing the then open space of lower moorfields. here their eldest child, the poet john keats, was born prematurely on either the th or st of october, . a second son, named george, followed on february , ; a third, tom, on november , ; a fourth, edward, who died in infancy, on april , ; and on the rd of june, , a daughter, frances mary. in the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a house in craven street, city road, half a mile farther north[ ]. in the gifts and temperament of keats we shall find much that seems characteristic of the celtic rather than the english nature. whether he really had any of that blood in his veins we cannot tell. his father was a native either of devon or of cornwall[ ]; and his mother's name, jennings, is common in but not peculiar to wales. there our evidence ends, and all that we know further of his parents is that they were certainly not quite ordinary people. thomas keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of intelligence and conduct--"of so remarkably fine a common sense and native respectability," writes cowden clarke, in whose father's school the poet and his brothers were brought up, "that i perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys." it is added that he resembled his illustrious son in person and feature, being of small stature and lively energetic countenance, with brown hair and hazel eyes. of his wife, the poet's mother, we learn more vaguely that she was "tall, of good figure, with large oval face, and sensible deportment": and again that she was a lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some imprudence. her second son, george, wrote in after life of her and of her family as follows:--"my grandfather [mr jennings] was very well off, as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would have been affluent. i have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of his excellencies, and mr abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother." and elsewhere:--"my mother i distinctly remember, she resembled john very much in the face, was extremely fond of him, and humoured him in every whim, of which he had not a few, she was a most excellent and affectionate parent, and as i thought a woman of uncommon talents." the mother's passion for her firstborn son was devotedly returned by him. once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in. haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different turn:--"he was when an infant a most violent and ungovernable child. at five years of age or thereabouts, he once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should go out. his mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the window saw her position and came to the rescue." another trait of the poet's childhood, mentioned also by haydon, on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rhyme to the last word people said and then laughing. the parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send them to harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school kept by the rev. john clarke at enfield. the brothers of mrs keats had been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. traces of its ancient forest character lingered long, and indeed linger yet, about the neighbourhood of the picturesque small suburban town of enfield, and the district was one especially affected by city men of fortune for their homes. the school-house occupied by mr clarke had been originally built for a rich west-india merchant, in the finest style of early georgian classic architecture, and stood in a pleasant and spacious garden at the lower end of the town. when years afterwards the site was used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but later it was taken down, and the façade, with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the south kensington museum as a choice example of the style. not long after keats had been put to school he lost his father, who was killed by a fall from his horse as he rode home at night from southgate. this was on the th of april, . within twelve months his mother had put off her weeds, and taken a second husband--one william rawlings, described as 'of moorgate in the city of london, stable-keeper,' presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management of her father's business. this marriage turned out unhappily. it was soon followed by a separation, and mrs rawlings went with her children to live at edmonton, in the house of her mother, mrs jennings, who was just about this time left a widow[ ]. in the correspondence of the keats brothers after they were grown up, no mention is ever made of their step-father, of whom after the separation the family seem to have lost all knowledge. the household in church street, edmonton, was well enough provided for, mr jennings having left a fortune of over £ , , of which, in addition to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding £ a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding £ a year to his daughter frances rawlings, with reversion to her keats children after her death; and £ to be separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on their coming of age[ ]. between this home, then, and the neighbouring enfield school, where he was in due time joined by his younger brothers, the next four or five years of keats's boyhood ( - ) were passed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. he did not live to attain the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in his grandmother's house at edmonton. they are conveyed in some rhymes which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside-- "in spite of the might of the maid, nor afraid of his granny-good"-- and for keeping small fishes in tubs. if we learn little of keats's early days from his own lips, we have sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school companions; which was that of a boy all spirit and generosity, vehement both in tears and laughter, handsome, passionate, pugnacious, placable, loveable, a natural leader and champion among his fellows. but beneath this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. these he was accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, between whom and himself there existed the very closest of fraternal ties. george, the second brother, had all john's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive disposition and a cooler blood: from a boy he was the bigger and stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery elder brother. tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. the singularly strong family sentiment that united the three brothers extended naturally also to their sister, then a child: and in a more remote and ideal fashion to their uncle by the mother's side, captain midgley john jennings, a tall navy officer who had served with some distinction under duncan at camperdown, and who impressed the imagination of the boys, in those days of militant british valour by land and sea, as a model of manly prowess[ ]. it may be remembered that there was a much more distinguished naval hero of the time who bore their own name--the gallant admiral sir richard godwin keats of the _superb_, afterwards governor of greenwich hospital: and he, like their father, came from the west country, being the son of a bideford clergyman. but it seems clear that the family of our keats claimed no connection with that of the admiral. here are some of george keats's recollections, written after the death of his elder brother, and referring partly to their school-days and partly to john's character after he was grown up:-- "i loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and i can safely say and my schoolfellows will bear witness that john's temper was the cause of all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are." "from the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and fought alternately, until we separated in , i in a great measure relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. he avoided teazing any one with his miseries but tom and myself, and often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him relief." let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to their confirmation in the words of two of keats's school-friends; and first in those of his junior edward holmes, afterwards author of the _life of mozart_:-- "keats was in childhood not attached to books. his _penchant_ was for fighting. he would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his brother among the rest. it was meat and drink to him.... his favourites were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour.... he was a boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty might easily fancy would become great--but rather in some military capacity than in literature. you will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly and unexpectedly.... in all active exercises he excelled. the generosity and daring of his character with the extreme beauty and animation of his face made i remember an impression on me--and being some years his junior i was obliged to woo his friendship--in which i succeeded, but not till i had fought several battles. this violence and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of disposition--in passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter--always in extremes--will help to paint keats in his boyhood. associated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more popular[ ]." entirely to the same effect is the account of keats given by a school friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first ventured into poetry. this was the son of the master, charles cowden clarke, who towards the close of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of keats:-- "he was a favourite with all. not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--i ever saw.... upon one occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had boxed his brother tom's ears, john rushed up, put himself into the received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. his passion at times was almost ungovernable; and his brother george, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when john was "in one of his moods," and was endeavouring to beat him. it was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. he was not merely the favourite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that i never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him." the same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his earlier school-days keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. but during his last few terms, that is in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, all the energies of his nature turned to study. he became suddenly and completely absorbed in reading, and would be continually at work before school-time in the morning and during play-hours in the afternoon: could hardly be induced to join the school games: and never willingly had a book out of his hand. at this time he won easily all the literature prizes of the school, and in addition to his proper work imposed on himself such voluntary tasks as the translation of the whole Æneid in prose. he devoured all the books of history, travel, and fiction in the school library, and was for ever borrowing more from the friend who tells the story. "in my mind's eye i now see him at supper sitting back on the form from the table, holding the folio volume of burnet's 'history of his own time' between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. this work, and leigh hunt's 'examiner'--which my father took in, and i used to lend to keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty." but the books which keats read with the greatest eagerness of all were books of ancient mythology, and he seemed literally to learn by heart the contents of tooke's _pantheon_, lempriere's _dictionary_, and the school abridgment by tindal of spence's _polymetis_--the first the most foolish and dull, the last the most scholarly and polite, of the various handbooks in which the ancient fables were presented in those days to the apprehension of youth. trouble fell upon keats in the midst of these ardent studies of his latter school-days. his mother had been for some time in failing health. first she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid consumption, which carried her off in february . we are told with what devotion her eldest boy attended her sick bed,--"he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease,"--and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--"he gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook under the master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in all who saw him." in the july following, mrs jennings, being desirous to make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, 'in consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,' executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom she made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of the instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from her late husband under his will[ ]. the guardians were mr rowland sandell, merchant, and mr richard abbey, a wholesale tea-dealer in pancras lane. mrs jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years[ ], but mr abbey, with the consent of his co-trustee, seems at once to have taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. under his authority john keats was withdrawn from school at the close of this same year , when he was just fifteen, and made to put on harness for the practical work of life. with no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own part, he was bound apprentice for a term of five years to a surgeon at edmonton named hammond. the only picture we have of him in this capacity has been left by r. h. horne, the author of _orion_, who came as a small boy to the enfield school just after keats had left it. one day in winter mr hammond had driven over to attend the school, and keats with him. keats was standing with his head sunk in a brown study, holding the horse, when some of the boys, who knew his school reputation for pugnacity, dared horne to throw a snowball at him; which horne did, hitting keats in the back, and then taking headlong to his heels, to his surprise got off scot free[ ]. keats during his apprenticeship used on his own account to be often to and fro between the edmonton surgery and the enfield school. his newly awakened passion for the pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be stifled, and whenever he could spare time from his work, he plunged back into his school occupations of reading and translating. he finished at this time his translation of the Æneid, and was in the habit of walking over to enfield once a week or oftener, to see his friend cowden clarke, and to exchange books and 'travel in the realms of gold' with him. in summer weather the two would sit in a shady arbour in the old school garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks and exclamations of enthusiasm. on a momentous day for keats, cowden clarke introduced him for the first time to spenser, reading him the _epithalamium_ in the afternoon, and lending him the _faerie queene_ to take away the same evening. it has been said, and truly, that no one who has not had the good fortune to be attracted to that poem in boyhood can ever completely enjoy it. the maturer student, appreciate as he may its inexhaustible beauties and noble temper, can hardly fail to be in some degree put out by its arbitrary forms of rhyme and diction, and wearied by its melodious redundance: he will perceive the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing humanity, even the failure, at times, of clearness of vision and strength of grasp, amidst all that luxuriance of decorative and symbolic invention, and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. it is otherwise with the uncritical faculties and greedy apprehension of boyhood. for them there is no poetical revelation like the _faerie queene_, no pleasure equal to that of floating for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by those shores and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive with glancing figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in distress. through the new world thus opened to him keats went ranging with delight: 'ramping' is cowden clarke's word: he shewed moreover his own instinct for the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm on epithets of special felicity or power. for instance, says his friend, "he hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'what an image that is--_sea-shouldering whales_!'" spenser has been often proved not only a great awakener of the love of poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of the germs of original poetical power where they exist; and charles brown, the most intimate friend of keats during two later years of his life, states positively that it was to the inspiration of the _faerie queene_ that his first notion of attempting to write was due. "though born to be a poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his eighteenth year. it was the _faerie queene_ that awakened his genius. in spenser's fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being; till, enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and succeeded. this account of the sudden development of his poetic powers i first received from his brothers, and afterwards from himself. this, his earliest attempt, the 'imitation of spenser,' is in his first volume of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those acquainted with his history[ ]." cowden clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest, and we may fairly assume him to have been mistaken. after he had thus first become conscious within himself of the impulse of poetical composition, keats went on writing occasional sonnets and other verses: secretly and shyly at first like all young poets: at least it was not until two years later, in the spring of , that he showed anything he had written to his friend and confidant, cowden clarke. in the meantime a change had taken place in his way of life. in the summer or autumn of , more than a year before the expiration of his term of apprenticeship, he had quarrelled with mr hammond and left him. the cause of their quarrel is not known, and keats's own single allusion to it is when once afterwards, speaking of the periodical change and renewal of the bodily tissues, he says "seven years ago it was not this hand which clenched itself at hammond." it seems unlikely that the cause was any neglect of duty on the part of the poet-apprentice, who was not devoid of thoroughness and resolution in the performance even of uncongenial tasks. at all events mr hammond allowed the indentures to be cancelled, and keats, being now nearly nineteen years of age, went to live in london, and continue the study of his profession as a student at the hospitals (then for teaching purposes united) of st thomas's and guy's. for the first winter and spring after leaving edmonton he lodged alone at , dean street, borough, and then for about a year, in company with some fellow-students, over a tallow-chandler's shop in st thomas's street. thence he went in the summer of to join his brothers in lodgings in the poultry, over a passage leading to the queen's head tavern. in the spring of they all three moved for a short time to , cheapside. between these several addresses in london keats spent a period of about two years and a half, from the date (which is not precisely fixed) of his leaving edmonton in until april, . it was in this interval, from his nineteenth to his twenty-second year, that keats gave way gradually to his growing passion for poetry. at first he seems to have worked steadily enough along the lines which others had marked out for him. his chief reputation, indeed, among his fellow students was that of a 'cheerful, crotchety rhymester,' much given to scribbling doggrel verses in his friends' note-books[ ]. but i have before me the ms. book in which he took down his own notes of a course, or at least the beginning of a course, of lectures on anatomy; and they are not those of a lax or inaccurate student. the only signs of a wandering mind occur on the margins of one or two pages, in the shape of sketches (rather prettily touched) of pansies and other flowers: but the notes themselves are both full and close as far as they go. poetry had indeed already become keats's chief interest, but it is clear at the same time that he attended the hospitals and did his work regularly, acquiring a fairly solid knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the rudiments of medical and surgical science, so that he was always afterwards able to speak on such subjects with a certain mastery. on the th of july, , he passed with credit his examination as licentiate at apothecaries' hall. he was appointed a dresser at guy's under mr lucas on the rd of march, , and the operations which he performed or assisted in are said to have proved him no bungler. but his heart was not in the work. its scientific part he could not feel to be a satisfying occupation for his thoughts: he knew nothing of that passion of philosophical curiosity in the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame which by turns attracted coleridge and shelley toward the study of medicine. the practical responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him, and he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill. voices and visions that he could not resist were luring his spirit along other paths, and once when cowden clarke asked him about his prospects and feelings in regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of his unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that "the other day, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and i was off with them to oberon and fairy-land." "my last operation," he once told brown, "was the opening of a man's temporal artery. i did it with the utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and i never took up the lancet again." keats at the same time was forming intimacies with other young men of literary tastes and occupations. his verses were beginning to be no longer written with a boy's secrecy, but freely addressed to and passed round among his friends; some of them attracted the notice and warm approval of writers of acknowledged mark and standing; and with their encouragement he had about the time of his coming of age (that is in the winter of - ) conceived the purpose of devoting himself to a literary life. we are not told what measure of opposition he encountered on the point from mr abbey, though there is evidence that he encountered some[ ]. probably that gentleman regarded the poetical aspirations of his ward as mere symptoms of a boyish fever which experience would quickly cure. there was always a certain lack of cordiality in his relations with the three brothers as they grew up. he gave places in his counting-house successively to george and tom as they left school, but they both quitted him after a while; george, who had his full share of the family pride, on account of slights experienced or imagined at the hands of a junior partner; tom in consequence of a settled infirmity of health which early disabled him for the practical work of life. mr abbey continued to manage the money matters of the keats family,--unskilfully enough as will appear,--and to do his duty by them as he understood it. between him and john keats there was never any formal quarrel. but that young brilliant spirit could hardly have expected a responsible tea-dealer's approval when he yielded himself to the influences now to be described. chapter ii. particulars of early life in london--friendships and first poems--henry stephens--felton mathew--cowden clarke--leigh hunt: his literary and personal influence--john hamilton reynolds--james rice--cornelius webb--shelley--haydon--joseph severn--charles wells--personal characteristics--determination to publish. [ -april .] when keats moved from dean street to st thomas's street in the summer of , he at first occupied a joint sitting-room with two senior students, to the care of one of whom he had been recommended by astley cooper[ ]. when they left he arranged to live in the same house with two other students, of his own age, named george wilson mackereth and henry stephens. the latter, who was afterwards a physician of repute near st albans, and later at finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of the time[ ]. "he attended lectures," says mr stephens of keats, "and went through the usual routine, but he had no desire to excel in that pursuit.... poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations--the only thing worthy the attention of superior minds--so he thought--all other pursuits were mean and tame.... it may readily be imagined that this feeling was accompanied by a good deal of pride and some conceit, and that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals." on the whole, it seems, 'little keats' was popular among his fellow-students, although subject to occasional teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and even his birth as the son of a stable-keeper. mr stephens goes on to tell how he himself and a student of st bartholomew's, a merry fellow called newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions by keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, keats taking always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes. he despised pope, and admired byron, but delighted especially in spenser, caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile, than for the interest of action or passion. newmarch used sometimes to laugh at keats and his flights,--to the indignation of his brothers, who came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and destined to exalt the family name. questions of poetry apart, continues mr stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady and well-behaved--"his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having any other taste or indulging in any vice." another companion of keats's early london days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain george felton mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young medical student some hospitality. "keats and i," wrote in mr mathew,--then a supernumerary official on the poor-law board, struggling meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy,--"keats and i, though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in many respects as different as two individuals could be. he enjoyed good health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was fond of company--could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life--and had great confidence in himself. i, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy--fond of repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree.... he was of the sceptical and republican school--an advocate for the innovations which were making progress in his time--a faultfinder with everything established. i on the other hand hated controversy and dispute--dreaded discord and disorder"[ ]--and keats, our good mr timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to apologize for shocking him. as to his poetical predilections, the impression left on mr mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by mr stephens:--"he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the muse. he delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. he used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but i never observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme sensibility." the exact order and chronology of keats's own first efforts in poetry it is difficult to trace. they were certainly neither precocious nor particularly promising. the circumstantial account of brown above quoted compels us to regard the lines _in imitation of spenser_ as the earliest of all, and as written at edmonton about the end of or beginning of . they are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a little later in keats's work. although, indeed, the poets whom keats loved the best both first and last were those of the elizabethan age, it is clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of writers nearer his own time. his professedly spenserian lines resemble not so much spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of these not the latest, byron[ ], but rather such milder minstrels as shenstone, thomson, and beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental irish poetess mrs tighe; whose _psyche_ had become very popular since her death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces preluding the romantic movement of the time. that keats was familiar with this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of tom moore, which he addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a shell. his two elegiac stanzas _on death_, assigned by george keats to the year , are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of moralizing. equally so is the address _to hope_ of february , with its 'relentless fair' and its personified abstractions, 'fair cheerfulness,' 'disappointment, parent of despair,' 'that fiend despondence,' and the rest. and once more, in the ode _to apollo_ of the same date, the voice with which this young singer celebrates his elizabethan masters is an echo not of their own voice but rather of gray's:-- "thou biddest shakspeare wave his hand, and quickly forward spring the passions--a terrific band-- and each vibrates the string that with its tyrant temper best accords, while from their master's lips pour forth the inspiring words. a silver trumpet spenser blows, and, as its martial notes to silence flee, from a virgin chorus flows a hymn in praise of spotless chastity. 'tis still! wild warblings from the Æolian lyre enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire." the pieces above cited are all among the earliest of keats's work, written either at edmonton or during the first year of his life in london. to the same class no doubt belongs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish, sentimental sonnet _to byron_, and probably that also, which is but a degree better, _to chatterton_ (both only posthumously printed). the more firmly handled but still mediocre sonnet on leigh hunt's release from prison brings us again to a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the young poet's life. it was on either the nd or the rd of february, , that the brothers hunt were discharged after serving out the term of imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling the prince regent two years before. young cowden clarke, like so many other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to leigh hunt in surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed quickly into friendship. within a few days of hunt's release, clarke walked in from enfield to call on him (presumably at the lodging he occupied at this time in the edgware road). on his return clarke met keats, who walked part of the way home with him, and as they parted, says clarke, "he turned and gave me the sonnet entitled _written on the day that mr leigh hunt left prison_. this i feel to be the first proof i had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do i recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! there are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with life." not long afterwards cowden clarke left enfield, and came to settle in london. keats found him out in his lodgings at clerkenwell, and the two were soon meeting as often and reading together as eagerly as ever. one of the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of chapman's homer. after a night's enthusiastic study, clarke found when he came down to breakfast the next morning, that keats, who had only left him in the small hours, had already had time to compose and send him from the borough the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost hackneyed, _on first looking into chapman's homer_;-- "much have i travell'd in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen; round many western islands have i been which bards in fealty to apollo hold. oft of one wide expanse had i been told, that deep-brow'd homer ruled as his demesne: yet did i never breathe its pure serene till i heard chapman speak out loud and bold: then felt i like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the pacific--and all his men look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- silent, upon a peak in darien." the date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed; but it was when nights were short in the summer of . the seventh line of the sonnet is an afterthought: in the original copy sent to cowden clarke it stood more baldly, 'yet could i never tell what men might mean.' keats here for the first time approves himself a poet indeed. the concluding sestet is almost unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius than the image of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of schoolboy reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, which should be balboa and not cortez, but what does it matter?) is converted into the perfection of appropriate poetry. one of the next services which the ever zealous and affectionate cowden clarke did his young friend was to make him personally known to leigh hunt. the acquaintance carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages and even penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encouragement and pleasure. it is impossible rightly to understand the career of keats if we fail to realise the various modes in which it was affected by his intercourse with hunt. the latter was the elder of the two by eleven years. he was the son, by marriage with an american wife, of an eloquent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher of west indian origin, who had chiefly exercised his vocation in the northern suburbs of london. leigh hunt was brought up at christ's hospital, about a dozen years later than lamb and coleridge, and gained at sixteen some slight degree of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile poems. a few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the war office; an occupation which he abandoned at twenty-four (in ) in order to join his brother john hunt in the conduct of the _examiner_ newspaper. for five years the managers of that journal helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of eldon and of castlereagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. at last they were caught tripping, and condemned to two years' imprisonment for strictures ruled libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and person of the prince regent. leigh hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. liberal statesmen, philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. tall, straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black eyes, and 'nose of taste,' leigh hunt was ever one of the most winning of companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. if in some matters he was far too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him nearly always a receiver,--still men of sterner fibre than hunt have more lightly abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer for what they believed. liberals could not but contrast his smiling steadfastness under persecution with the apostasy, as in the heat of the hour they considered it, of southey, wordsworth, and coleridge. in domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under difficulties; and none was better loved by his friends, or requited them, so far as the depth of his nature went, with a truer warmth and loyalty. his literary industry was incessant, hardly second to that of southey himself. he had the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a singular quickness of intellectual apprehension for the points and qualities of what he enjoyed; and for the gentler pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word he loved) of literature, he is the most accomplished of guides and interpreters. his manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which coleridge and de quincey, with their more philosophic powers and method, were subject, the faults of pedantry and effort. the infirmity of leigh hunt's style is of an opposite kind. "incomparable," according to lamb's well-known phrase, "as a fire-side companion," it was his misfortune to carry too much of the fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both in prose and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty familiarity and ease which passes too easily into cockney pertness. a combination of accidents, political, personal, and literary, caused this writer of amiable memory and second-rate powers to exercise, about the time of which we are writing, a determining influence both on the work and the fortunes of stronger men. and first of his influence on their work. he was as enthusiastic a student of 'our earlier and nobler school of poetry' as coleridge or lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the characteristic excellences of the 'french school,' the school of polished artifice and restraint which had come in since dryden, he was not less bent on its overthrow, and on the return of english poetry to the paths of nature and freedom. but he had his own conception of the manner in which this return should be effected. he did not admit that wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. "it was his intention," he wrote in prison, "by the beginning of next year to bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate harmony of the english heroic." the result of this intention was the _story of rimini_, begun before his prosecution and published a year after his release, in february or march, . "with the endeavour," so he repeated himself in the preface, "to recur to a freer spirit of versification, i have joined one of still greater importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language." in versification hunt's aim was to bring back into use the earlier form of the rhymed english decasyllabic or 'heroic' couplet. the innovating poets of the time had abandoned this form of verse (wordsworth and coleridge using it only in their earliest efforts, before ); while the others who still employed it, as campbell, rogers, crabbe, and byron, adhered, each in his manner, to the isolated couplet and hammering rhymes with which the english ear had been for more than a century exclusively familiar. the two contrasted systems of handling the measure may best be understood if we compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern, with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. the regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the verse into equal pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its other divisions--dependent not on metre but on the sense--into clauses and periods of variable length and structure. under the older system of versification the sentence or period had been allowed to follow its own laws, with a movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the beauty of the result depended upon the skill and feeling with which this free element of the pattern was made to play about and interweave itself with the fixed element, the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now drawing attention to the rhyme and now withholding it. for examples of this system and of its charm we have only to turn at random to chaucer:-- "i-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse. hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse, byhynde her bak, a yerdë long, i gesse, and in the garden as the sonne upriste she walketh up and down, and as hir liste she gathereth floures, party white and reede, to make a sotil garland for here heede, and as an aungel hevenlyche sche song." chaucer's conception of the measure prevails throughout the elizabethan age, but not exclusively or uniformly. some poets are more inobservant of the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the _enjambement_, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. others show an opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall regularly on the rhyme. this principle gradually gained ground during the seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work of dryden. but dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the use of the triplet and the alexandrine, thus:-- "full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood were poured upon the pile of burning wood, and hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food. then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around the fire, and arcite's name they thrice resound: 'hail and farewell,' they shouted thrice amain, thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again--:" and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:-- "i come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; i am the ghost of poor departed nelly. sweet ladies, be not frighted; i'll be civil; i'm what i was, a little harmless devil." in the hands of pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element entirely. the sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical divisions of the verse. to take a famous instance, and from a passage not sententious, but fanciful and discursive:-- "some in the fields of purest æther play, and bask and whiten in the blaze of day. some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, or roll the planets through the boundless sky. some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light pursue the stars that shoot across the night, or seek the mists in grosser air below, or dip their pinions in the painted bow, or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain." leigh hunt's theory was that pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic couplet had been dryden, on whom the verse of _rimini_ is avowedly modelled. the result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial cadences of dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in either:-- "the prince, at this, would bend on her an eye cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly; nor, to say truly, was he slow in common to accept the attentions of this lovely woman, but the meantime he took no generous pains, by mutual pleasing, to secure his gains; he entered not, in turn, in her delights, her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights; nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he unless his pride was roused by company; or when to please him, after martial play, she strained her lute to some old fiery lay of fierce orlando, or of ferumbras, or ryan's cloak, or how by the red grass in battle you might know where richard was." it is usually said that to the example thus set by leigh hunt in _rimini_ is due the rhythmical form alike of _endymion_ and _epipsychidion_, of keats's _epistles_ to his friends and shelley's _letter to maria gisborne_. certainly the _epistles_ of keats, both as to sentiment and rhythm, are very much in hunt's manner. but the earliest of them, that to g. f. mathew, is dated nov. : when _rimini_ was not yet published, and when it appears keats did not yet know hunt personally. he may indeed have known his poem in ms., through clarke or others. or the likeness of his work to hunt's may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the disyllabic rhyme and the 'overflow' as used by some of the elizabethan writers, particularly by spenser in _mother hubbard's tale_ and by browne in _britannia's pastorals_. at all events the appearance of _rimini_ tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice. as to hunt's success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his 'free and idiomatic cast of language' to supersede the styles alike of pope and wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps enough. the taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so completely as in _rimini_. the piece indeed is not without agreeable passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and vocabulary that are intolerable. contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, found, indeed, something to praise in leigh hunt's _rimini_: and ladies are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what, one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can endure to hear the story of paolo and francesca--dante's paolo and francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like this?-- "what need i tell of lovely lips and eyes, a clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise?--" "how charming, would he think, to see her here, how heightened then, and perfect would appear the two divinest things the world has got, a lovely woman in a rural spot." when keats and shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed leigh hunt in the attempt to add a familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred strain as this: but keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more than once. next as to the influence which leigh hunt involuntarily exercised on his friends' fortunes and their estimation by the world. we have seen how he found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no means fitted him. this was in itself enough to mark him out as a special butt for tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. during his imprisonment leigh hunt had reprinted from the _reflector_, with notes and additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the _feast of the poets_, which he had written about two years before. in it apollo is represented as convoking the contemporary british poets, or pretenders to the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. some of those who present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. moore and campbell fare the best; southey and scott are accepted but with reproof, coleridge and wordsworth chidden and dismissed. the criticisms are not more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on their contemporaries. the bitterness of the 'lost leader' feeling to which we have referred accounts for much of hunt's disparagement of the lake writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against scott as a conspicuous high tory and friend to kings. but he quite acknowledged the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the poetical perversities, of wordsworth. his treatment of scott, on the other hand, is idly flippant and patronising. now it so happened that of the two champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other the dagger, of tory criticism in edinburgh,--i mean wilson and lockhart,--wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of wordsworth, and lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion was to scott. hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour with which the gentle hunt, and keats as his friend and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in _blackwood_. to go back to the point at which hunt and keats first became known to each other. cowden clarke began by carrying up to hunt, who had now moved from the edgware road to a cottage in the vale of health at hampstead, a few of keats's poems in manuscript. horace smith was with hunt when the young poet's work was shown him. both were eager in its praises, and in questions concerning the person and character of the author. cowden clarke at hunt's request brought keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has left a vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. the introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of [ ]. keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the hampstead household; and for the next year or two hunt's was the strongest intellectual influence to which he was subject. so far as opinions were concerned, those of keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood by leigh hunt's writings in the _examiner_. hunt was a confirmed sceptic as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of eighteenth-century philosophy in france. keats shared the natural sympathy of generous youth for hunt's liberal and optimistic view of things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:--ready to entertain and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. in matters of poetic feeling and fancy keats and hunt had not a little in common. both alike were given to 'luxuriating' somewhat effusively and fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever they liked in art, books, or nature. to the every-day pleasures of summer and the english fields hunt brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in keats were intense beyond parallel. in his lighter and shallower way hunt also felt with keats the undying charm of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about this time some agreeable translations of the sicilian pastorals, and some, less adequate, of homer. the poets hunt loved best were ariosto and the other italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in english he was devoted to keats's own favourite spenser. the name of spenser is often coupled with that of 'libertas,' 'the lov'd libertas,' meaning leigh hunt, in the verses written by keats at this time. he attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the _faerie queene_ in the metre of _rimini_, and in others to express in the same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the beautiful, then rural hampstead woods and slopes. in the summer of he seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the vale of health, where a bed was made up for him in the library. in one poem he dilates at length on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; and the sonnet beginning, 'keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there', records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend's house one night in winter. we find him presenting hunt with a crown of ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. or they would challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme. cowden clarke, in describing one such occasion in december , when they each wrote to time a sonnet _on the grasshopper and cricket_, has left us a pleasant picture of their relations:-- "the event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of leigh hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. his sincere look of pleasure at the first line:-- 'the poetry of earth is never dead.' "such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines:-- 'on a lone winter morning, when the frost hath wrought a silence'-- "ah that's perfect! bravo keats!" and then he went on in a dilatation on the dumbness of nature during the season's suspension and torpidity." through leigh hunt keats was before long introduced to a number of congenial spirits. among them he attached himself especially to one john hamilton reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. reynolds was born at shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in london, as writing-master at the blue coat school. he lacked health and energy, but has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a charming character and no slight literary talent. he held a clerkship in an insurance office, and lived in little britain with his family, including three sisters with whom keats was also intimate, and the eldest of whom afterwards married thomas hood. his earliest poems show him inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the time. one, _safie_, is an indifferent imitation of byron in his then fashionable oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published in the year of keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's relations with him. in a lighter strain, reynolds wrote a musical entertainment which was brought out in at what is now the lyceum theatre, and about the same time offended wordsworth with an anticipatory parody of _peter bell_, which byron assumed to be the work of moore. in he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to relate, under the name _peter corcoran_, the fortunes of an amateur of the prize-ring; and a little later, in conjunction with hood, the volume of anonymous _odes and addresses to eminent persons_ which coleridge on its appearance declared confidently to be the work of lamb. but reynolds had early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of an opening in business as a solicitor. in he inscribed a farewell sonnet to the muses in a copy of shakspeare which he gave to keats, and in he writes again, "as time increases i give up drawling verse for drawing leases." in point of fact reynolds continued for years to contribute to the _london magazine_ and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with hood. but neither in literature nor law did he attain a position commensurate with the promise of his youth. starting level, at the time of which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,--with keats and shelley,--he died in as clerk of the county at newport, isle of wight, and it is only in association with keats that his name will live. not only was he one of the warmest friends keats had, entertaining from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet written early in their acquaintance proves[ ], but also one of the wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake. in connection with the name of reynolds among keats's associates must be mentioned that of his inseparable friend james rice, a young solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, but always, in keats's words, "coming on his legs again like a cat"; ever cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in good offices to those about him: "dear noble generous james rice," records dilke,--"the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest men i ever knew." besides reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming member of hunt's set, when keats first joined it, was one cornelius webb, remembered now, if remembered at all, by _blackwood's_ derisory quotation of his lines on-- "keats, the muses' son of promise, and what feats he yet may do"-- as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of keats's own later letters. he disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the work of hunt, or even for that of keats himself in his weak moments[ ]. for some years afterwards webb served as press-reader in the printing-office of messrs clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the _quarterly_ proofs. towards -- he re-appeared in literature, as cornelius 'webbe', author of the _man about town_ and other volumes of cheerful gossipping cockney essays, to which the _quarterly_ critics extended a patronizing notice. an acquaintance more interesting to posterity which keats made a few months later, at leigh hunt's, was that of shelley, his senior by only three years. during the harrowing period of shelley's life which followed the suicide of his first wife--when his principle of love a law to itself had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the world's--the kindness and affection of leigh hunt were among his chief consolations. after his marriage with mary godwin, he flitted often, alone or with his wife, between great marlow and hampstead, where keats met him early in the spring of . "keats," says hunt, did not take to shelley as kindly as shelley did to him, and adds the comment: "keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "he was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank," says haydon in his unqualified way. where his pride had not been aroused by anticipation, keats had a genius for friendship, but towards shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or material patronage on the other's part: but he should soon have learnt better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy, according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his kindness. of shelley's kindness keats had in the sequel sufficient proof: in the meantime, until shelley went abroad the following year, the two met often at hunt's without becoming really intimate. pride and social sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy between them, and that keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of shelley, his passionate negation of the world's creeds and the world's law, and his intense proselytizing ardour. it was also at hunt's house that keats for the first time met by pre-arrangement, in the beginning of november , the painter haydon, whose influence soon became hardly second to that of hunt himself. haydon was now thirty. he had lately been victorious in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory in the other. he had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence of the elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor's art acknowledged in the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation secured. this is haydon's chief real title to the regard of posterity. his other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by providence to add the crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. his indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his self-assertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. his first two great pictures, 'dentatus' and 'macbeth', had been dubiously received; his last, the 'judgment of solomon', with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than all, 'christ's entry into jerusalem,' and while as usual sunk deep in debt, was perfectly confident of glory. vain confidence--for he was in truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts of genius and not the other. its energy and voluntary power he possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "never," wrote he about this time, "have i had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. i have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his soul. while i was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... they came over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till i lifted up my heart and thanked god." but for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch and insight, were not in him. except for a stray note here and there, an occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of true heroic art but of rodomontade. even in drawing from the elgin marbles, haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety of the original. very much better is his account of them in words: as indeed haydon's chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. readers of his journals and correspondence know with what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style he can relate an experience or touch off a character. but in this, the literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings. take for instance, in relation to keats himself, haydon's profound admonition to him as follows:--"god bless you, my dear keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read shakspere, and trust in providence, and you will do, you must:" or the following precious expansion of an image in one of the poet's sonnets on the elgin marbles:--"i know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects of their seeking"-- but it was the gifts and faculties which haydon possessed, and not those he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his associates as they impressed himself. the most distinguished spirits of the time were among his friends. some of them, like wordsworth, held by him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others after a while. he was justly proud of his industry and strength of purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies', and the like. "i always rose up from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to keats, "with a refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." and he was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it might be, on their bounty. experience of these qualities partly alienated keats from him in the long run. but at first sight haydon had much to attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and keats were mutually delighted when they met. each struck fire from the other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. after an evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the th of november, , the young poet wrote to haydon as follows, joining his name with those of wordsworth and leigh hunt:-- "last evening wrought me up, and i cannot forbear sending you the following:-- great spirits now on earth are sojourning: he of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, who on helvellyn's summit, wide awake, catches his freshness from archangel's wing: he of the rose, the violet, the spring, the social smile, the chain for freedom's sake, and lo! whose steadfastness would never take a meaner sound than raphael's whispering. and other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the world another heart, and other pulses. hear ye not the hum of mighty workings in the human mart? listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb." haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. the three well-known sonnets of wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and about the same time as keats, john hamilton reynolds also wrote him a sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. in his reply to keats he proposed to hand on the above piece to wordsworth--a proposal which "puts me," answers keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence i would send my well-wishes to him." haydon suggested moreover what i cannot but think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the words after 'workings' in the last line but one. the poet, however, accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. two other sonnets, which keats wrote at this time, after visiting the elgin marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject, confessing his inability rightly to grasp or analyse the impressions he had received. by the spring of the following year his intimacy with haydon was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a standing invitation to his studio in great marlborough street, declaring him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried together. to complete the group of keats's friends in these days, we have to think of two or three others known to him otherwise than through hunt, and not belonging to the hunt circle. among these were the family and friends of a miss georgiana wylie, to whom george keats was attached. she was the daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive irregular cast of beauty, and keats on his own account had a great liking for her. on valentine's day, , we find him writing, for george to send her, the first draft of the lines beginning, 'hadst thou lived in days of old,' afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[ ]. through the wylies keats became acquainted with a certain william haslam, who was afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, but whose character and person remain indistinct to us; and through haslam with joseph severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. severn was the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to be himself a painter. he had a talent also for music, a strong love of literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which mr ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at rome[ ]. from the moment of their introduction severn found in keats his very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him with an admiring affection. a still younger member of the keats circle was charles wells, afterwards author of _stories after nature_, and of that singular and strongly imagined biblical drama or 'dramatic poem' of _joseph and his brethren_, which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group of poets and critics in ours. wells had been a school companion of tom keats at enfield, and was now living with his family in featherstone buildings. he has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. he was only about fifteen when he sent to john keats the present of roses acknowledged in the sonnet beginning, 'as late i rambled in the happy fields.' a year or two later keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on tom keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the _stories after nature_, published in , are said to have been written in order to show keats "that he too could do something." thus by his third winter in london our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art, letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most ardent spirits of the time. his youth, origin, and temperament alike saved him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and deference towards his elder, companions. but the power and the charm of genius were already visibly upon him. portraits both verbal and other exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression which he made. "the character and expression of his features," it is said, "would arrest even the casual passenger in the street." a small, handsome, ardent-looking youth--the stature little over five feet: the figure compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired--"an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a delphian priestess who saw visions." "keats was the only man i ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high calling, except wordsworth." these words are haydon's, and to the same effect leigh hunt:--"the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. at the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled." it is noticeable that his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. to return to haydon:--"he was in his glory in the fields. the humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered." in like manner george keats:--"john's eyes moistened, and his lip quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;" and a shrewd and honoured survivor of those days, "herself of many poets the frequent theme and valued friend,"--need i name mrs procter?--has recorded the impression the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on some glorious sight[ ]. in regard to his social qualities, keats is said, and owns himself, to have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and unaffected. if the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the window-seat came to be recognized as his place. his voice was rich and low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are said to have been great, and never used unkindly. thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, passion for the poetic life. his guardian, as we have said, of course was adverse: but his brothers, including george, the practical and sensible one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his compositions, show. in august we find him addressing from margate a sonnet and a poetical epistle in terms of the utmost affection and confidence to george. about the same time he gave up his lodgings in st thomas's street to go and live with his brothers in the poultry; and in november he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side occupations. poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. it was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as england has not known since. in such an atmosphere keats soon found himself induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. the encouragement of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. it was leigh hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without comment, in the _examiner_ for the th of may, , his sonnet beginning, 'o solitude! if i with thee must dwell,' and on the st of december in the same year the sonnet on chapman's homer. this hunt accompanied by some prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, associating with his name those of shelley and reynolds. it was by the praise of hunt in this paper, says mr stephens, that keats's fate was sealed. but already the still more ardent encouragement of haydon, if more was wanted, had come to add fuel to the fire. in the marlborough street studio, in the hampstead cottage, in the city lodgings of the three brothers, and in the convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that john keats should put forth a volume of his poems. a sympathetic firm of publishers was found in the olliers. the volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _to leigh hunt esqr._, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:-- "glory and loveliness have pass'd away; for if we wander out in early morn, no wreathèd incense do we see upborne into the east to meet the smiling day: no crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, in woven baskets bringing ears of corn, roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn the shrine of flora in her early may. but there are left delights as high as these, and i shall ever bless my destiny, that in a time when under pleasant trees pan is no longer sought, i feel a free, a leafy luxury, seeing i could please, with these poor offerings, a man like thee." with this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's first venture was sent forth in the month of march . chapter iii. the _poems_ of . the note of keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from spenser which he prefixed to it:-- "what more felicity can fall to creature than to enjoy delight with liberty?" the element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. and the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys. we have already glanced, in connection with the occasions which gave rise to them, at a few of the miscellaneous boyish pieces in various metres which are included in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. the remaining and much the chief portion of the book consists of half a dozen poems in the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. these had all been written during the period between november and april , under the combined influence of the older english poets and of leigh hunt. the former influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. keats had by this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the elizabethans and from milton. the chief verbal echoes of spenser to be found in his first volume are a line quoted from him entire in the epistle to g. f. mathew, and the use of the archaic 'teen' in the stanzas professedly spenserian. we can indeed trace keats's familiarity with chapman, and especially with one poem of chapman's, his translation of the homeric _hymn to pan_, in a predilection for a particular form of abstract descriptive substantive:-- "the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the speculation of the stars:"-- "or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:"-- "ere i can have explored its widenesses."[ ] the only other distinguishing marks of keats's diction in this first volume consist, i think, in the use of the miltonic 'sphery,' and of an unmeaning coinage of his own, 'boundly,' with a habit--for which milton, spenser, and among the moderns leigh hunt all alike furnished him the example--of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his convenience. for the rest, keats writes in the ordinary english of his day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. single lines and passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and instinct. but they are mixed up with much that only illustrates his crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with leigh hunt to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and grace. in the matter of metre, we can see keats in these poems making a succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic couplet. in the colloquial _epistles_, addressed severally to g. f. mathew, to his brother george, and to cowden clarke, he contents himself with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional _enjambement_ or 'overflow.' in the _specimen of an induction to a poem_, and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled _calidore_ (a name borrowed from the hero of spenser's sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed piece beginning 'i stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' which opens the volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught either from spenser's nuptial odes or milton's _lycidas_,-- "open afresh your round of starry folds, ye ardent marigolds." in _sleep and poetry_, which is the most personal and interesting, as well as probably the last-written, poem in the volume, keats drops this practice, but in other respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather than an exception the chaucerian and elizabethan fashion of breaking the couplet by closing a sentence or paragraph with its first line. passing from the form of the poems to their substance, we find that they are experiments or poetic preludes merely, with no pretension to be organic or complete works of art. to rehearse ramblingly the pleasures and aspirations of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow another with no particular plan or sequence, is all that keats as yet attempts: except in the _calidore_ fragment. and that is on the whole feeble and confused: from the outset the poet loses himself in a maze of young luxuriant imagery: once and again, however, he gets clear, and we have some good lines in an approach to the dryden manner:-- "softly the breezes from the forest came, softly they blew aside the taper's flame; clear was the song from philomel's far bower; grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone; lovely the moon in ether, all alone." to set against this are occasionally expressions in the complete taste of leigh hunt, as for instance-- "the lamps that from the high-roof'd wall were pendent, and gave the steel a shining quite transcendent." the _epistles_ are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint pleasures of literature and friendship. in that to cowden clarke, keats acknowledges to his friend that he had been shy at first of addressing verses to him:-- "nor should i now, but that i've known you long; that you first taught me all the sweets of song: the grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine, what swell'd with pathos, and what right divine: spenserian vowels that elope with ease, and float along like birds o'er summer seas; miltonian storms, and more, miltonian tenderness; michael in arms, and more, meek eve's fair slenderness. who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly up to its climax, and then dying proudly? who found for me the grandeur of the ode, growing, like atlas, stronger for its load? who let me taste that more than cordial dram, the sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? show'd me that epic was of all the king, round, vast, and spanning all like saturn's ring?" this is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter manner of keats in his early work. blots like the ungrammatical fourth line are not infrequent with him. the preference for miltonian tenderness over miltonian storms may remind the reader of a later poet's more masterly expression of the same sentiment:--'me rather all that bowery loneliness--'. the two lines on spenser are of interest as conveying one of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of which no one has left us more or better than keats. the habit of spenser to which he here alludes is that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive lines, for example,-- "eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, more swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye; withouten oare or pilot it to guide, or winged canvas with the wind to fly." the run here is on _a_ and _i_; principally on _i_, which occurs five times in its open, and ten times in its closed, sound in the four lines,--if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel these two unlike sounds denoted by the same sign. keats was a close and conscious student of the musical effects of verse, and the practice of spenser is said to have suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration of vowel sounds in poetry. what his theory was we are not clearly told, neither do i think it can easily be discovered from his practice; though every one must feel a great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of the vowel and diphthong sequences. he often spoke of the subject, and once maintained his view against wordsworth when the latter seemed to be advocating a mechanical principle of vowel variation. hear, next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, and of nature, come naively jostling one another in the _epistle_ addressed from the sea-side to his brother george:-- "as to my sonnets, though none else should heed them i feel delighted, still, that you should read them. of late, too, i have had much calm enjoyment, stretch'd on the grass at my best loved employment of scribbling lines for you. these things i thought while, in my face, the freshest breeze i caught. e'en now i am pillow'd on a bed of flowers that crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers above the ocean waves. the stalks and blades chequer my tablet with their quivering shades. on one side is a field of drooping oats, through which the poppies show their scarlet coats; so pert and useless that they bring to mind the scarlet coats that pester human kind. and on the other side, outspread is seen ocean's blue mantle, streak'd with purple and green. now 'tis i see a canvass'd ship, and now mark the bright silver curling round her brow; i see the lark down-dropping to his nest, and the broad wing'd sea-gull never at rest; for when no more he spreads his feathers free, his breast is dancing on the restless sea." it is interesting to watch the newly-awakened literary faculty in keats thus exercising itself in the narrow circle of personal sensation, and on the description of the objects immediately before his eyes. the effect of rhythmical movement attempted in the last lines, to correspond with the buoyancy and variety of the motions described, has a certain felicity, and the whole passage is touched already with keats's exquisite perception and enjoyment of external nature. his character as a poet of nature begins, indeed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. he differs by it alike from wordsworth and from shelley. the instinct of wordsworth was to interpret all the operations of nature by those of his own strenuous soul; and the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from the scenery of his home, deepened and enriched by continual after meditation, and mingling with all the currents of his adult thought and feeling, constituted for him throughout his life the most vital part alike of patriotism, of philosophy, and of religion. for shelley on his part natural beauty was in a twofold sense symbolical. in the visible glories of the world his philosophy saw the veil of the unseen, while his philanthropy found in them types and auguries of a better life on earth; and all that imagery of nature's more remote and skyey phenomena, of which no other poet has had an equal mastery, and which comes borne to us along the music of the verse-- "with many a mingled close of wild Æolian sound and mountain odour keen"-- was inseparable in his soul from visions of a radiant future and a renovated--alas! not a human--humanity. in keats the sentiment of nature was simpler than in either of these two other masters; more direct, and so to speak more disinterested. it was his instinct to love and interpret nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of sympathy which the human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. he had grown up neither like wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor in the glow of millennial dreams like shelley, but london-born and middlesex-bred, was gifted, we know not whence, as if by some mysterious birthright, with a delighted insight into all the beauties, and sympathy with all the life, of the woods and fields. evidences of the gift appear, as every reader knows, in the longer poems of his first volume, with their lingering trains of peaceful summer imagery, and loving inventories of 'nature's gentle doings;' and pleasant touches of the same kind are scattered also among the sonnets; as in that _to charles wells_,-- "as late i rambled in the happy fields, what time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew from his lush clover covert,"-- or again in that _to solitude_,-- --"let me thy vigils keep 'mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."[ ] such intuitive familiarity with the blithe activities, unnoted by common eyes, which make up the life and magic of nature, is a gift we attribute to men of primitive race and forest nurture; and mr matthew arnold would have us recognize it as peculiarly characteristic of the celtic element in the english genius and english poetry. it was allied in keats to another instinct of the early world which we associate especially with the greeks, the instinct for personifying the powers of nature in clearly-defined imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half-human faculties. the classical teaching of the enfield school had not gone beyond latin, and neither in boyhood nor afterwards did keats acquire any greek: but towards the creations of the greek mythology he was attracted by an overmastering delight in their beauty, and a natural sympathy with the phase of imagination that engendered them. especially he shows himself possessed and fancy-bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical enchantment, of the moon. never was bard in youth so literally moonstruck. he had planned a poem on the ancient story of the loves of diana, with whom the greek moon-goddess selene is identified in the latin mythology, and the shepherd-prince endymion; and had begun a sort of prelude to it in the piece that opens 'i stood tiptoe upon a little hill.' afterwards, without abandoning the subject, keats laid aside this particular exordium, and printed it, as we have seen, as an independent piece at the head of his first volume. it is at the climax of a passage rehearsing the delights of evening that he first bethinks himself of the moon-- "lifting her silver rim above a cloud, and with a gradual swim coming into the blue with all her light." the thought of the mythic passion of the moon-goddess for endymion, and the praises of the poet who first sang it, follow at considerable length. the passage conjuring up the wonders and beneficences of their bridal night is written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the collective feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary conditions of human pain and pleasure, health and sickness, as rarely occurs again in keats's poetry, though his correspondence shows it to have been most natural to his mind:-- "the evening weather was so bright, and clear, that men of health were of unusual cheer. * * * * * the breezes were ethereal, and pure, and crept through half-closed lattices to cure the languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, and sooth'd them into slumbers full and deep. soon they awoke clear-ey'd: nor burnt with thirsting, nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: and springing up, they met the wond'ring sight of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, and on their placid foreheads part the hair."[ ] finally, keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exordium of his unwritten poem with the cry:-- "cynthia! i cannot tell the greater blisses that followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses: was there a poet born? but now no more my wandering spirit must no farther soar." was there a poet born? is the labour and the reward of poetry really and truly destined to be his? the question is one which recurs in this early volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences closely recalling those of milton in his boyish _vacation exercise_; sometimes with a cry like this, which occurs twice over in the piece called _sleep and poetry_,-- "o poesy! for thee i hold my pen, that am not yet a glorious denizen of thy wide heaven:"-- and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring tone of young ambition,-- "but off, despondence! miserable bane! they should not know thee, who, athirst to gain a noble end, are thirsty every hour. what though i am not wealthy in the dower of spanning wisdom: though i do not know the shiftings of the mighty winds that blow hither and thither all the changing thoughts of man: though no great ministering reason sorts out the dark mysteries of human souls to clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls a vast idea before me"--. the feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the overmastering pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, gives way in other passages to confident anticipations of fame, and of the place which he will hold in the affections of posterity. there is obviously a great immaturity and uncertainty in all these outpourings, an intensity and effervescence of emotion out of proportion as yet both to the intellectual and the voluntary powers, much confusion of idea, and not a little of expression. yet even in this first book of keats there is much that the lover of poetry will always cherish. literature, indeed, hardly affords another example of work at once so crude and so attractive. passages that go to pieces under criticism nevertheless have about them a spirit of beauty and of morning, an abounding young vitality and freshness, that exhilarate and charm us whether with the sanction of our judgment or without it. and alike at its best and worst, the work proceeds manifestly from a spontaneous and intense poetic impulse. the matter of these early poems of keats is as fresh and unconventional as their form, springing directly from the native poignancy of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. that his inexperience should always make the most discreet use of its freedom could not be expected; but with all its immaturity his work has strokes already which suggest comparison with the great names of literature. who much exceeds him, even from the first, but shakspere in momentary felicity of touch for nature, and in that charm of morning freshness who but chaucer? already, too, we find him showing signs of that capacity for clear and sane self-knowledge which becomes by-and-by so admirable in him. and he has already begun to meditate to good purpose on the aims and methods of his art. he has grasped and vehemently asserts the principle that poetry should not strive to enforce particular doctrines, that it should not contend in the field of reason, but that its proper organ is the imagination, and its aim the creation of beauty. with reference to the theory and practice of the poetic art the piece called _sleep and poetry_ contains one passage which has become classically familiar to all readers. often as it has been quoted elsewhere, it must be quoted again here, as indispensable to the understanding of the literary atmosphere in which keats lived:-- "is there so small a range in the present strength of manhood, that the high imagination cannot freely fly as she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, paw up against the light, and do strange deeds upon the clouds? has she not shown us all? from the clear space of ether, to the small breath of new buds unfolding? from the meaning of jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening of april meadows? here her altar shone, e'en in this isle; and who could paragon the fervid choir that lifted up a noise of harmony, to where it aye will poise its mighty self of convoluting sound, huge as a planet, and like that roll round, eternally around a dizzy void? ay, in those days the muses were nigh cloy'd with honours; nor had any other care than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair. could all this be forgotten? yes, a schism nurtured by foppery and barbarism made great apollo blush for this his land. men were thought wise who could not understand his glories; with a puling infant's force they sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, and thought it pegasus. ah, dismal-soul'd! the winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd its gathering waves--ye felt it not. the blue bared its eternal bosom, and the dew of summer night collected still to make the morning precious: beauty was awake! why were ye not awake? but ye were dead to things ye knew not of,--were closely wed to musty laws lined out with wretched rule and compass vile; so that ye taught a school of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, till, like the certain wands of jacob's wit, their verses tallied. easy was the task: a thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask of poesy. ill-fated, impious race! that blasphemed the bright lyrist to his face, and did not know it,--no, they went about, holding a poor, decrepit standard out, mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large the name of one boileau! o ye whose charge it is to hover round our pleasant hills! whose congregated majesty so fills my boundly reverence, that i cannot trace your hallow'd names, in this unholy place, so near those common folk; did not their shames affright you? did our old lamenting thames delight you? did ye never cluster round delicious avon, with a mournful sound, and weep? or did ye wholly bid adieu to regions where no more the laurel grew? or did ye stay to give a welcoming to some lone spirits who could proudly sing their youth away, and die? 'twas even so. but let me think away those times of woe: now 'tis a fairer season; ye have breathed rich benedictions o'er us; ye have wreathed fresh garlands: for sweet music has been heard in many places; some has been upstirr'd from out its crystal dwelling in a lake, by a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake, nested and quiet in a valley mild, bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild about the earth: happy are ye and glad." both the strength and the weakness of this are typically characteristic of the time and of the man. the passage is likely to remain for posterity the central expression of the spirit of literary emancipation then militant and about to triumph in england. the two great elder captains of revolution, coleridge and wordsworth, have both expounded their cause, in prose, with much more maturity of thought and language; coleridge in the luminous retrospect of the _biographia literaria_, wordsworth in the austere contentions of his famous prefaces. but neither has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rhymes of this young untrained recruit in the cause of poetic liberty and the return to nature. it is easy, indeed, to pick these verses of keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. what is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do? fly, or drive? is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? and why paw? deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than strange. what sort of a verb is 'i green, thou greenest?' delight with liberty is very well, but liberty in a poet ought not to include liberties with the parts of speech. why should the hair of the muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more intelligible. and surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to 'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit, but not a standard, and a standard flimsy, but not a motto. 'boundly reverence': what is boundly? and so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude. many minds not indifferent to literature were at that time, and some will at all times be, incapable of any other. such must naturally turn to the work of the eighteenth century school, the school of tact and urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think the only 'blasphemy' was on the side of the youth who could call, or seem to call, the poet of belinda and the _epistle to dr arbuthnot_ fool and dolt. byron, in his controversy with bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack effectively enough: his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the genius and the methods of pope. but controversy apart, if we have in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from that of taste and reason, however clearly we may see the weak points of a passage like this, however much we may wish that taste and reason had had more to do with it, yet we cannot but feel that keats touches truly the root of the matter; we cannot but admire the elastic life and variety of his verse, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of rhetoric, the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow of his delight in the achievements and promise of the new age. his volume on its appearance by no means made the impression which his friends had hoped for it. hunt published a thoroughly judicious as well as cordial criticism in the _examiner_, and several of the provincial papers noticed the book. haydon wrote in his ranting vein: "i have read your _sleep and poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations, and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that _will_ follow." but people were in fact as far from being disturbed in their occupations as possible. the attention of the reading public was for the moment almost entirely absorbed by men of talent or of genius who played with a more careless, and some of them with a more masterly touch than keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit; as moore, scott, and byron. in keats's volume every one could see the faults, while the beauties appealed only to the poetically minded. it seems to have had a moderate sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. the poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, apparently with little reason, to blame their friends the publishers for the failure. on the th of april we find the brothers ollier replying to a letter of george keats in dudgeon:--"we regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. we are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connexion with it, which we must have done, as we think the curiosity is satisfied, and the sale has dropped." one of their customers, they go on to say, had a few days ago hurt their feelings as men of business and of taste by calling it "no better than a take in." a fortnight before the date of this letter keats had left london. haydon had been urging on him, not injudiciously, the importance of seclusion and concentration of mind. we find him writing to reynolds soon after the publication of his volume:--"my brothers are anxious that i should go by myself into the country; they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that i should be alone to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me continually for a great good which i hope will follow: so i shall soon be out of town." and on the th of april he in fact started for the isle of wight, intending to devote himself entirely to study, and to make immediately a fresh start upon _endymion_. chapter iv. excursion to isle of wight, margate, and canterbury--summer at hampstead--new friends: dilke: brown: bailey--with bailey at oxford--return: old friends at odds--burford bridge--winter at hampstead--wordsworth: lamb: hazlitt--poetical activity--spring at teignmouth--studies and anxieties--marriage and emigration of george keats. [april, -may, .] as soon as keats reached the isle of wight, on april , , he went to see shanklin and carisbrooke, and after some hesitation between the two, decided on a lodging at the latter place. the next day he writes to reynolds that he has spent the morning arranging the books and prints he had brought with him, adding to the latter one of shakspere which he had found in the passage and which had particularly pleased him. he speaks with enthusiasm of the beauties of shanklin, but in a postscript written the following day, mentions that he has been nervous from want of sleep, and much haunted by the passage in _lear_, 'do you not hear the sea?'--adding without farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet beginning-- "it keeps eternal whisperings around desolate shores, and with its mighty swell gluts twice ten thousand caverns"--. in the same postscript keats continues:-- "i find i cannot do without poetry--without eternal poetry; half the day will not do--the whole of it. i began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan. i had become all in a tremble from not having written anything of late: the sonnet overleaf did me good; i slept the better last night for it; this morning, however, i am nearly as bad again.... i shall forthwith begin my _endymion_, which i hope i shall have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place i have set my heart upon, near the castle." the isle of wight, however, keats presently found did not suit him, and haydon's prescription of solitude proved too trying. he fell into a kind of fever of thought and sleeplessness, which he thought it wisest to try and shake off by flight. early in may we find him writing to leigh hunt from margate, where he had already stayed the year before, and explaining the reasons of his change of abode. later in the same letter, endeavouring to measure his own powers against the magnitude of the task to which he has committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we have seen recurring once and again in his verses during the preceding year, the vein of awed self-questioning, and tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest and half in jest. the next day we find him writing a long and intimate, very characteristic letter to haydon, signed 'your everlasting friend,' and showing the first signs of the growing influence which haydon was beginning to exercise over him in antagonism to the influence of leigh hunt. keats was quite shrewd enough to feel for himself after a little while the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of depth and strength, in the kind and charming nature of hunt, and quite loyal enough to value his excellences none the less, and hold him in grateful and undiminished friendship. but haydon, between whom and hunt there was by degrees arising a coolness, must needs have keats see things as he saw them. "i love you like my own brother," insists he: "beware, for god's sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend! he will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own neglect of character." there is a lugubrious irony in these words, when we remember how haydon, a self-deluder indeed, came to realise at last the very fate he here prophesies for another,--just when hunt, the harassing and often sordid, ever brightly borne troubles of his earlier life left behind him, was passing surrounded by affection into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. but for a time, under the pressure of haydon's masterful exhortations, we find keats inclining to take an exaggerated and slightly impatient view of the foibles of his earlier friend. among other interesting confessions to be found in keats's letter to haydon from margate, is that of the fancy--almost the sense--which often haunted him of dependence on the tutelary genius of shakspere:-- "i remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius presiding over you. i have lately had the same thought, for things which i do half at random, are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in a dozen features of propriety. is it too daring to fancy shakspeare this presider? when in the isle of wight i met with a shakspeare in the passage of the house at which i lodged. it comes nearer to my idea of him than any i have seen; i was but there a week, yet the old woman made me take it with me, though i went off in a hurry. do you not think this ominous of good?" next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own nature, describing it in words which the after issue of his life will keep but too vividly and constantly before our minds:--"truth is, i have a horrid morbidity of temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, i have no doubt, the greatest enemy and stumbling-block i have to fear; i may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment." was it that, in this seven-months' child of a consumptive mother, some unhealth of mind as well as body was congenital?--or was it that, along with what seems his celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he had inherited a special share of that inward gloom which the reverses of their history have stamped, according to some, on the mind of the celtic race? we cannot tell, but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there dwelt in keats's bosom an almost equally busy and inventive spirit of self-torment. the fit of dejection which led to the remark above quoted had its immediate cause in apprehensions of money difficulties conveyed to keats in a letter from his brother george. the trust funds of which mr abbey had the disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed executed by mrs jennings, amounted approximately to £ , [ ], of which the capital was divisible among them on their coming of age, and the interest was to be applied to their maintenance in the meantime. but the interest of john's share had been insufficient for his professional and other expenses during his term of medical study at edmonton and london, and much of his capital had been anticipated to meet them; presumably in the form of loans raised on the security of his expectant share. similar advances had also been for some time necessary to the invalid tom for his support, and latterly--since he left the employment of mr abbey--to george as well. it is clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances were made both wastefully and grudgingly. it is further plain that the brothers were very insufficiently informed of the state of their affairs. in the meantime john keats was already beginning to discount his expectations from literature. before or about the time of his rupture with the olliers, he had made the acquaintance of those excellent men, messrs taylor and hessey, who were shortly, as publishers of the _london magazine_, to gather about them on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors comprising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. with them, especially with mr taylor, who was himself a student and writer of independent, somewhat eccentric ability and research, keats's relations were excellent from first to last, generous on their part, and affectionate and confidential on his. he had made arrangements with them, apparently before leaving london, for the eventual publication of _endymion_, and from margate we find him acknowledging a first payment received in advance. now and again afterwards he turns to the same friends for help at a pinch, adding once, "i am sure you are confident of my responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;" nor did they at any time belie his expectation. from margate, where he had already made good progress with _endymion_, keats went with his brother tom to spend some time at canterbury. thence they moved early in the summer to lodgings kept by a mr and mrs bentley in well walk, hampstead, where the three brothers had decided to take up their abode together. here he continued through the summer to work steadily at _endymion_, being now well advanced with the second book; and some of his friends, as haydon, cowden clarke, and severn, remembered all their lives afterwards the occasions when they walked with him on the heath, while he repeated to them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting tone, the newly-written passages which best pleased him. from his poetical absorption and elysian dreams they were accustomed to see him at a touch come back to daily life; sometimes to sympathize heart and soul with their affairs, sometimes in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns, (it was a punning age, and the keats's were a very punning family), sometimes with a sudden flash of his old schoolboy pugnacity and fierceness of righteous indignation. to this summer or the following winter, it is not quite certain which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in stand-up fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had found tormenting a cat (a 'ruffian in livery' according to one account, but the butcher version is the best attested). for the rest, the choice of hampstead as a place of residence had much to recommend it to keats: the freshness of the air for the benefit of the invalid tom: for his own walks and meditations those beauties of heath, field, and wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habitations, which his imagination could transmute at will into the landscapes of arcadia, or into those, 'with high romances blent,' of an earlier england or of fable-land. for society there was the convenient proximity to, and yet seclusion from, london, together with the immediate neighbourhood of one or two intimate friends. among these, keats frequented as familiarly as ever the cottage in the vale of health where leigh hunt was still living--a kind of self-appointed poet-laureate of hampstead, the features of which he was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets, and now in the cheerful singsong of his familiar _epistles_:-- "and yet how can i touch, and not linger awhile on the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile? on its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley'd shades, with fields going down, where the bard lies and sees the hills up above him with roofs in the trees." several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed to keats himself, some translations from the greek, and a not ungraceful mythological poem, the _nymphs_, were published early in the following year by leigh hunt in a volume called _foliage_, which helped to draw down on him and his friends the lash of tory criticism. near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction from hunt's cottage, lived two new friends of keats who had been introduced to him by reynolds, and with whom he was soon to become extremely intimate. these were charles wentworth dilke and charles armitage brown (or plain charles brown as he at this time styled himself). dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by birth belonging to a younger branch of the dilkes of maxstoke castle, by profession a clerk in the navy pay office, and by opinions at this time a firm disciple of godwin. he soon gave himself up altogether to literary and antiquarian studies, and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the most accomplished and influential of english critics and journalists, and for many years editor and chief owner of the _athenæum_. no two men could well be more unlike in mind than dilke and keats: dilke positive, bent on certainty, and unable, as keats says, "to feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything:" while keats on his part held that "the only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." nevertheless the two took to each other and became fast friends. dilke had married young, and built himself, a year or two before keats knew him, a modest semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near the lower end of hampstead heath, at the bottom of what is now john street; the other part of the same block being built and inhabited by his friend charles brown. this brown was the son of a scotch stockbroker living in lambeth. he was born in , and while almost a boy went out to join one of his brothers in a merchant's business at st petersburg; but the business failing, he returned to england in , and lived as he could for the next few years, until the death of another brother put him in possession of a small competency. he had a taste, and some degree of talent for literature, and held strongly radical opinions. in he wrote an opera on a russian subject, called _narensky_, which was brought out at the lyceum with braham in the principal part; and at intervals during the next twenty years many criticisms, tales, and translations from the italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals edited by leigh hunt. when keats first knew him, brown was a young man already of somewhat middle-aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled,--a kindly companion, and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good measure both of obstinacy and caution lying in reserve, _more scotico_, under his pleasant and convivial outside. it is clear by his relations with keats that his heart was warm, and that when once attached, he was capable not only of appreciation but of devotion. after the poet's death brown went to italy, and became the friend of trelawney, whom he helped with the composition of the _adventures of a younger son_, and of landor, at whose villa near florence lord houghton first met him in . two years later he returned to england, and settled at plymouth, where he continued to occupy himself with literature and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, an essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobiographical poems of shakspere. thoughts of keats, and a wish to be his biographer, never left him, until in he resolved suddenly to emigrate to new zealand, and departed leaving his materials in lord houghton's hands. a year afterwards he died of apoplexy at the settlement of new plymouth, now called taranaki[ ]. yet another friend of reynolds who in these months attached himself with a warm affection to keats was benjamin bailey, an oxford undergraduate reading for the church, afterwards archdeacon of colombo. bailey was a great lover of books, devoted especially to milton among past and to wordsworth among present poets. for his earnestness and integrity of character keats conceived a strong respect, and a hearty liking for his person, and much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in his mind and cogitations, was called out in the intercourse that ensued between them. in the course of this summer, , keats had been invited by shelley to stay with him at great marlow, and hunt, ever anxious that the two young poets should be friends, pressed him strongly to accept the invitation. it is said by medwin, but the statement is not confirmed by other evidence, that shelley and keats had set about their respective 'summer tasks,' the composition of _laon and cythna_ and of _endymion_, by mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. keats at any rate declined his brother poet's invitation, in order, as he said, that he might have his own unfettered scope. later in the same summer, while his brothers were away on a trip to paris, he accepted an invitation of bailey to come to oxford, and stayed there during the last five or six weeks of the long vacation. here he wrote the third book of _endymion_, working steadily every morning, and composing with great facility his regular average of fifty lines a day. the afternoons they would spend in walking or boating on the isis, and bailey has feelingly recorded the pleasantness of their days, and of their discussions on life, literature, and the mysteries of things. he tells of the sweetness of keats's temper and charm of his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with which the hot young liberal and free-thinker would listen to his host's exposition of his own orthodox convictions: describes his enthusiasm in quoting chatterton and in dwelling on passages of wordsworth's poetry, particularly from the _tintern abbey_ and the _ode on immortality_: and recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and other technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling looks and low-voiced recitations, his vividness of inner life, and intensity of quiet enjoyment during their field and river rambles and excursions[ ]. one special occasion of pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to stratford-on-avon. from oxford are some of the letters written by keats in his happiest vein; to reynolds and his sister miss jane reynolds, afterwards mrs tom hood; to haydon; and to his young sister frances mary, or fanny as she was always called (now mrs llanos). george keats, writing to this sister after john's death, speaks of the times "when we lived with our grandmother at edmonton, and john, tom, and myself were always devising plans to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us to the others." since those times keats had seen little of her, mr abbey having put her to a boarding-school before her grandmother's death, and afterwards taken her into his own house at walthamstow, where the visits of her poet brother were not encouraged. "he often," writes bailey, "spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection:" and from this time forward we find him maintaining with her a correspondence which shows his character in its most attractive light. he bids her keep all his letters and he will keep hers--"and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good bundle--which hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and god knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come." he tells her about oxford and about his work, and gives her a sketch of the story of _endymion_--"but i daresay you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have come down to us from the ancient times of that beautiful greece." early in october keats returned to hampstead, whence he writes to bailey noticing with natural indignation the ruffianly first article of the _cockney school_ series, which had just appeared in _blackwood's magazine_ for that month. in this the special object of attack was leigh hunt, but there were allusions to keats which seemed to indicate that his own turn was coming. what made him more seriously uneasy were signs of discord springing up among his friends, and of attempts on the part of some of them to set him against others. haydon had now given up his studio in great marlborough street for one in lisson grove; and hunt, having left the vale of health, was living close by him at a lodging in the same street. "i know nothing of anything in this part of the world," writes keats: "everybody seems at loggerheads." and he goes on to say how hunt and haydon are on uncomfortable terms, and "live, _pour ainsi dire_, jealous neighbours. haydon says to me, 'keats, don't show your lines to hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you'--so it appears hunt wishes it to be thought." with more accounts of warnings he had received from common friends that hunt was not feeling or speaking cordially about _endymion_. "now is not all this a most paltry thing to think about?... this is, to be sure, but the vexation of a day, nor would i say so much about it to any but those whom i know to have my welfare and reputation at heart[ ]." when three months later keats showed hunt the first book of his poem in proof, the latter found many faults. it is clear he was to some extent honestly disappointed in the work itself. he may also have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully into confidence during its composition; and what he said to others was probably due partly to such chagrin, partly to nervousness on behalf of his friend's reputation: for of double-facedness or insincerity in friendship we know by a hundred evidences that hunt was incapable. keats, however, after what he had heard, was by no means without excuse when he wrote to his brothers concerning hunt,--not unkindly, or making much of the matter,--"the fact is, he and shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously; and from several hints i have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip i may have made. but who's afraid?" keats was not the man to let this kind of thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend: and writing about the same time to bailey, still concerning the dissensions in the circle, he expounds the practical philosophy of friendship with truly admirable good sense and feeling:-- "things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard of them; reynolds and haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting for ever. the same thing has happened between haydon and hunt. it is unfortunate: men should bear with each other; there lives not the man who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. the best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with circumstance. the sure way, bailey, is first to know a man's faults, and then be passive. if after that he insensibly draws you towards him, then you have no power to break the link. before i felt interested in either reynolds or haydon, i was well-read in their faults; yet knowing them both i have been cementing gradually with both. i have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite; and to both must i of necessity cling, supported always by the hope that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully in their esteem, i may be able to bring them together. this time must come, because they have both hearts; and they will recollect the best parts of each other when this gust is overblown." keats had in the meantime been away on another autumn excursion into the country: this time to burford bridge near dorking. here he passed pleasantly the latter part of november, much absorbed in the study of shakspere's minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of finishing _endymion_. he had thus all but succeeded in carrying out the hope which he had expressed in the opening passage of the poem:-- "many and many a verse i hope to write, before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, i must be near the middle of my story. o may no wintry season, bare and hoary, see it half finished; but let autumn bold, with universal tinge of sober gold, be all about me when i make an end." returning to hampstead, keats spent the first part of the winter in comparative rest from literary work. his chief occupation was in revising and seeing _endymion_ through the press, with much help from the publisher, mr taylor; varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism, and as the spring began, by the composition of a number of minor incidental poems. in december he lost the companionship of his brothers, who went to winter in devonshire for the sake of tom's health. but in other company he was at this time mixing freely. the convivial gatherings of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun high, the discussions on art and literature boisterous, and varied with a moderate, evidently never a very serious, amount of card-playing, drinking, and dissipation. from these gatherings keats was indispensable, and more than welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, messrs taylor and hessey, men as strict in conduct and opinion as they were good-hearted. his social relations began, indeed, in the course of this winter to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought consistent with proper industry. we find him dining with horace smith in company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:--"they only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment. these men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling a decanter. they talked of kean and his low company. 'would i were with that company instead of yours', said i to myself." men of ardent and deep natures, whether absorbed in the realities of experience, or in the ideals of art and imagination, are apt to be affected in this way by the conventional social sparkle which is only struck from and only illuminates the surface. hear, on the other hand, with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius for genius, keats writes after seeing the great tragedian last mentioned interpret the inner and true passions of the soul:-- "the sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of kean ... his tongue must seem to have robbed the hybla bees and left them honeyless! there is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while speaking of the instant. when he says in othello, 'put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. from eternal risk, he speaks as though his body were unassailable. again, his exclamation of 'blood! blood! blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the last degree; the very words appear stained and gory. his nature hangs over them, making a prophetic repast. the voice is loosed on them, like the wild dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' in richard, 'be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle norfolk!' came from him, as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns." it was in the christmas weeks of - that keats undertook the office of theatrical critic for the _champion_ newspaper in place of reynolds, who was away at exeter. early in january he writes to his brothers of the pleasure he has had in seeing their sister, who had been brought to london for the christmas holidays; and tells them how he has called on and been asked to dine by wordsworth, whom he had met on the th of december at a supper given by haydon. this is the famous sunday supper, or 'immortal dinner' as haydon calls it, which is described at length in one of the most characteristic passages of the painter's _autobiography_. besides wordsworth and keats and the host, there were present charles lamb and monkhouse. "wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted milton and virgil, keats's eager inspired look, lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation," says haydon, "that i never passed a more delightful time." later in the evening came in ritchie the african traveller, just about to start on the journey to fezzan on which he died, besides a self-invited guest in the person of one kingston, comptroller of stamps, a foolish good-natured gentleman, recommended only by his admiration for wordsworth. presently lamb getting fuddled, lost patience with the platitudes of mr kingston, and began making fun of him, with pranks and personalities which to haydon appeared hugely funny, but which keats in his letter to his brothers mentions with less relish, saying, "lamb got tipsy and blew up kingston, proceeding so far as to take the candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft fellow he was[ ]." keats saw wordsworth often in the next few weeks after their introduction at haydon's, but has left us no personal impressions of the elder poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one day preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest clothes, with his aforesaid unlucky admirer mr comptroller kingston. we know from other sources that he was once persuaded to recite to wordsworth the hymn to pan from _endymion_. "a pretty piece of paganism," remarked wordsworth, according to his usual encouraging way with a brother poet; and keats was thought to have winced under the frigidity. independently of their personal relations, the letters of keats show that wordsworth's poetry continued to be much in his thoughts throughout these months; what he has to say of it varying according to the frame of mind in which he writes. in the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days again insists, that there are three things to rejoice at in the present age, "the _excursion_, haydon's pictures, and hazlitt's depth of taste." this mention of the name of hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence which somewhat powerfully affected keats at this time. on the liberal side in politics and criticism there was no more effective or more uncertain free lance than that eloquent and splenetic writer, with his rich, singular, contradictory gifts, his intellect equally acute and fervid, his temperament both enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and incisive. the reader acquainted with hazlitt's manner will easily recognize its influence on keats in the fragment of stage criticism above quoted. hazlitt was at this time delivering his course of lectures on the english poets at the surrey institution, and keats was among his regular attendants. with hazlitt personally, as with lamb, his intercourse at haydon's and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and friendly, but not intimate: and haydon complains that it was only after the death of keats that he could get hazlitt to acknowledge his genius. of haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we see by the words above quoted that keats continued to think as highly as ever. he had, as severn assures us, a keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting and music. cowden clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to him at school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind's eye visions of pictures:--"when a schoolboy the abstract idea i had of an heroic painting was what i cannot describe. i saw it somewhat sideways, large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence--somewhat like the feel i have of anthony and cleopatra. or of alcibiades leaning on his crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea." in haydon's pictures keats continued to see, as the friends and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt to see, not so much the actual performance, as the idea he had pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend's intentions and enthusiasm. at this time haydon, who had already made several drawings of keats's head in order to introduce it in his picture of christ entering jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, "to be engraved," writes keats, "in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying, at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it." both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part of the sublime haydon; who failed, however, to carry out his promise. "my neglect," said haydon long afterwards, "really gave him a pang, as it now does me." with hunt also keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with reynolds his intimacy grew daily closer. both of these friendships had a stimulating influence on his poetic powers. "the wednesday before last shelley, hunt, and i, wrote each a sonnet on the river nile," he tells his brothers on the th of february, . "i have been writing, at intervals, many songs and sonnets, and i long to be at teignmouth to read them over to you." with the help of keats's manuscripts or of the transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. on the th of january was written the humorous sonnet on mrs reynolds's cat; on the st, after seeing in leigh hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be milton's, the address to that poet beginning 'chief of organic numbers!'--and on the nd the sonnet, 'o golden tongued romance with serene lute,' in which keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his spenser, in order to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _lear_. on the st he sends in a letter to reynolds the lines to apollo beginning 'hence burgundy, claret, and port,' and in the same letter the sonnet beginning 'when i have fears that i may cease to be,' which he calls his last. on the rd of february he wrote the spirited lines to robin hood, suggested by a set of sonnets by reynolds on sherwood forest; on the th, the sonnet beginning 'time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love-fancy, and also the well-known sonnet on the nile, written at hunt's in competition with that friend and with shelley; on the th, another sonnet postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of leigh hunt's to compose something in honour, or in emulation of spenser; and on the th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest against one of reynolds. about the same time keats agreed with reynolds that they should each write some metrical tales from boccaccio, and publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with _isabella_ or _the pot of basil_. a little later in this so prolific month of february we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. he theorizes pleasantly in a letter to reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of a singular and haunting melody. in the course of the next fortnight we find him in correspondence with taylor about the corrections to _endymion_; and soon afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing to flit. his brother george, who had been taking care of tom at teignmouth since december, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a scheme of marriage and emigration; and tom's health having made a momentary rally, keats was unwilling that he should leave teignmouth, and determined to join him there. he started in the second week of march, and stayed almost two months. it was an unlucky season for weather--the soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of devonshire rain renewing themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the scenery, the walks, and flowers. his letters are full of objurgations against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible, in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents his father to have been a devonshire man:-- "you may say what you will of devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. the hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the primroses are out,--but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them."... "i fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. i fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an acrasian spell about them; i feel able to beat off the devonshire waves like soap-froth. i think it well for the honour of britain, that julius caesar did not first land in this county: a devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would dispossess him[ ]." besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, keats was busy during these devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of _endymion_. he also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had begun at hampstead, the whole of _isabella_, the first of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. at the same time he was reading and appreciating milton as he had never done before. with the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been attracted by _paradise lost_, until first severn, and then more energetically bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its power and beauty. his correspondence with his friends, particularly bailey and reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. it was in all senses manifestly a time with keats of rapidly maturing power, and in some degree also of threatening gloom. the mysteries of existence and of suffering, and the 'deeps of good and evil,' were beginning for the first time to press habitually on his thoughts. in that beautiful and interesting letter to reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he thus describes:-- "we no sooner get into the second chamber, which i shall call the chamber of maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere. we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight. however, among the effects this breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression; whereby this chamber of maiden-thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages. we see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are in that state, we feel the 'burden of the mystery.'" a few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed _epistles_, keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea's edge:-- "twas a quiet eve, the rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave an untumultuous fringe of silver foam along the flat brown sand; i was at home and should have been most happy,--but i saw too far into the sea, where every maw the greater or the less feeds evermore:-- but i saw too distinct into the core of an eternal fierce destruction, and so from happiness i far was gone. still am i sick of it, and tho' to-day, i've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay of periwinkle and wild strawberry, still do i that most fierce destruction see,-- the shark at savage prey,--the hawk at pounce,-- the gentle robin, like a pard or ounce, ravening a worm,--away, ye horrid moods! moods of one's mind!"-- in a like vein, recalling to bailey a chance saying of his "why should woman suffer?"--"aye, why should she?" writes keats: "'by heavens, i'd coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas.' these things are, and he who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of thought." and again, "were it in my choice, i would reject a petrarchal coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. i should not by rights speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary spirit that would do so." not the general tribulations of the race only, but particular private anxieties, were pressing in these days on keats's thoughts. the shadow of illness, though it had hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly not only over his brother but his best friends. he speaks of it in a tone of courage and gaiety which his real apprehensions, we can feel, belie. "banish money"--he had written in falstaff's vein, at starting for the isle of wight a year ago--"banish sofas--banish wine--banish music; but right jack health, honest jack health, true jack health--banish health and banish all the world." writing now from teignmouth to reynolds, who was down during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains laughingly, but with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, how he can go nowhere but sickness is of the company, and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or he must cut them. nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was the pain of a family break-up now imminent. george keats had made up his mind to emigrate to america, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get possession of, in business there. besides the wish to push his own fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on george's part was the desire to be in a position as quickly as possible to help, or if need be support, his poet-brother. he persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, miss wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be married and sail early in the summer. keats came up from teignmouth in may to see the last of his brother, and he and tom settled again in their old lodgings in well walk. he had a warm affection and regard for his new sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted for george's sake. but at the same time he felt life and its prospects overcast. he writes to bailey, after his outburst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing his ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. and after recounting his causes of depression, he recovers himself, and concludes:--"life must be undergone; and i certainly derive some consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it ceases." with reference to his poem then just appearing, and the year's work which it represented, keats was under no illusions whatever. from an early period in its composition he had fully realised its imperfections, and had written: "my ideas of it are very low, and i would write the subject thoroughly again, but i am tired of it, and think the time would be better spent in writing a new romance, which i have in my eye for next summer. rome was not built in a day, and all the good i expect from my employment this summer is the fruit of experience which i hope to gather in my next poem." the habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so in keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend might judge. he shows himself perfectly aware that in writing _endymion_ he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry; and when the time comes to write a preface to the poem, after a first attempt lacking reticence and simplicity, and abandoned at the advice of reynolds, he in the second quietly and beautifully says of his own work all that can justly be said in its dispraise. he warns the reader to expect "great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished," and adds most unboastfully:--"it is just that this youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if i had not some hope that while it is dwindling i may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live." the apprehensions expressed in these words have not been fulfilled; and _endymion_, so far from having died away, lives to illustrate the maxim conveyed in its own now proverbial opening line. immature as the poem truly is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as are the sweets which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing of far too much beauty, or at least of too many beauties, to perish. every reader must take pleasure in some of its single passages and episodes, while to the student of the poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its weakness as its strength. chapter v. _endymion._ in the old grecian world, the myth of endymion and selene was one deeply rooted in various shapes in the popular traditions both of elis in the peloponnese, and of the ionian cities about the latmian gulf in caria. the central feature of the tale, as originally sung by sappho, was the nightly descent of the goddess to kiss her lover where he lay spell-bound, by the grace of zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on mount latmos. the poem of sappho is lost, and the story is not told at length in any of our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the poets, as theocritus, apollonius rhodius, and ovid, and of the late prose-writers, as lucian, apollodorus, and pausanias. of such ancient sources keats of course knew only what he found in his classical dictionaries. but references to the tale, as every one knows, form part of the stock repertory of classical allusion in modern literature: and several modern writers before keats had attempted to handle the subject at length. in his own special range of elizabethan reading, he was probably acquainted with lyly's court comedy of _endimion_, in prose, which had been edited, as it happened, by his friend dilke a few years before: but in it he would have found nothing to his purpose. on the other hand i think he certainly took hints from the _man in the moon_ of michael drayton. in this piece drayton takes hold of two post-classical notions concerning the endymion myth, both in the first instance derived from lucian,--one that which identifies its hero with the visible 'man in the moon' of popular fancy,--the other that which rationalises his story, and explains him away as a personification or mythical representative of early astronomy. these two distinct notions drayton weaves together into a short tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into the mouth of a shepherd at a feast of pan. like most of his writings, the _man in the moon_ has strong gleams of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile and pedantic. critics, so far as i know, have overlooked keats's debt to it: but even granting that he may well have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the notion of introducing his story with a festival in honour of pan--do not, at any rate, the following lines of drayton contain evidently the hint for the wanderings on which keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air[ ]?-- "endymion now forsakes all the delights that shepherds do prefer, and sets his mind so generally on her that, all neglected, to the groves and springs he follows phoebe, that him safely brings (as their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, where in clear rivers beautified with flowers the silver naides bathe them in the bracke. sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back among the blue nereides: and when weary of waters goddess-like again she the high mountains actively assays, and there amongst the light oriades, that ride the swift roes, phoebe doth resort: sometime amongst those that with them comport the hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; and there she stays not, but incontinent calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, and with endymion pleased that she saw, mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye stripping the winds----" fletcher again, a writer with whom keats was very familiar, and whose inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely kindred to his own--fletcher in the _faithful shepherdess_ makes chloe tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from theocritus-- "how the pale phoebe, hunting in a grove, first saw the boy endymion, from whose eyes she took eternal fire that never dies; how she convey'd him softly in a sleep, his temples bound with poppy, to the steep head of old latmus, where she stoops each night, gilding the mountain with her brother's light, to kiss her sweetest." the subject thus touched by drayton and fletcher had been long, as we have seen already, in keats's thoughts. not only had the charm of this old pastoral nature-myth of the greeks interwoven itself in his being with his natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the story in his mind. the divine vision which haunts endymion in dreams is for keats symbolical of beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[ ]. the manner in which keats set about relating the greek story, as he had thus conceived it, was as far from being a greek or 'classical' manner as possible. he indeed resembles the greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature: and he loved to follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. moreover, his intuitions for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to conjure up visions of the classic past, or images from classic fable, he was able to do so often magically well. to this extent keats may justly be called, as he has been so often called, a greek, but no farther. the rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential, and paring away their material to the quick that the main masses might stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously clear--these instincts had neither been implanted in keats by nature, nor brought home to him by precept and example. alike by his aims and his gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' gothic, english. a general characteristic of his favourite elizabethan poetry is its prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it takes the powers of a shakspere to keep the vital play of character and passion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the quality is quite unchecked. to keats, at the time when he wrote _endymion_, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constituted an essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. "i think poetry," he says, "should surprise by a fine excess:" and with reference to his own poem during its progress, "it will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my invention--which is a rare thing indeed--by which i must make lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry." the 'one bare circumstance' of the story was in the result expanded through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate, amplifying every incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion into a world of subtleties. he interweaves with his central endymion myth whatever others pleased him best, as those of pan, of venus and adonis, of cybele, of alpheus and arethusa, of glaucus and scylla, of circe, of neptune, and of bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations, and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and aërial gulfs and over the floor of ocean. the scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not merely of a gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of oriental bewilderment,--an arabian nights jugglery with space and time,--in the vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. such organic plan as the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. the first book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a festival of his people held in honour of the god pan, and is afterwards induced by his sister peona[ ] to confide to her the secret of the passion which consumes him. the account of the feast of pan contains passages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely to be surpassed in poetry:-- "rain-scented eglantine gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; the lark was lost in him; cold springs had run to warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold, to feel this sun-rise and its glories old." what can be more fresh and stirring?--what happier in rhythmical movement?--or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the earth? not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn to pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the greek myth to greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. keats having got from drayton, as i surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from chapman's homer's hymn, from the sacrifice to pan in browne's _britannia's pastorals_[ ], and from the hymns in ben jonson's masque, _pan's anniversary_: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an imagination fed from the living sources of nature:-- "o thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang from jagged trunks, and overshadoweth eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; and through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken the dreary melody of bedded reeds-- in desolate places, where dank moisture breeds the pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; bethinking thee, how melancholy loth thou wast to lose fair syrinx--do thou now, by thy love's milky brow! by all the trembling mazes that she ran, hear us, great pan! * * * * * o hearkener to the loud clapping shears, while ever and anon to his shorn peers a ram goes bleating: winder of the horn, when snouted wild-boars routing tender corn anger our huntsman: breather round our farms, to keep off mildews, and all weather harms: strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, that come a-swooning over hollow grounds, and wither drearily on barren moors: dread opener of the mysterious doors leading to universal knowledge--see, great son of dryope, the many that are come to pay their vows with leaves about their brows!" in the subsequent discourse of endymion and peona he tells her the story of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has experienced or dreamed. in keats's conception of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman them quite: as indeed a helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of his own nature. he partly knew it, and could not help it: but the consequence is that the love-passages of _endymion_, notwithstanding the halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can scarcely be read with pleasure. on the other hand, in matters of subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance wherein peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:-- "is this the cause? this all? yet it is strange, and sad, alas! that one who through this middle earth should pass most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave his name upon the harp-string, should achieve no higher bard than simple maidenhood, sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood left his young cheek; and how he used to stray he knew not where; and how he would say, _nay_, if any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love; what could it be but love? how a ring-dove let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; and how he died: and then, that love doth scathe the gentle heart, as northern blasts do roses. and then the ballad of his sad life closes with sighs, and an alas! endymion!" in the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless region of adventure. in the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings keats in this book lets himself go without a check. a naiad, in the disguise of a butterfly, leads endymion to her spring, and there reveals herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to descend 'into the sparry hollows of the world': which done, he gropes his way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-grecian magnificence, where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping adonis, and whither venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. thence, urged by the haunting passion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. through all this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry admirably felt and expressed:-- "he sinks adown a solitary glen, where there was never sound of mortal men, saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences melting to silence, when upon the breeze some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet to cheer itself to delphi:"-- or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:-- "forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, came mother cybele--alone--alone-- in sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown about her majesty, and front death-pale, with turrets crowned." after seeing the vision of cybele, endymion, still travelling through the bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. next he encounters the streams, and hears the voices, of arethusa and alpheus on their fabled flight to ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to his goddess in their behalf, and then-- "he turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept, there was a cooler light; and so he kept towards it by a sandy path, and lo! more suddenly than doth a moment go, the visions of the earth were gone and fled-- he saw the giant sea above his head." hitherto endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of alpheus and arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third book, those of glaucus and scylla. keats handles this latter legend with great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of scylla by circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance resembling death, from which after many ages glaucus is enabled by endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. from the point in the hero's submarine adventures where he first meets glaucus,-- "he saw far in the green concave of the sea an old man sitting calm and peacefully. upon a weeded rock this old man sat, and his white hair was awful, and a mat of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"-- --from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and occasional ugly flaws, keats brings home his version of the myth with strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. no picture can well be more vivid than that of circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims: and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. in the same book the description of the sunk treasures cumbering the ocean-floor challenges comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage in shakspere's _richard iii._ in the halls of neptune endymion again meets venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore. thence nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in starlight on the dark. since, in his adventure with glaucus, he has allowed himself to be diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last nearer to fulfilment. it might seem fanciful to suppose that keats had really in his mind a meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. and in his fourth book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. returning, in that book, to upper air, endymion before long half forgets his goddess for the charms of an indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come wandering in the train of bacchus from the east. this mysterious indian maiden proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise. but it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents, descents, enchanted slumbers and olympian visions. all these, with his infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the cave of quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality and to peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape, make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in pursuit of the ideal. let a soul enamoured of the ideal--such would seem the argument--once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,--that it is after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. what chiefly or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric poetry which keats has put into the mouth of the supposed indian maiden when she tells her story. his later and more famous lyrics, though they are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit. a mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the best elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as heine's of the immemorial romance of india and the east; a power like that of coleridge, and perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful associations almost with a word; clear visions of greek beauty and wild wood-notes of celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual. keats calls the piece a 'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening measures are repeated at the close. it begins with a tender invocation to sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of a deserted maidenhood beside indian streams; till suddenly, with another change, comes the irruption of the asian bacchus on his march; next follows the detailed picture of the god and of his rout, suggested in part by the famous titian at the national gallery; and then, arranged as if for music, the challenge of the maiden to the maenads and satyrs, and their choral answers: "'whence came ye, merry damsels! whence came ye! so many, and so many, and such glee? why have ye left your bowers desolate, your lutes, and gentler fate?' 'we follow bacchus, bacchus on the wing, a conquering! bacchus, young bacchus! good or ill betide, we dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:-- come hither, lady fair, and joined be to our wild minstrelsy!' 'whence came ye, jolly satyrs! whence came ye! so many, and so many, and such glee? why have ye left your forest haunts, why left your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'-- 'for wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; for wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, and cold mushrooms; for wine we follow bacchus through the earth; great god of breathless cups and chirping mirth!-- come hither, lady fair, and joined be to our mad minstrelsy!'" the strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:-- "come then, sorrow! sweetest sorrow! like an own babe i nurse thee on my breast: i thought to leave thee, and deceive thee, but now of all the world i love thee best. there is not one, no, no, not one but thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; thou art her mother and her brother, her playmate, and her wooer in the shade." the high-water-mark of poetry in _endymion_ is thus reached in the two lyrics of the first and fourth book. of these at least may be said with justice that which jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." in the main body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. admirable truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, mark such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. thus in the tale told by glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as-- "Ææa's isle was wondering at the moon," standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme and expression-- "i look'd--'twas scylla! cursed, cursed circe! o vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?" is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and the heart:-- "cold, o cold indeed were her fair limbs, and like a common weed the sea-swell took her hair." one, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry keats has shaken off--his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar sentimental chirp of hunt's. but that tendency which he by nature shared with hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. and to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of english poetry. the creative impulse of the elizabethan age, in its waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. he outdoes even spenser in his proneness to let invention ramble and loiter uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with imagination at her heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds there: and sometimes imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: and even busy invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:-- "--a nymph of dian's wearing a coronal of tender scions":-- "does yonder thrush, schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush about the dewy forest, whisper tales?-- speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails will slime the rose to-night." chapman especially among keats's masters had this trick of letting thought follow the chance dictation of rhyme. spenser and chapman--to say nothing of chatterton--had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash dealings with their mother tongue. english was almost as unsettled a language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use of compound and other adjectival coinages in chapman's spirit--'far-spooming ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their surly eyes brow-hidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'--coinages sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms as 'shent', 'sith', and 'seemlihed' from spenser, 'eterne' from spenser and william browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly', 'to monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as active, as to 'travel' an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and _vice versa_. hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of oddities and discords. in rhythm keats adheres in _endymion_ to the method he had adopted in _sleep and poetry_, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. leigh hunt thought keats had carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. some later critics have supposed the rhythm of _endymion_ to have been influenced by the _pharonnida_ of chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest syllables--prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions--on which neither pause nor emphasis is possible[ ]. but keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of sentence structure. there is nothing in his treatment of the measure for which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival for the purposes of narrative poetry by marlowe. at most, he can only be said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous. as the best criticism on keats's _endymion_ is in his own preface, so its best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. "it is as good," he says, "as i had power to make it by myself." hunt had warned him against the risks of a long poem, and shelley against those of hasty publication. from much in his performance that was exuberant and crude the classical training and now ripening taste of shelley might doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. but he was determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous expression of his mind. "had i been nervous," he goes on, "about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble. i will write independently. i have written independently _without judgment_. i may write independently and _with judgment_ hereafter. the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself." how well keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next labours. chapter vi. northern tour--the _blackwood_ and _quarterly_ reviews--death of tom keats--removal to wentworth place--fanny brawne--excursion to chichester--absorption in love and poetry--haydon and money difficulties--family correspondence--darkening prospects--summer at shanklin and winchester--wise resolutions--return from winchester. [june -october, .] while keats in the spring of was still at teignmouth, with _endymion_ on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different plans for the immediate future. one was to go for a summer's walking tour through scotland with charles brown. "i have many reasons," he writes to reynolds, "for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. i'll have leather buttons and belt, and if brown hold his mind, 'over the hills we go.' if my books will keep me to it, then will i take all europe in turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." a fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the flight of poetry:-- "i was proposing to travel over the north this summer. there is but one thing to prevent me. i know nothing--i have read nothing--and i mean to follow solomon's directions, 'get learning--get understanding.' i find earlier days are gone by--i find that i can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. i find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. some do it with their society; some with their wit; some with their benevolence; some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good-humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great nature. there is but one way for me. the road lies through application, study, and thought. i will pursue it; and, for that end, purpose retiring for some years. i have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for philosophy: were i calculated for the former i should be glad; but as i am not, i shall turn all my soul to the latter." after he had come back to hampstead in may, however, keats allowed himself to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year before, to resume his original intention. it was agreed between him and brown that they should accompany george keats and his bride as far as liverpool, and then start on foot from lancaster. they left london accordingly on monday, june [ ]. the coach stopped for dinner the first day at redbourn near st albans, where keats's friend of medical-student days, mr stephens, was in practice. he came to shake hands with the travelling party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards wrote an account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of mrs george keats. "rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome, but looked like a being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily love. she had the imaginative poetical cast. somewhat singular and girlish in her attire.... there was something original about her, and john seemed to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her with evident satisfaction[ ]." with no other woman or girl friend was keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this 'nymph of the downward smile and side-long glance' of his early sonnet--'sister george' as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards in america, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth preserving. the farewells at liverpool over, keats and brown went on by coach to lancaster, and thence began their walk, keats taking for his reading one book only, the little three-volume edition of cary's _dante_. "i cannot," writes brown, "forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly, and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain scenery. it was just before our descent to the village of bowness, at a turn of the road, when the lake of windermere at once came into view.... all was enchantment to us both." keats in his own letters says comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and fastidious gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. the truth is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit. moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of windermere, it is evident that as keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery somewhat foreign to his taste. besides the familiar home beauties of england, two ideals of landscape, classic and mediæval, haunted and allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the scottish border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to neither. "i know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-grecian and anti-charlemagnish." a change, besides, was coming over keats's thoughts and feelings whereby scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his fellow-creatures more. in the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of maiden-thought, the appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. "scenery is fine," he had already written from devonshire in the spring, "but human nature is finer." in the lake country, after climbing skiddaw one morning early, and walking to treby the same afternoon, where they watched with amusement the exercises in a country dancing-school: "there was as fine a row of boys and girls," says keats, "as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. i never felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. this is what i like better than scenery." the same note recurs frequently in letters of a later date. from lancaster the travellers walked first to ambleside; from ambleside to the foot of helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on wordsworth at rydal, and been disappointed to find him away electioneering. from helvellyn to keswick, whence they made the circuit of derwentwater; keswick to treby, treby to wigton, and wigton to carlisle, where they arrived on the st of july. thence by coach to dumfries, visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of burns, to whose memory keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. from dumfries they started southwestwards for galloway, a region little frequented even now, and then hardly at all, by tourists. reaching the kirkcudbrightshire coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering solway to the hazy hills of man, brown bethought him that this was guy mannering's country, and began to tell keats about meg merrilies. keats, who according to the fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for scott's poetry, and of the waverley novels had read the _antiquary_ but not _guy mannering_, was much struck; and presently, writes brown,--"there was a little spot, close to our pathway. 'there,' he said, 'in that very spot, without a shadow of doubt, has old meg merrilies often boiled her kettle.' it was among pieces of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and fulness of blossom." as they went along, keats composed on scott's theme the spirited ballad beginning 'old meg, she was a gipsy,' and stopping to breakfast at auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he began at the same place to tom. it was his way on his tour, and indeed always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add scraps to them as the fancy took him. the systematic brown, on the other hand, wrote regularly and uniformly in the evenings. "he affronts my indolence and luxury," says keats, "by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; secondly his pens; and last, his ink. now i would not care if he would change a little. i say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? but i might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead of afterwards." from kirkcudbright they walked on july ,--skirting the wild moors about the water of fleet, and passing where cairnsmore looks down over wooded slopes to the steaming estuary of the cree,--as far as newton stewart: thence across the wigtonshire levels by glenluce to stranraer and portpatrick. here they took the donaghadee packet for ireland, with the intention of seeing the giant's causeway, but finding the distances and expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to belfast, and crossed again to portpatrick on the third day. in letters written during and immediately after this excursion, keats has some striking passages of human observation and reflection:-- "these kirk-men have done scotland good. they have made men, women, old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants, all careful; so they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and gainers.... these kirk-men have done scotland harm; they have banished puns, love, and laughing. to remind you of the fate of burns:--poor, unfortunate fellow! his disposition was southern! how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not!... i would sooner be a wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the kirk; and i would sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's penance before those execrable elders." "on our return from belfast we met a sedan--the duchess of dunghill. it was no laughing matter though. imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. in such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from madagascar to the cape, with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered girls carried her along. what a thing would be a history of her life and sensations!"--. from stranraer the friends made straight for burns's country, walking along the coast by ballantrae, girvan, kirkoswald, and maybole, to ayr, with the lonely mass of ailsa crag, and presently the mountains of arran, looming ever above the atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the coast scenery. they went to kirk alloway, and he was delighted to find the home of burns amid scenes so fair. he had made up his mind to write a sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did so, but was worried by the prate of the man in charge--"a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him"--"his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet." and again, as they journeyed on toward glasgow he composed with considerable pains (as brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'there is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' they were meant to express the temper in which his pilgrimage through the burns country had been made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself. from ayr keats and brown tramped on to glasgow, and from glasgow by dumbarton through the _lady of the lake_ country, which they found vexatiously full of tourists, to inverary, and thence by loch awe to oban. at inverary keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of _the stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. bathing in loch fyne the next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in a set of doggrel rhymes. the walk along the shores of loch awe impressed him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set description, for the benefit of his brother tom. at the same point occur for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. at the beginning of his tour keats had written to his sister of its effects upon his sleep and appetite: telling her how he tumbled into bed "so fatigued that when i am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. then i get so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to me.... i can eat a bull's head as easily as i used to do bull's eyes." presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty miles or more a day without inconvenience. but now in the remoter parts of the highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and brown, and he grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. arrived at oban, the friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for keats's strength. finding the regular tourist route by water to staffa and iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither side of the island of mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the farther side opposite iona: a wretched walk, as keats calls it, of some thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather. by good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had a favourable view of staffa. by the power of the past and its associations in the one 'illustrious island,' and of nature's architecture in the other, keats shows himself naturally much impressed. fingal's cave in especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer since ben jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines beginning 'not aladdin magian.' avoiding mere epithet-work and description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, bethinking himself of milton's cry to lycidas, "--where'er thy bones are hurl'd, whether beyond the stormy hebrides"-- imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of ocean, and put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. in his priestly character lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:-- "so for ever i will leave such a taint, and soon unweave all the magic of the place![ ] * * * * so saying, with a spirit's glance he dived--." from the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his scotch tour, and especially in this mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct and settled symptoms of failure in keats's health, and of the development of his hereditary tendency to consumption. in the same letter to his brother tom which contains the transcript of the fingal poem, he speaks of a 'slight sore throat,' and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at oban. thence they pushed on in bad weather to fort william, made the ascent of ben nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the th of august to inverness. keats's throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the ascent, and especially the descent, of ben nevis had, as he confesses, tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue his tour. accordingly he took passage on the th or th of august from the port of cromarty for london, leaving his companion to pursue his journey alone,--"much lamenting," to quote brown's own words, "the loss of his beloved intelligence at my side." keats in some degree picked up strength during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards described pleasantly in a letter to his brother george. but his throat trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of time left him afterwards. on the th 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[ ]. simultaneously, almost, with keats's return from the north appeared attacks on him in _blackwood's magazine_ and the _quarterly review_. the _blackwood_ article, being no. iv. of a series bearing the signature 'z' on the 'cockney school of poetry,' was printed in the august number of the magazine. the previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter similarly signed, had been directed against leigh hunt, in a strain of insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness of partisan licence. it is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were most probably the work either of lockhart or of wilson, suggested and perhaps revised by the publisher william blackwood, at this time his own sole editor. not content with attacking hunt's opinions, or his real weaknesses as a writer or a man, his edinburgh critics must needs heap on him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. in the course of these articles allusion had several times been made to 'johnny keats' as an 'amiable bardling' and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of cockaigne, hunt. when now keats's own turn came, his treatment was mild in comparison with that of his supposed leader. the strictures on his work are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic persons full of prejudice and wishing to hurt. 'cockney' had been in itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon hunt; neither was it altogether inapplicable to keats, having regard to the facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of it. the worst part of the keats review was in its personalities,--"so back to the shop, mr john, stick to 'plasters, pills, ointment boxes,' &c."--and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for them had been obtained. keats's friend bailey had by this time taken his degree, and after publishing a friendly notice of _endymion_ in the _oxford herald_ for june, had left the university and gone to settle in a curacy in cumberland. in the course of the summer he staid at stirling, at the house of bishop gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a previous love-affair with one of the reynolds sisters having fallen through) he soon afterwards married. here bailey met lockhart, then in the hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy of scott; and earning, on the staff of _blackwood_ and otherwise, the reputation and the nickname of 'scorpion.' bailey, anxious to save keats from the sort of treatment to which hunt had already been exposed, took the opportunity of telling lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to leigh hunt was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his disadvantage. to which lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so used by _him_. within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all appearance, and to bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had thus confidentially communicated. to the end of his life bailey remained convinced that whether or not lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and supplied the materials for it[ ]. it seems in fact all but certain that he actually wrote it[ ]. if so, it was a felon stroke on lockhart's part, and to forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude that is his due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of scott. but even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the party violence of the time and place scott himself was drawn into encouraging the savage polemics of his young edinburgh friends; and that he was in some measure privy to the cockney school outrages seems certain. such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time[ ]; and when severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the subject of keats and his detractors in conversation with scott at rome, he observed both in scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which he could only interpret in the same sense[ ]. it is hard to say whether the thought of the great-hearted scott, the soul most free from jealousy or harshness, thus associated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the distracting cries and blind collisions of the world. the _quarterly_ article on _endymion_ followed in the last week of september (in the number dated april), and was in an equally contemptuous strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first canto, or to make head or tail of that. in this case again the question of authorship must remain uncertain: but gifford, as editor, and an editor who never shrank from cutting a contributor's work to his own pattern, must bear the responsibility with posterity. the review is quite in his manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the pain he gives. considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with which keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work, the attacks are both alike inexcusable. they had the effect of promptly rousing the poet's friends in his defence. reynolds published a warm rejoinder to the quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the _alfred_; an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the _morning chronicle_ with the initials j. s.--those probably of john scott, then editor of the _london magazine_, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of lockhart's in a duel, arising out of these very blackwood brawls, in which it was thought that lockhart himself ought to have come forward. leigh hunt reprinted reynolds's letter, with some introductory words, in the _examiner_, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. but he could not have done more to any purpose. he was not himself an enthusiastic admirer of _endymion_, and had plainly said so to keats and to his friends. reynolds's piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of keats by hunt would only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind. neither was keats's demeanour under the lash such as could make his friends suppose him particularly hurt. proud in the extreme, he had no irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:--"i hate," he says, "a mawkish popularity." even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his critics. accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than older and less sensitive men had taken the like. hunt had replied indignantly to his blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn. hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. keats at the first sting declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what good he could to the world in some other way. then quickly recovering himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one merely temporary, indifferent, and external. when mr hessey sent for his encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended, he wrote:-- "i cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. as for the rest, i begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. my own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what 'blackwood' or the 'quarterly' could possibly inflict: and also when i feel i am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine." and again:--"there have been two letters in my defence in the 'chronicle,' and one in the 'examiner,' copied from the exeter paper, and written by reynolds. i don't know who wrote those in the 'chronicle.' this is a mere matter of the moment: i think i shall be among the english poets after my death. even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to crush me in the 'quarterly' has only brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among book-men, 'i wonder the 'quarterly' should cut its own throat.'" in point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent keats about this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a further tribute in the shape of a £ note. keats was both pleased and displeased: "if i had refused it," he says, "i should have behaved in a very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a little." about the same time he received, through his friend richard woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or assistant to messrs taylor and hessey[ ], a glowing letter of sympathy and encouragement from miss porter, 'of romance celebrity': by which he shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands. keats was really living, during the stress of these _blackwood_ and _quarterly_ storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt trouble. his hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return from scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on account of the alarming condition of his brother tom. he had left the invalid behind in their lodgings at well walk, and found that he had grown rapidly worse during his absence. in fact the case was desperate, and for the next few months keats's chief occupation was the harrowing one of watching and ministering to this dying brother. in a letter written in the third week of september, he speaks thus of his feelings and occupations:--"i wish i could say tom was better. his identity presses upon me so all day that i am obliged to go out--and although i had intended to have given some time to study alone, i am obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and feebleness--so that i live now in a continual fever. it must be poisonous to life, although i feel well. imagine 'the hateful siege of contraries'--if i think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and yet i must do so or suffer." and again about the same time to reynolds:--"i never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverous relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. this morning poetry has conquered--i have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--i feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and i am thankful for it. there is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality." as the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing[ ]. on the th of october keats wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in america, warning them, in language of a beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst. for the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and in the first week of december the end came. "early one morning," writes brown, "i was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. it was keats, who came to tell me that his brother was no more. i said nothing, and we both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. at length, my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, i said,--'have nothing more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! had you not better live with me?' he paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,--'i think it would be better.' from that moment he was my inmate[ ]." brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part--the smaller eastern part--of the block of two semi-detached houses near the bottom of john street, hampstead, to which dilke, who built and occupied the other part, had given the name of wentworth place[ ]. the accommodation in brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them. the arrangement with keats was that he should share household expenses, occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. as soon, relates brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in some measure alleviated his grief, keats became gradually once more absorbed in poetry: his special task being _hyperion_, at which he had already begun to work before his brother died. but not wholly absorbed; for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more powerful than that of poetry itself. it was at this time that the flame caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid 'lest it should burn him up.' with his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards womankind. chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind's ideal of the sex, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. conscious at the same time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of passion by his sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. the set of three sonnets in his first volume, beginning 'woman, when i beheld thee flippant, vain,' had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to this state of mind. its persistency is affirmed often in his letters. "i am certain," he wrote to bailey from scotland, "i have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment i am striving to be just to them, but i cannot. is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? when i was a schoolboy i thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. i have no right to expect more than their reality. i thought them ethereal, above men. i find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small.... is it not extraordinary?--when among men, i have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; i feel free to speak or to be silent; i can listen, and from every one i can learn; my hands are in my pockets, i am free from all suspicion, and comfortable. when i am among women, i have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; i cannot speak, or be silent; i am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; i am in a hurry to be gone.... i must absolutely get over this--but how?" in a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in america, he alleges this general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he will never marry:-- "the roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, i have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. an amiable wife and sweet children i contemplate as part of that beauty, but i must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. i feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that i do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. no sooner am i alone, than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's bodyguard: "then tragedy with scepter'd pall comes sweeping by." according to my state of mind, i am with achilles shouting in the trenches, or with theocritus in the vales of sicily; or throw my whole being into troilus, and, repeating those lines, "i wander like a lost soul upon the stygian bank, staying for waftage," i melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that i am content to be alone. these things, combined with the opinion i have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom i would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony that i rejoice in." but now keats's hour was come. since his return from scotland, in the midst of his watching by his brother's sick-bed, we have seen him confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. this was a certain miss charlotte cox, a west-indian cousin of reynolds's, to whom he did not think the reynolds sisters were quite kind. a few days later he writes again how he has been attracted by her rich eastern look and grace. very soon, however, the attraction passed, and this 'charmian' left him fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. a mrs brawne, a widow lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two younger children, had taken brown's house for the summer while he was away in scotland. here the brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved from brown's house to one in downshire street close by: and it was at the dilkes' that keats met miss fanny brawne after his return. her ways and presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated him. from his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as well as from severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in titian's picture of sacred and profane love, and from the full-length silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise her aspect and presence. a brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the far from uncommon english hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, carriage and complexion,--such was fanny brawne externally, but of her character we have little means of judging. she was certainly high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. both his men and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and in regarding the attachment as unlucky. so it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been. stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth begun to fall on keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional misgivings of his darker moods. first the departure of his brother george had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. next the exertions of his scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in his blood. coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed inexorably upon his brother tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit through all his pains. at the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his practical hopes from literature. last were added the pangs of love--love requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even love disdained might have made him suffer less. the passion wrought fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty, exposed them. within a year the combined assault proved too much for his strength, and he broke down. but in the meantime he showed a brave face to the world, and while anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, energy. during the first few weeks of winter following his brother's death, he wrote indeed, as he tells haydon, "only a little now and then: but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting." yet such work as keats did at this time was done at the very height of his powers, and included parts both of _hyperion_ and _the eve of st agnes_. within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was finished, having been written out during a visit which keats and brown paid in sussex in the latter part of january ( ). they stayed for a few days with the father of their friend dilke in chichester, and for nearly a fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the snooks, at bedhampton close by. keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to 'a couple of dowager card-parties,' and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day, at the consecration of a chapel for converted jews. the latter ceremony jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. during his stay at chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate conceived, the poem on the _eve of st mark_, which he never finished, and which remains so interesting a pre-raphaelite fragment in his work. returning at the beginning of february, keats resumed his life at hampstead under brown's roof. he saw much less society than the winter before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally to avoid the night air. but the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt the passion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest in the other relations of life. the stages by which it grew on him we cannot follow. his own account of the matter to fanny brawne was that he had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting. his real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong mixed attraction and aversion. he might seem to have got no farther by the th of february, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in america, "miss brawne and i have every now and then a chat and a tiff;" but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. the secret violence of keats's passion, and the restless physical jealousy which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed _to fanny_, which belong apparently to this date. they are written very unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and there. the occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:-- "who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast, what stare outfaces now my silver moon? ah! keep that hand unravished at the least; let, let the amorous burn-- but, pr'ythee, do not turn the current of your heart from me so soon, o! save, in charity, the quickest pulse for me. save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe voluptuous visions into the warm air, though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath; be like an april day, smiling and cold and gay, a temperate lily, temperate as fair; then, heaven! there will be a warmer june for me." if keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother or his friends. except in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no direct mention of miss brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers, in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. brown after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as when the dilkes left hampstead in april, and went to live at westminster, the brawnes again took their house; so that keats and brown thenceforth had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. dilke himself, but apparently not till many months later, writes, "it is quite a settled thing between john keats and miss brawne, god help them. it's a bad thing for them. the mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that it will go off. he don't like any one to look at her or speak to her." other friends, including one so intimate and so affectionate as severn, never realised until keats was on his death-bed that there had been an engagement, or that his relations with miss brawne had been other than those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours. intense and jealous as keats's newly awakened passion was, it seemed at first to stimulate rather than distract him in the exercise of his now ripened poetic gift. the spring of this year seems to repeat in a richer key the history of the last; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits of lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season advanced. between the beginning of february and the beginning of june he wrote many of his best shorter poems, including apparently all except one of his six famous odes. about the middle of february he speaks of having taken a stroll among the marbles of the british museum, and the ode _on indolence_ and the ode _on a grecian urn_, written two or three months later, show how the charm of ancient sculpture was at this time working in his mind. the fit of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former piece is recorded in his correspondence under the date of march . the lines beginning 'bards of passion and of mirth,' are dated the th of the same month. on the th of april he sends off to his brother, as the last poem he has written, the ode _to psyche_, only less perfect and felicitous than that _on a grecian urn_. about a week later the nightingale would be beginning to sing. presently it appeared that one had built her nest in brown's garden, near his house. "keats," writes brown, "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. when he came into the house, i perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. on inquiry, i found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. the writing was not well legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. with his assistance i succeeded, and this was his _ode to a nightingale_.... immediately afterwards i searched for more of his (in reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again assisted me.... from that day he gave me permission to copy any verses he might write, and i fully availed myself of it. he cared so little for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was released from their influence, that he required a friend at hand to preserve them." the above account perfectly agrees with what keats had written towards the end of the summer before:--"i feel assured i should write from the mere yearning and fondness i have for the beautiful, even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them." and yet for these odes keats seems to have had a partiality: with that to psyche, he tells his brother, he has taken more pains than with anything he had ever written before; and haydon has told how thrillingly, 'in his low tremulous under-tone,' he recited to him that to the nightingale as they walked one day in the kilburn meadows. during the winter and spring while his faculties were thus absorbed between love and poetry, keats had suffered his correspondence to flag, except only with haydon, with his young sister fanny, and with his brother and sister-in-law in america. about christmas haydon, whose work had been interrupted by a weakness of the eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for the time being exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to keats of all men. with his usual generosity keats had promised, only asking him to try the rich lovers of art first, that if the worst came to the worst he would help him with all he had. haydon in a few weeks returns to the charge:--"my dear keats--now i feel the want of your promised assistance.... before the th if you could help me it would be nectar and manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst." keats had intended for haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother tom's share in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over to him at once on his application. but difficulties of all sorts were raised, and after much correspondence, attendance in bankers' and solicitors' offices, and other ordeals harassing to the poetic mind, he had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. when by-and-by haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with his promise and his failure to keep it, keats replies with perfect temper, explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting possession of his money. moreover he finds that even if all he had were laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on for two years.[ ] incidentally he mentions that he has already lent sums to various friends amounting in all to near £ , of which he expects the repayment late if ever. the upshot of the matter was that keats contrived somehow to lend haydon thirty pounds. three months later a law-suit threatened by the widow of captain jennings against mr abbey, in connection with the administration of the trust, had the effect for a time of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. thereupon he very gently asks haydon to make an effort to repay his loan; who not only made none--"he did not," says keats, "seem to care much about it, but let me go without my money almost with nonchalance." this was too much even for keats's patience. he declares that he shall never count haydon a friend again: nevertheless he by-and-by let old affection resume its sway, and entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly as ever. to his young sister keats's letters during the same period are full of playful brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of regrets that she is kept so much from him by the scruples of mr and mrs abbey; and of plans for coming over to see her at walthamstow when the weather and his throat allow. he thinks of various little presents to please her,--a selection of tassie's pretty, and then popular, paste imitations of ancient gems,--flowers,--drawing materials,-- "anything but live stock. though i will not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond i used to be of goldfinches, tomtits, minnows, mice, ticklebacks, dace, cock salmons and all the whole tribe of the bushes and the brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the water,--though i must confess even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then i would have it hold ten pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. then i would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with myrtles and japonicas. i should like the window to open on to the lake of geneva--and there i'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading." for some time, in these letters to his sister, keats expresses a constant anxiety at getting no news from their brother george at the distant kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices been bound. in the middle of april news of them arrives, and he thereupon sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has been writing up at intervals during the last two months. among all the letters of keats, this is perhaps the richest and most characteristic. it is full of the varied matter of his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love: these are only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more indistinctly in the vaguely passionate tenor of two sonnets which he sends among other specimens of his latest work in verse. one is that beginning 'why did i laugh to-night?'--the other that, beautiful and moving despite flaws of execution, in which he describes a dream suggested by the paolo and francesca passage in dante. for the rest he passes disconnectedly as usual--"it being an impossibility in grain," as keats once wrote to reynolds, "for my ink to stain otherwise"--from the vein of fun and freakishness to that of poetry and wisdom, with passages now of masterly intuition, and now of wandering and uncertain, almost always beautiful, speculative fancy, interspersed with expressions of the most generous spirit of family affection, or the most searching and unaffected disclosures of self-knowledge. poetry and beauty were the twin powers his soul had ever worshipped; but his devotion to poetry seemed thus far to promise him no reward either in fame or bread; while beauty had betrayed her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a sustaining power, since his love for the beautiful in general had turned into a craving passion for the beauty of a particular girl. as his flesh began to faint in the service of these two, his soul turned often with a sense of comfort, at times even almost of ecstasy, towards the milder divinity of death, whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts:-- "verse, fame, and beauty are intense indeed, but death intenser--death is life's high meed." when he came down from these heights of feeling, and brought himself soberly to face the facts of his existence, keats felt himself compelled, in those days while he was producing, 'out of the mere yearning and fondness he had for the beautiful,' poem after poem that are among the treasures of the english language, to consider whether as a practical matter he could or ought to continue to apply himself to literature at all. in spite of his magnanimous first reception of the _blackwood_ and _quarterly_ gibes, we can see that as time went on he began more and more to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened by them. reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material harm which the reviews were capable of inflicting, when he wrote the year before:--"certain it is, that hundreds of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set down this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writer, merely on the assertions of some single heartless critic, who has just energy enough to despise what is good." such in fact was exactly the reputation which _blackwood_ and the _quarterly_ had succeeded in making for keats, except among a small private circle of admirers. of praise and the thirst for praise he continues to speak in as manly and sane a tone as ever; especially in the two sonnets _on fame_; and in the _ode to indolence_ declares-- "for i would not be dieted with praise, a pet-lamb in a sentimental farce." again in the same ode, he speaks of his 'demon poesy' as 'a maiden most unmeek,' whom he loves the better the more blame is heaped on her. at the same time he shows his sense of the practical position which the reviews had made for him when he writes to his brother:--"these reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially the 'quarterly'.... i was in hopes that as people saw, as they must do, all the trickery and iniquity of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the spectators at the westminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or loses." and as a consequence he adds presently, "i have been, at different times, turning it in my head whether i should go to edinburgh and study for a physician. i am afraid i should not take kindly to it; i am sure i could not take fees; and yet i should like to do so; it is not worse than writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the review shambles." a little later he mentions to his sister fanny an idea he has of taking a voyage or two as surgeon on board an east indiaman. but brown, more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of his friend's genius, would not hear of this plan, and persuaded him to abandon it and throw himself again upon literature. keats being for the moment unable to get at any of his money, brown advanced him enough to live on through the summer; and it was agreed that he should go and work in the country, and that brown should follow him. towards the end of july keats accordingly left hampstead, and went first to join his friend rice in lodgings at shanklin. rice's health was at this time worse than ever; and keats himself was far from well; his chest weak, his nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to fanny brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains and joys of love. these love-letters of keats are written with little or none of the bright ease and play of mind which make his correspondence with his friends and family so attractive. pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, but in the main they are constrained and distressing, showing him a prey, despite his efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity and fretfulness of passion. an enraptured but an untrustful lover, alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing through a hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he found in the fever of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his love-sickness. as long as rice and he were together at shanklin, the two ailing and anxious men, firm friends as they were, depressed and did each other harm. it was better when brown with his settled health and spirits came to join them. soon afterwards rice left, and brown and keats then got to work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, that of writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. what other struggling man of letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? brown, whose russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him in £ , was supposed to possess the requisite stage experience, and to him were assigned the plot and construction of the play, while keats undertook to compose the dialogue. the subject was one taken from the history of the emperor otho the great. the two friends sat opposite each other at the same table, and keats wrote scene after scene as brown sketched it out to him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next, until the end of the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into his own hands. besides the joint work by means of which he thus hoped, at least in sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, keats was busily engaged by himself in writing a new greek tale in rhymed heroics, _lamia_. but a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. the climate of shanklin was against him: their lodgings were under the cliff, and from the south-east, as he afterwards wrote, "came the damps of the sea, which having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke." after a stay of five or six weeks, the friends made up their minds to change their quarters, and went in the second week of august to winchester. the old cathedral city, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its clear-coursing streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the nimble and pure air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited keats, who quickly improved both in health and spirits. the days which he spent here, from the middle of august to the middle of october, were the last good days of his life. working with a steady intensity of application, he managed to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort. his work continued to be chiefly on _lamia_, with the concluding part of _otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of king stephen; in this last he laboured alone, without accepting help from brown. early in september brown left winchester to go on a visit to bedhampton. immediately afterwards a letter from america compelled keats to go to town and arrange with mr abbey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his brother george. he dared not, to use his own words, 'venture into the fire' by going to see his mistress at hampstead, but stayed apparently with mr taylor in fleet street, and was back on the fourth day at winchester, where he spent the following ten days or fortnight in solitude. during this interval he took up _hyperion_ again, but made up his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style and method too miltonic and artificial. _lamia_ he had finished, and his chief present occupation was in revising the _eve of st agnes_, studying italian in the pages of ariosto, and writing up one of his long and full journal-letters to brother and sister george. the season was fine, and the beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his spirit, prompted also in these days the last, and one certainly of the happiest, of his odes, that _to autumn_. to the fragment of _st mark's eve_, begun or planned, as we have seen, the january before, he now added lines inspired at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his letters show to have affected him deeply here at winchester, and by the literary example of chatterton, for whom his old admiration had of late returned in full force. the wholesome brightness of the early autumn continuing to sustain and soothe him, keats made in these days a vigorous effort to rally his moral powers, to banish over-passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself on a right footing with the world. the letter to america already mentioned, and others written at the same time to reynolds, taylor, dilke, brown, and haydon, are full of evidences of this spirit. the ill success of his brother in his american speculations shall serve, he is determined, as a spur to his own exertions, and now that real troubles are upon them, he will show that he can bear them better than those of imagination. the imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him up into an agent. he has been passing his time between reading, writing, and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, and stick to the other two. he does not consider he has any just cause of complaint against the world; he has done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few people predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that any thing really fine will make its way. "what reviewers can put a hindrance to must be a nothing--or mediocre which is worse." with reference to his own plans for the future, he is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes of ultimate success, whether from plays or poems, but to turn to the natural resource of a man 'fit for nothing but literature' and needing to support himself by his pen: the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. "i will write, on the liberal side of the question, for whoever will pay me. i have not known yet what it is to be diligent. i purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper. when i can afford to compose deliberate poems, i will." these words are from a letter written to brown on the nd of september, and further on in the same letter we find evidence of the honourable spirit of independence and unselfishness towards his friends which went together in keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willingness to accept their services at a pinch. he had been living since may on a loan from brown and an advance from taylor, and was uneasy at putting the former to a sacrifice. the subject, he says, is often in his mind,-- "and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your happiness. this anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to the plan i propose pursuing. i had got into a habit of mind of looking towards you as a help in all difficulties. you will see it is a duty i owe myself to break the neck of it. i do nothing for my subsistence--make no exertion. at the end of another year you shall applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct." brown, returning to winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose his company, and doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected their motives too much to contend against them. it was accordingly settled that the two friends should part, brown returning to his own house at hampstead, while keats went to live by himself in london and look out for employment on the press. chapter vii. _isabella_--_hyperion_--_the eve of st agnes_--_the eve of st mark_--_la belle dame sans merci_--_lamia_--the odes--the plays. during the twenty months ending with his return from winchester as last narrated, keats had been able, even while health and peace of mind and heart deserted him, to produce in quick succession the series of poems which give us the true measure of his powers. in the sketches and epistles of his first volume we have seen him beginning, timidly and with no clearness of aim, to make trial of his poetical resources. a year afterwards he had leapt, to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and boldly tried his strength on the composition of a long mythological romance--half romance, half parable of that passion for universal beauty of which he felt in his own bosom the restless and compulsive workings. in the execution, he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and invention, and the caprice of rhyme, run away with him, and by substituting for the worn-out verbal currency of the last century a semi-elizabethan coinage of his own, less acceptable by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit greater real poetic value. the experiment was rash, but when he next wrote, it became manifest that it had not been made in vain. after _endymion_ his work threw off, not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and ineffectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full 'effluence' (the phrase is landor's) 'of power and light[ ].' his next poem of importance was _isabella_, planned and begun, as we saw, in february , and finished in the course of the next two months at teignmouth. the subject is taken from the well-known chapter of boccaccio which tells of the love borne by a damsel of messina for a youth in the employ of her merchant-brothers, with its tragic close and pathetic sequel[ ]. keats for some reason transfers the scene of the story from messina to florence. nothing can be less sentimental than boccaccio's temper, nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his style. keats invoking him asks pardon for his own work as what it truly is,--'an echo of thee in the north-wind sung.' not only does the english poet set the southern story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of the arno, for instance, how its stream-- "gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream keeps head against the freshets"-- he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, enriching it with tones of sentiment and colours of romance, and brooding over every image of beauty or passion as he calls it up. these things he does--but no longer inordinately as heretofore. his powers of imagination and of expression have alike gained strength and discipline; and through the shining veils of his poetry his creations make themselves seen and felt in living shape, action, and motive. false touches and misplaced beauties are indeed not wanting. for example, in the phrase "his erewhile timid lips grew bold and poesied with hers in dewy rhyme," we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not infrequent in his earliest verses. and in the call of the wicked brothers to lorenzo-- "to-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount to spur three leagues towards the apennine. come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count his dewy rosary on the eglantine,"-- the last two lines are a beauty indeed, and of the kind most characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as leigh hunt long ago pointed out) misplaced in the mouths that utter it. moreover the language of _isabella_ is still occasionally slipshod, and there are turns and passages where we feel, as we felt so often in _endymion_, that the poetic will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or suggestion of the rhyme. but these are the minor blemishes of a poem otherwise conspicuous for power and charm. for his italian story keats chose an italian metre, the octave stanza introduced in english by wyatt and sidney, and naturalised before long by daniel, drayton, and edward fairfax. since their day, the stanza had been little used in serious poetry, though frere and byron had lately revived it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the purpose for which the epigrammatic snap and suddenness of the closing couplet in truth best fit it. keats, however, contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles the measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale of pathos. over the purely musical and emotional resources of his art he shows a singular command in stanzas like that beginning, 'o melancholy, linger here awhile,' repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude of the main narrative. and there is a brilliant alertness of imagination in such episodical passages as that where he pauses to realize the varieties of human toil contributing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. but the true test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the essential points and central moments of action and passion, imaginative vitality and truth with beauty and charm. this test _isabella_ admirably bears. for instance, in the account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her lover's mouldering corpse:-- "its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright with love, and kept all phantom fear aloof from the poor girl by magic of their light." with what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the story of the apparition invested by this touch, and all its charnel horror and grimness mitigated! or again in the stanzas describing isabella's actions at her lover's burial place:-- "she gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though one glance did fully all its secrets tell; clearly she saw, as other eyes would know pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well; upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, like to a native lily of the dell: then with her knife, all sudden, she began to dig more fervently than misers can. soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon her silk had play'd in purple phantasies; she kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, and put it in her bosom, where it dries and freezes utterly unto the bone those dainties made to still an infant's cries: then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care, but to throw back at times her veiling hair." the lines are not all of equal workmanship: but the scene is realised with unerring vision. the swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as she begins to dig 'more fervently than misers can' (what a commentary on the relative strength of passions might be drawn from this simple text):--then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic truth as well as grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a limpid and flowing ease of narrative. poetry had always come to keats, as he considered it ought to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers of the school of pope. in comparison with the illuminating power of true imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay, those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two kinds of writing comparable. after the completion of _isabella_ followed the scotch tour, of which the only poetic fruits of value were the lines on meg merrilies and those on fingal's cave. returning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother mortally ill, keats plunged at once into the most arduous poetic labour he had yet undertaken. this was the composition of _hyperion_[ ]. the subject had been long in his mind, and both in the text and the preface of _endymion_ he indicated his intention to attempt it. at first he thought of the poem to be written as a 'romance': but under the influence of _paradise lost_, and no doubt also considering the height and vastness of the subject, his plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books. his purpose was to sing the titanomachia, or warfare of the earlier titanic dynasty with the later olympian dynasty of the greek gods; and in particular one episode of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god hyperion and the assumption of his kingdom by apollo. critics, even intelligent critics, sometimes complain that keats should have taken this and other subjects of his art from what they call the 'dead' mythology of ancient greece. as if that mythology could ever die: as if the ancient fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things believed, into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. faiths, as faiths, perish one after another: but each in passing away bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. the polytheism of ancient greece, embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern mind which is in so far dead and not they. one of the great symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of europe, toward the close of the last century, was its awakening to the forgotten charm of past modes of faith and life. when men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke of greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms which showed that they had never felt its power; just as, when they spoke of nature, it was in set phrases that showed that they had never looked at her. on matters of daily social experience the gifts of observation and of reason were brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts of the time were thoughts of the street, the mart, and the assembly. the human genius was for the time being like some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused to see or think of anything beyond them. at length resuming its march, it emerged on open ground, where it fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest the beauties of the earth and sky, and whence at the same time it could turn back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning with new clearness and a new emotion, here under cloud and rainbow the forests and spired cities of the middle age, there in serener light the hills and havens and level fanes of hellas. the great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on this new phase of its pilgrimage was goethe, who with deliberate effort and self-discipline climbed to heights commanding an equal survey over the mediæval and the classic past. we had in england had an earlier, shyer, and far less effectual pioneer in gray. as time went on, poet after poet arose and sang more freely, one the glories of nature, another the enchantments of the middle age, another the greek beauty and joy of life. keats when his time came showed himself, all young and untutored as he was, freshly and powerfully inspired to sing of all three alike. he does not, as we have said, write of greek things in a greek manner. something indeed in _hyperion_--at least in the first two books--he has caught from _paradise lost_ of the high restraint and calm which was common to the greeks and milton. but to realise how far he is in workmanship from the greek purity and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images, we have only to think of his palace of hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. this is the most sustained and celebrated passage of the poem. or let us examine one of its most characteristic images from nature:-- "as when, upon a tranced summer night, those green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, dream, and so dream all night without a stir--." not to the simplicity of the greek, but to the complexity of the modern, sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and express, by such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees--their aspect of human venerableness--their verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky[ ]. but though keats sees the greek world from afar, he sees it truly. the greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated english way he writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of greek ideas. for the story of the war of titans and olympians he had nothing to guide him except scraps from the ancient writers, principally hesiod, as retailed by the compilers of classical dictionaries; and from the scholar's point of view his version, we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary, mixing up latin conceptions and nomenclature with greek, and introducing much new matter of his own invention. but as to the essential meaning of that warfare and its result--the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,--as to this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with more beauty and force, than by keats in the speech of oceanus in the second book. again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human, what masterly justice of instinct does he show,--to take one point only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices. thus of the assembled gods when saturn is about to speak:-- "there is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines when winter lifts his voice; there is a noise among immortals when a god gives sign, with hushing finger, how he means to load his tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, with thunder, and with music, and with pomp: such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines." again, of oceanus answering his fallen chief:-- "so ended saturn; and the god of the sea, sophist and sage, from no athenian grove, but cogitation in his watery shades, arose, with locks not oozy, and began, in murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands." and once more, of clymene followed by enceladus in debate:-- "so far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook that, lingering along a pebbled coast, doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, and shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice of huge enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: the ponderous syllables, like sullen waves in the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, came booming thus." this second book of _hyperion_, relating the council of the dethroned titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, where the solemn opening vision of saturn fallen is followed by the resplendent one of hyperion threatened in his 'lucent empire'; nor the intensity of the unfinished third, where we leave apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the afflatus of mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. but it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind, quite on a level with the other two. with a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal incorrectness, _hyperion_, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the easiest and most spontaneous. keats, however, had never been able to apply himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. partly this was due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of dawning passion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception of _endymion_: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial to his powers in the task itself. when after letting the poem lie by through the greater part of the spring and summer of , he in september made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to reynolds explaining his reasons as follows. "there were too many miltonic inversions in it--miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humour. i wish to give myself up to other sensations. english ought to be kept up." in the same connection he declares that chatterton is the purest writer in the english language. "he has no french idiom or particles, like chaucer; it is genuine english idiom in english words." in writing about the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as to milton and chatterton. the influence, and something of the majesty, of _paradise lost_ are in truth to be found in _hyperion_: and the debate of the fallen titans in the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the fallen angels. but miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of milton's age with keats's youth, of his austerity with keats's luxuriance of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:--in the matter of rhythm, keats's blank verse has not the flight of milton's. its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since milton,--beside that of shelley's _alastor_,--perhaps a little below that of wordsworth when wordsworth is at his infrequent best. as to diction and the poetic use of words, keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as milton himself: but while of milton's diction the characteristic colour is derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with the contents of books, the characteristic colour of keats's diction is rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme refinements of physical sensation. he is no match for milton in a passage of this kind:-- "eden stretch'd her line from auran eastward to the royal towers of great seleucia, built by grecian kings, or where the sons of eden long before dwelt in telassar." but then neither is milton a match for keats in work like this:-- "throughout all the isle there was no covert, no retired cave unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, though scarcely heard in many a green recess." after the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical note of milton's style is his partiality for a latin use of the relative pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly latin turns and constructions generally. already in _isabella_ keats is to be found attempting both notes, thus:-- "with duller steel than the persean sword they cut away no formless monster's head--." similar miltonic echoes occur in _hyperion_, as in the introduction already quoted to the speech of oceanus: or again thus:-- "then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope in smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, blown by the serious zephyrs, gave of sweet and wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies." but they are not frequent, nor had keats adopted as much of milton's technical manner as he seems to have supposed. yet he had adopted more of it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain. in turning away from milton to chatterton, he was going back to one of his first loves in literature. what he says of chatterton's words and idioms seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by the bristol boy out of kersey's _dictionary_[ ]. but it is true that through that jargon can be discerned, in the rowley poems, not only an ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition, but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. and after keats had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to us so masterly, in the paths of milton, we find him in fact tempted aside on an excursion into the regions beloved by chatterton. we know not how much of _hyperion_ had been written when he laid it aside in january to take up the composition of _st agnes' eve_, that unsurpassed example--nay, must we not rather call it unequalled?--of the pure charm of coloured and romantic narrative in english verse. as this poem does not attempt the elemental grandeur of _hyperion_, so neither does it approach the human pathos and passion of _isabella_. its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance,--its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the mediæval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all,--its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth: and without these no great literature can exist. keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story wherein something of romeo and juliet is mixed with something of young lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into association with the old popular belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her lover in a dream. choosing happily, for such a purpose, the spenserian stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as it has been called, of spenser, a transparent ease and directness of construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. from the opening stanza, which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with the life of imagination and beauty. it indeed plays in great part about the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. but in handling these keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and sculptor. he never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, movement, and feeling. thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:-- "knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, he passeth by; and his weak spirit fails to think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the poet strikes life:-- "the carved angels, ever eager-eyed, stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, with wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts." the painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out their beauties in detail, he calls-- "innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--" a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. in the last line of the same stanza-- "a shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings," --the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of her lineage and ancestral fame. observation, i believe, shows that moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted glass as keats in this celebrated passage represents it. let us be grateful for the error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. when madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their lustre or other visible qualities: keats puts those aside, and speaks straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the wearer,--'her warmed jewels.' when porphyro spreads the feast of dainties beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far countries whence they have been gathered-- "from silken samarcand to cedar'd lebanon." if the unique charm of the _eve of st agnes_ lies thus in the richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go. what can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse, who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die quietly of age when their parts are over[ ]: especially the debate of old angela with porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the stair? madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, i think, at two moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,-- "no uttered syllable, or, woe betide: but to her heart, her heart was voluble, paining with eloquence her balmy side:"-- and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:-- "'ah porphyro!' said she, 'but even now thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear made tunable with every sweetest vow; and those sad eyes were spiritual and clear; how changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear'." criticism may urge, indeed, that in the 'growing faint' of porphyro, and in his 'warm unnerved arm,' we have a touch of that swooning abandonment to which keats's heroes are too subject. but it is the slightest possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet individually than to his time. lovers in prose romances of that date are constantly overcome in like manner. and we may well pardon porphyro his weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady's side in defiance of her 'whole bloodthirsty race,' and will bear her safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 'beyond the southern moors' that he has prepared for her[ ]. nearly allied with the _eve of st agnes_ is the fragment in the four-foot ballad metre, which keats composed on the parallel popular belief connected with the eve of st mark. this piece was planned, as we saw, at chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at winchester six months later: the name of the heroine, bertha, seems farther to suggest associations with canterbury. impressions of all these three cathedral cities which keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture of which the fragment consists. i have said picture, but there are two: one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her quaint fire-lit chamber. each in its way is of an admirable vividness and charm. the belief about st mark's eve was that a person stationed near a church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the ensuing year. keats's fragment breaks off before the story is well engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to incidents illustrating this belief. neither is it clear whether he intended to place them in mediæval or in relatively modern times. the demure protestant air which he gives the sunday streets, the oriental furniture and curiosities of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his archæology--witness, for instance, the line which tells how 'the long carpets rose along the gusty floor' in the _eve of st agnes_. the interest of the _st mark's_ fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and charm of workmanship: and second, its relation to and influence on later english poetry. keats in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modern pre-raphaelite schools. the indoor scene of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is perfectly in the spirit of rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and interested),--of his pictures even more than of his poems: while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and cadences of mr morris in some tale of the _earthly paradise_:-- "the city streets were clean and fair from wholesome drench of april rains; and on the western window panes the chilly sunset faintly told of unmatured green valleys cold, of the green thorny bloomless hedge, of rivers new with springtide sedge." another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _la belle dame sans merci_. the title is taken from that of a poem by alain chartier,--the secretary and court poet of charles vi. and charles vii. of france,--of which an english translation used to be attributed to chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. this title had caught keats's fancy, and in the _eve of st agnes_ he makes lorenzo waken madeline by playing beside her bed-- "an ancient ditty, long since mute, in provence call'd 'la belle dame sans merci'." the syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the spring or summer ( ) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more to do with that of chartier than chartier has really to do with provence[ ]. keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the mediæval world of enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a bane. the plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his own soul in thraldom. every reader must feel how truly the imagery expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. to many students (of whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound and sense, make of _la belle dame sans merci_ the master-piece, not only among the shorter poems of keats, but even (if any single master-piece must be chosen) among them all. before finally giving up _hyperion_ keats had conceived and written, during his summer months at shanklin and winchester, another narrative poem on a greek subject: but one of those where greek life and legend come nearest to the mediæval, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of passion. i speak, of course, of _lamia_, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of corinth, and builds for him by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. keats had found the germ of the story, quoted from philostratus, in burton's _anatomy of melancholy_. in versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them, however, not as in _endymion_, but in a manner founded on that of dryden, with a free use of the alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. in the measure as thus treated by keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its way as the victorious march of dryden himself. here is an example where the poetry of greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:-- "leave thee alone! look back! ah, goddess, see whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! for pity do not this sad heart belie-- even as thou vanishest so i shall die. stay! though a naiad of the rivers, stay! to thy far wishes will thy streams obey: stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, alone they can drink up the morning rain: though a descended pleiad, will not one of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?" and here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:-- "as men talk in a dream, so corinth all, throughout her palaces imperial, and all her populous streets and temples lewd, mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, to the wide-spreaded night above her towers. men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, companion'd or alone; while many a light flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals, and threw their moving shadows on the walls, or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade." no one can deny the truth of keats's own criticism on _lamia_ when he says, "i am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation." there is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the touch of hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the transformation itself. admirably told, though perhaps somewhat disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode of hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. this thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give _lamia_ almost the first, if not the first, place among keats's narrative poems. but surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others too unequal. it contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for instance that of the palace reared by lamia's magic; which will not bear comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet's building. and it has reflective passages, as that in the first book beginning, 'let the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and the first fifteen lines of the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at its best, keats relapses into something too like leigh hunt's and his own early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. he shows at the same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language. the positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the _eve of st agnes_ we had to 'brook' tears for to check or forbear them, in _hyperion_ 'portion'd' for 'proportion'd;' eyes that 'fever out;' a chariot 'foam'd along.' some of these verbal licences possess a force that makes them pass; but not so in _lamia_ the adjectives 'psalterian' and 'piazzian,' the verb 'to labyrinth,' and the participle 'daft,' as if from an imaginary active verb meaning to daze. in the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is moreover a weakness. keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him uttering. but the doctrine he sets forth in _lamia_ is one which from the reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain consistency:-- "do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? there was an awful rainbow once in heaven; we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air and gnomed mine-- unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made the tender-person'd lamia melt into a shade." campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in _the rainbow_: but one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which keats would have done well to stand, is preached by wordsworth in his famous preface. passing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of keats's work during this period--it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly occupied in the spring months of , from the completion of _st agnes' eve_ at chichester in january until the commencement of _lamia_ and _otho the great_ at shanklin in june. these odes of keats constitute a class apart in english literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. in what he calls the 'roundelay' of the indian maiden in _endymion_ he had made his most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching shelley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled coleridge in touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. his new odes are comparatively simple and regular in form. they are written in a strain intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate with the idea of an ode. of the five composed in the spring of , two, those on _psyche_ and the _grecian urn_, are inspired by the old greek world of imagination and art; two, those on _melancholy_ and the _nightingale_, by moods of the poet's own mind; while the fifth, that on _indolence_, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations. in the _psyche_, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching those of spenser's nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) keats recurs to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in the opening poem of his first book, beginning-- "so felt he, who first told how psyche went on the smooth wind to realms of wonderment." following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. nor are like touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are disclosed--'mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' what other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with keats, and of spenser, with his 'sea-shouldering whales,' he is now in his own manner the equal. the 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in _st agnes' eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'moss-lain dryads' and the 'soft-conchèd ear' of psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on us a little with a sense of oddity, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in _lamia_. for the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:-- "yes, i will be thy priest, and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind, where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, instead of pines shall murmur in the wind." yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener fancy,' his ear charmed by the glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the invocation and the imagery. less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the _ode on a grecian urn_. instead of the long and unequal stanza of the _psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the sestet, and in one instance--the ode to melancholy--expanding it into a septet. the sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had set the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art to life. the opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'what men or gods are these, what maidens loth,' &c. the second and third stanzas express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even richer than the real. then the questioning begins again, and yields the incomparable choice of pictures,-- "what little town by river or sea shore, or mountain built with peaceful citadel, is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?" in the answering lines-- "and, little town, thy streets for evermore will silent be; and not a soul to tell why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--" in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. but it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice it. finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,-- "in midst of other woe than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, beauty is truth, truth beauty,--" thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of keats's temper--an immutable law. it seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied keats with the suggestion for this poem. there exists, indeed, at holland house an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is described in his fourth stanza[ ]: and of course no subject is commoner in greek relief-sculpture than a bacchanalian procession. but the two subjects do not, so far as i know, occur together on any single work of ancient art: and keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of sculptures actually seen in the british museum with others known to him only from engravings, and particularly from piranesi's etchings. lord holland's urn is duly figured in the _vasi e candelabri_ of that admirable master. from the old leigh hunt days keats had been fond of what he calls-- "the pleasant flow of words at opening a portfolio:" and in the scene of sacrifice in _endymion_ (book l, - ) we may perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as well as an anticipation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the subject in the ode. the ode _on indolence_ stands midway, not necessarily in date of composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two greek and the two personal odes, as i have above distinguished them. in it keats again calls up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of love, ambition, and poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. this ode, less highly wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record of a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an agreeable physical languor. well had it been for him had such moods come more frequently to give him rest. most sensitive among the sons of men, the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled to bursting. one of the attributes he assigns to his enchantress lamia is a "sciential brain to unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain." in the fragmentary ode _on melancholy_ (which has no proper beginning, its first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of beaumont and of milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:-- "aye, in the very temple of delight veil'd melancholy has her sovereign shrine, though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst joy's grape against his palate fine: his soul shall taste the sadness of her might, and be among her cloudy trophies hung." the same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet's feeling for nature and romance, in the _ode to a nightingale_. just as his grecian urn was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular nightingale he had heard singing in the hampstead garden that he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. thither he sighs to follow her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations which he will leave behind him. nay, he needs not the aid of bacchus,--poetry alone shall transport him. for a moment he mistrusts her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of the season and the night. in this joy he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome now than ever. the nightingale would not cease her song--and here, by a breach of logic which is also, i think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with the permanence of the song-bird's life, meaning the life of the type. this last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those memorable touches of far-off bible and legendary romance in the stanza closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes. in this group of the odes it takes rank beside the _grecian urn_ in the other. neither is strictly faultless, but such revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to faultlessness? both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. both are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. let us therefore place here, as an example of this class of keats's work, the ode _to autumn_, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of his quiet september days at winchester. it opens out, indeed, no such far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. in the first stanza the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art and greek personification have an exquisite congruity and lightness. "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; conspiring with him how to load and bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; to bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel; to set budding more, and still more, later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days will never cease, for summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor, thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: and sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep steady thy laden head across a brook; or by a cider-press, with patient look, thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. where are the songs of spring? ay, where are they? think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows, borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; and full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft the red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; and gathering swallows twitter in the skies." to pass from our poet's work at this time in the several fields of romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pass from a region of happy and assured conquest to one of failure, though of failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been in store for him. at his age no man has ever been a master in the drama: even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. the manner in which keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted. he brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we have seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, and a mind prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. but these things were not enough. the power of sympathetic insight had not yet developed in keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in conception. keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing with all the hues of poetry. but in themselves they have the effect only of puppets inexpertly agitated: otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and fatherly affection, ludolph of febrile passion and vacillation, erminia of maidenly purity, conrad and auranthe of ambitious lust and treachery. at least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. from that point keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence, shows a great improvement. there is a real dramatic effect, of the violent kind affected by the old english drama, in the disclosure of the body of auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when ludolph in his madness vainly imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of marlowe, not only by their pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses expressed in them. of the second historical play, _king stephen_, which keats began by himself at winchester, too little was written to afford matter for a safe judgment. the few scenes he finished are not only marked by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his capacity had not this fragment been preserved. but in the mingling of his soul's and body's destinies it had been determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be suffered to ripen farther upon earth. chapter viii. return to wentworth place--autumn occupations: the _cap and bells_: recast of _hyperion_--growing despondency--visit of george keats to england--attack of illness in february--rally in the spring--summer in kentish town--publication of the _lamia_ volume--relapse--ordered south--voyage to italy--naples--rome--last days and death. [october -feb. .] we left keats at winchester, with _otho_, _lamia_, and the _ode to autumn_ just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting imagination magnify and passion exasperate them as heretofore. at his request dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in westminster ( college street), and here keats came on the th of october to take up his quarters. but alas! his blood proved traitor to his will: and the plan of life and literary work in london broke down at once on trial. the gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a distance from the great perturbing cause. two days after his return he went to hampstead--'into the fire'--and in a moment the flames had seized him more fiercely than ever. it was the first time he had seen his mistress for four months. he found her kind, and from that hour was utterly passion's slave again. in the solitude of his london lodging he found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. he must send her a line, he writes to fanny brawne two days later, "and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. upon my soul i can think of nothing else.... i cannot exist without you. i am forgetful of everything but seeing you again--my life seems to stop there--i see no further. you have absorb'd me." a three days' visit at her mother's house, followed by another of a day or two at the dilkes', ended in his giving up all resistance to the spell. within ten days, apparently, of his return from winchester, he had settled again at hampstead under brown's roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. he writes with a true foreboding: "i shall be able to do nothing. i should like to cast the die for love or death.--i have no patience with anything else." it was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to wentworth place in october, , begins the melancholy closing chapter of keats's history. of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last kept smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the first began from this time forth to sink. not that he was idle during the ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. for the present he determined not to publish _lamia_, _isabella_, and the other poems written since _endymion_. he preferred to await the result of brown's attempt to get _otho_ brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. in the meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in estimation that brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold his friend's name. the great hope of the authors was that kean would see an opportunity for himself in the part of ludolph. in this they were not disappointed: the play was accepted: but elliston, the manager, proposing to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, keats and brown objected to the delay, and about christmas transferred the offer of their ms. to covent garden, where macready, under harris's management, was at this time beginning to act the leading parts. it was after a while returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped. in the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which keats bent his hopes. "one of my ambitions," he had written to bailey from winchester, "is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as kean has done in acting." and now, in a letter to mr taylor of nov. , he says that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. the little dramatic skill he may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to diffuse the colouring of _st agnes' eve_ throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." two or three such poems would be, he thinks, the best _gradus_ to the _parnassum altissimum_ of true dramatic writing. meantime, he is for the moment engaged on a task of a different nature. "as the marvellous is the most enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, i have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy, and to let her manage for herself. i and myself cannot agree about this at all." the piece to which keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the _cap and bells_, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. writing of the autumn days immediately following their return to wentworth place, brown says:-- "by chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem in the spenser stanza, and i was glad to encourage it. he had not composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. it was to be published under the feigned authorship of 'lucy vaughan lloyd,' and to bear the title of the _cap and bells_, or, which he preferred, the _jealousies_. this occupied his mornings pleasantly. he wrote it with the greatest facility; in one instance i remember having copied (for i copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner[ ]." excellent friend as brown was to keats, he was not the most judicious adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the _cap and bells_ to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to keats's nature. as long as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable[ ], and he was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. moreover the spirit of poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of the metrical romances of the italian renaissance, and again, with unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early cantos of _don juan_. it was partly the influence of the facetious brown, who was a great student of pulci and boiardo, partly that of his own recent italian studies, and partly the dazzling example of byron's success, that now induced keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. having already employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the _ottava rima_ of the italians, in his serious poem of _isabella_, he now, by what seems an odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave spenserian stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his choice of metre, keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to gay with a light hand, and the movement of the _cap and bells_ has much of his characteristic suppleness and grace. in other respects the poem is not a success. the story, which appears to have been one of his own and brown's invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a fairy princess of the east. the two are unwillingly betrothed, each being meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. the eighty-eight stanzas, which were all that keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the emperor elfinan for england, which takes place at the moment when his affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. into the elfinan part of the story keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the fragment of _st mark's eve_ at the beginning of the year,--the tale of an english bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through the reading of a magic book. with this and other purely fanciful elements of the story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day. it was in this year, , that the quarrels between the prince regent and his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject: and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. the references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the _cap and bells_ are general rather than particular, although here and there individual names and characters are glanced at: as when 'esquire biancopany' stands manifestly, as mr forman has pointed out, for whitbread. but the social and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. as keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the byronic wit and devilry his raillery seems but child's play. where the fun is of the purely fanciful and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in passages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and colour,--but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time. besides his morning task in brown's company on the _cap and bells_, keats had other work on hand during this november and december. "in the evenings," writes brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of _hyperion_ into the form of a vision." the result of this attempt, which has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in keats's history. we have seen how, in the previous august, he had grown discontented with the style and diction of _hyperion_, as being too artificial and miltonic. now, in the decline of his powers, he took the poem up again[ ], and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly, it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading, partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which were pressing on his mind. his new plan was to relate the fall of the titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision revealed and interpreted to him by a goddess of the fallen race. the reader remembers how he had broken off his work on _hyperion_ at the point where mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of apollo with the inspiration of her ancient wisdom. following a clue which he had found in a latin book of mythology he had lately bought[ ], he now identifies this greek mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, with the roman moneta; and (being possibly also aware that the temple of juno moneta on the capitol at rome was not far from that of saturn) makes his mnemosyne-moneta the priestess and guardian of saturn's temple. his vision takes him first into a grove or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval temple. presently a voice, the voice of moneta, whose form he cannot yet see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an image beside which she is offering sacrifice. obeying her with difficulty, he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of saturn. then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of saturn's overthrow. 'deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' &c.,--from this point keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his _vision_ the text of the original _hyperion_; with alterations which are in almost all cases for the worse. neither does the new portion of his work well match the old. side by side with impressive passages, it contains others where both rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more on single lines and passages, and less on sustained effects. keats has indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the opening of the _vision_, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the priestess when she removes her veils. but the especial interest of the poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the poet's character and lot. when moneta bids him mount the steps to her side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish utterly where he stands. in fact he all but dies before he reaches the stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the ordeal:-- "none can usurp this height," returned that shade, "but those to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest. all else who find a haven in the world, where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, if by a chance into this fane they come, rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half." "are there not thousands in the world," said i, encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, "who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labour for mortal good? i sure should see other men here, but i am here alone." "those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; they seek no wonder but the human face, no music but a happy-noted voice: they come not here, they have no thought to come; and thou art here, for thou art less than they. what benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, to the great world? thou art a dreaming thing, a fever of thyself: think of the earth: what bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? what haven? every creature hath its home, every sole man hath days of joy and pain, whether his labours be sublime or low-- the pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: only the dreamer venoms all his days, bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, such things as thou art are admitted oft into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, and suffer'd in these temples--"[ ]. tracing the process of keats's thought through this somewhat obscure imagery,--the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. at first he is lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden): awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly above him. if he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. and even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of common men. in the conception keats here expresses of the human mission and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. almost from the first dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry towards-- "a nobler life, where i may find the agonies, the strife of human hearts." what is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet's lot even at its best. "only the dreamer venoms all his days, bearing more woe than all his sins deserve," --through what a circle must the spirit of keats, when this bitter cry broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before, when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the poetic life:-- "these are the living pleasures of the bard, but richer far posterity's award. what shall he murmur with his latest breath, when his proud eye looks through the film of death?"-- his present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh. the wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his sensations and emotions into pain--at once darkening the shadow of impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied cravings of his passion. in verses at this time addressed, though doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones like this:-- "where shall i learn to get my peace again?"-- --"o for some sunny spell to dissipate the shadows of this hell":-- or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:-- "yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, withhold no atom's atom or i die, or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, forget, in the mist of idle misery, life's purposes,--the palate of the mind losing its gust, and my ambition blind." that he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does not seem to have occurred to keats as possible in the present state of his fortunes. "however selfishly i may feel," he had written to her some months earlier, "i am sure i could never act selfishly." the brawnes on their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. as the autumn wore into winter, keats's sufferings, disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate comrade brown. without understanding the cause, brown was not slow to perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances keats had given him at winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen him against troubles of imagination, and that he was not and would not allow himself to be unhappy. "i quickly perceived," writes brown, "that he was more so than i had feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great uneasiness. he was unwilling to speak on the subject; and i could do no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding that word however.... all that a friend could say, or offer, or urge, was not enough to heal his many wounds. he listened, and in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. he was too thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. it was discovered by accident, and without delay, revealed to me. he needed not to be warned of the danger of such a habit; but i rejoiced at his promise never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could induce him to break his word when once given,--which was a difficulty. still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional proof of his rooted misery"[ ]. some of the same symptoms were observed by haydon, and have been described by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting another's weakness with his own strength[ ]. to his friends in general keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice that he had lost his cheerfulness. one of them, severn, at this time competed for and carried off (december , ) the annual gold medal of the academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for several years. the subject was spenser's 'cave of despair.' we hear of keats flinging out in anger from among a company of elder artists where the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an appointment with severn to go and see his prize picture,--adding, however, parenthetically from his troubled heart, "you had best put me into your cave of despair." in december his letters to his sister make mention several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made to him by mr abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in connection with that gentleman's business. early in january, , george keats appeared on a short visit to london. he was now settled with his wife and child in the far west, at louisville on the ohio. here his first trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of the naturalist audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to england by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant abbey, of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers from their grandmother's gift. his visit lasted only three weeks, during which john made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. "he was not the same being," wrote george, looking back on the time some years afterwards; "although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs." in a letter which the poet wrote to his sister-in-law while her husband was in england, he attempts to keep up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. of his work he says nothing, and it is clear from brown's narrative that both his morning and his evening task--the _cap and bells_ and the _vision_--had been dropped some time before this[ ], and left in the fragmentary state in which we possess them. george left for liverpool on friday jan. . a few days later keats was seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set up in his constitution by the exertions of his scotch tour, and which recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated. "one night," writes brown--it was on the thursday feb. --"at eleven o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. such a state in him, i knew, was impossible[ ]; it therefore was the more fearful. i asked hurriedly, 'what is the matter? you are fevered?' 'yes, yes,' he answered, 'i was on the outside of the stage this bitter day till i was severely chilled,--but now i don't feel it. fevered!--of course, a little.' he mildly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my request that he should go to bed. i followed with the best immediate remedy in my power. i entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. on entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and i heard him say,--'that is blood from my mouth.' i went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. 'bring me the candle, brown, and let me see this blood.' after regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that i can never forget, and said,--'i know the colour of that blood;--it is arterial blood;--i cannot be deceived in that colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--i must die.' i ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, i left him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep." keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue truly. he survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life was but a life-in-death. how many are there among us to whom such _lacrymae rerum_ come not home? happy at least are they whose lives this curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,--who know not what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under mediterranean palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of alpine snows, their dearest and their brightest perish. the malady in keats's case ran through the usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. the doctors would not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering regimen and rest from mental excitement. the weakness and nervous prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to see nobody but brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. after a week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed, and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. a hint, which his good feelings wrung from him, that under the circumstances he ought to release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he became quieter and more composed. to his sister at walthamstow he wrote often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his men friends: among them one to james rice, which contains this often quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:-- "i may say that for six months before i was taken ill i had not passed a tranquil day. either that gloom overspread me, or i was suffering under some passionate feeling, or if i turned to versify that acerbated the poison of either sensation. the beauties of nature had lost their power over me. how astonishingly (here i must premise that illness, as far as i can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! like poor falstaff, though i do not 'babble,' i think of green fields; i muse with the greatest affection on every flower i have known from my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if i had just created them with a super-human fancy." the greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, keats said at another time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the literary merits of the bible he once, says hazlitt, found fault with the hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. what he wants to see again, he writes now further from his sickbed, are 'the simple flowers of our spring.' and in the course of april, after being nearly two months a prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. even as early as the twenty-fifth of march, we hear of him going into london, to the private view of haydon's 'entry into jerusalem,' where the painter tells how he found him and hazlitt in a corner, 'really rejoicing.' keats's friends, in whose minds his image had always been associated with the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring themselves to believe but that he would recover. brown had arranged to start early in may on a second walking-tour in scotland, and the doctor actually advised keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own state too well to venture. he went with brown on the smack as far as gravesend, and then returned; not to hampstead, but to a lodging in wesleyan place, kentish town. he had chosen this neighbourhood for the sake of the companionship of leigh hunt, who was living in mortimer street close by. keats remained at wesleyan place for about seven weeks during may and june, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in london or for a drive on hampstead heath. during the first weeks of his illness he had been strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even that of reading, poetry. about this time he speaks of intending to begin (meaning begin again) soon on the _cap and bells_. but in fact the only work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at last induced him to put forward. this is the immortal volume containing _lamia_, _isabella_, _the eve of st agnes_, _hyperion_, and the _odes_. of the poems written during keats's twenty months of inspiration from march to october , none of importance are omitted except the _eve of st mark_, the _ode on indolence_, and _la belle dame sans merci_. the first keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: la belle dame sans merci he had let hunt have for his periodical _the indicator_, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on may , . _hyperion_, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original shape, the poet's friends, says brown, having made him feel that they thought the re-cast no improvement. the volume came out in the first week of july. an admirably kind and discreet review by leigh hunt appeared in the _indicator_ at the beginning of august[ ]: and in the same month jeffrey in the _edinburgh review_ for the first time broke silence in keats's favour. the impression made on the more intelligent order of readers may be inferred from the remarks of crabb robinson in his _diaries_ for the following december[ ]. "my book has had good success among the literary people," wrote keats a few weeks after its appearance, "and i believe has a moderate sale." but had the success been even far greater than it was, keats was in no heart and no health for it to cheer him. passion with lack of hope were working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards recovery. the relapse was not long delayed. fresh hæmorrhages occurring on the nd and rd of june, he moved from his lodgings in wesleyan place to be nursed by the hunts at their house in mortimer street. here everything was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but all in vain: he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards avowed, on hampstead; and once when at hunt's suggestion they took a drive in that direction, and rested on a seat in well walk, he burst into a flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. in writing to fanny brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. "hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to ophelia, 'go to a nunnery, go, go!'" keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, 'a fever of himself:' and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his betrothed. wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory[ ]. such at this time was keats's condition that the slightest shock unmanned him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or stranger. after he had been some seven weeks with the hunts, it happened on the th of august, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note from fanny brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. this circumstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to his old lodgings in well walk. the brawnes, however, would not suffer this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. under the eye and tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some mitigation of his sufferings. haydon came one day to see him, and has told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks. he was deeply affected and so was i[ ]." ever since his relapse at the end of june, keats had been warned by the doctors that a winter in england would be too much for him, and had been trying to bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to italy. the shelleys had heard through the gisbornes of keats's relapse, and shelley now wrote in terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come and take up his residence with them at pisa. this letter reached keats immediately after his return to hampstead. he replied in an uncertain tone, showing himself deeply touched by the shelleys' friendship, but as to the _cenci_, which had just been sent him, and generally as to shelley's and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much to the purpose to say. as to the plan of wintering in italy, keats had by this time made up his mind to try it, "as a soldier marches up to a battery." his hope was that brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend in the highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for keats's departure was fast approaching while brown still remained in ignorance of his purpose. in the meantime another companion offered himself in the person of severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the royal academy the year before, determined now to go and work at rome with a view to competing for the travelling studentship. keats and severn accordingly took passage for naples on board the ship 'maria crowther,' which sailed from london on sept. [ ]. several of the friends who loved keats best went on board with him as far as gravesend, and among them mr taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase for £ of the copyright of _endymion_. as soon as the ill news of his health reached brown in scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way south, and for that purpose caught a smack at dundee, which arrived in the thames on the same evening as the 'maria crowther' sailed: so that the two friends lay on that night within hail of one another off gravesend unawares. the voyage at first seemed to do keats good, and severn was struck by his vigour of appetite and apparent cheerfulness. the fever of travel and change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, and in keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time afterwards. contrary winds held them beating about the channel, and ten days after starting they had got no farther than portsmouth, where keats landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at bedhampton. on board ship in the solent immediately afterwards he wrote to brown a letter confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever confided it face to face. even if his body would recover of itself, his passion, he says would prevent it. "the very thing which i want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. i cannot help it. who can help it? were i in health it would make me ill, and how can i bear it in my state? i wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then i wish death away, for death would destroy even these pains, which are better than nothing. land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever." on the night when keats wrote these words (sept. ) brown was staying with the dilkes at chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly missed seeing each other once more. the ship putting to sea again, still with adverse winds, there came next to keats that day of momentary calm and lightening of the spirit of which severn has left us the record, and the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of his sonnets. they landed on the dorsetshire coast, apparently near lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of which keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. on board ship the same night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of english knows so well; placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a _lover's complaint_, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of shakespeare's poems which had been given him by reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and feeling:-- "bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art, not in lone splendour hung aloft the night and watching, with eternal lids apart, like nature's patient, sleepless eremite, the moving waters at their priestlike task of cold ablution round earth's human shores, or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors-- no--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, to feel for ever its soft fall and swell, awake for ever in a sweet unrest, still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, and so live ever--or else swoon to death." these were keats's last verses. with the single exception of the sonnet beginning 'the day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,' composed probably immediately after his return from winchester, they are the only love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. getting clear of the channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent storm in the bay of biscay; and severn waking at night, and finding the water rushing through their cabin, called out to keats "half fearing he might be dead," and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first line of arne's long-popular song from _artaxerxes_--'water parted from the sea.' as the storm abated keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _don juan_, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and presently flung the volume from him in disgust. a dead calm followed: after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a portuguese man-of-war, in order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. after a voyage of over four weeks, the 'maria crowther' arrived in the bay of naples, and was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says keats, he summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole course of his life before. a miss cotterill, consumptive like himself, was among his fellow-passengers, and to her keats showed himself full of cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his own. he admits as much in writing from naples harbour to mrs brawne: and in the same letter says, "o what an account i could give you of the bay of naples if i could once more feel myself a citizen of this world--i feel a spirit in my brain would lay it forth pleasantly." the effort he constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world of colour and classic beauty about him, partly imposed on severn; but in a letter he wrote to brown from naples on nov. , soon after their landing, his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:-- "i can bear to die--i cannot bear to leave her.... oh god! god! god! everything i have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. the silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. my imagination is horribly vivid about her--i see her--i hear her.... oh brown, i have coals of fire in my breast. it surprises me that the human heart is capable of so much misery." at naples keats and severn stayed at the hotel d'angleterre, and received much kindness and hospitality from a brother of miss cotterill's who was there to meet her. the political state and servile temper of the people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms imposed on the bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous summer--grated on keats's liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. he had received there another letter from shelley, who since he last wrote had read the _lamia_ volume, and was full of generous admiration for _hyperion_. shelley now warmly renewed his invitation to keats to come to pisa. but his and severn's plans were fixed for rome. on their drive thither (apparently in the second week of november) keats suffered seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which severn gathered for him by the way. reaching rome, they settled at once in lodgings which dr (afterwards sir james) clark had taken for them in the piazza di spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to sta trinità dei monti. here, according to the manner of those days in italy, they were left pretty much to shift for themselves. neither could speak italian, and at first they were ill served by the _trattorìa_ from which they got their meals, until keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says severn, which was quickly taken. one of severn's first cares was to get a piano, since nothing soothed keats's pain so much as music. for a while the patient seemed better. dr clark wished him to avoid the excitement of seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left severn to visit these alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the pincian close by. the season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. in severn's absence keats had a companion he liked in an invalid lieutenant elton. in their walks on the pincian these two often met the famous beauty pauline bonaparte, princess borghese. her charms were by this time failing--but not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affected keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of their walks. sometimes, instead of walking, they would ride a little way on horseback while severn was working among the ruins. it is related by severn that keats in his first days at rome began reading a volume of alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to himself:-- "misera me! sollievo a me non resta altro che 'l pianto, _ed il pianto è delitto_." notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful. his thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on the subject of sabrina. severn began to believe he would get well, and wrote encouragingly to his friends in england; and on nov. keats himself wrote to brown in a strain much less despondent than before. but suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. on dec. came a relapse which left no doubt of the issue. hæmorrhage followed hæmorrhage on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and distressing. keats at starting had confided to his friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on severn's refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting heart." it was no unmanly fear of pain in keats, severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. "he explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him." severn gently persisting in refusal, keats for a while fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. in religion keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting christianity without calling himself a christian, and by turns clinging to and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. contrasting now the behaviour of the believer severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the power of the christian teaching and example, and bidding severn read to him from jeremy taylor's _holy living and dying_, strove to pass the remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy. by degrees the tumult of his soul abated. his sufferings were very great, partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to combat it. shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then were in italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous kindness of dr and mrs clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, mr ewing. at one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in danger of actual destitution, till a remittance from mr taylor arrived just in time to save them. the devotion and resource of severn were infinite, and had their reward. occasionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with "beating about in the tempest of his mind;" and once and again some fresh remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. but generally, after the first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his companion soothed him with reading or music. his favourite reading was still jeremy taylor, and the sonatas of haydn were the music he liked severn best to play to him. of recovery he would not hear, but longed for nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, himself from thoughts of fame. "i feel," he said, "the flowers growing over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave the words for his epitaph:--"here lies one whose name was writ in water." ever since his first attack at wentworth place he had been used to speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to the doctor when he came in was, "doctor, when will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?" as he turned to ask it neither physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. loveable and considerate to the last, "his generous concern for me," says severn, "in my isolated position at rome was one of his greatest cares." his response to kindness was irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to the end. severn tells how in watching keats he used sometimes to fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. "to remedy this one night i tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all which i did without telling keats. when he awoke and found the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while doubting suddenly cried out, 'severn, severn, here's a little fairy lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'" and again "poor keats has me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep." such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations to write them down. life held out for two months and a half after the relapse, but from the first days of february the end was visibly drawing near. it came peacefully at last. on the rd of that month, writes severn, "about four, the approaches of death came on. 'severn--i--lift me up--i am dying--i shall die easy; don't be frightened--be firm, and thank god it has come.' i lifted him up in my arms. the phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that i still thought he slept." three days later his body was carried, attended by several of the english in rome who had heard his story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the english race for ever. it was but the other day that the remains of severn were laid in their last resting-place beside his friend[ ]. chapter ix. character and genius. the touching circumstances of keats's illness and death at rome aroused naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous mind. foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy was shelley. he had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics had contributed to keats's sufferings, and believing that they had killed him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of passionate regret for what the world had lost. under the stress of that double inspiration shelley wrote,-- "and a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres." as an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, _adonaïs_ is unsurpassed in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of shelley's art: while its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most lucid exposition of his philosophy. but of keats as he actually lived the elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his character and fate is erroneous. a similar false impression was at the same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than that reached by shelley, in the well-known stanza of _don juan_. in regard to keats byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. when the _edinburgh_ praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to murray:--"no more keats, i entreat:--flay him alive;--if some of you don't, i must skin him myself." then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he turns against the latter, and cries:--"i would not be the person who wrote that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world." in the _don juan_ passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath. taken together with the notion of 'johnny keats' to which _blackwood_ and the _quarterly_ had previously given currency, the _adonaïs_ and the _don juan_ passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of keats's character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction had been poison. it was long before his friends, who knew that he was 'as like johnny keats as the holy ghost,' did anything effectual to set his memory right. brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been quoted so often in the above pages. for anything like a full biography george keats in america could alone have supplied the information; but against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) brown had unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication between them became impossible. neither was dilke, who alone among keats's friends in england took george's part, disposed under the circumstances to help brown in his task. for a long time george himself hoped to superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his occupations in the west, prevented him. mr taylor, the publisher, also at one time wished to be keats's biographer, and with the help of woodhouse collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them. the same wish was entertained by john hamilton reynolds, whose literary skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the poet's friends the most competent for the work. but of these many projects not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after keats's death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,--the monckton milnes of those days, the lord houghton freshly remembered by us all,--and with help from nearly all keats's surviving friends, and by the grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every student is familiar. keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, inherited disease, which killed him. he had a nature all tingling with pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 'exquisite sense of the luxurious': and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which he describes as his 'horrid morbidity of temperament.' the greater his credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued him. to the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way when he speaks of the 'violence of his temperament, continually smothered up.' left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely better trained and less hardly tried. his hold over himself gave way, indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the weak places of his nature. but we must remember his state of health when the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,--not indeed, so far as we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. under another kind of trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his fortunes justified. in all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for manly spirit and sweetness. no man who ever lived has inspired in his friends a deeper or more devoted affection. one, of whose name we have heard little in this history[ ], wrote while the poet lay dying: "keats must get himself again, severn, if but for me--i cannot afford to lose him: if i know what it is to love i truly love john keats." the following is from a letter of brown written also during his illness:--"he is present to me every where and at all times,--he now seems sitting here at my side, and looking hard into my face.... so much as i have loved him, i never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[ ]." elsewhere, speaking of the time of his first attack, brown says:--"while i waited on him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. something like this, severn his last nurse, observed to me[ ]:" and we know in fact how the whole life of severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. when lord houghton's book came out in , archdeacon bailey wrote from ceylon to thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius i did not, and do not, more fully admire than i entirely loved the _man_[ ]." the points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. first his high good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for many. "he had a soul of noble integrity," says bailey: "and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. indeed his character was, in the best sense, manly." next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of sympathy. this is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it nothing,--but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. but when genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. and this is what his companions found in keats. "he was the sincerest friend," cries reynolds, "the most loveable associate,--the deepest listener to the griefs and distresses of all around him,--'that ever lived in this tide of times[ ].'" to the same effect haydon:--"he was the most unselfish of human creatures: unadapted to this world, he cared not for himself, and put himself to any inconvenience for the sake of his friends.... he had a kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who wanted it." and again bailey:-- "with his friends, a sweeter tempered man i never knew, than was john keats. gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... in his letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. it appeared not in his conversation. on the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man i ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. but if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation[ ]." lastly, "he had no fears of self," says george keats, "through interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and purse." in this chorus of admiring affection, haydon alone must assert his own superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. when he laments over keats's dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, idly and calumniously. when on the other hand he speaks of the poet's "want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never for two days did he know his own intentions," his criticism is deserving of more attention. this is only haydon's way of describing a fact in keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. he acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." what he means is no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in regard to himself. "the celtic instability," a reader may perhaps surmise who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. whether the quality was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar complexion of keats's genius. or rather it was an expression in character of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. acute as was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. he realised clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. "as to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(i mean that sort, of which, if i am anything, i am a member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing _per se_, and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self--it is everything and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated,--it has as much delight in conceiving an iago as an imogen. a poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body.... if then, he has no self, and if i am a poet, where is the wonder that i should say i would write no more? might i not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of saturn and ops? it is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word i ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature." "even now," he says on another occasion, "i am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul i now live." keats was often impatient of this protean quality of his own mind. "i would call the head and top of those who have a proper self," he says, "men of power": and it is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. but in the sphere of thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent of his own genius. in that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. thus in speaking of what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of wordsworth:-- "for the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist? every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. many a man can travel to the very bourne of heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul." this is but one of many passages in which keats proclaims the necessity, for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. his critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. if the foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware that no criticism can be more mistaken. at the creation, the revelation, of beauty keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its elements existed:--"i have loved," as he says, "the principle of beauty in all things." his conception of the kingdom of poetry was shaksperean, including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the soul and every speculation of the mind. of that kingdom he lived long enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit of youth. would he have been able to make the rest also his own? would the faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the middle age,--would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life? my belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. from the height to which the genius of keats arose during the brief period between its first effervescence and its exhaustion,--from the glowing humanity of his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of his own consciousness and his friends' experience, he was accustomed to live in the lives of others,--from the gleams of true greatness of mind which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and pleasantry of his familiar letters,--from all our evidences, in a word, as to what he was as well as from what he did,--i think it probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most shaksperean spirit that has lived since shakspere; the true marcellus, as his first biographer has called him, of the realm of english song; and that in his premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. something like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living successors, as lord tennyson, mr browning, mr matthew arnold. others have formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? in a final estimate of any writer's work, we must take into account not what he might have done, but only what he did. and in the work actually left by keats, the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with fulness. when we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we can think, indeed, of the pathos of _isabella_, but of that alone, as equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the _hymn to pan_ and the _ode to a nightingale_, with the glow of romance colour in _st agnes' eve_, the weirdness of romance sentiment in _la belle dame sans merci_, the conflict of elemental force with fate in _hyperion_, the revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the _ode on a grecian urn_ and the fragment of an _ode to maia_. it remains to glance at the influence exercised by keats on the poets who have come after him. in two ways chiefly, i should say, has that influence been operative. first on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling and informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. and secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of execution--a standard not of technical correctness, for which keats never cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he speaks of 'loading every rift of a subject with ore.' we may define it as the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of phrase. a typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that tell us of the trembling hopes of madeline,-- "but to her heart her heart was voluble, paining with eloquence her balmy side." the beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. the first line describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on ourselves. in so far as keats has taught other poets really to write like this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,--but not so when for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. the first considerable writer among keats's successors on whom his example took effect was hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. the dominant poet of the victorian age, tennyson, has been profoundly influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed the heir of keats and of wordsworth in almost equal degrees. after or together with coleridge, keats has also contributed most, among english writers, to the poetic method and ideals of rossetti and his group. himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, of our own day. such, i think, is keats's historic place in english literature. what his place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned from their own lips. the days of the years of his life were few and evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines immortally. the end. appendix. p. , note . as to the exact date of keats's birth the evidence is conflicting. he was christened at st botolph's, bishopsgate, dec. , , and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register (which i am informed is in the handwriting of the rector, dr conybeare) is a note stating that he was born oct. . the date is given accordingly without question by mr buxton forman (_works_, vol. i. p. xlviii). but it seems certain that keats himself and his family believed his birthday to have been oct. . writing on that day in , keats says, "this is my birthday." brown (in houghton mss.) gives the same day, but only as on hearsay from a lady to whom keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as to the year. lastly, in the proceedings in _rawlings v. jennings_, oct. is again given as his birthday, in the affidavit of one anne birch, who swears that she knew his father and mother intimately. the entry in the st botolph's register is probably the authority to be preferred.--lower moorfields was the space now occupied by finsbury circus and the london institution, together with the east side of finsbury pavement.--the births of the younger brothers are in my text given rightly for the first time, from the parish registers of st leonard's, shoreditch; where they were all three christened in a batch on sept. , . the family were at that date living in craven street. p. , note . brown (houghton mss.) says simply that thomas keats was a 'native of devon.' his daughter, mrs llanos, tells me she remembers hearing as a child that he came from the land's end. persons of the name are still living in plymouth. p. , note . the total amount of the funds paid into court by the executors under mr jennings's will (see preface, p. viii) was £ . _s._ _d._ p. , note , and p. , note . of the total last mentioned, there came to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other legatees who predeceased her) sums amounting to £ . _s._ in the chancery proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by mrs jennings for the benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but only its general purport; whence it appears that the sum she made over to messrs sandell and abbey in trust for them amounted approximately to £ , and included all the reversions fallen or still to fall in as above mentioned. the balance it is to be presumed she retained for her own support (she being then ). p. , note . the following letter written by mr abbey to mr taylor the publisher, under april , , soon after the news of keats's death reached england, speaks for itself. the letter is from woodhouse mss. b. "sir, i beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the th ult. respecting the late mr jno. keats. i am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my controul, and acted contrary to my advice, i cannot interfere with his affairs. i am, sir, yr. mo. hble st., richd. abbey." p. , note . the difficulty of determining the exact date and place of keats's first introduction to hunt arises as follows.--cowden clarke states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in leigh hunt's cottage at hampstead. hunt in his _autobiography_ says it was 'in the spring of the year ' that he went to live at hampstead in the cottage in question. putting these two statements together, we get the result stated as probable in the text. but on the other hand there is the strongly huntian character of keats's _epistle_ to g. f. mathew, dated november , which would seem to indicate an earlier acquaintance (see p. ). unluckily leigh hunt himself has darkened counsel on the point by a paragraph inserted in the last edition of his _autobiography_, as follows:--(pref. no. , p. ) "it was not at hampstead that i first saw keats. it was at york buildings, in the new road (no. ), where i wrote part of the _indicator_, and he resided with me while in mortimer street, kentish town (no. ), where i concluded it. i mention this for the curious in such things, among whom i am one." the student must not be misled by this remark of hunt's, which is evidently only due to a slip of memory. it is quite true that keats lived with hunt in mortimer street, kentish town, during part of july and august (see page ): and that before moving to that address hunt had lived for more than a year (from the autumn of to the spring of ) at , new road. but that keats was intimate with him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact living not in london at all but at the vale of health, is abundantly certain. p. , note . cowden clarke tells how keats once calling and finding him fallen asleep over chaucer, wrote on the blank space at the end of the _floure and the leafe_ the sonnet beginning 'this pleasant tale is like a little copse.' reynolds on reading it addressed to keats the following sonnet of his own, which is unpublished (houghton mss.), and has a certain biographical interest. it is dated feb. , . "thy thoughts, dear keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed; they set the heart a-breathing, and they shed the glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves, o'er the excited soul.--thy genius weaves songs that shall make the age be nature-led, and win that coronal for thy young head which time's strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne'er bereaves. go on! and keep thee to thine own green way, singing in that same key which chaucer sung; be thou companion of the summer day, roaming the fields and older woods among:-- so shall thy muse be ever in her may, and thy luxuriant spirit ever young." p. , note . woodhouse mss. a. contains the text of the first draft in question, with some preliminary words of woodhouse as follows:-- "the lines at p. of keats's printed poems are altered from a copy of verses written by k. at the request of his brother george, and by the latter sent as a valentine to the lady. the following is a copy of the lines as originally written:-- hadst thou lived in days of old, oh what wonders had been told of thy lively dimpled face, and thy footsteps full of grace: of thy hair's luxurious darkling, of thine eyes' expressive sparkling. and thy voice's swelling rapture, taking hearts a ready capture. oh! if thou hadst breathed then, thou hadst made the muses ten. could'st thou wish for lineage higher than twin sister of thalia? at least for ever, ever more will i call the graces four." here follow lines -- of the poem as afterwards published: and in conclusion:-- "ah me! whither shall i flee? thou hast metamorphosed me. do not let me sigh and pine, prythee be my valentine. feby. ." p. , note . mrs procter's memory, however, betrayed her when she informed lord houghton that the colour of keats's eyes was blue. that they were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence alike of c. c. clarke, of george keats and his wife (as transmitted by their daughter mrs speed to her son), and from the various portraits painted from life and posthumously by severn and hilton. mrs procter calls his hair auburn: mrs speed had heard from her father and mother that it was 'golden red,' which may mean nearly the same thing: i have seen a lock in the possession of sir charles dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have looked gold in the lights. bailey in houghton mss. speaks of it as extraordinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his head was like laying it 'on the rich plumage of a bird.' an evidently misleading description of keats's general aspect is that of coleridge when he describes him as a 'loose, slack, not well-dressed youth.' the sage must have been drawing from his inward eye: those intimate with keats being of one accord as to his appearance of trim strength and 'fine compactness of person.' coleridge's further mention of his hand as shrunken and old-looking seems exact. p. , note . the isolated expressions of keats on this subject, which alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him somewhat unjustly to the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. fairness seems to require that the whole passage in which he deals with it should be given. the passage occurs in a letter to bailey written from hampstead and dated oct. , , of which only a fragment was printed by lord houghton, and after him by mr buxton forman (_works_, vol. iii. p. , no. xvi.). "i went to hunt's and haydon's who live now neighbours.--shelley was there--i know nothing about anything in this part of the world--every body seems at loggerheads. there's hunt infatuated--there's haydon's picture in statu quo--there's hunt walks up and down his painting-room criticizing every head most unmercifully--there's horace smith tired of hunt--'the web of our life is of mingled yarn.'... i am quite disgusted with literary men, and will never know another except wordsworth--no not even byron. here is an instance of the friendship of such. haydon and hunt have known each other many years--now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours. haydon says to me, keats, don't show your lines to hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you--so it appears hunt wishes it to be thought. when he met reynolds in the theatre, john told him i was getting on to the completion of lines--ah! says hunt, had it not been for me they would have been ! if he will say this to reynolds, what would he to other people? haydon received a letter a little while back on the subject from some lady, which contains a caution to me, thro' him, on this subject. now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?" p. , note . see haydon, _autobiography_, vol. i. pp. - . the letter containing keats's account of the same entertainment was printed for the first time by speed, _works_, vol. i. p. i. no. , where it is dated merely 'featherstone buildings, monday.' (at featherstone buildings lived the family of charles wells.) in houghton mss. i find a transcript of the same letter in the hand of mr coventry patmore, with a note in lord houghton's hand: "these letters i did not print. r. m. m." in the transcript is added in a parenthesis after the weekday the date april, : but this is a mistake; the th of april in that year was not a monday: and the contents of keats's letter itself, as well as a comparison with haydon's words in his _autobiography_, prove beyond question that it was written on monday, the th of january. p. , note . similar expressions about the devonshire weather occur in nearly all keats's letters written thence in the course of march and april. the letter to bailey containing the sentences quoted in my text is wrongly printed both by lord houghton and mr forman under date sept. . i find the same date given between brackets at the head of the same letter as transcribed in woodhouse mss. b., proving that an error was early made either in docketing or copying it. the contents of the letter leave no doubt as to its real date. the sentences quoted prove it to have been written not in autumn but in spring. it contains keats's reasons both for going down to join his brother tom at teignmouth, and for failing to visit bailey at oxford on the way: now in september keats was not at teignmouth at all, and bailey had left oxford for good, and was living at his curacy in cumberland (see p. ). moreover there is an allusion by keats himself to this letter in another which he wrote the next day to reynolds, whereby its true date can be fixed with precision as friday, march . p. , note . the following unpublished letter of keats to mr taylor (from woodhouse mss. b.) has a certain interest, both in itself and as fixing the date of his departure for the north:-- "sunday evening, "my dear taylor, i am sorry i have not had time to call and wish you health till my return. really i have been hard run these last three days. however, au revoir, god keep us all well! i start tomorrow morning. my brother tom will i am afraid be lonely. i can scarcely ask the loan of books for him, since i still keep those you lent me a year ago. if i am overweening, you will i know be indulgent. therefore when you shall write, do send him some you think will be most amusing--he will be careful in returning them. let him have one of my books bound. i am ashamed to catalogue these messages. there is but one more, which ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. i promised mrs reynolds one of my books bound. as i cannot write in it let the opposite" [a leaf with the name and 'from the author,' notes woodhouse] "be pasted in 'prythee. remember me to percy st.--tell hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged on a history piece to his own content. and tell dewint i shall become a disputant on the landscape. bow for me very genteely to mrs d. or she will not admit your diploma. remember me to hessey, saying i hope he'll _carey_ his point. i would not forget woodhouse. adieu! your sincere friend, john o'grots. june , . hampstead" [the date and place are added by woodhouse in red ink, presumably from the post-mark]. p. , note . in the concluding lines quoted in my text, mr buxton forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between 'all the magic of the place' and the next line, 'so saying, with a spirit's glance,' and has proposed, by way of improvement, to read 'with a spirit's grace'. i find the true explanation in woodhouse mss. a., where the poem is continued thus in pencil after the word 'place'. "'tis now free to stupid face, to cutters, and to fashion boats, to cravats and to petticoats:-- the great sea shall war it down, for its fame shall not be blown at each farthing quadrille dance. so saying with a spirit's glance he dived"--. evidently keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any indication of the hiatus so caused. p. , note . lord houghton says, "on returning to the south, keats found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at teignmouth." it is certain that no such second visit to teignmouth was made by either brother. the error is doubtless due to the misdating of keats's march letter to bailey: see last note but two, p. . p. , note . keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been mismanaged. at the time when he thus found himself near the end of the capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. quite apart from the provision made by mrs jennings for her grandchildren after her husband's death, and administered by mr abbey, there were the legacies mr jennings himself had left them by will; one of £ direct; the other, of a capital to yield £ a year, in reversion after their mother's death (see p. ). the former sum was invested by order of the court in consols, and brought £ . _s._ _d._ worth of that security at the price at which it then stood. £ . _s_. _d._ worth of the same stock was farther purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of £ a year. the interest on both these investments was duly paid to frances rawlings during her life: but after her death in both investments lay untouched and accumulating interest until ; when george keats, to whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the first time, received on application to the court a fourth share of each, with its accumulations. two years afterwards fanny keats received in like manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers john and tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being £ . _s._ _d._, and to george £ . _s._ _d._ it was a part of the ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors at the time when he most needed them. p. , note . landor's letter to lord houghton on receipt of a presentation copy of the _life and letters_, in , begins characteristically as follows:-- "bath, aug. . dear milnes, on my return to bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, i find your valuable present of keatses works. he better deserves such an editor than i such a mark of your kindness. of all our poets, excepting shakspeare and milton, and perhaps chaucer, he has most of the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity. he has not indeed overcome so great a difficulty as shelley in his _cenci_, nor united so many powers of the mind as southey in _kehama_--but there is an effluence of power and light pervading all his work, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of chaucer.--" p. , note . i think there is no doubt that _hyperion_ was begun by keats beside his brother's sickbed in september or october , and that it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 'plunging into abstract images,' and finding a 'feverous relief' in the 'abstractions' of poetry. certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as the translation of ronsard's sonnet, _nature ornant cassandre_, which is the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. brown says distinctly, of the weeks when keats was first living with him after tom's death in december--"it was then he wrote _hyperion_"; but these words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already begun. in his december-january letter to america keats himself alludes to the poem by name, and says he has been 'going on a little' with it: and on the th of february, , says 'i have not gone on with _hyperion_.' during the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the _odes_, and whether he at the same time wrote any more of _hyperion_ we cannot tell. it was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in april, as in that month woodhouse had the ms. to read, and notes (see buxton forman, _works_, vol. ii. p. ) that "it contains books and / --(about lines in all):" the actual length of the piece as published being lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by woodhouse before revision and a word (see below, note to p. ). when keats, after nearly a year's interruption of his correspondence with bailey, tells him in a letter from winchester in august or september, "i have also been writing parts of my _hyperion_," this must not be taken as meaning that he has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing them,--like _isabella_ and the _eve of st agnes_, which he mentions at the same time,--since the date of his last letter. p. , note . the version of _the eve of st agnes_ given in woodhouse mss. a. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the original ms. in the possession of mr f. locker-lampson; which is in all probability that actually written by keats at chichester (see p. ). the readings of the ms. in question are given with great care by mr buxton forman (_works_, vol. ii. p. foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the poem as printed are wanting in it. students may therefore be glad to have, from woodhouse's transcript, the following table of the changes in those stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:-- stanza i.: line , for "chill" stood "cold": line , for "was" stood "were": line , for "from" stood "in": line (and stanza ii., line ), for "prayer" stood "prayers". stanza iii.: line , for "went" stood "turn'd": line , for "rough" stood "black". after stanza iii. stood the following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed. . but there are ears may hear sweet melodies, and there are eyes to brighten festivals, and there are feet for nimble minstrelsies, and many a lip that for the red wine calls-- follow, then follow to the illumined halls, follow me youth--and leave the eremite-- give him a tear--then trophied bannerals and many a brilliant tasseling of light shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night. stanza v.; line , for "revelry" stood "revellers": lines - , for-- "numerous as shadows haunting fairily the brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay of old romance. these let us wish away,"-- stood the following:-- "ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs, the muse should never make the spirit gay; away, bright dulness, laughing fools away." p. , note . at what precise date _la belle dame sans merci_ was written is uncertain. as of the _ode to melancholy_, keats makes no mention of this poem in his correspondence. in woodhouse mss. a. it is dated . that woodhouse made his transcripts before or while keats was on his shanklin-winchester expedition in that year, is i think certain both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence among them of _lamia_ and the _ode to autumn_. hence it is to the first half of that _la belle dame sans merci_ must belong, like so much of the poet's best work besides. the line quoted in my text shows that the theme was already in his mind when he composed the _eve of st agnes_ in january. mr buxton forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (_works_, vol. ii. p. , note). p. , note . the relation of _hyperion, a vision_, to the original _hyperion_ is a vital point in the history of keats's mind and art, and one that has been generally misunderstood. the growth of the error is somewhat interesting to trace. the first mention of the _vision_ is in lord houghton's _life and letters_, ed. , vol. i. p. . having then doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of brown's ms. memoir quoted in the text, lord houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following his account of _hyperion_:--"he afterwards published it as a fragment, and still later re-cast it into the shape of a vision, which remains equally unfinished." when eight years later the same editor printed the piece for the first time (in _miscellanies of the philobiblon society_, vol. iii. - ) from the ms. given him by brown, he must have forgotten brown's account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: "is it the original sketch out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? i have no external evidence to decide this question:" and further,--"the problem of the priority of the two poems--both fragments, and both so beautiful--may afford a wide field for ingenious and critical conjecture." ten years later again, when he brought out the second edition of the _life and letters_, lord houghton had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing the piece in his appendix as 'another version,' says in his text (p. ) "on reconsideration, i have no doubt that it was the first draft." accordingly it is given as 'an earlier version' in mr w. m. rossetti's edition of , as 'the first version' in lord houghton's own edition of ; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by messrs buxton forman, speed, and w. t. arnold. the obvious superiority of _hyperion_ to the _vision_ no doubt at first sight suggested the conclusion to which these editors, following lord houghton, had come. in the mean time at least two good critics, mr w. b. scott and mr. r. garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the _vision_ was not a first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his powers: an opinion in which mr garnett was confirmed by his recollection of a statement to that effect in the lost ms. of woodhouse (see above, preface, p. v, and w. t. arnold, _works_ &c. p. xlix, note). brown's words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen were right. they are confirmed from another side by woodhouse mss. a, which contains the copy of a real early draft of _hyperion_. in this copy the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several books of the poem as printed). book i. after line stood the cancelled lines-- "thus the old eagle, drowsy with great grief, sat moulting his weak plumage, never more to be restored or soar against the sun; while his three sons upon olympus stood." in line , for "stay'd ixion's wheel" stood "eased ixion's toil". in line , for "tone" stood "tune". in line , for "gradual" stood "sudden". in line , after the word "saturn," stood the cancelled words-- "what dost think? am i that same? o chaos!" in line , for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like mist." in line , for "savour of poisonous brass" stood "a poison-feel of brass." in line for "when earthquakes jar their battlements and towers" stood "when an earthquake hath shook their city towers." after line stood the cancelled line "most like a rose-bud to a fairy's lute." in line , for "and like a rose" stood "yes, like a rose." in line , for "suddenly" stood "and, sudden." book ii. in line , for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." in line for "starry uranus" stood "starr'd uranus" (some friend doubtless called keats's attention to the false quantity). book iii. after line stood the cancelled lines:-- "into a hue more roseate than sweet pain gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears gush luscious with no sob; or more severe." in line , for "most like" stood "more like." in these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that where a corrected passage occurs again in the _vision_, it in every case corresponds to the printed _hyperion_, and not to the draft of the poem preserved by woodhouse. this of itself would make it certain that the _vision_ was not a first version of _hyperion_, but a recast of the poem as revised (in all probability at winchester) after its first composition. taken together with the statement of brown, which is perfectly explicit as to time, place, and circumstances, and the corresponding statement of woodhouse as recollected by mr garnett, the proof is from all sides absolute: and the 'first version' theory must disappear henceforward from editions of and commentaries on our poet. p. , note . a more explicit refutation of haydon's account was given, some years after its appearance, by cowden clarke (see preface, no. ), not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from general knowledge of the poet's character:-- "i can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which that ill-ordered being, haydon, the artist, left behind him in his 'diary' respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, john keats" ... "haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against him of cockney ostentation and display. the most mean-spirited and trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that keats was so far gone in sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his claret. in the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, i have not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. during my knowledge of him keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as could not escape me, i am bound to say that his domestic expenses never would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, i never perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence." p. , note . in medwin's _life of shelley_ ( ), pp. - , are some notices of keats communicated to the writer by fanny brawne (then mrs lindon), to whom medwin alludes as his 'kind correspondent.' medwin's carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but i think an attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. , which discusses mr finch's account of keats's death, leaves no doubt that it continues in substance the quotation previously begun from mrs lindon. "that his sensibility," so runs the text, "was most acute, is true, and his passions were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is implied. his was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his friends. violence such as the letter" [of mr finch] "describes, was quite foreign to his nature. for more than a twelvemonth before quitting england, i saw him every day", [this would be true of fanny brawne from oct. to sept. , if we except the kentish town period in the summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] "i often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and i do not hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to any human being." the above passage has been overlooked by critics of keats, and i am glad to bring it forward, as serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to dilke so often quoted. index. abbey, mr richard, , , , , , , . _adonaïs_ (shelley's), , . _adventures of a younger son_ (trelawney's), . alfieri, . _alfred, the_, . _anatomy of melancholy_ (burton's), . _antiquary_ (scott's), . _apollo, ode to_, - . _autumn, ode to_, . bailey, benjamin, , , , , , . beattie, . _biographia literaria_ (coleridge's), . boccaccio, . bonaparte, pauline, princess borghese, . brawne, miss fanny, seq., - , , . _britannia's pastorals_ (browne's), . brown, charles, , , seq., , seq., , , . browne, . browning, robert, . burnet, . byron, , , , ; sonnet to, . canterbury, . _cap and bells_, seq. castlereagh, . _champion, the_, . chatterton, , ; sonnet to, . chaucer, . chichester, . clarke, cowden, , , , , , , . clarke, rev. john, . 'cockaigne, king of,' . _cockney school of poetry_ (articles in _blackwood's magazine_), , seq. coleridge, , , , , . cooper, astley, . cotterill, miss, , . cox, miss charlotte, . _dante_ (cary's), . _death_, stanzas on, ; keats' contemplation of, ; longing for, . de quincey, . devonshire, . _dictionary_ (lempriere's), . dilke, , . dilke, charles wentworth, , , . _don juan_ (byron's), , , . dryden, , , . edmonton, , , , , . eldon, . elton, lieutenant, . emancipation, literary, - . _endymion_, , , , , , , , ; keats' low opinion of the poem, ; its beauties and defects, , - ; drayton's and fletcher's previous treatment of the subject, - ; keats' unclassical manner of treatment, ; its one bare circumstance, ; scenery of the poem, ; its quality of nature-interpretation, ; its love passages, ; comparison of description with a similar one in _richard iii._, ; its lyrics, - ; appreciation of the lyrics a test of true relish for poetry, ; its rhythm and music, ; keats' own preface the best criticism of the poem, . enfield, , . _epistles_, their tributes to the conjoined pleasures of literature and friendship, ; ungrammatical slips in, ; characteristic specimens of, - . _epithalamium_ (spenser's), . _eve of st agnes_, its simple theme, ; its ease and directness of construction, ; its unique charm, . _eve of st mark_, contains keats' impressions of three cathedral towns, ; its pictures, ; the legend, ; its pictorial brilliance, ; its influence on later english poetry, . _examiner, the_ (leigh hunt's), . _faerie queene_ (spenser's), , , . _faithful shepherdess_ (fletcher's), . _fanny, lines to_, . _feast of the poets_ (leigh hunt's), . fletcher, . _foliage_ (leigh hunt's), . genius, births of, . _gisborne, letter to maria_ (shelley's), . goethe, . _grasshopper and cricket_, . gray, . greece, keats' love of, , , . _guy mannering_ (scott's), . hammond, mr, , . hampstead, , . haslam, william, , (note). haydon, , , , , , , , , . hazlitt, william, , . _history of his own time_ (burnet's), . holmes, edward, . _holy living and dying_ (jeremy taylor's), . _homer, on first looking into chapman's_ (sonnet), - . hood, . _hope_, address to, . horne, r. h., . houghton, lord, , - . hunt, john, . hunt, leigh, , , , , , , , , , , , . _hyperion_, , , ; its purpose, ; one of the grandest poems of our language, ; the influences of _paradise lost_ on it, ; its blank verse compared with milton's, ; its elemental grandeur, ; remodelling of it, seq.; description of the changes, - ; special interest of the poem, . _imitation of spenser_ (keats' first lines), , . _indolence, ode on_, - . _isabella, or the pot of basil_, ; source of its inspiration, ; minor blemishes, ; its italian metre, ; its conspicuous power and charm, ; description of its beauties, . isle of wight, . jennings, mrs, , . jennings, capt. m. j., . joseph and his brethren (wells'), . kean, . keats, john, various descriptions of, , , , , , , , ; birth, ; education at enfield, ; death of his father, ; school-life, - ; his studious inclinations, ; death of his mother, ; leaves school at the age of fifteen, ; is apprenticed to a surgeon, ; finishes his school-translation of the _Æneid_, ; reads spenser's _epithalamium_ and _faerie queene_, ; his first attempts at composition, ; goes to london and walks the hospitals, ; his growing passion for poetry, ; appointed dresser at guy's hospital, ; his last operation, ; his early life in london, ; his early poems, seq.; his introduction to leigh hunt, ; hunt's great influence over him, seq.; his acquaintance with shelley, ; his other friends, - ; personal characteristics, - ; goes to live with his brothers in the poultry, ; publication of his first volume of poems, ; retires to the isle of wight, ; lives at carisbrooke, ; changes to margate, ; money troubles, ; spends some time at canterbury, ; receives first payment in advance for _endymion_, ; lives with his two brothers at hampstead, ; works steadily at _endymion_, - ; makes more friends, ; writes part of _endymion_ at oxford, ; his love for his sister fanny, ; stays at burford bridge, ; goes to the 'immortal dinner,' ; he visits devonshire, ; goes on a walking tour in scotland with charles brown, ; crosses over to ireland, ; returns to scotland and visits burns' country, ; sows there the seeds of consumption, ; returns to london, ; is attacked in _blackwood's magazine_ and the _quarterly review_, ; lockhart's conduct towards him, ; death of his young brother tom, ; goes to live with charles brown, ; falls in love, - ; visits friends in chichester, ; suffers with his throat, ; his correspondence with his brother george, ; goes to shanklin, ; collaborates with brown in writing _otho_, ; goes to winchester, ; returns again to london, ; more money troubles, ; determines to make a living by journalism, ; lives by himself, ; goes back to mr brown, ; _otho_ is returned unopened after having been accepted, ; want of means prevents his marriage, ; his increasing illness, seq.; temporary improvement in his health, ; publishes another volume of poems, ; stays with leigh hunt's family, ; favourable notice in the _edinburgh review_, ; lives with the family of miss brawne, ; goes with severn to spend the winter in italy, ; the journey improves his health, ; writes his last lines, ; stays for a time at naples, ; goes on to rome, - ; further improvement in his health, ; sudden and last relapse, ; he is tenderly nursed by his friend severn, ; speaks of himself as already living a 'posthumous life,' ; grows worse and dies, ; various tributes to his memory, . his genius awakened by the _faerie queene_, ; influence of other poets on him, ; experiments in language, , , , ; employment of the 'heroic' couplet, , ; element and spirit of his own poetry, ; experiments in metre, ; studied musical effect of his verse, ; his grecian spirit, , , , , ; view of the aims and principles of poetry, ; imaginary dependence on shakspere, ; thoughts on the mystery of evil, ; puns, , ; his poems greek in idea, english in manner, ; his poetry a true spontaneous expression of his mind, ; power of vivifying, ; verbal licenses, ; influence on subsequent poets, ; felicity of phrase, . personal characteristics: celtic temperament, , , ; affectionate nature, , , , , ; morbid temperament, , , ; lovable disposition, , , , , ; temper, , , ; personal beauty, ; _penchant_ for fighting, , , ; studious nature, , ; humanity, , , - ; sympathy and tenderness, , ; eyes, description of, , , ; love of nature, , - ; voice, ; desire of fame, , , , ; natural sensibility to physical and spiritual spell of moonlight, ; highmindedness, - ; love romances, , - , - , , , , ; pride and sensitiveness, ; unselfishness, , ; instability, . various descriptions of, , , , , , , , . keats, admiral sir richard, . keats, fanny (mrs llanos), . keats, mrs (keats' mother), , . keats, george, , , , , . keats, thomas (keats' father), , . keats, tom, , . _king stephen_, . 'kirk-men,' - . _la belle dame sans merci_, , , ; origin of the title, ; a story of the wasting power of love, ; description of its beauties, . lamb, charles, , , . _lamia_, ; its source, ; versification, ; the picture of the serpent woman, ; keats' opinion of the poem, . landor, . _laon and cythna_, . letters, extracts, etc., from keats', , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , . 'little keats,' . lockhart, , , . _london magazine_, . mackereth, george wilson, . madeline, seq. 'maiden-thought,' , . _man about town_ (webb's), . _man in the moon_ (drayton's), . margate, . mathew, george felton, . meg merrilies, - . _melancholy, ode on_, . milton, , , , . monckton, milnes, . moore, . _morning chronicle, the_, . _mother hubbard's tale_ (spenser's), . mythology, greek, , , , . naples, . _narensky_ (brown's), . newmarch, . _nightingale, ode to a_, , , . _nymphs_, . odes, , , , - , , , , , . _orion_, . _otho_, , , , . oxford, , . _oxford herald, the_, . _pan, hymn to_, . _pantheon_ (tooke's), . _paradise lost_, , , , . patriotism, . _peter corcoran_ (reynolds'), . plays, , , , . poems (keats' first volume), faint echoes of other poets in them, ; their form, ; their experiments in metre, ; merely poetic preludes, ; their rambling tendency, ; immaturity, ; attractiveness, ; characteristic extracts, ; their moderate success, - . poetic art, theory and practice, , . poetry, joys of, ; principle and aims of, ; genius of, . _polymetis_ (spence's), . pope, , , . 'posthumous life,' . prince regent, . proctor, mrs, . _psyche, ode to_, , , . _psyche_ (mrs tighe's), . quarterly review, , . _rainbow_ (campbell's), . rawlings, william, . reynolds, john hamilton, , , . rice, james, , . _rimini, story of_, , , , . ritchie, . rome, . rossetti, . _safie_ (reynolds'), . scott, sir walter, , , , , , . scott, john, . sculpture, ancient, . _sea-sonnet_, . severn, joseph, , , , , seq. shakspere, , . shanklin, , . shelley, , , , , , , , , . shenstone, . _sleep and poetry_, , , , . smith, horace, , . sonnets, , , , , , , . _specimen of an induction to a poem_, . spenser, , , , , , , . stephens, henry, - . surrey institution, . taylor, mr, , , , , , , . teignmouth, . tennyson, . thomson, . _urn, ode on a grecian_, , - . _vision, the_, , (_see_ hyperion). webb, cornelius, . wells, charles, . wilson, . winchester, - . windermere, , . wordsworth, , , , , , , , , . cambridge printed by john clay, m.a. at the university press. footnotes: [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] john jennings died march , . [ ] _rawlings v. jennings._ see below, p. , and appendix, p. . [ ] captain jennings died october , . [ ] houghton mss. [ ] _rawlings v. jennings._ see appendix, p. . [ ] mrs alice jennings was buried at st stephen's, coleman street, december , , aged . (communication from the rev. j. w. pratt, m.a.) [ ] i owe this anecdote to mr gosse, who had it direct from horne. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] a specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance narrative, composed in the sham old-english of rowley, and in prose, not verse, will be found in _the philosophy of mystery_, by w. c. dendy (london, ), p. , and another, preserved by mr h. stephens, in the _poetical works_, ed. forman ( vol. ), p. . [ ] see appendix. [ ] see c. l. feltoe, _memorials of j. f. south_ (london, ), p. . [ ] houghton mss. see also dr b. w. richardson in the _asclepiad_, vol. i. p. . [ ] houghton mss. [ ] what, for instance, can be less spenserian and at the same time less byronic than-- "for sure so fair a place was never seen of all that ever charm'd romantic eye"? [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] see particularly the _invocation to sleep_ in the little volume of webb's poems published by the olliers in . [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] see _praeterita_, vol. ii. chap. . [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] compare chapman, _hymn to pan_:-- "the bright-hair'd god of pastoral, who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe, by lot, all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow, all tops of hills, and _cliffy highnesses_, all sylvan copses, and the fortresses of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove, and sometimes, by allurement of his love, will wade the _wat'ry softnesses_." [ ] compare wordsworth:-- "bees that soar for bloom, high as the highest peak of furness fells, will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells." is the line of keats an echo or merely a coincidence? [ ] mr w. t. arnold in his _introduction_ (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel passage from leigh hunt's _gentle armour_ as an example of the degree to which keats was at this time indebted to hunt: forgetting that the _gentle armour_ was not written till , and that the debt in this instance is therefore the other way. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] the facts and dates relating to brown in the above paragraph were furnished by his son, still living in new zealand, to mr leslie stephen, from whom i have them. the point about the _adventures of a younger son_ is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken from the keats mss. then in brown's hands, especially _otho_. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] in the extract i have modernized drayton's spelling and endeavoured to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending. [ ] mrs owen was, i think, certainly right in her main conception of an allegoric purpose vaguely underlying keats's narrative. [ ] lempriere (after pausanias) mentions pæon as one of the fifty sons of endymion (in the elean version of the myth): and in spenser's _faerie queene_ there is a pæana--the daughter of the giant corflambo in the fourth book. keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave endymion a sister and called her peona. [ ] book , song . the point about browne has been made by mr w. t. arnold. [ ] the following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of chamberlayne:-- "upon the throne, in such a glorious state as earth's adored favorites, there sat the image of a monarch, vested in the spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been a diadem's redemption; his large size, beyond this pigmy age, did equalize the admired proportions of those mighty men whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when found out, are carefully preserved to tell posterity how much these times are fell from nature's youthful strength." [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] houghton mss. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] severn in houghton mss. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] dilke (in a ms. note to his copy of lord houghton's _life and letters_, ed. ) states positively that lockhart afterwards owned as much; and there are tricks of style, _e.g._ the use of the spanish _sangrado_ for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand. [ ] leigh hunt at first believed that scott himself was the writer, and haydon to the last fancied it was scott's faithful satellite, the actor terry. [ ] severn in the _atlantic monthly_, vol. xi., p. . [ ] see preface, p. viii. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] houghton mss. [ ] the house is now known as lawn bank, the two blocks having been thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the summer of were pointed out to me in detail by mr william dilke, the then surviving brother of keats's friend. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] _decamerone_, giorn., iv. nov. . a very different metrical treatment of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously with that of keats, by barry cornwall in his _sicilian story_ ( ). of the metrical tales from boccaccio which reynolds had agreed to write concurrently with keats (see above, p. ), two were finished and published by him after keats's death in the volume called _a garden of florence_ ( ). [ ] as to the date when _hyperion_ was written, see appendix, p. : and as to the error by which keats's later recast of his work has been taken for an earlier draft, _ibid._, p. . [ ] if we want to see greek themes treated in a greek manner by predecessors or contemporaries of keats, we can do so--though only on a cameo scale--in the best idyls of chénier in france, as _l'aveugle_ or _le jeune malade_, or of landor in england, as the _hamadryad_ or _enallos and cymodamia_; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at alexandria in the days of theocritus. [ ] we are not surprised to hear of keats, with his instinct for the best, that what he most liked in chatterton's work was the minstrel's song in _Ælla_, that _fantasia_, so to speak, executed really with genius on the theme of one of ophelia's songs in _hamlet_. [ ] a critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the beadsman and angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rhyme. on the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines, "but no--already had his death-bell rung; the joys of all his life were said and sung;" that of angela where she calls herself "a poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll." [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] chartier was born at bayeux. his _belle dame sans merci_ is a poem of over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his consequent despair and death.--for the date of composition of keats's poem, see appendix, p. . [ ] this has been pointed out by my colleague mr a. s. murray: see forman, _works_, vol. iii. p. , note; and w. t. arnold, _poetical works_, &c., p. xxii, note. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] "he never spoke of any one," says severn, (houghton mss.,) "but by saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of the person he was speaking of." [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] _auctores mythographi latini_, ed. van staveren, leyden, . keats's copy of the book was bought by him in , and passed after his death into the hands first of brown, and afterwards of archdeacon bailey (houghton mss.). the passage about moneta which had wrought in keats's mind occurs at p. , in the notes to hyginus. [ ] mrs owen was the first of keats's critics to call attention to this passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it derives from the date of its composition. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] see below, p. , note . [ ] "interrupted," says brown oracularly in houghton mss., "by a circumstance which it is needless to mention." [ ] this passing phrase of brown, who lived with keats in the closest daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of haydon. but see appendix, p. . [ ] a week or two later leigh hunt printed in the _indicator_ a few stanzas from the _cap and bells_, and about the same time dedicated to keats his translation of tasso's _amyntas_, speaking of the original as "an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical." [ ] see crabb robinson. _diaries_, vol. ii. p. , etc. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] houghton mss. in both the _autobiography_ and the _correspondence_ the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy additions. [ ] i have the date of sailing from lloyd's, through the kindness of the secretary, col. hozier. for the particulars of the voyage and the time following it, i have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials published by lord houghton, by mr forman, by severn himself in _atlantic monthly_, vol. xi. p. , and from the unpublished houghton and severn mss. [ ] severn, as most readers will remember, died at rome in , and his remains were in removed from their original burying-place to a grave beside those of keats in the protestant cemetery near the pyramid of gaius cestius. [ ] haslam, in severn mss. [ ] severn mss. [ ] houghton mss. [ ] _ibid._ [ ] houghton mss. 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