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Tous les autres exemplaires originaux sont fllm6s en commenpant par la premiere page qui comporte une empreinte d'impression ou d'illustration et en terminant par la derniftre page qui comports une telle empreinte. Un das symboles suivants apparaitra sur la dernidre image de cheque microfiche, selon le cas: le symbols — ^ signifie "A SUIVRE", le symbole V signifie "FIN ". Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent dtre film6s d des taux de reduction diff6rents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre reproduit en un saul clich6, il est filmd d partir de Tangle sup^rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'imagas ndcessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la m^thode. rata 3 lelure, 3 32X 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 JOHN KEATS THE A.POTHECi^KY POET BY WILLIAM OSLER BALTIMORE THE FHIKDENWALD COMPANY 1896 , Johnt Hopkinn Ifoiipital Ifixlorieal Club, October ">, isur,. JOHN" KEATS THE APOTHECARY POET BV WILLIAM OSLER BALTIMORE THE FRIEDKNWALD COMPANY 1896 wr,<< i a iii i»» i "'» ii i ^ ■Tii ii'ati(>iis, thoiightH, uiul liopes. If. Tho sjjirit of nqiative capubilifi/ doniiuuted tliese yeura — the cupubility, us lie exjircsses it, "of hein^' in uiicertuiiitics, mys- teries, iloiiiits, without uiiy irritui)le seurciiing after fact uud reason." 'i'he native hue of any resolution which he may have entertained — and we shall learn that he had such — was soon sicklied o'er, and he lapsetl into idleness so far as any remunerative work was concerned. A practical woman like Mrs. Ahey, the wife of the trustee of his mother's estate, con- doned his conduct with the words " the Keatses were ever indolent, that they would ever be so, and that it was born in them." In a letter to his brother he uses the right word. Here is his confession: "This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely cureless — I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence' — my pas- sions are uU asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal tibre all over ine to a delightful Bensution ubout three degrees this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies, f should call it languor; but as I am* I must call it laziness This is the only hap- jiiucss and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowtM'ing the mind." The gospel of "living" as against that of "doing," which Milton preached in the celebrated sonnet on his blindness, found in Keats a warm advocate. " Let us not, therefore," he says, "go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buz/jng here and there for a knowledge of Avhat is not to be arrived at, but let us ojien our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive, budding patiently under the eye of Ajiollo, and taking truths from every noble insect that favors • Especially as I have a black-eye. 8 ns with 11 visit." Fatal to encourage in an acuv- man of affairs, this dreamy state, this passive existence, favors in "bards of passion and of mirth" the develoimient of a fruit- ful mental attitude. The dreamer spins from his "own inwards his own airy citadel "; and as the spider needs but few points of leaves aiul twigs from which to begin his airy circ at, so, Keats says, "man should l>e content with as few points to tip with the flue 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 wanderings, of distinct- ness for his luxury." All the wliile Ker.,ts was "budding patiently," feeling his powers expand, and with the "viewless wings Poesy" taking ever larger flights. An absorption in ideals, a yearning passion for the beautiful, was, he says, his master-passion. Matthew Arnold remarks it was with him "ail intellectual and spiritual passion. It is 'connected and made one' as Keats declares that in his Cos- it was 'with the fimbition of the intellect.' It is, as he again says, the mighty abstract Idea of Beauty in all things.'^ Listen to one or two striking passages from his letters: "This morning Poetry has conquered ,— I nave relapsed i.ito those abstractions which are my only life." " I feel more uud 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 oi epic greatness are stationed round me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guai-d. Then 'Tragedy with scepter'd pall comes sweeping by." "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth," the expn -sion in prose of his ever memorable lines, " Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know." III. Keats' flrst published work, a small volume of poems issued in 1817, contamed the verses written while he was a student aiul before ho ha 1 aijtindoned the profession. With tl.e excep- tion of one or two small i)ieces it contained nothing of note. The sonnet on Chapman's Homer, written while he was a pupil at Guy's, was the most remarkable poem of the collec- tion. In 1818 appeared Endi/mion, a poetic romance, an ambitious work, which, in the autumn of the year, was merci- lessly " cut up " in the Quarterly and in Blackwood. Popularly the.:e reviews are believed to have caused Keats' early death — a belief fostered by the jaunty rhyme of Byron : " 'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle. Should let itself be snuffed out by an article."; The truth is, no event in Keats' life so warmly commends him to us, or shows more clearly the genuine robustness of his mind than his attitude in this much discussed episode. In the iirst place, he had a clear, for so young a man an extraor- dinarily clear, perception of the limitation of his own powers and the value of his work. The preface to Endymiou, one of the most remarkable ever written, contains his own lucid judgment. He felt that his foundations were "too sandy," that the poem was an immature, feverish attempt, in which he had moved, as he says, from the leading-strings to the go-cart. Did any critic ever sketch with firmer hand the mental condition of a young man in transition? "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 pro- ceeds niawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the follow- ing pages." It cannot be denied that there are in Endymiou, as the Quarterly Review puts it, " the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language/" but the poem has lines of splendid merit, some indeed which have passed into th^^ daily life of the people. Naturally the criticism of the Quarterly and of Blac/cwood rankled deeply in his over-sensitive heart, but after the first 10 pangs he appears to have accepted the castigation in a truly philosophic way. In a letter to his friend Hersey, dated Oct. 9th, 1818, he writes, " Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic in his own works. My own domestic criticism has "•iven me pain without comparison beyond Avhat Blachioood 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." And he adds, "I ^ill write independently,— I have written independently without judgment. I may write independently, and with judgment hereafter. The Genius of Poetry mu-^t work out its own salvation in a man." A young man of twenty-three who could write this, whatever else he possessed, had the mens sana, and could not be killed by a dozen reviews. In June 1820 appeared Keats' third work, "Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other poems," Avhioh placed him in the first rank of English writers. I will quote briefly the criticisms of two masters. "No one else in English poetry save Shakespeare," says Matthew Arnold, "has in expression quite the fascinating facility of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. 'I think,' he said humbly, * I shall be among the English poets after my death.' He is ; he is with Shakespeare." Lowell, speaking of his wonderful power in the choice of words, says, "Men's though us and opinions are in a great degree the vassals of him who invents a new phrase or reapplies an old one. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. ... As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or our sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the discoverer of an ausesthetir Tvr the body and make him a member of all the V 11 ':> societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the small Academy of the Immortals." And I will add a criticism on the letters by Edward Fitz- gerald: "Talking of Keats, do not forget to read Lord Houghton's Life and Letters of him ; in which you will find what you may not have guessed from his poetry (though almost unfauhomably deep in that also) the strong masculine sense and humor, etc., of the man ; more aki'ia to Shakespeare, I am tempted to think, in a perfect circle of poetic faculties, than any poet since." IV. Very few indications of his professional training are to be found in Keats' letters ; fewer still in the poems. Referring to his studies, he says, in one of .he early poems (the epistle to George Felton Mathew), " far different cares beckon me sternly from soft Lvdian airs." During the four years from 1817 to 1820 he made fitful efforts to bestir himself into action, and on several occasions his thoughts turned toward his calling. In a letter to his brother, written in February, 1819, he says, " 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 t .an writing poems and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review shambles." In 1818 he wrote to his friend Reynolds, " Were I to study physic, or rather medicine, again, I feel it would not make the kast difference in my poetry ; when the mind is in its infancy a bias is in reality a bias, but when we acquire more strength, a bias becomes no bias," adding that he is glad he had not given away his medical books, " which I sh